ted the jealousy of the old and divided its
ranks." The inferior, but still prosperous class, the shopkeepers, also
equally advanced in intelligence and power. In those dark and dingy
backrooms, in which for generations their ancestors had been immured,
they now discussed their rights, and retailed the scandals which they
heard. They read the sarcasms of the poets and the theories of the new
philosophers. Even the tranquillity which succeeded inglorious war was
favorable to the rise of the middle classes; and the Revolution was as
much the product of the discontent engendered by social improvements as
of the frenzy produced by hunger and despair. The court favored the
improvements of Paris, especially those designed for public amusements.
The gardens of the Tuileries were embellished, the Champs Elysees
planted with trees, and pictures were exhibited in the grand salon of
the Louvre. The Theatre Francais, the Royal Opera, the Opera Comique,
and various halls for balls and festivals were then erected,--those
fruitful nurseries of future clubs, those poisoned wells of popular
education. Nor were charities forgotten with the building of the
Pantheon and the extension of the Boulevards. The Hopital des
Enfants-Trouves allowed mothers, unseen and unheard, to bequeath their
children to the State.

There were two events connected with the reign of Madame de Pompadour--I
do not say of the King, or his queen, or his ministers, for
philosophical history compels us to confine our remarks chiefly to great
controlling agencies, whether they be sovereigns or people; to such a
man as Peter the Great, when one speaks of a semi-barbarous nation, to
ideas, when we describe popular revolutions--which had a great influence
in unsettling the kingdom, although brought about in no inconsiderable
measure by this unscrupulous mistress of the King. These were the
expulsion of the Jesuits, and the triumph of the philosophers.

In regard to the first, I would say, that Madame de Pompadour did not
like the Jesuits; not because they were the enemies of liberal
principles, not because they were the most consistent advocates and
friends of despotism in all its forms, intellectual, religious, and
political, or the writers of casuistic books, or the perverters of
educational instruction, or boastful missionaries in Japan and China, or
cunning intriguers in the courts of princes, or artful confessors of the
great, or uncompromising despots in the school