I am sure that Magnanimity went to bed that night, pleased and happy,
intimately convinced that he had done an action of sublime virtue, and had
easy slumbers and sweet dreams--especially if he had taken a light supper,
and not too vehemently attacked his "en cas de nuit." ...

The king his successor has not left, at Versailles, half so much occasion
for moralizing; perhaps the neigbhboring Parc aux Cerfs would afford
better illustrations of his reign. The life of his great grandsire, the
Grand Llama of France, seems to have frightened Louis the well-beloved;
who understood that loneliness is one of the necessary conditions of
divinity, and, being of a jovial, companionable turn, aspired not beyond
manhood.

Only in the matter of ladies did he surpass his predecessor, as Solomon
did David. War he eschewed, as his grandfather bade him; and his simple
taste found little in this world to enjoy beyond the mulling of chocolate
and the frying of pancakes. Look, here is the room called Laboratoire du
Roi, where, with his own hands, he made his mistress's breakfast; here is
the little door through which, from her apartments in the upper story, the
chaste Du Barri came stealing down to the arms of the weary, feeble,
gloomy old man.

But of women he was tired long since, and even pancake-frying had palled
upon him. What had he to do, after forty years of reign; after having
exhausted everything? Every pleasure that Dubois could invent for his hot
youth, or cunning Lebel could minister to his old age, was flat and stale;
used up to the very dregs; every shilling in the national purse had been
squeezed out, by Pompadour and Du Barri and such brilliant ministers of
state. He had found out the vanity of pleasure, as his ancestor had