he prince felt it deeply, in spite of his pious resignation.
"A dauphin," he would say, "must needs appear a useless body, and a king
strive to be everybody" (_un homme universel_).

Whilst trying to beguile his tedium at the camp of Compiegne, the
dauphin, it is said, overtaxed his strength, and died at the age of
thirty-six on the 20th of December, 1765, profoundly regretted by the
bulk of the nation, who knew his virtues without troubling themselves,
like the court and the philosophers, about the stiffness of his manners
and his complete devotion to the cause of the clergy. The new dauphin,
who would one day be Louis XVI., was still a child; the king had him
brought into his closet. "Poor France!" he said sadly, "a king of
fifty-five and a dauphin of eleven!" The dauphiness and Queen Mary
Leczinska soon followed the dauphin to the tomb (1767-1768). The king,
thus left alone and scared by the repeated deaths around him, appeared
for a while to be drawn closer to his daughters, for whom he always
retained some sort of affection, a mixture of weakness and habit. One of
them, Madame Louise, who was deeply pious, left him to enter the convent
of the Carmelites; he often went to see her, and granted her all the
favors she asked. But by this time Madame Dubarry had become all-
powerful; to secure to her the honors of presentation at court, the king
personally solicited the ladies with whom he was intimate in order to get
them to support his favorite on this new stage; when the youthful Marie
Antoinette, Archduchess of Austria, and daughter of Maria Theresa, whose
marriage the Duke of Choiseul had negotiated, arrived in France, in 1770,
to espouse the dauphin, Madame Dubarry appeared alone with the royal
family at the banquet given at La Muette on the occasion of the marriage.
After each reaction of religious fright and transitory repentance, after
each warning from God that snatched him for an instant from the depravity
of his life, the king plunged more deeply than before into shame. Madame
Dubarry was to reign as much as Louis XV.

Before his fall the Duke of Choiseul had made a last effort to revive
abroad that fortune of France which he saw sinking at home without his
being able to apply any effective remedy. He had vainly attempted to
give colonies once more to France by founding in French Guiana
settlements which had been unsuccessfully attempted by a Rouennese
Company as early as 1634. The enterprise was ba