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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Illustration: Vauban----534]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Illustration: Misery of the Peasantry----543]

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

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




CHAPTER XLVII.----LOUIS XIV. AND RELIGION.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Illustration: The Torture of the Huguenots---552]

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

And a few days later, at Alais--"I no longer know what to do with the
troops, for the places in which I had meant to, post them get converted
all in a body, and this goes on so quickly that all the men can do is to
sleep for a night at the localities to which I send them.  It is certain
that you may add very nearly a third to the estimate given you of the
people of the religion, amounting to the number of a hundred and
eighty-two thousand men, and, when I asked you to give me until the,
25th of next month for their complete conversion, I took too long a