his people were growing desperate under the enormous taxation
made necessary by incessant wars and by the extravagant expenditures of
the court? Louis simply turned his back upon the whole problem of
administration, and left his ministers, Fleury, and later de Choiseul,
to deal with the misery and the discontent and to make their way
through the financial morass as best they might.

The power of Madame de Pompadour may be imagined when we learn that
Maria Theresa, empress and proud daughter of the Caesars, when she
needed the friendship of Louis XIV., in her struggle with Frederick of
Prussia, in order to win him to her side, wrote a flattering letter to
this woman.

This friendship, so artfully sought by the empress, led to another very
different and very momentous alliance. A marriage was arranged between
her little daughter, Marie Antoinette, and the boy Louis, who was to be
the future king of France. The dauphin, the dauphiness, and their
eldest child were all dead. So Louis, the second son of the dauphin,
was the heir to his grandfather, Louis XV.

How should the empress of Austria, born, nurtured, and fed in the very
centre of despotism, utterly misunderstanding as she must the past, the
present, and the future, how should she suspect that the throne of
France would be a scaffold for her child? Hapsburg and Bourbon were to
her realities as enduring as the Alps.

In the meantime England and France had come into collision over their
boundaries in America, and the war opened by Braddock and his young
aide, Washington, had been a still further drain upon impoverished
France. With the loss of Montreal and Quebec, those two strongholds in
the north, the French were virtually defeated. And when the end came,
France had lost every inch of territory on the North American
Continent, and had ceded her vast possessions, extending from Canada to
the Gulf of Mexico, to England and Spain.

So while England was steadily building up a world-empire, penetrated
with the forces of a modern age, France, loaded with debt, was taxing a
people crying for bread--taxing a starving people for money to procure
unimaginable luxuries and pleasures for Madame du Barry, who had
succeeded to the place once, held by Madame de Pompadour. Did she
desire a snowstorm and a sleighride in midsummer, these must be created
and made possible. And one may see to-day at Versailles the sleigh in
which this mad caprice was realized.

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