The closing years of the Well-Beloved's reign were years of unmitigated ignominy and disaster. Indian conquests were muddled away, and the gallant Dupleix died broken-hearted and in misery at Paris. Canada was lost. During the Seven Years' War the incapacity and administrative corruption of Madame de Pompadour's favourites made them the laughing-stock of Paris. In 1770 the Duke of Choiseul refused to tolerate the vile Du Barry, whom we may see in Madame Campan's Memoirs sitting on the arm of Louis' chair at a council of state, playing her monkey tricks to amuse the old sultan, snatching sealed orders from his hand and making the royal dotard chase her round the council chamber. She swore to ruin the duke and, aided by a cabal of Jesuit sympathisers and noble intriguers, succeeded in compassing his dismissal. The Parlement of Paris paid for its temerity: it and the whole of the parlements in France were suppressed, and seven hundred magistrates exiled by _lettres de cachet_. Every patriotic Frenchman now felt the gathering storm. Madame Campan writes that twenty years before the crash came it was common talk in her father's house (he was employed in the Foreign Office) that the old monarchy was rapidly sinking and a great change at hand. Indeed, the writing on the wall was not difficult to read. The learned and virtuous Malesherbes and many another distinguished member of the suppressed parlements warned the king of the dangers menacing the crown, but so sunk was its wearer in sensual stupefaction that he only murmured: "Well, it will last my time," and with his flatterers and strumpets uttered the famous words--"_Apres nous le deluge_." So lost to all sense of honour was Louis, that he defiled his hands with bribes from tax-farmers who ground the faces of the poor, and became a large shareholder in an infamous syndicate of capitalists that bought up the corn of France in order to export and then import it at enormous profit. This abominable _Pacte de Famine_ created two artificial famines in France; its authors battened on the misery of the people, and for any who lifted their voices against it the Bastille yawned.