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But under Louis XV. the people began to meditate on the causes of their miseries, and to indulge in those speculations which stimulated their discontents or appealed to their intellectual pride.

"You think, then," returned Louis XV, "that I am bound to make this unhappy girl some present? Well, I will; to-morrow I will send her 10,000 louis." "A thousand louis!" exclaimed I, clasping my hands; "what, as a recompense for seventeen years' imprisonment?

By this time it was understood how insufficient would be a body of twenty-four thousand men for a distant and hazardous war. Recently called to the council by King Louis XV., Marshal Belle-Isle, still full of daring in spite of his age, loudly declared that, "since war had come, it must be made on a large scale if it were to be made to any purpose, and speedily."

It was well known throughout the chateau, that La Martiniere, the king's surgeon, had strongly recommended a very temperate course of life, as essentially necessary to recruit his constitution, wasted by so many excesses, and had even gone so far as to recommend his no longer having a mistress; this the courtiers construed into a prohibition against his possessing a friend of any other sex than his own; for my own part, I experienced very slight apprehensions of being dismissed, for I well knew that Louis XV reckoned too much on my society to permit my leaving the court, and if one, the more tender, part of our union were dissolved, etiquette could no longer object to my presence.

Compared to the lavish curves of the style of Louis XV, the fine outlines and the beautiful ornament of Louis XVI appear to some people cold, but if they look carefully at the matter, they will find them not really so. The warmth of the Gallic temperament still shows through the new garb, giving life and beauty to the dainty but strong furniture.

"The martyrdom of Rohatzek, however, was a mere trifle compared with the ordeal by which the tribunal of Paris tried in vain to extort a confession of the would-be regicide, Damiens. Robert Damiens, a native of Arras, had been exiled as an habitual criminal, and returning in disguise made an attempt upon the life of Louis XV, January 5, 1757.

But the self-evidence of the great Truth, as a universal of the reason, as the reason itself as a light which revealed itself by its own essence as light this they had not had vouchsafed to them. Query XV. p. 225-6. The pretence is, that we equivocate in talking of eternal generation. Ib. p. 226. True, it is not the same with human generation.

Louis XV., a voluptuous and extravagant monarch, was succeeded by Louis XVI., a man of refined habits, pious and benevolent in disposition, but unpossessed of the moral power requisite for the extermination of the evils deeply rooted in the government.

XV. Once when the people of Megara secretly invited Phokion to come to their aid, as he was afraid that the Bœotians might hear of his intentions and cut off the proposed reinforcements, he called a meeting of the Assembly at daybreak, laid the Megarian proposals before the Athenians, and as soon as a decree had been passed to aid them, ordered the trumpet to sound, bade his troops leave the Assembly and get under arms at once, and led them straightway to Megara.

They were for the most part romances of the time of Louis XV; my pious aunt had probably inherited them herself and never read them, for they were, so to speak, catechisms of vice. I was singularly disposed to reflect on everything that came to my notice, to give everything a mental and moral significance; I treated events as pearls in a necklace which I tried to string together.