but none the less audible,
none the less there. In them was the dawn of liberty, the rebirth of real
love, an explosion of evil but also of good.

Said Tartuffe:

Le scandale du monde est ce qui fait l'offense
Et ce n'est pas pecher que pecher en silence.

Under the Maintenon regime the theory had been very fully exploited.
Multiple turpitudes were committed but in the dark. Under the Regency they
occurred openly, unhypocritically, in the daylight. The mud that was there
was dried by the sun. It ceased to be unwholesome. Though vile it was not
vicious. Moreover, in the air was a carnival gayety, put there by the
Regent, who, while not the best man in the world was not the worst, an
artistic Lovelace that gave the tone to a Neronian society, already in
dissolution, one that Law tossed into the Niagara of bankruptcy and
Cartouche held up, a society of which Beranger said:

Tous les hommes plaisantaient,
Et les femmes se pretaient
A la gaudriole.

Mme. de Longueville being in the country was asked, would she hunt. Mme.
de Longueville did not care for hunting. Would she fish, would she walk,
would she drive? No, she would not. Mme. de Longueville did not care for
innocent pleasures. Mme. de Longueville was a typical woman of the day.
Life to such as she was a perpetual bal d'opera and love, the image of
Fragonard's Cupid, who, in the picture of the Chemise enlevee, divested it
of modesty with a smirk.[74]

Modesty then was neither appreciated nor ingrained. The instinct of it was
lacking. It was a question of pins, a thing attachable or detachable at
will. Women of position received not necessarily in a drawing-room, or
even in a boudoir but in bed. In art and literature there was an equal
sans-gene. In affairs of the heart there was an equivalent indifference.
There was no romance, no dream, no beyond. Chivalric ideals were regarded
as mediaeval bric-a-brac and fine sentiments as rubbish. Even gallantry
with its mimic of being jealous and its pretended constancy was vieux jeu.
Love, or what passed for it, had become a fugitive caprice, lightly
assumed and as readily discarded, without prejudice to either party.

On s'enlace. Puis, un jour,
On s'en lasse. C'est l'amour.

It had, however, other descents, a fall to depths of which history
hitherto had been ignorant. Meanwhile the Regent had gone. Louis XV had
come. With him were the real sovereigns of the realm, Mme. de Chateaur