Louis the Well-Beloved was not as yet Louis the Well-Hated. Barbier says there was general consternation at Paris; everybody lamented. The archbishop commanded the devotions of the forty hours in all the churches. The priests and monks, suffocated by emotion, could hardly intone the _Domine salvum fac regem_. What was happening to Madame de Pompadour all this time? She remained in her apartment in the palace of Versailles, but she had not even dared solicit the favor of seeing the royal sufferer. She knew that Louis XV. was no longer the same man when he was ill, and that it took him only a moment to become once more a devotee. Remembering what had happened at Metz at the time of the ignominious banishment of the Duchess de Châteauroux, she was convinced that she was about to go into exile, and nearly everybody believed the same. “The people,” says Madame du Hausset, “received the news of the assault on the King with furious cries and the utmost despair; one could hear them crying under the windows from Madame’s apartment. They came in crowds, and Madame dreaded the fate of Madame de Châteauroux. Her friends came constantly with tidings. For that matter, her apartment was like a church, which everybody thought he had a right to enter. They came to see how she took it, under pretence of interest, and Madame did nothing but weep and faint away. Doctor Quesnay never left her, nor I either.” What was at this moment the attitude of the three principal ministers, Count d’Argenson (brother of the author of the Memoirs), Minister of War, M. de Machault, Keeper of the Seals, Minister of Justice, and Abbé de Bernis, who had been appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs three days before the assault? The first was the sworn enemy of the Marquise. He caught at the chance for vengeance. The second was under obligations to the Marquise, but, believing she would henceforth be powerless, he declared against her in order to salute the Dauphin’s rising sun. The third did not abandon the woman to whom he owed the portfolio he had just obtained. He wrote to M. de Choiseul this singular letter, in which the words “honor” and “virtue” are employed strangely enough: “The King has been assassinated, and all that the court has seen in this frightful event is a favorable moment for driving away our friend. Every intrigue has been brought to play on the confessor. There is a tribe at court who are always awaiting the Extreme Unction in order to try to augment their importance. Why should devotion be separated so from virtue? Our friend can no longer scandalize any one but fools and knaves. It is of public notoriety that friendship has supplanted gallantry these five years back. It is pure bigotry to go back into the past to impugn the innocence of the actual connection. This is founded upon his need of being able to open his heart to a proved and trusty friend who is, in the divisions of the Ministry, the sole point of reunion.