So while England was steadily building up a world-empire, penetrated with the forces of a modern age, France, loaded with debt, was taxing a people crying for bread—­taxing a starving people for money to procure unimaginable luxuries and pleasures for Madame du Barry, who had succeeded to the place once, held by Madame de Pompadour.  Did she desire a snowstorm and a sleighride in midsummer, these must be created and made possible.  And one may see to-day at Versailles the sleigh in which this mad caprice was realized.

The various instructors of Louis XV. had not taught him anything about mind and soul processes.  They were quite unaware that there had commenced a movement in the brain of France, which was going to liberate terrific forces—­forces which would sweep before them the work of the Richelieus and the Mazarins and the Colberts as if it were chaff.

The human mind was probing, questioning doubting, everything it had once believed.  And as one after another cherished beliefs disappeared, it grew still more daring.  The whole religious, social, and political system was wrong.  The only remedy was to overthrow it all, and crown reason as the sovereign of a new era.  Such was the ferment at work beneath the surface as Louis was devising incredible extravagances for du Barry.  And there was rage in men’s hearts as they wrote insulting lines upon his equestrian statue in the Place Louis Quinze.

The Place Louis Quinze was soon to be the Place de la Revolution.  The bronze statue was to be melted into bullets by a maddened populace, and standing on that very spot was to be the guillotine which would destroy king, queen, the king’s sister, and a great part of the nobility of France.

It is said that the three great events of modern times are the Reformation, the American War of Independence, and the French Revolution.  Events such as these have a lurid background, a long vista of causes behind them!  A French Revolution is not the work of a day, nor of a single man.  There had been a steady movement toward this event for a thousand years—­in fact, ever since the dogma that labor is degrading was placed at the foundation of the social structure of France.

The direct causes which were precipitating the crisis in the closing eighteenth century were financial and economic, while the contributing causes were a remarkable intellectual movement and the War of Independence in America.  It is possible that a king with a heart and a brain, and the moral sense which belongs to ordinary humanity, might have averted this tragic outburst, and at least have delayed the event by awakening hope.  The Revolution was born of hopeless misery.  With the reign of Louis XV. hope died, and his successor fell heir to the inevitable.

A heartless sybarite, depraved in tastes, without sense of responsibility or comprehension of his times, a brutalized voluptuary governed by a succession of designing women, regardless of national poverty, indulging in wildest extravagance—­such was the man in whom was vested the authority rendered so absolute by Richelieu; such the man who opened up a pathway for the storm.