One thing strikes me in this series of royal mistresses; I see debauchery everywhere, but nowhere love. Love with its refinements, its disinterestedness, its spirit of sacrifice, its mysticism, its poetry--where is it? I perceive not even the least shadow of it. Ah! how right was Rochefoucauld in saying: “It is the same thing with true love as with the apparition of ghosts; everybody talks about, but very few have seen it.” Voluptuousness, on the other hand, is shameless in its cynicism, and when I contemplate this wretched King whom it degrades and corrupts and weakens, who is wearied and complains and is sad unto death, I recall a page from one of the most eloquent of men: “The intoxication once past, there remains in the soul a doleful astonishment, a bitterly experienced void. It may be filled by new agitations; but it is reproduced again vaster than before, and this painful alternation between extreme joys and profound depression, between flashes of happiness and the impossibility of being happy, begets at last a state of continual sadness.... Say no longer to the man attacked by it: See what a fine day! Say no more: Listen to this sweet music! Do not even say: I love you! Light, harmony, love, all that is good and charming can do no more than irritate his secret wound. He is doomed to the _Manes_, and everything appears to him as if he were in a sepulchre, stifling for want of air and crushed by the weight of marble.... There comes a moment when all the man’s satiated powers give him an invincible certainty of the nothingness of the universe. Once a fleeting smile was all the despairing man needed to open limitless perspectives before him; now the adoration of the world would not affect him. He estimates it at its true value: nothing.”[1] Is not the profound sadness of Louis XV. a moral lesson as striking as any instruction from the preachers? Here is a sovereign privileged by destiny, handsome, powerful, victorious, surrounded by general admiration, possessor of the first throne of the universe, loved almost to idolatry by his people, having a tender and devoted wife, good and respectful children, soldiers who long to die bravely in his service to the cry of, “Long live the King!” He dwells in splendid palaces; when he pleases, he shakes off the yoke of etiquette and lives like a private gentleman in little residences which are masterpieces of grace and good taste; every one seeks to divine his wishes, his caprices; all the arts are pressed into the service of making life agreeable to him; all pleasures, all elegancies, conspire to charm and entertain him. His health is robust; boon-companion, bold horseman, indefatigable huntsman and lover, he enjoys every pleasure at his will. Well, he is plunged into the depths of ill-humor, the most dismal melancholy, and the sentiment he inspires in those who observe him closely--as every memoir of the time attests--is not envy, but pity.