Maria Antoinette Author:Jacob Abbott Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Lonto XV. idled with imaU-pox. Flight of the ctrartten Chapter III. Maria Antoinette Enthroned. |"N the year 1774, about four years after the -- marriage ... more »of Maria Antoinette and Louis, the dissolute old king, Louis XV., in his palace at Versailles, surrounded by his courtiers and his lawless pleasures, was taken sick. The disease soon developed itself as the small-pox in its most virulent form. The physicians, knowing the terror with which the conscience-smitten tnonarch regarded death, feared to inform him af the nature of his disease. " What are these pimples," inquired the king, " which are breaking out all over my body ?" "They are little pustules," was the reply " which require three days in forming, three in suppurating, and three in drying." The dreadful malady which had seized upon the king was soon, however, known throughout the court, and all fled from the infection. The miserable monarch, hated by his subjects, despised by his courtiers, and writhing under the mnrpion lash of his own rxmsoience, was left to The Marchioness du Pompadour. Her dissolute chiracter groan and die alone. It was a horrible termination of a most loathsome life. The vices of Louis XV. sowed tho seeds of the French Revolution. Two dissolute women, notorious on the page of history, each, in theii turn, governed him and France. The Marchioness du Pompadour was his first favorite. Ambitious, shrewd, unprincipled, and avaricious, she held the weak-minded king entirely under her control, and spread throughout the court an influence so contaminating that the whole empire was infected with the demoralization. Upon this woman he squandered almost the revenues of the kingdom. The celebrated Pare au Cerf, the scene of almost unparalleled voluptu- ousness, was reared for her at an ex...« less