If such were popular impressions before the Seven Years’ War, it is easy to comprehend what they must have been after the national humiliations which overwhelmed unhappy France. Madame de Pompadour thought she could remedy the immense unpopularity which pursued her by flattering still more the philosophers who could blow the trumpet of Renown for her. These singular patriots, who had celebrated the glory of the victor of Rossbach as if he had been a Titus or a Marcus Aurelius, asked only one thing to console them for the afflictions, shames, and miseries of their country: a regular persecution against the Jesuits. Madame de Pompadour was ready to follow Voltaire’s disciples on to this ground. She might have hesitated if the Jesuits had been her flatterers, if they had made a pretence of being her dupes, if they had concluded to play a rôle of complaisance in the comedies of her pretended repentance, if they had seemed to take her for another Maintenon, for a mother in Israel. But she did not forget that when, in 1756, she had been obliged to go to confession in order to be eligible for an appointment as lady of the Queen’s palace, Père de Sacy had refused her absolution, and that when the attempt was made on the King, in 1757, Père Desmarets had nearly obliged her to leave the court. Hence the Jesuits were condemned. A Parliament decree of February 22, 1764, commanded that within eight days they should take an oath not to live any longer according to their institute, to abjure the condemned maxims, and to hold no correspondence with their former superiors. “When the Jesuits were expelled,” says Chateaubriand, “their existence was not dangerous to the State; the past was punished in the present; that often happens among men; the _Provincial Letters_ had deprived the Company of Jesus of its moral force. And yet Pascal is merely a calumniator of genius; he has left us an immortal lie.” The great crime of the Jesuits was to have displeased the Marquise de Pompadour. One saw holy missionaries, untiring apostles, illustrious professors, men who had honored religion and science, old men surrounded by the esteem of all honest people, driven from their houses, deprived of all resources, expelled from France with a rigor and injustice so cruel that certain philosophers thought they could take up their defence in the name of humanity. Those Jesuits whom Madame de Pompadour was driving out, Frederick the Great was to shelter in his dominions. “They are the best priests I have ever known,” said he. Catherine II. was to welcome them to her vast states and make use of them in founding educational establishments.