as to leaving the heir to the throne in the shade.

The prince felt it deeply, in spite of his pious resignation.
"A dauphin," he would say, "must needs appear a useless body, and a king strive to be everybody" (_un homme universel_).
Whilst trying to beguile his tedium at the camp of Compiegne, the dauphin, it is said, overtaxed his strength, and died at the age of thirty-six on the 20th of December, 1765, profoundly regretted by the bulk of the nation, who knew his virtues without troubling themselves, like the court and the philosophers, about the stiffness of his manners and his complete devotion to the cause of the clergy.

The new dauphin, who would one day be Louis XVI., was still a child; the king had him brought into his closet.

"Poor France!" he said sadly, "a king of fifty-five and a dauphin of eleven!" The dauphiness and Queen Mary Leczinska soon followed the dauphin to the tomb (1767-1768).

The king, thus left alone and scared by the repeated deaths around him, appeared for a while to be drawn closer to his daughters, for whom he always retained some sort of affection, a mixture of weakness and habit.