A Popular History of France From the Earliest Times, Volume 6

Volume Vi.

XLIX. LOUIS XIV. AND HIS COURT

L. LOUIS XIV. AND DEATH. (1711-1715.)

LI. LOUIS XV., THE REGENCY, AND CARDINAL DUBOIS. (1715-1723.)

LII. LOUIS XV., THE MINISTRY OF CARDINAL FLEURY. (1723-1748.)

LIII. LOUIS XV., FRANCE IN THE COLONIES. (1745 -1763.)

LIV. LOUIS XV., THE SEVEN YEARS’ WAR. --MINISTRY OF THE DUKE OF CHOISEUL. (1748-1774.)

LV. LOUIS XV., THE PHILOSOPHERS

LVI. LOUIS XVI., MINISTRY OF M. TURGOT. (1774-1776.)

LVII. LOUIS XVI., FRANCE ABROAD.--THE UNITED STATES’ WAR OF INDEPENDENCE. (17751783.)

LVIII. LOUIS XVI., FRANCE AT HOME.--MINISTRY OF M. NECKER. (1776-1781.)

LIX. LOUIS XVI., M. DE CALONNE, AND THE ASSEMBLY OF NOTABLES. (1781- 1787.) LX. LOUIS XVI., CONVOCATION OF THE STATESGENERAL. (1787-1789.)

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS:

HOTEL DE VILLE, PARIS FRONTISPIECE.

YPRES 151

BRUSSELS 159

NAMUR 161

ANTWERP 233

LOUIS XVI. 347

MARIE ANTOINETTE 456

LIST OF WOOD-CUT ILLUSTRATIONS.

The Grand Monarch in his State Robes 9

Madame de la Valliere 10

Madame de Montespan 12

The Iron Mask 14

Bed-chamber Etiquette 15

Madame de Maintenon and the Duchess of Burgundy. 27

Death of Madame de Maintenon. 34

The King leaving the Death-bed of Monseigneur 36

Louis XIV. in Old Age 47

The Death-bed of Louis XIV 50

Versailles at Night 52

The Regent Orleans 54

The Bed of Justice 57

John Law 62

La Rue Quincampoix 68

The Duke of Maine 71

The Duchess of Maine 72

Cardinal Dubois 78

Peter the Great and Little Louis XV 82

Belzunce amid the Plague-stricken 96

The Boy King and his People 104

Death of the Regent 107

Louis XV 110

Cardinal Fleury 110

Mary Leczinska 121

Death of Plelo 130

“Moriamur pro rege nostro.” 142

Louis XV. and his Councillors 148

Louis XV. and the Ambassador of Holland 151

Marshal Saxe 154

Battle of Fontenoy 157

Arrest of Charles Edward 166

Dupleix 168

La Bourdonnais 170

Dupleix meeting the Soudhabar of the Deccan 174

Death of the Nabob of the Carnatic 174

Lally at Pondicherry 184

Champlain 190

Death of General Braddock 203

Death of Wolfe 209

Madame de Pompadour 215

Attack on Fort St. Philip. 218

Assassination of Louis XV. by Damiens 221

Death of Chevalier D’Assas 233

“France, thy Parliament will cut off thy Head too!” 249

Defeat of the Corsicans at Golo 256

Montesquieu 269

Fontenelle 274

Voltaire 277

The Rescue of “La Henriade.” 283

Arrest of Voltaire 298

Diderot 314

Alembert 317

Diderot and Catherine II 321

Buffon 323

Rousseau and Madame D’Epinay 338

Turgot’s Dismissal 367

Destruction of the Tea 378

Suffren 413

The Reading of “Paul and Virginia.” 427

Necker Hospital 432

“There are my Sledges, Sirs.” 458

Lavoisier 465

Cardinal Rohan’s Discomfiture 470

Arrest of the Members 502

A POPULAR HISTORY OF FRANCE FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES.

Chapter Xlix.----Louis Xiv. and His Court.

Louia XIV. reigned everywhere, over his people, over his age, often over Europe; but nowhere did he reign so completely as over his court. Never were the wishes, the defects, and the vices of a man so completely a law to other men as at the court of Louis XIV. during the whole period of his long life. When near to him, in the palace of Versailles, men lived, and hoped, and trembled; everywhere else in France, even at Paris, men vegetated. The existence of the great lords was concentrated in the court, about the person of the king. Scarcely could the most important duties bring them to absent themselves for any time. They returned quickly, with alacrity, with ardor; only poverty or a certain rustic pride kept gentlemen in their provinces. “The court does not make one happy,” says La Bruyere, “it prevents one from being so anywhere else.”

At the outset of his reign, and when, on the death of Cardinal Mazarin, he took the reins of power in hand, Louis XIV. had resolved to establish about him, in his dominions and at his court, “that humble obedience on the part of subjects to those who are set over them,” which he regarded as “one of the most fundamental maxims of Christianity.” “As the principal hope for the reforms I contemplated establishing in my kingdom lay in my own will,” says he in his Memoires, “the first step towards their foundation was to render my will quite absolute by a line of conduct which should induce submission and respect, rendering justice scrupulously to any to whom I owed it, but, as for favors, granting them freely and without constraint to any I pleased and when I pleased, provided that the sequel of my acts showed that, for all my giving no reason to anybody, I was none the less guided by reason.”

The principle of absolute power, firmly fixed in the young king’s mind, began to pervade his court from the time that he disgraced Fouquet and ceased to dissemble his affection for Mdlle. de La Valliere. She was young, charming, and modest. Of all the king’s favorites she alone loved him sincerely. “What a pity he is a king!” she would say. Louis XIV. made her a duchess; but all she cared about was to see him and please him. When Madame de Montespan began to supplant her in the king’s favor, the grief of Madame de La Valliere was so great that she thought she should die of it. Then she turned to God, in penitence and despair. Twice she sought refuge in a convent at Chaillot. “I should have left the court sooner,” she sent word to the king on leaving, “after having lost the honor of your good graces, if I could have prevailed upon myself never to see you again; that weakness was so strong in me that hardly now am I capable of making a sacrifice of it to God; after having given you all my youth, the rest of my life is not too much for the care of my salvation.” The king still clung to her. “He sent M. Colbert to beg her earnestly to come to Versailles, and that he might speak with her. M. Colbert escorted her thither; the king conversed for an hour with her, and wept bitterly. Madame de Montespan was there to meet her with open arms and tears in her eyes.” “It is all incomprehensible,” adds Madame de Sevigne; “some say that she will remain at Versailles, and at court, others that she will return to Chaillot; we shall see.” Madame de La Valliere remained three years at court, “half penitent,” she said humbly, detained there by the king’s express wish, in consequence of the tempers and jealousies of Madame de Montespan, who felt herself judged and condemned by her rival’s repentance. Attempts were made to turn Madame de La Valliere from her inclination for the Carmelites: “Madame,” said Madame Scarron to her one day, “here are you one blaze of gold: have you really considered that at the Carmelites’ before long, you will have to wear serge?” She, however, persisted. She was already practising in secret the austerities of the convent. “God has laid in this heart the foundation of great things,” said Bossuet, who supported her in her conflict: “the world puts great hinderances in her way and God great mercies; I have hopes that God will prevail; the uprightness of her heart will carry everything.”

“When I am in trouble at the Carmelites’,” said Madame de La Valliere, as at last she quitted the court, “I will think of what those people have made me suffer.” “The world itself makes us sick of the world,” said Bossuet in the sermon he preached on the day of her taking the dress; “its attractions have enough of illusion, its favors enough of inconstancy, its rebuffs enough of bitterness, there is enough of injustice and perfidy in the dealings of men, enough of unevenness and capriciousness in their intractable and contradictory humors--there is enough of it all, without doubt, to disgust us.” “She was dead to me the day she entered the Carmelites,” said the king, thirty-five years later, when the modest and fervent nun expired at last, in 1710, at her convent, without having ever relaxed the severities of her penance. He had married the daughter she had given him to the Prince of Conti. “Everybody has been to pay compliments to this saintly Carmelite,” says Madame de Sevigne, without appearing to perceive the singularity of the alliance between words and ideas; “I was there too with Mademoiselle. The Prince of Conti detained her in the parlor. What an angel appeared to me at last! She had to my eyes all the charms we had seen heretofore. I did not find her either puffy or sallow; she is less thin, though, and more happy-looking. She has those same eyes of hers, and the same expression; austerity; bad living, and little sleep have not made them hollow or dull; that singular dress takes away nothing of the easy grace and easy bearing. As for modesty, she is no grander than when she presented to the world a princess of Conti, but that is enough for a Carmelite. In real truth, this dress and this retirement are a great dignity for her.” The king never saw her again, but it was at her side that Madame de Montespan, in her turn forced to quit the court, went to seek advice and pious consolation. “This soul will be a miracle of grace,” Bossuet had said.

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