The end of that fatal eighteenth century was now approaching; undermined by years and debauchery, it was now like a ruined spend-thrift moving away from the calendar of the world in rags; it was hideously old, but its years inspired not respect. Old king, old ministers, old generals--if indeed there were generals,--old courtiers, old mistresses, old poets, old musicians, old opera dancers, broken down with _ennui_, pleasure, and idleness--toothless, faded, rouged, and wrinkled--were descending slowly to the tomb. Louis XV. formed one of the funeral procession; he was taken to St. Denis between two lines of _cabarets_ filled with drunken revellers, madly rejoicing at being rid of this plague, which another plague had carried off to the grave. Crebillon was dead; the son of the great Racine, honored by the famous title of Member of the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles Lettres, was taken off by a malignant fever, and obtained from the grateful publicity of the day the following necrological eulogium, as brief as it was eloquent: "M. Racine, last of the name, died yesterday of a malignant fever; as a man of letters he was long dead, having become stupefied by wine and devotion." Twelve days afterwards Marivaux followed Racine to the grave. The Abbe Prevost died of a tenth attack of apoplexy in the forest of Chantilly. In the following spring the celebrated Madame de Pompadour descended, at the age of forty-four, into the grave, after having exhaled a _bon mot_ in guise of confession. Desirous, as it would appear, of leaving this world like the rest of his worthy _comperes_, the composer Rameau cried furiously to his confessor, whose lugubrious note while intoning the service at his bedside offended the delicacy of his ear, 'What the devil are you muttering there, Monsieur le Cure? you are horribly out of tune!' And thereupon Master Rameau expired of a putrid fever. And what think you, worthy reader, occupied the public the day following the death of the most celebrated musician in Europe, the king of the French school? Why, nothing less than this wonderful piece of news: "Mademoiselle Mire, of the Opera, more celebrated as a courtesan than as a _danseuse_, has interred her lover; on his tomb are engraven these words: MI RE LA MI LA." A touching funeral oration, truly, for poor Rameau! Panard, the father of the French vaudeville, died some days after Rameau; and the Parisian public, with its national tenderness of heart, merely remarked, that "the words could not be separated from the accompaniment." You see, reader, how the ranks were thinning, how all these old candles were expiring in their sockets, how the ball was approaching its end.