[1732-1739 A.D.]

of Richelieu, seduction personified, vice made man. The plotters first urged Louis to gluttony: the taste for wine led to a love of gaming and the chase; these to experimental gallantries. At last an adroit and cynical valet succeeded in throwing into his arms a lady of the court who was taken with his appearance and who made all the advances the countess of Mailly.

Fleury was suspected of having a hand in the affair. For his plans La Mailly would serve better than any other mistress-since the time of mistresses was come. The queen, it must be remembered, had rendered this development almost inevitable, even had no courtesan conspired against the fidelity of her husband. The most upright of women, Maria Leczinska was also the most unattractive; grave and austere, rigidly and tactlessly religious, she could not fail to be distasteful to a husband younger than herself, whose barren mind needed constant entertainment and distraction and who, while he had a cold heart, had hot enough blood. Louis no longer bore the mark of his weakly childhood. A domestic quarrel growing out of the indifference of his wife precipitated the crisis desired among the intriguers of the court. Madame de Mailly became the acknowledged mistress of the king. Fleury, who had easily tolerated the fact, would have liked to prevent or smother the scandal; but he now perceived that his power, hitherto absolute, had reached its limit, and he forebore to insist.

The curb was snapped: Louis had been restrained only by a sort of physical timidity, to which was joined the dread of hell; but all inherent sense of integrity, all gentleness of heart was absent from his unfortunate character. He proved not more faithful to his mistress than to his wife; and he was not long in exceeding the bounds of ordinary libertinism and presenting to the eyes of France a spectacle unprecedented. Madame de Mailly was the eldest of five daughters of the house of Nesle, all remarkable either for beauty or grace of mind. The second sister, at the time a pensionnaire in a convent, was called to Versailles by Madame de Mailly with the fixed purpose of presenting her to the king, that in her turn she might amuse him, dominate him, and adopt the political rôle for which the mild La Mailly

had no desire. Mlle. de Nesle succeeded in part: COSTUME AT THE BEGINNING she captivated the king. She did not banish her oF THE REIGN OF Louis XV sister; worse, she shared the king with her. When

she became pregnant the king married her, for form's

sake, to the marquis of Vintimille, grandnephew of the archbishop of Paris; the successor of the upright Noailles blessed the marriage without scruple. A third demoiselle de Ñesle, married to the duke of Lauraguais, was added to the two elder. It seemed that Louis could relish no pleasure unseasoned by incest.

The regency had returned to Versailles-minus the life and gaiety. The moral effect of these examples is easily understood; as for the political consequences, they were not immediately obvious. Fleury had surrendered as to morals, but not as to expenditure: he defended, with great dexterity, his

[1726-1740 A.D.] authority and his treasury against the audacious Vintimille; and Louis, satisfied so long as his old preceptor spared him remonstrances concerning his debaucheries, turned a deaf ear to the insinuations of his mistress.

PROSPERITY IN THE COLONIES

Industry flourished in the cities, in spite of obstructive regulations. Commerce, scarcely retarded for a moment by a war without serious danger and wholly continental, pursued its way in the Mediterranean and the Levant, where France maintained a decided supremacy, and took towards the Indies a flight which the government had not instigated, and which promptly filled it with apprehension. France executed spontaneously the designs of Colbert and of Law, and developed too maritime a spirit for the taste of Fleury, who wished to keep her hidden within her own frontiers. The events of this part of the eighteenth century are the best refutation of the melancholy presumption, born of her misfortunes, that France is not adapted for maritime commerce, the only commerce which extends indefinitely as well the power of a nation as its field of activity.

The enormous machine of the Compagnie des Indes, disentangled from the débris of Law's "System," of 1717, was again put forcibly in motion. The organic centre of this vast body was the new Breton city of Lorient (L'Orient); this home of the first Indian company under Colbert, a simple little village of eight or nine hundred souls in 1726, rapidly developed into a splendid city. The beautiful blue granite from the Blavet and the Scorff was fashioned into imposing edifices to adorn the wharves whence departed and whither returned the Indian vessels, each year more numerous and more heavily laden. The returns, amounting only to 2,000,000 francs [£80,000 or $400,000] a year, in 1714-1719, before the reorganisation of the company, reached 18,000,000 francs [£720,000 or $3,600,000] between 1734 and 1736. The Indian factories, so long slack, resumed work with triumphant activity; one hundred million natives sought the shelter of the French flag at Pondicherry; Chandernagor grew rapidly; the islands of Mascarenhas, that well-chosen post between Africa and the Indies, became the one, the Isle of Bourbon, a rich agricultural colony; the other, the Isle of France, a naval station whence France dominated the Indian Ocean. By a happy combination, which founded free trade upon a monopoly, while the company exercised exclusive control over the traffic between France and India, French merchants and agents of the company coasted from place to place, in every quarter of the Orient, as far as China. French vessels multiplied, encouraged by success; the English and Dutch companies simmered with jealousy to behold these newcomers hastening eagerly to make up lost

time.

The honour of this mighty impulse was due not less to the old prime minister or to the comptroller-general than to the financiers who from Paris directed the operations of the Compagnie des Indes. This movement, entirely spontaneous, this venturous expansion of France, was impersonated by two men who, posted the one at Chandernagor on the Ganges, in the heart of India, the other on the Isle of France, the key to the oceans, executed or instigated projects new and bold. This is not the time to detail the labours, the glories, the misfortunes of these two men, equal in intrepidity and

1 This advantage was offset by the fact that the French colours were unknown in the Baltic, and her commerce with Portugal, very flourishing before the War of the Spanish Succession, had fallen off since the Treaty of Methuen and been replaced by that of England.

[1717–1740 A.D.]

determination, if not in character and genius - these men whom Colbert employed for the honour of France, whom the ministers of Louis XV baited one against the other, and one after the other sacrificed them both. It suffices here to write the names of Dupleix and Labourdonnais.

The American possessions showed a development even vaster than the Indian. Progress in America was not dependent upon a few great men, as in India. The tide of affairs sufficed to carry it along, since that man of genius, Law, had removed those obstacles which heretofore had stemmed the flood of colonial production. Canada, vast and cold, was the one exception; in spite of the fact that her population had materially augmented since the time of Louis XIV, she had made no such progress as that of the English colonies farther south. Louisiana, on the contrary, had prospered ever since the company, not knowing how to turn it to advantage, had ceded it back to the government in 1731; free trade had replaced the control of the company, by which all traffic. had been restricted to that with France and prohibited with the neighbouring colonies. But the greatest interests, wealth, and population centred in the West Indies—the land of dazzling sunshine in the splendid tropical seas.

Here France had acquired, since 1717, a decisive and irresistible preponderance over England. Under Colbert, the wretched administration and the increasing calamities in France had deprived the colonies of the extension of domestic commerce. They were declining; raw sugar, bringing from 14 to 15 francs per quintal in 1682, had fallen in 1713 to 5 or 6. In 1696 the island of Santa Cruz (St. Croix) was abandoned; in 1698 there were not twenty thousand blacks in the French West Indies; and fifty vessels of ordinary tonnage sufficed for the island trade. At the end of 1717, the moment when Law's influence began to make itself appreciable, all was changed. A new regulation released French merchandise destined for the islands from all duty; authorised the free re-exportation of goods brought from the islands to France, subject to a tax of three per cent; and struck a blow at foreign sugar with a general tax. Marseilles was admitted among the ports enjoying commercial relations with America, which opened the Mediterranean to colonial commodities. French West Indian agriculture and commerce took huge strides. In 1740, French sugar had driven English sugar from foreign markets. French coffee from the same source, a product but recently filched from Dutch Guiana, had attained to a superiority almost as exclusive. The Spanish district of Santo Domingo remained dormant; the French, much smaller, reached a development that made it worth more than the entire English West Indies. Martinique, which in 1700 had but fifteen thousand native cultivators, in 1736 counted seventy thousand, and abounded in specie as well as in notes; general emporium for the Windward Islands, it received every year in its ports two hundred vessels from France and thirty from Canada. Guadaloupe, entering a little later into the movement, aspired to rival its rich and flourishing neighbour. These were the two queens of the Lesser Antilles, and the most productive of all the American archipelago in proportion to their extent.

The ports of France, in touch with colonial commerce, participated largely in this fruitful activity, of which the greatest benefit reverted to the ship owners. The splendid edifices with which the eighteenth century adorned Nantes, Marseilles, above all magnificent Bordeaux, afterwards so fallen into decay, are sufficient witness to the life of activity and splendour of those prosperous days. We can sum up in a few words the progress of France: before Law, if we can believe Voltaire, P she possessed only three hundred

H. W. VOL. XII. D

[1717-1740 A.D.] merchant vessels; in 1738, she counted eighteen hundred! Had Colbert lived to see these days, how great would have been his joy! How deep, also, his indignation at the paucity of the military marine! The old tubs of Tourville and Duguay-Trouin rotted among the silent docks in front of the empty arsenals, and the noble remnants of the naval armies were contemptuously relegated to oblivion. While France had next to no marine commerce to protect she had maintained a magnificent navy; now that she had vast interests to defend, she had neither vessels nor troops.

Two perils menaced the future of France on the seas one imminent, of which we have spoken; the other less immediate, but growing steadily with the growth of colonial prosperity, forming indeed the basis of that prosperity-slavery. A splendid present, a future full of alarms—such was the prospect that faced urban France-France industrial, commercial, and maritime. Agricultural France, the vast dormant rural districts, offered a widely different aspect, a lamentable contrast-a dark and doubtful future, a present full of sorrow and bitterness. Fleury's economies had sufficed to ward off another bankruptcy, and to restore a partial equilibrium between the receipts and the expenditures, which would have been complete but for the war of 1733; but he had not remedied the chronic maladies of the rural population. The fatal system of taxation weighed each day more heavily; Fleury's inertia had done as much harm to the provinces as it had done good to commerce. The despotism of the tax-farmers and fiscal agents had free rein; in proportion as the government was weak at its centre, it was severe and unrighteous at its extremities. Intendants and their subordinates, commissioners, officers of elections, juggled the laws and the decrees of the courts; taxes were imposed without regard to justice; extortion, imprisonment, peculation, arbitrary favours and punishments - this was the regular régime for the most part. The intendants, guardians of order and national unity under Richelieu and Colbert, of severe and regular despotism under Louvois, were now, with a few honourable exceptions, no more than capricious pashas.

THE CORVÉE

Fleury was not, however, altogether inert in matters of public duty. He made one innovation, and here again his inevitable economy was fatal. The slight concessions in the matter of the taille were counterbalanced by a new change, by which the declining monarchy appropriated to itself the most oppressive tradition of feudalism-the corvée. the corvée. After the war of 1733, the government, having resolved to take up the work of the regency on the public ways, opened new roads, repaired old ones, ordered works of art at the expense of the state, and authorised the intendants to levy upon the communities for men, carts, and horses for the work. This by no law, no decree of the courts, no act of government - they dared not brave the indignation of the people by a solemn proclamation of the infamous corvée. The enormous burden was cunningly imposed upon the parishes bordering the route by the intendants, who portioned it out according to their caprice; and imprisonment without record was the punishment of the least resistance, the slightest delay.

The result of all these abuses was the profound misery, a picture of which is left us by D'Argenson. The years between 1738 and 1740 were most disastrous for the peasants. Under that ministry, cited by historians as a period of happy tranquillity, or at least of material well-being, "men died like flies from poverty and hard living”—and this during years of

[1735-1740 A.D.] comparative plenty (if we except 1740, a year of dearth throughout all Europe), and notwithstanding the apportionment of provisions by the government. The eastern and western provinces were the greatest sufferers; but the distress reached even to the Paris faubourg. On a day in September, 1739, when the king passed through the faubourg St. Victor on the way to his new palace of Choisy, the crowds saluted him not with the cry, "Long live the king!" but with the appeal, "Distress! Famine! Bread! At the end of 1740 a rumour was current that the national fund had been diminished by one sixth; and D'Argenson affirms that "misery had slain more French in one year than all the wars of Louis XIV!" Allowing for some exaggeration on his part, the facts remain sufficiently dismal.

Cardinal Fleury had neither known nor cared to know how to employ for the good of France those intervals of peace and calm allowed her; he had lived from one day to the next, a selfish old man, desiring only to assure at any cost peace to his declining years. The woes of France, instead of healing, he had benumbed with sleeping draughts. He knew not even how to prolong that sleep until he himself should have entered into the eternal silence.m

THE WAR OF THE AUSTRIAN SUCCESSION (1740-1748 A.D.)

Five years of peace had ensued for France. Her ardent abettors of war were satisfied. Not so those of similar temper in England, where national animosity was excited against the Spaniards on account of their commercial restrictions on the trade with South America, and of the cruelties with which they AN ECCLESIASTIC OF THE COURT OF supported them. The same cry was raised against Walpole in one country as against Fleury in the other; and the English minister was driven into a war with Spain, as the latter had been compelled to hostilities against the emperor. The court of France became occupied in this interval with baser intrigues.

LOUIS XV

Louis XV hitherto had led a regular life attached to his queen, and his society was confined to a small knot of young courtiers, empty as himself, whom he admitted to partake of his petits soupers in the petits appartements. The monarch, in affecting the pettiness and privacy of humbler life, sought variety and escape from the dulness of grandeur. Even here, however, Louis was tenacious of his dignity; nor did he allow any political influence to those who partook of his convivial pleasures. One or two boy nobles had once indeed endeavoured to influence the king against Fleury. The monarch betrayed them to his minister, as Louis XIII might have done; but Fleury did not imitate Richelieu in his revenge. He merely sent the young conspirators away from court, stigmatising the plot sufficiently by calling it that of the marmousets or monkeys.