oux,
Petticoat I; the Pompadour, Petticoat II; the Du Barry, Petticoat
III--legitimatized queens of love, with courts of their own, with the
rights, prerogatives and immunities of princesses of the blood, the
privilege of dwelling with the king, of receiving foreign ambassadors and
of pillaging France.

"Sire," said Choiseul, "the people are starving." Louis XV answered: "I am
bored."

The boredom came from precocious pleasures that had left him, without
energy or conviction, a cold, dreary brute, Asiatic and animal, a sort of
Oriental idol gloomy and gilded, who, while figuratively a spoke in the
wheel of monarchy then rolling down to '89, personally was a minotaur in a
feminine labyrinth which he filled, emptied, renewed, indifferent to the
inmates as he was to his wife,[75] wringing for the various Petticoats
prodigal sums from a desolate land, supplying incidentally to fermiers
generaux and grands seigneurs an example in Tiberianism which, assured of
immunity, they greedily followed and, generally, making himself so
loathed that when he died, delight was national.

It was in those days that Casanova promenaded through palace and cottage,
convent and inn, inveigling in the course of the promenade three thousand
women, princesses and soubrettes, abbesses and ballet girls, matrons and
maids. The promenade, which was a continuous sin, he recited at length in
his memoirs. During the recital you see a hideous old man, slippered and
slovenly, fumbling in a box in which are faded ribbons, rumpled notes,
souvenirs and gages d'amour.

Richelieu was another of that type which the example of the throne had
created and which de Sade alone eclipsed. It was then there appeared in
Petersburg, in Vienna, in London, wherever society was, a class of men,
who depraved women for the pleasure of it, and a class of women who
destroyed men for destruction's sake, men and women who were the hyenas of
love, monsters whose treachery was premeditated and malignant, and who,
their object attained, departed with a laugh, leaving behind but ruin.
Ruin was insufficient. Something acuter was required. That something was
found by de Sade.

In ways which Bluebeard had but outlined, the Marquis de Sade, lineal
descendant of Petrarch's Laura, mingled kisses with blood. Into affection
he put fright, into love he struck terror, he set the infernal in the
divine.

It was the logical climax to which decadence had groped and to it already
the auster