1, Part III, Chapter Ten, Section 5) " Après moi, le déluge! is the watchword of every capitalist and of every capitalist nation. Karl Marx and Fyodor Dostoevsky apply the phrase in their writings to describe the selfishness and apathy of certain corrupting values. Halley's Comet finally passed the earth in April 1759, and caused enormous public attention and anxiety, but no floods. Biographer Michel Antoine wrote that the King's remark "was a manner of evoking, with his scientific culture and a good dose of black humor, this sinister year beginning with the assassination attempt by Damiens and ending with the Prussian victory". The King was a proficient amateur astronomer, who collaborated with the best French astronomers. The "Deluge" the King referred to was not a revolution, but the arrival of Halley's Comet, which was predicted to pass by the earth in 1757, and which was commonly blamed for having caused the flood described in the Bible, with predictions of a new deluge when it returned. It was made in 1757, a year which saw the crushing defeat of the French army by the Prussians at the Battle of Rossbach and the assassination attempt on the King. The remark is usually taken out of its original context. The phrase is also often seen as foretelling the French Revolution and the corresponding ruin brought to aristocratic decadence. Après nous, le déluge." Another account states that the Madame used the expression to laugh off ministerial objections to her extravagances.
One account says that Louis XV's downcast expression while he was posing for the artist Maurice Quentin de La Tour inspired Madame de Pompadour to say: "Il ne faut point s'affliger vous tomberiez malade. The phrase itself is in reference to the biblical flood and is believed to date from after the 1757 Battle of Rossbach, which was disastrous for the French. Its meaning is translated by Brewer in the forms "When I am dead the deluge may come for aught I care", and "Ruin, if you like, when we are dead and gone." It is generally regarded as a nihilistic expression of indifference to whatever happens after one is gone, though it may also express a more literal forecasting of ruination. 'After us, the flood') to Madame de Pompadour, his favourite. 'After me, the flood') is a French expression attributed to King Louis XV of France, or in the form " Après nous, le déluge" ( pronounced lit. " Après moi, le déluge" ( pronounced lit.
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