Cardinal Fleury. was engaged in the desperate task of reconstruction. There was only one way by which this could be accomplished, and that was by keeping the youthful king busy with frivolous pastime, while the master-hand performed the labor. And in this matter, the careless act of a nurse materially assisted. She was an attendant of Louis XV, when he was a child, and permitted him to play with the daughter of a blacksmith, for whom he formed a childish attachment.

At the ripe age of fifteen years, the ministry selected a Polish princess as the bride for the king. They reasoned that this plaything would keep him out of public affairs. After a time he began to think of the playmate of his childhood, and to keep him amused, the ministry made search, and found her, then grown into a beautiful woman. The king was mightily pleased, and he bestowed upon the blacksmith's daughter the title of Marchioness le Pompadour, and for twenty years she was the virtual ruler of France.

Spain had been anticipating an alliance of

HISTORY OF WESTERN NEBRASKA

the French King with some one of Castillian nobility, and it is not the character of the Spaniard to take kindly to the shattering of hopes because of a blacksmith's daughter. The conditions had reached such a stage that they involved the territory of the new world. Spaniards had been endeavoring to get a foothold in the valleys of the Arkansas and the Platte, and it was under the direction of the French ministry that Mallet brothers traversed the wilderness in 1739.