young
Louis was little more fitted to be a king than was his wife to be a
queen. Dull of perception and indifferent to affairs of state, he had
only two interests that absorbed him. One was the love of hunting, and
the other was his desire to shut himself up in a sort of blacksmith
shop, where he could hammer away at the anvil, blow the bellows, and
manufacture small trifles of mechanical inventions. From this smudgy
den he would emerge, sooty and greasy, an object of distaste to his
frivolous princess, with her foamy laces and perfumes and pervasive
daintiness.

It was hinted in many quarters, and it has been many times repeated,
that Louis was lacking in virility. Certainly he had no interest in the
society of women and was wholly continent. But this charge of physical
incapacity seems to have had no real foundation. It had been made
against some of his predecessors. It was afterward hurled at Napoleon
the Great, and also Napoleon the Little. In France, unless a royal
personage was openly licentious, he was almost sure to be jeered at by
the people as a weakling.

And so poor Louis XVI., as he came to be, was treated with a mixture of
pity and contempt because he loved to hammer and mend locks in his
smithy or shoot game when he might have been caressing ladies who would
have been proud to have him choose them out.

On the other hand, because of this opinion regarding Louis, people were
the more suspicious of Marie Antoinette. Some of them, in coarse
language, criticized her assumed infidelities; others, with a polite
sneer, affected to defend her. But the result of it all was dangerous
to both, especially as France was already verging toward the deluge
which Louis XV. had cynically predicted would follow after him.

In fact, the end came sooner than any one had guessed. Louis XV., who
had become hopelessly and helplessly infatuated with the low-born
Jeanne du Barry, was stricken down with smallpox of the most virulent
type. For many days he lay in his gorgeous bed. Courtiers crowded his
sick-room and the adjacent hall, longing for the moment when the breath
would leave his body. He had lived an evil life, and he was to die a
loathsome death; yet he had borne himself before men as a stately
monarch. Though his people had suffered in a thousand ways from his
misgovernment, he was still Louis the Well Beloved, and they blamed his
ministers of state for all the shocking wrongs that France had felt.

The abler men,