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Or, more undoubtedly, some pretty little Pompadour overcome by that Parisian infirmity so pleasantly described by M. de Maurepas in that quatrain which cost him his protracted disgrace and certainly contributed to the disasters of Louis XVI's reign: "Iris, we love those features sweet, Your graces all are fresh and free; And flowerets spring beneath your feet, Where naught, alas! but flowers are seen."
Although confined for five years from the age of fourteen to that of nineteen in the rigid and aristocratic convent of Picpus, she had been enabled to see much of Paris life, during the waning epoch of Louis XVI's reign and the times of morbid fashionable excitement immediately preceding the great Revolution.
France was weary of the republican government which had brought her to the verge of bankruptcy and ruin, and inclined to look favourably on the idea of a monarchy. Napoleon determined that this should be the monarchy of a Buonaparte, not that of a Bourbon. The Church had ceased to support the claims of Louis XVI's brother.
Or, more undoubtedly, some pretty little Pompadour overcome by that Parisian infirmity so pleasantly described by M. de Maurepas in that quatrain which cost him his protracted disgrace and certainly contributed to the disasters of Louis XVI's reign: "Iris, we love those features sweet, Your graces all are fresh and free; And flowerets spring beneath your feet, Where naught, alas! but flowers are seen."
On my telling him of Oscar Browning's study of Louis XVI's flight to Varennes, he stood up for Carlyle's general accuracy. He liked Sir Henry Maine's book, but was surprised at so much praise for "The Federalist," since he thought Story's "Commentaries" much better. He thought Draper's "History of the Intellectual Development of Europe" showed too much fondness for very large generalizations.
It was, as one of Louis XVI's ministers declared, "an invisible power which, without treasury, guards, or an army, ruled Paris and the court, yes, the very palace of the king." The latter half of the eighteenth century was a period of outspoken and acrid criticism of the whole existing social and governmental system.
Louis XVI's "legitimate" heir was his brother, the count of Provence, a cynical, prosaic, and very stout old gentleman who had been quietly residing in an English country-house, and who now made a solemn, if somewhat unimpressive, state entry into Paris.
As regards the main body at court, from the grand dukes, the women, etc., down, he had committed the sin of which Turgot and Necker were guilty when they sought to save France but found that the women, princes, and favorites of poor Louis XVI's family were determined to dip their hands into the state treasury, and were too strong to be controlled.
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