being Madame de
Pompadour and Dame de Barry, her successor in crime; under them, and the
corrupt court they presided over, the country went step by step to ruin,
and she was powerless to withstand the military ascendency of England,
which deprived her of all her colonies both in the East and in the West;
though Choiseul, his last "substantial" minister, tried hard by a family
compact of the Bourbons to collect her scattered strength; the situation
did not trouble Louis; "it will last all my time," he said, and he let
things go; suffering from a disease contracted by vice, he was seized
with confluent smallpox, and died in misery, to the relief of the nation,
which could not restrain its joy (1710-1774).

LOUIS XVI., the grandson of the preceding and his successor; had in
1770 married Marie Antoinette, the youngest daughter of Maria Theresa of
Austria, and a woman young, beautiful, and accomplished, in high esteem
for the purity of her character; his accession was hailed with
enthusiasm, and he set himself to restore the ruined finances of the
country by taking into his counsel those who could best advise him in her
straitened state, but these one and all found the problem an impossible
one, owing to the unwillingness of the nobility to sacrifice any of their
privileges for the public good; this led to the summoning of the
States-General in 1789, and the outbreak of the Revolution by the fall of
the Bastille in July of that year; in the midst of this Louis,
well-intentioned but without strength of character, was submissive to the
wishes of his court and the queen, lost his popularity by his hesitating
conduct, the secret support he gave to the EMIGRANTS (q. v.),
his attempt at flight, and by his negotiations with foreign enemies, and
subjected himself to persecution at the hands of the nation; he was
therefore suspended from his functions, shut up in the Temple, arraigned
before the Convention, and condemned to death as "guilty of conspiracy
against the liberty of the nation and a crime against the general safety
of the State"; he was accordingly guillotined on the 21st January; he
protested his innocence on the scaffold, but his voice was drowned by the
beating of drums; he was accompanied by the Abbe Edgeworth, his
confessor, who, as he laid his head on the block, exclaimed, "Son of St.
Louis, ascend to heaven" (1754-1793).

LOUIS XVII., second son of the preceding, shut up in the Temple,
was, after the execution