"_comme on enleve les
creatures prostituees d'un lieu infame_," says St. Simon, and
scattered among other religious houses in all directions. The friends
of the buried were bidden to exhume their dead, and all unclaimed
bodies were flung into a neighbouring cemetery, where dogs fought for
them as for carrion. The church was profaned, all the conventual
buildings were razed and sold in lots, not one stone being left on
another; the very ground was ploughed up and sown, "not, it is true
with salt," adds St. Simon, and that was the only favour shown.

Two years after the scene at Port Royal, amid the heartless gaiety of
the court, the Angel of Death was busy in Louis' household. On 14th
April 1711, the old king's only lawful son, the Grand Dauphin,
expired; on 12th February 1712, the second Dauphiness, the sweet and
gentle Adelaide of Savoy, Louis' darling, died of a malignant fever;
six days later the Duke of Burgundy, her husband, was struck down; on
8th March, the Duke of Brittany, their eldest child, followed them.
Three Dauphins had gone to the vaults of St. Denis in less than a
year; mother, father, son, had died in twenty-four days--a sweep of
Death's scythe, enough to touch even the hearts of courtiers. In a few
days the king gave orders for the usual play to begin at Marly, and
the dice rattled while the bodies of the Dauphin and Dauphiness lay
yet unburied.

In May 1714, the Duke of Berri, son of the Grand Dauphin, died, and
the sole direct heir to the throne was now the king's great-grandson,
the Duke of Anjou, a sickly child of five years. On September 1715,
the Grand Monarque made a calm and an edifying end to his long reign
of seventy-two years, declaring that he owed no man restitution, and
trusted in God's mercy for what he owed to the realm. He called the
young child, who was soon to be Louis XV., to his bedside, and
apparently without any sense of irony, exhorted him to remember his
God, to cherish peace, to avoid extravagance, and study the welfare of
his people. After receiving the last sacraments he repeated the
prayers for the dying in a firm voice and, calling on God's aid,
passed peacefully away. None but his official attendants, his priest
and physicians, saw the end: two days before, Madame de Maintenon had
retired to St. Cyr.

The demolition of what remained of mediaeval Paris proceeded apace
during Louis XIV.'s lifetime, and, at his death, the architectural
features of its streets were subs