And her extravagance was equal to
her audacity. She insisted on drawing bills on the treasury without
specifying the service. The comptroller-general was in despair, and
the state was involved in inextricable embarrassments.

It was through her influence that the Duke de Choiseul was made the
successor of Fleury. He was not deficient in talent, but his
administration proved unfortunate. Under his rule, Louis lost the
Canadas, and France plunged into a contest with Frederic the Great.
The Seven Years' War, which occurred during his administration, had
made the age an epoch; but as this is to be considered in the chapter
on Frederic III., no notice of it will be taken in this connection.

The most memorable event which arose out of the policy and conduct of
Choiseul was the fall of the Jesuits.

[Sidenote: The Jesuits.]

Their arts and influence had obtained from the pope the bull
_Unigenitus_, designed to suppress their enemies, the Jansenists; and
the king, governed by Fleury, had taken their side.

But they were so unwise as to quarrel with the powerful mistress of
Louis XV. They despised her, and defied her hatred. Indeed, the
Jesuits had climbed to so great a height that they were scornful of
popular clamor, and even of regal distrust. But there is no man, and
no body of men, who can venture to provoke enmity with impunity; and
destruction often comes from a source the least suspected, and
apparently the least to be feared. Who could have supposed that the
ruin of this powerful body, which had reigned so proudly in
Christendom for a century; which had imposed its Briareus's arms on
the necks of princes; which had its confessors in the courts of the
most absolute monarchs; which, with its hundred eyes, had penetrated
the secrets of all the cabinets of Europe; and which had succeeded in
suppressing in so many places every insurrection of human
intelligence, in spite of the fears of kings, the jealousy of the
other monastic orders, and the inveterate animosity of philosophers
and statesmen,--would receive a fatal wound from the hands of a woman,
who scandalized by her vices even the depraved court of an enervated
prince? But so it was. Madame de Pompadour hated the Jesuits because
they attempted to undermine her influence with the king. And she
incited the prime minister, whom she had raised by her arts to power,
to unite with Pombal in Portugal, in order to effect their ruin.

[Sidenote: Exposure of the Jesuits.