Boucher died a few months before that Christmas Eve of 1770 that saw Choiseul driven from power by the trio of knaves who used the vulgar but kindly woman Du Barry as their tool--indeed she refused to pull the great minister down until she had made handsome terms on his behalf; Choiseul was too astute a man not to recognise what lay beyond the shadow of her pretty skirts--nay, does he not turn in the courtyard as he leaves the palace to go into banishment, his _lettre de cachet_ in his pocket, and, seeing a woman looking out from a window at the end of an alley, bow and kiss his hand to the window where gazes out of tear-filled eyes this strange doomed beauty who has won to the sceptre of France? 'Twas four years before the small-pox took the king--four years during which this same Du Barry, with her precious trio, d'Aiguillon, Maupeou, and Terray, sent the members of Parliament into banishment--years that launched royal France on its downward rushing, with laughter and riot, to its doom, whilst the apathetic Louis shrugged his now gross royal shoulders at all warnings of catastrophe, which to give him due credit, he was scarce witless enough or blind enough not to foresee. Nay, did he not even admit it in his constantly affirmed, if cynical, creed that "things, as they were, would last as long as he; and he that came after him must shift for himself"? Ay; he came even nearer to the kernel of the significance of things, when, shrugging his no longer well-beloved shoulders, as the Pompadour had done, he repeated her cynical saying of "_Après nous le déluge_." It was to be a deluge indeed--scarlet red. Wit and ruthless fatuity were the order of the day; these folk were wondrous full of the neatly turned phrase and the polished epigram. Most fatuous of them all, and as ruthless as any, was Terray--he who tinkered with finance, with crown to his many infamies the scandalous _Pacte de Famille_, that mercantile company that was to produce an artificial rise in the price of corn by buying up the grain of France, exporting it, and bringing it back for sale at vast profit--with Louis of France as considerable shareholder. Had not the owners of the land the right to do what they would with their own? 'Twas small wonder that the well-beloved became the highly-detested of the groaning people--he and his precious privileged class.