Such were the ladies whom the Prince de Conti was justified in insulting, by saying to Louis XV., when the latter asked him why France produced no more marshals, "C'est qu'aujourd'hui nos femmes ont affaire à leurs laquais." In this circle, which only lived for the lowest sensuality, everything was degraded. Thus there was a Duc de Gesvres, who assumed the manner and avocations of a woman; he rouged himself, wielded the fan, and worked embroidery. Everything was brought low, everything disgraced; and a levity of the most odious nature was displayed in religious matters. What could the Church be and signify with persons who had seen a Dubois made a cardinal? And was not Bernis, too, a cardinal?--the same Bernis, christened "Suzon la Bouquetière," who once preached at the reception of a nun of noble birth, and had the misfortune, while going into the pulpit, to let fall a piece of paper, on which he had written a most scandalous couplet about the novice. As is usual in such degenerate times, the coarsest superstition was mixed up with the most frivolous free-thinking. The spirit of religious reform, brutally suppressed on its manifestation as Jansenism, had only been able to penetrate the universal rottenness in the caricature of Convulsionism. After the immoral mania of these revivalists went out of fashion, calling up spirits and demons grew popular among the great. At court, Saint Germain, the manufacturer of diamonds and the elixir of life, the predecessor of the clumsy charlatan Cagliostro, was called on to kill time for the yawning king and the Pompadour. In the Palais Royal, Casanova erected his cabalistic pyramids of figures; and for the entire fashionable female world, the coffee-cup of the fortune-teller Bontemps was a Delphic oracle. With extravagance and superstition, their sister, cruelty, naturally went hand in hand. When in March, 1757, Damiens was executed, the fashionable ladies hurried to a nameless act of barbarism, at their head being the pretty wife of Popelinière, the farmer-general, who had gained a great reputation in society by a scandalous intrigue with the sinner of sinners, the Duc de Richelieu. In order to learn what people were capable of in the Paris of that day, the reader ought to be acquainted with the awful sketch drawn by Casanova, the most decried but most masterly painter of the morals of the eighteenth century, of the execution of Damiens.