Louis began with the Duchesse de Chateauroux, the exquisite, who lasted, as we might say, but a day.  From that he turned to the Marquise de Pompadour, a descent sufficiently significant, but it was only the beginning of decadence.  The King’s feeling for the Marquise was wholly unworthy, and it soon wore itself out.  Her death caused him no regret.  On the day of her funeral, during a heavy rainstorm, the King, standing at one of the windows of Versailles, watched the carriage bearing the body of his former favorite to Paris, and observed carelessly:  “The Marquise will not have fine weather for her journey.”  Louis soon turned to Madame Dubarry—­and a lower step was taken.  The prestige and dignity of the Court suffered.  “Vice,” as Saint-Amand observes, “threw off all semblance of disguise” and yet, while the King slowly submerged his nature in a slough of corruption, and his associates made of the Court a carnival of immorality, there was still one figure in whom the traditional morals and manners were maintained—­the Queen Marie Leczinska.  She was the one pure and virtuous figure in the Court life.  “Her domestic hearth,” writes Saint-Amand, “was near the boudoir of the favorites, but it was she that preserved for the Court the traditions of decency and decorum.

“Last of all of the women of Versailles, came Marie Antoinette, the woman who, in the most striking and tragic of all destinies, represents not solely the majesty and the griefs of royalty, but all the graces and all the agonies, all the joys and all the sufferings, of her sex.”

CHAPTER VIII

THE VERSAILLES OF LOUIS XV

Louis the Great, in commanding immense and costly edifices to rise out of the earth, was moved, at least in part, by a desire to assure the monarchy and its established ceremonial a worthy background.  Louis XV, in the numerous graceful additions to the chateau made by him, sought only to satisfy his own caprice and convenience.

When the Court returned from Vincennes to Versailles in 1722, seven years after the death of Louis XIV, one of the new King’s first undertakings was the construction of the Salon of Hercules, adjoining the chapel court.  This splendid hall, which to-day serves as the entrance to the grand appartements, owed its design to Robert de Cotte.  As in the time of Louis XIV and Mansard, marble was chosen as the main decorative medium.  All the sculptural ornaments are in bronze and marble.  The bases of the pilasters are of gilded bronze.  Carvings in wood and stucco were contributed by a Flemish artist named Verberckt, to whom Louis XV assigned most of the sculptural work done at the chateau during his reign.  It was he that modeled the two doors placed on either side the bronze and marble chimney-piece, and the sculptures of the cornice.  The painting on the ceiling—­the Apotheosis of Hercules—­was first seen by His Majesty as he passed through the