THE DEATH OF LOUIS XV.

Louis XV. foreboded his approaching death. Like all men who retain the habit of debauchery until they are old, he found more suffering than delight in sensual pleasure, more pain than joy. Expiating a few minutes of false rapture by long hours of ennui and discouragement, he experienced the painful pressure of fatigue, the remorse of the body, and of remorse, the fatigue of the soul.

Count de Mercy-Argenteau wrote to Maria Theresa, June 16, 1773: “Although His Majesty’s health has not grown worse within a month, yet it is observed that he is becoming more subject to vapors and ennui. His first liking for the favorite having been weakened by time, and this woman possessing infinitely few resources of mind or character, the King finds very slender entertainment with her, and even that is mixed up with inconveniences whose effects he constantly experiences.”

In his correspondence with his sovereign, the ambassador frequently returns to this incurable melancholy of Louis XV. He wrote, August 14th of the same year: “The King is growing old, and from time to time seems to have regrets. He finds himself isolated, without aid or consolation from his children, without zeal, attachment, or fidelity from the bizarre assemblage composing his ministry, his society, his surroundings.” And February 19, 1774: “From time to time the King begins to make remarks concerning his age, his health, and the frightful account that must one day be rendered to the Supreme Being for our employment of the life He has accorded to us in this world. These reflections, occasioned by the death of some persons of his own age, who died almost before his eyes, have greatly alarmed those who retain the monarch in his present errors, and from that moment, everybody has thought it his duty to conceal such events as far as possible.” People criticised the actions, the secret thoughts, of Louis XV., his occasional returns to religious practices, his more frequent visits to his daughter Louise, the Carmelite, the humility with which he had listened to a courageous prelate, Monseigneur Beauvais, Bishop of Senez, saying to him in a sermon delivered before the whole court: “Solomon, satiated with voluptuousness, tired of having exhausted, in the endeavor to revive his withered senses, every sort of pleasures that surround the throne, ended by seeking one of a new kind in the vile remnants of public license.”

Louis XV. was sixty-four years old. In his last days, as in those of his early youth, he was hesitating between vice and virtue when, April 28, 1774, he was attacked at the Little Trianon, by a malady which at once became alarming. The sick man was taken to the château of Versailles, and at once what has been so well named “the jobbing and traffic in the King’s conscience” began. The Aiguillonists, the Barriens, as the partisans of the minister and the favorite were called, maintained that the illness was not serious, and would not listen to any mention of the sacraments. The friends of the Duke de Choiseul, on the other hand, urgently demanded that the King should receive extreme unction, which must be the signal for the dismissal of his mistress. Concerning this, the brothers Goncourt have made the judicious remark: “It happened, strangely enough, that the Aiguillon party, that of the devotees and the Jesuits, combined to prevent the communion of Louis XV., while the Choiseul party, that of the philosophers and unbelievers, combined to force this communion.” The Aiguillonists trembled. The King’s malady was extremely serious, being smallpox of the most dangerous description. If the old monarch should die, it was all up with their favor. If he should recover, he would this time become devout. In either case, Madame Du Barry would be nobody.

The courtiers, fearing contagion, did not come near the chamber of the royal invalid without alarm. One of them, M. de Létorières, succumbed for nothing but opening the door and looking at the King two minutes. More than fifty persons caught it by merely passing through the gallery. The daughters of Louis XV., Mesdames Adelaide, Victoire, and Sophie, gave at this time an admirable example of courage and filial piety. Although they had never had the smallpox, they heroically braved the scourge. While the Dauphin and his two brothers, the Counts of Provence and Artois, prudently withdrew, the three Princesses did not hesitate to shut themselves up in the chamber[57] of their deserted father. They remained there from the time his illness began until his death.

The Archbishop of Paris, Monseigneur Christopher de Beaumont, paid a visit to the King, May 2. “As they were on the watch for everything,” says Baron de Besenval in his Memoirs, “as soon as the Archbishop appeared, people saw Marshal de Richelieu hastily leave the King’s apartment and go as far as the hall of the guards[58] to meet him; there, drawing him aside, they sat down on a bench. It was noticed that the Marshal talked with great vehemence and animated gestures; although what he said could not be overheard, it was not difficult to see that he was trying to deter him from proposing to administer the sacraments.” The King did not make up his mind at once. Meanwhile, the sickness was growing worse. The physicians used the word “delirium” in the bulletin of May 3, a piece of frankness which exasperated the Duke d’Aiguillon. In the evening of May 4, Madame Du Barry was introduced into the sick man’s chamber. “Madame,” he said to her, “I am ill; I know what I have to do. I will not renew the scenes of Metz; we shall have to part. Go to M. d’Aiguillon’s house at Reuil. Be sure that I shall always have the tenderest affection for you.” The next day, at three o’clock in the afternoon, the favorite left Versailles, where she was never to reappear.

Behold Louis XV. on his deathbed. In vain he entreats his courageous daughters to leave him; for the first time in their lives they disobey him. The old King, as Mercy-Argenteau writes to Maria Theresa, gives “many signs of repentance and resignation.” He is repairing by a Christian end the scandals of his long existence. In the night of May 5-6, he asks for the Abbé Mondou, his confessor. He receives absolution, and at the first glimmer of dawn, May 6, he asks to have the sacraments brought. Showing extreme impatience for the priest’s arrival, he sends M. de Beauveau several times to the window to see if the messenger of God is not on his way. At last the clergy approach with the sacraments. The royal invalid briskly throws off his bed coverings, and forces himself into a kneeling posture, leaning against the front of his bed. As the physicians try to induce him to cover himself up, he says: “When my great God does a wretch like me the honor to come to him, it is the least he can do to receive Him with respect.” After the Communion, the grand almoner, Cardinal de La Roche-Aymon, reads aloud the public apology made by the sovereign to his people. “Although the King,” exclaims the Cardinal, “owes an account of his conscience to God alone, he declares that he repents of having given occasion for scandal to his subjects.” At these words, the dying man, in a voice broken by the last agony, said: “Repeat those words, Monsieur the almoner, repeat them.” Let us own that if Louis XV. did not know how to live, he had at least the merit of knowing how to die well.

A candle burning in the King’s chamber, which was to be extinguished at the same moment as the life of the King, was the signal agreed on for the measures to be taken and the orders given as soon as he should have breathed his last. The candle was put out at two o’clock in the afternoon of May 10, 1774. Instantly a great tumult, comparable to a clap of thunder, shook the arches of Versailles. It was the crowd of courtiers leaving the antechambers of the dead man and noisily hastening to meet the new monarch. He who now called himself Louis XVI. threw himself spontaneously on his knees along with his wife. “My God!” he exclaimed, “guide us, protect us; we are too young to reign!” At six in the evening the new King and Queen departed for Choisy. Versailles was now only a desert.

Count de Ségur says, in his Memoirs, concerning this sudden solitude: “Dazzled from infancy by the splendor of the throne, the extent of the royal power, a witness of the apparent zeal, the affected ardor, the continued eagerness of courtiers and those incessant arts of homage which resembled a sort of cult, the last agony and the death of the King caused me to shed tears. What was my surprise when, on hastening to Versailles, I found myself solitary in the palace, when I saw a general indifference and even a kind of joy pervading the city and the gardens! The setting sun was forgotten; all adorations were turning toward the rising one. Not yet laid in his tomb, the old monarch was already numbered among his motionless and silent predecessors. From that time his reign was ancient history, and people concerned themselves only about the future; the old courtiers thought of nothing but how to keep their credit under the new reign, and the young ones of how to supplant them. The counterspell for the enchantments of a court is a change of reigns; then the heart is laid bare; all illusions end; the dead king is no longer more than a man, and often less. There is no dramatic stroke more moral than that, nor more adapted to make one reflect.”

At the moment when Louis XV. was in his agony, the Duke de Liancourt noticed that a valet of the wardrobe was in tears. “Well,” said the Duke to him, “are you weeping for your master?” To which the domestic answered in a loud tone: “Oh! not for that. If I am crying, it is for my poor comrade, who has never had the smallpox, and who will die of it.” The corpse, rolled up hastily in the sheets of the bed, was thrown into a triple coffin of oak and lead. Several priests, in the mortuary chapel, were the only victims condemned not to abandon the remains of the miserable King. May 12, the coffin was placed on a large coach. As is related by Baron de Besenval, “a score of pages and fifty mounted grooms, carrying torches, but like the carriages, not dressed in black, composed the entire procession, which set off at full trot at eight o’clock in the evening, and arrived at Saint Denis at eleven, amidst the gibes of the curious spectators on either side of the road, and who, under cover of the darkness, gave full scope to jesting, the dominant characteristic of the nation. They did not confine themselves to that; epitaphs, placards, verses, were scattered broadcast, aspersing the memory of the late King.”

A letter written by the Countess de Boufflers to Gustavus III., July 20, 1774, shows what were then the sentiments of a part of the French nobility. “After his death,” says the Countess, speaking of Louis XV., “he was abandoned, as usual, and even in a still more terrible manner on account of the nature of the disease; he was promptly interred; his corpse passed through the wood of Boulogne on its way to Saint Denis, about midnight. Cries of derision were heard as it passed by; people kept repeating: Taïaut! taïaut! as when a stag is seen, and in that ridiculous tone in which it is customary to pronounce it. If this circumstance is true, it shows great cruelty; but nothing is more inhuman than the indignant Frenchman, and, it must be agreed, he never had more cause to be so; never have a nation squeamish about honor, and a nobility naturally proud, received a more signal or less excusable insult than that given us by the late King when, not contented with the scandal he had given by his mistresses and his seraglio, at the age of sixty we saw him draw from the vilest class and the most infamous condition, a creature of the worst sort, in order to establish her at court, admit her to his table with his family, make her absolute mistress of favors, honors, and rewards, of politics and the laws, of which she has been the ruin,—misfortunes which one can hardly expect will be repaired. One cannot help regarding this sudden death and the dispersion of this infamous troupe as a stroke of Providence.”

If the nobility spoke thus, what must the bourgeoisie and the Parisian population, always so caustic and fault-finding, have said? Satirical verses in the style of those that follow were published:—

“Te voilà donc, pauvre Louis, Dans un cercueil, à Saint-Denis! C’est là que la grandeur expire. Depuis longtemps, s’il faut le dire, Inhabile à donner la loi, Tu portais le vain nom de roi, Sous la tutelle et sous l’empire Des tyrans qui régnaient pour toi.

“Étais-tu bon? C’est un problème Qu’on peut résoudre à peu de frais. Un bon prince ne fit jamais Le malheur d’un peuple qui l’aime, Et l’on ne peut appeler bon Un roi sans frein et sans raison, Qui ne vécut que pour lui-même....

“Faible, timide, peu sincère, Et caressant plus que jamais Quiconque avait su te déplaire, Au moment que de ta colère Il allait ressentir les traits: Voilà, je crois, ton caractère. Ami des propos libertins, Buveur fameux, et roi célèbre Par la chasse et par les catins: Voilà ton oraison funèbre.”[59]

O kings! was not Bossuet in the right when he said that although seated on the throne you were none the less sitting under the hand and the supreme authority of God? What reflections there are to make over the inanity of the grandeurs of this world, the miseries of court life, the recantations and meanness of flatterers, the shameful calculations of ambition and interest, the ugliness of the human heart! What a lesson! that frightful, horrible, repulsive death struggle of this sovereign, who had exhausted all the enjoyments of luxury, all the refinements of pleasure, all the elegances of voluptuousness! What a contrast between the boudoirs full of lights and flowers and perfumes, and the coffin where rotted “that indescribable something for which no language has a name”! What spectacle is at once more dismal and more instructive than the lamentable ending of this prince who had once been called the Well-Beloved?