Jeanne
wept in silence and prayed to God as one who has long neglected
her prayers.
Louis XV had not neglected his prayers, and gave two hundred
thousand livres to the poor, besides ordering masses at St.
Genevieve. Parliament opened the shrine, and knelt gravely
before that miraculous relic. The least serious of all these good
worshippers was, strange to say, the curate of St. Genevieve:
"Ah, well!" said he gaily, when Louis was dead, "let us continue
to talk of the miracles of St. Genevieve. Of what can you
complain? Is not the King dead?"
At the last moment it was not God who held the heart of Louis--it
was his mistress. "Ask the Countess to come here again," he said.
"Sire, you know that she has gone away," they answered.
"Ah! has she gone? Then I must go!" So he departed.
His end drew forth some maledictions. There were insults even
at his funeral services. "Nevertheless," said one old soldier, "he
was at the battle of Fontenoy." That was the most eloquent
funeral oration of Louis XV.
"The King is dead, long live the King!" But before the death of
Louis XVI they cried: "The king is dead, long live the Republic!"
Rose-colored mourning was worn in the good city of Paris. The
funeral oration of the King and a lament for his mistress were
pronounced by Sophie Arnould, of which masterpiece of sacred
eloquence the last words only are preserved: "Behold us orphaned
both of father and mother.
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