Corrupt as he was, Louis XV. had faith. He suffered, because he acted against his conscience, and his conscience spoke louder than all his flatterers. The more adulation they gave him the more dissatisfied was he with himself. Nothing is so sad as the condition of a man who believes but does not practise, who is present at divine service, who kneels before the altar, who prays or tries to pray, and yet who does not amend his life. The ceremonies of religion, so touching and poetic, are then no longer consolations. They are torments. Remorse pursues him everywhere. The chants of the Church, if they are sad, increase his disquietude. If they are joyous, their gladness brings them into contrast with the bitterness of his heart. The soul feels that it can nevermore rejoice. Occasionally he conceives a horror of the woman who turns him from his duty; she appears to him for what she is: his enemy, his bad angel. Then the habit of vice resumes its sway. Remorse is stilled for awhile. Holy Week has gone by. But the wound remains at the bottom of his heart, profound, incurable. Louis XV. dared not communicate in 1739. He had been told of sacrilegious men, who, receiving the Host in their mouths, and thus “eating and drinking their own damnation,” had fallen stiff and dead. This made him reflect, and when the grand provost asked whether he would touch for the king’s evil, which the Kings of France cannot do until after they have received Communion, he drily answered: No. A King of France who does not make his Easter duty, a son of St. Louis who conducts himself like a disciple of Voltaire, what a scandal! Concerning this, Barbier the advocate, writes in his _Journal_: “It is dangerous for a king to give such an example to his people; we are on good enough terms with the Pope for the Son of the Church to have a dispensation to make his Easter communion, no matter in what state he is, without sacrilege and with a safe conscience.” Strange manner of comprehending religion! The impression made on the court was deplorable in this century apparently so incredulous. D’Argenson himself affirms this. He says: “They tried to hide the indecency by a Low Mass which Cardinal de Rohan should say in the cabinet of the King, Père de Linières being present; the fact that His Majesty had not presented himself either at the tribunal of Penance or to receive the Eucharist would be carefully concealed.”