the French Opera to migrate to the great city, in which were fermenting
with much noisy fervor those new ideas in art, literature, politics,
and society, which were turning the eyes of all Europe to the French
capital.

The world's history has hardly a more picturesque and striking
spectacle, a period more fraught with the working of powerful forces,
than that exhibited by French society in the latter part of Louis XV.'s
reign. We see a court rotten to the core with indulgence in every form
of sensuality and vice, yet glittering with the veneer of a social
polish which made it the admiration of the world. A dissolute king
was ruled by a succession of mistresses, and all the courtiers vied in
emulating the vice and extravagance of their master. Yet in this foul
compost-heap art and literature nourished with a tropical luxuriance.
Voltaire was at the height of his splendid career, the most brilliant
wit and philosopher of his age. The lightnings of his mockery attacked
with an incessant play the social, political, and religious shams of
the period. People of all classes, under the influence of his unsparing
satire, were learning to see with clear eyes what an utterly artificial
and polluted age they lived in, and the cement which bound society in a
compact whole was fast melting under this powerful solvent.

Rousseau, with his romantic philosophy and eloquence, had planted his
new ideas deep in the hearts of his contemporaries, weary with the
artifice and the corruption of a time which had exhausted itself and had
nothing to promise under the old social _regime_. The ideals uplifted in
the "Nouvelle Héloïse" and the "Confessions" awakened men's minds with
a great rebound to the charms of Nature, simplicity, and a social order
untrammeled by rules or conventions. The eloquence with which these
theories were propounded carried the French people by storm, and