If you, Sir, desire the silence to be broken, it is for you to order it." For the first time Louis XV.

seemed to awake from the midst of that life of intellectual lethargy and physical activity which he allowed to glide along, without a thought, between the pleasures of the chase and the amusements invented by his favorite; a remembrance of Louis XIV.

came across his mind, naturally acute and judicious as it was.

"The late king, my great- grandfather," he writes to Marshal Noailles on the 26th of November, 1743, "whom I desire to imitate as much as I can, recommended me, on his death-bed, to take counsel in all things, and to seek out the best, so as always to follow it.

I shall be charmed, then, if you will give me some; thus do I open your mouth, as the pope does the cardinals, and I permit you to say to me what your zeal and your affection for me and my kingdom prompt you." The first fruit of this correspondence was the entrance of Marshal Noailles into the Council.
[Illustration: Louis XV.