Had Fortune dealt as kindly with the Bourbon House as she had lately done with the failing Hapsburgs: could she have given to France in Louis XV. the latest and greatest of her kings, the Revolution might have been undreamed of, and the Bourbons absolute to this day. Such a man would have discerned the tendency of events: he would have thrown himself into line with it.[435] He would have sent his nobles beyond the Rhine, with a mission to die or to justify their existence; he would have crushed with an iron hand the pretensions of the Church; and turning Versailles into a national museum, he would have transferred his Court to the Louvre or the Tuileries, nor would he have allowed it to be surpassed in brilliance by the salons of the farmers-general. By putting himself at the head of the new France, he might have renewed the tradition of the French Monarchy. Such might have been the work of a great King; but the Great King reviewed his squadrons on the plain of Potsdam, and devoted to France but a passing jest; and she was left to the guidance of one of the most pitiable and mean of men, who could do no more than watch "_C'est la déportation qui constitue principalement l'esclavage; nul n'est facilement esclave dans son pays._"--"Considérations" (1784). the clouds and predict the bursting of "Le Déluge." Effort to avert it there was none. Versailles displayed perhaps as strange a combination of pomp and vanity as was ever known in the history of the world. It retained the profusion, without the dignity, of the Grand Age; and public affairs went as they could while incapable nobles and dissolute Churchmen exchanged the shuttle of an endless intrigue. In tradition and spirit it was utterly alien from the new society. But one representative of the rising classes won her way into the charmed circle; she entered the Court as Madame d'Etioles; but before long the wife of the farmer-general was lost in Madame la Marquise de Pompadour. In public affairs the blindness was equally insensate. The King consented to trail his ermine in the slush of ecclesiastical quarrels; and such men as Tencin were the rulers of France, while Voltaire was reduced to crave the favour of some obscure lieutenant of police. When at last a man arises who will not take Madame's gifts, but will consent to copy her music, and who will not accept a hundred louis for work worth a dozen francs, he is spoken of as some strange kind of wild animal, "un original d'une nouvelle espèce," in Madame's own words.[436] And meanwhile the silver-tongued "bourreau" went on correcting his proofs--of the "Contrat Social"--and inditing the charter of those great classes which the French Monarchy continued to ignore.