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 Library 
 
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 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
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 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924010272957 
 
Cornell University Library 
 DC 121.B76 1920a 
 
 3 1924 010 272 957 
 
THE NATIONAL HISTORY OF FRANCE 
 
 EDITED BY 
 FR. FUNCK-BRENTANO 
 
 With an Introduction by J. E. C. BODLEY 
 
 THE SEYElNfTEENTH 
 CENTURY 
 
THE NATIONAL HISTORY OF FRANCE 
 
 EDITED BY FR. FUNCK-BRENTANO 
 
 With ah Inteodtjotion by J. E. C. BODLEY 
 BaiA Volume Demy Sw. 
 
 THE MIDDLE AGES. By Fb. Fitnok-Beentano 
 
 \To be Published 
 
 THE CENTURY OF THE RENAISSANCE. By L. 
 Batutol 
 
 THE XVIIth century. By Jacques Botoengee 
 
 THE XVIIlTH CENTURY. By Casumie Steyienski 
 
 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. By Louis Madeldi 
 
 THE CONSULATE AND THE EMPIRE. By LouB 
 Madelin [To be PiMished 
 
 NEW YORK: G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 
 
THE NATIONAL HISTORY OF FRANCE 
 
 THE SEVENTEENTH 
 CENTURY 
 
 BY 
 JACQUES BOtJLENGER 
 
 TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH 
 
 ;,vnUIIIII;„,^^^ 
 
 NEW YORK ,;V 
 
 G. P. PUTNAM S SONS 
 
 t- ^^ 
 
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Printed in Great Britain 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 OHAPTBR PAOE 
 
 I. THE YOUTH OF LOUIS XIII 1 
 
 II. RICHELIEU 30 
 
 III. THE PREPONDERANCE OF FRANCE (1630-1643) 62 
 
 IV. THE KINGDOM UNDER LOUIS XIII 88 
 
 V. THE BEGINNINGS OF SOCIETY AND OP CLASSIC 
 
 LITERATURE " 112 
 
 VI. THE FRONDE AND MAZARIN 136 
 
 VII. THE " ROI-SOLEIL " 172 
 
 VIII. THE GLORIOUS YEARS, 1661-1678 209 
 
 IX. DECLINE 235 
 
 X. RELIGIOUS MATTERS 259 
 
 XI. SUNSET 285 
 
 XII. THE KINGDOM UNDER LOUIS XIV 320 
 
 XIII. THE GREAT AGE 359 
 
 INDEX 397 
 
CHAPTER I 
 THE YOUTH OF LOUIS XIII 
 
 I. Marie and Leonora. II. The States-General. III. The Concini. 
 IV. Luynes. V. The advent of Richelieu. 
 
 ON May 14, 1610, Queen Marie de' Medici was conversing 
 with Mme. de Montpensier in her " cabinet " in the 
 l/ouvre, when the sound of some unwonted disturbance 
 fell upon her ears. 
 
 " As the noise increased in the most extraordinary way," 
 Marie herself tells us later, " I sent Mme. de Montpensier to 
 Accession of find out what it meant, and I began to fear some 
 Louis Xin. accident had befallen my son, and that he was 
 dead. My alarm increased when I saw Mme. de Montpensier 
 suddenly close the door and turn round to me, her face blanched 
 with terror — for she had seen the King lying dead. And to all 
 my agonized questions as to my son's fate she would give no 
 satisfactory reply, but contented herself with teUing me : 
 ' Your son is not dead.' I determined to see what was causing 
 all this confusion for myself ; I opened the door of my cabinet, 
 and just as I was coming out of my room I beheld, besides the 
 persons already there, over two hundred naked swords coming 
 in, and M. de Praslin, one of the four Captains of the Guard, 
 turned to me and cried : ' Oh, Madame ! We are lost ! ' 
 And just at that moment I saw the King laid upon his 
 
 bed. . . ." 
 
 She adds that she very nearly fainted. It is possible : but 
 the murder of her husband made her mistress of his kingdom, 
 and that fact, apparently, prevented her from fainting out- 
 right. 
 
 Not, indeed, that she was ambitious, or that she had any 
 taste for politics. When on a former occasion the King had 
 
 A 1 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 desired to give her a place at his Council-board, she had 
 betrayed such evident signs of boredom, and given proof of so 
 Character o! wonderful an incapacity for business, that he had 
 Marie de' promptly sent her back to her ladies. 
 
 Medici. gut though Marie had no wish to direct the 
 
 policy of the kingdom, she had a keen desire to control its 
 treasury. That economy — almost amounting to avarice — which 
 w^as perhaps the most valuable of all Henri IV's virtues as a 
 monarch, was not his most agreeable quality as a husband. 
 The Queen's chief thought, when she heard of his death, was 
 that now she would be able to spend as freely as she chose. 
 The interests of France were a very secondary consideration. 
 A grossly stupid lady was this Marie de' Medici ! 
 
 Looking at her official portraits, by Rubens or Porbus, and, 
 above all, seeing her as engraved by Guillaume Dupr^ : obese, 
 sensual, the low forehead shaded by frizzled fair hair, the 
 prominent short-sighted eyes, the red and white complexion of 
 a fat overfed woman — we are reminded of Saint-Simon's verdict : 
 " Imperious, jealous, stupid to a degree, ruled at all times by 
 the dregs of the Court and of the people she had brought with 
 her from Italy, she was the cause of wretchedness to Heru:i IV, 
 to her son, and to herself as well, though she might have been 
 the happiest woman in Europe merely at the cost of abstaining 
 from giving way to her temper and her servants." As to her 
 giving way to her servants, nothing seems less certain, but 
 undoubtedly she gave way to her temper, and it was anything 
 but a good one. 
 
 "You are self-willed," Henri IV told her, "not to say 
 obstinate ! " She had fits of rage which upset her to the extent 
 of making her ill. Obtuse, lazy, brutal, irresohite, " spiteful both 
 by her natural temper and thanks to the impeUing influence of 
 others," it was this foreigner — she talked vile French till her 
 last hour, saying soucre for sucrS and ifa cho for ilfait chaud — 
 this " fat she-banker " who was to take the place of Henri IV 
 in the Kingdom of France. 
 
 She had no affection for her eldest son, and hardly ever went 
 to see him at the Chateau of Saint-Germain, where her own 
 children and those of the King's favourites were all brought up, 
 pell-mell. In the year 1610, Louis XIII was a little boy of 
 
THE YOUTH OF LOUIS XIII 
 
 nine, self-willed and mischievous, subject to violent fits of 
 blind fury, who spent his days playing at soldiers, and whose 
 governors — following the custom of those times — did not spare 
 the rod, when, as frequently happened, the child proved 
 " stubborn." Marie is said to have preferred her second son, 
 Gaston d'Orleans. But she probably never felt deep affection 
 for any one except for her tirewoman, Leonora Dori, otherwise 
 Leonora Galigai. 
 
 Leonora was the daughter of the Queen's nurse, and the 
 friend of her childish days. When Marie came to France, she 
 Leonora forced her on the Court, though not without some 
 
 Galigar. difficulty, for the King was by no means attracted 
 
 by the dry, dusky, sly-faced little woman, who began by com- 
 promising herself in the most outrageous manner with a good- 
 looking Italian, another of Marie's followers, known as " the 
 Sieur Conchine." Though born himself of a good Florentine 
 family, Concino Concini did not hesitate, in 1601, to marry the 
 Queen's humble waiting-woman, and he had no reason to 
 regret his action. Soon, in fact, it became evident that the 
 wily Leonora ruled the Queen's mind entirely, and that the 
 King was powerless to prevent it. The Bedchamber Woman 
 had a right to be lodged within the palace, just above the rooms 
 occupied by her mistress, and had constant access to her person, 
 so every evening Leonora went down to the Queen's apartments, 
 and when, a few years later, she fell into a state of infirmity 
 which prevented her from leaving her own rooms, Marie de' 
 Medici went up to her. 
 
 After 1610, and the death of the King, the friendship between 
 the two women became closer than ever. Leonora, so Talle- 
 mant tells us, was " very eccentric " : " being an unhealthy 
 woman " — she suffered from some nervous complaint — " she 
 fancied she had been bewitched, and in her fear of spells, she 
 always went about veiled, so, she declared, as to avoid gli 
 guardatori." She habitually consulted astrologers, and kept a 
 Jewish doctor, Montalto, about her person, by the Pope's special 
 permission. She lived, indeed, quite out of the world, and 
 knew nothing of the ways of society : shut up in her apartment, 
 which consisted of three rooms, so much afraid of the evil eye 
 that she would receive no visitors save her men of business and 
 
 3 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 a certain dubious Neapolitan abbe of the name of Andrea di 
 Lizza, who acted as her factotum and played her airs on the 
 guitar, she spent her days tormenting her ' servants, stringing 
 beads, and compounding magic philtres. But so great was the 
 influence this half-cracked being wielded over Marie de' Medici 
 that many citizens of Paris believed the Queen to be either 
 infatuated with her or bewitched by her. " Her Majesty dotes 
 on Leonora in the most extraordinary way, it is as if she were 
 in love with her," wrote the Florentine Ambassador in June, 
 1610. In all questions of place, of pensions, or business of any 
 kind, " Madame la Marechale " used her influence, and invari- 
 ably intervened. As will be readily believed, she never forgot 
 her own financial interests nor her husband's, and he, indeed, 
 would not have allowed her to forget them. Immediately 
 after the King's death, she had the Marquisate of Ancre in 
 Picardy conferred upon him, and had him appointed First 
 Gentleman of the Bedchamber, Marshal of France, and Governor 
 of Roye, Peronne, and Montdidier. Absorbed as they were in 
 the business of amassing money, neither she nor Concino 
 meddled in general politics until the year 1615. The Regent 
 governed according to the advice given her by her aged ministers, 
 who were agreed on one point only, that she would do well to 
 wait and let things take their course ; by Father Coton, the 
 King's confessor ; by the Nuncio, who had a seat at the Council- 
 board ; and even by the Spanish Ambassador ; as to her 
 Council, she only consulted it as a matter of form. Thus was 
 France governed. 
 
 On the very morrow of the death of Henri IV, the Prince 
 de Conde began to talk of forming the " great " nobles into a 
 Intrigues of the league, with the object of restricting the Regent's 
 Great Nobles, power. These " great " nobles, who were really 
 quite distinct from the rest of the nobility, consisted of the 
 Princes of the Blood, in the first place ; of the royal bastards ; 
 of the " foreign " princes, such as Nevers, Bouillon, and others ; 
 and finally of certain Governors of Provinces, who were 
 sovereigns of a kind, like the Montmorencys, the Lesdigui^res, 
 and the d'Epernons. Each of these nobles, successors of the 
 great feudal vassals, was surrounded by a whole body of men 
 4> 
 
THE YOUTH OF LOUIS XIII 
 
 attached to his house, and devoted to it, who were, in a sense, 
 his subjects first, and the subjects of the King afterwards. 
 These were his " servants," they " belonged " to him, they 
 were "his": first, a crowd of cousins and poor relations, 
 small squires and gentlemen who were lodged in his house, who 
 fed at his table, rode his horses, handled his hounds, and formed 
 his noisy escort wherever he went, thus doing him honour, 
 and affording lively proof of the power and grandeur of his 
 house ; then the servants, properly so called, in immense 
 numbers, footmen, cellarmen, cooks, runners, coachmen, lackeys, 
 engaged without any close scrutiny into character, and more 
 or less ill-paid, who slept in odd corners, and lived as best they 
 could, but were protected, like the rest, by the master whose 
 livery they wore, and grew grey and died under his roof ; and 
 finally there were the pensioners of every sort — hired bravoes, 
 chaplains, almoners, physicians, or men of letters, whose duty 
 it was to laud their patron's virtues in verse and prose, write 
 his love-letters for him, and supply his wit. When such a man 
 as Cond^ or Lesdiguieres revolted, every soul who " belonged " 
 to him, from the humblest page to the officers for whom he 
 had procured posts in his Government, his gentlemen and his 
 lackeys, followed in his train and consequently revolted with 
 him. All he had to do, to provide himself with an army like 
 the King's, was to raise a few thousand fighting men. And if, 
 that done, he chanced to win a battle, the monarchy was in 
 actual peril. 
 
 Naturally, the weaker the monarch grew, the stronger the 
 great nobles became. Theoretically — for practically things 
 were very different — ^there was no limit to the King's authority, 
 at this period, save his " good pleasure," and he owed no 
 account of his actions to any one. Thus any revolt against 
 the King on any pretext whatever was a crime. But when the 
 King happened to be a minor, and a Regent exercised authority 
 in his name, there was a feehng that the moral duty of obedience 
 was much less pressing. The decisions of a Regent might very 
 fairly be considered open to discussion : was it so very certain 
 that she was ruling in the best interests of the King her son ? 
 As a consequence, rebellion became a much less definite and 
 also a far more tempting form of crime. It is for this reason 
 
 5 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 that seditions were of such frequent occurrence under Marie 
 de' Medici and, later, under Anne of Austria. And it will be 
 noted invariably that the insurgents carefully pointed out that 
 they were not rebelling against the King, but against the 
 Regent or her Ministers, and that they claimed, just as much 
 as the partisans of the legitimate Government, to be fighting in 
 the name of the King, and in his " true interests." 
 
 II 
 
 Harassed by the great nobles from the very outset of her 
 Regency, Marie de' Medici was not in a position to think of 
 carrying out the ambitious plans formed by Henri IV. Sully 
 himself realized this, and advised her to disband the greater 
 part of the army collected in Champagne, at great expense, in 
 view of the approaching war with Spain, 
 
 But in any case the Juliers business had to be settled first : 
 in the course of August and September, 1610, the Duchy was 
 taken, without any difficulty, from the Emperor Rudolph. But 
 " this expedition was the last concession made to the past." 
 Marie de' Medici, urged on by the foreign priests and aged men 
 who were her counsellors, laboured — as was indeed her wisest 
 course — ^from that time forward, to release herself from Pro- 
 testant alliances and draw closer to Spain, Thus all the 
 designs of the preceding reign were overthrown. 
 
 The Queen had kept Henri IV's ministers, Sillery, Jeannin, 
 Villeroy, and Sully, But between the three first-named — ^they 
 Sully and the were very old, and generally known as the " three 
 " Greybeards." greybeards " — ^there was little agreement, save in 
 a desire to do their utmost to keep all business out of the hands 
 of the fourth. For everybody hated old Sully, with his bald 
 head and his snarling temper, who never ceased grumbling in 
 his great beard, worked ostentatiously all day long in his study 
 at the Arsenal, sitting under the portraits of Luther and Calvin, 
 and watched over the finances with a vigilance that was most 
 disagreeable. The Queen herself, though she realized his 
 usefulness, could not forgive the scant ceremony with which, in 
 the late King's time, he had invariably cut down her expenses 
 and refused her pocket-money. And further. Sully had two 
 6 
 
THE YOUTH OF LOUIS XIII 
 
 great faults. He was a Huguenot, and his person recalled 
 memories of the late Government. Thus he soon perceived 
 that il he insisted on retaining his post as Superintendent " it 
 might bring some misfortune upon him " ; he prudently handed 
 in his resignation (January 26, 1611), and departed to live in 
 his various country houses, at one of which he died in 1641, 
 having looked on furiously while his successors ruined his work, 
 and with bitterness in his heart having seen Richelieu build it 
 up again. 
 
 His disgrace caused great dissatisfaction among the Pro- 
 testants, already alarmed by the negotiations with Spain. 
 They called a regular Assembly at Saumur, and drew up some 
 imperiously worded " Memorials " ; when the King's Com- 
 missaries called on them to disperse, they declared they would 
 do nothing of the sort until they had received the Regent's 
 replies to their demands. Then Marie de' Medici resorted to 
 the expedient which was always her chief method of govern- 
 ment : she bought over (at a heavy price) one of the chief 
 leaders of the party, the Due de Bouillon, and to such good 
 purpose did Bouillon exert himself that the Assembly gave in. 
 All fear of trouble from the Huguenot party being thus re- 
 moved, the Regent published the treaty she had signed a few 
 months previously with Spain (April, 1611), which provided for 
 those astonishing unions, the marriages of the grandchildren 
 of Philip II with the children of Henri IV. The contracts of 
 marriage between the King of France and the Infanta Anne 
 of Austria, and between the King of Spain and the sister of 
 Louis XIII, were duly signed in August, 1612. 
 
 Thus all warlike projects were at an end : and the contents 
 of the war-chest, so laboriously amassed during the late King's 
 reign, became available at last. This treasure, on the morrow 
 of Sully's retirement, amounted to some six millions of livres, 
 packed into hundreds of bags and coffers and kegs, which were 
 shut up in the treasure tower of the Bastille. To reach them, 
 the Lieutenant of the fortress had to unlock one door, behind 
 which was another, with three locks, the keys of which were 
 kept by the Queen, the Treasurer, and a Treasury official, 
 respectively. But even such precautions as thes3 did not 
 suffice to protect the precious hoard. The Regen,t only con- 
 
 7 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 trived to maintain her position by dint of largess and pensions ; 
 the moment the shower of gold relaxed, princes and great 
 nobles were stirred by an indignation, the fierceness of which 
 drove them to instant and public denunciation of the disorders 
 in the State. 
 
 So it came about that in 1614, Cond6 — having first of all 
 entrenched himself at M^zi^res, in the company of Vendome, 
 Conde's Longueville, Bouillon, and Mayenne — published a 
 
 Manifesto. manifesto which insidiously deplored the fact 
 that the population was ground down by taxation, the nobility 
 impoverished, and justice hard to obtain, and in which, says 
 Richelieu, " the best of all was that he complained of the 
 profusion and extravagance with which the King's money was 
 being spent, as if it were not he and his who had received it." 
 The necessity for soothing the indignation of the first Prince of 
 the Blood and his adherents, supported as they were by all the 
 Huguenots, was evident ; and as the Queen's counsellors were 
 determined to avoid war, the only resource left them was to 
 try the usual remedy : pensions. This succeeded very well : 
 by the treaty of Sainte-Menehould (May 15, 1614), Conde 
 received 450,000 livres, liOngueville 100,000, Mayenne 300,000, 
 and the others in due proportion, not to speak of Governments 
 and other favours, in consideration of which the Princes made 
 peace with the Court, which, as the reader will perceive, still 
 had at its disposal a fair number of the bags of money M. de 
 Sully had so carefully laid by. 
 
 But the Regent had allowed herself to be coerced into 
 giving a dangerous promise— that of summoning the States- 
 Convocation of General. The Princes were convinced that after 
 the States- the service they had rendered to the kingdom. 
 General. after the issue of their manifesto, in fact, the 
 
 country could hardly fail to prove its gratitude by electing 
 deputies who would support them in their opposition to the 
 Government. But the Court instantly invented " official 
 candidature " in all its perfection. It then proceeded to 
 arrange a journey all through the provinces for the young 
 King : this was one long triumph. Thanks to these precautions, 
 the majority of the elected deputies were hostile to the Prinoes. 
 So much so that the Regent determined to convoke the 
 8 
 
THE YOUTH OF LOUIS XIII 
 
 Assembly, not at Sens, as she had at first intended, but in Paris, 
 and in that city the States-General were inaugurated on 
 October 26, 1614, after a procession and a solemn Mass at 
 Notre-Dame. 
 
 Of course they only represented the upper classes of the 
 nation. The " common people," and even the middle-class 
 population of shopkeepers and the like, were not represented 
 at all, and the deputies of the " Third Estate," in this year 
 1610, would probably have been sorely offended at the idea of 
 having to protect the interests of the " riff-raff." Almost all 
 these Third Estate deputies were connected with the magistracy : 
 out of their whole number (192), there were only seventy-six 
 who could not claim a right to the title of Messire or nohle 
 homme ; 156 were judicial or financial officials, 15 were mayors 
 or aldermen, a few were lawyers, two or three were plain 
 burghers, and three, at the outside, were merchants. Thus 
 instead of representing the interests of the majority of French- 
 men, they stood for those of the parliamentary and middle-class 
 patriciate which had set itself up within the kingdom and had 
 developed proportionately to the gradual estabhshment of a 
 recognized traffic in offices. 
 
 To grow rich, then purchase one of the innumerable " offices " 
 which lack of money was perpetually forcing the sovereign to 
 create, and thus to attain a rank that could be transmitted to 
 posterity — such were the means by which families made their 
 way upwards in the seventeenth century. An official who 
 owned a large fortune would contrive to buy some great office, 
 civil or even military; this gave him a title, and enabled him 
 to marry his daughter to some prominent gentleman : and in 
 this way the descendant of the Potier family became Due de 
 Gesvres, Mile. Seguier was transformed into the Duchesse de 
 Verneuil, Mile, de Mesmes became Duchesse d'Elbeuf, Mile. 
 Guyonne Ruellend, the daughter of a dishonest but exceedingly 
 wealthy financier, Duchesse de Brissac, and Mile, de la Porte, 
 whose father was a lawyer, Duchesse de Richelieu. Middle- 
 class folk such as these were duly turned into authentic lords 
 and ladies, and believed they had as much right to look down 
 on the low condition from which they themselves had risen as 
 any member of the ancient aristocracy. The nobles themselves, 
 
 9 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 ruined by the cost of living, which was perpetually increasing, 
 whereas the income from their estates stood still, or dwindled, 
 were forced to marry rich wives to exist at all. A family which 
 had lived in affluence in the sixteenth century, found itself in 
 difficulties in the seventeenth, with the very same fortune : its 
 judiciary and financial rights had been suppressed, any attempt 
 at trade or labour involved forfeiture of position — how then 
 were its pecuniary resources to be increased, save by marriage ? 
 Only two means of subsistence were open to a gentleman of 
 small fortune: marriage, or the King's bounty. In the pro- 
 vinces, more especially, the sovereign's bounty was apt to be 
 slow in its coming, and consequently the old nobility often 
 married into the families of rich plebeians. But it continued 
 to be none the less jealous of the privileges conferred by birth, 
 and the feelings it entertained, as a class, with regard to that of 
 its fathers-in-law may be easily guessed. 
 
 Thus immediately after the opening of the States-General in 
 1614, the deputies of the Nobility tried to strike a blow at those 
 Suppression o! of the Third Estate by demanding the suppres- 
 the "Paulette." sion of the paulette. Every official, judicial or 
 financial, who paid this tax — ^invented by Sully in 1604, and 
 named after the financier Paulet, the first man who farmed it — 
 owned his office outright, so that it did not fall in to the King 
 at its holder's death : so long as the annual fees were paid, his 
 heirs could dispose of it as they chose. To demand the sup- 
 pression of the paulette therefore involved an attempt to 
 suppress hereditary offices, a severe blow to the lawyers who 
 represented the Third Estate. They retaliated, very cleverly, 
 by a demand for the suppression of all pensions : " You are 
 requested. Sire, to abolish the paulette," said Savaron, the 
 spokesman of the Third Estate, who made an exceedingly good 
 speech on this occasion, " that is to say, to deprive your coffers 
 of the 1,600,000 livres your officers pay into them every year, 
 but there is no mention of any suppression of the excessive 
 outlay on pensions . . . 5,660,000 livres ! " The Nobility, 
 unable to retort, declared it had been insulted, and demanded 
 satisfaction. Thereupon the Clergy intervened, and sent a 
 delegate to the Third Estate — a young bishop, already well 
 known for his tact and activity, Armand du Plessis de Richelieu 
 10 
 
THE YOUTH OF LOUIS XIII 
 
 by name. Savaron made a most spirited explanation, declaring 
 he had not intended to give offence to the Nobility, " either in 
 will or deed," but that for the rest, he had carried arms for 
 five years before he had begun to serve the King in his courts 
 of law, and was therefore in a position to give satisfaction to 
 anybody. In the end, the matter was settled. As a sop to 
 the malcontents, the suppression of the paulette was set down 
 in the Memorials of the Assembly — ^but the question was never 
 seriously discussed again. 
 
 Hardly had the Third Estate emerged from this conflict 
 with the Nobility, before it entered on a struggle with the 
 The Third Clergy. It had headed its Memorials with a 
 
 Estate and the clause couched in the following terms, which it 
 Clergy. desired might be accepted as "a fundamental 
 
 law of the State " : 
 
 ". . . That as he [the King] is recognized to be sovereign 
 in his State, holding his crown from God alone, there is no power 
 on earth, whether spiritual or temporal, which has the smallest 
 right over his kingdom. . . . That the contrary opinion, to wit, 
 that it can be lawful to kill or depose our Kings ... is impious, 
 detestable, contrary to the establishment of the State of France, 
 which is directly dependent on God alone. . . ." 
 
 Now this article, which strikes us as inspired by the most 
 absolute good sense, aimed at nothing less than the high-handed 
 solution, by one of its political consequences, of a quarrel that 
 had been maintained in France for several centuries — ^the 
 dispute between the Galileans and the Ultramontanes. Since 
 the days of the League and the intervention of Rome in France, 
 the question for all who were not professional theologians had 
 been embodied in the following proposition : " Has the Pope 
 the right, or not, to exercise any control over the crown of the 
 Most Christian King ? If the King becomes a heretic, can 
 the Pope depose him ? And if the reply to these two questions 
 is in the affirmative, does it not follow that any Frenchman 
 who is a good Catholic may kill the King whom the Pope has 
 condemned, or even disapproved, just as Jacques Clement 
 killed Henri III, and Ravaillac killed Henri IV ? " The extreme 
 Ultramontanes, the Jesuits themselves, certainly did all they 
 could to avoid any acceptance of this ultimate outcome of the 
 
 11 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 argument, and disavowed those who, hke Father Mariana, 
 proclaimed it (1610). But in the mind of the populace and the 
 simpler folk, it remained the logical consequence of the principles 
 set forth. So much so that, in 1614, many people were con- 
 vinced the Ultramontane priests had banded themselves 
 together and used the arm of Ravaillac to murder Henri IV : 
 when the murderer had been put to death, the instrument only 
 had been destroyed, the accomplices had escaped punishment : 
 these accomplices now surrounded the Queen, and were pressing 
 . the Spanish alliance upon her : there was no certainty, indeed, 
 that Marie herself had not been implicated in the plot ! . . . 
 And, to the more enlightened Frenchmen, Gallicanism was still 
 a traditional doctrine, in favour of which Parliament and the 
 Sorbonne, amidst a war of decrees issued on both sides, had 
 both been struggling for centuries against Rome. So that, on 
 the whole, the Third Estate, when it inserted the clause dealing 
 with the divine right of the French Kings, simply gave expression 
 to a national feeling. But it was not able to defend it. 
 
 When the Clergy, which contained a great proportion of 
 Ultramontanes, first heard of the motion in the Chamber of 
 the Third Estate, it fell into " an extraordinary state of agitation 
 and depression." But among its members were many young 
 and gifted prelates, such as Richelieu, who gathered round the 
 celebrated Cardinal du Perron : and several of these, the 
 Archbishop of Aix, the Bishop of Montpellier, and others, went 
 and suggested to the Third Estate, " with silken words," that 
 if by chance there should happen to be any clauses that might 
 affect religious matters in their Memorials, it would be as well 
 to consult the Clergy on the subject. . , . The gentlemen of 
 the Third Estate made as though they did not understand. 
 Then Du Perron himself intervened. On January 21, 1615, he 
 proceeded in person to the Chamber of the Third Estate, 
 attended by an imposing escort of bishops and noblemen, and 
 there pronounced a brilliant and glowing speech, which lasted 
 for three hours. The Third Estate was flattered, but still it 
 did not give way : and Parliament renewed its condemnation 
 of the Ultramontane teachings, while the Prince de Conde, with 
 due regard for his own popularity, read out a long memorandum 
 against regicide to the King's Council. In the end, the Court, 
 12 
 
THE YOUTH OF LOUIS XIII 
 
 which was swayed by the Ultramontane party, discovered a 
 way of giving satisfaction ahke to Clergy and to Third Estate : 
 it informed the Third Estate that there was no further necessity 
 for inscribing the clause in the Memorial, because the King 
 considered it already " presented and received." And this 
 done, its one desire was to close the sittings of these troublesome 
 States-General. On February 24, when the Third Estate tried 
 to meet as usual, the members found the door of their " Cham- 
 ber " locked in their faces. Thus did the Regent trick the 
 States-General of the year 1614. Each of the three Orders 
 that composed it had striven to defend its own interests only, 
 arid Bassompierre describes it quite adequately in these careless 
 terms : " The year 1614 began with the debate about the 
 article of the Third Estate, which made some little stir in the 
 States-General : it was patched up at last. Then came the 
 carnival, in the course of which M. le Prince gave a fine ballet, 
 and the morning after that the States came to an end." 
 
 To give some satisfaction to public opinion, which appeared 
 very hostile to hereditary right in the various offices, the Court 
 had issued a somewhat vague announcement of its intention 
 to suppress the paulette. The Paris Parliament, like all its 
 fellows, would have been affected by this measure. For this 
 reason, and by way of reprisal, it began to oppose it. It 
 assembled, in spite of the Queen's command to the contrary, 
 and proceeded, on May 22, 1615, to lay its solemn remonstrances 
 before her, complaining of the existing confusion in the finances, 
 of the favour shown to foreigners (the Concini and the Nuncio), 
 and of the Ultramontane tendencies of the Court. But the 
 Queen having spoken very firmly in reply, it apologized forth- 
 with : the members did not as yet pride themselves on the 
 possession of that Roman heroism which was to be fashionable 
 in the days of the Fronde, 
 
 Then Conde, always ready to seize every opportunity for 
 " embroiling matters," took up the business on his own account. 
 Marriage of With much noise and bustle he sent forth a 
 Louis xm manifesto in which he, too, reproduced all the 
 and Anne of most popular grievances : and, with the aid of 
 Austria, 1615, princes and Protestants, he proceeded to raise an 
 army. Thus, it was under the protection of the royal troops 
 
 13 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 that Elisabeth of France was conducted to the Spanish frontier, 
 and the fair-haired Anne of Austria was brought back to 
 Bordeaux, where she was married to the King on November 28, 
 1615. The enemies of the Government lacked resolution, and 
 the Court had an army at its command. But the Queen, 
 sluggish and undecided by nature, and prompted, too, by her 
 aged ministers and her very prudent Italian counsellors, pre- 
 ferred negotiation to battle. Three months' parley ended, at 
 last, in the peace of Loudun (May, 1616). According to the 
 published articles of this glorious treaty, the Princes affirmed 
 that their only care had been the general interests of the country, 
 and they secured a refusal to recognize the Council of Trent in 
 France (this was to please the Galilean party), and the dismissal 
 of the Marechal d'Ancre, who was universally detested, from 
 his post as Governor of the citadel of Amiens : but by certain 
 secret clauses they cheerfully accepted a sum of something 
 over six millions of livres. It will be seen, therefore, that they 
 had " worked " even more successfully than in 1614 : the peace 
 of Sainte-Menehould had not brought them in more than half 
 that sum. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Then Cond6, defender of the people, went back to Paris, 
 where he was hailed with loud acclamations. He had hardly 
 passed his twenty-eighth year. Brutal and rapacious, prompt 
 in his decisions, but uncertain in his plans, he was nevertheless 
 by no means devoid of charm, and his wife — ^the beautiful 
 Charlotte de Montmorency, for whose favours Henri IV had 
 sued in vain, and who, when she first saw the royal greybeard, 
 frankly exclaimed, " J^sus ! How mad he is ! " — was still 
 more attractive, and won many hearts for her husband. But 
 just at that moment the whole of Paris was singing the praises 
 of M. le Prince : was he not the sworn enemy of the Marechal 
 d'Ancre, whom all France hated as it was one day to hate 
 another Italian, the favourite of another Queen : Cardinal 
 Mazarin ? 
 
 As a matter of fact, it was not so much Concino as his wife 
 who enjoyed the favour of Marie de' Medici. He, so Fontenay- 
 14 
 
THE YOUTH OF LOUIS XIII 
 
 Mareuil assures us, " never spoke to the Queen, nor even saw 
 her, except during the hours of public reception," and he did 
 not live within the Louvre, but in a small house close to the 
 Palace gardens. When he desired any special favour, he would 
 write a letter to his wife, beseeching her to support his request. 
 This Leonora frequently refused to do : and in such a case he 
 would go to see her, and, when he had exhausted every gentle 
 argument at his command, he would take her by the throat 
 and draw his dagger, so that the lady, exhausted and terrified, 
 at last planned her own retirement to Italy, to escape from her 
 exacting spouse. On the whole, we are forced to the conclusion 
 that Concini was not absolutely displeasing to Marie de' Medici, 
 though she did frequently treat him ill : but his personal power 
 was chiefly based on the idea of it with which he contrived to 
 inspire others : he may really be described, in short, as a master 
 of " bluff," and this is proved by the fact that it was Leonora, 
 and not her husband, who overthrew the " greybeard " Ministry 
 in 1616. 
 
 It was not so much through the Queen-Mother's liberalities 
 as by their own business undertakings that the Concini had 
 my, n ■ ■ grown SO rich. Now Sillery, Jeannin, and Villeroy 
 had done their best to thwart their financial 
 enterprises, and circumvent their practice of receiving bribes. 
 For this reason Leonora, when she had succeeded in obtaining 
 their dismissal, desired to fill their places with men who would 
 certainly not behave with similar insolence, and chose Claude 
 Barbin, Guillaume du Vair, Bishop of Lisieux, and Mangot, to 
 whom she shortly afterwards added that young Bishop of 
 Lu9on who had distinguished himself so greatly in the States- 
 General, M. de Richelieu, Every one of these men possessed 
 a certain merit. Concini was so struck by his interview with 
 Monseigneur de Lugon, especially, that he declared him capable 
 of giving lessons to " tutti quei barboni." Notwithstanding 
 this, the real leader of the Ministry was not Richelieu, but 
 Claude Barbin, who had previously been controller of the finances, 
 and Master of the Queen's Household. And in the matter of 
 boldness, Barbin was not a whit inferior to the Marechal d' Ancre, 
 as the world soon perceived. 
 
 The Prince de Coiid6, finding himself so popular, had ended 
 
 15 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 by thinking himself almost a king. His palace was called the 
 new Louvre. There is a story that the English Ambassador — 
 a very magnificent gentleman, Lord Savile — had proposed the 
 health of the King of France in the Prince's house, looking at 
 him in the most significant way when he drank it. When 
 Conde came to the Council at the Louvre, he arrived with his 
 hands full of petitions which had been confided to him. In 
 this fashion, no doubt, he entered the palace on September 1, 
 1616, at about eight o'clock in the morning : " Here comes the 
 present King of France, but his royalty will be like a Twelfth 
 Night kingship, it will not last long ! " cried Marie de' Medici, 
 who was watching him, as she leant on a window-sill : and 
 seeing she had given orders for his arrest, she knew something 
 about it. Within a few hours, in fact, Conde was shut up in 
 the Bastille, and all in vain did the Princess his mother, robed 
 in mourning garments, and attended by an escort of gentle- 
 men on horseback, drive through the Paris streets i<n her coach, 
 casting dramatic appeals from the windows : "To arms, 
 gentlemen of Paris, to arms ! The Marshal has had M. le Prince 
 killed ! " But the " gentlemen of Paris " never stirred, save to 
 sack Concini's splendid house — a trifling misfortune for its 
 owner, seeing that the suppression of his enemy made him 
 master of France. 
 
 For little by little the Marshal's power had become irresistible. 
 He had taken advantage of his military position to raise a 
 veritable army, which would obey no orders but his. Safely 
 entrenched in the fortresses of which he had caused himself to 
 be appointed Governor, master of the courtiers, whom he 
 had bound to his chariot-wheels either by favour or by fear, 
 master of the ministers, who now held their sittings in his house, 
 master of the Queen through his wife, and of his wife thanks to 
 certain varied but excellent expedients, what had he to fear 
 from any one ? His dream, in the old days, had been to make 
 himself Constable of France : now, so men said, he was thinldng 
 of carving himself out an independent principality on the 
 frontiers of the kingdom : in any case, his pride and insolence 
 knew no bounds. Supple, cunning, excitable, capable alike of 
 heroism and of cowardice, he was a true Southerner, and 
 paraded his power more from sheer delight in it than from any 
 16 
 
THE YOUTH OF LOUIS XIII 
 
 deliberate calculation. Like all his countrymen, he would 
 vary from one moment to the next ; charming and kindly when 
 he was pleased, he would fall into a sudden despair, and almost 
 burst into tears, or break into the most terrible fury, if he 
 found any obstacle in his path. Such as he was, this good- 
 looking cavalier with his over-mobile coxmtenance became 
 absolutely intolerable to Frenchmen. He did indeed faithfully 
 protect and support his own adherents, but he treated his 
 followers like so many lackeys, and called the gentlemen who 
 formed his guard, " coglioni di mila franchi." He himself 
 demanded to be addressed as " Your Excellency " : the most 
 trifling failure in respect sent him into a fury : " Nobody could 
 lay a finger on that mountain," says Matthieu, " without 
 making it smoke with rage." He affected the airs of a dictator : 
 he issued orders : he kept a body of police of his own : he had 
 people cast into prison. At last, he fell perpetually out of one 
 rage into another : he insulted and threatened every one he 
 met — even the ambassadors. The ministers wanted to hand in 
 their resignations : Leonora, alarmed by the hatred she felt 
 seething in every quarter, would have fled into Italy. . . . But 
 " the Sieur Conchine " only added to the number of his troops, 
 and swore, pale with fury, that he would hold out to the bitter 
 end : " If they do not love me, I'll make myself feared ! " he 
 vowed. . . . One man alone ventured to conspire against him : 
 the King. 
 
 In 1617, Louis XIII was sixteen years of age. He was 
 considered a simpleton, even a downright fool, and nobody 
 Louis XlII as who had watched the existence of the silly and 
 a youth. passionate boy, that " most childish of children " 
 
 — who never worked at all, and spent his days, not only in riding 
 and a passionate pursuit of sport, but in games of baseball and 
 soldiers, beating drums, gardening in the Tuileries gardens, 
 doing kitchen work, larding joints and cooking them, helping 
 the masons, harnessing dogs to little cannons and having them 
 led past him— would have imagined he was ever to be capable 
 of taking up the reins and governing his kingdom. His mother 
 and her ministers let it be understood that he was feeble- 
 minded. When his presence at a Council was allowed, it was 
 on condition he should not open his lips : he ventured, one 
 
 B 17 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 day, to enter the Council-chamber without having been sent 
 for ; his mother rose from her seat, took him by the arm, and 
 turned him out of the room. At the Louvre, everybody 
 avoided the King, for fear of displeasing the Marshal, and 
 hardly two dozen courtiers would gather round Louis XIII of 
 a morning, whereas the whole Court clustered bareheaded and 
 eager about Concini, who heaped scorn on the royal boy, and 
 may have even delighted to wound him for sport, as on the 
 day he advised him to apply boldly to himself for the pocket- 
 money the Queen refused to give him, and that other occasion 
 on which he offered to lend him his army. So sorely did the 
 sixteen-year-old King feel all this, that he fell ill. He may not 
 have been over-intelligent, but he was brave, violent, and a 
 dissembler : he passionately longed to see his tjTant's fall. 
 But what could he do, all alone, against the masters of his 
 kingdom ? 
 
 Only men of small account had been left about him — among 
 them a needy Provengal gentleman who had been taken into 
 Assassination the service of Henri IV, and then into the 
 of Concini. Dauphin's household, on the recommendation of 
 the Comte du Lude. His name was Charles d' Albert, Sieur de 
 Luynes. Luynes was a handsome man of eight and thirty, with 
 a high forehead, and an open countenance, easy, courteous, and 
 attractive. He had charge of the King's falcons, and his 
 functions brought him into frequent relations with his young 
 master, who had taken a passionate liking for him, akin to that 
 he was to feel, in later years, for Barradas and Cinq-Mars. The 
 unassiuning Luynes gave no umbrage to the mighty Marshal : 
 Louis XIII was even allowed to provide his friend with a 
 lodging within the Louvre, just over his own apartments. But 
 from that time forward the King climbed the stairs to his 
 Falconer's rooms every evening, and there, with a few other 
 trusty persons, he considered means to rid himself of his tyrant. 
 Luynes, who was cowardly by nature, would have had the 
 King take to flight and seek refuge with the Princes, who had 
 raised a fresh revolt and collected another army. But others^ 
 such as D^ageant, and more especially the little King himself, 
 were braver, and Louis ended by making up his mind to have 
 Concini arrested. The man who should be bold enough to 
 18 
 
THE YOUTH OF LOUIS XIII 
 
 undertake this duty still remained to be found : neither Luynes 
 nor his brothers cared to do so. The name of Nicolas de 
 I'Hospital, Marquis de Vitry, Captain in the Guards, an exceed- 
 ingly brave soldier and a noted duellist, was suggested. Sum- 
 moned to the King's presence, he asked one question only : 
 " But if he defends himself. Sire, what does Your Majesty desire 
 me to do ? " The boy made no reply. " The King," quoth 
 D6ageant, " desires he shall be killed." Then Vitry answered : 
 " Sire, I will carry out your commands." And on the morning 
 of April 24, 1617, just as the Marshal walked through the 
 wicket-gate of the Louvre, reading a letter as he went, and 
 carrying a nosegay in his hand, Vitry issued from the guard- 
 room. Concini was attended, as usual, by a bevy of gentlemen, 
 so numerous that the Captain of the Guards, stopped here and 
 there by the greetings of friends, had some difficulty in coming 
 up with him. " I arrest you by the King's order 1 " he was 
 able to say to him at last. . . . ".4 ?ne? To me?" cried 
 Concini, aghast, laying his hand on his sword-hilt. Instantly 
 he fell to the ground with three bullets in his body : the shots 
 had been fired by Vitry's brother and brother-in-law and two 
 or three of his friends. 
 
 IV 
 
 Thus perished the Mar^chal d'Ancre, at the very moment 
 when he seemed at the zenith of his power, condemned and 
 Disgrace ol the overthrown by a strong-willed boy whom he had 
 Queen-Mother too bitterly offended. All France exulted. When 
 and Leonora, the news of the murder spread, the courtiers all 
 came crowding round the billiard-table on which the young 
 King, flushed, talkative, and excited, had climbed to receive 
 the congratulations of men who had just stepped across the 
 corpse of him on whom they had been heaping flattery only the 
 night before. Very soon the populace had torn the hated 
 favourite's corpse out of its grave, and dragged it round the 
 city streets. The great nobles submitted to the King. The 
 Queen-Mother was sent to Blois. After a long and very unjust 
 trial, Leonora was condemned to death, and her spoils were 
 divided among the victors. Vitry was given 70,000 crowns and 
 
 19 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 a Marshal's baton : but after Leonora's execution Luynes got 
 almost all the rest, and notably the Marquisate of Ancre, which 
 Monsieur de was now to bear his name, Albert. Then he 
 Luynes. turned his attention to his family : he married his 
 
 brother Cadenet, who owned an islet in the Rhone, to Mile, de 
 Pequigny, he made him a Marshal of France and Due de 
 Chaulnes, and a peer of France : his other brother, the mighty 
 lord of a small vineyard, became the husband of Marguerite- 
 Charlotte, Duchesse de Luxembourg et de Piney, and a duke 
 and peer too : Luynes himself, hkewise a duke and peer, 
 married Marie de Rohan, daughter of the Due de Montbazon 
 (the future Duchesse de Chevreuse) : he was never weary of 
 acquiring, at the King's expense, for his brothers and for the 
 cousins (who came up out of their native province " by boat- 
 loads ") money, titles, and governments : and at one and the 
 same time a few years later, he was given the sword of a 
 Constable of France, and the dignity of Keeper of the King's 
 Seals. Did all this amount to the presence of a new Concini 
 in France ? " It is the same old tavern," said the gossips, 
 "nothing is changed but the sign I " This was really unjust, 
 for Lujmes, who cared much more for titles than for money, 
 was not a mere pirate, like Concini, and further, though his 
 favour was immense, his political influence was in reality of 
 the slightest. A cowardly though handsome fellow, vacillating, 
 full of contradictions and inconsequence, who would take up a 
 hundred different projects at a time, and not carry out a single 
 one, a poltroon as little inclined to war as to duelling, he had 
 none of the makings of a statesman in him. The part he 
 played in politics has been grossly exaggerated : he was not 
 appointed Constable of France till some eight or nine months 
 before his death, and up to that moment he was no more than 
 an ordinary member of the King's Council, and certainly not 
 one of the most influential. That he had the King's ear is 
 certain : but Louis, who was fond of authority, and full of 
 strong good sense, often lost patience with his empty talk, as 
 on the day when he exclaimed to him : " Hold your tongue, you 
 do not know what you are talking about ! " Indeed the 
 Council frequently arrived at decisions of importance without 
 consulting M. de Luynes at all, and he did but little in the way 
 20 
 
THE YOUTH OF LOUIS XIII 
 
 of keeping himself informed as to the progress of business. The 
 almost amorous affection and remarkable favour shown him by 
 the King certainly kept him in the foreground, and he was 
 well pleased it should be so. Nevertheless, while the pubhc 
 believed Luynes to be directing everything and ruling France 
 just as he chose, the favourite was really exercising no more 
 influence over the general policy of the country than many 
 another member of the Council, and very much less than the 
 " greybeards " (who were ministers once more), or than the 
 capable and violent D^ageant. 
 
 While the Concini were in power, the Spaniards, emboldened 
 by the two marriages, and encouraged by French indifference, 
 Treaty ol had made some progress in Italy. They had 
 
 Favia, 1619. attacked the Piedmontese and threatened the 
 Venetians : they had lately taken Vercelli ; and were preparing 
 to seize Asti. Louis XIII and his Council were in time to make 
 it evident that France had no intention of relinquishing her 
 interest in Piedmont : they forced Spain to sign the Peace of 
 Pavia (October, 1619) which re-established things as they had 
 been before the war, and further, to counterbalance the effect 
 of the famous Spanish marriages, they bestowed the hand of 
 Louis XIII's second sister, Christine, on the eldest son of 
 Charles-Emmanuel of Savoy (February, 1619). 
 
 Marie de' Medici, who had been exiled to Blois, was not 
 even invited to her daughter's wedding. She was keeping up 
 intercourse with all the discontented persons in the kingdom, 
 including M. de Lugon, Concini's former minister, who inspired 
 her with an extraordinary sympathy, and who, it was asserted, 
 directed her actions from afar, and had even gone in disguise 
 to see her at Blois. The Council decided the most prudent 
 course would be to exile the intriguing bishop to Avignon. But 
 Escape of the Marie escaped by a window one night, and took 
 Queen-Mother refuge at Angouleme, where d'Epernon, Governor 
 from Blois. of Saintonge and the Angoumois, offered her an 
 asylum. Henri Ill's former favourite had then attained his sixty- 
 fifth year, and was one of the most powerful noblemen in the 
 kingdom. Ilis post as Colonel-General of the King's infantry, 
 far more important, in reality, than that of any Marshal, 
 enabled him to dispose of the greater part of the armed forces. 
 
 21 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Thus a civil war, the result of which would have been most 
 doubtful, might well have broken out. To escape it, the 
 Council recalled the Queen-Mother's favourite from his banish- 
 ment at Avignon, and Richelieu, having recovered all his 
 influence over Marie, induced her, as he had undertaken to do, 
 to sign the Treaty of Angouleme (April, 1619). This secured 
 the government of Anjou to the Queen, and to her beloved 
 bishop the promise of a Cardinal's hat — for which he was 
 destined to wait a considerable time. 
 
 But Marie had hardly settled down at Angers before that 
 town became a hotbed of conspiracy. In October, 1619, the 
 Council had liberated the Prince de Cond6 from the prison into 
 which it had thrown him, and on that occasion the King had 
 caused Parliament to register a declaration, the tenor of which 
 was, it must be confessed, anything but friendly to the Queen- 
 Mother. As for M. de Lugon, he had done his best, in the first 
 instance, to induce Marie to be reconciled to her son in a spirit 
 of sincerity, but he was not the man to risk his own future for 
 the sake of keeping a promise : the moment he was sure his 
 advice was imwelcome to his protectress, he turned his coat, 
 without the slightest hesitation, and worked as hard to make 
 mischief as he had previously laboured in the interests of peace. 
 He even proved his talent to be as remarkable in one direction 
 as in the other, for before long, Soissons, Longueville, and 
 Mayenne were all ready to league themselves with d'Epernon 
 Battle ol Les and the Queen-Mother, and the Protestants, too, 
 Fonts-de-Ce, seemed inclined to side with them. ... In Paris 
 1620. the Council would have entered into fresh negotia- 
 
 tions, but Louis XIII decided to march straight on the rebels, 
 with such troops as he had at his command. He acted wisely : 
 the Norman towns (in the Due de Longueville's Government) 
 opened their gates to him, and the Queen-Mother's troops, 
 which had been entrenched at Ponts-de-C6, so as to defend the 
 road to Angers, made but a " trembling defence," as Rohan 
 called it, and dispersed with such celerity when the royal 
 army came within sight of their lines, that this parody of a 
 battle was christened the DrSlerie des Ponts-de-Ci (August 7, 
 1620). Three days later, peace was signed at Angers, and the 
 ingenious M. de Lufon, who acted for the Queen-Mother, took 
 22 
 
THE YOUTH OF LOUIS XIII 
 
 good care to have himself included in its provisions. But 
 France was now to find herself face to face with enemies of a 
 more dangerous kind than this handful of factious nobles. 
 
 In the early years of the seventeenth century, thanks to a 
 reaction against the doctrines of the Reformation, and also, it 
 The Catholic may be, against the " pagan " naturalism of the 
 Revival. Renaissance, there was a strong revival of Catho- 
 
 licism: in every quarter the religious orders were reforming 
 themselves, fresh orders were being established, convents and 
 monasteries were being built. And though mysticism seemed 
 to be blossoming anew in certain souls, the great majority of 
 these new orders were active, not contemplative. B^rulle had 
 imported the Carmelite Order from Spain in 1603, but he 
 foimded the Oratorian Order in 1611. In 1618, Saint Frangois 
 de Sales founded the Visitandines, and Saint Vincent de Paul 
 the Sisters of Charity. The Jesuits, who had been recalled by 
 Henri IV in 1603, were granted leave, in 1617, to open colleges 
 for youths : and everywhere, even in the hostage-cities {villes 
 de siiretS) their orators challenged the Calvinist pastors to 
 theological controversies, frequently held in the presence of a 
 sort of jury, and before a very large audience. The Protestants, 
 on their side, were just as zealous as their opponents in the 
 matter of preaching and discussing and converting, and as 
 there was no conception in those days of religious tolerance, it 
 followed, as a necessary consequence, that where the majority 
 of the inhabitants were Catholics (in the greater part of France, 
 in other words) they did all they could to persecute the Hugue- 
 nots, and that the Huguenots exercised most skilful arts of 
 oppression on the Papists, wherever they had the upper 
 hand. 
 
 Royal sympathies, in France, naturally went to the CathoUcs. 
 Marie de' Medici's government had been frankly clerical. 
 Louis XIII, in a thoroughly honest spirit, did his best to treat 
 his subjects of either religion with equal fairness : but he was 
 exceedingly devout to begin with, anii further, how could any 
 King of France help feeling a prejudice against the Reformers ? 
 Ever since the death of Henri IV, the Protestants, alarmed by 
 
 23 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 the reconciliation with Spain and the Ultramontane sympathies 
 of the Government, had been multiplying their assemblies, legal 
 or illegal, and their acts of sedition. They had supported 
 every opponent of the Court, and recently they had even stood 
 for the Queen-Mother against the King. . . . This was because 
 the natural and almost inevitable tendency of the Protestants 
 was to try to escape from the authority of a Government 
 swayed by Catholics, and therefore by their enemies — a Govern- 
 ment they regarded with distrust, seeing tolerance was a thing 
 unknown in those days, and that they themselves would not 
 have shown any had they been in that Government's place. 
 This led them to organize with a view to resisting the King's 
 authority, escaping from it more and more, and forming a sort 
 of republic of their own within the kingdom. Greatly em- 
 boldened by their success and by the impunity they had 
 enjoyed, and exasperated by the religious propaganda of the 
 other side, they were ready to seize on any pretext for taking 
 up arms. . . . This pretext was offered them in 1620. 
 
 Jeanne d'Albret had bestowed all the ecclesiastical 
 properties in Beam on the ministers of the Reformed Church. 
 The Pope had called on Henri IV to restore this Church property 
 to the rightful owners, but the monarch, shrinking from the 
 inextricable difficulties of the situation, had put the question 
 by. But Louis the Just (as Louis XIII has been very deservedly 
 surnamed), in his simple loyalty, felt he must not refuse the 
 Catholics a thing that was strictly in conformity with the 
 provisions of the Edict of Nantes, and strongly pressed on him, 
 not only by Luynes, who had no natural taste for fighting, but 
 by all the other members of his Council. Wherefore, in the year 
 1617 he issued an order for the restitution of all property 
 belonging to the clergy of Beam. His decree remained a dead 
 letter. Then in 1620 the King, exceedingly elated by the 
 victories he had lately gained, vowed he was determined to be 
 really King in France, proceeded to Beam in person, and had 
 the churches reopened by force. 
 
 Before he was back in Paris, a General Assembly of the 
 Protestants had been convened at La Rochelle in spite of his 
 orders to the contrary. And on May 10, 1621, this Assembly 
 voted the division of France into eight " circles," commanded 
 24, 
 
THE YOUTH OF LOUIS XIII 
 
 by chiefs who were to govern with the help of the provincial 
 councils, raise armies in time of war, and collect taxes in the 
 Protestant King's place. These decisions, which involved the 
 General setting up, in the heart of the kingdom, of a 
 
 Assembly at " repubhc drafted on the Dutch system," and 
 La Rochelle, specially aimed against the King, and so against 
 1621. France, would have been most serious if they could 
 
 have been put into execution : as a matter of fact they did not 
 alter the situation one whit. Still, Louis XIII could not do 
 otherwise than proclaim the La Rochelle Assembly and all its 
 supporters guilty of high treason (May 27). Then he put himself 
 at the head of his troops, accompanied by his favourite, Luynes, 
 whom he had just appointed Constable, occupied Saumur, took 
 Saint-Jean-d'Angely, conquered Clairac, seized some fifty 
 fortified towns in the course of a few months, and finally laid 
 siege to Montauban : once that fortress had fallen, La Rochelle 
 would be almost the only stronghold left in the Reformers' 
 hands. 
 
 The majority of the Huguenot nobility had refused to have 
 anything to do with the Assembly : they were Protestants, 
 indeed, but they were noblemen too, and their interests by no 
 means coincided with those of the majority of the party, who 
 were clearly inclined towards a sort of theocratic and oligarchic 
 republic. But La Force and Rohan hurried up to Montauban. 
 While the first named was bravely defending the town with the 
 help of Du Puy, the consul, the second fought skirmishes with 
 the assailants, and passed supplies in to the besieged. The 
 operations of the King's army, on the other hand, were con- 
 ducted with considerable slackness by the newly appointed 
 Constable — who, so Brienne tells us, had " never drawn his 
 blade against anything but deer and wild boar " — so that 
 after three months of ineffectual effort, Louis XIII was 
 obliged, as winter was fast coming on, to raise the siege in- 
 gloriously. 
 
 This was a cruel humiliation, and one for which he kept a 
 grudge against his favourite, for his vanity was especially 
 sensitive to failure in his military undertakings. And further, 
 for several months past, Luynes had not been showing sufficient 
 consideration for his feelings. It would even seem as though 
 
 25 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 his Constableship had completely turned the favourite's head : 
 he would talk to the King with " his cap upon his ear," 
 and contradict him too, with a " Gently, Sire ! " and dilate 
 behind his back on the power of the Mayors of the Palace, 
 and humiliate him by giving away larger sums than he him- 
 self gave. 
 
 So that Louis XIII "was struck, at last, by the dimensions 
 of this suddenly made colossus," as Saint-Simon puts it. In 
 any case he began, very often, to draw his familiar friends into 
 window recesses, and there confide to them that the Constable 
 (who had also become Keeper of the Seals) wanted to " play 
 the king," and these gentlemen do not appear to have made 
 any great effort to persuade him to the contrary. In short, 
 De Luynes' star was rapidly declining. 
 
 And at once everybody attacked him, and lampoons against 
 him appeared in swarms. The pamphleteers said cruel things 
 Death of De about his cowardice : at Montauban, they declared, 
 Luynes, 1621. he had never dared to come within a cannon-shot 
 of the ramparts, but had hidden behind a hill known as " the 
 Constable's breastplate," and remembering he was Keeper of 
 the Seals, " he amused himself by sealing papers while other 
 men were fighting hand to hand." Even the Catholic party, 
 whose policy he had always supported in the Council, now 
 fell upon him. He succeeded in procuring the dismissal of 
 the King's confessor. Father Arnoux, but he was on the eve of 
 his own disgrace when he died of a " purple fever " (scarlatina 
 or measles) on December 15, 1621, before the little fortified 
 town of Monheurt, to which he had laid siege. His friend the 
 King regretted him but little. His widow was remarried, 
 within a few months, to the Due de Chevreuse. " When his 
 body was taken for burial — ^to his own duchy of Luynes, I 
 think," writes Fontenay-Mareuil, " instead of seeing priests 
 praying for his soul, I saw some of his lackeys playing piquet 
 on his coffin, while their horses were baiting." 
 
 26 
 
THE YOUTH OF LOUIS XIII 
 
 When Luynes died, Louis XIII made a vow that in future 
 " he would act for himself in all State matters, as he was doing 
 Treaty of at that time." The memory of his Montauban 
 
 Montpellier. failure was still sore : like the brave soldier he 
 was, and in defiance of all his advisers except Conde, he marched 
 straight upon the enemy. Soubise, Rohan's brother, had won 
 a few engagements in the west : the King overthrew him at 
 the Isle of Riez. And then Louis seized Royan, received the 
 submission of all Sully's fortresses in Quercy, took Negrepelisse 
 and Saint-Antonin, and ended by laying siege to Montpellier. 
 This was one of the bulwarks of Protestantism. The besieged 
 town — Whelped by Rohan, who kept skirmishing round and 
 about as he had done at Montauban— made such a good defence 
 that at the end of six weeks the King's troops were apparently 
 worn out. And for this reason, when Lesdigui^res, a new 
 convert, offered his mediation, it was accepted perforce. A 
 new treaty between the King and his Protestant subjects was 
 signed at Montpellier in October, 1622. 
 
 Richelieu still continued to direct the policy of the 
 Queen-Mother, who wa» more infatuated with him than ever. 
 Louis XIII, unfortunately, could not endure M. de Lu9on, and 
 never lost an opportimity of jeering at his mother's devotion 
 to her favourite, whose soaring ambition alarmed the monarch. 
 But she, being miraculously obstinate, defended her Richelieu 
 against all and sundry, and with a courage that never failed 
 nor wearied, she went on begging favours for him. Hitherto 
 she had not succeeded in getting him made a cardinal : Louis' 
 attempts to carry out the promise snatched from him by the 
 treaty of Angouleme had been of the most half-hearted descrip- 
 tion : and his ministers — ^more especially the aged Brulart de 
 Sillery and his son Puisieux — were secretly opposed to the idea 
 of conferring the purple on the troublesome churchman : 
 RicheUeu had inspired them, too, with the antipathy most men 
 felt for him all his life long. . . . But when the Treaty of 
 Montpellier had been signed, and the Prince de Cond^, who 
 had advised against it, had taken himself off to sulk in Italy, 
 they did not dare to fool the Queen-Mother any longer : in 
 
 27 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 September, 1622, M. de Lu9on, sitting in a modest inn, learnt 
 with a joy so intense that in spite of himself we detect it in his 
 correspondence, that he was a Cardinal at last. 
 
 Thus, by slow degrees, we see him force himself on the 
 King, but how difficult he found it ! "I have had this mis- 
 The rise ol fortune," he writes, without any mock modesty, 
 Richelieu. at a later date, " that those who were powerful in 
 the State have always had a spite against me, not for any harm 
 I had done them, but because of the good they believed to be 
 in me." The incapacity of Sillery and Puisieux was notorious : 
 under their management, France was falling into discredit 
 owing to the weakness of her foreign policy in Germany, in the 
 Valtellina — everywhere, in fact. This the King well knew, so 
 day after day his mother, primed by her gifted friend, repeated 
 his lessons at the Council-board. But Louis XIII, a suspicious 
 person, who lived in constant fear of being led by others, could 
 not overcome his distrust of one whose imperious superiority 
 was detested by every human being about the Court, as much 
 as by the King himself. In vain did the haughty Cardinal 
 make himself charming, compliant, modest, insinuating, reas- 
 suring : in vain did public opinion (which he bought) support 
 his claims : in vain did the Queen-Mother return stubbornly 
 to the charge : when the King decided at last on the dismissal 
 of Brulart (January-February, 1624), he did not even grant the 
 new Cardinal a seat in the Council, and La Vieuville was made 
 chief minister. But presently the condition of foreign affairs 
 became still more compUcated. What was to be done ? The 
 advice of that much bepraised Richelieu really was badly 
 needed. . . . Then La Vieuville fancied he had devised a 
 means of making use of him without admitting him to the 
 Council-board : he suggested his being given the presidency of 
 a sort of secondary Council, less important than the King's, 
 a " Council of Dispatches." But unluckily the Cardinal, quite 
 aware that he was indispensable, did not care to accept a post 
 which would have involved responsibility without liberty. . . . 
 And at Compi^gne, on April 29, 1624, towards two o'clock 
 in the afternoon, Louis XIII was forced to summon to 
 his Council, and introduce to all its members, his newly ap- 
 pointed minister, the Cardinal de Richelieu. . . . Within four 
 28 
 
THE YOUTH OF LOUIS XIII 
 
 months the new-comer was master, and showed Vieuville the 
 door. 
 
 WoKKS TO Consult: Memoirs of Brlenne, Fontenay-Mareufl, La 
 Force, Pontchartrain, Richelieu, Rohan ; Journal of Hdroard ; Relazioni 
 degli ambasciatori veneti nel secolo decimo settimo, published by Barozzi and 
 Berchet ; Vicomte d'Avenel, Richelieu et la monarchie absolue (1884-90) ; 
 L. Battifol, Au temps de Louis XIII (1904) ; La vie intime cTune Reine de 
 France (1906) ; Le Roi Louis XIII & 20 ans (1910) ; G. Fagniez, Le Fire 
 Joseph el Richelieu (1894) ; G. Hanotaux, Histoire du Cardinal de Richelieu 
 (1896 et seq.) ; Mari^jol, Histoire de France, published under the direction 
 of E. Lavisse, vol. vi, ii (1905) ; G. Picot, Histoire des ^tats-gdndrauix 
 (1888) ; B. ZeUer, La minoriti de Louis XIII (1897) ; Louis XIII (1898) ; 
 Louis XIII (1899). 
 
 29 
 
CHAPTER II 
 RICHELIEU 
 
 I. Richelieu and Louis XIII. II. The Valtellina business and the 
 Protestant revolts. III. The Queen against the Cardinal : 
 Buckingham : Chalais. IV. The ruin of the Protestant party. 
 V. The Mantua business ; the " Day of Dupes " ; Montmorency's 
 
 plot. 
 
 ARMAND-JEAN DU PLESSIS DE RICHELIEU was 
 born on September 9, 1585, the third son of a Poitevin 
 gentleman of fairly good position, and of his wife, 
 Suzanne de La Porte, the daughter of an advocate belonging 
 to the Paris Parliament. The eldest of his brothers was 
 .. intended for the career of arms, the second, 
 
 Alphonse, was to go into the Church, and he 
 himself— his parents had at first intended him, too, for the 
 army — received the education of a -young courtier in the 
 academy of a certain Sieur de Pluvinel. But one fine day, 
 Alphonse de Richelieu having resigned his bishopric of Lu9on 
 to join the Carthusian order, Armand, to save the modest 
 bishopric from passing out of the family, had to make up his 
 mind to embrace the ecclesiastical career. The decision cost 
 him an effort, no doubt ; but having taken it, he adhered to 
 it steadily, for he was not the man to wear his life out in hopeless 
 regrets, and he would appear, too, to have realized that as far as 
 worldly success went the Church might serve his purpose as well 
 as the army — or even better. So he studied theology at the 
 University with industry and success, and was duly appointed 
 Bishop of Lugon in 1606 ; he was then twenty, five years below 
 the canonical age. The country bishopric, " the ugliest 
 bishopric in France, the dirtiest and the most disagreeable," as 
 he calls it himself, was not the most tempting of benefices in the 
 30 
 
RICHELIEU 
 
 eyes of a young prelate overflowing with ambition, such as 
 Richeheu : but he had quite decided to employ every possible 
 means of getting out of it. 
 
 The first he selected cannot be said to have been particularly 
 good. On the morrow of the murder of Henri IV, he thought it 
 judicious to send the Queen a protestation of his fidelity couched 
 in terms so exaggerated that his brother, who was living at the 
 Court, considered it ridiculous, and refused to transmit it. In 
 vain did young M. de Lugon hasten to Paris ; in spite of the 
 various intrigues he at once succeeded in setting on foot there, 
 he failed to secure any place under the new government ; and 
 being too poor to remain at Court was fain to get back to his 
 province, tolerably crestfallen, and just the plain bishop he 
 had been before. 
 
 He did not retire to his own diocese, which he found very 
 dull, but to the Priory of Coussay, near Milhau, which was his 
 property. And there he set to work to write to everybody, 
 try to ingratiate himself, endeavour to make himself useful, 
 and strive to gain new friends. In this fashion he spent 
 four mortal years, and so contrived to get himself sent to the 
 States-General by his province in 1614. We have already 
 described the part he played in the quarrels between the three 
 Orders. His sermons, his speeches, and his adroitness had 
 Richelieu brought him into prominence, and his friends 
 
 Chaplain to succeeded in getting him appointed chaplain to the 
 Anne of young Queen Anne of Austria, whose household was 
 
 Austria. just then in course of formation. He soon contrived 
 
 to insinuate himself into the good graces of the Concini couple : 
 Barbin was his friend : through Barbin he obtained Leonora's 
 friendship, and thanks to Leonora, he became a minister in 
 1616. . . . When one looks at the famous picture Philippe de 
 Champagne painted of him when he was at the height of his 
 glory, and notes the proud emaciated face, framed in black 
 locks, the scornful eyes under the arched brows, the haughty 
 mien, the imperious port, of the Cardinal-Due de Richelieu, it 
 is piquant to recall that young M. de Lugon, who put up so 
 patiently with the stout Marie de' Medici, paid such attentive 
 court to the fantastic Marechale d'Ancre, worked so hard to make 
 friends and acquaintances, was so unfailingly eager to please, 
 
 31 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 so obsequious, persevering, tenacious, and calculating. During 
 the five months he was in power (1616-1617), how unwearied 
 was his endurance of Concini's rebufts ! His letters to him were 
 almost humble (at first, in any case), and betrayed so compromis- 
 ing a devotion that those who seized the Marshal's private 
 papers thought for a moment of including the Bishop in the 
 approaching prosecution. But during the closing period of his 
 ministry, Richelieu had contrived to secure a certain amount 
 of support in the King's immediate circle, and those in power 
 merely sent him into exile at his Priory of Coussay, 
 
 There, with a most reassuring zeal, he devoted himself forth- 
 with to theological studies : " reduced to a tiny hermitage," 
 he declared himself resolved henceforth " to spend his time peace- 
 fully between his neighbours and his books." Notwithstanding 
 this assertion, the Council heard that he was keeping up com- 
 munications with the Queen-Mother, and the King, much 
 incensed, sent him to prosecute his beloved studies in his own 
 diocese, first of all, and then at Avignon. I have shown how it 
 soon became necessary to send him to Angers, to quiet Marie de' 
 Medici, and how, when he had established his ascendency over 
 that elderly lady's mind, he ruled her for the furtherance of his 
 own interests, gradually forced himself on the Court and even 
 on the King himself, by virtue of his genius, and above all by 
 his gift of intrigue, and how, having laboriously attained a seat 
 at the Council-board, he made himself master of the whole 
 Council in the space of four months. 
 
 The finest portrait of Richelieu that we possess was neither 
 painted, nor chiselled, nor engraved. It was penned by Car- 
 Cardinal de dinal de Retz, in the second chapter of the second 
 Retz on part of his own Memoirs : 
 
 Richelieu. « Richelieu," he says, " was a man who kept his 
 
 word whenever no great interest forced him to do otherwise, 
 and in that case he neglected nothing that was calculated to save 
 his appearance of good faith. He was not liberal, but he gave 
 more than he promised, and his way of adding zest to the 
 benefits he conferred was admirable. He cared for glory far 
 more than morality permits ; but it must be acknowledged that 
 his abuse of the dispensation he had granted himself touching 
 the excess of his ambition was no greater than his merit 
 82 
 
RICHELIEU 
 
 warranted. ... He was a good friend ; he would even have 
 desired the love of the people : but though he possessed the 
 civility, the appearance, and many other qualities necessary to 
 this result, he never had that indescribable something which is 
 more indispensable in this matter than in any other. . . . No 
 man could distinguish better than he between bad and worse, 
 between good and better, and that is a very great quality in a 
 minister. He was too apt to grow impatient over the small 
 things that lead up to the great ; but this fault, which is peculiar 
 to lofty minds, is always accompanied by a sagacity which 
 makes amends for it. He had sufficient religion for the purposes 
 of this world. He inclined towards that which is good, whether 
 by preference or by good sense, whenever his interests did not 
 lead him towards evil, which he recognized perfectly well, even 
 when he did it. . . . To conclude, it must be acknowledged 
 that all his vices were of a kind which a high fortune easily 
 renders illustrious, for they were of those which can only use 
 great virtues as their instruments." 
 
 This portrait, with the addition of a very few features, gives 
 us the whole nature of the man. In the first place, then, Riche- 
 lieu, as my readers know, had by no means the soul of an ascetic : 
 all those things which the generality of men regard as the good 
 things of life, he passionately desired to possess. He was not 
 content with being powerful : to enjoy his power, he felt im- 
 pelled to show it forth to all men. He was ostentatious : in 
 the days when he was Bishop of Lugon, and hardly able to pay 
 his way, he took a gentleman to be his steward ; " it looks well," 
 he said ; " he manages the household and receives my company." 
 He delighted in luxury and splendour and expenditure, and iii 
 money too, for he amassed a huge fortune (something like three 
 miUions of livres a year, equal to about twelve millions in our 
 day) ; in honours, for he was always an ardent collector of titles, 
 and in women, who never cared for him at all. Like all the men 
 of his time, he was not content to be exalted in his own person 
 only, his " house " had also to be honoured : thanks to him, his 
 brother, the Carthusian monk, became Archbishop of Lyons, 
 received a cardinal's hat, was made Grand Almoner of France, 
 and accepted all these distinctions very readily ; he made one 
 of his nieces a duchess, and the other a Princess of the 
 
 c 33 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Blood ;* he provided royally for his nephews and his cousins. His 
 pride was enormous and insatiable : he claimed to be the first 
 personage in the realm, after the King himself ; he took prece- 
 dence of the Princes of the Blood, even in his own house : one 
 day, shortly before his death, he ventured to receive the Queen 
 without rising from his arm-chair, and when, far from excusing 
 himself on the score of his illness, he informed the sovereign that 
 she could not think his behaviour unusual, seeing that in Spain 
 the cardinals had the right to remain in their arm-chairs in the 
 Queen's presence, Anne of Austria appositely replied that she 
 was now a Frenchwoman, and had forgotten all about the 
 customs of Spain. 
 
 It must be added that Richelieu was not proud only, but 
 conceited : he possessed all the vanities, in fact, even that of 
 the Uterary man. The latter trait, indeed, seems pardonable 
 enough ; this terrible actor in so many fine scenes, diplomatic and 
 military, on the " European stage " was hardly a poet, nor even 
 a dramatic author, but his talent and his power of writing prose 
 are both evident in his dispatches and reports ; and, after all, is 
 not an excessive love of literature a pleasing weakness in the 
 case of a great minister ? 
 
 Now the Cardinal's ambition and his splendid greed were 
 served by an energy that was sublime. Richelieu was a man who 
 Character of knew no weakness, and pity least of all. He had, 
 Richelieu. as people say," no heart." He would indeed, when 
 
 the occasion served, display a sort of tearful sentimentality, 
 but it was " all on the surface," and " never moved him from 
 the line laid down by his calculations." It was not very often 
 that he would relax, even among his most familiar associates, 
 but when this did occur he would indulge in a sort of jovial 
 merriment not uncommon among priests, and would laugh 
 heartily at Boisrobert's sallies. Subject as he was to physical 
 weaknesses and fits of nervous depression which he did not find 
 
 * Richelieu had two sisters older than himself: (1) Franfoise, who 
 died in 1615, married Rend de Vignerot, by whom she had a son who 
 became General of the Galleys, and a daughter, Marie-Madeleine, married 
 on November 26, 1620, to Antoine de Combalet (nephew to Luynes), who 
 ultimately became Duchesse d'Aiguillon ; (2) Nicole, who married M. de 
 Br6z6, by whom she had a daughter who married the future " great 
 Condd " in 1640, and a son who became Admiral of France. 
 84 
 
RICHELIEU 
 
 it easy to conceal, he was never able to endure the smallest hurt 
 to his vanity with indifference : this is what Retz calls his 
 " weakness in not despising small things," and what Tallemant 
 means when he writes that the Cardinal " had not the gift 
 of imperturbability." But when we remember that till the 
 very end of his hfe Richelieu suffered agonies from headache — 
 he called his head " the worst head in the world " — that he was 
 tortured by a disease of the bladder, that he was perpetually 
 tormented by haemorrhoids and boils, and that thus the man who 
 spent his whole existence struggling, without an instant's 
 respite, not only against the enemies of France, but against all 
 the persons who surrounded Louis XIII, against Court intrigue, 
 and plots, and attempts at assassination, was a sick man, we are 
 forced into a boundless admiration for the inexorable Cardinal 
 who ruled the whole epoch in which he lived, and moved across 
 the page of history draped in his purple robe, like one of Cor- 
 neille's heroes. 
 
 Richelieu was universally hated (and his unpopularity has 
 survived him. Note the part he is generally made to play in our 
 modern popular literature). The admiration inspired by men of 
 despotic genius is usually accompanied by antipathy. He had 
 tried, indeed, in the earlier days of his career, to gather friends 
 around him, but his very silence was oppressive. Women — 
 who were all-powerful in the romantic and gallant Court of 
 Louis XIII — detested him ; he never knew what to say to them. 
 Had he any real friends ? Fancan betrayed his confidence, 
 and La Valette, Bullion, the Bouthiliers, Servien, Chavigny, 
 even the Archbishop of Sourdis, whom he preferred, for a 
 time, to all the other men about him, served him for their own 
 ends and because he was known to stand faithfully by his 
 creatures. . . . But did any one, save Father Joseph Le Clerc 
 du Tremblay, the famous " Grey Fiminence," ever love him ? 
 
 The son of a former parliamentary President, who had served 
 as ambassador to the Venetian Republic, and great-grandson of 
 a Marshal of France, Father Joseph had been 
 Fatner osep . ^^ Court, and had seen active service, before he 
 joined the Capuchin Order in 1599. His fervent faith, his 
 enthusiastic imagination, and the chimeras that filled his brain, 
 never prevented him from being the most cunning of diplo- 
 
 85 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 matic agents. His dream, for many years of his life, was to 
 organize a crusade against the Turks, and he believed that his 
 activities would forward this. 
 
 His coarse gown, his great grave eyes under their bushy eye- 
 brows, and the huge hairy beard that filled his cowl, and con- 
 cerning which Richelieu declared that " he did not know any man 
 in the world capable of shaving it, however dexterous he might 
 be," were seen at every Court in Germany and Italy, whither 
 the Cardinal sent him. From 1633 till 1638, when he died, he 
 lived, for the most part, with the Cardinal, who entrusted to 
 him the duty of communicating all his instructions to his secret 
 agents and to the ambassadors. Father Joseph loved Richelieu 
 because he had divined his greatness : in the days when his 
 patron was still nothing but a poor shabby bishop, Joseph's 
 " attentive soul," as M. Hanotaux puts it, " was already hanging 
 watchfully over that young and brilliant destiny. . . ." But 
 the nobles he had humiliated, the great ladies who were his 
 enemies, the magistrates he despised, the people, bowed down by 
 his taxation, every soul, in fact, except Father Joseph, detested 
 the Cardinal. 
 
 The King, for his part, did not hate the Minister (whom he 
 admired whole-heartedly), as he is said to have hated him — but he 
 may not have looked on him with an over-sympathetic eye. He 
 kept him in office because Richelieu served the country well, and 
 because Louis XIII always put his kingly duty before his per- 
 sonal convenience, a truly noble characteristic. But indeed we 
 all know, nowadays, that the son of Henri IV was not the melan- 
 choly and grotesque puppet of the old historians. True, he was 
 unattractive at first sight : clad invariably in dull and sad- 
 coloured stuffs, even when fashion imposed brilliant fabrics and 
 ribbons and gold fringes on all his courtiers ; a poor dancer, still 
 in need of dancing lessons at the age of twenty-two, he was 
 miserably thin, his big head was covered with a bristling mane of 
 hair, and the mouth, with slightly pendulous under-lip, that 
 gaped perpetually under his great Bourbon nose, tended as little 
 to endue his long countenance with intelligence as his habitual 
 stammer tended to enliven his conversation. But all the stories 
 about his moral weakness, his melancholy distrust of others, his 
 lack of energy, are merely so many legends. 
 86 
 
RICHELIEU 
 
 In 1624 the King was a young man of three and twenty, 
 active, violent, healthy, and agile — a sportsman, as we should 
 Louis Xm at say nowadays, who spent his activity in an eager 
 twenty-three, enjoyment of the delights of hawking herons and 
 partridges, and hunting stags and wild boar. The elder Saint- 
 Simon was appointed to the office of Master of the King's 
 Horse because he contrived to bring up his fresh mounts 
 quicker than anybody else. He also loved tennis, boating, 
 shooting at a mark, riding, and so forth. He was already 
 beginning to suffer, indeed, from the enteritis which was to 
 kill him in the end, but his constitution cannot have been so 
 very weakly, since it held out for over forty-two years against 
 the treatment of his physicians ; and in one single year, we are 
 told. Dr. Bouvard bled His Majesty forty-seven times, made him 
 swallow two hundred and twelve purgatives, and gaA'^e him two 
 hundred and fifteen injections. 
 
 Nor was Louis XIII a moral weakling. He was certainly not 
 an " intellectual " : he never opened a book. When he was not 
 hunting, he was carpentering, or building, or printing, or turning; 
 or forging metal, and doing all this very skilfully : at an earlier 
 period in his life he had spent hours over childish games, con- 
 structing imitations " of the artificial fountains at Saint-Germain 
 with little canals made of quills," cultivating green peas which he 
 sent to the market to be sold, larding meat, with his equerry 
 Georges, making forcing-frames with the help of M. de Noyers, 
 or cooking preserves, all alone ; one day he amused himself 
 by shaving off the beards of several of his officers. But 
 in spite of all this, Louis XIII was as brave as his father 
 Henri IV, whom he had worshipped from his earliest childhood, 
 striving, with a touching awkwardness, to imitate him, " trying 
 to play the good comrade," but avoiding his father's loose morals, 
 in the matter of which, as is generally known, the son's reserve 
 was extreme, and, after his marriage, even excessive. He took 
 a passionate interest in all military subjects : throughout his 
 youth he had been in the habit of studying the movements of 
 troops, and tactics in general, with the help of silver toy-soldiers 
 which he set up on a table. He was not a first-rate general, 
 indeed, for his only idea of a campaign was to march straight 
 upon the enemy without subterfuge or ditour ; but he was a 
 
 37 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 good officer, who knew all his men by name, and would say a 
 word to the brave fellows as they marched by him, who delighted 
 in reviews and inspections of camps, and the sketching of maps 
 and the drawing up of orders, quite able (as he did at the Isle of 
 Riez) to spend seventeen hours in the saddle with his men, sleep 
 on the hard ground, and eat whatever he could find in the nearest 
 peasant's hut : " a big hunch of brown bread with nothing to 
 drink," or some coarse omelet made with his own assistance. . . . 
 
 This being his character, careful of his own dignity and 
 jealous of his kingly power, none of his contemporaries took 
 Louis XIII to be a weak man, easily led. They considered him 
 a great gentleman and a king. Sad he was, certainly, weakened 
 by bleedings and merciless physicking, modest and reserved, 
 his fastidious taste shocked by the loose behaviour of the people 
 about him, " distrusting himself," but capable of a princely 
 dissimulation, as also of energetic action and secrecy — did he 
 not prove it as a boy of sixteen, when he plotted Concini's destruc- 
 tion ? — ^just, soldier-like, conscientious, " passionately devoted 
 to the glory of his State." Louis XIII was assuredly a king who 
 was no slave to voluptuous weaknesses, one of the most virtuous 
 monarchs that ever sat upon the throne of France, one who may 
 not have possessed the intelligence, but who certainly had the 
 heart, of a great sovereign. 
 
 Violent in temper and jealous of his own authority as Louis 
 was, the Cardinal treated him with the greatest respect, and on 
 Louis' appie- 8^11 questions, great and small, he drew up reports 
 elation of which he sent to the King when he was absent, or 
 
 Richelieu. laid before him at his Councils. In these the 
 
 solutions that might be adopted and the reasons in favour ol 
 adopting one or the other were clearly set forth. The King 
 would read them, listen attentively, take great pains to under- 
 stand them, and would then think over the matter : this done, he 
 frequently decided in accordance with his Minister's wishes, 
 but this did not always happen, especially when the question 
 was one affecting military arrangements. The ambassadors 
 always found the King thoroughly informed on current affairs, 
 and with a perfect mastery of matters that had been debated in 
 Council : they describe him as a prudent man, weighing the 
 replies he gave them, careful to say just what was necessary, 
 88 
 
RICHELIEU 
 
 without compromising or entangling himself, . . . Those who 
 represent Louis XIII as trembling in the presence of the Cardinal 
 are quite in the wrong. Between 1617 and 1624, before the 
 Minister was connected with the business of the State, the King 
 had given proof, on several difficult occasions, of that very 
 decision, vigour, and power of general direction which were to be 
 the characteristics of French poUcy " under " Richelieu. The 
 Cardinal certainly brought the depth and wisdom of his own 
 views, the methodical consistency of his ideas — his political 
 genius, in fact — into his conduct of public business, but Louis 
 never needed his presence to make him energetic and resolute. 
 To sum up, it was never either feebleness or indolence that 
 led Louis XIII to follow the counsels of his great Minister. He 
 followed them because he was too sensible not to recognize the 
 Cardinal's superior gifts, and that being so, too honest not to 
 submit to them. 
 
 II 
 
 In March 1623, the Prince of Wales, attended by Bucking- 
 ham, made a secret journey into Spain : romantic and utilitarian, 
 Marriage of ^^^ most Anglo-Saxons, his dream had been to 
 the Prince of niake the Infanta fall in love with him, and thus 
 Wales and carry off both her hand and her dowry — ^the 
 Henriette- Palatinate. Six months later (in September), he 
 Inane. returned, sorely disappointed ; the Spaniards had 
 
 tried to make him turn Catholic, and the Duke of Bavaria 
 had become Palatine. Then he cast his eyes on the sister of 
 Louis XIII, and his suit was accepted. The opinion of Riche- 
 lieu, who had then just entered the Council, was that in return 
 for Henriette's hand, France ought to exact the same conditions 
 as those England had proposed when the Infanta's had been 
 asked ; and he was deputed, with La Vieuville, to arrange the 
 provisions of the marriage contract. The discussion did not 
 prove an easy one: the fact was that Richelieu's colleague, 
 desiring to play him a trick, sent secret messages to the English 
 ambassadors, advising them not to give in. The Cardinal, be- 
 coming aware of this, complained to the King, who instantly 
 gave orders for La Vieuville's arrest (August 13, 1624). Within 
 
 89 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 three months of that date the contract was duly signed. 
 Richelieu, now without a rival in the Council, was soon to be 
 called on to prove the quality of his talents. 
 
 The Valtellina is the valley, some twenty leagues in length 
 and one in breadth, lying along the upper Adda, and closed at its 
 The War in two ends by the counties of Bormio and Chiavenna, 
 the Valtellina. which command the Stelvio and Spliigen Passes, 
 and have always shared the valley's fate. To Spain it was an 
 important matter to establish communications between her 
 Italian colony in the Milanese State and the dominions of Austria, 
 her natural ally, and with that object, to conunand the Stelvio 
 and the Spliigen. For this reason, when the Catholics of the 
 Valtellina fell under the rule of the Protestants of the Grisons, the 
 Spaniards at once felt that conscience imperiously dictated the 
 duty of protecting the Catholic faith in the Valtellina. In 1620, 
 therefore, they occupied the country, and then forced the 
 Grisons to grant them the right of passage through it, in con- 
 sideration of an annual subsidy of 25,000 crowns (January, 
 1622). While these events were taking place, France had been 
 absorbed by her struggle against her own Protestants ; but the 
 moment the Peace of Montpellier had been signed (October, 
 1623), she leagued herself with Savoy and Venice, for the purpose 
 of restoring their conquest to the Grisons (February, 1623). 
 Then the Spaniards, in alarm, offered to make the forts over to 
 some third Power — to the Holy See, for instance : a proposal 
 the Brularts, who were directing the policy of France at that 
 moment, very foolishly accepted. Yet it should have been 
 clear enough that once the Pope had been appointed to hold the 
 fortresses, it would be difficult to force him to return them, or 
 agree to any measure in favour of the Grisons heretics, the 
 oppressors of a Catholic population. It was on this that Spain 
 had reckoned, and her wisdom was soon manifest. The Holy 
 See, in fact, devised the following arrangement : the Spaniards 
 were to have the right of passage, and the inhabitants of the 
 Valtellina were to be free to practise their religion : the sove- 
 reignty over the country was still to remain with the Grisons, 
 but they were to lose it if they were guilty of the slightest in- 
 fraction of religious tolerance ; and as it was the Pope who 
 undertook to verify these infractions, it will readily be imagined 
 40 
 
RICHELIEU 
 
 that they were hkely to occur at once ! Yet the French ambassa- 
 dor at Rome, Brulart de Sillery, gave his verbal adhesion to this 
 agreement. And things had reached this point when RicheUeu 
 took the helm. 
 
 This is what he did. On November 25, 1624, the Marquis de 
 Coeuvres suddenly marched a small French army into the Val- 
 tellina, to the general stupefaction, and by the end of three 
 months the whole valley was in his hands : the Pope was left 
 with nothing but Riva and Chiavenna. Richelieu at once pro- 
 ceeded to disavow his general's proceedings, and then opened 
 negotiations. Unfortunately for him, the powerful party of 
 devout Catholics, which he had alienated by forwarding the 
 marriage of Henriette of France with the heretic English prince, 
 and by signing a treaty with the Dutch Protestants, was raising 
 an outcry about the " scandal " — ^the King's ordnance had 
 actually fired on the standard of Saint Peter ! And at the 
 same moment, the Protestants, thinking the occasion a favour- 
 able one, revolted once more. In January and February, 1625, 
 Soubise, having seized seven great ships, took possession of 
 Oleron, and when the news spread, all the Calvinists in the 
 South, spurred on by Rohan, rose in revolt likewise. 
 
 The difficulty in which Richelieu found himself may be 
 imagined : he was on bad terms with the Pope, he was 
 threatened by Spain, and he had not only to cope with the foe 
 within the borders of France — ^the Huguenots — but to hold out 
 against the bigots and against his own personal enemies — in other 
 words, practically the entire Covu-t ; and all this at a time when 
 he was not sufficiently powerful to reckon on imposing his will 
 even on the Council. . . . He extricated himself from the 
 difficulty with extraordinary dexterity. 
 
 Apparently only two courses were open to him : either to 
 make peace with Spain and the Holy See, and so overwhelm the 
 Peace with Reformers, or else to treat with the Protestants, 
 Spain and with and so bring the Valtellina business to a satisfactory 
 the Huguenots, conclusion. The Catholic clan tried to force the 
 first of these expedients on him, but he did not feel himself 
 strong enough, as yet, to crush the Huguenots completely, and 
 desired to secure a little breathing-time. What, then, did he 
 do ? In the most cimning fashion, he inspired each of his 
 
 41 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 adversaries with a fear that he was going to ally himself with 
 one so as to destroy the other, and in this manner he induced 
 Spain to grant him the exclusive use of the passages into and 
 out of the Valtellina (Treaties of Mongon, January 1 and March 5), 
 and concluded the Peace of La Rochelle with the Protestants 
 on February 5, 1626. " The Huguenots," he tells us himself in 
 his Memoirs, " were led to consent to this peace by their dread 
 of one with Spain, and the Spaniards to make peace out of their 
 dread of peace with the Huguenots." The game had been skil- 
 fully won, but the Court did not thank him for his victory. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Now the Frenchmen of those days took but little interest in 
 foreign politics. In the first place, because they knew very 
 little about them — ^their means of information on the subject 
 being of the scantiest description. The King, indeed, was 
 perpetually publishing statements. Declarations, in which the 
 affairs of the State, those of his own family, and the reasons 
 which had guided his conduct, were all set forth at length — for the 
 sovereign thought a great deal of public opinion, and took immense 
 pains to conciliate it. But all this, as will be imagined, was 
 exceedingly " official," and gave little satisfaction to curiosity. 
 
 There was a periodical publication, the Mercure Francais, 
 but it only appeared once a year, and was nothing but a summary 
 The first of " the most remarkable " events. Besides this, a 
 
 Newspapers. mass of lampoons and political pamphlets were re- 
 tailed round about the Palace, on the Pont-Neuf, and in booths, 
 but the authors of these confined themselves to dragging the 
 great nobles, or the Cardinal, through the mud, according as their 
 pensions happened to be paid by one or the other. So that 
 almost the only source of information open to the public consisted 
 of private correspondence (which accounts for the importance 
 attached, in the seventeenth century, to the art of letter-writing). 
 The first number of the first embryo of our present newspaper 
 made its appearance on May 1, 1631. But this Gazette, edited 
 by a physician, Th^ophraste Renaudot, was nothing but a four- 
 paged weekly sheet, which printed news, but supplied no com- 
 mentary. Renaudot's invention, we may add, was soon granted 
 42 
 
RICHELIEU 
 
 the Cardinal's encouragement, and the effect government 
 encouragement produces on the Press, in most cases, is pretty 
 generally known. . . . The public had no confidence whatever 
 in the Gazette. 
 
 Thus it came about that after the appearance of Renaudot's 
 paper, as before it, our forefathers lived, one might almost say, 
 feeling their way. And for this reason we must not cry out too 
 loudly against the lords and ladies of the Court, if, at the very 
 moment when the Cardinal was simultaneously fighting the 
 Huguenots and carrying on negotiations with Spain, they were 
 doing their utmost to overthrow him altogether. The political 
 services rendered to France by Richelieu, and at a later date by 
 Mazarin, were very often misjudged by Frenchmen, or even 
 utterly unrealized by them. 
 
 After the death of Luynes all that was young and gay at 
 Court gathered roimd Anne of Austria, and opposed Marie de' 
 Anne ol Medici, whose creature the hated Cardinal was 
 
 Austria. supposed to be. For, to all romantic hearts, the 
 
 young Queen was a touching figure, persecuted and misimder- 
 stood ! 
 
 After her marriage Anne of Austria was so utterly neglected 
 by her timid lord that Spain, deeply offended, caused her 
 ambassador to lodge a complaint. It was not till early in 1619, 
 and then only by resorting to a certain violence, that Luynes 
 succeeded in making the King play a husband's part : from that 
 time, Louis XIII and Anne of Austria lived on good terms, 
 until, after the Constable's death, Marie de' Medici came back 
 to Court, and forthwith set herself to make mischief between her 
 son and her daughter-in-law. 
 
 Poor Anne, now kept at a distance, amused herself as best 
 she could. Just at that moment the AstrSe was all the fashion : 
 what harm could there be in listening to the doleful and flowery 
 discourse of a lover respectful and fluent as one of the shepherd 
 lads of the Lignon ? M. de Bellegarde, an old beau of the days of 
 the Valois, still preserved " that politeness which Catherine de' 
 Medici had brought with her from Italy," and his old-fashioned 
 manners filled the young men brought up in the rough Court of 
 Henri IV with admiration : Anne, then, permitted M. de Belle- 
 garde " to behave to her after the fashion of the century in 
 
 43 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 which he had hved, which had been the reign of gallantry and of 
 fair ladies." But neither the speeches of the old Duke, nor 
 those of the brave Henri de Montmorency, contributed to heal the 
 breach between the King and Queen. 
 
 Nor did Anne's best friend help to improve matters. Marie de 
 Rohan had married the Due de Luynes when she was seventeen : 
 The Duehesse by the time her first husband died, her reputation 
 de Chevreuse. was already so extremely bad that the Nuncio 
 thought it his duty to advise the young Queen not to keep so 
 compromising a lady about her person. . . . But Anne did not 
 dismiss her friend. One evening, on March 14, 1624, Mme. de 
 Luynes and Mile, de Vertieuil amused themselves by running, 
 with the Queen, along the apartment in the Louvre now known 
 as the Salle La Caze. Anne, then in an interesting condition, 
 " stumbled and fell, and hurt herself." Whereupon the King, 
 in a fury, sent the young Duchess about her business. But she 
 soon contrived to recover her position, thanks to her marriage 
 with a younger member of the Guise family, the Due de Chev- 
 reuse, to whom Louis XIII was very much attached. 
 
 But hardly had she married again when she fell in love with 
 Henry Rich, Lord Kensington, Earl of Holland, " one of the 
 The Queen and handsomest men in the world " it would appear, 
 Buckingham. " but of an effeminate style of beauty." And this 
 love affair would certainly have had no bearing on the history 
 of France if Mme. de Chevreuse had not taken it into her head 
 to provide the neglected Queen, her friend, with as charming a 
 consoler as she herself had discovered. For such a purpose 
 could anybody more attractive be imagined than the splendid 
 Duke of Buckingham ? Charles I had just dispatched this 
 nobleman as his Ambassador Extraordinary to the Court of 
 France, to escort the new Queen of England, Henriette-Marie, to 
 her future home (May, 1626). During the week he spent at the 
 French Court, Buckingham took advantage of his mission to be a 
 great deal with Anne of Austria, and his presence was certainly 
 not disagreeable to her. . . . When Henriette departed to 
 England, the Queen and the Queen-Mother accompanied her as 
 far as Amiens. There, if we may believe La Rochefoucauld, 
 Buckingham was very bold, and when he took leave of Anne, 
 a few days later, those present noticed that he could not conceal 
 44 
 
RICHELIEU 
 
 his tears. He had only just reached Boulogne when he declared 
 he had received a letter from his master which necessitated his 
 return to Amiens ; he went to pay his respects to the Queen ; 
 she was in her bed, he fell on his knees beside it. . • . All this 
 extravagant behaviour made a stir. The King, who heard 
 something of it, dismissed Anne's equerry and her footman, 
 and his mother's favour with him was increased by all he with- 
 drew from his wife. But Anne, thus persecuted, excited even 
 more sympathy than before, and the Court ladies and coxcombs 
 were hotter than ever against the Queen-Mother and her creature, 
 the Cardinal. 
 
 These two had devised a perfectly reasonable plan for the 
 marriage of Gaston d'Orleans (Monsieur, the King's brother) with 
 Projected mar- Mile, de Montpensier (who afterwards became the 
 riage o£ Gaston mother of the " Grande Mademoiselle "). Many 
 d'Orleans. people were hostile to this alliance : Anne of 
 
 Austria, in the first place — for, being childless herself, she did not 
 care to have a sister-in-law who might bear an heir presumptive 
 to the crown ; the Prince de Cond^, too, the first Prince of the 
 Blood after Monsieur, who was loath to lose all chance of seeing 
 his own family on the throne ; the Comte de Soissons, who 
 wanted to marry Mile, de Montpensier himself; the King's two 
 natural brothers, the Due and the Grand Prieur de Vend6me ; 
 Mme. de Chevreuse, carried away by her love of intrigue ; Henri 
 de Talleyrand, Comte de Chalais, carried away by his passion for 
 Mme. de Chevreuse ; and various other persons, who plotted 
 for the same reasons as Chalais — for the sake of pleasing their 
 lady-loves, or out of gallantry, or romance, or fashion, or becaiise 
 intrigue seems almost the only occupation open to courtiers. 
 Thus love was mixed up with the whole cabal, and, one way with 
 another, a most powerful party was labouring with all its might 
 to prevent the marriage. 
 
 In those days Monsieur was a very good-looking man, " who 
 always wears his hat like a halo, and whistles all the time, with 
 Character o! his hands in his pockets." Light of foot, lively 
 Gaston. and wiry to the most extraordinary degree, he 
 
 never ceased moving hither and thither and twisting about — ^to 
 such an extent that his servants were obliged to put his clothes 
 on him at random, and dress him, so to speak, by guess-work. 
 
 45 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 At night he would wander all over the town, frequenting low 
 resorts like any wild young student, and often showing himself 
 in places " where the police commissary of the quarter is sorely 
 feared " : such habits scandalized the " severe and Christian " 
 King, who would lecture him to the best of his ability. Hence, 
 to the end of his life, Gaston's pleasantries always smacked of 
 " page's wit " : but he was intelligent, he was fond of pictures 
 and medals, and hair-splitting controversies ; he would note the 
 best passages of a book, he was affable in his dealings with 
 gentlemen, and more than affable with ladies : with all this, his 
 " manners were incredibly easy," and, to conclude, he possessed, 
 as Retz tells us, " everything that is necessary to the making of 
 an honourable man, with the exception of courage " : he might 
 have stood for a Prince Charming if he had not been such a 
 coward. But what a coward he was ! All his life long he 
 plotted " because he had not strength to resist the persons who 
 dragged him into their intrigues for their own interest," and then 
 betrayed his accomplices " because he had not the courage to 
 support them." With his keen wit, his jeering tongue, and 
 chicken heart, this prince appears "quite out of place among the 
 men of his period. His soft and feeble nature seems to set him 
 far apart from his sturdy and independent contemporaries, 
 even as the virtues of Corneille's heroes distinguish them from 
 the neurotic heroes of our own times. 
 
 In 1625 he was blindly following the counsels of his Governor, 
 the Mar^chal d'Ornano. Ornano, " an old man, and the ugliest 
 Intrigues and ^^ France," who was much petted by Mme. de 
 punishment ol Chevreuse and also by the Princesse de Conde, to 
 Chalais. whom he was deeply attached, and whose interests 
 
 he desired to defend, joined the party of " those averse to the 
 marriage," and easily persuaded his pupil to refuse to take Mile, 
 de Montpensier to wife. Whereupon Richelieu, having failed 
 to win the old Marshal over to his side, induced the King to put 
 him in prison. But this blow did not discourage the conspira- 
 tors : the Venddme brothers, indeed, went so far as to hatch a 
 plot to have the Cardinal stabbed, and possibly to set the Due 
 d'Orl^ans on the throne. . . . Chalais was the confidant of all 
 these black designs. He was a gallant young fellow of eight 
 and twenty, smiling and amiable and frivolous : "a handsome 
 46 
 
RICHELIEU 
 
 head, but with no brains ! " He was so imprudent as to repeat 
 what he knew to one of his friends, who threatened to denounce 
 him if he did not reveal the whole plot to the Cardinal instantly. 
 Chalais obeyed. And forthwith the wily Cardinal wrote to the 
 King, reported what he had heard, and offered to resign his 
 office. " Whoever attacks you," replied the angry monarch, 
 " you will have me for your second " ; and without a moment's 
 hesitation he ordered the arrest of his two natural brothers, 
 the VendSmes (Jxme 11, 1626) ; while Richelieu, on his side, 
 terrified Monsieur (no very difficult task), and made him sign a 
 most humble declaration of submission to the King (May 81). 
 
 But Gaston, whose habit, as he says himself, was always to 
 reserve " something when he took an oath," had only sworn 
 to be faithful " with his lips." Every night, Chalais, who had 
 plunged into the plot again for the love of Mme. de Chevreuse, 
 would come to see him, in his dressing-gown, and exhort him to 
 rebel openly, and then retire to some fortress. . . . Unfor- 
 tunately for the imprudent Chalais, his own intimate friend, the 
 Comte de Louvigny, with whom he had quarrelled, betrayed him 
 to the King: he was arrested forthwith, and answered very 
 awkwardly under cross-examination. He also rashly confided 
 the letters he wrote to Mme. de Chevreuse to a lackey, who 
 handed them over to his judges. 
 
 If my complaints [he wrote, in the fashionable jargon of his day] have 
 touched the tenderest of hearts, when my sun failed to shine on the 
 paths sacred to love, where are those who wUl not sympathize with my 
 sobs, in a prison into which its rays can never penetrate ? And my fate 
 is all the more harsh since it forbids me to reveal my cruel martyrdom. . . . 
 
 Meanwhile, Gaston, shaking with terror, confessed everything, 
 gave up the names of all the associates who had put their faith 
 in him, compromised everybody. When the Cardinal promised 
 him a fine fortune on his marriage, he felt quite persuaded that 
 " in this extremity the best thing was to make it up with the 
 King," and on August 5, 1626, the triumphant Richelieu gave 
 his blessing to the marriage with Mile, de Montpensier. 
 
 A fortnight later Chalais mounted the scaffold. His friends, 
 hoping till the last moment for a pardon that never came, had 
 spent large sums in bribing the executioner to keep out of 
 the way. But Richelieu granted their lives to two men who 
 
 47 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 had been sentenced to the gallows, on condition that one 
 acted as the executioner and the other as his man. The first 
 blow struck by the amateur headsman, armed for the pur- 
 pose with a sword belonging to one of the Swiss Guards, made 
 only a trifling wound : he asked for an adze (he was a cooper by 
 trade). Even at the twentieth stroke from this weapon, the 
 sufferer was still crying out " Jesus Maria et Regina Coeli ! " . . . 
 He received thirty-four blows in all, and before his head could be 
 entirely severed from his body, the corpse had to be tiimed 
 over. . . . Thus perished the frivolous Chalais, a conspirator 
 for love's sake. Mme. de Chevreuse, compromised both by his 
 letters and by his confessions while imder trial, was exiled to 
 Lorraine. Ornano died in prison, just when he was about to 
 be tried (August, 1626). Two years later (February, 1629) the 
 Grand Prieur de VendSme died. The Duke his brother did not 
 come out of prison till 1630. The Comte de Soissons departed 
 on a little journey. As for Anne of Austria, she was summoned 
 to the presence of the King, the Queen-Mother, and the Cardinal. 
 Louis XIII reproached her with having desired his death so that 
 she might marrv' his brother : "I should have gained too little 
 by the change ! " she answered scornfully ; and it is probable, 
 indeed, that the idea had never existed anywhere save in the 
 over-fertile imagination of Mme. de Chevreuse : but to the end 
 the King remained persuaded of his wife's guilt. " In the state 
 in which I am," he was to say on his death-bed, " it is my duty 
 to forgive her, but I am not bound to believe her." Gaston 
 alone — as a reward for his treachery to everybody — ^gained a 
 rich heiress and an apanage by " the conspiracy of Chalais." 
 
 IV 
 
 The Protestants were more dangerous enemies than the 
 plotters of the Court. In 1625, according to their usual custom, 
 Protestant they had seized the moment when the Govem- 
 revolts. ment, absorbed by external difficulties, was least 
 
 able to make head against them, to raise the standard of revolt : 
 and had thus once more acted in conjunction with the enemies 
 of the realm. Yet their conduct should not be judged from our 
 modem point of view, 
 48 
 
RICHELIEU 
 
 No European, at that period, had the smallest conception of 
 tolerance. Everywhere, in England, in Spain, in Germany, the 
 church of the majority was forced by law on all the rest of the 
 population. There was no question of liberty ; the general 
 opinion was that men were as much bound to live under a 
 single religion as under a single ruler : cujus regio, ejus religio. 
 So much so that the religious minority only contrived to impose 
 itself on France by sheer force. The Huguenots snatched the 
 Edict of Nantes from Henri IV by dint of threats, and threats 
 uttered at a moment when he was engaged in a most difficult 
 struggle with Spain. And this Edict was hailed with as much 
 ill-will by the Catholics, whom its clauses infuriated, as by the 
 Protestants, whom they disappointed. The first named did 
 their utmost to oppose its application all over France, where 
 they generally had the upper hand, and the others laboured with 
 the same object in the parts of the country in which they had the 
 mastery — as in Lower Languedoc and in B^arn, where the first 
 outcome of the Edict would have been to re-establish that Roman 
 faith which they had more or less suppressed. . . . Add to this 
 the fact that, on both sides, under Louis XIII religious ardour 
 had grown much keener, and tolerance, consequently, had not 
 increased. In the Catholic parts of the kingdom the populace 
 was constantly insulting the Huguenots, jeering at their funeral 
 processions, disturbing their worship, destroying their dwellings 
 or demolishing their churches, and sometimes even going so 
 far as to take their lives — while the Protestants, in their own 
 towns, applied similar treatment to all Papists. How could the 
 Parisians possibly allow the " so-called Reformers " to refuse to 
 uncover, like other men, and their women-folk to abstain 
 from falling on their knees, on the line of passage of the Blessed 
 Sacrament, which the King himself so respectfully attended on 
 its way, whenever he chanced to meet it ? Yet that was the 
 point on which the Protestants most frequently refused com- 
 pliance ; and some fanatics would go to the length of cursing at 
 the processions, or committing sacrilege during Mass ; while their 
 pastors would call the Church of Rome the " wanton," and 
 Catholics " idolators," or even, like Jeremie Ferrier, denounce 
 the Pope as " Antichrist." 
 
 And on every side, among the people, reports were circulated 
 
 D 49 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 of massacres planned by Papists, and of Huguenot plots. ... In 
 short, Frenchmen, thus divided between two religions, looked on 
 each other as two hostile peoples. 
 
 And this all the more because the idea of nationality was not 
 as yet very clearly defined in the national mind. Patriotism, 
 as we understand the word — love of the true qualities of the 
 Frenchman, and pride in them — probably did not develop 
 Patriotism a into a general feeling till after the reign of the 
 modem virtue. " Grand Roi." Amongst the nobility, at least, the 
 feudal sentiment was still lively in the seventeenth century : 
 the nobles were royalists rather than patriots ; civic virtue 
 consisted in fidelity to the King : in a word (and the nobler 
 Smigrh of the Revolutionary period had exactly the same feel- 
 ing), the King was the fatherland, he was France. And further, 
 many men, in the days of Louis XIII, regarded religion as 
 something even more important than royalism, because the 
 theory of the League as to the temporal supremacy of the Pope 
 over the King was still under discussion. And there certainly 
 were numbers of Catholics who felt themselves much nearer to 
 the Spaniards, for instance, who were Catholics like themselves, 
 than to the French heretics : but, above all, the majority of the 
 Protestants felt that their English and Genevan co-religionists 
 were far more their fellow-countrymen than the French Papists. 
 This explains the alliance of the Reformed party with the 
 enemies of the kingdom. To all good Huguenots, and more 
 especially to the men of La Rochelle, who kept representa- 
 tives at the English Court and attacked all ships that flew 
 the French flag on the high seas. Catholic France was a foreign 
 nation. 
 
 But it is only fair to add that this was not the unanimous 
 opinion of the Reformers : when Rohan strove to stir them up 
 against the King he was frequently received with a very tepid 
 enthusiasm. This was because the Protestant community was a 
 sort of federation, each town in which was eager to preserve its 
 own liberty, acting, above all things, in its own special interest. 
 The cities of the South, which, with La Rochelle, constituted 
 the chief strength of the party — each of them a small theocratic 
 repubUc modelled on that of Geneva — desired war, as a rule, as 
 little as they had desired the Edict, of Nantes, which they did not 
 50 
 
RICHELIEU 
 
 want at all. Altogether, there was a great deal of division in 
 the Reformed party. The nobles despised the political assemblies, 
 which in their turn distrusted the nobles ; and the churches — 
 as the Huguenots denominated what the Catholics called the 
 parishes — distrusted both the nobles and the general assembly. 
 And indeed the cohesion of the party was ensured, not by its 
 political but by its ecclesiastical organization. Each church 
 was ruled, in democratic fashion, by an elected assembly called a 
 Consistory, and served by one pastor or more. The deputies 
 sent from a certain number of Consistories composed a higher 
 assembly, known as a Colloquy. Several of these Colloquies, 
 again, made up a Provincial Synod, and these sent up their 
 delegates to the National Synod, which thus represented the 
 whole of Protestant France. These ecclesiastical assemblies, 
 less regular in their sittings and less popular in their composi- 
 tion than the political assemblies, played a far more important 
 part than these last in keeping the framework of the Reform 
 party together. 
 
 The Consistory, which was charged with all matters of 
 discipline, kept its eye on the conduct and the very thoughts of 
 the " faithful." These might appeal from the decisions of the 
 Consistory to the Colloquy, and from the Colloquy to the Pro- 
 vincial Synod, and to the National Synod in the last resort. This 
 perfect subordination of the various classes of assemblies to 
 each other endued the Reformed religion vath a moral unity 
 which rendered its adherents a most powerful minority. 
 
 Thus organized, and moved by such a spirit, the Protestants, 
 though not always perfectly agreed on matters of general politics, 
 possessed interests apart from those of the kingdom, a fact which, 
 as they frequently proved, rendered them a very dangerous 
 element within it. In 1611 RicheUeu had begun to plan the 
 suppression of the exceptional privileges they had obtained from 
 Heiu-i IV, and their conduct in 1625 was not calculated to lead 
 him to alter his intention : as soon as he was rid of Spain, he set 
 about preparing the destruction of La Rochelle — ^that " wasps' 
 nest," as he called it. He constructed two forts on the Isle of 
 R6, and sent the brave Toiras to command the strong garrison 
 he placed in them. Then, having been himself appointed Grand 
 Master and Superintendent of the Navy, he caused a number of 
 
 61 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 ships to be built. . . . England was to furnish him with the 
 pretext for declaring war just when he wanted it. 
 
 Buckingham, who was Charles I's favourite, just as he had 
 been his father's, had no reason to love Anne of Austria's " bar- 
 barous spouse," and Louis XIII, it may be fairly argued, had 
 still less reason to love Buckingham. The Treaty of Mongon, 
 which had reconciled France with Spain, had set enmity between 
 her and England. Buckingham began by seizing French mer- 
 Bnckingham's chantmen, and next, on June 27, 1627, he set sail 
 expedition from Portsmouth, and bore down on La Rochelle, 
 against the which he reached within a month. Protestant 
 lie de Re. noblemen from all parts of the country had hurried 
 
 to meet the English fleet : he formed them into a body of troops 
 who were to lead every assault. But instead of entering La 
 Rochelle, he amused himself by attacking the Isle of R6 ; and 
 by September 10, when the heavy guns of La Rochelle opened 
 fire, at last, on the royal forces, Louis XIII had had time to 
 mass seventeen regiments of infantry and twenty-two companies 
 of horse — carabineers, chevau-Ugers, and gendarmes — before the 
 town. 
 
 Toiras, meanwhile, was still holding out at Saint-Martin-de- 
 Re. On the night of November 7 Schomberg broke the English 
 blockade, and threw himself into the island, with the regiments 
 of Navarre, Plessis-Praslin, La Meilleraye, and Pi^mont, the 
 gentlemen of the Queen's household and the chevau-Ugers. 
 Buckingham, in spite of his hasty retreat across the marshes, 
 was caught and defeated ; he lost courage, and re-embarked 
 his troops. We can imagine the despair of the men of La 
 Rochelle, when, from the top of their ramparts, they watched 
 the British squadron disappear over the horizon ! But hope- 
 lessly compromised as they were, there was nothing for it but 
 to resist to the end. 
 
 The King's councillors would not run the risk of assaulting 
 the town, and desired to starve its defenders out. On the land 
 side they constructed a line of redoubts and batteries, connected 
 by trenches, which extended over a distance of three leagues, 
 and on the side towards the sea they built, after several ineffec- 
 tual attempts, the celebrated dike, measuring 747 fathoms, 
 bristling with cannon, pierced in the centre to give passage to 
 52 
 
RICHELIEU 
 
 the tides, defended from every attack by a floating barricade of 
 beams and ships all bound together, and guarded by twenty -five 
 large vessels, twelve galleys, and forty-five boats and barges : 
 it took Metezeau, the architect, and Thiriot, the mason, six 
 months to carry out the huge undertaking, in the teeth of the 
 enemy's opposition. 
 
 The Cardinal had arrived with the King on October 12. 
 Louis XIII liked to persuade himself that his commanding 
 Siege and officers had no more respect for Richelieu than 
 
 capture of for some " cook-boy " ; but as a matter of fact 
 
 La Rochelle. nobody felt inclined to laugh when the Cardinal 
 rode by, attended by his pages and the Captain of his Guard, 
 " very pensive and yellow-faced," with a pair of pistols in his 
 saddle-holsters, his sword girt round his waist, and a plumed hat 
 on his head, and clad in a light brown coat embroidered with 
 gold, rnider a cuirass " the colour of water," or else in the garb 
 of a " general in the army — a black beaver hat with a gold cord, a 
 red satin coat, and over it a scarlet cloak covered with gold em- 
 broidery, silk stockings, and red slippers." Aided by Louis XIII, 
 he had organized the troops in the most admirable way ; 
 they were regularly paid, all supplies were bought, not taken, 
 from the peasants, the soldiers were well clothed, comfortably 
 lodged in huts, and made to confess and receive the communion 
 at regular intervals. (It would be imprudent, however, to 
 believe, as we have been assured, that they bore the most 
 perfect resemblance to " monks under arms.") 
 
 Early in the spring food was becoming very scarce within 
 the town, which was bombarded with red-hot shot, night after 
 night. But on April 30 the townsmen elected Jean Guiton, 
 one of the aldermen, to be their Mayor, and this wiry little man, 
 a bold sea-dog, who began by telling them all that it was no use 
 to choose him unless they had made up their minds to die 
 fighting, raised everybody's courage. And very soon (May 
 11) a splendid fleet, numbering fifty-two ships of war and at- 
 tended by a bevy of transports, hove in sight of the port ; it was 
 commanded by Buckingham's brother-in-law. Lord Denbigh. 
 All the men of La Rochelle crowded gaily to the ramparts to 
 admire the manoeuvres of the squadron and watch the royal 
 forces as they swarmed, in their haste, on to the dike and into 
 
 53 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 the trenches. . . . Alas ! after a few days' skirmishing the 
 British admiral, convinced that the great dike was im- 
 pregnable, weighed his anchors, and passed out of sight. Then 
 the rations of the 2000 soldiers, 200 Englishmen, and 4000 
 burghers of the militia who formed the garrison had to be cut 
 down by a third. Many women used to slip out of the town and 
 beg food from the King's soldiers ; in this quest the comeliest 
 were more successful than their sisters. One day, at last, 
 Guiton expelled all the owners of useless mouths, and as the 
 royal army would not let them pass, a crowd of unhappy wretches 
 perished between the town and the trenches. 
 
 At the earnest prayer of the envoys from La Rochelle, King 
 Charles I dispatched a third fleet, which hove in sight of R6 on 
 September 28. But it did no better than its two predecessors, 
 and three days after its departure the men of Rochelle, " having 
 no more grass that they could eat upon their counterscarps, 
 no more of the ox- and horse-hides, the boots, shoes, leathern 
 belts, sword-knots and pouches, out of which they had been 
 making jellies with moist sugar and sweetened pap on which 
 they had fed," made up their minds to sue for the King's mercy. 
 On All Saints' Day, November 1, 1628, Louis made his entry 
 into the town between two lines of skeletons, who raised feeble 
 voices to cry, " Long live the King ! " The Cardinal said Mass 
 in the ancient church of Sainte-Marguerite, which, like all the 
 others, was given back to the Catholics : a bishopric of La 
 Rochelle was created ; the liberties and privileges of the town 
 were all abolished, and the walls razed to the ground ; but the 
 inhabitants (only 5000 remained out of 28,000, it was said), 
 and even Guiton himself, were given their lives, and granted 
 permission to follow the Reformed faith immolested. 
 
 While the Cardinal had been successfully carrying on this 
 memorable siege, Vincenzo Gonzaga II, Duke of Mantua and 
 Italian cam- Marquis of Montferrat, had breathed his last 
 paign ol 1628. (December 21, 1627). His heir, strictly speaking, 
 was his first cousin once removed, the head of the yoimger 
 branch of the family, established in France, Charles, Due de 
 Nevers, a subject of Louis XIII. But Charles Emmanuel, Duke 
 of Savoy, seeing the French troops all engaged in the struggle 
 with the Protestants, claimed the Marquisate of Montferrat in 
 54, 
 
RICHELIEU 
 
 the name of his own granddaughter Maria, who was niece to 
 the late Duke. And immediately Maria Gonzaga, Duchess- 
 Dowager of Lorraine and sister of Vincenzo II, put forward a 
 similar claim. 
 
 Spain decided, meanwhile, to support the Duke of Guastalla's 
 claim to Mantua, and entered into negotiations with Charles 
 Emmanuel for a partition of Montferrat. On February 17 the 
 son of the Due de Nevers had taken possession of the inheritance 
 in his father's name : on the 25th the Savoyards and the 
 Spaniards opened their campaign against him ; very soon the 
 town of Casale was invested. ... At first Richelieu, whose 
 hands were full at La Rochelle, was imable to do anything 
 beyond negotiating. But the moment he was rid of that 
 business he left the subjugation of the Huguenot towns in the 
 South of France to a more convenient season, and started, with 
 the King and the army, for Italy. Louis crossed the Alps in 
 mid-winter, and carried the Pass of Susa at the head of his 
 troops, in the most brilliant fashion. Before very long he had 
 forced the Duke of Savoy to make peace, and relieved Casale 
 (March, 1629). ... He would fain have followed up his suc- 
 cesses in Italy, but the Cardinal was able to persuade him to 
 complete the destruction of the Huguenot party first of all. 
 And while he himself remained at Susa to watch over the ne- 
 gotiations, the soldier-king marched to the help of Conde, whose 
 savage devastation of the Cdvennes and Languedoc had stirred 
 the Reformers to fury. 
 
 They were led by a bold man, who may well have only 
 lacked opportunity to become a great one : the Due de Rohan. 
 Truce with the His uprightness had won him popularity with his 
 Huguenots. party, which had not, for many a day, seen any great 
 gentleman in its ranks who had omitted to sell himself to the 
 King in the long run. When the English failed him, Rohan 
 had turned to Spain, and had signed a treaty with Philip IV 
 whereby, in return for an annual subsidy of 300,000 ducats 
 (May 3, 1629), he undertook to keep up an army and carry on 
 the war in France. But on May 27 Louis took and burned the 
 town of Privas, and captured Alais, while his generals were 
 threatening Nimes, Castres, and Montauban. Then Rohan 
 realized that he must submit. On June 28, 1629, the King 
 
 55 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 granted him the peace known as the Paix de grdce. By this the 
 Reformers lost all their hostage towns, and ceased from that time 
 forward to form " any separate body, independent of the will of 
 their sovereign," but as regards all other points the provisions 
 of the Edict of Nantes were confirmed : the King, in fact, made a 
 declaration to the effect that his sole desire had been to " remove 
 faction from the midst of his subjects, the rest " (the matter of 
 faith) " being a work which must be waited for from Heaven, 
 without the use of any violence save that of a good life and 
 example." As a matter of fact, he subsequently encouraged the 
 Catholic propaganda, and never grudged money for the purpose 
 of buying apostasies. But the Protestants preserved their 
 legal freedom of conscience. And Louis XIII deserves great 
 honour for his tolerance, which was not the result of his personal 
 indifference — for his piety was most fervent — but of his con- 
 stitutional sense of justice, a quality in which he was greatly in 
 advance of his times. 
 
 In Italy, unhappily, all the work had to be done over again. 
 The Emperor Ferdinand, in fact, had interfered, on the plea that 
 Campaign ^^ ^^^ received no request from the Due de Nevers 
 
 against the to invest him with the States of Mantua and 
 Emperor Feidi- Montferrat. He had the Valtellina passes occupied 
 nand, 1629. by hjs troops, and meanwhile Spinola, the Spanish 
 general, overran the Montferrat country. . . . Once the peace 
 of Alais had been signed, and their hands were free, Louis XIII 
 and Richelieu hurried to the scene, but they were unable to 
 succour Casale, where Spinola was besieging the gallant Toiras, 
 nor did they succeed in preventing the sack of Mantua by the 
 Imperial troops (July 1). By great good fortune, and thanks 
 to the efforts of the Legate and of an exceedingly clever young 
 member of his suite, Giulio Mazarini, a truce, to last till October 
 15, was signed at Rivalto on September 4. Though this was not 
 a final peace, the Cardinal had great hopes that before hostilities 
 had to be renewed Father Joseph and Brulart de L6on, whom 
 he had dispatched to the Ratisbon Diet, would have arranged 
 the treaty with the Emperor on which his hopes were set. 
 56 
 
RICHELIEU 
 
 The King, who was suffering from dysentery, had been absent 
 from the army since the end of July. At Lyons, whither he had 
 The Queen- proceeded, he grew rapidly worse : between the 
 Mother attacks 27th and the 30th he thought he was dying. The 
 Richelieu. Queen his mother and the Queen his wife both 
 
 nursed him with great devotion ; his heart softened to them, 
 and he begged them to forgive the pain he had caused them. 
 Marie de' Medici now hated her former favourite, Richelieu, 
 with all her strength ; had he not forsaken her interests, after 
 she had made him what he was ? Had he not, only the year 
 previously, objected to the bestowal on Gaston of the frontier 
 governments of Champagne and Bourgogne, which she had 
 asked for him ? . . . So while the King lay sick, Marie, backed 
 by Anne, besought her son to dismiss the Cardinal as soon as the 
 war was over, and the Mantuan business settled, and Louis, 
 weakened by illness, very pious, and believing himself near his 
 end, dared not refuse his mother the boon she so urgently prayed 
 for. But the moment he recovered he repented him of his 
 promise, and confessed to his Minister the fact that he had been 
 weak enough to give it. 
 
 " There was no sort of complaisance and flattery," we are 
 told, that Richelieu did not employ in his endeavour to mollify 
 the Queen-Mother, " even to the point that one day, when the 
 Queen had been angry with a jester of hers who had forgotten 
 himself in her presence, he called him to his side and said to him, 
 in the gravest and most serious way, before the assembled 
 company : " What are you thinking of, Manuguet " (that was 
 his name), " to displease the Queen ? Do you not know she is so 
 great a princess, and so powerful, that she is able to turn the 
 Cardinal de Richelieu into a Manuguet, and a Manuguet into a 
 Cardinal de Richelieu ? " What such a speech must have cost hig 
 pride we may readily imagine ! Yet it was labour lost, for the 
 portly Maxie, obstinate and shallow, doggedly pursued the idea 
 she had taken into her head. . . . She dismissed Mme. de 
 Combalet, the Cardinal's niece, who had been her lady-in-waiting, 
 in the most public maimer. Richelieu believed his downfall 
 imminent. 
 
 The war was supposed to be over : the Queen-Mother deter- 
 mined to force the scrupulous King to carry out the promise she 
 
 57 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 had snatched from him. On November 10, when he came to see 
 her at the Liixembourg, where she was lodged, she shut herself 
 up in her cabinet with her son, having given orders that nobody 
 was to venture to disturb them. All at once, in the very middle 
 of their discussion, a door opened : they looked up — it was 
 Richelieu! . . . The Minister, feeling it to be a case of " nothing 
 venture nothing have," had contrived to get into the room by a 
 door that opened into the chapel, and in later years the Queen 
 was often heard to assert that " if she had not forgotten to shoot 
 a bolt, the Cardinal would have been undone ! " . . . At the 
 sight of Richelieu, Marie instantly flew into a passion, and lost 
 all self-control. He did his best to defend himself, wept, 
 humbled himself, tendered his resignation, and finally retired in 
 despair. The King, very much " vexed," as Goulas tells us, 
 departed to his small country-house at Versailles, and Marie 
 made the mistake of allowing him to go there alone, staying on 
 herself at the Luxembourg to receive the whole Court, which 
 hastened to do homage to her victory. But while she was en- 
 joying her triumph, the Marquis de Sourdis, Boutilier, and 
 Father Joseph, seated in the King's coach, were using all their 
 eloquence in Richelieu's favour, and Louis was thinking matters 
 over. ... 
 
 When the Cardinal, who had followed his master, reached 
 Versailles, the King received him " perfectly," and had him lodged 
 in a chamber just above his own : they ended by " talking 
 together for four hours that night " (Arnauld d'AndUly). . . . 
 The courtiers all turned round again, in the handsomest manner. 
 
 This was " the Day of Dupes." Knowing what Richelieu 
 was, we cannot wonder that it was followed by a long series of 
 " The Day reprisals. Michel de Marillac, Keeper of the Seals, 
 of Dupes." whom the Queen-Mother's party would have brought 
 into power after the Cardinal's fall, was exiled : the Conn^table 
 de Lesdigui^res, the Duchesse d'Elbeuf, and the Princesse de 
 Conti were banished to their country estates : Bassompierre, 
 the last-named lady's close friend, was shut up in the Bastille, 
 " not on account of any fault he had committed, but for fear he 
 should be led into doing wrong " : the King's confessor. Father 
 Suffren, was dismissed ; the Due de Guise thought it prudent to 
 travel abroad ; and the Mar^chal de Marillac, brother of the 
 58 
 
RICHELIEU 
 
 Keeper of the Seals, was arrested by Schomberg, one of his own 
 colleagues. His trial was marked by scandalous injustice : 
 the Cardinal, according to his usual habit, did not send him 
 before the regular courts, but had him tried by a special com- 
 mission ; and as this appeared to him too dilatory, he had a 
 second appointed, which sat in his own house, at Rueil. One of 
 the chief crimes with which the accused man was charged was 
 that of having appropriated his soldiers' pay, and cheated in 
 connection with the commissariat supplies ; but this was the 
 constant practice of all generals, and the worthy Marshal, 
 utterly astounded, declared that " the whole of this trial is a 
 question of hay and cheese — trifles for which a page would 
 hardly get a whipping ! " In spite of which he was condemned 
 to death by a majority of one voice, and executed in May, 1632. 
 
 Marie de' Medici had obstinately refused to be reconciled to 
 Richelieu, or even to sit at the Coxmcil-board with him. Then, 
 Exile and when the King appointed her Governor of the 
 
 Death of the Bourbonnais, and ordered her to retire to Moulins, 
 Queen-Mother, she stayed on doggedly at Compi^gne, pouring out 
 endless lamentation concerning the " persecution " inflicted on 
 her by her unnatural son : Louis XIII, sorely perplexed, could do 
 nothing with her, whether by promises or threats. At last, in 
 the month of July, she took to flight, and the King drew a long 
 breath. She had calculated that one of her partisans would 
 have put her in possession of the small fortified town of La 
 Capelle, where she intended to establish herself, and make her 
 own conditions ; but when she appeared before the town, she 
 found the gates shut in her face, and was fain to move on into the 
 Low Countries. There Louis XIII left her till she died. The 
 soul passed out of her bulky body at Cologne in 1642, some six 
 months before the death of Richelieu. 
 
 Gaston meanwhfle, alarmed by the events that followed 
 immediately on the Day of Dupes, began by lying low. But in 
 January, 1631, urged on by his favourites, he proceeded into the 
 Cardinal's presence, insulted him in the boldest way, and then, 
 in a terror, galloped off to Orleans. An army was sent to attack 
 the town, and Gaston got away into Burgimdy ; but the Gover- 
 nor alone declared in his favour, not another person in the pro- 
 vince stirred : then he took refuge in Lorraine, fell in love with 
 
 59 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 the Duke's sister Marguerite, married her in secret (January, 
 1632), and in July, after publishing various manifestos against 
 Richelieu, re-entered France at the head of an army. 
 
 Among his partisans he reckoned one very great and power- 
 ful personage, the Due de Montmorency, brother-in-law to Conde, 
 Henri de and godson of Henri IV. Though he squinted, 
 
 Montmorency, and was not very intelligent, Henri de Mont- 
 morency was a fine-looking man, frank, brave, gallant, chival- 
 rous, and greatly loved by women. Hitherto he had served the 
 King, and even the Cardinal, with tolerable fidelity, against 
 both Protestants and Spaniards, but he did not consider he had 
 been rewarded as he would have desired. Now in Languedoc — 
 of which province he was Governor, as his father and grandfather 
 had been before him — his family had acquired a considerable 
 following, and he himself had earned popularity by his pleasant 
 manners and his generosity. As the master and patron of that 
 powerful province, he might well have proved a precious ally 
 for Gaston, and a redoubtable adversary for the Cardinal : but 
 when the Due d'Orleans made his unexpected entry into France, 
 he was not quite ready. He proceeded to the States of Langue- 
 doc, at Pezenas, and obtained the adhesion of the deputies to 
 the revolt, but the province in general did not follow them. 
 Nevertheless, he effected a junction with Monsieur at Lunel, and 
 together they marched on Castelnaudary. There they came 
 upon a small army of the King's troops commanded by Schom- 
 berg : at the first onset their imdisciplined bands fled, and 
 Montmorency, who had courted death, was taken prisoner, with 
 seventeen wovmds, " making four and twenty holes in his body " 
 (September 1, 1632). Though his dignity as a Peer of France 
 gave him the right to be tried by the Parliament of Paris, even 
 as Biron had been tried in the days of Henri IV, the King and 
 Richelieu gave orders for his trial by the Parliament of Toulouse, 
 presided over, for the occasion, by one of the Cardinal's creatures, 
 Chateauneuf, Keeper of the Seals — a twofold abuse. In vain 
 did the Paris Parliament raise a protest : it was forced to submit. 
 Montmorency was condemned to death, and courageously met 
 his fate on October 30, 1632. The whole Court had interceded 
 for him, and all night long the populace had cried out " Mercy ! " 
 under the monarch's windows — but in vain. 
 60 
 
RICHELIEU 
 
 As for Gaston, he had undertaken at B6ziers, on September 
 29, " to love his cousin the Cardinal de Richelieu most par- 
 Submission of ticularly," and, further, " to take no interest in 
 Gaston. those who had been connected with him on 
 
 these occasions," and " not to make it a cause of complaint 
 when the King should cause them to suffer that which they 
 deserved " — in other words, to leave Montmorency, who had 
 ruined himself for his sake, to his fate. However, when he 
 saw that his late ally's head was really to be cut off, he thought 
 it safer to join Marie de' Medici at Brussels (November). There 
 he remained for two years, and then, urged on by Puylaurens, 
 his favourite, who was tired of exile, he was reconciled to the 
 King, who restored him " all his properties, apanages, pensions, 
 and emoluments " (October, 1634). This, in his eyes, was the 
 chief thing : he allowed Puylaurens to be arrested soon after- 
 wards (February 14, 1635) without a protest, and his quondam 
 favourite died in the donjon of Vincennes, after a few months' 
 imprisonment (July 1, 1635), even as Ornano, the Grand Prieur 
 de Vend6me, and Marillac had died before him. 
 
 Works to Consult : Works quoted under Chapter I, and the Memoirs 
 of N. Goulas, O. Talon, and Mme. de Motteville ; Tallemant des Reaux, 
 Historietles ; A. Barine, La Jeunesse de la Grande Mademoiselle (1901); 
 V. Cousin, Madame de Chevreuse (1862) ; Abh6 Houssaye, Le Cardinal de 
 Berulle el le Cardinal de Richelieu (1910) ; La Roncifere, Histoire de la 
 Marine, vol. iv (1910) ; Dom Vaissete, Histoire du Languedoc, vols. 
 
 61 
 
CHAPTER III 
 THE PREPONDERANCE OF FRANCE (1630-1643) 
 
 I. The House of Austria. II. Swedish successes. III. French 
 successes. IV. The last intrigues of the Court. V. The Cinq- 
 Mars affair. VI. Deaths of the Cardinal and the King. 
 
 WHEN the Day of Dupes was over, Richelieu felt that 
 he was delivered from the Protestant peril and the 
 Queen-Mother ; and fancied he had disheartened all 
 conspirators and haters of discipline. Master, as he believed 
 himself to be, of those " four square feet of the King's cabinet, 
 The House ol more difficult to win than all the battlefields in 
 Austria. Europe," he was free to apply himself to the work 
 
 of " raising the King's name to the place it ought to hold 
 among foreign nations." 
 
 Since the days of Charles V the balance of power in Europe 
 had inclined to the side of the House of Austria. The Hapsburgs 
 of Madrid and the Hapsburgs of Vienna, allied by blood — ^which 
 coimted for much — ^were bound together likewise by common 
 interests — and this was more. The King of Spain, indeed, 
 stood in need of the Emperor's help to keep open his com- 
 munications with his domains in the Low Coimtries and Franche- 
 Comt6, and without the King of Spain the Emperor's position 
 in Italy would have been robbed of all its importance. And 
 these two branches of the House of Austria, thus united by 
 ties of blood, by interest, and by the struggle against Protes- 
 tantism in which both were engaged, masters of Spain and of 
 the Empire, with the huge territories dependent on them, 
 wielded, to all appearances, a power beside which that of the 
 King of France seemed a trivial thing. In reality this was not 
 the case. 
 62 
 
PREPONDERANCE OF FRANCE 
 
 On the one hand, Spain was beginning to decay : though 
 she owned Portugal, the Kingdom of Naples, the province of 
 Decadence ol Milan, Franche-Comt6, the Low Countries, and 
 Spain. though all the treasures of the Americas were 
 
 hers, her population was diminishing, she was ruled by a 
 corrupt bureaucracy, ruined financially to such an extent that 
 her successive bankruptcies brought her no remedy, and ruined 
 hopelessly, too, since the expulsion of the Moors, the only 
 hardworking subjects she possessed. For the Spaniards them- 
 selves were not a laborious race; and their industry and com- 
 merce were carried on, their colonies turned to account, and 
 their very fields cultivated, by foreigners, who had even ended 
 by monopolizing the small trades in their towns. Spain, it is 
 true, did still possess a very powerful army, but two-thirds of 
 the men serving in it were foreigners, and the Fi'cnch troops 
 were spon to equal them. 
 
 As for the Emperor, he reigned over an inextricable con- 
 fusion of races, and over several hundred States of varjdng 
 size, kept apart, not only by the rivalries of their various heads, 
 but by deep-seated religious disagreements ; and over these, as 
 we have already said, his power was scarcely greater than that 
 the first Capetian sovereigns had wielded over their vassals in 
 France. His dominions were of two kinds : those under his 
 direct rule and sovereign authority, and the " Empire," in 
 regard to which his power was defined by an ancient constitu- 
 tion, contested by the Diets or Imperial assemblies, and 
 frequently scorned by the reigning princes whose suzerain he 
 was. Notwithstanding this fact, the seven Electors for two 
 centuries past (four of these were Catholics in the days of 
 Richelieu : the Archbishops of Cologne, Treves, and Mayence, 
 and the King of Bohemia ; and three Protestants : the Count 
 Palatine, the Duke of Saxony, and the Margrave of Branden- 
 bm-g) had always elected a member of the House of Hapsburg 
 to the Imperial dignity. And little by little, alongside the 
 Empire, the family had built up a huge patrimony of its 
 own : Hungary, Bohemia, Austria, Styria, Carinthia, Camiola, 
 Tyrol, Silesia, Moravia, Breisgau, and the greater part of 
 Alsace. Natm-ally the Hapsburgs did their utmost to acquire 
 a hereditary right in the Empire for their house, to add it to 
 
 68 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 their other dominions, and, in short, to convert the great 
 Germanic Federation into a monarchy resembling those of 
 France and Spain. 
 
 Now in 1630 the chances in favour of the realization of this 
 plan seemed tolerably good. For in the CathoHc party in 
 Ambitions Germany, of which he was the leader, the Emperor 
 flesigns of the had found a powerful support : from the day 
 Hapsburgs. when the House of Hapsburg associated its cause 
 with the cause of Catholicism, the progress of the Roman faith 
 became identical with its owri, and while it laboured to con- 
 solidate its own power it seemed to be fighting in the name of 
 the Catholic religion. The advantages of this confusion are 
 manifest : the Catholic princes of the Empire, against whose 
 foes the Hapsburgs warred, helped them, or did not stand in 
 their way at all events, and they owed their first successes to 
 the Army of the Holy League, commanded by Tilly. . . . From 
 1629 onwards the Emperor's fortunes, served by the brilliant 
 genius of Wallenstein, attained their zenith. Ferdinand II 
 felt himself strong enough to decree, by the Edict of Restitution, 
 that the Protestants must deliver up all Church properties 
 taken from the Catholics for a century — ^notably the two 
 archbishoprics of Bremen and Magdeburg, a dozen bishoprics, 
 and a large number of abbeys. Wallenstein's army, which was 
 firmly established all round Magdeburg, saw to the execution 
 of the order, and the General did not hesitate to declare openly 
 that the Electors ought to be reduced to the status of grandees 
 of Spain, and the Princes of the Church to that of chaplains to 
 the Emperor. . . . But the Cathohcs themselves, faithful allies 
 of the Emperor though they were, began to feel alarmed at 
 the ambitious projects that were gradually taking shape: 
 when once the Protestants were utterly defeated, who, they 
 began to wonder, would be strong enough to stand out against 
 Wallenstein, if it should please him to overthrow the ancient 
 constitution of the Empire, and set up his master as an absolute 
 sovereign, to the detriment of the German princes ? For this 
 reason, religious quarrels became a secondary consideration 
 from that time forward, and even in Germany people began to 
 realize that the real question was not the future of Catholicism, 
 but the future of the House of Austria. 
 64 
 
PREPONDERANCE OF FRANCE 
 
 Richelieu was less disposed than any other person to allow 
 the Emperor to carry out a plan for transforming Germany 
 into one united and hereditary State, under colour of the 
 promotion of a Catholic restoration. When he first began to 
 deal with State affairs he had been forced into a conflict with 
 the Hapsburgs : we have already noticed the fashion in which 
 he opposed their projects in the Valtellina, and then at Mantua. 
 In Germany his system was to reveal the designs of Ferdinand II 
 to the Catholic Princes, unite them against him, and form with 
 them what he had already formed with the Protestant States 
 of Germany — a powerful league to resist the Emperor's encroach- 
 ments. But at the outset his agents had but a chilly reception 
 from the Electors. Then the King of Denmark, his secret ally, 
 was defeated at Lutter, and driven back into Jutland by Tilly 
 and Wallenstein (1627). Happily for France — or, as the French 
 historians put it, for " the equilibrium of Europe " — ^his in- 
 trigues in the Ratisbon Diet were to meet with better success. 
 
 II 
 
 The Emperor had convoked the Electors of the Holy Empire 
 to a meeting at Ratisbon on June 3, 1630. He reckoned on 
 The Diet o! inducing them, in the first place, to elect his son 
 Ratisbon, 1630. King of the Romans (in other words, his successor 
 in the Imperial dignity), and, in the second, to supply him with 
 troops to fight his enemies : in short, to express their approval 
 of his policy. But the Electors were anything but well disposed 
 towards him : the Protestants reproached him with having 
 published the Edict of Restitution, and the Catholics, as we 
 have just said, felt by no means inclined to give any encourage- 
 ment to the plans against their own independence attributed to 
 Wallenstein and his master. Thus the very first condition they 
 imposed on the Emperor was the dismissal of his general. 
 
 Ferdinand II, a little fat bigot, spent his hfe surrounded by 
 priests and monks : it was no doubt piety rather than cunning 
 that had led him to adopt his violently pro-Catholic policy, and 
 he would quite possibly have been as earnest in his labour for 
 the triumph of the Roman faith if it had threatened to cost 
 him his throne. After due consultation with his confessor, he 
 
 E 65 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 dismissed Wallenstein. But when he had thus laid down his 
 arms, as it were, the Electors refused nearly everything he had 
 asked of them, and notably the election of his son to be King 
 of the Romans. 
 
 A crowd of foreign diplomatic agents had gathered round 
 the Diet. Besides Brulart de L6on, her ordinary ambassador, 
 France had sent Father Joseph to Ratisbon : " The story goes," 
 wrote an Italian, " that whenever Cardinal Richelieu desires to 
 carry out some clever trick (not to call it some piece of deceit) 
 he invariably makes use of pious and devout persons," and the 
 French agents certainly did their work in the most artful 
 manner : it is related (though the truth of the statement is any- 
 thing but certain) that Ferdinand declared, when the Diet was 
 over, " that a poor Capuchin monk had disarmed him with his 
 rosary, and small as his monk's cowl was, had contrived to 
 pack six electoral caps into it. . . ." 
 
 Officially Father Joseph and Brulart had imlimited powers 
 as to the arrangement of the Mantuan question with the 
 Emperor : but the Cardinal had forbidden them to touch on 
 other litigious matters : for Richeheu, though ready enough to 
 wind up the Italian business, which did not promise to work 
 out to our advantage, was determined to keep his hands free, 
 and act as he chose with regard to all other points. Unluckily 
 the Imperial ministers easily divined his plan, and plainly told 
 the French agents that \mless they signed a general peace they 
 would sign no peace at all. The agents, thus driven into a 
 corner, were in a state of great perplexity. It was most 
 important, on the one hand, to conclude peace in Italy before 
 Casale capitulated (immediately, in other words, for the truce 
 of Rivalta bound the French garrison to march out of the 
 town if it was not relieved before December 15) : but, on the 
 other, neither Father Joseph nor Brulart had been given powers 
 to conclude any general peace. What was to be done ? Their 
 dispatches to the Cardinal remained unanswered (the reader 
 will soon guess why). . . . After waiting on as long as they 
 dared, they ended by making up their minds to sign the Peace 
 of Ratisbon (October 13, 1630). 
 
 News of the signing of this treaty reached Richelieu at 
 Roanne on October 22. He instantly feigned a furious rage, 
 66 
 
PREPONDERANCE OF FRANCE 
 
 swore loudly that he had been betrayed, and then proceeded 
 to disavow his ambassadors, on the plea that they had exceeded 
 The Treaties ot their powers (which, as a matter of fact, was true). 
 Cherasco, 1621. He then hastened to enter into fresh negotia- 
 tions with the Emperor, in Italy. The result of all this was 
 the Treaties of Cherasco (April-June, 1631), the carrjdng out of 
 which was another clever comedy, composed and put on the 
 stage by Richelieu, by Vittorio-Amadeo of Savoy, who was 
 friendly to France, and by the Pope's wily envoy, Giulio 
 Mazarini. It had been agreed that the Imperial and the 
 French troops were to evacuate all the strongholds either 
 Power held in Italy on a certain date. The French troops, 
 consequently, made a show of leaving Pignerol on September 21. 
 But an envoy from the French King at once insisted that 
 Vittorio-Amadeo should leave Pignerol to his government for 
 another six months, on the plea that neither Spain nor the 
 Emperor was carrying out the clauses of the treaty. The 
 Duke of Savoy, with a great outcry for the benefit of the public, 
 appeared to consent. In reality he had been under a secret 
 engagement ever since the preceding April to make over the 
 town to France. . . . This was the closing act and dinouement 
 of the Mantuan business. Thanks to it, France had obtained 
 possession of one of the gates of Italy. As for Spain and the 
 Emperor, they could at all events feel they had been fooled in 
 most masterly fashion — ^this was consolation of a kind. 
 
 And indeed Ferdinand had already lost the power of making 
 any opposition. Greatly weakened by that Diet of Ratisbon 
 from which he had expected so much advantage, and to which 
 he had himself finally granted the dismissal of Wallenstein and 
 the reduction of his army without receiving anything in exchange, 
 he now found himself face to face with the new and redoubtable 
 foe that had started up in his path supported by France — 
 Sweden under Sweden. This was a small and poor nation which 
 Gustavus- dwelt along the shores of the Gulf of Bothnia, 
 Adolphns. though its borders did not reach the Sound, both 
 shores of which belonged to Denmark. But the two miUions 
 of which this little nation was composed were brave folk, 
 warlike, full of confidence, and led by Gustavus-Adolphus. In 
 1629 Gustavus, then only thirty-four years of age, had already 
 
 67 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 vanquished Denmark, Poland, and Russia. This tall, burly 
 Scandinavian, blue-eyed, fair-haired, broad-shouldered, jovial, 
 strong, was filled with a most fervent piety, and proposed to 
 descend upon Germany with the object of ensuring hberty of 
 conscience to his coreligionists : but he reckoned at the same 
 time on completing his conquest of the Baltic Provinces. 
 
 In his own kingdom, where military service was a tradition 
 and wellnigh an obligation, he had raised an army of 40,000 
 men, national troops, and therefore immeasurably superior to 
 the mercenary soldiery under the command of such men as 
 Tilly and Wallenstein. At that period soldiers were recruited 
 " to fight a battle, just as any private individual might hire 
 labourers to build him a house." Captains bargained to supply 
 a certain number of men, clothed, armed, and equipped at 
 their expense. Naturally these mercenaries appeared on the 
 scene in larger or smaller numbers according to the reputation 
 of the men under whose command they were to serve, and the 
 old soldiers, whose profession it was to fight just as an artisan's 
 business was to work at his trade, charged more or less for their 
 services according to the risks they expected to run and the profit 
 they hoped to make out of the campaign : and even as a good 
 captain found less difficulty than another in recruiting his men, 
 a general of renown such as Tilly or Wallenstein would have a 
 crowd of captains all desirous of enlisting under his command, 
 and could thus raise an army at comparatively small expense. 
 But in any case his troops could not compare with a homo- 
 geneous army such as this Swedish one, which did not fight 
 solely for the sake of gain, but for its religion and its King, in 
 whom it had a supernatural confidence : for this reason 40,000 
 Swedes, trained and led by so matchless a general as Gustavus- 
 Adolphus, were equal to 100,000 Imperial troops. 
 
 Richelieu, warned by one of his agents, was aware of all 
 this, and had already been negotiating for a considerable time 
 Alliance with a view to securing little Sweden as his ally, 
 
 between France But Gustavus-Adolphus hesitated to embark on 
 and Sweden, the adventure, and it was not till February 23, 
 1631, that he finally decided in favour of it. France was to 
 make him an annual payment of 1,000,000 Kvres, and he, in 
 consideration of this, was to keep up an army of 86,000 men 
 68 
 
PREPONDERANCE OF FRANCE 
 
 to oppose Ferdinand. It was an understood thing that he was 
 never to do anything to harm the Cathohc faith in those places 
 where he might find it already established. In this last clause 
 of the agreement, Richelieu was endeavouring, no doubt, to 
 reconcile his duty as a Minister with his scruples as a Cardinal : 
 but his sense of the first was probably stronger than his realiza- 
 tion of the last. 
 
 Tilly had laid siege to Magdeburg, and when the city capitu- 
 lated (on May 20, 1631) it was sacked in the most merciless 
 Sack of Magde- manner : soldiers were seen cutting off the heads 
 burg, 1631. of fifty-three young girls who had sought refuge 
 in a church, Croats impaled infants snatched from their mothers' 
 breasts upon their swords, rough old troopers ripped up women 
 with child, and outraged wives and daughters imder the very 
 eyes of their husbands and fathers. Tilly refused to put a stop 
 to these atrocities — could he have done it even if he had so 
 desired ? " The soldiers must amuse themselves," he said. . . . 
 When the news of this " Magdeburg merrymaking " spread over 
 the country a shudder of horror ran through the whole of 
 Lutheran and Calvinist Germany : there was a general uprising. 
 The Saxons, who had been doubtful so far, threw in their lot 
 with Gustavus-Adolphus, and helped him to crush Tilly's army 
 at Breitenfeld, on the Elster, not far from Leipzig, on Sep- 
 tember 17, 1631 ; the peasants dispatched all the fugitives : 
 " the Harz Moimtains hurled themselves " upon the torturers 
 of Magdeburg. 
 
 And then Gustavus-Adolphus began his triumphant progress 
 through the rich Catholic countries of the Rhine, through 
 Swabia and Franconia : he entered Frankfort, Mayence, Spires, 
 Worms. ... In the course of the winter of 1632, when only 
 Alsace lay between him and France, he strove to spur on his 
 ally — ^his sleeping partner — ^Louis XIII : he advised him to 
 march on the provinces lying along the left bank of the Rhine. 
 Most of the members of the Council were much tempted by the 
 plan. But Father Joseph ardently opposed it : thus to fall on 
 the Franche-Comt6, on Alsace, Luxemburg, and Flanders would 
 surely involve a final rupture with the Roman Faith and ensure 
 the heretics' triumph in Germany. Richelieu was irresolute, 
 and the Council dispersed without coming to any definite 
 
 69 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 decision. At six o'clock the next morning the Cardinal, after 
 a sleepless night, sent for the Capuchin and informed him he 
 had resolved to follow his advice. How would the destiny 
 of France have been affected if possession of her natural frontiers 
 had been acquired at one blow in 1632 ? 
 
 When the spring came, Gustavus-Adolphus recommenced his 
 victorious advance. Tilly was defeated and mortally wounded 
 Battle of on the banks of the Lech, near Augsburg (April 15), 
 
 Liitzen, 1632. and the Swedes made their entry into Munich. 
 Then Wallenstein emerged from his retirement, and raised an 
 army. On November 19, 1632, Gustavus-Adolphus attacked 
 him at Lutzen : by nightfall the Swedes were in possession of 
 the enemy's positions, but their King was dead, killed as he 
 was leading a charge through the fog. He was only thirty- 
 eight. 
 
 While the conqueror whom Richelieu had brought "from the 
 Pole," as Voiture has it, was filling Europe with the fame of his 
 victories, the Cardinal himself was slowly forwarding the 
 interests of his country. During the earliest months of the 
 year 1632 the Archbishop-Elector of Treves, thinking the 
 Emperor too far away to afford him adequate protection, had 
 given in his adhesion to Louis XIII, and shortly afterwards 
 French garrisons made their appearance along the Rhine, at 
 Philippsburg and Coblenz. At the same time, on the pretext 
 of punishing Charles IV of Lorraine for having supported 
 Gaston after the Day of Dupes, the Duke was forced to 
 make over several of his towns (January-July, 1682). The 
 death of Gustavus-Adolphus did not check the progress of 
 France. On the very morrow of the Battle of Lutzen, in fact, 
 Wallenstein had opened negotiations in all directions. Was he 
 contemplating some treason ? As to this point historians are 
 not yet agreed. . . . Meanwhile Richelieu continued to strip 
 the Duke of Lorraine : by the summer of 1634 the French had 
 occupied all the fortified towns in his Duchy. 
 
 But in the midst of all this, fortune once more began to 
 smile on the Hapsburgs. On February 24, 1634, Ferdinand 
 Assassination had caused the disquieting Wallenstein to be 
 o! Wallenstein. murdered (he ordered two thousand Masses, how- 
 ever, to be said for the repose of his soul). In September, 
 70 
 
PREPONDERANCE OF FRANCE 
 
 Gallas, his new general, crushed the Swedes at Nordlingen. 
 Finally, in May, 1635, the Emperor rescinded his Edict of 
 Restitution, and Saxony and the smaller Protestant States 
 instantly made their peace with him. From that time forward 
 Sweden stood almost alone against the House of Austria. . . . 
 Richelieu perceived that the time when France must act had 
 come. In the space of a few months, and with incomparable 
 skill, he had gathered every one of the remaining foes of the 
 House of Austria under the banner of Louis XIII, and on 
 May 19, 1635, he sent a herald to declare war in solemn form, 
 not on the Emperor, but on Spain. 
 
 Ill 
 
 What were the forces at his command ? 
 
 The army under Louis XIII consisted of various bodies of 
 troops as unequal in quality and size as in the esteem in which 
 TheAimy they were held. The first of these bodies, the 
 under Louis largest and the most highly honoured, was the 
 Xm. regiment of the Guard : then came the old 
 
 regiments of Picardy, Piedmont, Navarre, and Champagne, all 
 the officers of which were personally known to the King : and 
 then the " little old " regiments — ^Normandy, Ile-de-France or 
 Rambures, Maugeron, Nerestang, Vaubecour, Bellenave, Saint- 
 Luc, Saulx, Chamblay (these appellations were subject to 
 change), which bore the names of their commanding officers ; 
 and, finally, somewhere about one hundred new regiments, the 
 strength and importance of which rose and fell perpetually 
 according to the necessities of war and the wealth of the noble- 
 men who commanded them. No effective strength was fixed, 
 indeed ; the mestre de camp commanding the Guard might 
 have some 6000 men under his orders, and the colonel of some 
 other regiment might not have more than 300. Altogether, 
 and reckoning the cavalry, the French army, about the year 
 1635, numbered some 130,000 men. 
 
 The rank and file consisted of an agglomeration of foreign 
 ruffians and all the most good-for-nothing fellows in the king- 
 dom. Even in France nothing could prevent " La Fleur," 
 " La Jeunesse," " Champagne," " Belhumeur," or " Gargaillou " 
 
 71 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 (every old soldier had some nickname of this sort) from leaving 
 the ranks whenever the fancy took him, and going off a la 
 picorie — in other words, to steal chickens, cattle and horses, 
 furniture and forage, strip travellers, thrash tavern-keepers, 
 and hang peasants, with the most deplorable ease. . . . This 
 being so, my readers will conceive the horrors of war as these 
 men made it. The Cardinal's memoirs relate, with a touch of 
 indignation, that too often these soldiers " rubbed their boots 
 with the holy oils, smashed images of the Virgin, trampled the 
 Blessed Sacrament under their feet, and fired volleys of musketry 
 at the Crucifix " : and no description can possibly be attempted 
 of the horrors that took place when a town was sacked, for 
 instance, or when a general thought it necessary to starve out 
 the enemy by devastating the neighbouring country to some 
 extent. . . . Further, robbers, incendiaries, murderers, tor- 
 turers, as these soldiers were, they were far exceeded in all 
 these respects by the vile crew who acted as their servants. 
 One of these young wretches, a lad of sixteen or seventeen, 
 makes a pleasing boast of having " strung up," with his own 
 hand, some score of peasants of both sexes. Even in times of 
 peace the passage of a French army through any province in the 
 kingdom was a calamity. 
 
 " Musket on shoulder, his bandolier slung about his neck, 
 his musket-rest in his right hand, a long walking-stick in his 
 left — ^thus do we see the ' foot-soldier,' in the engravings of 
 Abraham Bosse or Callot," When he fired his weapon he had 
 to light his match, load his musket, take his match again, 
 twist it round the cock, and then take aim : he can hardly 
 have had time to discharge his piece more than once on the 
 attacking force, for his fire did not carry much farther than 
 sixty-nine yards. Thus, as a defence against the enemy's 
 charge, each company contained a certain proportion of pike- 
 men, who opposed the advance of the cavalry by crossing their 
 heavy weapons, fourteen feet long. As for the cavalry, it 
 consisted of musketeers, raised by Louis XIII (dragoons, they 
 called themselves), mounted infantry, which dismounted before 
 firing ; light horse ; gendarmes in aimour ; and carabiniers, 
 who acted as scouts and skirmishers. 
 
 Uniforms there were none, save for certain picked troops : 
 72 
 
PREPONDERANCE OF FRANCE 
 
 no special marks distinguished officers from their men. Colours 
 (so huge, for the infantry, that the material of which they were 
 made would have dragged along the ground if the man carrying 
 each had not kept a corner under his arm), and the small 
 standards used by the cavalry all differed from each other. So 
 much so that the troops on one side frequently found their 
 only method of mutual recognition was that every man of 
 them should pull his shirt out of his hose, or else put it on over 
 his doublet. 
 
 The military hierarchy was tolerably confused in its nature, 
 and an officer's place in it depended less on his actual rank 
 than on his regiment and his birth. A private in a crack 
 regiment such as the Guards paid scant respect to a lieutenant 
 belonging to one of the recently raised regiments : and what 
 was a carabinier — some fdrmer lackey, perhaps — compared 
 with a high-born gendarme who served the King attended, 
 by his varlets and his squire ? The Marshals of France 
 were all equal, and as each directed the army's operations 
 in turn, none cared to press the enemy so hard that some 
 one or other of his colleagues would have nothing to do on 
 the morrow — or the following week — but to cull the fruits of 
 victory. 
 
 Besides all this, and in spite of the fact that a mere youth 
 might attain officer's rank, what the leaders lacked was not so 
 Lack of disci- nauch experience as discipline. Every nobleman 
 pline in the intended for military life learned his business in 
 Anny. early youth at his " academy," and served some 
 
 time in a regiment before he was given a command. He might 
 be an officer at seventeen, perhaps, but he had been a soldier 
 at the age of fifteen, or even, like Cinq-Mars, of thirteen years. 
 The misfortune was that, once the battle began, each captain 
 carried out the orders he had received after his own fashion 
 and skirmished much as he chose. Every man strove to shine 
 on his own account, and when Marshals of France could not 
 deny themselves the pleasure of going under fire at the head 
 of the leading battalions, it was of course difficult to prevent 
 colonels from marching on the enemy, pike on shoulder, six 
 paces ahead of their officers, and these, again, from advancing 
 in a row in front of their men. 
 
 78 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Further, since the French troops had won their brilliant 
 successes, since the days of La Rochelle and the Pass of Susa, 
 the art of war had undergone a total change. It no longer 
 consisted, as in the old days, in moving a few thousand men 
 this way and that, but in the handling of huge bodies of troops. 
 Gustavus-Adolphus had completely changed military tactics, 
 and the dealings of the German armies with him had taught 
 them to manoeuvre : their musketeers knew how to retire in 
 good order behind their pikemen, after they had delivered 
 their fire, their infantry how to open its ranks in time to allow 
 the ordnance it was covering to do its part, their cavalry to 
 ride amongst the foot-soldiers without throwing them into 
 disorder. Practice alone could accustom the troops of 
 Louis XIII to these well-ordered evolutions, and their appren- 
 ticeship was to cost them several defeats. 
 
 IV 
 
 In the spring the Mardchal .de ChS.tillon invaded Spanish 
 Flanders, and on May 20, 1635, he defeated a small Spanish force 
 War with near Lidge. But his soldiers having committed 
 
 Spain. the habitual atrocities of their kind, in a country 
 
 which had quite forgotten what war was like, the population 
 rose in every quarter, and the French army was obliged to 
 retire across the frontier. 
 
 In the following year the Prince de Cond^ made an attempt 
 on Franche-Comt^, the only effect of which was to lead the 
 French re- Emperor to send Louis XIII a formal declaration 
 verses : " the of war. Then Don Fernando, Cardinal-Infante 
 Corbie Year." and Governor of the Low Countries, made an 
 unexpected dash across the frontier, forced La Capelle, Le 
 Catelet, and Corbie to capitulate without striking a blow, 
 devastated the whole of the country between the Somme and 
 the Oise, and actually sent his skirmishers up to Compifegne 
 (August, 1636). At the news of this blow panic seized on 
 Paris — ^the populace fancied it already saw the Spanish troops 
 manning the towers of the Bastille. It ventured to hiss 
 Richelieu's coach as it passed through the city streets. His 
 guards, whom he had lately garbed in a gorgeous uniform, were 
 74 
 
PREPONDERANCE OF FRANCE 
 
 hooted : one of them was actually assaulted at the Porte 
 Saint-Denis. . . . Popular hatred has a peculiarly overpower- 
 ing effect on certain nervous organizations, and Richelieu at 
 first fell into a condition of profound despondency. But after 
 a lecture from Father Joseph of a somewhat rough description 
 (the Capuchin, we are told, called him a "milksop ") he soon 
 pulled himself together. He was inspired with the idea of 
 driving through all the roughest of the Paris streets with no 
 attendants but a few lackeys, and with one of those sudden 
 changes of front to which the idle elements of the population 
 of that city is addicted, the populace gave him an ovation to 
 begin with, and then rushed to enlist for the defence at the 
 H6tel de Ville. Here the aged Mar^chal de La Force, whom 
 the people loved because he was not haughty, shook hands 
 with every vagabond who exclaimed, in his enthusiasm, " Yes, 
 M. le Mar^chal ! I will go out to fight with you ! " It was a 
 splendid moment. Every corporation and guild — Parliament, 
 Court of Aids, Aldermen, and so forth — ^undertook to raise and 
 support a larger or smaller b(jdy of volunteer troops. Horses 
 were requisitioned. Gentlemen hurried up from the provinces. 
 Finally the King found himself at the head of an army of 
 45,000 men, with which he marched to meet the Spaniards. 
 But the Cardinal-Infante would not wait for him, and proceeded 
 to evacuate Picardy. Thus ended the " Corbie Year," which 
 lived long in the memory of Paris. In all other quarters — 
 Germany, Italy, and on the Spanish frontier — the warlike 
 operations of France had been most unfortunate. 
 
 Happily the confederated forces which were opposing the 
 Emperor's troops in Germany were commanded by the best of 
 Gustavus-Adolphus' pupils, Duke Bernhard of Saxe- Weimar, 
 whom Louis XIII had carefully won over to his interests by a 
 secret treaty (October, 1635). Between January and December, 
 
 1638, Bernhard, liberally supplied with French money, con- 
 quered Alsace : soon after this (July 18, 1639), he died, at the 
 very moment when, as he did not betray any particular inclina- 
 Alsace annexed ^^^^ to hand over his conquest, he threatened to 
 by France, give Richelieu a great deal of trouble. But the 
 
 1639. Cardinal enjoyed that special good fortune which 
 no great politician has ever lacked. When Bernhard passed 
 
 73 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 away, the officers who had served under him, and then: men — 
 mercenaries all of them — were in a quandary as to which side 
 they should take : Gu6briant, a Breton nobleman in command 
 of the small contingent of Frenchmen with the army, persuaded 
 them to sell their services to the Most Christian King, and thus 
 Alsace was finally absorbed by the French Crown. From that 
 time forward Burgundy and Lorraine found a protector against 
 the Emperor : and in the same way the communications 
 between Milan and the Low Countries opened by the Spaniards' 
 defeat of the French forces in the Valtellina under Rohan (1637) 
 were finally cut. ^ 
 
 Meanwhile the arms of the Comte d'Harcourt and the fine 
 words of Mazarin, now one of Richelieu's agents, were carrying 
 succour to Marie Christine, Duchess of Savoy and sister of 
 Louis XIII, and strengthening the French King's hold on 
 Casale and Pignerol. Thus, on every side, France, the last to 
 join the fray, was overcoming her wearied adversaries. 
 
 Germany was now a mere ravaged desert, the inhabitants 
 of which were retiu^ing to a stafe of savagery. In those parts 
 Horrors of war of the country which had suffered most, such 
 in Germany, peasants as had survived massacre, famine, and 
 1638. pestilence could find no more carrion of beasts 
 
 wherewith to stay their hunger, and had been devouring human 
 flesh ; towards 1638, we are assured, the bodies of men who 
 had been hanged were retailed as food in certain cook-shops in 
 the Palatinate. . . . Starvation it was, far more than the 
 troops of the newly elected Emperor, that checked the advance 
 of the Swedish armies in that desolate land. 
 
 On the Spanish side there was less resistance still. From 
 1687 onwards the French generals had been capturing all the 
 strong towns in Artois, one after the other : this slow war of 
 sieges, which needed more patience than genius, suited them 
 admirably. In 1689, at a huge sacrifice, Spain collected a 
 squadron of ships which set sail with reinforcements for Dun- 
 kirk : but hearing that the fleet of the United Provinces, the 
 allies of France, awaited them in the Channel, the Spanish ships 
 sought refuge in British waters : and there, near Dover, in the 
 neutral zone, they were destroyed by Van Tromp (October). 
 In the following year (August, 1640) Arras capitulated. At 
 76 
 
PREPONDERANCE OF FRANCE 
 
 the same time Catalonia and Portugal revolted against the 
 Catholic King. No great effort was needed to overcome so 
 Conquest ol feeble a foe : while Richelieu was promising help 
 Roussillon, to the Portuguese, and actually sending it to 
 1642. Catalonia, the French troops were carrying out 
 
 the conquest of Roussillon : this Louis XIII completed by 
 laying siege to Perpignan, which surrendered in September, 1642. 
 Just after signing the " preliminaries " with the Emperor 
 the Cardinal died, in the conviction that peace was to follow 
 certainly and immediately. Nevertheless the end was by no 
 means to be yet : but Louis XIII had acquired possession of 
 Alsace, Artois, and Roussillon : holding Piedmont, he held the 
 gate into Italy : his hand was on Spain, and " the great tree of 
 the House of Austria, which overshadowed all the rest of the 
 earth, was shaken to its very roots." 
 
 While he was so skilfully guiding the external business of 
 France, Richelieu found it a hard task to stand out against his 
 enemies on French soil. These, since the Day of Dupes, 
 had indeed been weakened ; and Louis XIII, who had a soul 
 above all meanness, valued the Minister who did so much to 
 increase his master's glory. But he was fond of authority, he 
 was jealous, and his infatuations for his favourites were pas- 
 sionate beyond belief. Richelieu, whose sole support at Court, 
 where he was generally disliked, was the distrustful King himself, 
 must have dreaded the power of these favourites sorely : 
 " People fall in his good graces, not by degrees, but by preci- 
 pices ! " he said of his sovereign one day — and the little 
 sentence gives us food for reflection. 
 
 He had very dangerous enemies : women. In Anne of 
 Austria's circle he was hated, and in her fight against him 
 Feminine Mme. de Chevreuse combined the considerable 
 
 intrigues resources of her intelligence with the no less 
 
 against potent charm of her beauty. Richelieu did all he 
 
 Richelieu. could to conciliate his foes, and this occasionally 
 by methods of the most simple description. It would appear 
 certain, indeed, that he made an attempt to obtain the good 
 
 77 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 graces of Anne of Austria, who only laughed at him. " As for 
 Mme. de Chevreuse," so Mme. de Motteville assures us, " her 
 beauty never lost its charm " for the gallant Cardinal. And 
 after the Day of Dupes, Richelieu acknowledged to the too 
 fair Duchess that " in spite of the severity he had shown, he 
 had never hated her." As will be readily imagined, the skilful 
 coquette took good care not to discourage so illustrious an 
 adorer : but the feelings she betrayed were no more to her than 
 another means of lulling him to a false security and more 
 successfully deceiving him. 
 
 He had just appointed a somewhat paltry fellow to the 
 office of Keeper of the Seals. Charles de I'Aubespine, Marquis 
 The Marauis de de Chateaimeuf, had pronounced sentence of 
 Cbateanneuf . death on the upright Marechal de Marillac, brother 
 to his own predecessor in office, and on Montmorency : he 
 owed everything to Richelieu, who had pushed his fortimes as 
 he always pushed those of his own creatures, and he was fifty 
 years of age. . . . But Mme. de Chevreuse had undertaken the 
 task of turning his grizzled head, and her effort was crowned 
 with the most complete success. 
 
 The lovely Duchess was then occupied, as was her wont, 
 with intrigues of the most complicated nature. Just at that 
 period Gaston had taken refuge in Lorraine, first of all, and 
 then at Brussels, with his mother (1632) : certain persons were 
 trjdng to persuade him to seek shelter in England, together with 
 Marie de' Medici. But for that purpose it was necessary, in 
 the first place, to overthrow the English Ministry, which was 
 much inclined to keep the peace and had little desire to quarrel 
 with Louis XIII, and then to bring the enterprising Lord 
 Holland into power, and likewise substitute the Chevalier de 
 Jars for Fontenay-Mareuil, then French Ambassador in London. 
 Mme. de Chevreuse, like all Richelieu's enemies, was bent on 
 Gaston's triumph, and, further, the fascinating Holland and 
 the charming De Jars were still her friends, after having been, 
 it may be, even more to her : this sufficed to make her apply 
 that marvellous talent for intrigue which had made her almost 
 a power in Europe to their service : but she drew Chateauneuf 
 into the plot, and he, to please her, did not hesitate to fail 
 utterly in his duty as a minister. He went mad about her : in 
 78 
 
PREPONDERANCE OF FRANCE 
 
 November, 1632, while the Cardinal, sick unto death, remained 
 at Bordeaux surrounded by his faithful friends, the Keeper of 
 the Seals could not deny himself the delight of accompanying 
 Anne of Austria and Mme. de Chevreuse to La Rochelle. The 
 whole journey was one long series of merrymakings, but it 
 had a disastrous end : on February 25, 1638, the amorous 
 Keeper of the Seals was arrested and his papers were seized : 
 among them, it is said, Richelieu discovered certain letters from 
 Mme. de Chevreuse wherein his own sentimental hopes were 
 treated with a most unflattering scorn. . . . Chateauneuf was 
 cast into prison : De Jars was sentenced to be beheaded, and 
 was only pardoned at the very last minute : as for Mme. de 
 Chevreuse, she was banished to her estates in Touraine — ^where 
 she plotted more busily than ever. 
 
 Louis XIII was in love, just then, with one of the Queen's 
 maids of honour, Marie de Hautefort, and under the influence 
 Marie de of this fair-haired merry young girl he was 
 
 Hautefort. gradually becoming " of a gallant mood," and 
 the Court was consequently " very pleasant." Several times in 
 each week he would carry oft a bevy of young ladies, in company 
 with his dear Hautefort, to join his hunting-party. " In those 
 days," says Mile, de Montpensier, " he would allow people to 
 speak to him of the Cardinal de Richelieu with considerable 
 freedom, and a proof that this did not displease him is that he 
 himself talked of him in the same fashion." Marie de Haute- 
 fort, who was the friend of Anne of Austria, did not fail to make 
 a mock of the mighty Minister, and laud the Queen's good 
 qualities to the King her husband. As for the Queen, her 
 lord's love affairs troubled her but little, for Louis' affection for 
 the young lady was purely platonic. The reader is no doubt 
 acquainted with the famous story — of doubtful authenticity — 
 about the letter Mile, de Hautefort hid in the bosom of her 
 dress, and the tongs the poor King would have used to pick 
 it out. 
 
 Further, the courtiers noticed one day that the King was 
 beginning to be fond of talking to Mile. Marie-Louise de La 
 Marie-Louise Fayette, This young girl of seventeen, of pro- 
 de La Fayette, vincial origin and hmnble means, dark-haired, 
 and of a somewhat ordinary type of beauty, was gentle, serious, 
 
 79 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 and reserved, and her talk was far less startling than that of 
 the fair-haired and lively Hautefort. The King soon fell in 
 love with her. We may beheve that she was touched by the 
 chaste affection the King of France expressed for her, but she 
 had always intended to become a nun : she felt herself called 
 " by a strong vocation from God. . . ." Weeping, Louis XIII 
 gave her leave to depart. On May 19, 1637, Mile, de La Fayette 
 retired to the Convent of the Visitation in the Faubourg Saint- 
 Antoine. 
 
 While all these things were happening, Mme. de Chevreuse 
 was busy with her intrigues at Tours. The beautiful Duchess 
 was gifted with one of those imperious imaginations which 
 make women, according to their circvunstances, either heroines 
 of the Fronde or most unhappy creatures. " She loved without 
 selection, and purely because she had to love somebody. . . . 
 Her devotion to her passion — ^which might be called eternal, 
 though its object changed — did not prevent her from being led 
 astray, now and then, by passing whims : but she always came 
 back from these distractions with an ardour that made them 
 appear delightful " (Retz). Plotting, in her opinion, stimulated 
 the imagination, and the delightful dangers it entailed imparted 
 an infinite zest to love. . . . From Tom-s, then, Mme. de 
 Chevreuse was carrying on secret communications with Anne of 
 Austria through the Queen's devoted servant La Porte, and a few 
 faithful gentlemen such as Lord Craven and La Rochefoucauld : 
 and as Spain and France were competing, at that moment, to 
 obtain the Duke of Lorraine as an ally, Anne and her friend 
 were doing their best to persuade the Duke to pronounce in 
 favour of Spain. . . . More serious still, the Queen of France 
 was sending her brother, the Cardinal-Infante, all the informa- 
 tion she could collect : now warning him that Richelieu had 
 just dispatched a monk to Spain, charged with a secret mission ; 
 then that England was negotiating with France against the 
 interests of Spain ; or again that the parleying between 
 Louis XIII and the Duke of Lorraine seemed just about to 
 reach a successful conclusion, and that it was high time to take 
 measures. . . . 
 
 It is certain that Anne, when she did all these things, was 
 acting the part of a. Spanish Infanta rather than that of a 
 80 
 
PREPONDERANCE OF FRANCE 
 
 Queen of France, and that she was guilty indeed towards her 
 adopted country. But we must recollect that patriotism, in 
 Intrigues of those days, was not the clear and authoritative 
 Anne ol duty it is in our time ; how many of the great 
 
 Austria. nobles were guilty of appeals to the foreigner ! 
 
 In the eyes of a Cond6, for instance, a revolt against the King 
 was no more than a quarrel with his own cousin. And we may 
 De sure Anne of Austria never imderstood that her sin lay, not 
 only in the deception she practised on her husband, but in the 
 fact that she had betrayed her people. Patriotism was an 
 abstract idea rarely mentioned to little Infantas — who were 
 hardly taught even to read — and we may very fairly believe 
 that Anne had no precise notion of what it meant : whereas 
 she saw M. le Cardinal — and hated him — every day of her life. 
 Like the women of her own epoch and of every other, her 
 political conduct was entirely governed by the sympathies and 
 antipathies with which the various politicians inspired her. 
 Her mental attitude was that of her romantic female contem- 
 poraries : all of them, from Mme. de Chevreuse and Mme. de 
 Longueville to the Grande Mademoiselle, felt, and thought, and 
 would have acted had the occasion arisen, even as she did. 
 
 It was in the Louvre, at night, or at the Val-de-Grace, 
 whither she habitually retired to perform her devotions, that 
 the Queen wrote her secret letters. The faithful La Porte put 
 them into cypher, and either he or the Superior of the convent 
 had them conveyed to Mme. de Chevreuse, or handed them to 
 a secretary of the English Embassy who sent them on to 
 Brussels. One day the Cardinal intercepted one of these notes 
 to Mme. de Chevreuse. Instantly La Porte was thrown into 
 the Bastille and threatened with the rack : and Siguier, the 
 Chancellor, proceeded to the Val-de-Grace to make a search, 
 and cross-question the Mother Superior, whom the Archbishop 
 of Paris commanded to reveal everything on pain of ex- 
 The Queen's communication. The Queen began by swearing 
 Confession, on the Blessed Sacrament that she had never 
 1637. written any but the most trivial things. But 
 
 seeing that the Cardinal knew more than she was telling 
 him, she ended by a full confession, on Richelieu's assurance 
 that the King would forgive her if she would make a clean 
 
 F 81 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 breast of everything. The scene was a pitiful one (if we are to 
 believe what the Cardinal tells us of it). Anne humbled herself, 
 and wept ; she said, " What a kind heart you must have, M. le 
 Cardinal ! " : she vowed she would be eternally grateful to the 
 Minister : and ended by begging him to " give me your hand ! " 
 which the Cardinal, as he carefully tells us, " refused to do, out 
 of respect, drawing back for the same reason instead of coming 
 nearer. ..." The Queen was forced to sign a paper in which 
 she confessed her ill-doing and swore she would never repeat 
 it. This done, the King forbade her (still in writing) to hold 
 any future communication either with Mme. de Chevreuse or 
 her " go-betweens," or even to send any letter to any one that 
 had not first been shown to her lady in waiting, who was to 
 notify himself of its contents. Such were the humiliating 
 conditions on which Anne obtained her pardon (August, 1637). 
 And Louis never forgot. 
 
 Richelieu strove to preserve a certain amenity in his deal- 
 ings with Mme. de Chevreuse, " that dangerous spirit " as he 
 Plight o! called her, fearing she might betake herself abroad, 
 
 Mme. de " and carry fresh disturbances, which cannot be 
 
 Chevreuse. foreseen, into affairs." But she, mistrusting him, 
 thought it safer to slip away. And in September, 1637, having 
 fooled the old Archbishop of Tours in the twinkling of an eye, 
 she escaped, under circumstances of the most romantic kind, 
 rode right across France, disguised as a man, and so reached 
 Spain. 
 
 Meanwhile Louis XIII would go, from time to time, to see 
 Mile, de La Fayette in her convent : he loved her still. Father 
 Caussin, the King's confessor, who directed the young girl's 
 conscience, attempted, most imprudently, to use her as a 
 weapon against the Cardinal. Primed by the priest. Mile, de 
 La Fayette endeavoured to make Louis see that his support of 
 the German Protestants against the Catholic Emperor, and his 
 severe treatment of his mother and his wife, were grievous sins. 
 But at the very first word she uttered on the subject, the 
 monarch " turned his back on her and departed without giving 
 her any answer." Shortly afterwards (December 10, 1637) the 
 King's archers conducted Father Caussin, a disgraced man, to 
 one of the houses of his Order at Rennes. 
 S2 
 
PREPONDERANCE OF FRANCE 
 
 And these visits of the King to Mile, de La Fayette had a 
 result of which nobody had dreamt. One December evening in 
 Birth of Louis 1637, Louis, leaving his lady-love, was prevented by 
 XIV, 1638. a fall of snow from returning to Versailles, where 
 he was living at the time, and was fain to take refuge at the 
 Louvre. Now in those days it was customary for the King of 
 France to travel about with all his furniture : when he quitted 
 one palace for another, the first was left completely stripped. 
 The only chamber in the Louvre in which it was possible for 
 the King to be lodged in this unexpected fashion was that of 
 the Queen, who was residing there. And on September 5, 1638, 
 Anne of Austria brought the future Louis XIV into the world. 
 
 VI 
 
 With Father Caussin the last vestige of the devout 
 party, which had caused Richelieu so many difficulties during 
 Gaston again ^^^ earlier years of his Ministry, disappeared, 
 conspires But the party of the " great " nobles was by no 
 
 against Riche- means extinct. In 1636, while the royal troops 
 lieu, 1636. were besieging Corbie, a plot was concocted, and 
 joined in by the Due d'Orleans and the Comte de Soissons, to 
 assassinate the Cardinal. At Amiens everything was ready : 
 M. le Comte was to come out of the Council-room with Richelieu 
 and keep him talking for a few minutes at the door : at that 
 moment. Monsieur was to give the signal to the murderers. 
 But once again Gaston's courage failed him : when the 
 Cardinal appeared in the doorway, imposing and formidable, 
 Monsieur lost his head and fled, despite all efforts to stop him. 
 Richelieu lived and died in ignorance of the peril he had 
 escaped. 
 
 But notwithstanding this, Soissons and Gaston thought it 
 prudent to seek safety, one in the strong fortress of Sedan, and 
 the other in his own town of Blois. M. le Comte was a good 
 soldier, but apart from his ambition he had none of the qualities 
 requisite for the leader of a party. Yet hatred stood him in 
 the stead of skill. A huge conspiracy was formed, and was 
 joined, in the train of the Due de Bouillon, Prince de Sedan 
 (brother to Turenne), by great nobles, lords, officers of the 
 
 83 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 army, and even by prisoners in the Bastille, such as that Comte 
 de Cramail, who swore that with the help of the Marechal de 
 Vitry he could raise the garrison of the fortress in revolt when- 
 ever it pleased him so to do^ Spain was approached, and 
 gladly promised to support a rebellion so favourable to her own 
 cause : and Charles IV of Lorraine, in his turn, abjured the 
 treaty he had lately signed with France. When all things were 
 ready, Lamboy, the Spanish general, crossed the frontier with 
 6000 men, and defeated the Marechal de Chatillon at La Marf^e 
 (July, 1641). But Soissons was killed in the battle, and his 
 death disorganized the party formed in his name. Its collapse 
 became complete some six months later, after Guebriant had 
 utterly defeated Lamboy at Kempen (January, 1642). 
 
 But already a fresh plot was being hatched against the 
 hated Minister. " The Cardinal, who had not found La Fayette 
 The Marquis satisfactory, and clearly perceived the King must 
 de Cing-Mars. have some amusement," had chosen, to entertain 
 liis master, one Henri d'Effiat, Marquis de Cinq-Mars, son of 
 one of his most faithful servants, on whose dutiful behaviotu- 
 he relied. He was a handsome young fellow, hvely and eager, 
 extraordinarily winning and graceful in manners. The idea of 
 shutting himself up in the palace of Saint-Germain with a 
 cross-grained, overbearing old king had very little charm for 
 him, and a year and a half went by before he resigned himself 
 to it. 
 
 The passion the King did not fail to develop for him was 
 both jealous and tyrannical : Cinq-Mars had to spend his days 
 in the monarch's company, hunting stags and wolves, digging 
 out foxes' earths, catching blackbirds in cast-nets, and all this 
 in the company of a dozen other men of small accoimt, and 
 exceedingly foul-mouthed. By way of diversion he had to 
 listen to hunting stories, and discuss the profession of arms. 
 . . . Often, half dead with boredom, he would jump on his 
 horse at night, and gallop straight away to Paris, where he 
 would serenade Marion de I'Orme, who loved him — ^unless 
 indeed he spent his evening with "Messieurs du Marais," a 
 company consistmg of "the most worthy people about the 
 Court," it would appear — and the least dull as well — ^who held 
 their meetings at the house of Mme. de Rohan. But he was 
 84 
 
PREPONDERANCE OF FRANCE 
 
 late at the King's lever on the following morning : Louis, 
 invariably informed by third persons of his favourite's pranks, 
 was angry, complained, sulked : Cinq-Mars, weary and exas- 
 perated, stood out against him : there were scenes, in short, 
 after which nobody but the Cardinal could contrive to make 
 peace between the King and " Monsieur le Grand " (as Cinq- 
 Mars was called, owing to his office as Grand Ecuyer, Master of 
 the Horse) ; this he would do by drawing up an agreement 
 for them in due form, as follows : " We, the undersigned, 
 certify to whomsoever it may concern that we are well pleased 
 and satisfied with each other, and have never been in such 
 perfect mutual understanding as at this present time. In 
 testimony whereof we have signed the present certificate. 
 Given at Saint-Germain, this 26th day of November, 1639. . . ." 
 Was not a favour so excessive enough to turn the head of any 
 favourite of twenty ? 
 
 Now while Louis XIII was treating Cinq-Mars like a spoilt 
 young brother, Richelieu, for his part, was snubbing him as 
 though he were a little boy, and when he once guessed that 
 Monsieur le Grand was dreaming of playing a part in State 
 affairs, he scolded him " like a lackey." Cinq-Mars was actually 
 venturing to aspire to the hand of the Princess Marie of Mantua. 
 Further, he claimed the right to attend the Council, and to be 
 appointed to some high military command. The Cardinal had 
 a way of jeering at these pretensions that hurt the young man's 
 vanity cruelly : and he reminded him, too, that he had put 
 him about the Kng for a purpose, that of serving as his spy. . . , 
 Thus Cinq-Mars ended by having but one object in life, that of 
 destroying the bully who had so wounded him. 
 
 He had been informed of the Soissons plot : after the battle 
 of La Marfee he entered into relations with the Due de Bouillon. 
 And at the same time he made active endeavours to prejudice 
 the King's mind against the Cardinal. Louis did not at all 
 object to hearing the most violent abuse of his Minister. In 
 reality he did not take such talk very seriously : but the 
 plotters were so encouraged by his listening to them that every 
 one of them was convinced he secretly approved their plot. 
 And thus, having come to an agreement, the eternal Gaston 
 d'Orl^ans, the Due de Bouillon, and Cinq-Mars boldly signed a 
 
 85 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 treaty with Spain (March, 1642). Anne was aware of the 
 existence of this document, and the fact was also confided to 
 Cinq-Mars' best friend, Frangois-Auguste de Thou, who, in 
 spite of the alarm it caused him, did not feel himself bound to 
 inform against his comrade. 
 
 Richelieu, then lying sick at Narbonne, felt, as it were, the 
 existence of all these intrigues without being able to lay his 
 Arrest and hand on any decisive proofs. At last, however, 
 execution ol one of his police-agents supplied him with a copy 
 Cinq-Mars and of the treaty : he was saved. For some time 
 De Thou. past Louis XIII had been telling Cinq-Mars that 
 
 ill-natured remarks about the Cardinal were now displeasing to 
 him. Once the treaty bearing the signatures of the various 
 conspirators was in his hands, he did not hesitate to order 
 the arrest of a favourite for whom he now felt little affec- 
 tion. He was ill, and had himself carried to the chamber in 
 which the Cardinal lay in bed : the King was thoroughly 
 ashamed of his own ingratitude, and the Minister had hardly 
 recovered from the state of anxiety into which he had been 
 thrown : they both shed tears of emotion — ^and agreed that 
 young Cinq-Mars must be put to death. 
 
 All this happened at Tarascon. Richelieu departed for 
 Lyons by way of the Rhone, and the barge that bore the bed 
 on which he lay dying towed the boat on board which De Thou 
 was kept under watchful guard. Once at Lyons, the Cardinal 
 himself appointed the commissaries charged with the duty of 
 passing sentence on Cinq-Mars, and on De Thou, whose guilt 
 consisted in his having failed to betray his friend. On Septem- 
 ber 12 the two young men were beheaded on the Place des 
 Terraux : both strove to meet death stoically, after the manner 
 of the heroes of antique times, then so much in fashion, and 
 bore themselves admirably. As for Monsieur, he confessed, he 
 informed, he wept, he humbled himself— in short, he was more 
 utterly base than ever. He was pardoned, and so was the 
 Due de Bouillon. 
 
 Meanwhile Richelieu was making his way back to Paris. 
 Dying, eaten up with ulcers, literally rotting away, he travelled 
 in a litter^or a room, rather— hung with violet cloth, with one 
 of his secretaries, who was accommodated with a table and a 
 86 
 
PREPONDERANCE OF FRANCE 
 
 chair, seated beside him : when there was no possibiHty of 
 placing this heavy machine on the deck of a barge, it was borne 
 along by four and twenty guards, each with his hat in his hand. 
 When the resting-place for the night was reached, a hole was 
 broken in the wall of some house, an inclined plane was built 
 from the ground to the upper story, and thus, still on the 
 shoulders of the guards, the huge litter was carried into shelter. 
 
 The Cardinal reached Paris, and forthwith caused his enemy, 
 the loyal Treville, Commandant of the Mousquetaires a cheval. 
 Death of to be deprived of his command. Then, on 
 
 Richelieu, 1642. December 1, 1642, he secured a declaration 
 whereby Gaston was stripped of almost all his power. The 
 next day his death-agony began. When his confessor, the 
 parish priest of Saint-Eustache, exhorted him to forgive his 
 enemies, he replied that he had never had any, save those of 
 the State. He died, courageously, on December 4, 1642. 
 
 " The King," says Tallemant, " only went to see the 
 Cardinal just before he died, and having found him very ill, he 
 came away cheerful." Louis did nothing, it is true, in the 
 way of altering his great Minister's policy, and he even left 
 Richelieu's creatures in power. But he was too ill himself to 
 be able to stand out altogether against the reaction that ensued, 
 and little by little the exiles returned : the VendSmes, the 
 Duchesse de Guise, all the disgraced people began to reappear. 
 Death ol Monsieur among them : the prisoners of the 
 
 Louis Xm, Bastille, Bassompierre and Vitry, issued forth. 
 1643. Yet when Louis XIII realized that death was 
 
 close upon him, he roused himself. On April 2, 1643, in the 
 presence of the whole Court and the Parliament, he read the 
 final Declaration according to which the powers of the Regent, 
 Anne, and the Lieutenant-General of the Kingdom, Gaston, were 
 subordinated to those of a Council composed of Seguier, Boiit- 
 hilier, Chavigny, and Mazarin. On the 8th of the following 
 May, Louis XIII was dpng, and on the 14th, towards three 
 o'clock, he breathed his last. 
 
 A few days later Enghien won his victory at Rocroy. 
 
 (For bibliography, see end of chapter iv.) 
 
 87 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 THE KINGDOM UNDER LOUIS XIII 
 
 I. Justice. II. Finance ; Commerce ; The Navy. III. The 
 Clergy. IV. The Nobility. V. Conclusion. 
 
 IN our day justice and administration are two separate 
 things. Oiu- magistrates try cases, and our official 
 functionaries — our prefects, for instance — administer. 
 Under the Ancien Rigime this distinction between the two 
 powers did not exist : there was no administrator who had not 
 judicial powers, nor was there any judge who was not also 
 charged with certain administrative functions — so much so 
 that the judges were almost as numerous as the royal 
 officials. 
 
 The jurisdictions were not only innumerable, but their 
 powers were ill-defined. In the first place there were the 
 Administration Parliaments, one of which, the Paris Parliament, 
 of Justice. had jurisdiction over almost half the kingdom, 
 while the nine others — ^Bordeaux, Dijon, Rouen, Toulouse, Aix, 
 Rennes, Grenoble, Pau, and Metz — covered very little more 
 than a province each. Below these ten parliaments there 
 were eighty presidial courts, distributed in yet more irregular 
 fashion. But at least all these presidial courts enjoyed similar 
 powers, whereas the bailiwicks and the seneschals' courts, 
 which were beneath them, possessed rights and performed 
 duties of the most varied kinds. And, finally, a number of 
 inferior tribunals did the work of Courts of First Instance in 
 the names of different towns, and noblemen, and abbeys, or in 
 the King's name — and the pretensions and powers of these last 
 were more various still. But this was not all. Side by side with 
 this judicial hierarchy there was another : that of the financial 
 administration : all cases connected with taxation were settled 
 88 
 
THE KINGDOM UNDER LOUIS XIII 
 
 by the Elections, the Finance Offices, the Court of Aids, the 
 Chamber of Accounts, the Court of the Mint, and so forth. 
 Then there was the King's Great Council, the powers of which 
 were somewhat indefinite : its duty was to settle all disagree- 
 ments between the higher courts, but it likewise acted as a 
 Court of First Instance in all cases " evoked " by the sovereign. 
 Add to all these a number of special jurisdictions : the Ecclesias- 
 tical Courts for the clergy ; the Provost-Marshals for military 
 offenders ; the Admiralty Courts and the Salt Water Court for 
 naval cases ; and the " Grand Provost of the Hotel," who dealt 
 with the persons employed in the royal residences, etc. ... In 
 a maze such as this a man might well lose his way from time 
 to time. 
 
 Another vice of the judicial system was the slowness 
 and complexity of procediu-e. Those were happy times for the 
 Slowness of swarm of attorneys and lawyers, advocates and 
 Procedure. bailiffs and process-servers, for the pettifoggers of 
 every degree ! Prescription was a thing unknown, and the 
 most insignificant lawsuit brought in a mass of memoranda 
 and statements, and productions, and objections, scrolls and 
 documents of every kind. These all helped to cram the bags 
 that were perpetually being conveyed from the attorney's office 
 to the court, and from the coiu:t to the magistrate. " I have 
 seven and twenty lawsuits on my hands," quoth a financier 
 in 1625, " and I have the wherewithal to keep them all going 
 for seven and twenty years." Judicial procedure was a perfect 
 jungle, attorneys and advocates had Roman law. Canon law, 
 the Royal Decrees, the innumerable local " customs " which 
 were accepted as law, all at their disposal : and thanks to these 
 they weire able to transform the simplest of cases into a hopeless 
 tangle. 
 
 And meanwhile the bags of law papers, piled one upon the 
 other, ended by costing a perfect fortune. A man who was 
 called on to defend his property had to spend almost the whole 
 of it in the process. Every item was charged in detail. For 
 one single document, the attorney had first to be paid for his 
 advice, and then for the memorandum, the assignation, the copy, 
 the presentation to the court; then there were the charges 
 for time, and the travelling expenses — and what not besides? 
 
 89 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 In the criminal courts, when the guilty man was not rich 
 enough to pay for his own execution, it was the plaintiff who 
 had to bear the expense of the sentence : and the cheapest of 
 capital punishments did not cost less than three or four hundred 
 livres : it is true, indeed, that the bill would contain such 
 entries as the following : "to the executioner, for dressings and 
 medicine for himself , . . to the surgeons who physicked the 
 said executioner and dressed his hurts." And one crjang abuse 
 was that the judge's pay had to come out of the pockets of the 
 persons under his jurisdiction. Till the sixteenth century the 
 amount of the fees had been left to the option of the suitor, oi 
 very nearly so. Now they were fixed, and the magistrates took 
 good care that they should be paid in advance. Without 
 money payment, no justice was to be had. Poor folk could 
 not go to law — and this made them desperate. 
 
 Money payments did not suffice : the judges had to be 
 canvassed, waited on in their antechambers, and if the suitor 
 Civilitiee to was not a man of quality this process would have 
 Judges. to be repeated over and over again before he was 
 
 allowed beyond them : in any case, the magistrate's goodwill 
 had to be won by some offering — wine, or capons, or preserves. 
 Were the magistrates thus courted and paid a corrupt body ? 
 Not at all : on the contrary, their decisions were exceedingly 
 equitable. These visits and presents, a custom, and an openly 
 acknowledged one, involved no particular consequences, and 
 the judicial functionary ran no risk when he delivered judgment 
 according to his conscience, for his office was his own property, 
 and his position consequently both permanent and independent. 
 The magistrate of our day — a functionary serving under a 
 minister on whom his advancement depends — who has no power, 
 in a criminal court, beyond that of giving effect to the verdict oi 
 a jury, and whose decisions, in a civil court, are ordered and 
 directed by the code and the laws of jurisprudence, has nothing 
 Hereditary in common with the hereditary magistracy of 
 Magistrates. those old days, with its huge authority — a separate 
 caste within the nation, full of traditional pride and uprightness, 
 pompous, perhaps, as to its habits, and imbued with an excessive 
 sense of its own dignity, but profoundly conscious, also, of the 
 importance of its social function. Every member of this body 
 90 
 
THE KINGDOM UNDER LOUIS XIII 
 
 from the humble village bailiff to " Monsieur le Premier " who 
 presided over the Parliament of his province, and made his 
 way home, when he entered the town, to the impressive sound 
 of cannon, delivered judgment in perfect freedom, and with 
 much more care for equity than for mere jurisprudence. They 
 did not invariably make the endless procession of laws and 
 customs and decrees their first thought : they very often 
 settled the question in hand according to the dictates of common 
 sense rather than according to precedent. They were what 
 are now known in France as de bons juges. And thus the 
 confusion in the laws frequently ensured the triimiph of equity. 
 
 What did Richelieu do in this domain ? 
 
 Very little in the way of perfecting the judicial machine 
 and rendering justice easier of access to the King's subjects : 
 Richelieu's ^is only endeavour was to make the magistrates 
 contribution more malleable and more submissive to the 
 to Justice. Government. 
 
 We must remember, in fact, that these officers, financial and 
 judicial, these magistrates who owned their posts and held 
 them permanently, were anything but a docile body. When 
 the King published an edict the first difficulty was to get it 
 " received," and the next, when that was done, was to get it 
 applied. The Parliaments had power to delay the " registra- 
 tion " of these edicts : in that case, the Government had 
 either to constrain them to do so by force (and in the case of a 
 strong Government this could be done), or else negotiate with 
 them (and this succeeded if the Government was rich). Even 
 when the edicts had been " received," they were rarely put into 
 force. We see the kings perpetually renewing their own edicts 
 and those of their predecessors : a proof that none of them had 
 been applied so far. And it was this wall of passive opposition 
 and inertia on the officials' part which was to break the force 
 of Colbert's effort, to some extent. 
 
 Not only did the Parliaments, if it so pleased them, refuse 
 to register the King's edicts, but they would address " remon- 
 strances " to His Majesty. The Paris Parliament, more 
 especially, claimed the right, when it registered royal wills, and 
 treaties, and official documents, of examining their clauses — in 
 
 91 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 other words, a certain political power. In these matters 
 Richelieu called it to order. 
 
 When the Paris Parliament decided to "make its very 
 humble remonstrances," the procedure was as follows. A 
 "Remon- president and a councillor presented themselves 
 strances." before the Chancellor, and inquired the date and 
 hour at which the King would be pleased to hear the remon- 
 strances. On the appointed day the members and nine or ten 
 presidents and councillors met at the First President's house, 
 at seven or eight o'clock in the morning. He always accom- 
 panied them. If the Court was at Saint-Germain, which was 
 Louis XIII's favourite place of residence, they reached the 
 town at about eleven o'clock, dined with the First President, 
 who had a lodging there, and waited till the King could receive 
 them : then they robed, and were solemnly introduced into the 
 royal presence. Louis received them in his cabinet, surroimded 
 by his whole Court : he invariably began by scolding them in 
 his usual violent manner : then, somewhat intimidated already 
 by the manner of their reception, they presented their case in 
 the most respectful terms : the Keeper of the Seals, the Super- 
 intendent, the Cardinal, discussed the matter with them : fresh 
 threats followed. When necessary, Louis would summon the 
 most recalcitrant of the coimcillors to his presence, reproach them 
 bitterly, and even send them into exile. 
 
 The provincial Parliaments were no better treated. During 
 the siege of La Rochelle, for instance, the King ordered the 
 First President of the Bordeaux Parliament, M. de Gourgues, 
 another of the Presidents, the Attorney-General, one of the 
 Councillors, and the Keeper of the Records, to his camp. When 
 De Gourgues began his speech, Louis broke in exclaiming in a 
 voice that shook with rage, " To yoiu" knees, little man, before 
 your master ! " He even caught hold of his gown to force him 
 to obey : it was a scandalous scene. Under liOuis XIII the 
 Parliaments, thus terrorized, invariably gave way. 
 
 Beyond their judicial functions, the Parliaments, presidial 
 courts, bailiwicks, and so forth, had hardly any administrative 
 powers, save that of the police, which they preserved, in Paris, 
 through the intermediary of the Attorney-General, more par- 
 ticularly, and also of the Lieutenant of Police : and in the 
 92 
 
THE KINGDOM UNDER LOUIS XIII 
 
 provinces, through the Lieutenants of Police of the various 
 baihwicks and seneschals' courts (which offices were still 
 purchasable and hereditary). 
 
 But the financial jurisdictions (Coiu-t of Aids, Elections, 
 etc.) had power to exercise all sorts of administrative functions : 
 Financial they apportioned the taxes, administered the 
 
 Courts. public properties, kept an eye on the public 
 
 highways and all public works, controlled all matters connected 
 with the pay, supply, and commissariat of troops, and so forth. 
 Now these financial officials, who, like the parliamentary 
 magistrates, owned their offices, and therefore held them 
 permanently, were no more docile than the rest. Richelieu 
 accordingly endeavoured to deprive them, as far as possible, of 
 their administrative powers, which he made over to a set of 
 functionaries whom he could dismiss at will, who were passive 
 instruments in the hands of the Government, and absolutely 
 dependent on it : the Intendants. 
 
 Since the close of the sixteenth century the sovereign had 
 been in the habit of sending inspectors of a kind — Masters of 
 Requests, or Councillors — ^into the provinces to 
 supervise the magistrates and report any irregu- 
 larities in judicial or administrative matters to him. Thus the 
 Intendants were by no means Richelieu's own creation. StiU, 
 he both used and abused them : sometimes he made them into 
 viceroys of some province or town, sometimes they were com- 
 missaries with the armies, sometimes they were judges, some- 
 times they acted as political emissaries or police officers. They 
 were agents for carrying out the law, which, when the hereditary 
 officials with whose interests it clashed were left to put it in 
 motion, frequently remained a dead letter. But in spite of the 
 Intendants, the chief difficulty of the so-called absolute French 
 monarchy down to the days of Louis XIV and Colbert was to 
 make itself obeyed. 
 
 To pronounce sentence on his enemies, the Cardinal needed 
 judges more obedient, more exact in carrying out his intentions. 
 Special Com- than these haughty men of law. For this reason 
 missions. all his adversaries — Chalais, Ornano, Marillac, 
 
 Chateauneuf, Cinq-Mars, and the rest — were withdrawn from 
 the jurisdiction of the ordinary courts, and sent for trial before 
 
 93 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 commissions specially appointed to condemn them : a few 
 magistrates, and occasionally several dukes and peers, were 
 called to sit in the King's own cabinet, it might be, and obliged 
 to express their opinions aloud, in the monarch's presence : such, 
 for instance, was the commission that " tried " La Valette. 
 Theoretically speaking, it must be admitted, the King did not 
 exceed his powers when he took a criminal from his natural 
 judges and arraigned him before others, chosen by himself for 
 that purpose : the monarch was indeed the sovereign judge of 
 all his subjects : the magistrates of the kingdom were no more 
 than his delegates and representatives : all justice was dispensed 
 in his name, and he had power, if he chose, to call any particular 
 cause before himself : in virtue of this principle the murder of 
 the Due de Guise imder Henri III, or that of Concini, was 
 perfectly justifiable. But though Louis XIII in no way 
 exceeded his rights when he confided the duty of trying one 
 or other of his subjects to these special conunissaries, the 
 proceeding was tyrannical and odious in practice, and public 
 opinion openly opposed it. Yet Richelieu constantly resorted 
 to it, and parliamentary protests were all in vain. Masters of 
 Requests travelled all over the kingdom, armed with discre- 
 tionary powers, and acting with a complete disregard for formali- 
 ties. Such a man was Laffemas, known as " the Cardinal's 
 headsman," the "grand sportsman of France," or, vir bonus 
 strangulandi peritus, who would frequently exclaim, " What a 
 pleasure a hanging would be to-day ! " 
 
 " High treason is a crime of such importance," says Riche- 
 lieu, "that he who is guilty of it, even by the merest thought, is 
 Richelieu's worthy of punishment." Now it is evident that 
 arbitrary anything might become an act of high treason : 
 
 powers. to speak of the Government " with a little too 
 
 much freedom," for instance, or to endeavour " to supplant the 
 Cardinal," or even to be one of those " who would have exulted 
 at his fall." This was the exact nature of the sin committed 
 by young Barradas, a favourite " who sprang up in one night, 
 like a gourd, thought the King loved him better than he loved 
 the Cardinal, and — ^this was the last stage of folly — dared to say 
 so to His Majesty." Wherefore the chastisement of banishment 
 fell upon him. The Minister had been fully informed of his 
 94 
 
THE KINGDOM UNDER LOUIS XIII 
 
 most trifling remarks ! — one in particular, which he learnt from 
 Du Plessis, who had it from Cardinal de La Valette, who had 
 it from Bellegarde, who had heard Barradas make it to the 
 Queen : Richelieu reports this with the utmost gravity. 
 
 " Gossip," and " reports," and " they say " — such grounds 
 as these were almost sufficient to induce the Cardinal to banish 
 a man, or hang him, or have him beheaded, or at least hand 
 him over to his commissaries, which came to the same thing. 
 His police service was well done : he had a swarm of spies, such 
 as that cook of M. de Treville's who was paid 400 livres out of 
 the Cardinal's privy purse. And indeed, seeing, as he tells us 
 himself, " that in matters of conspiracy it is almost impossible 
 to obtain mathematical proofs," he was content with presump- 
 tions. Thus Chateauneuf was condemned, not on the evideiwe 
 of facts, but on that of " certain designs " ascribed to him, 
 which were " not altogether consonant with the service of the 
 King " : for reasons of State, in fact. . . . 
 
 Such was the justice dealt out by Richelieu. 
 
 II 
 
 In his financial administration, likewise, Richelieu gave 
 little thought to the remedy of abuses, and none at all to the 
 Richelieu's improvement of the situation of the taxpayer : 
 financial his only endeavour was to secure, by fair means 
 
 policy. or foul, the money necessary for the carrying out 
 
 of his admirable foreign policy. He may, when he entered on 
 his Ministry, have nursed some vague and lofty plan of admini- 
 strative reform. But though he was a splendid diplomatist 
 and a good War Minister, he was an indifferent legislator, and 
 for figures, as he most readily confessed himself, he had no head 
 at all. He left the squeezing of the taxpayers and fooling of 
 the Government's creditors to the superintendents of the 
 finances : from his point of view, D'Effiat and BuUion performed 
 their duties marvellously well, because they always contrived 
 to find him money. Whether this was done by perpetual borrow- 
 ing at usurious rates of interest, by bankruptcies, or by reminting 
 the coinage, deplorable expedients, all of them, which remained 
 the usual practice of the French Monarchy, and aggravated the 
 
 95 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 financial disorder destined to destroy the Ancien Regime, till 
 it was beyond remedy, Richelieu cared not a jot. What he 
 had to do was to overcome the House of Austria and his 
 personal enemies. 
 
 One of these financial expedients was the sale of offices. 
 Even in the earlier half of the seventeenth century the venality 
 connected with these offices was universally held 
 to be an abuse, and Richelieu himself had 
 stigmatized it as such in a noble speech delivered in the States- 
 General of 1614. But when he became Minister he added to 
 the evil. After his time there were alnagers (cloth inspectors), 
 for instance, and even langueyeurs whose business it was to 
 examine pigs' tongues. It must be acknowledged that these 
 newly created offices were no more, as a rule, than a veiled tax 
 levied on officials who already existed. One fine day, for 
 instance, the King would decide that such and such an office 
 should be administered for six months in the year by its actual 
 holder, and for the next six by some newly appointed person : 
 or, again, he would increase the number of councillors of some 
 presidial court. To save themselves from loss of income in 
 the first case, or from loss of dignity in the second, the men in 
 possession bought up the new offices. . . . And this explains 
 how it was that when the State was pressed for money it cut 
 down the pay of its officers or the incomes of the holders of 
 State securities by a few quarters : the two categories occupied 
 a precisely similar position in its estimation. 
 
 After 1636, more especially, the taxes grew very much 
 heavier. The urban taxes, for instance, increased twofold 
 Increase in between 1636 and 1646 : in most towns there 
 Taxation. were octroi charges, and these were doubled for 
 
 the benefit of the Treasury. Yet we must not accept the 
 figures of the official documents as absolutely correct : the 
 accountants calculated according to the amount due on the 
 lists they issued : and there was a considerable residue of 
 unpaid taxes, which were remitted every year : but instead of 
 reducing the nominal value shown on their returns, and tiiereby 
 diminishing their own percentages, the assessors preferr^ a 
 perpetual process of over-estimation, which made their fictitious 
 total far exceed the amount really collected. 
 96 
 
THE KINGDOM UNDER LOUIS XIII 
 
 The distribution of taxation was very unequal. Brittany, 
 Burgundy, Dauphin^, Provence, Languedoc, and the ancient 
 possessions of the Kings of Navarre, such as Bdarn and the 
 County of Foix, had retained the right of summoning tlieir own 
 Estates — elected assemblies which voted the sum due to the 
 King. But besides these districts with Estates of their own, 
 there were others under the direct administration of the King, 
 through his financial agents, in which the taxes, being fixed by 
 the King alone, were far heavier. These were called the regions 
 of Elections. . . . Richelieu undertook, or pretended to under- 
 take, to convert the regions of Estates into Elections. In 
 reality his sole object was to obtain a large sum of money, and 
 thus he permitted the majority of the provinces to buy them- 
 selves out : the only one to lose its Estates was Dauphin^. 
 
 As the major part of the weight of this taxation fell on the 
 lower classes, there was hardly a year after 1630 that did not 
 Revolts witness a revolt of some kind : but the most 
 
 against taxa- terrible was that of the Va-nu-pieds in Normandy, 
 tion : " Les Dm"ing the summer of 1639, the Avranches 
 Va-nu-pieds.' peasants murdered the Lieutenant criminel of 
 Coutances, because they suspected he had come to the town to 
 set up the salt tax, which had not existed there as yet. An 
 ecclesiastic belonging to that neighbourhood, nicknamed Jean 
 Va-nu-pieds, put himself at their head : before long he was 
 backed by an army of 20,000 peasants. The revolt, which had 
 been feebly or unsuccessfully repressed, spread to Caen, Falaise, 
 Bayeux, and Rouen. The authorities had to send Gassion, 
 then a Field-Marshal, with 4000 troops, to put the rebels down. 
 It was a terrible process : the soldiers laid the province waste. 
 " You cannot make too notable an example," wrote the Minister, 
 " besides chastising individuals, you must raze the walls of the 
 towns to the ground. . . ." 
 
 The reader will recognize that under Richeheu's guidance 
 the monarchy was more qualified on the whole to cover France 
 Richelieu's with glory than to rule her on the lines of a 
 Colonial prosperous commercial undertaking. Yet the 
 
 Policy. Cardinal did bestow a certain amount of care on 
 
 commerce, and made some effort to encourage the great com- 
 panies then being formed with a view to the profitable v/orking 
 
 G 97 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 of the French colonies, in which they all failed most lamentably. 
 These colonies, which were wellnigh abandoned by the mother 
 country, had hardly any population except missionaries, such 
 as those Jesuits who by sheer heroism contrived to found a sort 
 of primitive theocratic republic (something like that of Paraguay) 
 among the Hurons of Canada, or pirates, like the " filibusters " 
 of Tortoise Island, or the members of such short-lived com- 
 mercial establishments as that of Pronis in Madagascar. 
 
 The fact was that merchants, emigrants, colonists, traders, 
 sailors, and shipowners all found the risks, physical and 
 pecuniary, more than they could face. The sea, in those days, 
 was an area of evil repute, swarming with malefactors whose 
 numbers far exceeded those of the inoffensive passengers, and 
 wherein the strongest always had right on his side. It was a 
 miraculous piece of good luck when any merchant ship made a 
 Corsairs and voyage without coming across an enemy of some 
 Pirates. kind, corsair or pirate, or even one of the coast- 
 
 guard ships belonging to the French King, which were very apt 
 to strip his subjects on the pretext of protecting them. The 
 Spaniards, the Dutch, the English above all, looted without 
 the slightest regard for treaties, and plundered the French ships 
 for choice ; it must be admitted that these acts of brigandage were 
 repaid with usury by the French sailors whenever opportunity 
 served them. The Mediterranean was infested by Barbary 
 Moors, Tunisians, Algerians, Moroccans, Turks, all of whom 
 lived on the fruits of piracy. In vain did Richelieu's agents 
 conclude truces with Bey, or Dey, or Sultan ; the Christians 
 frequently made the first attack on the Moslem shallops and 
 tartans. But the Infidels raided our very coasts. In 1633 
 there were 25,000 Christian slaves in Algeria, for whom a 
 ransom of 3000 livres per head, on an average, was demanded, 
 and the Dey would only consent to hand over 130 Christians 
 in exchange for 1000 Turks : which proves that one Christian, 
 in his eyes, was worth seven and a half Turks : a heavy price. 
 
 Richelieu made one splendid effort : besides all he did for 
 the army, he succeeded in improvising a war fleet. In 1626 he 
 A Navy created, bought the office of Admiral of France from 
 1626-28. Montmorency, and transformed and enlarged its 
 
 functions, under the title of Grand Master and Superinten- 
 98 
 
THE KINGDOM UNDER LOUIS XIII 
 
 dent of Navigation. Two years later, by the end of 1628, a 
 squadron of sixty-seven ships was already anchored before 
 La Rochelle. Almost all of them were hired ships, indeed, 
 and their crews were hired as well — for in those days a fleet 
 was raised after the same fashion as an army, for temporary 
 service. But by degrees the sailors learnt their business : the 
 officers appointed to command them were no " nobles with 
 curled locks," for whom the Cardinal had scant liking, but 
 " bold stout mariners, bred to salt water and the bottle," and 
 thus the foreign mercenaries, so often insubordinate — such as 
 those Dutchmen who refused, at the last moment, to fire on 
 their co-religionists — ^were finally abolished. Soon, indeed, the 
 King was able to have a few ships built in his own kingdom : in 
 1638 came a great day when the Couronne, a vessel over 200 feet 
 long (the Dutch ships only measured 100), armed with 88 guns, 
 was duly launched, the standard of France, a huge silken flag 
 that had cost 1400 crowns, waving over her in the breeze I 
 Then, on the " Western seas " (the Channel and the Atlantic 
 Ocean) floated galleons and advice-boats, three-deckers, heavy 
 transports, light cutters for reconnoitring, and pinnaces of small 
 tonnage. On the Eastern side (the Mediterranean) the Cardinal 
 kept up a lively war on the Barbary Moors with his galleons, and 
 carried on negotiations with the Dey. But he never succeeded in 
 putting down the pirates, and did not even attempt to prevent 
 the exactions of the Consuls of France and our Ambassador at 
 Constantinople from their own fellow-countrymen. So that 
 French trade in the Levant diminished, and in Louis XIV's 
 time it had wellnigh disappeared. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Richelieu was the very opposite of a freethinker, a " Liber- 
 tme," like Cardinal de Retz. Not only was he, like Louis XIII, 
 rjijjg profoundly pious and regular in the performance 
 
 " Clericalism " of his rehgious duties, he was even, if I may call 
 o! the it so, " clerical " — that is to say, he was fond of 
 
 Executive. surrounding himself with ecclesiastics, and of con- 
 fiding every sort of duty to them, even those for which we should 
 now think a priest most unsuited, such as directing the navy 
 
 99 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 (Archbishop Sourdis), or military operations (Cardinal de La 
 Valette), or leading the contingents of troops sent on active 
 service from various dioceses (the Bishops of Montpellier, Nimes, 
 Mende, and AIbi, in 1639). It is true that in those days priests, 
 even those most fervent in their devotion, did not always profess 
 to be patterns of angelic gentleness. Father Joseph is a case 
 in point. " Kill them all ! " this pious Capuchin calmly replied 
 one day to a captain who had asked him for orders, and then 
 quietly went on saying his Mass. Indeed the habit of em- 
 ploying churchmen in the most secular occupations, and 
 even in warfare, was widespread in every country. Richelieu 
 himself set the example. He laboured with all his strength 
 for what he believed to be the welfare of France, and far 
 harder than he laboured for the good of the Church. Not, 
 we may be sure, that he took no interest in the progress of 
 Catholicism and of virtue, but these, in his mind, came after 
 the interests of the wState. 
 
 Now the Church of France was at this period a prey to 
 undoubted abuses, such as commendams. A commendatory 
 Abuses in the abbot lived in Paris, or elsewhere, and when the 
 Galilean fancy took him to pay a visit to his monastery, he 
 
 Church. ^ set up his residence in a more or less pleasant 
 habitation which he had built for himself, outside the monastery 
 walls. He received the abbey revenues, on condition that he 
 kept the abbey buildings in repair (which he did as little as 
 might be), and ensured the support of the prior and monks 
 (whom he starved when they had not forced him into an agree- 
 ment as to the share each was to have, by a series of law- 
 suits). The same state of things obtained as to the parish 
 ciures. The men who drew the incomes were not, as a rule, the 
 men who did the parish work. Many of the titular priests did 
 not live in their parishes at all ; they had deputies, who heard 
 the parishioners' confessions, administered the Holy Com- 
 munion to them, and buried them. And the villages that were 
 served to this extent were the lucky ones ! Many others were 
 forced to go to law to escape total deprivation of religious 
 services, and induce their parish priest to send down some 
 other priest to perform his duties. Canonries were conferred 
 on the same principle as the cures of souls : but the canons did 
 100 
 
THE KINGDOM UNDER LOUIS XIII 
 
 not even send substitutes. As for the bishops, they were 
 even less often in residence than the canons and priests and 
 abbots. 
 
 At that period no priest had any right to an income in virtue 
 of his priesthood : thus if he was to live at all it was essential 
 Status of the that he should have a benefice. Now in the 
 Clergy. kingdom of France the number of clerics far 
 
 exceeded the number of benefices available ; and thus many 
 ecclesiastics, and even priests, were forced to earn their livelihood 
 by manual labour, like common workmen, and thought them- 
 selves most fortunate if they could contrive to get into the 
 service of some wealthy nobleman who would employ them to 
 do his errands, if he did not put them to even less exalted tasks, 
 such as to stand on the footboard of his coach, dressed up in 
 some lackey's jerkin : this at least was the fashion in which 
 the Comte de Grammont utilized his chaplain, M. Poussatin. 
 
 Benefices of every kind, from the humblest parish livings to 
 the richest abbeys, were bestowed without the slightest regard 
 Scandals of for age or fitness. Richelieu gave the bishopric 
 Patronage. of Grasse to young Godeau, in return for a copy 
 of verses, and a monastery to Maugars, a violinist whose playing 
 had pleased him : the son of the Duchesse de Guise held Saint- 
 Denis when he was seventeen : Chatillon was given to the 
 Comtesse de Guiche : Sully, a Huguenot, held four abbeys. 
 These laymen, women, and Protestants were not the titular 
 abbots : their benefices were held for them by a dummy, some 
 ecclesiastic paid for the work, who collected the income in his 
 own name : none the less was the abuse a crying one. As to 
 the cures of souls, prebends, and bishoprics, they were given to 
 clerics only, but with no greater consideration for individual 
 merit. The nobles and magistrates looked on these benefices 
 as so many gratuities which the King was bound to bestow on 
 the junior members of their families. "An abbey would be 
 stipulated for as a young girl's dowry, and a colonel would 
 reorganize his regiment with the revenue of a priory" (Vol- 
 taire). And naturally these younger sons of great families, 
 who had gone into the Church to ensure themselves the where- 
 withal to keep up their rank in the great world, these 
 pious great ladies, and juvenile or schoolboy bishops, all these 
 
 101 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 amateur ecclesiastics, if we may so describe them, made strange 
 priests at times : some were atheists, like Bishop Lavardin, some 
 debauchees, like the Bishop of Broc or the Abbe of Gondi, some 
 men of scandalous life, like Canon Bois-Robert. And while 
 many convents of nuns were not unlike those described by 
 Boccaccio, the sisters in many others lived in utter indifference 
 to the rules of their order, and received " all sorts of boarders, 
 without distinction " : ladies who " desired to go to law with 
 their husbands or to conceal the disorder of their own lives," 
 girls who were " trying to escape the pursuit of one gallant, or 
 await or catch another " (Francion). , . . 
 
 At the Court of Henri IV unbelief had been very much in 
 fashion, and atheism the vogue. All through Louis XIII's 
 The reign, but more especially during its opening 
 
 " Libertines." period, the " Libertines " made a great uproar, 
 and cast clumsy scorn on the mysteries of religion. We need 
 not be astonished to learn that Father Mersenne reckoned Paris 
 to contain at least 40,000 " Libertines," when we realize that 
 Richelieu himself admitted avowed freethinkers to his intimate 
 circle. M. de Matha and M. de Fontrailles charged at the 
 crucifix, sword in hand, one day, shouting " The enemy ! " 
 And trials such as that of Theophile de Viau had no terrors for 
 these gentlemen. . . . But indeed more ardent missionaries 
 than the tipstaffs of the French Parliaments would have been 
 needed to stem the flood of irreligion. 
 
 Such missionaries there were : the period of the freethinkers 
 was also the period of Berulle, Bourdoise, Vincent-de-Paul, 
 Reaction Olier, and Ranee. It saw the birth of the first 
 
 against seminaries : Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet (1620 
 
 Unbelief. and 1644), Saint-Sulpice (1641), and a whole 
 
 efflorescence of religious orders, the Oratorians, the Nuns of 
 Saint Magdalen, the Sisters of Charity, the Lazarists, the 
 Eudists, who carried their good example into the provinces, 
 warred against ignorance and reformed the clergy — aided by 
 the Compagnie du Saint-Sacremeni. 
 
 It was towards the year 1625 that a virtuous nobleman, the 
 Due de Ventadour, laid the foundations of this secret society, 
 destined ultimately to obtain an enormous development. The 
 " Brothers " who composed it belonged to every class : priests 
 102 
 
THE KINGDOM UNDER LOUIS XIII 
 
 and laymen, small tradesmen, lawyers, great lords, and their 
 names were known to the Superior only. Now this devout 
 The Company association was not content with exercising charity, 
 of the Holy improving the condition of the galley-slaves, for 
 Sacrament. instance, visiting the sick and the prisons, and 
 alleviating, with great success, the misery of the country-folk, 
 during the Fronde : it also sought to fight against heresy and 
 irreligion, and to " avenge the honour of God," by watching 
 over the morals of the country. Thus it made a very successful 
 struggle against Jansenism, which it took to be a kind of under- 
 hand plot on the part of the Reformers, and against the Protes- 
 tants themselves, whom it persecuted, individually, with an 
 ingenuity which has never been equalled, putting Huguenot 
 artisans on a sort of " index," making life impossible, by a 
 variety of small annoyances, to a heretic physician here, a 
 lawyer there, now to a pastor, and then again to an official. It 
 was the duty of the " Brothers " to make private inquiries 
 concerning the private life of every individual, to know who 
 were well and who were ill conducted, to discover freethinkers, 
 and inform against them in unobtrusive fashion. In the end 
 the " Cabal of the Devout " exasperated the whole community, 
 but though the identity of the pious spies was suspected, it was 
 impossible to establish it. And, further, the Company had some 
 very powerful protectors : after the death of Louis XIII, both 
 the Regent and Gaston d'Orl^ans favoured it, and the Prince 
 de Conti requested it to furnish him with " reliable reports as 
 to everything that happened " on his country properties. But 
 Mazarin had no liking for this clandestine and constantly 
 increasing power, and Colbert liked it even less. So much so, 
 that after 1661 the " Cabal of the Devout," betrayed and 
 openly revealed, was laid imder an interdict, its meetings 
 proclaimed, its members hunted down. After the year 1666 it 
 ceased to exist, save in a few provincial towns, and the Tartuffe 
 whom Molifere's contemporaries hissed would seem to have been 
 a caricature of a " Brother." 
 
 Richeheu tolerated the activities of the devout party and 
 the founders of new Orders, but gave them little encouragement, 
 and his claim — ^in that political will and testament which sets 
 forth what he would fain have done more than what he really 
 
 103 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 accomplished, and is, in fact, a monument to his good inten- 
 tions — to have originated the great improvement in Catholic 
 Richelieu and morals that took place under Louis XIII is very 
 the taxation ol ill-founded. In reality he took far more pains to 
 the Clergy, improve what we may call the yield of the Catholic 
 clergy to the State than the morals of its individual members. 
 The richest order in the kingdom contributed nothing to its 
 treasury beyond the tithes and a " free gift " grudgingly 
 voted, year by year, by the Assembly of the Clergy. In 1611 
 the King, without further ceremony, issued an order that all 
 beneficed persons were to pay a considerable portion of their 
 revenues into his coffers (abbeys, bishoprics, and ordinary 
 benefices were to pay 33 per cent. ; cures, 17 per cent. ; and 
 chapters, 10 per cent.). So great was the clamour that instantly 
 rose from the Assembly of the Clergy that the Government 
 compoimded for a sum of 5,500,000 livres, to be paid in three 
 yearly instalments. And two archbishops and three bishops 
 refused to set their hands even to this engagement. Richelieu 
 responded by a minor coup d'Stat quite in his usual manner. 
 D'Emery was sent down to the Assembly, and ordered the 
 protesting dignitaries, in the King's name, to retire instantly to 
 their dioceses — a punishment keenly felt by a prelate in those 
 days. The Archbishop of Sens replied that " he listened with 
 honour and respect to everything that came from the King, 
 even to abusive words," and when d'Emery answered that no 
 words coming from the King were abusive, " You must give 
 me time to finish," quoth Monseigneur de Sens, " and then you 
 will hear that I call them abusive, coming from your lips ! " 
 After which the Assembly was left to continue its deliberations 
 in peace. . . . 
 
 Such was the religious work of the Cardinal de Richelieu. 
 
 IV 
 
 The first personage in the kingdom, after the King himself, 
 the Dauphin, and the Queen, was Monsieur, the King's brother. 
 He took precedence, of course, of the Princes of the Blood — 
 Henri de Cond6 and the Comte de Soissons, second cousins 
 of Louis XIII. Below these, and far below the members of 
 104 
 
THE KINGDOM UNDER LOUIS XIII 
 
 the royal family, were the nobles. First in order came the 
 " foreign princes " (younger sons of reigning houses) living in 
 The Royal France, or petty sovereign princes who were at the 
 Princes and same time subjects of the French crown, such as 
 Princes of the Guise (a younger son of the House of Lorraine), 
 Blood. Bouillon (Prince de Sedan), Valentinois (Prince de 
 
 Monaco), Nemours, Nevers, Luxembourg, and so forth ; and 
 the " dukes and peers," greatly increased in number by 
 Louis XIII, and more especially by Louis XIV. Dukes without 
 a peerage were few and far between : Louis XIII did create a 
 few by patent — that is to say, he gave a few of his courtiers 
 leave to call themselves dukes for their own lives — but these 
 were mere courtesy titles, semi-official, and not recognized by 
 Parliament. As for the other titles, baron, viscount, count, or 
 marquis, no one of them had any more value than the other. 
 For in those days " nobility was attached to the individual, 
 whereas titles went with the soil " (D'Avenel). If a nobleman 
 sold his lands — a marquisate, for instance — he also sold to the 
 purchaser (unless he was a commoner) the right to bear the 
 title of marquis as well as the name of that particular mar- 
 quisate. Fathers were in the habit of conferring the name of 
 some one of their fiefs on each of their sons. But these sons 
 could not take the name of the paternal property with titles of 
 a lower rank, according to the custom obtaining in France since 
 the thirteenth century : " a property raised to a marquisate 
 conferred one title of marquis, and not the subsidiary titles of 
 count, viscount, and baron as well." The antiquity and 
 celebrity of the name was what was treasured, the title had no 
 importance at all. At Court many noblemen put on the title 
 of count or marquis just as they would have put on a fine coat, 
 and nobody offered any protest : others, on the contrary, did 
 not even adopt the de (wrongly believed to indicate noble 
 birth), which was often used by plain artisans. 
 
 It was the moral right, and almost the duty, of the members 
 of the royal family to take some share in the government of 
 the country : " a Prince of the Blood must make civil war 
 rather than forgo any part of his dignity," wrote Retz himself. 
 Now Richelieu allowed Marie de' Medici to die in a foreign 
 land : he forced Gaston into acts of the most dishonouring 
 
 105 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 pusillanimity : Soissons perished at La Marf^e : Cond^— a 
 rapacious, intelligent little old man, so filthy that RicheUeu 
 used to send him word that he was to clean himself on the days 
 when he visited the King — only saved himself by his flattering 
 tongue, and was too happy to marry his son, the future hero of 
 Rocroy, to one of the Cardinal's nieces. . . . This was the 
 treatment Richelieu applied to all these selfish and mischief- 
 making princes. 
 
 In the provinces the old military nobility tended to die 
 out, as a consequence of its pecuniary ruin. The whole of the 
 The Provincial fortune of the nobles had been in lands, and very 
 Nobility. often these lands only brought in the most 
 
 miserable income, because their owners had alienated them, in 
 the Middle Ages, in consideration of a yearly rent, the cens, 
 fixed once for all, and permanently paid, by tenants who passed 
 their holdings on from father to son : since that time the 
 purchasing power of money had greatly diminished. A half- 
 penny may have been a fair rent for an acre of ground in the 
 Middle Ages, but when that acre brought in no more than a 
 single copper coin in the days of Louis XIII, its owner found 
 himself by no means a wealthy man ! 
 
 To ensure themselves a livelihood, the ruined nobles married 
 the daughters of rich magistrates and financial magnates — and 
 thus the provincial aristocracy renewed itself. Or else they 
 begged offices and benefices and sinecures of the King's bounty — 
 and thus the Court nobility was formed. Richelieu — and in 
 this he pointed out the way to Louis XIV — did all he could to 
 develop this aristocracy of parasitical courtiers kept by the 
 King, which was certainly injurious to the economic life and 
 well-being of the nation, but which was to develop French wit 
 to its most exquisite point. 
 
 Yet at the time of which I write the manners and customs 
 of the nobility — even at the H6tel de Rambouillet — ^were still 
 Education of coarse, and very far removed from the refinement 
 the Nobility. they were later to attain. A well-born youth 
 was taught, in his boyhood, to fence, to dance, a little music, a 
 still smaller amount of mathematics : when he was fourteen or 
 fifteen he was attached for a certain period to some regiment, 
 so as to be taught his military duties : then he spent fifteen 
 106 
 
THE KINGDOM UNDER LOUIS XIII 
 
 months at a Paris " academy " to learn to be " a good horse- 
 man " : and there his education ended. Wherefore noblemen, 
 as a rule, had no desire to gain a reputation for politeness or 
 wit ; their aim was to be known for their bravery and " magni- 
 ficence." They were quite content if their houses swarmed 
 with servants and lackeys ; if they owned one or two of those 
 heavy coaches drawn by six horses and sumptuously lined with 
 velvet, bilt cruelly devoid of springs, the leathern curtains of 
 which afforded the traveller but little shelter from rain and 
 wind, but which bore at least three or four lackeys on their 
 footboards ; and if they could have this heavy machine attended, 
 as it bmnped along the streets, by a bevy of servitors, who 
 made a hideous clatter and thus clearly demonstrated the 
 grandeur of their master's house. '^ 
 
 Their chief quality was bravery — a mad, ridiculous, but 
 fascinating bravery. " Do you not know," said one Italian, 
 
 ^ ,,. " that Frenchmen go to their deaths as if they 
 
 Duellmg. . . • .1 . • o ;. 
 
 were to rise agam the next mornmg ! . . . 
 
 About the year 1625 hardly a week went by without some duel 
 
 at the Court. Men drew their blades on account of the merest 
 
 trifles, and sometimes for no reason at all, simply for the 
 
 pleasure of so doing. " Sir," Boutteville would say to any 
 
 gentleman whose reputation as a duellist offended his own 
 
 claim to be the first in that particular, " I have been assured 
 
 that you are brave : we must fight ! " A certain Chevalier 
 
 d'Andrieux, we are told, killed seventy-two men with his own 
 
 hand. As a rule the " challenger " and the " challenged " did not 
 
 appear alone on the field : each party was supported by two or 
 
 three, or even four, friends, and these " seconds " fought with 
 
 each other. One day in 1638 Bussy-Rabutin received a visit from 
 
 a man of noble birth with whom he had no previous acquaintance : 
 
 Having heard that I had an affair with Busc, and was looking for him, 
 he came to offer to inform me of his whereabouts, on condition that I 
 would employ his services. ... I thanked him a thousand times over. . . . 
 I begged him to consider that I already had fovu* friends to support me, 
 and that if I accepted the honoiu: he desired to do me, it would become 
 a battle. . . . He expressed his satisfaction with my reasons, and, said 
 he, " As I cannot be on your side, sir, you will not take it ill if I go and 
 offer my service to M. de Busc, and tell him you are here 1 " I esteemed 
 this gentleman's behaviour highly. 
 
 107 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Valengay, who was successively Knight, Bailli, and Com- 
 mander of the Order of Malta, had been a famous dueUist : this 
 did not prevent him from dying a Cardinal. He it was who, as 
 second to the Marquis des Portes, was fighting, one day, with 
 Cavoye, who later became Captain of Richelieu's Guard. 
 " Cavoye wounded the Chevalier de Valengay with two little 
 thrusts, for he was very skilful, and said, ' Monsieur le Chevalier, 
 have you had enough ? ' The Chevalier replied : ' A little 
 patience, don't flutter about so much ! ' and dealt him so shrewd 
 a blow that he very nearly died of it " (Tallemant). , . . And 
 indeed duels very often bore a close resemblance to assassina- 
 tions. Louvigny — ^the man who betrayed Chalais — was fighting 
 one day with Hocquincourt, afterwards a Marshal of France, 
 and said to him, " Let us take off our spurs." Then, " as the 
 other bent down to do it, he gave him a sword-thrust that ran 
 him through and through." The Chevalier de Guise ran his 
 adversary through before he had time to draw his sword at all : 
 every one agreed that this proceeding was somewhat " too 
 princely " : yet many gentlemen of lesser degree behaved 
 exactly like the Chevalier de Guise. One of Puymorin's servants 
 gave Balagny, with whom his master was fighting in the middle 
 of the Rue des Petits-Champs, a thrust with a pitchfork in his 
 back. But it is only fair to add that such performances were 
 more characteristic of the sixteenth century : as a general rule 
 the duellists of the days of Louis XIII prided themselves on 
 destroying each other with every courtesy. 
 
 Since the time of Henri IV the sovereign frequently 
 endeavoured to check these fights, which were forbidden by 
 the Church, and in which the flower of the French nobility 
 sometimes fell. But law has never succeeded in overriding 
 fashion, and the various edicts against duelling produced no 
 more effect than the ordinances forbidding splendour of attire. 
 And indeed Louis XIII was the first to scoff at men who would 
 not fight. If Boutteville had not shown such insolence, the 
 King would never have condemned him. 
 
 By the time Frangois de Montmorency, Comte de Boutte- 
 ville, Lord of Lusse and other places, had reached his twenty- 
 third year, he had fought more than twenty duels. In 1624, 
 after his meeting with Pontgibault, Parliament issued a writ for 
 108 
 
THE KINGDOM UNDER LOUIS XIII 
 
 his apprehension : he left Paris in broad daylight, in a coach 
 drawn by six horses, escorted by two hundred friends and ser- 
 The vants, and took service in Flanders : as soon as 
 
 Boutteville he came back, which he did in the most haughty 
 Encounter. fashion, without taking the smallest notice of the 
 sentence of death by default which had been passed upon him, 
 he slew Thorigny, and soon afterwards wounded the Marquis de 
 La Frette. Louis XIII had just signed a fresh edict : angered 
 by this feat, he would have had Boutteville arrested, but the 
 latter took refuge at Brussels in company with the Comte des 
 Chapelles, the friend of his boyhood, and his usual " second." 
 Yovmg Beuvron went to Brussels, and challenged him to fight. 
 Any avoidance of the challenge on Boutteville's part was 
 impossible : as he had promised the Archduchess-Governor of 
 the Low Countries that he would not draw his sword within 
 her territories, it was settled that the meeting should take place 
 in Paris. And thus it came about that on May 12, 1627, six 
 gentlemen got out of their coaches on the Place Royale, drew 
 their swords, and fought so fiercely that in a few minutes 
 Beuvron was disarmed by Boutteville, who granted him his life, 
 Bussy d'Amboise had been killed by Des Chapelles, and La 
 Berthe grievously wounded by Buquet. While the dead man 
 was carried back to his lodging in his coach, and the wounded 
 duellist transported to the H6tel de Mayenne, the survivors 
 mounted their horses and fled. Beuvron and his squire made 
 for England, Boutteville and Des Chapelles hurried in the 
 direction of Lorraine. That night, by a mere chance, these 
 two were recognized and detained in a tavern where they had 
 halted for the night. In vain did all Boutteville's relations 
 plead for him. His wife cast herself at the King's feet : Louis 
 passed on without replying to her prayer, saying to those about 
 him, " I am sorry for the wife, but I will and must preserve 
 my authority." He was convinced Boutteville had intended 
 to defy him, and that he could not forgive. 
 
 In 1633 Corneille was able to put a duel on the stage (in 
 the Galerie du Palais) without eliciting the smallest symptom 
 of displeasure on the part of King or Cardinal. Thus the 
 executions of Boutteville and Des Chapelles caused no diminu- 
 tion in the number of duels fought in France : the ^arechal de 
 
 109 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Grammont was to relate, at a subsequent period, that nine 
 hundred gentlemen lost their lives in single combat in the 
 course of the Regency of Aime of Austria. 
 
 The authorities were powerless against the abuse of duelling, 
 only an alteration in the manners of the country was to bring 
 about a change. 
 
 Before Richelieu's time the power of the sovereign was 
 limited by the authority of certain constituted bodies, and 
 Checks on the certain important personages, by the special 
 Monarchy. rights of certain provinces, or certain towns, by 
 very ancient institutions, or traditions that were centuries old, 
 and by customs as imperious in their operation as any laws. 
 Louis Xin and his Minister did their utmost to diminish these 
 autonomous powers and customs and local rights, all the things, 
 in fact, that hampered the sovereign's action. They were very 
 far from attaining complete success : even in the days of 
 Louis XIV the exercise of the royal will was held in check by 
 local traditions and resistance. Nevertheless, after Richelieu's 
 Ministry the ruUng power was more successfully concentrated 
 in the King's hands than it had ever been : and through the 
 Intendants, who were absolutely subordinate to the Govern- 
 ment, a really central administration was introduced in every 
 quarter. What is known as the absolute monarchy, as it 
 existed in France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 
 dates from Richeheu rather than from Ijouis XIV. 
 
 Richelieu was neither a speculator nor a doctrinaire : he 
 was a man of action, and not an administrator nor a legislator. 
 Richelieu's Thus he did not proceed methodically in his work 
 ideal of the of destruction and reform : he did not attempt to 
 State. recast the administration of the French kingdom, 
 
 on principles of his own, into one homogeneous system. He 
 contented himself with adapting certain details. " In an 
 ancient monarchy," he says in his PoUtical Testament, with 
 a wisdom that reminds us of Renan, certain " imperfections 
 have passed into habits, and the disorder they cause becomes, 
 not altogether uselessly, a part of the State." Yet it might not 
 110 
 
THE KINGDOM UNDER LOUIS XIII 
 
 have been a bad thing to arrange this disorder, as far as possible, 
 and labour to render it easier of endurance for the King's 
 subjects. This the Cardinal never attempted. He never tried, 
 for instance, to make justice more just, or the financial agents 
 of the sovereign less thievish ; in short, to ameliorate the social 
 condition of the inhabitants of the kingdom ; his only aim was 
 to make officials still more submissive, and existing institutions 
 more flexible, to put more money into the coffers of the State, 
 and render France, in fine, a better and stronger instrument of 
 strength and power in the hands of the monarch who ruled her. 
 This was the ideal of almost all the rulers of former days : the 
 individual good of each Frenchman was not their first thought, 
 as it is with those who now govern the country : the end and aim 
 of all policy, in the eyes of such a man as Richelieu, was the 
 glory of the collective body, of France — ^in other words, the 
 glory of the King. 
 
 WoKKs TO Consult for Chapters III and IV : Works already 
 quoted, notably those of d'Avenel and Hanotaux, and the Memoirs of 
 La Porte, Montglat, Campion, Du Plessis-Besangon, the Marquis de 
 Chouppes, Puys^gur, etc. J. P. Basserie, La Conjuration de Cinq- 
 Mars (1896) ; v. Cousin, Mme. de Hautefort (1856); Vicomte de NoaUles, 
 Episodes de la Guerre de Trente Ans (1906-1908) ; Pfere de Rochemonteix, 
 Nicolas Caussin, Confesseur de Louis XIII et le Cardinal de Richelieu 
 (1911); A. Waddington, La Republique des Provinces-Vnies, la France et 
 les Pays-Baa espagnols de 1630 a 1650 (1895) ; Raoul Allier, La Cabale des 
 Divots (1902), and Rebelliare in the Reuue des Deux Mondes (1910) ; Abbe 
 de Broglie, Saint Vincent de^ aul (1897) ; E. Glesson, Le Parlement de 
 Paris (1901) ; Hanotaux, Eludes sur le XVI^' et XVIP"" Siecles 
 (1886) ; Origines de Vinstitution des Intendants (1884) ; Perrens, Les 
 Libertins en Prance (1899) ; P. de Valssiere, Gentilshnmmes campagnards de 
 Vancienne France (1904). 
 
 Ill 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF SOCIETY AND OF CLASSIC 
 LITERATURE 
 
 I. Society : The Aslrie and the Prdcieuses. II. Literature, from 
 Malherbe to Comeille. 
 
 AN important development marked the reign of Louis XIII : 
 " the organization of the aristocratic class into a social 
 world" (Lanson). The feudal aristocracy completed 
 its transformation into a Court aristocracy, and the nobles, 
 growing more and more into the habit of living either in the 
 ETolution ol King's circle or in Paris, and having nothing to 
 fashionable do save look at each other, and compare their 
 Society. ideas, their feelings, and their manner of life, 
 
 became " men of the world." Already, under the later Valois 
 kings, " society " had attained a certain brilliance, but this 
 was at Court only, and during the first few years of the reign 
 of Louis XIII the refined and gallant manners of the old 
 courtiers of Henri III were as much admired as the super- 
 annuated graces of the Ancien BSgime towards the year 
 1820. When the religious turmoil of the close of the sixteenth 
 centiu-y subsided, and France began to rest and recover, imder 
 the restorative rigime of Henri IV, a small society once more 
 collected — not at the rough and unceremonious Court of the 
 " Roi Vert-Galant," indeed, but in the city. This society was 
 polite, fond of good talk and Uterature, almost pedantic, even 
 at that period, and for its benefit a certain number of authors 
 began to write novels the subject of which was love. By 
 degrees the number of these " men of the world " increased : 
 under Louis XIII they were so numerous as to be able to ensure 
 the prodigious success of a fashionable and psychological novel 
 entitled L'Astrie, and to create the vogue of the first French 
 112 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF SOCIETY 
 
 salon, that of Mme. de Rambouillet, while at the same time, 
 by a due interaction, novel and salon both did a great deal to 
 disseminate refinement and courtesy. 
 
 Honord d'Urf6's Astrie was derived from the tales of love and 
 chivalry of the sixteenth century and from the Greek, Italian, 
 D'TJrfS's and Spanish pastorals of Heliodorus, Tatius, 
 
 "Astrfie." Longus, Tasso, Guarini, Montemayor, and other 
 writers — all very popular since the Renaissance. The story is 
 somewhat insipid, the style most charming. It begins by 
 showing us Celadon, a lover, after addressing most melancholy 
 speeches to the ring and the ribbon his ungrateful mistress has 
 left in his hands, throwing himself into the Lignon, in his despair 
 at the unjust jealousy manifested by Astrde, a shepherdess. 
 His life is saved by the nymphs of Isoure, and disguised as a 
 shepherdess he soon becomes the unrecognized but intimate 
 friend of his former lady-love. He does not gather courage 
 to appear in the fair lady's sight clad in his own habili- 
 ments until she herself has expressed her desire to see him, 
 and that is not until the scruples of Astrde, the unhappy 
 passion of Galatde, the loves of Diane and Sylvandre, the 
 adventiures of the inconstant Hylas, the far too lengthy speeches 
 of the over-sapient Druid Adamas, the war, the siege of 
 Marcilly, and a hundred other episodes that perpetually cut the 
 slight thread of the story, have filled up the five volumes of 
 which the novel consists. 
 
 Now the success of this tale — ^the first three volumes appeared 
 between 1607 and 1619, and the last two in 1627 — was something 
 incredible : for the space of thirty years the whole of France 
 sighed for Astree or dreamt of Celadon. In certain circles, so 
 Tallemant tells us, " a favourite amusement, among others, 
 was to exchange written questions about the Astr6e, and those 
 who gave faulty answers had to pay a pair of gloves for each 
 mistake." In 1624 an " Academy of True Lovers " was founded 
 in Germany, the members of which, all German gentlemen and 
 Teutonic dames, adopted the names and habits of the shepherd 
 of the Lignon, learned how to guide tender lambkins with their 
 crooks, and strove to love each other gracefully. During the 
 Fronde the Astrie was read as generally as the Grand Cyrus, 
 and it is evident that the majority of Mazarin's terrible foes, 
 
 H 113 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 masculine and feminine, plotted less from conviction or even 
 self-interest than for the sake of romance and in the hope of 
 resembling the heroes with whose doings their heads were filled. 
 In Louis XIV's time, and even long after it, Honore d'Urfe still 
 nad many enthusiastic readers, some of whom, such as La Fon- 
 taine, Mme. de Sevigne, Racine, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau 
 bore names far from obscure. , . . Yet how dull the flowing 
 long-winded story with its endless succession of episodes and 
 its graceful monotonous phrases seems to us now ! We do not 
 possess the robust appetite our fathers boasted : blash as to 
 romances, and hard to amuse, we need liveher and more highly 
 seasoned narratives, couched in language less noble, less majestic, 
 but more dramatic and more spirited. . . . On the other hand, 
 we must consider, when we try to understand the request in which 
 this book remained, that for twenty years it was a kind of manual 
 of good manners : the budding man of fashion foiuid in its pages 
 the pattern after which he must model his speech, his epistolary 
 style, his manner of thought : it taught him how to treat ladies 
 with the respect and admiration that was their due, to discourse 
 to them in language at once respectful, flowery, and ingenious ; 
 to write them pompous and literary letters ; in short, all his 
 lessons in politeness and deportment were drawn from the 
 AstrSe. . . . Add to all this the fact that Honor6 d'Urf^'s 
 book was entirely devoted to the glorification of the fair sex, at a 
 time when the trimnph of that sex in French society was greater 
 than it has ever been, either before or since. From the day on 
 which, under the influence of the Platonism of the Renaissance, 
 the famous quarrel broke out between the partisans and the 
 detractors of " the ladies " — a quarrel which absorbed part of the 
 The first literary effort of the sixteenth century and was 
 
 " Feminists." carried on into the seventeenth — ^the " feminists," 
 if we may so call them, had gained the upper hand, at Court at 
 least, both in the higher ranks of literature and in society, and 
 had routed those who still persisted in simply regarding woman 
 as the heroine of the ribald stories of the Middle Ages, the 
 mere female, at once dangerous and despicable. And with 
 them had triumphed the neo-platonic theory of love, the credo 
 of the PrScieuses — ^which one of their number, and certainly 
 not the least important, Mme. de Sabl^, has formulated in terms 
 114 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF SOCIETY 
 
 that would have gained the approval, a century earlier, of the 
 " Marguerite des Marguerites " or of H^rouet : declaring that 
 
 " Men, without committing any]crime, might cherish the most 
 tender feelings for women, that the desire to please them gave 
 them wit, and inspired them with liberality and all sorts of 
 virtues ; but that women, on the other hand, who were the orna- 
 ment of the world and made to be served and worshipped, 
 should never permit anything beyond respect on the part of 
 men." 
 
 Did Mme. de Sable, in her own practice, really never permit 
 anything else ? " The love that lady bore herself," Mme, de 
 Motteville tells us, "made her a little too sensitive to that 
 she inspired in men. ..." 
 
 Be this as it may, platonic love — la belle galanterie, as Anne 
 of Austria called it — was all the fashion among the Predeuses. 
 And the Astrie, entirely devoted to the glorification of intellec- 
 tual passion, to the praise of respectful lovers and virtuous 
 mistresses, and thus responding to the intimate feelings of the 
 most refined section of contemporary society, well deserved to be, 
 as it was, the gospel of the H6tel de Rambouillet. 
 
 It was towards the year 1609 that Catherine de Vivonne, 
 Marqtiise de Rambouillet, then about twenty years of age, 
 Madame de declared herself thoroughly disgusted with the 
 Rambouillet. habits and manners of the courtiers of Henri IV, 
 and announced that she " would no longer attend the gatherings 
 at the Louvre." She retired to her own house, and as she was 
 amiable, extremely cultivated, knowing both Spanish and 
 Italian, as she was rich, as she was so witty that, so Mile, de 
 Scud^ry assures us, one afternoon spent in her ruelle, even 
 without seeing her face, " and on one of those siunmer days 
 when ladies darken their chambers artificially to exclude 
 the great heat," was enough to make a visitor fall in love 
 with her : as, besides all this, " all her passions " were " sub- 
 servient to her reason " ; and as, to conclude, she possessed 
 that gift of entertaining which is the vocation of certain members 
 of her sex, her house soon became the rallying-point of a select 
 society of lords, ladies, and men of letters. 
 
 This dwelling stood almost on the site of the block of houses 
 on the Place du Palais-Royal just facing the present Magasins du 
 
 115 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Louvre. In 1618 Mme. de Rambouillet set herself to arrange 
 it according to a plan of her own invention, most original, as it 
 would seem, and admirably suited to her future intentions. She 
 was the first person, so Tallemant tells us, who thought of 
 " having a room painted in any other colour than red or tawny 
 brown " : her own chamber, hung with blue velvet enlivened 
 with gold and silver, was soon to become famous. At that period 
 the various rooms in a Parisian house were not each reserved for 
 any particular piu:pose. Their denizens slept and ate, and 
 received company, in any cabinet, or chamber, or antechamber, 
 or large apartment, just as it suited their convenience at the 
 moment. Mme. de Rambouillet generally received her friends 
 in her blue chamber. Her bed, probably set with its head 
 against a wall, was separated from the rest of the room by a 
 balustrade, and it was a great favour to be admitted to the space 
 between the side walls of the apartment and the bed : the 
 ruelle. The furniture of this blue chamber probably consisted 
 of twelve or eighteen seats — arm-chairs, chairs, and folding- 
 stools — ^which the mistress of the house had to assign to her 
 visitors according to their quality ; not an easy art. Finally, 
 according to the number of guests present, Mme. de Ram- 
 bouillet caused screens to be opened or closed, as a protection 
 against the cold. 
 
 Such were the surroundings in which, for the space of forty 
 years, but more particularly between 1630 and 1645 or there- 
 The Circle of abouts, the famous society of France was formed, 
 the Hotel de Duchesses and bourgeoises alike made their appear- 
 Rambouillet. ance there : Mile. Paulet, the " beautiful lioness," 
 whose proud beauty and golden hair did as much as her wit to 
 buy forgiveness for her stormy past ; marquises and men of 
 letters ; honest Scudery and his ugly but charming niece ; the 
 keen-witted Abbe Cotin ; the discreet Vaugelas ; the learned 
 Manage ; the influential Chapelain ; and young Godeau, who 
 suddenly, and to the astonishment of all men, transformed him- 
 self unto a most virtuous bishop : then, among the authors 
 every one who could be produced in the company of ladies, from 
 Malherbe to Comeille, not forgetting the yoimg Abb^ Bossuet, 
 and, above all, Voiture, a matchless talker and diverting com- 
 panion, the king of the whole society — el rey chiquito, they called 
 116 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF SOCIETY 
 
 him, on account of his small stature — who, son of a wine mer- 
 chant though he was, could hold his own, and proved himself as 
 touchy as if he had been born a prince. 
 
 Before all things, the H6tel de Rambouillet was a literary 
 salon : poetry and letters were handed about like so many 
 dainties ; the guests listened to the works their authors read 
 aloud, and discussed them : within those walls Corneille de- 
 claimed almost all his masterpieces. This public, consisting of 
 well-bred men and women, who knew what good French was — 
 for in the Blue Room grammatical problems were courageously 
 discussed and immense stress was laid on refinement of style — 
 no doubt exercised a certain influence on the literature and 
 language of France. Its effect on the great writers must not be 
 exaggerated, of course ; salons, as a rule, have but little influence 
 on good authors (when the influence is strong, it is harmful) ; 
 but they spread a taste for intellectual things, they increase the 
 number of connoisseurs — and that was the work performed by 
 Mme. de Rambouillet's society. It supphed writers with an 
 excellent public, well-informed, passionately interested in art and 
 in psychology, and a public, too, which did not expect literature 
 to give it a picture of realities so much as models for its own 
 speech and thought ; with these desiderata literature forthwith 
 set out to provide it. 
 
 And the H6tel de Rambouillet produced other excellent 
 results. In the Blue Room the habitual guest was only ex- 
 Its refining pected to be amusing, and to entertain others, 
 Influence on and there the originality came in. Before that 
 Manners. time a gentleman took little trouble to charm by 
 
 his conversation and his knowledge of letters : his desire was to 
 be thought brave, in the first place, and, in the next, to be con- 
 sidered powerful, magnificent, and able to spend large sums of 
 money : intellect was the last thing about which he cared. And, 
 further, before the days of the H6tel de Rambouillet, the idea 
 that conversation might be a pleasure so great as to make it 
 worth one's while to meet simply for the sake of enjoying it had 
 never occurred to anybody : people met, as they met at the 
 Louvre, for a ballet, or to play cards, or for some sight or festivity, 
 but never for the sake of talking. Once the frequenters of the 
 ' circle " had brought wit into fashion, men and women began 
 
 iir 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 to be valued for the amount of that quaUty they displayed, and 
 no longer for their birth or for their riches : the writers certainly 
 did not become the aristocrats' equals, but they gained a certain 
 professional consideration in general society ; and among the 
 nobles themselves a man who did not prove himself a sufficiently 
 " polite man " (or man of the world) lost the approval of his 
 fellows. 
 
 But all this did not come about from the very day on which 
 " the incomparable Arthenice established her empire." It was 
 only by degrees, and exceedingly slowly, except in a very 
 limited circle, that the nobility and upper ranks of the French 
 bourgeoisie grew more refined. And to tell the truth, if the 
 tone of the H6tel de Rambouillet and of the Astrie seems refined, 
 it is by comparison with the tone of the society immediately 
 surrounding them rather than with that of the days that came 
 after them. Mme. de Rambouillet's friends, and Mme. de 
 Rambouillet herself, were amused by jokes which might seem 
 somewhat coarse to the schoolboys of the present day. 
 
 There were a good many Polexandres, Cassandres, the Grand 
 Cyrus, and ClSlies before the Princesse de Clives, and before 
 the gradual evolution of the subtle, pompous, and superficial 
 gallantry of the heroes of those novels into true delicacy of 
 feeling. And, indeed, it is a fairly well-known fact, now, that 
 the Great Age was by no means immovably fixed in that 
 attitude of impeccable nobility formerly ascribed to it : long 
 after Richelieu's day, and even under Louis XIV, French 
 society continued to bubble with life, and youth, and vigour. 
 Under their ribbons and feathers and ceremonious manners the 
 Versailles courtiers concealed a passion and violence of the most 
 extreme kind : there were hot heads under those flowing wigs 
 of theirs. But if they were fierce, and even brutal, at bottom, 
 they possessed an inimitable suppleness, elegance, and politeness 
 of mind. And there can be no doubt that the H6tel de Ram- 
 bouillet, by setting women in the place they ought to hold in 
 society, and asserting their claims to the influence they ought 
 to exercise on the customs of a country, did much to promote 
 the growth of this politeness. The incomparable Arthenice and 
 the Pricieuses rendered a priceless service to the intellect of 
 France. 
 118 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF SOCIETY 
 
 The salon began to decline towards 1645, when Mile, de 
 Rambouillet, the celebrated Julie d'Angennes, made up her mind, 
 Decline of the at last, to " crown the flame " of the Marquis de 
 " Salon." Montausier, whom she had kept dancing attendance 
 
 on her for twelve years, according to all the correct rules of 
 " cruelty " : it was time for the young lady to become less in- 
 human : she was just forty. She departed for Saintonge, where 
 her husband was Governor, and with the heroine of the Guir- 
 lande de Julie* the Blue Room lost the most inexorable of the 
 Pricieuses who had adorned it. Voiture died in 1648 : then 
 the Fronde broke out : Mme. de Rambouillet retired to the 
 country, and though the doors of her salon were not closed, its 
 glory gradually departed. But the fashion had been set, and in 
 all directions other " nooks " and ruelles, formed on the same 
 pattern, entered into competition with the original. There were 
 Mile, de Scuddry's " Saturdays," principally attended by middle- 
 class folk and literary men ; there were the Vicomtesse d'Auchy's 
 pedantic " Tuesdays " ; there were the receptions of the Mar- 
 quise de Sable, Mme. de Bouchavannes, and Mme. de Brdgis ; 
 even in the provinces the Pricieuse flourished. And as it 
 is the peculiarity of every fashion to go on falling into greater 
 and greater exaggerations, till at last it dies a sudden death by 
 ridicule, these imitations of Mme. de Rambouillet's salon did 
 not fail to transform the tendencies of the original model into 
 abuses. Already the tendency of the " Blue Room " had been 
 to talk about literature with an excessive gravity — gravity is 
 a great pitfall in any salon — and even, if the truth must be told, 
 to hold forth on the subject of grammar. And, further, the 
 language of its frequenters, deliberately involved, did not 
 lighten discussion, and the conversation was apt to be too 
 laboriously playful to be really witty. Finally, it frequently 
 happened that the most trifling matters of gallantry were dis- 
 cussed with an insistence that could hardly be called anything 
 but pedantic, and the affectation of delicacy was carried to the 
 verge of silliness. These defects, this " blue-stockingism," this 
 pretentiousness of manner, language, and sentiment, this 
 
 • This " Garland " was a vellum book, adorned with twenty-nine 
 paintings of flowers by Robert, in which were written sixty-two madrigals 
 composed by the habituds of the " circle." 
 
 119 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 seventeenth-century pose, in short, is what has been christened 
 " preciosity." 
 
 This preciosity waxed stronger and stronger in proportion 
 as the power of Mme. de Rambouillet's own salon declined. 
 Extravagances Many of the " bureaux of wit " which opened their 
 of the Blue- doors between 1650 and 1660 became ridiculous 
 stockings. beyond all words. If the cheres and the alcovistes 
 
 were not to faint with disgust, their frequenters must " know the 
 end of things, the great end, the uttemiost end " ; they must 
 exaggerate all that was " gentle, tender, passionate " ; they 
 must not say " teeth," but " the furniture of the mouth " : nor 
 speak of " cheeks," but of " the thrones of modesty " : nor of 
 a police-sergeant, but of " the criminals' bad angel " : instead of 
 " blow up that fire " the expression must be " excite that com- 
 bustible element " : never " draw up that arm-chair," but 
 " convey hither the comforts of conversation " ; and some of 
 these ladies even want so far as to insist on the suppression of 
 unseemly syllables, and claimed that in future their adorers 
 must say trois livres instead of un &cu ! 
 
 This was too much. When, at the first performance of 
 Les Precieuses Ridicules, on November 18, 1659, the audience 
 saw M. de Mascarille appear before the delighted eyes of the two 
 foolish ladies from the provinces, in those astounding habili- 
 ments of his, the garb of the fashionable " tuft " of the period — 
 with his wig " so huge that it swept the floor every time he made 
 a bow," and his hat so tiny " that it was easy to guess the 
 Marquis carried it in his hand much oftener than he put it on his 
 head," his neck-ruffle, which in all conscience " might be called 
 a respectable dressing-cape," his breeches, with their lower 
 trimmings " that looked as if they had been made on purpose for 
 children to play hide-and-seek in them," the " bimdle of tassels " 
 hanging " out of his pocket as it is were a horn of plenty," his 
 shoes " so covered with ribbons that it is quite impossible for me 
 to tell you whether they were made of tanned English calf or 
 morocco leather," and set up on heels so high that everybody was 
 " sorely puzzled to know how heels so tall and slender could 
 possibly carry the body of the Marquis, his ribbons, his trimmings, 
 and his powder " — a shout of laughter rent the air. Very soon 
 the name of Pricieuse, hitherto a compliment, became a term of 
 120 
 
CLASSIC LITERATURE 
 
 derision. . . . And, indeed, fashion, which had gone wild about 
 delicacy, now took up learning, and Moli^re, after raising the 
 laugh against the Pricieuses Ridicules in 1659, was able to banter 
 the Femmes Savantes in 1672. 
 
 II 
 
 Thus the H6tel de Rambouillet gave literature a public 
 consisting of the world of fashion. And before long these 
 Formation ol fashionable folk began to plume themselves on 
 the Classical their own literary powers. In Richeheu's time 
 Style. no member of the aristocracy would have con- 
 
 descended to belong to the Academic Fran9aise : later, noblemen 
 were to be seen canvassing to obtain entrance into that body. 
 This interpenetration, if we may so describe it, of society by 
 literatiure, and vice verSa, produced excellent effects on both 
 sides. ... In the first place, before long, it did not suffice a 
 cultivated man to be well-informed ; he had also to possess 
 " style," he had to express himself clearly and gracefully, both 
 in speech and with his pen — ^to sum up, in fact he had to be able 
 to please, to fascinate, to amuse, to charm. And it was this art 
 that the men of the world of that day carried to perfection, for 
 they learned it in their childhood and practised it till they died — 
 a very useful art indeed, and even indispensable, at a period 
 when nothing was to be had as a right, but everything by 
 favovu" or by the skill with which the applicant presented his 
 request. . . . What classic French literature gained by the 
 influence of the world of fashion was its admirable limpidity of 
 expression. In fact " the public laid down the law. ... It 
 forced the authors to save it frouble without complaining of 
 their own, to have a clear conception of what they wanted to say 
 and to say it definitely " (Lanson). An absence of pedantry 
 and of false profundity, no Ijricism whatever, but a perfect 
 limpidity and order in its ideas, and an extreme art and good 
 taste in the matter of style ; the study of humanity in general, and 
 certain of its social habits and passions, such as seventeen 
 hundred years of Christianity had made them — ^these were the 
 characteristics of the best literature of the seventeenth century. 
 Under Louis XIII, in addition to the H6tel de Rambouillet 
 
 121 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 and fashionable society, three men specially contributed to 
 the formation of the classic style : Malherbe, Balzac, and 
 Vaugelas. 
 
 Francois de Malherbe (1555-1628) was a short-tempered old 
 gentleman, very crusty, " boorish and uncivil," says Talle- 
 mant, licentious in his life and coarse in his talk, 
 whom, however, his passion for his art endued 
 with style. After a hfetime spent in the service of the fair 
 sex, he found strength, on his death-bed, to reprove an incorrect 
 expression used by his nurse, and when his confessor exhorted 
 him to think thenceforth of nothing except his Savioiu", he 
 replied — and there was a touch of sublimity about the sally 
 — ^that he intended " to uphold the purity of the French 
 language till he died." . . . Now Malherbe has no natural 
 sincerity, no spontaneity, no real feeling : he is a mere book- 
 man, in fact : by this we mean that life and nature interested 
 and touched him only as they appear in books ; but the 
 correctness of the composition and the harmony of the words 
 employed invest certain of his poems with beauty. Many 
 of his predecessors, in addition to the emotion and enthusiasm 
 lacking in his case, had far more character, imagery, and 
 colour than he, but none of them succeeded in writing a 
 language so pure, so precise, and so intrinsically beautiful. 
 Here then lies his great merit : he re-estabhshed the taste 
 for technical perfection, he counselled all poets to labour at 
 their work, to distrust obscure constructions in phraseology, to 
 avoid cacophony and hiatus, to spend their pains, not only on 
 their imagery, but on the sound and rhythm of the words 
 employed — to write, so to speak, not only for the eyes of their 
 readers' imaginations, but also for their ears ; in fine, to make our 
 language into music (see, for example, the stanzas on the Dessin 
 de quitter une dame qui ne le contentoit que de promesses (" Design 
 to quit a lady who gave him no satisfaction save in promises "). 
 Unfortunately Malherbe not only clarified the language, he 
 clarified poetic inspiration as well. So exalted, in fact, was his 
 idea of art, that he would have had the poet abstain from 
 subjects which he, Malherbe, thought unworthy, such as his own 
 sorrows and his private life ; and the noble themes he recom- 
 mended were the taking of some city, for instance, or the King's 
 122 
 
CLASSIC LITERATURE 
 
 departure for the seat of war — official poetry, in a word: 
 so much so that he certainly tended, by this process, to 
 " purge poetry of every personal touch, and transform it into 
 eloquence " (Bruneti^re) : but lyric poetry died of the process, 
 and two centuries passed before it rose again. 
 
 Taking him altogether " the old Court pedagogue," the 
 " tyrant of words and syllables," as Balzac calls Malherbe, was 
 as much a teacher of language and French versification as a 
 poet, and it might almost be said that his poems were used by 
 the generation following his own as a handbook of examples and 
 corrected exercises. Yet he had only two immediate disciples : 
 Maynard (1582-1646) and the Marquis de Racan (1589-1670), 
 and on contemporary poetry his influence was nil. Everybody 
 either attacked him or jeered at him, some in the name of the 
 sixteenth century, which they declared he outraged (Malherbe 
 professed to regard Ronsard and his disciples as mere bimglers, 
 and told Desportes, one day, that his soup was better than his 
 verses) ; others, in the name of liberty, inspiration, and fancy. 
 The Minor against all of which, to their thinking, this man 
 Poets under whom they considered a mere manipulator of words 
 Louis Xm. had offended. It is impossible, here, to quote the 
 names of all those charming poets — pricieux, burlesque, and 
 libertine — who flourished under Louis XIII and in the earlier 
 part of the reign of Louis XIV, and who seem to have been called 
 the " minor poets " principally because, as a rule, their poems 
 were short. Almost every one of them wrote exquisite lines, 
 and many succeeded, once in their lives, at all events, in achieving 
 perfection and producing a masterpiece — so beautiful was the 
 French language in those days ! And the best of them all was 
 not Thdophile, who wrote some fifty exquisite lines, and not 
 many more ; nor Saint-Amant, some of whose sonnets are like 
 little Dutch pictures ; nor Scarron, the wonderful, the dazzling, 
 who committed the error of writing his Virgile travesti ; nor M. de 
 Sygognes, of whom we know nothing at all, who sang of dwarfs 
 and weaklings, of milksops, and of elves — 
 
 Petit rat de Bi^sil, qui vous a boting ? 
 
 Oil allez-vous ainsi en robe de guenuche, 
 
 Les bras sur les rognons comme ceux d'une cruche ? 
 
 Vous froncez le sourcil ? fetes-vous muting ? . . , 
 
 123 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Le moindre petit vent, pour soulager sa peine, 
 Comme un vent de lutin la porte a la fontaine. 
 Car elle pese moins, la nymphe du jardin. 
 Que son vertugadin. . . . 
 
 — nor Jacques Valine, Sieur des Barreaux, author of one of the 
 most beautiful reUgious sonnets that has ever been written, 
 entitled Becours d'un picheur d la bonti de Dieu ; nor the worthy 
 Gombard, " a little infatuated with Parnassus " ; nor Tristan 
 I'Hermite, nor Cyrano de Bergerac, nor Sarasin — 
 
 Achille beau comme le jour 
 
 Et vaUlant comme son 6pee, 
 Pleura neuf mois sur son amour 
 
 Comme un enfant pour sa poup^e. 
 
 A chanter ses fomeux exploits 
 
 J'emploierais volontiers ma vie : 
 Mais je n'ai qu'un filet de voix, 
 
 Et ne chante que pour Sylvie. . . . 
 
 — nor yet Voiture, nor Benserade, nor even the great Mathurin 
 Regnier : but Jean de La Fontaine. 
 
 The work Malherbe did for poetic style was performed for 
 French prose by Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac. No more dis- 
 Guez de agreeable individual than this stiff and conceited 
 
 Balzac. personage would be conceivable were it not that 
 
 he, like Malherbe, was ennobled by his lifelong and passionate 
 devotion to the French language. He Uved in the depths of his 
 native province, but he kept up a voluminous correspondence. 
 There were long intervals between his letters, truth to tell, for 
 Balzac felt a well-deserved scorn for those who " wrote a book 
 in less than a week," and spent weeks himself in polishing one of 
 his own epistles, so that the missives he intended to answer lay 
 piled upon his writing-table, and he occasionally found himself 
 replying to the announcement of a marriage after the birth of the 
 first child had taken place. But that mattered little : his 
 letters were handed about, and every one desired to receive 
 them. Yet their substance is ordinary, and the ideas they ex- 
 press are commonplace; but it may be that what now strikes 
 us as the most obvious platitude seemed, in Balzac's time, a very 
 impressive truth. And, besides, the qualities his contemporaries 
 valued and discussed with the most eager interest were his style, 
 124 
 
CLASSIC LITERATURE 
 
 his language, and his long and well-constructed sentences. He 
 taught his readers the proper development of a subject, how to 
 build up a speech, how to compose a narrative, and how to order 
 the various parts of a period clearly and harmoniously. . . . 
 Altogether he was a good craftsman, and under his directicHi 
 France, as it has been truly said, took her degree in rhetoric. 
 
 Towards 1629 " a certain number of private individuals " 
 had formed the habit of gathering, on certain fixed days, in the 
 house of M. Conrart, for the purpose of enjoying " all that is most 
 delightful and charming in the society of wit and in a reasonable 
 existence." Amongst these men of enlightened mind was Bois- 
 robert, who mentioned his friends to the Cardinal, his master. 
 Richelieu sent a message to the circle to inquire whether its 
 members would be inclined to "constitute themselves into a 
 body, and hold their assemblies under a public authority " : 
 the proposal was accepted without any enthusiasm, but M. le 
 The origin o! Cardinal's wishes were imperious things. Thus 
 the Acad6mie began the Academie Fran§aise, which held its first 
 Fraucaise. meeting on March 13, 1634, and sat, to begin with, 
 in the house of one or another of its members, then, from 1643 till 
 1672, at the H6tfil S^gTiier, and finally at the Louvre, in the two 
 rooms now called the Salle de Puget and the Salle des Coustou 
 (Museum of Modern Sculpture). 
 
 The Academy had planned to prepare a Grammar, a book on 
 Rhetoric, another on the Art of Poetry, and first and foremost a 
 Dictionary, on which last it soon set to work. Now at this time 
 there was a man living in France — timid, clumsy, ingenuous, to 
 the point of credulity, but who had also devoted himself to a 
 passionately eager analysis of the French language, and had 
 brought to it more good taste than Balzac, and even a greater 
 Vaugelas. subtlety than Malherbe; he was called Claude 
 
 Favre, Baron de P&oges and Sieur de Vaugelas 
 (1585-1650). He had been attached to the service of Gaston 
 d'OrMans, and had thereby lost the whole of his small fortune. 
 In 1639, to enable him to work undisturbed on the Dictionary, 
 which, people complained, was advancing far too slowly, 
 Richelieu granted him a small pension ; nevertheless, when 
 Vaugelas published his Remarks on the French Language, in 
 1647, the Dictionary was by no means ready for publication. 
 
 125 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 These Remarks, which attained the greatest and most 
 legitimate success, exercised a strong influence on the French 
 language, and thus upon French literature. They were not 
 embodied in a methodically arranged treatise, but were simply 
 a collection of notes on various points. Vaugelas, like Malherbe 
 and Balzac, laid it down as a rule that " the king and tyrant " 
 of language is custom, and that writers must obey custom even 
 if it should be absurd. But there are good customs and bad, 
 and the good custom, which must be followed, is that of men and 
 women of the world. . . . 
 
 For in those days the well-bred section of society had a 
 language of its own : men and women of that society recognized 
 each other as much by their speech as by their dress : we have 
 already alluded to this special form of affectation. Grammar, 
 indeed, formed one of the favourite entertainments of this 
 society, and we come upon story after story concerning the 
 eager discussions in the ruelles as to the use of the conjunction 
 car, for instance, and as to whether it was correct to say surge or 
 serge, muscadin or muscardin. On the whole, even after the 
 days of Balzac and Malherbe, society continued to purify the 
 language, and this involved a certain drawback : that of im- 
 poverishing the vocabulary by the elimination of many old 
 words, like those the loss of which La Bruyfere regrets, and of all 
 those special and technical terms for which the world of fashion 
 had no use: but, on the other hand, this process had great 
 advantages — that, in the first place, of fixing syntax, the 
 sense of the various words, and rendering the language clearer, 
 more precise, more adapted to the expression of thought ; and, 
 in the second, that of enriching style with the mass of imagery 
 and metaphor it put into circulation. For a very large number of 
 those affected metaphors which made the subjects of Louis XIII 
 laugh till they cried were rapidly absorbed into current use ; 
 and as to the majority of the remainder, it may be safely 
 wagered that if we were to find them now — and we do find many 
 of them — ^in the works of Victor Hugo, they would not strike 
 us as being in the least absurd, so far have we travelled beyond 
 the frequenters of the H6tel de Rambouillet in the matter of 
 bold imagery. 
 
 The language of the PrScieuses, then, was the language 
 126 
 
CLASSIC LITERATURE 
 
 Vaugelas made his study, and all that was best in it he selected 
 with the most unerring taste : it was codified in the Diction- 
 ary of the Academy (1694), half a century after Vaugelas' 
 The Dictionary death ; and employed by all the great authors, 
 o! the who prided themselves on their purism, and made 
 
 Academy. it their boast that they " talked Vaugelas." The 
 
 writers of the age of Louis XIV have proved that this language 
 possessed brilliant qualities. 
 
 And now we come to the man who endowed classic literature 
 with the philosophy that befitted it : Rene Descartes (1596- 
 „ . _ . 1650). Son of a Councillor of the Parliament of 
 ' Brittany, he was born in the village of La Haye, in 
 Touraine. The early part of his life was spent in travelling about 
 in stirring scenes : he served under Maurice of Nassau and the 
 Duke of Bavaria ; journeyed through Holland, Germany, Austria, 
 Switzerland, and Italy ; returned to France in 1625 ; then went 
 back into Holland for the sake of quietness ; lived there for twenty 
 years ; and, finally, yielding to the entreaties of Queen Christina 
 of Sweden, he travelled to join her, and died five months later, 
 in February 1650. He had been spending his days, early in the 
 winter of 1619, " meditating alone in a stove " (that is to say, in 
 a room provided with a stove), when, on November 10, in a 
 dream he received a revelation which, according to his judgment, 
 could only have been sent him from on high : this fact notwith- 
 standing, he waited eighteen years before he published his 
 Discours de la MSthode. In this he sets forth that, having 
 remarked that the only method whereby some certainties can 
 be attained is the use of mathematics, geometry, and algebra, 
 he resolved to apply the same treatment to philosophy. He 
 therefore begins by submitting every notion of his intelligence 
 to this test : he rejects all that we learn from our senses be- 
 cause in certain cases our senses deceive us ; he rejects all mathe- 
 matical propositions because we must commit paralogisms to 
 demonstrate them ; he rejects all the thoughts he has hitherto 
 had because a man may have the same ideas in a dream that he 
 has when he is awake. The only truth that seems to him 
 " certain and evident " is that M. Descartes must exist because 
 he thinks : " I think, therefore I am." And this axiom is the 
 principle of all his philosophy ; relying on it, he demonstrates 
 
 127 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 the existence of the soul and of God, and recomposes, in imagina- 
 tion, the whole mechanism of the universe. 
 
 Thus Descartes' philosophy made reason the sole and only 
 
 means for discovering truth, and proclaimed the fact that the use 
 
 of reason alone would bring about the knowledge of 
 
 Cartesiaaism. ^^^^ ^.j^^^ Tj^is doctrine adapted itself perfectly 
 
 well to the teachings of the Catholic Church : Descartes had been 
 most careful to overlay his philosophy with religion, so to 
 speak : piety and prudence alike had inspired him to draw 
 a careful distinction between the things of reason and those 
 matters connected with revealed religion which lay beyond 
 the sphere of reason and critical inquiry. Hence the most 
 religious minds of the seventeenth century, from Malebranche, 
 an Oratorian, to Arnauld and Bossuet, could be, and were, 
 Cartesians. On literature Cartesianism exercised a considerable 
 influence. It would be too much to say, certainly, that the 
 classical spirit proceeds from Descartes ; before his advent 
 order, harmony, the taste for reason, were already in the ascen- 
 dant. But Descartes endued the seventeenth century with the 
 method and the doctrine best suited to its genius. 
 
 His influence had to contend with that of Gassendi, who had 
 renewed the Epicurean theory of atomism. And it was also 
 opposed by Pascal. But it should be noted that Pascal warred 
 against philosophy in general rather than against that of 
 Descartes in particular : if his thoughts turned to Descartes, it 
 was because Descartes was the fashionable philosopher when he 
 wrote ; and we must also remember that his contemporaries 
 knew but one edition of his PensSes, that mangled and dis- 
 figured by the Jansenists : the first fairly exact version of his 
 work did not appear till the nineteenth century. 
 
 When he was twelve years old, Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), 
 alone and unaided, re-invented Euclid's geometry : at sixteen he 
 Pascal. wrote a Treatise on Conic Sections : at twenty he 
 
 constructed an arithmetical machine : at twenty- 
 four and twenty-five he was already celebrated, and formulated 
 --though a recent attempt has been made to contest his claim to 
 Ih ^°!^°"^~*^s earliest hypothesis as to atmospheric pressure : 
 thus his learning alone would have sufficed to inunortalize his 
 name. In 1646 he became absorbed in religious matters, and 
 
CLASSIC LITERATURE 
 
 with all the passionate zeal he brought to everything he "did, set 
 himself, after his own conversion, to secure that of his father, of 
 his elder sister, the prudent Mme. P6rier, and his younger sister, 
 the fervent Jacqueline. But he had not relinquished his 
 scientific studies, and the flattering notoriety he enjoyed after 
 the experiments in the Puy-de-D6me exerted a cooling influence 
 on his religious ardour. The truth was that his extraordinary 
 sensibility forbade indifference on his part to anything of any 
 kind. So he frequented the gay world, and if he did not fall in 
 love (for we have no proof, unluckily, that the delightful Discours 
 sur les passions de V Amour is his work), he proved, at all events, 
 that when occasion arose he could write pretty verses for fair 
 ladies, and remarked, no doubt, that the " geometric mind " is 
 less necessary to the man who desires to please than that 
 " subtlety of mind " of which the Chevalier de M^r^ talked to 
 him, and to which so many illustrious philosophers and learned 
 men of every period, less great than he, have been total strangers. 
 Under the sway of his lofty moral anxieties, towards the end of 
 1654 he once more plunged into theology, and thus, little by 
 little, slowly, and in accordance with reason, his final conversion 
 was achieved. 
 
 To realize the nature of Pascal's genius we must imagine the 
 most limpid mathematical intelligence united to the tenderest 
 The " Lettres and most exquisite feeling : it is this feeling which 
 provinciales." imparts life and movement to the Provinciates 
 and pathetic force to the style of the Pensies. In 1655, when 
 Pascal had become one of the Messieurs de Port Royal, he under- 
 took to put together a few statements in defence of Arnauld, 
 then threatened with condemnation by the Sorbonne : this 
 undertaking resulted in those eighteen Lettres provinciales, all of 
 which appeared between January 23, 1656, and March 24, 1657. 
 In these, questions of theology were brought within the range of 
 the public comprehension and popularly explained with the 
 perspicuity of a consummate artist : the author succeeded in 
 captivating his readers' interest as skilfully as the best journalist 
 of our own time : his success was enormous. These letters, 
 now eloquent and indignant, now dryly amusing, and then 
 again full of an ironical compassion, written in a dramatic and 
 picturesque style, which was a great novelty at that period, 
 
 I 129 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 amused, charmed, and convinced their readers. In vain 
 did the Jesuits strive to defend themselves in the Uterary 
 Usts : the rescripts they published in response to Pascal's 
 " campaign " only served to demonstrate their adversary's 
 talent more clearly. 
 
 But in the full tide of its success, the publication of the 
 Letters was broken off. Had Pascal been stung by the reproach 
 of one of his enemies to the effect that he was using against 
 Catholics a talent which would have done better service to God 
 if it had been employed against heretics ? That would have 
 been a noble reason, and we would fain believe it true. Be that 
 as it may, he instantly set himself to write a vindication of the 
 Faith. He had been ill almost all his life. From 1568 onwards, 
 amidst cruel sufferings, he began to jot down or dictate notes 
 The for this work, instead of trusting, as had been his 
 
 " Pensfies." previous custom, to his prodigious memory ; and 
 these notes, which illness and death prevented him from utiliz- 
 ing, are the Pensies. There is, unfortunately, no apparent order 
 in their arrangement, and it is therefore very difficult to imagine 
 the plan Pascal would have ultimately adopted, but Bruneti^re 
 thus sets forth, in noble words, the general scheme as we 
 may suppose it to have existed : " From everything within and 
 around us the clamoiir of our distress arises : the weakness of 
 our bodies, the vices of oiu* social organization, and again the 
 powerlessness of our reason, are only so many reasons for despair. 
 Whence, then, comes the protest that rises from the depths of 
 that despair ? — ^the exception, which, thanks to it, we constitute 
 in the scheme of nature, and our invincible confidence in a 
 happier destiny ? This we shall know if we accept the doctrine 
 of an original fall, the obligation imposed on us to expiate it, 
 and the doctrine of the redemption, which are, in fact, the 
 essential teachings of Christianity, Do we shrink from accept- . 
 ing them ? Let us consider, in that case, that we need omy 
 believe them to become as good as we can be — ^living as we do 
 amongst other men : that these doctrines, besides, have been 
 typified in the ancient Law, foretold by the prophets, confirmed 
 by miracles, and that if our reason cannot accept them, our will 
 can always bow before them." Everything has been said in 
 praise of the Pensies, and said with the utmost fervour and 
 180 
 
CLASSIC LITERATURE 
 
 enthusiasm. Certain expressions, certain broken sentences — 
 " pathetic Uke a ruin under the setting sun," ..." man, a 
 reed endued with the power of thought," ..." the infinite 
 spaces terrifying in their silence," . , . and even the famous 
 " foreshortening of the abyss," which may be a mere misreading 
 of the text, linger in the memories of us all. Mme. de Sevigne 
 asserted that Pascal's book gave one " a disgust for all others," 
 and Sainte-Beuve has written as follows : " Pascal, an ad- 
 mirable writer when he works out his thought, is perhaps even 
 more admirable when he is interrupted." 
 
 The biography of Corneille has no bearing of importance on the 
 history of his works. He was born at Rouen in 1606, was a very 
 ordinary kind of man, devout," provincial," a func- 
 tionary of some sort, and died poor in 1684. The 
 first time I saw him," says Vigneul-Marville, " I took him for a 
 Rouen merchant : he never talked French very correctly." 
 " My father," writes Voltaire, " had drunk in Corneille's com- 
 pany : he used to tell me this great man was the most tiresome 
 mortal he had ever seen in his life, and that his conversation was 
 of the commonest kind." And La Bruy^re writes, " Another 
 is simple-minded, timid, wearisome in his conversation : he 
 takes one word for another, and only judges the quality of his 
 play by the amount of money it brings him : he cannot recite it, 
 nor even read his own writing. . . ." But this simple fellow 
 was fured by a sublime inspiration. 
 
 Until his day, tragedy had been hardly more than a sort of 
 exercise of the lyric and declamatory powers, or else a romantic 
 imbroglio, or a spectacle to delight the eye, like our fairy enter- 
 tainments and operatic libretti : but Corneille showed that the 
 real subject of the drama ought not to be the events themselves, 
 but the feelings they evoke in the minds of the characters : 
 thus in his first masterpiece, the Cid (acted at the close of 1636 
 or the beginning of 1637), he took good care not to present the 
 duel between Rodrigue and the Count on the stage, for instance, 
 but applied himself to revealing the mental attitude of his 
 heroes as they were modified under the influence of external 
 accidents. 
 
 The considerable success attained by the Cid displeased 
 
 131 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Richelieu — ^perhaps because he himself had pretensions to talent 
 as a playwright, and his feeling for Corneille was tinged with 
 " T Pifl " ^^^ jealousy of an unsuccessful writer, but much 
 more probably because it was disagreeable to him, 
 as a Minister, to know the public was nightly applauding a play 
 that glorified Spain, just at the very moment when the war 
 between that country and France was at its fiercest. So the 
 Cardinal submitted the piece to the consideration of the French 
 Academy, and the too severe, but very remarkable Sentimens de 
 VAcaMmie frangaise sur le Cid (which are more especially the 
 sentiments of that judicious critic and pitiful author of La 
 Pucelle, Jean Chapelain) resulted in the correction by the 
 worthy Corneille of some fine lines, alas ! and of a great many 
 poor ones. 
 
 To modems, one of the objections to the play expressed by 
 the Academy is most curious. If the dramatis persona of the Cid 
 were transported into one of our modem plays, with their 
 characters, at all events, even if without their habits of life, they 
 would certainly strike the public of the present day as being of a 
 quite improbable virtue and moral perfection : for the only one 
 of them all who ever betrays a symptom — and that a passing 
 one — of any evil feeling is the Count, when he gives way to the 
 jealousy with which Don Diegue's favour inspires him. Now the 
 thing with which the Academy reproaches Corneille is the moral 
 weakness of his characters. To the critics of the year 1638, 
 Chim^ne was " an unnatural daughter," because, though she 
 does all she can to ensure the punishment of Rodrigue, she 
 still loves him, and even grants him interviews which in their 
 eyes exceed all the bounds of propriety. And the remarkable 
 thing is that the Academicians' feeling on this subject was also 
 that of the connoisseurs amongst the public of the day, and 
 probably that of the author himself. For from that time 
 forward we see Corneille make it his special care to paint his 
 stage heroes as men without a touch of weakness, showing more 
 and more perfect as time goes on, and when he criticizes any of 
 his own plays, he invariably reproaches himself with not having 
 caused his characters to take the most sublime resolution — if any 
 resolution more sublime than that they have taken can be 
 conceived. Such then were the model beings whereof the sub- 
 132 
 
CLASSIC LITERATURE 
 
 jects of Louis XIII dreamt : these superhuman heroes embodied 
 their ideals. 
 
 In Corneille's heroes the will is everything, even in love. 
 But their love bears no resemblance to love as Musset knew it. 
 Corneille's It is the pure outcome of reason : lovers hold each 
 conception of other dear because of the virtues and good qualities 
 tragedy. each discovers in the other : their affection is 
 
 founded on their reciprocal admiration, and in this way their 
 love comes back to the one starting-point — ^the longing for 
 perfection. Thus, they frequently change the partner of their 
 flame ; should one of them discover some fresh object whose 
 merits seem still greater, the first is straightway forgotten. It is 
 easy to see that this " intellectual love " (Jules Lemaitre) is the 
 same platonic love as that conceived by the readers of the 
 Astrie and by the Pricieuses. And, indeed, the self -analysis of 
 Corneille's heroes is not much less subtle than that practised 
 by those of Mile, de Scud^ry, nor is their manner of expressing 
 themselves essentially different. 
 
 It has been frequently demonstrated (as by M. Jules Lemaitre) 
 that Corneille's plays did not embody the " triumph of duty over 
 passion," as the old-fashioned formula has it, at all, but the 
 victory of the human will over all the obstacles which the poet 
 skilfully raises in its path. Comeille exalts energy, not holiness : 
 it is not always virtue that spurs on his characters to heroism : 
 sometimes it is one motive, sometimes another — and for the 
 most part it is pride. When Chim^ne, for instance, seeks the 
 death of the man she loves, it is not so much out of filial love 
 that she crushes her own heart, but as a point of honomr, out of 
 regard for her " renown," and that of her " house," because, as 
 she says : 
 
 . . . Je veux que la voix de la plus noire envie 
 £l&ve au del ma gloire et plaigne mes ennuis. 
 
 The incomparable audience which applauded the Cid shared 
 the young girl's view. It approved and admired the Infanta in 
 the Cid, the Queen in Don Sanche, All those spirited princesses 
 evoked by the great Comeille considered their love for heroes 
 whose merits and exploits far exceed our wildest imagina- 
 tions, but who, not being the sons of kings, were unworthy of 
 these ladies by their " birth," a shameful weakness which must 
 
 133 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 be overcome. And so in real life their admirers, unlike our- 
 selves, regarded those unions which we call " love marriages " 
 as something quite inadmissible. In their eyes, the strict and 
 elementary duty of every man and woman of noble birth was 
 to contract an alliance founded exclusively on rank, name, 
 and fortune, with as many advantages as could possibly be 
 secured for him, for her, and for their descendants : to their 
 thinking, the man who married a " beloved " (but poor) object 
 was not doing a noble, but rather a shameful thing, he was 
 sacrificing his " glory " to his passion ; and to give way to his 
 passion was no sublime action, it was a not very creditable 
 weakness. (This, whatever some people may say, was also, to 
 some extent, the point of view of Racine, but it is the exact 
 opposite of that of the Romantic School, which is our own.) 
 
 On the whole, the nobles and ladies of the times of Louis XIII 
 and of the Fronde tried to behave like the heroes of their 
 The literature. Cinna and Chim^ne were the models 
 
 precursors of whereon such beings as Richelieu, and Retz, and 
 Romanticism, the Grande Mademoiselle probably strove to form 
 themselves. Those vigorous men and women of the year 1650, 
 so much admired by Nietzsche, were full of greatness, pomp, 
 generosity, candour, and brutality ; they had a passionate taste 
 for the heroic and the theatrical. Those who desire to under- 
 stand Chevreuse and Longueville, De Thou, Chalais, and Retz, 
 their pretentious and somewhat heavy gallantry, their useless 
 and Machiavellian conspiracies, their heroism and their swagger, 
 must remember that they had been brought up on the Condones 
 and on Plutarch, on Cassandre and on the Grand Cyrus, on 
 Polyeucte and on the Astrie, Now Sainte-Beuve noted certain 
 similarities of accent and inspiratiop forming a link between 
 the tragedies of Corneille and the great romances of the H6tel de 
 Rambouillet, on the one hand, and the romantic literature of his 
 own time, on the other, and further he observed that after having 
 been ridiculed, killed, and cast aside by Boileau and the realist 
 school of 1660, this " elevated, romantic, sentimental style " 
 had been taken up again " in the days of Jean- Jacques 
 Rousseau." 
 
 This is perfectly true : is not Celadon languid, gloomy, and 
 melancholy, like Saint-Preux ? Certain of Corneille's tragedies, 
 184 
 
CLASSIC LITERATURE 
 
 such as Bodogune, Hdraclius, and Don Sanche, are nothing but 
 melodramas. " Clitandre," says M, Faguet, " is simply a novel 
 of adventure put upon the stage, with masked assassins, and 
 archers, and single combats, and earthquakes, . . ." And the 
 romance of the heroes of the Fronde bears a prodigious resem- 
 blance, in many respects, to the romanticism of the conspirators 
 of Young Italy — or even to that of the " .Teunes-France " of the 
 days of Hernani. 
 
 Works to Consult : Brunetifere, Manuel de I'histoire de la littiraiure 
 fran^aise (1898) ; E. Faguet, XVII^' Siicle (1889). The bibliography 
 ■will be found in G. Lanson, Manuel bibliographiqtte de la litUrature modeme, 
 vol. ii (1910) ; G. Lanson, Histoire de la littirature frangaise, (10th ed. 
 revised, 1908) ; J. Lemaitre, Corneille ; Petit de JullevUle, Histoire de la 
 langue et de la litterature fran^aise, vol. iv ; Sainte-Beuve, passim (see the 
 two alphabetical tables) ; the collection of Grands Ecrivains frmifais, 
 published by Messrs. Hachette. 
 
 185 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 THE FRONDE AND MAZARIN 
 
 I. Anne of Austria and Mazarin. II. The great victories. The 
 
 WestphaUan Treaty. III. The Fronde. IV. The end of the 
 
 war. The Treaty of the Pjrrenees. Apotheosis of Mazarin. 
 
 ONLY a few hours after Louis XIII had breathed his last, 
 disturbance began to threaten among the Princes 
 assembled at Saint-Germain. The Queen, leaving a 
 few of the Crown officials to watch the late King's body, had 
 gone to join her sons. But the crowd of courtiers in their 
 Accession ol apartment was so great that Anne grew faint, and 
 Louis XIV. begged the Due de Beaufort to clear the room. 
 This Beaufort, second son of the Due de Vend6me, and grandson 
 of Henri IV and Gabrielle d'Estr^es, was a good-looking fellow, 
 rude, presumptuous, boastful, but brave, whose sense " was 
 below the average " (Retz), his wit " heavy and rough " (La 
 Rochefoucauld), and his language that of a street-porter, in 
 spite of which he was popular with women, and even Anne 
 herself looked upon him with a favourable eye. He proceeded, 
 after his usual insolent fashion, to carry out the Queen's com- 
 mand, whereupon the Prince de Cond6 asked him what authority 
 he had to issue any orders at all : the quarrel was patched up 
 with some difficulty. 
 
 A few days later (May 18, 1643) Anne of Austria proceeded 
 to the Parliament, to secure its assistance in setting aside the 
 will by the provisions of which the late King had endeavoured 
 to limit her powers. It was a fine sight. The great hall hung 
 with violet velvet, all the Councillors and Presidents, and 
 Masters of Requests, and the King's servants, in their red or 
 black gowns, the Princes and Dukes, the guards, the heralds, 
 the mace-bearers : the Queen draped in a great crape veil that 
 136 
 
THE FRONDE AND MAZARIN 
 
 almost totally concealed her face : the King, just four and a 
 half years old, who made his entry borne in the arms of M. de 
 Chevreuse. Silence was proclaimed, and the child was made to 
 stand in front of his " bed " — five cushions laid under a violet 
 velvet canopy dotted with golden fleurs-de-lis — between his 
 mother and his governess, to recite his speech, " but he sat 
 down again, comically, and would not say a word." Forth- 
 with the Chancellor and the Advocate-General made him long 
 harangues. Each member voted, and then the Chancellor 
 mounted the steps to where their Majesties were seated, came 
 back to his own place, and said, " The King, seated on his 
 Bed of Justice, has declared, and now declares," etc. etc. 
 Anne was given the right to govern as she chose, and admit 
 any one she pleased to the Council. The precautions poor 
 Louis XIII had taken so carefully had only been in force for 
 four days. 
 
 Anne was a handsome woman of two and forty, superbly 
 healthy, fresh and buxom, with fine eyes and quantities of fair 
 Anne ol hair, which her women delighted to watch her 
 
 Austria. curling skilfully round her beautiful white fingers, 
 
 when her head was dressed. She generally woke at ten or 
 eleven o'clock, gave a few audiences, and breakfasted before 
 she heard Mass. " She was served, after her broth, with 
 cutlets, sausages, and bread-porridge. She generally ate a 
 little of everything, and did not dine the less heartily " — nor 
 sup less well either. Her style of dress was modest, " but like 
 that of persons who wish to look well, without luxury, without 
 gold or silver, or rouge or any extraordinary ornament," and it 
 was easy to see that " she might be capable of a little vanity." 
 Unlike Marie de' Medici, who had never been able to pronounce 
 French correctly, Anne spoke that language with as little 
 accent as if she had been bom in the Ile-de-France. She was 
 fond of unceremonious amusements, and during the great heats 
 of the year 1646 she actually held a Court for her ladies in the 
 River Seine, not far from Thomery : the little King bathed too, 
 with his Governor, the Mar^chal de Villeroy, and everybody, 
 from the Marshal to the ladies, was decently clothed in a long 
 garment that trailed upon the ground, so that " modesty was 
 not offended." 
 
 187 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Anne was very devout, spent much time at her prayers, 
 made retreats in convents, and offered gifts, after the Spanish 
 custom, to the Virgin and the saints. Ignorant as any Infanta, 
 she knew some Uttle about politicians, but nothing at all about 
 politics. Even-tempered as a rule, she was, however, subject 
 to furious fits of anger, and then her voice would grow strident 
 and harsh, as on the day when she called out shrilly to the 
 members of the Parliament, " Hold your tongues ! Hold your 
 tongues ! " On the whole, she was likeable, noble, and simple, 
 both in character and demeanour, a perfectly well-bred woman 
 — she " knew better than anybody how to do what is called 
 ' holding a Court.' " 
 
 She was coquettish : she loved admiration. Her late 
 husband had not spoilt her by over-attention, and under 
 Louis XIII to declare oneself in love with the Queen was not 
 thought such a very extraordinary action as it would have been 
 held thirty years later. It was quite well known at Coiul; that 
 the gentlemen who were not prevented by the majesty of the 
 sovereign from realizing the beauty of the woman in her were 
 not unpleasing in her sight. Their adoration was platonic, 
 indeed, for Anne was virtuous and scrupulous. Gondi, the 
 Coadjutor, had hoped to gain great advantage by following 
 the counsels given him by Mme. de Chevreuse : " Only look 
 dreamy when you are with the Queen," said she, " keep gazing 
 at her hands ; inveigh against Cardinal Mazarin — and leave the 
 rest to me ! " And Retz goes on : "I played the game well : 
 in the talks I had with the Queen I passed from reverie to 
 frenzy. . . ." But he got no more for his pains than the 
 conceited little Marquis de Jarze. Anne was a fond lover, as is 
 clearly shown by the fashion in which she defended her Mazarin. 
 " Till my last breath," she wrote him one day. " Farewell, I am 
 tired out ! " When he died, she relinquished power as though 
 she had never desired to have it": all reason for ambition had 
 disappeared when she could no longer be ambitious for another. 
 At her son's Court, her one care, from that time forward, was 
 to play the part of an old lady tastefully, and right well did she 
 succeed. 
 
 Giulio Mazarini, born on July 14, 1602, the son of a Sicilian 
 attached to the Colonna household in the quality of business 
 138 
 
THE FRONDE AND MAZARIN 
 
 man, was a good-looking and very intelligent gentleman, tall, 
 chestnut-haired, bright-eyed, of pleasant and open countenance, 
 . always gay and smiling, who told a story better 
 
 than anybody else, excelled in every game, and, 
 in short, had "charms which unfailingly endeared him to 
 those he desired to please." Being himself subject neither to 
 hatred nor to friendship, he knew how to manifest just so much 
 of one feeling or the other " as his interest obliged him to do," 
 and this practice had served him well. He had been a model 
 student at the Jesuit College at Rome, and had then studied 
 at the University of Alcala in Spain, where, being ruined by his 
 gambling debts, he contemplated marr3dng a notary's daughter. 
 He afterwards became a doctor in utroque jure, an infantry 
 captain, a diplomat, and tried many trades in fact. At the 
 siege of Casale in 1630, when all the negotiations failed, and 
 the French and Spanish armies were preparing to renew hos- 
 tilities, suddenly the young Papal agent made his appearance, 
 hurrying towards the front of the troops, and brandishing the 
 treaty the signature of which he had just obtained, with 
 cries of " Peace ! Peace ! " This triumph, and the theatrical 
 manner of its announcement, made Giulio Mazarini's fortune. 
 He entered into relations with Richelieu, put on the ecclesiastical 
 habit (though without taking orders, it is thought), was 
 appointed Nuncio in France, and ended by entering the King's 
 service. Richelieu obtained the Cardinal's hat for him in 1641, 
 and after that he contrived to become the King's favourite and 
 continue at one and the same time to be his Minister. And 
 when, in 1643, Louis XIH appointed him one of the four 
 Councillors on whose will Anne of Austria was to be dependent, 
 does the reader imagine this made him that proud lady's 
 enemy ? No, indeed ! Three days only after that on which 
 the late King's will was set aside, and the Regent's powers 
 fully restored to her, she chose Cardinal Mazarin to be her 
 chief Minister. 
 
 He was so accommodating ! Business never was compli- 
 cated when he had it in charge : politics became quite easy. 
 And, besides, he had been at the French Court for so short a 
 time that he had had no opportunity of compromising himself 
 with any party — let alone the fact that he had taken good care 
 
 139 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 to avoid such an error. The Regent, on the whole, had no 
 complaint to make of this clever man, who did not seem to 
 have set his heart on anything in particular, and was always 
 talking of going back to Rome, And then he was perpetually 
 telling Her Majesty of the deep, the tender, the respectful 
 affection with which she had inspired him ! Her Majesty ended 
 Mazarinand by being profoundly touched. Day by day, in 
 Anne ol Mazarin's private notebooks, we follow the pro- 
 
 Austria, gress of the suave and handsome Cardinal in his 
 
 sovereign's affections. The earlier books are full of protesta- 
 tions in Spanish and Italian : "I would it had cost me dear, 
 and that I had been Her Majesty's servant for long years 
 already ! " " If I believed what is said — that Her Majesty 
 employs my services out of necessity, without any inclination 
 whatever — I would not stay here three days 1 " At the same 
 time one feels Mazarin was far, as yet, from being certain of 
 his favour with the Regent, for he grows uneasy sometimes as 
 to the sympathy she betrays for one person or another, the 
 assertions of the Commandeur de Jars, who " boasts of his 
 intercourse, his credit, and his familiarity with the Queen, in 
 days gone by," or the remarks of the Mother-Superior of the 
 Carmelites, who has plainly warned Her Majesty that her 
 Minister is compromising her reputation. And then suddenly, 
 in the later books, the tone changes ; " a jaundice, caused by 
 excess of passion," is the first thing we read : and after this 
 Mazarin trembles no more, but writes in the firmest, though the 
 most respectful tone : " Let Her Majesty find out privately from 
 His Highness what is to be done with M. le Due de VendSme " : 
 " Her Majesty should do her best to gain me the support of all 
 those who serve her, and that by causing all the favours they 
 receive to pass through my hands." " If Her Majesty does not 
 make herself obeyed, all is lost, because every man will dare 
 everything," etc. These counsels, no doubt, Mazarin imparted 
 to the Queen in her cabinet, where she shut herself up with him 
 every night. Before long, in November, 1644, the Regent was 
 to inform the Council that she was granting her Minister rooms 
 in the Palais-Royal, where she herself lived, " so as to be able 
 to confer with him on her business more conveniently. As 
 Anne was then forty-three years old, no very great perspicacity 
 140 
 
THE FRONDE AND MAZARIN 
 
 was needed to see that Mazarin had every chance of holding 
 permanent office. 
 
 At the outset the Queen still retained the sympathy evoked 
 by the manner in which Cardinal Richelieu had persecuted her. 
 And, then, it was a time of general gladness : pensions, honours, 
 offices, were poured out as in the days of Marie de' Medici : 
 " There are only five little words, now, in the French language," 
 said La Feuillade, " La Reine est si bonne ! " (The Queen is 
 so kind !) Even Mazarin was not dishked : " On the steps of 
 the throne, whence the terrible Richelieu had crushed rather 
 than ruled the human race, we saw a successor who was gentle, 
 benign, who desired nothing for himself, who was in despair 
 because his dignity as a Cardinal did not pennit him to humiliate 
 himself before all the world as he would fain have done, who 
 drove through the streets with two diminutive lackeys behind 
 his coach " (Retz). And further, everybody believed Anne 
 would dismiss him " in five or six months," when all business 
 The " Cabale matters had been cleared up. Yet month after 
 des Im- month went by, and still the Cardinal remained, 
 
 portants." ... At last, all those to whose interest it was to 
 bring about his fall joined forces — this was the " Cabal of the 
 Mighty Ones " {Cabale des Importants). 
 
 " The great strength of M. le Cardinal de Mazarin lay in 
 soft words, hinting, giving reason to hope : he would fet in a 
 glimmer of light, and then take it back, he would give an idea, 
 and then confuse it." And good Father Tixier ingenuously 
 confesses : " I have never approached the Cardinal without 
 being persuaded I was going to talk to the greatest impostor in 
 the world, and I never left his presence without being charmed 
 by him." It was wonderful, indeed, how " Pantaloon " as he 
 was coarsely nicknamed by Retz, his bitter enemy, contrived, 
 while he was completing the conquest of Anne of Austria's 
 affections, to use the Cond^s against the Vend6mes, foil the 
 plans of Mme. de Chevreuse, and attack her, so to speak, at 
 her weakest point. She tried the power of her charms — ^the 
 charms of a woman of forty-three — upon him, and he, on his 
 side, endeavoured to make her believe she had inspired him 
 with a genuine passion ; but he was just as gallant, meanwhile, 
 in his dealings with the fascinating Mme. de Gudm^nde, and 
 
 141 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 in the end these two fair ladies, sorely nettled, began to wonder 
 wliich of them was to prevail. . . . Finally the " Importants," 
 perceiving how little they were gaining from this warfare 
 masked by flowers, coolly made up their minds to have the 
 obnoxious Minister assassinated. But day by day Mazarin's 
 influence over the Queen had increased in strength, imtil one 
 fine morning the Due de Beaufort, grandson of Henri IV though 
 he was, was conducted to the Castle of Vincennes, Mme. de 
 Chevreuse was banished to Totu-aine, and the rest of the con- 
 spirators were either exiled or imprisoned (September, 1643). . . . 
 This done, the mild-mannered Cardinal did his utmost to 
 persuade everybody that it was not he, but the Due d'Orleans 
 and the Prince de Cond6 who had counselled such severe repres- 
 sive measures. " The morning after the event he seemed 
 more moderate and civil than ever. Access to his person was 
 quite free, audiences were easily granted, people dined with him 
 just as with any private individual : he even put away a great 
 deal of the stately manner affected by cardinals of the most 
 ordinary sort. In fact, he played his cards so well that he 
 had his foot on everybody's head, while everybody thought he 
 was still standing beside them " (Retz). 
 
 II 
 
 Louis XIII had spent the winter of 1643 in planning the 
 campaign which was to open in the following spring. He had 
 The Spanish intended to march in person against Don Fran- 
 Campaign of cisco de Melo, Governor of the Low Countries, 
 1643. who was threatening to invade Champagne : but 
 
 when his illness destroyed all his hopes of being able to start, he 
 appointed the elder son of his cousin Conde to take his place. 
 
 The Due d'Enghien was then a young man of two and 
 twenty, more than careless about his toilet, whose thin, lank, 
 active body bore a head like that of some strange bird of prey : 
 a narrow receding forehead, hollow cheeks, a nose as sharp and 
 hooked as a beak, and eyes with so fierce a flame in them that 
 men shrank -from their gaze. Like all the well-born men of his 
 time he had gained his first experience of war as a volunteer 
 (at the siege of Arras), and had then fought through the cam- 
 142 
 
THE FRONDE AND MAZARIN 
 
 paigns of 1641 and 1642 : thus he was not a mere novice : 
 nevertheless, it was thought wise to supply him with a Mentor 
 in the person of the Mar6chal de rH6pital, then a man of sixty. 
 Since May 10 Don Francisco de Melo had been laying siege 
 to the fortress of Rocroy, intending, when that place had fallen, 
 The Battle o! to make his way to Paris through Champagne : 
 Bocroy. the Spaniards had not forgotten the Corbie Year. 
 
 The Due d'Enghien went to meet them, and on May 17 the 
 French army arrived at the entrance of the passes it had to 
 cross, amidst woods and marshes (now dried up), to reach the 
 enemy before Rocroy. But just at this juncture the news of 
 the death of Louis XIII arrived. Forthwith a council of war 
 was called : was it best to take the risk of a pitched battle, or 
 merely try to throw some reinforcements into the besieged 
 town ? Against the advice of the aged De I'HSpital, and of 
 the majority of the military chiefs, who all leaned towards the 
 more prudent course, the young Duke insisted on fighting. 
 And it was because he had imposed his will on all the rest that, 
 on May 18, the French troops deployed without let or hindrance 
 (wherefore, nobody seems to know) in face of the enemy on the 
 plain of Rocroy. Though it was already six o'clock in the 
 evening, Enghien was making his arrangements for an immediate 
 attack, when the whole Spanish line moved forward and marched 
 upon the Frenchmen, with trumpets sounding and drums beat- 
 ing the charge. A false step at that moment would have thrown 
 the whole of the French army into confusion : if the Spaniards 
 had driven home their attack, their adversaries would have 
 been defeated, it would have spelt utter disaster. . . . Happily, 
 after marching some 400 paces, Don Francisco halted : his 
 only object had been to ensure room for his rear lines. And 
 the struggle was deferred till the following day. 
 
 Before daybreak on the 19th, his attendants roused the 
 stripling who was to command the French troops from his 
 youthful slumbers. He put on his armour, but refused to wear 
 a helmet, and donned a white-plumed hat instead : then he 
 moimted his horse and showed himself to his men : wiry, eager, 
 and authoritative, with that " noble ardour " of his (Grand 
 Cyrus), he was truly " a young Prince of the Blood who carried 
 victory in his eyes " (Bossuet), 
 
 143 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 He gave the command of the left wing to the Mardchal de 
 rH6pital : the Baron de Sirot, a veteran who had fought in 
 the Thirty Years' War, was put in charge of the reserve : he 
 himself, assisted by Gassion, an excellent cavalry officer, led 
 the right wing. And now the French advance began. At the 
 very first contact Enghien completely drove in the Spanish left : 
 then, leaving Gassion to pursue the fugitives, he turned sud- 
 denly upon the Walloon and Italian infantry which formed the 
 second line of his opponents' centre, and having broken it, 
 finally threw himself on the rear of the Spaniards' right wing. 
 It was high time : the Spanish troops, commanded on that side 
 by Don Francisco himself, had already very nearly routed the 
 force the Mar^chal de I'HSpital had led against them : but 
 when they felt Enghien's sudden attack upon their rear, they 
 broke. The only resistance now was that offered by the leading 
 ranks of the Spanish centre, " that redoubtable infantry of the 
 army of Spain, whose great serried battalions, like towers 
 capable of repairing their own breaches, stood unshaken in the 
 midst of all the rest of the rout, and darted forth fire on every 
 side " (Bossuet). These were the proud tercios viejos, com- 
 manded by the Comte de Fontaines, who was forced by his 
 infirmities to have himself carried into the fray on a litter — 
 war-worn old regiments, famous throughout Europe : Avila, 
 Vilandio, Villalva, Albuquerque, Garcies, Castelvi, entirely 
 composed of those " native Spaniards " whose bravery, as 
 Cond^ himself tells us, was of an essence more exquisite than 
 that of any other nationality. These regiments, swelled by a 
 large number of men belonging to those which had just been 
 broken, and provided with eighteen cannon, formed themselves 
 into squares. Three times did the whole French army, led by 
 Cond6, throw itself upon them : at the fourth attack, whicfr 
 assailed them on three sides at once, they gave way. The battle, 
 begun at three o'clock in the morning, was over at ten. The 
 Spaniards left seven or eight thousand dead on the field, besides 
 four and twenty guns, 170 infantry colours, fourteen cavalry 
 standards, and a considerable amount of treasure, and though 
 their Captain-General, Don Francisco de Melo, succeeded in 
 making his escape, the French took his baton, covered with 
 inscriptions commemora.ting former victories. 
 144 
 
THE FRONDE AND MAZARIN 
 
 The victor of Rocroy moved on towards the Moselle, took 
 Thionville on August 10, and Sierk on September 8, and then 
 returned to Court to clamour greedily for his reward and 
 indulge in immoderate triumph, like the very young man he 
 was. . . . About the same time the old Mardchal de Gudbriant 
 met his death gloriously at the siege of Rothweil (September 25), 
 and Mazarin sent the Due de Bouillon's second son, Henri de la 
 Tour d'Auvergne, Vicomte de Turenne, whom he had just 
 created Marshal of France, to replace him in command of the 
 troops on the Rhine. 
 
 Turenne was then a man of thirty-two, ten years older than 
 Cond^, to whom he bore no resemblance of any kind. With his 
 brick-red complexion, his hairy face, thick-set, 
 heavy figure, and broad shoulders, and his big 
 head that always hung down, he looked anything but dashing, 
 whether on horseback or on foot. " I send you a courser that 
 will suit you," writes Mazarin to him on July 9, 1644, " for he 
 served my purpose perfectly, though I am not a good rider, and 
 to tell the truth you are not a much better horseman than I." 
 Morally Turenne was perhaps devoid of any vice save that of 
 pride in his noble birth : he was awkward in his mode of 
 expression, but he was a diligent thinker, he turned his ideas 
 over slowly " under those great eyebrows of his that met," and 
 even his most daring actions were the result of a methodical 
 process of decision. His first performances, after he had been 
 created a Marshal, proved him a past-master in the art of taking 
 advantage of the ground he held : later he acquired the art of 
 sudden action in which he had been lacking at first. Indeed he 
 improved all his life long, and the most splendid, probably, of 
 all his campaigns was the last he fought. 
 
 Gu6briant's army welcomed him gladly : the " Weimarians," 
 Protestants Uke himself, remembered that their famous general, 
 Bemhard, had valued him highly. . . , Meanwhile, Mercy had 
 taken possession of Freibiu-g : it was necessary to drive him 
 out, and Tiu-enne had not sufficient troops to attempt this 
 successfully. On August 2 the Due d'Enghien joined him, 
 and took over the command. No pitched battle ensued, but 
 there was a series of somewhat disconnected engagements. 
 Mercy was firmly established in a mountainous region, with a 
 
 K 145 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 force inferior to the French. On August 3 his entrenchments 
 were stormed : Enghien got off his horse and crossed the first 
 abatis with his infantry. But in the course of the night the 
 Bavarians formed up again on a somewhat steep and thickly 
 wooded hill, the Josephberg, and in spite of three attacks 
 delivered in oppressively hot weather, and a hand-to-hand 
 fight which lasted all through the day of August 5, their dis- 
 lodgment proved impossible. Then, for a few days, the two 
 armies lay watching each other, till, early on the 9th, Enghien 
 made up his mind to move : he marched away. Mercy, who 
 could get no supplies, and whose horses were reduced to eating 
 the leaves oft the trees, did the same thing, and executed a 
 skilful disappearance. But the Weimar cavalry caught him 
 and delayed his march : Enghien was close on their heels : 
 Mercy only contrived to save the 6000 men who remained to 
 him by abandoning his artillery and baggage. The Bavarian 
 army was not utterly wiped out, but for a lengthy period it was 
 practically destroyed. 
 
 The Due d'Enghien wisely gave up all thought of laying 
 siege to Freiburg, which threatened to hold out for a very long 
 time. He marched down the Rhine, took possession of PhiUpps- 
 burg without any difficulty, entered Spires, Worms, and Mayence, 
 conquered Landau, and then returned to France. Turenne, 
 who replaced him in the command, reopened the campaign 
 early in March, 1645 : this was earlier than usual, and the old 
 Weimarian leaders grumbled about the change of routine. 
 When Mercy attacked Turerme at Marienthal, in May, 1645, he 
 had no difficulty in driving the discontented army of King 
 Louis back across the Main. 
 
 Then Enghien hurried up to Turenne's aid. Mercy had 
 entrenched himself in a very strong position at the village of 
 Battle o£ Allerheim, near Nordlingen : on August 3, 1645, 
 
 Nordlingen, the Duke attacked him with 38,000 men. A first 
 1645. infantry assault on the village was repulsed with 
 
 loss, and the enemy was vigorously pursuing this advantage 
 when it was checked by the death of Mercy. During this time, 
 the French right had been completely driven in by Werth, 
 who, instead of imitating Enghien's wise behaviour at Rocroy, 
 allowed himself to be carried away by the eagerness of the 
 146 
 
THE FRONDE AND MAZARIN 
 
 pursuit. By the time he returned, Turenne, who commanded 
 the French left, had routed the troops opposing him, and, 
 acting on his chief's orders, had taken the village in the rear 
 while the infantry of the French centre delivered another frontal 
 attack : Allerheim was carried. Werth was forced to order a 
 retreat. This was the battle of Nordlingen. So heavily had the 
 victors lost that they were obliged to take their way back to 
 Philippsburg. 
 
 But all this while the laurels won by the House of Conde 
 were filling the soul of Gaston d'Orleans with bitterness, and 
 he resolved he too would become a mighty warrior. He was 
 appointed to command the army in Flanders (several good 
 generals were to give him their aid), and this army took Grave- 
 lines from the Spaniards in 1644, Mardick and Cassel in 1645, 
 and Courtrai in 1646 : this time the victor of Rocroy served 
 under Gaston's orders. But after these exploits, Monsieur went 
 back to Court satiated with glory. And his departure did not 
 by any means prevent Enghien from carrying the very strong 
 fortified town of Dunkirk (1646). 
 
 On the Spanish frontiers the French operations were less 
 successful. Even Enghien, now Prince de Conde, owing to his 
 Siege ol father's death, won but little success there. On 
 
 Lerida. May 14, 1647, he laid siege to Lerida. " The 
 
 fortress was nothing : but Don Gregorio Brice (or rather de 
 Brito), its Governor, was somebody," and this was soon to 
 become evident. Condd had " ordered the trenches to be 
 mounted at noonday by his own regiment, at the head of which 
 marched four-and-twenty fiddlers, as if it had been to a 
 wedding," so Hamilton tells us. 
 
 " Night approaching, we were all in high spirits ; our violins 
 were playing soft airs, and we were comfortably regaling our- 
 selves. ... All this was going on in the trenches, when 
 we heard an ominous cry from the ramparts, repeated two or 
 three times of, ' Alerte on the walls ! ' This cry was followed 
 by a discharge of cannon and musketry, and this discharge by 
 a vigorous sally, which, after having filled up the trenches, 
 pursued us as far as our grand guard. 
 
 " The next day Gregorio Brice sent by a trumpet a present of 
 ice and fruit to the Prince de Cond^, humbly beseeching his 
 
 147 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Highness to excuse his not returning the serenade which he was 
 pleased to favour him with, as unfortunately he had no violins ; 
 but that if the music of last night was not disagreeable to him, 
 he would endeavour to continue it as long as he did him the 
 honour to remain before the place. The Spaniard was as 
 good as his word; and as soon as we heard 'Alerte on the 
 walls ' we were sure of a sally that cleared our trenches, 
 destroyed our works, and killed the best of our officers and 
 soldiers," 
 
 So loud was this brave Don Gregorio's music that Conde 
 was fain to raise the siege of Lerida. The struggle was to be 
 fought out to the end on the north-western frontier of France. 
 
 In 1646 and 1647 Turenne and the Swedish General Wrangel, 
 who had succeeded that glorious cripple Torstenson, reduced 
 The Great Bavaria to submission. The following year saw 
 
 Coiid6 in Cond6 at the head of the army in Flanders : he 
 
 Flanders. seized Ypres, but when he reached Lens, he found 
 
 that town occupied by the Archduke Leopold (the patron of 
 Teniers). He deployed his troops opposite his adversary's, 
 and then suddenly, on the morning of August 20, he feigned a 
 retreat. The Archduke instantly quitted his strong position 
 and fell on the French rearguard — so vigorously, indeed, that 
 Cond6, who was with it, narrowly escaped being taken prisoner. 
 But all at once the King's army made a half-turn, as if it had 
 been on parade, and marched straight on the enemy. Surprised 
 by this counter-attack, the Spanish lines were driven in, and 
 the Archduke, in his flight, left 8000 dead, 5000 prisoners, 118 
 pieces of ordnance, and more than 100 colours behind him. . . . 
 About the same time, Turenne and Wrangel, who had beaten 
 the Imperialists at Zusmarshausen, were preparing to besiege 
 Prague and march on Vienna, when they heard that peace had 
 been signed (October 24, 1648). 
 
 The negotiations had been going on for four years. The 
 plenipotentiaries of Sweden and the Empire (whose differences 
 were to be arranged apart from the rest) held their meetings 
 at Osnabriick : the others — those of France, Spain, Holland, 
 and the Empire — sat at Miinster. But diplomatic etiquette 
 and jealousies had delayed progress. At last, in January, 1648, 
 a private treaty was signed between Spain and the United 
 148 
 
THE FRONDE AND MAZARlN 
 
 Provinces, and these two retired from the conferences : Holland, 
 on the whole, thought it better to have the Spaniards than the 
 French as her neighbours in the Low Countries : as for Spain, she 
 preferred to carry on the war, hoping that the troubles of the 
 Fronde, of which she perceived the beginnings in France, would 
 provide her with allies like those she had found in that country 
 in the days of the League. ^ 
 
 But on October 24, 1648, the Emperor affixed his signature 
 to the Treaty of Westphalia, which reduced him to a position 
 Treaty ol Uttle higher than that of the first among the 
 
 Westphalia, German princes. The allies of France — Sweden, 
 1648. Brandenburg, the Elector Palatine, the petty 
 
 Protestant princes — gained considerable advantages. France 
 received Pignerol and the three Bishoprics of Metz, Toul, and 
 Verdim (which she had been occupying, de facto, for a long 
 period of time, but her ownership of which the Emperor now 
 formally recognized), and also Alsace — ^that is to say, the two 
 landgraviates and the inextricable chaos of lordships and 
 imperial towns which made up the territory known under that 
 geographical name : unfortunately this cession of Alsace was 
 couched in terms the ambiguity of which was to be the pretext 
 for much future contestation and war. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Mazarin's successes in the departments of foreign politics 
 and war were almost unnoticed, like those of Richelieu in earlier 
 Unpopularity days : the whole of France had grown to hate 
 ofMazarin. the foreigner, the intruder, the Italian. The 
 populace ascribed the increased weight of taxation to him, and 
 reproached him with having amassed a fortune for himself. 
 Even in 1645 women had cast themselves at Anne of Austria's 
 feet in the chiurch of Notre-Dame, crying out that she " had a 
 man about her who took everything " (d'Ofmesson). At Court 
 there had been a hope that this Regent's rule would be as weak 
 as that of others, and that the usual profits would consequently 
 be made out of it : and behold, Anne had chosen a Minister 
 who took good care nobody should play on her ignorance or 
 her indolence to extort favours, pensions, honours, and bene- 
 
 149 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTUKY 
 
 factions. The princes, too, loathed this tiresome fellow who 
 kept them out of power with a gentle hand, indeed, but one 
 that never failed. And like them, the former " Importants," 
 the ambitious men, and all those who had reckoned on fishing 
 in troubled waters, from Retz to Mile, de Montpensier — ^the 
 "Grande Mademoiselle" as Gaston's daughter was called, on 
 account of her height — were bent on the Cardinal's ruin. Even 
 those who had nothing to gain by such an event longed for it 
 too, for the sake of being in the fashion — ^for the Fronde was a 
 fashion. 
 
 What more fascinating adventure could there be, in fact, in 
 the eyes of those fair and romantic ladies and the fops of their 
 period, passionate admirers, every one of them, 
 of the Grand Cyrus if not of Oroondate the 
 Scythian (just as their grandchildren, at a later date, were to 
 go crazy over Saint-Preux or Ren^), whose dreams were all of 
 heroic loves and splendid intrigues, and doughty sword-thrusts, 
 than such a civil war as this one — ^not " savage " and " bar- 
 barous," but chivalrous and well-ordered, with its battles 
 fought under the eyes of the fair sex, and that famous siege of 
 the Bastille in 1649, graced by the presence of the most fascinat- 
 ing ladies of the Fronde, who brought their chairs " as if they 
 had come to hear a sermon," and sat behind the battery which 
 fired five or six shots — & mere formality — on the ancient fortress 
 before it surrendered. And was it not a prodigiously fine 
 thing to come back, like M. de Noirmoutiers, from firing off 
 pistols in the faubourgs, and find your way, all covered with 
 heroism and dight in armour, into Mme. de Longueville's 
 own chamber, where the very air rustled with talk of warfare 
 and of love ? " The medley of ladies and blue scarves and 
 cuirasses, of violins in the room, and trmnpets in the square, 
 made up a sight more conunonly seen in novels than elsewhere," 
 says Retz : " Noirmoutiers, who was a great admirer of the 
 Astrie, said to me, ' I imagine to myself that we are besieged 
 in Marcilly.' ' You are quite right,' I replied." What more 
 unforgettable indeed, to romantic imaginations, than scenes 
 such as the following : 
 
 The smallpox had left Mme. de Longueville all the radiance of her 
 beauty, and that of Mme. de Bouillon, though somewhat impaired, 
 150 
 
THE FRONDE AND MAZARIN 
 
 was still most brilliant. Imagine, I beg of you, these two ladies on the 
 steps of the Hotel de Ville, their appearance all the more lovely because 
 it seemed unstudied, although it was not. Each held one of her children 
 in her arms, as beautiful as their mothers. The Place de Grfeve was 
 crammed to the roofs with people : all the men shouting with delight, 
 all the women shedding tears of tender emotion ! (Retz). 
 
 The Parliament — like the Court, like the town, like every one 
 in fact — was at enmity with the Cardinal. It had considerable 
 The Paris pretensions, which it constantly put forward, and 
 
 Pailiament. more particularly, for the best of reasons, during 
 the minority of any sovereign. If claimed to be the sole 
 representative of the ancient Court of the Peers, the Assembly 
 of the Champ-de-Mai, and the States-General of the Three 
 Orders, and to have a right, in consequence, to control the 
 King's Government : unfortunately, in the King's opinion, his 
 Council sufficed for all his needs. But the Parliament was 
 powerful. It had a huge following of attorneys, sheriffs' 
 officers, Serjeants, lawyers, and pettifoggers of every kind, who 
 exercised a great influence on public opinion. When, in con- 
 junction with the three sovereign courts — ^the Court of Aids, the 
 Chamber of Accounts, and the Great Council — it discussed the 
 King's edicts, its deliberations attracted the greatest attention. 
 All the Parliamentary magistrates in their scarlet mantles 
 trimmed with ermine, and those of the other courts in their 
 black gowns — of velvet, satin, damask, or silk — ^gathered them- 
 selves together in the Chamber of Saint-Louis, and there 
 solemnly exchanged speeches, frequently violent in tone, and 
 interrupted by the hooting and the plaudits of the young 
 Councillors of the Court of Inquiry— -more than four hundred 
 of them, between the ages of twenty-five and thirty, far 
 outn\mibering the greybeards of the " Grand' Chambre." The 
 public acclaimed the " fathers of the country " as it called 
 them, and this popularity was by no means displeasing to 
 them. Nurtured as they had been on the Latin authors, 
 they were delighted to hear their speeches described as " mag- 
 nificent harangues with something of ancient Rome about 
 them," and themselves likened to Roman senators defend- 
 ing the rights of freedom. That was their special form of 
 romance. 
 
 151 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 On ordinary occasions the Palace of Justice was full of all 
 sorts of people who had nothing to do with judicial matters, 
 The Palais de and besides the throng of attorneys, advocates. 
 Justice. lawyers, and litigants of every kind, innumerable 
 
 idlers spent their whole days there. For in all the pubUc halls, 
 and every corner of the old building — ^but above all in that 
 " Galerie Merci^re " in which Corneille laid the scene of his 
 comedy La Galerie du Palais — every variety of fashionable ware 
 and elegant trifle was sold : fans, gloves, slippers, fine linen, 
 trinkets : even engravings and books were to be had : every 
 pillar in the Great Hall had its bookstall. On the days of 
 great political sessions the news was carried from shop to shop, 
 spread to the street, reached the Place Dauphine, and thence 
 was passed on to the Pont-Neuf. . . . Once there, all Paris 
 caught it up. 
 
 The Pont-Neuf was the real heart of the city. There were 
 no houses along its parapets, as on all the other bridges, and 
 - the view over the river was open on both sides. 
 ' Looking up-stream, this was bounded, at no great 
 distance, by the buildings of the Pont-au-Change and the Pont- 
 Saint-Michel, but down-stream the yellowish ripples of the 
 Seine could be seen shining in the far distance. The river was 
 more useful in those days than in ours, and quite as busy. Its 
 banks were crowded with stores and open-air markets, and boats, 
 barges, roofed passenger-boats, and pleasure-galleys, carved 
 and gilded, shot in all directions over the face of the stream, 
 which was narrowed, wherever there was a landing-stage, by 
 the rows of boats moored close to it. On the left bank, behind 
 the H6tel de Nevers and the ruined Tour de Nesles, which stood 
 on the edge of the quay, was the shadowy outline of a great 
 mass of houses, intersected by streets, and dominated by the 
 steeple of Saint-Germain-des-Pr^s. But on the right the 
 Louvre extended in noble beauty. In the foreground, in the 
 angle formed by the Little Gallery and the southern front of 
 the old palace (that which runs parallel with the river), there 
 was a sort of garden of orange-trees bounded by a terrace and 
 a wall, against which stood several houses in what has now 
 become the Rue du Louvre. Then, from the southern end of 
 the Little Gallery, the Great Gallery ran right down to the 
 152 
 
THE FRONDE AND MAZARIN 
 
 Tuileries, flanked, just before it reached that palace, by an 
 ancient fortified gate, the great wooden tower of which corre- 
 sponded with the Tour de Nesles. At the end of the garden of 
 the Tuileries was the town wall and the Porte de la Conference, 
 through which the King had easy access to the Cours-la-Reine 
 and the open country. ... It was a delight to pass out of the 
 close network of the Paris streets, full of stinking mud and 
 encumbered with filth of every description, which the townsfolk 
 threw indiscriminately out of window, and find oneself on the 
 fine road over the Pont-Neuf, spacious and airy, swept by the 
 river breeze, and offering the most amusing sight conceivable. 
 
 For all day long a huge crowd swarmed there. People going 
 about their business, in the first place : horsemen with ladies 
 behind them, gentlemen who galloped along without the smallest 
 regard for the passers-by, biirghers bestriding their mules, 
 women of the humbler sort sitting on their donkeys, market- 
 gardeners and washerwomen leading their pack-horses or their 
 asses, laden with linen, lackeys with led horses, carters driving 
 long strings of tumbrils ; often a coach would appear, leather- 
 curtained, more or less sumptuous, covered with gilding and 
 armorial bearings, lined with velvet and fringes — a weighty 
 machine filled with lords and ladies, and drawn by great coach- 
 horses under whose hoofs the pavement shook. But the special 
 colour of the Pont-Neuf was due to the fair that was held there 
 all the year round. All along the parapets, in front of the 
 fine new and regularly built houses — brick with stone facings 
 — of the Place Dauphine, facing the open space on which the 
 colossal statue of good King Henri IV stood, and even along 
 the neighbouring banks of the river, swarmed jugglers, and 
 singers, and conjurers, and tooth-drawers, and dog-sellers, and 
 vendors of silk stockings, and parasols, and flowers, and fruit, the 
 shabby poets, and the second-hand book-dealers. Close to the 
 pumping machine that rose out of the river and was set against 
 the parapet not far from the right bank — ^the " Samaritaine," 
 as it was called, because its handsome clock was adorned with 
 figures of Jesus and the Samaritan Woman — ^the small book- 
 sellers laid out their wares, and did an underhand trade in 
 lampoons and " mazarinades " : there the gazetteers had their 
 newspapers cried — sometimes these were in manuscript, some- 
 
 158 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 times they were printed — and the song-writers produced 
 couplets about the victories of M. le Prince or the misdeeds of 
 M. le Cardinal : " Beware of the ponts-neufs" said Conde at 
 Lerida. . . . Farther on, protected by their canvas tents or 
 sheltered by red umbrellas, the wineshop-keepers and orange- 
 sellers offered their wares, the jugglers blew their horns, perched 
 on their trestle-boards, the quacks, successors of the illustrious 
 Mondor and his servant Tabarin, vaimted their remedies. Here 
 the " Orvietan," round whom four fiddlers scraped their instru^ 
 ments, dispensed his miraculous ointment. Elsewhere, Carme- 
 line, Cormier, and Rondin pulled out teeth and sold their opiates, 
 warranted not only to restore youth to the old, but to beautify 
 the human countenance and heal the most incurable ills. 
 Philipot, a blind man, otherwise called the Savoyard, and the 
 famous Baptiste (two of Boileau's " victims ") sang couplets of 
 their own composition. Brioch6 made his monkey, Fagotin, 
 dance (the monkey which Cyrano ran his sword through one 
 day), and there were plenty of rogues ready to imitate him. 
 
 Vestus comme des harlequins 
 
 Avec trois guenilles de linge, 
 
 Qui font sauter un pauvre singe 
 
 Et grimper dessus un baston, 
 
 Afln de gagner un teston. . . . (F. Colletet). 
 
 Till the sun went down the bridge rang with talk and 
 shouts. Then, when darkness approached, each man prudently 
 closed his shop, for at that hour thieves, and bravoes, and high- 
 waymen reigned supreme : once, towards the year 1700, they 
 ventured to hold up the mail-coach to Tours, when it halted at 
 the " Samaritaine." 
 
 Though the Fronde came into existence in the Palais de 
 Justice, it was on the Pont-Neuf, and amongst the populace, 
 that it gathered strength, and flamed into action. Yet the 
 Fronde did not respond to any deep national feeling. Apart 
 from the touch of romance, and the hatred of the Minister, the 
 parties that made up the opposition had not a single idea or 
 passion in common : the Fronde possessed no programme. 
 From the very outset, jealousy between the chief leaders, 
 Orleans and Conde, was as bitter as between their subordinates, 
 and these rivalries resulted in some ridiculous incidents. On 
 154 
 
THE FRONDE AND MAZARIN 
 
 one occasion, in 1644, " Madame la Princesse " had herself bled, 
 so as to avoid taking part in some ceremony in which she would 
 have had to yield precedence to Gaston's daughter, the " Grande 
 Mademoiselle " : forthwith Mademoiselle took physic, so as ta 
 escape appearing without Madame la Princesse in her wake—' 
 nothing but the threat of having her carried bodily to Notre* 
 Dame settled the matter. In 1648 her attendants hardlj 
 dared to inform her of the victory won at Lens by the Great 
 Condd, her father's adversary, and when she did hear of it she 
 was in despair. The Cardinal, as may easily be conceived, 
 made no effort to reconcile the princes, and he was quite right : 
 when they did join forces, it was against him. . . . These 
 divisions were a source of weakness to his enemies (who were, 
 after all, the enemies of France as well), but a greater one was 
 their lack of conviction. The name bestowed on the Fronde 
 was that of a childish game, and this was appropriate enough, 
 for the rebellion really was a game, a silly comedy, played by 
 France for her own entertainment : in it the members of the 
 Parliament were to be seen figuring as " magistrates of Ancient 
 Rome," fine gentlemen and fair ladies played at war and politics, 
 and even the worthy Paris burghers played at soldiers on the 
 Place Dauphine and the Place Royale : the " common folk " 
 were the only people who did not play ; they paid instead, as 
 usual. 
 
 It was the Parliament that opened the battle, so to speak. 
 For several years past it had been opposing all edicts for taxa- 
 Arrest of tion, and had gained immense popularity as the 
 
 Blancmesnil result. Mazarin, out of prudence, had nearly 
 andBroussel. always persuaded the Queen to give way, but 
 Anne, thoroughly embittered, was impatiently awaiting the 
 moment when she should be strong enough to take her revenge. 
 That moment seemed to her to have arrived on the day when 
 the Te Deum for the victory of Lens was sung in Notre-Dame. 
 So on August 26, 1648, she ordered the arrest of two Councillors 
 well known for their violent language regarding the Court — 
 Blancmesnil and Broussel. The latter of the two, " who had 
 grown old amongst the bags and dust of the Grand' Chambre, 
 with more reputation for integrity than capacity," was an 
 exceedingly obstinate old fellow, whose imperturbable opposi- 
 
 155 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 tion and blind obstruction In connection with the financial 
 edicts had made him the popular idol. While Comminges, a 
 lieutenant of the Guard, was preparing to remove him in a 
 closed coach, his servant-maid, leaning out of the window, 
 roused the neighbourhood. Instantly a crowd collected, and 
 the coach started on its way amidst a storm of hostile cries : 
 then the news spread like wildfire all over Paris : soon the shops 
 were shut noisily : chains were stretched across the streets as 
 though darkness had already fallen : the rusty old weapons of 
 the League began to reappear : within a few hours the city was 
 barricaded right up to the Palais-Royal. ... In those days, 
 and even under Louis-Philippe, a few paving-stones and two or 
 three hogsheads filled with earth and horse-dung sufficed to block 
 up many of the old Paris streets very thoroughly : when Baron 
 Haussmann widened the city highways he did the rioters a very 
 bad turn. At the Palais-Royal, in spite of it all, the Court had 
 not as yet taken alarm. M. le Cardinal kept a cheerful coun- 
 tenance. The Due d'Orleans went on whistling with his hands 
 in his pockets, as was his wont. To amuse the Queen, the 
 courtiers took off old Broussel's " nurse " at her window. Anne 
 herself seemed as calm and placid as usual : but when Gondii 
 the Archbishop's Coadjutor, whose hatred of the Court had won 
 him huge popularity, waited upon her, and hypocritically 
 advised her to give in, she suddenly lost all patience. " ' I Jjpow 
 what you mean, M. le Coadjuteur I ' she cried, and her voice 
 grew shrill with anger, ' you wotild have me set Broussel at 
 liberty : I wouJd rather strangle him with these two hands ! ' 
 And as she spoke the last syllable she almost struck me in the 
 face with them, and added : ' and those who . . .' The 
 Cardinal, convinced that she was on the point of saying every- 
 thing to me that fury could inspire, came forward and whispered 
 something in her ear. She composed herself, and that to such 
 an extent that if I had not known her so well I should have 
 thought her very much appeased. . . ." 
 
 But the next day the populace began firing on the Guard. 
 Very early in the morning the Parliament met in solemn 
 Popular assembly, and while a great crowd in the Grand' 
 
 risings. Salle sent up shouts of " Broussel ! Broussel ! " 
 
 the Councillors decided to go in a body to the Palais-Royal and 
 156 
 
THE FRONDE AND MAZARIN 
 
 demand the prisoners' release. They were very badly received : 
 the Queen, in a furious rage, slammed the door of her chamber 
 in their faces : but the Cardinal, to console them, assured them 
 in the most civil fashion that Broussel and Blancmesnil would 
 be set free at once if Parliament would undertake to discontinue 
 its seditious meetings. Whereupon the Councillors resolved to 
 go back to the Palais de Justice and there discuss the matter. 
 
 But seeing them issue forth without the prisoners, the 
 crowd assembled in the square hooted them. When the red- 
 robed procession reached the barricade of the Croix-du-Trahoir, 
 at the corner of the Rue Saint-Honore and the Rue de I'Arbre- 
 Sec, it was obliged to halt : a cookshop-keeper's apprentice 
 marched straight down upon Mol^, the First President, caught 
 him resolutely by his flowing white beard, and ordered him to 
 go back and fetch Broussel. In face of this pressing danger the 
 President was as bold as the antique senators whose courage he 
 no doubt panted to emulate : but all the same, the Councillors, 
 sorely frightened, were fain to retrace their steps. Back they 
 went to the Palais-Royal, where, after some pretence of a 
 discussion, they agreed to the Cardinal's conditions, and the 
 Queen granted the prisoners their freedom. But it was not till 
 the morrow, and after the populace had seen Broussel return to 
 his own house, that the barricades disappeared. 
 
 .Now while the good man was being borne in triumph to 
 Notre-Dame, Mazarin was writing as .follows in his notebook : 
 " Parliament has performed the functions of the King, and the 
 populace has completely complied with its will : it has given 
 Broussel to the King as his partner : it has used imprudent 
 language touching the Queen and myself " : all of which things 
 the Prime Minister regarded, very justly, as intolerable. And 
 for this reason, on September 18, 1648, the little King made his 
 surreptitious exit from Paris and was joined by the Queen at 
 Rueil the same day. Mazarin's intention had been to collect 
 troops at that place, and then administer exemplary chastise- 
 ment to " those knaves." But Gaston, as usual, was horribly 
 frightened. And as for that incoherent being Cond^, so clear- 
 sighted and resolute in war, but half-crazed with pride in civil 
 life, he certainly thought the boldness of " those devils of 
 square caps " an insult to the crown, but at the same time he 
 
 157 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 kept telling everybody that he loathed that " rogue of a 
 Sicilian." And so the two parties came to a compromise. The 
 Queen, with rage in her heart, signed a sort of " charter " in 
 twenty-four articles, which gave satisfaction to the Parliament. 
 A-nd the Court returned to Paris. 
 
 Mazarin had not abandoned his original idea. He was 
 firmly resolved to violate the Rueil understanding the moment 
 he could find means to do so. For this purpose he issued 
 secret orders for the advance of the Army of Flanders nearer 
 Paris : and that done, set himself to win over Conde, whom he 
 took to be the only good general in the country. Wily fellow ! 
 His notebooks show that he desired Arme to make public 
 complaints of himself, to blame his mildness and weakness, and 
 say to M. le Prince, with a sham air of resignation, " that if 
 men, even M. le Cardinal, should fail her, God would help her ! " 
 Anne followed these instructions, as other documents prove, to 
 the letter : and the proud Cond6's vanity was exquisitely 
 tickled. . . . Two months after the Court had returned to 
 Paris (at the end of December), the troops began to collect 
 round the city. Monsieur had been won over, M. le Prince was 
 tonquered, and Mazarin felt it was time for him to act. 
 
 On the evening of January 5, the eve of Twelfth-Night, 
 Anne seemed, to all her circle, as calm and placid as was her 
 Removal of wont. To amuse the little King she shared a 
 the Court to Twelfth-Night cake with him and two or three of 
 Versailles. her ladies, found the bean herself, and shortly 
 afterwards retired to rest. But at three o'clock in the morning 
 she left her bed, had the child-King and his little brother dressed, 
 took them with her down a secret staircase, passed out of the 
 gardens by a side door, entered a coach that stood waiting for 
 her, and departed to the Cours-la-Reine, there to await the 
 Cardinal and the Princes : her only attendants were her principal 
 waiting-woman and three officers of the Guard. Gaston, 
 Cond4 and Mazarin had supped and spent the evening with the 
 Mardchal de Grammont : when they left his house they pro- 
 ceeded to the Cours-la-Reine to join the Queen. Meanwhile 
 lackeys were running hither and thither all over the town, to 
 warn the most important persons of the Court ; these, in their 
 turn, informed their own friends ; and thus a whole caravan of 
 158 
 
THE FRONDE AND MAZARIN 
 
 coaches, laden with sleepy gentlemen and ladies, set forth and 
 jolted along in the thick darkness, behind that in which the 
 Queen was seated. She halted at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. 
 The only furniture the palace boasted consisted of a few camp 
 beds. On these the King, the Queen, and the Princes lay down : 
 the courtiers slept where and how they could, on mattresses, on 
 straw, or on the hard floors. 
 
 When Paris woke up on January 6, the population learnt 
 with astonishment that the Court had fled. But the first 
 moment of consternation once past, it put a good face on the 
 matter. Parliament decreed the impeachment of Mazarin, 
 ordered " all burghers and heads of families " to take up arms, 
 and published an exceedingly insolent edict forbidding soldiers 
 or people connected with the business of war to come within 
 twenty leagues of the capital. All this, of course, was done in 
 the King's name, for the constant anxiety of the supporters of 
 the Fronde — so strong was the worship of monarchy in the 
 hearts of that period — was clearly to establish the fact that 
 they only rebelled against Mazarin the better to serve the King : 
 Querimus regem nostrum was one of the legends on the flags 
 carried by the Paris burghers, and the Parliament wrote : 
 " Your preservation. Sire, and that of the Kingdom, are the 
 sole cause of our prohibition, and the motive of our decree 
 ordering Paris to take up arms." 
 
 Thus began this burlesque warfare, in which the amount of 
 gimpowder used by the warriors was far exceeded by the 
 quantities of ink and paper consumed by the lampooners. 
 Cond6 was quite unable to blockade Paris with his 5000 or 
 6000 men : he held the chief strategic points, and did his best 
 to starve out the city by occupying the Gonesse bakeries, for 
 instance, and the cattle markets at Poissy. The Parisians began 
 by taking a huge delight in playing at soldiers. But, if the 
 truth must be told, they had little taste for downright fighting. 
 For the burgher, we are told, 
 
 ... est prudent et craint la touche, 
 Outre qu'il n'aime la cartouche. . . . 
 
 Yet leaders there were in plenty. Mme. de Longueville, 
 sister to M. le Prince, had refused to flee with the Court, having 
 
 159 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 sworn an oath to play a noble part in the Paris revolt. This 
 indolent beauty, who looked " like an angel," with her pink 
 and white skin, pale golden hair and eyes of turquoise blue, 
 dreamt of a life of perils, like Mme. de Chevreuse, like 
 Mademoiselle, like the Princess Palatine, and many another lady 
 of her generation. She would pass from fits of languor to 
 " awakenings that were luminous and surprising." She, too, 
 was romantic, and of the stuff whereof Comeille's heroines were 
 made : she cared for her " glory." She longed to be like the 
 heroines of whom she had read : and, as she said, " I do not 
 care for innocent pleasures. . . ." 
 
 And Mme. de Longueville was not the Parisians' only 
 refuge : they had Cond6's own brother, Conti : they had 
 The " From- Mme. de Bouillon : they had the Coadjutor, 
 deuses." they had all the men of noble birth who came 
 
 hurrying up from Saint-Germain, day after day, to put them- 
 selves at their head, after the example of La Rochefoucauld, 
 Elbeuf, and Beaufort. . . , But all these gentlemen, whose 
 profession was bravery, tried to lead the city troops into under- 
 takings against the enemy which the said troops took to be 
 imprudences of the most culpable kind, so much so that the 
 officers of the city militia were obliged to point out, at last, 
 " that the Colonels and Captains of Paris had not been appointed 
 for the purpose of exposing themselves and the burghers of the 
 said town to sorties in which they might very well risk their 
 lives." And further, all these high-bom gentlemen expected to 
 be worthily entertained, together with their attendants and 
 their soldiers — a most ruinous proceeding. In addition to all 
 this, the behaviour of the populace was beginning to cause 
 alarm : it fancied it saw " Mazarins " in every comer, and had 
 begun a series of domiciliary visits, after which the persons 
 visited very seldom found their silver intact. . . . All these 
 things put the burghers so out of conceit with heroism that 
 when the Archduke Leopold sent an agent to offer the Parliament 
 an alliance with Spain, a great many people perceived that to 
 the Peace ol support the foreigner against the French Govern- 
 Aaeil, 1649. ment would really be a preposterous manner of 
 serving the King. One man of courage, M0I6, the First Presi- 
 dent, braved the rage of the demagogues, and took upon himself 
 160 
 
THE FRONDE AND MAZARIN 
 
 to open negotiations with the Court : this brought about the 
 Peace of Rueil (March 30, 1649). Neither Parliament nor city 
 lost anything by this agreement, and the rebeUious nobles 
 gained various favours : the lesson was not lost on the rest. 
 
 The Court retiu-ned to Paris amidst the most extraordinary 
 enthusiasm (August 18, 1649). A great ball was given at the 
 H6tel de Ville. Mazarin himself was much applauded. . . . 
 And after that the Fronde grew stronger than ever in Paris. 
 Cond^, especially, literally drunk with vanity and surrounded 
 by a band of young coxcombs as insolent as himself, became 
 unendurable, now that he had saved the Court. And indeed he 
 gave offence to everybody — to the Parliament by his incredibly 
 rude speeches, to the Cardinal by the extraordinary scorn with 
 which he treated him, to the Queen by his clumsy attempt to 
 foist on her as an admirer one of his friends, a good-looking 
 fop of the name of Jarz^ : so that the cunning Mazarin soon 
 succeeded in forming a coalition against him : on January 18, 
 1650, Cond6, his brother Conti, and his brother-in-law Longue- 
 ville were all arrested, without a word of protest from anybody. 
 The ladies stiU remained : the Dowager Princess of Cond^ the 
 Princess her daughter-in-law, and the Duchesse de Longueville : 
 they managed to raise a revolt in Bordeaux. But a royal army 
 soon appeared on the scene : October had come, and the 
 Bordelais were beginning to think about their vintage : the 
 Cardinal offered them very easy terms, and they capitulated. 
 
 Meanwhile, a small Spanish army commanded by Turenne, 
 who had not accepted the Peace of Rueil, was advancing by 
 the north, and its scouts were already threatening Vincennes. 
 But it was completely defeated at Rethel (December 15, 1650). 
 . . . Thus Mazarin's triumph seemed assured : but he had been 
 guilty of an unpardonable fault : that of not keeping the 
 promises with which he had bought the Coadjutor's support. 
 
 Yet this Paul de Gondi, future Cardinal de Retz, was a man 
 he should have humoiured. Though his appearance was against 
 Panl de Gondi, lui^ — ^^ was small, swarthy, badly built, short- 
 Cardinal de sighted, and extraordinarily clumsy in his move- 
 Retz. ments — ^his real character did not answer to his 
 
 face. We shall never know whether he possessed true genius 
 or not — ^for it is not prudent to credit statesmen with this 
 
 L 161 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 till they have turned it to account — ^but at all events he 
 gave many signs of it. Brave, adventurous, violent, caring 
 for nothing but women and sword-play, the last man in the 
 world, in fact, to be a priest, the necessity of keeping the Arch- 
 bishopric of Paris in his family had forced him, like Richelieu, 
 into the Church : the step had cost him much pain, but once 
 he had made up his mind to it, his whole ambition was fixed on 
 the great prospect it had opened to him, that of becoming chief 
 minister in Mazarin's place. To this end he struggled, all 
 through the Fronde, with astonishing skill, vigour, and unscru- 
 pulousness, displaying every quality needful in a party leader — 
 eloquence, courage, tact, knowledge of men, quickness in seizing 
 opportunities. . . . But great politicians, like great generals, 
 cannot win the day unless fortune is on their side ; events 
 turned out badly for Retz, and the accession of Louis XIV to 
 power was to deal a terrible blow to his hopes. Then, like the 
 gamester who knows how to lose, we see him show a smiling 
 countenance; he becomes a cultured man, much addicted to 
 belles-lettres, and never giving a thought to politics. Only now 
 and then, in the Conclave, he will use all his talent in the service 
 of France — the King might perhaps remark him, employ 
 him ? . . . But once thoroughly convinced that Louis XIV 
 will never, on any pretext whatsoever, call the Frondeur of 
 other days to his councils, he forthwith humbly resigns his 
 honours as a Prince of the Church, and sets himself to be, at all 
 events, a holy man — ^that being the only noble part left him to 
 play. . . . Thus Retz, in every circumstance of his existence, 
 remembered his future biographers and lived with a view to 
 the verdict of posterity. He was a true specimen of the kind 
 of character dear to Corneille. " His whole life, from one end 
 of it to the other, was ruled by his will. His immorality was 
 sublime, and his greatness of soul never failed him " (Lanson). 
 To drive so cunning a personage to extremes was a grave 
 piece of imprudence. Within a very short time Gondi had 
 contrived to set everybody against the Cardinal. Monsieur 
 himself, under his skilful guidance, broke with the Court, and 
 made up his differences with Cond6; he had been promised 
 that once Mazarin was dismissed he himself should be placed at 
 the head of the Council. One of his daughters was to marry 
 162 
 
THE FRONDE AND MAZARIN 
 
 Condi's son, the Due d'Enghien : Conti was to marry Mile, de 
 Chevreuse : the Coadjutor was to have a Cardinal's hat, and so 
 forth. The ladies had thrown themselves joyously into the plot : 
 the Princess Palatine, Anne de Gonzague, Mme. de Chevreuse, 
 Mme. de Montbazon, the whole bevy of voluptuous dames 
 were rapturously engaged in making mischief. . . . Already 
 Gondi was stirring up his parish priests, and Beaufort was- 
 talking to the market-women of the Halles in the language they 
 best understood. . . , Mazarin finally believed his life to be in 
 danger, and slipped away secretly (February 6, 1651). Anne 
 and her son, closely watched by the populace, which suspected 
 their intentions, were unable to join him. He hoped for help 
 from the imprisoned princes, and went himself to Le Havre 
 to release them : but we are told that when he bowed low — 
 very low indeed — before M. le Prince's coach, a disagreeable 
 burst of laughter was heard to issue from the vehicle. Nothing 
 was left him save to get across the frontier : and this he did. 
 
 Conde hurried up to Paris, where he succeeded in completely 
 ruining things for the Fronde. The Queen, to whom Mazarin, 
 from his retreat at Bruhl, constantly sent the wisest coimsels 
 mingled with passionate protestations of his own feelings for 
 her, flattered him most skilfully, and this made him lose his 
 head completely. In less than no time M. le Prince had con- 
 trived to give mortal offence to Monsieur, the Coadjutor, 
 Beaufort, the Parliament, and Mme. de Chevreuse, and make 
 them all band themselves together against him. Then he left 
 Majority of Paris and departed to his own government of 
 Louis XIV. Guyenne, where he raised a rebellion. Meanwhile 
 (September 7, 1651) the majority of Louis XIV was declared : 
 resistance no longer meant opposing the Regent " for the good 
 of the King," it meant flat rebellion. This excellent pretext 
 permitted Condi's last remaining allies to forsake him. 
 
 Thereupon Mazarin re-entered France at the head of a 
 small army which wore his colours — a green scarf (December, 
 1651). He had feared, no doubt, that mischief might be made 
 about him with the Queen, or even worse things yet — and this 
 the most charming gentlemen about the Court were doing their 
 best to achieve. But his inopportune return stirred up the 
 Fronde, which had been dying of sheer inanition. The moment 
 
 163 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 his reappearance was known, in fact, the Parliainent set a 
 price on his head (and sold his splendid library of books). But 
 — a most miraculous happening — Monsieur did a decisive thing ; 
 he opened negotiations with Cond6 (January, 1652), who had 
 already come to an arrangement with Spain. In the end, two 
 or three armies took the field at once : that of the Princes, that 
 of Mazarin, and that of the King and Queen, which was under 
 the command of Turenne, who had joined the Court party in 
 consideration of a liberal reward. 
 
 The Grande Mademoiselle threw herself into Orleans, an 
 apanage of her father's : there she took, or fancied she took, 
 Adventures of command of the troops : the oflBcers praised her 
 the Grande sagacity in military matters. . . . These were the 
 Mademoiselle, happiest days she ever knew. But indeed the 
 King's troops made no attempt to enter Orleans. Condd 
 surprised D'Hocquincomt's headquarters at Bleneau, but 
 Tiu:enne saved the situation (April, 1652) : then he placed the 
 army of the princes (which Cond^ had left, hurrying off to 
 Paris) in a most critical position. He was unfortunately obliged, 
 just at this moment, to move against the Due de Lorraine, who 
 had hired himself and his troops to Spain, and the princes' 
 forces slipped away. He did not find them again till he met 
 them under the walls of Paris, commanded, once more, by the 
 victor of Rocroy. 
 
 The Parisians energetically refused to allow any troops, 
 whether friendly or otherwise, to enter their walls. AJid when, 
 on July 1, Condi's forces, which had been driven out of Saint- 
 Cloud, arrived by the Cours-la-Reine on what is now called the 
 Place de la Concorde, they found the " Gate of the Conference " 
 closed in their faces. The little army was fain to make a 
 detour round the town and so reach Charenton : all night long 
 it marched along what we now call the Grands Boulevards. 
 But at six o'clock on the morning of July 2 it was met and 
 attacked, in the Faubourg Saint- Antoine, by the King's troops, 
 which came down from Belleville. Cond^ was driven back 
 against the wall and the Porte Saint- Antoine, which was still 
 shut against him, and guarded by the militia of his friends the 
 Parisians, who stood to their guns with matches ready lighted. 
 The ramparts were crowded with spectators : Mazarin himself 
 164 
 
THE FRONDE AND MAZARIN 
 
 watched the fray from the heights of Charonne. After a fight 
 that lasted six hours, and prodigious deeds of valour accom- 
 plished by the Prince, the troops of the Fronde seemed on the 
 point of being finally crushed against the wall, and Turenne 
 was just about to call on his men for a final effort, when, all of 
 a sudden, the drawbridge was lowered, the gates opened wide, 
 and the fugitives were seen disappearing into the town, while 
 a puff of white smoke rose over the Bastille, The Grande 
 Mademoiselle had persuaded the Parisians to open the gate, 
 and had then caused the King's soldiers to be fired on. Turenne 
 stopped short : Conde was saved. 
 
 At that moment Paris was. in a state of utter anarchy. 
 Authority over the city was in the hands of Monsieur, who had 
 Anarchy in assumed the title of Lieutenant-General of the 
 Paris. Kingdom : but whenever he was asked for an 
 
 order, Gaston took to his bed and swore he was dying. Each 
 of the leaders, consequently, had rioters of his own, in his 
 own pay. The populace, at a loss to know in whom it was to 
 believe, stopped any passing burgher, and made him shout 
 " Death to the Mazarins " — which was far from pleasant. . . . 
 When Cond6 and Gaston entered the assembly specially elected 
 to govern the town (July 4, 1652), they found the chief subject 
 of discussion was the possibility of coming to some arrange- 
 ment with the Court. They left the meeting. The Place de 
 Gr^ve was black with people. All at once shots were fired in 
 the midst of the crowd : this was the work of hired agents 
 placed there by Conde, who had fired on the city archers. The 
 archers returned the fire, and forthwith the populace rushed 
 upon the H6tel de Ville, burned down one of the doors, made 
 its way in, sacked the whole building, and murdered five 
 deputies who had not been able to get away. This riot was 
 The " Straw called the " Straw Sedition," because everybody, 
 Sedition." from the Princes to the meanest counter-jumper, 
 had adopted, for the day, the badge worn by Condi's men at 
 the fight before the Porte Saint-Antoine — a wisp of straw stuck 
 into their hats. 
 
 Si sans paille on voyait un homme, 
 Chacun crioit : Que Ton rassomme. 
 Car c'est un chien de Mazarin I 
 
 165 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 However, within a month half the hats in Paris were adorned 
 with paper, which was the royaUst emblem. 
 
 The Princes, and Retz, who had calmed down considerably 
 having at last attained the purple, were all making terms for 
 End o! the themselves. So ill-guarded were the gates of Paris 
 Fronde. that Turerine was thinking of taking the city by 
 
 surprise and sending in troops to support " the gentlemen who 
 wear paper." There was no necessity for this : Mazarin having 
 been so obliging as to take himself into exile in August, 1652, the 
 King returned to his good town of Paris two months later 
 (October 11). Four months after this, again, Mazarin himself 
 returned, and was loudly acclaimed (February 6, 1653). Save 
 at Bordeaux, where it was kept up by the Dowager Princesse 
 de Condd, by Conti, and by Mme. de Longueville, the Fronde 
 was dead. At Bordeaux, too, it was killed, as it had been 
 killed in Paris, by popular excesses : and in August, 1653, the 
 advent of the King's troops was enthusiastically welcomed by 
 the Bordelais. 
 
 A certain amount of chastisement was meted out to the 
 great nobles. Monsieur, who had fled to Blois, easily secured 
 his pardon on condition that he should betray his friends (which 
 he did very willingly) : Mademoiselle, the artless virago who had 
 dreamt of winning the hand of Louis XIV at the point of the 
 sword, was sent in disgrace to a splendid country-house : Retz 
 was imprisoned at Vincennes, first of all, and then at Nantes, 
 whence he escaped : Beaufort, La Rochefoucauld, and their 
 fellows were exiled to a certain distance from Paris for a time. 
 As for the Parliament, it was discussing some later edicts of 
 the King's, one day (April 13, 1655), when the monarch, in his 
 red jerkin and grey hat, suddenly appeared in its midst ; he 
 did not say, " I am the State," but with his own lips, and 
 without the intervention of his Chancellor, he forbade the 
 continuance of the discussion. This prohibition produced no 
 effect, indeed, till the members had been bought over one after 
 the other — all, at least, who were worth buying. When this 
 was accomplished, everybody was pacified — save Conde. 
 
THE FRONDE AND MAZARIN 
 
 IV 
 
 Cond^ had left Paris a few days before the King's return, 
 and joined the Spanish army : but there his pride clashed with 
 the arrogance of Archduke Leopold and the haughtiness of 
 Fuensaldana. Repulsed in Champagne in 1652, and held in 
 check by Turenne on the Somme in 1653, he was solemnly 
 declared guilty of high treason and treachery to his country, 
 and condemned to death by default on January 19, 1654. Then 
 Alliance with the war was carried on in somewhat desultory 
 England, 1657. fashion till Mazarin succeeded in persuading 
 Cromwell, the ruler of England, to become his ally. The 
 Protector exacted a considerable price for the support he gave ; 
 Turenne, after effecting a junction with the English troops, 
 6000 in number, took Mardick, and then proceeded to lay siege 
 to Dunkirk, while the British fleet blockaded the town from 
 the sea. In vain did the Spanish army, commanded by Don 
 John of Austria (son of Philip IV by an actress), and led, 
 under that prince's orders, by Cond^, endeavour to succour the 
 besieged town : it suffered a complete defeat at the Dunes, in 
 June, 1657. This glorious victory was announced to his wife by 
 Turenne, who was not given to eloquence, in the following 
 letter : 
 
 " The enemy came upon us. They have been beaten. God 
 be praised ! I have worked rather hard all day : I bid you 
 good night, and am going to bed." * 
 
 Spain, worn out, was forced to sue for peace. The chief 
 condition Mazarin imposed was the marriage of Louis XIV 
 Peace with with Philip I V's eldest daughter, the Infanta Maria- 
 Spain. Theresa. To this Philip objected, for so far he 
 only had two sons, puny and sickly boys, and nobody expected 
 them to live. As the succession of females in default of male 
 heirs to the throne was a fundamental law of Spain, the poor 
 King was disinclined to give his brother of France, who was 
 his traditional rival, any hope of ultimately wearing his crown. 
 To overcome his hesitation Mazarin arranged a very entertaining 
 comedy. 
 
 * This is the text as Ramsay gives it ; Grimoard has another version. 
 
 167 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Louis XIV was at that moment a healthy young fellow of 
 twenty. He had already been in love, and each time " for his 
 First loves oi whole Ufe," with Olympia Mancini, one of the 
 Louis XIV. Minister's own nieces, in the first place, with 
 Mile, de La Motte-Argencourt, and, at the time of which we 
 are now writing, with yet another of Mazarin's nieces, the skinny 
 Maria Mancini, his adoration for whom was likewise to last for 
 ever : all this made it evident that it was high time for him to 
 be married. So the Cardinal arranged an interview, with a 
 view to matrimony, between the young King and the daughter 
 of Christina of Savoy. The King had " always said he must 
 have a wife who was beautiful," and Princess Maria of Savoy 
 was far from lovely ; but Louis was of the age of Cherubin : 
 he at once discovered that his future wife was " very pleasant- 
 looking," " well made," and only " a little swarthy." And 
 Christina, on the faith of his declarations, already saw her 
 daughter Queen of France, when she heard of the hvuried 
 arrival of an envoy from Spain; he had been sent to promise 
 Louis XIV the Infanta's hand in his sovereign's name. The 
 Cardinal's cunning little comedy had ended as he had foreseen. 
 
 Nothing now remained except to conclude peace. The two 
 plenipotentiaries, Mazarin and Don Luis de Haro, met at the 
 frontier, on a little island in the Bidassoa. A whole month was 
 spent over the settlement of the problems in etiquette and 
 precedence arising out of the meeting : four more elapsed 
 before the treaty was finally arranged. " The Cardinal's policy 
 depended on his subtlety, that of Don Luis was founded on 
 delay.* The last named would never say a word, those spoken 
 by the first were always ambiguous. The genius of the Italian 
 Minister lay in his attempt to take others unawares, that of the 
 Spaniard in the way in which he defended himself against 
 surprises. We are told that he said of the Cardinal : " He has 
 one great political fault, he is always trying to deceive " 
 (Voltaire). On the whole, the treaty reflected great credit 
 on Don Luis de Haro : according to its provisions, France 
 forsook her ally, the King of Portugal, restored the greater 
 number of the fortified towns she had taken in the Franche- 
 Comt6 and the Low Countries — ^Ypres, Oudenarde, and so 
 forth — and pardoned Cond6 : in return she acquired definite 
 168 
 
THE FRONDE AND MAZARIN 
 
 possession of Roussillon and the Cerdagne, the whole of Artois 
 except the towns of Aire and Saint-Omer, and a series of 
 northern towns which provided her with a solid girdle of defence 
 in that quarter : further, the Duke of Lorraine, who had been 
 the paid soldier of Spain, only recovered his Duchy on condition 
 that he ceded a great slice of it to France : and finally Louis XIV 
 was to marry the Infanta, who renounced all her rights to the 
 Spanish throne in consideration of the dowry of 500,000 gold 
 crowns which her father was to give her. Philip IV was utterly 
 unable to find such a siun. Did Mazarin, who could not have been 
 ignorant of this fact, say to himself that the day would surely 
 come when either the Queen of France or her children would 
 have a right to the throne of Spain ? Perhaps so, and if so. 
 Treaty of the events were to prove he was right. ... In any 
 Pyrenees, 1658. case, when this Treaty of the Pyrenees was signed, 
 and the Cardinal had succeeded in placing the Rhenish League 
 under the protection of France (1658), Louis XIV found himself 
 master everywhere. Mazarin had completed what Richelieu 
 had begun, and proved himself a great diplomatist. 
 
 Within the kingdom he was a greater figure at that time 
 than his predecessor had been, and even greater, in a way, than 
 Magnificence the King himself. He lived splendidly in Paris, 
 of Mazaiin. in his magnificent palace (standing almost on the 
 site of the present Bibliothfeque Nationale), which was filled 
 with works of art and rare books, and protected by guards and 
 musketeers who wore his livery. " The Councils were held in 
 his chamber while he was being shaved or dressed, and often 
 he would play with his bird or his pet monkey while people were 
 talking business to him. He never asked any one to be seated 
 in his chamber — ^not even the Chancellor or the Marechal de 
 Villeroy." His fortune was enormous, much larger than 
 Richelieu's : it amounted to at least 200 millions of modem 
 French money, and he never ceased adding to it, not out of 
 avarice — ^for he was fond of showing off his splendour, as on the 
 day when he spent a million on a lottery for his friends — but, 
 like many another man, less because he loved money than 
 because he delighted in the art of making it. Assisted by a 
 most crafty man of business, named Colbert, " poor M. le 
 Cardinal " lent the King money for short periods and at heavy 
 
 169 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 interest, sold the Crown offices for his own benefit, received, on 
 various pretexts, sums of money intended for the use of the 
 army and navy, and exacted from all and sundry payments too 
 considerable to be called gratuities, to which the more high- 
 sounding title of " commissions " must be applied. 
 
 He was on excellent terms with the King. La Porte has 
 asserted that he allowed the monarch, as a child, to sleep in 
 sheets that were full of holes, and grow quite out of clothes that 
 were too short for him, and it would appear that at a later 
 period he did not fail to economize on the expenses of the 
 young man's establishment as far as he could contrive to 
 do so without causing a scandal. Nevertheless, he seems 
 to have had a sincere affection for the handsome, manly, 
 thoughtful youth. As we have already related, Louis XIV fell 
 
 . . . in love, in 1658, with the Cardinal's niece Maria 
 
 Mancini, a tall girl of seventeen, thin, dark-haired, 
 violent, witty — " a contradictory and passionate spirit " the 
 Cardinal himself said of her — who had set her mind on making 
 him marry her, and very nearly succeeded in doing so. The 
 Cardinal made a most heroic resistance to the plan : he packed 
 off his unmanageable niece to Brouage. When the moment of 
 parting came, Louis wept hot tears, and his lady-love said to 
 him fiercely : " Sire, you are the King, you love me, and yet you 
 let me go ! " — a celebrated sentence, which Racine was to 
 reproduce later, in a less trenchant form, in his Birinice : 
 Vous 6tes empereur, Seigneur, et vous pleurez I 
 
 Why did the Cardinal refuse to permit his niece to mount 
 the throne ? Like all the men of his time, he had the strongest 
 feeling for his own family : in proof of this it may be pointed 
 out that his nephew, FiUppo Mancini, was made Due de 
 Nevers, one of his nieces, who died in 1637, was Duchesse de 
 Mercoeur, and therefore granddaughter by marriage to Henri IV ; 
 another was married to Conti, and consequently a Princess of 
 the blood-royal ; a third was Duchesse de Bouillon ; a fourth 
 the wife of Eugene of Savoy, Comte de Soissons ; a fifth Duchess 
 regnant of Modena ; Hortense, indeed, married a mere Marshal 
 of France (De la Meilleraie), but even he was promoted to be 
 Due de Mazarin. Might not Maria Mancini, sister and cousin of 
 170 
 
THE FRONDE AND MAZARIN 
 
 so many princesses, have aspired to be Queen of France ? . . . 
 But Anne of Austria was already drawing up formal protests 
 against the marriage : and then Mazarin did not like Maria : and 
 he did, besides, feel a most passionate interest in his own pohtical 
 work : no doubt he would not permit the failure of the Spanish 
 marriage, his crowning achievement. 
 
 However this may have been, when he had made the final 
 sacrifice to virtue involved in his renunciation of any attempt 
 to place his own kinswoman on the throne, he felt he had done 
 enough, and from that time forth all his attention was devoted 
 to preventing any possibility of the fortune he had amassed 
 being confiscated after his death. On March 3, 1661, he craftily 
 made over everything he possessed to Louis XIV. Alas ! 
 for three whole days the young King hesitated as to whether 
 he should accept so magnificent a gift, and Mazarin lived in an 
 anguish of apprehension. At last, on March 6, Louis returned 
 Death of the document embodying the donation, and gave 
 
 Mazarin, 1661. his Minister authority to dispose as he thought 
 fit of the riches enumerated in it. After this fashion " M. le 
 Cardinal " quieted his own conscience, and ensured the inheri- 
 tance of his wealth to his family. To console Hortense for being 
 no more than a duchess, he gave her thirty millions. The others 
 contented themselves with what was left. As for the King, he 
 received a great deal of wise counsel — especially he was advised 
 never to take another Prime Minister. And all this being com- 
 pleted, the Cardinal made a good end : on March 9, 1661, he died 
 in the odour of piety, fortified by the rites of the Church, and with 
 the name of Jesus on his lips. 
 
 WoBKS TO Consui-t: See henceforth passim, M. E. Lavisse's fine 
 history ; vols, vii, 1, 2, and viii, 1, deal with the reign of Louis XIV. See 
 also, in addition to works already quoted : A. Barine, Louis XIV et la 
 Grande Mademoiselle (1905) ; Princesses et grandes Dames (1909) ; Ch^ruel, 
 Histoire de France pendant la minoriti de Louis XIV (1879-80) ; Histoire 
 de France pendant le Ministire de Mazarin (1883) ; Funck-Brentano and P. 
 d'Estree, Les Nouvellistes (1905) ; G. Lacour-Gayet, L'Mucation politique 
 de Louis XIV (1898) ; J. Lair, Nicolas Fouquet (1890) ; Normand, La 
 bourgeoisie fran^aise au XVIP^ Sihcle (1908) ; L. P^rey, Le Roman du 
 Grand Rm (1894) ; J. Roy, Turenne (1884) ; A. Renee, Les nieces de 
 Mazarin (1858) ; Rod. Reuss, L' Alsace au XVIP"" Steele (1897) ; Val- 
 frey, Hugues de Ldonne (1881) ; Voltaire, Le Siecle de Louis XIV (1893). 
 
 171 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 THE "ROI-SOLEIL" 
 
 I. The King. II. The Court before the advent of Mme. de 
 Maintenon. III. Court Ufe. 
 
 FOR several days Anne of Austria, Louis XIV, and his 
 nurse had been spending their nights at the Castle of 
 Vincennes, in a room next to that in which Mazarin 
 lay dying. On the morning of March 9, 1661, the King called 
 his nurse, and asked her in a whisper, so as not to wake the 
 Louis XIV Queen, if the Cardinal were dead. When he knew 
 asserts his this to be the case, he dressed himself, summoned 
 power. the ministers, and forbade them to do any business 
 
 whatsoever — even to grant a passport — ^without having taken 
 his orders. When Monseigneur de Rouen said to him, on the 
 following day : " Sire, I have the honour of presiding over the 
 Assembly of the Clergy of your kingdom : Yoiu* Majesty ordered 
 me to address myself in all business matters to M. le Cardinal : 
 to whom does Your Majesty now desire me to apply ? " " To 
 myself. Monsieur I'Archeveque," replied the King. 
 
 There was universal stupefaction at Court. When her son's 
 words were reported to the Queen, she could not help laughing. 
 But Louis had begun to work six and seven hours a day at his 
 kingly duties ; fifty-four years later he was working harder 
 still. 
 
 His Memoirs tell us that he had long been making himself 
 ready against the day when the Cardinal's death should leave 
 him sole master. That day he at " once desired and feared " : 
 this was apparently because " though he had been brought up 
 in ignorance, his innate good sense had made him timid " (Vol- 
 taire). He has himself set forth, in very noble words, the 
 172 
 
THE "ROI-SOLEIL" 
 
 emotions he experienced after he had publicly declared his 
 intention of governing alone : 
 
 I felt my heart and my courage rise up within me, as it were ; I found 
 I was quite different, I discovered that within me of which I had been 
 unaware, and I reproached myself, with joy, for having been so long 
 imconscious of it. This first timidity, which judgment always brings 
 with it, and which distressed me — more especially when I had to speak 
 at some length and in public — ^vanished in a very short time. Then I 
 reaUy seemed to myself to be a king, and born to be one. I experienced 
 a delight, in fact, which it is diflScult to express. , . . 
 
 His education had been very much neglected. As a little 
 child, his governesses had generally left him to the care of 
 Youthful their waiting-women. In those days the great 
 
 training ol King was a fair-haired little boy, much addicted 
 Louis XIV. to the pleasures of his age. " He ate everything 
 he could lay hands on," Mme. dci Maintenon indignantly 
 reports, " and no one cared what might disagree with his health : 
 it was this which gave him the habit of being so severe with 
 himself. If anybody cooked an omelet, he always contrived to 
 get hold of some scraps, which Monsieur, his brother, and he 
 went and ate in a corner. He would sometimes relate that 
 most of his time was spent with a little girl, the daughter of a 
 woman who waited on the Queen's waiting-women : he called 
 her Queen Marie, because they used to play together at being 
 grown-up people "... Later on, the child did not learn 
 very much : nobody in those days imagined that knowledge 
 was indispensable to a prince. The only item as to which 
 Queen Anne was strict with him was that of his religious duties. 
 The chief object of M. de Villeroy, his Governor, was to secure the 
 affections of a pupil who was soon to become his master, and he 
 thought it useless, for this purpose, to force the youthful Louis 
 to apply himself to studies for which he had no taste. As for 
 Mazarin, who had caused himself to be invested with the title 
 of Superintendent of the King's education, he derided La 
 Porte, the King's valet, who displayed his zeal by reading 
 Mezeray's history to his young master at night " to put him to 
 sleep " (for which purpose the means may not have been ill- 
 chosen). For Mazarin, a practical man, held the teaching of 
 things to be far more precious than the teaching of books : he 
 
 173 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 preferred talking to the boy, and instilling, in familiar converse, 
 mistrust of men : it may well be that Louis XIV owed his 
 prudence, and that famous saying of his, " I will see," to the 
 counsels of his earliest instructor. In spite of which his real 
 knowledge, in 1661, was of the scantiest description, and he was 
 himself so well aware of this that he resolved to put himself to 
 school once more. This is one of the noblest passages in his 
 life : the young King, just three and twenty, intoxicated with 
 the delights of reigning, went back to his studies like any 
 child. ... As a matter of fact, he never knew any foreign 
 language really well, except Italian ; Maria Mancini may have 
 taught him that. 
 
 The King was exceedingly handsome. Tall and strong, 
 masculine in stature, and in face elegant, " the figure of a hero," 
 Avpearance o! with firm well-rounded cheeks about which 
 Louis XIV. his magnificent chestnut hair fell in soft waves — 
 it was not till 1673 that he could make up his mind to hide it 
 under a wig, and this was made with holes in it, to give passage 
 to the locks he refused to have cut off — a large nobly shaped 
 nose, and a scornful mouth : dark eyes that shot intimidating 
 glances : " his whole person so impregnated with the most 
 imposing majesty that it revealed itself alike in his slightest 
 gestures and his most ordinary actions, without any appearance 
 of pride, but with an air of grave simplicity " : "a voice the 
 sound of which agreed with all the rest : a great deal of reserve : 
 a politeness that was always grave, always majestic, always 
 distinguished, and suitable to age, station, and sex, and, towards 
 women, an air of natural gallantry " : " his figure, his bearing, 
 the charm, the beauty, and the noble aspect which succeeded that 
 beauty," the air of splendour and authority, in short, diffused 
 over his whole person, marked him out, in the midst of his Court, 
 " as the king-bee " (Saint-Simon and Primi), and made him, in 
 his subjects' eyes, the most perfect King of France they could 
 have imagined. 
 
 In his youth Louis was an accomplished dancer, and a still 
 better shot ; even at seventy he was a perfect horseman, and 
 drove his own chaise and four, at full speed, on 
 His physique. ^^^^ hunting day. He had an iron constitution. 
 More than once, in the course of the year 1661, he travelled forty 
 174 
 
THE "ROISOLEIL" 
 
 leagues in a day, to see Mile, de La Valli^re. In 1662 the Grande 
 Mademoiselle fell ill from sheer fatigue after dancing the ballet 
 entitled Hercule amoureux in his company. And the incessant 
 festivities of the period, the jousts, and hunting parties, and 
 love-making, never prevented him from working all the rest of 
 the day. His appetite was gigantic : "So hugely and so 
 solidly did he eat, at night and in the morning, and so regularly, 
 too, that nobody could grow accustomed to the sight " (Saint- 
 Simon). "I have often seen the King eat four full plates of 
 soup of various kinds, a whole pheasant, a partridge, a great 
 plate of salad, two large slices of ham, mutton dressed with 
 gravy and garlic, a dish of pastry, and after all that, fruit and 
 hard-boiled eggs," says his sister-in-law. And when the doctors 
 made a post-mortem examination of the old King's body, 
 " what especially astonished them was his stomach and bowels, 
 on account of their size and length — twice as long as the ordi- 
 nary — ^which explained his being so large and regular an eater " 
 (Saint-Simon). It is not astonishing, after such a regimen, that 
 the King should have suffered at an early age from gout, from 
 gravel soon after, and all his life long from sensations of heaviness, 
 and vapours, and fits of giddiness, for which his physicians, 
 — those depicted by Moli^re — ^treated him in the manner 
 familiar to us. He had smallpox in 1647, and scarlet fever in 
 1658 : in 1663 he had measles, and for the space of four and 
 twenty hours was in some danger ; in 1686 he suffered from that 
 " troublesome fistula " the operation for which he endured with 
 a courage that transported his whole Court with admiration. 
 And, indeed, his splendid endurance never failed. " No fatigue, 
 no ill-treatment by the weather, was too much for him, nor made 
 any impression on that heroic countenance : under rain, snow, 
 cold, sweat, or covered with dust, he was always the same." 
 And, as his own "robust and splendidly formed body" easily 
 endured all things, he insisted that those of others should do 
 likewise. Great ladies — ^kinswomen, daughters, or favourites — 
 had always, whether well or ill, " to appear in full dress (with 
 bare shoulders and uncovered heads), fully adorned and laced 
 into their stays, and go to Flanders or even farther, dance, sit up 
 late, join in every merrymaking, eat, be gay and pleasant com- 
 pany, go hither and thither, never look afraid or uncomfortable 
 
 175 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 because of the cold or the wind or the dust, and all this exactly on 
 the very days and at the very hours set forth, without faiUng by 
 the space of one minute." For so the King would have it. 
 
 Too much stress can hardly be laid on the physical quahties 
 of Louis XIV, because " the infinite graces and the imposing 
 His good majesty of his incomparable countenance " did 
 
 manners. more than can be told for the greatness of his 
 
 reign. His politeness was at once a masterpiece in itself and 
 a method of government. It was charming, it was also useful. 
 Everybody knows that " he never passed the humblest woman 
 without raising his hat, even to waiting-women, I say, and whom 
 he knew to be such. ... To ladies he lifted his hat right off 
 his head, but from a greater or lesser distance : to men of title, 
 he half lifted it, and held it up, or over his ear, for a few moments, 
 more or less markedly : to gentlemen — ^who were really such — 
 he contented himself with raising his hand to his hat. He took 
 it off to the Princes of the Blood just as he did to ladies." His 
 words, like his salutations, were measiured, graduated according 
 to the quality of the persons to whom they were addressed. He 
 . . spoke little, and gravely, saying what it was neces- 
 
 sary to say, and to the person to whom it was proper 
 to say it ; and, indeed, a word from him was an honour about 
 which people talked. In short, " no man ever sold his words, his 
 smiles, and his glances to better advantage." There is something 
 admirable in it all : does any one realize the effort imposed on 
 himself by this man whose whole existence was spent in public : 
 who never, for a single moment, forgot he was the Great King, 
 and played the part for which he had cast himself on the earthly 
 stage without once weakening in the course of fifty-four years ? 
 " Being in his chamber with some other courtiers," says Primi 
 Visconti, " I remarked several times that if the door happened 
 to open, or if he left the room, he at once composed himself in an 
 attitude, and his face took on a different expression, just as if he 
 were about to appear on the stage of a theatre : altogether, he 
 knows how to play the king right well in every particular." 
 Saint-Simon reckoned that in all his Ufe he was only in a rage 
 four or five times. " He had a bearing which was appropriate 
 to himself and his rank only, and would have been ridiculous 
 in any other man," says Voltaire, But in any case, and what- 
 176 
 
THE "ROISOLEIL" 
 
 ever might have happened, Louis XIV could never have been 
 ridiculous : he certainly is the only nnan to whom the epithet of 
 majestic may be applied with impunity. Majestic everything 
 about him was, decent, noble, great, and at the same time 
 very natural. His strength of will and force of character 
 overawed every one : the merciless Saint-Simon, who hated 
 him, himself acknowledges that " you had to accustom yourself 
 to the sight of him if you did not wish to expose yourself to 
 the danger of breaking down when you had to address a speech 
 to him." More fully than any other man, Louis XIV 
 possessed the art of being a king. 
 
 He was not highly intelligent, but he was judicious, thoughtful, 
 hard-working, practical, master of himself ; he possessed powers 
 of discernment, dignity, gravity, strong common sense, and, in 
 short, what he himself described as " a solid and active mind " : 
 just the qualities useful to a monarch or a business man. So 
 much good sense roused Boileau to a sort of enthusiasm : " this 
 prince never speaks wthout having thought ; everything he 
 says is admirably constructed " — and everything he writes, 
 Boileau might have added, for Louis XIV's Memoirs and his 
 letters are models of correctness and good taste, of lucid elo- 
 quence, and clear and straightforward expression. Added to 
 all this, Louis was passionately devoted to his " calling as a 
 king " ; to him it was " a great, noble, delightful " thing : he 
 had a lively sense of the pleasure to be derived from informing 
 oneself carefully as to a particular question, discovering all that 
 was true and just and useful in it, and bringing it to a practical 
 solution. Further, he was by nature kindly, gentle, and in- 
 dulgent : when he granted an audience, " however prejudiced 
 he might have been beforehand, he would listen with patience, 
 kindness, with a desire for enlightenment and information, and 
 would never interrupt, save to procure this ; he proved himself 
 imbued with a spirit of equity and a desire to know the truth, 
 and this though he was sometimes angry, and up to the very 
 end of his hfe," To conclude, he knew how to appeal to men's 
 hearts, and the way in which he granted his favours doubled 
 their value : the tone in which his praises were delivered 
 inspired those on whom he bestowed them with the blindest 
 devotion, and when he blamed, he did not discourage the 
 
 M 177 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 wrongdoer, but filled him with a longing to succeed better 
 another time. Being, then, what he was, with his clear reason, his 
 knowledge of men, his inherent dignity, his prudent tact, Louis 
 XIV remains the perfect type of the finished gentleman, the 
 honnete homme of the seventeenth century. He was not at all 
 brilliant : Racine, who collected his bons mots, only found a 
 bare half-dozen, and these by no means of the wittiest (but to 
 console us, he quotes some delightful traits of his personal charm). 
 " At every moment," says Sainte-Beuve, " he makes us feel the 
 attraction there is in the exercise of good sense." 
 
 His somewhat moderate intellectual gifts were heightened 
 by his nobility of character. Louis XIV had a very pure and 
 
 . .. . very beautiful ideal, embraced with passionate 
 ardom* and followed up with the most splendid 
 energy : that of figuring in history as a " great king." Often, 
 in his Memoirs, in which he puts forward his passion for " glory " 
 as the moving principle of his conduct, he speaks of it in really 
 touching terms : "I realized that the love of glory has the same 
 sensitiveness, and I may even say timidity, as the most tender of 
 all passions " : and elsewhere : 
 
 It is after this fashion, my son, that glory will have us love her. The 
 ardour we feel for her is not one of those feeble passions that cool with 
 possession. Her favours, which can never be obtained except with effort, 
 never cause disgust, and he who can refrain from longing for firesh ones 
 is unworthy of all those he has received. 
 
 But the idea of a great monarch, as it appeared to Louis XIV 
 and to his contemporaries, bore but little resemblance to our 
 Louis XIV and present conception of royalty. The King of 
 Pivine Right. France did not consider himself at all in the light 
 of a sort of permanent functionary or hereditary steward, whose 
 duty it is to administer the affairs of the nation to the best of his 
 ability. He looked on himself as an owner, free to manage his 
 patrimony — ^in other words, his kingdom — as he chose, an 
 owner, in fine, whose own good sense, uncontrolled save by 
 God Himself, led him to manage it wisely. 
 
 " Rome est a vous, Seigneur, I'empire est votre bien," says 
 Maxime to Auguste, in Cinna. The bishops were, in a sense, the 
 sovereign's chaplains, the officers of justice or finance were his 
 police and his cashiers, the intendants were his business agents, 
 178 
 
THE "ROI-SOLEIL" 
 
 the ministers and courtiers were " servants " of his " house," 
 secretaries, or members of his Guard of Honour. . . . And a 
 " great king," a " glorious " king, was simply, in his eyes, a 
 king who enlarged the borders of his kingdom and made his 
 rivals tremble — a warrior, a conqueror : wherefore he made war. 
 No doubt he likewise strove, as far as he was able, to ensure his 
 subjects equal justice and freedom from taxation, but that was 
 not his first care, for in his eyes to sacrifice his " glory " to his 
 subjects' happiness would have been " base." We may not 
 share his opinions nowadays, but it would be a sovereign in- 
 justice to judge Louis XIV solely from our modem point of 
 view. 
 
 Unfortunately this splendid and well-balanced nature 
 had one weak point — ^vanity : and from the very beginning 
 of his active reign Louis gave proof of this in various ways. 
 The young man, so serious and resolute in 1661, began by de- 
 grees to lose his head : flattered by his courtiers like any sultan 
 of The Arabian Nights, worshipped hke a god by his subjects,, 
 favoured by fortune herself, intoxicated with adulation, the 
 vainglorious Louis went a little mad with pride. It will be 
 seen that the errors of his reign had no other cause than this 
 mental malady. 
 
 II 
 
 Mme. Scarron was one of the spectators of Louis XIV's 
 entry into Paris with his young newly married Queen : " I do 
 Louis XIV's not believe anything so handsome can be seen 
 Marriage. anywhere," she wrote to one of her friends, 
 
 " and the Queen must have gone to bed well pleased with the 
 husband she had chosen." Now Marie-Ther^se had not chosen 
 her handsome husband, by any means, but she loved him with 
 all her strength, nevertheless. She was a very small fair woman, 
 with chubby cheeks, a fleshy nose, and loose-lipped mouth, 
 whose round blue eyes looked out upon the world with an 
 astonished air. Brought up, like all the Spanish Infantas, like 
 an idol, she was a pattern, all her life long, of the most sohd 
 virtue and the greatest stupidity. When she had lived in 
 France for twenty years, she was still saying una servilietta for 
 
 179 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 une serviette, Sancta Biergen for Sainte Vierge, and eschevois for 
 chevaux. But her love for the handsome man political arrange- 
 ments had given her for a husband was really touching : if 
 Louis only " looked kindly at her," says Madame, " she was 
 merry the whole day long," and people about the Court laughed 
 a little on the sly when she appeared, one day, to please her 
 lord, " all covered with coloured ribbons," an adornment under 
 which her plump little person looked odd indeed ; or when a proof 
 of the King's tenderness filled her with open delight. " She 
 was so exhilarated when this happened to her that everybody 
 found it out at once. She liked to be joked about it, then she 
 would laugh, and her eyes would twinkle, and she would rub her 
 little hands together." She bore five other children after the birth 
 of the Grand Dauphin, all of whom died in their infancy. When 
 she died, in her turn (July 80, 1683), Louis might well exclaim, 
 " This is the first sorrow she has caused me ! " 
 
 Less than a year after the King's marriage, his brother, 
 Monsieur, took a wife. Though the younger brother was very 
 " Monsieur " unUke his elder, there was a great affection be- 
 (Philippe tween the two. Philippe d'0rl6ans had hair and 
 
 d'Orleans). eyebrows as black as jet, a thick nose, dark eyes, 
 a small mouth, and his face looked long and narrow under his 
 immense wig. Whereas Louis was tall and masculine and fine- 
 looking, Philippe was small and plump and effeminate. " He 
 cared neither for horses nor for hunting : his only pleasures were 
 gaming, receptions, good eating, dancing, and wearing fine 
 clothes." Foppish, frivolous, coquettish, as loquacious " as two 
 or three women," he delighted in gossip — Saint-Simon calls him 
 " a king of mischief-makers " — he took care of his complexion, 
 laughed prettily, minced, simpered in the most marvellous way, 
 and painted his face, " which endued him with a beauty more 
 fitted to a princess than to a prince," as Mme. de La Fayette 
 judiciously puts it. Further, he loved his friends with a pas- 
 sionate affection, and more especially the Chevalier de Lorraine, a 
 younger son of a great family, " like a painted angel," who soon 
 became " a more absolute favourite with Monsieur than a man 
 can permit himself to be if he does not choose to be taken to be 
 the master, or the mistress, of the house " (Choisy). ... At 
 the age of fifty, " short and full-bellied, looking as if he were 
 180 
 
THE "ROI-SOLEIL" 
 
 walking on stilts, so high-heeled were his shoes, always adorned 
 like any woman, covered with rings and bracelets and gems, 
 with a long, black, powdered wig brought very much forward, 
 Rnd ribbons wherever he could put them, exhaling perfumes of 
 every kind, and cleanliness itself in all details," the Duke of 
 Orleans was still simpering. A fairly good-natured man, apart 
 from all this, and not at all devoid of intelligence ; he was not 
 afraid, when his elder brother's jealousy permitted him to go to 
 the seat of war, " to expose his beauty to a merciless sun " and 
 ride under fire and into the most dangerous positions, " painted 
 and indolent " indeed, but as unconcernedly as if he had been 
 going to pay a visit to the Queen. 
 
 His yoimg wife, Henrietta of England, sister of Charles II, 
 had one shoulder a Uttle higher than the other, and yet the 
 Henrietta beauty of her figure was the subject of universal 
 
 Stuart, praise. The fact is that her grace and charm 
 
 Duchesse blinded all men to her faults. She lived for 
 
 d'Orlians. nothing but to fascinate. She openly acknow- 
 ledged her belief that she had really been born the day on which 
 she had been loved for the first time. " One would think she was 
 asking for one's heart, however indifferent the words she spoke," 
 writes the author of the Princesse de Cldves. " When anybody 
 looked at her, and she noticed it, it was impossible to believe 
 that she had any other desire than to be pleasing in the sight of 
 him who was gazing upon her " (Choisy). The King, in the first 
 instance, had appeared by no means attracted by Henrietta's 
 charms : he thought them lacking in opulence, and was fond of 
 teUing his intimate friends that they reminded him of " the bones 
 in the Cemetery of the Innocents." . . . But here we will hand 
 the pen to Mme. de La Fayette : she wrote Madame's Memoirs, 
 and though, as she herself acknowledges, it was " a work of some 
 difficulty to interpret the truth, in certain instances, in such a 
 way as to make it known without rendering it either offensive or 
 disagreeable to the princess," she succeeded fairly well in her 
 attempt, as we shall see : 
 
 Madame [she says] had no thought beyond that of pleasing the King 
 as his sister-in-law : I think she did attract him after another fasliion, 
 and I believe, too, that she thought he only pleased her as a brother-in-law, 
 although he perhaps attracted her more strongly : but in any case, as 
 
 181 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 they were both infinitely charming, and both born with an instinctive 
 inclination to gallantry, and as they met every day or two, in the midst 
 of pleasures and entertainments, it seemed to every one else that each 
 possessed for the other that charm which is the usual precursor of great 
 passions. . . . 
 
 And indeed, within a fortnight of her arrival at Court 
 Madame was the queen of every festivity : moonlight drives 
 round the Fontainebleau canal, torchlight dances, Benserade 
 ballets, alfresco collations, theatrical performances, reviews, 
 which the ladies attended on horseback, mingling their scarves 
 with the cuirasses : so much so that Monsieur thought his wife's 
 triumph excessive, and Louis, to reassure him, was obliged to 
 make love to one of Henrietta's maids of honour. He chose the 
 simplest and most modest of them all, Louise de La Valli^re. 
 
 This charming girl of sixteen, fair-haired and black-eyed, 
 gentle, frail, delicate, had a slight limp, " but it did not suit her 
 Louise de badly " : it was on horseback that she looked her 
 
 La Vallidre. best, for not only had she a perfect seat, but " the 
 riding- jacket hid her bosom, and the cravat made it look fuller." 
 The King's contemporaries could not understand his admira- 
 tion for so thin a lady : at that period slight beauties were not 
 at all the rage. D'Ormesson, when he saw her, thought her 
 " emaciated, with hollow cheeks, an ugly mouth and teeth, a 
 thick end to her nose, and a long face " : an anonymous critic 
 indignantly informs us that she had no bosom to speak of, flat 
 arms, and that everybody agreed in declaring her " intelligence 
 rather limited." But it was not her mind, nor yet her beauty, 
 that enchanted Louis, it was her gentleness, her maidenly re- 
 serve, her glance, " at once so tender and so modest," and, above 
 all, her absorbing love for him. And the feelings of this young 
 King, who could talk to ladies in those days like the most 
 fascinating of Benserade's shepherds, were still so fresh that he 
 could not be insensible to her deep and timid passion. 
 
 It was at this period that the modest country-house — as il 
 still was in those days — of Versailles became the scene of the 
 Fetes at Plaisirs de Vile enchantie, a famous festival, the 
 
 Versailles. subject of which was " the Palace of Alcina." 
 The first day saw Roger and his knights — represented by the 
 King and some of his courtiers, blazing with jewels — ^riding in 
 182 
 
THE "ROI-SOLEIL" 
 
 front of a glistening car on which Apollo sat enthroned, supported 
 by the Four Ages, the Golden, the Silver, the Bj-onze, and the 
 Iron. After much reciting of verses and singing of madrigals 
 and cantatas, the joust began, and when night had fallen, the 
 Seasons, attended by fauns, and wood-nymphs, and dryads, and 
 harvesters, and vintagers, all escorting a hill that moved on 
 rollers whence Pan and Diana duly descended, served a supper 
 in the Ught of four thousand torches. The next day there was a 
 performance of Moli^re's Princesse d'Elide, and the cavalcades 
 and ballets went on for five days more. All this was secretly 
 dedicated to Mile, de La Vallifere, " and she enjoyed it, hidden 
 in the crowd." But the poor girl's happy days were of short 
 duration. The King loved her, indeed, but this did not prevent 
 him from climbing about on the palace roofs to visit the other 
 maids of honour. And indeed her position as the royal favourite 
 made Louise blush with shame : when Louis, who had made his 
 relations with her more and more public, established her in 
 Paris, and created her a duchess, in 1666, she almost died of 
 it. . . . And even then the King had no eyes save for one of 
 her own friends, Mme. de Montespan. 
 
 In the person of rran9oise-Ath^nais de Tonnay-Charente, 
 Marquise de Montespan — ^fair-sldnned, golden-haired, " beauti- 
 Mme. de ful as the day," says Saint-Simon, " tonnante el 
 
 Montespan. triomphante," writes Mme. de S^vigne — a perfect 
 form was united to a most enchanting wit. " She was always 
 a person of the highest breeding, with charms that made one 
 overlook her haughty ways and suited them. It was not 
 possible to possess more wit, a more delicate politeness, with a 
 quaintness of expression, an eloquence, a natural correctness 
 which formed a language peculiar to herself, but which was 
 delightful, and which others caught up to such an extent that 
 her nieces, and the persons who assiduously frequented her 
 company, all adopted it, and even now we feel and recognize it 
 in the few of them who still remain." . . . Mme. de Montes- 
 pan could entertain a circle of guests like a really great lady ; she 
 would take risks, fasten on what was ridiculous, " and make 
 others feel it by a manner peculiar to the Mortemart family " ; 
 she was a woman of taste ; she patronized Quinault, helped 
 Lulli, encouraged Racine, took an interest in Boileau : what 
 
 188 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 was poor little La Valli^re beside this radiant lady ? So it 
 came about that in 1667 " the wondrous," " the incomparable," 
 " the beautiful lady," " Quanto," as Mme. de S6vign6 calls her, 
 having given herself some trouble to attain this end, took 
 her rival's place in the King's affections. For the space of ten 
 years her fine manners, sparkling wit, and dazzling beauty 
 were to increase the glories of Versailles. 
 
 But in spite of this new passion, the King did not dismiss 
 Mile, de La Valliere. For Mme. de Montespan was a married 
 woman. And, indeed, her husband was a most inconvenient 
 spouse, an " extravagant fellow " who ventured to " inveigh 
 very loudly against the King's friendship for her," and who 
 " had a great deal of wit " into the bargain. " When he betook 
 himself to Saint-Germain and poured out his admonitions, 
 Mme. de Montespan used to be in despair : ' Here he is 
 putting stories about the Court,' said she to Mademoiselle, in hei 
 rage. ' I am so ashamed to see that he and my parrot provide 
 amusement for the mob ! '" One fine day Montespan donned 
 mourning for his wife, put his whole household into mourning 
 too, proceeded, in a coach hung with black, to bid a solemn 
 farewell to all his friends and relations, and then departed into 
 his own province, where Louvois cynically did his utmost to 
 implicate him in some shady business. For a long time 
 afterwards, the King and the Marquise felt by no means easy as 
 to what his next prank might be. . . . But it may be men- 
 tioned that many of Montespan's contemporaries ascribed his 
 uncompromising attitude to his not having obtained all the 
 advantages for which he had hoped from his position. 
 
 In that very year when the haughty Marquise's favour 
 became known to all men, on Sunday, June 29, 1670, Madame 
 Death of fainted after drinking a glass of chicory water : 
 
 Henrietta at half-past two the next morning she was dead : 
 
 of Orleans. hardly a week previously she had returned from 
 the most triumphal joiuney to England whence she had brought 
 Louis XIV the Treaty of Dover and the alliance of her brother, 
 Charles II. Two months later, on August 21, 1670, at Saint- 
 Denis, Bossuet, Bishop of Condom, pronounced, with an emotion 
 that deepened as he proceeded, his funeral oration on Henrietta- 
 Anne of England. When he spoke those celebrated words," Oh, 
 184 
 
THE "ROI-SOLEIL" 
 
 night of disaster ! night of horror ! whereon, as with a clap of 
 thunder, the astonishing news rang out, ' Madame is dying ! 
 Madame is dead ! ' " the whole Court broke into sobs. . . . 
 Many .of the courtiers who could not restrain their tears were 
 persuaded Henrietta had been poisoned by the Chevalier de 
 Lorraine, whose banishment she had brought about, perhaps 
 even with the assent of Monsieur himself. This was a false- 
 hood : the physicians of the present day, at all events, have 
 expressed their imhesitating opinion that Madame was carried 
 off by a violent attack of peritonitis. But the calumny brooded 
 over Philippe d'Orl^ans all his life. 
 
 Hardly a fortnight after Henrietta had breathed her last the 
 King sent for his brother, and invited him to espouse their 
 cousin the " Grande Mademoiselle," daughter of Gaston d'Or- 
 16ans, and the richest heiress in the kingdom. But Monsieur 
 asked for time, and betrayed considerable repugnance to the 
 idea. It was written, no doubt, that Mademoiselle's likeness 
 to the heron of the fable was to be complete : after she had 
 scorned a Prince of Wales, an Infante of Portugal, a Duke of 
 Lorraine, and fancied she was to be Queen of France, of Eng- 
 land, of Spain, and of Hungary, if not an Empress indeed, this 
 proud princess was to end by setting her whole heart on the 
 younger son of a Gascon gentleman. 
 
 " Nobody would dream what his life has been," La Bruy^re 
 writes of Lauzun. . . . He was a httle man, insipidly fair, 
 Lauzun and " the most insolent little man that has been seen 
 the "Grande for a century " (La Fare), half bald, with red eyes 
 Mademoiselle." and a sharp nose, and a " face like a skinned cat," 
 dirty and slovenly to boot, but in him the ladies delighted, 
 just as he was. Witty and illiterate, full of scoffing jests, brave, 
 at times, even to heroism, or servile as the lowest menial, he had 
 won the King's regard by affecti;ng an almost religious admiration 
 for the sovereign, which indeed he did not scruple to intersperse 
 with the most amazing scenes, as on that day when he broke his 
 sword in Louis' presence, crying out in a rage " that he would no 
 longer serve a prince who broke his word to him so scurvily." 
 The King, beside himself with fury, retorted by one of the finest 
 gestures of his life : he tunned about at once, opened the window, 
 threw out his cane, said he would have been " sorry to have 
 
 185 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 struck a man of quality," and left the room. It was by such 
 traits as these that Louis XIV was continually proving himself 
 the most perfect gentleman in his own kingdom. . . . Made- 
 moiselle was a tall, stout woman of three and forty, with a great 
 majestic nose, above which the two most innocent eyes in the 
 world looked out. Having made Lauzun's acquaintance, so 
 she tells us, she clearly felt " that for once in her life she must 
 taste the delight of feeling herself loved by some one it was 
 worth while to love " : and hence, on October 15, 1670, Mme. 
 de Sevigne wrote her friend Coulanges the news, " the most 
 astonishing, the most surprising, the most miraculous," and so 
 forth — ^the marriage of the little Lauzun to Mademoiselle, 
 own cousin to Louis XIV, and the most richly dowered old 
 maid in France. . . . Alas ! the King, who had begun by 
 consenting to this union, retracted within three days; the 
 whole of the royal family, and Mme. de Montespan above 
 all, had pointed out the impropriety of such an alliance ; and 
 it had perhaps occurred to him, without any outside inter- 
 ference, that if Mademoiselle died unmarried, her immense 
 wealth must all fall back into the hands of the reigning family 
 of France. . . . The " Grande Mademoiselle " wept and sobbed 
 and raged. Lauzun bowed to his fate with heroic fortitude. 
 This did not prevent him from marrying his lady-love in secret, 
 and he consequently spent ten years in the fortress of Pignerol : 
 that done, he was restored to favour and was made a duke. 
 " We have seen him a favourite, we have seen him drown, and 
 here he is back on the crest of the wave," wrote Bussy to Mme. 
 de S6vign6. " Don't you know a game in which one says, ' I've 
 seen him alive, I've seen him dead, I've seen him alive after his 
 death ! ' ? That just describes him." 
 
 Mademoiselle being no longer in question, Monsieur married 
 Ehsabeth-Charlotte, daughter of the Elector Palatine, familiarly 
 Second known as " Liselotte " (1671). Liselotte was not 
 
 Marriage of beautiful : Saint-Simon has told us she had " the 
 Monsieur. face and the manners of a Swiss Guard," and she 
 herself, at the age of forty-six, described herself as follows : 
 
 You cannot remember me very well if you do not class me among the 
 ugly ones. . . . My figure is monstrously fat, I am as square as a cube ; 
 my skin is red, with yellow patches on it ; my hair is getting quite grey ; 
 186 
 
THE "ROI-SOLEIL" 
 
 my nose, and my two cheeks as well, have been horribly scarred by small- 
 pox ; I have a large mouth and bad teeth ; and there you have a portrait 
 of my pretty face. 
 
 When this daughter of the Palatinate arrived at Versailles 
 (1671), the courtiers thought Monsieur had been made to marry 
 a servant-girl, and Philippe himself could not suppress a frown. 
 The new . Madame could neither talk, nor curtsy, nor play 
 cards, nor dance, nor even, at first, ride a horse, and her rustic 
 and rubicund figure was as much out of place in the midst of 
 that brilliant Court as her " honest German stomach " was 
 offended by French cookery. " For the first three days she ate 
 nothing but one olive, and said not a word, so uncivilized was 
 she " (Primi). Later, she talked and ate more, even " more 
 then she should," but this Liselotte, whose whole delight was to 
 " fill her jaws " as she calls it herself, never grew accustomed to 
 the French cuisine ; nor did she become used to French habits, 
 so that her letters present a melancholy alternation of regret- 
 ful longings for German food and the most violent abuse of 
 her French surroundings. Mme. de Maintenon was her pet 
 aversion, " the wizened old thing, the old slut, the old wretch, 
 the old horror, the filthy old creature," or simply, and more 
 eloquently, " the old woman " : but what displeased her always 
 was France and everything French — ^mind, manners, cooking, 
 and inhabitants. So, to console herself, she would dream of her 
 beloved Palatinate, that virtuous country — and her corre- 
 spondents filled her with deep astonishment when they replied 
 that the morals of that part of the world were hardly so pure as 
 she took them to be : her melancholy fancy dwelt on its land- 
 scapes and its dainties : some " good beer-soup," " a good dish 
 of sauerkraut with smoked sausages," or " a good salad made of 
 German cabbage with bacon." Ah ! that German cabbage ! 
 With what emotion does she laud it, with what poetic feeling 
 does she sing it, in every page of her correspondence 1 We can 
 easily understand how nowadays, on the other side of the Rhine, 
 her patriotic tastes are esteemed extremely meritorious. And 
 indeed this princess, so chaste in morals, so ribald in speech, who 
 contrived to live at the Court of Versailles for half a century 
 without any tincture of corruption or of politeness, is a fair 
 specimen of the qualities of the German race. 
 
 187 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Poor La Valli^re was present at Monsieur's marriage ; she, 
 like Mme. de Montespan, was to be seen everywhere. The 
 two ladies were lodged in the same apartment : so that when 
 the King went to see the fair Marquise, it was said " the King 
 is with the ladies." In February, 1671, Louise fled for the first 
 time, and sought refuge in the convent at Chaillot : Colbert 
 undertook to fetch her back, and the two ladies became more 
 inseparable than ever. At Saint-Germain, at Fontainebleau, at 
 Versailles, the courtiers saw " La Valli^re get into the King's 
 chaise, first of all, then the King, and then Mme. de Montes- 
 pan, all three on the same seat, the King in the middle. Louis 
 very well dressed in brown stuff, but heavily laced with gold, 
 gold round his hat, too, and a high colour in his face : Mme. 
 Louise de La de Montespan very handsome, with a most 
 Vallidre a Nun. beautiful complexion " : Louise thinner than ever. 
 This went on for a long time. . . . Then one fine day the news 
 spread abroad that the Duchesse de La Valliere was going to 
 enter the Carmelite Order. On April 20, 1674, she who was no 
 longer to be known save as Soeiu: Louise de la Misdricorde cast 
 herself at the feet of the Queen, who lifted her up and em- 
 braced her. A fortnight later she took her vows (June 3). The 
 King, it would appear, condescended to preserve for her " an 
 esteem and cold respect which he expressed, indeed, rarely and 
 curtly." 
 
 A month later Louis XIV was triumphantly celebrating 
 his conquest of Franche-Comt^ at Versailles. The festivities 
 opened on July 4, 1674, with a collation in one of the 
 groves : marble tables arranged amidst the green boughs 
 bore dishes of fruit, decanters filled with liquem's, and baskets 
 of marzipans or dried preserves ; the tinkle of the falling 
 waters mingled with the sound of violins and hautboys : 
 at eight o'clock, an opera was performed in the Cour de 
 Marbre : the eight columns supporting the gilded balcony 
 formed the background of the stage, the sides of which were 
 marked out by the great orange-trees in their boxes, while 
 dwarf trees of the same kind spread their greenery in porcelain 
 vases set between the larger ones. All this was lighted up by 
 quantities of wax tapers placed on the balconies and on the 
 entablatures, and in crystal and silver chandeliers on stands 
 188 
 
THE "ROISOLEIL" 
 
 painted blue and gold. After listening to a performance by 
 the artistes of the Academy of Music of Quinault's Alceste, to 
 Lulli's music, their Majesties proceeded to the Palace to eat 
 a midianoche (midnight supper). . . . On July 11 there was 
 another collation in a verdant glade at the Trianon, where the 
 Eclogue de Versailles was afterwards played. On the 19th yet 
 another collation at the Menagerie, at the end of the Great 
 Canal : an excursion on the water in gondolas, attended by a 
 boat-load of musicians : and a performance of the Malade 
 Imaginaire at the Grotto of Thetis. On the 28th a collation 
 at the Theatre d'Eau, a performance of the Files de V Amour et de 
 Bacchus close to the ornamental water called the Piece d'eau du 
 Dragon : fireworks on the Canal : midianoche in the Cour de 
 Marbre. On August 18 the Court proceeded in eighteen 
 coaches to partake of a collation in the A116e Royale, and then 
 attended a performance of IphigSnie which took place in the 
 avenue leading to the Orangery : this over, their Majesties 
 entertained themselves with an illumination of the sheet of 
 water which ultimately became the Bassin d'Apollon, and a 
 display of fkeworks over the Canal. And at last, on August 31, 
 the rejoicings were closed by a general illumination of the whole 
 park, and an excursion in gondolas on the Canal, to the sound 
 of musical instruments. . . . 
 
 Mme. de Montespan was the sultana of all these festivities. 
 Louis was then having built for her, at Clagny, by Mansard, a 
 Eclipse of " little Versailles," a " palace of Armida." In her 
 
 lyime. de own apartment she never condescended to rise 
 
 Montespan. from her chair to receive any one, not even the 
 King's brother, a most unheard-of thing. . . . Yet, when 
 Bossuet persuaded Louis to break with her in 1675, surely this 
 was done, to some extent, because the King was growing tired 
 of her ! ... Be that as it may, no sooner had the beautiful 
 Marquise taken her departure, than Louis felt the lack of her 
 presence so severely that the good Bishop was soon to be seen 
 acting, quite unconsciously, as his royal penitent's postman. 
 . . . Mme. de Montespan came back, and then it was that 
 Lenglee made her that celebrated gown " of gold on gold, and 
 gold-embroidered on that, and above that again a gold in relief 
 figured with gold, mixed with a certain gold which makes the 
 
 189 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 most divine material that ever was imagined." . . . That year 
 she was still in great beauty. 
 
 I thought her back very flat, but seriously her beauty is a marvellous 
 thing. Her figure is not half so thick as it was, and yet neither her skin, 
 her eyes, nor her lips are the worse for it. She was dressed from head to 
 foot in point de France, her hair dressed in thousands of curls, the two on 
 her temples falling down very low on her cheeks : black ribbons on her 
 hair, the Mardchale de I'Hopital's pearls, embellished with diamond 
 buckles and drops of the most extreme beauty : three or four bodkins, 
 no cap : in a word, a triumphant beauty for the ambassadors to see. 
 (Sevign6.) 
 
 But from the very beginning she had treated the Great King 
 to angry scenes (" she has often scolded him, he has not been 
 proud of it," as Mademoiselle tells us) : did she not even venture 
 to tell him one day that at all events she did not smell as 
 nasty as he did ? And the fits of temper, which had charmed 
 him once, were thoroughly disagreeable to him now. . . . 
 Mile, de In short, in 1679 the King allowed it to be 
 
 Fontanges. officially known that he was in love with a lovely 
 auburn-haired girl — " as beautiful as an angel, from head to 
 foot," says Bussy ; " as fair as an angel, as stupid as an owl," 
 adds Choisy ; " beautiful from her feet to her head, but with no 
 more intelligence than a kitten," so Madame sums up— called 
 Mile, de Fontanges. And all men turned their faces towards 
 the rising star. 
 
 In August, 1679, the whole Court crowded into the chapel 
 at Fontainebleau to see the wedding of Mile. d'Orleans and 
 the King of Spain. Mme. de Montespan, so the Duchess of 
 Osnabriick relates, appeared in " a very careless dress, with 
 embroidered lappets, and in dismal grief at beholding the 
 triumph of a younger woman than herseif." Not far from 
 where she sat, Mile, de Fontanges was reading her breviary, 
 which " gave her on excuse for keeping her eyis cast down on 
 the King, whom she loved better, no doubt, than the King of 
 kings, which is not astonishing, for he is most lovable." 
 Louis XIV, on his side, kept gazing at Mile, de Fontanges 
 " with more devotion than at the altar," and yawned with all 
 his might, closing his eyes whenever he was not looking at her. 
 Marie-Th^r^se was stifling, meanwhile, under the weight of a 
 gown " heavier than the trappings of a horse." After the 
 190 
 
THE "ROI-SOLEIL" 
 
 ceremony the Duchess of Osnabriick paid a visit to the Queen. 
 Monsieur, who had accompanied her, took a taper to show her 
 the jewels with which his sister-in-law was laden : and good- 
 natured Marie-Th6r^se obligingly submitted to the scrutiny : 
 " You must look at these," she said, pointing to her diamonds, 
 " and not at this," she added, pointing to her face. 
 
 The poisoning scandals had just come to light. For ten 
 years past sorcery and magic had been tremendously in fashion. 
 The poisoning Those charming creatures who, according to 
 scandals. Mme. de Longueville's unforgettable sentence, did 
 
 not care for innocent pleasures, no longer desired, as in the 
 days of the Fronde, to resemble Chim^ne or Clelie : their new 
 dream was simply to transform " everything into gold, carry on 
 life for ever, cure by spoken words, make themselves loved by 
 any one they chose, know all the secrets of the future, command 
 evil spirits," etc. (Molifere, Amants magnifiques). 
 
 PeTdait-on un chiffon, avait-on un amant, 
 
 Un mari vivant trop au gr6 de son Spouse, 
 
 Une mere facheuse, una fenime jalouse, 
 
 Chez la devineuse on courait. . . . (La Fontaine). 
 
 And from the fortune-teller these clients obtained whatever they 
 desired, for the sorceresses of every kind who swarmed about 
 the city were not content with selling magic philtres as disgusting 
 as they were inoffensive, they likewise dealt in " powders " for 
 tiresome husbands or rich relatives, who shortly suffered from 
 the consequences, for poisonings could be carried out without 
 much risk in those days, when the legal science of medicine was 
 unknown. 
 
 There had been a first scandal in 1668, Two quacks who 
 had been arrested revealed the fact that Mme. de Montespan 
 had ordered the use of spells to assist her in obtaining and 
 preserving the King's affections. But Louis, at that moment, 
 was still in love, and had not as yet turned devout : all he did 
 was to laugh at his credulous mistress and her peccadilloes. . . . 
 But in 1673 the priests of Notre-Dame warned the judicial 
 authorities that numbers of penitents were confessing abomin- 
 able crimes, and one of the most famous of these sorceresses, 
 Voisin by name, was arrested with her confederates. All these 
 wretches set themselves to compromise a whole bevy of persons, 
 
 191 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 and in the highest places (this was to their interest) : towards 
 the end of 1679 they began to relate the most horrible stories 
 about Mme. de Montespan herself, accusing her of having 
 had " Black Masses " said on her own body,, slaughtered little 
 children, given powders to the King, and even conceived a plan 
 to poison both him and Mile, de Fontanges. Was all this true ? 
 It is very doubtful : the cross-examinations were all directed 
 by Louvois, Mme. de Montespan's mortal enemy. Yet it seems 
 clear that though the Marquise may not have committed all 
 the abominations of which she was accused by this hideous 
 crew, she had at least kept up relations with the sorceresses, 
 more especially about the time of her temporary dismissal in 
 1675. The full details of the business are not known : the King 
 had the whole inquiry stopped, in the most sudden manner, in 
 July, 1682. To what conclusion does this fact point ? For 
 several years longer the Marquise continued to enjoy a pro- 
 minent position at Court : apparently, therefore, she was able 
 to clear herself of the gravest of the misdeeds imputed to her. 
 
 In January, 1680, she was present, with Mile, de Fontanges 
 and the whole Court, at the marriage of the daughter of Mile. 
 Marriage ol de La Valli^re, Mile, de Blois, with the Prince de 
 Mile, de Blois. Conti, nephew of the Great Conde. On this 
 occasion an astonishing sight was seen : " M. le Prince, the 
 hero," freshly shaved and decently dressed. "Mme. de 
 Langeron, seizing her opportunity when his paws were crossed 
 like a lion's, had a coat with diamond buttons slipped upon 
 him, a valet, who likewise imposed upon his patience, curled 
 his hair, powdered it, and reduced him at last to the appearance 
 of the best-looking of Court gentlemen, with a head that made 
 all the wigs look shabby : this was the great wonder of the 
 wedding " (S^vignd). » Ever since 1675, in fact, Conde had been 
 living in retirement on his splendid property at Chantilly, 
 bravely enduring torture from the gout, as odd as ever, and as 
 full of genius, violent, dirty, careless, charming — " he has been 
 heard to say ' / fled ' with the same grace as that with which 
 he said ' We heat them ! ' " (La Bruy&re) ; and besides, since the 
 signing of the Treaty of the Pyrenees he had been a good 
 courtier, as submissive and htunble, indeed, in his behaviour 
 to the King as he had once been intractable. This man, so 
 192 
 
THE "ROI-SOLEIL" 
 
 deservedly surnamed the "great" — "genuine, simple, mag- 
 nanimous, lacking nothing but the lesser virtues " — was to die 
 in 1686. 
 
 In 1680 it was Mme. de Montespan again, " being the 
 woman of fashion who knows most about all things," who was 
 The Grand deputed to choose the wedding gifts intended for 
 Dauphin. the Dauphiness, Anne-Marie- Victoire, daughter of 
 
 the Elector of Bavaria. The bride was an insignificant and not 
 very healthy German, who never played any part at Court 
 beyond that of bringing the King's grandchildren into the 
 world — ^the Due de Bourgogne in 1682, the Due d'Anjou in 
 1683, and the Due de Berry in 1686. As for the Grand Dauphin 
 — ^Monseigneur, as he was called — he had been brought up with 
 the most ridiculous severity by his Governor the Due de Mon- 
 tausier, husband of Mile, de Rambouillet, and instructed by the 
 famous Bossuet, whose far too intensive method of teaching had 
 dulled rather than awakened his slow mind. Cruelly beaten with 
 a ruler by his Governor — so severely indeed that his hands were 
 constantly swelled and his " arm all stiff," as on the day when 
 he " had omitted one word " in reciting his Sunday prayers in 
 French — ^with three lessons from Bossuet every day of his life, 
 even on Sundays, and his austere tutor seated beside his bed at 
 night, " to put him to sleep with some pleasant story," the child 
 had grown, by 1680, into a heavy young fellow of nineteen, dull 
 and apathetic, sickened for ever of " everything that smacked 
 of study," never happy except when he was out hunting, 
 terrified at Court, and always quaking with the fear of doing 
 anything to displease his awe-inspiring father, whose jealousy 
 would never have permitted him the smallest share in the 
 management of State affairs. 
 
 Mile, de Fontanges, who had been created a duchess in 1680, 
 was obliged to leave Versailles almost immediately afterwards 
 in consequence of an accident which compromised her health. 
 She died on June 28, 1681, at the age of twenty-two, and 
 her place was not refilled : religion, Mme. de Maintenon, and 
 Louis XIV's own innate good taste saved him from an undignified 
 old age : at the age of forty-four he settled down. 
 
 This Mme. de Maintenon had led an adventurous life. 
 The granddaughter of the rough Huguenot poet, Agrippa 
 
 N 198 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 d'Aubign^ born under the walls of the Chateau-Trompette. 
 the Bastille of Bordeaux, in which Richelieu had caused her 
 TWiti B, de father to be shut up, taken away, as a child, to 
 
 Uaintenon. Martinique, whence her mother returned widowed 
 and penniless, brought up on the charity of one of her relatives, 
 who employed her to keep her tvu:keys, with no hope before her, 
 in short, save that of entering a convent or domestic service, 
 Frangoise was only too glad, in 1652, when she was just sixteen 
 and a half, to marry the crippled poet Paul Scarron. Now 
 Scarron belonged to a good legal family, but " the burlesque 
 style he professed discredited him, while it made him popular " 
 (Voltaire). His contemporaries looked upon him as a sort of 
 merry-andrew : his marriage was considered one of his best 
 buffooneries. Naturally the young girl was nothing to him save 
 a sick-nurse. . . . Frangoise endured her position with a 
 singular dignity, decent and simple, which impressed all who 
 came in contact with her. After her husband's death she 
 obtained a pension of 2000 livres. Her reputation, of which 
 she was very careful, was as good as could be expected in the 
 case of a young widow in most needy circumstances. Tall, with 
 " an air of nobility, gentle, merry, and modest," regular features, 
 " soft brilliant black eyes, full of passion and intelligence, she 
 did not set up to be a beauty, though she had a thousand 
 obvious charms " (Scudery). " Her mind suited her beauty — 
 it was large, tranquil, agreeable, elegant." She dressed simply, 
 but " like a woman who spends her life among persons of 
 quality " (Sevign^). In the best society, which she frequented, 
 her conversation was considered " deUcious." 
 
 Mme. de Montespan, who met this wonderftd creature in 
 the house of the Mar^chale d'Albret, chose her, in 1670, to 
 educate her children, and then presented her to the King. 
 Little by Uttle the quiet beauty of his children's governess, her 
 distinction, her reason, so calm and subtle — ^Louis XIV, who 
 was a connoissem: in the matter of good sense, was later to 
 call her " Your Solidity " — ^the correctness of her language, 
 " gentle, well chosen, naturally eloquent, and concise," all 
 charmed the King. Mme. Scarron's conversation was an agree- 
 able change from Mme. de Montespan's stormy scenes : for the 
 first time in his life, perhaps, a young woman talked to him 
 194 
 
THE "ROI-SOLEIL" 
 
 simply and seriously, " without seeking to attract a declaration 
 on his part, nor attempting to amuse him Avith trifling dis- 
 course " (ArvMe Barine). And on December 27, 1674, " Dame 
 Fran§oise d'Aubigny, widow of Messire Paul Scarron, lord of 
 Fougerets and Councillor of the King," purchased, for the 
 sxaa of 240,000 livres, the Marquisate of Maintenon : shortly 
 afterwards Louis XIV addressed her publicly as Mme. de 
 Maintenon : from that moment the " Widow Scarron " was no 
 more. 
 
 Mme. de Maintenon was a pious person : she took a great 
 interest in the King's salvation, and to exhort him to virtue 
 she told him fables which Louis, it appears, thought amusing, 
 but at which Mme. de Montespan did not laugh at all. . . . 
 When the lovely Fontanges supplanted the haughty " Quanto," 
 the favour of the lady whom the courtiers already called Madame 
 de Maintenant (Madame Now) showed no sign of diminution, 
 quite the contrary. The King went to see her every day, 
 and she would seem to have exhorted him to very good pur- 
 pose, seeing that after the departure of Mile, de Fontanges 
 she induced him to return to the Queen (August, 1680). 
 But presently the kind-hearted Marie-Ther^se herself died 
 The K in g (July, 1683) ; and Mme. de Maintenon no doubt 
 
 mairies continued to preach the doctrine of conjugal 
 
 Mme. de virtue, for in the course of the following winter 
 
 Mamtenon. Louis XIV married her. 
 
 And indeed Fran9oise d'Aubign^ was anything but an 
 ambitious and wily woman, nor was she even, it would seem, a 
 designing coquette ; she was a prudent, thrifty being, who 
 loathed adventxures Uke the plague ; further, she was a person 
 of delicate taste ; and, again, we have every reason to believe 
 her to have been perfectly virtuous, while her deep piety is 
 manifest to all. In November, 1702, she wrote to her dear 
 Mme. de Glapion in that fine style of hers, pure and noble like 
 herself : 
 
 Do you not see that I am dying of melancholy amidst a fortune that 
 can hardly be imagined, and that nothing but the help of God prevents 
 me from perishing ? I have been young and pretty, I have tasted pleasure, 
 I have been loved wherever I went : at a rather more advanced age, I 
 spent years in the society of intelligent minds : I have risen to favour, 
 
 195 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 and I protest to you, my dear daughter, that all these conditions leave 
 a hideous void, an anxiety, a lassitude, a longing to know some other 
 thing, because in aU this there is nothing that really satisfies, . . . 
 
 It is in fact probable that events rather than any exertion 
 of her own raised Mme. de Maintenon to the throne. Indeed, 
 Fonndation ol her vocation was not to be Queen of France, she 
 Saint-Cyr. was manifestly born to be a teacher. The work 
 
 of her life was the House of Saint-Cyr which the King founded, 
 at her request, close to Versailles, for the education of two 
 hundred poor young girls of noble birth (1686). Weary of the 
 Court, which she disliked exceedingly, she sought refuge at 
 Saint-CjT whenever she found it possible, and threw herself 
 with passionate interest into all its arrangements, even the 
 most trifling ; teacTiing the children herself, or advising the 
 mistresses. She had a gift for reading character, and pointing 
 out each person's special duty ; she cared much more about 
 training " good girls " who might, when occasion offered, be 
 " turned into good wives and good nuns," than about forming 
 " talkers, inquisitive, bold," etc. . . . Gentle, but firm, unerring 
 in taste, loved and respected by all who approached her, Mme. 
 de Maintenon was an incomparable schoolmistress. 
 
 Ill 
 
 On the spot where the Palace of Versailles now stands, there 
 stretched, in 1624, a plain, owned by a number of small holders 
 and two large ones : the Marechal de Retz and a certain Jean 
 Martin. Louis XIII was fond of the village of Versailles, 
 whither he often came when he was hunting, and where he 
 habitually halted for breakfast on his way to Saint-Germain or 
 Fontainebleau by way of Palaiseau. He decided to build 
 himself a hunting-lodge there, and in 1624, after the occupants 
 of the ground had been expropriated, a small country-house 
 was erected on a hillock covering a modest space of some few 
 square yards, built of brick with stone facings, with a wing on 
 each side, adorned with the high-pitched roof then in fashion — 
 a manor-house, in fact, of a quite unpretentious kind, which he 
 carefully paid for out of the funds set apart "for his "small 
 enjoyments." so as to put no expense on the public purse, and 
 196 
 
THE "ROI-SOLEIL" 
 
 the cost of which did not at all exceed that in which any gentle- 
 man in comfortable circumstances might have permitted himself 
 to indulge. 
 
 Louis XIV had all his forefathers' love of building : early in 
 1661 his architects, Le Vau for the buildings, Le N6tre for the 
 Enlargement ol gardens — these two had been the makers of Vaux, 
 the Ch&teau the property he had so greatly admired, too much 
 de Versailles, indeed for the safety of its owner, Fouquet — 
 began to rearrange this " gentleman's small country-house," 
 this " little house of cards " ; but they did not greatly alter its 
 general aspect : in 1668 the hillock at Versailles was still 
 crowned by a palace in the Louis XIII style, but richly decorated, 
 with red fa9ades, and white chimney-stacks, and sharp-pointed, 
 gilded roofs : away in the distance the future " Great Canal " 
 was still a flat plain, and though the general outlines of the 
 gardens were there, few statues and fountains adorned them as 
 yet. This was the setting in which the entertainments offered 
 to Mile, de La Valli^re took place : the Impromptu de Versailles 
 in 1663, the Delights of the Enchanted Island in 1664 — and even 
 the first of those given in honour of Mme. de Montespan in 
 1668, the Fetes de V Amour et de Bacchus, by Quinault. 
 
 Louis XIV disliked his capital, to the despair of Colbert. . . . 
 For Colbert, a practical man, loved his Paris ; it was a delight 
 to him to see the people hurrying along the streets, and the 
 customers dawdling about the shops, and the crowd swarming 
 upon the bridges ; the noise that rose up from the city and 
 filled his study with its busy hum was a joy to him ; it was a 
 sound of commerce and of health, the throbbing of the life of 
 France ; and he would write, insidiously, " Oh, what a sad pity 
 it would be if the greatest of all kings, and the most virtuous — 
 with that true virtue which makes the greatest of princes — 
 should be judged by the standard of Versailles I " . . . But 
 Louis XIV was never able to forget the battle of the Porte 
 Saint-Antoine : and the city, with its stinking, winding streets, 
 and the confused mass of people moving hither and thither in 
 them, was not, to his mind, so worthy a setting for the King's 
 Majesty as a park laid out by Le N6tre. What delighted him 
 was the regular avenue along which his great white horses 
 could trot, with the heavy red and gold coach rolling smoothly 
 
 197 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 behind them ; the walks cut through the grove and round 
 about the flower-beds ; the prospect " disposed for the perfect 
 delight of the eye " ; the surprise of a statue set at the corner 
 of a clump of trees ; water, enclosed or running freely, murmur- 
 ing low or spouting forth ; clipped trees, rare blossoms. He dis- 
 regarded his Minister, and forsook Paris more and more : after 
 1671 he ceased to live there : after 1678 he did all he could to 
 avoid entering the city, and when he dined at the Hotel de 
 The Couit Ville in 1689 it was considered an extraordinary 
 installed at thing. The Court took up its quarters at Ver- 
 Veisailles. sailles, and there soon formed a society apart, 
 quite different from that of the " town," and even using a 
 language of its own : thus the King of France, to whom his 
 faithful people had formerly obtained access very easily, ended 
 by living in isolation, as far as the nation was concerned; a 
 misfortune, probably, for the monarchy. 
 
 As a permanent residence for the King and his Court the 
 Versailles of 1668, which contemporaries were already extolling 
 as a marvel, was too small : after 1669 it was rebuilt. But 
 Louis XIV would never consent to the pulling down of the 
 remains of his father's hunting-box, and Le Vau was fain to 
 content himself with masking the little country-house, on 
 three of its sides, with a series of new buildings : thus there 
 were three new fronts, looking on the gardens, but the original 
 fa9ade, looking over the Cour de Marbre, was left standing, 
 though greatly altered by the various adornments added to it. 
 Then the State apartments of the King and Queen were deco- 
 rated, very much as we see them now, and finally, in 1671, the 
 town of Versailles was founded by an edict which gave any one 
 who chose to do so, leave to build on the ground lying between 
 " the pump of the said Versailles and the farm of Clagny." 
 This was the Versailles of Mme. de Montespan. 
 
 But the Court grew larger, and the King's taste for building 
 stronger. From 1678 onward, and in 1682 particularly, a third 
 Versailles rearrangement of the palace was commenced, 
 
 rebuilt by on plans supplied by Mansart : by the last week 
 
 Mansart. in August, 1684, 22,000 men and 6000 horses 
 
 were toiling on the works at Versailles ; in the following year 
 the labourers numbered 36,000, The Galerie des Glaces was 
 198 
 
THE "ROI-SOLEIL" 
 
 finished first ; then the south wing, and the north wing, in 
 which the courtiers were lodged, the stables, the Grand Commun, 
 the Orangery ; the gardens were all laid out over again, the 
 Gran4 Trianon was erected in the place occupied by the old 
 " porcelain " Trianon, with its charming blue and white fa§ade. 
 The chapel was not completely finished till 1710 . . . but by 
 that time all Louis XIV's interest had been centred for several 
 years in Marly. 
 
 It was towards the end of 1678 that the King began the 
 work of making himself a " hermitage " at Marly, In one of 
 „ . his most lively pages Saint-Simon has criticized 
 
 the choice of this " deep narrow valley with its 
 steep sides, inaccessible on account of the marshes around it, 
 without view of any kind, shut in by hills in every direction," 
 where even by cutting through the hill-sides, so he declares, 
 nothing but a " most imperfect outlook " was obtainable, 
 " a filthy hole," which had to be dried by filling it up with 
 earth, " a den of snakes and offal, of frogs and toads," where, 
 to get any shade at all, it was necessary to transplant " whole 
 forests of full-grown bushy trees," " great trees from Compi^gne 
 and from much farther off than that, more than three-quarters 
 of which died, and were replaced forthwith." . . . Marly 
 really was a pretty little valley lying between pleasant hills, so 
 thickly wooded that in 1679, when the palace was built, it was 
 necessary to clear some of the land, and from the palace, when 
 finished, there was a charming view over Saint-Germain and its 
 neighbourhood. ' As for the " thousands of millions " spent, so 
 the censorious duke assures us, on gratifying what he ventures 
 to describe as " the King's invariably bad taste and the vain- 
 glorious delight of doing violence to Nature," they amounted to 
 just 13,200,000 livres, laid out in the course of thirty-seven 
 years. This was the expenditure necessitated by the erection, 
 on the brow of a hill, and on a white marble terrace, of the 
 Pavilion du Soleil, a little fairy dwelling, the walls of which 
 were covered, on their outer sides, with frescoes after drawings 
 by Le Brun, adorned with wreaths and bas-reliefs, and pilasters 
 with gilded capitals, and crowned by a balustrade consisting of 
 gold-coloured pillars with groups of figures representing children 
 at each comer : twelve other pavilions for the courtiers, painted 
 
 199 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 like the larger one : and the gardens, the unequalled beauty of 
 which has been described by the admirable Saint-Simon in 
 indignant terms : " huge stretches of thick wood and shady 
 paths, suddenly transformed into great sheets of water on which 
 the company floated in gondolas, and then turned back into 
 forests so close that they shut out the daylight the moment 
 they were planted — I speak of what I saw myself in the course 
 of six weeks : the fountain basins altered a hundred times 
 over : the cascades as well, in a succession of shapes, and always 
 different ones : habitations for fishes adorned with painting 
 and gilding of the most exquisite kind, and hardly finished 
 before the owners changed and rearranged them in some 
 different style, and this an endless number of times." , . . 
 Thirteen millions of livres for this marvel of " sure and polished 
 taste," this " lesson in proportion, precision, and grace," for the 
 expression of an idea so eminently French, was not too high a 
 price. 
 
 In that " sumptuous and delightful abode " the King 
 imagined himself to be enjoying a country life. The exiguous 
 proportions of the dwelling forbade his bringing more than a 
 few courtiers with him : thus it was a favour to be invited to 
 " the Marlys," and the remark of the Cardinal de Polignac, 
 when the King and those attending on His Majesty were 
 overtaken by the rain while out walking, is historic : " 'Tis 
 nothing. Sire ! The rain of Marly does not wet 1 " Never- 
 theless, even in that " hermitage " etiquette was scarcely 
 relaxed. 
 
 In the old days the courtiers, though they respected the 
 King as their master, still treated him like a man. The simple 
 friendliness with which Henri IV would talk to his comrades, 
 and invite himself to dine with any one who took his fancy, is 
 legendary. The exceedingly coarse compliments with which 
 the fascinating Bassompierre habitually entertained Marie de' 
 Medici cannot well be quoted here. In 1621 the English 
 Ambassador was astounded to see Bellegarde slip up on the 
 tips of his toes behind the Queen and drop some " small comfits " 
 into Her Majesty's hair, to startle her. As to the freedom of 
 the language in use among the courtiers of Louis XIII, the 
 following lines will give my readers some idea of it : 
 200 
 
THE "ROI-SOLEIL" 
 
 Being at my gallery window [writes Louis XIII himself to Richelieu] 
 I saw Saint-Preuil coming towards me, all swelling with rage, and when 
 he reached me, he said, " What have I done to you that you should wish 
 me so iU ? I thought there was something to be gained by serving you, 
 but I see there is nothing that I can hope for. . . ." [He had been a 
 Captain in the Guard for many years, and a young lieutenant had been 
 given a regiment over his head. The King replied :] " At Chantilly, the 
 last time you were there, you asked me leave to get rid of your company, 
 and I granted it. . . ." " I do not choose to get rid of it now 1 " " But 
 I insist on your getting rid of it I . . . You are a cross-grained fellow, 
 nobody can get on with you : I'll have you given 20,000 crowns for your 
 company. . . ." " No, you can take it from me 1 . . ." " You would be 
 well caught if I took you at your word, but I do not choose to do so ! " 
 " Here are 20,000 francs that I have wasted in your service, without your 
 having ever done the smallest thing for me. . . ." " Say 100,000 crowns 
 that you have lost at the gambling-table. ..." And thereupon every- 
 body came up and stood between us. . . . (D'Avenel, Biclielieu, iii, p. 49.) 
 
 The kindly King adds, " His aim was to make me say 
 something to him at which he might take offence, but I was 
 very wise." 
 
 Louis XIV himself did not at first claim to be more than 
 the foremost of the elegant young gentlemen covered, like 
 The Court in himself, with gems and laces, gay with ribbons 
 the King's and feathers, who fluttered round the fair ladies 
 young days. of his Court. And indeed the Court of the year 
 1662 or thereabouts bore but little resemblance to that of later 
 days : the courtiers only made their appearance from time to 
 time, and the comparative smallness of their numbers rendered 
 the continual removals from Paris to Fontainebleau, from 
 Saint-Cloud to Saint-Germain, an easy matter : the youthful 
 courtiers of that time, lively, merry, and unaffected, seemed to 
 owe their freedom from constraint to the graceful ease of the 
 master of them all. These were the days when the Due de 
 Guiche posed as the King's rival in the good graces of Mile, de 
 La Valli^re, and then boldly sought to replace him in the favour 
 of Henrietta of England : when His Majestj' was not tmfre- 
 quently seen climbing about the roofs at night : and when Mile. 
 de La Motte-Houdancourt pinched her royal admirer so sharply 
 in the Queen's room, one morning, that in spite of himself he 
 exclaimed " Ha ! the bitch ! " at the top of his voice. We are 
 far, indeed, from the future husband of Mme. de Maintenon I 
 
 201 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Thus it was by slow degrees that the King became an idol : 
 but by the year 1685 a look from him singled a man out, a 
 The etiquette word with him was an honour, a favour bestowed 
 ol later years, covered the recipient with glory. To hold his 
 bedroom candlestick for a single evening made the fortunate 
 holder the envy of his brethren. When he was operated on for 
 a fistula, all the courtiers came crowding to Fagon, beseeching 
 him to treat them Ukewise. When he timtied pious, the whole 
 Court hiorried after him to church. And indeed divine honours 
 were paid him : on March 28, 1686, M. de La Feuillade set up 
 on the Place des Victoires, at his own expense, an equestrian 
 statue, in gilded bronze, of Louis the Great, and by his will he 
 The Monarch charged his son with the duty of having lanterns 
 an idol. lighted, every night, all round the sacred image I 
 
 This no doubt was pure flattery, " the most enormous, the 
 vilest, the most pagan," as Saint-Simon phrases it. In 1699 
 another statue was set up on the Place Vend6me : " but for 
 the fear of the devil, the King would have had himself wor- 
 shipped, and he would have found men to worship him." And 
 indeed he does seem to have actually found them : in the 
 Chapel at Versailles the courtiers " turned their backs on the 
 priest and the sacred mysteries, and lifted their faces to the 
 King, who was to be seen kneeling in a gallery, and on whom 
 their whole hearts and spirits seemed bestowed : this custom 
 certainly indicates a sort of subservience, for the gathering 
 appears to worship the prince while the prince worships God " 
 (La Bruy^re). And Mademoiselle piously exclaims : " He is 
 like imto God, we must wait on his will, and hope all things 
 from his justice and his goodness, without impatience even, so 
 as to gain more merit by so doing." 
 
 The worship of the Ruler of Versailles began with the 
 morning. Even before his eyes were open the approaches to 
 his chamber were filled with a spruce and gilded crowd. There, 
 by right of office, we see the Great Chamberlain, the first gentle- 
 men of his chamber, the pages, and chief valets de charnbre, the 
 other valets de charnbre, the ushers of the antechamber, the Grand 
 Master, the Master, and the Valets of the Wardrobe, both valets 
 proper and valets in ordinary, the gentlemen of the household, 
 the private secretaries, and so forth; and in the year 1687 these 
 202 
 
THE "ROI SOLEIL" 
 
 retainers bore the names of the Dues de Bouillon, de Saint-Aignan, 
 de Beauvilliers, d'Aumont, de Gesvres, de La Trdmoille, de Mon- 
 tausier, de La Rochefoucauld, etc. etc. — 198 persons in all, for 
 nothing beyond the monarch's own personal service, and 
 without reckoning the servants properly so called. One man 
 had the right to look after the royal lap-dogs, another was in 
 command of the mules that carried the King's bed from place 
 to place, another had the sole responsibility for a less picturesque 
 item of His Majesty's personal belongings. 
 
 At the hoiu- given out on the previous evening (generally at 
 eight o'clock. Saint-Simon tells us ; at 8.30 according to the 
 The King's Etat de la France of 1687), the First Valet de chambre 
 "Lever." woke the King. At that moment the Grande 
 
 Entree was admitted to the room — ^the Due de Bouillon, Great 
 Chamberlain, and the Chief Gentlemen of the Bedchamber ; the 
 Due de La Rochefoucauld, Grand Master of the Wardrobe, the 
 Masters of the Wardrobe, the Chief Valets de chambre ; the 
 King's Physician in chief, Daquin, the Chief Physician to the 
 late Queen, Fagon ; the King's nurse, and a few favourites 
 who had succeeded in attaining this treasured honour, such as 
 the Due de La Feuillade. " This was the moment to speak to 
 the King, if they had anything to say to him or ask of him," 
 and in this case the others discreetly retired to a distance from 
 the person who was conversing with His Majesty. Meanwhile 
 Louis crossed himself, recited the Office of the Order of the 
 Holy Ghost, put on his slippers, presented by his First Valet de 
 chambre (a duke), and his dressing-gown, held for him by the 
 Great Chamberlain (a prince), and while the barber was dressing 
 the King's hair, the usher opened the door to the First EntrSe — 
 that is to say, the four private secretaries, the three First Valets 
 de chambre, who were not doing their quarterly term of service, 
 the two Readers, the two Comptrollers of the King's Plate, the 
 Physician in Ordinary, the King's Apothecary, and a few 
 courtiers to whom this special favour had been granted, among 
 them Dangeau and Villeroy. Shortly after this the " Chambre " 
 made its appearance : then came all the most distinguished of 
 the company waiting in the antechamber, such as the dukes 
 and peers and the Marshals of France : after these the chief 
 officials of the King's household, and fiiiallv the general Court. 
 
 203 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 "It is part of the usher's duty to inquire the names and 
 qualities of the persons who are unknown to him," remarks the 
 Etat de la France. " Nobody is permitted to open the door for 
 himself, it must be opened by the usher," and to this end 
 the person desiring to enter must scratch very gently on one 
 side of the folding door : to knock on it with the knuckles 
 would be an act of rudeness. 
 
 While all this was going on, the King was dressing himself : 
 he put on his wig : then his breeches, to which his stockings 
 were fastened, were slipped on his legs : every second day, the 
 barber shaved him : his early breakfast was carried in with 
 endless ceremony : his night jacket was taken off, his shirt 
 duly presented to him — a serious business, this, the honour of 
 accomplishing which belonged to Monsieur if he were present, or 
 in his absence, to his son : if neither were on the spot, the privilege 
 fell to a Prince of the Blood or else to one of the legitimized 
 princes, and failing these, to the Great Chamberlain or to the 
 officer holding the highest rank after his : the First Valet de 
 chambre held up the right sleeve of the shirt, the First Valet of 
 the Wardrobe held up the other, and the Master of the Wardrobe 
 would not have surrendered the honour of helping His Majesty 
 to pull up his breeches to any other being upon earth : after all 
 this, Louis was garbed in his vest of red, or blue, or green cloth 
 or satin, richly embroidered : his blue ribbon was slipped over 
 his head, his sword buckled on for him ; over all this he put on 
 his coat — " brown, more or less dark, lightly embroidered, but 
 never on the seams, sometimes with plain gold buttons " — 
 knotted his own cravat, chose one of the fom* handkerchiefs 
 presented to him on a salver, took his hat, with its white feather, 
 his gloves, and his tall cane from the hands of the Master of the 
 Wardrobe, and retired to the space beside his bed to say his 
 prayers. By the time the King reappeared the whole Court 
 was present, and the lever was over. 
 
 The whole existence of Louis XIV was a ceremony, governed 
 by fixed rites of this description. When his lever was over he 
 Piogramme o! announced his plans for the day : " thus every- 
 the King's day. body knew, to a quarter of an hour, what the 
 King was to do." Then he heard Mass. Then he went to his 
 Council. When he left the Council Chamber, at about one 
 204 
 
THE "ROI-SOLEIL" 
 
 o'clock, he proceeded to his own room, where his meal was 
 laid on a small square table opposite the centre window, and 
 there, surrounded by his gazing courtiers, and in a silence only 
 occasionally broken by the few words he would sometimes say 
 to persons to whom he desired to show favour, he ate, with the 
 mighty appetite of which we have so often heard — and without 
 any fork. 
 
 As a matter of politeness, the Due de Bourgogne and his two brothers 
 had been taught to eat with a fork. But when they were admitted to 
 sup with the King, he would not hear of it, and forbade them to do it. 
 He never forbade me to do anything of the kind, for aU my life I have 
 never used anything to eat my food save my knife and my fingers. 
 (Madame, January 22, 1713.) 
 
 One day. Father Tixier tells us, he saw King Charles of 
 England supping with Louis XIV and the two Queens at 
 Compiegne : every time Marie-Th6rese spoke to the English 
 King, he lifted his hat to her, and " by the end of the meal his 
 hat was most terribly greasy. . . ." 
 
 After his dinner the King would take a walk in the gardens, 
 or go to look at the new works, always followed by a troop of 
 courtiers, hat in hand, his head alone being covered : but oftenest 
 of all he went a-hunting. Towards three o'clock, or later, he 
 again met his ministers in council. At seven o'clock the 
 evening entertainments began. Three times a week there was 
 a theatrical performance ; on Mondays, Wednesdays, and 
 Thursdays, the appartement ; on Sundays there was nothing 
 at all. 
 
 What was known as the appartement was the assemblage of 
 the whole Court — from seven in the evening till ten, when the 
 Evening King sat down to supper — ^in the grand apparte- 
 
 amusements of ment ; that is to say, in the series of saloons that 
 the Court. lie between the Galerie des Glaces and the Chapel 
 Gallery. These huge rooms were decorated with luxurious 
 comfort and splendour, with a profusion of tapestries, paintings, 
 marbles, and heavy plate, set everywhere on massive silver 
 stands. At night, under the blaze of the lustres, candelabra, 
 candlesticks, and girandoles, the gilded furniture gleamed, the 
 damask of the arm-chairs blushed red, the colours of the velvet 
 doublets and brocaded govms played in the light, the diamonds 
 
 205 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 sparkled, the golden and silver vases and salvers, flagons and 
 ewers, shone brightly. . . . There were tables for every kind of 
 game : a lansquenet table at which Monseignenr (the Dauphin) 
 and Monsieur (the King's brother) almost always played, a 
 billiard-table, too, and every one had leave to ask anything he 
 desired to have of the lackeys, all in blue coats braided with 
 silver. Meanwhile the musicians were making themselves 
 heard, and a collation of fruit, oranges, citrons, and dried fruits 
 was laid out in the Salon de Vinus. . . . All these things, " the 
 numerous and august company, the magnificence and richness 
 of the furniture, the rare pictures and busts," the huge size of 
 the billiard-table, the grace of the ladies as they danced, " and 
 the charming scraping of the fiddle-bows," greatly dazzled the 
 learned M. Boiurdelot, who was permitted to view them in 1682, 
 but not so much, perhaps, as the sight of the King himself 
 moving majestically to and fro in the rooms. 
 
 When there was dancing, a special festivity, or a State recep- 
 tion, the Galerie des Glaces reflected the light of hundreds of 
 tapers arranged in a sort of pyramid form, on stands and on gilt 
 tables. The chairs were placed in a double line, and sometimes 
 small graduated stages, covered with Savonnerie carpets, were 
 placed in the window recesses. And even so there were not 
 seats enough, for the crowd at the French Court was something 
 tremendous, and by no means so respectful as might have been 
 imagined. When the King received the Doge of Venice, there 
 was no keeping the way clear between the Salon de la Guerre 
 and the Salon de la Paix, in which the sovereign was awaiting 
 his visitor : the Doge had the greatest difiiculty in getting 
 through the press. Constantly Madame complains of the heat, 
 the smell, of having been half smothered. Another German, 
 Mme. d'Osnabriick, who was present at a theatrical per- 
 formance at Court in 1679, likewise declares that the " crowd " 
 and " the terrible heat " cause " the pleasures of the Q,o\a\, of 
 France to be mingled with many discomforts," and that, in 
 fact, the ntmiber of curtsies that have to be made to every 
 new-comer, the infernal noise that goes on all day long, and the 
 trouble people take to amuse themselves, make the Court a 
 most tiring place to live in. 
 
 At ten o'clock, when the appartemeni was over, the King 
 206 
 
THE "ROI-SOLEIL" 
 
 supped in great state, with the " sons, daughters, grandsons, and 
 granddaughters of France." Towards midnight there was the 
 The King's coucher, for which the rules were as minutely 
 "Coucher." prescribed as those for the lever. Then at last 
 " the Court was over." 
 
 Like the King — although, so Madame vows, "there is 
 nothing more tiresome than to eat alone, with a score of big 
 fellows standing round, watching you chew, and counting every 
 mouthful " — ^the members of the royal family all lived in public 
 from morning till night. In 1665, an Italian traveller had no 
 difficulty in obtaining admission to the Queen's lever : 
 
 WhUe her hair was being dressed she wore a pair of light white linen 
 stays, well boned and tightened round hei figure, and a petticoat so narrow 
 __ _ , that she looked as if she were wrapped up in a silken 
 «T » bag. When the Queen's hair was dressed, her upper 
 
 garments were brought in by pages. They were of a pretty 
 fabric, of extremely rich material, with alternate flowers of blue and 
 gold, on a silver groimd, and, with her ornaments, were all put on her 
 person by male attendants. They even laced her into her gown and 
 finished dressing her ; but her women fastened the jewels she wore on 
 her head and in the front of her gown. When she was completely 
 dressed, she turned towards the foreigners, a certain number of whom 
 had been admitted, made them a very fine curtsy, and flew, so to speak, 
 to the apartments of the Queen-Mother, her aunt. . . . (Locatelli.) 
 
 It will thus be perceived that access to the royal residences 
 was not difficult to obtain. At Versailles there were beggars 
 and hucksters selling trifles even on the landings of the stair- 
 cases. Thieves plied their trade, and one rogue went so 
 far, one day, as to steal the diamonds on the hat the King had 
 just laid on a table. The number of persons in attendance was 
 immense, for the Queen, as well as the King, the Dauphin, 
 Monsieur, Madame, every member of the royal family, had his 
 or her Household : when we add to these the soldiers on duty 
 and the swarm of lackeys, tradesmen, loafers, and parasites of 
 every kind that helped to swell the numbers of the Court, it 
 becomes evident that its total population must have been well 
 over 10,000 souls. 
 
 Richelieu had done his utmost to attract the French nobility 
 to Paris : Louis XIV made it the duty of that nobility to live 
 at Versailles. He had a great prince's eye and memory for 
 
 2or 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 faces, " He saw and noticed everybody, not a soul escaped 
 him — ^not even those who had no hope of being seen." If any 
 Concentration favour was asked for an absentee : " That is a 
 of the man I never see," he would answer dryly, or " I 
 
 Nobility at do not know him." So the nobles forsook their 
 Versailles. beautiful dwellings in the provinces, or their 
 convenient houses in Paris, in the hope of obtaining, after years 
 of intrigue, " two small, dark, garret rooms, into which neither 
 light nor air could penetrate," but which were in the King's 
 palace, close to him : and the greatest punishment he could 
 inflict upon them was to order them back to their own homes. 
 
 " I would rather die than spend two months without seeing 
 him," was the Due de Richelieu's confession to Mme. de 
 Maintenon : and Vardes, on his return from exile, said, " Sire, 
 far from your presence a man is not only unhappy, he is 
 ridiculous ! " " The creation of that horror of exile," says 
 Stendhal, " was the masterpiece of Louis XIV." 
 
 Works to Consult : In addition to those already quoted, the Letters 
 of Mme. de Sevign^, Mme. de Maintenon, Bussy-Rabutin, and Madame, 
 Duchess of Orleans ; La Bruyere's Caracteres ; the Works and Memoirs of 
 Louis XIV ; Locatelli's, Voyage en France ; Dangeau's Journal ; the 
 Menwirs of Choisy, de La Fare, Mme. de La Fayette, Saint-Simon, Primi 
 Visconti, etc. 
 
 A. Barine, Madame, Mire du Regent (1909) ; Boislisle, P. Scarron et 
 Franfoise d'Aubigne (1894,) ; Bourgeois, 2^ grondSt^cfe (1894) ; P.Clement, 
 Louis XIV et Mfne. de Montespan (1868) ; A. Dayot, Louis XIV (1909) ; 
 E. Forichon, Marly, in the Revue de Paris, 1909 ; Fr. Funck-Brentano, 
 Le Drame des Poisons (1900) ; Funck-Brentano and P. d'Estree, Les Nou- 
 vellistes (1905) ; Figaro et ses devanders (1910) ; H. Gauthier-Villars, La 
 Princesse Palatine, in the Grande Revue (1907); D'Haussonville and G. 
 Hanotaux, Souvenirs sur Mme. de Maintenon (1903-4) ; J. Lair, Louise de 
 La VaUiire (1907) ; J. Lacour-Gayet, Vidtwation politique de Louis XIV 
 (1898) ; J. liemoine, Mme. de Montespan et la Ugende des poisons (1908) ; 
 Lemoine and Lichtenberger, Trois familiers du grand Condi (1909) ; De La 
 Valliire a Montespan (1905) ; P. de Nolhac, HisUrire du Chateau de Versailles 
 (1900 et seq.) ; A. Perate, Versailles ; G. Piton, Marly-le-Roi ; A, Taphanel, 
 La Beaumette et Saint-Cyr (1898). 
 
 208 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 THE GLORIOUS YEARS, 1661-1678 
 
 I. The forces of France : The Ministers : The Army. II. First 
 successes : The Devolution War. III. The Dutch War. 
 
 SPAIN, already decadent in the time of Richelieu, 
 seemed moribund in 1661. True, her King, Philip IV, 
 a kind of fetish whose every thought and action were 
 governed by etiquette, still reigned over territories so vast that, 
 as men said, the sun never set upon them, and the memory of 
 Royal con- P^st grandeur, not less than the national pride in 
 temporaries oi which the most poverty-stricken hidalgo can drape 
 Louis XIV. himself as in a cloak, still lent a certain prestige to 
 the Spanish monarchy ; but it was undermined by the bureau- 
 cracy, overwhelmed by the weight of a huge clergy, and hope- 
 lessly ruined, for its population, which diminished steadily, lived 
 " nobly " without working ; a skeleton proudly tricked out in 
 glittering ornaments, it subsisted solely by the support of its 
 allies. The Hapsburg at Vienna was hardly more powerful 
 than he of Madrid : the Emperor Leopold I reigned by various 
 titles over ill-assorted races ; moreover, he had to make a stand 
 against the Turks who were attacking him, and the League of 
 the Rhine, which was threatening him in the name of the King 
 of France. For the Princes of Germany were doffing their hats 
 and holding out their hands to Louis XIV ; the majority of 
 them were ignorant, brutal, drunken, venal, selfish, and particu- 
 larist, utterly devoid of any national sentiment. The Free 
 States of Italy seemed falling into decline, and the rest of the 
 peninsula was a kind of European colony. Puritan England 
 felt a loyalist respect for the King she had restored in 1660, but 
 did not in the least understand him : Charles II (Stuart), a 
 
 o 209 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 iharming and polished gentleman after the French fashion, 
 brought up in France, which he loved, aimed at restoring the 
 England under Papacy and absolute power in his kingdom ; when 
 Charles n. she came to realize this, old England made up 
 her mind to get rid of him, but while working to this end she 
 was not particularly dangerous to her neighbours. Sweden in 
 1661 held sway over a considerable domain, but she was always 
 short of money, and could do nothing without subsidies from 
 Louis XIV : indeed, she had been the client of France for thirty 
 years. Beside her, the vast Russian Empire was still in process 
 of formation. Denmark scarcely counted any longer. Poland 
 was failing, and her neighbours were casting covetous eyes on 
 her territory : in 1663 Colbert was to work ardently, but in 
 vain, to make her elect one of the Condes as her king. 
 
 Meanwhile there had grown up on the lower shores of the 
 North Sea a new State, small as regards population, but great 
 Tbe United by reason of its wealth and valour ; this was the 
 Provinces. Republic of the United Provinces. Since the 
 decline of Spain, it had become the first of maritime Powers ; 
 it had seized nearly all the Portuguese provinces, and its mer- 
 chant ships, protected by a formidable navy, had almost a 
 monopoly of the trade of Europe, whether making long voyages 
 from China to Brazil, or coasting, transporting from port to port 
 the salt fish of Amsterdam, the spices of Batavia, the sheep and 
 oxen of the polders, the wools of Dutch manufacturers, the 
 boats built at Saardam. The Bank of Amsterdam ranked as 
 the first in the world. The University of Leyden reckoned 
 2000 students. Dutch printing-presses published the works of 
 Grotius, Vossius, and Huygens, and the famous political gazettes 
 which appeared freely. It was in Holland that Descartes com- 
 posed his Discours de la MHhode, that Spinoza speculated, that 
 Frans Hals, Ruysdael, Rembrandt, Potter, Cuyp, and Jan 
 Vermeer painted. This vigorous and flourishing little country, 
 inspired by an indomitable man, was to be the most terrible 
 adversary of the great King. 
 
 But in 1661, flourishing as the United Provinces were, and 
 great as was the consideration shown by Louis XIV himself to 
 the Grand Pensionary of Holland, no comparison seemed possible 
 between them and France, which indeed no other coimtry in 
 210 
 
THE GLORIOUS YEARS. 1661-1678 
 
 Europe could claim to rival. In the first place the French 
 population amounted to some 20,000,000 inhabitants, as many 
 as those of Germany and Austria together, and almost four times 
 as many as those of England, which at this period had but five or 
 six millions. Great France, as fashioned by the administration of 
 Richelieu and the Treaties of Westphalia, dominated all the 
 other States by her strength and discipline, just as her sovereign 
 himself surpassed the conscientious but discouraged Emperor 
 Leopold I, Philip IV, King of Spain, the laconic idol of an ex- 
 hausted country, and the needy and venal Charles II of England. 
 
 Louis XIV was served by the most adroit ministers, as by 
 the most brilliant generals. His Secretary of State for Foreign 
 Hugues de Affairs was Hugues de Lionne. The nephew of 
 Lionne. Abel Servien, he had learned his profession of 
 
 minister from childhood; he had worked under Mazarin, and 
 practised the methods of that incomparable diplomatist. He 
 took part in the negotiations of Westphalia, invented for the 
 Treaty of the Pyrenees that famous little moyennant (in consider- 
 ation of) which made the renunciation of the Infanta conditional 
 on the payment of the dowry, worked at the League of the 
 Rhine, travelled as political agent throughout Europe, with the 
 secrets and intrigues of which he was marvellously familiar. He 
 was a man of pleasure, enjoying idleness, yet indefatigable and 
 ready to spend whole nights at work when necessary, eager, 
 subtle, energetic, an experienced diplomatist, and supple as the 
 " late lamented Cardinal " himself, witty, cultivated, with a 
 lively imagination tempered by a classical good sense, a great 
 gambler, a great lover of women, and for the rest so charming 
 that Mazarin during his exile in 1651 did not fear any of those 
 who attempted to take his place with the Queen so much as he 
 dreaded his dear pupil, Hugues de Lionne. 
 
 Lionne died in 1671, worn out by work and pleasure, and was 
 replaced by Amauld de Pomponne, who had nothing in common 
 Amauld de with him but his efficiency. Pomponne, who in 
 Pomponne. former days had been a hahitu& of the H6tel de 
 Rambouillet, had remained the worthy man of a bygone genera- 
 tion, and as a diplomatist he had " an art, a singular skill in 
 getting the best of an argument in negotiation, a subtlety and a 
 flexibility devoid of cunning which enabled him to gain his 
 
 211 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 ends without irritating his opponents," But he was no fanatic 
 for work Uke Colbert ; he enjoyed conversation in town and 
 correspondence with Mme. de S6vign^ ; in short, he cultivated 
 friendship, as if the worship of the God of Versailles had been 
 compatible with private affections. He even quitted the Court 
 occasionally, without any show of despair, to go and rest on his 
 estate. . . . Colbert and Louvois did their utmost to discredit 
 so impertinent a rival, and Pomponne, who, in addition to 
 his other offences, was suspected of Jansenism and was a 
 nephew of the great Amauld, was disgraced in 1679, on the 
 occasion of the Matthioli affair. However, his merit was so 
 indisputable that he was restored to office in 1691. He died 
 four years later. 
 
 If Colbert and Louvois had combined for the overthrow of 
 Pomponne, it was because each of them proposed to fill his 
 The younger place with a henchman of his own. Colbert 
 Colberts. triumphed ; the King appointed his brother, 
 
 Colbert de Croissy. The latter had the harsh and rapacious 
 disposition of his elder brother, the same deference towards the 
 great ones of the earth, and, according to d'Ormesson, a " very 
 heavy " but well-stored mind. Professionally he was a clever 
 business man, cunning as a Norman, ready for anything, and 
 full of resource. His son, Colbert de Torcy, married Pomponne's 
 daughter, and succeeded him : he proved himself a good diplo- 
 matist, adroit and trustworthy ; like Lionne, Louvois, and Seigne- 
 lay, he had begun his apprenticeship to ministerial functions at 
 his adolescence. 
 
 Such were Louis XIV's principal diplomatists. To these 
 must be added Turenne and Cond^ whose disgrace, contrary to 
 tradition, was really a very short one. But the actual director 
 of foreign policy was the King himself ; he was well versed in 
 the calling, having learnt it from Mazarin, and he worked at it 
 daily with that solar regularity which excited the admiration 
 of his courtiers as it still excites ours. Prudent and judicious 
 at the outset, his policy became preposterously arrogant as he 
 himself became so. 
 
 The Secretaries of State for War were at first Le Tellier and 
 his son Louvois. Michel Le Tellier was a lawyer, intelligent, 
 handsome, gentle, insinuating — and so modest ! Spanheim 
 212 
 
THE GLORIOUS YEARS, 166 1-1678 
 
 tells us of his " natural repugnance to any manifestation of 
 pride " ; he scarcely increased his scale of living when he 
 Michel Le became Chancellor. " In social intercourse," says 
 
 Tellier. Choisy, " he scattered only flowers " (indeed, these 
 
 were the sole tokens of friendship to be expected from him). " He 
 was an accomplished humbug," says the honest Saint-Hilaire 
 bluntly. " He was inclined to bear malice," adds Gourville. 
 And Saint-Simon sums him up exhaustively as " supple, adroit, 
 artful, modest, always between the two extremes, keeping his 
 end well in view, full of intelligence, vigour, and, at the same 
 time, of amenity, gentleness, foresight," etc. etc. For the rest, 
 the gentle Le Tellier was an excellent administrator. In 1661, 
 when he was fifty-eight and had been Secretary of State since 
 1643, he had already indicated the main lines of the reforms 
 which were subsequently carried out. From 1662 onwards he 
 obtained for his son Louvois the right of " signing " together 
 with himself; but he continued to direct administration until 
 about 1677, and it is doing him less than justice to attribute all 
 the credit for reforms to Louvois : Le Tellier's part in these was 
 at least as considerable as his son's, and Louis XIV was as well 
 versed in military organization as in diplomacy. 
 
 In 1661 Louvois was twenty-two, just a year younger than 
 the King, and from the age of fifteen his claim to succeed his 
 father had been assured. From that father he had 
 inherited a handsome face, the effect of which on the 
 fair sex he enhanced by the care he bestowed on his dress, though 
 it may be doubted whether this was as powerful a factor in his 
 successes among ladies as his prestige as a minister. In other 
 respects the Marquis de Louvois bore little resemblance to the 
 modest Le Tellier ; as brusque, overbearing, violent, and arrogant 
 as his father was the reverse — ^tall, strong, and full-blooded, " his 
 body heavy and fleshy " (Spanheim), he " treated all the world 
 in a domineering fashion, and the natural ferocity painted on his 
 countenance terrified all those who came in contact with him " 
 (Saint-Hilaire) ; in short, he was " the most perfect clerk and the 
 greatest bully imaginable " (Siri). His favour was based primarily 
 on his merit, which was unparalleled in all things pertaining to 
 war, but also to some extent on the fact that he had posed as 
 the pupil of the King : Louis was greatly attracted by this clever 
 
 213 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 personage who came to him for advice and instruction, and 
 whom he undertook to train for the business of the State ; 
 finally, it was derived from his skill in encouraging the King's 
 inclination for war and flattering his conquering instincts : 
 Louis XIV considered Louvois the Minister par excellence of his 
 " glory." Thus Louvois was a disastrous force ; all the memoirs 
 of the seventeenth century accuse him of having fomented wars 
 and incited religious persecution solely that he might remain 
 "the necessary man" and counterbalance the influence of 
 Colbert ; and we cannot but agree with the memoirs. 
 
 Often, in the seventeenth century, some florid, well-dressed 
 fellow, sometimes accompanied by several robust veterans, and 
 System ol even by a few pretty girls, might be seen perorat- 
 
 recmiting. ing in public places, jingling a purse of crowns 
 which sounded harmoniously in the ears of loafers, while his 
 followers brandished white bread and fowls on a spit under their 
 noses. This was a non-commissioned officer recruiting men for 
 his captain. Enlistment was concluded between two drinks at 
 a neighboiiring dram-shop, and it was useless for the new recruit 
 to protest as soon as he became sober ; the recruiting officer 
 never had any trouble in finding witnesses to swear that they 
 had seen him drinking the King's health. 
 
 When once the recruits were enrolled, they had to be 
 equipped. At the beginning of the reign only the troops of His 
 Majesty's Household wore imiform, but the custom of dressing 
 the men all alike gradually spread throughout the army ; 
 towards 1673 it was almost universally adopted. 
 
 In April, 1665, the Italian Locatelli was present at one of 
 those grand military parades which Louis XIV loved to show 
 Household to ladies on the plain of Saint-Denis. The gigantic 
 Troops. Swiss Guards, crowned by black velvet caps with 
 
 red, white, and blue plumes, marched past first to the soimd of 
 fifes and drums, their halberds on their shoulders ; they were 
 uniformly dressed in blue and red ratteen, relieved by facings 
 ornamented with tufts of silk and silver. After them, on tall 
 white or dappled horses, with crimson trappings, came the Grands 
 Mousquetaires, whose blue cloth tunics were embroidered on the 
 chest and back with a silver cross surrounded by golden rays, 
 214 
 
THE GLORIOUS YEARS, 1661-1678 
 
 and the King's cipher. Then the Petits Mousquetaires, without 
 any silver braid on their tunics, riding black horses with blue 
 trappings, adorned with an L and a golden crown ; and finally 
 the soldiers, in grey, blue, or red cloth and black silk cravats em- 
 broidered with silver. The young King bestrode a large dapple- 
 grey charger, whose saddle and trappings, covered with gold and 
 precious stones, were of a " warm dry rose " tint, and his stirrups 
 of silver-gilt ; the King changed his mount several times, " and all 
 these horses, proud and joyous at bearing the King, did nothing 
 but prance and gallop." Two wide flame-coloured ribbons, 
 matching the immense plvune which adorned his hat, fastened 
 back Louis' long hair ; his collar of Venetian point floated over 
 his gilded gorget ; his doublet of light-coloured moirS, so thickly 
 braided with gold and silver that the tint was barely distinguish- 
 able, was unbuttoned, showing a vest of brocade d la Polonaise 
 trimmed with wide gold lace adorned with brilliants ; two 
 large diamonds sparkled like stars at the points of the two 
 golden lilies which formed the clasp of a belt of an antique 
 pattern ; his wide Walloon trunk hose surrounded him like a 
 little petticoat ; garters of flame-colour and gold held up his 
 stockings, which were of the same shade of brown as his shoes 
 of English calf, and spurs of violet enamel were fastened to his 
 feet by gold and diamond buckles. In his hand he held a 
 switch " twisted like two serpents entwined," made of a black 
 flexible wood said to have come from China : a present from 
 Mazarin, like the little sword which hung at His Majesty's 
 side. Thus equipped, and beautiful as Mars, the young warrior 
 bore little resemblance to the King nobly but soberly attired in 
 brown slightly relieved with gold known to Saint-Simon and a 
 later generation. 
 
 Under Louis XIV, a foot soldier received 5 sols a day, a 
 cavalryman 15 sols, and a dragoon 11 sols. The captain's pay 
 Pay of was only 75 livres a month. But no great skill 
 
 soldiers. was required to add considerably to his income. 
 
 In the time of Louis XIII it was almost a rule that the French 
 infantry companies, composed on paper of some sixty men and 
 paid on this basis, consisted really of from fifteen to twenty ; 
 on the days when the war-commissaries came to inspect their 
 troops, captains made up their effectives by supers (passe- 
 
 215 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 volants) : lackeys, loafers, beggars of every sort, hired for a few 
 hours, dressed and equipped, marched past in the ranks of the 
 true soldiers. Le Tellier and Louvois did their best to suppress 
 this practice, but they were never altogether successful. 
 
 Above the private soldiers there were the anspessade or 
 soldier of the first class, the corporal or caporal, and the sergeant, 
 The Military called in the cavalry the mardchal des logis ; these 
 Hierarchy. inferior officers could never hope, save in very ex- 
 ceptional cases, to become officers. The superior officers were 
 the ensign or sub-lieutenant (called a cornet in the cavalry), the 
 lieutenant, the captain, the major, the lieutenant-coUmel, the 
 colonel. Above these were the general officers : brigadier, field- 
 marshal, and lieutenant-general. Finally, the Marshals of France. 
 Under Louis XIII the generals took over the command in 
 turns, and we have pointed out the disadvantages of this custom. 
 They ceased to alternate one with another after the decree of 
 1675, which established "the order of the list," or in other 
 words, decided that the officer of highest seniority in his rank 
 should always command his equals. 
 
 Not all officers, and not even all generals, were of noble 
 birth. Catinat and Gassion were the sons of lawyers, many others 
 were plebeians, like Saint-Hilaire, or Gangniferes, whose father 
 was a butcher at Jargeau. Louvois deserves credit for having 
 established that henceforth military rank should be everything 
 and nobility nothing : duke or marquis, a man had to obey his 
 superior officer ; and Mme. de Sevigne tells us how the son of Le 
 Tellier used to remind the officers of the Court of their duty. 
 
 M. de Louvois said loudly the other day to M. de Nogaret : " Sir, your 
 company is in a very bad state." " Sir," he replied, " I did not know it." 
 " It is your business to know it," said M. de Louvois ; " have you seen 
 it ? " " No," answered Nogaret. " It is your business to have seen it, 
 sir." " Sir, I will put it in order." " You ought to have done so already. 
 You must be one thing or the other, sir ; either declare yourself a courtier, 
 or do your duty as an officer." (February 4, 1689.) 
 
 S^bastien Le Prestre de Vauban, a simple country squire of 
 Morvan, passed in one stride from the rank of captain to 
 that of brigadier, and became a Marshal of France. 
 " This was because nature had endowed him with 
 
 such marvellous talent as a military engineer that he never 
 216 
 
THE GLORIOUS YEARS, 1661-1678 
 
 failed in any siege. " The town defended by Vauban," said his 
 compatriots, " is impregnable ; the town invested by Vauban is 
 taken " ; and it was true. The siege of a fortress became in his 
 hands an operation the successive stages of which followed 
 logically and inevitably one after the other, " like the five acts 
 of a tragedy." For defence, he invented forts on a level with 
 the ground, and replaced the high walls of former ages, useless 
 against cannon-balls, by trenches ; he introduced covered ways, 
 and bastions so designed that their cross-fire could always enfilade 
 the trenches. By his efforts France was surrounded by a girdle 
 of fortifications so solid that they resisted the enemy until 
 the time of the Revolution, and so imposing that their ruins are 
 still the pride of our towns. " He was a man of medium height 
 and sturdy build, very warlike in appearance, but at the same 
 time superficially coarse and rustic, not to say brutal and 
 ferocious." This was by no means his disposition ; he was, on 
 the contrary, very respectful of human life, and opposed to 
 unjustifiable bombardments. In 1707, at the age of seventy- 
 four, moved by popular suffering, the worthy Vauban published 
 a book. La Dime royale, in which he expresses his indignation 
 against the collectors of customs, and sensibly demands that 
 taxation should be in proportion to income. The financiers 
 oould not forgive him for this, and he was disgraced. 
 
 The great point in the reforms of Le Tellier and Louvois, 
 seconded by Vauban, was the organization of the artillery and 
 the administrative services. Down to 1669 the 
 ■ artillery was a sort of commercial enterprise : the 
 artillery officers, who were hardly more military than the officers 
 of the Cour des Aides (Court of Subsidies), for instance, contracted 
 with the King, under penalties, to establish batteries, and their 
 men were mere workmen or soldiers borrowed from other corps. 
 Louvois created special artillery troops. Then he organized 
 magazines of victuals and forage close to the frontiers ; thanks 
 to him, the cavalry was enabled to take the field even before 
 the grass had grown again, and the troops could live in the 
 ravaged districts, advantages which His Majesty's marshals did 
 not fail to turn to the best account. 
 
 For at this period war really resembled a game of chess. On 
 the field of operations, duly marked out and delimited, the 
 
 217 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 generals began the contest every year in the spring. When, 
 after compHcated manoeuvres, one of the adversaries had lost 
 or gained several pieces — ^towns or fortresses — ^the decisive battle 
 took place ; from the top of some slope, whence the whole 
 chess-board — ^the battlefield — lay before him, the Marshal moved 
 his fine regiments backwards and forwards. . . . Check and 
 mate, the loser cleared his board : " the pawns were put 
 back into their boxes, or the regiments into their winter quarters, 
 and each one went oft to attend to his private affairs while 
 awaiting the next game or campaign." 
 
 II 
 
 Louis XIV, who proposed to acquire the fame of a great 
 sovereign, could conceive no other method of achieving this 
 Rivalry of end than war and conquest : now the traditional 
 France and enemy of the King of France was the King of 
 Spain. Spain. On the other hand, Hugues de Lionne 
 
 could not but feel impelled to follow the policy of Mazarin, 
 which was also his own, and to realize the advantages which 
 the Spanish marriage and the Treaty of the Pyrenees had ap- 
 parently been concluded to ensure some day. Thus it is by no 
 means absurd to conclude with Mignet that " the Spanish 
 succession was the pivot of all Louis XIV's policy." Nor is it 
 any more so to believe the exact opposite, for Mignet's famous 
 phrase is indeed but a hypothesis. As a fact we only see from 
 the correspondence of ambassadors, ministers, and the King 
 himself that the projects and diplomatic enterprises of the 
 reign were very varied, that they changed, arose from conjunc- 
 tures, were interrupted or developed according to events. That 
 Louis XIV's ruling thought was the Spanish succession, that he 
 wished to unite in his house the two most illustrious crowns of 
 the world and to reconstitute for his own advantage a power 
 superior to that of the Emperor Charles V is possible, but we 
 have no proof of this. Be this as it may, such a dream woul<J 
 have been no chimera in the seventeenth century : nations 
 were then looked upon as the property and inheritance of kings, 
 and their fate was decided between diplomatists just as that of 
 private fortunes is weighed between men of business : why 
 218 
 
THE GLORIOUS YEARS, 1661-1678 
 
 should Louis XIV have hesitated to add to his own possessions, 
 which were France, those destined to revert to his wife, which 
 were Spain ? Whatever his plans may have been, we see him 
 from the moment of his accession slowly elaborating them, 
 because he was prudent and patient, by strengthening and 
 perfecting his army. Meanwhile he made trial of his power in 
 certain small adventures. 
 
 At this period it was an accepted axiom that an ambassador 
 represented the actual person of his master ; it followed that the 
 Precedence o! order of precedence of the various ambassadors 
 Ambassadors, in official ceremonies was very important, and 
 that, on the other hand, their ages and individual qualities had 
 nothing to do with the question. By common consent the 
 envoy of the Emperor came first, but the envoy of France 
 claimed the second place, to which the envoy of Spain also 
 aspired. In 1661 this competition had disastrous results in 
 London ; at the solemn entry of the Swedish ambassador, the 
 coach of the Baron de Watteville, the representative of Philip 
 IV, tried to take precedence of that of the Comte d'Estrades, 
 who represented Louis XIV ; there was a regular battle, with 
 dead and wounded ; but the followers of the French ambassador 
 were outnumbered, and had to yield. Louis XIV at once 
 demanded an apology from his father-in-law ; he obtained it, 
 together with the recall of Watteville and a promise that the 
 Spanish ambassadors throughout Europe should henceforth 
 forbear to " compete " with his. 
 
 Shortly afterwards (1662), when the King of England de- 
 manded that foreign vessels should give the salute first to his 
 flag " on the English seas," Louis XIV wrote a very proud 
 letter (rather too proud, indeed, for good taste) ; and Charles II 
 was obliged to give way in this " matter of the flag." 
 
 Finally, this same year, 1662, was the date of the affair of the 
 Corsican Guard. The King had sent to the Holy See the least 
 Affair o£ the patient of men, the Due de Cr^qui, with secret 
 Corsican Guard, instructions to make himself intolerable, which 
 Cr^ui at once succeeded in doing, for if his first interview 
 with His Holiness was chilly, the second was unpleasant, and the 
 third absolutely stormy. Neither the imperious Alexander VII 
 not his Cardinals could brook such treatment. On August 20, 
 
 219 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 1662, a dispute arose between some of M. de Crequi's men and 
 several Corsican soldiers of the Pope's Guard ; supported by 
 their comrades, the latter fired upon the Farnese Palace and the 
 coach of the ambassador's wife. Crequi immediately withdrew 
 from the Papal States, and the King confiscated Avignon, and 
 then assembled an army with great clamour. The Holy 
 Father had to disband his Corsican Guard, raise an expiatory 
 pyramid, and also give satisfaction to the Dukes of Parma and 
 Modena, the protegis of Louis XIV, in certain territories ; 
 finally, in July, 1664, Cardinal Chigi came to Fontainebleau to 
 read an apologetic declaration ; " he was the first Legate of the 
 Roman Court who had ever been sent to ask pardon," said M. de 
 Voltaire gleefully. 
 
 Meanwhile Louis XIV was eager to prove his fine army. In 
 
 1663, 120,000 Turks having invaded Himgary, he offered the 
 Emperor 60,000 soldiers, 30,000 as King of France, and 30,000 
 as a member of the League of the Rhine. The unhappy Leopold, 
 uneasy and distrustful, did not dare to accept more than 6000, 
 commanded by Coligny. On August 1, 1664, the Turks were 
 defeated at Saint-Gothard by Montecuculli. The French troops 
 had played a gallant part in the victory ; it was said that when 
 the Grand Vizier Koeprilii saw our gentlemen with their fair 
 periwigs, their feathers, ribbons, and laces fluttering in the wind, 
 he asked who these young girls were ; and that for his part La 
 Feuillade, who had taken over the command on the death of 
 Coligny, made this curt but eloquent speech to them : " Com- 
 rades, there are three hundred leagues between us and Vau- 
 girard, and there is no way to get there but over the bellies of 
 
 these . Forward ! " They advanced, and at their first charge 
 
 Koeprilu learned by the fhght of his Turks what was the worth, 
 if not what was the sex, of M. de La Feuillade's young ladies. 
 
 In 1662 Louis XIV pointed out to his father-in-law that as 
 Marie-Ther^se's dowry had not been paid over within the stipu- 
 lated time, the Infanta's renimciation of her claim to the throne 
 must be annulled. Moreover, Hugues de Lionne was already 
 at work forming a series of alliances against Spain. The 
 needy King of England, who had become the brother-in-law of 
 Louis XIV by the marriage of his sister Henrietta with Philippe 
 d'OrMans, in 1662 obtained, through the French King's inter- 
 220 
 
THE GLORIOUS YEARS, 1661-1678 
 
 vention, the Infanta of Portugal and her rich dowry (Tangiers 
 and Bombay), and sold back to us Dunkirk and Mardick for five 
 millions (a profitable transaction). In Germany the Emperor, 
 harassed by the Turkish peril, and opposed even in the Diet 
 itself by the clients of Louis XIV, was powerless to help Spain. 
 In 1663 France was treating with Denmark ; Sweden seemed 
 still fettered by French gold. Finally, in 1662 Lionne signed a 
 treaty of alliance with the United Provinces. But such a treaty 
 was necessarily illusory ; for, on the one hand, Holland did not 
 want powerful France as her immediate neighbour, and, on the 
 other, the French King had no idea of renouncing Marie-Th6r^se's 
 The Law of claim to the Spanish Netherlands. This claim he 
 Devolution. based very ingeniously upon a custom observed in 
 certain Flemish provinces, known as the law of devolution, accord- 
 ing to which the children, after the death of father or mother, be- 
 came sole owners of the fortune of the deceased, while the surviv- 
 ing parent retained only the usufruct. According to Louis XIV's 
 argument, Marie-Ther^se, by the death of her mother, had 
 become the owner of the territories of the Spanish monarchy 
 in which the law of devolution was recognized — that is to say, in 
 the Netherlands — and these territories would revert to her on 
 the death of Philip IV, who had only a life-interest in them. 
 The Dutch did not accept these conclusions for a moment ; they 
 were soon to give rise to a conflict. 
 
 In 1665 an unforeseen event upset the diplomatic manoeuvres 
 of Louis XIV : England, the friend of France, attacked Holland, 
 the ally of France, and Holland called upon the King to carry 
 out the treaty of 1662. The King was greatly embarrassed, 
 but he had no thought of evading his engagements with the 
 Republic, on the neutrality of which he counted as necessary to 
 the success of his projects concerning the Low Countries. As 
 the treaty allowed him an interval of four months before inter- 
 vention, he tried first to induce the two Powers to accept his 
 mediation. But he failed, and as Philip IV had just died, 
 leaving no heir but a child of his second marriage (September 
 17, 1665), his one thought was to finish off this war as quickly as 
 possible in order to have his hands free to deal with Spain. On 
 land his troops accordingly marched against the robber-bishop 
 of Miinster, Bemhard von Galen, who was attacking the Dutch 
 
 221 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 from behind. On the sea his fleet sped towards that of De 
 Ruyter, which, however, it was unable to join, owing to the 
 inadequacy of the French warships of that period. And as soon 
 as he saw that his aUies the Dutch were beginning to get the 
 better of their adversaries, Louis invaded the Spanish Nether- 
 lands with 50,000 men and Turenne, to occupy the territory he 
 claimed for Marie-Th^r^se by virtue of the famous right of 
 Devolution (May, 1667). 
 
 The Governor, Castel Rodrigo, had very few soldiers ; for 
 the war against Portugal kept the best troops of His Catholic 
 LonisXIV Majesty in Spain. Louis XIV accordingly 
 occupies gathered a veritable harvest of fortresses ; in a 
 
 Flanders. campaign of two and a half months, he took 
 
 possession of Flanders by a simple military march ; after which 
 he returned to celebrate his triumph in France, while the army 
 went into winter quarters. 
 
 Europe was greatly stirred by the news of this sudden con- 
 quest. Holland was distracted by it, but her struggle against 
 England was not yet at an end. At last she succeeded in signing 
 the Peace of Breda under the auspices of Louis XIV (July, 
 1667) ; six months later the United Provinces enteried into a 
 league with their recent enemy, England, and with Sweden, 
 against France. 
 
 But Louis XIV had had time to prepare a new stroke. At 
 the end of January, 1668, 15,000 men, gathered from various 
 directions, punctually assembled in Burgundy, the province 
 governed by the Great Cond6. On February 8, the Prince 
 invaded Franche-Comt^ at their head. On the 7th, Louis XIV 
 arrived in great haste to join the army ; he had ridden 250 
 kilometres. Twelve days later, when he set out to retimi to 
 Saint-Germain, the Comtd was conquered ; it had taken less 
 than three weeks, just a quarter of the time it had taken for the 
 conquest of Flanders. The Spaniards wrote that " the King of 
 France might have been content to send his lackeys to take 
 possession of the Comt6." 
 
 Louis XIV would gladly have continued the war and followed 
 up his successes. But the Swiss, very uneasy with regard to 
 their new neighbours, were stirring ; Portugal made peace with 
 Spain ; and finally the King heard of the Anglo-Swedo-Dutch 
 222 
 
THE GLORIOUS YEARS, 1661-1678 
 
 Triple Alliance. It cut him to the quick ; his conduct to the 
 United Provinces had been very correct, and he had supposed 
 that they in return would have allowed him to carry out his 
 plans undisturbed. Urged on by Colbert, he thereupon deter- 
 mined to punish them. But always prudent, and judging that 
 he had not as yet enough troops and allies to embark on this 
 enterprise, he signed at Aix-la-Chapelle a treaty the moderation 
 of which caused great astonishment (May 2, 1668) : Franche- 
 Comt6 was thereby restored to Spain, and Louis retained only the 
 Spanish fortresses. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Colbert was the person mainly responsible for the Dutch war. 
 True, the King had every reason to feel resentment against the 
 The War with United Provinces. Foremost among these was 
 Holland. the one just mentioned : the Dutch had checked 
 
 his progress by means of the Triple Alliance. Then their 
 gazettes never ceased ridiculing the Boi-Soleil ; on the occasion 
 of the negotiations of 1668 they had struck medals such as that 
 on which five horsemen were seen beneath a sun, with this 
 inscription : Steiit sol in medio coeli, and the other on which 
 Holland boasted of having " strengthened the laws, purified 
 religion, aided, defended, and reconciled kings," etc. — which was 
 too much. Colbert, for his part, could not meekly accept the 
 action of the United Provinces in replying to his protectionist 
 tariff of 1667 by tariffs still higher and a sort of " boycott " 
 of French products. And wealthy, desirable, insolent little 
 Holland tempted him. He accordingly incited the King to make 
 war on her. 
 
 The Government of the Seven United Provinces was as 
 republican and decentralized as that of France was monarchical 
 and centralized. As a fact, the Provinces, which differed one 
 from the other by language, manners, and race, being partly 
 German and partly French, lacked unity ; it was the persecution 
 by Philip II and the war against Spain which had made them a 
 nation. Each of them, and within them each of their towns, 
 formed an almost autonomous little State, governed by an 
 assembly, and before any decision of a general order affecting 
 
 228 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 the federation as a whole could be adopted, it had to be unani- 
 mously voted by the States-General, composed of the delegates 
 of the seven Provinces. Nevertheless, one of the provinces, 
 Holland, was greatly superior to the rest in wealth and influence ; 
 if it was Zealand which nominated the ambassadors to be sent to 
 England, Holland alone chose the ambassadors to France, 
 Sweden, and Germany (and this is why in France the Seven 
 United Provinces are usually called by the generic name of 
 Holland) ; in like manner the States-General, which met in one 
 of her villages. The Hague, generally followed her counsels, and 
 consequently her Grand Pensionary, a sort of political adminis- 
 trator or minister whom she nominated every five years, became 
 the Prime Minister of the United Provinces. In 1668 this 
 Pensionary, who had held ofiice since 1653, was called Jan de 
 Witt. His brown hair, big prominent eyes, and thick moustache 
 did not make him handsome. But he was an upright man 
 and a skilful politician ; industrious, intelligent, supple, adroit, 
 and an orator of great parts, he excelled not only in giving 
 general satisfaction in the United Provinces, but in steering a 
 safe course between France, Spain, and England. And this 
 middle-class republican who went on foot through the streets 
 followed by a single servant, who despised the mob, but prayed 
 God every day to save his country from the fiuy of kings, was to 
 die a death worthy of the pages of Plutarch. 
 
 The rich, cultivated, and tolerant citizens who administered 
 the Seven Provinces inclined, like their chief, Jan de Witt, to 
 ipjig peace, favourable to commerce and the arts. 
 
 " Stathouder." But there were many malcontents in the Re- 
 public ; insignificant persons who aspired to be admitted into 
 the municipalities like the more important citizens, soldier- 
 squireens who wished for war, proletarians naturally hostile to 
 the commercial aristocracy, fanatical Calvinists opposed t« 
 religious toleration. The head of this opposition was the 
 Stathouder. In the beginning each of the provinces had had itj 
 special Stathouder, a sort of president of its government, but 
 from 1620 onwards six out of the seven provinces had made it a 
 custom to nominate the same man to this office : the Prince of 
 Orange, the head of the House of Nassau, who was, in addition, 
 the Captain-General of the forces of the Union. Now the 
 224 
 
THE GLORIOUS YEARS, 166 1-1678 
 
 Prince of Orange — ^necessarily a partisan of war, during which 
 his military functions gave him greater influence in the State, 
 and at the same time inimical to the middle-class Republic by 
 reason of his birth — thus became the natural leader of the 
 opponents of the Government and of the Grand Pensionary. In 
 1651 the latter had scored a great success against his traditional 
 adversary the Staihouder : William II of Orange had died without 
 children save an unborn infant, and the States-General seized 
 this opportunity to declare it useless to appoint a successor to 
 the office. In 1668, therefore, there was no Stathouder. But 
 William III of Orange, the posthumous son of William II, was 
 now seventeen years old. His birth made him the leader of the 
 opposition to the States-General, and the enemy of the Grand 
 Pensionary. The reverses of Holland brought about the death 
 of Jan de Witt and the Prince's triumph. 
 
 For four years, from 1668 to 1672, Louis XIV prepared 
 methodically for war upon the United Provinces. In England, 
 The Treaty o! Charles II volunteered his aid. He cherished 
 Dover, 1670. various secret designs, such as the re-establishment 
 of the Roman Catholic faith and of absolute power in his king- 
 dom. But it was certainly difficult for him to ask his Parliament 
 for subsidies for such purposes. He therefore applied to the 
 French ambassador, Colbert de Croissy. His sister, the fascinat- 
 ing Mme. Henriette, was sent over to induce him finally to sell 
 himself. She came back bearing the Treaty of Dover (1670) 
 and the alliance of Charles II. Sweden, for her part, put herself 
 up to auction. Louis XIV offered 200,000 crowns ; Holland 
 bid higher ; finally France carried the day with 400,000 crowns 
 (1672). The King secretly incited the Hungarians, always 
 ready to revolt, against the Emperor. In Poland he negotiated 
 for the elevation to the throne of a French prince — Cond^, for 
 instance. Finally, in Germany French gold succeeded as usual. 
 And while Lionne and Pomponne were weaving this web of 
 alliances, Vauban fortified the strongholds of Flanders, where 
 the Court made a sumptuous " progress " in 1670, and Le Tellier 
 and Louvois collected vast stores of provisions, and an army of 
 120,000 soldiers, more numerous perhaps than any ever yet seen 
 in Europe. 
 
 To meet all this, the United Provinces had about 80,000 men, 
 
 p 225 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 obtained with great difficulty from the States-General, for the 
 pacific middle classes are not fond of opening their purse-strings 
 for men of war. And these 80,000 men, distributed in half-dis- 
 mantled fortresses, were ill-trained and ill-provided with victuals 
 and powder. (Louvois had, indeed, by unknown machinations 
 The Prince ol procured part of the munitions of the French 
 Orange army in Holland itself.) But the inefficient 
 
 Captain- Dutch troops were commanded by the youthful 
 
 General. William of Orange, whom it had been necessary 
 
 to nominate Captain-General. This prince, a thin stripling, 
 with bowed shoulders, a hooked nose between hollow cheeks, 
 and a face seamed by small-pox, asthmatic, always ailing, 
 carried in his frail body one of the most energetic souls that have 
 ever existed. A wretched general, his tenacity was his substi- 
 tute for talent ; on the morrow of the most flagrant disaster, he 
 would set to work again with his phlegmatic persistence, and soon 
 he would reappear, a threatening presence. This terrible man, 
 insensible to luxury, vanity, love, pity, pleasiure, to ever3i;hing 
 save political passion, came very near to vanquishing powerful 
 France and that Louis XIV whose antithesis he was in every 
 respect. But in 1672 he was only twenty-one, and the States- 
 General felt so weak that they wrote humbly to the King asTcing 
 him how they could have offended His Majesty, and offering 
 him any satisfaction he might desire. They received only a 
 mocking answer. In the spring of 1672 Louis XIV and his 
 ally Charles II took the field. 
 
 The King with Turenne and 80,000 men was joined near 
 Maestricht by Cond^ and 40,000 soldiers, and, as in 1667, his 
 first successes were overwhelming ; at the beginning of June 
 his army was already on the right bank of the Rhine, and he had 
 only to cross the Yssel to reach Amsterdam. As the Prince of 
 Orange had entrenched himself behind this deep river with 
 20,000 men, it was decided to turn him on the right and cross 
 the Rhine, which was scarcely defended at all ; and while 
 Luxembourg distracted the attention of the Dutch by a curtain 
 of troops, scouts went in search of a place where the great river 
 seemed fordable. " Some of the natives then informed the 
 Prince de Cond^ that the recent drought had formed a ford on an 
 arm of the Rhine near an old tower which was used as a tolls- 
 226 
 
THE GLORIOUS YEARS, 166 1-1678 
 
 office, and called the Tolhuys, the toll-house [beyond Schenk]. 
 . . . The King ordered the Comte de Guiche to sound this ford ; 
 there were only some twenty paces to swim in the middle of the 
 The Passage ol stream. , . . This space was nothing, for twenty 
 the Rhine. horses abreast broke the current which was not at 
 all rapid " (Voltaire). On the opposite bank a single infantry 
 regiment and a few horsemen were drawn up to oppose the 
 landing. But while the French artillery rained projectiles 
 upon them, " the King's Household troops and the pick of the 
 cavalry to the number of 15,000 men passed safely across ; the 
 Prince de Cond6 crossed beside them in a copper boat. The 
 Dutch cavalry began to retreat and the infantry to surrender 
 very peaceably, when the Due de Longueville, Conde's nephew, 
 " his head full of the fumes of wine, fired a pistol at his adver- 
 saries, who were begging for their lives on their knees, crying : 
 ' No quarter for this rabble ! ' The Dutch infantry in despera- 
 tion snatched up their weapons and fired a volley which killed 
 the Due de Longueville. A cavalry captain, who had not fled 
 with the rest, ran to the Prince de Conde, who had just landed, 
 and was mounting his horse, and held a pistol to his head. The 
 Prince made a movement to avoid the shot, which only broke his 
 wrist. This was the only wound Cond6 ever received in all his 
 campaigns. The French, exasperated, threw themselves upon 
 the Dutch infantry, which began to flee in all directions. 
 Louis XIV passed over on a pontoon with the infantry, having 
 himself directed the entire march." . . . " Such " adds Voltaire, 
 " was this passage of the Rhine, a brilliant and unique action, 
 celebrated at the time as one of those great events destined to 
 live in the memory of man." Boileau extolled it in his well- 
 known Epistle. But Napoleon considered it " an operation of 
 the fourth rank." Be this as it may, each of the provinces, on 
 hearing of the arrival of the royal army in the heart of the 
 Republic, recalled its individual contingents in terror for its 
 own defence, and the Prince of Orange, reduced to a few thousand 
 men, was obliged to retreat hastily from the line of the Yssel. 
 Hereupon Nimeguen, Arnheim, ZwoUe, Utrecht, all the towns 
 surrendered when called upon to submit. An officer named 
 Mazel sent this message to M. de Turenne : " If you will send 
 me sixty horses, I could take two or three fortresses ; " and this 
 
 227 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 was hardly an idle boast. A few French horsemen advanced to 
 Muiden, where are the principal locks of the Zuider Zee. Now 
 Muiden is at the gates of Amsterdam ; the great town was 
 already in panic ; the richest inhabitants thought of embarking 
 for Batavia ; the municipal council were discussing the handing 
 over of the keys even before they had been demanded ; there is 
 no doubt that had a few French troops presented themselves at 
 this moment, Amsterdam would have opened her gates. . . . 
 But the King, Turenne, and Louvois were over-prudently em- 
 ployed in taking towns instead of marching straight upon the 
 capital. The delay was irreparable : on June 20, the very day of 
 the capitulation of Utrecht, the States ordered the lock-gates at 
 Muiden to be opened. 
 
 " Holland is a conquest of man from the sea ; it is an artifi- 
 cial country, a country that has been made." If the system of 
 The Dutch dikes and locks by which she holds back the sea 
 open the upon her shores, and keeps her rivers within their 
 
 sluices. beds, be cut, the waters at once resume their sway, 
 
 spread over the country, submerge fields and meadows, and 
 leave only the narrow threads of embanked roadways uncovered. 
 Holland had already defended herself in 1629 by the inimdation 
 of her soil ; in 1672 she not only broke open the dikes of 
 the canals, but those of the Zuider Zee, and allowed the sea 
 to mingle its waters with those of the rivers. A truly heroic 
 resolution : all the beautiful coimtry-houses of the rich mer- 
 chants, with their exotic gardens, their rare plants, and their 
 famous collections, perished ; flocks and crops disappeared ; 
 and the salt water made the land barren for years. But then 
 " Amsterdam was like a huge fortress in the midst of the 
 waters," surrounded by gunboats, for after June 23 it could 
 only be approached in boats. The capital was saved by this 
 suicide of the country. 
 
 Meanwhile deputies of the States-General had come to sue 
 for peace from the King. They offered him the towns on the 
 Rhine, Dutch Brabant, and an indemnity of ten millions. 
 When he refused this offer Louis did not commit a great " error " 
 as has been asserted ; he was merely prudent ; for there is every 
 reason to believe that the proposals of the Dutch were not 
 sincere. 
 228 
 
THE GLORIOUS YEARS, 1661-1678 
 
 The whole Republic had turned to the descendant of William 
 the Silent. On July 4 the young Prince of Orange was elected 
 The Murder of Stathouder. In August, Cornells, the brother of 
 the De Witts. Jan de Witt, was accused of having plotted the 
 death of the Prince of Orange by poison, and was tortured for an 
 hour and a half. On August 20, when Jan came to visit him, 
 the excited mob invaded the prison, dragged the two brothers 
 into the street, murdered them, tore them limb from limb, and 
 gibbeted their remains. . . . Meanwhile more dikes had been 
 thrown down, and the French were closely invested by the 
 waters. The King had returned to France, leaving the command 
 to Luxembourg. When the first frosts set in, Luxembourg, 
 wishing to make a brilliant stroke, left his headquarters at 
 Utrecht in the hope of reaching The Hague on the ice. But a 
 thaw suddenly took place ; his army was forced to fall back on 
 Utrecht by a narrow highway, wading waist-deep in mud and 
 water. Shortly afterwards Luxembourg's communications were 
 very nearly cut ; the Prince of Orange advanced towards the 
 Meuse, but was unable to take Charleroi (December). 
 
 Thus the luck seemed to be changing. Before his death, Jan 
 de Witt had successfully concluded an alliance with the Elector 
 of Brandenburg and the Emperor Leopold, who were both 
 uneasy at the progress of French power. As a result of this it 
 became necessary, by the end of 1672, to detach an army to hold 
 the Imperial and Electoral troops on the Rhine. Turenne was 
 entrusted with the task. But in 1673 the King, who hitherto 
 had commanded only with the help of his famous generals, 
 wished to show the world that he could make war on his own 
 initiative, and while Cond6 in Holland and Turenne on the 
 Rhine were quietly keeping the enemy in check on his right and 
 on his left, Louis ostentatiously laid siege to Maestricht, which 
 he took in a week (June, 1673). To tell the truth, he had the 
 " Sieur Vauban " with him. 
 
 This' new success determined the coalition against France : 
 the Emperor, the King of Spain, and the Duke of Lorraine 
 Coalition (August 30, 1673) joined the Prince of Orange, 
 
 against France. " It became necessary to abandon the three 
 Dutch provinces no less promptly than they had been conquered. 
 The triumphal arch of Saint-Denis and other monuments of the 
 
 229 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 conquest were scarcely completed when the conquered terri- 
 tories had to be abandoned " (Voltaire). Moreover, Luxem- 
 bourg, who was in command of the little French army in Holland, 
 feared that he would be crushed by the more numerous troops of 
 the Stathouder ; but he was able to deceive his adversary by a 
 feint, and bring back his soldiers without hindrance. Thus it 
 was France who now had to retire. And in 1674 England, 
 weary of a war which injured her trade, and in which her fleet 
 had been constantly beaten by that of Admiral de Ruyter, 
 abandoned her ally and made peace with Holland. When the 
 minor German princes in their turn broke with Louis XIV, 
 France was alone against Europe. 
 
 In 1674 she had to maintain three large armies in the field, 
 without counting the troops who were operating in the Pyrenees 
 against Spain. The task of the first, commanded by Conde, 
 was to contain the Dutch and the Spaniards in Flanders ; that 
 of the second, under Turenne, to check the advance of the 
 Imperialists in Alsace and in Lorraine ; the third, commanded 
 by the King in person — ^he had again, as in the previous year, 
 reserved the showy part for himself — took the offensive in 
 Franche-Comte, entered Dole and Besan§on, and for the second 
 time Louis found himself master of the province in less than 
 six weeks (May- June, 1674). 
 
 In Flanders Conde had to face the sixty or seventy thousand 
 Dutch, Spanish, and Imperial troops of the Prince of Orange 
 with forty or fifty thousand men. He had entrenched himself near 
 Charleroi, in a position so well chosen that the coalition judged 
 it to be impregnable, and preferred to turn it. The Prince 
 allowed the main body of their forces to defile quietly, but he 
 fell upon their rear-guard, composed of Spaniards, and routed it 
 at Seneffe. William at once halted, and deployed from his 
 centre. Conde launched a second furious attack. The Dutch 
 fell back, but, reinforced by the Imperialists, the stubborn 
 Prince of Orange formed his troops again upon the heights of the 
 village of Fayt. Cond6 attacked for the third time, throwing 
 himself upon the left and then on the right of the enemy, but 
 failing to break either. " At the end it was evident that only 
 M. le Prince wished to go on fighting " (La Fare). In the night the 
 two exhausted armies both retreated. The losses were consider- 
 230 
 
THE GLORIOUS YEARS, 1661-1678 
 
 able : eight thousand men of the finest French regiments, ten 
 or twelve thousand men on the side of the allies. On the whole 
 it was an indecisive action (August 11, 1674). 
 
 On the Rhine Turenne's tactical skill enabled him to resist 
 forces infinitely superior to his own : this campaign of 1674-5, 
 Turenne which was to be his last, was also his most ad- 
 
 ravages the mirable achievement. In June and July, 1674, with 
 Palatinate. 15,000 men, he twice surprised his adversaries and 
 twice defeated them, at Sinzheim and at Ladenburg. But the 
 forces of the allies grew incessantly. Then, by Louvois' orders, 
 Turenne ravaged the rich lands of the Palatinate abominably — 
 that so it might become a desert which would prevent the 
 enemy from marching on Alsace ! The cattle were driven off, the 
 crops destroyed, the small towns and villages methodically set on 
 fire. Useless cruelties, moreover, for the coalition troops quietly 
 invaded Alsace by the bridge of Kehl, which was placed at their 
 disposal by the free town of Strasburg. Turenne flew to meet 
 them with the 30,000 men at his command, and succeeded in 
 checking them temporarily near Strasburg (October). Mean- 
 while the allies, reinforced by the soldiers of Brandenburg, 
 had mustered 60,000 men. Then Turenne, as if recognizing the 
 impossibility of further resistance, retired into Lorraine by the 
 Col de Saverne, and installed himself in his winter quarters. 
 The enemy, thinking hostilities were suspended till the spring, 
 dispersed throughout Alsace to winter at their ease. But all at 
 once, on the last day of November, Turenne left his quarters 
 without sound of drum or trumpet, marched his army swiftly 
 forward under shelter of the Vosges, from north to south, and 
 after twenty-seven days of a march which the cold made in- 
 tensely painful, arrived at Belfort, and fell suddenly on the 
 scattered allies. In a fortnight, he had hustled them at Alt- 
 kirchen, Mulhouse, and Colmar, and throAvn them back to the 
 other side of the Rhine. Better still, he had done all this in 
 spite of Louvois, who had desired him to retire upon Champagne 
 in order to oppose a possible advance of the allies towards 
 Paris ; this resistance " to the all-powerful Louvois was not one 
 of the least tokens of Turenne's courage, nor one of the most 
 insignificant exploits of the campaign " (Voltaire). When 
 the great Marshal arrived at Saint-Germain after a journey 
 
 281 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 which had been one long triumph, the King advanced to meet 
 him, embraced him in the presence of the whole Court, and said to 
 him : " You have raised up afresh one of the lilies of my crown." 
 
 The campaign of 1675 was a continuation of that of 1674. 
 While Cond6 was manoeuvring against Orange and the King was 
 Campaign of taking a few Flemish towns as was his custom, 
 1675. Turenne, on the right bank of the Rhine, had the 
 
 illustrious Montecuculli as his adversary. After several months 
 of scientific marching and counter-marching, a great battle 
 at Salzbach seemed imminent between the two famous generals 
 on July 26. M. de Turenne seemed pleased with the order in 
 which he had arranged his troops : " Positively, I think it is 
 not at all bad, and I believe M. de Montecuculli will think 
 what we have just done pretty good," he declared in the 
 morning. At two o'clock he mounted his horse, and advanced 
 along the line of battle to observe the enemy positions once 
 more. As he was passing near some guns, M. de Saint-Hilaire 
 approached him, hat in hand, saying : " Monsieur, just take 
 a look at the battery I have placed here." As he spoke, a 
 cannon-ball tore off the arm and the hand with which Saint- 
 Hilaire was holding his hat and struck the great Marshal on 
 Death of the left side. Thus died Tiu-enne in the height 
 
 Turenne. of his glory, at the age of sixty-three. The whole 
 
 army, which worshipped him, was filled with grief. De Lorges 
 and De Vaubrun wrangled over the leadership : " Let the 
 Magpie loose," cried the soldiers, " she will lead us." (The 
 Magpie was the Marshal's mare.) The troops were obliged 
 to fall back upon the Rhine. Happily Cond^ came to take 
 Turenne's place, and succeeded in driving Montecuculli out of 
 Alsace. But for him, too, this was a last campaign. Tortured 
 by gout, and almost helpless, he retired to his estate at Chantilly, 
 where he spent the ten years he had still to live cultivating 
 art and letters with great enthusiasm. 
 
 Three days after the death of his glorious Marshal-General, 
 on July 30, Louis XIV had nominated eight new Marshals of 
 France, among them the Due de Luxembourg. But, as Mme. 
 Comuel remarked, they were merely " the small change of M. 
 de Turenne," and the war languished. In Flanders, Louis XIV 
 entered Cond6 and Bouchain, but he missed the opportunity of a 
 232 
 
THE GLORIOUS YEARS, 166 1-1678 
 
 pitched battle with the Prince of Orange, having taken counsel 
 with his generals, who dared not accept the responsibility of 
 " endangering the glory of the King " (1676). The following 
 year, while he himself took Valenciennes and Cambrai, Monsieur, 
 with the help of Luxembourg and d'Humi^res, gained the battle 
 of Cassel, receiving a bullet in his cuirass with an indifference 
 which the coiui;iers magnified into heroism, and causing the 
 King, who could not brook a rival, to determine thereupon that 
 he would never again entrust his brother with an army. Simul- 
 taneously, on the Rhine, Crequi, Turenne's best pupil, as Luxem- 
 bourg was Conde's, following his master's tactics, got the better 
 of the skilful Duke Charles of Lorraine ; finally, in the Medi- 
 terranean, an old sea-dog of sixty-six twice routed the fleet 
 commanded by the great De Ruyter near the coast of Spanish 
 Sicily. This gentleman — a crablDed Protestant squire, an old 
 beau, and a great lover of Hungary water and lace cravats — 
 was called Abraham Duquesne. 
 
 In spite of these successes, and although Holland and France 
 were both very weary, the negotiations which had been going 
 Peace ol on at Nimeguen for a year came to no conclusion 
 
 Nimeguen. — ^first, because the Stathouder set himself strenu- 
 ously against peace ; and, secondly, because neither of the two 
 nations could decently abandon her allies, which tended greatly 
 to complicate matters. And at this juncture Charles II, 
 impelled by English public opinion, which was very hostile to 
 " Papist " France, was obliged to give his niece, the Princess 
 Mary, daughter of the Duke of York, in marriage to William of 
 Orange, and then to conclude a treaty with this redoubtable 
 nephew (January, 1678). Louis XIV bore this double blow in a 
 manner worthy of a great king and an intelligent man ; by way 
 of showing that France was by no means beaten, he at once 
 mustered a new army, seized Ypres and Ghent (March, 1678), 
 and hurled an ultimatum at the United Provinces. . . . Greatly 
 alarmed, they at last signed a treaty of peace (Nimeguen, 
 August and September, 1678). 
 
 Spain had to pay for every one ; for though she recovered 
 certain towns such as Charleroi, Oudenarde, Courtrai, and Ghent, 
 which would have been mere isolated outposts for the French, 
 she ceded Franche-Comtd and the strongholds of the ancient 
 
 233 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 frontier : Cambrai, Bouchain, Valenciennes, Conde, Saint- 
 Omer, Ypres, Cassel, Maubeuge, etc. As for Holland, she 
 came out of the war immune, recovered even Maestricht, and 
 obtained a promise that Colbert's famous tariff on foreign 
 merchandise should be suppressed. On the whole she 
 triumphed, for it was the establishment of this tariff in 1667 
 which had caused hostilities. Nevertheless, the Peace of 
 Nimeguen was abhorrent to the Stathouder, for it put an end to 
 the war. Four days after it had been concluded, William of 
 Orange attacked Luxembourg near Mons, in defiance of treaties ; 
 but once more repulsed, he saw his last chance of renewing 
 hostilities brought to naught. 
 
 When Louis XIV had signed agreements with the Emperor 
 and the Due de Lorraine — ^the first losing Freiburg, and the 
 second the last remnants of his duchy, which he would not 
 accept in the mutilated state in which it was offered to him — 
 and subsequently with Denmark and Brandenburg, which were 
 obliged to restore what they had taken from France's sole ally, 
 Sweden, the French nation was left greater and more glorious 
 perhaps than she had ever been. At Nimeguen, indeed, her 
 King may be said to have imposed his ultimatum on, and dictated 
 his conditions to, all Europe, " Victorious from the outset of 
 his reign, never having besieged any fortress without taking it, 
 superior in every way to his united enemies, the terror of Europe 
 for six consecutive years, and finally her arbitrator and peace- 
 maker, adding Franche-Comt^, Dunkirk, and half Flanders to 
 his States " (Voltaire), Louis XIV was unquestionably a great 
 sovereign. Yet he had not succeeded in crushing insolent little 
 Holland, and he must have recognized this. 
 
 WoKKS TO Consult : See those already quoted ; Mimoires of Saint- 
 HUaire ; Mimoriaux du Conseil de 1661, published by Jean de Boislisle ; 
 Vast, Grands traites du regne de Louis XIV ; Andre, Michel Le Tellier (1906) ; 
 L. Delavaud, Le Marquis de Pomponne (1911) ; Gerin, Louis XIV et le 
 Saint Siige (1894) ; Lefevre-Pontalis, Jean de Witt (1884) ; Legrelle, La 
 Diplomatiejranqaise et la Succession d'Espagne ; Michel, Histoire de Vauban 
 (1896) ; Mignet, Nigocialions relatives a la Succession d'Espagne ; Pagfes, 
 Le Grand Electeur et Louis XIV (1903) ; Pagfes and Japiske, in the Revue 
 Hist. (1905) ; C. Rousset, Histoire de Louvois (1886) ; P. de Segur, La 
 Jeunesse du Marshal de Luxembourg (n.d.) ; Tuetey, Les Offlders sous 
 Vancien Rigime (1908). 
 234 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 DECLINE 
 
 I. The Reunions. The League of Augsburg. II. The Court in 
 
 the days of Mme. de Maintenon. III. The War of the League 
 
 of Augsburg. 
 
 LOUVOIS regretted the peace, for he was the Minister for 
 War, But Louvois was a man of great ingenuity ; he 
 managed to make this peace fertile in conquests, and 
 thus to remain " the necessary man " in the King's eyes. After 
 the disappearance of Colbert and Pomponne he had no rival in 
 the Council ; he constituted himself the champion of " Re- 
 union." What may not be evolved from ancient documents 
 with a little intelligence ? France's neighbours were about to 
 have a lesson in the art. 
 
 The question was to determine which were the territories 
 pertaining to the towns which the treaties of Nimeguen and 
 . even those of Westphalia had made over to 
 France. The archives were searched, and yielded 
 all that the searchers wished to find. Relying, when this was 
 necessary, on documents dating from the early days of the Middle 
 Ages, the King claimed and occupied eighty small towns or 
 villages of Franche-Comt6, everything that was still at liberty 
 in Alsace (with the exception of Strasburg), and a number of 
 fiefs in Lorraine. Finally, in September, 1681, the French troops 
 entered Strasburg with the approval of the municipality — on 
 the same day that in Italy they occupied Casale, which they 
 had disputed with the Spaniards for two centuries, and finally 
 wrested from the Duke of Mantua. (It was on this occasion 
 The Man with that the King ordered the imprisonment of 
 the Iron Mask. Matthioli, the Man with the Iron Mask, an agent 
 who had sold to Spain the secret of the negotiations.) 
 
 235 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 As may be imagined, " this gnawing and encroaching peace," 
 as it has been called, and the arrogant policy of France raised 
 difficulties. In 1681 a pretty diplomatic contest took place. 
 On the last day of September oiir ancient ally, Sweden, specially 
 offended by the " reunion " of the duchy of Zweibriicken, which 
 belonged to her, made an alliance with Holland. Louis XIV, 
 whose diplomacy was once again admirable, answered by signing 
 a treaty with Brandenburg and Denmark, the irreconcilable 
 enemies of Sweden {January-March, 1682). But the Emperor 
 and Spain joined Holland and Sweden (February-May, 1682). 
 Then French agents let loose Tm-key upon the Empire, and 
 very soon the troops of the Crescent arrived under the walls of 
 Vienna: the King hastened to offer his services ; if the Emperor 
 had accepted them he would thereby have recognized the 
 "reunions." But the King of Poland, the chivalrous John 
 Sobieski, came to the rescue of the Emperor, bringing him an 
 army to fight the Infidels ; Vienna was saved : Louis XIV 
 accordingly hastened to complete his acquisitions before the 
 Emperor's hands were free. Meanwhile Spain, despoiled and 
 exasperated, declared war. The French troops at once took 
 the field, and occupied Courtrai, Dixmude, Luxembiu-g, and 
 Oudenarde ; after which the King imposed a truce of twenty 
 years on his feeble enemy, forcing her not only to recognize the 
 " reunions " as legitimate, but further to cede Luxemburg and 
 Oudenarde to him (Truce of Ratisbon, August, 1684). The 
 game was played out. 
 
 This year, 1684, was to all appearances the culminating-point 
 of the reign of Louis XIV. The kingdom of France was larger 
 Apogee oi than it had ever been. The King's person, his 
 Louis' glory. Court, the culture, graces, and wit of the French 
 were famous among all the people of Christendom. But the 
 impossibility of living secure of the morrow and without fear of 
 some new enterprise on the part of France began to make itself 
 plainly felt among other nations, Europe was alarmed to see 
 " this power, which was extending in every direction, and 
 acquiring in peace more than ten kings, the predecessors of 
 Louis XIV, had acquired by their wars." The King's navy 
 even seemed to be developing into the strongest in Europe. In 
 1681 Duquesne and d'Estrdes harried the Mussulman pirates in 
 236 
 
DECLINE 
 
 the Mediterranean ; then they bombarded Tripoli twice, and 
 Algiers three times, with the new " galleons with bombs " 
 invented by Petit-Renaud, and imposed peace upon the people 
 j)f Barbary (1687). Finally, as the Republic of Genoa con- 
 tinued to build galleys for Spain in spite of Louis' prohibition, 
 Duquesne's fleet appeared one day off the coast, and in less 
 than ten days threw over 10,000 bombs into the town ; after this 
 the suburbs and their magnificent palaces were set on fire. To 
 avoid a fresh bombardment the Doge was obliged, in spite of 
 the laws which forbade him to quit the Republic, to come to 
 Versailles and read an apologetic speech prepared for him by 
 Seignelay (1685). 
 
 This policy, at once brutal, arrogant, and cunning, roused 
 resentment even stronger than the terror inspired by the King 
 Bevocation of of France. Moreover, William of Orange had 
 the Edict of not ceased to work against him. In 1685 the 
 Nantes. Revocation of the Edict of Nantes caused great 
 
 indignation among the Protestant Powers. In 1685 the 
 famous monument of the Place des Victoires deeply offended 
 the rulers of Sweden and Brandenburg : it represented Louis 
 the Great trampling underfoot Cerberus, the sjrmbol of the 
 Triple Alliance, while two allegorical figures, personifying 
 the Elbe and the Oder, paid homage to him, and the King 
 of Sweden was represented as a slave in chains. Finally, 
 at about the same time, Spain was again threatened, and the 
 allies of France were disgusted by encroachments without 
 compensation. At last all the malcontents — ^the Emperor, 
 Spaia, Sweden, Bavaria, Saxony, the Elector-Palatine, and (in 
 secret) the Elector of Brandenburg — ^formed the League of 
 Augsburg (July, 1686). When Holland, Savoy, and England 
 joined this coalition, France had all Europe against her. 
 
 A fresh act of violence on the part of Louis XIV provoked 
 war. 
 
 For nearly ten years the King had been struggling against 
 Rome on the subject of the Rigale right, and after the Declara- 
 Disputes with tion of the four articles in 1682, France was almost 
 the Pope. in a state of schism. In 1687 the situation was 
 
 aggravated by a fresh conflict. It had become a tradition that 
 all ambassadors in Rome should exercise a right of sanctuary 
 
 237 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 throughout the quarter they inhabited, and that, further, 
 goods entering the city in their name should be duty-free; 
 the results were that a great many criminals of all sorts 
 were able to elude justice and that smuggling was freely 
 practised. Innocent XI imdertook to reform these abuses. 
 After discussions more or less prolonged, all the Powers of 
 Christendom agreed to renounce the " immunities " and privi- 
 leges of their ambassadors. Louis XIV alone declared that 
 God had established him " to give an example to others and not 
 to take one from them," and he caused his new envoy to Rome, 
 the Marquis de Lavardin, to be accompanied by a formidable 
 escort of naval guards and armed followers. The Pope excom- 
 mimicated Lavardin, but such was the prestige of the King of 
 France that his ambassador nevertheless found a church even 
 in Rome itself in which to receive the Sacrament : Saint-Louis- 
 des-Fran9ais. The Pope laid the church of Saint-Louis under 
 an interdict. But the King thereupon threatened to seize 
 Avignon (January, 1688). 
 
 Such was the state of affairs when the Archbishop-Elector of 
 Cologne died (June, 1688). Louis XIV at once supported the 
 candidature of the Cardinal von Fiirstenberg ; but the Emperor 
 put forward that of Prince Clement of Bavaria. The votes of 
 the Chapter were equally divided between the two candidates, 
 and the Pope chose Clement of Bavaria, in spite of the threats 
 of Louis XIV, who retorted by forcibly installing the Cardinal 
 von Fiirstenberg. 
 
 At the same time he perpetrated further acts of violence. 
 The Elector-Palatine, brother of the Duchess of Orleans, had 
 died in 1685, and the King had then claimed part of his estate 
 on behalf of his sister-in-law. In 1688, under pretext of taking 
 possession of Madame's inheritance for her, French troops 
 suddenly entered Germany, and conquered the Palatinate in 
 less than seven weeks. It was war ! But alas ! Louis XIV 
 could not foresee that WiUiam of Orange, having ousted James II 
 of England from his throne with incredible facility, would, 
 within three months, reinforce the coalition with his new and 
 powerful kingdom. 
 
 238 
 
DECLINE 
 
 II 
 
 At the moment when the war of the League of Augsburg 
 began, nearly all Louis XIV's great servants had disappeared : 
 War of the Turenne had died in 1675, Cond6 in 1686, Colbert 
 League ol in 1683, and Le Tellier in 1686 ; Seignelay was to 
 
 Augsburg. die in 1690 and Louvois in 1691, more or less in 
 disgrace. True, the King was still to have some good ministers, 
 such as the Torcys and the Pontchartrains, and good generals, 
 such as Luxembourg, VendSme, Berwick, Villars, and Boufflers ; 
 but these could not attend to everything, and during the closing 
 years of the reign such men as Chamillart were to direct 
 policy, and too often a Villeroy or even a La Feuillade was to 
 command the army. 
 
 The King, by no means piously inclined at the beginning 
 of his reign, was now converted (1686). But his religion was 
 to some extent more material than sentimental. " The King 
 never misses a station or a penance, but he cannot understand 
 the necessity of humbling himself and acquiring the true spirit 
 of repentance," wrote Mme. de Maintenon. Indeed, Louis XIV 
 was cruelly lacking in Christian humility, and his piety was 
 inspired less by love than by the fear of hell and the hope 
 of Paradise, which he thought that Heaven would certainly 
 grant him, provided he attended divine service assiduously, 
 observed Lent, and, in short, gave God His due, or paid 
 respectful court to the Almighty. 
 
 The courtiers had all been converted with the King, for 
 irreligion had become an obstacle to promotion. " To the devil 
 The Court "^^^ ^^^ ^-^'^ whining and psalm-singing, aaa, iii ! " 
 becomes cried Madame ; but no one followed her on this 
 
 devout. dangerous ground. Under the gilded ceilings 
 
 where the haughty " Quanto " once flaunted her beauty there 
 were now only pious gentlemen and devout and modest-spoken 
 ladies to be seen. " The courtier of the past had flowing hair, 
 was dressed in doublet and hose, wore wide boots, and was a 
 libertine. This is no longer the mode : he now wears a wig, a 
 closely fitting coat, plain stockings, and is devout " (La Bruy^re). 
 Light colours, trunk-hose, fluttering ribbons, plumes, shoulder- 
 knots are no more ; now the mode is a long severe jerkin, closely 
 
 239 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 buttoned, dark purple or brown in colour, close-fitting breeches, 
 and dark stockings ; no ribbons save one at the neck ; no lace 
 save in the cravat and cuffs ; no plumes save in the three- 
 cornered hat, and then a very small one. Gallantry and 
 intrigues were also at an end : love was hunted down and lovers 
 were reprimanded. " The Bang," said Madame, " imagines he 
 is pious when everybody is bored to death." In 1685 Louis 
 ordered his Grand Provost to denounce all members of the 
 Court who should eat meat in Lent ; in 1694 he would have 
 suppressed the acting of plays, if Pfere de La Chaise had not 
 warned him of the danger of banishing harmless amusements ; 
 in 1696 he laid the Fair of Saint-Germain imder an interdict for 
 a fortnight. Scarcely any entertainments were permitted save 
 the official " circle " (appartement), where, to put it briefly, the 
 same persons met all their hves three days a week, and where 
 Louis XIV, who now spent his evenings working with one of his 
 ministers in the Marquise's apartments, no longer appeared. The 
 principal attraction was gaming : bagatelle, barette, reversi, 
 trente-et-quarante, hoca, dice, backgammon, and, above all, 
 lansquenet — " a game without any limits and without any 
 rules, which to you is no longer a mere diversion, but a profession, 
 a trade, an occupation, an attachment, a passion, and, if I may 
 venture to say so, a rage and a fury ! " (Bourdaloue) — and a 
 game in which everybody had not, like Dangeau, the good fortune 
 never to be suspected of helping his luck adroitly. Add to all 
 this a system of espionage, letters opened in the cabinet noir, 
 the King's spies keeping him informed of everything, and the 
 most comfortless life in the great icy-cold rooms, where in 
 winter at the King's table, " both wine and water froze in the 
 Discomforts o! glasses," and in the small, inconvenient bedrooms, 
 the Court. approached by filthy passages. Such was the 
 Court. Nevertheless, every noble desired to Uve there, so great 
 to most of them was the prestige of him who reigned there, and 
 so persuaded were the ambitious that the only road to success 
 was to please him, but also, as the Due d'Antin once said, 
 because there were to be found " a small number of men and 
 women with whom it was possible to spend one's life agree- 
 ably, and more easily here than elsewhere, on account of the 
 difficulty of gettmg them together " ; finally, above all, because 
 240 
 
DECLINE 
 
 curious observers (so numerous in the seventeenth century) 
 were never weary of the absorbing spectacle of characters in 
 conflict and of courtiers expending all their resources of energy 
 and cunning to obtain advantages often purely conventional, 
 it must be admitted — such as that of the patent conferring 
 the right to amuse the King when on his close-stool — but 
 which then seemed, and so indeed became, the greatest in the 
 world. 
 
 After the death of Louvois (1691), Louis tried more than 
 ever to do everything himself. He carried out very heavy 
 The King's labours with admirable perseverance and con- 
 industry as scientiousness. He mastered the contents of 
 a niler. every diplomatic report, and prescribed the reply ; 
 
 he it was, henceforth, who corresponded directly with the 
 generals, sending them almost daily letters of from fifteen to 
 twenty pages carefully studied and elaborated, and often 
 admirable ; on the whole, " there were few days on which the 
 King did not work eight or nine hours " (Dangeau). It was 
 thus that Louis XIV conceived his " grand, noble, delicious 
 craft of kingship." 
 
 Every day he held a Council (sometimes two) and worked 
 with one of his ministers from about seven to ten o'clock in 
 Mme. de Maintenon's apartment. Louis XIV and the Marquise 
 were seated in arm-chairs on either side of the fireplace ; 
 before each of them was a table ; in front of the King's table 
 stood two stools, for the minister and his bag. Mme. de 
 Maintenon read a book, or worked at her embroidery-frame, 
 careful not to seem too much interested in the conversation. 
 When the King asked her opinion, she gave it, without insisting 
 too strongly upon it, for any such insistence would have been 
 enough to make Louis, who was more anxious than ever not to 
 be dominated, decide the exact opposite. About nine o'clock 
 in the evening two ladies' maids came to undress the Marquise ; 
 immediately afterwards her steward and a man-servant brought 
 her some soup and something light to eat ; as soon as she had 
 finished her supper, her women put her to bed ; all this in the 
 presence of the King and the Minister of State, who did not 
 interrupt their work. At last ten o'clock would strike, and His 
 Majesty would take leave, and go off to sup. 
 
 Q 241 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 What, under these circumstances, was Mme, de Maintenon's 
 poUtical influence ? According to Saint-Simon, she had a 
 Influence o! secret understanding with the ministers, not one 
 Mme. de of whom would have dared to resist her. On 
 
 Maintenon. the day when the business in which she was 
 interested came up (it would seem to have been always some 
 appointment to make or some favour to grant), the minister 
 showed a list of candidates ; if the King stopped of his own 
 accord at the name pointed out by the Marquise, the minister 
 " managed to go no further ; if the King paused at some other 
 name, the minister proposed to see those who were eligible ; he 
 rarely proposed the one he meant to come to directly, but always 
 mentioned several whose claims he affeqted to weigh impartially 
 in order to perplex the King " ; hereupon the King generally 
 consulted Mme. de Maintenon ; she would smile, affect help- 
 lessness, sometimes say a word in favour of another candidate, 
 and then, if she had not already pronounced in his favour, 
 would come back to the one the minister had supported." . . . 
 All this seems to show that Louis XIV, suspicious and distrustful, 
 greatly feared to be influenced. If Mme. de Maintenon was 
 obliged to display so much skill and cunning merely to secure a 
 place for one of her proUgis, can we suppose with Saint-Simon 
 that she ruled " without an interval, without an obstacle, 
 without the slightest cloud, for over thirty, and indeed for 
 thirty -two years " ? 
 
 Perhaps she had no great desire to rule ; the character of 
 Fran9oise d'Aubign^ was not that of a woman of vast ambitions. 
 She was honestly fond of quiet, embroidery, the education of 
 young girls, and meditation. Court life was irksome to her, 
 and she had no pleasure in ostentation. At Versailles she led 
 by choice the most modest and retiring life possible ; a queen 
 in her own apartments, remaining seated in her arm-chair even 
 in the presence of the King and his children, " she was a very 
 simple private person outside, always in the background, making 
 way for women of title, and even for those of distinguished 
 parts." Further, she was extremely disinterested ; she accepted 
 nothing from the King but the estate of Maintenon, and was 
 not even a duchess ; her household were all people of modest 
 fortune, who remained in a more or less comfortable obscurity ; 
 342 
 
DECLINE 
 
 her relatives received no conspicuous favours ; her brother, the 
 Comte d'Aubign^, never succeeded in becoming either a duke or 
 a Marshal of France. Pacific and scrupulous, she dreaded to 
 disturb and harass the King her husband. ... If she took part 
 in affairs of State, it was from a sense of duty ; her confessors 
 told her that Heaven had placed her beside Louis that she 
 might be " the sentinel of God," and she believed herself to be 
 bound in conscience to forward the salvation of her royal 
 spouse. No doubt, when taking part in the government of the 
 country, she turned to account the facilities thus afforded her 
 to induce Louis to fill vacant posts with pious persons as far as 
 possible, and her devout scruples counted for something, no 
 doubt, as has been said, in the choice of ambassadors, generals, 
 and ministers. But we must avoid exaggeration : it is evident 
 that she had nothing to do with the Revocation of the Edict of 
 Nantes, and Saint-Simon himself declares that she only 
 " initiated herself " in religious politics in connection with " the 
 affair of M. de Cambrai " (Fenelon) (1697). It would seem, then, 
 that Mme. de Maintenon did in fact exercise more influence 
 than the earlier favourites, whom the King had never allowed 
 to interfere in the slightest degree in affairs of State ; but, save 
 in the four or five closing years of his reign, that influence seems 
 to have been less than that of Pere de La Chaise himself, and 
 that of Le Tellier. 
 
 In 1688 the Grand Dauphin was twenty-seven years old. 
 Although his father had said grandiloquently, when dispatching 
 The Grand him to command the Army of the Palatinate, 
 Dauphin. " Go and show your merit to all Europe, so that 
 
 when I come to die no one will notice that the King is dead," 
 Monseigneur had not greatly distinguished himself in the course 
 of this campaign, though he had behaved like a good soldier ; 
 nor did he distinguish himself in the Councils when Louis XIV 
 permitted him to be present. The truth was that " his mind 
 was not brilliant in any respect." Sometimes he spent a whole 
 day lying on his bed, holding a cane with which he slashed his 
 boots, or seated in a corner of the reception-room, whistling, 
 tapping on his snuff-box, staring wide-eyed at one and the 
 o her, and when he was absolutely obliged to hold a public 
 
 243 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 reception, answering the speeches addressed to him only " by 
 nods, and two or three halting words, so timidly pronounced 
 that they could scarcely be heard " (Spanheim). He was, in 
 fact, according to Saint-Simon, " an only son made expressly 
 for such a father," this prince who at the age of fifty " only 
 ventured upon what he was permitted to do." He was, however, 
 a good creature, kind to his servants and humane to the poor. 
 
 Like Louis XIV, the Grand Dauphin had his Maintenon 
 after the death of his wife in 1690. She was a big, sturdy 
 young woman, with a flat nose and a brown skin, " fresh, lively, 
 very plain, but gay, courageous, and witty," known as Mile. 
 Choin. As she proved " right-minded, sensible, and reasonable " 
 (disinterested, in short), the King and Mme. de Maintenon 
 were indulgent to her, and wished her to come and settle at 
 Versailles, so that Monseigneur might be there more. But 
 Mile. Choin preferred her parvulo at Meudon, where she received 
 the princesses seated in her arm-chair, offering the Duchess of 
 Burgundy herself nothing but a stool. 
 
 The Duke of Bvirgundy, Monseigneur's eldest son, bom in 
 1682, was a richly endowed character. Proud, impetuous. 
 The Duke o! subject to fits of blind rage, wild with joy when 
 Burgundy. pleased, mad with anger a moment after — 
 " fantastic," as F6nelon says in the portrait he has drawn of 
 him, a portrait to be preferred to the glowing picture of Saint- 
 Simon — ^but sincere and artless, lively, eloquent, subtle, and full 
 of new turns even in his " strangest and most senseless fury," 
 showing in all things such vivacity of mind that he could not 
 concentrate it entirely on a single object, and that it was found 
 necessary, for instance, to let him occupy his eyes and fingers 
 with drawing when having a lesson — such was the Due de 
 Bourgogne in early adolescence. The governor appointed for 
 him was the wise and pious Due de Beauvilliers, and the tutor 
 the Abb^ de F^nelon ; of this violent and unequal but gifted 
 nature the two succeeded in making a man of perfect virtue and 
 deep religious feeling, scrupulous indeed to excess, and almost 
 to the point of indecision. For this conscientious and uneasy 
 soul the crown would have been a torture which he greatly 
 dreaded in anticipation. However, the young Duke had 
 244 
 
DECLINE 
 
 prepared himself for his royal function with touching piety ; he 
 had even renounced his scientific tastes that he might not steal 
 a minute from his political instruction. When by the death of 
 Monseigneur his father he became Dauphin, he worked more 
 diligently than ever. He sought anxiously for some means of 
 remedying the abuses he discovered, which filled him with 
 despair. Moreover, he would have made F^nelon his Prime 
 Minister, and F^nelon, who considered Louis XIV's " despotism " 
 the " cause of all our woes," longed to relieve the masses, to 
 renounce war entirely, to reconstitute the nobility as a real 
 aristocracy, free to engage in trade and to enter the magis- 
 tracy, to summon the States-General every three years, and 
 to establish everywhere provincial States to control public 
 finance, and report to the King upon everything. . . . This 
 intelligent Duke of Burgundy, eager for the public good, and 
 nourished on philosophy and morality, who wrote : " The rank 
 of prince without that of upright man would only serve to make 
 me more guilty at the tribunal of God, for the more favours we 
 have received from His hand, the stricter will be the account 
 we shall have to give Him " ; and : " I ought only to make use 
 of the greatness proper to my rank in order to rise to a more 
 sublime degree of virtue, humiliating myself under the almighty 
 hand of God, and doing all the good to others which they are 
 entitled to expect from me " — this grandson of Louis XIV, who 
 had perhaps the soul of a Marcus Aurelius or of a Saint Louis, 
 guided by F^nelon might have been a great king, a pacific 
 administrator, whose reign would have saved the monarchy. 
 
 At the age of fifteen, in 1697, the Due de Bourgogne married 
 his cousin Marie-Adelaide of Savoy, the daughter of Amadeo II 
 The Duchess and Marie d'Orleans. The young girl had arrived 
 of Burgundy, at Versailles a year earlier, delighting everybody 
 by her youthful charm ; moreover the little creature was shrewd 
 enough, in spite of her heedless ways, and it was evident from the 
 deference she paid at once to Mme. de Maintenon that her father 
 had thoroughly instructed her in the affairs of the Court of 
 France. Her only critic was the portly Madame, who was always 
 surly, and who was scandalized at her free-and-easy manners : 
 
 €lood Heavens ! how badly they are bringing up the Duchess of 
 Burgimdy, to my mind I [she exclaims on October 22, 1698]. It is pitiable 
 
 245 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 to see the child. She begins to sing in the middle of dinner, jumps about 
 on her chair, pretends to bow to the company, makes the most dreadful 
 faces, tears chickens and partridges to pieces with her fingers, and dabbles 
 in the sauces ; in short, it would be impossible to have worse manners, 
 and those who stand behind her exclaim : " Ah 1 how graceful and pretty 
 she is 1 " She treats her father-in-law (Monseigneur) most disrespectfully, 
 and calls him " thou ! " He then imagines that he is in high favoxu: and 
 is quite delighted. . . . 
 
 As she grew older, the Duchess did not cease to romp about 
 the King and the Marquise. They were dehghted with her 
 pranks : this spoilt child was the joy and brightness of their 
 splendid, melancholy life. " Chattering, jumping, fluttering 
 round them, now perching on the arms of their chairs, now upon 
 their laps, she would throw her arms round their necks, embrace, 
 kiss, and caress them, crumpling their attire, pulling them by 
 the chin, and teasing them." All this in private, however, for 
 before strangers she became " serious, reticent, respectful to 
 the King, and timidly polite to Mme. de Maintenon, whom she 
 always addressed as ' Aunt,' with a pretty confusion of rank 
 and affection." Finally Louis could not be happy without 
 her : when she was unable to be present at his supper " an 
 additional cloud of gravity and silence " enveloped him. 
 
 She was not pretty, in spite of a regular face with " the most 
 expressive and beautiful eyes in the world," marred, however, 
 by a prominent forehead, pendant cheeks, an insignificant nose, 
 and thick lips which disclosed defective teeth ; in compensation, 
 she had " a long, rounded, slender, supple waist, perfectly 
 moulded," a beautiful bust, a long flexible neck, and " the gait 
 of a goddess upon clouds." Such as she was, her husband 
 loved her with all the fervour of a temperament severely held in 
 check in other directions — a fervour which Mme. de Maintenon, 
 herself by no means subject to such ardours, considered as 
 unpleasant for their object as for spectators. Deformed and 
 lame (though not less active on this account), the young Duke 
 of Burgundy was not handsome, in spite of an intelligent face, 
 " so brilliant as to inspire brilliance in others." Nor was he 
 very amiable ; while his wife, noisy and lively, dispelled the 
 dullness of the Court, arranged riding-parties on horses or 
 donkeys, and bathing-parties, delighted in acting, had a passion 
 for dancing, spent the night at balls, and went to bed at dawn, 
 246 
 
DECLINE 
 
 he would shut himself up in his study working and praying, 
 scrupulously avoiding pleasures to which he felt himself but too 
 much inclined. But so much virtue inevitably gave him an air 
 of constraint, and often an unintentional air of disapproval, 
 " so that, in spite of himself, he seemed by his conduct to be 
 reproving the King and every one else, which was not well 
 received by the King or by any one. . . . However, as years 
 passed, the Duchess sobered down, and the Duke, for his part, 
 realized that his austerity and his devotion were exaggerated for 
 one in the position of a prince destined to be a king and hold a 
 Court, as Heaven had decreed ; thereupon, and especially after 
 the death of Monseigneur, " he lent himself more to the world, 
 and did so with so much grace and such a natural air that it 
 was easy to understand his reason for having refrained there- 
 from, and his regret that he could only so lend himself." Once 
 more, he was an admirable man. 
 
 Among the children of Louis XIV and Mme. de Montespan, 
 the favourite was the Due du Maine, who was club-footed. 
 The Due du Mme. Scarron had brought him up, as well as 
 Maine. his brother and his two sisters, and she had 
 
 retained " a nurse's tenderness " for him, says Saint-Simon, by 
 reason of all the trouble the delicate childhood of the little 
 prince had given her. Now M. du Maine had the most brilliant 
 qualities of wit and intelligence, but he lacked a vice without 
 which it is difficult to succeed — ^violence. Weakly of body, he 
 was no more vigorous in character ; he lacked temperament, 
 authority, that touch of brutality essential to a commanding 
 nature. In spite of his intellectual gifts and his ambition, he 
 was never able to overcome his timidity ; hence at Court he 
 assumed the character of a religious person, a philosopher, and 
 an unsociable being. In war he lost an opportunity of crushing 
 the enemy one day because he could not take upon himself to 
 order an attack, and this failure had dishonoured him as far as 
 a favoured prince can be dishonoured. 
 
 But if he was deficient in health, he had the intelligence, 
 " I will not say of an angel, but of a demon " (Saint-Simon). 
 He excelled in deep manoeuvres and " exquisite perfidy." 
 Further, he could amuse, and charm, and fill the imagination. 
 Finally, and above all, he played the part of " the good son, 
 
 247 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 the loving son, tenderly contemplating a glorious father, 
 and unable to be happy out of sight of him, doing violence 
 to his own taste for seclusion in order to breathe the 5ame 
 air " (A. Barine). Thus he exercised a daily fascination over 
 Louis XIV and Mme. de Maintenon. 
 
 His wife, by her force of character, succeeded in inspiring 
 him with a little courage. Like all the Condes, Mme. du 
 The Duchesse Maine was small and slender, remarkably intelli- 
 dn Maine. gent, and slightly cracked. The Prince, her 
 
 father (Henri-Jules, son of the Great Conde), imibrtunately 
 discounted a delightful mind, an exquisite culture, and great 
 refinement of manners by his capricious humours, his furious 
 rages, and an avarice checkered by ostentation. As to M. du 
 Maine, he trembled at the scenes caused by the violent little 
 person he had married ; but urged on by her, he advanced 
 yearly in the King's good graces, and finally obtained the 
 principal prerogatives of the Regency to the detriment of the 
 Duke of Orleans. 
 
 Until the death of Monsieur, his father (1701), the latter was 
 known as the Due de Chartres. His mother, the Princess- 
 Palatine, was greatly attached to him ; in her correspondence 
 she speaks of him with indulgence and even admiration, and 
 this maternal sentiment in a great lady of that period, and 
 even in this particular one, is very touching. Like the Duke of 
 Burgundy, the Due du Maine, the Condes, and many princes of 
 the family of Louis XIV, the Due de Chartres was highly 
 gifted. He proved himself humane, brave in war, literary, a 
 good judge of painting and music — altogether charming. Un- 
 fortunately he was by no means virtuous. He was licentious, 
 dissipated, and weak. When in 1692 the King wished him to 
 marry Mile, de Blois, he dared not resist, in spite of the objurga- 
 tions of Madame ; thus, on the morrow of the day when he had 
 consented, as he approached his mother to kiss her hand, 
 " Madame gave him such a sounding box on the ear that it was 
 heard some paces off, covering the poor prince with confusion 
 in the presence of the whole Court, and filling the numerous 
 spectators, of whom I was one, with prodigious amazement," 
 writes Saint-Simon, who, thirty years after this appetizing 
 scandal, still rejoiced at having witnessed the scene. 
 248 
 
DECLINE 
 
 Like her sister, Madame la Duchesse, the Duchesse de 
 Chartres was far from well-behaved. Both were given to 
 The Duchesse indulging in copious meals, after which the former 
 de Chartres. would compose " very pretty verses," in which 
 she spared " neither her dear papa, the King, nor the little Duke, 
 her husband." At times they were surprised by Monseigneur 
 " smoking pipes they had sent for from the guardroom of the 
 Swiss Regiment," or they would be attacking their sister Conti, 
 who was supposed to be over-susceptible. On the whole, none 
 of these three princesses had as much intelligence in her whole 
 person as the Duchesse du Maine in her minute little finger. 
 
 Ill 
 
 On October 15, 1688, the Prince of Orange and his supporters 
 landed at Torbay. Two months later James II was forced to 
 The Prince o! % from his kingdom. And on February 18, 1689, 
 Orange King the Prince of Orange was proclaimed King of 
 of England. England under the title of William III. 
 
 " To tell the truth," writes Madame, " our good King 
 James is an excellent and worthy man, but the most foolish 
 person I have ever encountered. Piety has positively stupefied 
 him." But Louis XIV could not allow WDliamT his bitterest 
 foe, to take quiet possession of England in order to turn it 
 against France, and overthrow a king who was the ally of 
 France, and whose only crime was that he had wanted to 
 restore Catholicism. He accordingly received James with great 
 magnificence at Saint-Germain, and when on February 25, 1689, 
 the latter set out to regain his kingdom, he was well provided 
 with French money and protected by Chateau-Renault's fleet : 
 " Monsieur, it grieves me to part with you, and yet I hope that 
 I may never see you again," said the great king when taking 
 leave of him. James II was not very quick in repartee ; it is 
 not known what he replied ; but a month later he landed in 
 Catholic and separatist Ireland, which rose and joined him. 
 James II at Alas ! on July 11, 1690, his Irish rabble was 
 Versailles. routed by WiUiam III at Drogheda, to the north 
 of Dublin ; and he himself, saved by the little body of French 
 troops he had brought with him, returned hastily to Versailles. 
 
 24i9 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 The following dialogue may be quoted as very characteristic of 
 the Stuart King : 
 
 " Sire," said M. de la Rong^re to him, " what became of the Frenchmen 
 who were with Your Majesty [at Drogheda] ? " 
 
 " I don't know," replied James. 
 
 " What ! " exclaimed La Rongere, " Your Majesty does not know I 
 Were they not with you ? " 
 
 " You must forgive me," said the King ; "I am going to tell you : 
 the Prince of Orange arrived with 40,000 men, I had only about half that 
 number ; he had forty guns, I had only sixteen ; I saw that he was drawing 
 out his left wing towards Dublin and that he would cut me off, so that 
 I should not be able to return ; thereupon I came away, and here I am." 
 
 " But," said La Rongfere, " there is some talk about a bridge which 
 Your Majesty did not keep ; apparently you did not require it." 
 
 " Oh, as to the bridges," said the King, " I had ordered them to be 
 well guarded, but guns and forces were brought up which threw back the 
 troops I had placed at these points, and so the Prince of Orange got 
 across." 
 
 On the very day when James II was defeated at Drogheda, 
 Tourville, with seventy ships, routed the Anglo-Dutch fleet off 
 Cape Bevdziers ; but this glorious victory of our sailors was 
 useless, for shortly afterwards the only Irish town which had 
 remained faithful to its lawful king, Limerick, was taken by 
 William III in spite of a brave defence by the Frenchman 
 Boisselau. 
 
 The subordinates of M. de Tourville admired him for his 
 knowledge of " all departments of the navy," from that of 
 carpenter to that of an excellent admiral " as much as they 
 loved him for his gentleness, his equity, his courtesy, and his 
 quiet valour. By his extraordinary skill this great sailor 
 succeeded, throughout the campaign of 1691, in occupying the 
 fleet of the allies, which was almost twice as strong as his own, 
 and in preventing it from attacking the coasts of France ; this 
 was the famous campagne du large (open sea campaign). In 
 May, 1692, he set sail again from Brest to protect the landing 
 of 30,000 men whom Louis XIV had once more confided to 
 James II, and who were mustered at La Hougue, near Cher- 
 bourg. He encountered the fleet of the coalition, consisting of 
 eighty-nine ships of the line, oft Cape La Hague. He himself 
 had only sixty ; but in spite of his numerical inferiority, he 
 managed to fight for twelve hours and to sink two of the enemy's 
 250 
 
DECLINE 
 
 ships without losing any of his own. Then he tried to slip away 
 under cover of night. Twenty-two of his vessels reached 
 Naval battle o! Saint Malo, thanks to a pilot who guided them 
 LaHougue. through the passages of the Channel Islands. 
 Seven others arrived at Brest. But three were burnt in the 
 open roadstead of Cherbourg, and twelve in the roadstead of 
 La Hougue, in the sight of the indifferent French troops 
 (May 29- June 3, 1692). It was not this glorious defeat which 
 ruined our navy ; in 1693 Tourville again commanded a 
 squadron of seventy-two ships and gained a fresh victory over 
 the Anglo-Dutch fleet at Lagos. But as the expenses of the 
 army increased, Louis showed increasing unwillingness to pay 
 for the maintenance of his navy. Hence, after 1694, the Govern- 
 ment abandoned the effort to maintain large fleets ; this was 
 the day of the corsairs, Jean Bart, Duguay-Trouin, Pointis, 
 Forbin, etc., heroes whose incredible exploits form one of the 
 most glorious pages of French history. 
 
 Meanwhile on the frontiers Louis XIV was resisting the 
 attacks of the Empire, of the German Princes, of Savoy, Spain, 
 and the United Provinces, which gradually leagued themselves 
 together against him. 
 
 In order to check the advance of the enemy on the Rhine, 
 Chamlay and Louvois harked back to the idea of devastating 
 The Palatinate the Palatinate which had just been conquered by 
 again the Dauphin's army (October-November, 1688). 
 
 devastated. Louvois considered all atrocities permissible in 
 war ; already during the Dutch War he had caused whole 
 districts to be burnt by Condd and Luxembourg ; even Turenne 
 had once before ravaged the Palatinate by his orders, but those 
 earlier flames " were but sparks " compared with the new 
 conflagration projected by the War Minister. In Jp-nuary, 
 1689, Tessd received orders to destroy the flourishing town of 
 Heidelberg : on the 18th his soldiers blew up the castle of the 
 Electors, the great tower of which is still to be seen, lying at 
 the bottom of the ravine ; then they deliberately destroyed the 
 gardens, vineyards, and crops, cut the bridge, pulled down the 
 houses of the city and carefully lighted fires among the ruins. 
 By way of a civility to Madame, Tess6 had saved several 
 ancestral portraits for her, and he also sent a fine canvas to 
 
 251 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Louvois to compensate for his first hesitation in obeying orders 
 which he feared would cause him some distress " for a week to 
 come." On the other hand, at Mannheim, Montclar had no 
 such puerile scruples ; he was much surprised, indeed, to find 
 that he could not induce the inhabitants to demolish their 
 houses themselves " to prevent disorder " ; on the contrary, 
 indeed, these schnapans (vagabonds) persisted in camping 
 among the ruins. Louvois sent orders that they were " to be 
 killed." Spires and Worms were entrusted to Duras ; like 
 Tesse, he had scruples, but the fear of displeasing the powerful 
 Minister soon overcame them, for Saint-Simon, who passed 
 through Spires in 1694, tells us of " the few remaining inhabitants 
 burrowing imder the ruins, or living in cellars." Bingen and 
 Oppenheim were similarly treated. At the same time the 
 country was ravaged by the soldiery and even by the rascals of 
 the district who were bribed to play the part of incendiaries. 
 " Four hvmdred thousand persons were fleeing and sleeping on 
 the ground. All the roads were covered with carts, and with 
 terror-stricken families escaping they knew not whither," says 
 Michelet, who for once exaggerates very little. 
 
 The French troops had merely to keep guard behind the 
 Palatinate when it had been devastated in this fashion. The 
 great effort was reserved for Flanders and the Alps. 
 
 Louvois hated Luxembourg ; he had therefore arranged at 
 the beginning of the war that his enemy should remain at 
 Versailles, unemployed. But after the army of Flanders had 
 been compelled to beat a general retreat in 1689, the King 
 appointed Luxembourg to conunand it. 
 
 M. de Luxembourg, the posthumous son of Montmorency- 
 Boutteville the duellist, although he was so deformed that 
 Marshal de Mme. de Grignan declared no one would have 
 Luxembourg, noticed it if he had lost an arm or even a leg in 
 battle, showed the same ardour in love and war as his father 
 had displayed in single combat with an adversary. He was 
 small, with a true hunchback's face, sharp and malevolent, and 
 a hooked nose ; yet his deformity, " slight in front, but very 
 marked and pointed behind," did not prevent him from finding 
 favoiu" with ladies, for more than one reason. In war he was 
 an admirable general, whose genius resembled that of the Great 
 252 
 
DECLINE 
 
 Cond^ in its rapid grasp of a situation, and power of prompt 
 and ingenious decision. 
 
 Immediately on his arrival in Flanders he crossed the 
 Sambre by surprise and turned the position of the old Prince of 
 Waldeck with part of his forces while the rest attacked on the 
 front. The allied English, Spanish, and German army, which 
 was much more numerous than his, lost 6000 killed, 8000 
 prisoners, 106 standards, 49 guns, and almost the whole of its 
 baggage : this was the splendid victory of Fleurus (July 1, 1690). 
 The captured banners were hung in the cathedral of Paris, and 
 gained for M. de Luxembourg the glorious sobriquet of the 
 Upholsterer of Notre-Dame {Tapissier de Notre-Dame). 
 
 In 1691 and 1692 Luxembourg continued to hold the allies, 
 whUe the King took Mons (April, 1691) with great pomp and 
 circumstance, and then Namur (June- July, 1692), the conquest 
 of which was celebrated by innumerable poets (we know to 
 what flights of rhetoric it inspired the author of Le Lutrin). 
 
 But when the town was taken and Louis XIV had gone 
 home, Luxembourg was left with some 60,000 men to oppose 
 Battle of the greatly superior forces of the King of England. 
 
 Steinkerk. Weakened by illness, he relied more than was 
 prudent on the counsels of one of his spies. William III caused 
 him to be misled by false information, and succeeded in sur- 
 prising him near the little town of Steinkerk, on broken 
 groimd where the redoubtable French cavalry was miable to 
 charge. Happily for the French, an English column which 
 might perhaps have overthrown them immediately in their 
 disorder, was stopped by a misguided order of William Ill's, 
 and Luxembourg was able to form his forces in order of battle. 
 Nevertheless, hard pressed by the Duke of Wurtemberg and 
 Mackay's English division, his first two lines had been forced to 
 retreat, abandoning their guns, and the battle seemed all but 
 lost when he rallied all the infantry of the King's Household 
 and sent them to retake the lost positions. Led by the Duke, 
 the Prince de Conti, the Duke and the Grand Prior de Vend6me, 
 Berwick, Villeroy, the three sons of Luxembourg, and the 
 flower of the French nobility, the fine regiments of the Guards 
 and the Swiss marched upon the enemy, shouldering their 
 muskets and without firing a shot, as the Marshal had ordered 
 
 253 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 them ; and as the English muskets were much better for firing 
 than the old French weapon, " the whole business was done by 
 cold steel." At the same time William's right wing fell back 
 before the furious onslaught of the French, who drove his men 
 " from garden to garden, from hedge to hedge, from ditch to 
 ditch, striking them down with the butt-ends of their muskets 
 when swords and bayonets were broken." Finally the King of 
 England had to beat a retreat, abandoning a large number of 
 prisoners, twelve cannon, and twelve standards (August 3, 1692). 
 After this victory everything in France was for a time christened 
 d la Steinkerque : "at this period men wore lace cravats, the 
 arrangement of which cost considerable time and trouble ; the 
 French princes, dressing hastily for the fight, had wound their 
 cravats carelessly round their necks ; women wore adornments 
 made in this fashion ; they were called Steinkerques " (Voltaire) ; 
 and M. de Luxembourg thus became the most fashionable of 
 Marshals. 
 
 Unfortunately " all these famous victories procured a great 
 deal of glory, but few solid advantages." Vanquished, but not 
 crushed at Fleurus and at Steinkerk, the Bang of England had 
 ever been able to retire in good order, " and a fortnight after 
 a battle it was always necessary to fight another in order to be- 
 come master of the district." In 1693 Louis XIV committed 
 a serious blimder. William was not in a position to say, as the 
 French king could, " I wish it " in order to be obeyed ; jealousy, 
 discouragement, and the distrust of his allies had prevented 
 him from getting more than 75,000 men together, whereas 
 Louis had assembled 110,000 near Namur. Entrenched not far 
 from Louvain, William foresaw that he would inevitably be 
 crushed, when he suddenly heard that Louis was sending 
 half of his forces into Germany. At first he would not be- 
 lieve this news ; yet it was true : Luxembourg had in vain 
 opposed the incredible decision made by the King on Chamlay's 
 advice. 
 
 With the 60,000 men he had left, Luxembourg marched 
 on the enemy. Diminished by the detachment of various 
 Battle ol corps to protect certain towns, William's army had 
 
 Neerwinden. dwindled to 50,000 men. But it was entrenched 
 in an impregnable position, resting on a watercourse, the rugged 
 254 
 
DECLINE 
 
 banks of which defended it in the rear, its right in two good- 
 sized market towns, Laer and Neerwinden, battlemented, 
 barricaded, and surrounded with paUsades and hedges, its left 
 in two villages, Rumpsdorp and Neerlanden, similarly fortified ; 
 its front, about a league in extent, protected by a ravine, then 
 by earthworks, a ditch, and redoubts, the whole raised and 
 excavated in a night. Twice Luxembourg rushed his troops to 
 the attack of Neerwinden, which commanded the entire position ; 
 twice the village was taken and lost again. Then, as at Stein- 
 kerk, the Marshal assembled all the infantry of the King's 
 Household, placed himself at its head with the princes, and 
 dashed forward to attack for the third time ; very soon the 
 Prince de Conti planted the standard of the Guards in the centre 
 of the village. William at once detached part of the troops of 
 his centre, sending them to the right to try to recapture 
 Neerwinden ; Luxembourg had expected this : by his orders 
 the French cavalry approached the camp thus deprived of the 
 main body of its defenders, and succeeded in entering it by 
 surprise. At the same time the troops which had seized Rumps- 
 dorp at the beginning of the action attacked the enemy's left. 
 The Anglo-Dutch troops were forced to give way imder the 
 fury of the French onslaught (July 29, 1693). The young Due 
 de Chartres (who charged accompanied by his governor), the 
 Prince de Conti, and Villeroy had covered themselves with 
 glory ; Luxembourg's son, the Due de Montmorency, had been 
 wounded by a bullet in the shoulder while covering his father 
 with his body, and a few moments after the Marshal had seen 
 his second son carried oft on a litter, his own duty as a general 
 making it impossible for him to quit the field. Indeed, French 
 valour never showed itself in a more attractive light than at 
 *' Nerwinde." A stray bullet shattered M. de RivaroUe's 
 wooden leg : " What fools they are ! " cried he ; " they don't 
 know that I have two others in my valise 1 " At Rumpsdorp 
 the French cavalry stood against the enemy's cannonade 
 without stirring save to close up the ranks. William rode up 
 to his batteries in a rage, accusing his pointers of lack of pre- 
 cision ; when he had duly noted the effect of their fire, he 
 turned away, exclaiming : " Oh I the insolent nation ! " 
 Neerwinden was the last victory of the glorious Upholsterer of 
 
 255 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Notre-Dame : after a skilful defensive campaign against his 
 eternal adversary William in 1694, he died almost suddenly on 
 January 5, 1695. 
 
 The King's greatest effort had been made in Flanders from 
 the outset of the war. While Luxembourg was fighting 
 Marshal brilliantly there against the Anglo-Dutch, the 
 
 Catinat. army commanded by Marshal de Lorge was 
 
 holding its own precariously on the Rhine. In Catalonia, 
 Marshal de Noailles had a certain measure of success. Finally, 
 M. de Catinat gained the notable victory of Staffarde over the 
 Duke Vittorio-Amadeo (August, 1690), and then took possession 
 of Savoy and of the County of Nice (1691). 
 
 M. de Catinat, long, thin, and dark, with a pensive face and 
 deliberate gestures, was a whilom barrister, who had left the 
 bar in disgust at having lost a suit which he believed to be just, 
 and having embraced the career of arms, proved himself so apt 
 in his new calling that he had made his way by sheer merit. A 
 good general, " instinct with precautions and all the talents 
 which tend to economy," sparing of the lives of his men, he was 
 looked upon somewhat contemptuously at Court because he 
 was prudent, of obscure birth, modest, and unskilled in intrigue. 
 After his disgrace he retired to his little country-house of 
 Saint-Gatien, and lived the life of a philosopher, occupying 
 himself in the cultivation of his garden, and, every year, in 
 " receiving the first nightingale " there. He died at Saint- 
 Gatien, poor and immarried, in 1712. 
 
 In 1692 he had at his disposal only some 20,000 men, without 
 provisions, and without enough horses for transport and 
 artillery. Vittorio-Amadeo crossed the Alps with 40,000 men 
 and took Gap and Embrun, but ravaged the province so merci- 
 lessly that the exasperated peasants armed themselves, and 
 under the direction of an heroic young girl. Mile, de La Tour du 
 Pin, waged such a murderous war of ambuscades upon the 
 invaders that Catinat had no difficulty in throwing them back 
 across the Alps. The following year he beat them again at 
 La Marsaille (October, 1693), and this victory gained him his 
 Marshal's baton. 
 
 But Louis XIV had come to the end of his soldiers and of 
 his money. The Emperor, on his side, did not know how to 
 256 
 
DECLINE 
 
 meet the demands of the German princes, who were not accus- 
 tomed to fight for nothing. And the English and Dutch 
 merchants were tired of loosing their purse-strings. Hence the 
 military operations languished on the Rhine, in Catalonia, and 
 everywhere. In Flanders, the incapable Marshal de Villeroy, 
 
 Villeroy, Villeroy 
 
 Qui si bien servit le Roy 
 
 Guillaiune, 
 
 allowed the King of England to recapture Namur in 1695. 
 Jean Bart and the corsairs continued their extraordinary 
 exploits on the seas, but Louis XIV took away the soldiers of 
 the royal navy to reinforce his armies on land. It seemed as if 
 both France and her enemies were too weary to strike a decisive 
 blow. 
 
 Throughout the war Louis XIV had worked continually to 
 embroil the allies one with another. In 1691 those of his 
 advisers who were in favour of peace, notably Beauvilliers and 
 Chevreuse, had persuaded him to open negotiations with 
 Vittore-Amadeo, and in 1693, not only Savoy, but the two 
 maritime Powers were parleying with France. Everybody was 
 agreed in principle on the necessity of terminating the conflict, 
 but differed concerning the details of the treaty. . . . Finally, 
 in 1696, French diplomacy gained a signal advantage by the 
 defection of Vittorio-Amadeo. It was liberally paid for : the 
 Duke recovered all his states, even Pignerol which had belonged 
 to France since 1630, and his daughter married the Due de 
 Bourgogne (June-August, 1696). 
 
 Having thus become the ally of Louis XIV, Vittorio-Amadeo 
 called upon the Emperor and the King of Spain, who hastened 
 Peace o! to treat with him (October, 1696), to evacuate 
 
 Ryswyck. Italy. William III, angry and uneasy at this 
 
 peace brought about without reference to him, pressed on his 
 private negotiations with Louis XIV, unmoved in his turn by 
 the knowledge that he was forcing the Emperor's hand, and the 
 Anglo-Dutch and French plenipotentiaries met near Ryswyck, 
 in a country-house belonging to the Orange family. Although 
 Louis XIV had made it known beforehand that he would not 
 abate anything of the claims he had made in the Treaty of 
 Nimeguen, their discussions were very complicated. Moreover, 
 
 R 257 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 the question William had most at heart, that of James II, was 
 dealt with outside the Congress, by Lord Portland and Marshal 
 Boufflers ; but these two finally came to an agreement. Imme- 
 diately after this, Pointis, with the help of the filibusters of the 
 Tortugas, seized Cartagena, whence they returned with fabulous 
 spoils ; finally VendSme entered Barcelona (August 9, 1697). 
 All this facilitated the task of the French diplomatists. On 
 September 20, 1697, Spain, England, and Holland signed the 
 peace ; and on October 30 following, the Emperor, who had 
 been left in isolation, had to sign it in his turn. 
 
 By the Treaty of Ryswyck France gave back to Spain, to the 
 Empire, and to the German princes all the fortresses " reunited " 
 or conquered since the Peace of Nimeguen, with the exception of 
 Strasburg, which Leopold definitively ceded to France ; the Duke 
 of Lorraine recovered his duchy (occupied by the French since 
 1633), save Marsal and Sarrelouis ; the Palatinate was secured 
 to the Elector in consideration of a yearly payment of 300,000 
 crowns to the Duchess of Orleans ; the Dutch, pleased at the 
 restitution to Spain of the fortresses of the Netherlands, obtained 
 a commercial treaty ; but returned Pondicherry, which they 
 had taken from the French: finally, Louis XIV recognized 
 William III as King of Great Britain, and abandoned the cause 
 of James II. In short, the King renounced the profits of the 
 " gnawing peace " except as regards Strasburg, lost Lorraine 
 and Pignerol, which had belonged to France since the time of 
 Richelieu, and humbled his pride before the Prince of Orange. 
 
 Works to Consult : In addition to the volumes already mentioned, 
 the Menwirs of Catinat, ViUars, Berwick, and Tourville ; E. de Broglie, 
 Catinai (1902) ; Comte d'Haussonville, La Dttchesse de Bourgogne (1898- 
 1908) ; Legrelle, Notes et Documents sur la Paix de Ryswick (1894) ; 
 Macaulay, History of England ; Marquis de Segur, Le Tapissier de Notre- 
 Dame (1904) ; Marquis de Vogue, Le Due de Bourgogne et le Due de Beau- 
 villiers (1900). 
 
 258 
 
CHAPTER X 
 RELIGIOUS MATTERS 
 
 I. Protestantism. II. Jansenism. III. Gallicanism. IV. Quietism. 
 V. Jansenism (sequel). 
 
 AT the time of Mazarin's death, Louis XIV was by no 
 means devout. Not, indeed, that he was at all a free- 
 thinker {Kbeftin) ; the only part of his education which 
 Anne of Austria had supervised was that of religion. Neverthe- 
 less, he had no knowledge of theology, for he had nothing of the 
 Orthodoxy of metaphysical turn of thought. But he was regu- 
 Louis XIV. lar and orthodox, fasted, and attended Mass 
 daily — Saint-Simon tells us that he only missed a service once 
 in his life — and devoutly accompanied the Holy Sacrament with 
 torches, as in 1664, by virtue of which he confidently counted 
 on winning Paradise. Indeed, he was not much occupied by 
 thoughts of his salvation. " I dreamt you were mad ! " he 
 replied to the Due de Mazarin, who had exhorted him to repent 
 and to leave La Valli^re. In 1668 he did not make much 
 difficulty about forgiving the fair Montespan her transactions 
 with soothsayers. At the beginning of his reign the King 
 thought only of his " glory " and his love-affairs ; and, if we 
 may say so, it was only when he had ceased to love women that 
 he began to love God. 
 
 Although by no means devout, the young Louis XIV was 
 not at all tolerant. True, the " Libertines," who had been forced 
 Intolerance of to lie low during the triumph of the Company of 
 the King. the Holy Sacrament, from 1640 to 1660, came to 
 
 the surface again in large numbers after the defeat of this pious 
 cabal, and vigorously applauded Moli^re's Tartuffe, which His 
 Majesty caused to be given in defiance of the sanctimonious. 
 
 259 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 For twenty years they floiirished, and it was only after Louis' 
 conversion that they again subsided — at least at Versailles, for 
 " the strange thing is, that the same man who plays the part of 
 an atheist in Paris, plays that of a saint at Versailles " (Madame, 
 1699). And in the eighteenth century they became " the 
 philosophers." However, if he tolerated the " Libertines," the 
 yoimg King could not suffer Protestants. And, indeed, there was 
 a great difference between them. The Libertines might, after 
 all, be looked upon as believers who were holding aloof for the 
 moment ; they were only bad Catholics, they did not dogmatize. 
 But the Protestants had embraced, avowed, and proclaimed a 
 religion hostile to that of the Prince ; their state of mind, their 
 manners, their very costume, were peculiar — ^they were a dis- 
 cordant note in the harmony of the kingdom. And this discord 
 was so shocking to every French soul of the seventeenth century, 
 instinctively inclined to unity and harmony, that it became so 
 even to the Protestants themselves. Further, it was a question 
 yvhether, if the King were at war with a nation of the same faith 
 as his Reformed subjects, they would be sure to desire the 
 success of Catholic France and the defeat of their co-religionists ? 
 In other words, were they more French than Protestant, or, as 
 they had been imder Louis XIII, more Huguenot than Royalist 
 (or French ; for this was the same thing) ? The point was 
 raised, and the Reformers were so conscious of it that in all their 
 supplications they never ceased to protest their fidelity to the 
 very Christian King. It must also be remembered that at the 
 time of Louis XIV no one, either Huguenot or Papist, admired 
 tolerance. From the Catholic point of view, tolerance is not a 
 virtue, but a weakness, and Christian charity imperatively 
 commands us to liberate other men from the greatest of mis- 
 fortunes, which is heresy. On the other hand, the Dutch 
 Calvinists were demanding precisely the same measures against 
 the Papists which the King was one day to take against the 
 French Reformers by revoking the Edict of Nantes. In short, 
 in the seventeenth centiuy nearly every one considered it a 
 duty to use force and compulsion in order to bring back the 
 erring, and looked upon liberty of conscience as an absolute 
 scandal. Thus Louis XIV carried out the national will 
 when he worked to procure for his people that religious unity 
 260 
 
RELIGIOUS MATTERS 
 
 which every one at that period held to be useful and even 
 necessary. 
 
 The Assemblies of the clergy had long been demanding the 
 abolition of the Edict of Nantes, or at least what they called its 
 Revocation of " execution " — ^which was almost the same thing, 
 the Edict of Henri IV has been unduly praised for this famous 
 Nantes. edict, which was forced upon him, and satisfied 
 
 neither the Huguenots nor the Papists. Strictly speaking, it 
 was no more liberal than the other edicts granted to the Re- 
 formers by the last Valois Icings ; its whole merit — considerable 
 enough indeed — was that it had been applied, whereas this had 
 not been possible in the case of those which had preceded it. 
 Its text is obscure ; a literal interpretation thereof would have 
 made it easy to deprive the Protestants of many privileges, and 
 a subtle interpretation would have sanctioned the withdrawal of 
 most of the rest. The Company of the Holy Sacrament, the 
 Jesuits, and the Assemblies of the clergy were successful in 
 achieving these results under Louis XIII, under Mazarin, and 
 finally under Louis XIV. 
 
 In 1661 the King granted what his Catholic subjects had 
 long been demanding : the appointment of Commissioners to 
 " verify the Edict of Nantes " ; these Commissioners worked in 
 couples — one very Catholic, the other a member of the R.P.R. 
 {Religion prdtendue Reformie, the so-called Reformed Religion) ; 
 but care was taken to elect Protestants of humble birth, even if 
 these were not bought over by the Catholics. Before these two 
 judges the clergy appeared as prosecutors. The Commissioners 
 decided, and when they could not agree, sent the affair on to the 
 King's Council. Now the interpretation of the Edict by the 
 clergy was singular : " the text nowhere declares that the burial 
 of a member of the so-called Reformed Religion may be per- 
 formed in the day-time ; it must therefore take place at night," 
 maintained P^re Meynier, for instance. And the judges often 
 decided, and finally always decided, after the manner of P^re 
 Meynier. 
 
 Moreover, the Assemblies of the clergy periodically presented 
 petitions against the Reformers to the King. The latter, it is 
 true, retorted in like fashion, and Louis tried sincerely to 
 be impartial : if in 1666, for instance, he granted most of the 
 
 261 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 demands of the Catholics, in 1669 he amended his first edict, 
 the Protestants having remonstrated. Nevertheless, the 
 Measures Catholics, by dint of gaining lawsuits on matters 
 
 against the of detail, and also because the Assemblies which 
 Reformers. presented petitions against the R.P.R. were the 
 very bodies which voted the ecclesiastical free-will offering {don 
 gratuit) to His Majesty, a fact which naturally made them 
 interesting, gradually obtained the suppression of an ever- 
 increasing number of places where the exercise of Protestant 
 worship was permitted, the demolition of a great many Pro- 
 testant churches, partial interdiction of the provincial synods 
 (the national synods had been suppressed in 1659), the abolition 
 of the mixed courts {Chambres mi-parties) composed of Catholic 
 and Protestant judges, before whom the Reformers might plead, 
 etc. At the same time the Catholic controversialists redoubled 
 their efforts ; the Jansenists and, above all, the great and mag- 
 nanimous Bossuet fondly dreamed of giving the Protestants 
 proof ot their error, and bringing them back by reason ! Another 
 and more efficacious means to this end was the " conversion 
 fund " founded in 1676, but this indeed was too successful in 
 some ways, for certain individuals abjured three or four times 
 under different names or in different places, in order to receive 
 the premium of from six to twelve livres on each occasion. 
 
 About 1680 the King began to show visible signs of his 
 conversion. Mme. de Maintenon spoke to him of God at 
 The King's every opportunity, but she was not yet in a 
 conversion. position to exercise a direct influence on public 
 affairs. On the other hand, P^re de La Chaise, the King's con- 
 fessor, was in high favour, and though M. de Colbert " thought 
 only of his finances, and hardly ever of religion," M. de Louvois 
 urged the King strongly to suppress the R.P.R., seeing in this a 
 means of occupying the King and himself remaining " the 
 indispensable man." Still, we must not exaggerate Louvois' 
 action, nor even that of the confessor. Louis XIV was not 
 easily influenced ; and the progress of his own conversion 
 sufficiently explains his growing zeal against heresy. He, who 
 in religion saw mainly observances and good works, no doubt 
 appreciated " the pleasure of carrying out a facile repentance at 
 the expense of others," as Saint-Simon says, and he must have 
 262 
 
RELIGIOUS MATTER^ 
 
 thought that the Lord would certainly appreciate the suffering 
 he would inflict upon the Protestants. Already, in a letter of 
 1679, Mme. de Maintenon had written : " The King con- 
 fesses his weaknesses, he recognizes his faults " ; and she imme- 
 diately adds : " He is thinking seriously of the conversion of the 
 heretics, and very soon he will work at it in earnest." He was 
 already working at it. 
 
 From 1680 onwards, indeed, a series of edicts made the 
 situation intolerable for the Reformers. In the first place, 
 Severe treat- children of seven years old were declared to be 
 ment o! the sufficiently reasonable to embrace the Catholic 
 Huguenots. faith, and they were authorized to leave their 
 heretic parents and demand a maintenance allowance from 
 them. Further, the Protestant " academies " (universities) were 
 suppressed ; the small schools were relegated to isolated and 
 inaccessible places, and parents were forbidden to send their 
 children abroad to be educated. All public offices, the pro- 
 fessions of barrister, doctor, and midwife, and certain trades, 
 were closed to Huguenots, Catholics were forbidden to marry 
 Protestants, or to embrace the R.P.R. The royal functionaries 
 were empowered to visit heretics on their death-beds to learn 
 from their own lips whether they persisted in their en'ors. 
 Nearly all the Protestant churches were closed on the most 
 astonishing pretexts. And finally, there were the dragonnades. 
 
 The dragonnades were not invented for the Huguenots. It 
 was an old custom to lodge troops in communes or with indivi- 
 duals by way of punishment. Marillac, the administrator of 
 Poitou, was no innovator when in 1680 he distributed the 
 dragoons at his disposal among the Protestants of his province. 
 But he was careful to let the soldiers know that he would shut 
 his eyes if the fervour of their faith and their apostolic zeal 
 should lead them occasionally to commit some excusable violence 
 on the persons of their heretic hosts. Hereupon these " booted 
 missionaries " beat, wounded, robbed, pillaged, and ruined their 
 hosts so conscientiously that they brought about a large number 
 of conversions, which seemed miraculous to the Court, and 
 delighted M. de Louvois. However, it seems to be clearly 
 established that Louis XIV himself was not aware of these 
 excesses ; when complaints reached him from Poitou, he 
 
 263 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 caused Marillac to be reprimanded several times, and finaDy 
 dismissed him. Nor did Louvois actually enjoin violence ; but 
 administrators were aware that the Minister would bear them 
 no ill-will if they followed the example of Marillac, provided that 
 The Dragon- no over-loud complaints reached the ears of His 
 nades. Majesty. The dragonnades accordingly spread 
 
 throughout a large part of France ; it was terrible. As the King 
 knew nothing, no one at Comi; did anything to inquire into 
 the violence that was going on, and praises were lavished on 
 the amazing success of " the provincial governors and magis- 
 trates, supported by a few dragoons," as Mme. de Sevigne says. 
 She adds : " It is the greatest and finest thing which has ever 
 been imagined and carried out." Meanwhile, towns such as 
 Montpellier and Nimes, and provinces such as Beam, abjured 
 wholesale. The King was at last made to believe that there were 
 scarcely any heretics left in his kingdom. On October 17, 1685, 
 Louis signed the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. 
 
 The act was approved in all quarters. The Pope sent a 
 brief in which he declared that the revocation was indisputably 
 " the finest thing His Majesty had ever done " ; he then granted 
 plenary absolutions, and had the Vatican illuminated. France 
 exulted : Bossuet, La Fontaine, Mme. de Sevign^, and La 
 Bruy^re all extolled the great King. Need we repeat that 
 tolerance was considered no virtue, but a weakness ? However, 
 Emigration of several hundred thousand Huguenots fled from 
 the Huguenots, the kingdom, in spite of the precautions taken to 
 prevent them and the condemnation to the galleys of those who 
 were caught. These Calvinists, who preferred the most terrible 
 dangers, exile, and ruin to religious concession, sufficiently 
 proved the quality of their energy ; their departure sensibly 
 diminished the moral value of the State. They were for the 
 most part artisans, humble folk, for the majority of the noble 
 families had abandoned a religion which barred the way to 
 sticcess, and the members of the upper middle class who held 
 royal offices had abjured in order to keep their posts. The 
 refugees settled in England, in Holland, in Switzerland, and in 
 Germany, more especially ia Brandenbm-g, where the Elector 
 did his best to attract them : in 1697 his dirty little capital, 
 Berlin, contained 4292 Frenchmen among its 20,000 inhabitants. 
 264 
 
RELIGIOUS MATTERS 
 
 Good workmen or worthy manufacturers for the most part, 
 they made a valuable contribution to foreign trade, whereas 
 their departure told unfavourably on French products. From 
 many points of view the revocation of the Edict of Nantes 
 impoverished France. 
 
 And from the point of view of Catholicism it was futile 
 enough. For it had the usual effect of religious persecutions ; 
 it gave a marked impetus to the persecuted faith. 
 
 Nearly all the N.C.'s (New Converts or New Catholics) had 
 abjured only with the lips. In vain were priests sent to evan- 
 gelize them ; they had generally to confess what F^nelon wrote 
 to the Duchesse de Beauvilliers, begging her to let M. de Seigne- 
 lay read his words in secret : " We found in all minds an in- 
 credible persistence in heresy." The N.C.'s had resort to the 
 device of folded arms, if I may venture to describe it thus ; they 
 refrained from public worship altogether. What was to be 
 done ? It was impossible to punish all the King's Catholic 
 subjects who behaved in like fashion. Besides, the Edict of 
 Revocation did not exactly order the Reformers to be converted ; 
 it merely deprived them of the right of performing their service 
 Oppressions publicly; they were free to do so mentally, if 
 and cruelties, indeed they had the courage to bear their situa- 
 tion, which had been made crueller than ever by fresh edicts, 
 forbidding doctors to attend patients who refused the sacra- 
 ments, annulling marriages celebrated without a Catholic priest, 
 approving the abduction of the little children of Huguenot 
 parents, ordering that the bodies of those who died without the 
 sacraments should be dragged through the streets on hurdles 
 (though this was hardly ever actually done), etc. The dragon- 
 nades were greatly multiplied ; the soldiers hustled the recal- 
 citrant into the churches, " where their enforced presence was 
 reckoned as an act of abjuration " (true, it was a Protestant 
 pastor who said this). For the rest, the penalties decreed against 
 relapse and against pastors surprised in the kingdom, and the 
 condemnations to the galleys were powerless to prevent secret 
 gatherings for worship, " in the desert," as the Reformers said. 
 They, for their part, kindled a civil war in the C^vennes. When, 
 after the death of P^re de La Chaise, an amiable and moderate 
 Jesuit, the King took as his confessor the austere and ardent 
 
 265 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Le Tellier, it was in vain that persecution revived ; at the end 
 of the reign Protestantism was still alive. 
 
 II 
 
 In the fifth century Saint Augustine, "the most subtle of 
 dialecticians, and the most perturbed of men," agreed with 
 Saint Paul that man, corrupted by original sin, 
 cannot be saved by his own efforts, and that his 
 own will is powerless to procure salvation ; the souls to whom 
 God does not grant His help and grace are damned to all 
 eternity, whatever they may do. But if we are thus predestined, 
 how can we exercise free will and deserve reward or punishment 
 by our actions ? How can we reconcile the omnipotence of 
 God with our own liberty ? Theologians have displayed pro- 
 digious ingenuity in their efforts to solve this insoluble question. 
 The Church did not insist on any very definite doctrine ; since 
 the Council of Trent it had merely forbidden its members to go 
 to extremes, i.e. either to believe that a man can procure his 
 salvation " by works alone, accomplished by the power of 
 human nature, and without the help of God," or, on the contrary, 
 " that man's free will was lost and extinguished after the sin of 
 Adam, that it is a word without meaning, a fiction introduced by 
 Satan into the Church," Between these two extremes the faithful 
 were free to adopt the tenet they preferred. The Jesuits had 
 chosen and disseminated a theory which allowed considerable 
 latitude, because this encouraged the faithful to perform good 
 works, and also because the Calvinists upheld the doctrine of 
 predestination. On the other hand, at the beginning of the 
 seventeenth century, a Bishop of Ypres named Jansen or Jan- 
 senius, a professor at the University of Louvain (1585-1638) 
 revived the theology of Saint Augustine, and accepted its 
 extreme conclusions. His friend and disciple, Duvergier de 
 Hauranne, Ahh6 of Saint-Cyran, became the apostle of his ideas 
 in France. 
 
 Meanwhile, in the year 1599, a child of eight years old, 
 Jacqueline Arnauld, the daughter of a famous advocate who had 
 pleaded against the Jesuits, was appointed coadjutrix of the 
 Abbess of Port-Royal. This Cistercian convent was situated in 
 266 
 
RELIGIOUS MATTERS 
 
 the hollow of a retired and delightful valley, which in those 
 days was described as a " frightful desert." As in all the con- 
 Port-R al vents of the period, the rule had been greatly 
 relaxed there, and the nuns lived very freely, by no 
 means isolated from the world. When she became Abbess, 
 Jacqueline Arnauld (in religion. Mother Ang61ique) reformed her 
 daughters by dint of energy and piety, and subsequently those of 
 the neighbouring convent of Maubuisson (1609-1623). In 1626 
 the nuns of Port-Royal quitted their domicile, which had become 
 too small for them, and was, moreover, damp and unhealthy, 
 and removed to Paris, where they settled in the Faubourg 
 Saint-Jacques (in the building which is now the Maternity 
 Hospital). And in 1636 they obtained as their spiritual direc- 
 tor the Abb6 de Saint-Cyran (the friend of Mother Angelique for 
 some ten years past), who won them over to his ideas, and made 
 their community the centre of Jansenism. 
 
 Now from the year 1637 onwards, certain men touched by 
 grace, who desired to work out their salvation apart from the 
 world, yet without binding themselves by any vows, had estab- 
 lished themselves in the deserted buildings of Port-Royal-des- 
 Champs. " While some of them took the temporal affairs of the 
 Abbey in hand, and endeavoured to put them on a solid footing, 
 others were not too proud to till the soil like simple day-labourers ; 
 they even repaired portions of the building which were falling 
 into ruins, and raising those which were too low and subter- 
 raneous, made the habitation of this desert much healthier and 
 more comfortable than it had been" (Racine). Thus, when 
 in 1648 the house in Paris had become too small for all the nuns 
 who had entered the order, a considerable number of them 
 returned to live at Port-Royal-des-Champs. Making way for 
 the holy women, the anchorites accordingly retreated to the 
 farm of Les Granges on the neighbouring hill-side. There they 
 lived a humble, devout, and active life. In 1647 Messrs. Lance- 
 lot, Nicole, Wallon de Beaupuis, and others gathered together a 
 few pupils in Paris, in the Rue Saint-Dominique d'Enfer, close to 
 the convent ; molested by the Jesuits, and harried by the 
 Lieutenant of Police, they came and installed themselves with 
 their children at Port-Royal, and by 1650 their little schools 
 there had become famous. Those of the " Messieurs " who were 
 
 267 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 learned gave instruction, or occupied themselves with works of 
 erudition, or in repljdng to the attacks of the Jesuits. The 
 rest imdertook " the lowliest and most menial tasks," such as 
 cooking, poultry-keeping, vine-dressing, and gardening. 
 
 In this " little Thebaid " at the gates of Versailles, there were 
 some exquisite and admirable souls : M. Hamon, the learned 
 Eminent physician of the community, who was to be met 
 
 Jansenists. on the roads, mounted on his donkey, mm-muring 
 his orisons, his fingers busy with some knitting as he went to 
 visit his patients ; M. Nicole, the author of that work which 
 Mme. de Sevigne loved so dearly that " she would fain have made 
 it into a broth and. drunk it," and who, gentle though he was by 
 nature, was always warring against the Jesuits, and then against 
 the Huguenots that he might not disappoint his great friend, 
 M. Arnauld ; M. Claude Lancelot, an excellent Hellenist, who 
 taught Greek so successfully to Jean Racine, and took the 
 classes of the yoimger children, to whom he was akin in his 
 guilelessness and gaiety (" The abiuidance of the mercies 
 which it pleased God to heap upon me, and the peace with which 
 He filled my heart were so great that I could scarcely refrain 
 from laughing continually," he wrote) ; M. Antoine Le Maistre, 
 a famous advocate, who " at the age of twenty-nine had re- 
 nounced the bar, and all the advantages which his great elo- 
 quence might have procured him, to retire to this desert," where, 
 indeed, he occupied himself in a careful publication of all his 
 speeches, into which, however, he inserted edifying passages ; 
 and Blaise Pascal. . . . But the soul of the community was 
 Antoine Amauld. 
 
 Jansenism was an episode of the CathoUc reaction of the 
 seventeenth century against the religious anarchy, the heresy, 
 and the pagan " libertinage " of the sixteenth. " The years of 
 dissension and misery, which revived the energy of French souls, 
 inclined them to evolve a hard, virile, and ascetic form of Catho- 
 licism, which, while asking much of man, gave him back much 
 in depth of emotion and capacity for action " (Lanson). Jan- 
 senism, which prostrates man before a terrible God ; which fills 
 him with despair by denying him even the assurance of salvation 
 through his efforts ; which treats as a crime the love of art, 
 268 
 
RELIGIOUS MATTERS 
 
 science, and even of Nature, in short, preoccupation with anything 
 tending to beautify life and distract the mind from the one thing 
 needful : salvation ; which systematically stripped the churches 
 of ornament ; which sought to replace pleasaunces by kitchen- 
 gardens ; and which caused the Pensies to be rewritten before 
 publishing them, that so Pascal's style might be that of the 
 generality — ^this dreary and ardent creed was the antithesis of 
 the amiable, facile, and worldly faith of the Jesuits, Moreover, 
 the Company of Jesus felt itself to be menaced socially by the 
 Jansenists, who competed with it successfully for the direction 
 of souls and the education of children, and whom it considered 
 the advance guard of its Galilean adversaries. This was why it 
 attacked them from the outset. They retorted : Saint-Cyran 
 published his Petrus Aurelius in 1632 ; but he had displeased 
 Richelieu by his political and religious independence ; he was 
 imprisoned at Vincennes in 1638, and released only in 1643, to 
 die shortly afterwards. 
 
 That same year, 1643, Antoine Arnauld published his TraiU 
 de lafrSquente Communion, to defend Saint-Cyran against Pere 
 M '^^ Sesmaisons. Like M^re Angelique, the great 
 * ■ Arnauld was one of the twenty-two children of 
 the advocate who had pleaded against the Jesuits in 1594, and 
 Port-Royal was full of the members of his family; his own 
 mother, seven of his sisters, two of his brothers, five of his 
 nieces (the daughters of his brother, Arnauld d'Antilly), three 
 of his nephews (the sons of his sister Mme. Le Maistre), An- 
 toine Le Maistre, Le Maistre de Sacy, Le Maistre de S^ricourt, 
 entered the monastery, or lived like himself among the an- 
 chorites. In his treatise Arnauld attacked the frequent use of 
 the Sacrament enjoined by the Jesuits. The considerable 
 success of his work made the Company more anxious than ever 
 for the destruction of that Port-Royal " whence issued all those 
 excellent works, so edifying for the Church, which caused them 
 so much chagrin " (Racine). 
 
 The Jesuits replied effectively in 1649 : the S3mdic of the 
 Faculty of Theology, Nicolas Cornet, who was devoted to them, 
 extracted from the Auguslinus (a book published in 1640, in 
 which Jansenius had epitomized his doctrine), five propositions 
 summing up Jansenism, which he begged the Faculty to examine. 
 
 269 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Eighty-five bishops referred the question to the Pope. The 
 Jansenists intrigued busily at the Papal Court, as did also their 
 adversaries ; finally, on May 31, 1653, the Pope condemned the 
 five propositions. But the Jansenists argued that the doctrine 
 of Jansenius was in no wise affected by this condemnation, 
 seeing that the five propositions submitted to the Holy See were 
 not in the Augustinus. This was defensible, for the propositions 
 The Jansenist were not textually in the book, but it was not 
 controversy. equitable, for, as Bossuet declared, they were there 
 in substance ; however, the Pope settled the question by de- 
 claring formally, on September 29, 1654, that he had condemned 
 the doctrine of Jansenius together with the five propositions. 
 The Jansenists were not yet beaten ; they maintained still more 
 forcibly that the propositions were nowhere to be found in the 
 Augtistinus ; that in any case, in the sense in which Jansenius 
 had understood them, they had not been condemned ; for the rest, 
 that the question was one of historic fact, and that, though the 
 Pope be infallible when he decides a question of law, he is not so 
 when he decides a question oifact, and his decisions only demand 
 " a respectful silence " on the part of the faithful. There is no 
 doubt that these subtleties would have greatly irritated the 
 author of the Provinciales if they had been put forward by the 
 Jesuits ; was it not absurd to allow the Pope the faculty to 
 determine a doctrine, but to refuse him that of deciding whether 
 this doctrine was or was not in accordance with that of a given 
 book ? The public deemed the Jansenists to be in the wrong, 
 and Arnatdd was censured by the Faculty of Theology. Pascal's 
 campaign, and the prodigious success of his Provinciales, no less 
 than the miracle of the Holy Thorn (the miraculous cure of a 
 Jittle girl called Marguerite P^rier), which took place at Port- 
 Royal, brought about a temporary reaction, it is true ; and the 
 recluses came back to Les Granges, which they had been obliged 
 to abandon. But the Jesuits obtained a fresh Bull, insisting 
 that the five propositions were a correct sununary of the Au- 
 gtistimts, and that they had been condemned even in the sense 
 ^iven to them by Jansenius (October 16, 1656). 
 
 The Jansenists were in very bad odour at Court, chiefly 
 because the Jesuits were in high favour, but also for purely 
 political reasons. Racme admits that they had relations " with 
 270 
 
RELIGIOUS MATTERS 
 
 many persons disgusted with the Court, or fallen into disgrace, 
 who came to them to seek consolation, and sometimes even to 
 devote themselves to penitence " ; in other words, with the 
 Frondeurs, certain of whom, such as the Prince de Conti and the 
 Duchesse de Longueville, gave them a compromising support. 
 At a later period Louis XIV stated in his memoirs : " Cardinal 
 de Retz, Archbishop of Paris, who, for well-known reasons of 
 State, was insufferable to me just then, favoured or was favoured 
 by the whole of this infant sect." The young King, little in- 
 clined to piety, and Mazarin, who was quite indifferent to theo- 
 logy, pronounced themselves against the Jansenists. 
 
 On December 18, 1660, the King summoned the Presidents 
 of the Clerical Assembly to the Louvre, and ordered them to 
 Jansenism extirpate the Jansenist sect. As a result, the 
 condemned by Assembly instructed all the clergy of the kingdom 
 the Cliarcta. to sign a formulary declaring that the doctrine of 
 the condemned propositions was certainly that of the Augustinus. 
 And Louis XIV at once ordered all the bishops to see to 
 the matter of this signature (April 13, 1661) ; then he forbade 
 the nvms of Port-Royal to receive pupils or novices in the 
 future, and caused the police to expel all the inhabitants of 
 the convent. 
 
 The Grand Vicars who governed the diocese of Paris were 
 favourable to Port-Royal, as was also Retz, their exiled Arch- 
 bishop ; they attempted to evade the difficulty of the formulary 
 by drawing up, in conjunction with Arnauld and the most acute 
 intelligences of the party, a recommendation, the ambiguous 
 arguments of which should enable the Jansenists to sign with- 
 out stultifying themselves. But neither the King not the Pope 
 would lend themselves to this casuistry (1661). Retz was ob- 
 liged to resign his archbishopric, and was replaced by Marca, 
 who in his turn was succeeded by Hardouin de Pdr^fixe (1662). 
 The latter was kindly, but peremptory. As the nuns of Port- 
 Royal had declined to accept the formulary unreservedly, he 
 undertook to convince them ; but they were better contro- 
 versialists than he ; he wasted his Latin on them, and this 
 angered him. 
 
 In August he sent them a formal order to subscribe purely 
 and simply ; they refused. Hereupon the prelate spoke of the 
 
 271 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 venerable Mfere Madeleine de Sainte-Agnfes du Ligny as " a little 
 prig " ; he then deprived the saintly women of the sacraments, 
 telling them that " they were indeed pure as angels, but as 
 proud as devils." (The Church has always condemned its rebels 
 for their pride.) Five days later the Archbishop returned to 
 Port-Royal with eight coaches full of police, and seized twelve 
 of the nuns, whom he caused to be distributed m different 
 convents. However, as they soon began to make proselytes in 
 the very communities in which they had been placed, they were 
 finally all brought back to Port-Royal (July, 1665). 
 
 They were not alone in their resistance. Four prelates : 
 Choart de Buzenval, Bishop of Beauvais, Henri Amauld (one 
 Resistance of of Antoine's brothers), Bishop of Angers, Etienne- 
 the Four Fran9ois de Caulet, Bishop of Pamiers, and 
 
 Bishops. notably Nicolas Pavilion, Bishop of Alet, declared 
 
 that in drawing up the formiilary the Clerical Assembly 
 — an assembly without definite spiritual powers, irregular, 
 and uncanonical — ^had exceeded its powers. Hoping to over- 
 come their opposition, the King begged the Pope to compose 
 a new formulary himself. But the nuns of Port-Royal and the 
 four bishops were no more amenable to the formulary of the 
 Holy Father than to that of the Clerical Assembly. 
 
 Greatly incensed, Louis XIV roundly demanded that the 
 Pope should appoint commissaries to judge the rebellious 
 prelates and abbey. It was a false step : such a trial would 
 have been contrary to those famous " Galilean liberties " for 
 which the French Church had been fighting against Rome for 
 centuries. The Pope, highly delighted, hastened to choose the 
 judges asked for by the King. But nineteen bishops, secretly 
 supported by others, immediately made common cause with the 
 revolting prelates to protest against the interference of R,ome in 
 the affairs of France. 
 
 Thus Jansenism was now linked with the Galilean question. 
 The King considered the matter : after all, he was by no means 
 inclined to forward the claims of the Holy Father at the expense 
 of the prerogatives of his own kingdom. The Pope, whose 
 Nimcio informed him that the agitation among the French 
 clergy was immense, hesitated in his turn. It was known that 
 Bishop Nicolas Pavilion would probably declare for schism rathet 
 272 
 
RELIGIOUS MATTERS 
 
 than yield ; he was a man of stern and austere virtue, who 
 had the confidence of the heretic in his own logic, and the 
 temperament of a Calvinist, so to speak. At this juncture, 
 Alexander VII died and was succeeded by Clement IX ; every 
 one was longing for peace, even Arnauld ; every one worked 
 to bring it about. 
 
 The greatest obstacle in the path was the character of 
 Pavilion : to effect a settlement it was necessary to imply 
 The " Peace concessions, to foster compromise, to make use of 
 of the Church." ambiguities and reticences ; how was the rigid 
 Bishop of Alet to be induced to accept such methods ? By 
 dint of importunity he was won over to a sort of adjustment ; 
 he and the three other prelates signed the formulary, at the 
 same time writing a letter to the Pope in which they set forth 
 their reservations, but in terms sufficiently ambiguous to enable 
 the Holy Father (with a little goodwill) to see nothing repre- 
 hensible in it. Subsequently prodigies of tact were necessary 
 to prevent the uncompromising Pavilion from indulging in some 
 ebullition. Finally the controversy died out ; this consumma- 
 tion is known as the Peace of the Church (1668). 
 
 Ill 
 
 On many points the relations and the reciprocal fights of 
 Catholic France and the Holy See were not clearly defined, and 
 The Galilean the King claimed on behalf of the French clergy 
 attitude. privileges which the Pope by no means conceded. 
 
 In 1639 an advocate of the Parliament, Pierre Piton, had codified 
 these " rights " and " liberties of the Galilean Church," and 
 though it had never been officially recognized, his work was 
 accepted as law on the matter. The two principles laid down by 
 him were : (1) that the Pope has no authority over temporal 
 things in France ; (2) that even in things spiritual his power is 
 not absolute and indefinite, "but that it is limited by the canons 
 and rules of the ancient Councils of the Church received in that 
 kingdom." From these principles a host of other maxims 
 were deduced, by virtue of which the King caused his Parlia- 
 ment to examine pontifical bulls, and the canons of Councils, 
 and permitted or forbade their publication, etc., while the 
 
 s 273 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 French bishops admitted the superiority of the (Ecumenical 
 CoTUicil over the Pope, maintained that they had not been 
 instituted by Saint Peter and his successors, but that they were 
 the direct successors of the Apostles, just as much as His Holiness 
 himself, and claimed consequently to be tried only by their col- 
 leagues, to judge themselves in matters of first instance even in 
 questions of faith, to examine bulls before they were received in 
 France, etc. In opposition to these doctrines, the Ultramontanes 
 defended the authority of the Holy See both in the spiritual and 
 in the temporal domain, and it was they who at the beginning 
 of the century had openly upheld the theories of the Leaguers 
 concerning the right of the Pope to excommunicate and depose 
 the sovereign or release subjects from the duty of obedience. 
 However, at the beginning of Louis XIV's reign they were not 
 numerous ; the Parliament, the Sorbonne, and all the clergy 
 save certain of the regular religious orders were Galileans, ready 
 to support the King vigorously in his struggle with Rome. 
 
 By the Concordat of 1516 the Kings of France had obtained 
 the right of nomination for important benefices, such as bishop- 
 
 " -Rfieai " "^^' *^^^ys> priories, and in a large part of France 
 they enjoyed the privilege of rigale — ^that is to say, 
 the right to draw the revenues of bishoprics and to appoint in- 
 cumbents to all benefices in the diocese during such time as the 
 see remained vacant. Now the King always presented to newly 
 elected bishops the sums he had received as rSgale in their 
 dioceses. Hence, when by two edicts, of 1673 and 1675 respec- 
 tively, Louis XIV extended the regale throughout the kingdom, 
 only two prelates protested against the decree, which in practice 
 changed nothing. The dissidents were Nicolas Pavilion, Bishop 
 of Alet, and Fran§ois de Caulet, Bishop of Pamiers, the two 
 Jansenists. Th^ maintained obstinately that their churches 
 had always been exempt from the r6gale, and that the second 
 Council of Lyons had decreed that he who extended this claim to 
 bishoprics hitherto exempt should be excommunicated ; nothing 
 could induce them to bow to the royal will. Pavilion died in 
 December, 1677, but Caulet continued to resist. Deprived of 
 his see and condemned by his Archbishop, he appealed to Rome. 
 
 The combative Innocent XI had been Pope from 1676 on- 
 wards. In 1678, not only did he hasten to accept the appeal, 
 274 
 
RELIGIOUS MATTERS 
 
 but he congratulated Caulet, excommunicated the Archbishop 
 of Toulouse, of which Pamiers was a dependency, and wrote to 
 the King in a tone of pride no longer habitual to the Holy See. 
 
 Louis XIV replied very mildly. But in 1681 he convoked 
 an extraordinary Assembly of the Clergy, which first of all 
 declared him to be in the right, then wrote to the Pope, saying 
 it approved the extension of the rigale to the whole kingdom, 
 and, finally, on March 19, 1682, voted a declaration in four 
 articles, drawn up by Bossuet, in which the Galilean theories 
 were plainly and clearly set forth. It stated : (1) That Saint 
 Peter and his successors received their power from God only as 
 regards spiritual things, and not as regards temporal matters, 
 and that therefore the Church could not depose kings and princes, 
 nor release their subjects from their vows of fidelity ; (2) that 
 CEcumenical Councils are above the Pope in authority ; (8) that 
 the "rules, customs, and constitutions " (somewhat vague terms) 
 accepted in the kingdom of France are immutable ; (4) that the 
 Pope's decision is not " irreformable " even in matters of faith, 
 unless it is in conformity with that of the Church (in other 
 words, the Pope is not infallible). The King at once issued an 
 edict, commanding that these maxims should be taught through- 
 out the kingdom, and that all doctors or licentiates in theology 
 and canon law should uphold them in one of their theses before 
 being received by the faculty (March, 1682). 
 
 Innocent XI, for his part, bore this blow without any show 
 of anger ; but after declaring the decisions of the Assembly 
 Struggle for ^^^^ ^^^ void, he systematically refused canonical 
 Gallican institution to all the new bishops who had approved 
 
 liberties. and subscribed the four articles — ^that is to say, all 
 
 those nominated by the King, for Louis would have no others. 
 The struggle went on for years. The revocation of the Edict 
 of Nantes failed to appease the Holy Father ; in 1688, at the 
 time of the franchise affair, thirty-five French dioceses were 
 without bishops. Louis XIV, who had become devout, felt 
 that his position was extremely embarrassing, for his sincere 
 piety forbade a rupture with Rome, and the Curia, well aware 
 of tlais, was by no means intimidated by his threats, nor by his 
 jnilitary preparations, nor by the seizure of Avignon. The 
 death of the " holy zealot " Innocent XI (1689), and subse- 
 
 275 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 quently that of Alexander VII (1691), made no difference in the 
 situation. Finally the King, who needed the diplomatic 
 support of the Holy See, decided to compromise. All the 
 bishops presented themselves before the Nuncio and signed a 
 disavowal of the four articles, in virtue of which they obtained 
 their bulls of institution ; the Pope, on his side, recognized the 
 right of regale throughout the kingdom (1693). 
 
 Nevertheless, the Church of France had not abandoned her 
 claims ; in the eighteenth century we shall find the Parliament 
 again fighting in the name of " Galilean liberties." 
 
 IV 
 
 Quietism has been known in all ages, and in the seventeenth 
 centm-y Falconi and Malaval or Desmarets de Saint-Sorlet 
 . each revived it individually ; but Miguel Molinos 
 
 expounded it more completely than they. This 
 Spanish priest, who was living at Rome about 1670-1680, 
 taught his penitents that there is a supreme state of divine love, 
 in which the soul adores so ecstatically that, lost in the contem- 
 plation of the Creator, it becomes indifferent to all else, even to 
 the hope of heaven and the dread of hell, the desire to do right 
 and the fear of sin, and is without thought, feeling, or conscience. 
 The Pope manifested little hostility to this mysticism, the conse- 
 quences of which might certainly be far-reaching, but which was 
 unlikely to attract any but souls of a high order. However, as 
 the King of France fervidly denounced it, the Holy Office was 
 obliged in 1687 to condemn Molinos' book, The Spiritual Guide 
 (published m 1675). 
 
 Now at this period a certain Mme. Guyon, a widow of 
 agreeable appearance, noble birth, and great wealth, the 
 mother-in-law of Fouquet's son, discovered in 
 Mme. Guyon. ^^^ ^^^ ^^^ delights of " perfect," " passive," 
 " infused " prayer, of " slumber-prayer," and " the deiform 
 life." 
 
 Love left me not a moment of rest [she writes], I said to it : " O Love, 
 it is enough. Leave me I " My prayers were entirely devoid of form, 
 species, or images ; nothing took place in my brain, yet it was prayer, 
 without action or speech. Sometimes, however, I was free to say a few 
 276 
 
RELIGIOUS MATTERS 
 
 words to my Well-Beloved ; but subsequently all was taken from me. . . . 
 I had no vision of Jesus Christ or of His divine attributes ; all was absorbed 
 into a delectable faith. ... If any one asked me why I loved God, whether 
 it was because of His mercy or His kindness, I did not know what they 
 were talking about. ... I had no thought of myself in loving Him. . . • 
 Everything in the nature of self-interest or reward was irksome to my 
 heart. . . . 
 
 Mme. Guyon had revealed the dreams of her agitated and 
 ecstatic soul to many devout women of the aristocratic world to 
 which she belonged. She believed she had power to transfuse 
 into those she loved, by a sort of physical emanation, something 
 of that " torrent " of divine grace which was " flowing " in her- 
 self, and even filled her to such an extent that one day her corset 
 was rent. She begged those present to unlace her as quickly as 
 possible, undertook miracles, and declared that she was, literally, 
 the bride of Christ. She was first censured, but this had little 
 effect, for this gentle, absurd, and rather indecent monomaniac 
 was a fascinating creature, who continued to charm every one 
 even after her condemnation, from the Ahh6 de F^nelon, so alert 
 and subtle, but full of " sensibility " (already !) and imagination, 
 to the prudent Mme. de Maintenon, who introduced her into 
 Saint-Cyr. 
 
 There, as was her habit, Mme. Guyon turned all heads. 
 But one day, in 1694, the Bishop of Chartres, Godet des Marais, 
 who was the Superior of the community, intervened ; having 
 interrogated some of the teachers and pupils, he raised the cry 
 of heresy and warned the Marquise. Mme. Guyon was at once 
 expelled. She asked for arbitration, which was not denied her ; 
 Bossuet, Noailles (then Bishop of Chalons), and the Superior of 
 Saint-Sulpice^ M. Tronson, carefully examined and then con- 
 demned her numerous and interminable works. F^nelon, who 
 had just been appointed Archbishop-Duke of Cambrai, had 
 upheld Mme. Guyon to the end ; yet it was impossible for him 
 to avoid signing with the three commissaries the thirty-four 
 articles in which the errors of the visionary were condemned 
 (1695). But he was the reverse of grateful to his old friend 
 Bossuet for this condemnation. 
 
 Mme. Guyon, who had retired to a convent, escaped, re- 
 sumed her speeches and her propaganda, and ended by getting 
 herself interned at Vincennes (December, 1695). Bossuet then 
 
 277 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 prepared an Instruction on the States of Prayer to " crush the 
 false mystics of our day," and submitted the proof-sheets to 
 Noailles, Tronson, and Fenelon, who had signed the condemna- 
 tion of Mme. Guyon with him. Now not only did Fenelon 
 refuse his approval this time, but he hastened to compose, in 
 Controversy refutation of Bossuet, an Explanation of the 
 between Maxims of the Saints, where he in his turn adopted 
 
 Bossuet and the thesis of " pure love." Then he appealed to 
 F6neIon. ^j^g Pope. Thus between the two prelates, one 
 
 of whom, upheld by the Bang and Mme. de Maintenon, repre- 
 sented the past, and the other, supported by the Due de Bour- 
 gogne, the future, a duel began, the causes of which were perhaps 
 not purely theological, and in which the arguments were cer- 
 tainly not so. At Rome Bossuet, aided officially and energeti- 
 cally by the King, who demanded the condemnation of M. de 
 Fdnelon, intrigued as ardently, but with less amenity than 
 Fenelon. In France the Bishop of Meaux took advantage of 
 Mme. Guyon's absurdities to discredit his adversary, and at the 
 same time the Government ostentatiously condemned certain 
 debauched priests who claimed to be Quietists. But the skilful 
 Fenelon, on his side, did not fail to tiirn the " persecution " to 
 which he was subjected to excellent account. Moreover, he 
 continued to defend Mme. Guyon obstinately, though he did 
 not accept her theories with all their logical conclusions. 
 
 At last the Pope pronoimced the sentence invoked by the 
 King ; by a brief of March 12, 1699, he declared twenty-three 
 propositions presumptuous, erroneous, and pernicious, but 
 refrained from pronouncing the word heresy and from any 
 mention of Fenelon. The judgment was announced to M. de 
 Cambrai just as he was about to go up to the pulpit ; without 
 hesitation, the Archbishop communicated the adverse decision 
 to his flock; he then published a pronouncement in which he 
 declared that he submitted humbly to the judgment of the Holy 
 Father, and presented a commemorative monstrance to his 
 cathedral. 
 
 Conduct so tactful attracted sympathy. Moreover, his 
 tender mysticism, which, after all, had not been nominally dis- 
 credited, was more in harmony with the aspirations of the dawn- 
 ing century than the reasonable and practical faith of M. de 
 278 
 
RELIGIOUS MATTERS 
 
 Meaux : this was, thinks M. Rebelliau, because he allowed more 
 scope for that sensibility which was already making its appear- 
 ance even in serious and Christian minds. Preachers were 
 invited to win men through the heart and through tears, and 
 Massillon succeeded Bourdaloue, as F^nelon succeeded Bossuet. 
 When in 1699 TUSmaque appeared, a work in which every one 
 agreed to see a sort of satire on the Government, M. de Cambrai, 
 whose friendship and correspondence with the Duke of Bur- 
 gundy were well known, was acclaimed as the great doctrinaire 
 of the opposition, and the master of to-morrow, .& r6le by no 
 means displeasing to him. 
 
 The " Peace of the Church " had not cured the King of 
 his natm-al antipathy for those Jansenists in whom he saw 
 Jesuit influence former Frondeurs protected by Retz or Mme. de 
 on the King. Longueville, and whose austere morality, inde- 
 pendence, proud candour, and contempt for luxury, art, 
 " glory," whose whole spirit, in short, he felt to be the antithesis 
 of that prevailing at Versailles. The vexations caused him by 
 Pavilion and Caulet in the affair of the rigale were not calculated 
 to remove his prejudices. Further, as the King's conversion 
 progressed, he came more and more under the influence of the 
 Jesuits and their friends, who surrounded him. Finally the 
 Jansenists, who were at least as combative as their adversaries 
 (and much less adroit), broke the " Peace of the Church " 
 perpetually by attacks such as that of the fiery Arnauld and his 
 faithful Nicole in 1677, on the morality of the Jesuits, 
 
 Hence the persecution revived somewhat. A month after 
 the death of the Duchesse de Longueville (April 15, 1679) M, de 
 Harlay, the Archbishop of Paris who had succeeded Hardouin de 
 P^refixe in 1670, evicted from Port-Royal the pupils and the lay 
 persons who had retired there, and forbade the nuns to receive 
 any more novices ; this was virtually a decree of extinction. 
 Hereupon, on June 17, Arnauld fled, disguised, with two friends 
 to Flanders, where Nicole joined him ; he was sixty-eight years 
 old. He acted prudently, for the Government began to commit 
 Jansenists to the Bastille very freely ; the gentle M. Vuillard 
 
 279 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 spent twelve years there, and was only released after the death 
 of the King. 
 
 Nevertheless, Amauld and his friends now had the Holy See 
 on their side. Innocent XI (1676-1689) did not forget the 
 assistance they had given him in the matter of the rSgale ; 
 Alexander VIII (1689-1691) did not attack them, nor did 
 Innocent XII (1691-1700). Even in France, Bossuet and 
 several other prelates, for the sake of peace, and also out of 
 opposition to Jesuit Ultramontanism, occasionally supported 
 them. And they were soon to find a very powerful ally in the 
 new Archbishop of Paris, 
 
 In 1693 an Oratorian, Pere Quesnel, who, after the death of 
 Arnauld (1694) and of Nicole (1695), became the most promi- 
 p, _ J nent member and the leader of the party, had 
 published a third and much enlarged edition of A 
 New Testament with Moral Reflections, an incontestably Jan- 
 senist work, which the Bishop of Chalons, M. de Noailles, con- 
 ceived it his duty to recommend warmly to the faithful of his 
 diocese in June, 1695. This Noailles, a very saintly man, of a 
 somewhat vacillating disposition, hostile to the Jesuits, not by 
 reason of Jansenist leanings, but from Galilean sentiment, and 
 who intended at least to remain impartial, was appointed Arch- 
 bishop of Paris in 1695. Having on October 28, 1697, paid a 
 visit to Port-Royal, he returned greatly edified by the piety of 
 the nuns, and begged Louis to rescind the decree forbidding 
 them to receive novices. But the King refused ; he hated Port- 
 Royal worse than ever. In 1699 he struck the name of the 
 Comtesse de Grammont off the visitors' list of Marly, because 
 she had committed the crime of going into retreat at the Abbaye 
 des Champs : " Those who go to Port-Royal must not come to 
 Marly," he declared. And he was still in the same mind when 
 the strife broke out again in 1702. 
 
 Either out of bravado or ineptitude, this question had been 
 submitted in July, 1701, to forty doctors of the Sorbonne : Is it 
 permissible to give absolution to an ecclesiastic who confesses 
 on his death-bed that he condemns the five propositions, as the 
 Church enjoins, but that, touching the fact of the presence of 
 these propositions in the book of Jansenius, he has merely 
 kept respectful silence ? Yes, replied the forty doctors. This 
 280 
 
RELIGIOUS MATTERS 
 
 Case of Conscience was published. All the anti-Jansenist 
 bishops at once attacked it in rescripts, and the Pope con- 
 The Bull demned it in two successive briefs. But the briefs 
 
 " Vineam were not recognized by the Gallican Church. Im- 
 
 Domini." portuned by the King, Clement XI was solicited 
 
 and almost threatened for two years before consenting to confirm 
 his brief by a bull ; but on July 15, 1705, he fulminated the bull 
 Vineam Domini. In it he declared " respectful silence " to be 
 insufficient, and demanded that the doctrine of the Augustinus 
 as formulated in the five propositions should be whole-heartedly 
 rejected. This was aiming beside the mark; the Jansenists 
 had long agreed to repudiate the doctrine of the five proposi- 
 tions, whatever it might be ; they limited themselves to denying 
 that the five propositions were to be found in the book of 
 Jansenius, and it was solely on this question ol fact that they 
 maintained that the Pope's decision imposed no duty on the 
 faithful beyond that of " respectful silence." And on this 
 point the Galileans were not far from agreeing with them, as 
 soon became evident. 
 
 A clerical Assembly having met to receive the bull, the 
 Cardinal de Noailles, the leader of the Galileans, who presided, 
 began by delivering a very skilful speech, the subtleties of which 
 once more saved Jansenism theologically. Further, in order to 
 safeguard the Gallican maxim according to which pontifical 
 decisions could not be received in France until after they had 
 been accepted by the bishops, the Assembly took care to vote a 
 rescript approving the constitution Vineam, a sanction which 
 greatly offended the Holy Father. Finally, in 1706, the Bishop 
 of Saint-Pons published a pastoral instruction boldly defending 
 the " respectful silence " in spite of Rome, and entered upon a 
 controversy with F^nelon on the subject. Thus the bull would 
 have entirely missed fire if it had not caused the downfall of 
 Port-Royal. 
 
 As no novices had entered the community for seventeen 
 years, only twenty-five nuns remained in 1705, the youngest of 
 Suppression of them being sixty years old. Their opponents had 
 Port-Royal. not the patience to let them die in peace : they 
 were ordered to sign a new formulary condemning " respectful 
 silence." The proud yet humble women did not understand 
 
 281 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 the subtleties of the theologians very well ; at all hazards, and 
 to guard against pitfalls, they refused to sign without adding the 
 following reservation : " without prejudice to what took place 
 concerning us at the Peace of the Church under Clement IX." 
 Then Noailles, hard pressed by the Court, was obliged to sacrifice 
 them ; he forbade them to elect a new Abbess in place of M^re 
 Agn^s de Sainte-Th^cle (Racine's aunt), and deprived them 
 of the Sacraments (1707). At the same time the Paris Port- 
 Royal, which had become the worst enemy of the Jansenists, 
 demanded the suppression of the Abbaye des Champs. The King 
 begged for a papal bull, obtained it on March 27, 1708, and had it 
 registered in the following December. Cardinal de Noailles in 
 his turn issued a decree of abolition on July 11, 1709. In vain 
 did the nuns resist as best they could, and appeal to the Primate 
 of Lyons, and then to the Parliament ; on the morning of Oc- 
 tober 29, d'Argenson, the Lieutenant of Police, presented himself 
 at the Abbey, produced a decree of the Council and twenty-two 
 lettres de cachet (one for each of the fifteen nuns of the choir and 
 the seven lay-sisters who still survived), seized all papers, put 
 everything under seal, and made the old nuns get into tbe 
 coaches he had brought, which took them to various convents, 
 guarded by mounted archers. A month later the Paris com- 
 munity took over the furniture and relics. But it was necessary 
 to destroy " what was still quivering " : in 1710 the King 
 ordered the convent to be razed to the ground ; in 1711 the two 
 graveyards were dug over, corpses were scandalously disinterred, 
 bones were heaped into a cart, and thrown ignominiously into 
 a common grave at Saint-Lambert ; in 1712 the Church was 
 demolished. Thus perished miserably Port-Royal-des-Champs. 
 
 The Jansenists had left it to its fate, for it was round the 
 Reflexions morales of P^re Quesnel that the battle was now 
 raging. Having by force of circumstances become the defenders 
 of the liberty of the Church of France against the authority of 
 the Pope, they had rallied all the enemies of the Jesuits, so that 
 now the struggle appeared entirely as one between the Galileans, 
 directed by Cardinal de Noailles, against the Ultramontanes, 
 directed by P^re Le Tellier and Fenelon. 
 
 Noailles had again notified his approval of the Rifleodons 
 morales in 1699, after certain slight corrections. On July 15, 
 282 
 
RELIGIOUS MATTERS 
 
 1708, the Pope pronounced them Jansenistic and pernicious. 
 Nevertheless, Noailles did not withdraw his approval. Then 
 The Bull his opponents circulated in Paris, and insolently 
 
 " Unigenitus." posted up on the doors of the Archbishop's palace, 
 a rescript by the Bishops of Lu§on and La Rochelle condemn- 
 ing Quesnel's book. Noailles, supported by his parish priests, 
 retorted by forbidding the faithful to read the placard of the two 
 bishops, and ended by disallowing the hearing of confessions by 
 Jesuits in his diocese. Hereupon Louis XIV once more inter- 
 vened : a decree of the Council prohibited the sale of the B&- 
 flexions morales (November 11, 1711), and the King begged the 
 Pope to condemn it solemnly. 
 
 It was under these circumstances that on September 8, 1718, 
 the famous bull Unigenitus was published, which condemned as 
 false, captious, ill-sounding, calculated to wound the ears of the 
 pious, scandalous, presumptuous, etc., 104 propositions of P^re 
 Quesnel. But the bull Unigenitus encountered the same diffi- 
 culties as the bull Vineam. First, the clerical assembly, charged 
 by the King to receive it, voted a rescript to confirm it, by way of 
 reserving Galilean rights. But more than this : the Archbishop 
 of Paris and fifteen prelates formally refused to accept it ; 
 Noailles went so far as to interdict it in his diocese. And as on 
 September 28 he had revoked the approval he had formerly 
 given to the Reflexions morales, it was clear that he and his 
 allies were rejecting the Unigenitus constitution, not in the 
 name of Jansenism, but in the name of Galilean liberties. 
 Now on this ground the objecting bishops found plenty of 
 allies : primarily the Sorbonne and the Parliament, which the 
 King only constrained by threats to register the pontifical 
 decree, and, secondly, the general public, which considered the 
 bull absurd. 
 
 For under Louis XIV religious questions interested the crowd 
 much as do political questions to-day. They were discussed 
 in the stage-coach, the ferry-boat, the inn. Ray, an English 
 traveller, remarked at the beginning of the eighteenth century, 
 that whereas in Italy it was considered impolite to ask strangers 
 " what faith they professed, in France one has scarcely ex- 
 changed three words with one's neighbour before this question is 
 put." Tatlers accordingly were of opinion that the bull Uni- 
 
 283 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 genitus was revolting to common sense, and they were not far 
 wrong, perhaps, seeing that it condemned propositions such as 
 those which merely recommended the study of the New Testa- 
 ment ; hearing this, the Parisians laughingly asked if the Holy 
 Father considered it an offence to read the Gospel. 
 
 In short, when Louis XIV died in September, 1715, the 
 Galilean Jansenists were more vital than ever. And shortly 
 afterwards the Regent was to appoint the rebel Noailles, whom 
 the Great King had proposed to bring to trial, President of the 
 Council of Conscience. 
 
 Works to Consult : Mimoires of Amauld d'Andilly, by G. Hermant ; 
 Journal of Jean Migault ; Works of Bossuet and Fenelon ; Mimoires des 
 Eveqties de France, published by J. Lemoine ; Racine, Abrigi de I'histoire 
 de Port-Royal, Gazier ed. ; Bulletin de la Soditi de I'histoire du Protestantisme 
 (in course of publication) ; TSit.Dejean, Nicolas Pavilion (1909); E. Faguet, 
 V AnticUricalisme (1906) ; A. Hallays, Le PUerinage de Port-Royal (1909) ; 
 J. Lemaitre, Fdnelon (1910) ; Rebelliau, Histoire de France, published 
 under the direction of E. Lavisse, vol. viii, 1 ; Bossuet historien du Pro- 
 testantisme (1909) ; Sainte-Beuve, Port-Royal (1888-91) ; cf. Griselle in 
 Etudes, May 20, 1907. 
 
 284 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 SUNSET 
 
 The Spanish Succession. II. War. III. The end of the 
 Great King. 
 
 WHEN in 1665 the late-born son of Philip IV ascended 
 the throne of Spain, it seemed evident that he could 
 not live long. At the age of four years, Charles II 
 was a rickety child, consumed by scrofula and fever, a degenerate, 
 as yet unweaned, who could speak very little, and could only 
 The Spanish walk upheld by straps. Yet this abortion reigned 
 Succession. for thirty-five years. He had a singularly long, thin 
 face, a heavy nose, a hanging imder-lip, a retreating forehead, 
 and thin, dull, light hair ; illiterate and restless, spending his days 
 playing spillikins with his dwarfs, the victim of an intellectual 
 anaemia which made him incapable of mental effort, the poor 
 man was at least conscious of the great traditions he incarnated, 
 and his pride, his gravity, and his piety gained the hearts of his 
 people in spite of everything. His first wife, Maria-Luisa, having 
 died suddenly in 1689, he married that same year Maria-Anna 
 of Neuburg, the daughter of the Elector-Palatine. She was a 
 fresh German girl of twenty-two, coquettish, ambitious, and 
 violent. The weakly Charles II loved her with all his strength, 
 which was very limited, and the various emotions induced by 
 this passion brought him nearer to the grave each night. 
 
 Spain seemed almost as moribund as her King. At this 
 period she possessed only from twenty to thirty thousand 
 soldiers in rags, begging or stealing their daily bread, to guard 
 the remnant of Flanders, the province of Milan, Naples, Sicily, 
 Sardinia, the hulks of Africa, the Canaries, part of Oceania, 
 the Antilles with Cuba, and, finally, the whole of South America 
 
 285 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 save Brazil and Guiana. Nevertheless, there was no lack of 
 princes who aspired to the possession of tliis vast empire in 
 ruins and the twenty crowns of the Spanish sovereign, after the 
 death of Charles II. Three among them outshone their com- 
 petitors as much by their powers as by their rights.* 
 
 (1) The Dauphin claimed the succession through his mother, 
 Marie-Th^r^se, daughter of Philip IV and elder sister of 
 Candidates for Charles II, and further through his grandmother, 
 the Spanish Anne of Austria, sister of Philip IV ; these two 
 Throne. princesses had certainly renounced their claims to 
 the throne of Spain on their marriage, but their renunciations 
 might be considered null and void, for the law of succession to 
 a throne cannot be altered by a mere convention, and moreover 
 the dowry on which Marie-Ther^se's abnegation had been 
 conditional had never been paid. 
 
 (2) Ferdinand-Joseph, Electoral Prince of Bavaria, claimed 
 the throne in right of his mother, Maria- Antoinetta, daughter of 
 Margaret-Theresa, and thus the granddaughter of Philip IV 
 and niece of Charles II, just as the Dauphin was his nephew. 
 
 (3) Finally, the Emperor Leopold claimed the succession in 
 right of his mother, Maria- Anna, and his wife, Margaret-Theresa, 
 kinswomen of Charles II and Philip IV in the same degree as 
 Anne of Austria and Marie-Ther^se, but the younger sisters of 
 these princesses, and he promised, should the heritage fall to 
 him, to make it over to the second son.of his second marriage, 
 the Archduke Charles. 
 
 In order to exclude Louis XIV and his family, the Emperor 
 invoked the renimciations of Anne of Austria and Marie-Ther^se, 
 
 GENEALOGICAL TABLE 
 
 Anne, m. Louis XIII 
 
 Philip IV 
 
 Maria-Anna, m. the Emperor 
 Ferdinand III 
 
 Louis XIV, m. Marie- 
 Th6r6se 
 
 The Dauphin, m. 
 Christina of Bavaria 
 
 Duke of Burgundy 
 Duke of Anjou 
 
 (Philip V of Spain) 
 Duke of Berry 
 
 Charles II 
 d. childless 
 
 Margaret- 
 Theresa, m. Leopold I, whose 
 I second wife was 
 
 Leonora of Neuburg 
 
 Maria- Antoinetta, 
 m. Elector of Bavaria 
 
 Ferdinand-Joseph, 
 
 Electoral Prince 
 
 of Bavaria 
 
 286 
 
 Archduke Joseph, 
 
 Archduke Charles, 
 
 to whom Leopold 
 
 ceded his claim 
 
 to the throne of 
 
 Spain 
 
SUNSET 
 
 and alleged that Maria-Anna and Margaret-Theresa had not 
 been disinherited as their elder sisters had been. To exclude 
 his grandson, the Electoral Prince, he invoked a renunciation 
 of the throne of Spain which he had dictated to his daughter on 
 her marriage to the Elector. To which the Electoral Prince 
 retorted that this document was valueless, since Leopold was 
 not competent to modify the rights of succession to the throne 
 of Spain, and that, moreover, Charles II had formally refused 
 to ratify Maria-Antoinetta's renunciation. On the whole, the 
 claim of the House of France seemed the most valid. 
 
 Every one felt that this question of the Spanish succession 
 threatened to bring about a general war. Now neither France, 
 Secret Treaty still hampered by her recent effort, nor commercial 
 of The Hague. Holland, nor England, whose King was engaged 
 in a struggle with his Parliament, desired war. Thus they tried 
 at the outset to arrange the matter amicably, and this miracle 
 came to pass : Louis XIV and William III agreed to sign a 
 convention and impose it on the other nations ; by the Treaties 
 of The Hague (September-October, 1698) the two naval Powers 
 and France decided beforehand on the division of the heritage 
 between the three aspirants. It was impossible to keep the 
 convention secret ; Spanish patriotism was greatly incensed by 
 it, and Charles II, to avoid the dismemberment of his kingdom, 
 hastened to make a will in favour of the Electoral Prince 
 (November, 1698). But three months later this child of seven 
 years old died, and the signatories of The Hague thereupon 
 concluded a fresh compact (March, 1700) : on the death of 
 Charles II, France was to take over all the Italian possessions ; 
 the Emperor was to have Spain, the Low Countries, and the 
 Indies, and should he refuse the portion they assigned him 
 without consulting him, it should be given to some other prince. 
 Leopold protested. 
 
 What made him so recalcitrant was that he believed he 
 could reckon upon the support of Charles II. His party, it is 
 true, was predominant at the Court of Spain, where the Queen, 
 his sister-in-law, who was omnipotent with her feeble and 
 uxorious husband, pressed his claims vigorously. But Maria- 
 Anna was herself surrounded by a clan of greedy Germans, 
 indecently eager to make their fortunes ; she was governed by 
 her confessor, a Tyrolese monk, Father Gabriel, and by a 
 
 287 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 lady-in-waiting called Gertrud-Maria-Josefa Wolff von Gutten- 
 berg, the widow of the Baron von Berlepsch ; and this monk, 
 aided by this Baroness, put up everything saleable in the way 
 of offices and honours to auction. Moved by hatred of this 
 " Camarilla," the Spaniards gradually rallied to Louis XIV's 
 ambassador, the Marquis d'Harcourt, whose French cordiality 
 was skilfully opposed to the stiffness and rapacity of the Imperial 
 ambassador, Coimt von Harrach. At the same time Cardinal 
 Porto-Carrero, the leader of the nationalist party, and the Pope 
 himself pointed out to Charles II that the Emperor would never 
 be strong enough to protect the Spanish monarchy against the 
 combined forces of England, France, and Holland, and advised 
 him to save his kingdom by giving it to a French prince. Accord- 
 ingly the poor King, patriotically overcoming his traditional 
 Death ol hostility to the Bourbons, ended by choosing as 
 
 Charles n o! his heir his grand-nephew, the Due d'Anjou, on 
 Spain. condition that this prince should solemmly renounce 
 
 all claims to the crown of France. A month later he died 
 (November 1, 1700). 
 
 The news of his wiD and of his death reached Versailles on 
 November 9, and placed Louis in a most embarrassing position. 
 What should he do ? Repudiate the will ? Or, on the other 
 hand, break his covenant with England and Holland ? On the 
 very day of the arrival of the courier, at three o'clock, he held 
 a Council of his son and the Ministers of State in Mme. de 
 Maintenon's apartments. The Due de Beauvilliers was for 
 adhering to the partition treaty, which secured certain solid 
 advantages for France, rather than undertake a war against 
 the whole of Europe for the sake of establishing in Spain a 
 dynasty which in a few generations might easily become hostile 
 to that of France, in spite of the ties of kinship. But Torcy 
 and Pontchartrain pointed out that war could not be avoided 
 in any case ; if the will were set aside, war would have to be 
 waged against the Emperor, whose son, failing the Due d'Anjou, 
 would become the universal legal heir of Charles II, and who 
 would certainly oppose any partition ; on the other hand, since 
 from the time of Charles V nothing had succeeded in embroiling 
 the Hapsburgs of Vienna and those of Madrid, there was every 
 reason to suppose that such would also prove to be the case 
 288 
 
SUNSET 
 
 with the Bourbons ; finally France would reap innumerable 
 advantages of all sorts, and notably commercial advantages, 
 from an intimate connection with Spain and her immense 
 colonial empire. The Dauphin intervened in his turn, with a 
 firmness that surprised his auditors, to claim the heritage of his 
 son. On the following day Louis XIV decided to accept the will. 
 It was at Versailles, on November 16, that he made his 
 decision officially known : 
 
 The King, when he came out from his lever, received the Spanish 
 
 Ambassador in his cabinet, which M. le Due d'Anjou had entered from 
 
 . behind. The King, presenting the Prince, said the Am- 
 
 «!* «i » bassador might salute him as his king. The Ambassador 
 
 tne iDione or ^^ once fell to his knees in the Spanish fashion, and 
 
 " made a rather long complimentary speech in that tongue. 
 
 The King remarked that the Duke did not yet understand the lan- 
 guage, and that it should be his business to reply for his grandson. 
 Thereupon, contrary to all precedent, the King caused the two folds of 
 the door of his cabinet to be thrown open, and ordered all the crowd 
 assembled without to enter ; then, glancing majestically over the numerous 
 company : " Gentlemen," said he, indicating the Due d'Anjou, " this is 
 the King of Spain. His birth has called him to the throne and also the 
 deceased King by his will ; the whole nation desired his succession, and 
 urged me to approve it ; it was the will of Heaven ; I agreed with 
 pleasure." Then, turning to his grandson : " Be a good Spaniard, this 
 is now your first duty, but remember that you were born a Frenchman 
 to promote union between the two nations ; this is the way to make them 
 happy and to preserve the peace of Europe." Then, pointing his finger 
 at his grandson and turning to the Ambassador, he said : " If he takes my 
 advice, you will be a great personage, and very soon ; he cannot do better 
 than follow your counsels." When this first excitement of the courtiers 
 was over, the two other royal princes arrived, and all three embraced 
 each other affectionately, with tears in their eyes. (Saint-Simon.) 
 
 ■to* 
 
 In thus accepting the Spanish succession for the Due d'Anjou, 
 Louis XIV apparently adopted the wisest course open to him ; 
 but it was incumbent on him to employ all his diplomatic skill 
 in reassuring England and Holland, his former allies. What 
 they most dreaded was the union of France and Spain under 
 his direction ; he should have clearly shown that Philip V was 
 master in his own kingdom, that he could act as he chose, that 
 the King of France would henceforth look upon him as a friend, 
 perhaps an ally, but a foreigner. Louis XIV pursued a directly 
 opposite course, and committed blunder after blunder. 
 
 T 289 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 In the first place, on February 1, 1701, he published letters 
 patent in which he declared that the Due d'Anjou and his 
 Spanish for- descendants would retain all their rights to the 
 tresses seized crown of France ; then, a few days later, on 
 by the French. February 6, without any preliminary announce- 
 ment, French troops suddenly entered the Spanish fortresses of' 
 the Netherlands in the name of the King of Spain, and tpok 
 the Dutch garrisons they foxmd there prisoners. No enterprise 
 could have been more calculated to alarm the United Provinces, 
 which for over thirty years had made considerable sacrifices in 
 order to maintain this barrier of fortresses between themselves 
 and too adventurous France. From this day forth they 
 accordingly made up their minds to fight ; their States-General 
 shortly afterwards made an appeal to England which excited 
 much emotion in that country. 
 
 In Italy hostilities against the Emperor were already in 
 progress. Leopold had secured the support of nearly all the 
 German princes, notably that of the Elector of Brandenburg by 
 recognizing him as King of Prussia. On September 7, 1701, he 
 entered into an agreement with William III and Holland ; this 
 was the Grand Alliance of The Hague. 
 
 A final blunder on the part of the King cemented this coali- 
 tion. James II died at Saint-Germain (September, 1701) ; the 
 Death of dethroned Queen of England implored Louis XIV 
 
 James n. to recognize her son, the Prince of Wales, as 
 
 King of England : " You see. Sire," she said, " the state in 
 which I am ; shall I also lose my son, and shall the son of a 
 king lapse into the condition of a private individual ? " 
 Louis XIV replied that he would consult his Council, but the 
 Queen's appeal had struck him. In vain his ministers reminded 
 him that he had recognized William III by the Treaty of 
 Ryswyck ; Monseigneur was in favour of granting royal honours 
 to the Prince of Wales, and this counsel prevailed. To his 
 mind, perhaps, the title he accorded to the son of James II was 
 a mere matter of courtesy, of no more practical importance 
 than that of King of France assumed by the sovereigns of 
 Great Britain ever since the Hundred Years' War. But the 
 whole English nation, its susceptibilities deeply wounded, 
 quivered with wrath ; the last partisans of peace were reduced 
 290 
 
SUNSET 
 
 to silence in Parliament, the Commons voted the supplies 
 necessary to begin hostilities (January), and William III, 
 delighted, recalled his ambassador. He was preparing his army 
 for battle when he died on March 19, 1702, at the age of fifty-two. 
 His death did not check the movement which carried the 
 English people on against the " Papist " king, and three persons 
 were ready to replace him as leaders of the coalition : Heinsius, 
 „ . . Marlborough, and Prince Eugene. The Grand 
 
 Pensionary of Holland, Heinsius, was a man of 
 sixty who lived modestly in a little house, passed along the 
 streets on foot, and worked ten hours a day ; this honest 
 burgher had but one passion : hatred of France ; he could 
 never forget how one day at Versailles, Louvois had threatened 
 him, a diplomatic envoy, with imprisonment in the Bastille. 
 John Churchill, who became Duke of Marlborough, 
 was both a skilful diplomatist and a great com- 
 mander. His wife had complete ascendancy over Queen Anne, 
 whose favourite she was, and he himself, abetted by Godolphin, 
 the Minister of Finance, directed Parliament with unscrupulous 
 political dexterity. In short, he could do what he liked, and 
 could even please the ladies, for he was a handsome man. But 
 he was so dishonest as to create a certain amount of prejudice ; 
 he amassed a scandalous fortune in the army. As to Prince 
 Eugene, son of the turbulent and brilliant Olympia 
 Mancini, Comtesse de Soissons and Duchesse de 
 Savoie-Carignan, this ugly little man with a turned-up nose 
 over an upper lip too short to conceal his teeth, had inherited 
 from his great-uncle, Mazarin, indisputable diplomatic aptitudes, 
 which, like Marlborough, he combined with the talents of an 
 excellent general. Bom a French subject, he had been taken 
 into exile by his mother, who had been deeply compromised in 
 the poisoning affairs, and out of pique at being unable to obtain 
 a command from Louis XIV, he had entered the service of 
 Austria, where he had lately won his spurs by defeating the 
 army of the Grand Turk. He never forgave the King for 
 having overlooked him. 
 
 Such were the " triumvirs of the League," as Torcy called 
 them : having at their disposal the wealth and ships of Holland, 
 the Imperial armies, trained by long years of warfare against 
 
 291 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Turkey, and, above all, a kingdom in the hey-day of commercial 
 prosperity, eager England, they all but compassed the ruin of 
 Louis XIV. France had a few allies besides decrepit Spain : 
 the Electors of Bavaria and of Cologne, the Duke of Savoy, and 
 the King of Portugal, but the last two went over to the enemy 
 in 1703, and the first two were very insignificant princes ; 
 Louis XIV accordingly soon foimd himself alone against Europe. 
 Now France was very weary ; her navy, her trade, and her 
 finances had been half destroyed by the last war. And then 
 she had lost her great Ministers. The incapable Chamillart had 
 replaced Barbezieux, the successor of Louvois, as War Minister, 
 and was in his turn replaced in 1709 by the deplorable Voysin. 
 Torcy, fortunately, still presided over Foreign Affairs. And the 
 King, of course, still had Marshals such as Boufflers, Vendome, 
 Berwick, and Villars, but they were not numerous enough for 
 all the work on hand ; so it became necessary to employ a 
 Villeroy, and even a La Feuillade. 
 
 II 
 
 The war opened badly for the French. 
 
 Immediately upon receipt of the news of Charles II's will, 
 the Emperor had instructed Prince Eugene to occupy the 
 province of Milan with an army corps. Louis XIV had secured 
 the support of Savoy by the marriage of the Duke's second 
 daughter, the sister of the Duchess of Burgundy, to the new 
 King of Spain, Philip V. But the treacherous Vittore Emanuele 
 played a double game, and Catinat, who commanded the French 
 army, betrayed by him and discouraged, allowed himself to be 
 outwitted by Eugene, and retired beyond the Oglio ; thus in 
 the summer of 1701 the Austrians were already on the French 
 frontier. 
 
 The King, highly displeased, determined to change his 
 generalissimo, and replaced Catinat by Villeroy, the only man, 
 says Saint-Simon, whom Louis himself ever called 
 his " favourite." Unfortunately Villeroy, an 
 attractive courtier and indeed a very gallant soldier, was a 
 wretched general. Having received orders to give battle at all 
 costs, he at once marched upon Chiari (between Milan and 
 292 
 
SUNSET 
 
 Brescia), which he supposed to be held merely by a detachment ; 
 he found the entire hostile army awaiting him there, and had 
 to beat a precipitate retreat, leaving 2000 men on the field 
 (September 1). After this exploit he took up his winter 
 quarters at Cremona. 
 
 On February 1, 1702, at daybreak he was writing in his 
 room, fully dressed, when he heard cries and shots ; he went 
 down in all haste, and fell into the midst of a large body of 
 Austrians ; it was Prince Eugene, a few of whose soldiers had 
 entered the town by a drain, and opened one of the gates to 
 their comrades. A few hours later the Imperialists were 
 driven out of the town, but they took with them the unfortunate 
 Marshal, who was quite in the dark as to the whole business : 
 
 Fran^ais, rendez grace k Bellone, 
 
 Votre bonheur est sans ^gal : 
 Vous avez conserve Cremone 
 
 Et perdu votre g^n^ral. 
 
 The Due de Vend6me was appointed Villeroy's successor. 
 Tall and big, with " a very noble countenance and a haughty 
 The Due de air," this great-grandson of Henri IV was a 
 Vendome. " Libertine " and a debauchee like his brother the 
 
 Grand Prior, who, according to Saint-Simon, always went to 
 bed dead drunk. We must not, however, take the written 
 caricature which the terrible Duke has left us quite literally ; 
 he declares that Vend6me often did not get up till four o'clock 
 from the bed where he lay among his dogs, and where his 
 bitches had their litters ; that waking late when with the army, 
 he gave his orders on his night-stool, considered riding very 
 fatiguing, and was more than once nearly captured by enemy 
 scouts as a result of lingering too long in comfortable quarters 
 too far from the camp. There is a good deal of exaggeration in 
 all this, but Vend6me's laziness was proverbial, and his men 
 loved him for his very disorders, and for his familiarity towards 
 them. His ciilpable negligence often imperilled the success of 
 operations. But on the day of battle he was a leader of quick 
 and sure perception and prompt and irresistible decisions, 
 somewhat akin to Cond6 and Luxembourg. 
 
 This mixture of activity and indolence enabled him in 1702 
 to gain an advantage over Prince Eugene at Santa- Vittoria and 
 
 293 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 at Luzzara, and force him to evacuate the Duchy of Mantua. 
 In 1703, the Austrian army being diminished, and Prince 
 Eugene having been recalled to Vienna, the campaign opened 
 favourably for the French ; but unfortxinately Vend6me had to 
 stop and disarm his Piedmontese soldiers on receiving news of 
 the definitive defection of the Duke of Savoy, who, having 
 obtained from the Emperor the promise of Montferrat and 
 other territories, had turned his coat unblushingly. A retreat 
 before the combined forces of Austria and Savoy was inevitable : 
 in 1705 the enemy recrossed the Adige. And in 1706 the King 
 had to recall VendSme and send him to the Netherlands to 
 repair the disasters brought about by VUleroy's negligence. 
 The army was placed imder the nominal command of the 
 young Duke of Orleans, and under the effective direction of 
 " a man very small in person and in all else, active, lively, and 
 extremely loquacious," who was known as Marshal de Marcin. 
 
 Meanwhile 25,000 French soldiers were besieging Turin imder 
 
 the direction of La FeuUlade, Chamillart's son-in-law, and the 
 
 son of the courtier who in 1684 had bought the 
 
 H6tel de La Ferte-Sennecterre to lay out a square 
 
 on its site for the famous monument celebrating the victories of 
 
 Louis the Great. 
 
 The Due d'Elbeuf [says Madame] one day surprised La Feuillade 
 standing in front of his glass, and saying : " I am well made, the ladies 
 love me. Come, Feuilladin, FeuiUadin, La FeuiQade." This was the 
 origin of his nickname, Feuilladin. 
 
 This Feuilladin was^ a lunatic with a pretty wit. When 
 Vauban offered to go and serve under him as a volunteer, he 
 replied gracefully : " I shall then take Turin d la Cohorn." 
 Alas ! . . . He began by allowing the Duke of Savoy to escape, 
 then placed his lines in the most absurd manner ; finally, when 
 the Duke of Orleans and Marcin, hard pressed by Prince Eugene, 
 arrived before Turin, he refused to accept the sensible advice of 
 the young Duke, who, judging his positions to be deplorable, 
 urged him to quit them and give battle. Hereupon, on Septem- 
 ber 7, 1706, Prince Eugene attacked the French army and 
 completely routed it. Marcin was taken prisoner and died of 
 his wounds, while Feuilladin retreated precipitately to the Alps, 
 abandoning his siege material, several hundred guns, his 
 294 
 
SUNSET 
 
 wounded, a quanitty of standards, his baggage, etc. The 
 French had to evacuate Italy (March, 1707). The enemy was 
 very soon to besiege Toulon. 
 
 In Germany, war had been declared in May, 1702. It began 
 by a failure. Catinat, who was in command on the Rhine, had 
 only 21,000 men to oppose to the 50,000 soldiers of the Margrave 
 Louis of Baden ; he could not prevent his adversary from 
 taking Landau, though it was heroically defended by M61ac 
 (September, 1702), and it was thought at Versailles that there, 
 as in Italy, he had been over-cautious. But the loss of Landau 
 was made good by a marked advantage. The Elector of 
 Bavaria had lately signed a fresh treaty of alliance with 
 Louis XIV (June, 1702) ; a portion of Catinat's troops, under 
 the command of Lieutenant-General de Villars, was sent to join 
 the Bavarians, Deceiving the Prince of Baden by a feint 
 in the direction of Neuburg, Villars succeeded in crossing the 
 Rhine near Huningen (October, 1702), and then, in spite of the 
 iuferiority of his forces, he defeated his adversary at Friedlingen. 
 He barely escaped defeat himself; surprised by a violent 
 counter-attack, his hitherto victorious regiments began to waver 
 when he received news that his cavalry had routed that of the 
 Margrave ; he at once ran along the ranks, shouting : " Come, 
 friends, victory is ours. Long live the King ! " (Voltaire) ; in 
 short, he put new heart into his infantry, which forced the 
 enemy to retire. The troops, filled with enthusiasm, proclaimed 
 him Marshal on the battlefield, and the King confirmed the 
 well-earned honour. 
 
 The Marquis de Villars was a tall man of fifty, " who had 
 become somewhat stout as he grew older, but not heavy ; he 
 Marshal de had a lively, open, forthcoming (sortante) counte- 
 Villais. nance, rather fleshy, with which his gestures and 
 
 demeanour harmonized. He had made his way by his zeal, his 
 goodwill, and his dexterity. " It seems as if this little fellow 
 sprang out of the ground to be present wherever there is any 
 firing," cried Louis XIV once at the siege of Maestricht. By 
 dint of looking out for " opportunities," as he himself said, 
 Villars ended by conquering fortune : he became a Marshal, a 
 duke and a peer, and saved the kingdom. His luck as a general 
 
 295 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 was proverbial ; when the weather was radiant during 
 manoeuvres, the soldiers called it " Villars' weather." Further, 
 he was a fine soldier, a born leader of men after the manner of 
 Napoleon's Marshals, but with something both noble and subtle 
 in his character, which was peculiar to his century ; he possessed 
 audacity, gaiety, a strain of dramatic gallantry (panache) : 
 " a genius created for war and created to lead Frenchmen." 
 For the rest, he was not very refined ; the courtiers ridiculed 
 his braggadocio and swagger, and Saint-Simon hated him. 
 
 Villars joined the Elector of Bavaria at Willingen in the 
 Grand Duchy of Baden on May 6, 1703. But he could not 
 persuade Max Emmanuel to march directly upon Vienna, which 
 would perhaps have brought the war to an end ; and while the 
 Elector was vainly trying to join forces with Vendome in the 
 Tyrol, he was obliged to defend Bavaria with his 25,000 men 
 against the 50,000 soldiers of Styrum and the Margrave. He 
 defeated Styrum at Hochstadt on September 25 ; but he agreed 
 so ill with Max Emanuel that he himself begged to be recalled. 
 He was sent into the C6vennes against the Camisards, and Marcin 
 took his place. 
 
 The allies resolved to concentrate their forces against the 
 Elector and Marcin, whose advanced position was a continual 
 menace to Vienna. Leaving his lieutenant, Stahrenberg, and 
 the Duke of Savoy to hold VendSme in Italy, Prince Eugene 
 proceeded to Germany. Marlborough, for his part, left the Low 
 Countries with his troops, passed along the right bank of the 
 Rhine, observed by Villeroy who was following the left bank, 
 and then, suddenly parting company with the hero of Cremona, 
 to the great bewilderment of the latter, and picking up on his 
 way the remnants of the army of the Prince of Hesse which Tallart 
 had just defeated near Spires, he joined the Margrave of Baden at 
 Ulm, and devastated the Palatinate in a terrible fashion. The 
 Elector was beginning to think of begging the Emperor for mercy 
 when he learned that Tallart was coming to his assistance with 
 his 30,000 men. This threw him back upon the French alliance. 
 
 The Franco-Bavarian troops took up their position near 
 Hochstadt, on the very ground where Villars had gained his 
 victory the year before. Tallart — a thin haggard person " with 
 rather jealous eyes [i.e. a squint], full of fire and intelligence, 
 296 
 
SUNSET 
 
 but very short-sighted," commanded the right wing; as the 
 village of Blindheim, on his own right, seemed to him the key 
 Battle ol of his positions, he posted half of his forces there 
 
 "Blenheim." with orders not to stir until they received his 
 express command. The left wing was under Marcin. The 
 centre was composed of the Elector's troops. On August 13, 
 1704, towards eight o'clock in the morning, Marlborough 
 deployed his Anglo-Dutch army before Tallart, while Prince 
 Eugene with his Austrians took up a position in front of Marcin 
 (the Margrave of Baden and his Germans were absent, de- 
 tained by the siege of Ingolstadt). First of all, the English 
 attacked Blindheim; they were vigorously repulsed. Marl- 
 borough did not persist ; forgoing Blindheim, he threw himself 
 on Tallart's left, which was composed mainly of cavalry, which, 
 embarrassed by a sort of ravine or chasm, gave way, carrying 
 with it a portion of the Elector's troops. M. de Tallart had 
 himself been taken prisoner, in the plain, while galloping 
 furiously across it in an attempt to reach Blindheim. The 
 troops he had posted there, with orders not to move, receiving 
 no instructions and finding themselves surrounded by Marl- 
 borough's army, laid down their arms instead of trying to rejoin 
 Marcin : this " ignominy," this " horrible capitulation," was 
 signed by all the corps-commanders, save that of the regiment 
 of Navarre, whose veterans tore up and buried their colours. 
 Meanwhile, the right wing was victoriously resisting Prince 
 Eugene ; but exposed on their right flank by the destruction of 
 Tallart's troops, Marcin and the Elector had to retreat with the 
 French army corps and what remained of the Bavarian troops ; 
 they retired into Alsace under the protection of Villeroy, who had 
 at last approached. By these means they saved some 20,000 
 men out of an army of over 50,000 ; the enemy held their 
 standards, their wounded, a vast number of prisoners, and several 
 generals, as well as Marshal Tallart. The French had to quit 
 Germany entirely, and the Elector was obliged to take refuge in 
 Alsace. Thus France was now reduced to defending her frontier. 
 Villars, recalled from the C^vennes, was entrusted with the 
 task, and fully justified the confidence the King had in him, 
 and that which, as his conversation sufficiently proclaimed, he 
 had in himself. He entrenched himself at Sierk and on the 
 
 29T 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Moselle. Marlborough — "that rascal of a Marlborough," as 
 he called the Englishman — advanced against the French lines, 
 but owing to the insubordination of his German and Dutch 
 troops, who could not be induced to leave their homes too far 
 behind them, he was obliged to fall back, first writing very 
 politely to M. de Villars to say he was in despair at being unable 
 to fight a splendid battle with him (June). Hereupon, the 
 Marshal's boasts were redoubled, but at the same time he 
 crossed the Rhine and with great adroitness surprised the 
 Prince of Baden at Wissembourg. In 1706 he completed the 
 liberation of Alsace. . . . 
 
 In the Low Countries the modest and worthy Marshal de 
 Boufflers had been charged in 1701 to occupy the fortresses of 
 Marshal de the Barrier in the name of the King of Spain. 
 Boufflers. Saint-Simon has left us a noble eulogy of him : 
 
 " He was a very short man, but all compact of honour and 
 valour and probity, of gratitude and attachment to the King, 
 and of love for his country." He had some successes at first, 
 but lacking provisions, he was obliged to fall back ; then part 
 of his army was sent to Catinat in Germany ; with the result 
 that Marlborough, who was in command of the Anglo-Dutch 
 forces, took Venloo, Ruremonde, and Li^ge (October, 1702). In 
 1703 Villeroy, whom the Emperor had released without ransom, 
 came to du'ect operations in place of Boufflers ; but fortunately 
 he had received orders to confine himself to the defensive, and 
 as in the hostile army the Dutch absolutely refused to risk a 
 decisive battle, Marlborough had to be content with completing 
 the conquest of Guelderland, doing some damage to Cologne 
 and Limburg, and then, in defiance of Villeroy, forcing the 
 bridges of the Dyle (July, 1705). He would fain have profited 
 by this success, pushed on, carried the war boldly into France ; 
 once again the over-prudent generals of Holland held him back. 
 
 In 1706 he deployed his forces not far from Louvain to pre- 
 vent the junction of VUleroy with Marcin, who was bringing up 
 French losses reinforcements from Germany. The " favourite " 
 in the Low took cover for his left behind some marshes which 
 Countries. made it impossible for them to move ; it was the 
 blunder of Hochstadt over again. Marlborough threw himself 
 298 
 
SUNSET 
 
 upon the French right with his whole force, broke it, and took 
 the left in flank. Villeroy had to retreat to Louvain. So far 
 he had lost only 2000 men ; he lost 6000, fifty-four cannon out 
 of sixty, and a large number of standards in the rout which this 
 retreat very soon became, after passing through the defile of 
 Jardoigne. As a sequel to this disaster Louvain, Brussels, 
 Ghent, Bruges, and Oudenarde fell into the hands of the enemy. 
 The Prussians sang : 
 
 " Varus, rends-moi mes legions I " 
 
 S'ecriait autrefois Auguste. 
 
 " Tallart, rends-moi mes bataillons 1 " 
 
 Dit Louis k titre plus juste. 
 
 " Demandez-les k, Villeroy, 
 
 n en a perdu plus que moi." 
 
 The King decided to disgrace his favourite, and Vend6me, 
 hastily recalled from Italy, was charged to reconstruct the 
 shattered army. But his absence was fatal to French fortunes 
 in Piedmont. We have already spoken of the disaster of Turin. 
 At the end of 1706 France was everywhere thrown back upon 
 her frontiers. 
 
 Meanwhile, civil war had broken out in the kingdom. 
 
 The most serious of the popular outbreaks caused by the 
 persecutions which followed the Revocation of the Edict of 
 Revolt in the Nantes was that in the Cevennes. Lamoignon de 
 Cevennes. Basville, the Intendant of Languedoc, a man of a 
 
 mild countenance of almost feminine charm, was singularly 
 successful in making life a burden to New Converts of ill repute. 
 The War of the Spanish Succession was just beginning ; Hugue- 
 not refugees were passing secretly throughout the country, 
 predicting that, with God's help, the Dutch, the English, and 
 the Germans would shortly overcome the King's armies : 
 inflamed by these speeches, and exasperated by Basville's 
 agents, the hardy C6vennes mountaineers revolted. On July 24, 
 1702, a troop of armed ruffians massacred the arch-priest of 
 the diocese of Mende ; other bands were at once formed. The 
 war was peculiarly atrocious. The " Camisards " (so called 
 from the white shirts they wore over their clothes) had some 
 good leaders, such as Jean Cavalier, a baker's assistant aged 
 
 299 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 twenty-three, Couderc, Roland, Ravenel, etc., and the royal 
 troops, accustomed to fight in good order, had no stomach for 
 this war against ferocious churls, whom it was impossible to 
 get at among their rocks and precipices. Villars in 1704 
 succeeded better than his predecessors ; he employed relatively 
 mild methods, and very intelligently made Cavalier a colonel, 
 begging him to raise a regiment among his former comrades. 
 When he left in January, 1705, the situation was better, but it 
 was not until 1710 that the last bands of Camisards disappeared. 
 Thus throughout the War of the Succession, France was obliged 
 to keep troops to fight the Protestants of the Cdvennes, troops 
 which, as we shall see, were badly needed on the frontiers. 
 
 In Spain the yoimg French prince had been very well received 
 at first. Philip V was seventeen. " He was well made, fair 
 Philip V of like the late King Charles and the Queen his 
 Spain. grandmother, grave, silent, sedate, and reserved, 
 
 just the person for the Spaniards." He was withal gentle, an 
 easy master, with a just and honest mind ; he was capable of 
 intrepidity upon occasion, but he spoUt his many fine qualities 
 by irresolution, timidity, a piety quite Spanish in character, 
 savouring more of superstition than of ardour ; also he was 
 indolent — in short, " God had given him a docile, nay, more, a 
 servile spirit " (Louville). He needed some one to govern him ; 
 he had his wife, Queen Maria-Luisa of Savoy, and the Princesse 
 des Ursins (Orsini). The little Queen, who was barely foiirteen 
 at the time of her marriage (1701), was no less lively and inteUi- 
 gent than her sister, the Duchess of Burgundy ; however, she 
 cared nothing for " music, or acting, or conversation, or walking, 
 or hunting — ^in a word, for any of the pleasures of her age " ; 
 her one preoccupation was " to rule the King her husband 
 absolutely, and keep him always in leading-strings " — ^in other 
 words, to govern Spain. She had excellent means at her 
 disposal to attain her ends, the traditional means used by the 
 Queen-Dowager, Maria-Anna of Neuburg, for Philip V was no 
 less amorous, no less devout, and no less ardent than Charles II 
 had been. And apparently she turned them to good account, 
 for Philip V never resisted her will, which was also that of the 
 Princesse des Ursins, 
 300 
 
SUNSET 
 
 Marie-Anne de la Tremoille, the widow, first of the Prince de 
 Chalais (a Talleyrand), and, by her second marriage, of Prince 
 The Princesse Flavio Orsini (in French, des Ursins), Duke of 
 desUrsins. Bracciano and grandee of Spain, was fifty-nine 
 when she was appointed camar era-may or, thanks to the 
 patronage of her friend Mme. de Maintenon, of the Duchess of 
 Burgundy, who was grateful for all the pains she had taken in 
 connection with her sister's marriage, and of Cardinal Porto- 
 Carrero, who remembered that he had once loved her. 
 
 She was tall rather than short, a brunette with blue eyes, which said 
 whatever she wished them to say, with a perfect figure, a fine bust, and 
 a face which, without being beautiful, was charming ; a very aristocratic 
 air, something majestic in her whole bearing, and in everything such 
 natural and perpetual graces, even in the most trivial and unimportant 
 things, that I have never seen any one to approach her either in person 
 or in wit, of which she had a large share of every variety ; flattering, 
 caressing, insinuating, sedate, seeking to please for the sake of pleasing, 
 with a charm which it was impossible to resist when she wanted to attract 
 and fascinate ; withal, an air which, albeit grand, attracted instead of 
 alarming ; her conversation was delicious, never-failing, and extremely 
 amusing by reason of all the countries and persons she had known ; her 
 voice and speech were most agreeable, with an air of gentleness ; she 
 had also read a great deal, and she was a person who reflected much ; 
 she was, moreover, a greater adept in intrigue than any one in the world, 
 and had spent her life in it by choice when in Rome ; she had many vast 
 ambitions, much above her sex and the ordinary ambitions of men, and 
 a will to govern not inferior to her wiU to exist, etc. (Saint-Simon.) 
 
 This expert old lady, who when necessary had no difficulty 
 in becoming a charming young woman, and who, in spite of 
 her fifty-nine years, had renounced nothing, easily fascinated 
 the Queen of fourteen and the King of seventeen who were 
 about to govern Spain, and on whom her functions kept her in 
 perpetual attendance. 
 
 I have the honour to take the King of Spain's dressing-gown when 
 he gets into bed, and to band it to him with his slippers when he gets 
 up [she gaily confides to Mme. de Maintenon on November 12, 1701]. 
 When the King comes to the Queen's room to go to bed, the Comte de 
 Benavente hands me His Majesty's sword, a chamber-pot, and a lamp, 
 which I generally upset over my clothes ; it is too grotesque. The King 
 would never get up if I did not go and draw his curtain. 
 
 Unfortunately the Spaniards soon began to murmur at the 
 too apparent influence of the camarera-mayor, whose firist fault 
 
 301 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 in their eyes was that she was a foreigner, which she could not 
 help. Philip V and Maria-Luise indeed surrounded themselves 
 with French people, and they, who considered the " hidalgos " 
 perfectly ridiculous and, to sum up, provincial, could not 
 refrain from making them feel the superiority of the culture of 
 Versailles ; with the result that French impertinence daily 
 made enemies for France, and that the nobles, kept outside the 
 domain of State affairs and humiliated, gradually rallied to the 
 Austrian party. Add to this, that from the moment when the 
 people of Castille had declared enthusiastically for Philip V, 
 those of Catalonia and Aragon had felt at once less repugnance 
 to the Hapsburgs. » 
 
 As the Spanish monarchy lacked every necessary, France 
 had to undertake the task of defending it. Already, in Octo- 
 The Archduke ber, 1703, the English had destroyed the galleons 
 Charles in coming from America laden with gold in the actual 
 
 Spain. roadstead of Vigo : a catastrophe for the public 
 
 finances. In May, 1703, an event still more serious took place : 
 the defection of Portugal, whose king turned traitor too suddenly 
 for his future glory, when the Emperor promised him several 
 Spanish towns. An English fleet came to Lisbon, bearing the 
 Archduke Charles, to whom the Emperor Leopold, his father, 
 had solemnly made over his claim to the crown of Spain in 
 September, 1703 ; and very soon " Charles III " set out for 
 Madrid at the head of an army of English, Dutch, and Portuguese 
 soldiers. But on the way he met the French troops, com- 
 manded by the Duke of Berwick, the son of James II and 
 Arabella Churchill, and thus the nephew of Marlborough (he 
 became a naturalized Frenchman in 1703). This " tall English 
 fellow," pious and rigid, narrow, tapiturn, sententious, cold, and 
 dry, was " the most exact and precise of men in his measures " 
 (Dangeau) : he methodically annihilated the efforts of the 
 allies, and vanquished his quondam compatriots by the most 
 purely Anglo-Saxon qualities. On the other hand, by sea, 
 Admiral Rooke sxirprised Gibraltar : this fortified rock was 
 considered impregnable, and the English have since proved 
 that it is so, but the Spanish soldiers who guarded it were so 
 averse from fighting that they laid down their arms as soon as 
 the Admiral began to disembark his troops (August 4, 1704). 
 802 
 
SUNSET 
 
 However, this check was not taken to heart very seriously at 
 Versailles, and was amply compensated for in the King's eyes 
 by a slight advantage which the Comte de Toulouse obtained, 
 in spite of the inferiority of his .vessels, over Admiral Rooke. 
 
 Unhappily the great disasters were about to begin ; the 
 Spanish nobility became more and more estranged from 
 Philip V ; Berwick was recalled by Louis XIV at the request 
 of the young Queen of Spain, who could not endure him ; the 
 Archduke Charles and Lord Peterborough embarked at Lisbon 
 for the Mediterranean : as they passed along the coasts of 
 Valencia, several towns proclaimed Charles III, and on August 
 25, 1705, Barcelona opened its gates to them, carrying with it 
 all Catalonia and Valencia, In vain did Philip V attempt to 
 recapture the great town the following year : on May 12, 1706, 
 he was obliged to raise the siege, abandoning his munitions, 
 his cannon, his wounded, while in order to return to his capital 
 he was forced to cross the frontier and pass through Pau. More- 
 over, Madrid itself was not too safe, for the allies were approach- 
 ing ; Philip V had to transfer his Court to Burgos, and in the 
 capital he had just quitted Charles III was proclaimed king. 
 
 At this moment, then, Louis XIV seemed to be vanquished 
 in Spain, as everywhere else. He asked his grandson to 
 French abdicate, but Philip V answered bravely that " he 
 
 recovery in would shed the l^st drop of his blood rather than 
 Spain. abandon his States." He was right. He had 
 
 never ceased to be popular in Castille, and Madrid cordially 
 hated the Portuguese, the Catalans, and the heretic English 
 who supported Charles III. Massacred piecemeal by the people 
 at the instigation of the clergy, the little army of the allies 
 dwindled visibly. It was obliged to leave Madrid and fall back 
 hastily, not upon the too distant frontier of Portugal, but upon 
 the northern provinces. Philip V returned amidst acclamations 
 to his capital, and on April 25, 1707, Berwick gained a brilliant 
 victory at Almanza (to the north of Murcia), over Las Minas 
 and the Protestant Frenchman Ruvigny, who had become 
 Lord Galloway : thus Valencia, Aragon, and the greater part 
 of Catalonia were regained. Finally, on October 10, 1707, the 
 young Duke of Orleans took Lerida in a very brilliant 
 manner. 
 
 303 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 On every side the year 1707 was marked by similar French 
 successes. Prince Eugene and the Duke of Savoy, who had 
 invaded Provence, had to return to Italy after vainly besieging 
 Toulon for five months (August). In the Low Countries, 
 Vend&me held Marlborough in check. On the Rhine, Villars 
 defied adversaries weaker than himself, carried the famous 
 " lines of Stolhofen " by a celebrated manoeuvre, occupied 
 Heidelberg, Mannheim, and Stuttgart, and pushed on to Ulm 
 and Nuremberg. 
 
 At this moment Charles XII of Sweden, who had just 
 concluded the Peace of Altranstadt after a fabulous series of 
 Charles xn of victories, insolently camped in the midst of 
 Sweden. German territory. A new Gustavus Adolphus, it 
 
 was open to him to take the coalition in the rear with his terrible 
 army, bring the Emperor to his knees, and do what he pleased — 
 and no one knew what this would be ; Villars was hopeful, the 
 allies were uneasy. Marlborough, the commander-in-chief of 
 the coalition, and a skilled diplomatist on occasion, went to 
 Altranstadt to try to beguile the arbiter of Europe. He was 
 received with disconcerting coldness, but he is said to have seen 
 a map of Russia spread out on the King of Sweden's table, and 
 to have thought this a reassuring omen. He was not mistaken : 
 in September, 1707, Charles XII, after imposing humiliating 
 conditions on the Emperor, recklessly set his army on the 
 march towards Moscow. And with him the best hope of 
 France disappeared. 
 
 Louis XIV had made up his mind that the whole effort of 
 the campaign of 1708 should be concentrated in the Low 
 Campaign in Countries, and that elsewhere, except in Spain, 
 the Low the troops should simply remain on the defensive. 
 
 Countries, By dint of an immense effort an army was 
 
 1708. mustered, " a splendid, complete, eager army, of 
 
 great goodwill," under the effective command of Vend6me, and 
 the nominal direction of the Duke of Burgundy. But, alas ! 
 no more impossible collaboration could have been devised than 
 that of the overbearing, lazy, and debauched VendSme with the 
 grandson of France, the most timorous and least military of 
 men, and also the most easily scandalized of mortals. Vend6me 
 804 
 
SUNSET 
 
 advanced with his habitual nonchalance ; not until July 6 did 
 he recapture Bruges. Eugene hastily brought up 35,000 men 
 from Germany to reinforce Marlborough, who already had 
 60,000 ; it was essential to prevent their junction. Instead of 
 at once investing Oudenarde and there entrenching himself 
 strongly, VendSme wasted three days doing nothing, with the 
 result that when the French army finally crossed the Scheldt, 
 its advanced guard came into contact with that of Marlborough, 
 who had come up by forced marches ; this happened on July 11, 
 at two o'clock in the afternoon. 
 
 Taken by surprise, Vendome directed the action very 
 badly. He threw his troops forward at random, as they 
 Battle of gradually came up to the field of battle ; his 
 
 Oudenarde. breathless regiments were mauled by the enemy. 
 Later, in his report to the King, he complained that the Duke 
 of Burgundy, far from charging as he had begged him to do, had 
 entrenched his troops, without even informing him : "I could 
 not suppose," he said, " that fifty battalions and nearly a 
 hundred and eighty squadrons of the best troops in this army 
 would content themselves with seeing us fighting for six hours, 
 and would look on at the spectacle as one looks on at the opera 
 from the third row of boxes." Of course this was not the version 
 given by the Prince's partisans. In any case, " night was 
 falling ; a great deal of ground had been lost ; half of the army 
 had not finished deploying. In this depressing situation the 
 Princes consulted with M. de VendSme as to the best course to 
 adopt." VendSme wished to resume the battle on the morrow, 
 but his proposal found no supporters : " Oh, well ! " he 
 exclaimed, " gentlemen, I see you are all of one mind, so we 
 must retire. Moreover," he added, looking at the Duke of 
 Burgundy, " you have wished this for a long time past " 
 (Saint-Simon). According to Saint-Hilaire, Vend6me's opinion 
 prevailed at the council of war, but a portion of the army, 
 which had received neither orders nor ammunition, spon- 
 taneously retired the next day, entailing the disorganization of 
 the rest. To put it briefly, the retreat took place in fearful 
 disorder ; every one made for Ghent as fast as he could. 
 
 Six mille tant morts que blesses, 
 Trois autres mille d^sertes, 
 
 u 805 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Pits de cinq mille prisonniers, 
 Et plus de neuf cents officiers 
 Immortalisent la besogne 
 De M. le Due de Bonrgogne. 
 
 While the dissensions between the leaders redoubled, and 
 even the soldiers, divided into parties, quarrelled violently, and 
 Capture oi sought to fix responsibility on each other, Marl- 
 Lille, borough and Eugene quietly laid siege to Lille. 
 In spite of the splendid defence made by the aged Boufflers, the 
 town was taken in October, and the citadel in December, 1708. 
 Then Louis XIV disgraced Vendome, and made Boufflers a 
 duke and a peer ; but it was said that the Duke of Bxu-gundy 
 was playing tennis when the news of the capitulation of Lille 
 reached him, and that he did not interrupt his game for such a 
 trifle. . . . This disastrous campaign left France in the most 
 terrible distress. 
 
 And the year 1709 was that of the famous winter. The cold 
 began on the eve of the Epiphany ; the rivers were soon frozen 
 Terrible winter over down to their mouths. The thaw came at 
 ol 1709. the end of two months, but " was followed by a 
 
 frost as hard as the first, which lasted for three weeks more." 
 Wine and strong waters burst the bottles, and the bread 
 hardened on the table. In the vast, draughty rooms at 
 Versailles in vain did the fireplaces devour perfect forests of 
 trees ; Mme. de Maintenon felt paralysis coming on ; the 
 King alone, imperturbable and solar, continued his walks in 
 the gardens ; he only interrupted them out of pity for those in 
 attendance, who were obliged to accompany him. Hares and 
 partridges were found lifeless in the fields, and travellers on the 
 high roads ; others perished in their beds ; nearly all the new- 
 born infants died. Madame declares that 24,000 persons 
 succumbed from January 5 to February 2 ; " the common 
 people are dying of cold like flies," she adds. She exaggerated. 
 But, nevertheless, the wolves were ravening in the country; 
 the fruit-trees and the early sowings were frozen ; the water- 
 mills could not work ; corn and flour were lacking. But the 
 Parisians, pale with hunger and pinched with cold, managed to 
 laugh at the thought that the Maintenon was eating oatmeal 
 bread, and they chanted the following Paternoster : 
 306 
 
SUNSET 
 
 Our Father -which art at Versailles, thy name is no longer hallowed, 
 thy kingdom is no longer so great, thy will is no longer done either on 
 earth or on the waters. Give us our bread which on every side we lack. 
 Forgive our enemies who have beaten us, and not thy generals who 
 allowed them to do so. Do not succumb to all the temptations of the 
 Maintenon, but deliver us from Chamillart. 
 
 At Versailles " the King himself heard some rude home- 
 truths from his windows." The Court murmured, feeling little 
 gratitude to the aged ,Louis for having " reduced his table at 
 Marly," sent his gold plate to the Mint, and tried to pawn his 
 jewels. " He is reproached for all his expenditure,*' confessed 
 Mme. de Maintenon at this crisis ; " the journeys to Marly 
 have caused the ruin of the State ; they would like to take 
 away his horses, his dogs, his servants. . . . There are murmurs 
 at his very door ; they would like to stone me because they 
 imagine that I never tell him anything impleasant, for fear of 
 grieving him." Of course the taxes had ceased to come in ; 
 how were the troops to be maintained ? Soldiers and even 
 officers sold their arms, their clothes, and their linen to buy 
 bread : " It is now impossible to serve in the army without 
 swindling right and left," wrote Fenelon. France seemed to be 
 in her death-throes. 
 
 Then Louis' pride had to give way, and the King resigned 
 himself to ask for peace. Ever since 1705 he had been in 
 Peace conununication with the allies ; in March, 1709, 
 
 negotiations. President de Bouille was sent secretly to Holland 
 to ask definitely what conditions could be made the basis of 
 peace ; they were such that he expected to be recalled imme- 
 diately, but nothing of the sort happened. The King called his 
 Council : " The Due de Beauvilliers painted such a touching 
 picture of the state to which France was reduced that the Duke 
 of Burgundy shed tears ; the Ministers of War and Finance 
 confessed that they were without resources " (Voltaire). Torcy 
 went off to The Hague under a false name. But the demands 
 of the allies had become still more humiliating. The United 
 Provinces insisted on a new " Barrier," but this time it was to 
 consist of French fortresses such as Lille and Tournai ; the 
 English claimed the destruction of Dunkirk, recognition of their 
 Queen, Anne, the expulsion of the Pretender, and the cession of 
 
 307 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Newfoundland ; the Empire asked for Alsace and Strasbiirg ; 
 finally, the Spanish crown was to be taken from Philip V without 
 compensation, and the Very Christian King was to combine 
 with the allies to fight against his grandson, if, as seemed 
 probable, the latter should resist ; if all these conditions were 
 granted, France should enjoy a truce of two months, after 
 which the allies would reconsider the matter ! 
 
 On Jime 12, 1709, the aged Louis made known to his people 
 the shame it was proposed to inflict upon him : 
 
 Although my affection for my people is no whit less than that I feel 
 for my own children [he added], although I share all the stifferings inflicted 
 by the war on my faithful subjects, and have plainly shown all Europe 
 that I sincerely desire to let them enjoy peace, I am convinced that they 
 themselves would refuse to receive it on conditions so opposed to justice 
 and to the honour of the French name. 
 
 This noble letter, which was read aloud in all the churches 
 by the parish priests, raised the whole kingdom, and, reinforced 
 by the prevailing destitution, caused the peasantry to enlist 
 en masse. The army thus recruited lacked everjrthing : horses, 
 provisions, munitions, money ; but it was conunanded by 
 Marshal de Villars. 
 
 With such raw troops, the Marshal deemed it prudent to 
 remain on the defensive in his entrenchments, and to let the 
 Magnetic allies take Tournai and invest Mons. But every 
 
 leadership o! day his good-humoured raillery enlivened the 
 Villars. ranks ; he went about " caressing the soldier," as 
 
 he said ; he mocked at " Monsieur de Malbrouck," amazed the 
 men by his braggadocio, talked of the millions which were shortly 
 coming from India as a loan, read aloud the beautiful and noble 
 letters he received from the King ; the soldiers laughed, rubbed 
 their hands, joked : " M. le Mar6chal is right ; one must suffer 
 sometimes." Then they would shout at the top of their voices : 
 " Long live the King 1 " One fine day the hero of Lille, M. de 
 Boufflers, arrived to join the army ; he came to fight for France 
 as a simple volunteer under the command of his junior. . . . 
 Then Villars asked permission to march against the enemy. 
 
 The troops were massed to the south of Quievrain ; they 
 decamped quietly ; then, masked by the curtain of woods which 
 cuts the plain of Mons in two, they defiled imperceived all along 
 308 
 
SUNSET 
 
 the enemy's front, and debouched unexpectedly on their left, 
 on September 9, 1709, by the gap of Malplaquet, between the 
 woods of Sars and La Lani^re. The majority of the Dutch 
 and Austrian soldiers were off marauding ; Eugene and Marl- 
 borough were some distance away, at the mill of Sars, with only 
 a few troops ; the French might perhaps have suddenly over- 
 thrown the surprised and scattered enemy, but Villars halted. 
 Why ? We know not. He had only from 90,000 to 100,000 
 men, for the most part recruits, to oppose to 120,000 soldiers 
 accustomed to victory ; he had to remember, too, that his 
 army was the last which was left to France. 
 
 But while the French army lay firmly entrenched in the 
 Gap of Malplaquet, the troops of the coalition took up their 
 Battle of position at their leisure. On the morning of the 
 
 Malplaauet. 11th Eugene threw himself upon the French left, 
 and Marlborough on the right, which Villars had entrusted to 
 Boufflers. It was about eight o'clock. Boufflers, who was 
 well entrenched, repulsed Marlborough vigorously, but, embar- 
 rassed by his own fortifications, he was unable to follow up his 
 advantage. Meanwhile, the left had been turned, and was 
 falling back step by step through the wood of Sars on which it 
 rested. It reformed on the plateau of Malplaquet, behind the 
 reserves, which threw back the enemy by an admirable bayonet 
 charge. Villars had received a bullet just above the knee ; he 
 had to be carried to the rear lines, in a swoon, on a litter made 
 of standards taken from the foe. At this moment Marlborough 
 threw his fresh troops upon the centre, the ranks of which had 
 been depleted to strengthen the left, and broke through. 
 Boufflers had taken over the command : six times he hurled all 
 his cavalry upon the enemy, and thanks to these magnificent 
 charges, the French right retired quietly towards Le Quesnoy, 
 and the left on Valenciennes, the troops of the coalition not 
 daring to pursue them. The French got away their cannon, 
 thirty-two standards captured as against nine which they left 
 in the enemy's hands ; they had lost 11,000 men, but they had 
 killed or wounded 22,989. " If God be pleased to let us lose 
 another such battle," wrote M. de Villars to the King, in his 
 usual somewhat swaggering strain, " Your Majesty may take it 
 that your enemies are destroyed." 
 
 809 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Hereupon negotiations were again begun at Gertruydenberg. 
 But the Allies had not moderated their demands : indeed, it 
 was now proposed that Louis XIV should undertake to dethrone 
 his grandson, " tjoith his own unaided forces, within a term of 
 two months ! " " Since I must make war, I would rather make 
 it on my enemies than on my children," said the old King 
 sadly, and the Abbe de Polignac, when he asked the States- 
 General for his passports, remarked wittily : " It is plain, 
 gentlemen, that you are not accustomed to conquer ! " (March- 
 July, 1710). 
 
 In Spain the Castillians, still devoted to their Boiu-bon 
 King, waged that war on the Imperialists which was afterwards 
 to save their country from the hands of Napoleon ; one by one 
 the foreign soldiers were assassinated or poisoned, and the 
 allied army gradually melted away. Louis XIV sent a few 
 troops under VendSme to his grandson, and on December 10, 
 
 1710, Stahrenberg was completely defeated at Villaviciosa ; it 
 was all he could do to bring back a handful of his men to 
 Barcelona, the only town now remaining to the Hapsburg. 
 
 Was fortune about to turn ? In January, 1711, a secret 
 agent, the Abbe Gaultier, arrived at Versailles, bearing proposals 
 England pro- of peace from Queen Anne. This was due to 
 poses peace, certain changes that had taken place in England : 
 
 1711. Marlborough and his duchess had been disgraced, 
 and in their fall had dragged down the Whig Ministry, which 
 was in favour of war. Then, on April 17, 1711, the Emperor 
 Joseph I died, leaving no heir but his brother, the Archduke 
 Charles, the aspirant to the throne of Spain. Could the Powers 
 allow the might of Charles V to be reconstituted ? . . . On 
 October 8, 1711, France and England signed the preliminaries 
 in London, and Queen Anne threatened to retire from the 
 coalition if the allies would not reopen negotiations. 
 
 Thus a conference began again at Utrecht in January, 1712. 
 It was a pure comedy : Eugene already saw himself in Paris. 
 The departure of the British forces scarcely weakened him at 
 all : they consisted of 12,000 Englishmen and 50,000 auxiliaries ; 
 when the first had left, Holland bought the second, and it was 
 an army of about 115,000 men, confident, well paid, and well 
 fed, which had to be met by the 70,000 miserable soldiers under 
 310 
 
SUNSET 
 
 Villars, who constituted the last defence of the kingdom of 
 France. 
 
 The final struggle was to take place on the single line of 
 fortresses which still protected the valley of the Oise : Arras, 
 Cambrai, and Landrecies. In July, 1712, after taking Le 
 Quesnoy, Eugene invested Landrecies. Villars received orders 
 to make every possible effort to save the town. He hesitated 
 a little under the fearful responsibility laid upon him : he lost 
 Battle ol several days, and it seems probable that it was 
 
 Denain, 1712. the Court which gave him the strategic idea on 
 which his glory rests ; but at least, when once this plan was 
 decided upon, he carried it out with extreme resolution and 
 skill. Prince Eugene's commissariat base was at Marchiennes, 
 and he communicated with it by the fortified camp of Denain, 
 and by a line of entrenchments which his soldiers had insolently 
 christened the " road to Paris." Villars marched upon Landrecies 
 and seemed to be preparing to attack the besiegers on the side 
 nearest to the Sambre ; throughout the day of July 23 the 
 French troops mustered in order of battle on the banks of the 
 river, ostensibly preparing bridges for the morrow. But sud- 
 denly in the night of July 23-24, the royal army decamped 
 without sound of drum or trumpet, in spite of the dissatisfaction 
 of the soldiers, who supposed they were beating a retreat ; by 
 a flanking movement they skirted the besieging forces of 
 Landrecies at a distance, followed the left bank of the Selle, 
 crossed the Scheldt beyond Bouchain, and about eleven o'clock 
 in the morning, spent with fatigue, but full of enthusiasm, they 
 threw themsdves with the bayonet upon the entrenched camp 
 of Denain, and captured it. At this moment Eugene, informed 
 of what was happening in his rear, arrived in hot haste from 
 Landrecies. Too late ! He stopped, biting his gloves with 
 rage (July 24, 1712). 
 
 And it was this little battle of Denain that saved France. 
 His communications being cut, Eugene was obliged to raise the 
 siege of Landrecies. Then Saint-Amand, Douai, Le Quesnoy, 
 and Bouchain, which had cost him so many efforts, opened 
 again to the French. Finally Holland became weary of an 
 interminable war, which was doing great damage to trade. . . . 
 In April-July, 1713, and June, 1714, the treaties so long debated 
 
 811 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 were signed at Utrecht by France and Spain on the one hand, 
 and by Prussia, Savoy, England (final peace), and Holland on 
 the other. There was still the Emperor to deal with ; but 
 Prince Eugene, deprived of his English and Dutch soldiers, was 
 too much weakened to continue the campaign, and Villars 
 seized Landau and Freiburg (September, 1713). Negotiations 
 were set on foot at Rastadt, and lasted for two months and a 
 half, between the Prince, who was a very skilful diplomatist, 
 and Villars, who was not quite his equal in this domain ; 
 Peace of fortunately Louis XIV was watching over all ; on 
 
 Rastadt, 1714. March 6, 1714, the honourable Peace of Rastadt 
 was concluded with the Empire. 
 
 It was on Spain that the main cost of the war fell. In the 
 first place, Philip V explicitly renounced his claims to the 
 throne of France, a solemn engagement which was ratified by 
 the Cortes. If she retained the Indies, Spain was to lose all her 
 European possessions, including Gibraltar and Minorca, which 
 were to remain in the hands of the English ; she had to give 
 up the Low Countries and her Italian possessions to the Emperor, 
 with the exception of Sicily, which came to the Duke of Savoy, 
 together with the royal title. France, for her part, ceded 
 Newfoundland to England (reserving only her fishery rights 
 there), and, further, Acadia, Hudson Bay and Strait, and the 
 island of Saint Christopher in the Antilles ; moreover, Louis XIV 
 formally recognized the Protestant House of Hanover, and 
 promised to expel the Pretender, James Stuart, from France ; 
 finally, he undertook to raze the fortifications of Dunkirk. To 
 Holland the King made over the Low Countries in trust, to be 
 transmitted to the Emperor Charles VI when they had come 
 to an agreement with him concerning the famous Barrier. With 
 Vittorio-Amedeo, Louis exchanged a part of Dauphine, situated 
 on the Piedmont slopes, for the Barcelonnette valley, situated 
 on the French slope ; he further restored Nice and Savoy to 
 him, and recognized his title of King of Sicily. 
 
 The Emperor obtained the reconstruction of the frontier as 
 determined by the Treaty of Ryswyck, and the King of Prussia 
 recognition of his new dignity. The Archbishop of Cologne and 
 the Elector of Bavaria, the faithful allies of France, retained 
 their respective States. 
 312 
 
SUNSET 
 
 III 
 
 " The King remarked with pleasure," says Dangeau in 
 August, 1695, " that the Duke of Burgundy would be of age in 
 six days, that we need not fear a minority in France, and that 
 ever since the foundation of the monarchy there had been no 
 other instance of a grandfather, a father, and a grandson, all of 
 an age to govern the kingdom." Before the troubles due to 
 the Spanish Succession, Louis XIV, secure in the support of his 
 family and his people, might consider himself the most mighty 
 monarch on earth. Twelve years later, humiliated in his glory, 
 and stricken in his race, he had only a little child of two years 
 old to assume the heavy burden of the crown after him. 
 Portrait of Students of history should study the astounding 
 Louis XIV at medallion in which Antoine Benoist recorded the 
 sixty-four. appearance of the King in 1702, at the age of 
 sixty-four. " The royal countenance, modelled in a coloured 
 wax which is extraordinarily lifelike, shows, under the luxuriant 
 and severe wig, the proud and senile profile, with the haughty 
 nose and heavy pendulous under-lip. This is indeed the aged 
 Louis, arrogant and fanatical, petrified by fifty years of power, 
 still great, in spite of the decline of his strength and of his star ; 
 he whose despotic presence yet fills the huge palace he built, the 
 palace his glorious and taciturn shade still seems to haunt " 
 (H. de Regnier). 
 
 In 1701 Monsieur, the King's brother, had died of apoplexy, 
 being old, worn out with debauchery, and short in the neck. 
 Death of the Louis was greatly attached to his brother ; 
 Duke of nevertheless, Monsieur was " still warm " when 
 
 Orleans. the King ordered the card-tables to be set out as 
 
 usual at Marly. So also in 1702, on the morrow of the naval 
 defeat at Vigo, Madame wrote : " One sees nothing but long 
 faces here ; only the King seems quite serene." Thus did 
 Louis XIV bear with equal courage the disasters of France and 
 the losses of his family. To tell the truth, so much stoicism is 
 rather disquieting, and we should be tempted to call the Great 
 King's firmness by the less flattering names of selfishness and 
 insensibility, had not Saint-Simon himself borne witness that 
 Louis XIV " felt the culmination of so many misfortunes 
 
 818 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 deeply " ; that " his ministers saw his tears flow " ; that " his 
 closest personal attendant beheld his grief." Moreover, the 
 Stoicism ol seventeenth century knew nothing of that " sensi- 
 the King. bility " of which the eighteenth and nineteenth 
 
 made such deplorable use : what seemed praiseworthy to the 
 contemporaries of the aged Louis was, not the display of a 
 " tender " soul and a parade of lofty sorrow, but a manly and 
 Christian mastery of grief. Again, Saint-Simon, the Great 
 King's worst enemy, could not refrain from writing : 
 
 Under adversities so prolonged, so repeated, and so intimately poignant, 
 his firmness, nay, more, his immutability, remained unshaken ; the same 
 face, the same bearing, the same graciousness, the same occupations, the 
 same journeys, the same course of years and days. . . . Let us declare 
 with all the cordiality of a true Frenchman, naturally well pleased when 
 truth does not check his praises, that it was out of the depths of this 
 abyss of sorrows of every kind that Louis XIV contrived to deserve, in 
 the opinion of all Europe, the epithet of Great which his flatterers had 
 prematurely bestowed upon him. The title Great became in these later 
 years a title justly acquired, a real name, the fitting name for this prince 
 who showed, with simplicity, the greatness of his soul, his firmness, his 
 stability, his evenness of temper, a courage midaunted by the most terrible 
 reverses and the keenest griefs, a strength of mind which concealed nothing 
 from itself, which dissimulated nothing, which saw things as they were, 
 and so, leading him to hmnble himself imder the hand of God, preserved 
 the even tenor of his external life with a steadiness so simple and unaffected 
 that the admiration aroused in all who saw him both in public and in 
 private was daily renewed. 
 
 In August, 1704, the Court had received the news of the 
 defeat at Hochstadt so sadly that it had composed no songs 
 upon M. de Tallart, which was unprecedented. As to the King, 
 when P^re de La Chaise sought to console him by referring to 
 the reverses of King David, he asked simply " if David took his 
 revenge ; for his part, he meant to do so." And Primi, again, 
 noted (in his correspondence) this answer of Louis to the Great 
 Dauphin and Chamillart, when they annoimced the disaster of 
 Ramillies : " We must think of retrieving it, we must hope for 
 all help from God. It is not the Marshal's fault, but mine." 
 Nevertheless, Mme. de Maintenon wrote : "I confess that the 
 pain of seeing the King suffer is great." 
 
 In April, 1705, the little Due de Bretagne, the King's great- 
 grandson (the first, long-expected child of the Duchess of 
 314 
 
SUNSET 
 
 Burgundy), died before he was a year old. On April 14, 1711, 
 Monseigneur, his grandfather, died suddenly of smallpox. The 
 Deaths of the King " spoke kindly to every one," gave his orders 
 King's Heirs, calmly, but every moment " his eyes filled with 
 tears," says Madame ; " I pity him with all my heart. By the 
 death of Monseigneur, the Duke and Duchess of Burgundy 
 became Dauphin and Dauphiness. On February 12, 1712, 
 the new Dauphiness, the darling of the King and Mme. de 
 Maintenon, died. Seven days later, on February 19, the 
 Dauphin died. And on the 8th of March following, their son, 
 the second Due de Bretagne, followed them. 
 
 At this moment the enemy was preparing to march upon 
 Paris. A few days before the triple obsequies of his children, 
 the old King sent for the man to whom he had confided his last 
 army, and addressed him in these magnanimous words : 
 
 There are few examples of such disasters as have fallen upon me, as 
 the loss in one week of a grandson, a granddaughter-in-law, and their son, 
 all of great promise and most dearly loved. God is punishing me. I 
 deserve it. I shall suffer the less in the next world. . . . This is what 
 I think ; you shall tell me yoxa opinion afterwards. I know all the 
 arguments of my courtiers ; nearly all of them wish me to retire to Blois, 
 and not to wait until the enemy approaches Paris, which would be quite 
 possible were my army defeated. As to me, I know that armies so con- 
 siderable are never so utterly defeated as to prevent the main body of 
 my troops from retiring upon the Somme. I know that river ; it is 
 difficult to cross ; there are fortresses, and I have thoughts of going to 
 Peronne or Saint-Quentin, mustering all the troops left to me there, making 
 a last effort with you, and perishing together or saving the State, for I 
 will never consent to allow the enemy to approach my capital. This is 
 my plan ; now give me your opinion. (Villars.) 
 
 We have just seen how Villars saved France at Denain by 
 carrying out the plan suggested to him by the King and Voysin ; 
 but Louis was to suffer yet another loss. As the Due d'Anjou, 
 who had become Philip V, had definitively renounced his claim 
 to the throne of France, only two direct heirs to the crown were 
 now living : the little Dauphin, the future Louis XV, the King's 
 The Due de great-grandson, who was four years old, and his 
 Berry. uncle, the Due de Berry, the King's third grand- 
 
 son. " M. le Due de Berry was of medium height, rather stout 
 everywhere, fair-haired, with a fresh, good-looking face, indicat- 
 ing perfect health." By nature lively, gay and undisciplined, 
 
 315 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 he had been subjected, like his father, the Great Dauphin, to a 
 crushing education, which had disgusted him also for ever with 
 all intellectual work, and had made him absurdly diffident by 
 having convinced him that he was but " a fool and a simpleton, 
 fit for nothing." For the rest, he was " a good, round Prince," 
 an ardent sportsman, a hardy pedestrian, and a brilliant 
 horseman. He died suddenly, on May 4, 1714, without issue, 
 thus leaving the eventual Regency and his claims to the 
 throne to his cousin-german, the King's nephew, the Duke of 
 Orleans. 
 
 The Duke of Orleans was thoroughly unpopular : public 
 opinion, indeed, did not hesitate to accuse him of having 
 The Due poisoned all the princes who had stood between 
 
 d'Orleans. him and the throne. The King, for his part, 
 certainly believed in none of these abominations, any more 
 than in the current rumours concerning the incestuous loves of 
 the Due d'Orleans and the Duchesse de Berry. He imderstood 
 his nephew's character. " He is one who brags of crimes," 
 he said. But the profligate Philip was notoriously " Libertine," 
 and, on the other hand, the Protestants coimted upon him, no 
 less than the adversaries of the devout, and the enemies of 
 Mme. de Maintenon ; in short, every one felt that his acces- 
 sion would be that of a policy diametrically opposed to that of 
 the Great King. It is not to be wondered at, therefore, if 
 Louis did his best to bar the Duke's way to the throne ; by an 
 edict of July, 1714, he appointed the Due du Maine, the Comte 
 de Toulouse, and their posterity heirs to the throne failing 
 legitimate descendants of the King, and then, by a will of the 
 following August 2, he instituted a Council of Regency, of 
 which the Due d'Orleans was to be merely the President, and 
 confided the charge of the royal child to the Due du Maine. In 
 his heart Louis was not very firmly convinced that his last 
 wishes would be more effectually respected than those of his 
 grandfather and his father : " You wished to have it thus," he 
 wrote to the Due du Maine, " but know that, however great I 
 make you, you will be nothing after me, and it will be your 
 business to turn all that I have done for you to account — ^if you 
 can." And it was very soon evident that the Due du Maine 
 could not, 
 316 
 
SUNSET 
 
 At this time the King's health was visibly failing. Louis, 
 who had always had bad teeth, had always been " a prodigious 
 Last days of eater," and he ate no less prodigiously after he 
 Louis XIV. had lost them all : it was not until the close of 
 his life that he began to have a poor appetite. Now on August 9, 
 1715, it was noticed that he seemed very much exhausted after 
 following a stag in a little carriage which he drove himself. A 
 few days later he complained of sciatica in his leg ; black marks 
 soon appeared ; it was gangrene. Louis was seventy-six ; 
 having lived very nobly, he did not fail to die nobly, and to 
 remain a great king to the end. On August 24 he supped in 
 his dressing-gown, for the last time in public : "I noticed," 
 says Saint-Simon, " that he could only swallow liquids, and that 
 it distressed him to he looked at." On August 25 he dictated to 
 the Chancellor a codicil by which he added to M. du Maine's 
 other prerogatives that of the direction of the King's Household. 
 Then he received the last sacraments ; but death could not 
 subdue this temperament ; he lived for six days more, which 
 he employed very tranquilly in regulating his conscience, the 
 affairs of his family and those of the State, and in making a 
 little speech, very noble and regal in tone, to all about him. To 
 the courtiers he said : 
 
 Gentlemen, I ask your pardon for the bad example I have set you. 
 I have to thank you sincerely for the manner in which you have served 
 me, and the fidelity you have always shown to me. I ask you to give 
 the same zeal and the same devotion to my grandson which you have 
 given to me. He is a child who may have to suffer much. I hope you 
 will all work for union, and that should any one fail in this, you will seek 
 to call him back to his duty. I feel that I am allowing my feelings to 
 overcome me, and am causing you to do the same. I ask your pardon 
 for this. Farewell, gentlemen, I trust that you will sometimes remember 
 me. 
 
 Having heard the princesses lamenting in his cabinet, he 
 summoned them to his bedroom, told them they must not 
 weep so noisily, and bade them farewell in terms which Madame, 
 the shy Liselotte, to whom he spoke very gently, confessed had 
 nearly made her faint. He exhorted Cond6 and Conti to be 
 submissive and united. He talked for a long time alone with 
 the Due du Maine and the Comte de Toulouse. He was friendly 
 to the Due d'Orl^ans. He advised that the little Dauphin 
 
 817 
 
THE SEVENTEENTHCENTURY 
 
 should be taken to Vincennes, the air of which he considered 
 favourable to the health ; and, " shortly after, he remembered 
 that Cavoye, the Quartermaster of his Household, had never 
 arranged for the lodging of the Court at Vincennes, as the Court 
 had not been there for fifty years ; he showed a casket in which 
 a plan of the castle would be found." 
 
 Finally, having asked Mme. de Ventadour to bring the 
 future Louis XV to him, he gave his great-grandson certain 
 Louis XIV's counsels which were afterwards reproduced on a 
 covmsel to his placard and hung up in the child's bedroom : 
 successor. jyiy dear child, you are going to be the greatest king 
 
 on earth. Never forget what you owe to Gk)d. Do not imitate me by 
 making war, try to keep the peace with your neighbours, to comfort 
 your people as far as possible, which I have unfortunately not been 
 able to do, by reason of necessities of State. Always follow good advice, 
 and remember that you owe all you are to God. I give you Pere Le 
 TeUier as your confessor, foUow his counsels, and always remember your 
 obligations to Mme. de Ventadour.* 
 
 Death did not seem terrible to his great character. Madame 
 heard him say to Mme. de Maintenon : " I thought it would 
 be harder to die than this ; I assure you it is not a very terrible 
 business ; it does not seem to me difficult at all." He spoke 
 of his funeral and gave instructions as if he had merely been 
 going on a journey ; and in speaking of the Dauphin he even 
 said : " the young King." 
 
 Finally, on August 30, he lost consciousness. Then, towards 
 five o'clock in the evening, Mme. de Maintenon withdrew ; 
 Death of he had begged her to retire, because her presence 
 
 Louis XIV. moved him, and she did not wish to be a spectacle 
 for the Court at the moment when the death, of the King would 
 throw her back " into nonentity." She therefore went to her 
 own apartments, divided her furniture among her attendants, 
 and left for Saint-Cyr, never to leave it again. On the 31st, 
 about eleven o'clock in the evening, " the remedy of the late 
 Abbe Aignan," which had been applied at all hazards, recalled 
 the King to consciousness ; he repeated the prayers for the 
 dying in such a strong voice that it was heard above those of 
 the numerous ecclesiastics and all those who had come into the 
 
 " This last clause seems to indicate that it was Mme. de Ventadour, 
 the child's governess, who took down the King's last words. 
 318 
 
SUNSET 
 
 room. At the end of the prayers he recognized the Cardinal de 
 Rohan and said to him : " These are the last benefactions of the 
 Church." Rohan was the last person to whom the King spoke. 
 He repeated several times : Nunc et in hora mortis, and then 
 said : " O my God, come to my help, haste Thee to help me ! " 
 .These were his last words. He again became unconscious, lay 
 in his death agony all night, and expired on Sunday, September 1, 
 1716, at eight o'clock in the morning, aged seventy-seven years 
 less three days, after a reign of sixty-three years. 
 
 Works to Consult. Baudrillart, Philippe V et la Cour de France, 
 vol. i (1890) ; Boislisle, Le Grand Hiver et la Disette de 1700, in the 
 Revue des questions historiques (1003) ; Marquis de Courcy, La Coalition 
 de 1701 contre la France (1886) ; Fortescue, History of the British Army, 
 vol. i (1899) ; E. Hubert, Les Pays Bas espagnols et la Republique des 
 Provinces-Unies depuis la Paix de Munsier jusqu^au Traiti d^ Utrecht, 1648- 
 1713 (1907) ; Legrelle, La Diplomatic frangaise et la Succession d'Espagne 
 (1895-1900) ; Marquis de Vogue, Villars (1888), and the article in the 
 Correspondant (1904) ; Malplaquet et Denain (i802) ; O. Weber, Die Friede 
 von Utrecht (1891). 
 
 819 
 
CHAPTER Xn 
 THE KINGDOM UNDER LOUIS XIV 
 
 I. Central Government. II. Colbert. III. Colbert and finance ; 
 Fouquet. IV. Colbert and industry, commerce, and the Colonies. 
 V. Colbert and the Navy ; Seignday. VI. Provincial administra- 
 tion. VII. Estimate of Colbert. VIII. " Colbertism " after 
 Colbert. IX. The Clergy; The Nobility; The Officials; The 
 
 People. 
 
 THEORETICALLY— for in practice it was far from being 
 the case — the power of Louis XIV was absolute. In 
 law, the King of France was the sole source of all 
 authority, and everything had to be done in his name. The 
 only dispenser of justice, the judges were merely his repre- 
 Powers of the sentatives and delegates ; he caused whom he 
 Monarchy. would to be judged by whom he pleased, increased 
 the sentence if he felt so inclined (Fouquet) or condemned 
 without a sentence (Lauzun, Matthioli, Rohan). The sole 
 proprietor, all the possessions of his subjects belong to him ; 
 this was the opinion of the Sorbonne. Thus he had all rights, 
 like God Himself, of Whom he was the " living image " and 
 the delegate on earth, and to Whom alone he owed an account 
 of his actions ; to disobey him was a sin ; such was the doctrine 
 universally admitted, and adopted even by the Church ; in 
 1677, Bossuet wrote his Politique tirie de VEcriture Sainte 
 (Polity derived from Holy Scripture) to establish it. Louis XIV 
 governed with the help of various Councils and Secretaries of 
 State. 
 
 The first was the Conseil d'Etat, Conseil d'en haul, or 
 Conseil (Council of State, Higher Council, or simply Council), 
 which at the beginning of the reign was held on Sundays, 
 Wednesdays, and Thursdays, and, in addition, on two Mondays 
 320 
 
THE KINGDOM UNDER LOUIS XIV 
 
 in the month, from ten to twelve approximately, in the King's 
 apartments. Those who had seats at this Council were called 
 The King's Ministers of State : they were usually the Secre- 
 Councils. taries of State and the Controller-General of 
 
 Finance, but not necessarily so : Barbezieux, for instance, 
 appointed Minister for War on the death of his father, Louvois, 
 was never admitted to it, whereas Beauvilliers and Pomponne 
 (after 1691) were included without being Secretaries of State. 
 The Council decided great political affairs, diplomacy, war ; it 
 was somewhat like the Council of Ministers of to-day. On the 
 other hand, in the Conseil des Dipeches (Council of Dispatches), 
 only questions of administration were considered ; the Secre- 
 taries of State, standing, reported on the principal affairs of 
 their respective departments ; it was a sort of Council of the 
 Interior. The Conseil royal des Finances (Royal Council of 
 Finance), where the business was taxation, was generally held 
 on Tuesday and Saturday mornings. It was composed of the 
 Chancellor, the head of the Council of Finance (Villeroy, and 
 then Beauvilliers), of the Controller-General, and the two Coun- 
 cillors of State. 
 
 These were the Councils at which the King was regularly 
 present. At the Conseil PrivS (Privy Council), or des Parties, 
 or Grand Conseil — ^which played much the same part as our 
 Council of State and our Court of Appeal, but also gave a first 
 hearing to all the cases " evoked " by the Sovereign — ^his great 
 red arm-chair generally remained empty in front of the table 
 covered with a cloth of purple velvet, embroidered with golden 
 fleurs-de-lis, round which the Councillors, in black robes with 
 wide sleeves, sat on folding seats of black morocco leather, 
 presided over by the Chancellor, who sat to the left of the royal 
 chair. The Coimcil was composed (after 1673) of thirty Coun- 
 cillors who judged, and of over eighty Masters of Requests who 
 reported, a function much coveted, for the King often chose 
 his Intendants among these officials. 
 
 In addition to these four principal Councils, there were 
 others, in the nature of temporary commissions, like the War 
 Council, the Council of Commerce, the Council of Conscience, 
 which dealt with ecclesiastical affairs, etc. 
 
 However, the King was by no means bound to act upon the 
 
 X 321 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 advice of these Councils, and we must not suppose that 
 Louis XIV's government worked with the regularity of a 
 modem government. The Higher Council, for instance, was 
 held less and less frequently, and finally Louis decided matters 
 of moment in a iMe-d-tete with the respective Secretaries of State. 
 
 These were still, as in the Middle Ages, hardly more than 
 the " servants " of the sovereign. At the beginning of the 
 Secretaries of reign their names figured in the household accounts 
 State. side by side with those of the food controllers and 
 
 the castle attendants, and at Fontainebleau, for instance, they 
 had a right to the ordinary : two loaves, a quart of wine, on 
 non-fast days a piece of game and a pound of bacon, and on 
 fast days six carp and three pounds of butter. Thus it seemed 
 natural to every one that Louis XIV should treat them as 
 simple secretaries on occasion, and should demand services of a 
 private nature from Colbert or some other minister. Moreover, 
 as we know from the famous ebullitions of Saint-Simon and many 
 others, the King never employed the nobles in the Government, 
 the Due de Beauvilliers being almost the sole exception to this 
 rule. 
 
 There was no systematic division of affairs between the 
 Controller-General of Finances and the four Secretaries of State. 
 In the first place, one of them sometimes held several Secretary- 
 ships of State, as did Colbert, Louvois, and Chamillart. Besides, 
 several of them were to some extent co-Ministers of the Interior ; 
 in 1689 Poitou, Lyonnais, Roussillon, Lorraine, the Three 
 Bishoprics, and the conquered districts were under the jiu-is- 
 diction of Louvois, the Ile-de-France, " Soissonnais as far as 
 Noyon," Orleanais, and Touraine tinder that of Seignelay, and so 
 on. Finally they divided the various services more or less 
 according to their predilections ; Colbert, the Minister of 
 Finance, for instance, undertook Commerce, Industry, the 
 Colonies, the Navy, Public Works, Education, the Fine Arts, and 
 the Postal Service, to say nothing of several provinces with 
 their fortifications, and even the special war credits, which 
 should logically have fallen on Louvois. But he accepted these 
 overwhelming labours with joy. 
 
 322 
 
THE KINGDOM UNDER LOUIS XIV 
 
 II 
 
 Jean-Baptiste Colbert was born at Reims on August 29, 
 1619, of a tradesman's family. One day his father left his sign 
 _ „ , of the Long-Vitu and the sale of serge and camlet 
 
 to take up a modest function at the H6tel de Ville 
 of Paris ; thanks to this circumstance, and to the kinship of his 
 mother, Marie Pussort, with the Secretary of State, Le Tellier, 
 Jean-Baptiste entered the offices of the Ministry of War at the 
 age of twenty, about the year 1640. In 1648 he made a very 
 suitable marriage with Marie Charon, daughter of one of the 
 Conservators of the Loire (intendant des turcies et lev&es, i.e. the 
 piers and dikes). As Le Tellier's secretary he did not conceal from 
 his patron that he had " no esteem " for Mazarin. But when in 
 1651 he became Mazarin's man, he seems to have ceased to feel 
 any regard for Le Tellier. He was a model steward ; he applied 
 the same impassioned skill to increase the scandalous wealth of 
 that " poor M. le Cardinal," his master, which he was to employ 
 some years later in administering the kingdom of Louis XIV. 
 Hence the grateful Cardinal inserted in his will a bequest in the 
 following terms : "To Colbert the house in which he lives, 
 without the obligation of rendering any account, those who 
 would demand any such account from him to be disinherited ; 
 and I beg the King to make use of his services, as he is very 
 faithful." This advice Louis XIV did not neglect. 
 
 Colbert had a naturally sour countenance, hollow eyes, thick 
 black eyebrows, an austere appearance, and " savage and nega- 
 tive " manners. He was by no means amiable ; Mme. de 
 S^vigne calls him " The North," or " the surly Minister," and 
 Mme. Comuel, having one day obtained an interview with 
 him with great difficulty, was so exasperated by his silence 
 that she could not help exclaiming : " Monseigneur, at least 
 make a sign that you hear what I am saying." Yet this " man 
 of marble " had a weakness ; he wanted at any price to be 
 accepted as a descendant of the ancient Kings of Scotland, and 
 he had accordingly arranged for the discovery by accident in 
 one of the churches of Reims of a tombstone, bearing this 
 inscription in half-effaced Gothic characters : " Here lies the 
 valiant knight, Richard Colbert, called the Scot . . . 1300." 
 
 823 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 To this he took occasion to bring the Dukes of Chevreuse and 
 BeauvilKers, the husbands of his daughters, to kneel with him, 
 " repeating psalms and making his sons-in-law repeat them 
 very devoutly " ; in like manner he became furiously angry with 
 those who gave him to understand that, out of consideration 
 for him, his son would not be required to prove the quarterings 
 necessary for admission to the order of the Knights of Malta. 
 But in spite of his Scottish nobility, Colbert was ready for a 
 great many tasks, for, though not devoid of prejudices, neither 
 was he hampered by scruples. His wife was secretly engaged 
 to bring up the children of La Valli^re — ^which occasioned the 
 Great King to write to his Controller-General of Finances : 
 " My daughter de Blois has asked my leave to discard her bibs ; 
 I have consented " — and there was nothing undignified in such 
 an employment in those days. But Colbert readily made use of 
 Colbert's his authority in a thousand different ways, such 
 
 nepotism. as that of intimidating the judges who had to 
 
 pronounce in his own suits or those of his relatives, and he took 
 advantage of the facilities it offered him to amass a fortune, which 
 was estimated at over ten millions ; then he made one of his 
 sons, Seignelay, a Secretary of State for the Navy, and the 
 other, Ormoy-Blainville, a Superintendent of Buildings, of the 
 third a coadjutor of the Bishop of Rouen, of the fourth the 
 General of the Galleys at Malta, of the fifth the Abbe of Bonport, 
 of the sixth a Colonel ; of his three daughters, three Duchesses ; 
 of his three brothers, a Bishop, a Secretary of State, and a 
 Lieutenant-General ; and no doubt this was just the way in 
 which Mazarin, Richelieu, Lujmes, and Concini had behaved 
 before him ; but they had not made such a repellent parade of 
 honesty, nor had they adopted such treacherous means to hunt 
 down a Nicolas Fouquet, guilty of having enriched himself 
 precisely as they had done. 
 
 Thus Colbert had not a noble character, but he had a noble 
 passion ; he loved his work profoundly. He laboured for 
 fourteen hours a day with joy, to realize certain projects which 
 would, he thought, make the King, his master, the mightiest 
 monarch in the world ; and (if we except his own fortune) 
 nothing interested or touched him save in its bearing on this 
 enterprise. He encouraged art and letters, for instance, not 
 824 
 
THE KINGDOM UNDER LOUIS XIV 
 
 because he cared for them, but because he thought it seemLy 
 that art and letters should flourish under the sway of a great 
 prince. So too, he was a believer and a good CathoKc, but he 
 instructed one of his agents in Japan to " say, concernijig 
 religion, that the French have two sorts, one the same as that 
 of the Spaniards, the other the same as that of the Dutch ; " for 
 nothing, not even religion, was so close to his heart as the 
 trade of the kingdom. And since his impassioned efforts 
 tended to promote the greatness of France, it is only just that 
 Colbert, who was harsh to all, hated by the people, detested 
 by the courtiers, a dishonest financier who amassed a 
 scandalous fortune, should be praised by historians. 
 
 Methodical and rationalistic like his contemporaries, he had 
 conceived, starting from certain d priori ideas on the wealth of 
 Colbert's States (which, however, were false), a programme 
 
 theory ol he laboured to carry out in France in spite of 
 
 wealth. opposition. It is certain that the King's extrava- 
 
 gance caused his attempt to fail to some extent ; and as it is 
 evident that if Louis XIV had listened to Colbert he would have 
 sought to rule the world, not so much by force of arms as by that 
 of money, and that he would have laboured, either by ecorion^ 
 in finance or by the protection accorded to agriculture, trade, and 
 industry, to possess the richest kingdom, and so the most power- 
 ful kingdom in the world, it seems lamentable that Louis XIV 
 should not have followed the principles of his Minister more 
 assiduously, and thus worked for order and economy. But it is 
 unjust to overwhelm him (as his detractors have always done) 
 by holding him alone responsible for Colbert's comparative 
 failure. And it is also an unsound method of decrying the Great / 
 King, to compare the glorious and ruined France of 1715 to the 
 rich, commercial France of Colbert's dreams, for that France 
 never existed, after all, and we do not even know if it was 
 possible in those days. There is, in fact, nothing to prove that 
 even if Colbert had been free to carry out his projects just as he 
 wished, he would have succeeded ; indeed, it seems more prob- 
 able that he would have failed. Throughout the country he 
 met with unanimous opposition, perhaps because his projects 
 on the Dutch model were ill suited to the France of his time, 
 and that he claimed power to regulate arbitrarily too many 
 
 825 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 things which among us Frenchmen will only flourish in liberty. 
 As to the Dutch war which ruined so many of his plans, was it 
 not he himself who desired, invited, and provoked it ? Finally, 
 if Colbert failed, it was to a great extent his own fault ; and it 
 was not so much the King as the entire kingdom, nobles, magis- 
 trates, citizens, tradesmen, workmen, and peasants who resisted 
 his great effort. 
 
 Ill 
 
 " If out of one hundred crowns spent by the King, forty were 
 effectively used in his service, he might consider himself well 
 served," wrote the Venetian ambassador, Angelo Correr, about the 
 year 1642. Richelieu had died leaving the finances in a deplorr 
 able condition, Mazarin aggravated theh- disorder by confiding 
 them to an over-amiable financier, who could refuse nothing to 
 any one (and least of all to himself). 
 
 This Nicolas Fouquet, bom in 1615, came of a good legal 
 family. An advocate at sixteen, a Councillor in the Parliament 
 of Metz at nineteen. Master of Requests, Intendant 
 of the Army of the North, then in Dauphine, then 
 in Catalonia, then in the Army of Flanders, then in Paris (1648), 
 he remained faithful throughout the first Fronde to Mazarin, 
 who authorized him to purchase the office of Solicitor-General 
 to the Parliament of Paris. He supported the Court ably during 
 the troubles, and employed himself very successfully in safe- 
 guarding the little profits of " poor M. le Cardinal " during 
 Mazarin's exile at Bruhl. As a reward for his services, after the 
 death of La Vieuville in January, 1653, he was appointed 
 Superintendent of Finances jointly with Servien (February), 
 and he at once distinguished himself in his office by his extreme 
 dexterity in filling the Government coffers , this was the most 
 essential duty of the moment, and it was a difficult matter, for 
 no one would risk lending money to the King, even at an ex- 
 orbitant rate of interest. But Fouquet had imagination, and he 
 manoeuvred wonderfully ; he generally acted in his own name, 
 so that at the end he no longer kept the accounts of his private 
 fortune and the budget of the State apart. 
 
 He was very rich personally and by his second marriage in 
 826 
 
THE KINGDOM UNDER LOUIS XIV 
 
 February, 1651, with Marie-Madeleine de Castille, who belonged 
 to one of the wealthiest financial families of France, allied to the 
 great names of the nobility and the magistrature. But Fouquet 
 was one of those sumptuous individuals who always spend more 
 money than they possess. He was an attractive person, with a 
 nervous, intelligent face, " a friend of the arts, a friend of letters, 
 a friend of women." He wrote occasional verses ; protected 
 Scarron, La Fontaine, Benserade, Boisrobert, Bombault, Charles 
 P&rault, and Corneille. For his estate of Vaux-le-Vicomte, 
 which was already in progress in 1640, but which dates mainly 
 from 1656, he wisely chose Le Vau as architect, Le N6tre as 
 gardener, and Le Brun as painter and decorator. His cook was 
 called Vatel. He was interested in manuscripts and medals, 
 marbles and tapestries, pictures and jewels. He had a collection 
 of orange-trees which the King appropriated for Versailles after 
 his condemnation. In short, everybody was attracted by his 
 gracious manners, his liberality, his cordiality, his " smiling and 
 intelligent aspect," and he encountered as few obdurate beauties 
 as a Minister of Finance witty enough to delight Mme. de 
 S^vigne was likely to encounter. 
 
 Colbert envied him for all these things ; as early as 1659 
 he denounced him to Mazarin in a secret note ; but at that time 
 Colbert's Fouquet was not much afraid of the Sieur Colbert, 
 
 enmity to On the death of the Cardinal, however, he did not 
 
 Fouguet. take the young King seriously, and this gross 
 
 error of psychology caused his ruin ; he failed to see that his 
 luxury, his successes, his brilliance were insupportable to one 
 who aspired to be the only star ; on the contrary, he expected 
 to be called to office. The cunning Colbert, for his part, pur- 
 posely exaggerated his r61e of humble clerk, dressed himseli 
 modestly as a simple citizen in a black cloak, a black doublet, a 
 point lace collar, and a plain hat. Mme. de Sevigne called 
 him " Little One." But daily after the Council " Little One " 
 spoke to the King of the Minister's fantastic accounts. 
 
 Moreover, Fouquet was very maladroit. By his efforts to 
 win the good graces of La VaUiIre, he caused it to be supposed 
 that he was the lover of the King's mistress, though he was not, 
 and did not desire to be. Then he sold his office of Attorney- 
 General, which had ensured the support of the Parliament. 
 
 827 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Finally, in August, he tried to pay court to the King by receiving 
 him at Vaux with unprecedented splendoiu* ; when Louis saw 
 this domain which had cost eighteen milhons, to make room 
 for which three villages had been razed, the marvels of which 
 Mile, de Scud&y described in ClSlie, and beside which the royal 
 castles, Fontainebleau and Saint-Germain, seemed mere shanties, 
 the King was so outraged that he had thoughts of arresting his 
 Superintendent on the spot. But Colbert had depicted Fouquet's 
 conspiracy in terrible colours : " He intended to make himself 
 Duke of Brittany and lord of the adjacent isles," declared the 
 young Louis subsequently, " he won over every one by his pro- 
 fusion ; I had no one left whom I could trust." And it is true, 
 indeed, that the Minister had tried to make a party of his own 
 by pensioning a great many people, including Hugo de Lionne, 
 that he had, further, fortified Belle-Isle which belonged to him, 
 and finally, that he had drawn up a plan of campaign which was 
 found, corrected by his own hand, and that consequently he had 
 proposed to offer armed resistance and provoke some new 
 Fronde should he be disgraced. But it was above all necessary, 
 to satisfy Colbert's hate, that the King should think the most 
 minute precautions necessary for the arrest of Fouquet; he 
 went so far as to send battleships to cruise about in view of 
 Belle-Isle. Finally, when all was ready, on September 5, 1661, 
 d'Artagnan, the Captain of the Musketeers, suddenly seized 
 the Superintendent at Nantes, put him into, a coach, and 
 escorted by one hundred soldiers took him to Angers, where 
 he shut him up in the castle. 
 
 Adopting Richelieu's methods, the King had the prisoner 
 tried, not by his legal judges, but by special commissaries. The 
 Trial of Court of Justice formed to inquire into the 
 
 Fonquet. " abuses and malversations committed in the 
 
 finances since the year 1635 " was not very severe to farmers of 
 revenue, provided they had stolen enough to enrich themselves, 
 and were able to pay ransom ; and thus over 100 millions 
 returned to the exchequer. But the suit they brought against 
 Fouquet lasted three years. The accused made an admirable 
 defence ; he affected to consider himself " the prey of the Sieur 
 Colbert," to whom he obstinately referred as " my prosecutor," 
 and he was warmly supported by his family and his friends, 
 828 
 
THE KINGDOM UNDER LOUIS XIV 
 
 many of whom remained very faithful to him. But his offences 
 were undeniable, and then Colbert caused the judges who seemed 
 favourable to the man whose death he desired to be changed 
 and disgraced, after which he calmly falsified the documents 
 bearing on the case. In spite of everything, the Superintendent 
 was not condemned to pay the capital penalty, but only to 
 banishment ; it was the King himself who commuted this 
 punishment, which he thought too mild, into that of life-long 
 detention at Pignerol (December, 1664). 
 
 The Superintendent had been replaced in the State by a 
 Council of Finance in which Colbert sat with the title of Inten<iant 
 of Finances until 1665, when he became Controller-General. 
 Fouquet had sometimes been obliged to borrow at the rate of 
 from 15 to 18 per cent. ; to liquidate the situation, Colbert 
 simply suppressed a good shaje of the Government securities. 
 To tell the truth, the victims of this iniquitous measure were not 
 very interesting ; they were chiefly financiers, shady specu- 
 lators ; but there were some honest folk among them. Some 
 raised an outcry ; they were sent to the Bastille ; this calmed 
 the others. 
 
 The principal tax at this period was the faille, from which 
 not only the clergy and the nobility, but a large number of 
 mi, « ip 11 » officers of justice, finance, and municipalities — in 
 short, a host of privileged persons, all of consider- 
 able means- -were exempt. In the districts where the States 
 which voted \^,he taxes had been retained, the sum total of the 
 taille was less than in the regions of the Elections ; moreover, 
 the taille was often real there — that is to say, assessed on real 
 estate ; finally, it was the States themselves which distributed 
 it as equitably as possible among the parishes, and collected it. 
 The regions of the Elections were not so fortunate ; as they were 
 taxed directly by the King, they had always to pay a much 
 larger sum ; and, further, here the taille was personal — ^that is 
 to say, it was assessed on the approximate income of the tax- 
 payers as arbitrarily computed by the authorities. The manner 
 in which the personal taille was collected was as follows : each 
 Finance Office divided the sum it was its duty to recover between 
 the Elections within its jurisdiction (just as now the Conseil 
 Gin&ral divides it among the arrondissements) ; the Elections, 
 
 829 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 in their turn, made a further distribution among the parishes 
 (somewhat after the manner of our modern Conseil d'arrondisse- 
 ment (District Council)) ; finally, in each parish certain inhabi- 
 tants in rotation, the collectors, taxed each individual inhabitant. 
 The collectors, detested by the whole village, were further 
 responsible for their parishes, and were obliged to pay for the 
 insolvent — ^in other words, ruin themselves or go to prison 
 (sometimes both). This explains why each peasant awaited 
 with terror the moment when it would be his turn to perform 
 this dangerous duty.* 
 
 The gabelle was the tax on salt. In most of the provinces 
 the State had a monopoly of salt, which it sold at an exorbitant 
 The price (as it now sells matches), while compelling its 
 
 "Gabelle." subjects to purchase a minimum quantity, which 
 was called duty-salt. Like the taille, this tax was unequally 
 imposed, for all France did not pay the same price for salt : the 
 districts of the grandes gamelles, lying approximately between 
 the Somme and the Loire, paid from 35 to 40 livres for a " peck " 
 of 100 pounds ; those of the petites gamelles (the basin of the 
 Mediterranean) from 6 to 30 livres ; the regions between the 
 Loire and the Garonne had bought themselves off (rMimS) once 
 for all ; those of the north, of the basin of the Garonne, of 
 Brittany, and of Alsace, were exempt. The King did not him- 
 self exploit his monopoly ; he farmed it out to a syndicate of 
 financiers, and the people hated these farmers and their em- 
 ployees, the gdpians, as these excisemen were then called, from 
 the name "of a small bird of prey. No one was allowed, for 
 instance, to salt pork or cod-fish with the duty-salt, which the 
 law restricted to use in the kitchen, nor might the salt destined 
 
 * The personal taille had at least this advantage, that the farmers of 
 the nobles and the clergy paid it ; it was probably for this reason that 
 the Encyclopadia of the eighteenth century, compiled by persons of the 
 privileged classes, attacked it so bitterly. Now, in default of adequate 
 monographs, too often even now all discussion of the finances of the 
 ancien rigime is based upon information given by the Encyclopaedia. It 
 would seem that the injustice of the incidence of the taille has been greatly 
 exaggerated ; the Intendant was there to check fraud, and as he had no 
 local attachments he could do so freely ; further, as the collectors were 
 taken by roster, the assertions as to their venality and vindictiveness 
 seem a priori excessive. 
 830 
 
THE KINGDOM UNDER LOUIS XIV 
 
 to preserve meat or fish be used in cooking, nor salt water be 
 given to cattle to drink ; this gave occasion for endless petty 
 vexations ; on the pretext of inspecting, the hated gdpian 
 would have the bread-bin and the salt-box opened, and often 
 took advantage of the peasant's simplicity. On the other 
 hand, salt-smuggling (faux-saunage) was comparatively easy, 
 and the penalties by which it was repressed were lighter than 
 those by which other smuggling was punished : the salt-smug- 
 glers, indeed, were not condemned to death unless they were old 
 offenders or were taken with arms in their hands. Salt accord- 
 ingly passed secretly in large quantities from the exempted or 
 redeemed districts unto those of the gabelle, and thus smuggling 
 sensibly modified the rigour of the law. 
 
 The customs {traites) were not paid only at the frontiers of 
 the State. The kingdom was divided into districts where the 
 _ , excise duties (aides) were in force — ^these districts 
 
 formed a kernel the shell of which comprised Nor- 
 mandy, Picardy, Champagne, Nivernais, Lyonnais, Bourbonnais, 
 Berry, Poitou, Aunis and Saintonge, Anjou and Maine — and the 
 districts not subject to them, from which the King derived dues 
 analogous to the excise duties, and varying according to the 
 region. In the provinces subject to excise the dues were no 
 more uniform than in the districts not so subject, and thus the 
 kingdom was intersected by lines of customs the tariffs of which 
 varied infinitely, and studded with local toll-systems ; there 
 were the droit de Septembre, the great and small pied fourchS, 
 the vingtain de caresme, the chemins obliques, the trap bu, the 
 traits d'Arzac, the droit de Manicault, the tripas de la Loire; 
 in Languedoc, the patente du Languedoc and the denier de 
 Saint-AndrS ; in Guyenne, the branche de cypres and the guillage ; 
 at Aries, the Hard du Baron ; at Marseilles, the table de mer ; 
 in Roussillon, the tarif Catalan, etc. In short, goods were held 
 up incessantly, to the great injury of trade. 
 
 The aides (excise duties) were indirect taxes, chiefly dues 
 upon drink. Like the customs, they varied greatly. 
 " Aides " and Finally, the last legal revenue of the Treasury 
 " Domaine." was that of the domaine ; this was the name given to 
 the King's estates and his feudal and seignorial rights. In 1661 
 the domaine was mortgaged, sold, and alienated to a great extent. 
 
 831 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Like many others before him (Fouquet, for instance), Colbert 
 was alive to the imperfection and injustice of this financial 
 system. But he had not the tender and Utopian spirit of a 
 Vauban, and he never dreamt of transforming it ; he merely 
 undertook to organize it practically as well as he could. 
 
 The gabelles, traites, aides, and the domaine were farmed by 
 companies of financiers. It seems evident that if the taxes had 
 Farming of been collected directly by the royal agents, the 
 the revenues. King and his subjects would have benefited by 
 the enormous sums which enriched the farmers. But we must 
 remember that the administration of the farms was very 
 superior to that of the State ; the farmers made very careful tours 
 of inspection, and the modem system of indirect taxation and 
 of State property has retained the greater part of their technical 
 organization. Colbert therefore did not attempt to abolish the 
 farming of revenue ; he merely endeavoured to concentrate as 
 many leases as possible in the hands of a single company, because 
 he hoped that the more important the company became, the 
 less it would steal ; that, further, it might act as the banker of 
 the State, and that it would have a more stable, better paid, and 
 more carefully graded staff, one in every respect superior. More- 
 over, Colbert struggled with all his strength against abuses in 
 detail, exhorting the Intendants unceasingly to repress the 
 frequently dishonest practices of the farmers' clerks. Then he 
 tried to codify the financial regulations, to simplify them, and 
 make them uniform. He made some improvement in the dis- 
 order of the excise. He had a dream of suppressing the customs 
 (but it was only a dream). Finally, he reconstituted the domaine 
 to a great extent by arbitrary purchase at low prices to the 
 detriment of the holders of the alienated portions, and he re- 
 formed the administration of the rivers and forests by an 
 admirable decree. Unfortunately many of his plans were 
 stopped by the Dutch war (which he fui'thered) and by tha vast 
 increase in public expenditure resulting therefrom. 
 
 Louis XIV was less interested in finance than in war or 
 politics ; in his heart he was of opinion that money is not a 
 matter for a gentleman. True, he answered " Yes " courageously 
 when Colbert asked if he should send him some wearisome 
 detailed report ; but this was because he meant to be master, 
 382 
 
THE KINGDOM UNDER LOUIS XIV 
 
 and to appear so in everything, over Colbert as over othei-s : 
 in practice he relied a good deal on his Controller-General of 
 Finances. " As you think best," he would frequently write on 
 the margin of reports, or " I order you to do what you think will 
 be most advantageous." And he was very grateful to his great 
 Colbert. He remunerated him by an annual salary of over 
 100,000 livres, equal perhaps to from 400,000 to 500,000 francs 
 of modern money, by 400,000 livres of gratuities, by 1,400,000 
 livres of dowry to his daughter Mortemart. He encouraged and 
 thanked him incessantly with a charming and unvarying grace. 
 But he treated him rather like one of those devoted and clever 
 old servants, who grumble a good deal, and whose lamentations 
 need not be taken too seriously. 
 
 Colbert, indeed, dared to tell the King some very plain 
 truths. He disapproved of the ruinous reviews of troops to 
 Colbert's which Louis XIV loved to invite ladies ; in this 
 
 admonitions connection he wrote boldly : " Your Majesty 
 to the King. ought to know . . . that a lampoon has been 
 placarded in Paris containing these words : ' Louis XIV will 
 present the great puppet-show in the plains of Moret.' " And 
 again, in reference to the building at Versailles, which he could 
 not endure : " This house will tend far more to the pleasure and 
 amusement of Your Majesty than to your glory " (1663) ; and : 
 "It has seemed to me that Your Majesty was beginning to 
 prefer your pleasures and amusements to everything " (1666). 
 He writes in the same strain on July 22, 1666 : 
 
 It is well to save flvepence on unnecessary things and to pour out 
 millions when it is a question of your glory. I declare to Yoiur Majesty 
 that, for my own part, a useless meal which costs one thousand crowns 
 distresses me beyond measure ; yet, when it is a question of millions of 
 gold for Poland, I would sell aU I have ; I would mortgage my wife 
 and my children ; I would go on foot all my life to provide it, were this 
 necessary. 
 
 Your Majesty must please excuse this little outburst. 
 
 All these letters date from the first years of the reign, but a 
 memorandum of 1680 and later notes show that to the end of 
 his life the Minister addressed these necessary remonstrances to 
 his master with praiseworthy frankness. 
 
 As to Louis XIV, he bore Colbert's insinuations patiently, 
 
 833 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 and replied with grace and civility, or with one of those delicate 
 flatteries of which he was a past-master ; but afterwards he 
 pressed his demands inexorably ; some of these were occasioned 
 by the war, and these were the most considerable ; but others 
 were in connection with the expenses of the Court. It has been 
 calculated (very approximately) that the annual budget of 
 expenditure under Louis XIV amounted on an average to about 
 600 million francs of the present day ; 150 being used for the 
 war and the navy, and ninety perhaps for secret expenses, for 
 the King's Household, for buildings, for entertainments (these 
 last items, which were moderate at the beginning of the reign, 
 increased steadily). In 1670 Colbert was already complaining 
 that the expenditure exceeded the revenue by five millions ; in 
 spite of which, Mme. de Montespan lost 4,000,000 livres at the 
 gaming-table on March 6 ; it is true that she won back five the 
 same night. The war with Holland increased the deficit, and 
 the distracted Minister was obliged to have recourse to all the 
 deplorable expedients of his predecessors : loans, creation of 
 offices, new taxes, sale of the domaine, etc. In spite of every- 
 thing, the deficit in 1680 was nearly forty-eight millions. And 
 Bussy-Rabutin relates that in January, 1680, at the marriage of 
 the Prince de Conti and Mile, de Blois " there were seven 
 hundred dishes at one table alone, which were served as five 
 courses — ^that is to say, 140 dishes for each course." This 
 prodigality on the part of the King was not the sole cause of 
 Colbert's (comparative) failure ; but it must be admitted that 
 it contributed thereto. 
 
 IV 
 
 Colbert beUeved that a State enriches itself (and so becomes 
 powerful) by keeping its own money and attracting that of 
 Colbert's others, and that to this end it is necessary : (1) 
 
 financial That the State should manufacture all it requires 
 
 system. itself, without buying anything abroad, so that it 
 
 may not allow its current coin to leave the country ; (2) That 
 it should manufacture surplus products in order to exchange 
 them for the gold of other nations. In consequence, Colbert's 
 system was to tax all imports heavily, and at the same time to 
 834 
 
THE KINGDOM UNDER LOUIS XIV 
 
 stimulate French industrial activity, perfecting it by the means 
 he approved, means which were traditional in France — that is to 
 say, by tyrannical regulations. At first the results of this 
 system were very good. Unfortunately Colbert at once 
 exaggerated it. And his successors, by further exaggerating 
 Colbertism, injured industry, trade, and agriculture almost as 
 much as did war. 
 
 In the beginning, as he did not consider French industry 
 sufficiently strong to be self-supporting as yet, Colbert favoured 
 a certain measure of Free Trade. But as soon as he was able to 
 record the " estabUshment of various manufactories in the 
 kingdom," he caused an edict to be issued fixing such a high 
 tariff that he practically closed France to foreign imports (1667). 
 Holland retorted by putting high duties on French products, 
 and the tariff-war which ensued brought about the war of 1672, 
 which initiated the ruin of French finance. At the Peace of 
 Nimeguen, Louis XIV was obliged to renounce the tariff of 1667, 
 and this clause, which drove Colbert to despair, was apparently 
 of happy augury for France. 
 
 Colbert's Protection policy inflicted the gravest injury upon 
 agriculture, which was on the whole the most important industry 
 of the kingdom. True, the Minister endeavoured to encourage 
 certain branches, such as the culture of the mulberry-tree ; he 
 ha,d pines planted in Gascony ; he established horse-breeding 
 centres. But in 1664 he had imposed a heavy export duty on 
 com, in the hope of averting famines ; and thus, deprived of any 
 outlet, corn remained at a very low price, save in certain years 
 when the crops were bad, a consummation the peasant finally 
 wished for with his whole heart. Further, in response to the 
 tariff of 1667, all agricultural products, notably wine and spirits, 
 which were the principal exports of France, were heavily taxed 
 abroad. 
 
 In the towns, the majority of crafts were not free, but close — 
 that is to say, that nearly all artisans and tradesmen belonged to 
 Th Ouild corporations composed of masters, journeymen, 
 and apprentices in fixed numbers. The drawback 
 to these privileged corporations was that they encouraged 
 routine and prevented improvement. For instance, as the 
 number of drapers was fixed, and as the public could not buy 
 
 335 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 cloth anywhere but in their shops, there was no reason why the 
 drapers should have tried to make cloth better and cheaper. 
 On the other hand, the corporations had one great advantage : 
 they ensured the perfection of French workmanship and French 
 taste. Moreover, the monarchy had circumvented the difficulty 
 by the invention of royal factories : the manufacturer who had 
 the right to inscribe this title over his door escaped the juris- 
 diction of his corporation, and henceforth was controlled only 
 by the requisitions of the H&tel. 
 
 Colbert, reviving the efforts of Henri IV and Sully with 
 increased ardour, subsidized hundreds of factories, lavished the 
 Industries title of royal factories upon them, granted them 
 
 created by temporary monopolies, found customers for them, 
 Colbert. and bought their products. In 1662 he installed 
 
 the famous factory for the manufacture of Crown furnitvu-e in 
 the Hotel des Gobelins, under the direction of Le Brun. In 
 1664 a citizen of Paris, Hinard, founded, with his help, the Beau- 
 vais tapestry factory. In 1665 Josse van Robais of Middel- 
 burg, invited to France by him, created the manufacture of 
 cloth at Abbeville. At Aubusson, he encouraged the corpora- 
 tion of carpet-makers. At Chaillot, he reorganized the factory 
 of La Savonnerie. At Alengon, Chantilly, Sedan, Gisors, Aiurillac, 
 privileged lace workshops, at Saint-Gobain and Cirey, looking- 
 glass factories, at Saint-Etienne, a gun-foundry, were established. 
 For the Minister intended that France should learn to make all 
 the most renowned products of other nations : the fine cloths 
 of Holland, the laces and mirrors of Venice, the tapestries of 
 Flanders, the steel of England, the tar of Sweden, the tin of 
 Germany. To this end he caused the French ambassadors to 
 recruit the most skilful workpeople in foreign countries ; he 
 established them in the kingdom, and facilitated their naturaliza- 
 tion ; thus he attracted the artisans of Faenza, who founded the 
 potteries at Nevers; the six Venetian and the twenty-two 
 Flemish women who taught the women of Reims to make 
 Venetian and Flemish point ; the workmen from Murano, who 
 taught French workmen to blow glass artistically, etc. Finally, 
 he worked successfully, as we may imagine, to " disgust " those 
 subjects of the King who persisted in placing their orders beyond 
 the frontiers, instead of supporting national industry, 
 336 
 
THE KINGDOM UNDER LOUIS XIV 
 
 It would be unjust to say that Colbert's splendid effort was 
 unsuccessful ; the prestige of French industry in the eighteenth 
 Arbitrary century sufficiently proves the contrary. But its 
 
 restrictions on success was partial. And this was primarily the 
 industry. fault of the kingdom : the peasants, conservative 
 
 and distrustful, refused to enrol themselves in the factories, nor 
 would the municipalities concern themselves with the fate of the 
 new industries which the Minister was creating among them. 
 But it was also the fault of Colbert himself, who wished to make 
 the people happy logically and in their own despite. He inter- 
 vened despotically in private enterprises, and imposed prescrip- 
 tions contrary to the taste and habits of the population by force. 
 Thus at Chevreuse, where, thinking the ribbon factory did not 
 flourish because the workpeople did not work enough, he pro- 
 hibited publicans from selling food and drink to them, save for 
 one hour during the day. His regulations of output would have 
 been beneficial in ensuring the quality of work, but their harass- 
 ing minuteness tended to check production ; an edict of August, 
 1669, for instance, on the preparation of stuffs, laid it down that 
 shearers were not to use any grease but lard, and that they were 
 not " to use teasels to tease the said cloths and serges, nor to 
 keep them in their houses," but only " thistles, under penalty of 
 a fine of 12 livres for each infringement." In vain did sellers 
 and buyers claim more liberty and ask for changes ; Colbert 
 dealt severely with " products which did not conform to 
 regulations," as he said, regardless of remonstrances, and his 
 tyranny was only tempered by the fact that three-quarters of 
 the magistrates would not carry out the excessively harsh 
 measures he promulgated. 
 
 He laboured for trade as for industry with admirable zeal 
 and unfortun^ate dogmatism. 
 
 The trading companies founded by his predecessors. Sully 
 and Richelieu, had failed disastrously. But he had before his 
 Trading eyes the example of the flourishing Dutch East 
 
 Companies. India Company, and, further, he dwelt with de- 
 light on the idea of all French traders duly enrolled in great 
 societies, each of which should methodically exploit its special 
 region of the world, and all of which should be dependent on the 
 
 Y 887 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 King and his Minister. Accordingly, in 1664, he created and 
 very skilfully floated the French East India Company, which 
 was privileged to traffic on the ocean from the Cape of Good 
 Hope to the Straits of Magellan, with the island of Madagascar 
 as its centre ; an Academician, Fran9ois Charpentier, composed 
 the prospectus, and the crowd was informed with great circum- 
 stance that the King, the Queen, the Dauphin, the Princes of 
 the Blood, and the sovereign Courts were eagerly compet'ng for 
 the shares. The advertisement fell flat ; the public thought the 
 Government was preparing some new snare akin to the many it 
 had already seen ; the recent reduction in Government securities 
 was not calculated to inspire confidence — as a whole, it pru- 
 dently refrained from purchase. Even at this period French 
 capital was timid ; the peaceful ambition of the citizen was to 
 retire from business as soon as he had gained a small competence, 
 and to buy some municipal or other post, which would entitle 
 him to the respect of his neighbours. To find the capital 
 necessary for the working of the Company, it became necessary 
 to exact subscriptions from the great parhamentary capitalists. 
 Naturally these proceedings did not increase the popularity of 
 the French East India Company. It was in vain that Colbert 
 caused a fictitious dividend to be paid in 1675. Seven years 
 later he had to confess himself beaten ; the King withdrew its 
 charter from the moribund enterprise. 
 
 All the great trading companies Colbert persisted in founding 
 failed in like manner. The West India Company succumbed 
 in 1674, after having swallowed up 3,523,000 livres in ten years. 
 The Companies of Senegal, Guinea, the Levant, the Pyrenees, 
 and the North had no better success. It was perhaps because 
 they prevented all private initiative ; the French have never 
 taken kindly to this system. But the too logical Colbert could 
 not believe that what was successful in Holland might not be 
 suitable for his own coimtry. 
 
 Nevertheless, here again his effort was not altogether sterile. 
 He greatly improved the roads and waterways of the kingdom : 
 Improvement the canal from Orleans to Montargis, that from 
 o! Trade Saint-Omer to Calais, and, above all, the Canal du 
 
 Routes. Midi (Southern Canal), constructed by Riquet from 
 
 1666 to 1681. The rivers, which were made navigable and freed 
 338 
 
THE KINGDOM UNDER LOUIS XIV 
 
 from a large number of tolls, bore to Marseilles, Nantes, Le 
 Havre, and Dieppe the cloth, wines, and silks of France, and 
 there French merchant vessels, which had increased in numbers, 
 were loaded to take them to Spain, England, Holland, and 
 Sweden, Then, in March, 1673, the great commercial ordinance 
 appeared, the code which was law until the end of the ancien 
 rSgime. Finally, Colbert was passionately interested in the 
 development of the colonies. 
 
 Until the Treaty of Utrecht, in 1713, they were immense, 
 embracing nearly the whole of North America (Newfoundland, 
 The French Canada, Acadia, Louisiana, discovered by the 
 Colonies. heroic Cavelier de la Salle from 1673 to 1683), a 
 
 good share of the Antilles, Guiana, Senegal, Madagascar, Hin- 
 dustan. The two Companies of the Indies had received sovereign 
 powers in their domains ; they governed, judged, and declared 
 war on the natives at their pleasure. After their failm-e the 
 King took over the direct administration, and Colbert unfortu- 
 nately set up a system modelled on that of the metropolis, with 
 governors and intendants who were not allowed to decide any- 
 thing of importance without consulting him. But he did his best 
 to foster the development of the colonies, their commercial pros- 
 perity, and their population. " We are getting ready the 150 girls, 
 the brood mares, stallions, and sheep to be sent to Canada," he 
 wrote one day ; and after the arrival of such a cargo soldiers were 
 given a week in which to get married ; finally, those who had no 
 children were fined. 
 
 Louis XIV took httle interest in naval operations. In spite 
 of Colbert's entreaties, it was not until July, 1680, that he made 
 up his mind to go to Dunkirk ; he came back 
 filled with wondering admiration after seeing one 
 of his battleships manoeuvre. But : " I considered that, as the 
 interest of the State forbids a king to expose himself to the 
 chances of the sea, I should be obliged to entrust my lieutenants 
 with the entire care of my effectives, and should be unable to act 
 on my own initiative," he wrote on one occasion; and it is 
 evident that the expenses necessitated by the upkeep of this 
 fleet that he could never command, never see in action, and 
 
 839 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 never pass in review before a crowd of ladies, after the manner of 
 Louvois' splendid regiments, were very irksome to him. One day 
 in 1666 Colbert urged on the King the necessity of constructing 
 six new ships : " At the very time when Your Majesty was 
 telling me that this was so essential to your glory that we ought 
 to take the very bread out of our mouths to provide the funds," 
 he adds, " Your Majesty spent 200,0000 livres of ready money 
 on the journey to Versailles — ^that is to say, 13,000 pistoles for 
 the gambling expenses of yourself and the Queen, and 50,000 
 livres on banquets." This lack of interest on the King's part 
 makes the Minister's energy all the more creditable. 
 
 At the time of Louis XIV's accession the ports were in a 
 deplorable condition and the arsenals empty ; the fleet created 
 by Richelieu had disappeared, and the disbanded crews were 
 serving foreign governments : a third of Admiral de Ruyter's 
 effectives were Frenchmen. Colbert set to work in 1665, and 
 after 1669 he. had the help of his son Seign,elay. At first the 
 young man, who was eighteen, seemed only anxious to get 
 as much pleasure as his father's position enabled him to enjoy ; 
 but M. Colbert senior was not the man to put up with such a 
 manner of living ; Seignelay was taken to task severely, and 
 began to work in earnest. In temperament Colbert's son was no 
 less strongly individual than his rival, the son of Le Tellier ; 
 presumptuous and violent as Louvois himself, " audacious in the 
 extreme," " he dared everything " (Voltaire), and even " showed 
 civility haughtily." But " he had all the qualities of a great 
 Minister of State," and after the death of his father he carried 
 on Colbert's work worthily ; it was during his ministry that 
 Louis XIV's navy was at its apogee, and the French squadrons 
 and ports were the first in Europe. 
 
 Ships of the line were classified according to the number of 
 their guns ; if they carried from 74 to 120, they were of the first 
 Xypes of class, and so on down to the fifth class. The fast 
 
 vessels. frigates had rarely more than forty guns. Mer- 
 
 chant vessels such as transport-boats, corvettes, schooners, and 
 the large brigs might be equipped for war. Bomb-ketches were 
 first used in 1682, at the bombardment of Algiers ; before the 
 time of theu- inventor, Renaud d'Eli9agaray, known as " little 
 Renaud," no one had supposed that mortars could be 
 340 
 
THE KINGDOM UNDER LOUIS XIV 
 
 established anywhere but on land. Indeed, these vessels, 
 built for two or three rows of guns, too round and too 
 massive, with some imposing figure in gilded wood at the 
 bowsprit, and a three-decked poop loaded with rich and heavy 
 carving, were cumbrous and slow, in spite of their compli- 
 cated rig. Their names were the Terrible, the Mutine, the 
 Capricieux, and the Royal-Louis. 
 
 For the recruiting of crews Colbert organized naval enlist- 
 ment {inscription maritime) (1669 and 1673). But seafaring 
 Naval folk detested this kind of regular military service, 
 
 enlistment. and had recourse to every kind of trick to avoid it. 
 Indeed, to secure the required number of sailors it became 
 necessary to revert to the ancient press-gang system — that is to 
 say, to blockade some port from time to time, and ship by 
 force all the sailors surprised there. 
 
 The galleys formed but an insignificant section of the fleet, 
 and were used chiefly in the Mediterranean. Flat, and drawing 
 but little water, they could travel two leagues to 
 the hour ; they could take advantage of a strong 
 wind by hoisting their two triangular sails, and rely on their 
 oars in perfectly calm weather. On their prows rose a sort 
 of platform bearing big guns ; in the stern was the cabin, 
 where the officers lived. Between stern and bows were the 
 wooden benches where the convicts rowed, ate, slept, and lived 
 in chains. Whip in hand, the warder and the under-warders 
 ran along the coursie, a passage which separated the right-hand 
 from the left-hand benches lengthwise. Above the rowers, on a 
 platform that extended all along the bulwarks, and was called 
 the couroir, tlie soldiers were stationed. Below, in the hold, 
 were store-rooms and cabins for the officers. As we see, the 
 space was limited, and the galleys, in spite of their large staffs of 
 soldiers, sailors, and convicts, could carry but a small stock of 
 provisions ; this was one of their disadvantages. 
 
 The recruiting of the oarsmen was always a difficult business. 
 Colbert enjoined the tribunals to condemn as many prisoners as 
 possible to forced labour. But certain magistrates ventured to 
 have scruples. In 1662 the Intendant of Poitou announced to 
 his Minister : " I have at present in my department twenty 
 convicts condemned to the galleys, who are strong, vigorous 
 
 341 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 fellows ; whenever you like you can send off a commissary with a 
 
 chain to take them, and the sooner the better, that they may not 
 
 deteriorate." But shortly afterwards the same Intendant 
 
 apologized for having only five convicts to send : " One has no 
 
 real hold on the magistrates," he complains regretfully. 
 
 The convicts were taken to the galleys by easy stages, chained 
 
 together in gangs of a hundred ; they lived on food given them 
 
 „ „ , by the charitable on the way. On amval their 
 
 Galley slaves, i-uj j u t,ji.i, 
 
 hau-, beards, and eyebrows were shaved ; they 
 
 were given two shirts, two paius of drawers, a jacket, a cap, and 
 an overcoat, and sent on board. But there were never enough 
 of them. After the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, Calvinist 
 ministers who had been caught peeaching, and Protestant 
 citizens and gentlemen guilty of attempting to leave the kingdom, 
 came to row in the King's galleys. Yet still the effectives were 
 insufficient. It was in vain that raids were made on vagabonds 
 and beggars ; in vain that convicts were kept in the gang some- 
 times " for fifteen and twenty years after their sentences had 
 expired"; convicts were sometimes bought from the Duke of 
 Savoy, who had no navy himself ; but the supply was mainly 
 kept up by the purchase of Barbary slaves in the markets of 
 Leghorn, Genoa, and Malta, and of captive Slavs sold by the 
 Tatars at Constantinople. The Turkish slaves, fatalistic and 
 vigorous, were the most prized ; the average price of one was 
 from 400 to 450 livres. The negroes of Senegal and Guinea had 
 the inconvenient habit of dying of despair ; the Redskins were 
 tried : the Marqtiis de Denonville lured some Iroquois chiefs 
 into an ambuscade, and sent them to His Majesty ; but the 
 Indians rose, and carried out reprisals so terrible that four 
 years later it was thought prudent to restore their chiefs to 
 them. Finally volunteers were engaged, known as the bonne- 
 voglie — for there were miserable creatures who agreed, in return 
 for a pittance, to pass a part of their lives, crouching in filth, and 
 goaded by the lash, at the task of " writing on the water with a 
 pen fifteen feet long." But in France the bonnevoglie, unlike 
 their Italian confreres, refused to be chained ; and then they had 
 to be paid wages. 
 
 The galleys on the whole spent more time in port than 
 cruising on the seas, and the crews were more on land than in 
 842 
 
THE KINGDOM UNDER LOUIS XIV 
 
 their floating prison : at Toulon the convicts wandered about 
 the streets, dragging their chains, and selling passers-by purses, 
 shoulder-knots, and little pieces of handwork ; some of the more 
 wretched among them found the life bearable, and asked to be 
 taken on again at the end of their term. But at sea their 
 existence was horrible in the extreme. Naked as a rule, be- 
 neath their loose red jackets, shaven and shorn — ^many had had 
 their ears and noses cut off as a punishment for attempted 
 escape — swarming with vermin, and fed on beans, black bread, 
 and a little salt pork, the convicts lived chained to their benches 
 in gangs of seven, six, or five, according to the size of the galley. 
 Each gang worked an oar, the strongest man, called the passe- 
 avant, directing the handle, while the others, the apostice, the 
 tercers, etc., down to the puny cague-rageole, pulled the rings. 
 The overseer or warder marked the rhythm of the stroke by 
 blowing on a whistle, and the under-warders, running along the 
 coursie, stimulated the efforts of the galley-slaves by slashing at 
 them with whips. Sometimes the poor wretches would row 
 thus for twenty-four hours ; on these occasions they were 
 given biscuit soaked in wine, which the under-warders would 
 thrust into their mouths, so that they might not have to loose 
 their hold of the oar. If the enemy came in sight the order was 
 given : Tap en bouche (Stoppers in), and the convicts had to 
 take between their teeth a piece of cork which was hung roimd 
 their necks by a cord and prevented them from screaming at 
 blows or wounds. Life was a grim business on the King's galleys. 
 
 VI 
 
 In the domain of provincial administration Louis XIV and 
 Colbert continued the work of centralization inaugurated by 
 Richelieu. 
 
 The States of Normandy, Berry, Maine, Anjou, Touraine, 
 Auvergne, etc., were suppressed, and to nullify the freedom of 
 Administrative the others the usual traditional expedients were 
 centralization, employed : official candidature, the corruption of 
 deputies, and intimidation. The Intendant and his subordinates 
 presented to the electors candidates " devoted to the King's 
 service " ; at the Assembly of the States, votes were bought ; 
 
 S43 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 finally, the deputies, always very few in number, who persisted 
 in their independence, were subjected to a thousand annoyances, 
 which deterred others from imitating them. After a time these 
 precautions became unnecessary : the Intendant had merely to 
 state the sum of the tax the King proposed to lay on the 
 province, and the States at once voted it. 
 
 In Uke manner in the towns the municipal elections became 
 a farce : the Governor or the Intendant proposed the candidates 
 who were to be chosen, and they were elected. As to the 
 communal budget, the Intendant revised it, and at need drew 
 it up himself ; as their municipalities robbed them, the towns 
 were no worse off for this supervision. In 1692 an edict 
 suppressed even the simulacrum of elections, and transformed 
 the functions of mayors into offices which the King sold like 
 any others. 
 
 All the authority which was withdrawn from the Governors 
 of provinces, the sovereign Courts of Justice and Finance, the 
 States, and the Municipalities, passed to the Intendant, who 
 was henceforth a permanent official. This representative of 
 the central Government was also the judge of the cases he 
 " evoked " (save when there was an appeal to the Council) ; he 
 had to organize and superintend the collection of the taxes, 
 either officially or semi-officially ; to inspect and regulate trade 
 and industry ; to direct public education ; to control the police, 
 the administration of the troops, and the municipalities. Sub- 
 ject to dismissal, of modest birth, without personal relations in 
 the province, and directly dependent upon his Minister, the 
 Intendant was an ideal instrument of centralization. 
 
 VII 
 
 Colbert remained gruff and surly to tiie end. 
 
 It is said that M. Colbert died ill-content, that, the King having written 
 to him a few days before his death desiring him to eat and to take care of 
 , , himself, he said not a word when the letter was read to 
 
 r uf t ^™* Hereupon, they brought him some broth, which he 
 
 Colbert. refused. Mme. Colbert said to him: "Will you not 
 
 answer tiie King ? " He replied : " Is this the time for such things ? 
 What I have to think of is how to answer to the King of kings." When 
 on another occasion she said something of the same sort to him, be 
 844) 
 
THE KINGDOM UNDER LOUIS XIV 
 
 replied : " Madame, when I was in this cabinet working at the King's 
 business, neither you nor any one else dared to enter ; and now that I 
 have to work at the business of my salvation, you will not leave me in 
 peace." (Racine.) 
 
 Finally, after having made a will in favour of his son 
 Seignelay and arranged his affairs like the able man he was, he 
 died on September 6, 1683, in his magnificent house in the Rue 
 Neuve-des-Petits-Champs. " The hatred of the Parisians for 
 him was so great that it was considered unsafe to have him 
 buried by day ; and even at night the funeral procession was 
 escorted by the archers of the watch." They could not forgive 
 his harshness and his scandalous wealth, nor the fact that he had 
 begun his administration by a bankruptcy of Government stock, 
 and finished by tampering with the currency. Nevertheless, 
 it was greatly against the grain that he had increased taxation, 
 and he died in despair at the ruin of the public Treasury ; but 
 though he succeeded in introducing more order into State 
 finance, he had not carried out any of the essential reforms. He 
 had seen the downfall of his commercial creations and his 
 colonial imperialism. He had been more successful in develop- 
 ing industry, but here again the results he had obtained wrere 
 inferior to those he had expected. 
 
 On the whole, if Colbert failed partially, it was mainly 
 because of his theories ; his economic ideas seem to have 
 Colbert's stopped short at those of Montchrestien (and. 
 
 Life-work. consequently, those of Richelieu). Perhaps his 
 greatest achievement in the domain of administration, was to 
 have " codified " (like Napoleon) his noble ordinances touching 
 justice * (notably the Civil Code of 1667 and the Criminal Code 
 of 1669), on the rivers and forests, on accountancy (1669), on 
 criminal procedure (1670), on the Paris police (1672, still in 
 force), on trade (1673), on indirect taxes and the salt tax (1680), 
 
 * It has been stated that these great edicts of reform in procedure 
 were never carried out ; but, in fact, in the absence of adequate mono- 
 graphs on the subject, we know nothing about this, and isolated cases 
 prove nothing. M. Maurice Besnier, the archivist of the Eure Department, 
 has, for his part, recognized that in Normandy order certainly was very 
 much greater after the famous ordinance of 1667 ; seignorial cases were 
 tried by advocates and royal ofQcers ; a notary acted as registrar, and 
 kept the registers regularly. 
 
 345 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 on the farming of revenues, on the navy (1681), on the negroes 
 (the " black code " of 1685), to which we must add the miHtary 
 regulations of Le Tellier and Louvois — ^all these codes had long 
 the force of laws, and served as a basis for ultimate legislation. 
 We repeat, Colbert's failure was relative : the reconstruction of 
 the navy, and of a great number of highways, the making of the 
 Languedoc Canal, the saving of the forests, the reinforcement 
 of industry ; and then the valiant remonstrances of the Minister 
 to his prodigal King, his noble passion for public welfare, and, 
 finally, his conception, then a novel one, that the greatest 
 strength of a nation is in its wealth — ^nearly every one of these 
 achievements of Colbert's would suffice to make a statesman 
 illustrious. 
 
 VIII 
 
 War, which broke off the economic relations of France with 
 other nations, did not, perhaps, inflict greater injury on trade 
 " p ihorH » ^^^ industry than Colbert's system as exaggerated 
 by his successors. In vain did Ministers protest 
 with all their power against " Colbertism " ; the Government 
 had seemed to listen to them after the Treaty of Ryswyck (1697); 
 but the War of the Spanish Succession made it impossible to 
 conclude commercial treaties, and from 1713 onwards its 
 Protectionism increased in stringency. 
 
 The duties upon foreign goods became indeed prohibitive. 
 The English and the Dutch retorted by analogous taxes on 
 French products, and took their custom elsewhere. These 
 Protectionist measures, which were taken solely with a view to 
 the encouragement of manufactures, continued to affect agri- 
 culture, and notably the cultivation of the vine, very unfavoiu-- 
 ably ; moreover, in many districts the peasants were compelled 
 to dig up their vines in order to plant com, which was less 
 profitable, because it was supposed that this would avert 
 scarcity, which would have been much more effectively dealt 
 with by allowing the free circulation of com. While agricvd- 
 turists were discom-aged by such measiu-es, the tyrannical 
 regulation of production did not encourage manufacturers, for 
 the State now prescribed even the number of strands in the 
 346 
 
THE KINGDOM UNDER LOUIS XIV 
 
 warp of cloths. Finally, the large number of commercial 
 companies still existing were very detrimental to maritime 
 traffic ; enjoying privileges which made them indifferent to 
 competition, they dozed comfortably, and considered it prudent 
 to restrict rather than to increase their business, indemnifying 
 themselves by increasing prices, which they fixed to suit them- 
 selves. 
 
 At the close of the reign the public finances were in a 
 deplorable state of disorder. At the time of Colbert's death 
 Disorder o! the deficit in the budget was already sixteen 
 Public millions, although every financial expedient had 
 
 Finance. been tried. In 1697 expenditure had risen to 
 
 nearly 219 miHions, while the regular receipts amounted only to 
 81 millions ; the requisite 138 millions had therefore to be 
 procured by the pitiful device of " transactions extraordinary." 
 Not only were new offices created and sold by the thousand, but 
 the King also granted patents of nobility for cash, issued bonds 
 to meet which he had not a halfpenny at his disposal, evaded 
 State creditors by bankruptcajr, borrowed money at ever- 
 increasing rates of interest, organized lotteries, mortgaged the 
 revenues of future years, and, above all, altered the currency. 
 To crown all, he astounded the courtiers by himself doing the 
 honours of his gardens at Marly to the Sieur Samuel Bernard 
 " with all the grace he knew so well how to display when he was 
 minded to dazzle," and squeezing the enormous sum of money 
 he required out of the banker " by this species of prostitution." 
 
 In 1695 a new and nominally temporary tax was levied, 
 which lasted until the Revolution (save for a Iwief interval of 
 time, from 1698 to 1701) : the poll-tax. AH Erenchmen, from 
 the Princes of the Blood to the lowliest workman, were divided 
 into twenty-two classes, the first of which paid 2000 livres, the 
 second less, and so on to the last, which was taxed at one livre. 
 But in reality the clergy bought exemption with a comparatively 
 moderate sum, various provinces obtained leave to become 
 " subscribers " — ^that is to say, to follow the example of the 
 clergy — and the great and powerful generally managed, either 
 by traffic, influence, or adroitness, to pay very little, so that it 
 was mainly the least wealthy — ^workmen, citizens of the middle 
 classes, and country nobles — ^who continued to pay. Moreover, 
 
 347 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 after 1701 the character of the poll-tax was modified : those 
 liable to be taxed were assessed at a mark in the livre of the 
 taille, whereas the exempt, according as they were nobles, 
 officials, or citizens of free cities, were taxed arbitrarily or by 
 certain special tariffs. 
 
 Finally, from 1710 onwards to the poll-tax was added the 
 tenth. This was also a tax on income, but it was based on the 
 revenue of Government securities, offices, and industry, and 
 therefore affected the privileged classes as well as the masses. 
 But the former bought exemption from the tenth as they had 
 done from the poll-tax ; and the middle classes were almost the 
 sole contributors. 
 
 IX 
 
 Under Louis XIV the clergy were more docile than they 
 had ever been, and had occasion offered they would probably 
 The Clergy have supported their sovereign against Rome 
 under even to the point of schism. The clerical 
 
 Louis XIV. assemblies voted as the King wished. Even the 
 Jesuits appear to have greatly modified their traditional Ultra- 
 montanism, and they taught the Galilean articles of 1682 in 
 their colleges without raising any objections. The priests 
 brought up the children of the nation in religious respect for 
 the monarchy and the worship of Louis XIV. Finally, the 
 inferior clergy were actually a -wheel in the State machine ; the 
 parish priest presided regularly over the parochial assembly, 
 where the affairs of the commune were arranged : the incidence 
 of taxation, the upkeep of the roads. State relief, etc. ; moreover, 
 he was empowered to receive testamentary dispositions, to read 
 edicts after preaching, to communicate agricultural instruction ; 
 it was through him alone that the illiterate people of the rural 
 districts communicated with the rest of the world. 
 
 As to the nobles, under Louis XIV they had already lost all 
 
 recollection of their feudal independence ; if they revolted at 
 
 all, it was only to extort money from the sovereign. 
 
 The Nobles. g^yj j^^^ ^^^ ^^^ prince or grandee make any 
 
 claim to the smallest effective power under Louis XIV; the 
 Governors of provinces, for instance, were splendidly paid and 
 348 
 
THE KINGDOM UNDER LOUIS XIV 
 
 lavishly honoured, but they could not transfer a company of 
 soldiers or raise a farthing without the sanction of the Intendant. 
 The long reign of the great King witnessed but one aristocratic 
 conspiracy, if indeed this be not too grandiloquent a word to 
 apply to the crazy enterprise of the Chevalier de Rohan ; in 
 common with a certain Mme. de Villers, two Norman gentle- 
 men named Pr6aux and Le Tr^aumont, and Van den Enden, a 
 schoolmaster of the United Provinces, this great nobleman, a 
 discredited person, deeply in debt and disowned by his family, 
 had plotted to hand over Quilleboeuf to the Dutch for a sum of 
 money (1674) ; both he and his accomplices paid for their 
 treason on the scaffold. 
 
 And yet Louis XIV, like Richelieu, distrusted the nobles as 
 a body. He kept them out of politics, the administration, and, 
 as far as possible, out of the ranks of the superior clergy ; he 
 left them no outlet but the army — and the military calling, far 
 from being lucrative, is generally very costly. Further, the 
 King considered it the duty of every gentleman to come and 
 pay court to him, and he bestowed favours only on those 
 personally known to him. In order to succeed, therefore, it 
 was essential to be a courtier: — and Court life was ruinous. 
 
 The household of a man of quality had to consist of at least 
 seventy-five persons, reckons the Sieur Audiger in 1692 ; the 
 Ruinous cost stables could not decently contain less than four- 
 of Court life, teen carriage-horses, making two teams, sixteen 
 saddle-horses for Monsieur, seven carriage-horses and four 
 saddle-horses for Madame ; the whole costing about 63,632 
 livres, equal to some 200,000 francs of modem money (apparently, 
 for this valuation is extremely uncertain), and exclusive of the 
 expenditure for the children, who had seven servants allotted 
 to them, and that of the country-houses. Thirteen years 
 earlier, Mme. de Maintenon, like the careful housekeeper she 
 was, drew up a strictly economical budget for her sister-in-law, 
 who was not rich ; she considered the following essential for 
 service : three women, four lackeys, two men-servants, two 
 coachmen, the whole representing 12,000 livres (50,000 francs 
 approximately), exclusive of the upkeep of two coaches. A 
 simple Councillor, in 1675, kept a secretary, a master of the 
 horse, two men-servants, a porter, a house-steward, a pantler, a 
 
 349 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 cook, two pages, six lackeys, two coachmen, two postillions, 
 two footmen, four grooms, and in addition, to wait on his wife, 
 two maids, a lady's maid, and four women-servants. We 
 cannot therefore be surprised to learn that M. de Pontchartrain 
 kept 113 servants, and that no less than 146 were lodged in the 
 H6tel de Nevers ; for a great noble, it was a sort of social 
 obligation to keep a veritable army of " people," And even 
 with this huge staff he was very ill served, for nothing would 
 induce a valet, for instance, to bring in a meal, nor a lady's maid 
 to light a fire ; in the absence of the house-steward, M. le 
 Marquis would have to go without his dinner, and we know 
 how one of Mme. de Sevigne's staff preferred to be turned out 
 of the house rather than help in the haymaking when he had 
 not been engaged to do so. Nevertheless, as a rule, servants 
 succeeded each other from father to son in the service of the 
 master and of his children. The master signed their contracts, 
 employed their boys and gave dowries to their daughters ; they 
 grew old and died, as they had been bom, imder his roof, for he 
 would have blushed to turn away aged and invahd servants ; to 
 spare them the humiliation of receiving alms, some sinecure 
 was found for them, as, for instance, the task of carrying the 
 Mass-book to chiu-ch. But we must bear in mind that though 
 these retainers were paid hardly anything ((even when they 
 were supposed to receive wages), such households were very 
 costly. Even a gentleman who was determined to live quietly 
 in Paris in 1692 could not spend less than from five to six 
 thousand livres a year, if we may believe Audiger, the authority 
 quoted above. Much more then, as may be supposed, was a 
 large fortune necessary for Court life, and as no means of 
 acquiring wealth was open to a gentleman save some profitable 
 m&salliance or the favour of the King, the country nobility, who 
 could hope for neither one nor the other, were always more or 
 less dying of hunger. 
 
 For the nobility consisted not only of the luxm-ious 
 aristocracy which shone at Versailles, but also of that multitude 
 The Provincial of country squires whose manors — ^half farms, half 
 Nobility. mansions — cover the soil of France. Their lot was 
 
 as a rule far from enviable. Lacking the privileges of persons 
 in favoiur at Court, they paid the poll-tax from 1701 onwards, 
 850 
 
THE KINGDOM UNDER LOUIS XIV 
 
 and the tenth from 1710 ; from time immemorial they had 
 paid the tithe, and even the taille in the districts where 
 the real taille existed — ^that is to say, where this tax was levied 
 not on persons, but on property. Now since the time of 
 Louis XIII, the income from land had diminished ; many 
 squires could no longer find tenant-farmers to keep up the value 
 of their properties (and, further, they lacked capital to procure 
 the necessary materials). How were they to bring up " nobly " 
 the families of from fifteen to eighteen children they often had, 
 to send their sons to the army and marry their daughters ? 
 Some were reduced to working their fields themselves, and went 
 off to the market to sell their poultry and vegetables, a sword 
 at their side and a basket on their arm ; and for nearly all the 
 rest there was no escape, if not from destitution, at least from 
 debt, the struggle against the bailiffs, who now proceeded 
 against the noble with no more fear of a cudgelling than in an 
 action against a chm-l, and a poverty it was a point of honour to 
 conceal : the farm-girl was promoted to the office of chamber- 
 maid when a visitor arrived, the little herd became a lackey, the 
 skinny fowls were described as capons, the plough-horse played 
 the part of a Spanish cob. There was nothing more ridiculous 
 than a provincial baron in the eyes of the gentlemen of Versailles ; 
 the vanity of the Sotenvilles, the Pourceaugnacs, the La Grasses, 
 and the Escarbagnas, their garments " of the time of my grand- 
 mother," their country-houses through which all the winds 
 of heaven whistled, their absurd meals — ^the memoirs and 
 literature of the period are full of these things. And in the 
 State the country squire was hardly more than the most 
 prominent inhabitant of his village. 
 
 It was from the ranks of the upper magistracy, the noblesse 
 de robe (legal nobility), that the old hereditary caste {noblesse 
 d'SpSe) was reinforced when threatened with extinction. 
 
 The caste of "officials" had been, as a fact, consolidated 
 since the time of Louis XIII. Colbert and the King had first 
 The Legal planned to destroy it, the Minister because the 
 Nobility. venality of office seemed to him as to every one a 
 
 crying abuse, and Louis XIV for the same reason, but also 
 because he remembered, as he says in his Memoirs, that " the 
 
 851 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 elevation of Parliaments in general had been dangerous to the 
 whole kingdom during his minority." Edicts were accordingly 
 issued in 1665, 1669, and 1671, which reduced the price of 
 offices, and were therefore apparently designed to prepare the 
 way for their redemption by the State. But hereupon, the war 
 with Holland bsoke out, and instead of suppressing offices, it 
 became necessary to create new ones in order to raise money. 
 
 There were always people ready to buy them. The dream 
 of every Frenchman thenceforth was to make enough money 
 to enjoy a modest competence, and to acquire some office 
 which would ensure consideration for his person ; every mer- 
 chant hoped that his son would some day abandon trade to 
 become a functionary of some sort, and so rise in the social 
 scale. For officials formed a veritable order, a class superior 
 to that of the citizens ; a President of the Parliament and a little 
 country sheriff's officer belonged, indeed, to the same caste, in 
 spite of the difference of rank, in like manner as an archbishop 
 and a parish priest. 
 
 Several of the great functions of the sovereign Courts con- 
 ferred personal nobility on their possessors, some, indeed, 
 hereditary nobility (here we have the legal aristocracy, the 
 noblesse de robe). Thus the office of President h Mortier (Chief 
 Justice) of the Parliament of Paris was worth 350,000 livres in 
 1665, 500,000 in 1684 (1,500,000 or 2,000,000 francs of our 
 money, perhaps) ; the same office at the Rouen Parliament was 
 worth about 150,000 livres ; at that of Bordeaux, Rennes, or 
 Dijon, 120,000 livres. The post of Councillor was valued at 
 100,000 or 90,000 livres at the Parliament of Paris ; at 52,000 at 
 that of Dijon ; at 48,000 at that of Rouen ; at 22,000 at that 
 of Bordeaux. The office of First President of the Court of 
 Accounts of Paris was worth 400,000 livres ; that of the Court 
 of Accounts of Rouen, 150,000 ; that of Dijon, 130,000. At 
 the Chatelet in Paris the office of Civil Lieutenant was worth 
 400,000 livres ; that of Criminal Lieutenant 200,000 livres. A 
 man had, therefore, to be wealthy in order to buy one of these 
 important offices— if, indeed, the opportunity ever presented 
 itself, for as a rule they were kept in the same families — and the 
 more so as the incomes attached to them were very small ; but 
 the social prestige they conferred was immense. In the pro- 
 852 
 
THE KINGDOM UNDER LOUIS XIV 
 
 vinces, the First President of the Parliament made a solemn 
 entry, like a prince, to the roar of cannon, passing under 
 triumphal arches adorned with his coat of arms ; he took 
 precedence of the greatest personages ; when he died, all the 
 bells tolled. . . . True, the sovereign Courts had changed a good 
 deal in character since the Fronde ; they could no longer dare 
 to oppose the monarch boldly ; in 1673 the King reduced their 
 famous right of remonstrance to insignificance ; and even in 
 judicial matters the authority of the Parliaments was greatly 
 diminished by the power arrogated to himself by the Intendant, 
 who was always supported by the higher powers, to " evoke " 
 any particular case, in order either to decide it himself or submit 
 it to the Council. But the moral influence, the social position 
 of the officials, continued to be considerable. Holding their 
 ofi&ce for life, and owning it themselves, knowing that their 
 promotion depended only on their own wealth, and that they 
 could rise from Councillor to President or from sheriff's officer 
 to Registrar if their means allowed, without the intervention of 
 the Minister, the Government had scarcely any hold over them. 
 Hence the most difficult thing imaginable for Louis XIV, the 
 " absolute " monarch, was to command the obedience of those 
 who judged and administered in his name. 
 
 At the beginning of the seventeenth centm-y the masses 
 inspired no interest whatever. When in the States-General of 
 The lower 1614 Savaron uttered this eloquent apostrophe : 
 Orders. " What would you say, Sire, if you could see your 
 
 people in the provinces of Guyenne and Auvergne eating grass 
 like the beasts of the field ? " the magistrates his colleagues, 
 admirers of lofty harangues in the Roman style, applauded his 
 rhetorical outburst. As a fact, the villein seemed to them a 
 sort of domestic animal, much as the negro seemed to the planter 
 of former days. Richelieu said terrible things in this connection, 
 such as this : " All politicians are agreed that if the people were 
 too comfortable, it would be impossible to keep them within 
 the bounds of duty." In HSraclius, Corneille at first made the 
 woman who saves the Emperor's son by sacrificing her own 
 child, a simple nurse ; but on reflection, such heroism seemed 
 to him too exalted for a woman of the people : and the nurse 
 
 Z 853 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 was transformed into a governess. And in PMdre, no one even 
 commented on the blind devotion of GEnone to her mistress ; it 
 was only natxiral, CEnone being a common person, and PhMre a 
 princess. The villein was not pitiful : he was ridiculous. How 
 gracefully the good Sevign6 rallies the Bas-Bretons, those 
 " simpletons " who are sent to the war : 
 
 They cannot understand their drill, nor what they are forbidden to 
 do ! When they had their muskets on their shoulders, and M. de Chaulnes 
 appeared, if they tried to salute him, the weapon fell on one side and the 
 hat on the other ; they were told they must not salute under such condi- 
 tions ; presently, when they were disarmed, if they saw M. de Chaulnes 
 pass, they pulled their hats down on their heads with both hands, and 
 took care not to salute. They were told that when they were in the 
 ranks, they were not to go either to the right or the left ; they allowed 
 M. de Chaulnes' coach to drive through them the other day, and would 
 not give way an inch, whatever was said to them. 
 
 Yet La Bruy^re, who had witnessed the most terrible year 
 of the reign of Louis XIV in one of the most poverty-stricken 
 The misery o! regions of France, wrote the following pathetic 
 the poor. lines for posterity : 
 
 One sees certain sullen animals, male and female, scattered about the 
 country, dark, livid, scorched by the sun, attached to the earth they dig 
 up and tiu:n over with invincible persistence ; they have a kind of articulate 
 speech, and when they rise to their feet, they show a human face, and, 
 indeed, they are men. At night they retire to dens, where they live on 
 black bread, water, and roots ; they save others the toil of sowing, plough- 
 ing, and garnering in order to live, and thus deserve not to lack the bread 
 they have sown. 
 
 And during the last years of Louis XIV, Vauban, F^nelon, 
 and many others expressed their emotion after the manner of 
 La Bruy^re. For the Greiat Century did not last as long as the 
 Great King ; by their tearful prose, their novel tenderness and 
 pity, the latest writers of the reign heralded the triumph of 
 " sensibility " and of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. 
 
 In the mediaeval Corporations there was an intimate con< 
 nection between employer and workman, between the master 
 Constitution ol and the quondam apprentice who had become a 
 the Guilds. journeyman. The journejonan was often a mem- 
 ber of the confraternity ; he might even become one of the 
 jurors who governed the craft ; in case of illness or unemploy- 
 ment he might claim help from the box, or charitable fund of 
 354 
 
THE KINGDOM UNDER LOUIS XIV 
 
 the corporation. But the gulf between masters and journeymen 
 widened from century to century. Gradually excluded from the 
 association of the employers, the workmen began to combine 
 in secret societies which were reprobated by the Church and 
 harassed by the Company of the Holy Sacrament, because the 
 - rites of initiation and the oath to reveal nothing to the work- 
 man's confessor were pronounced sacrilegious. We know little 
 still of these occult associations, a species of workmen's syndicate, 
 formed in opposition to the employers' syndicate into which the 
 Corporation had developed : the Compagnons du Devoir (Journey- 
 men of Duty), for instance, had signs of recognition, a rallying 
 word, a common fund kept up by the contributions of its 
 adherents ; on occasions they would proclaim a strike to 
 obtain an increase of wages or the reintegration of a comrade, 
 or to impose a certain condition upon an employer. 
 
 The workman was a nomad, who engaged himself for a short 
 term only, sometimes for a single day, and wandered gaily 
 through France. He worked in the shop, at the back of the 
 dark, narrow, malodorous street, as did his master, for six, 
 eight, twelve, or fourteen hours, according to the length of the 
 day. Unless, indeed, he preferred to take a place in a factory 
 (that of the Van Robais gave work to 1500 men in 1715), or to 
 work at home, in defiance of prohibitions, in a bare room, 
 furnished with a chest, a few saucepans, a palliasse and a 
 mattress covered with green serge or black-and-white drugget, 
 and, very rarely, adorned with an old piece of stuff by way of 
 window-curtain, where the chambreland (home-worker), as he 
 was called, lodged with his wife and children. 
 
 In 1700 workers in the serge-factories in the region of 
 Amiens earned at most six sous a day ; the miners of Saint- 
 Etienne got fifteen or sixteen sous. Vauban calculated that the 
 artisans in large towns earned on an average twelve satis a day. 
 And bread cost a sou per pound (Sagnac). 
 
 The peasant had less freedom than the nomad workman, his 
 contemporary, who was not bound to the soil as he was. But, 
 The on the whole, he was not more heavily taxed than 
 
 Peasantry. he is now. He paid his dues to his lord, the 
 King's tax, and the tithe to the Church, which was his heaviest 
 burden ; nor was it so heavy as might be supposed, for it did 
 
 355 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 not correspond to the tenth part of the crop, and was generally 
 confined to the eleventh or the sixteenth sheaf. True, passing 
 troops might requisition his provisions, steal his fowls or ravage 
 his field, or he might be taken from plough or harvest and sent 
 to a distance for forced labour, such as repairing a road or 
 constructing fortifications. But troops rarely passed except in 
 the frontier provinces, and forced labour was not frequent 
 under Louis XIV. What harassed the peasant was not so much 
 the tax as the manner in which it was collected ; also, the low 
 prices he received for his corn and wine, and finally, in some 
 cases, fear of the black band of business folk : the village usurer, 
 the sheriff's officer, the agent of the farmer-general, the archers 
 who were always pitilessly ready to seize his cattle, his furniture, 
 and his agricultural implements. 
 
 It is usual enough to carry executions so far as to take away the doors 
 of houses after selling everything inside them ; houses are even demolished 
 to take the beams and rafters and planks, which are sold at sums five or 
 six times less than their value, with the taille deducted. (Vauban, 1707.) 
 
 And then there were the years of crisis, such as 1698 and, 
 above all, 1709, when famine was added to war : and at such 
 periods the destitution in certain districts was heart-breaking. 
 In 1698, in La Beauce, " although it is the best country in the 
 world for the production of wheat," the peasant contented him- 
 self with bread made of barley or rye mixed with a little wheat, 
 and sold the rest of his crop to pay his taxes ; only the rich ones 
 were able to salt a little meat after the harvest. In the district 
 of Rouen, out of 700,000 peasants there were not 50,000 " who 
 could eat their fill of bread, or who slept on anything but straw." 
 Those of La Marche, " dark, livid, and almost all hideous," fled 
 to Catalonia, " and when they returned, came back again to 
 their chestnuts and beetroot on which they lived themselves like 
 their cattle." Those in Auvergne lived in their stables that they 
 might not die of cold. Those of Riom fed on nut-oil, " and this 
 is almost the only food, which is astonishing, seeing how fertile 
 the country is ; but the taxes which oppress the people are so 
 heavy that they are imable to enjoy the natural wealth of their 
 native land." Again, in 1698 the Intendant of Berry wrote 
 these poignant words : 
 
 There is no nation more wild than these people ; one sometimes comes 
 356 
 
THE KINGDOM UNDER LOUIS XIV 
 
 upon troops of them in the country, seated in a circle in the middle of a 
 ploughed field, and always a long way from the road ; but if one approaches, 
 the band scatters at once. 
 
 " Your people are dying of hunger," said F&elon to 
 Louis XIV in 1709. " Instead of extorting money from these 
 poor creatures, we ought to give them alms and feed them. All 
 France is nothing but a vast, desolate hospital without pro- 
 visions." 
 
 Nevertheless, we must remember that these testimonies, 
 which have been used to furnish materials for the blackest 
 pictures, refer to years of exceptional poverty and famine ; even 
 the most heavily taxed districts presented a different appearance 
 at other times, much more so those where the real taille existed, 
 or where exemption had been bought (cf. Marolles and various 
 Peasant accounts of travels). Peasants might still be seen 
 
 costumes. dressed in those beautiful garments which, with 
 
 the furniture of the house, the cattle, and the land then con- 
 stituted the entire fortune (for there was little ready money in 
 country districts, and stocks and shares were unknown). The 
 woman wore a handsome head-dress of some sort, a braided 
 bodice with coloured sleeves, a skirt trinuned with velvet, a ring 
 on her finger, and a half-girdle round her waist, from which her 
 keys himg. The man had a large hat, stockings and shoes, and 
 a good cloak to keep him warm ; he baked his own bread, 
 gathered his own vegetables, milked his cow or his goat, fattened 
 his fowls and salted his pork ; he was not unhappy ; sometimes 
 he was much better oft than his lord, the country noble. In 
 Normandy contemporary documents do not bear witness to any 
 great destitution, except in those years of famine mentioned 
 above, and yet this province is generally quoted as the one most 
 severely tried — at any rate, as the one which paid the heaviest 
 dues : personal taille, utensils for the army, and the gabelle as a 
 tax (which was even more irksome than when it was a duty). 
 
 And, then, in the midst of the poorest districts there was 
 sometimes found standing among flowery meadows, well culti- 
 Model vated fields, and fat pastures, some fine, solid 
 
 estates. farm-house, whose inhabitants seemed to breathe 
 
 comfort and peace ; it was the property of some influential noble, 
 who protected his tenant-farmers out of self-interest, to a certain 
 
 857 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 extent, and to increase his income, but also out of pride, and 
 even charity, because they " belonged " to him, and because it 
 was the traditional duty of the gentleman to protect his vassals 
 as he protected his servants, his " people," his household. 
 
 In short, if at the end of the reign the rural population was 
 wretched here and there, on the other hand there were instances 
 of unprecedented prosperity. At Honfleur, for instance, the 
 great shipbuilding firms became doubly important. Saint-Malo, 
 thanks to the traffic of the gold galleons, and the trade of the 
 South Seas (South America, Peru, etc.), open to France since 
 the Spanish Succession had fallen to the Bourbons, was magni- 
 ficently rebuilt ; it fitted out the fleet with which Dugiiay-Trouin 
 went off to bombard Rio de Janeiro, lent the King fifty million 
 livres, and maintained a swarm of corsairs. 
 
 Thus a few years of peace and tranquillity sufficed to restore 
 plenty and prosperity in the weary kingdom ; never perhaps did 
 the French nation expand with more vitality than during the 
 first years of the Regency ; could it have done so if the country 
 had been so utterly exhausted as it is said to have been in 1715 ? 
 
 The France of Louis XIV, sternly tempered by Catholic 
 discipline, bore the trials which left her so great and glorious 
 with as much stoicism as her King himself. 
 
 Works to Consult. A. Babeau, Voyageurs en France (1885) ; La 
 Ville . . . La Province . . . La Vie rurale sous I'ancien Rigime (1882-94) ; 
 BaudriUart, Les populations agricoles de la France (1880-93) ; A. Berton, 
 L'impSt de la Capitation (1907) ; Bonnassieux, Les grandes Compagnies de 
 Commerce (1892); Th. Chapais, Jean Talon (1904), see the bibliography; 
 Clamageran, Hisioire de Vimpdt en France (1867-76) ; P. Clement, Hisloire 
 de Colbert (1892) ; Depping, Correspondance administrative sous le rigne 
 de Louis XIV (unpublished documents) ; F. Dumas, in Mimoires de 
 V Academic de Toulouse (1908) ; Flechier, Mimoires sur les grands Jours 
 d'Auvergne (ed. of 1856) ; Glasson, Hisioire du Droit et des Institutions en 
 France, vol. viii (1903) ; Hauser, Les Compagnonnages d'Arts et Mitiers 
 a Dijon (1907) ; cf. Retme d'Histoire moderne (1908) ; Lardi, La Capitation 
 dans les pays de taille persohnelle (1906) ; Lavisse, in the Revue de Paris 
 (1896, 1897, 1901) ; and Histoire de France, already quoted ; Martin 
 Saint-L6on, Histoire des Corporations et Mitiers (1897) ; Le Compagrum- 
 nage (1902) ; Sagnac, Histoire de France, edited by E. Lavisse, vol. vii, 1 
 (1908) ; Ph. Sagnac, La Politique commerciale de la France (1697-1713), 
 in the Rexme historique, July-August, 1910, p. 265 et seq. 
 
 858 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 THE GREAT AGE 
 
 I. The King's taste and influence. II. The Fine Arts. III. Music. 
 IV. Literature. V. Conclusion. 
 
 LOUIS XIV loved music passionately. The first operas 
 he heard enchanted him ; in 1673 he declared that " if 
 he were in Paris when opera was being given, he would 
 go every day ; " this speech, adds Mme. de S^vign^ who 
 records it, "will be worth 100,000 francs to Baptiste (Lulli)." 
 The King's As a young man the King played the hapsichord, 
 musical taste, the lute, and the guitar fairly well, and sang 
 agreeably ; in his old age, Mme. de Maintenon arranged 
 concerts for his amusement. Moreover, when he visited Vau- 
 ban's fortifications, he was struck, not only by their strength, 
 but by their beauty : " The bridge-head of the suburb at 
 Peronne is one of the finest things possible ; it surprises one by 
 its air of magnificence," he remarked. As to the harmony of 
 stones, trees, flowers, and water, he clearly showed his sense of it 
 at Versailles and at Marly. He drew up with his own hand a 
 sort of guide for the use of visitors : The Method for showing the 
 Gardens at Versailles, for he was proud of the beauty he had 
 created : 
 
 Mme. de La Fayette was at Versailles yesterday. She was well, nay, 
 very well received, that is to say, the King made her get into a carriage 
 with the ladies, and took pleasure in showing her all the beauties of 
 Versailles, just like a private person one might be visiting in his coimtry- 
 house. (S6vign6.) 
 
 " I am prepared," wrote Louis in agreeable anticipation, 
 " to feel some pleasure when I arrive [at Versailles]. It will not 
 be for some time. I expect to find a great many flowers, both 
 
 359 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 late and early ; my brother told me that the garden was not so 
 full of them as usual, and that Le Bouteux was keeping some 
 in reserve, I suppose this was the reason. Just find out about 
 this " (October, 1673), It may be that he could not discourse 
 learnedly on the cadence of a sonnet, the glow of a picture, 
 the action of a statue ; but his great natural taste caused him to 
 protect Racine and Moli^re against every one, to make Lulli 
 the fashion, to ennoble him as well as Mansart, Le Notre, and 
 Le Brun ; in short, it enabled him to feel that architects, musi- 
 cians, painters, and writers are no less essential to the " glory " 
 of a French Kling than conquests. And this was why, as early 
 as 1662, Chapelain was ordered to draw up a list of the authors 
 and scientists of every land, for a great King felt that he owed it 
 to himself to pension them. 
 
 Colbert, Superintendent of Building (Minister of Fine Arts) 
 from 1664 onwards, worked at encouraging the production of 
 Encourage- the beautiful as strenuously as he had worked at 
 ment of the the production of cloth, and sought to improve 
 Fine Arts. science, art, and letters by methods akin to those 
 he had applied to trade and industry. In other words, he regu- 
 lated them as rigorously as possible. Chapelain was entrusted 
 with the task of superintending the manufacture of Uterature, 
 so to speak, and encouraging good producers by prizes and 
 bounties. Le Brun directed the manufacture of art in the same 
 manner. Finally, academies more or less privileged were estab- 
 lished to determine the rules to be followed and the models to 
 imitate, and Colbert would not allow them to be inactive any 
 more than his factories, for he meant the King to have value for 
 his money. Fortimately, artists and, more pre-eminently, 
 writers were so great at this period that Colbert's solicitude was 
 not so detrimental to them as might have been expected. 
 
 In 1663 the Academic des Inscriptions et BeUes-Lettres was 
 founded ; in 1666 the Acaddmie des Sciences. The Academic 
 Academies of fran9aise had hastened to invite the powerful 
 Inscriptions Minister to " honour it by becoming one of its 
 and Science, members " and in 1671 it conferred on him the 
 title of Vice-Protector. Two years later Colbert invented the 
 system of attendance-counters, stipulating that they should 
 only be assigned to those who arrived at the sittings before 
 860 
 
THE GREAT AGE 
 
 the hour of opening and remained till after their close ; in 
 spite of this wise precaution, the Dictionary did not appear 
 till 1694. 
 
 Under Louis XIII the Masters of the Arts of Painting and 
 Sculpture still formed a corporation, and claimed to forbid those 
 Academy ol who were not affiliated to their guild to practise 
 Painting and their profession. But the most famous painters 
 Sculpture. and sculptors of the day did not belong to the con- 
 fraternity, and as they lived at the Court, they gave little heed 
 to the protests of the past-masters of their crafts. In 1648 
 Mazarin grouped them in an Academy which Colbert reor- 
 ganized in 1664, appointing Le Brun Director for life. This 
 new Academy of Painting and Sculpture was chartered : artists 
 not included among its forty members were forbidden to take 
 pupils. 
 
 As it was generally admitted that the masterpieces of art 
 were all in Italy, Colbert founded the French Academy in Rome 
 French ^ 1666. The twelve young painters, sculptors, 
 
 Academy in and architects who composed it under the direc- 
 Rome. tion of one of the King's painters, had to be up at 
 
 five o'clock in summer and six in winter, to study arithmetic, 
 geometry, perspective, and anatomy, to pray in common, to go 
 to bed at ten o'clock, and in the intervals to " copy all the 
 beautiful things in Rome : " their college was thus both a 
 school and a manufactory of models. When they had good 
 reports, the King took them into his service under the superin- 
 tendence of Le Brun. 
 
 Finally the Council of Buildings, formed in 1665, became in 
 1671 the Academy of Architecture, with quarters in the Palais 
 Royal. 
 
 And now, what influence was exercised by the King, the 
 Court, and all these establishments upon artists and writers ? 
 
 It is true that painters, sculptors, and architects were in- 
 fluenced by the Court for this potent reason : that as long as he 
 Court influence was not completely ruined, the King remained 
 on the Arts. their principal patron, and that the princes, great 
 nobles, and very rich magistrates or financiers who made up the 
 rest of their clientele, modelled their taste on that of His Majesty. 
 
 861 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Throughout the greater part of the reign, the artists were nearly 
 all employed in building and ornamenting the King's palaces 
 and gardens, representing his actions, and reproducing his image 
 and that of his courtiers. The whole Gobelins factory worked 
 for the King. They wove his tapestries there, engraved his 
 prints, composed his decorative panels, chased his silver and 
 bronzes, carved his vases, capitals, and statues. The versatile 
 Le Brun, " the King's first painter " (who died in 1690 and whose 
 place was but poorly filled by Mignard), directed everything, 
 superintended everything, inspired everything, gave ideas to 
 every one, even sketching designs for locks and bolts. Coysevox, 
 Girardon, Caffieri, Audran, and S^bastien Leclerc worked from 
 his drawings, and the master tapestry- weavers from his cartoons. 
 Van der Meulen painted the landscapes of pictures sketched by 
 him, and others put in the figures. The Louis XIV style was 
 elaborated under the inspiration of Le Brun, according to 
 the indications given by the King, who followed the work Avith 
 interest, at Versailles, and in that art-factory of the Gobelins, 
 where sixty children were educated in the prevailing taste, to be 
 afterwards dispersed throughout the kingdom. And thus it 
 may be said, with no disparaging intention, that the seventeenth 
 century witnessed the triumph of official art. 
 
 But during the early years of the eighteenth century great 
 disasters and financial ruin forced Louis XIV to restrict his 
 orders considerably, and his influence on artists waned in pro- 
 portion. Moreover, the clienUle of these changed completely ; 
 collectors of all sorts, and amateurs began to appear ; their 
 tastes differed, they bought easel-pictures, statuettes — and this 
 was the beginning of liberty for artists. 
 
 As to letters, the King, Colbert, and the Court combined 
 apparently exercised less influence on them than the H6tel de 
 Literary Rambouillet, for instance, had done. True, Col- 
 
 flattery oJ the bert one day threatened the historian M^zeray 
 King. that his pension of 4000 livres should be with- 
 
 drawn if he persisted in speaking as he did of the taille and the 
 gabelle ; and he actually reduced it by one-half. It is also a 
 fact that the French Academy invariably gave a eulogy of the 
 King as the subject for its competitions in eloquence and poetry, 
 and authors, even the scientists themselves, never wrote the 
 862 
 
THE GREAT AGE 
 
 radiant name of Louis without encircling it with ridiculous 
 hyperboles. " All the words of the language," declared Racine, 
 " all the syllables seem precious to us, because we look upon 
 them as so many instruments which may serve for the glory 
 of our august protector." 
 
 On ne peut trop louer trois sortes de personnes : 
 Ses dieux, sa maftresse, et son Roi, 
 
 sang La Fontaine. Every one is familiar with Boileau's odes 
 and MoU^re's gross compliments. La Bruy^re added the chapter 
 on the sovereign to his CaracUres. But what is proved by all 
 these praises, more or less sincere, forced, or interested ? When 
 we find that the greatest intellectual event of this period was the 
 triumph of that Cartesianism which was proscribed by the 
 State, it would seem that we ought to be careful not to imagine 
 all the great intellects of the Great Century gravitating like 
 stars about the Roi Soleil. 
 
 n 
 
 Before the dawn of Romanticism, what we call " the charm 
 of the past " was almost unknown. Rationalistic and Cartesian, 
 Indifference to the men of the seventeenth century lacked the 
 historic sense of history. They were as certain that their 
 
 interest. beauty was Beauty, and their taste Good Taste, as 
 
 Descartes was sure that mathematical truth is Truth. Ancient 
 things did not appeal to them, and the patina of age was merely 
 dirt to them. With Moli^re they deplored " the insipid taste for 
 Gothic monuments — those odious monstrosities of the ignorant 
 centuries, which barbarism produced in torrents ; " but they 
 looked upon the monuments of the Renaissance as Gothic build- 
 ings ; and if they did not destroy all the old stones which we 
 think touching and they considered ugly, to replace them by 
 constructions in their own manner, it was merely owing to the 
 impossibility of raising the huge sums necessary for such an 
 operation. However, they did their best, when they could, to 
 make these ancient monuments less barbarous and uncouth ; 
 thus, in 1699, for instance, at Notre-Dame, Robert de Cotte 
 destroyed the rood-screen and the pierced screens round the 
 choir, burnt the carved stalls, took away the memorial 
 
 863 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 stones, and replaced the coloiired glass by white panes ; in 
 like manner at Blois, Francois Mansart pulled down part of 
 Francis I's castle in order to raise a new building, admirable in 
 itself, but which would have been more acceptable had it been 
 built beside the rest ; so, too, Le Vau put a quadrangular dome 
 on the central pavilion of Philibert Delorme's Tuileries ; and yet 
 Le Vau was a great artist, as he showed in the Chateau de Vaux, 
 and also in the Louvre. 
 
 When in 1624 the worthy Louis XIII imdertook to finish the 
 palace of his fathers, the Louvre consisted only of two wings 
 Completion o! (besides the gallery along the bank of the river 
 the Louvre. which extended as far as the Tuileries), namely : 
 about half of the present south wing (parallel with the Seine) 
 and half of the west wing, as far as the central Pavilion of the 
 Clock ; between the Louvre and the Tuileries, as also between 
 the Louvre and Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, there was an entire 
 quarter of houses. Louis XIII wished his architects to carry 
 out the plans made by Lescot, and these, as has recently been 
 proved, provided for a coiutyard quite as spacious as the actual 
 Cour du Louvre. Consequently, Le Mercier, after rebuilding 
 the Pavilion de I'Horloge, continued the west wing to the end, 
 and then built the ground floor of the north wing (that parallel 
 with the present Rue de Rivoli), to about half its present length. 
 Le Vau, who succeeded him, finished the north wing, recon- 
 structed the exterior fa9ade of the south wing, and had laid the 
 foimdations of the east wing (that opposite to Saint-Germain- 
 l'Auxerrois), when Colbert became superintendent. Unhappily 
 Colbert condemned the aged Lescot's plan as insignificant, 
 stopped the works, invited competitors to submit plans for the 
 east front, and finally, to evade the resulting difiiculties, had 
 recourse to the most famous architect of the day, the Pope's 
 proUg&, the Neapolitan Cavaliere Bernini. 
 
 This lordly personage was lent by the Pope, and graciously 
 
 undertook the task. He passed through France amidst ovations, 
 
 . and was received most graciously by the King. 
 
 He was a good-looking little man, boastful and 
 
 self-satisfied, naive, eloquent, and astute, like many of his race. 
 
 He began in Paris by an ostentatious display of his contempt for 
 
THE GREAT AGE 
 
 everything that was not Italian, and even proposed to send to 
 Rome for muratori, alleging that the Parisian masons did not 
 understand building. Further, as an architect " he ignored all 
 details, thought only of making great rooms for banquets and 
 dramatic performances, and did not trouble his head about 
 comfort and convenience, and the lodging of the inmates." The 
 practical Colbert, on the other hand, insisted upon knowing 
 " where and how the King would be housed, how the service 
 could be most conveniently performed," and a thousand details 
 of the same kind, and he overwhelmed the Italian with letters and 
 memoranda. Their disputes must have been comic to a degree : 
 " The Cavaliere understood nothing and did not want to under- 
 stand anything of all these details, considering it unworthy of a 
 great architect like himself to descend to such minutiae." " M. 
 Colbert," he complained, "treats me like a little boy with all his 
 idle talk about privies and underground conduits." Finally, 
 one fine day " he brought a plan which he held against his breast, 
 and addressing M. Colbert, he told him he was convinced that 
 the angel who presided over the fortunes of France had inspired 
 him, that he honestly acknowledged that he was incapable of 
 inventing anything so magnificent, so great, and so happy as the 
 design which had come into his mind," etc. (it would be amusing 
 to quote the whole of Perrault's malicious account) ; every one 
 exclaimed in admiration, and, on October 17, 1665, the King 
 himself laid the foundation-stone of Bernini's proposed palace 
 with great pomp. But a few days later the Cavaliere departed 
 for Italy, loaded with money and honours, on the pretext that 
 he was afraid of a winter in Paris. And a year afterwards his 
 plans were laid aside in favour of those of the Sieur Perrault. 
 
 The dismal colonnade stuck on to the Louvre by this doctor 
 was begun in 1667 and finished in 1674. Its pediment is kept 
 Perrault's up by means of clamps and bars of iron. It had no 
 
 Colonnade. windows on the first floor ! One hundred and 
 seventy-six metres long, it extended beyond the south front, 
 making it necessary to rebuild the charming fa9ade of Lescot 
 and Le Vau, which was replaced by a dull wall. As the colonnade 
 was higher than the north wing, it was further necessary to over- 
 load this with an additional story, which spoilt its beautiful 
 proportions. Fortunately Louis XIV's lack of interest in the 
 
 365 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Louvre saved the rest of the palace, by stopping short Colbert's 
 embellishments about the year 1672, 
 
 Jules Hardouin Mansart (great-nephew of Francois), who 
 became first architect to the King on the death of Le Vau in 
 1670, was consequently not called upon to work at 
 the Louvre ; but he built Versailles. He was the 
 King of building, as was Le Brun of decoration. It was Liberal 
 Bruant who built the Invalides, but Mansart added the graceful, 
 harmonious dome which is perhaps his finest work. His pupiJ 
 Pretot would never have constructed the Place des Victoires 
 if he had not first constructed the Place VendSme. France is 
 fvill of his country-houses : he built Clagny for Mme. de 
 Montespan, and for the King, not only Versailles and Trianon, 
 but Marly. He fixed the character of the Louis XIV style ! 
 Henceforth, no more unexpected details, gay improvisations 
 and caprices, pointed roofs, picturesque alternations of brick 
 and stone ; but simple, grandiose lines ; for roofs, Italian 
 terraces, whose balustrades, decorated with statues, crowned the 
 walls ; around the building, Le N6tre's gardens, prolonging 
 them agreeably and linking them to Natiure ; everything 
 harmoniously arranged ; white statuary and dark groups of 
 trees, marble vases and flower-beds, green bronzes and yellow 
 porphyry, the slender jets of fountains and the calm surface of 
 pools, the regular or baroque figures of the ornamental waters ; 
 in general, a complete subordination of parts to the whole ; 
 Mansart's work is an admirable symbol of the classic spirit. 
 
 Under Louis XIII and Mazarin painting was a mediocre art. 
 True, Jacques Callot engraved his Miseries of War, his Travel- 
 ling Gipsies, his Beggars, his Tortures, and his 
 Fainting. Temptation of St. Anthony. But the fashionable 
 
 painter was the rhetorical Simon Vouet. The three brothers 
 Le Nain painted their heavy and joyless peasant scenes (very 
 interesting as documents). The skilful Le Sueur produced a 
 rapid succession of intolerably wearisome canvases (1616-1655). 
 Philippe de Champaigne the Jansenist (1602-1675) painted his 
 austere and glacial portraits with a brush that was always sincere 
 and conscientious, producing excellent works in his portraits of 
 the sisters of Port-Royal. But there was Nicolas Poussin. 
 366 
 
THE GREAT AGE 
 
 Poussin was born in Normandy of very poor parents in 1598 
 or 1594, and led a laborious, honest, regular, and happy life. 
 . After studying optics, perspective, and anatomy, 
 
 he succeeded, thanks to the Cavaliere Marini, his 
 patron, in going to Rome, where he settled in 1624. Sixteen years 
 later, when he had becQme famous, he returned very unwillingly 
 to France at the express order of Louis XIII, who gave him a 
 magnificent reception and appointed him his first painter-in- 
 ordinary. But he returned to his little house on the Pincio as 
 soon as he could (1642), and died there in 1665, two years after 
 his excellent wife, Marie-Aane Dughet. He had come to Rome 
 at the period of the great Italian decadence. Caravaggio, who 
 died in 1609, had sought to bring about a reaction against the 
 conventional idealism of the Carracci, and a return to realism ; 
 he had merely achieved melodrama. The school of the Carracci 
 was therefore triumphant in 1624, and Poussin did not altogether 
 escape the influence of their declamation in colour, but his sin- 
 cerity, his conscience, and his intelligence saved him from facile 
 painting, as did also his reverence for the antique, which he 
 studied ardently. Poussin felt as a sculptor perhaps no less 
 than as a painter ; when, for instance, he portrays the emotions 
 of his personages, he translates them rather by gestures than by 
 the expression of their somewhat inanimate faces. Intellec- 
 tually, he thought out his pictures as poems ; he gave them a 
 fable and a moral ; he wanted them to tell a story, to translate 
 sentiments and ideas. To this end, he chose in Nature the 
 phenomena which seemed to him expressive, and thus Nature 
 to him was not merely a model to copy, but a repertory of means 
 of expression : of him it might truly be said that his landscapes 
 are states of the soul. But his ideology is a small matter, since 
 he equals the greatest of those who have made line and colour 
 sing. He has the most appealing sense of values, light, and 
 shade ; like Racine or Mansart, he organizes all the parts of his 
 work strongly and poetically, in view of the impression he desires 
 to produce. " My disposition constrains me to seek well- 
 ordered things, avoiding the confusion which is as hostile and 
 repellent to me as is light to darkness," he once wrote. This 
 painter, who spent his life in Rome, is the most French of artists 
 and the most classical of Frenobmen, 
 
 367 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 His art sums up all the painting of his day, and the great 
 Poussin was the initiator of academic art iti France. His 
 Ponssin the pictures were greatly admired in the time of 
 initiator ol Louis XIV, and have never lacked admirers since, 
 academic Art. though their admiration has been based on very 
 varied, and even contradictory, grounds. The Academy of 
 Painting and Sculpture, encouraged by Colbert, who hoped 
 by its intermediary to regulate the fine arts some day like all 
 the rest, endeavoured to build up a theory of aesthetics from 
 his works (for the artists of the seventeenth century believed in 
 " rules," as did the authors). At one of its meetings Philippe 
 de Champaigne, discoursing upon Eleazar and Rebecca, regretted 
 that M. Poussin " had not treated the subject of his picture 
 with all the fidelity of history, since he had suppressed the 
 camels mentioned in the Scriptures " ; to which Le Brun replied 
 peremptorily that " M. Poussin . . . had omitted strange objects 
 which might seduce the eye of the spectator, and amuse it by 
 details." It was thus the painters of the day talked of painting. 
 Intellectual and bookish, like Poussin himself, they looked upon 
 objects as means for the expression of sentiments and ideas, 
 arranged Nature in accordance with reason (as Le N6tre so 
 admirably did in his gardens), remained spell-bound by antiquity, 
 and produced pictures which were " painted bas-reliefs." What 
 they wished to do was merely to make 
 
 Le grand choix du vrai beau, de la belle nature 
 Sur les testes exquis de I'ancienne sculpture ; 
 
 to translate the state of mind of " the heroes of the picture " 
 by means of appropriate action : 
 
 Par les gestes puisds dans la passion mSme 
 
 Bien marques pour parler, appuy^s, forts et nets, 
 
 Imitant en vigueur les gestes des muets 
 
 Qui veulent reparer la voix que la nature 
 
 Leur a voulu nier, ainsi qu'ii la peinture. 
 
 (Never has total insensibility to painting as such been so perfectly 
 revealed as by Moli^re in these lines). 
 
 But what the academic artists of the seventeenth century 
 lacked to make them equal to their leader was the meditative 
 and poetic soul, the conscience of the profound and exquisite 
 master who wrote one day : " The beautiful girls you saw at 
 368 
 
THE GREAT AGE 
 
 NImes cannot, I am sure, have delighted you less than the sight 
 of the beautiful columns of the Maison Carrie, seeing that the 
 latter are only old copies of the former ; " and again : " I feel 
 I have done a great deal when I have done a head in a day, 
 provided it produces its true effect." 
 
 The decorator Le Brun seems to have been mainly a skilful 
 stage-manager. To reconstruct the costumes and combine the 
 theatrical attitudes of his personages, to direct 
 the work of his assistants, to make, as he talked, 
 sketches for a piece of furniture or a figure, to improvise the 
 decoration of a gallery (the Galerie d'Apollon in the Louvre is his 
 work, save the present ceiling painted by Delacroix) — all this 
 amused him, for he had invention and draughtsmanship, but the 
 laying on of colour wearied him ; in the end, he left this tiresome 
 business to his pupils. And he is less admirable in his Battles 
 of Alexander than in his portraits. 
 
 Indeed, it is in portraiture that the art of the seventeenth 
 
 century excels, though the portrait-painters tried to generalize, 
 
 „ ^ .^ so to speak, and to paint " Man " in the individual 
 
 ForcFdiiLiirfi 
 
 — an ideal alien to their art, but characteristic of 
 
 their age ; they painted in the grand style, like Mignard (1610- 
 
 1695), who succeeded Le Brun as the president of the Academy, 
 
 and more especially Largilli^re (1656-1746), or Hyacinthe 
 
 Rigault (1659-1748). 
 
 We must give a place apart to Claude Gellde, called Le 
 
 Lorrain (1600-1682), who, born in the Vosges, spent his whole 
 
 Claude life in Italy, and thus hardly belongs to French 
 
 Lonain. art. He felt, more deeply than any Italian, the 
 
 grandeur and poetry of the Roman Campagna, and rendered 
 
 them in artificial and cunningly concocted landscapes, invariably 
 
 animated by some mythological or scriptural episode in the 
 
 taste of the times, and altogether delicious. Anticipating the 
 
 moderns, Claude Lorrain worshipped and painted sunlight more 
 
 exquisitely than Turner. 
 
 Le Brun apportioned tasks to his sculptors as to his painters, 
 and the former obediently carried out the decoration of Ver- 
 sailles from his designs. AH this sculpture is cold, empty, and 
 
 2 a 869 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 so impersonal that it is not always easy to tell from an ex- 
 amination what was the portion of each ; but it forms an 
 Decorative admirable whole, which harmonizes perfectly with 
 Scnlpture. the groves and foimtains of Le N6tre, as with the 
 
 walls of Mansart and the ornament of Le Bnm. It further pro- 
 duced very spirited decorative compositions, like the Horses of 
 Marly (now at the entrance to the Champs Elysees), by Guillaume 
 Coustou (1678-1746), Nevertheless, like painting, its chief 
 triumphs were won in portraiture : Coysevox (1640—1720) is as 
 elegant as Girardon (1628—1715) when he models some nymph or 
 allegory in the grand style, but there is no line of such portraits 
 as his bust of Cond6 or his statue of the Duchess of Burgimdy 
 which does not quiver with emotion, 
 
 Pierre Puget (1622-1694) was far from being the neglected 
 genius he has been called, Colbert employed him to decorate 
 the galleys ; he then worked for the Court. If he 
 lived an independent life, apart from Le Bnm, it 
 was because he had both a passion for his art and a deplorable 
 temper. Like Bernini, with whom he had much in common 
 (though he had less genius), he was lamentably lacking in taste, 
 but he was gifted with an admirable temperament as a sculptor. 
 " I am in my element among great things : I soar when I work 
 at them, and the marble trembles before me, however great 
 it may be," 
 
 III 
 
 At the close of the sixteenth century the Italians had dis- 
 covered opera. The new music at once aroused frantic enthu- 
 Invention ol siasm among these susceptible people : at the 
 Opera. first representation of Monteverde's Ariadne the 
 
 six thousand listeners burst into sobs. 
 
 Under Louis XIII (who loved music as passionately as did 
 his son) France knew nothing of dramatic music beyond ballets. 
 These " masquerades " were danced in costume 
 - ' by lords and ladies, and often by the King himself, 
 in presence of the whole Court : the framework was very loose ; 
 each performer had the words he sang composed to suit his own 
 taste or improvised them himself; only the orchestra which 
 accompanied was composed of professionals ; typical examples 
 870 
 
THE GREAT AGE 
 
 of such performances were the comic ballet of Les Andouilles 
 in 1628, and that of La Prosperity des Armes de France in 1641. 
 It was Mazarin who revealed Italian opera to the French ; he 
 introduced several companies from his native land. But manj 
 connoisseurs preferred the traditional ballet to Italian opera, 
 and among them was the Florentine, Jean-Baptiste Lulli (1633- 
 1687). 
 
 This former servant of the Grande Mademoiselle was a very 
 diverting person. After finding favour, while he was quite 
 ... young, with his mistress, who spoke Italian with 
 
 him, he was received among the King's violins, and 
 in this position succeeded in attracting the notice of Louis XIV, 
 who created the band known as the little violins, in order to 
 appoint him its conductor, and then made him superintendent 
 of the King's music. As such, he presented or composed a great 
 number of ballets, for which Benserade generally wrote libretti, 
 and also several ballet-comedies;^ in collaboration with Moliere, 
 among them the Princesse d' Elide (1664), L' Amour Medecin 
 (1665), M. de Pourceaugnac (1669), Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme 
 (1670). He declared at this time that it would be impossible 
 to execute an opera in French, or " to write an elegant score to 
 French words." 
 
 At this period a host of persons took part in the Court 
 ballets : princes, great ladies, citizens, professional singers, 
 musicians, dancers, and the King himself, who always loved to 
 figure, if but before the footlights, as Jupiter or Apollo. But 
 after 1669 Louis ceased definitively to appear in these mas- 
 querades, perhaps because he had been impressed by these two 
 lines in Britannicus : Nero, said Racine, excelled 
 
 A se donner lui-m€me en spectacle aux Romains, 
 A venir prodiguer sa voix sur un thdatre. 
 
 In this same year, on June 28, 1669, a certain Abb^ Perrin — 
 an industrious writer of verses for cantatas, and the joint 
 Royal author with the musician Cambert of a Pastorale, 
 
 Academy ol successfully acted in 1659, which was almost a 
 Music. musical comedy — obtained letters patent granting 
 
 him the privilege of representing tragedies sung in French. 
 In 1671 Pomone, by Cambert and Perrin, the first French 
 
 871 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 opera, was given with immense success. It sufficed to convert 
 LuUi to the new dramatic music ; as the two partners could 
 not agree, this astute person bought their charter, got the 
 King to extend its scope, in 1672, and foimded the Royal 
 " Academy " (in the Italian sense) of Music. 
 
 Thus, in spite of the raillery of Saint-Evr^mont, opera 
 became the passion of the day. From 1673 to 1687 Lulli com- 
 posed, with the help of Quinault, thirteen " Ijrrical tragedies," 
 ranging from Cadmus and Alceste to Armide, and his Academy 
 drew crowds to it. It displayed beautiful scenery and amazing 
 " machines " ; its frequenters listened to languorous and erotic 
 verse simg to delicious music ; the opera at this period was 
 a very delightful spectacle. Love is the theme of all LuUi's and 
 Quinault's lyrical tragedies : Love, say verses and music ; be not 
 cruel ! . . . In vain Boileau, who thought Quinault insipid, 
 and did not care for music, launched his thunderbolts ; neither 
 Mme. de Montespan's royal lover, his Court, nor the Town 
 agreed with M. Despreaux ! 
 
 Lulli did not only write operas ; he composed cantatas, 
 religious songs, notably (according to a dubious tradition) a 
 " God save sort of hymn, Bieu sauve le Roi, adopted by the 
 the King." English as God save the King. Nor must we forget 
 to mention together vidth him Lalande, the Master of the King's 
 Chapel, who in conjunction with Moli^re and La Fontaine wrote 
 the opera MSlicerte, in addition to many sacred airs. 
 
 IV 
 
 There is perhaps a certain analogy between the fate of the 
 Revolutionists after the Revolution and that of the Frondeurs 
 The Decline after the Fronde : both suddenly appeared to 
 of Romantic belong to another age. In 1660 the Grande 
 Literature. Mademoiselle, describing her ideal of life to 
 Mme. de Motteville, still could not conceive of it with- 
 out heroes and heroines of various kinds. But the Grande 
 Mademoiselle found herself prodigiously old-fashioned at the 
 Court of the youthful King ; the dreams and tastes of her 
 generation were no longer those of the day ; for the accession 
 of Louis XIV marks an important date in the history of the 
 372 
 
THE GREAT AGE 
 
 sentiments. In 1661 Bossuet and Moli^re had been living in 
 Paris for two years, Boileau was beginning to publish his satires. 
 La Fontaime brought out Joconde, his first tale, Racine was 
 about to produce the Thebmde ; and with this new generation 
 moral observation and a taste for truth was to triumph over 
 heroic and amorous romanticism. ** It was the end of a literature 
 designed for women ; they never held intellectual sway again 
 until the rise of modern romanticism. Under Louis XIII and 
 the Fronde they had become intoxicated with politics and 
 action, and they had imagined themselves the heroines of Cor- 
 neille ; imder Louis XIV they were reduced to occupying 
 themselves with the sentiments natural to their sex, and follow- 
 ing the King's example, men asked from them no more than 
 what it required no great heroism to give. Louis XIV was, 
 indeed, if we may say so, by no means feminist. He was 
 certainly fond of women, but his feeling for them was a kind 
 of fascinated contempt, and with the exception of Mme. de 
 Maintenon — who swayed him when he had grown old and pious 
 — ^there was no woman among those he distinguished to whom 
 he ever looked for guidance. Was it not because of the poor 
 opinion he had of their brains that he forgave the Frondeuses 
 more readily than the Frondeurs ? As to the latter, they re- 
 mained branded, during his reign, with an indelible stain, a 
 stigma no less fatal than that which marked the regicides at the 
 beginning of the nineteenth centiu-y. We may cite the history 
 of the unhappy Fargues in the pages of Saint-Simon. The 
 majority of them, though pardoned, were never received into 
 the royal favour again, and they had perforce to stifle all political 
 ambition in their breasts, after the fashion of Cardinal de Retz 
 and the Due de La Rochefoucauld. 
 
 For La Rochefoucauld, too, had plotted furiously under 
 Louis XIII and the Regency, and had dreamt of heroism, of 
 La glory, and of lofty sentiments in general. Only 
 
 Rochefoucauld, he had by no means the temperament of his ideal 
 personage. Contemplative, and so timid that he could never 
 utter a sentence in public, " habitually irresolute," brave indeed 
 but with the bravery of determination and not that of constitu- 
 tion, we cannot wonder that one of his character should have 
 
 873 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 failed in everything. Seriously wounded at the Porte Saint- 
 Antoine, and recognizing that his cause was lost, he withdrew 
 from politics, sore of heart, and feeling that he had failed in life. 
 " There was always an unknown quantity in all M, de La Roche- 
 foucauld," wrote Retz maliciously. What there was is shown by 
 the Maximes. It must indeed have been embarrassing for a 
 Frondeur to read his own heart and that of others so clearly. 
 
 When he had retired into private life, La Rochefoucauld no 
 longer tried to be anything but an honest man, in which he 
 succeeded perfectly. The old age of this bitter, delicate, and 
 graceful patrician, always shy and somewhat reserved, but 
 gentle and witty, was brightened by feminine affection, and we 
 know that he inspired in the ironical Mme. de La Fayette an 
 attachment which endured till death. In Mme. de Sable's 
 salon, which was still a trifle " precious," and in which he was a 
 constant visitor, a favourite amusement was the composition of 
 aphorisms, just as in that of Mademoiselle and elsewhere the 
 pastime was written portraitture, and the subtle Duke took great 
 pleasure in this game ; it was in this way that for the space of 
 five years, in conjtinction with the mistress of the house and 
 its habituSs, he composed, polished, and pointed his Maximes, 
 which he decided to print in 1665, when he knew that copies 
 of them were being circulated. Nothing of the sort had ever 
 appeared before ; the first incomplete edition of the Pensies was 
 published in 1669, and the Caracttres not until 1688. The 
 " lively, precise, and delicate " style of the Maximes vf as so much 
 admired that five editions appeared before 1678, and nothing 
 contributed more powerfully to cast ridicule upon the chivalrous 
 ideals of the preceding generation than this disillusioned little 
 book. Let us avoid the pedantry of treating La Rochefou- 
 cauld's pessimism as a system of philosophy. The charming 
 author of the Maximes was too excellent a man to insist that 
 personal interest and self-love are the springs of all our actions ; 
 he only said that they inspired nearly all of them ; and no one, I 
 think, will deny that " what we take for virtues are often 
 nothing but a concatenation of varied interests which fortune 
 or our own industry enables us to arrange," nor even that " the 
 love of justice is very often merely a lively dread that others may 
 deprive us of what we have." 
 874 
 
THE CHEAT AGE 
 
 Among the friends of La Rochefoucauld was a little foir, 
 plump, exuberant lady called the Marquise de Sevign6. She, 
 Dime. for her part, had an over-witty cousin, M, de 
 
 de S6vign6. Bussy-Rabutin, who, one day when she had 
 refused to lend him a large sum of money, composed a sketch 
 of her, which had every reason to be, and even had a super- 
 ficial appearance of being, unflattering, but in which, neverthe- 
 less, the painter finds little to record against his model, save that 
 she allowed herself to be too easily dazzled by the splendours of 
 the Court (that she was, in short, a bit of a snob), and that she 
 " tried to be too amusing " in conversation. What injustice I 
 This Mme. de Sevigne read Virgil, Tacitus, and Saint Augus- 
 tine (in Latin), spoke Spanish and Italian, had a smattering of 
 theology, was as well acquainted with the historians of antiquity 
 as with the philosophers of her own time, and would have been 
 capable of holding forth on literary subjects like the most 
 inexorable of Pricieuses ; how lucky it was that, knowing all 
 she did, she should have had that over-merry temperament 
 reprobated by M. de Bussy ! Let us further add that, being 
 very practical, she managed her business matters extremely 
 well, and that when far from the Court she could (as Mile, 
 de Scud^ry admiringly tells her) " amuse herself in the 
 country as calmly as if she had been bom in the woods." 
 Had she never written a line we must all have loved this 
 Mme. de Sevign^. 
 
 An orphan at seven years old, the widow at twenty-five of a 
 rou6 who had never loved her, she was always so judicious that 
 she had the best reputation in the world, and all her ardour was 
 concentrated in her passionate affection for that dry, pedantic 
 person her daughter. The letters she wrote to this Mme. de 
 Grignan, who lived at the other end of France, being the wife 
 of the Lieutenant-General of Provence, form the greater part of 
 the famous Correspondence. • 
 
 We must not look to her for profound and original views : 
 Mme. de Sevign6 was no thinker, but a reporter of genius ; 
 she has given us, with incomparable talent, " the chronicles of 
 the Court, of the Town, of literature and the drama, of the pro- 
 vinces, of the country, of the watering-place, of war, of famous 
 crimes, of fashion, a familiar chronicle, and personal confi- 
 
 375 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 dences " ; she is " the charming patron-saint of our society 
 journalists " (J. Lemaitre). 
 
 And now we come to the less charming patron-saint of critics. 
 
 Fils d'un pfere grefifler et d'aieux avocats, 
 
 Nicolas Boileau, called Despr^aux, was bom on November 1, 
 1636. After a half-hearted trial of theology and 
 law (to please his family), he abandoned all else 
 to devote himself to literature, which was not as yet considered 
 a career. He was a terrible person ; from 1660 to 1674 he 
 scarified Chapelain, Scudery, Quinault, and other successful 
 writers in the name of the young realistic school ; after which, 
 having dealt faithfully with those he denoimced as bad writers, 
 he proceeded to teach the art of writing well : his Art po6tique, 
 which appeared in 1674, is the manifesto of the new triumphant 
 Pleiad. He was then thirty -four ; thenceforth, as if his pre- 
 destined work had been accomplished, he did very little. Ap- 
 pointed historiographer to the King in 1677 together with 
 Racine, and admitted to the Academy only in 1683, he bought 
 in 1687 the Uttle house at Auteuil in which he was to live for 
 twenty years, perfectly insensible to the beauty of the country, 
 and no doubt quite capable of composing his Ode sur la Prise de 
 Namur on some fine spring morning, but enjoying good company, 
 good cheer, and a game of skittles, full of vivacity, a clever 
 mimic, kind-hearted though a trifle avaricious, and on the whole 
 the most honest fellow in the world. 
 
 As an artist Boileau had taste, and that tireless patience 
 which makes masterpieces possible, a sense of the picturesque 
 value of words, a most admirable conciseness, the robust syntax 
 which Flaubert lacked, and he shows continually in his poems 
 that he might have been a great prose writer. But he was quite 
 without sensibility ; he could not feel any essential difference 
 between prose and poetry ; to him verse was merely a more 
 distinguished kind of prose, and a few fine but isolated alexan- 
 drines which might be quoted prove nothing to the contrary. 
 Then he had no psychological insight (an exceptional case 
 in his days). But he was a keen observer of the superficial 
 aspects of man, and he has given us, in a kind of rhymed and 
 rhythmic prose, social pictmes which are slightly conventional, 
 376 
 
THE GREAT AGE 
 
 but full of vigour. His gift was purely critical, and it is his 
 glory to have helped La Fontaine, Molifere, and Racine, not only 
 to triumph, but to feel confidence in their own strength. 
 
 As his system of aesthetics was that of the great French 
 classical writers, it will be well to examine it briefly. In a 
 Boileau's general way his criticism enjoins a return to 
 
 System of realism, and we shall see that Racine's first 
 Esthetics. tragedies seemed almost as crude and outrageous 
 to spectators as did the first " naturalistic " novels of the nine- 
 teenth century to the " romantic " public. Nature, observed by 
 reason, and expressed in the forms of antiquity, was the sum of 
 Boileau's teaching. 
 
 " Nothing but truth is beautiful, only truth is worthy to be 
 loved," but it is not well to tell the whole truth. There are, 
 indeed, in real life strange, exceptional, and grotesque cases 
 which appear incredible and outrageous to good sense or good 
 taste (which are identical) ; " the true may sometimes seem 
 incredible ; " such incidents are no fit subjects for art ; " never 
 offer the spectator anjrthing incredible." And there is also in 
 realities a considerable" element of vulgarity and triviality, 
 which the artist should ignore. The subject should be " agree- 
 able," just as the language should be seemly ; even in treating 
 the comic the writer should " jest with dignity," and it was a 
 weakness in Molifere, for instance, to have written for " the 
 masses," and too often to have " forsaken the refined and 
 agreeable for the absurd." Thus Art is indeed Truth, but 
 selected Truth. Let us seek in real life general and universal 
 traits ; let us paint in the individual Man himself, with his great 
 immutable passions, and not those historical, physical, and moral 
 pecuUarities which constitute the sole value of what Louis XIV 
 called Teniers' "apes" and of our modern novels. This is 
 why, when a seventeenth-century writer says of one of his 
 characters that he was " very well made " or " very good- 
 looking," he considers that he has sufficiently distinguished him 
 as an individual, and goes on to show the movements of the 
 human heart in him. Two results followed from this system : 
 in the first place, absolute reliance on considered observation 
 and good sense excludes fancy, pure imagination ; and to make 
 the interpretation of Man in general and of reality only in its 
 
 877 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 universal and objective aspects the sole aim of art is to exclude 
 poetic enthusiasm, which is essentially personal and subjective ; 
 on the other hand, the great eternal sentiments do not offer an 
 infinite material, and artists who treat of them are in danger of 
 repeating themselves. This is of no importance ; the old 
 themes may be used perpetually ; originality will manifest 
 itself sufficiently in the different expression various writers will 
 give to the same subject ; the classic author aims at novelty, 
 not in invention, but in expression. 
 
 Finally, Boileau prescribes the imitation of antiquity. An- 
 tiquity, indeed, teaches us to express Nature, and by means 
 The Imitation of its masterpieces, which are the masterpieces 
 of the of humanity, it gives us lessons in Art. From 
 
 Antique. another point of view, as antiquity is " noble " 
 
 (like the East, for it would seem that distance, in space as in 
 time, gives majesty to a theme), antiquity (or the East) should 
 be drawn upon for the right names, costumes, accessories, and 
 scenery. Therefore let us borrow from the ancients lessons of 
 technique on the one hand, and of scenery on the other, but not 
 modes of thought or feeling. The Christian characters of Racine, 
 La Fontaine, Moliere, and La Bruy^re have absolutely nothing 
 essentially Greek or Roman. And it is necessary to insist upon 
 this, for many have deplored this " imitation of the antique " 
 which is supposed to have distorted French genius ; could not 
 our great classic writers, it has been asked, have found in the 
 past of their own nation heroes as splendid as those of Homer, 
 wars as noble as that of Troy, legends more moving than those of 
 mythology ? Yes, no doubt ; but everything seems to show 
 that under other names and costumes their characters would 
 have been much the same ; it is merely a question of clothing. 
 
 The principles here laid down were to Boileau the Rules of 
 Art. For Boileau and the classic writers believed that there 
 are one Beauty, one Art, one set of Rules. They could not 
 admit that man's idea of these things may differ according to 
 race, period, and soul. They had no historic sense. They were 
 perfect Cartesians. 
 
 The reign of Louis XIV, indeed, witnessed the triumph of 
 Descartes, in spite of Louis XIV. The most religious minds of 
 the day — ^the Jansenists even — might be, and were, Cartesian. 
 878 
 
THE GREAT AGE 
 
 And yet rationalism was dangerous to Catholicism : when 
 the aged Malebranche, abandoning the distinction his master 
 Triumph o! had carefully established between the domain of 
 Descartes. philosophy and that of religion, insisted that all 
 dogmas should be subjected to the examination of reason, when 
 he boasted of being " a reasonable theologian," he opened up 
 the road which the philosophers of the eighteenth century were 
 to follow to the end. But the contemporaries of Louis XIV 
 (with the exception of Bossuet) did not foresee this danger. 
 Only the Jesuits opposed Descartes ; and this, not because they 
 thought his rationalism dangerous to the Church, but because 
 their enemies, the Oratorians and Jansenists, supported him. 
 At their instigation the Courts of Rome and Versailles forbade 
 the propagation of the new theories. And, as might have been 
 expected, these interdicts were useless, for Cartesianism was the 
 fashion. Society crowded to lectures on metaphysics (of which, 
 indeed, it understood nothing, but this was of little moment) ; 
 great ladies were to be fomid in the humble cell of the insignifi- 
 cant Malebranche ; the Academy of Sciences was Cartesian ; in 
 1686 Fontenelle published his Entretiens sur la plurality des 
 Mondes. In the end the old Aristotelian systems were dis- 
 credited even among babes; at the bare phrase: "Nature 
 abhors a vacuum," schoolboys began to laugh. The new 
 theories had to be tolerated. 
 
 Cartesianism and the doctrine of Boileau have much iu 
 common. Both postulate the knowledge of " man " in general, 
 take their stand on pure reason, and exclude poetic enthusiasm, 
 erudition, and history. But Cartesianism absolutely confoimds 
 art and mathematics, and, as M. Lanson has shown, it could only 
 have evolved " a scientific literature, without aesthetic character, 
 reducing expression to the algebraic notation, so to speak, of the 
 idea." The contribution of the classical doctrine to Carte- 
 sianism was a principle which modifies it considerably : that of 
 the imitation of the ancients. Our great writers admired and 
 desired absolute truth, but they admired and desired antique 
 art no less warmly. In them the influence of Descartes and 
 that of Greek and Roman aesthetics met and amalgamated so 
 perfectly that on the whole their doctrine ended by differing very 
 notably from Cartesianism. This was clearly demonstrated by 
 
 379 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 the quarrel touching Ancients and Modems, which was, in fact, 
 that of the Classicists and the piure Cartesians. 
 
 It had long been smouldering, but it burst into flames at 
 last on January 27, 1687, at a meeting of the Academy, and was 
 Ancients v. prolonged for nearly ten years. Fontenelle, in his 
 Modems. Digression sur les Anciens et les Modernes (1688), 
 
 and Perrault, in his ParalUle des Anciens et des Modernes (1688 
 et seq.), argued approximately as follows : It does not appear 
 that Nature creates fewer men of genius now than formerly ; 
 now humanity has progressed since the days of antiquity ; 
 hence it is reasonable to conclude that the great men of modem 
 times, who enjoy the results of this progress, should produce 
 works superior to those of the great men of antiquity. As we 
 see, literature was for them a mere product of reason, not 
 essentially different from science, and susceptible of increasing 
 perfection. This was the pure Cartesian theory : Malebranche 
 necessarily supported the Modems. But the great artists of the 
 period, Racine, La Fontaine, and La Bniy^re, whose sense of 
 beauty was offended thereby, defended the Ancients. As to 
 Boileau, without going to the root* of the matter, he contented 
 himself at first by launching a series of somewhat heavy and 
 brutal epigrams against Perrault and his friends, which did not 
 increase his reputation either for wit or politeness ; not until 
 1694 did he publish his Biflexions sur Longin. ... In reality 
 he found it very difficult to maintain the theory of the complete 
 inferiority of his great contemporaries — ^notably Racine — ^to the 
 Ancients. When he had been reconciled to Perrault he ad- 
 mitted with a certain reUef that the Moderns had sxu"passed the 
 Ancients in some respects. 
 
 Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (in theatrical circles Molifere) had 
 already made a name as an author and actor in the provinces 
 when he made his first appearance before the 
 King at the Louvre, on October 24, 1658, in the 
 tragedy of Nicoddme, in which he failed to please, and in a farce 
 written by himself. In this he had such a brilliant success that 
 the King allotted him the theatre of the Petit-Bourbon (on the 
 site now occupied by the Colonnade of the Louvre), and later, in 
 1661, that which Richelieu had built in the Palais-Royal. It 
 380 
 
THE GREAT AGE 
 
 was here that Moli^re for thirteen years (from 1659 to 1673 
 presented and acted in twenty-five plays of his own composition, 
 and died in harness. 
 
 At the time of his first great success {L'Ecole des Femmes, 
 December, 1662) the theatrical quarrel which absorbed his 
 contemporaries and those of Racine was at its height. His 
 triumph marked him out for attack by the sanctimonious of all 
 persuasions (but rather the Brethren of the Holy Sacrament 
 and the Jansenists than the Jesuits), who were endeavour- 
 ing to secure the suppression of dramatic performances, and 
 they at once began a campaign against him which lasted all 
 his life. 
 
 Supported by Boileau, he was also protected by the King. 
 Louis XIV was at that time ill-disposed towards the devout, 
 who disapproved of his " disorders " — in short, bored him to 
 death — and on May 12, 1664, he went so far as to sanction the 
 performance at Versailles of a comedy which Moli^re had com- 
 posed as a retort to the pious adversaries who had dragged him 
 through the mud. It was called Tartuffe. However, the de- 
 vout raised such a clamour aj; this assault that the young King 
 yielded, and forbade the representation of the piece. The 
 Prince de Conti, lately notorious for his misconduct and atheism, 
 a great lover of the theatre, and the protector of Moliere, whose 
 schoolfellow he had been, but converted about 1655-1656, and 
 finally, in 1657, a member of the Cabale des Devots, was one of 
 those who were most zealous in protesting against Tartuffe and 
 against the author he had formerly encouraged. Moliere had 
 him in his mind when he drew the h5T)ocritical hero of his 
 romantic drama Don Juan (February, 1665). 
 
 Meanwhile the battle raged round Tartuffe, the representation 
 of which was not finally authorized till 1669, after a mass of 
 petitions, libels, and passionate intrigues for and against. Each 
 of Molifere's plays was attacked in the same fashion. During 
 the dispute concerning Tartuffe he brought out Le Misanthrope 
 (in 1666) and Amphitryon and VAvare (in ,1668). In 1669, 
 after his victory, he produced Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, 
 which enabled the Court nobility to laugh once more at the 
 provincial nobility, and the Rabelaisian lyricism of which 
 delighted the Court ladies and the King at Chambord ; 
 
 381 
 
Missing Page 
 
THE GREAT AGE 
 
 he did it all so gracefully ! For if this ingenuous rou6 knew 
 nothing of morality, at least, like the Milanese dear to Stendhal, 
 he was governed by his inclinations and not by self-interest, 
 and this entire abandonment of the reason and will to the 
 impulses of the heart, this sentimental egotism of La Fon- 
 taine's, is one of the most sympathetic of vices. Jean was 
 absent-minded enough to fall into a well like the astrologer 
 of whom he sang, because he remarked only what touched him. 
 Out of pure voluptuousness he loved faithfully and well those 
 whom he loved. He gave way to his enthusiasms with an 
 adorable spontaneity. When he opened a Bible he was all 
 ardour, he wanted to enter a monastery at once. After hearing 
 an ode by Malherbe he set to work incontinently to write poetry. 
 One day he discovered Spinoza ; he at once began to run about 
 crying : " Baruch ! Do you know this Baruch ? You must 
 read Baruch." His friend Canon Maucroix revealed the an- 
 cients to him : he devoured them all— Homer, Virgil, Terence, 
 and, after these, Voiture, Rabelais, Marot, and even the mediseval 
 Writers, which was astonishing in his times. 
 
 J'aime le jeu, I'amour, les livres, la musique, 
 La ville et la campagne, enfln tout ; il n'est rien 
 
 Qui ne me soit souverain bien, 
 Jusqu'aux sombres plaisirs d'un coeur melancolique. 
 
 Being a year older than Moli^re, fifteen years older than 
 Boileau, and almost nineteen older than Racine, " Polyphile " 
 was the eldest of the four friends. But he commenced author 
 only at the age of thirty-three, with a translation of Terence ; 
 and the three collections of his Fables were published respectively 
 when he was forty-seven, fifty-seven, and seventy-one years 
 old, for he wrote with extraordinary labour. Thus the art of 
 the bonhomme is conscientious and mature in the extreme ; 
 his work reveals a continuous progress ; the Contes are no more 
 than a miracle of style, the perfectly conventional personages 
 of which bear the same relation to the more vital characters of 
 the Fables as do the personages of Italian comedy to those of 
 Moli^re's comedy ; and the licentious poet of the Contes must 
 have felt the influence of Boileau before creating his " ample 
 comedy with its hundred different acts." So that the evolution 
 of La Fontaine under the action of classical realism demon- 
 
 383 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 strates the benefits of the discipline of the Great Age, and is an 
 example of the perfection to which it brought French genius. 
 
 A few well-worn words, barely reinforced by very ordinary 
 adjectives, the whole in the simplest order, but arranged by La 
 Fontaine — and we have the most picturesque painting, the most 
 touching music. All art seems coarse, almost unseemly, so to 
 speak, beside his, and only minds alien to our race, such as 
 Rousseau and Lamartine, have been capable of misunderstand- 
 ing and outraging the beauty of the truest and most exquisite 
 verse a French ear has ever been privileged to hear. 
 
 In 1652, after the failure of Pertharite, the great Comeille, 
 deeply offended, retired to sulk in his tent ; his wrath lasted for 
 Thomas seven years, during which he kept silence. His 
 
 Ciomeille and brother Thomas and Quinault took his place 
 Qninaolt. successfully. Both were skilful manipulators of 
 
 the romantic sentiment and superhuman gallantry which were 
 in vogue ; their characters refine upon heroism and work up to a 
 given point by a series of dramatic incidents arranged with much 
 art and situations of the most unusual and unprecedented kind. 
 Moreover, in the midst of political discussions, conspiracies, and 
 murders, love fills an important place in their tragedies, a polite 
 and languid love, which Quinault more especially excelled in 
 singing in liquid verse that delighted the young King and his 
 Coiut for a while. When Comeille returned to the theatre in 
 1659 with his CEdipe, he tried to adapt himself to the taste of the 
 new generation, and thenceforth his supermen were clothed d 
 la Quinault. Compared with these dandies of the sublime, 
 Racine's characters seemed to many persons the creations of an 
 ignoble and cynical realism. 
 
 On becoming his own master at the age of twenty-two (he 
 was an orphan) Jean Racine formed a close friendship with 
 La Fontaine, Fureti^re, Boileau, and, above all, 
 Moli^re, his senior by eighteen years, already 
 famous, and the manager of a theatre which produced the 
 young man's first two pieces — La TMbaide ou Les Frkes 
 ennemis (1664) and Alexandre le Grand (1665). He was then a 
 handsome fellow of twenty-five, passionate, enthusiastic, sus- 
 ceptible, and very much a man of letters. His success turned 
 his head. He withdrew his Alexandre abruptly from Moli^re, 
 884 
 
THE GREAT AGE 
 
 on the pretext that it had been badly acted, and took it to the 
 Hotel de Bourgogne. Then, thinking that a phrase of Nicole's 
 concerning dramatic authors was aimed at him — ^the quarrel of 
 the drama was then at its height — he published a witty and cruel 
 epistle attacking his former masters, who were in despair at the 
 impious calling their child had adopted. Only Boileau's inter- 
 vention prevented him from following this up by a second, 
 though later he confessed that he would gladly have atoned for 
 his ingratitude by twelve or fifteen years of his life. 
 
 After the success of Andromaque (1667) — comparable, says 
 Perrault, to that of the Cid — and Les Plaideurs (1669), many 
 people agreed that no doubt this young Racine showed a certain 
 talent in the treatment of love, but that he was incapable of 
 composing a great political Roman drama in the manner of 
 Comeille : Britannicus was written to show them they were 
 wrong. Then in 1670 he triumphed again with Birinice, but 
 his enemies were not disarmed. When Bajazet appeared (1672) 
 they objected that it was not sufficiently Turkish. Mithridate, 
 it is true, had a success. But IphigSnie (1674) was met by the 
 IphigSnie of Leclerc and Coras, and PhMre (1677) by the puerile 
 Phddre et Hippolyte of Pradon, which was acclaimed by a cabal. 
 
 What was the cause of all these violent attacks upon Racine ? 
 His enemies accused him of degrading tragedy. Moreover, to 
 Racine's his contemporaries he was by no means the " noble, 
 
 "Realism." harmonious Racine," and they were far from 
 recognizing in him that " inimitiable elegance " praised by 
 Marivaux. They reprobated what they considered the brutal 
 and even coarse realism of his works. The Corneilles and 
 Quinault had accustomed them to the idea that tragedy should 
 evoke admiration; and here was this Racine appealing only 
 to pity ! In the place of heroes of superhuman greatness of 
 soul, he represented persons who were exceptional only in 
 the violence of their passions, and gave them the sentiments 
 natural to men and women in the terrible moral crises 
 he imagined, caring nothing whether these sentiments were 
 " lofty " or not. Nor did it seem to him necessary that 
 there should be blood and murders in his plays, or politico- 
 historical speeches, or even any intrigue at all sometimes. And 
 love — ^not the intellectual and platonic love (desire for per- 
 
 2 b 385 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 fection) nor the romantic and gallant love of Quinault — ^but the 
 love-frenzy, " Venus tout enti^re a sa proie attachee," seemed 
 to him a subject worthy of tragedy. Thus in his hands tragedy 
 became merely a picture of the play of common passions in the 
 state of paroxysm, among persons who differed from the gene- 
 rality of mankind only by their exalted station. To many his 
 Pyrrhus seemed a ruffian, his Nero a monster of iniquity, Ph^dre 
 a monomaniac, the feverish Hermione a creature half distraught. 
 What could those critics who had found fault with Chim^ne's 
 lack of virtue have thought of this strange yoimg girl ? And 
 what must they have said when they read, in the preface to 
 Phedre, this delicious detail : "I thought it necessary to give 
 Hippolyte a certain weakness which would make him some- 
 what guilty towards his father " ? Further, Racine's style 
 seemed to them here and there outrageously familiar, and in 
 general wanting in elevation. This was why the partisans of 
 Comeille could not endure the popularity of the author of 
 Andromaque. And they abhorred it also because it made them 
 conscious that their modes of thought and feeling were cruelly 
 out of date, and that they themselves were all elderly gentle- 
 men and mature ladies. 
 
 Racine's early Jansenist education had left a profound im- 
 pression on his mind. Amauld admired Phedre, the heroine of 
 Racine's which, powerless in spite of all her efforts to con- 
 
 Jansenism, quer the passion which consumes and damns her, 
 has been called " a Christian to whom grace was denied." And 
 PMdre was therefore perhaps " the first stage in Racine's 
 conversion " (J. Lemaitre), for at the age of thirty-seven 
 Racine suddenly became converted. He conceived a horror of 
 his works, which he imagined to be corrupting and diabolical, 
 burned all his sketches and plans, and then, after thinking for a 
 time of embracing a religious life, married (by way of penance, 
 as his son Louis tells us), a middle-class wife without beauty 
 by whom he had two sons and five daughters, charming and 
 ardent souls, to the rearing of whom in the fear of the Lord he 
 henceforth devoted all his powers. 
 
 The King loved him and he loved the King with all his 
 heart. In 1689, at the request of Mme. de Maintenon who 
 wished to combine " amusement with instruction " for her 
 386 
 
THE GREAT AGE 
 
 young girls, he consented to write Esther for the young 
 ladies of Saint-Cyr, and Esther was played six times before 
 the whole Court with great magnificence. But Athalie (1691) 
 was given only in the Marquise's bedroom, and without cos- 
 tumes ; in spite of the care taken to make the young actresses 
 repeat the Veni Creator before their appearance on the stage, it 
 seems that the applause of the courtiers inspired worldly 
 thoughts in them. Moreover, the Jansenist Racine began to 
 lose favour. He died on April 21, 1699, cut to the heart by the 
 coldness with which the King treated him. 
 
 To include Bossuet — " the last of the Fathers of the Church " 
 (La Bruy^re) — among men of letters would be an impertinence. 
 He was the great voice by which the Catholic, 
 Apostolic, and Roman religion expressed itself in 
 seventeenth-century France in all its strength, its harmony, and 
 its cohesion. All his works were occasional, and composed, not 
 for art, but for action. There is no philosophy to be derived from 
 the immense sum of his work, but integral Catholicism (save for 
 certain opinions peculiar to Gallicanism). His very biography is 
 merged in that of the Church. If this great athlete of the faith 
 is one of the two or three pre-eminent masters of French prose, 
 he became so by the force of native genius, and not through any 
 desire for profane glory. 
 
 At the age of thirty-two, in 1659, he was already famous for 
 his eloquence when he came to Paris, where he preached for ten 
 years, in the town and at Court, sermons of all kinds, and his 
 first funeral orations, notably those on Anne of Austria (1667, 
 not preserved), Henriette of France (1669), and Hem-iette of 
 England, Duchess of Orleans (1670). We do not possess Bossuet's 
 sermons as they were delivered to his contemporaries. He 
 wrote them all beforehand ; but in the pulpit his eloquence 
 carried him away, and the recollection of what he had written 
 merely served to co-ordinate the movement of his ideas. 
 
 In 1670 Bossuet, then Bishop of Condom, was appointed 
 tutor to the Dauphin, and he undertook to compose with his 
 own hand all the works he considered necessary for the instruc- 
 tion of the royal child, among others the Traite de la connaissance 
 de Dieu et de soi-mime ; La Politique tirie de I'Ecriture Sainte, in 
 
 887 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 which he explained that kings are absolute rulers, answerable 
 for their conduct only to God ; and the Discours sur rnistoire 
 universelle, which is a summary of general history, followed by a 
 demonstration of the Divine Providence working throughout 
 the ages. 
 
 As a recompense for the ten years of his Ufe he had devoted 
 to the education of the Dauphin, Bossuet received in 1681 the 
 bishopric of Meaux, and thenceforth, though only a bishop, he 
 was the real head of the Church in France. In 1688 he pubUshed 
 his Histoire des variations de VJElglise protestante, the principal 
 effort of the war he waged throughout his life against the Refor- 
 mation. From 1695 to 1699 he wrote some thirty works directed 
 against Quietism and Fenelon. In 1702 he published the 
 Defense de la Tradition et des Saints-Peres in refutation of the 
 rationalistic Oratorian, Richard Simon. Nor must we omit 
 his long correspondence with Leibnitz, in giving a sUght idea 
 of his leading works. He died on April 12, 1704. 
 
 Official speeches, philosophical manuals for the use of a 
 child, theological polemics, historical treatises long out of date, 
 occasional writings — in all our literature there is nothing less 
 " actual " or more admirable than these works of vigour and 
 warfare in which all the genius of Catholicism expresses itself 
 with all the art of antiquity. Noiirished on the Latin writers 
 and Balzac, Bossuet wrote in the " Louis XIII style," which 
 was that of the period when he was formed, but he gives it the 
 contemporary clarity of Boileau. It is in his works that the 
 French language takes on its fullest sonority, its noblest move- 
 ment, its most succulent, most vital form. And even in the 
 simplest portions of his works, where he is concerned only to say 
 what he has to say without any subtlety, ever3i;hing lives and 
 palpitates, transfigured by an imagination akin to that of 
 Chateaubriand. 
 
 As an orator he was never so popular in his day as the Jesuit 
 BourdaloTie (1632-1704). The latter preached from memory, 
 „ - . with half-closed eyes and in a kind of chant, 
 
 almost without gesture, solid, logical, and closely 
 reasoned sermons, very accurate in their psychology, which 
 aimed at convincing rather than at moving a congi-egation 
 388 
 
THE GREAT AGE 
 
 addicted to " reason." His success was amazing. We know 
 with what enthusiasm Mme. de S^vign^ speaks of P^re Bour- 
 daloue : " He always strikes like a deaf man," she wrote one 
 day, " uttering truths at full speed. . . . Look out for your- 
 selves ! he always goes straight ahead." 
 
 F^nelon, on the other hand, did not admire him : to his 
 mind these demonstrations learnt by heart were not eloquence ; 
 his own sermons were extempore, and none of 
 them have survived, but we may form some idea 
 of their subtlety and emotion from the letters of Franfois de 
 Salignac de La Mothe-F6nelon (1651-1715). His theological 
 writings are innumerable, and he wrote, in addition to the 
 Fables, the Dialogues des Marts and TiUmaque, composed for the 
 instruction of the Duke of Burgundy, the TraiU de V Education 
 des Filles, which set forth principles very novel in 1687, and the 
 Lettre sur les Occupations de I'Acadimie, the charming lecture of a 
 delightful old man. But it is in his letters, and in works written 
 without literary preoccupations, and directly expressing his 
 nature, that he is most enjoyable, as, for instance, in his 
 Manuel de PiUd — " a delicious book, worthy to be placed beside 
 the Imitation " (J. Lemaitre). F6nelon's feminine and emotional 
 mind hardly belongs to the age of Louis XIV. His ideas of 
 education are those of Jean- Jacques ; in politics he grants 
 more than was demanded by the States-General of 1789 ; his 
 religion, which asks everything from the heart and almost 
 nothing from reason, differs as much from that of Bossuet as his 
 criticism, subjective and careless of rules, differs from that of 
 Boileau. F^nelon was the precursor of Rousseau and his pro- 
 geny, as La Bruyfere was the precursor of our modern men of 
 letters. 
 
 Jean de La Bruy^re (1645-1696), a citizen of Paris, at the 
 age of thirty-eight bought the office of treasurer-general of the 
 _ _ , bureau of finance in the district of Caen, which 
 
 did not prevent him from living in Paris, and this 
 is about all we know of the first forty years of his life. In 
 1684 he was appointed tutor to the grandson of the Great 
 Cond6. Neither comely of face nor nimble of wit, he was entirely 
 
 389 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 deficient in worldly graces, and did not shine in the Court of the 
 Condes ; why was it, then, that when, at the end of twenty-eight 
 months, his pupil's education was pronotinced finished, he asked 
 and obtained permission to remain in it ? We can guess, and 
 must deplore the reason : the great La Bruyfere suffered because 
 of his lack of charm and seduction ; he would have given all 
 his intelligence to be one of those agreeable lordlings who fas- 
 cinated the ladies of his circle. Accordingly he jested, alas ! 
 (see his letter to Pontchartrain of July 16, 1695) ; then " he 
 would suddenly set about dancing and singing very unplea- 
 santly." Boileau wrote to Racine : " He is a very excellent 
 man, who would lack nothing if Nature had made him as 
 agreeable as he would like to be." And Valincourt tells us : 
 " He was a good creature at bottom, but the dread of seeming 
 pedantic had driven him to an opposite extreme of absurdity 
 impossible to describe." 
 
 In March, 1688, after the publication of his Caractdres, La 
 Bruy^re became famous. The first three editions appeared in a 
 year ; six others followed, gradually expanded, corrected, and 
 improved with touching care. Elected to the Academy in 1693, 
 not without difficulty, he made (whether deliberately or not) 
 an unfortunate speech ; and it was after this incident that it 
 became customary to submit the speeches of newly elected 
 members to a commission charged to make siu-e that they con- 
 tained nothing offensive. Three years later he died of apoplexy, 
 leaving an unfinished series of Dialogues sur le QuiHisme, which 
 a certain Abb6 Du Pin published in 1698 after having recast 
 them. 
 
 Vauvenargues has said : " La Bruyfere was a great painter, 
 and not perhaps a great philosopher ; the Due de La Rochefou- 
 cauld was a philosopher and no painter." It is true ; and La 
 Bruy^re himself claimed to be an artist rather than a thinker. 
 (" AJl has been said during the seven thousand years that there 
 have been men and that they have thought.") La Rochefou- 
 cauld had proposed to explain the human heart in general — ^the 
 Cartesian Man ; the author of the CaracUres wished to compose 
 a gallery of sketches from Nature and studies of individuals. It 
 was a very novel essay : hitherto all that had been attempted in 
 the name of portraiture had been psychological descriptions ; 
 890 
 
THE GREAT AGE 
 
 in those tie painted he was less concerned to expound the senti- 
 ments themselves than to note the physical movements by 
 which the individual reveals them. It was because of this, no 
 doubt, that the CaracUres raised an outcry, and passed for a 
 book with a key without being more or less so than our contem- 
 porary novels. In this sense La Bruy^re was the first of the 
 Moderns. 
 
 He was also a modern in virtue of his style. The short 
 phrase had certainly been used by others before him {see S^vigne, 
 Racine in the Abrigi, Fontenelle, etc.) ; but this was a familiar, 
 unpretentious style, which proposed only to express a thought 
 directly ; the ceremonious style was periodic prose. Now La 
 Bruy^re used this prose also (for his book is an epitome of all 
 forms of French) ; but his originality lay herein, that he made 
 the short phrase " an artistic style," so to speak, which proposed 
 above all to paint. He preferred the picturesque and precise 
 epithet to the vague, sonorous moral epithet as used by Bossuet ; 
 and yet he wrought his phrases in a rhythm more subtle than that 
 of verse. On the whole, he was perhaps the first French writer 
 who looked upon prose as an art equal to that of poetry, and 
 hence Jean de La Bruy^re may be considered the first of our 
 " Stylists." 
 
 As a master of style he had no equal among his contem- 
 poraries. As a portrait-painter he is not superior to Saint- 
 
 „ . . „. Simon (1675-1755). After waiting for fifteen 
 
 Saint-Simon. iiij.i j-^- j. 
 
 years, consumed by hatred and mipatience, tor 
 
 the death of the King and the end of " the reign of the vile 
 
 middle class," this little surly dog — ^pimy, yellow, and irritable 
 
 — at last came into power with the Regent, who was his friend ; 
 
 but after a few years, having made himself intolerable to 
 
 every one, he was obliged to retire. Then, in the quiet of his 
 
 town house or his country estates, where he lived for another 
 
 twenty-two years, he assuaged his passion by reviewing his 
 
 past life, and describing the scenes which still blazed before 
 
 his eyes as vividly as when he lived them, trembling with 
 
 pleasure or with rage. And out of the struggle of this ignoramus 
 
 of genius, obsessed with the desire of giving utterance to his 
 
 visions, with the language he had neither the art nor the 
 
 391 
 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 patience to woo, with words which escape him, which he 
 seizes nervously, which he compels, and from which he wins 
 unrivalled accents, arose the incorrect, the palpitating, the 
 admirable Memoirs of Saint-Simon. 
 
 By its moderation, its clarity, and its perfection, our happily 
 named classic literature was pre-eminently fitted to become 
 French universal, and did, in fact, become so, as is well 
 
 classical known. Our language, our manners, and our 
 
 Literature authors conquered Europe, and from the end of the 
 
 seventeenth century our country exercised an intellectual and 
 moral influence greater than that exercised by any country since 
 the days of antiquity. It was in the reign of Louis XIV that 
 the French acquired the true sense of their national superiority 
 which they have retained to the present day. By his very 
 faults, his lofty pride, this king was an admirable inspirer of the 
 French spirit. 
 
 He demanded exhausting material efforts of his kingdom, and 
 caused it sufferings, some of which were vain and useless. What 
 would have happened if he had listened to Colbert ? Colbert's 
 conception of the glory of a sovereign differed essentially from 
 that of Louis XIV : he dreamed of an austere, equitable, 
 economical king, the director of a commercial State on the 
 pattern of Venice or Holland, encouraging art and letters, work 
 and workers. But it is hardly just to judge kings by comparing 
 what they accomplished with what their ministers dreamed of 
 doing, or to heap opprobrium on Louis XIV while glori- 
 f3dng Colbert, since there is nothing at all to prove that the 
 Idngdom would have been better off under Colbertism. More- 
 over, if the Duke of Burgundy had not been cut off at the age of 
 thirty, the conqueror Louis XIV would have been succeeded by a 
 peaceful sovereign, an intelligent, virtuous, liberal, and reforming 
 prince, with F^nelon as his adviser. And F^nelon had a pro- 
 gramme much finer even than Colbert's — on paper. To what 
 heights might not the monarchy have risen under these con- 
 ditions ! But we must turn away from the land of dreams. 
 892 
 
THE GREAT AGE 
 
 In 1715 France was very weary, but a few years of repose were 
 to enable her to arise more lively and vigorous than ever. 
 Materially greater, she was enriched — ^through the successive 
 efforts of Louis XIII and Richelieu, Mazarin and Louis XIV — ^by 
 the acquisition of Roussillon, Franche-Comt^, Alsace, Flanders 
 and Artois, provided with a vast colonial domain, and protected 
 by a solid and stately girdle of fortresses. Intellectually, she 
 shed her radiance throughout the world. The age in which 
 our national patrimony was enriched by so many provinces, by 
 so much glory, and so much beauty is justly known as The 
 Great Age. 
 
 Works to Consult ; See the bibliography of Chapter V. Bonaff^, 
 Les CollectionneuTS de rancienne France (1878) ; Choisy, Histoire de 
 Varchitecture (n.d.) ; P. Desjardins, Powssin (n.d.) ; Jouin, Le Brun et 
 les arts sous Louis XIV (1889) ; Maurice Donnay, Cours sur Moliire, in 
 the Remie hebdomadaire, 1911 ; A. Lefranc, Cours sur Moliire, in the 
 Reoue des Cours et Conferences, 1906-1910 ; J. Lemaitre, Jean Racine 
 (1908) ; FineUm (1910), etc. ; Masson-Forestier, Racine ignori (1911), to 
 be corrected by the articles of A. Halleys, in the Journal des Ddbats, 
 December, 1910, January, 1911 ; Lavoix, Histoire de la Mtmque (n.d.) ; 
 S. Reinach, Apollo (1907) ; R. Rolland, Histoire de I'Opera en Europe. 
 
 898 
 
f 
 
INDEX 
 
INDEX 
 
 Abbaye DBS Champs, 280, 282 
 
 Abbeville, cloth factory at, 336 
 
 Academie Franfaise, origin of, 125 
 
 Academie des Inscriptions, 360 
 
 Academie des Sciences, 360 
 
 Academy, Dictionary of the, 125-7 
 
 Academy of Architecture, 361 
 
 Academy of Fine Arts, 361 
 
 Academy in Rome, French, 361 
 
 Acadia, ceded to England, 309, 339 
 
 Agn^s de Sainte Th^cle, Mdre, 282 
 
 Aides (tax), 331-2 
 
 Aignan, Abbe, 318 
 
 Aiz, Parliament of, 88 
 
 Aix-la-Chapelle, 223 
 
 Alais, captured by Louis XIII, 65 
 
 Alais, Peace of, 56 
 
 d' Albert, Charles, 18 ; see also Luynes 
 
 Albi, Bishop of, 100 
 
 d'Albret, Jeanne, 24 
 
 d'Albret, Mar^chale, 194 
 
 Alen9on, lace-making at, 336 
 
 Alexander VII, Pope, 219, 220, 273, 276, 
 
 280 
 Algeria, 98 
 
 Algiers bombarded, 237 
 AUerheim, taken by Turenne, 140, 141 
 Almanza, Battle of, 303 
 Alsace, 63, 69, 70, 75, 76; ceded to 
 
 France, 149 ; invaded, 231, 308, 393 
 Altkirchen, skirmish at, 231 
 Altranstadt, Peace of, 304 
 Amadeo 11 of Savoy, 245 
 Ambassadors, quarrel of the, 219 
 America, 63 
 
 Amiens, 44, 45, 83 ; factories at, 365 
 Amsterdam, 210, 226, 228; saved by 
 
 inundation, 228 
 Anarchy during Fronde, 165 
 Ancients versus Modems, 380 
 d'Ancre, Concini as Marquis, 4 ; his 
 
 autocratic power, 16, 17 ; deprived of 
 
 governorship, 14 ; see also Concini 
 Ang61ique, Mdre, see Amauld, Jacqueline 
 d'Angennes, Julie, see Rambouillet, Mile. 
 
 de 
 Angers, Peace of, 22 
 
 Angonl6me, Treaty of, 22, 27 
 
 Anjou, 343 
 
 d'Anjou, Due, birth of, 193; becomes 
 King of Spain, 288, 289 ; his claims to 
 French throne maintained, 290; see 
 also Philip V of Spain 
 
 Anne of Austria, marries Louis XIII, 
 7; relations with Richelieu, 34; her 
 faction at Court, 43, 44; hostility of 
 Queen-Mother to, 43, 45 ; relations 
 with Buckingham, 45 ; complicity in 
 intrigues, 48 ; reconciled to her hus- 
 band, 57 ; and Marie d'Hautefort, 77 ; 
 secret correspondence with Spain, 80- 
 82 ; appointed Regent, 87 ; quoted, 
 115 ; her appearance and character, 
 137, 138; as Regent, 136-141; her 
 fury with the lYondeurs, 156 ; as 
 mother, 172, 173, 259 
 
 Anne of England, 291, 307, 310 
 
 Antilles, the, 339 
 
 d'Antin, Due, quoted, 240 
 
 Appartement, the, 205, 240 
 
 d'Argenson, Lieut, of Police, 282 
 
 Army under Louis XIII, 71-74; con- 
 stitution of the, 215, 218 
 
 Amauld, Antoine, 128, 129, 212, 268, 269 ; 
 flees to Flanders, 279 ; supported by 
 the Pope, 280, 286 
 
 Amauld (d'AndUly), 58, 269 
 
 Amauld, Henri, 269, 272 
 
 Amauld, Jacqueline, 267 
 
 Amoux, PSre, 26 
 
 Arras, 142, 311 
 
 d'Artagnan, Captain of Musketeers, 328 
 
 Artillery Corps created, 217 
 
 Artois, ceded to France, 169 ; captures 
 in, 76, 393 
 
 Arts, the Fine, 360; Court influence on 
 the, 361-3 
 
 Astr^e, 112, 113 
 
 d'AubignS, Agrippa, 194 
 
 d'Aubign6, Comte, 243 
 
 d'Aubign^, Franfoise, see Maintenon and 
 Scarron 
 
 Aubuisson, factory at, 336 
 
 d'Auchy, Mme., 119 
 
 897 
 
INDEX 
 
 Audigei, 349, 350 
 
 Audran, 362 
 
 Augsburg, League of, 237, 239 
 
 Augustine, St., 266 
 
 Augustinus, the, 269, 270 
 
 d'Aumont, Due, 203 
 
 Aurillao, laoe-making at, 336 
 
 Austria, 63 ; House of, 62, 64, 71, 77, 96 ; 
 
 see also Hapsburg 
 Auvergne, 343, 356 
 d'Avenel, quoted, 105, 201 
 Avignon, 238 ; seized, 275 
 
 Baden, Marqeave of, 295, 296 
 
 Balagny, 108 
 
 Ballets, 370 
 
 Baltic Provinces, 68 
 
 Balzac, J. L. Guez de, 124, 388 
 
 Barbezieux, War Minister, 292, 321 
 
 Barbin, Claude, 15, 31 
 
 Barcelona, taken by the English, 303, 310 
 
 Barcelonnette, 312 
 
 Barine, Arv^de, quoted, 195, 248 
 
 Barradas, 18, 94 
 
 Barreaux, see Vallte 
 
 " Barrier " fortresses, 298, 307, 312 
 
 Bart, Jean, 257 
 
 Bassompierre, 13, 58, 87, 200 
 
 BastiUe, treasure in the, 7 ; prisoners in 
 
 the, 74, 81, 84, 87 
 Bavaria, Duke of, becomes Elector 
 
 Palatine, 39 
 Bavaria, Elector of, 292, 295, 296 
 Bavaria, Electoral Prince of, 286, 287, 312 
 Bavaria, Prince Clement of, 238 
 Bayeux, revolt in, 97 
 B6am, Church property in, 24 
 Beauce, 356 
 Beaufort, Duo de, 136 ; imprisoned at 
 
 Vinoennes, 142, 160, 163 ; exiled, 166 
 Beaupuis, Wallon de (Jansenist), 267 
 Beauvilliers, Duo de, 203, 244, 257, 288, 
 
 307, 321, 322, 324 
 B^jart, Armando, 382 
 Beltort, 231 
 Bellegarde, M. de, 200 
 Belle-Isle, 328 
 Benoist, Antoine, his bust of Louis XIV, 
 
 313 
 Benserade, 124, 182, 327, 371 
 Berlepsch, Baroness von, 288 
 Bernard, Samuel, 347 
 Bemhard of Weimar, 75, 145 
 Bernini, 364, 365, 370 
 Berry, 343, 356 
 Berry, Duo de, birth, 193 ; death, 315, 
 
 316 
 Berry, Duchesse de, 316 
 B^ruUe, 23, 102 
 
 898 
 
 Berwick, Duke of, 239, 292, 302 j his 
 victory at Almanza, 303 
 
 Besanfon, 230 
 
 Besnier, Maurice, 345 note 
 
 BeuvTon, 109 
 
 Bidassoa (river), 168 
 
 Bingen destroyed, 252 
 
 Bishoprics, the Three, ceded to France, 
 149, 322 
 
 Blancmesnil (Frondeur), 155, 157 
 
 Bleneau, 164 
 
 Blenheim (Blindheim), Battle of, 297 
 
 Blindheim, see Blenheim 
 
 Blois, 83 ; Castle of, 19, 21, 364 
 
 Blois, Mile, de, 192, 248, 324 ; marriage 
 of, 334 
 
 Bohemia, 63 
 
 Boileau, 183 ; quoted, 227, 363, 372, 373, 
 376-8 ; his system of aesthetics, 377, 
 379 381 
 
 Boisrobert, 102, 125, 327 
 
 Boisselau, 250 
 
 Bombay, 221 
 
 Bombault, 327 
 
 Bordeaux, a centre of the Fronde, 166; 
 Parliament of, 88, 92 
 
 Bosse, Abraham, 72 
 
 Bossuet, 116; quoted, 143-4; procures 
 dismissal of Mme. de Montespan, 189 
 tutor to the Grand Dauphin, 193 
 attitude to Huguenots, 262, 264 
 attitude to Mme. Guyon, 277, 278 
 controversy with F6nelon, 278, 373 
 funeral orations of, 387, 388, 391 
 
 Bouchain, ceded to France, 234, 311 
 
 Bouchavannes, Mme. de, 119 
 
 Boufflers, Mareohal de, 239, 258, 292; 
 occupies the " Barrier " fortresses, 298 ; 
 defends LiUe, 306 ; a volunteer under 
 Villars, 308 ; at Malplaquet, 309 
 
 Bouill^, President de, 307 
 
 Bouillon, Due de, 4, 7 ; leagued with 
 Cond6, 8, 83, 85, 105, 203 
 
 Bouillon, Duchesse de, 150, 160, 170 
 
 Bourbons, the, 288, 289 
 
 Bourdaloue, quoted, 240, 279, 288, 289 
 
 Bourgogne, Duo de, birth of, 193; 
 education of, 205 ; becomes Dauphin, 
 244-5 ; character, 244-7 ; F6nelon on 
 character of, 244 ; marriage of, 245 ; 
 upholds F^nelon, 278-9 ; commands 
 army in Low Countries, 304^6 ; death 
 of, 316 ; mentioned, 389 ; his probable 
 development had he come to the 
 throne, 392 
 
 Bourgogne, Duchesse de, and MUe. Choin, 
 244 ; her marriage, 246 ; her affection 
 for the King and Mme. de Maintenon, 
 245, 246; appearance and character, 
 
INDEX 
 
 246 ; mentioned, 300, 301 ; death of, 
 315 
 
 BoQTgogne, H6tel de, 385 
 
 Bouthelier, 38, 68, 87 
 
 Boutteville, Comte de, 107-9, 252 
 
 Brandenburg, 234, 236 j Elector of, 229, 
 290 
 
 Breda, Peace of, 222 
 
 Breisgau, 63 
 
 Breitenfeld, Battle of, 69 
 
 Brioo, Don Gregorio, 147-S 
 
 Brienne, quoted, 25 
 
 Brissao, Duchesse de, 9 
 
 Broo, Bishop of, 102 
 
 Brousael (Frondeur), 155-7 
 
 Bruant, Liberal, 366 
 
 Brulart de Leon, 66, 66 
 
 Brulart de Sill^ry, 27, 28, 41 
 
 Briilarts, the, 40 
 
 Bnmeti^re, quoted, 123 
 
 Biussels, 61 
 
 Buckingham, Duke of, accompanies 
 Prince of Wales, 39 ; romantic attach- 
 ment to Anne of Austria, 44, 46 ; Mb 
 expedition to the Isle of B^, 62 
 
 Bullion, 35, 95 
 
 Bulls, Papal, 281-4 
 
 Buquet, 109 
 
 Burgos, Philip V at, 303 
 
 Burgundy, 76 
 
 Burgundy, Duke of, and Duchess of, see 
 Bourgogne, Due de, and Duchesse de 
 
 BusBy d'AJmboise, 109 
 
 Bussy Rabutin, quoted, 107, 186, 190, 334, 
 375 
 
 Buzenval, Choart de, 272 
 
 Calx^ des Divots, 103 
 
 Cahale des Importanta, 141 
 
 Caen, revolt at, 97 
 
 Caffieri, 362 
 
 Callot, Jacques, 72, 366 
 
 Cambert (musician), 371 
 
 Cambrai, taken, 233 ; ceded to France, 
 
 234,311 
 Camisards, the, 296, 299 
 Canada, 99, 339 
 
 Canals, construction of, 338, 346 
 Cararaggio, 367 
 Carinthia, 63 
 Camiola, 63 
 Carracci, the, 367 
 Cartesianism, see Descartes 
 Casale, relieved by Louis XIII, 55 ; 
 
 Invested by Spinola, 66 ; occupied by 
 
 the French, 66, 76, 235 
 CaBsel, taken by the French, 147 ; Battle 
 
 of, 233 J ceded to France, 234 
 Castelnaudary, Battle of, 60 
 
 Castille, Marie-Madeleine de, 327 
 
 Castres, 65 
 
 Catalonia, 266 
 
 Catholic Revival, 23 
 
 Catinat, Marshal, 216 ; in retirement, 
 266 ; death of, ib. ; disgrace of, 292 ; 
 in command on the Rhine, 295 
 
 Caulet, Etienne de (Bishop), 272, 274, 275 
 
 Caussin, P^re, 82, 83 
 
 Cavalier, Jean, 299 
 
 Cavoye, 108, 318 
 
 Centralization of government, 343 
 
 Cerdagne, 169 
 
 C6vennes, the, 56 ; revolt in the, 296, 299 
 
 Chalais, Comte de, conspiracy of the, 
 45-47 ; barbarous execution of the, 48 ; 
 mentioned, 93, 108, 134 
 
 Chambord, the Court at, 381 
 
 Chamillart (Minister), 239, 292, 314, 322 
 
 Chamlay (Minister), 261, 254 
 
 Champaigne, Philippe de, 366, 368 
 
 Chantilly, 232 ; lace-making at, 336 
 
 Chapelain, Jean, 116, 132, 360, 376 
 
 Chapelles, Des, 109 
 
 Charleroi, 230, 233 
 
 Charles, Archduke, 286 ; invades Spain, 
 302 ; enters Madrid, 303, 310 ; see also 
 Charles VI, Emperor 
 
 Charles I of England, 64 ; see also Wales, 
 Prince of 
 
 Charles II of England, at Compi^gne, 206 ; 
 hia French sympathies, 210 ; compared 
 with Louis XIV, 211 ; yields prece- 
 dence to Louis XIV, 219 j his 
 marriage with the Infanta of Portugal, 
 220-1 ; subsidized by France, 226 ; 
 becomes the ally of Louia XIV, 226 ; 
 makes peace with William of Orange, 
 233 
 
 Charles II of Spain, degeneracy of, 286 ; 
 his attitude respecting the Spanish 
 succession, 287-8 ; death of, 288 
 
 " Charles III of Spain," see Charles, Arch- 
 duke 
 
 Charles IV of Lorraine, 84 
 
 Charles V, Emperor, 62, 218, 310 
 
 Charles VI, Emperor, 312 
 
 Charles XII of Sweden, 304 
 
 Charon, Marie, 323 
 
 Charpentier, Francois, 338 
 
 Chartres, Due de, 248, 255 
 
 Chartres, Duchesse de, 248, 249 
 
 Chateauneuf , Marquis de, 60 ; appointed 
 Keeper of the Seals, 78 ; beguiled by 
 Mme. de Chevreuse, 78 ; arrested and 
 imprisoned, 79, 93, 95 
 
 Chateau-Trompette, 194 
 
 Chatillon, Mar^chal de, 74, 84, 101 
 
 Chavigny, 87, 304 
 
 899 
 
INDEX 
 
 ChercMCO, Treaties of, 67 
 
 Chevreuse, factory at, 337 
 
 Chevreuee, Duo de, marries the widow of 
 Duo de Luynes, 26, 44 ; adviser of 
 Louis XIV, 267 ; husband of Colbert's 
 daughter, 324 
 
 Chevreuse, Dnchesae de, marriages of, 
 26, 44; friendship with Aime of 
 Austria, 44 ; her intrigues and banish- 
 ment, 45-8, 78 ; beauty and intelli- 
 gence, 77 ; exile in Touraine, 79 ; 
 character, 80 ; escapes to Spain, 82 ; 
 hint to Gondi, 138 ; and Mazarin, 
 141-2 ; again banished, 142 ; quarrels 
 with Cond6, 163 
 
 Chiari, 292 
 
 Chiavenna, 41 
 
 Chigi, Cardmal, 220 
 
 Choisy, quoted, 181, 190, 213 
 
 Choin, Mile., 244 
 
 Christina of Savoy, 168 
 
 Christina of Sweden, 21, 76, 127 
 
 Churchill, Arabella, 302 
 
 Churchill, John, see Marlborough 
 
 Cinq-Mars, Marquis de, mentioned, 18, 
 73 ; the favourite of Louis XIII, 84 ; 
 plots against Richelieu, 86 ; disgraced 
 and executed, 86 
 
 Cirey, factory at, 336 
 
 Clagny, 189, 198, 366 
 
 Classical Style, evolution of, 121 
 
 Clement IX, Pope, 273 
 
 Qement XI, Pope, 281 
 
 Clement, Jacques, 11 
 
 Clergy, under Louis XIII, 100-1 ; under 
 Louis XIV, 348 
 
 aergy. Assembly of the, 104, 261, 271 
 
 Coalition against France, 229 
 
 Coblenz, 70 
 
 Colbert, as agent of Mazarin, 169 ; his 
 love of Paris, 197 ; and Poland, 210 ; 
 and Pomponne, 212 ; and the Dutch 
 War, 223 ; his protectionist tariff, 234 ; 
 mentioned, 235; his indifference to 
 religion, 262; plurality of offices held 
 by, 322 ; birth and parentage, 323 ; 
 marriage, 323 ; appearance and man- 
 ners, 323 ; services to Mazarin, 323 ; 
 character, 324 ; his nepotism, 324 ; 
 his political conceptions, 325 ; his 
 enmity to Fouquet, 327, 328 ; his 
 unscrupulous finance, 329; his re- 
 proofs to the King, 333 ; his financial 
 system, 334-5 ; industries created by, 
 336; death of, 344; failure of his 
 policy, 345 ; bis legislative achieve- 
 ment, 345 ; his conception of the 
 State, 392 
 
 Colbert de Croissy, 212 
 
 400 
 
 Colbert de Seignelay, 212; «ee dh6 
 Seignelay 
 
 Colbert de Toroy, 212 
 
 " Colbertism," 335, 346 
 
 Coligny,.220 
 
 Colletet, F., quoted, 154 
 
 Oolmar, 231 
 
 Cologne, Elector of, 292, 312 
 
 Colonies, French, 339 
 
 Combalet, Mme. de, 34 note, 57 
 
 Commendamn, 100 
 
 Comminges (Lieut, of the Guard), 156 
 
 Companies, trading, 337-8 
 
 Company, French East India, 338-9; 
 French West India, ib. ; of the Holy 
 Sacrament, 102-3, 259 
 
 Compi^gne, 74 
 
 Concordat of 1516, 274 
 
 Concini, Concino, 3; enriches himself 
 through his wife's influence, 4, 15 ; 
 hated by the French, 14, 17; his 
 appreciation of Richelieu, 16; his 
 power and arrogance, 16, 17 ; resent- 
 ment of Louis XIII against, 18; 
 assassination of, 19, 94 
 
 Concini, Leonora, her influence over 
 Marie de' Medici, 3, 4, 15; trial and 
 execution of, 9, 20 
 
 Condf ceded to France, 234 
 
 Conde, Prince Henri de (father of the 
 Grand Cond£), his position as Prince 
 of the Blood, 4, 6, 104 ; revolts against 
 the Regent, 8 ; intervenes in Gallican 
 controversy, 12 ; intrigues with Pro- 
 testants, 13 ; character and popularity 
 of, 14 ; arrogance of, 16 ; imprisoned 
 in Bastille, 16 ; liberated, 22 ; retires to 
 Italy, 27 ; opposes marriage of Gaston 
 d' Orleans, 45 ; his severities against 
 the Huguenots, 55; raids Franche- 
 Comt6, 74; mentioned, 104; his 
 squalid habits, 106 ; quarrels' with 
 Beaufort, 136 ; death of, 147 
 
 Cond<5, Prince de (the Great Cond^), as a 
 youthful commander, 142-4 ; gains 
 Battle of Rocroy, 87, 144; leader of 
 the Fronde, 154 ; rivalry with Gaston 
 d' Orleans, »5. ; reconciled to Mazarin, 
 168 ; leads royal troops against Paris, 
 159 ; goes over again to Fronde, 161 ; 
 arrested, ib. ; released by Mazarin, 1 63 ; 
 intrigues with Spain, 167 ; in old age, 
 192 ; death of, 193 ; as diplomatist, 
 212 ; his campaign in Holland, 226-8, 
 229-30 ; see also d'Enghien, Due 
 
 Cond6, Prince Henri Jules de (son of the 
 Great Cond6), 248 
 
 Cond6, Princesse de, 155 ; see also 
 Montmorency, Charlotte de 
 
INDEX 
 
 Conrart, M., 123 
 
 Conti, Prince de, active as Frondeur, 160 ; 
 arrested, 161 ; released by Mazarin, 
 163 ; marriage to Mile, de Blois, 192, 
 334 ; at Battle of Neerwinden, 255 ; 
 supports Jansenists, 271 ; leads attacks 
 upon Moliere, 381 
 
 Conti, Princesse de (Frondeuse), 68 
 
 Conti, Princesse de (niece of Mazarin), 170 
 
 Coras (dramatist), 385 
 
 " Corbio Year," 74, 75, 143 
 
 Comeille, Pierre, at the H6tel de Ram- 
 bouUlet, 116 ; birth and manners, 131 ; 
 production of his Cid, 131-3 ; his 
 exaltation of the wiU, 133 ; his 
 influence on the Frondeurs, 134 ; his 
 Oalerie du Palais, 152 ; protected by 
 Fouqnet, 327 ; ethics of, 353 ; collabo- 
 rates with Moliere, 382 ; temporary 
 eclipse of, 384 ; relation to Bacine, 385 
 
 Comeille, Thomas, 384, 385 
 
 Comet, Nicolas, 269 
 
 Comuel, Mme. de, quoted, 323, 232 
 
 Correr, Venetian envoy, 326 
 
 Corsican Guard, affair of the, 219-20 
 
 Cotin, Abb6, 116, 382 
 
 Coton, P^re, 4 
 
 Cotte, Robert de, 363 
 
 Couderc (Camisard), 300 
 
 Councils, the King's, 151, ZH 
 
 Cours-la-Reine, 153, 158 
 
 Court life, discomfort of, 206, 240 
 
 Courtrai, 147, 230, 233 
 
 Coussay, Priory of, 31, 32 
 
 Coustou, Guillaume, 370 
 
 Coysevox, 362 
 
 Cramail, Comte de, 84 
 
 Cremona, 293 
 
 Cr^qui, Duo de, 219, 220, 293 
 
 Dangeatt, at Court, 203, 240 ; quoted, 241, 
 
 302, 313 
 Daquin (physician), 203 
 Dauphin, 207, 315, 317-8 ; see also Bour- 
 
 gogne, Duo de, and Dauphin, Grand 
 Dauphin, Grand, his severe education, 
 
 193; marriage, »6. ; mediocrity of, 
 
 243-4 ; and his daughter-in-law, 246 ; 
 
 and the Spanish Succession, 286, 289 ; 
 
 death of, 315 
 Dauphine, Place, 152-3, 155 
 Dauphine, wife of Grand Dauphin, 193 ; 
 
 wife of Due de Bourgogne, afterwards 
 
 Dauphin, 315 
 " Day of Dupes," 58, 59, 62, 77 
 D6ageant, 18, 19 
 " Declarations," royal, 421 
 Delacroix, 369 
 Delorme, Philibert, 364 
 
 Denbigh, Lord, 63 
 
 Denmark, 66, 67, 210, 221, 234, 236 
 
 Denain, Battle of, 311, 315 
 
 Denonville, Marquis de, 342 
 
 Descartes, Ren^, 127-8, 378-80; in 
 Holland, 210 
 
 Desmarets de Saint-Sorlet, 276 
 
 Despr^aux, see Boileau 
 
 Desportes, 123 
 
 Devolution, Law of, 221-2 
 
 Dijon, Parliament of, 88 
 
 Dixmude, 236 
 
 Ddle, 230 
 
 Domaine (Crown lands), 331-2 
 
 Douai, 311 
 
 Dover, battle off, 76 ; Treaty of, 225 
 
 Diagonnades, 263-4 
 
 Drogheda, Battle of, 249 
 
 Duelling in France, 107-9, 252 
 
 Dughet, Marie Anne, 367 
 
 Duguay-Trouin, 358 
 
 Dunkirk, Spanish fleet sails for, 76; 
 taken by the Duo d'Enghien, 147 ; 
 sold to France, 221 ; Louis XIV at, 
 339 ; English demand dismantlement 
 of, 307 ; fortifications razed, 312 
 
 Duquesne, Abraham, 233, 236-7 
 
 Duras, 252 
 
 Edict of Nantes, 24, 49, 50, 66, 324 ; 
 
 ambiguity of, 261 ; revocation of, 237, 
 
 260-2, 264-5, 299 
 Edict of Restitution, 64, 66 ; rescinded,? 1 
 d'Effiat, 84, 95 ; see also Cinq-Mars 
 d'Elbeuf, Due, 160, 294 ; Duohesse, 9, 68 
 " Elections," the, 97 
 Electors of the Empire, 63 
 d'Elipagaray, Renaud, 340 
 Elisabeth of France marries Philip IV of 
 
 Spain, 14 
 Embrun, 266 
 d'Emery, 104 
 Enden, Van den, 349 
 d'Enghien, Due, victor at Rocroy, 87, 
 
 142-146 ; becomes Prince de Cond6, 
 
 147 ; see also Cond6 (the Great) 
 d'Epemon, 4, 21, 22 
 Estates, the, 97 
 Estrade, Comte, 219 
 d'Estrdes, 236 ; Gabrielle, 136 
 itat de la France, 203-4 
 Eugene, Prince, origin and aptitudes, 291 ; 
 
 occupies Milan, 292 ; in Germany, 
 
 296-7 ; in the Low Countries, 306, 309 ; 
 
 at Malplaquet, 309 ; at Denain, 311 ; 
 
 negotiates Peace of Rastadt, 312 
 
 Faenza, 336 
 
 Fagon (Court surgeon), 202-3 
 
 2 c 
 
 401 
 
INDEX 
 
 Faguet, M., guoled, 135 
 
 Falaise, revolt at, 97 
 
 Falconi (Quietist), 276 
 
 Fancan, 35 
 
 Fargues, 373 
 
 Farmers of revenue, 332 
 
 Favre, see Vaugelag 
 
 Fayt, Battle of, 243 
 
 Fenelon, and Mme. de Maintenon, 243 ; 
 his influence on the Duke of Burgundyj 
 245, 392; his philanthropic outlook, 
 246; and the Quietists, 277-9; and 
 Bossuet, 278 ; suhmission to the Pope, 
 278; his TMmaque, 279; and P^re 
 Le Tellier, 282; as precursor of 
 Bousseau, 354 ; quoted, 307, 357 ; as 
 man of letters, 389 
 
 Ferdinand It, Emperor, 56, 64-7, 74 
 
 Ferdinand-Joseph of Bavaria, 286 
 
 Fernando, Cardinal-Infante, 74, 76, 80 
 
 Ferrier, J^r^mie, 49 
 
 Finance under Louis XIII, 93 ; under 
 Louis XIV, 347 
 
 Flanders, 393 
 
 Fleurus, Battle of, 253-4 
 
 Fontainebleau, 197, 201, 328 
 
 Fontaines, Comte de, 144 
 
 Fontanges, Mile, de, 190, 192, 193, 195 
 
 Fontenay-Mareuil (ambassador), quoted, 
 26,78 
 
 Fontenelle, 380 
 
 Fontrailles, M. de, 102 
 
 Fortresses seized, Dutch, 290 
 
 Fortune-tellers, 191-2 
 
 Fouquet, Nicolas, character and career 
 of, 326-329; mentioned, 324, 332, 
 382 
 
 Franche-Comt6, Spanish possession, 63 ; 
 attack on, 74 ; restored to Spain, 223 ; 
 taken by Louis XIV, 230; ceded to 
 France, 233, 393 
 
 Francion, quoted, 102 
 
 Freiburg, 234, 312 
 
 Friedlingen, Battle of, 295 
 
 Fronde, the, 13, 150-66 ; origin of 
 the term, 155 ; revival of the, 163 ; 
 end of the, 166; survivors of the, 
 372-3 
 
 Frondeurs, 150, 271, 279, 373 
 
 Frondeuses, 373 
 
 Fuensaldana (Spanish commander), 167 
 
 Fiirstenberg, Cardinal von, 238 
 
 GabeOe, the (salt-tax), 330-2, 357 
 
 Gabriel, P^re, 287 
 
 Galen, Bemhard von, 221 
 
 Galigai, Leonora, see Concinoi 
 
 Gallas, General, 70 
 
 Galleys, the, 341-3 ; slaves of, 342-3 
 
 402 
 
 Gallicanism, 272-3 
 
 Galileans, 11, 12 
 
 Galloway, Lord, 206 
 
 Gambling at Court, 206, 240, 334, 340 
 
 Gangni^res, General, 216 
 
 Gap, 256 
 
 Gassendi, 128 
 
 Gassion, 144 
 
 Gaultier, Abb6, 310 
 
 Gell^e, Claude, 369 
 
 Genoa bombarded, 237 
 
 Germany, campaign in, 295 
 . Gertruydenberg, 310 
 " Gesvres, Due de, 9, 203 
 
 Ghent, 233 
 
 Gibraltar, 302 ; ceded to English, 312 
 
 Girardon, 362, 370 
 
 Gisors, lace-making at, 336 
 
 Glapion, Mme. de, 196 
 
 Gobelins, Les (factory), 362, 386 
 
 Godeau (Bishop), 101 
 
 Godet des Marais (Bishop), 277 
 
 Godolphin, 291 
 
 Gombard, 124 
 
 Gondi, 138, 166, 161-3; see also Betz, 
 Cardinal de 
 
 Gonzaga, Anna di, 163 
 
 Gonzaga, Maria di, 65 
 
 Gonzaga, Vincenzo di, 64, 55 
 
 Goulas, quoted, 58 
 
 Gourgues, M. de, 92 
 
 Gourville, quoted, 213 
 
 Grammont, Comte de, 101 ; Comtesse de, 
 280 ; Mar^chal de, 110, 158 
 
 Grand alliance, 290 
 
 Grand Cyrus, Le, 113, 134, 150 
 
 Grand Cond^, see Cond6 
 
 Grande Mademoiselle, see Mademoiselle 
 
 Gravellnes, 147 
 
 " Greybeards," the, 6, 15, 21 
 
 Gr^vo, Place de, 165 
 
 Grignan, Mme. de, quoted, 252; men- 
 tioned, 375 
 
 Grisons, the, 40 
 
 Grotius, 210 
 
 Guastalla, Duke of, 65 
 
 Gu^briant, Mardchal de, 76, 84, 14S 
 
 Gu6m6nde, Mme. de, 141 
 
 Guiana, 339 
 
 Guiche, Due de, 201 
 
 Guilds, 335, 354^ 
 
 Guise, Chevalier de, 108 
 
 Guise, Due de, 68, 94, 105 
 
 Guise, Duchesse de, 101 
 
 Guiton, Jean, 53-4 
 
 Gustavus-Adolphus of Sweden, 67, 69, 
 70 
 
 Guttenberg, see Berlepsch 
 
 Guyon, Mme., 276-8 
 
INDEX 
 
 Haqub, secret treaty of The, 287 
 Hamilton, Anthony, quoted on siege of 
 
 Lerida, 147-8 
 Hamon (Jansenist), 268 
 Hanotaux, M., quoted, 36 
 Hapsburgs, the, 62, 64, 65, 288 
 d'Harcourt, Comte, 76 ; Marquis, 288 
 Harlay, M. de (Archbishop), 279 
 Haro, Don Luis do, 168 
 Harraoh, Count, 288 
 Hauranne, see Saint-Cyran 
 Haussmann, Baron, 166 
 Hautefort, Marie de, 79-80 
 Heidelberg destroyed by TeBs£, 251 ; 
 
 occupied by Yillars, 304 
 Heinsius, 291 
 Henri III, 11, 112 
 Henri IV, assassination of, 1, 11, 23 ; and 
 
 Marie de' Medici, 2 ; and restoration 
 
 of Church property, 24 ; Louis XIII' s 
 
 cult of, 37 ; unceremonious Court of, 
 
 112 ; statue of, 153 ; familiar manners 
 
 of, 200 ; and the Edict of Nantes, 261 ; 
 
 mentioned, 336 
 Henrietta Stuart, 201 ; see also Madame 
 
 (Henriette) and d' Orleans, Duohesse 
 Henriette-Marie, marriage to Prince of 
 
 Wale>i 41, 44 
 H6rouet, 115 
 d'Henrart, M., 382 
 Hesse, Prince of, 296 
 Hinard, founder of BeauTaia factory, 
 
 336 
 Hindustan, 339 
 Hochstadt, 296, 314 
 d'Hocquincouit, Mar^chal, 108, 164 
 Holland, 210 ; war between England and, 
 
 221 ; peace with, 234 ; see also United 
 
 Provinces 
 Holland, Earl of, 44, 78 
 Honfleur, 358 
 
 Hotel-de-Ville, Paris, sack of, 165 
 Hudson Bay ceded to England, 312 
 Huguenots, seditious attitude of the, 
 
 23-5, 260; revolts of, 41, 48-54; 
 
 ecclesiastical hierarchy of the, 61 ; 
 
 emigration of the, 264-5; persecution 
 
 of the, 264-5 
 d'Humi^res (General), 233 
 Hundred Years' War, 290 
 Hungary, 63, 220 
 Huygens, 210 
 
 Ile-de-Fbakcb, 322 
 
 Industry, restrictions on, 337 
 
 Infanta, the, 39 
 
 Innocent XI, Pope, 238, 274, 280 
 
 Innocent XII, Pope, 280 
 
 Intolerance, religious, 49, 260, 264 
 
 Invalides, the, 366 
 
 Italy, 209 ; campaign in, 292-6 
 
 Jamis II of England, deposed, 238; 
 defeated at Drogheda, 249-50; for- 
 saken by Louis XIV, 258 ; death at 
 Saint-Germain, 290 
 
 James Stuart (Old Pretender), 207, 290, 
 312 
 
 Jansenism, 212, 266-273 
 
 Jansenists, eminent, 267-8 ; support 
 Descartes, 379 
 
 Jansenlus, 266, 269-70 
 
 Jars, Chevalier de, 78, 140 
 
 Jarz6, de {protigi of Cond6), 138, 161 
 
 Jesuits, 23, 98, 261, 266, 269 
 
 Joseph I, Emperor, 310 
 
 Joseph (Le Clero du Tremblay) P^re, 
 the " Grey Cardinal," 35-6 ; envoy at 
 Diet of Ratisbon, 66, 66-6 ; intercedes 
 for Richelieu, 58 ; opposes annexation 
 of Alsace, 69-70 ; admonishes Richelieu, 
 75 ; insensibility of, 100 
 
 Justice, administration of, under Louis 
 XIII, 88-91 ; under Louis XIV, 344-5 
 
 Kemfen, Battle of, 84 
 Koeprilii (Grand Vizier), 220 
 
 La Bebthe (duellist), 109 
 
 La Bruy^re, on Comeille, 131 ; on 
 Lauzun, 185; on the cult of Louis XIV, 
 202 ; on the devout courtier, 239 ; 
 attitude to the Huguenots, 264 ; on 
 the misery of the peasantry, 354 ; as 
 a classical writer, 378, 380 ; personality 
 and career, 389-91 ; his CaractSres, 
 363, 390-1 
 
 La Chaise, P^re de, 240, 243, 262, 265, 314 
 
 Ladenburg, 231 
 
 Laer, 255 
 
 La Fare, qiu)ted, 185, 230 
 
 La Fayette, Mme. de, on Philippe 
 d' Orleans, 180; on Madame (Hen- 
 riette), 181 ; at Versailles, 359 ; her 
 friendship with La Rochefoucauld, 374 
 
 La Fayette, Mile, de, 79-80, 82, 84 
 
 La Feuillade, Due de (senior), constructs 
 Place des Victoires, 202, 294 
 
 La FeuClade, Duo de (junior), gwoied, 141 ; 
 at the King's lever, 203 ; commands 
 expedition against the Turks, 220; 
 mentioned, 239, 292; routed by 
 Eugene, 294 
 
 LaSemas, 94 
 
 La Fontaine, Jean, as minor poet under 
 Louis XIII, 124; on the fortune- 
 tellers, 191 ; and the Huguenots, 264 ; 
 protected by Fouqnet, 327; his 
 
 403 
 
INDEX 
 
 flattery of Louis XIV, 363; collabo- 
 rates in Mdlicerte, 372 ; publishes first 
 tale, 373 ; encouraged by BoUeau^ 377 
 upholds the classical ideal, 378, 380 
 his appreciation of MoU^re, 382 
 character and career, 382-4 
 
 La Force, Mar6ohal de, 26, 75 
 
 La Frette, Marquis de, 109 
 
 La Hague, Cape, 260 
 
 La Hougue, Battle of, 250 
 
 Lagos, Battle of, 251 
 
 Lalande (composer), 372 
 
 La Marf6e, Battle of, 84, 85 
 
 Lamboy (Spanish General), 84 
 
 La MeiUeraie, Mme. de, 170 
 
 Lamoignon de Basville, 299 
 
 La Mothe-F^nelon, 389 
 
 La Motte-Argencourt, Mile, de, 168 
 
 La Motte-Houdancourt, Mile, de, 201 
 
 Lancelot, Claude ( Jansenist), 267-8 
 
 Landau, 295, 312 
 
 Landrecies, 311 
 
 Langnedoc, 55 
 
 Lanson, M., quoted, 121, 268, 379 
 
 La Porte (Louis XIV's valet), 80, 170, 173 
 
 La Porte, Suzanne de, 30 
 
 Largillidre, 369 
 
 La Rochefoucauld, Due de, on Duke of 
 Buckingham, 44; abets Mme. de 
 Chevreuse, 80 ; on Due de Beaufort, 
 136 ; as leader of the Frondeurs, 160 ; 
 exiled, 166 ; at the King's Uver, 203 ; 
 character and career, 373-5 ; his 
 Maxims, 374 
 
 La Eochelle, Huguenot Assembly at, 
 24^5 ; Peace of, 42 ; Huguenot strong- 
 hold, 51-2 ; siege of, 52-4 
 
 La Kong^re, M. de, 250 
 
 La Sabli^re, Mme. de, 382 
 
 La Salle, Cavelier de, 339 
 
 La Tour du Pin, Mile, de, 256 
 
 La Tr6moille, Due de, 203 
 
 Lauzun, Duo de, his extraordinary 
 personality, 185 ; marries La Grande 
 Mademoiselle, 186 ; imprisoned at 
 Pignerol, ib. ; restored to favour, »6. ; 
 mentioned, 382 
 
 La Valette, Cardinal, 35, 100 
 
 La Valli^re, Louise de, mentioned, 175 ; 
 distinguished by the King, 182 ; 
 created a duchess, 183 ; supplanted by 
 Mme. de Montespan, 184 ; takes the 
 veil, 188 ; the Duo de Guiche and, 201; 
 the Queen and, 201 ; mentioned, 259 ; 
 her children by the King, 324 ; Fouquet 
 and, 327 
 
 Lavardin, Bishop, 102 
 
 Lavardin, Marquis de, 238 
 
 La Vieuville, 28, 29, 39, 326 
 
 404 
 
 Le Bouteux, 360 
 
 lie Brun, his decorations for Marly, 199 ; 
 
 and at Vaux, 197, 327 ; director of 
 
 Les Gobelins, 336; ennobled, 360; 
 
 director of Academy of Painting and 
 
 Sculpture, 161 ; elaborates Louis XIV 
 
 Style, 362 ; the art of, 369-70 
 Leclerc (dramatist), 385 
 LeclerC; Sebastien (artist), 362 
 Le Clerc du Tremblay, see Joseph, P^re 
 Leipzig, 69 
 
 Le Maistre, Antoine, 268 
 Le Maistre de Sacy, 269 
 Le Maistre de S6ricourt, 269 
 Lemaitre, Jules, qvuited, 133, 376, 386 
 Le Mercier, 364 
 Le Naui, the brothers, 366 
 Lengl^ (milliner), 189 
 Le N6tre, work at Vaux, 197, 327; 
 
 ennobled, 360; work at VersaiUes, 
 
 197, 366, 368, 370 
 Lens, victory at, 155 
 Leopold, Archduke, 148, 160, 167 
 Leopold I, Emperor, insecurity of his 
 
 tenure, 209 ; contrasted with Louis 
 
 XIV, 211 ; accepts French aid against 
 
 the Turks, 220 ; helplessness of, 221 ; 
 
 his aUiance with United Provinces, 229 ; 
 
 accepts Peace of Nimeguen, 234; 
 
 advances claim to Spanish crown, 286- 
 
 7 ; a party to the Grand AUiance, 290 
 Le Qnesnoy, 30 ; taken by Eugene, 
 
 recovered by French, 311 
 Lerida, siege of, 147-8 ; taken, 303 
 Lescot, Pierre, 364-5 
 Lesdiguieres, 4, 5, 27, 58 
 Les Granges, 267, 270 
 Le TeUier, Michel (War Minister), 212-3, 
 
 225, 323, 340 
 Le TeUier, P^re (the King's Confessor), 
 
 243, 266, 282 
 Le Tr6aumont, 349 
 Le Vau (architect), his work at Vaux, 
 
 197, 327 ; at VersaUles, 197-8 ; in the 
 
 Louvre, 364-6 
 Leyden, 210 
 L'Hermite, Tristan, 124 
 L'H6pital, Mar^ohal de, 143-4 
 L'Hospital, Nicolas de, «ee Vitry 
 " Libertines," 99, 102, 259-60 
 Li6ge, taken by Marlborough, 298 
 LUle, fortress, 306-8 
 Limerick, 250 
 
 Lionne, Hugues de, 211, 218, 220, 225, 328 
 " Liselotte," see d'OrWans, Duchesse 
 Lizza, Andrea di, 4 
 LocatelU, describes the Queen's lever, 
 
 207 ; and a review by the King, 214 
 Longueville, Due de, 8, 22, 134, 227 
 
INDEX 
 
 Longueville, Mme. de, as Froudeuse, 160, 
 159-60 ; at Bordeaux, 161 ; men- 
 tioned, 191 ; supports the Jansenists, 
 271, 279 
 
 Lorges, De, 232 
 
 Lorme, Marion de, 84 
 
 Lorrain, Le, see Gell^e, Claude 
 
 Lorraine, 76 ; portion ceded to France, 
 169 ; restored to Duke of LoiTaine, 
 258 ; administered by Louvois, 322 
 
 Lorraine, Chevalier de, 180 
 
 Lorraine, Duke of, 164, 169, 234 
 
 Louis XIII, accession of, 1 ; childhood 
 of, 3 ; at sixteen, 17 ; conspires against 
 Concini, 17-19 ; his relations with 
 Richelieu, 36, 77 ; at twenty-three, 37 ; 
 character of, 37-39 ; military achieve- 
 ments of, 77 ; and the Parliaments, 92 ; 
 death of, 136 ; at Versailles, 197 ; 
 friendly relations with his courtiers, 
 200-1 ; and the completion of the 
 Louvre, 364 
 
 Louis XIV, birth of, 83 ; majority of, 
 163 ; maniage of, 167, 169, 171, 179- 
 80 ; youthful love-affairs of, 168 ; 
 memoirs of, 172, 177 ; neglected 
 education of, 173 ; asserts his power, 
 172-3 ; appearance and physique, 174 ; 
 gigantic appetite, 176 ; character of, 
 176 ; polished manners of, 176 ; his 
 belief in divine right, 178 ; intellect 
 of, 178 ; inordinate vanity of, 179 ; 
 as a young man, 201 j etiquette of his 
 Court, 202-7 ; conversion of, 202, 239 ; 
 statues of, 202 ; his lever, 203-4 ; his 
 coucher, 207 ; as diplomatist, 212 ; 
 ambitions of, 218 j invades Franohe- 
 Comtd in person, 222 ; his imper- 
 turbability in misfortune, 306, 313 ; 
 his will, 316 ; last days of, 317, 318 ; 
 death, 319 ; his relations with Colbert, 
 332-4 ; his ruinous expenditure, 333-4, 
 340, 346 
 _ Louis XV, 316, 318 
 ' Louis-Philippe, 166 
 
 Louvain, University of, 266 
 
 Louvigny, Comte de, 47, 108 
 
 Louville, quoted, 300 
 
 Louvois, his hostility to Mme. de 
 Montespan, 184, 192 ; his rivalry with 
 Pomponne, 212; Secretary of State 
 for War, 212-14 ; as disciplinarian, 
 216 J prepares for war with Holland, 
 225; and the " Eeunions," 235; 
 death of, 241 ; devastation of the 
 Palatinate ordered by, 251 ; severity 
 to Huguenots urged by, 262; his 
 arrogance, 340 
 
 Louvre, Louis XIII at the, 83 ; in the 
 
 time of Louis XIII, 162 ; completion 
 of the, 364-6 
 
 Low Countries, 63; ceded to the Em- 
 peror, 312 
 
 Loye, Mar^chal de, 256 
 
 Lude, Comte de, 18 
 
 LuUi, Jean-Baptiste, 359, 371-2, 382 
 
 Lutter, Battle of, 65 
 
 Liitzen, Battle of, 70 
 
 Luxembourg, Due de, 106 
 
 Luxembourg, Mar^chal de, commands in 
 Holland, 226, 229-30 ; created Marshal, 
 232 ; at Battle of Cassel, 233 ; repulses 
 William of Orange near Mons, 234; 
 mentioned, 239 ; as a general, 262 ; 
 death of, 256 
 
 Luxemburg (province), 236 
 
 Luynes, Charles d' Albert de, appointed 
 Falconer to Louis XIII, 18 ; created 
 Marquis d' Albert, 20 ; marries Mile, de 
 Eohan, ib. ; his political nullity, ib. ; 
 as favourite of the King, 20-1 ; created 
 Constable of France, 20, 25 ; decline of, 
 26 ; death of, ib. ; mentioned, 324 
 
 Luynes, Duchesse de, 20; see also Chev- 
 reuse, Duchesse de 
 
 Luzzara, Vendome at, 294 
 
 Lyonnais, the, 322 
 
 Lyons, Richelieu at, 86 
 
 Masaoascau, 98, 339 
 
 Madame, first wife of Philippe, Duo 
 d'Orl^ans, 181-2, 184-5, 225 ; see also 
 Henrietta Stuart 
 
 Madame, second wife of Philippe, Duo 
 d' Orleans, quoted on Mile, de Fontanges, 
 190 ; on manners at table, 205 ; on 
 the discomforts of the Court, 206, 207 ; 
 on the Duchess of Burgundy, 246; 
 on the winter of 1709, 306 ; on death 
 of Louis XIV, 3 1 8-9 ; see also d' Orleans, 
 Duchesse 
 
 Madeleine, M4re (of Port-Royal), 272 
 
 Mademoiselle, La Grande, as Frondeuse, 
 134, 150; her quarrels with the 
 Prinoesse de Cond^, 155 ; commands 
 troops in Orleans, 164; banished to 
 the country, 166; her proposed 
 marriage to PhiUppe d'Orl^ans, 185; 
 her flattery of Louis XIV, 202; 
 mentioned, 371 ; her romantic ideals, 
 372; mentioned, 382 
 
 Maestrioht taken by Louis XIV, 229; 
 restored to Holland, 234; siege of, 
 295 
 
 Magdeburg, Archbishopric of, 64; sack 
 of, 69 
 
 Maine, 343; Due du, 247-8; 316-7; 
 Duchesse du, 248-9 
 
 405 
 
IJN UEX 
 
 Maintenon, hostility of the Duchesse 
 d'Orl^ans to Madame de, 187 ; cha- 
 racter and career, 193-6 ; governess to 
 children of Mme. de Montespan, 194 ; 
 religious influence on the King, 196 ; 
 founds Saint-Cyr, 196 ; marriage to 
 Louis XIV; quoted on the emptiness 
 of realized ambitions, 195 ; mentioned, 
 201, 208; on the King's religious 
 attitude, 239; her life as the King's 
 wife, 241-3; her political influence, 
 242-3 ; indulgent to Mile. Choin, 244 ; 
 her affection for the Duchesse de 
 Bourgogne, 246 ; encourages severities 
 against the Huguenots, 262-3 ; and 
 Sbne. Guyon, 277 ; her friendship 
 with the Priucesse des Ursins, 301 ; 
 in 1709, 306 ; on murmurs against the 
 King, 307 ; quoted, 314 ; retires to 
 Saint-Cyr, 318 ; domestic budget of, 
 349 ; arranges concerts for the King, 
 359 ; ascendency of,: 373 ; patroness 
 of Racine, 386 
 
 Malaval, 276 
 
 Malherbe, 116, 122-3 
 
 Malebranche, 128, 379, 380 
 
 Malplaquet, Battle of, 309 
 
 Man in the Iron Mask, see Matthioli 
 
 Mancini, Filippo, 170 
 
 Mancini, Maria, 168, 170-1, 175 
 
 Mancini, Olympia, 168, 291 ; see also 
 Soissons, Comtesse de 
 
 Mangot, 15 
 
 Mannheim occupied by Villars, 304 
 
 Mansart, B"ran9ois, 364 
 
 Mansart, Jules Hardouin, 189, 360, 366 
 
 Mantua, 65 
 
 Manuguet (jester), 57 
 
 Maroa, Archbishop, 271 
 
 Marche, La, 356 
 
 Marciennes, 311 
 
 Maroilly, Siege of, 113, 150 
 
 Marcin, Mardchal de, 294, 296 
 
 Mardick, taken by the French, 147 ; sold 
 to France, 221 
 
 Margaret-Theresa, Empress, 286-7 
 
 Maria-Anna, Empress, 286-7 
 
 Maria- Anna of Neuburg, 285, 287, 300 
 
 Maria-Antoinetta of Bavaria, 286-7 
 
 Maria (of Savoy), 168 
 
 Maria Christina (of Savoy), see Christina 
 
 Maria-Luisa, Queen of Spain, 285 
 
 Maria-Luisa (of Savoy), 300 
 
 Maria-Theresa, Infanta, 167; see also 
 Marie-Th^rdse, Queen 
 
 Mariana, Father, 12 
 
 Marie, Princess (of Mantua), 85 
 
 Marie de' Medici, on the death of Henri 
 TV, 1 ; character and appearance, 2 ; 
 
 406 
 
 as Regent, 4-8 ; dominated by the 
 Concini, 15-16 ; banished to Blois, 19 ; 
 her intrigues with Richelieu, 21 ; 
 escapes from Blois, 21 ; appointed 
 Governor of Anjou, 22; heads a 
 rebellion, 22 ; hostile to Aime of Aus- 
 tria, 43 ; subservience of Richelieu to, 
 45, 57 ; her rupture with Richelieu, 
 67-8 ; checkmated by RicheUeu, 58 ; 
 exile and death, 69, 105 
 
 Marie-Th^r^se, Queen, 179-80; and 
 Mile, de La Valli^re, 188 ; at marriage 
 of Mile. d'OrMans, 190; and Mme. de 
 Maintenon, 195; death of, 180, 195; 
 and Charles II of England, 205; her 
 kver, 207 ; non-payment of her dowry, 
 220 ; her claim to the Spanish throne, 
 222, 286 
 
 Marienthal, Turenne at, 146 
 
 Marillao, Mar^ohal de, 58, 69, 61, 78, 264 
 
 Marino, Cavaliere, 367 
 
 Marivaux, 385 
 
 Marlborough, Duchess of, 291 
 
 Marlborough, Duke of, 291 ; at Blenheim, 
 297; in the Netherlands, 298; and 
 Charles XII of Sweden, 304; at 
 Malplaquet, 309 ; disgrace of, 310 
 
 Marly, 199, 200, 213, 280, 307, 369, 366 
 
 MaroUes, quoted, 367 
 
 Marsaille, La, 256 
 
 Marsal, 258 
 
 Martin, Jean, 196 
 
 Mary, of England, Princess, marries 
 Prince of Orange, 233 
 
 Massillon, 279 
 
 Matha, M. de, 102 
 
 Matthioli, 212, 235 
 
 Maubeuge ceded to France, 234 
 
 Maubuisson, Convent of, 267 
 
 Maucroix, Canon, 383 
 
 Maugars (violinist), 101 
 
 Mayenoe, 146 
 
 Mayenne, leagued with Cond6, 8 
 
 Maynard (writer), 123 
 
 Mazarin (Mazarini, Giulio), first appear- 
 ance of, 56 ; envoy of the Pope, 67 ; 
 Richelieu's agent, 76 ; appointed a 
 member of the Supreme Council, 87 ; 
 origin, character, and career, 138-142 ; 
 unpopularity of, 149 ; and the Fronde, 
 149-166; at Bruhl, 163; returns to 
 France, 163 ; makes aUianoe with 
 Cromwell, 167 ; foreign policy of, 
 168-9 ; magnificence of, 169 ; death 
 and will of, 171-2 ; superintendent of 
 Louis XrV's education, 173 ; trained 
 Hugues de Lionne, 211 ; mentioned, 
 259, 291, 324, 326 ; creates Academy 
 of Fine Arts, 361 
 
INDEX 
 
 Mazarin, Duo de, 170, 269 
 
 Melac, 295 
 
 Melo, Don Francisco de, 142-4 
 
 Manage, 116 
 
 Merooeur, Duchesse de, 170 
 
 Mercure Franfais, 42 
 
 Mercy (German General), 145-0 
 
 Mer6, Chevalier de, 129 
 
 Mersenne, Pdre, 102 
 
 Meulen, Van der, 362 
 
 Meudon, 244 
 
 Michelet, quoted, 252 
 
 Mignard, 362, 369 
 
 Milan, 63, 76 
 
 Minorca ceded to the English, 312 
 
 Modena, Duchess of, 170 
 
 Mol6, President, 160 
 
 Moli^re, quoted, on fashionable magic, 191 ; 
 protected by Louis XIV, 360 ; his 
 Battery of the King, 363 ; quoted on the 
 art of painting, 368 ; collaborates in 
 Milicerte, 372 ; encouraged by Boileau, 
 377 ; his career and works, 380-2 ; 
 the controversy touching his Tariuffe, 
 103, 259, 381 ; death of, 382 
 
 Moliuos, Miguel, 276 
 
 Mon9on, Treaty of, 42 
 
 Monheurt, siege of, 26 
 
 Mons, 234, 253, 308 
 
 Monseigneur, eee Dauphin, Grand 
 
 Monsieur, 45-8, 104 ; su also d'Orl^ans, 
 Gaston, Duo 
 
 Monsieur, 180; see also d'Orldans, 
 Philippe, Due 
 
 Montalto (physician), 3 
 
 Montauban, siege of, 25-27, 55 
 
 Montausier, Due de, 193, 203 
 
 Montansier, Marquis de, 119 
 
 Montchrestien, 345 
 
 Hontclar destroys Mannheim, 252 
 
 Montdidier, 4 
 
 Montecuculli, Imperialist General, 220, 
 232 
 
 Montespan, Mme. de, her beauty and 
 charm, 183 ; supplants MUe. de La 
 Valli^re, 184, 189; supplanted by 
 MUc. de Fontanges, 192, 195; her 
 dealings in magic, 191-2 ; chooses 
 gifts for Dauphme, 193 ; children of, 
 194, 247 ; her gambling, 334 ; Qagny 
 buUt for, 366 
 
 Mouteverde, 370 
 
 Montferrat, 294 
 
 Montmorency, Charlotte de, 14 
 
 Montmorency, Henri, Due de, friendship 
 with Anne of Austria, 44 ; joins Gaston 
 d'OrWans in revolt, 60 ; taken prisoner, 
 tried and executed, 60, 78 
 
 Montmoreacy-Boutteville, set Boutteville 
 
 Montmorency, Duo de, son of Marshal 
 
 Luxembourg, 255 
 MontpeUier, Treaty of, 27 ; Peace of, 40 
 Montpensier, Mme. de, 1 
 Montpensier, Mile, de, 45-7 
 Moors in Spain, 63 
 Moravia, 63 
 
 MotteviUe, Mme. de, 78, 372 
 Muiden, 228 
 Mulhouse, 23 
 Miinster, Congress of, 148 
 Music, 359 
 
 Namitb captured, 253; retaken by the 
 English, 257 
 
 Naples, kingdom of, 63 
 
 Napoleon, 227, 310 
 
 Nassau, Maurice of, 127 
 
 National Anthem, English, 372 
 
 Naval enlistment, 341 
 
 Navy, creation of the, 98, 99 ; under 
 Louis XIV, 339-43 
 
 N.C.'s, the (New Catholics), 265 
 
 Neerwinden, Battle of, 254-5 
 
 Ndgrepelisse captured, 27 
 
 Nemours, Due de, 105 
 
 Nevers, Due de, 4, 54, 56, 105, 170 
 
 Nevers, potteries at, 336 
 
 Newfoundland, 308, 312, 339 
 
 Newspapers, the first, 42-3 
 
 Nice taken by the French, 256 ; restored 
 to Savoy, 312 
 
 Nicole ( Jansenist), 267-8, 279, 385 
 
 Nietz3che,134 
 
 Nimeguen, Peace of, 233, 235, 257, 258 
 
 Nimes, 55, 369 
 
 Noailles, Bishop, 277-8 ; becomes Arch- 
 bishop of Paris, 280 ; and Cardinal, 
 281 ; leader of the Galilean party, 
 280-1 ; agrees to suppression of Port 
 Royal, 282 ; supports P^re Quesnel, 
 282-3 ; honoured by the Regent, 284 
 
 NoaiUes, Mar^chal de, 256 
 
 Nobility, centraUzation of the, 207-8 ; 
 provincial, 106 
 
 Nobles, the "great," 4-6, 83, 104-6; 
 under Louis XIV, 348-51 
 
 Noblesse d'ipee (patrician nobility), 351 ; 
 de robe (legal nobility), 351-3 
 
 Nogaret, M. de, 216 
 
 Noirmoutiers, M. de, 150 
 
 Nordlingen, Battle of, 71, 146-7 
 
 Normandy, 343, 357 
 
 Notre Dame, Paris, 156, 253, 363 
 
 Noyon, 322 
 
 OLEBOir, captured by Huguenots, 41 
 
 Olier, 102 
 
 Oppeuheim destroyed, 262 
 
 407 
 
INDEX 
 
 Oratorians, 379 
 
 Orders founded, religious, 102-3 
 
 Orders, lower, 353-4 
 
 Orl^anais, 322 
 
 d' Orleans, Gaston, Duo, brother of 
 Louis XIII, 3 ; his good looks and 
 despicable character, 45-48 ; marriaee 
 to Mile, de Montpensier, 47 ; cause of 
 rupture between Marie de' Medici and 
 Richelieu, 57 ; raises a revolt, 59 ; 
 marries his second wife. Marguerite of 
 Lorraine, 60 ; servile submission to 
 Biohelieu, 61 ; mentioned, 70 ; in 
 Lorraine and at Brussels, 78 ; plans 
 assassination of Richelieu, 83 ; makes 
 secret treaty with Spain, 85 ; Lieu- 
 tenant-General of the Kingdom, 87 ; 
 mentioned, 142 ; as leader of the 
 Fronde, 154 ; mentioned, 156 ; won 
 over by Mazarin, 157-8 ; negotiates 
 with Cond6, 164 ; concerned in the 
 " Straw Sedition," 165 ; pardoned, 166 
 
 d' Orleans, Philippe, Duo, brother of 
 Louis XIV, childhood. 173 ; character 
 and appearance, 180-1 ; marriage to 
 Henrietta Stuart, 180-1 ; at the 
 Battle of Oassel, 233 ; unwilling to 
 marry the Grande Mademoiselle, 185 ; 
 marries the Princess Palatine, 186 ; 
 death of, 313 
 
 d' Orleans, Philippe Duo, nephew of 
 Louis XIV, commands troops in Italy, 
 294 ; unpopularity of, 316 ; at the 
 King's death-bed, 317 ; see also 
 Chartres, Due de 
 
 d' Orleans, Elisabeth Charlotte, Duchesse, 
 second wife of Philippe (I) d'OrWans, 
 appearance and manners, 186-7 ; Louis 
 XIV claims Palatinate on her behalf, 
 238 ; quoted on the King's conversion, 
 240 J her affection for the Due de 
 Chartres, 248 ; quoted on James II of 
 England, 249 ; Tessd sends her por- 
 traits from Heidelberg, 251 ; pension 
 paid her by the Elector Palatine, 258 ; 
 quoted on the death of the King's heirs, 
 316; at the death-bed of Louis XIV, 
 317 
 
 d* Orleans, Henriette, Duchesse, first wife 
 of Philippe (I) d'Orldans, 180-2; 
 death of, 184-5 ; her mission to 
 England, 225 
 
 d' Orleans, MUe., married to King of 
 Spain, 190 
 
 d'Ormesson, quoted, 149, 182, 212 
 
 Ormoy-Blainville, 324 
 
 d'Omano, Mar6chal, Governor of Gaston 
 d'Orl^auB, 46 ; imprisoned, ib. ; death 
 in piiaon, 48 ; mentioned, 93 
 
 408 
 
 Orsini, see Ursins 
 
 Osnabriick, Duchess of, 190-1, 206 
 Oudenarde, 168, 233, 236; Battle of, 
 305 
 
 Paix de grdce, 56 
 
 Palais de Justice, 152 
 
 Palais Royal, 140, 156 
 
 Palaiseau, 197 
 
 Palatinate, misery in the, 76; ravaged 
 by Turenne, 231 ; conquest of the, 238 ; 
 again ravaged, 251 ; pays indemnity, 
 268 ; devastated by Marlborough, 296 
 
 Palatine, Elector, 186, 238, 258 
 
 Palatine, Princess, 248 ; see also d'Or- 
 l(Sans, Duchesse 
 
 Paris, centre of the Fronde, 156-161, 
 164-6; Louis XlV's dislike of, 197 j 
 Parliament of, 13, 90, 91, 151, 155- 
 159 
 
 Parliaments, the ten French (Aix, Bor- 
 deaux, Dijon, Grenoble, Metz, Paris, 
 Pau, Rennes, Rouen, Toulouse), 88, 
 91,92 
 
 Pascal, Blaise, 128-31, 268 ; his Lettres 
 Provinciales, 129-30, 270 ; his Pensies, 
 128, 130, 131, 269 
 
 Pascal, Jacqueline, 129 
 
 Paulet (financier), 10 
 
 Paulet, Mile. 116 
 
 Paulette, the (tax), 10, 13 
 
 Pavia, Treaty of, 21 
 
 Pavilion, Nicolas (Bishop), 272-4 
 
 Peasantry under Louis XIV, 355 
 
 " Peace of the Church," 273, 282 
 
 Peace negotiations in 1709, 307-8, 310 
 
 Pdr^xe, Hardouin de, 271, 279 
 
 Pirier, Mme., 129 
 
 Pirier, Marguerite, 270 
 
 P^roges, see Vaugelaa 
 
 P6ronne, 4, 316, 359 
 
 Perpignan, 77 
 
 Perrault, Charles, 327, 365, 380 
 
 Perrin, the Abb6, 371 
 
 Perron, Du, 12 
 
 Peterborough, Lord, 303 
 
 Petit-Benaud, 237 
 
 Philip II of Spain, 223 
 
 Philip IV of Spain, 55, 167, 209, 211, 219, 
 221, 285-6 
 
 Philip V of Spain, accepts throne, 289 ; 
 his reception in Spain, 300 ; alienates 
 Spanish nobility, 302 ; defeated by 
 the Allies, 303 ; removes Court to 
 Burgos, ib, ; recovers Madrid, t6. ; pro- 
 posed abdication of, 303, 310; re- 
 nounces claim to French crown, 312, 
 315 
 
 Philippsburg, 70, 146 
 
INDEX 
 
 Piedmont, 77 
 
 Pignerol, occupied by the Frenchj 67, 76 ; 
 ceded to Stance, 149 ; Lauzun im- 
 prisoned at, 186 ; Fouquet imprisoned 
 at, 329 ; restored to Savoy, 257 
 
 Pin, Abb6 du, 390 
 
 Pirates, 98 
 
 Plessis, Du, 95 
 
 Pluvinel, Sieur de, 30 
 
 Pointis, 258 
 
 Poisoning scandals, 191-2, 316 
 
 Poitou, 264, 322 
 
 Poland, 68, 210, 225, 333 
 
 Polignao, Abbd de, 310 
 
 Polignac, Cardinal de, 200 
 
 Poll-tax, 347-8 
 
 Pomponne, Arnauld de, 211-2, 225, 235, 
 321 
 
 Pondioherry, 258 
 
 Pontchartrain (Minister), 239, 288, 350 
 
 Pontgibault, 108 
 
 Pont-Neuf, 42, 152-4; quacks of the, 
 151 ; ponts-neufs (pasquinades), 164 
 
 Ponts-de-C6, Battle of the, 22 
 
 Poquelin, see Molidre 
 
 Portes, Marquis des, 108 
 
 Portland, Lord, 258 
 
 Porto-Carrera, Cardinal, 288, 301 
 
 Port-Eoyal, reorganization of, 266-7; 
 a centre of Jansenism, 267-8 ; the 
 King's hostility to, 271, 280 ; severe 
 measures against, 271-2; suppression 
 of, 281-2 
 
 Portugal, 63, 73, 222 ; King of, 302 
 
 Poussin, Nicolas, 366-9 
 
 Pradon, 385 
 
 Prashn, M. de, 1 
 
 Priaux (conspirator), 349 
 
 Pricieusea, the, 114, 118, 119, 375 
 
 Pr^tot, architect, 366 
 
 Primi, quoted, 176, 187, 314 
 
 Puget, Pierre, 370 
 
 Pnisieux, 27, 28 
 
 Pusaort, Marie, 323 
 
 Puy, Du, 25 
 
 Puylaurens, 61 
 
 Puymorin, 108 
 
 Pyrenees, Treaty of the, 108, 211, 218 
 
 QUEBOY, 27 
 
 Qnesnel, Pdre, 280; his New Tettament 
 
 with Moral Reflections, 280, 282-3 
 Quietism, 276 
 Qui^vrain, 308 
 Quilleboeuf, 349 
 Quinault, 183, 372, 382, 384, 385 
 
 Raoait, Mabquis db, 123 
 
 Racine, Jean, admirer of VAslrie, 114 ; 
 
 his BMnice quoted, 170; his relations 
 with Port-Royal, 267-70 ; protected by 
 Louis XIV, 360; his Britannicut 
 quoted, 371 ; Mut of, 373 ; encour- 
 aged by Boileau, 377 ; characters of, 
 378; declares for Ancients versus 
 Moderns, 380 ; character and career, 
 384 ; his quarrel with Port-Royal, 
 385 ; converted to Jansenism, 387 ; 
 death, ib. 
 
 Racine, Louis, 386 
 
 RambouiUet, Hotel de, 115-121, 211, 362 
 
 Rambouillet, Madame de, 113-120 
 
 RambouiUet, Mile, de, 119, 193 
 
 Ramillies, Battle of, 314 
 
 Ranc£, 102 
 
 Raatadt, Peace of, 312 
 
 Ratisbon, Diet of, 65-6 ; Truce of, 236 
 
 RavaiUao, 11, 12 
 
 Ravenel (Camisard), 300 
 
 Ray (English traveller), 283 
 
 R^, Isle of, 51-2 
 
 Recruiting, 214 
 
 Regale, the, 236-7, 274-6 
 
 Regency, of Anne of Austria, 136, 141 ; 
 of Marie de' Medici, 2-8, 17-18 ; of the 
 Dulie of Orleans, 391 
 
 Eegnier, H. de, quoted, 313 
 
 Regnier, Mathurin, 124 
 
 Reims, lace-making at, 336 
 
 Religious matters, 259-84 
 
 Renaudot, Theophraste, 42 
 
 Requests, Masters of, 321 
 
 Rethel, Battle of, 161 
 
 Retz, Cardinal de, quoted, on Richelieu, 32; 
 a " Libertine," 99 ; as Prondeur, 134 ; 
 quoted on Duo de Beaufort, 136 ; on 
 Mazarin, 141-2 ; imprisoned, 166 ; 
 favours the Jansenists, 271, 279 ; 
 lasting disgrace of, 373; quoted, on 
 La Rochefoucauld, 374 
 
 Retz, Mar^chal de, 196 
 
 " Reunions," the, 235 
 
 Reviews, military, 216, 340 
 
 Rhme, League of the, 169, 209, 211, 220 
 
 Rhine, Passage of the, 226-7 
 
 Richelieu, Alphonse de, 30 
 
 Richelieu, Armand du Plessis de, quoted, 
 on Condi's manifesto, 8 ; as Bishop of 
 Lujon, 10, 12, 15 ; delegate to Third 
 Estate, 10, 12 ; shares disgrace of the 
 Concini, 21 ; banished to Avignon, ib. ; 
 recalled, 22 ; his influence over Marie 
 de' Medici, 21, 22, 27; created a 
 Cardinal, 28 ; becomes first Minister, 
 t&. ; birth, parentage, and early career, 
 30-2 ; Philippe de Champaigne's por- 
 trait of, 31 ; Retz' description of, 32 ; 
 his nepotism, 33-4 ; character, 33-6 ; 
 
 409 
 
INDEX 
 
 and rather Joseph, 35, 36 ; deference 
 to Lonis XIII, 38; and Marie de' 
 Medici at the Conrt, 43 ; overreaches 
 the Emperor Ferdinand, 66-7 ; bar- 
 gains for alliance with Sweden, 68 ; 
 humiliates Anne of Austria, 82 ; death 
 of, 87 ; his special commissions of 
 justice, 93-4 ; his political ideals, 110, 
 111 ; institutes Acad^mie Franjaise, 
 125 ; persecution of Anne of Austria, 
 141 ; mentioned, 324 ; disorder in his 
 finances, 326 ; his insensibility, 363 
 
 Richelieu, Due de, 208 
 
 Bichelieu, Duchesse de, 9 
 
 Riez, Isle of, 27, 38 
 
 Bigault, Hyacinthe, 369 
 
 Bio di Janeiro, 358 
 
 Biom, 256 
 
 Biva, 41 
 
 Bivalta, Peace of, 56, 66 
 
 Bivarolle, M. de, 255 
 
 Bobais, Josse van, 336, 355 
 
 Bocroy, Battle of, 87, 143 
 
 Bohan, Cardinal de, 318 
 
 Eohan, Chevalier de, 349 
 
 Bohan, Due de, defends fortress of Mon- 
 taubon, 25 ; defends Montpellier, 27 ; 
 incites Huguenot revolt in the south, 
 41, 50 ; leads Huguenot insurgents, 55 ; 
 makes peace with Louis XIII, 55-6 ; 
 in the Valtellina campaign, 76 
 
 Bohan, Mme. de, 84 
 
 Bohan, Marie de, 20 ; tee also Chevreuse, 
 Mmei lie 
 
 Boland (Camisard), 300 
 
 Bomanticism, 134 
 
 Bonsard, 123 
 
 Booke, Admiral, 302-3 
 
 Bothweil, siege of, 145 
 
 Bouen, revolt in, 97 ; poverty in district 
 of, 356 
 
 Bouen, Archbishop of, 172 
 
 Bousseau, J. J., 114, 134, 354 
 
 BoussUlon taken, 77 ; ceded to France, 
 169, 322, 393 
 
 Royan, 27 
 
 Boye, 4 
 
 " B.P.R." the, 261-3 
 
 Bueil, the Court at, 1S7 ; agreement of, 
 158, 161 
 
 Buremonde, 298 
 
 Bussia, 68, 210 
 
 Buvigny, see Galloway, 303 
 
 Buyter, Admiral de, 222, 233, 240 
 
 Eyswyck, Peace of, 257, 258, 290, 312, 346 
 
 Sablb, Mme. de, 114, 115, 119, 374 
 Sagnao, quoted, 355 
 Saint-Aignan, Duo de, 203 
 
 410 
 
 Saint-Amand, 311 
 
 Saint-Amant, 123 
 
 Saint- Antoine, fighting in the Faubourg, 
 164, 197 
 
 Saint-Antonin captured, 27 
 
 Saint-Christopher ceded to England, 312 
 
 Saint-Cloud, 201 
 
 Saint-Cyr, school at, 277, 318, 387 
 
 Sauxt-(Van. Abbe de, 266, 267, 269 
 
 Saint-Etienne, foundry at, 336, 365 
 
 Saint-Evr^mont, 372 
 
 Saint Franfois de Sales, 23 
 
 Saint-Germain, Chateau de, 2, 84-5, 136, 
 159, 201, 231, 238 
 
 Saint-Gobain, factory at, 336 
 
 Saint-Hilaire, quoted, on Louvois, 213; 
 and on Battle of Oudenarde, 305; 
 wounded at Salzbach, 232 
 
 Saint-Louis-des-Fran9ais, Borne, 238 
 
 Saint-Malo, 261, 358 
 
 Saint-Omer ceded to France, 234 
 
 Saint-Pons, Bishop of, 281 
 
 Saint-Preuil (Captain of the Guard), 201 
 
 Saint-Simon, on Louis XTV's diet, 175; 
 on his self-control, 176 ; on Mme. de 
 Montespan, 183 ; on the second Duchess 
 of OrUans, 186 ; on the King's lever, 
 203; on Michel Le Tellier, 213; on 
 Mme. de Maintenon's politicalinfluence, 
 242-3 ; on Madame's violence to the 
 Duo de Chartres, 248 ; on the King's 
 conversion, 262 ; on the offer of the 
 Spanish crown to the Due d'Anjou, 
 289 ; on the Vend6me brothers, 293; 
 on the character of Boufflers, 298 ; on 
 the Princesse des Ursins, 301 ; on the 
 Battle of Oudenarde, 305 ; on the 
 King's fortitude, 313-4; on Louis 
 XIV's exclusion of the nobles from 
 office, 322 ; his character and career, 
 391 ; his Memoirs, 391 
 
 Saint Vincent de Paul, 23, 102 
 
 Sainte-Beuve, quoted, 134 
 
 Sainte-Menehould, Peace of, 8, 14 
 
 Salzbach, 232 
 
 Satnaritaine, La (pumping machine), 163 
 
 Sambre, the, 253 
 
 Santa- Vittoria, 293 
 
 Sarrelouis, 258 
 
 Saumur, Assembly of, 7 
 
 Savaron (deputy of the Third Estate), 
 10, 11, 353 
 
 Savonnerie, factory, 336 
 
 Savoy, 266, 257 ; Duke of, 54, 55, 292, 
 294 296 
 
 Soarron, Paul, 123, 194-5, 327 
 
 Scarron, Mme., quoted, 179; see <dso 
 Maintenon, Mme. de 
 
 Sch6rer, Edmond, 382 
 
INDEX 
 
 Sohomberg, Duo de, 62, 59, 60 
 
 Soud^ry, Abb4 de, 116 
 
 Soud^iy, Mile, de, quoted, on Mme. de 
 Bambouillet, 115 ; at the H6tel de 
 Bambouillet, 116 ; her own receptions, 
 119; her Grand Cyrus, 134, 160; on 
 Mme. de Maintenon, 194 ; her novel, 
 Cmie, 328 ; on Mme. de S6vign^, 375 ; 
 attacked by Boileau, 376 
 
 Secretaries of State, 321-2 
 
 Sedan, Comte de Soissons at, 83 ; lace- 
 making at, 336 
 
 Siguier, Chancellor, 81, 87 
 
 Seignelay, Colbert de, 237, 322, 324, 340, 
 345 
 
 Senefie, Battle of, 230 
 
 Senegal, 339 
 
 Sens, Archbishop of, 104 
 
 Servien, Abel, 35, 211, 326 
 
 Sivign^, Mme. de, admirer of VAalr4e, 
 114; on Pascal's Pense'es, 131; on 
 Mme. de Montespan, 183-4 ; on the 
 marriage of Lauzun and the Grande 
 Mademoiselle, 186 ; on Mme. de 
 Montespan in 1675, 190 ; on Mme. de 
 Maintenon, 194 ; correspondence with 
 Pomponne, 212 ; on Louvois as 
 disciplinarian, 216 ; approves dragon- 
 nades and revocation of Edict of 
 Nantes, 264 ; on Nicole, 268 ; on the 
 Breton recruits, 354 ; on Mme. de La 
 Fayette's visit to Versailles, 359 ; her 
 character and literary gifts, 375 ; her 
 Letters, ib. ; quoted, on Bourdaloue, 
 389 
 
 Sicily vmited to Savoy, 312 
 
 SUesia, 63 
 
 Sillery, 6, 15 
 
 Simon, Richard, 388 
 
 Sinzheim, Battle of, 231 
 
 Siri, quoted, on Louvois, 213 
 
 Sirot, Baron de, 144 
 
 Smuggling, 331 
 
 Sobieski, John, 236 
 
 " Society," evolution of, 112 
 
 Soissonnais, 322 
 
 Soissons, Comte de, leagued with Marie 
 de' Medici, 22 ; opposes marriage of 
 Gaston d' Orleans, 45 ; implicated in 
 Chalais' conspiracy, 48 ; joins in plot 
 to assassinate Richelieu, 83 ; killed in 
 the battle of La Marf^e, 84, 106; 
 mentioned, 104 
 
 Soissons, Comtesse de, 170 ; see also 
 Mancini, Olympia 
 
 Sorbonne, 12, 280, 283 
 
 Soubise, Duo de, 27, 41 
 
 Sourdis (Archbishop), 35, 100 
 
 Sourdis, Marquis de, 58 
 
 Spain, possessions of, 63, 285; war be- 
 tween France and, 71, 236; de- 
 feated in sea-fight, 76 ; and revolt in 
 France, 84 ; shorn of foreign posses- 
 sions, 312 ; peace concluded with, 
 167-9 ; decadence of, 209 ; Louis XIV 
 contemplates measures against, 221 ; 
 claimants to throne of, 286 
 
 Spanheim, quoted, on Le Tellier, 212 ; 
 and on Louvois, 213 
 
 Spanish marriages, the, 7, 14 
 
 Spanish Succession, 286-90, 313 ; War of 
 the, 299, 302-3, 310-12 
 
 Spinola, 66 
 
 Spinoza, La Fontaine and, 383 
 
 Spires, 146, 252 
 
 Spliigen Pass, 40 
 
 StaSarde, Battle of, 266 
 
 Stahrenberg, General, 296, 310 
 
 States-General convoked, 8 ; dissolved, 13 
 
 Steinkerk, Battle of, 253-4 
 
 Stendhal, quoted, 208, 383 
 
 StoUiofen, 304 
 
 Strasburg, 231 ; occupied by the French, 
 235; ceded to France, 258; its 
 restitution demanded, 308 
 
 " Straw Sedition," 165 
 
 Stuttgart, 304 
 
 Styria, 63 
 
 Styrum, 296 
 
 Suffren, P^re, 58 
 
 Sully, 7, 101, 336 
 
 Susa, Pass of, 55 
 
 Sweden, 67 ; alliance of France and, 68 ; 
 leagued against France, 222 ; bought 
 over, 225; the ally of France, 234; 
 deserts France and aUies herselJE with 
 Holland, 236 
 
 Sygognes, M. de, 123 
 
 Taille, the, 329, 357 
 
 TaUart, Mar^chal de, defeated and taken 
 
 prisoner at Blenheim, 296, 297 
 Tallemant des R^aux, quoted, on Leonora 
 
 Concini, 3 ; on the death of Richelieu, 
 
 87 ; on Valenjay's duel with Cavoye,108 
 Tangiers, 221 
 Tapissier de Notre-Dame, 253, 255 ; see 
 
 also Luxembourg, Mar^chal de 
 Tarascon, 80 
 
 Taxation, 196-7, 217, 329-32, 347-8 
 Teniers, 148, 377 
 TessA, destroys Heidelberg, 251 
 Theatres, 380, 384r-5 
 Th^ophile (poet), 123 
 Thionville, 145 
 Third Estate, 9 
 Thorigny, 109 
 Thou, Francois Auguste de, 86, 134 
 
 411 
 
INDEX 
 
 Three Estates, struggle between the, 10- 
 13 
 
 Tilly, 64, 68, 69 
 
 Tlxier, Father, 141, 205 
 
 Toiras, 51, 52, 56 
 
 Toroy, 239, 288, 291-2, 307 
 
 Torstenson (Swedish General), 148 
 
 Tortuga, La, 98, 258 
 
 Toulon, Siege of, 295, 304 
 
 Toulouse, Comte de, 303, 316, 317 
 
 Tour d'Auvergne, see Turenne 
 
 Touraine, 343 
 
 Toumai, 307-8 
 
 Tourville, M. de, 250 
 
 Traites (duties), 331-2 
 
 Trent, Council of, 14 
 
 Treves, Elector of, 70 
 
 Treville (Commander of Musketeers), 87 
 
 Trianon, 188, 199, 366 
 
 Triple Alliance, 222 
 
 Tripoli bombarded, 237 
 
 " Triumvirs of the League," 291 
 
 Tronson, Superior of St. Sulpice, 277-8 
 
 Tuileries, 364 
 
 Turenne, Vicomte de, succeeds Mar^ohal 
 de Gu^briant as commander, 145 ; 
 appearance and character, ib. ; takes 
 over Enghien's command in Germany, 
 146 ; at Battle of Ifordlingen, 147 ; 
 subdues Bavaria, 148 ; leaids troops 
 against the Frondeurs, 165-6 ; takes 
 Mardick and defeats Spaniards in 
 Battle of the Dunes, 167 ; as diploma- 
 tist, 212 ; in Holland, 226 ; in Lor- 
 raine, 231 ; on the Bhine, 229 ; death 
 at Salzbach, 232 
 
 Turin besieged, 294; French defeat at, 
 ib., 295, 299 
 
 Turks invest Vienna, 236 
 
 Turner, W. M., 369 
 
 Tyrol, 63 
 
 Ultramontanes, 11, 12, 280, 282 
 Vnigenitus, the Bull, 283-4 
 United Provinces, 210, 222-4 
 d'trrf6, Honor6, 113-14 
 Ursius, Princesse des, 300-1 
 Utrecht, 229, 310 ; Peace of, 312 
 
 VaIB, GnLLATHBE DU, 15 
 
 Valenfay, Cardinal de, 108 
 
 Valenciennes, 233-4, 309 
 
 Val-de-Grdce, 81 
 
 Valentinois, Prince of Monaco, 105 
 
 Valine, Jacques, 124 
 
 ValteUina, the, 28, 40-2, 65, 76 
 
 Van Tromp, 76 
 
 Va-nu-pied3, revolt of the, 97 
 
 Vardes, quoted, 208 
 
 412 
 
 Vauban, S6bastien Le Prestre de, his 
 genius, 216 ; his humanity, 217, 354-5 ; 
 supports military reforms, 217; with 
 the King at siege of Maestricht, 229; 
 volunteers to serve under La Fenillade, 
 294 ; quoted, on evictions, 356 ; his 
 bridge-head at Peronne, 359 
 
 Vaubrun (General), 232 
 
 Vaugelas, 116, 125-7 
 
 Vauvenargues, quoted, 390 
 
 Vaux-le-Vicomte, 197, 327-8 
 
 Vendome, Duo de, leagued with Cond^, 
 8 ; opposes marriage of Gaston d'Or- 
 l^ns, 45 ; plots to murder Richelieu, 
 46 ; arrested, 47 ; returns to Court, 87 ; 
 mentioned, 136; Mazarin and, 140; 
 mentioned, 239 ; enters Barcelona, 
 258 ; supersedes VUleroy in Italy, 293, 
 299; sent to the Netherlands, 294; 
 his campaign in 1 708, 304r-5 ; in Spain, 
 310 ; patron of La Fontaine, 382 
 
 Vendome, Grand Prieur de, 45-48, 87, 293, 
 382 
 
 Venloo, taken by Marlborough, 298 
 
 Ventadour, Duo de, 102 
 
 Ventadour, Duchease de, 318 
 
 Verneuil, Duchesse de, 9 
 
 Vemeuil, Mile, de, 44 
 
 Versailles a modest country-house, 182, 
 196-7 ; fetes at, ib., 183, 188-9, 197 ; 
 Mansart rebuUds, 198 ; Court installed 
 at, ib. ; splendour of, 206 ; gardens of, 
 359-60 ; a perfect expression of Louis 
 XIV style, 366 ; sculpture at, 369 
 
 Viau, Th^ophile de, 102 
 
 Victoires, Place des, Paris, 202, 237, 
 294 
 
 Vigneul-MarviUe, qiuAed, 131 
 
 Vigo, sinking of galleons off, 302 ; naval 
 battle off, 313 
 
 Villars, Mar^chal de, mentioned, 239, 292 ; 
 his appearance and character, 295-6 ; 
 liberates Alsace, 298 ; Marlborough 
 and, ib. ; quells the revolt in the 
 C^vennes, 300 ; his inspiring leader- 
 ship, 308 ; at Malplaquet, 309 ; at 
 Denain, 315 
 
 Villavioiosa, 310 
 
 Villeroy (Minister), 6, 15 
 
 ViUeroy, Mar^ohal de, Governor to 
 Louis XIV, 137, 173 ; EicheUeu and, 
 169; mentioned, 239; at Battle of 
 Neerwinden, 255 ; military incapacity 
 of, 257, 292 ; defeated at Chiari, and 
 taken prisoner at Cremona, 293 ; in 
 Germany, 296 ; releaeed, and succeeds 
 Boufflers in Low Countries, 298 ; 
 defeated and disgraced, 299 ; as 
 President of Council of Finance, 321 
 
INDEX 
 
 Villers, Mme. de, 349 
 
 Vinoennes, 61, 318 
 
 Vineam Domini, the Bull, 281 
 
 Vitry, Mar^ohal de, 84, 87 
 
 Vitry, Marquis de, 19 
 
 Vittorio-Amadeo, Duke of Saroy, 67, 256, 
 257 ; becomes King o£ the Sicilies, 312 
 
 Vivonne, Catherine de, see Rambouillet, 
 Mme. de 
 
 Voisin, fortune-teller, 191 
 
 Voiture, 70, 116, 119, 124 
 
 Voltaire, quoted, on abuses of church 
 patronage, 101 ; on Comeille, 131 ; on 
 Cardinal Mazarin, 168 ; on Louis 
 XIV's majestic bearing, 176 ; on 
 Cardinal Chigi's mission, 176 ; on the 
 Passage of the Rhine, 227 ; on the 
 French retreat in Holland, 230 ; on 
 Turenne, 231 ; on Louis XIV's glory, 
 234 ; on Villars at Friedlingen, 295 
 
 Vossius, 210 
 
 Vouet, Simon, 366 
 
 Voysin, 292, 316 
 
 Vuillard (Jansenist), 279 
 
 Wales, Chaelbs, Peinoe op, 39-40 
 Wales, Prince of, Old Pretender recog- 
 nized as,* 290 
 
 Wallenstein, 64, 65, 67, 70 
 
 Watteville, Baron de, 219 
 
 Werth (Gorman General), 146 
 
 Westphalia, Treaty of, 149, 211, 235 
 
 William III of Orange, leader of the 
 opposition in Holland, 224-5; ap- 
 pointed Captain-General, 226 ; becomes 
 Stathouder, 229 ; marries Mary of 
 England, 233 ; becomes King of 
 England, 238, 249; at Battle of 
 Steinkerk, 253-4 ; at Neerwinden, 255 ; 
 recognized by Prance as King of Great 
 Britain, 258 ; makes a pact with 
 Louis XIV, 287 ; allies himself with 
 Emperor Leopold, 290 ; death of, 291 
 
 Winter of 1709, 306 
 
 Witt, Comelis de, 229 
 
 Witt, Jan de, 224, 229 
 
 Worms, 146, 252 
 
 Wrangel (Swedish General), 148 
 
 YOBE, Duke of, 233 ; see also James II 
 
 of England 
 Ypres taken by Cond^, 148, 168, 233, 266 ; 
 
 ceded to Prance, 234 
 
 ZniDEB Zee, 228 
 Zweibriicken, 236 
 
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 LONDON 
 
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