day.

Du Barry believed neither in God nor in the devil, but she believed in
the almanac of Liege. She scarcely read any book but this--faithful to
her earliest habits. And the almanac of Liege, in its prediction for
April, 1774, said: "A woman, the greatest of favorites, will play her
last role." So Madame the Countess du Barry said without ceasing:
"I shall not be tranquil until these forty days have passed." The
thirty-seventh day the King went to the hunt attended with all the
respect due to his rank. Jeanne wept in silence and prayed to God as one
who has long neglected her prayers.

Louis XV had not neglected his prayers, and gave two hundred thousand
livres to the poor, besides ordering masses at St. Genevieve. Parliament
opened the shrine, and knelt gravely before that miraculous relic. The
least serious of all these good worshippers was, strange to say, the
curate of St. Genevieve: "Ah, well!" said he gaily, when Louis was dead,
"let us continue to talk of the miracles of St. Genevieve. Of what can
you complain? Is not the King dead?"

At the last moment it was not God who held the heart of Louis--it was
his mistress. "Ask the Countess to come here again," he said.

"Sire, you know that she has gone away," they answered.

"Ah! has she gone? Then I must go!" So he departed.

His end drew forth some maledictions. There were insults even at his
funeral services. "Nevertheless," said one old soldier, "he was at the
battle of Fontenoy." That was the most eloquent funeral oration of Louis
XV.

"The King is dead, long live the King!" But before the death of Louis
XVI they cried: "The king is dead, long live the Republic!"

Rose-colored mourning was worn in the good city of Paris. The funeral
oration of the King and a lament for his mistress were pronounced by
Sophie Arnould, of which masterpiece of sacred eloquence the last words
only are preserved: "Behold us orphaned both of father and mother."

If Madame du Barry was one of the seven plagues of royalty, she died
faithful to royalty. After her exile to Pont aux Dames she returned to
Lucienne, where the duc de Cosse Brissac consoled her for the death of
Louis XV. But what she loved in Louis was that he was a king; her true
country was Versailles; her true light was the sun of court life. Like
Montespan, also a courtesan of high order, she often went in these dark
days to cast a loving look upon the solitary park in the maze of the
Trianon. Yet she was part