Louis XIV. was the victim of three passions which hampered and in the long-run destroyed the accord between king and minister: that for war, whetted and indulged by Louvois; that for kingly and courtly extravagance; and that for building and costly fancies. Colbert likewise loved “buildments” (les batiments), as the phrase then was; he urged the king to complete the Louvre, plans for which were requested of Bernini, who went to Paris for the purpose; after two years’ infructuous feelers and compliments, the Italian returned to Rome, and the work was intrusted to Perrault, whose plan for the beautiful colonnade still existing had always pleased Colbert. The completion of the castle of St. Germain, the works at Fontainebleau and at Chambord, the triumphal arches of St. Denis and St. Martin, the laying out of the Tuileries, the construction of the Observatory, and even that of the Palais des Invalides, which was Louvois’ idea, found the comptroller of the finances well disposed, if not eager.

Versailles was a constant source of vexation to him. “Your Majesty is coming back from Versailles,” he wrote to the king on the 28th of September, 1685. “I entreat that you will permit me to say two words about the reflections I often make upon this subject, and forgive me, if it please you, for my zeal. That mansion appertains far more to your Majesty’s pleasure and diversion than to your glory; if you would be graciously pleased to search all over Versailles for the five hundred thousand crowns spent within two years, you would assuredly have a difficulty in finding them. If your Majesty thinks upon it, you will reflect that it will appear forever in the accounts of the treasurers of your buildments that, whilst you were expending such great sums on this mansion, you neglected the Louvre, which is assuredly the most superb palace in the world, and the most worthy of your Majesty’s grandeur. You are aware that, in default of splendid deeds of arms, there is nothing which denotes the grandeur and spirit of princes more plainly than buildments do, and all posterity measures them by the ell of those superb mansions which they have erected during their lives. O, what pity it were that the greatest king and the most virtuous in that true virtue which makes the greatest princes should be measured by the ell of Versailles! And, nevertheless, there is room to fear this misfortune. For my part, I confess to your Majesty that, notwithstanding the repugnance you feel to increase the cash-orders [comptants], if I could have foreseen that this expenditure would be so large, I should have advised the employment of cash-orders, in order to hide the knowledge thereof forever.” [The cash-orders (ordonnances au comptant) did not indicate their object, and were not revised. The king merely wrote, Pay cash; I know the object of this expenditure (Bon au comptant: je sais l’objet de cette depense).]

Colbert was mistaken in his fears for Louis XIV.‘s glory; if the expenses of Versailles surpassed his most gloomy apprehensions, the palace which rose upon the site of Louis XIV.‘s former hunting-box was worthy of the king who had made it in his own image, and who managed to retain all his court around him there, by the mere fact of his will and of his royal presence.

Colbert was dead before Versailles was completed; the bills amounted then to one hundred and sixteen millions; the castle of Marly, now destroyed, cost more than four millions; money was everywhere becoming scarce; the temper of the comptroller of finances went on getting worse. “Whereas formerly it had been noticed that he set to his work rubbing his hands with joy,” says his secretary Perrault, brother of the celebrated architect, “he no longer worked but with an air of vexation, and even with sighs. From the good-natured and easy-going creature he had been, he became difficult to deal with, and there was not so much business, by a great deal, got through as in the early years of his administration.” “I do not mean to build any more, Mansard; I meet with too many mortifications,” the king would say to his favorite architect. He still went on building, however; but he quarrelled with Colbert over the cost of the great railings of Versailles. “There’s swindling here,” said Louis XIV. “Sir,” rejoined Colbert, “I flatter myself, at any rate, that that word does not apply to me?” “No,” said the king; “but more attention should have been shown. If you want to know what economy is, go to Flanders; you will see how little those fortifications of the conquered places cost.”

It was Vauban whose praise the king thus sang, and Vauban, devoted to Louvois, had for a long time past been embroiled with Colbert. The minister felt himself beaten in the contest he had so long maintained against Michael Le Tellier and his son. In 1664, at the death of Chancellor Seguier, Colbert had opposed the elevation of Le Tellier to this office, “telling the king that, if he came in, he, Colbert, could not serve his Majesty, as he would have him thwarting everything he wanted to do.” On leaving the council, Le Tellier said to Brienne, “You see what a tone M. Colbert takes up; he will have to be settled with.” The antagonism had been perpetuated between Colbert and Louvois; their rivalry in the state had been augmented by the contrary dispositions of the two ministers. Both were passionately devoted to their work, laborious, indefatigable, honest in money matters, and both of fierce and domineering temper; but Louvois was more violent, more bold, less scrupulous as to ways and means of attaining his end, cruel in the exercise of his will and his wrath, less concerned about the sufferings of the people, more exclusively absorbed by one fixed idea; both rendered great service to the king, but Colbert performing for the prince and the state only useful offices in the way of order, economy, wise and far-sighted administration, courageous and steady opposition; Louvois ever urging the king on according to his bent, as haughty and more impassioned than he, entangling him and encouraging him in wars which rendered his own services necessary, without pity for the woes he entailed upon the nation. It was the misfortune and the great fault of Louis XIV. that he preferred the counsels of Louvois to those of Colbert, and that he allowed all the functions so faithfully exercised by the dying minister to drop into the hands of his enemy and rival.

At sixty-four years of age Colbert succumbed to excess of labor and of cares. That man, so cold and reserved, whom Madame de Sevigne called North, and Guy-Patin the Man of Marble (Vir marmoreus), felt that disgust for the things of life which appears so strikingly in the seventeenth century amongst those who were most ardently engaged in the affairs of the world. He was suffering from stone; the king sent to inquire after him and wrote to him. The dying man had his eyes closed; he did not open them. “I do not want to hear anything more about him,” said he, when the king’s letter was brought to him; “now, at any rate, let him leave me alone.” His thoughts were occupied with his soul’s salvation. Madame de Maintenon used to accuse him of always thinking about his finances, and very little about religion. He repeated bitterly, as the dying Cardinal Wolsey had previously said in the case of Henry, “If I had done for God what I have done for that man, I had been saved twice over; and now I know not what will become of me.” He expired on the 6th of September, 1683; and on the 10th, Madame de Maintenon wrote to Madame de St. Geran, “The king is very well; he feels no more now than a slight sorrow. The death of M. de Colbert afflicted him, and a great many people rejoiced at that affliction. It is all stuff about the pernicious designs he had; and the king very cordially forgave him for having determined to die without reading his letter, in order to be better able to give his thoughts to God. M. de Seignelay was anxious to step into all his posts, and has not obtained a single one; he has plenty of cleverness, but little moral conduct. His pleasures always have precedence of his duties. He has so exaggerated his father’s talents and services, that he has convinced everybody how unworthy and incapable he is of succeeding him.” The influence of Louvois and the king’s ill humor against the Colberts peep out in the injustice of Madame de Maintenon. Seignelay had received from Louis XIV. the reversion of the navy; his father had prepared him for it with anxious strictness, and he had exercised the functions since 1676. Well informed, clever, magnificent, Seignelay drove business and pleasure as a pair. In 1685 he gave the king a splendid entertainment in his castle of Sceaux; in 1686 he set off for Genoa, bombarded by Duquesne; in 1689 he, in person, organized the fleet of Tourville at Brest. “He was general in everything,” says Madame de la Fayette; “even when he did not give the word, he had the exterior and air of it.” “He is devoured by ambition,” Madame de Maintenon had lately said: in 1689 she writes, “Anxious (L’Inquiet, i. e., Louvois) hangs but by a thread; he is very much shocked at having the direction of the affairs of Ireland taken from him; he blames me for it. He counted on making immense profits; M. de Seignelay counts on nothing but perils and labors. He will succeed if he do not carry things with too high a hand. The king would have no better servant, if he could rid himself a little of his temperament. He admits as much himself; and yet he does not mend.” Seignelay died on the 3d of November, 1690, at the age of thirty-nine. “He had all the parts of a great minister of state,” says St. Simon, “and he was the despair of M. de Louvois, whom he often placed in the position of having not a word of reply to say in the king’s presence. His defects corresponded with his great qualities. As a hater and a friend he had no peer but Louvois.” “How young! how fortunate how great a position!” wrote Madame de Sevigne, on hearing of the death of M. de Seignelay, “it seems as if splendor itself were dead.”

Seignelay had spent freely, but he left at his death more than four hundred thousand livres a year. Colbert’s fortune amounted to ten millions, legitimate proceeds of his high offices and the king’s liberalities. He was born of a family of merchants, at Rheims, ennobled in the sixteenth century, but he was fond of connecting it with the Colberts of Scotland. The great minister would often tell his children to reflect “what their birth would have done for them if God had not blessed his labors, and if those labors had not been extreme.” He had married his daughters to the Dukes of Beauvilliers, Chevreuse, and Mortemart; Seignelay had wedded Mdlle. de Matignon, whose grandmother was an Orleans-Longueville. “Thus,” said Mdlle de Montpensier, “they have the honor of being as closely related as M. le Prince to the king; Marie de Bourbon was cousin-german to the king my grandfather. That lends a grand air to M. de Seignelay, who had by nature sufficient vanity.” Colbert had no need to seek out genealogies, and great alliances were naturally attracted to his power and the favor he was in. He had in himself that title which comes of superior merit, and which nothing can make up for, nothing can equal. He might have said, as Marshal Lannes said to the Marquis of Montesquieu, who was exhibiting a coat taken out of his ancestors’ drawers, “I am an ancestor myself.”

Louvois remained henceforth alone, without rival and without check. The work he had undertaken for the reorganization of the army was pretty nearly completed; he had concentrated in his own hands the whole direction of the military service, the burden and the honor of which were both borne by him. He had subjected to the same rules and the same discipline all corps and all grades; the general as well as the colonel obeyed him blindly. M. de Turenne alone had managed to escape from the administrative level. “I see quite clearly,” he wrote to Louvois on the 9th of September, 1673, “what are the king’s wishes, and I will do all I can to conform to them but you will permit me to tell you that I do not think that it would be to his Majesty’s service to give precise orders, at such a distance, to the most incapable man in France.” Turenne had not lost the habit of command; Louvois, who had for a long while been under his orders, bowed to the will of the king, who required apparent accord between the marshal and the minister, but he never forgave Turenne for his cool and proud independence. The Prince of Conde more than once turned to advantage this latent antagonism. After the death of Louvois and of Turenne, after the retirement of Conde, when the central power fell into the hands of Chamillard or of Voysin, the pretence of directing war from the king’s closet at Versailles produced the most fatal effects. “If M. de Chamillard thinks that I know nothing about war,” wrote Villars to Madame de Maintenon, “he will oblige me by finding somebody else in the kingdom who is better acquainted with it.” “If your Majesty,” he said again, “orders me to shut myself up in Bavaria, and if you want to see your army lost, I will get myself killed at the first opportunity rather than live to see such a mishap.” The king’s orders, transmitted through a docile minister, ignorant of war, had a great deal to do with the military disasters of Louis XIV.‘s later years.

Meanwhile order reigned in the army, and supplies were regular. Louvois received the nickname of great Victualler (Vivrier). The wounded were tended in hospitals devoted to their use. “When a soldier is once down, he never gets up again,” had but lately been the saying. “Had I been at my mother’s, in her own house, I could not have been better treated,” wrote M. D’Alligny on the contrary, when he came out of one of the hospitals created by Louvois. He conceived the grand idea of the Hotel des Invalides. “It were very reasonable,” says the preamble of the king’s edict which founded the establishment, “that they who have freely exposed their lives and lavished their blood for the defence and maintenance of this monarchy, who have so materially contributed to the winning of the battles we have gained over our enemies, and who have often reduced them to asking peace of us, should enjoy the repose they have secured for our other subjects, and should pass the remainder of their days in tranquillity.” Up to his death Louvois insisted upon managing the Hotel des Invalides himself.

Never had the officers of the army been under such strict and minute supervision; promotion went, by seniority, by “the order on the list,” as the phrase then was, without any favor for rank or birth; commanders were obliged to attend to their corps. “Sir,” said Louvois one day to M. de Nogaret, “your company is in a very bad state.” “Sir,” answered Nogaret, “I was not aware of it.” “You ought to be aware,” said M. de Louvois: “have you inspected it?” “No, sir,” said Nogaret. “You ought to have inspected it, sir.” “Sir, I will give orders about it.” “You ought to have given them. A man ought to make up his mind, sir, either to openly profess himself a courtier or to devote himself to his duty when he is an officer.” Education in the schools for cadets, regularity in service, obligation to keep the companies full instead of pocketing a portion of the pay in the name of imaginary soldiers who appeared only on the registers, and who were called dummies (passe-volants), the necessity of wearing uniform, introduced into the army customs to which the French nobility, as undisciplined as they were brave, had hitherto been utter strangers.

Artillery and engineering were developed under the influence of Vauban, “the first of his own time and one of the first of all times” in the great art of besieging, fortifying, and defending places. Louvois had singled out Vauban at the sieges of Lille, Tournay, and Douai, which he had directed in chief under the king’s own eye. He ordered him to render the places he had just taken impregnable. “This is no child’s play,” said Vauban on setting about the fortifications of Dunkerque, “and I would rather lose my life than hear said of me some day what I hear said of the men who have preceded me.” Louvois’ admiration was unmixed when he went to examine the works. “The achievements of the Romans which have earned them so much fame show nothing comparable to what has been done here,” he exclaimed; “they formerly levelled mountains in order to make highroads, but here more than four hundred have been swept away; in the place where all those sand-banks were there is now to be seen nothing but one great meadow. The English and the Dutch often send people hither to see if all they have been told is true; they all go back full of admiration at the success of the work and the greatness of the master who took it in hand.” It was this admiration and this dangerous greatness which suggested to the English their demands touching Dunkerque during the negotiations for the peace of Utrecht.

The honesty and moral worth of Vauban equalled his genius; he was as high-minded as he was modest; evil reports had been spread about concerning the contractors for the fortifications of Lille. Vauban demanded an inquiry. “You are quite right in thinking, my lord,” he wrote to Louvois, to whom he was united by a sincere and faithful friendship, “that, if you do not examine into this affair, you cannot do me justice, and, if you do it me not, that would be compelling me to seek means of doing it myself, and of giving up forever fortification and all its concomitants. Examine, then, boldly and severely; away with all tender feeling, for I dare plainly tell you that in a question of strictest honesty and sincere fidelity I fear neither the king, nor you, nor all the human race together. Fortune had me born the poorest gentleman in France, but in requital she honored me with an honest heart, so free from all sorts of swindles that it cannot bear even the thought of them without a shudder.” It was not until eight years after the death of Louvois, in 1699, when Vauban had directed fifty-three sieges, constructed the fortifications of thirty-three places, and repaired those of three hundred towns, that he was made a marshal, an honor that no engineer had yet obtained. “The king fancied he was giving himself the baton,” it was said, “so often had he had Vauban under his orders in besieging places.”

The leisure of peace was more propitious to Vauban’s fame than to his favor. Generous and sincere as he was, a patriot more far-sighted than his contemporaries, he had the courage to present to the king a memorial advising the recall of the fugitive Huguenots, and the renewal, pure and simple, of the edict of Nantes. He had just directed the siege of Brisach and the defence of Dunkerque when he published a great economical work entitled la Dime royale, the fruit of the reflections of his whole life, fully depicting the misery of the people and the system of imposts he thought adapted to relieve it. The king was offended; he gave the marshal a cold reception and had the work seized. Vauban received his death-blow from this disgrace. The royal edict was dated March 19, 1707; the great engineer died on the 30th; he was not quite seventy-four. The king testified no regret for the loss of so illustrious a servant, with whom he had lived on terms of close intimacy. Vauban had appeared to impugn his supreme authority; this was one of the crimes that Louis XIV. never forgave.

In 1683, at Colbert’s death, Vauban was enjoying the royal favor, which he attributed entirely to Louvois. The latter reigned without any one to contest his influence with the master. It had been found necessary to bury Colbert by night to avoid the insults of the people, who imputed to him the imposts which crushed them. What an unjust and odious mistake of popular opinion which accused Colbert of the evils which he had fought against and at the same time suffered under to the last day! All Colbert’s offices, except the navy, fell to Louvois or his creatures. Claude Lepelletier, a relative of Le Tellier, became comptroller of finance; he entered the council; M. de Blainville, Colbert’s second son, was obliged to resign in Louvois’ favor the superintendence of buildments, of which the king had previously promised him the reversion. All business passed into the hands of Louvois. Le Tellier had been chancellor since 1677; peace still reigned; the all-powerful minister occupied himself in building Trianon, bringing the River Eure to Versailles, and establishing unity of religion in France. “The counsel of constraining the Huguenots by violent means to become Catholics was given and carried out by the Marquis of Louvois,” says an anonymous letter of the time. “He thought he could manage consciences and control religion by those harsh measures which, in spite of his wisdom, his violent nature suggests to him almost in everything.” Louvois was the inventor, of the dragonnades; it was his father, Michael le Tellier, who put the seals to the revocation of the edict of Nantes; and, a few days before he died, full of joy at his last work, he piously sang the canticle of Simeon. Louis XIV. and his ministers believed in good faith that Protestantism was stamped out. “The king,” wrote Madame de Maintenon, “is very pleased to have put the last touch to the great work of the reunion of the heretics with the church. Father la Chaise, the king’s confessor, promised that it would not cost a drop of blood, and M. de Louvois said the same thing.” Emigration in mass, the revolt of the Camisards, and the long-continued punishments, were a painful surprise for the courtiers accustomed to bend beneath the will of Louis XIV.; they did not understand that “anybody should obstinately remain of a religion which was displeasing to the king.” The Huguenots paid the penalty for their obstinacy. The intelligent and acute biographer of Louvois, M. Camille Rousset, could not defend him from the charge of violence in their case. On the 10th of June, 1686, he wrote to the superintendent of Languedoc, “On my representation to the king of the little heed paid by the women of the district in which you are to the penalties ordained against those who are found at assemblies, his Majesty orders that those who are not demoiselles (that is, noble) shall be sentenced by M. de Baville to be whipped, and branded with the fleur-de-lis.” He adds, on the 22d of July, “The king having thought proper to have a declaration sent out on the 15th of this month, whereby his Majesty orders that all those who are henceforth found at such assemblies shall be punished by death, M. de Baville will take no notice of the decree I sent you relating to the women, as it becomes useless by reason of this declaration.” The king’s declaration was carried out, as the sentences of the victims prove:—Condemned to the galleys, or condemned to death—for the crime of assemblies. This was the language of the Roman emperors. Seventeen centuries of Christianity had not sufficed to make men comprehend the sacred rights of conscience. The refined and moderate mind of Madame de Sevigne did not prevent her from writing to M. de Bussy on the 28th of October, 1685, “You have, no doubt, seen the edict by which the king revokes that of Nantes; nothing can be more beautiful than its contents, and never did or will any king do anything more memorable.” The noble libertine and freethinker replied to her, “I admire the steps taken by the king to reunite the Huguenots. The war made upon them in former times and the St. Bartholomew gave vigor to this sect; his Majesty has sapped it little by little, and the edict he has just issued, supported by dragoons and Bourdaloues, has given it the finishing stroke.” It was the honorable distinction of the French Protestants to proclaim during more than two centuries, by their courageous resistance, the rights and duties which were ignored all around them.

Whilst the reformers were undergoing conversion, exile, or death, war was recommencing in Europe, with more determination than ever on the part of the Protestant nations, indignant and disquieted as they were. Louvois began to forget all about the obstinacy of the religionists, and prepared for the siege of Philipsburg and the capture of Manheim and Coblentz. “The king has seen with pleasure,” he wrote to Marshal Boufflers, “that, after well burning Coblentz, and doing all the harm possible to the elector’s palace, you were to march back to Mayence.” The haughtiness of the king and the violence of the minister went on increasing with the success of their arms; they treated the pope’s rights almost as lightly as those of the Protestants. The pamphleteers of the day had reason to write, “It is clearly seen that the religion of the court of France is a pure matter of interest; the king does nothing but what is for that which he calls his glory and grandeur; Catholics and heretics, Holy Pontiff, church, and anything you please, are sacrificed to his great pride; everything must be reduced to powder beneath his feet; we in France are on the high road to putting the sacred rights of the Holy See on the same footing as the privileges granted to Calvinists; all ecclesiastical authority is annihilated. Nobody knows anything of canons, popes, councils; everything is swallowed up in the authority of one man.” “The king willeth it:” France had no other law any longer; and William III. saved Europe from the same enslavement.

The Palatinate was in flames; Louvois was urging on the generals and armies everywhere, sending despatch after despatch, orders upon orders. “I am a thousand times more impatient to finish this business than you can be,” was the spirited reply he received from M. de la Hoguette, who commanded in Italy, in the environs of Cuneo; “besides the reasons of duty which I have always before my eyes, I beg you to believe that the last letters I received from you were quite strong enough to prevent negligence of anything that must be done to prevent similar ones, and to deserve a little more confidence; but the most willing man can do nothing against roads encumbered with ice and snow.” Louvois did not admit this excuse; he wanted soldiers to be able to cross the defiles of mountains in the depths of winter just as he would have orange trees travel in the month of February. “I received orders to send off to Versailles from La Meilleraye the orange trees which the Duke of Mazarin gave the king,” writes Superintendent Foucauld in his journal. “M. Louvois, in spite of the representations I made him, would have them sent by carriage through the snow and ice. They arrived leafless at Versailles, and several are dead. I had sent him word that the king could take towns in winter, but could not make orange trees bear removal from their hothouses.” The nature and the consciences of the Protestants were all that withstood Louis XIV. and Louvois. On the 16th of July, 1691, death suddenly removed the minister, fallen in royal favor, detested and dreaded in France, universally hated in Europe, leaving, however, the king, France, and Europe with the feeling that a great power had fallen, a great deal of merit disappeared. “I doubt not,” wrote Louis XIV. to Marshal Boufflers, “that, as you are very zealous for my service, you will be sorry for the death of a man who served me well.” “Louvois,” said the Marquis of La Fare, “should never have been born, or should have lived longer.” The public feeling was expressed in an anonymous epitaph:

“Here lieth he who to his will Bent every one, knew everything Louvois, beloved by no one, still Leaves everybody sorrowing.”

The king felt his loss, but did not regret the minister whose tyranny and violence were beginning to be oppressive to him. He felt himself to be more than ever master in the presence of the young or inexperienced men to whom he henceforth intrusted his affairs. Louvois’ son, Barbezieux, had the reversion of the war department; Pontchartrain, who had been comptroller of finance ever since the retirement of Lepelletier, had been appointed to the navy in 1690, at the death of Seignelay. “M. de Pontchartrain had begged the king not to give him the navy,” says Dangeau ingenuously, “because he knew nothing at all about it; but the king’s will was absolute that he should take it. He now has all that M. de Colbert had, except the buildments.” What mattered the inexperience of ministers? The king thought that he alone sufficed for all.

God had left it to time to undeceive the all-powerful monarch; he alone held out amidst the ruins; after the fathers the sons were falling around him; Seignelay had followed Colbert to the tomb; Louvois was dead after Michael Le Tellier; Barbezieux died in his turn in 1701. “This secretary of state had naturally good wits, lively and ready conception, and great mastery of details in which his father had trained him early,” writes the Marquis of Argenson. He had been spoiled in youth by everybody but his father. He was obliged to put himself at the mercy of his officials, but he always kept up his position over them, for the son of M. de Louvois, their creator, so to speak, could not fail to inspire them with respect, veneration, and even attachment. Louis XIV., who knew the defects of M. de Barbezieux, complained to him, and sometimes rated him in private, but he left him his place, because he felt the importance of preserving in the administration of war the spirit and the principles of Louvois. “Take him for all in all,” says St. Simon, “he had the making of a great minister in him, but wonderfully dangerous; the best and most useful friend in the world so long as he was one, and the most terrible, the most inveterate, the most implacable and naturally ferocious enemy; he was a man who would not brook opposition in anything, and whose audacity was extreme.” A worthy son of Louvois, as devoted to pleasure as he was zealous in business, he was carried off in five days, at the age of thirty-three. The king, who had just put Chamillard into the place of Pontchartrain, made chancellor at the death of Boucherat, gave him the war department in succession to Barbezieux, “thus loading such weak shoulders with two burdens of which either was sufficient to break down the strongest.”

Louis XIV. had been faithfully and mightily served by Colbert and Louvois; he had felt confidence in them, though he had never had any liking for them personally; their striking merits, the independence of their character, which peeped out in spite of affected expressions of submission and deference, the spirited opposition of the one and the passionate outbursts of the other, often hurt the master’s pride, and always made him uncomfortable; Colbert had preceded him in the government, and Louvois, whom he believed himself to have trained, had surpassed him in knowledge of affairs as well as aptitude for work; Chamillard was the first, the only one of his ministers whom the king had ever loved. “His capacity was nil,” says St. Simon, who had very friendly feelings towards Chamillard, “and he believed that he knew everything and of every sort; this was the more pitiable in that it had got into his head with his promotions, and was less presumption than stupidity, and still less vanity, of which he had none. The joke is, that the mainspring of the king’s great affection for him was this very incapacity. He confessed it to the king at every step, and the king was delighted to direct and instruct him; in such sort that he grew jealous for his success as if it were his own, and made every excuse for him.”

The king loved Chamillard; the court bore with him because he was easy and good-natured, but the affairs of the state were imperilled in his hands; Pontchartrain had already had recourse to the most objectionable proceedings in order to obtain money; the mental resources of Colbert himself had failed in presence of financial embarrassments and increasing estimates. It is said that, during the war with Holland, Louvois induced the king to contract a loan; the premier-president, Lamoignon, supported the measure. “You are triumphant,” said Colbert, who had vigorously opposed it; “you think you have done the deed of a good man; what! did not I know as well as you that the king could get money by borrowing? But I was careful not to say so. And so the borrowing road is opened. What means will remain henceforth of checking the king in his expenditure? After the loans, taxes will be wanted to pay them; and, if the loans have no limit, the taxes will have none either.” At the king’s death the loans amounted to more than two milliards and a half, the deficit was getting worse and worse every day, there was no more money to be had, and the income from property went on diminishing. “I have only some dirty acres which are turning to stones instead of being bread,” wrote Madame de Sevigne. Trade was languishing, the manufactures founded by Colbert were dropping away one after another; the revocation of the edict of Nantes and the emigration of Protestants had drained France of the most industrious and most skilful workmen; many of the Reformers had carried away a great deal of capital; the roads, everywhere neglected, were becoming impracticable. “The tradesmen are obliged to put four horses instead of two to their wagons,” said a letter to Barbezieux from the superintendent of Flanders, “which has completely ruined the traffic.” The administration of the provinces was no longer under supervision. “Formerly,” says Villars, “the inspectors would pass whole winters on the frontiers; now they are good for nothing but to take the height and measure of the men and send a fine list to the court.” The soldiers were without victuals, the officers were not paid, the abuses but lately put down by the strong hand of Colbert and Louvois were cropping up again in all directions; the king at last determined to listen to the general cry and dismiss Chamillard.

“The Dukes of Beauvilliers and Chevreuse were intrusted with this unpleasant commission, as well as with the king’s assurance of his affection and esteem for Chamillard, and with the announcement of the marks thereof he intended to bestow upon him. They entered Chamillard’s presence with such an air of consternation as may be easily imagined, they having always been very great friends of his. By their manner the unhappy minister saw at once that there was something extraordinary, and, without giving them time to speak, ‘What is the matter, gentlemen?’ he said with a calm and serene countenance. ‘If what you have to say concerns me only, you can speak out; I have been prepared a long while for anything.’ They could scarcely tell what brought them. Chamillard heard them without changing a muscle, and with the same air and tone with which he had put his first question, he answered, ‘The king is master. I have done my best to serve him; I hope another may do it more to his satisfaction and more successfully. It is much to be able to count upon his kindness and to receive so many marks of it.’ Then he asked whether he might write to him, and whether they would do him the favor of taking charge of his letter. He wrote the king, with the same coolness, a page and a half of thanks and regards, which he read out to them at once just as he had at once written it in their presence. He handed it to the two dukes, together with the memorandum which the king had asked him for in the morning, and which he had just finished, sent word orally to his wife to come after him to L’Etang, whither he was going, without telling her why, sorted out his papers, and gave up his keys to be handed to his successor. All this was done without the slightest excitement; without a sigh, a regret, a reproach, a complaint escaping him, he went down his staircase, got into his carriage, and started off to L’Etang, alone with his son, just as if nothing had happened to him, without anybody’s knowing anything about it at Versailles until long afterwards.” [Memoires de St. Simon, t. iii. p. 233.]

Desmarets in the finance and Voysin in the war department, both superintendents of finance, the former a nephew of Colbert’s and initiated into business by his uncle, both of them capable and assiduous, succumbed, like their predecessors, beneath the weight of the burdens which were overwhelming and ruining France. “I know the state of my finances,” Louis XIV. had said to Desmarets; “I do not ask you to do impossibilities; if you succeed, you will render me a great service; if you are not successful, I shall not hold you to blame for circumstances.” Desmarets succeeded better than could have been expected without being able to rehabilitate the finances of the state. Pontchartrain had exhausted the resource of creating new offices. “Every time your Majesty creates a new post, a fool is found to buy it,” he had said to the king. Desmarets had recourse to the bankers; and the king seconded him by the gracious favor with which he received at Versailles the greatest of the collectors (traitants), Samuel Bernard. “By this means everything was provided for up to the time of the general peace,” says M. d’Argenson. France kept up the contest to the end. When the treaty of Utrecht was signed, the fleet was ruined and destroyed, the trade diminished by two thirds, the colonies lost or devastated by the war, the destitution in the country so frightful that orders had to be given to sow seed in the fields; the exportation of grain was forbidden on pain of death; meanwhile the peasantry were reduced to browse upon the grass in the roads and to tear the bark off the trees and eat it. Thirty years had rolled by since the death of Colbert, twenty-two since that of Louvois; everything was going to perdition simultaneously; reverses in war and distress at home were uniting to overwhelm the aged king, alone upstanding amidst so many dead and so much ruin.

“Fifty years’ sway and glory had inspired Louis XIV. with the presumptuous belief that he could not only choose his ministers well, but also instruct them and teach them their craft,” says M. d’Argenson. His mistake was to think that the title of king supplied all the endowments of nature or experience; he was no financier, no soldier, no administrator, yet he would everywhere and always remain supreme master; he had believed that it was he who governed with Colbert and Louvois; those two great ministers had scarcely been equal to the task imposed upon them by war and peace, by armies, buildments, and royal extravagance; their successors gave way thereunder and illusions vanished; the king’s hand was powerless to sustain the weight of affairs becoming more and more disastrous; the gloom that pervaded the later years of Louis XIV.‘s reign veiled from his people’s eyes the splendor of that reign which had so long been brilliant and prosperous, though always lying heavy on the nation, even when they forgot their sufferings in the intoxication of glory and success.

It is the misfortune of men, even of the greatest, to fall short of their destiny. Louis XIV. had wanted to exceed his, and to bear a burden too heavy for human shoulders. Arbiter, for a while, of the affairs of all Europe, ever absolute master in his own dominions, he bent at last beneath the load that was borne without flinching by princes less powerful, less fortunate, less adored, but sustained by the strong institutions of free countries. William III. had not to serve him a Conde, a Turenne, a Colbert, a Louvois; he had governed from afar his own country, and he had always remained a foreigner in the kingdom which had called him to the throne; but, despite the dislikes, the bitternesses, the fierce contests of parties, he had strengthened the foundations of parliamentary government in England, and maintained freedom in Holland, whilst the ancient monarchy of France, which reached under Louis XIV. the pinnacle of glory and power, was slowly but surely going down to perdition beneath the internal and secret malady of absolute power, without limit and without restraint.

CHAPTER XLVII.

LOUIS XIV. AND RELIGION.

Independently of simple submission to the Catholic church, there were three great tendencies which divided serious minds amongst them during the reign of Louis XIV.; three noble passions held possession of pious souls; liberty, faith, and love were, respectively, the groundwork as well as the banner of Protestantism, Jansenism, and Quietism. It was in the name of the fundamental and innate liberty of the soul, its personal responsibility and its direct relations with God, that the Reformation had sprung up and reached growth in France, even more than in Germany and in England. M. de St. Cyran, the head and founder of Jansenism, abandoned the human soul unreservedly to the supreme will of God; his faith soared triumphant over flesh and blood, and his disciples, disdaining the joys and the ties of earth, lived only for eternity. Madame Guyon and Fenelon, less ardent and less austere, discovered in the tender mysticism of pure love that secret of God’s which is sought by all pious souls; in the name of divine love, the Quietists renounced all will of their own, just as the Jansenists in the name of faith.

Jansenism is dead after having for a long while brooded in the depths of the most noble souls; Quietism, as a sect, did not survive its illustrious founders; faith and love have withstood the excess of zeal and the erroneous tendencies which had separated them from the aggregate of Christian virtues and doctrines; they have come back again into the pious treasury of the universal church. Neither time nor persecutions have been able to destroy in France the strong and independent groundwork of Protestantism. Faithful to its fundamental principle, it has triumphed over exile, the scaffold, and indifference, without other head than God himself and God alone.

Richelieu had slain the political hydra of Huguenots in France; from that time the Reformers had lived in modest retirement. “I have no complaint to make of the little flock,” Mazarin would say; “if they eat bad grass, at any rate they do not stray.” During the troubles of the Fronde, the Protestants had resumed, in the popular vocabulary, their old nickname of Tant s’en fault (Far from it), which had been given them at the time of the League. “Faithful to the king in those hard times when most Frenchmen were wavering and continually looking to see which way the wind would blow, the Huguenots had been called Tant s’en fault, as being removed from and beyond all suspicion of the League or of conspiracy against the state. And so were they rightly designated, inasmuch as to the cry, ‘Qui vive?’ (Whom are you for?) instead of answering ‘Vive Guise!’ or ‘Vive la Ligue!’ they would answer, ‘Tant s’en fault, vive le Roi!’ So that, when one Leaguer would ask another, pointing to a Huguenot, ‘Is that one of ours?’ ‘Tant s’en fault,’ would be the reply, ‘it is one of the new religion.’” Conde had represented to Cromwell all the Reformers of France as ready to rise up in his favor; the agent sent by the Protector assured him it was quite the contrary; and the bearing of the Protestants decided Cromwell to refuse all assistance to the princes. La Rochelle packed off its governor, who was favorable to the Fronde; St. Jean d’Angely equipped soldiers for the king; Montauban, to resist the Frondeurs, repaired the fortifications thrown down by Richelieu. “The crown was tottering upon the king’s head,” said Count d’ Harcourt to the pastors of Guienne, “but you have made it secure.” The royal declaration of 1652, confirming and ratifying the edict of Nantes, was a recompense for the services and fidelity of the Huguenots. They did not enjoy it long; an edict of 1656 annulled, at the same time explaining, the favorable declaration of 1652; in 1660 the last national synod was held at Loudun. “His Majesty has resolved,” said M. de la Magdelaine, deputed from the king to the synod, “that there shall be no more such assemblies but when he considers it expedient.” Fifteen years had rolled by since the synod of Charenton in 1645. “We are only too firmly persuaded of the usefulness of our synods, and how entirely necessary they are for our churches, after having been so long with out them,” sorrowfully exclaimed the moderator, Peter Daille.

For two hundred and twelve years the Reformed church of France was deprived of its synods. God at last restored to it this corner-stone of its interior constitution.

The suppression of the edict-chambers instituted by Henry IV. in all the Parliaments for the purpose of taking cognizance of the affairs of the Reformers followed close upon the abolition of national synods. Peter du Bosq, pastor of the church of Caen, an accomplished gentleman and celebrated preacher, was commissioned to set before the king the representations of the Protestants. Louis XIV. listened to him kindly. “That is the finest speaker in my kingdom,” he said to his courtiers after the minister’s address. The edict-chambers were, nevertheless, suppressed in 1669; the half and half (mi partie) chambers, composed of Reformed and Catholic councillors, underwent the same fate in 1679, and the Protestants found themselves delivered over to the intolerance and religious prejudices of the Parliaments, which were almost everywhere harsher, as regarded them, than the governors and superintendents of provinces.

“It seemed to me, my son,” wrote Louis XIV. in his Memoires of the year 1661, “that those who were for employing violent remedies against the religion styled Reformed, did not understand the nature of this malady, caused partly by heated feelings, which should be passed over unnoticed and allowed to die out insensibly, instead of being inflamed afresh by equally strong contradiction, which, moreover, is always useless, when the taint is not confined to a certain known number, but spread throughout the state. I thought, therefore, that the best way of reducing the Huguenots of my kingdom little by little, was, in the first place, not to put any pressure upon them by any fresh rigor against them, to see to the observance of all that they had obtained from my predecessors, but to grant them nothing further, and even to confine the performance thereof within the narrowest limits that justice and propriety would permit. But as to graces that depended upon me alone, I have resolved, and I have pretty regularly kept my resolution ever since, not to do them any, and that from kindness, not from bitterness, in order to force them in that way to reflect from time to time of themselves, and without violence, whether it were for any good reason that they deprived themselves voluntarily of advantages which might be shared by them in common with all my other subjects.”

These prudent measures, “quite in kindness and not in bitterness,” were not enough to satisfy the fresh zeal with which the king had been inspired. All-powerful in his own kingdom, and triumphant everywhere in Europe, he was quite shocked at the silent obstinacy of those Huguenots who held his favor and graces cheap in comparison with a quiet conscience; his kingly pride and his ignorant piety both equally urged him on to that enterprise which was demanded by the zeal of a portion of the clergy. The system of purchasing conversions had been commenced; and Pellisson, himself originally a Protestant, had charge of the payments, a source of fraud and hypocrisies of every sort. A declaration of 1679 condemned the relapsed to honorable amends (public recantation, &c.), to confiscation and to banishment. The door’s of all employments were closed against Huguenots; they could no longer sit in the courts or Parliaments, or administer the finances, or become medical practitioners, barristers, or notaries; infants of seven years of age were empowered to change their religion against their parents’ will; a word, a gesture, a look, were sufficient to certify that a child intended to abjure; its parents, however, were bound to bring it up according to its condition, which often facilitated confiscation of property. Pastors were forbidden to enter the houses of their flocks, save to perform some act of their ministry; every chapel into which a new convert had been admitted was to be pulled down, and the pastor was to be banished. It was found necessary to set a guard at the doors of the places of worship to drive away the poor wretches who repented of a moment’s weakness; the number of “places of exercise,” as the phrase then was, received a gradual reduction; “a single minister had the charge of six, eight, and ten thousand persons,” says Elias Benoit, author of the Histoire de l’Edit de Nantes, “making it impossible for him to visit and assist the families, scattered sometimes over a distance of thirty leagues round his own residence.” The wish was to reduce the ministers to give up altogether from despair of discharging their functions. The chancellor had expressly said, “If you are reduced to the impossible, so much the worse for you; we shall gain by it.” Oppression was not sufficient to break down the Reformers. There was great difficulty in checking emigration, by this time increasing in numbers. Louvois proposed stronger measures. The population was crushed under the burden of military billets. Louvois wrote to Marillac, superintendent of Poitou, “His Majesty has learned with much joy the number of people who continue to become converts in your department. He desires you to go on paying attention thereto; he will think it a good idea to have most of the cavalry and officers quartered upon Protestants; if, according to the regular proportion, the religionists should receive ten, you can make them take twenty.” The dragoons took up their quarters in peaceable families, ruining the more well-to-do, maltreating old men, women, and children, striking them with their sticks or the flat of their swords, hauling off Protestants in the churches by the hair of their heads, harnessing laborers to their own ploughs, and goading them like oxen. Conversions became numerous in Poitou. Those who could fly left France, at the risk of being hanged if the attempt happened to fail. “Pray lay out advantageously the money you are going to have,” wrote Madame de Maintenon to her brother, M. d’Aubigne. “Land in Poitou is to be had for nothing, and the desolation amongst the Protestants will cause more sales still. You may easily settle in grand style in that province.” “We are treated like enemies of the Christian denomination,” wrote, in 1662, a minister named Jurieu, already a refugee in Holland. “We are forbidden to go near the children that come into the world, we are banished from the bars and the faculties, we are forbidden the use of all the means which might save us from hunger, we are abandoned to the hatred of the mob, we are deprived of that precious liberty which we purchased with so many services, we are robbed of our children, who are a part of ourselves. . . . Are we Turks? Are we infidels? We believe in Jesus Christ, we do; we believe Him to be the Eternal Son of God, the Redeemer of the world; the maxims of our morality are of so great purity that none dare gainsay them; we respect the king; we are good subjects, good citizens; we are Frenchmen as much as we are Reformed Christians.” Jurieu had a right to speak of the respect for the king which animated the French Reformers. There was no trace left of that political leaven which formerly animated the old Huguenots, and made Duke Henry de Rohan say, “You are all republicans; I would rather have to do with a pack of wolves than an assembly of parsons.” “The king is hood winked,” the Protestants declared; and all their efforts were to get at him and tell his Majesty of their sufferings. The army remained open to them, though without hope of promotion; and the gentlemen showed alacrity in serving the king. “What a position is ours!” they would say; “if we make any resistance, we are treated as rebels; if we are obedient, they pretend we are converted, and they hoodwink the king by means of our very submission.”