Madame de Pompadour was destined to “live in the midst of alarms.” For nearly a year she had been congratulating herself on the cleverness with which she had carried by assault the post of lady of the Queen’s palace, and had dismissed the confessors, of whom she thought she had no more need, when an unforeseen event was very near making her lose all the ground she had so painfully acquired. Toward six o’clock in the evening of January 5, 1757, Louis XV. had just come down the little staircase leading from his apartments to a vestibule facing the marble court, and was about to enter a carriage, when he was struck by a penknife in the hand of a person named Damiens, who, either through folly or fanaticism, wished not to kill him, but to give him a warning. The King thought himself mortally wounded. He belonged to that category of Christians who are never pious but when they are sick. When in good health they say: “There is always time to repent.” But if danger threatens them, they tremble, they go to confession, they become saints for the time being, reserving the privilege of resuming their vicious habits as soon as their health returns. When he thought death was facing him, Louis XV. expressed himself in terms worthy of the Most Christian King. At Metz he had been sublime. He was not less eloquent at Versailles. The noblest maxims were on his lips, the most beautiful sentiments in his heart. He named his son lieutenant-general of the kingdom, and said to him with emotion: “I leave you a very disturbed realm; I hope that you may govern it better than I have done.” He melted into tears of edification and admiration all those who came near him. This was no longer the man of the Deer Park; it was the son of Saint Louis. One of his first words after being struck was a cry for a priest. His Jesuit confessor, Père Desmarets, was not just then at Versailles. A priest of the Grand-Commun was summoned (the ecclesiastics who acted as chaplains to those persons in the King’s service who were lodged in the apartments called Grand-Commun). Louis XV. made his confession first to this priest, and again to Père Desmarets, who arrived in great haste from Paris. Louis XV. had received only a trifling wound. Damiens, who might have killed him, had not wished to do so. He had two blades on one handle, a large one and a small one, and had used only the latter. The doctor said that if the wounded man were not a king, he might go about his affairs the next day. But the imagination of Louis XV. was easily excited. When the wound had been probed, and he was assured that it was not very deep, he exclaimed: “It is deeper than you think, for it goes clear to the heart.” Baron de Besenval relates in his Memoirs that when the doctors had no longer the least anxiety, that of the King was such that, believing himself dying, he made the Abbé de Rochecour, the chaplain of the neighborhood, give him absolution every moment.