uff
and other games.--Dramatic entertainments.--Increasing affection of
the king.--Efforts to alienate the king's affections.--Agitation
of the queen.--Maria's children.--Royal visitors.--Extravagant
expenditures.--Rising discontents.--La Fayette and Franklin.--The
people begin to count the costs.--Letter from the Empress
Catharine.--The clouds thicken.

In the year 1774, about four years after the marriage of Maria
Antoinette and Louis, the dissolute old king, Louis XV., in his palace
at Versailles, surrounded by his courtiers and his lawless pleasures,
was taken sick. The disease soon developed itself as the small-pox in
its most virulent form. The physicians, knowing the terror with which
the conscience-smitten monarch regarded death, feared to inform him of
the nature of his disease.

"What are these pimples," inquired the king, "which are breaking out all
over my body?"

"They are little pustules," was the reply, "which require three days in
forming, three in suppurating, and three in drying."

The dreadful malady which had seized upon the king was soon, however,
known throughout the court, and all fled from the infection. The
miserable monarch, hated by his subjects, despised by his courtiers, and
writhing under the scorpion lash of his own conscience, was left to
groan and die alone. It was a horrible termination of a most loathsome
life.

The vices of Louis XV. sowed the seeds of the French Revolution. Two
dissolute women, notorious on the page of history, each, in their turn,
governed him and France. The Marchioness du Pompadour was his first
favorite. Ambitious, shrewd, unprincipled, and avaricious, she held the
weak-minded king entirely under her control, and spread throughout the
court an influence so contaminating that the whole empire was infected
with the demoralization. Upon this woman he squandered almost the
revenues of the kingdom. The celebrated Parc au Cerf, the scene of
almost unparalleled voluptuousness, was reared for her at an expense of
twenty millions of dollars. After her charms had faded, she still
contrived to retain her political influence over the pliant monarch,
until she died, at the age of forty-four, universally detested.

Madame du Barri, of whom we have before spoken, succeeded the
Marchioness du Pompadour in this post of infamy. The king lavished upon
her, in the short space of eight years, more than ten millions of
dollars. For her he erected the Little Trianon, with its