r of this famine pact, as the bitter saying was,
soon spread amongst the mob. Before its fall, the Parliament of Rouen
had audaciously given expression to these dark accusations; it had
ordered proceedings to be taken against the monopolists. A royal
injunction put a veto upon the prosecutions. "This prohibition from the
crown changes our doubts to certainty," wrote the Parliament to the king
himself; "when we said that the monopoly existed and was protected, God
forbid, sir, that we should have had your Majesty in our eye, but
possibly we had some of those to whom you distribute your authority."
Silence was imposed upon the Parliaments, but without producing any
serious effect upon public opinion, which attributed to the king the
principal interest in a great private concern bound to keep up a certain
parity in the price of grain. Contempt grew more and more profound; the
king and Madame Dubarry by their shameful lives, Maupeou and Abbe Terray
by destroying the last bulwarks of the public liberties, were digging
with their own hands the abyss in which the old French monarchy was about
to be soon ingulfed.

For a long while pious souls had formed great hopes of the dauphin;
honest, scrupulous, sincerely virtuous, without the austerity and
extensive views of the Duke of Burgundy, he had managed to live aloof,
without intrigue and without open opposition, preserving towards the king
an attitude of often sorrowful respect, and all the while remaining the
support of the clergy and their partisans in their attempts and their
aspirations. The Queen, Mary Leczinska, a timid and proudly modest
woman, resigned to her painful situation, lived in the closest intimacy
with her son, and still more with her daughterin-law, Mary Josepha of
Saxony, though the daughter of that elector who had but lately been
elevated to the throne of Poland, and had vanquished King Stanislaus.
The sweetness, the tact, the rare faculties of the dauphiness had
triumphed over all obstacles. She had three sons. Much reliance was
placed upon the influence she had managed to preserve with the king, and
on the dominion she exercised over her husband's mind. In vain had the
dauphin, distracted at the woes of France, over and over again solicited
from the king the honor of serving him at the head of the army; the
jealous anxiety of Madame de Pompadour was at one with the cold
indifference of Louis XV. as to leaving the heir to the throne in the
shade. T