ces of the blood, and the "delicious licenses
of the presentation were fully enjoyed by those who were fortunate
enough to obtain admission."

Her costumes were of such taste and became so renowned that Marie
Antoinette consulted her in reference to her own wonderful inventions;
the dresses became known as the _Robe a la La Guimard_. Inasmuch as
the management of the Opera supplied all gowns, the expense for this
one artist was enormous, in 1779 amounting to thirty thousand livres
for dresses alone. In 1785, being in financial straits, she sold
her hotel on the Rue Chaussee-d'Antin by lottery, two thousand five
hundred tickets at one hundred and twenty livres each. None of the
salons of Paris could compare with hers in the "costliness of the
crystal and the plate of her table service, in the taste and elegance
of her floral decorations--choice exotics obtained from a distance,
regardless of expense."

After appearing at the Haymarket Opera House in London in 1789,
Mlle. La Guimard decided to retire to private life, and married M.
Despreaux, the ballet master, fifteen years her junior. During the
Revolution the government ceased to pay pensions, and as she had
saved very little of her wealth the two lived in the most straitened
circumstances. Her fate was similar to that of the average woman of
pleasure--forgotten, half-witted, stooping to any act of indecency to
gain a few sous.

Such were the principal heroines of the stage, opera, and ballet; they
were in harmony with the general state of that depraved society of
which they were natural products; transitory lights that shone for but
a short space of time, consumed by their own sensuous instinct, they
were forgotten with death. The royal mistresses lived the same life
and followed the same ideals, but exerted a greater and more lasting
influence in the state.

Chapter XI

Royal Mistresses

In the study of the royal mistresses of the eighteenth century,
we encounter two in particular,--Mme. de Pompadour and Mme. du
Barry,--who, though totally different types of women, both reflect the
gradual decline of ideals and morals in the first and last years of
the reign of Louis XV. The former dominated the king by means of her
intelligence, but the latter swayed the sovereign, already consumed by
his sensual excesses, through her peculiarly seductive sensuality.

During the first years of the reign of Louis XV., one of the most
influential women was Mme. de Pr