ic of Genoa was in desperate need of money. The
island could be had by the highest bidder, and in 1768 it was purchased
by France, just in time to make the great Corsican a French citizen.

Indeed, all the performers in the approaching drama were assembled.
Three young princes, grandsons of Louis XV., who were to be
successively upon the throne of France, were at Versailles: Louis the
Dauphin, now twenty, and his Austrian bride, Marie Antoinette, and his
two brothers, afterward successively Louis XVIII. and Charles X. Still
another princeling, Louis Philippe, was at the Palais Royal, son of the
Duke of Orleans, late regent, also destined to wear the French crown;
and last of all that infant at Ajaccio, in whom the play was to reach
its splendid climax.

In 1744 Louis XV. was stricken with small-pox, and exchanged the
brilliant scenes at Versailles for the royal vault in the Church of St.
Denis, where he took his place among his ancestors.

CHAPTER XV.

Louis XV. was dead, and two children, with the light-heartedness of
youth and inexperience, stepped upon the throne which was to be a
scaffold--Louis XVI., only twenty, and Marie Antoinette, his wife,
nineteen. He, amiable, kind, full of generous intentions; she,
beautiful, simple, child-like, and lovely. Instead of a debauched old
king with depraved surroundings, here were a prince and princess out of
a fairy tale. The air was filled with indefinite promise of a new era
for mankind to be inaugurated by this amiable young king, whose
kindness of heart shone forth in his first speech, "We will have no
more loans, no credit, no fresh burdens on the people;" then, leaving
his ministers to devise ways of paying the enormous salaries of
officials out of an empty treasury, and to arrange the financial
details of his benevolent scheme of government, he proceeded with his
gay and brilliant young wife to Rheims, there to be crowned with a
magnificence undreamed of by Louis XIV.

In the midst of these rejoicings over the new reign, and of speculative
dreams of universal freedom, there was wafted across the Atlantic news
of a handful of patriots arrayed against the tyranny of the British
Crown. Here were the theories of the new philosophy translated into
the reality of actual experience. "No taxation without
representation," "No privileged class," "No government without the
consent of the governed." Was this not an embodiment of their dreams?
Nor did it detract f