vitality as
it possessed. It rapidly accomplished its work on the feudal
aristocracy, but only at a great price. With Louis XIV gone, it began
to crumble from corruption within, from criticism without. Louis XV
converted the palace into the most gorgeous of brothels, and its
inmates into the most contemptible and degraded of harlots and pimps.
The policy of France, still royal under Louis XIV, was marked by the
greed, lewdness and incapacity of Richelieu and Dubois, of Pompadour
and du Barry. When {15} the effluvious corpse of Louis XV was hastily
smuggled from Versailles to the Cathedral of St. Denis in 1774, that
seemed to mark the final dissolution into rottenness of the
Bourbon-Versailles regime. That regime already stank in the nostrils
of public opinion, a new force which for half a century past had been
making rapid progress in France.

The great religious and military struggle of the 16th and 17th
centuries had in one direction resulted in enhancing the prestige and
crystallizing the power of the French monarchy. In another direction
it had resulted in establishing even more firmly the new intellectual
position of Europe, the spirit of enquiry, of criticism, of freedom of
thought. The Roman or supreme doctrine of authority had been
questioned, and questioned successfully. It could not be long before
the doctrine of Bourbon authority must also be questioned. Even if
French thought and literature did for a moment pay tribute at the
throne of Louis XIV the closing years of the century were marked by the
names of Leibnitz, Bayle and Newton; the mercurial intelligence of
France could not long remain stagnant with such forces as these casting
their influence over European civilization. {16} The new century was
not long in, the Regent Philip of Orleans had not long been in power,
before France showed that Versailles had ceased to control her
literature. A new Rabelais with an 18th century lisp, Montesquieu, by
seasoning his _Lettres Persanes_ with a sauce piquante compounded of
indecency and style, succeeded in making the public swallow some
incendiary morsels. The King of France, he declared, drew his power
from the vanity of his subjects, while the Pope was "an old idol to
whom incense is offered from sheer habit"; nothing stronger has been
said to this day. A few years later, in his _Esprit des Lois_, he
produced a work of European reputation which eventually proved one of
the main channels for the con