on of love.

Louis XV., a pleasure-loving, dissolute man, had surrounded his throne
with all the attractions of fashionable indulgence and dissipation.
There was one woman in his court, Madame du Barri, celebrated in the
annals of profligacy, who had acquired an entire ascendency over the
mind of the king. The disreputable connection existing between her and
the monarch excluded her from respect, and yet the king loaded her with
honors, received her at his table, and forced her society upon all the
inmates of the palace. The court was full of jealousies and bickerings;
and while one party were disposed to welcome Maria Antoinette, hoping
that she would espouse and strengthen their cause, the other party
looked upon her with suspicion and hostility, and prepared to meet her
with all the weapons of annoyance.

Neither morals nor religion were then of any repute in the court of
France. Vice did not even affect concealment. The children of Louis XV.
were educated, or rather not educated, in a nunnery. The Princess
Louisa, when twelve years of age, knew not the letters of her alphabet.
When the children did wrong, the sacred sisters sent them, for penance,
into the dark, damp, and gloomy sepulcher of the convent, where the
remains of the departed nuns were moldering to decay. Here the timid and
superstitious girls, in an agony of terror, were sent alone, to make
expiation for some childish offense. The little Princess Victoire, who
was of a very nervous temperament, was thrown into convulsions by this
harsh treatment, and the injury to her nervous system was so
irreparable, that during her whole life she was exposed to periodical
paroxysms of panic terror.

One day the king, when sitting with Madame du Barri, received a package
of letters. The petted favorite, suspecting that one of them was from an
enemy of hers, snatched the packet from the king's hand. As he
endeavored to regain it, she resisted, and ran two or three times around
the table, which was in the center of the room, eagerly pursued by the
irritated monarch. At length, in the excitement of this most strange
conflict, she threw the letters into the glowing fire of the grate,
where they were all consumed. The king, enraged beyond endurance,
seized her by the shoulders, and thrust her violently out of the room.
After a few hours, however, the weak-minded monarch called upon her. The
countess, trembling in view of her dismissal, with its dreadful
consequences of