"You will be told what England proposes, that you should renounce your birthright, retaining the monarchy of Spain and the Indies, or renounce the monarchy of Spain, retaining your rights to the succession in France, and receiving in exchange for the crown of Spain the kingdoms of Sicily and Naples, the states of the Duke of Savoy, Montferrat, and the Mantuan, the said Duke of Savoy succeeding you in Spain; I confess to you that, notwithstanding the disproportion in the dominions, I have been sensibly affected by the thought that you would continue to reign, that I might still regard you as my successor, sure, if the dauphin lives, of a regent accustomed to command, capable of maintaining order in my kingdom and stifling its cabals. If this child were to die, as his weakly complexion gives too much reason to suppose, you would enjoy the succession to me following the order of your birth, and I should have the consolation of leaving to my people a virtuous king, capable of commanding them, and one who, on succeeding me, would unite to the crown states so considerable as Naples, Savoy, Piedmont, and Montferrat. If gratitude and affection towards your subjects are to you pressing reasons for remaining with them, I may say that you owe me the same sentiments; you owe them to your own house, to your own country, before Spain. All that I can do for you is to leave you once more the choice, the necessity for concluding peace becoming every day more urgent."

The choice of Philip V. was made; he had already written to his grandfather to say that he would renounce all his rights of succession to the throne of France rather than give up the crown of Spain. This decision was solemnly enregistered by the Cortes. The English required that the Dukes of Berry and Orleans should, likewise make renunciation of their rights to the crown of Spain. Negotiations began again, but war began again at the same time as the negotiations.

The king had given Villars the command of the army of Flanders. The marshal went to Marly to receive his last orders. "You see my plight, marshal," said Louis XIV. "There are few examples of what is my fate—to lose in the same week a grandson, a grandson's wife and their son, all of very great promise and very tenderly beloved. God is punishing me; I have well deserved it. But suspend we my griefs at my own domestic woes, and look we to what may be done to prevent those of the kingdom. If anything were to happen to the army you command, what would be your idea of the course I should adopt as regards my person?" The marshal hesitated. The king resumed: "This is what I think; you shall tell me your opinion afterwards. I know the courtiers' line of argument; they nearly all wish me to retire to Blois, and not wait for the enemy's army to approach Paris, as it might do if mine were beaten. For my part, I am aware that armies so considerable are never defeated to such an extent as to prevent the greater part of mine from retiring upon the Somme. I know that river; it is very difficult to cross; there are forts, too, which could be made strong. I should count upon getting to Peronne or St. Quentin, and there massing all the troops I had, making a last effort with you, and falling together or saving the kingdom; I will never consent to let the enemy approach my capital. [_Memoires de Villars, t. ii. p. 362.]"

God was to spare Louis XIV. that crowning disaster reserved for other times; in spite of all his defaults and the culpable errors of his life and reign, Providence had given this old man, overwhelmed by so many reverses and sorrows, a truly royal soul, and that regard for his own greatness which set him higher as a king than he would have been as a man. "He had too proud a soul to descend lower than his misfortunes had brought him," says Montesquieu, "and he well knew that courage may right a crown and that infamy never does." On the 25th of May, the king secretly informed his plenipotentiaries as well as his generals that the English were proposing to him a suspension of hostilities; and he added, "It is no longer a time for flattering the pride of the Hollanders, but, whilst we treat with them in good faith, it must be with the dignity that becomes me." "A style different from that of the conferences at the Hague and Gertruydenberg," is the remark made by M. de Torcy. That which the king's pride refused to the ill will of the Hollanders he granted to the good will of England. The day of the commencement of the armistice Dunkerque was put as guarantee into the hands of the English, who recalled their native regiments from the army of Prince Eugene; the king complained that they left him the auxiliary troops; the English ministers proposed to prolong the truce, promising to treat separately with France if the allies refused assent to the peace. The news received by Louis XIV. gave him assurance of better conditions than any one had dared to hope for.

Villars had not been able to prevent Prince Eugene from becoming master of Quesnoy on the 3d of July; the imperialists were already making preparations to invade France; in their army the causeway which connected Marchiennes with Landrecies was called the Paris road. The marshal resolved to relieve Landrecies, and, having had bridges thrown over the Scheldt, he, on the 23d of July, 1712, crossed the river between Bouchain and Denain; the latter little place was defended by the Duke of Albemarle, son of General Monk, with seventeen battalions of auxiliary troops in the pay of the allies; Lieutenant General Albergotti, an experienced soldier, considered the undertaking perilous. "Go and lie down for an hour or two, M. d'Albergotti," said Villars; "to-morrow by three in the morning you shall know whether the enemy's intrenchments are as strong as you suppose." Prince Eugene was coming up by forced marches to relieve Denain, by falling on the rearguard of the French army. It was proposed to Villars to make fascines to fill up the fosses of Denain. "Do you suppose," said he, pointing to the enemy's army in the distance, "that those gentry will give us the time? Our fascines shall be the bodies of the first of our men who fall in the fosse."

"There was not an instant, not a minute to lose," says the marshal in his Memoires. "I made my infantry march on four lines in the most beautiful order; as I entered the intrenchment at the head of the troops, I had not gone twenty paces when the Duke of Albemarle and six or seven of the emperor's lieutenant generals were at my horse's feet. I begged them to excuse me if present matters did not permit me to show them all the politeness I ought, but that the first of all was to provide for the safety of their persons." The enemy thought of nothing but flight; the bridges over the Scheldt broke down under the multitude of vehicles and horses; nearly all the defenders of Denain were taken or killed. Prince Eugene could not cross the river, watched as it was by French troops; he did not succeed in saving Marchiennes, which the Count of Broglie, had been ordered to invest in the very middle of the action in front of Denain; the imperialists raised the siege of Landrecies, but without daring to attack Villars, re-enforced by a few garrisons; the marshal immediately invested Douai; on the 27th of August, the emperor's troops who were defending one of the forts demanded a capitulation; the officers who went out asked for a delay of four days, so as to receive orders from Prince Eugene; the marshal, who was in the trenches, called his grenadiers. "This is my council on such occasions," said he to the astonished imperialists. "My friends, these captains demand four days' time to receive orders from their general; what do you think?" "Leave it to us, marshal," replied the grenadiers; "in a quarter of an hour we will slit their windpipes." "Gentlemen," said I to the officers, "they will do as they have said; so take your own course." The garrison surrendered at discretion. Douai capitulated on the 8th of September; Le Quesnoy was taken on the 4th of October, and Bouchain on the 18th; Prince Eugene had not been able to attempt anything; he fell back under the walls of Brussels. On the Rhine, on the Alps, in Spain, the French and Spanish armies had held the enemy in check. The French plenipotentiaries at Utrecht had recovered their courage. "We put on the face the Hollanders had at Gertruydenberg, and they put on ours," wrote Cardinal de Polignac from Utrecht: "it is a complete turning of the tables." "Gentlemen, peace will be treated for amongst you, for you and without you," was the remark made to the Hollanders. Hereditary adversary of the Van Witts and their party, Heinsius had pursued the policy of William III. without the foresight and lofty views of William Ill.; he had not seen his way in 1709 to shaking off the yoke of Marlborough and Prince Eugene in order to take the initiative in a peace necessary for Europe; in 1712 he submitted to the will of Harley and St. John, thus losing the advantages of the powerful mediatorial position which the United Provinces had owed to the eminent men successively intrusted with their government. Henceforth Holland remained a free and prosperous country, respected and worthy of her independence, but her political influence and importance in Europe were at an end. Under God's hand great men make great destinies and great positions for their country as well as for themselves.

The battle of Denain and its happy consequences hastened the conclusion of the negotiations; the German princes themselves began to split up; the King of Prussia, Frederic William I., who had recently succeeded his father, was the first to escape from the emperor's yoke. Lord Bolingbroke put the finishing stroke at Versailles to the conditions of a general peace; the month of April was the extreme limit fixed by England for her allies; on the 11th peace was signed between France, England, the United Provinces, Portugal, the King of Prussia, and the Duke of Savoy. Louis XIV. recovered Lijle, Aire, Bethune, and St. Venant; he strengthened with a few places the barrier of the Hollanders; he likewise granted to the Duke of Savoy a barrier on the Italian slope of the Alps; he recognized Queen Anne, at the same time exiling from France the Pretender James III., whom he had but lately proclaimed with so much flourish of trumpets, and he razed the fortifications of Dunkerque. England kept Gibraltar and Minorca; Sicily was assigned to the Duke of Savoy. France recognized the King of Prussia. The peace was an honorable and an unexpected one, after so many disasters the King of Spain held out for some time; he wanted to set up an independent principality for the Princess des Ursins, camerera mayor to the queen his wife, an able, courageous, and clever intriguer, all-powerful at court, who had done good service to the interests of France; he could not obtain any dismemberment of the United Provinces; and at last Philip V. in his turn signed. The emperor and the empire alone remained aloof from the general peace. War recommenced in Germany and on the Rhine. Villars carried Spires and Kaiserlautern. He laid siege to Landau. His lieutenants were uneasy. "Gentlemen," said Villars, "I have heard the Prince of Conde say that the enemy should be feared at a distance and despised at close quarters." Landau capitulated on the 20th of August; on the 30th of September Villars entered Friburg; the citadel surrendered on the 13th of November; the imperialists began to make pacific overtures; the two generals, Villars and Prince Eugene, were charged with the negotiations.



"I arrived at Rastadt on the 26th of November in the afternoon," writes Villars in his Memoires, "and the Prince of Savoy half an hour after me. The moment I knew he was in the court-yard, I went to the top of the steps to meet him, apologizing to him on the ground that a lame man could not go down; we embraced with the feelings of an old and true friendship which long wars and various engagements had not altered." The two plenipotentiaries were headstrong in their discussions. "If we begin war again," said Villars, "where will you find money?" "It is true that we haven't any," rejoined the prince; "but there is still some in the empire." "Poor states of the empire!" I exclaimed; "your advice is not asked about beginning the dance; yet you must of course follow the leaders." Peace was at last signed on the 6th of March, 1714: France kept Landau and Fort Louis; she restored Spires, Brisach, and Friburg. The emperor refused to recognize Philip V., but he accepted the status quo; the crown of Spain remained definitively with the house of Bourbon; it had cost men and millions enough; for an instant the very foundations of order in Europe had seemed to be upset; the old French monarchy had been threatened; it had recovered of itself and by its own resources, sustaining single-handed the struggle which was pulling down all Europe in coalition against it; it had obtained conditions which restored its frontiers to the limits of the peace of Ryswick; but it was exhausted, gasping, at wits' end for men and money; absolute power had obtained from national pride the last possible efforts, but it had played itself out in the struggle; the confidence of the country was shaken; it had been seen what dangers the will of a single man had made the nation incur; the tempest was already gathering within men's souls. The habit of respect, the memory of past glories, the personal majesty of Louis XIV. still kept up about the aged king the deceitful appearances of uncontested power and sovereign authority; the long decadence of his great-grandson's reign was destined to complete its ruin.

"I loved war too much," was Louis XIV.'s confession on his death bed. He had loved it madly and exclusively; but this fatal passion, which had ruined and corrupted France, had not at any rate remained infructuous. Louis XIV. had the good fortune to profit by the efforts of his predecessors as well as of his own servants: Richelieu and Mazarin, Conde and Turenne, Luxembourg, Catinat, Vauban, Villars, and Louvois, all toiled at the same work; under his reign France was intoxicated with excess of the pride of conquest, but she did not lose all its fruits; she witnessed the conclusion of five peaces, mostly glorious, the last sadly honorable; all tended to consolidate the unity and power of the kingdom; it is to the treaties of the Pyrenees, of Westphalia, of Nimeguen, of Ryswick, and of Utrecht, all signed with the name of Louis XIV., that France owed Roussillon, Artois, Alsace, Flanders, and Franche-Comte. Her glory has more than once cost her dear; it has never been worth so much and such solid increment to her territory.



CHAPTER XLVI.——LOUIS XIV. AND HOME ADMINISTRATION.

It is King Louis XIV.'s distinction and heavy, burden in the eyes of history that it is, impossible to tell of anything in his reign without constantly recurring to himself. He had two ministers of the higher order, Colbert and Louvois; several of good capacity, such as Seignelay and Torcy; others incompetent, like Chamillard; he remained as much master of the administrators of the first rank as if they had been insignificant clerks; the home government of France, from 1661 to 1715, is summed up in the king's relations with his ministers.

"I resolved from the first not to have any premier minister," says Louis XIV. in his Memoires, "and not to leave to another the functions of king whilst I had nothing but the title. But, on the contrary, I made up my mind to share the execution of my orders amongst several persons, in order to concentrate their authority in my own alone. I might have cast my eyes upon people of higher consideration than those I selected, but they seemed to me competent to execute, under me, the matters with which I purposed to intrust them. I did not think it was to my interest to look for men of higher standing, because, as I wanted above all things to establish my own reputation, it was important that the public should know, from the rank of those of whom I made use, that I had no intention of sharing my authority with them, and that they themselves, knowing what they were, should not conceive higher hopes than I wished to give them."

It has been said already that the court governed France in the reign of Louis XIV.; and what was, in fact, the court? The men who lived about the king, depending on, his favor, the source or arbiter of their fortunes. The great lords served in the army, with lustre, when they bore the name of Conde, Turenne, or Luxembourg; but they never had any place amongst the king's confidential servants. "Luck, in spite of us, has as much to do as wisdom—and more—with the choice of our ministers," he says in his Memoires, "and, in respect of what wisdom may have to do therewith, genius is far more effectual than counsel." It was their genius which made the fortunes and the power of Louis XIV.'s two great ministers, Colbert and Louvois.

In advance, and on the faith of Cardinal Mazarin, the king knew the worth of Colbert. "I had all possible confidence in him," says he, "because I knew that he had a great deal of application, intelligence, and probity." Rough, reserved, taciturn, indefatigable in work, passionately devoted to the cause of order, public welfare, and the peaceable aggrandizement of France, Colbert, on becoming the comptroller of finance in 1661, brought to the service of the state superior views, consummate experience, and indomitable perseverance. The position of affairs required no fewer virtues. "Disorder reigned everywhere," says the king; "on casting over the various portions of my kingdom not eyes of indifference, but the eyes of a master, I was sensibly affected not to see a single one which did not deserve and did not press to be taken in hand. The destitution of the lower orders was extreme, and the finances, which give movement and activity to all this great framework of the monarchy, were entirely exhausted and in such plight that there was scarcely any resource to be seen; the affluent, to be seen only amongst official people, on the one hand cloaked all their malversations by divers kinds of artifices, and uncloaked them on the other by their insolent and audacious extravagance, as if they were afraid to leave me in ignorance of them."

The punishment of the tax-collectors (traitants), prosecuted at the same time as superintendent Fouquet, the arbitrary redemption of rentes (annuities) on the city of Paris or on certain branches of the taxes, did not suffice to alleviate the extreme suffering of the people. The talliages from which the nobility and the clergy were nearly everywhere exempt pressed upon the people with the most cruel inequality. "The poor are reduced to eating grass and roots in our meadows like cattle," said a letter from Blaisois those who can find dead carcasses devour them, and, unless God have pity upon them, they will soon be eating one another." Normandy, generally so prosperous, was reduced to the uttermost distress. "The great number of poor has exhausted charity and the power of those who were accustomed to relieve them," says a letter to Colbert from the superintendent of Caen. "In 1662 the town was obliged to throw open the doors of the great hospital, having no longer any means of furnishing subsistence to those who were in it. I can assure you that there are persons in this town who have gone for whole days without anything to eat. The country, which ought to supply bread for the towns, is crying for mercy's sake to be supplied therewith itself." The peasants, wasted with hunger, could no longer till their fields; their cattle had been seized for taxes. Colbert proposed to the king to remit the arrears of talliages, and devoted all his efforts to reducing them, whilst regulating their collection. His desire was to arrive at the establishment everywhere of real talliages, on landed property, &c., instead of personal talliages, variable imposts, depending upon the supposed means or social position of the inhabitants. He was only very partially successful, without, however, allowing himself to be repelled by the difficulties presented by differences of legislation and customs in the provinces. "Perhaps," he wrote to the superintendent of Aix, in 1681, "on getting to the bottom of the matter and considering it in detail, you will not discover in it all the impossibilities you have pictured to yourself." Colbert died without having completed his work; the talliages, however, had been reduced by eight millions of livres within the first two years of his administration. "All the imposts of the kingdom," he writes, in 1662, to the superintendent of Tours, who is complaining of the destitution of the people, "are, as regards the talliages, but about thirty-seven millions, and, for forty or fifty years past, they have always been between forty and fifty millions, except after the peace, when his Majesty reduced them to thirty-two, thirty-three, and thirty-four millions."

Peace was of short duration in the reign of Louis XIV., and often so precarious that it did not permit of disarmament. At the very period when the able minister was trying to make the people feel the importance of the diminution in the talliages, he wrote to the king, "I entreat your Majesty to read these few lines attentively. I confess to your Majesty that the last time you were graciously pleased to speak to me about the state of the finances, my respect, the boundless desire I have always had to please you and serve you to your satisfaction, without making any difficulty or causing any hitch, and still more your natural eloquence which succeeds in bringing conviction of whatever you please, deprived me of courage to insist and dwell somewhat upon the condition of your finances, for the which I see no other remedy but increase of receipts and decrease of expenses; wherefore, though this is no concern at all of mine, I merely entreat your Majesty to permit me to say that in war as well as in peace you have never consulted your finances for the purpose of determining your expenditure, which is a thing so extraordinary that assuredly there is no example thereof. For the past twenty years during which I have had the honor of serving your Majesty, though the receipts have greatly increased, you would find that the expenses have much exceeded the receipts, which might perhaps induce you to moderate and retrench such as are excessive. I am aware, Sir, that the figure I present herein is not an agreeable one; but in your Majesty's service there are different functions; some entail nothing but agreeables whereof the expenses are the foundation; that with which your Majesty honors me entails this misfortune, that it can with difficulty produce anything agreeable, since the proposals for expenses have no limit; but one must console one's self by constantly laboring to do one's best."

Louis XIV. did not "moderate or retrench his expenses."

Colbert labored to increase the receipts; the new imposts excited insurrections in Angoumois, in Guyenne, in Brittany. Bordeaux rose in 1695 with shouts of "Hurrah! for the king without gabel." Marshal d'Albret ventured into the streets in the district of St. Michel; he was accosted by one of the ringleaders. "Well, my friend," said the marshal, "with whom is thy business? Dost wish to speak to me?" "Yes," replied the townsman, "I am deputed by the people of St. Michel to tell you that they are good servants of the king, but that they do not mean to have any gabel, or marks on pewter or tobacco, or stamped papers, or yreffe d'arbitrage (arbitration-clerk's fee)." It was not until a year afterwards that the taxes could be established in Gascony; troops had to be sent to Rennes to impose the stamp-tax upon the Bretons. "Soldiers are more likely to be wanted in Lower Brittany than in any other spot," said a letter to Colbert from the lieutenant general, M. de Lavardin; "it is a rough and wild country, which breeds inhabitants who resemble it. They understand French but slightly, and reason not much better. The Parliament is at the back of all this." Riots were frequent, and were put down with great severity. "The poor Low-Bretons collect by forty or fifty in the fields," writes Madame de Sevigne on the 24th of September, 1675: "as soon as they see soldiers, they throw themselves on their knees, saying, Mea culpa! all the French they know.. . ."

"The severities are abating," she adds on the 3d of November: "after the hangings there will be no more hanging." All these fresh imposts, which had cost so much suffering and severity, brought in but two millions five hundred thousand livres at Colbert's death. The indirect taxes, which were at that time called fermes generales (farmings-general), amounted to thirty-seven millions during the first two years of Colbert's administration, and rose to sixty-four millions at the time of his death. "I should be apprehensive of going too far, and that the prodigious augmentations of the fermes (farmings) would be very burdensome to the people," wrote Louis XIV. in 1680. The expenses of recovering the taxes, which had but lately led to great abuses, were diminished by half. "The bailiffs generally, and especially those who are set over the recovery of talliages, are such terrible brutes that, by way of exterminating a good number of these, you could not do anything more worthy of you than suppress those," wrote Colbert to the criminal magistrate of Orleans. "I am at this moment promoting two suits against the collectors of talliages, in which I expect at present to get ten thousand crowns' damages, without counting another against an assessor's officer, who wounded one Grimault, the which had one of his daughters killed before his eyes, his wife, another of his daughters, and his female servant wounded with swords and sticks, the writ of distrainment being executed whilst the poor creature was being buried." The bailiffs were suppressed, and the king's justice was let loose not only against the fiscal officers who abused their power, but also against tyrannical nobles. Masters of requests and members of the Parliament of Paris went to Auvergne and Velay and held temporary courts of justice, which were called grands jours. Several lords were found guilty; Sieur de la Mothe actually died upon the scaffold for having unjustly despoiled and maltreated the people on his estates. "He was not one of the worst," says Flechier, in his Journal des Grands Jours d'Auvergne. The Duke of Bouillon, governor of the province, had too long favored the guilty. "I resolved," says the king in his Memoires, "to prevent the people from being subjected to thousands and thousands of tyrants, instead of one lawful king, whose indulgence alone it is that causes all this disorder." The puissance of the provincial governors, already curtailed by Richelieu, suffered from fresh attacks under Louis XIV. Everywhere the power passed into the hands of the superintendents, themselves subjected in their turn to inspection by the masters of requests. "Acting on the information I had that in many provinces the people were plagued by certain folks who abused their title of governors in order to make unjust requisitions," says the king in his Memoires, "I posted men in all quarters for the express purpose of keeping myself more surely informed of such exactions, in order to punish them as they deserved." Order was restored in all parts of France. "The Auvergnats," said a letter to Colbert from President de Novion, "never knew so certainly that they had a king as they do now."

"A useless banquet at a cost of a thousand crowns causes me incredible pain," said Colbert to Louis XIV., and yet, when it is a question of millions of gold for Poland, I would sell all my property, I would pawn my wife and children, and I would go afoot all my life to provide for it if necessary. Your Majesty, if it please you, will forgive me this little transport. I begin to doubt whether the liberty I take is agreeable to your Majesty; it has seemed to me that you were beginning to prefer your pleasures and your diversions to everything else; at the very time when your Majesty told me at St. Germain that the morsel must be taken from one's mouth to provide for the increment of the naval armament, you spent two hundred thousand livres down for a trip to Versailles, to wit, thirteen thousand pistoles for your gambling expenses and the queen's, and fifty thousand livres for extraordinary banquets; you have likewise so intermingled our diversions, with the war on land that it is difficult to separate the two, and, if your Majesty will be graciously pleased to examine in detail the amount of useless expenditure you have incurred, you will plainly see that, if it were all deducted, you would not be reduced to your present necessity. The right thing to do, sir, is to grudge five sous for unnecessary things, and to throw millions about when it is for your glory."

Colbert knew, in fact, how to "throw millions about" when it was for endowing France with new manufactures and industries. "One of the most important works of peace," he used to say, "is the re-establishment of every kind of trade in this kingdom, and to put it in a position to do without having recourse to foreigners for the things necessary for the use and comfort of the subjects." "We have no need of anybody, and our neighbors have need of us;" such was the maxim laid down in a document of that date, which has often been attributed to Colbert, and which he certainly put incessantly into practice. The cloth manufactures were dying out, they received encouragement; a Protestant Hollander, Van Robais, attracted over to Abbeville by Colbert, there introduced the making of fine cloths; at Beauvais and in the Gobelins establishment at Paris, under the direction of the great painter Lebrun, the French tapestries soon threw into the shade the reputation of the tapestries of Flanders; Venice had to yield up her secrets and her workmen for the glass manufactories of St. Gobain and Tourlaville. The great lords and ladies were obliged to give up the Venetian point with which their dresses had been trimmed; the importation of it was forbidden, and lace manufactories were everywhere established in France; there was even a strike amongst the women at Alencon against the new lace which it was desired to force them to make. "There are more than eighty thousand persons working at lace in Alencon, Seez, Argentan, Falaise, and the circumjacent parishes," said a letter to Colbert from the superintendent of Alencon, "and I can assure you, my lord, that it is manna and a blessing from heaven over all this district, where even little children of seven years of age find means of earning a livelihood; the little shepherd-girls from the fields work, like the rest, at it; they say that they will never be able to make such fine point as this, and that one wants to take away their bread and their means of paying their talliage." Point d'Alencon won the battle, and the making of lace spread all over Normandy. Manufactures of soap, tin, arms, silk, gave work to a multitude of laborers; the home trade of France at the same time received development; the bad state of the roads was "a dreadful hinderance to traffic;" Colbert ordered them to be every where improved. "The superintendents have done wonders, and we are never tired of singing their praises," writes, Madame de Sevigne to her daughter during one of her trips; "it is quite extraordinary what beautiful roads there are; there is not a single moment's stoppage; there are malls and walks everywhere." The magnificent canal of Languedoc, due to the generous initiative of Riquet, united the Ocean to the Mediterranean; the canal of Orleans completed the canal of Briare, commenced by Henry IV. The inland custom-houses which shackled the traffic between province and province were suppressed at divers points; many provinces demurred to the admission of this innovation, declaring that, to set their affairs right, "there was need of nothing but order, order, order." Colbert also wanted order, but his views were higher and broader than those of Breton or Gascon merchants; in spite of his desire to "put the kingdom in a position to do without having recourse to foreigners for things necessary for the use and comfort of the French," he had too lofty and too judicious a mind to neglect the extension of trade; like Richelieu, he was for founding great trading companies; he had five, for the East and West Indies, the Levant, the North, and Africa; just as with Richelieu, they were with difficulty established, and lasted but a little while; it was necessary to levy subscriptions on the members of the sovereign corporations; "M. de Bercy put down his name for a thousand livres," says the journal of Oliver d'Ormesson. "M. de Colbert laughed at him, and said that it could not be for his pocket's sake; and the end of it was, that he put down three thousand livres." Colbert could not get over the mortifying success of the company of the Dutch Indies. "I cannot believe that they pay forty per cent.," said he. It was with the Dutch that he most frequently had commercial difficulties. The United Provinces produced but little, and their merchant navy was exclusively engaged in the business of transport; the charge of fifty sous per ton on merchandise carried in foreign vessels caused so much ill humor amongst the Hollanders that it was partly the origin of their rupture with France and of the treaty of the Triple Alliance. Colbert made great efforts to develop the French navy, both the fighting and the merchant. "The sea-traffic of all the world," he wrote in 1669 to M. de Pomponne, then ambassador to Holland, "is done with twenty thousand vessels or thereabouts. In the natural order of things, each nation should have its own share thereof in proportion to its power, population, and seaboard. The Hollanders have fifteen or sixteen thousand out of this number, and the French perhaps four or five hundred at most. The king is employing all sorts of means which he thinks useful in order to approach a little more nearly to the number his subjects ought naturally to have." Colbert's efforts were not useless; at his death, the maritime trade of France had developed itself, and French merchants were effectually protected at sea by ships of war. "It is necessary," said Colbert in his instructions to Seignelay, "that my son should be as keenly alive to all the disorders that may occur in trade, and all the losses that may be incurred by every trader, as if they were his own." In 1692 the royal navy numbered a hundred and eighty-six vessels; a hundred and sixty thousand sailors were down on the books; the works at the ports of Toulon, Brest, and Rochefort were in full activity; Louis XIV. was in a position to refuse the salute of the flag which the English had up to that time exacted in the Channel from all nations. "The king my brother and those of whom he takes counsel do not quite know me yet," wrote the king to his ambassador in London, "when they adopt towards me a tone of haughtiness and a certain sturdiness which has a savor of menace. I know of no power under heaven that can make me move a step by that sort of way; evil may come to me, of course, but no sensation of fear. The King of England and his chancellor may, of course, see pretty well what my strength is, but they do not see my heart; I, who feel and know full well both one and the other, desire that, for sole reply to so haughty a declaration, they learn from your mouth that I neither seek nor ask for any accommodation in the matter of the flag, because I shall know quite well how to maintain my right whatever may happen. I intend before long to place my maritime forces on such a footing that the English shall consider it a favor if it be my good pleasure then to listen to modifications touching a right which is due to me more legitimately than to them." Duquesne and Tourville, Duguay-Trouin and John Bart, permitted the king to make good on the seas such proud words. From 1685 to 1712 the French fleets could everywhere hold their own against the allied squadrons of England and Holland.

So many and such sustained efforts in all directions, so many vast projects and of so great promise, suited the mind of Louis XIV. as well as that of his minister. "I tell you what I think," wrote Louis XIV. to Colbert in 1674; "but, after all, I end as I began, by placing myself entirely in your hands, being certain that you will do what is most advantageous for my service." Colbert's zeal for his master's service merited this confidence. "O," he exclaimed one day, "that I could render this country happy, and that, far from the court, without favor, without influence, the grass might grow in my very courts!"



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."



The misfortunes were redoubling. From Poitou the persecution had extended through all the provinces. Superintendent Foucauld obtained the conversion in mass of the province of Bearn. He egged on the soldiers to torture the inhabitants of the houses they were quartered in, commanding them to keep awake all those who would not give in to other tortures. The dragoons relieved one another so as not to succumb themselves to the punishment they were making others undergo. Beating of drums, blasphemies, shouts, the crash of furniture which they hurled from side to side, commotion in which they kept these poor people in order to force them to be on their feet and hold their eyes open, were the means they employed to deprive them of rest. To pinch, prick, and haul them about, to lay them upon burning coals, and a hundred other cruelties, were the sport of these butchers. All they thought most about was how to find tortures which should be painful without being deadly, reducing their hosts thereby to such a state that they knew not what they were doing, and promised anything that was wanted of them in order to escape from those barbarous bands. Languedoc, Guienne, Angoumois, Saintonge, all the provinces in which the Reformers were numerous, underwent the same fate. The self-restraining character of the Norman people, their respect for law, were manifested even amidst persecution; the children were torn away from Protestant families, and the chapels were demolished by act of Parliament; the soldiery were less violent than elsewhere, but the magistrates were more inveterate. "God has not judged us unworthy to suffer ignominy for His name," said the ministers condemned by the Parliament for having performed the offices of their ministry. "The king has taken no cognizance of the case," exclaimed one of the accused, Legendre, pastor of Rouen; "he has relied upon the judges; it is not his Majesty who shall give account before God; you shall be responsible, and you alone; you who, convinced as you are of our innocence, have nevertheless condemned us and branded us." "The Parliament of Normandy has just broken the ties which held us bound to our churches," said Peter du Bosq. The banished ministers took the road to Holland. The seaboard provinces were beginning to be dispeopled. A momentary disturbance, which led to belief in a rising of the Reformers in the Cevennes and the Vivarais, served as pretext for redoubled rigor. Dauphiny and Languedoc were given up to the soldiery; murder was no longer forbidden them, it was merely punishing rebels; several pastors were sentenced to death; Homel, minister of Soyon in the Vivarais, seventy-five years of age, was broken alive on the wheel. Abjurations multiplied through terror. "There have been sixty thousand conversions in the jurisdiction of Bordeaux, and twenty thousand in that of Montauban," wrote Louvois to his father in the first part of September, 1685; "the rapidity with which this goes on is such, that, before the end of the month, there will not remain ten thousand religionists in the district of Bordeaux, in which there were a hundred and fifty thousand on the 15th of last month." "The towns of Nimes, Alais, Uzes, Villeneuve, and some others, are entirely converted," writes the Duke of Noailles to Louvois in the month of October, 1685; "those of most note in Nimes made abjuration in church the day after our arrival. There was then a lukewarmness; but matters were put in good train again by means of some billets that I had put into the houses of the most obstinate. I am making arrangements for going and scouring the Uvennes with the seven companies of Barbezieux, and my head shall answer for it that before the 25th of November not a Huguenot shall be left there."