Bigot knew he was safe so long as the Marquise de Pompadour governed
the King and the kingdom. But Louis XV. was capricious and
unfaithful in his fancies; he had changed his mistresses, and his
policy with them, many times, and might change once more, to the
ruin of Bigot and all the dependents of La Pompadour.
Bigot's letters by the Fleur-de-Lis were calculated to alarm him.
A rival was springing up at Court to challenge La Pompadour's
supremacy: the fair and fragile Lange Vaubernier had already
attracted the King's eye, and the courtiers versed in his ways read
the incipient signs of a future favorite.
Little did the laughing Vaubernier forsee the day when, as Madame du
Barry, she would reign as Dame du Palais, after the death of La
Pompadour. Still less could she imagine that in her old age, in the
next reign, she would be dragged to the guillotine, filling the
streets of Paris with her shrieks, heard above the howlings of the
mob of the Revolution: "Give me life! life! for my repentance!
Life! to devote it to the Republic! Life! for the surrender of all
my wealth to the nation!" And death, not life, was given in answer
to her passionate pleadings.
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