History of the French revolution Author:Thomas Carlyle Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: fire unqueuched and now unquenchable is smoking and smoldering all round, has Louis XV. lain down to die. With Pompadourism and Dubarryism, his fleur-de-lis has ... more »been shamefully struck down in all lands and on all seas; poverty invades even the royal exchequer, and tax-farming can squeeze out no more; there is a quarrel of twenty-five years' standing with the parlement; everywhere want, dishonesty, unbelief, and hot-brained sciolists for state-physicians : it is a portentious hour. 24. Such things can the eye of history see in this sick-room of King Louis, which were invisible to the courtiers there. It is twenty years, gone Christmas day, since Lord Chesterfield, summing up what he had noted of this same France, wrote and sent off by post the following words, that have become memorable: "In short, all the symptoms which I have ever met with in history, previous to great changes and revolutions in government, now exist and daily increase iu France." CHAPTER III. VIATICUM. 25. For the present, however, the grand question with the governors of France is, shall extreme unction, or other ghostly viaticum (to Louis, not to France), be administered ? It is a deep question. For, if administered, if so " Chesterfield's Letters," December 25,1753. much as spoken of, must not, on the very threshold of the business, witch Dubarry vanish, hardly to return should Louis even recover ? With her vanishes Duke d'Aiguillon and company, and all their Armida- palace, as was said; chaos swallows the whole again, and there is left nothing but a smell of brimstone. But then, on the other hand, what will the dauphin- ists and choiseulists say ? Nay, what may the royal martyr himself say, should he happen to get deadly worse, without getting delirious ? For the present, he still kisse...« less