a new and unknown future Louis XV. bowed his head in deeper and deeper despondency. In vain did the madcap Countess buzz about him like a bee, light as a butterfly, brilliant-plumaged as a humming-bird: the most the King could do was now and again to raise for a moment his heavy head, on which seemed to be set more visibly every hour the seal of death.
The fact is, time was passing, and the second month opening since the death of the Marquis de Chauvelin.
It was the 3rd May, and by the 28th of the same month it would be exactly two months since that nobleman died.
Then, as if everything concurred to deepen the lugubrious impression of coming disaster, the Abbé de Beauvais had been preaching before the Court, and in a sermon on the duty of preparing for death, and the peril of impenitence at the last, he had cried:
"Yet another forty days, Sire, and Nineveh shall be destroyed."
The result of all this was that from brooding over Monsieur de Chauvelin's sudden death the King turned to ponder on the Abbé de Beauvais' terrifying words,—that after reminding the Duc d'Ayen that by the end of May it would be just two months since Chauvelin died, he would mutter in the Duc de Richelieu's ear, " It was forty days that confounded Abbé de Beauvais said, was it not? "—adding plaintively, " I wish, I wish the forty days were over! "
Nor was this all. The Almanach de Liège, under the month April, prophesied: " In April of this year a lady in the highest favour at Court will play her last card."
This set Madame du Barry echoing the King's lamentations, and declaring of this fatal month what the King had said of the forty days: " I wish, I wish this cursed month were well ended! "
But in the said month of April which so terrified Madame du Barry, and during these forty days which the King so dreaded, omens and portents only multiplied. The Genoese Ambassador, whom the King was in the habit of seeing frequently, died with appalling suddenness. The Abbé de Laville, coming to the King's " lever " to tender his thanks for the post of Director of Foreign Affairs to which he had just been appointed, fell dead at the Monarch's feet, struck down by an apoplectic fit. To complete the tale, one day when the King was out hunting, a thunderbolt fell close beside him.
All these circumstances combined to render Louis XV. more and more gloomy. Still, Spring was come back, and might work some alleviation of the Monarch's sad condition. The new birth of Nature shaking off her winter winding-sheet, the re-clothing of the earth in green, the fresh leafage of the trees, the warm breezes that seem like fiery souls in search of corporeal habitations, the fragrant air peopled with a myriad living atoms,—all this would surely restore some life to the inert mass, some movement to the wornout machine.
About the middle of April Lebel had been struck by the remarkable beauty of a miller's daughter, whom he had chanced to see at her father's mill. He thought so dainty a morsel might stimulate the King's jaded appetite, and spoke in enthusiastic terms to his master of what he had seen. The latter gave a careless consent to this new attempt being tried to divert his melancholy.
As a general rule the girls who were to be honoured—or dishonoured—by the Royal favour went through certain preliminaries before arriving at the King's bedchamber. They were examined by the doctors and they passed through Lebel's hands; only after these formalities had been duly fulfilled, were they deemed eligible.
This time, however, so fresh and pretty was the child that all such precautions were omitted. Even had they been taken as usual, it would hardly have been possible for the most experienced physician to discover that a few hours before she had caught the small-pox.
The King had had the disease in his boyhood; yet two days after he had enjoyed the girl's society, he was attacked by it a second time, a malignant fever supervening on the top of everything, further to complicate matters.
On April 29th the first eruption declared itself, and the Archbishop of Paris, Christophe de Beaumont, hurried to Versailles.
The situation was of the strangest. The administration of the Last Sacraments, if the necessity should arise, could not take place till after the dismissal of the Royal concubine, and this same concubine, who was attached to the Jesuit
