in unworthy pleasures, he gave himself not
much concern for the future; and this career of self-abandonment
continued to the last, even after satiety and _ennui_ had deprived the
appetites of the power to please. His latter days were of course
melancholy, and his miseries resulted as much from the perception of the
evils to come as from the failure of the pleasures of sense. A languor,
from which he was with difficulty ever roused, oppressed his life. Deaf,
incapable of being amused, prematurely worn out with bodily infirmities,
hated and despised by the whole nation, he dragged out his sixty-fourth
year, and died of the small-pox, which he caught in one of his visits to
the Pare aux Cerfs; and his loathsome remains were hastily hurried into
a carriage, and deposited in the vaults of St. Denis.

As, however, during this long reign of fifty-eight years, women were
the presiding geniuses of the court and the virtual directors of the
kingdom, I cannot give a faithful portrait of the times without some
allusion, at least, to that woman who was as famous in her day as Madame
de Montespan was during the most brilliant period of the reign of Louis
XIV. I single out Madame de Pompadour from the crowd of erring and
infirm females who bartered away their souls for the temporary honors of
Versailles. Not that proud peeress whom she displaced, the Duchesse de
Chateauroux; not that low-born and infamous character by whom she was
succeeded, Du Barry; not the hundreds of other women who were partners
or victims of guilty pleasures, and who descended unlamented and
unhonored to their ignominious graves, are here to be alluded to. But
Madame de Pompadour is a great historical personage, because with her
are identified the fall of the Jesuits in France, the triumph of
philosophers and economists, the disgrace of ministers, and the most
outrageous prodigality which ever scandalized a nation. Louis XV. was
almost wholly directed by this infamous favorite. She named and
displaced the controllers-general, and she herself received annually
nearly fifteen hundred thousand livres, besides hotels, palaces, and
estates. She was allowed to draw bills upon the treasury without
specifying the service, and those who incurred her displeasure were
almost sure of being banished from the court and kingdom, and perhaps
sentenced, by _lettre de cachet_, to the dreary cells of the Bastille.
She virtually had the appointment of the prelates of the Church and