Is it not a curious thing to hear, forty years beforehand, the first mutterings of the formidable tempest which was to engulf everything,--nobility, clergy, Parliaments, monarchy? We are in the year 1750. The archers have arrested, as a police measure, certain vagabond children who were begging in Paris. Suddenly a rumor spreads that abductions are multiplying and that no family is any longer in security. Popular imagination is excited, overheated. People say that in order to restore his wasted forces the kingly debauché takes baths of children’s blood, like a new Herod. Madame de Pompadour, who has been imprudent enough to come to Paris, has barely time to escape from being torn to pieces. The people want to go to Versailles and burn the château, built, as they say, at their expense. The exasperated King says that hereafter he will not pass through Paris when going to Compiègne. “What!” he cries, “shall I show myself to these villainous people who say I am a Herod!” And to avoid entering thereafter the capital of which he has conceived a horror, he establishes outside the walls the road which is now called the path of the Revolt. The tide of anger rises--rises incessantly against the favorite. The people overwhelm her with curses; they call her the _King’s hussy_. The daughters of Louis XV. designate her by a still more vulgar name. In November, 1751, the Dauphin and Dauphiness, on their way to Notre Dame, cross the bridge of the Tournelle. Some two thousand women surround them. “We are dying with hunger!” they say. “Bread! bread!” The Dauphiness trembles like a leaf. The Dauphin causes several louis to be distributed. “Monseigneur,” say the women of the people, “we do not want your money. It is bread we want. We love you much. Let that wretch be sent away who is governing the kingdom and ruining it! If we had hold of her, there would soon be nothing left of her but relics.”