It was hinted in many quarters, and it has been many times
repeated, that Louis was lacking in virility. Certainly he had no
interest in the society of women and was wholly continent. But
this charge of physical incapacity seems to have had no real
foundation. It had been made against some of his predecessors. It
was afterward hurled at Napoleon the Great, and also Napoleon the
Little. In France, unless a royal personage was openly licentious,
he was almost sure to be jeered at by the people as a weakling.

And so poor Louis XVI., as he came to be, was treated with a
mixture of pity and contempt because he loved to hammer and mend
locks in his smithy or shoot game when he might have been
caressing ladies who would have been proud to have him choose them
out.

On the other hand, because of this opinion regarding Louis, people
were the more suspicious of Marie Antoinette. Some of them, in
coarse language, criticized her assumed infidelities; others, with
a polite sneer, affected to defend her. But the result of it all
was dangerous to both, especially as France was already verging
toward the deluge which Louis XV. had cynically predicted would
follow after him.

In fact, the end came sooner than any one had guessed. Louis XV.,
who had become hopelessly and helplessly infatuated with the low-
born Jeanne du Barry, was stricken down with smallpox of the most
virulent type. For many days he lay in his gorgeous bed. Courtiers
crowded his sick-room and the adjacent hall, longing for the
moment when the breath would leave his body. He had lived an evil
life, and he was to die a loathsome death; yet he had borne