And while France was thus weaving her future, what were the other nations doing? England, sane, practical, with little time for abstractions, and little said about "glory," was importing turnips, converting agriculture into a science, and under the instruction of exiled Huguenots, establishing marvellous industries. In the new kingdom of Prussia, a half-savage, half-inspired King had been importing artisans and skill of all sorts, reclaiming waste lands. Living like a miser, he had indulged in but one luxury: an army, which should be the best in the world. There was no powder, no patches at his Court; where he thrashed with his own royal hands male and female courtiers, starved, imprisoned, and cudgelled his son and heir to his throne for playing on the violin; and, it is said, so terrified and scarified his grenadiers with canes and cats that not one of them would not have preferred facing the enemy to meeting his enraged sovereign, had he done wrong. Frederick was not a pleasant barbarian. But there is at least a ring of sincerity about all this, which it is refreshing to recall after the tinsel and depraved refinements of France under Louis XV., and something too which gives promise, in spite of its brutality, of a stalwart future. Five years before the close of this miserable reign, an event occurred seemingly of small importance to Europe. A child was born in an obscure Italian household. His name was Napoleon Bonaparte. CHAPTER XI. Louis XV. was dead, and two children, with the light-heartedness of youth and inexperience, stepped upon the throne which was to be a scaffold--Louis XVI., only twenty, and Marie Antoinette, his wife, nineteen. He, amiable, kind, full of generous intentions; she, beautiful, simple, child-like and lovely. Instead of a debauched old King with depraved surroundings, here were a Prince and Princess out of a fairy-tale. The air was filled with indefinite promise of a new era for mankind to be inaugurated by this amiable young king, whose kindness of heart shone forth in his first speech, "We will have no more loans, no credit, no fresh burdens on the people;" then, leaving his ministers to devise ways of paying the enormous salaries of officials out of an empty treasury, and to arrange the financial details of his benevolent scheme of government, he proceeded with his gay and brilliant young wife to Rheims, there to be crowned with a magnificence undreamed of by Louis XIV.