Chapter XIX: “l’état, C’est Moi” (2)

When Lionne died in 1671 the king gave him as successor the marquis de Pomponne who had conducted several embassies with success and was then in Sweden, whose king he had succeeded in detaching from the Dutch alliance. Pomponne directed all the negotiations which terminated in the Peace of Nimeguen. “But,” said Louis XIV, “the office I gave him was found to be too great and extensive for him. I was obliged to order him to retire, because everything that passed through his hands lost something of the grandeur and force which are needed in executing the orders of a king of France who is not unfortunate.”

TRIUMPH OF THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY

Some of these ministers of Louis XIV, especially Colbert and Louvois, were certainly great administrators; they were not, they could not be, great statesmen. Colbert himself aimed at making France richer only in order to render the king more powerful; and all laboured to constitute the excessive centralisation which enveloped the whole country, its industry and commerce, the arms and the brain, with a thousand bonds of a minute regulation, so that the initiative of the ministers was everywhere substituted for the action of individuals and communities. The result of this system was to be that France would live less by her own vitality than by that of her government. When age and sickness should freeze that ever-present hand all would decline. A great people would be subjected to the vicissitudes of one man’s existence.

If the administration of the realm was as much the work of Louis XIV’s ministers as his own, one thing belonged to him alone: this was the general direction he gave to the government and to society--the skilful and energetic manner with which he knew how to control all other powers, to annul them, and make them to serve his greatness; it was in fact that art of ruling which no other prince, in Saint-Simon’s[i] judgment, possessed to a greater degree. We have already seen his ideas on the rights of sovereigns; he had summed them up in that phrase attributed to him, it is said, in his youth, at the end of the Fronde: “_L’État, c’est moi_--The State, it is I.”[116]

He believed this; everybody believed it with him, and the church taught it. Bossuet founded the divine right of the monarchy on maxims drawn from the Scriptures. “Oh kings, ye are gods,” exclaimed the great bishop at the very moment that Lebrun was filling Versailles with the apotheosis of Louis XIV. While he lived there was but one uncontrolled and limitless will--his own. The states-general might have recalled other wills, but he never convoked it; he punished those that spoke of it, and when, at the Treaty of Utrecht, the allies, still defying his ambition, tried to exact that the conditions of peace should be ratified by a national assembly, he haughtily refused and declared that he regarded the demand as an insult to the majesty of the throne. The minority of the provinces had their own estates, but he suppressed many of them. Those which remained, as in Languedoc, Burgundy, Provence, Brittany, etc., never assembled except to execute the orders of the ministers. Whatever remained of municipal liberty disappeared like that of the provinces. The king, coining money with the ancient rights dear to the towns, changed the mayoralties into hereditary offices and sold them to the highest bidders. An edict of 1683 placed the financial administration of the towns under the direction of the intendants. Their finances did not improve. The communities were made responsible for the payment of the _taille_ as the _curiates_ had been under the Roman emperors. Former fiscal arrangements had ruined the magistrates. The new one held them exempt, but ruined the communes.

A phrase sums up this entire policy--unfortunately it was spoken by Colbert: “It is not well,” he wrote to a governor, charging him to let an elective magistracy fall into desuetude, “that some one should speak in the name of all.”

_Submission of Parliament_

Royalty had taken five centuries to undermine the great body of the feudal aristocracy, and the better to perfect this work had formed with its own hands another body--that of the judiciary order. In the sixteenth century they spoke of the parliaments as “the strong columns on which the monarchy is supported,” but in the seventeenth the new royalty wished for no other support than its absolute power.

Nevertheless, thanks to the sale of offices, which left the same offices in the same hands, thanks to the dignity of the magistrate’s lives, to the political rôles they had played on several occasions, to the _esprit de corps_ which had quickly been established in the bosom of the great judiciary companies, there had been raised alongside the nobility of the sword a nobility of the robe, which seemed quite as troublesome as the other because it already had its souvenirs and regrets. It was not always easily managed. It parried attacks with that force of inertia peculiar to assemblies of aged men, which is difficult to overcome at a time when tradition stands for law. The spirit of opposition, everywhere punished, took refuge here--political opposition, scarcely sensible in the parliament of Paris, provincial opposition in the others, all religious opposition, under the form of Jansenism. One of Louis XIV’s ideas which he sought to realise with the greatest perseverance was to transform the parliaments into simple courts of appeal, to put his state councils over them, even the parliament of Paris which had brought about the Fronde. In an edict of 1667 he proscribed it from enregistering ordinances within a week and he suffered no remonstrance. The following year he had torn from the parliament registers the records of all its deliberations during the civil war, in order to efface even the memory of its old-time pretensions. Besides this he changed its title of sovereign court into that of superior court, as if the first were a usurpation of royal sovereignty.

_Submission of the Nobility_

It appeared a more difficult task to reduce the nobles. Cardinal Richelieu had razed their fortresses and cut off the heads of some of the most unruly. Mazarin had bought them or vanquished them by ruse. Louis XIV made himself their master by drawing them around him by his fêtes, dragging them from their domains, where they thought too often of their ancestors and still felt themselves free, filling his antechamber and household posts with the descendants of those who had made his fathers tremble, and forming for royalty such brilliant cortèges as the representative of God on earth would wish to be surrounded by.

If they had titles and honours they had no political influence in the state. In his councils, the king, after the death of Mazarin, admitted but a single one of the old noblesse, the duke de Beauvilliers, governor of the royal children; and he chose all his ministers from those of middle conditions, in order, according to Saint-Simon’s[i] forceful expression, to be able “to plunge them into the depths of nothingness from which he had drawn them.” The French nobility never knew how, like that of England, to become a political class; it was never anything but a military caste.

_The Third Estate_

Louis XIV preferred, following in this the ancient monarchical traditions, to be served by the middle class, more educated and, moreover, more devoted, because it did not yet feel the inconveniences of absolute power, as it had been feeling for centuries those of the feudal régime. Louis turned over to it all the financial, political, and judicial functions; he established it peacefully in the administration of the realm; he pushed it energetically towards commerce and industry--two forces of the new era--and the regard he had for those _petites gens_ named Boileau, Racine, Molière, announced the coming substitution of the rights of intellect for those of birth. Louis XIV thus unknowingly paved the way for democracy in France and the Revolution. However he must not be regarded as a sort of bourgeois king, a _roi des maltôtiers_, as Saint-Simon[i] disdainfully calls him. His policy, the high idea he had of his person, the rigorous ceremonial which made a sort of redoubtable and inaccessible divinity of him, the _carrousels_, the brilliant fêtes--none of these recalls to mind the modest pictures of constitutional monarchies.[117] More than that, those nobodies whom Louis made his councillors, his ambassadors, and his secretaries of state quitted their plebeian state before entering his court. They became the marquis de Louvois, the count de Pontchartrain, the marquis de Torcy. While working with the bourgeois, the grandson of Henry IV always had the desire to remain the king of the noblemen.

LOUIS XIV AND THE CHURCH

[Sidenote: [1661-1685 A.D.]]

Louis XIV conducted himself towards the clergy as he had done towards the nobility--in honouring them he watched to see that they robbed him of none of his power. The great lords, with but few exceptions, were removed from the church as they had been from the administration. Therefore the aristocratic Saint-Simon[i] reproaches Louis “with having ruined the episcopacy by filling it with seminarian pedants and their pupils without education and without birth”--a strange reproach from the mouth of a man who had lived with Bossuet, Fénelon, Fléchier, and Massillon, the eternal honour of the French church.

(From an old French print)]

The clergy was therefore under Louis XIV one force the more at the disposal of royalty. In the affair of the _régale_, the bishops even upheld the king against Rome. The _régale_ was the king’s right to enjoy the revenues of certain benefices, bishoprics, and archbishoprics, during vacancies in the sees. In 1673 an edict declared all the French sees subject to the _régale_. Two bishops refused to obey and their action was approved by the pope. Louis XIV, to end the dispute, convoked an assembly of French clergy which adopted, in 1682, under the inspiration of Bossuet, four propositions which were registered by the courts and the faculty of theology. They were in substance: God gave to St. Peter and his successors no power, direct or indirect, over temporal affairs. The Gallican church approves those decrees of the Council of Constance which declare the œcumenical councils superior to the pope in spiritual affairs. The rules and customs received in the kingdom and in the Gallican church must remain unalterable. The pope’s decisions, in matter of doctrine, shall not be irreformable until the church has accepted them.

Innocent XI neither approved nor quashed these resolutions, but he refused to grant bulls of investiture to those bishops, appointed by the government, who had been members of the assembly. The consequence was that at his death there were twenty dioceses without heads. The matter was, however, brought to a conclusion in 1693 by a compromise. Innocent XII granted the bulls of investiture and the king ceased to impose upon the theological faculties the obligation of teaching the four propositions of 1682.

_The Protestants_

The dissenters profited nothing by the quarrel with the court of Rome.[c]

Since the Peace of Alais the Protestants, being deprived of their political organisation, of their “towns of security,” and of everything which had helped to form them into a party, had been living in obscurity, doing their best to make their enemies forget them, and carefully abstaining from taking any part in the civil troubles of the time. During the Fronde not one of them had shown any sign of life. Their attitude towards the government was that of a child in disgrace, and towards the Catholics that of a disdainful enemy. They persisted in isolating themselves from the rest of the nation, and continued to correspond with their friends in England and Holland. They were law-abiding, peaceable, and industrious citizens, and contributed their full share to the greatness and prosperity of their country by their courage and their energy.

Nevertheless, the nation continued to look on them with mistrust, as if they were foreigners; France felt as if there were a little Holland in her midst, rejoicing at the success of the greater one (with which it was then waging ineffectual war). To reunite the Protestants with the national church was a fixed idea with Louis XIV. This desire inspired his policy, and was the chief goal of all his efforts; this was to be “the noble work and special feature of his reign”; and he looked upon the enterprise as a noble one, not only from a political but from a religious point of view. He was beginning to get into a narrow devotional groove, and allowed the Jesuits to exercise a powerful influence over him. He wished to free himself from the reproach of heresy, which his conduct towards the pope had drawn down upon him, and to atone for the irregularities of his youth. He resolved to revoke the Edict of Nantes. The assembly of the clergy, the parliament of Toulouse, the Catholics in the south all advocated this measure so strongly that it appeared to be the general desire of the nation; Louvois in his ambition, Le Tellier in his fanatical piety, also did their best to urge the king on, and last, but not least, Madame de Maintenon, whose influence during the rest of his life was to be paramount, threw all the weight of her persuasions into the scale in order to bring about the revocation of this edict.

Up to this time bribery had been the chief means employed in the attempts to convert the Protestants. Richelieu had used this method with great success. Louis XIV followed his example with favourable results; flattery, favours, rewards of every kind were lavishly bestowed in the attempt to gain over the Protestants. Pensions were given to the newly converted, they were exempted from taxation, all sorts of offices were given to them over the heads of staunch Catholics. A fund was formed for making conversions, with Pellisson, a converted Protestant, as director. France was flooded with missions, sermons, tracts, and books of dogma.

Calvinism suffered such severe losses that Madame de Maintenon said, “Very soon it will be ridiculous to belong to that religion.” But these methods of bribery and persuasion were not rapid enough, and harsher methods began to be used: royal edicts, parliamentary decisions, and orders issued by governors of provinces and cities rendered the preaching of the reformed doctrines difficult, made the Protestant pastors very uneasy, forbade their synods to assemble. Protestants were deprived of their pensions and of their titles of nobility; the chief burden of the taxes was laid on them; they were excluded from the king’s household, from the university, from holding municipal offices. They were also forbidden to practice as lawyers or doctors. They were expelled from financial offices, the rights of free citizenship were refused to them, they were not allowed to be members of corporations, their schools were closed, any of their places of worship which had been built since 1598 were destroyed, and their children were taken from them to be educated as Catholics. Then the Protestants began to fly from France (1682); but emigration was forbidden under pain of being sent to the galleys.

The Calvinists in the south made one last appeal to the king in March, 1684, begging him to allow them to serve God according to the dictates of their own conscience, or else to take refuge in some other country. For answer, the king sent them a number of missionaries accompanied by a detachment of dragoons, who were supposed to be the most cruel of all the French soldiers. Every day conversions by the hundred were announced to the king. On the 2nd of September all the Protestants of Montauban changed their religion by a resolution passed at a meeting in the town hall; on the 5th of October Montpellier, Castres, Lunel, etc., followed suit; then the dioceses of Gap and Embrun, then the whole of Poitou. The governor of Languedoc said that he had seen sixty thousand people converted in three days. It was thought that nothing more remained to be done, but to publicly announce the destruction of a sect which had only a few adherents left in distant provinces, among the rude inhabitants of the mountainous parts; it was necessary to strike only one more decisive blow and so complete the work for which a long series of unjust acts and the ingenious tyranny of the last fifty years had been the preparation. Père Lachaise, the king’s confessor, and Louvois promised that not a single drop of blood should be shed.

_Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685 A.D.)_

Accordingly on the 22nd of October, 1685, an edict appeared ordaining: (1) The suppression of all the privileges which had been accorded to the Protestants by Henry IV and Louis XIII; (2) the proscription of Protestant worship throughout the kingdom (except Alsace and Strasburg); (3) the expulsion of Protestant ministers, the closing of Protestant schools, and the demolition of the churches, etc. Numerous rewards were given to those who agreed to change their religion; Calvinists were forbidden on pain of being sent to the galleys and the confiscation of their property, to go out of France; permission was given them to remain on their own property and engage in business without their worship being interfered with so long as they did not hold public services.

This edict was received in France with the greatest enthusiasm: sermons, poems, pictures, medals were produced with astounding rapidity to celebrate this great act of unity! At last the whole country was to be under one jurisdiction and under one king! Louis XIV was a second Constantine, a modern Theodosius. Never had any king performed such a wonderful achievement, nor was it likely that any parallel to it would be seen in the future. The whole of Europe was amazed at the promptitude and ease with which this great king had stamped out a heresy which had defied the efforts of six of his predecessors.

The only complaints that arose were directed against the leniency of that clause which allowed the Protestants to worship in their own fashion in private. This clause was only a lure, and Louvois wrote to the governors and those in authority: “His majesty desires that those who refuse to embrace his religion should be treated with the utmost rigour, and those who foolishly pride themselves on being the last to be converted are to be driven to the extremity of their endurance.” Then began a series of bloody atrocities which the king had never commanded, and which were not at all in accordance with his character for moderation. A defenceless population was delivered over to the cruel brutality of the soldiery, men were put to the torture, women were subjected to a dishonour worse than death, children were torn from their parents, houses and farms were wrecked, converts who refused to take the sacraments were sent to the galleys, as were those who harboured Protestant ministers or those who attempted to leave the kingdom. Sentence of death was pronounced against all who practised any other than the Catholic religion, against all Protestant ministers, and all who formed themselves into gatherings or held meetings. Those who were weak yielded; they were dragged to the altar and, with the executioner standing over them, forced to commit sacrilege. “Torture, abjuration, and forced communion,” says Saint-Simon,[i] “often all took place within twenty-four hours,” and the executioners were the guides and the sponsors of the convert. Almost all the bishops took part in these hasty irreverent practices. Most of them urged on the executioners and used every means to swell the number of conversions, for they sent an account of their triumphs to the court, and were anxious to gain as much glory and substantial recompense as possible. The king received from all quarters news and details of these persecutions; those who had abjured Protestantism and received the communion were counted by the thousand. The king gloried in his power and in his piety; the bishops sent him the most fulsome panegyrics on the great work he was doing; pulpits rang with his praises.

The Protestants fled from the country. The police were unable to prevent them. Certificates of confession were required from all travellers, sentence of death was pronounced against anyone who countenanced or assisted others in emigrating. The emigrants had been deprived of seventeen millions of francs in house and land property, the frontier was guarded by numerous troops; but all these measures were vain, and in spite of them fifty thousand families left the kingdom, and took refuge in Holland, England, Germany, and Switzerland. They consisted of nobles, tradesmen, and manufacturers. This active, energetic, and enlightened body of men, placed at the service of foreigners their talents, their swords, the secrets of French manufactures, their wealth, and a relentless hatred of the tyrant who had banished them. Their emigration did an irreparable injury to France. They were received everywhere with the greatest kindness; they were even invited to leave their country, and good positions were promised them. One part of London was peopled with silk-weavers and workers in crystal and steel; and England became the leading manufacturing nation. Brandenburg rose from its abasement; Berlin became a town; Prussia was opened up; the influence of the refugees on Frederick William’s states was so marked that it is from this time that their greatness and their subsequent weight among European powers may be dated. Amsterdam built a thousand houses for them, William gave them pensions, granted them privileges, and provided them with places of worship; he formed them into a royal guard of six hundred noblemen and two regiments. He made use of their ministers, embittered by hatred, to flood Europe with pamphlets against Louis XIV. Henceforth on every battle-field the French would meet these emigrants filled with a fierce hatred of their country, and, for more than a century afterward, French soldiers found that their bitterest enemies in Germany were the descendants of these refugees.[j]

_The Jansenists_

[Sidenote: [1661-1715 A.D.]]

Nor did Louis protect the Jansenists who were, on certain points, in disagreement with the church of Rome. The Jansenists owed their doctrine to a bishop of Ypres, named Jansenius, who died in 1638, and to the abbé of St. Cyran who had sustained some ancient opinions, which seemed to be new, upon grace and predestination. Jansenism deserves at least a passing word especially on account of the character of the men who defended it. The most illustrious of them, the great Arnauld, Lemaistre de Sacy, Nicole, and Lancelot, retired to the ancient Cistercian abbey of Port-Royal des Champs, near Versailles, when Pascal also joined them in 1654, and there, leading a solitary life, these Catholic puritans set the world an example of assiduous works of the hands and the intellect, of lively piety, and of austerity which went as far as asceticism. They wrote, for the most part in common, some excellent works which are still in use; they had some illustrious pupils, among others Racine; they won over to a great part of their doctrine almost the entire magistracy.[c]

The Jesuits then monopolised the authority and influence of the church, whose spirit and moral code they attempted to modify, and adapt to the present courtly and despotic times. The studious, reasoning, and ascetic brethren of Port-Royal saw the tendency of the Jesuit preaching, the false and worldly basis of their creed. It was on the subject of Jansenism that the Jesuits had declared themselves, and had come forth in the arena of argument. The pious wits of Port-Royal seized the opportunity, took up a cause sufficiently absurd in its fundamental dogmas, but which they were enabled to support by battering the still more absurd outworks of the Jesuits. The latter won the pope to their side, and obtained from the head of the church a condemnation of the tenets of Jansenius. The polemic writers of Port-Royal bowed to his holiness, confessed that he was infallible as a high priest, in condemning such and such belief, but most fallible as a critic, since not one of these propositions, so lustily condemned, were to be found in Jansenius. This ingenious effrontery succeeded; for, under colour of disputing about such abstractions, Pascal and Arnauld attacked their enemies in more vulnerable points--in their moral laxity, their sophistic logic, their worldliness, courtliness, and servility. Louis XIV took the Jesuit side. Many of the courtiers, who dared no longer draw the sword in rebellion, ventured to move the tongue, and exercise thought at least in independence. Amongst the most distinguished sectaries of Port-Royal was the duchess de Longueville, sister of Condé, the famous partisan of the Fronde, and mistress of La Rochefoucauld. Her hôtel, once the resort of the coadjutor [de Retz] and his party, of the hot cavaliers that drove the court from Paris, was now the lurking-place and concealment of the Jansenists. She braved the royal authority at all times, whether in the cause of the noblesse or of religion; gallant and dissolute in the Fronde, in Jansenism rigid and devout. “She was Jansenist in truth and heart,” says Brienne, “just as she had indulged her gallantries with the same sincerity, and always drums beating” (the expression means openly and boldly): “a princess of the blood need fear nothing; and Madame de Longueville marched on her way with head erect.” Although the Jansenism of Pascal and of Arnauld was the protestation of reason, common sense, and deep religious feeling, against the corruptions of the Jesuits, that of Madame de Longueville and her class must be considered as a kind of covert opposition to the court, and to the despotic will of the sovereign. The froward love of independence, that could no longer exercise itself in political intrigue, found more harmless vent in criticism and polemics.[k]

The outcome of the Jansenist disputes was that in 1709 the king caused the buildings of Port-Royal des Champs to be levelled to the ground.[118] The bodies of the inoffensive solitaires were disinterred, and dogs were seen quarrelling over them.

THE POLICE

The police was the creation of Louis XIV. In 1687 he appointed a magistrate to oversee the Paris police, Nicholas de la Reynie, who was succeeded in 1697 by the marquis d’Argenson--these were the first two _lieutenants de police_. They established order, decency, and security in the city. Now commenced the system of public lighting; from the 1st of November to the 1st of March, lanterns, burning candles, were placed at the ends and in the middle of every street. There were five thousand of these lights in Paris. The watch was augmented and reorganised. Firemen replaced the Capuchins in the fire Service. The narrow streets, often cut up and always filthy, were cleaned, widened, and paved; coaches and cabs for the public were introduced; Pascal even devised the omnibuses, which did not succeed at that time. The custom of going about Paris on horseback was no longer kept up except by a few obstinate representatives of the olden times.

The police attended to other things; it censured all writings,[119] it held up the post, and read in what was afterwards called the _cabinet noir_, all suspected correspondence, and to relieve the government of too slow methods of justice it multiplied the _lettres de cachet_[120] which removed all guarantee of personal liberty to citizens. The new power charged with the overseeing of persons and opinions, thus became like an ever-open eye, always defiant of royalty. Thus were all the orders of state, all the existing authorities, all the conditions--parliament, nobility, bourgeois, clergy, and dissenters--reduced and dominated. Vauban, Catinat, and Fénelon resisted the contagion. Condé himself, in spite of his rank, his services, and his spirit, became a courtier. Turenne alone managed to keep a position from which he could tell the king many truths which others dared not repeat.[c]

THE COURT OF THE GRAND MONARCH

Louis XIV put so much brilliancy and magnificence into his court that the smallest details of its life seem interesting to posterity, to such an extent were they an object of curiosity to all the courts of Europe and to all his contemporaries. The splendour of his government shone on his pettiest actions.

That is why no historian has failed to write of the early affections of Louis XIV for the baroness de Beauvais, for Mademoiselle d’Argencourt, for the niece of Cardinal Mazarin, who was married to the count de Soissons, the father of Prince Eugene, and above all for Marie Mancini, her sister, who afterwards married the constable Colonna.

The court, after the triumphant return of Mazarin after the Peace of the Pyrenees, busied itself with games, and the ballet, with comedy, which, being only new born, had not yet become an art, and with tragedy, which had become a sublime art in the hands of Pierre Corneille. A _curé_ of St. Germain l’Auxerrois, who inclined to the rigorous ideas of the Jansenists, had often written to the queen against these spectacles, ever since the first years of the regency. He claimed that a person would be damned for being present at them. He even had this anathema signed by seven doctors of the Sorbonne, but the abbé de Beaumont, the king’s preceptor, provided himself with more approbations of doctors, than the strict _curé_ had with condemnations. He thus quieted the scruples of the queen, and, when he became archbishop of Paris, he gave his authority to the opinion he had supported as abbé.

There had been one continual succession of fêtes, entertainments, and gallantries since the marriage of the king. Interrupted by the death of Mazarin, they were redoubled on the marriage of Monsieur, brother of the king, with Henrietta of England, sister of Charles II [which took place twenty days after Mazarin’s death]. After the cardinal’s death the court became the centre of amusements and the model for other courts. The king prided himself on giving fêtes which should cast those of Vaux into oblivion.

The good taste of society had not yet received its full perfection at court. The queen-mother, Anne of Austria, began to be fond of retirement.[121] The reigning queen could scarcely speak French and her goodness was her only merit. The princess of England, the queen’s sister-in-law, brought to court the attraction of a kindly and animated style of conversation, which was soon seconded by her reading of good works and her sure and fine taste. She perfected herself in the language, which she still wrote poorly at the time of her marriage. She inspired a fresh mental stimulus, and introduced graces and a politeness into court, of which the rest of Europe had scarcely an idea. Madame had all the wit of her brother Charles II, embellished by the charms of her sex, by the talent and the desire to please. The court of Louis XIV breathed forth a gallantry which a sense of propriety made more piquant. That which reigned at the court of Charles II was bolder, and too much grossness disfigured its amusements.

There was at first between Madame and the king a great deal of sprightly coquetry and a secret understanding, which was shown in little attentions often repeated.[122] The king sent her verses; she answered them. It chanced that the same man was at once the confidant of the king and of Madame in this ingenious intercourse. This was the marquis of Dangeau. He conducted the correspondence for both king and princess; thus serving both of them without letting one suspect what he was doing for the other.

_Mademoiselle de la Vallière_

These pastimes gave way to the more serious and more protracted passion which the king had for Mademoiselle de la Vallière, maid of honour to Madame. He experienced with her the rare pleasure of being loved solely for himself. She was for two years the hidden object of all the gallant amusements, all the entertainments which the king gave. A young _valet de chambre_ of the king, named Belloc, composed several recitals which were interspersed between dances, sometimes in the queen’s, sometimes in Madame’s apartments, and these recitals expressed with an air of mystery the secrets of their hearts, which soon ceased to be a secret.

All these public entertainments which the king gave were so many homages to his mistress. In 1662, a tournament (_carrousel_) was held opposite the Tuileries in a large enclosure which has retained its name from this event, Place du Carrousel. There were five _quadrilles_. The king was at the head of the Romans; his brother of the Persians, the prince of Condé of the Turks, the duke d’Enghien, his son, of the Indians, the duke of Guise of the Americans.

The queen-mother, the reigning queen, the queen of England, widow of Charles I, forgetting for the moment her misfortunes, were under a dais to see this spectacle. The count de Saulx, son of the duke de Lesdiguières, took the prize and received it from the hand of the queen-mother. These fêtes reanimated more than ever the taste for devices and emblems, which tourneys had formerly made the fashion, and which had lasted after them.

In 1662, an antiquarian called D’Ouvrier designed for Louis XIV the emblem of a sun darting its rays on a globe, with the words: _Nec pluribus impar_. The idea imitated somewhat a Spanish device made for Philip II, and which was more appropriate for the Spanish king, who owned the best part of the New World and so many states in the old, than for a young king of France who as yet gave only hopes. This device had a prodigious success. The _armoires_ of the king, the crown furniture, the tapestries, the carvings, were decorated with it. The king never wore it in his tournaments.

The fête of Versailles, in 1664, surpassed that of the carrousel by its originality, by its magnificence, and by the pleasures of mind which, being joined to the splendours of these diversions, added an attraction and graces which no fête before had ever had. Versailles began to be a charming place of abode.

The 5th of May the king came there with the court, composed of six hundred persons, who, together with their suites, were entertained at his expense, as well as all those who assisted in preparing the entertainments. Nothing was ever lacking at these fêtes except buildings especially constructed for giving them, such as were raised by the Greeks and Romans. The quickness, however, with which theatres, amphitheatres, and porticoes were erected, and ornamented with as much magnificence as good taste, was a marvel which added to the illusion and which, diversified since in a thousand different ways, increased the charm of these exhibitions.

There was first a sort of tournament. Those who were to take part appeared on the first day as in a review; they were preceded by heralds at arms, by pages and equerries who carried their devices and their shields. On the shields were written verses composed by Périgny and Benserade. This latter especially had a singular talent for those gallant verses in which he always made delicate and piquant allusions to the character of the persons, to the personages of antiquity or of fable which were represented, and to the passions which animated the court. The king represented Roger; all the crown diamonds glittered on his coat and on the horse he rode. The queens and three hundred ladies, under triumphal arches, watched this entrance.

(1644-1710)]

The king with all eyes fastened upon him distinguished only those of La Vallière. The fête was for her alone; she enjoyed it hidden in the crowd. The cavalcade was followed by a gilded car, 18 feet high, 15 feet wide, and 24 feet long, representing the chariot of the sun. The four ages, of gold, silver, bronze, and iron, the signs of the zodiac, the seasons, the hours, followed this car on foot. Everything was in character. Shepherds carried pieces of the barrier which were adjusted to the sound of trumpets, followed at intervals by bagpipes and violins. Certain persons who followed Apollo’s car came first to the queens to recite verses appropriate to the place and time, to the king and the ladies. When the races were finished and night was come, four thousand great torches lit up the space wherein fêtes were given. Tables were served by two hundred persons, representing the seasons, fauns, sylvan creatures, dryads, together with shepherds, vintagers, harvesters. Pan and Diana advanced on a moving mountain from which they descended to place on tables the most delicious products of field and forest. Behind these tables in the half circle, a theatre filled with performers arose. The arcades which surrounded the tables and theatre were ornamented with five hundred green and silver chandeliers, holding candles; a gilded balustrade shut in this vast enclosure. These fêtes, so far superior to those invented in romances, lasted for seven days. The king carried off the prize of the games four times, and then let other cavaliers contest for the prizes he had gained, which he abandoned to them. The comedy of the _Princesse d’Élide_, although not one of Molière’s best, was one of the most agreeable attractions of these entertainments, on account of an infinity of fine allegories on the customs of the times and by the apposite observations which form an agreeable feature of such entertainments, but which lose their point for posterity.

The chief glory of these entertainments, which in France perfected good taste, good form, and talent, came from the fact that they detracted nothing from the continual labours of the monarch. Without these labours he would have been able only to hold a court, he would not have known how to reign; and if the magnificent amusements of this court had increased the misery of the people, they would have been only odious; but the same man who had given these fêtes had also given the people bread in the famine of 1662. He caused grain to be brought, which the rich bought at a low price, and which he gave to poor families at the gate of the Louvre. He had returned three millions of taxes to the people; no part of the interior administration had been neglected.[b] Yet it cannot be overlooked that bad economics underlay most of these financial measures,--as, indeed, of all Colbert’s work.[a]

The legate Chigi, sent by Pope Alexander VII, arrived at Versailles in the midst of all these enjoyments to render satisfaction to the king for the assault of the papal guards.[b] This attack had taken place on August 20th, 1662, at Rome. It precipitated a quarrel very similar to that which had taken place in London the preceding year. The liveried servants of the duke de Créqui, the ambassador, had a fight with the Corsican guard; one of them was killed, the duke was insulted and his coach fired upon. Louis XIV demanded reparation. The court of Rome attempted, according to the custom of the times, to gain time; the king insisted, sent the papal nuncio to the frontier under escort, occupied the county of Venaissin, sent troops into the duchies of Parma and Modena in Italy, and finally threatened war. Alexander VII, seeing that these menaces were serious, gave in (1664). His own brother, the legate Fabio Chigi, brought in person the desired satisfaction. Louis XIV then gave back Avignon and Venaissin.[e] This visit of the papal delegate revealed to the court a new spectacle. The grand ceremonies were fêtes for the public. The honours paid him made the satisfaction more brilliant. Seated under a dais, he received the greetings of the superior courts, of the municipal courts, and of the clergy. He entered Paris to the sound of cannon, having the great Condé at his right and the son of that prince at his left; and in this manner he came to humiliate himself, Rome, and the pope, before a king who had not yet drawn a sword. After the audience he dined with Louis XIV, and the chief thought of all was to treat him magnificently and give him pleasure.

[Sidenote: [1669-1679 A.D.]]

All this gave to the court of Louis XIV an air of grandeur which affected all the other courts of Europe. The king wanted this _éclat_, which was attached to his person, to reflect on all that surrounded him. To distinguish his principal courtiers he invented blue cassocks embroidered with gold and silver. The permission to wear them was a great favour to men influenced chiefly by vanity. They were sought after almost like the collars of the order. We may mention here, since we are speaking of details, that it was the fashion then to wear cassocks over a doublet ornamented with ribbons, and over this cassock passed a shoulder band to which the sword was attached. A kind of lace band was worn around the neck and on the head a hat decorated with two rows of feathers. This fashion, which lasted until 1684, became that of all Europe with the exception of Spain and Poland. Almost everywhere people prided themselves on imitating the court of Louis XIV.

Louis established order in his household, regulated ranks and factions, and created new offices in connection with his person, such as that of the grand-master of his wardrobe. He re-established the tables instituted by Francis I, and augmented them. There were twelve for the officers of the king’s household, which were served with as much niceness and profusion as those of many sovereigns. He wanted all strangers to be invited to them, and this attention lasted during all his reign. There was another attention which was even more select and polite. When he had the pavilions of Marly built in 1679, all the ladies found a complete toilet-set in their apartments; nothing which belonged to commodious luxury was forgotten. Whoever was on a journey could give repasts in his apartments, and was served there with the same delicacy as the master. These little things acquire value only when they are sustained by greater ones. In everything which the king did might be seen splendour and generosity. He made a present of 200,000 francs to the daughters of his ministers on their marriage.

One can easily imagine the effect which this magnificence had in Europe. The French were not the only ones who praised him: twelve panegyrics were pronounced on Louis XIV in different towns of Italy--an homage rendered neither from fear nor hope of favour, which the marquis Zampieri sent to the king.

He continued to extend his patronage to letters and to the arts. Proofs of this are the particular gratuities of about 4,000 livres to Racine, the fortune of Despréaux, that of Quinault, and above all that of Lully and of all the artists who consecrated their work to him. The king danced in ballets until the year 1670. He was then thirty-two years old. The tragedy of _Britannicus_ was played before him at St. Germain; he was struck by these verses:

_Pour mérite premier, pour vertu singulière,_
_Il excelle à traîner un char dans la carrière,_
_A disputer des prix indignes de ses mains,_
_A se donner lui-même en spectacle aux Romains._

After that he never again danced in public: the poet had reformed the monarch. His union with La Vallière still continued in spite of his frequent infidelities to her. These infidelities cost him little trouble. He never found women who resisted him, and he always came back to the one who, by the sweetness and goodness of her character, by her sincere affection, and even by the chains of habit, had subjugated him without the aid of art. But beginning with the year 1669, La Vallière perceived that Madame de Montespan was gaining the ascendency; she fought against it with her usual sweetness; she supported for a long time, and almost without complaining, the pain of being the witness of her rival’s triumph; she still thought herself happy in being even thought of by the king, whom she continued to love, and in seeing him without being loved by him.

Finally in 1675 she embraced the resource of tender souls, which need deep and intense sentiments to subjugate them. She thought that God alone could succeed her lover in her heart. Her conversion became just as celebrated as her affection. She became a Carmelite at Paris and persevered in her resolve. To wear haircloth, to walk with bare feet, to fast rigorously, to sing at night in chorus in an unknown tongue--all this did not repulse the delicacy of a woman accustomed to so much glory, luxury, and pleasure. She lived this austere life from 1675 to 1710, under the simple name of Louise de la Miséricorde.

It is known that when Sister Louise de la Miséricorde was told of the death of the duke de Vermandois, whom she had borne to the king, she said: “I ought to weep for his birth more than for his death.” One daughter was left to her, who resembled the king the most of all his children. She married the prince Armand de Conti, nephew of the Great Condé.

_Madame de Montespan_

[Sidenote: [1670-1675 A.D.]]

In the meantime the marquise de Montespan was enjoying the king’s favour with much _éclat_ and authority. Athénaïs de Mortemar, wife of the marquis de Montespan, her elder sister the marquise de Thiange, and her younger sister, for whom she obtained the abbey of Fontevrault, were the most beautiful women of their day, and all three joined to this distinction singular attractions of mind. The duke de Vivonne, their brother, and marshal of France, was also one of the men at court who had the most good taste and was best read. It was to him that the king said one day: “But what is the good of reading?” The duke de Vivonne, who was stout and red faced, answered: “Reading does for the mind what your partridges do to my cheeks.”

These four persons were universally popular by a singular style of conversation mingled with pleasantry, naïveté, and wit, which was known as _l’esprit de Mortemar_. They all wrote with an ease and grace peculiar to them.

(1641-1707)]

Madame de Montespan’s triumph burst forth during a journey which the king made to Flanders in 1670. The ruin of the Dutch was prepared on this journey in the midst of entertainments. It was a continual fête, accompanied with great pomp. The king, who made all his war expeditions on horseback, made this one for the first time in a closed carriage. Postchaises had not yet been invented. The queen, Madame, her sister-in-law, and the marquise de Montespan were in this superb equipage, followed by many others, and when Madame de Montespan was alone she had four bodyguards at the doors of her carriage. The dauphin came next with his court. Mademoiselle with hers; it was before the fatal event of her marriage; she took part in all these triumphs in peace and saw with complaisance her lover, the king’s favourite, at the head of his company of guards. The most beautiful crown furniture was carried to the towns where they slept. In every city they found a masked or dress ball, or fireworks. All his military retinue accompanied the king and all his household retinue followed or preceded him. The tables were kept as at St. Germain. In this pomp the court visited all the conquered cities. The principal ladies of Brussels, of Ghent came to see this magnificence. The king invited them to his table. He made them very handsome presents. All the officers of the garrison troops received gratuities. His liberality cost the king several times fifteen hundred gold louis a day.

All the honour, all the homage was for Madame de Montespan, except what duty gave to the queen. Nevertheless this lady did not share the secrets of state. The king knew how to distinguish affairs of state from pleasure. The unfortunate experience of a maid of honour to the queen in 1673 gave rise to a new court order. The danger attached to the position of a young girl in a gallant and voluptuous court caused twelve ladies of the palace to be substituted for the twelve maids of honour, who had graced the court and the queen’s presence. After that the queens’ households were composed in that manner. This arrangement made the court larger and more magnificent, by establishing in it the husbands and families of these ladies, which increased the society and spread greater opulence.

_Poisoning: The Brinvilliers Case_

[Sidenote: [1670-1685 A.D.]]

About 1670 the crime of poisoning began to be prevalent in France. This revenge of cowards had not been employed during the horrors of the civil war, but, by a singular fatality, had infected France in the time of glory and of the pleasures which softened manners, even as it found its way into ancient Rome in the fairest days of the republic.

Two Italians, one of whom bore the name of Exili, worked for a long time with a German apothecary called Glaser, in quest of the philosopher’s stone. In this enterprise the two Italians lost the little they had and endeavoured, by crime, to repair the harm done by their folly; they secretly sold poisons. Confession, the greatest curb to human wickedness but which is abused in the idea that one may perform the crimes one is sure of expiating, was the means of informing the grand penitentiary of Paris that certain persons had died of poison; he apprised the government. The two Italians were suspected, and put in the Bastille; one of the two died there; Exili remained there without being convicted; and from the depths of his prison he spread through Paris those dark secrets which cost the lives of the civil lieutenant D’Aubrai and his family, and which finally led to the establishment of the Chamber of Poisons, called the _Chambre Ardente_.

Love was the prime source of these horrible tragedies. The marquis of Brinvilliers, son-in-law of the civil lieutenant D’Aubrai, had in his house Sainte-Croix, the captain of his regiment, a man with too handsome a face: his wife warned him of the consequences; the husband persisted in letting the young man remain in the house with his wife, a young, beautiful, and susceptible woman. What might have been expected happened: they fell in love with each other. The civil lieutenant, father of the marquise, was harsh and imprudent enough to solicit a _lettre de cachet_ and get the captain, who needed only to be returned to his regiment, sent to the Bastille. Sainte-Croix was unfortunately put in a room with Exili: this Italian taught him how to revenge himself; the results make one shudder. The marquise did not attempt the life of her husband, who had had some indulgence for a love of which he was himself the cause, but the fury of her vengeance induced her to poison her father, her two brothers, and her sister. Amidst so many crimes she was religious; she often went to confession, and when she was arrested at Liège a general confession was even found written in her handwriting, which served not as a proof against her but as presumptive evidence. It is not true that she tried her poisons in the hospitals as the people said, and as written in the _Causes célèbres_, the work of a briefless barrister (François Gabot de Pitaval) and made for the people; but it is true that she as well as Sainte-Croix had secret connections with persons afterwards accused of the same crimes. She was burned in 1676 after having had her head cut off. But from 1670, when Exili had begun to make poisons, down to 1680 this crime infected Paris. It cannot be concealed that Penautier, the receiver-general of the clergy and a friend of this woman, was accused some time afterwards of having put his secrets in practice and that it cost him half his wealth to suppress the indictment.

The Bavarian princess, wife of Monseigneur,[123] at first added brilliancy and vivacity to this court. The marquise de Montespan still attracted the principal attention but finally she ceased to please, and the violent transports of her grief did not bring back a heart that was forsaking her. However, she still kept her place at court, through her high position, being superintendent of the queen’s household, and with the king through habit and through her authority. The youth and beauty of Mademoiselle de Fontanges, a son she had borne to the king in 1680, the title of duchess she had received, kept Madame de Maintenon away from the first place, to which she did not then dare to aspire but which she afterwards obtained. The duchess de Fontanges, however, and her son died in 1681.