God was to spare Louis XIV. that crowning disaster reserved for other times; in spite of all his defaults and the culpable errors of his life and reign, Providence had given this old man, overwhelmed by so many reverses and sorrows, a truly royal soul, and that regard for his own greatness which set him higher as a king than he would have been as a man. “He had too proud a soul to descend lower than his misfortunes had brought him,” says Montesquieu, “and he well knew that courage may right a crown and that infamy never does.” On the 25th of May, the king secretly informed his plenipotentiaries as well as his generals that the English were proposing to him a suspension of hostilities; and he added, “It is no longer a time for flattering the pride of the Hollanders, but, whilst we treat with them in good faith, it must be with the dignity that becomes me.” “A style different from that of the conferences at the Hague and Gertruydenberg,” is the remark made by M. de Torcy. That which the king’s pride refused to the ill will of the Hollanders he granted to the good will of England. The day of the commencement of the armistice Dunkerque was put as guarantee into the hands of the English, who recalled their native regiments from the army of Prince Eugene; the king complained that they left him the auxiliary troops; the English ministers proposed to prolong the truce, promising to treat separately with France if the allies refused assent to the peace. The news received by Louis XIV. gave him assurance of better conditions than any one had dared to hope for.
Villars had not been able to prevent Prince Eugene from becoming master of Quesnoy on the 3d of July; the imperialists were already making preparations to invade France; in their army the causeway which connected Marchiennes with Landrecies was called the Paris road. The marshal resolved to relieve Landrecies, and, having had bridges thrown over the Scheldt, he, on the 23d of July, 1712, crossed the river between Bouchain and Denain; the latter little place was defended by the Duke of Albemarle, son of General Monk, with seventeen battalions of auxiliary troops in the pay of the allies; Lieutenant General Albergotti, an experienced soldier, considered the undertaking perilous. “Go and lie down for an hour or two, M. d’Albergotti,” said Villars; “to-morrow by three in the morning you shall know whether the enemy’s intrenchments are as strong as you suppose.” Prince Eugene was coming up by forced marches to relieve Denain, by falling on the rearguard of the French army. It was proposed to Villars to make fascines to fill up the fosses of Denain. “Do you suppose,” said he, pointing to the enemy’s army in the distance, “that those gentry will give us the time? Our fascines shall be the bodies of the first of our men who fall in the fosse.”
“There was not an instant, not a minute to lose,” says the marshal in his Memoires. “I made my infantry march on four lines in the most beautiful order; as I entered the intrenchment at the head of the troops, I had not gone twenty paces when the Duke of Albemarle and six or seven of the emperor’s lieutenant generals were at my horse’s feet. I begged them to excuse me if present matters did not permit me to show them all the politeness I ought, but that the first of all was to provide for the safety of their persons.” The enemy thought of nothing but flight; the bridges over the Scheldt broke down under the multitude of vehicles and horses; nearly all the defenders of Denain were taken or killed. Prince Eugene could not cross the river, watched as it was by French troops; he did not succeed in saving Marchiennes, which the Count of Broglie, had been ordered to invest in the very middle of the action in front of Denain; the imperialists raised the siege of Landrecies, but without daring to attack Villars, re-enforced by a few garrisons; the marshal immediately invested Douai; on the 27th of August, the emperor’s troops who were defending one of the forts demanded a capitulation; the officers who went out asked for a delay of four days, so as to receive orders from Prince Eugene; the marshal, who was in the trenches, called his grenadiers. “This is my council on such occasions,” said he to the astonished imperialists. “My friends, these captains demand four days’ time to receive orders from their general; what do you think?” “Leave it to us, marshal,” replied the grenadiers; “in a quarter of an hour we will slit their windpipes.” “Gentlemen,” said I to the officers, “they will do as they have said; so take your own course.” The garrison surrendered at discretion. Douai capitulated on the 8th of September; Le Quesnoy was taken on the 4th of October, and Bouchain on the 18th; Prince Eugene had not been able to attempt anything; he fell back under the walls of Brussels. On the Rhine, on the Alps, in Spain, the French and Spanish armies had held the enemy in check. The French plenipotentiaries at Utrecht had recovered their courage. “We put on the face the Hollanders had at Gertruydenberg, and they put on ours,” wrote Cardinal de Polignac from Utrecht: “it is a complete turning of the tables.” “Gentlemen, peace will be treated for amongst you, for you and without you,” was the remark made to the Hollanders. Hereditary adversary of the Van Witts and their party, Heinsius had pursued the policy of William III. without the foresight and lofty views of William Ill.; he had not seen his way in 1709 to shaking off the yoke of Marlborough and Prince Eugene in order to take the initiative in a peace necessary for Europe; in 1712 he submitted to the will of Harley and St. John, thus losing the advantages of the powerful mediatorial position which the United Provinces had owed to the eminent men successively intrusted with their government. Henceforth Holland remained a free and prosperous country, respected and worthy of her independence, but her political influence and importance in Europe were at an end. Under God’s hand great men make great destinies and great positions for their country as well as for themselves.
The battle of Denain and its happy consequences hastened the conclusion of the negotiations; the German princes themselves began to split up; the King of Prussia, Frederic William I., who had recently succeeded his father, was the first to escape from the emperor’s yoke. Lord Bolingbroke put the finishing stroke at Versailles to the conditions of a general peace; the month of April was the extreme limit fixed by England for her allies; on the 11th peace was signed between France, England, the United Provinces, Portugal, the King of Prussia, and the Duke of Savoy. Louis XIV. recovered Lijle, Aire, Bethune, and St. Venant; he strengthened with a few places the barrier of the Hollanders; he likewise granted to the Duke of Savoy a barrier on the Italian slope of the Alps; he recognized Queen Anne, at the same time exiling from France the Pretender James III., whom he had but lately proclaimed with so much flourish of trumpets, and he razed the fortifications of Dunkerque. England kept Gibraltar and Minorca; Sicily was assigned to the Duke of Savoy. France recognized the King of Prussia. The peace was an honorable and an unexpected one, after so many disasters the King of Spain held out for some time; he wanted to set up an independent principality for the Princess des Ursins, _camerera mayor_ to the queen his wife, an able, courageous, and clever intriguer, all-powerful at court, who had done good service to the interests of France; he could not obtain any dismemberment of the United Provinces; and at last Philip V. in his turn signed. The emperor and the empire alone remained aloof from the general peace. War recommenced in Germany and on the Rhine. Villars carried Spires and Kaiserlautern. He laid siege to Landau. His lieutenants were uneasy. “Gentlemen,” said Villars, “I have heard the Prince of Conde say that the enemy should be feared at a distance and despised at close quarters.” Landau capitulated on the 20th of August; on the 30th of September Villars entered Friburg; the citadel surrendered on the 13th of November; the imperialists began to make pacific overtures; the two generals, Villars and Prince Eugene, were charged with the negotiations.
[Illustration: Marshal Villars and Prince Eugene—-512]
“I arrived at Rastadt on the 26th of November in the afternoon,” writes Villars in his Memoires, “and the Prince of Savoy half an hour after me. The moment I knew he was in the court-yard, I went to the top of the steps to meet him, apologizing to him on the ground that a lame man could not go down; we embraced with the feelings of an old and true friendship which long wars and various engagements had not altered.” The two plenipotentiaries were headstrong in their discussions. “If we begin war again,” said Villars, “where will you find money?” “It is true that we haven’t any,” rejoined the prince; “but there is still some in the empire.” “Poor states of the empire!” I exclaimed; “your advice is not asked about beginning the dance; yet you must of course follow the leaders.” Peace was at last signed on the 6th of March, 1714: France kept Landau and Fort Louis; she restored Spires, Brisach, and Friburg. The emperor refused to recognize Philip V., but he accepted the status quo; the crown of Spain remained definitively with the house of Bourbon; it had cost men and millions enough; for an instant the very foundations of order in Europe had seemed to be upset; the old French monarchy had been threatened; it had recovered of itself and by its own resources, sustaining single-handed the struggle which was pulling down all Europe in coalition against it; it had obtained conditions which restored its frontiers to the limits of the peace of Ryswick; but it was exhausted, gasping, at wits’ end for men and money; absolute power had obtained from national pride the last possible efforts, but it had played itself out in the struggle; the confidence of the country was shaken; it had been seen what dangers the will of a single man had made the nation incur; the tempest was already gathering within men’s souls. The habit of respect, the memory of past glories, the personal majesty of Louis XIV. still kept up about the aged king the deceitful appearances of uncontested power and sovereign authority; the long decadence of his great-grandson’s reign was destined to complete its ruin.
“I loved war too much,” was Louis XIV.’s confession on his death bed. He had loved it madly and exclusively; but this fatal passion, which had ruined and corrupted France, had not at any rate remained infructuous. Louis XIV. had the good fortune to profit by the efforts of his predecessors as well as of his own servants: Richelieu and Mazarin, Conde and Turenne, Luxembourg, Catinat, Vauban, Villars, and Louvois, all toiled at the same work; under his reign France was intoxicated with excess of the pride of conquest, but she did not lose all its fruits; she witnessed the conclusion of five peaces, mostly glorious, the last sadly honorable; all tended to consolidate the unity and power of the kingdom; it is to the treaties of the Pyrenees, of Westphalia, of Nimeguen, of Ryswick, and of Utrecht, all signed with the name of Louis XIV., that France owed Roussillon, Artois, Alsace, Flanders, and Franche-Comte. Her glory has more than once cost her dear; it has never been worth so much and such solid increment to her territory.
CHAPTER XLVI.—-LOUIS XIV. AND HOME ADMINISTRATION.
It is King Louis XIV.’s distinction and heavy, burden in the eyes of history that it is, impossible to tell of anything in his reign without constantly recurring to himself. He had two ministers of the higher order, Colbert and Louvois; several of good capacity, such as Seignelay and Torcy; others incompetent, like Chamillard; he remained as much master of the administrators of the first rank as if they had been insignificant clerks; the home government of France, from 1661 to 1715, is summed up in the king’s relations with his ministers.
“I resolved from the first not to have any premier minister,” says Louis XIV. in his Memoires, “and not to leave to another the functions of king whilst I had nothing but the title. But, on the contrary, I made up my mind to share the execution of my orders amongst several persons, in order to concentrate their authority in my own alone. I might have cast my eyes upon people of higher consideration than those I selected, but they seemed to me competent to execute, under me, the matters with which I purposed to intrust them. I did not think it was to my interest to look for men of higher standing, because, as I wanted above all things to establish my own reputation, it was important that the public should know, from the rank of those of whom I made use, that I had no intention of sharing my authority with them, and that they themselves, knowing what they were, should not conceive higher hopes than I wished to give them.”
It has been said already that the court governed France in the reign of Louis XIV.; and what was, in fact, the court? The men who lived about the king, depending on, his favor, the source or arbiter of their fortunes. The great lords served in the army, with lustre, when they bore the name of Conde, Turenne, or Luxembourg; but they never had any place amongst the king’s confidential servants. “Luck, in spite of us, has as much to do as wisdom–and more–with the choice of our ministers,” he says in his Memoires, “and, in respect of what wisdom may have to do therewith, genius is far more effectual than counsel.” It was their genius which made the fortunes and the power of Louis XIV.’s two great ministers, Colbert and Louvois.
In advance, and on the faith of Cardinal Mazarin, the king knew the worth of Colbert. “I had all possible confidence in him,” says he, “because I knew that he had a great deal of application, intelligence, and probity.” Rough, reserved, taciturn, indefatigable in work, passionately devoted to the cause of order, public welfare, and the peaceable aggrandizement of France, Colbert, on becoming the comptroller of finance in 1661, brought to the service of the state superior views, consummate experience, and indomitable perseverance. The position of affairs required no fewer virtues. “Disorder reigned everywhere,” says the king; “on casting over the various portions of my kingdom not eyes of indifference, but the eyes of a master, I was sensibly affected not to see a single one which did not deserve and did not press to be taken in hand. The destitution of the lower orders was extreme, and the finances, which give movement and activity to all this great framework of the monarchy, were entirely exhausted and in such plight that there was scarcely any resource to be seen; the affluent, to be seen only amongst official people, on the one hand cloaked all their malversations by divers kinds of artifices, and uncloaked them on the other by their insolent and audacious extravagance, as if they were afraid to leave me in ignorance of them.”
The punishment of the tax-collectors (_traitants_), prosecuted at the same time as superintendent Fouquet, the arbitrary redemption of rentes (_annuities_) on the city of Paris or on certain branches of the taxes, did not suffice to alleviate the extreme suffering of the people. The talliages from which the nobility and the clergy were nearly everywhere exempt pressed upon the people with the most cruel inequality. “The poor are reduced to eating grass and roots in our meadows like cattle,” said a letter from Blaisois those who can find dead carcasses devour them, and, unless God have pity upon them, they will soon be eating one another.” Normandy, generally so prosperous, was reduced to the uttermost distress. “The great number of poor has exhausted charity and the power of those who were accustomed to relieve them,” says a letter to Colbert from the superintendent of Caen. “In 1662 the town was obliged to throw open the doors of the great hospital, having no longer any means of furnishing subsistence to those who were in it. I can assure you that there are persons in this town who have gone for whole days without anything to eat. The country, which ought to supply bread for the towns, is crying for mercy’s sake to be supplied therewith itself.” The peasants, wasted with hunger, could no longer till their fields; their cattle had been seized for taxes. Colbert proposed to the king to remit the arrears of talliages, and devoted all his efforts to reducing them, whilst regulating their collection. His desire was to arrive at the establishment everywhere of real talliages, on landed property, &c., instead of personal talliages, variable imposts, depending upon the supposed means or social position of the inhabitants. He was only very partially successful, without, however, allowing himself to be repelled by the difficulties presented by differences of legislation and customs in the provinces. “Perhaps,” he wrote to the superintendent of Aix, in 1681, “on getting to the bottom of the matter and considering it in detail, you will not discover in it all the impossibilities you have pictured to yourself.” Colbert died without having completed his work; the talliages, however, had been reduced by eight millions of livres within the first two years of his administration. “All the imposts of the kingdom,” he writes, in 1662, to the superintendent of Tours, who is complaining of the destitution of the people, “are, as regards the talliages, but about thirty-seven millions, and, for forty or fifty years past, they have always been between forty and fifty millions, except after the peace, when his Majesty reduced them to thirty-two, thirty-three, and thirty-four millions.”
Peace was of short duration in the reign of Louis XIV., and often so precarious that it did not permit of disarmament. At the very period when the able minister was trying to make the people feel the importance of the diminution in the talliages, he wrote to the king, “I entreat your Majesty to read these few lines attentively. I confess to your Majesty that the last time you were graciously pleased to speak to me about the state of the finances, my respect, the boundless desire I have always had to please you and serve you to your satisfaction, without making any difficulty or causing any hitch, and still more your natural eloquence which succeeds in bringing conviction of whatever you please, deprived me of courage to insist and dwell somewhat upon the condition of your finances, for the which I see no other remedy but increase of receipts and decrease of expenses; wherefore, though this is no concern at all of mine, I merely entreat your Majesty to permit me to say that in war as well as in peace you have never consulted your finances for the purpose of determining your expenditure, which is a thing so extraordinary that assuredly there is no example thereof. For the past twenty years during which I have had the honor of serving your Majesty, though the receipts have greatly increased, you would find that the expenses have much exceeded the receipts, which might perhaps induce you to moderate and retrench such as are excessive. I am aware, Sir, that the figure I present herein is not an agreeable one; but in your Majesty’s service there are different functions; some entail nothing but agreeables whereof the expenses are the foundation; that with which your Majesty honors me entails this misfortune, that it can with difficulty produce anything agreeable, since the proposals for expenses have no limit; but one must console one’s self by constantly laboring to do one’s best.”
Louis XIV. did not “moderate or retrench his expenses.”
Colbert labored to increase the receipts; the new imposts excited insurrections in Angoumois, in Guyenne, in Brittany. Bordeaux rose in 1695 with shouts of “_Hurrah! for the king without gabel_.” Marshal d’Albret ventured into the streets in the district of St. Michel; he was accosted by one of the ringleaders. “Well, my friend,” said the marshal, “with whom is thy business? Dost wish to speak to me?” “Yes,” replied the townsman, “I am deputed by the people of St. Michel to tell you that they are good servants of the king, but that they do not mean to have any gabel, or marks on pewter or tobacco, or stamped papers, or _yreffe d’arbitrage_ (arbitration-clerk’s fee).” It was not until a year afterwards that the taxes could be established in Gascony; troops had to be sent to Rennes to impose the stamp-tax upon the Bretons. “Soldiers are more likely to be wanted in Lower Brittany than in any other spot,” said a letter to Colbert from the lieutenant general, M. de Lavardin; “it is a rough and wild country, which breeds inhabitants who resemble it. They understand French but slightly, and reason not much better. The Parliament is at the back of all this.” Riots were frequent, and were put down with great severity. “The poor Low-Bretons collect by forty or fifty in the fields,” writes Madame de Sevigne on the 24th of September, 1675: “as soon as they see soldiers, they throw themselves on their knees, saying, Mea culpa! all the French they know.. . .”
“The severities are abating,” she adds on the 3d of November: “after the hangings there will be no more hanging.” All these fresh imposts, which had cost so much suffering and severity, brought in but two millions five hundred thousand livres at Colbert’s death. The indirect taxes, which were at that time called _fermes generales_ (farmings-general), amounted to thirty-seven millions during the first two years of Colbert’s administration, and rose to sixty-four millions at the time of his death. “I should be apprehensive of going too far, and that the prodigious augmentations of the _fermes_ (farmings) would be very burdensome to the people,” wrote Louis XIV. in 1680. The expenses of recovering the taxes, which had but lately led to great abuses, were diminished by half. “The bailiffs generally, and especially those who are set over the recovery of talliages, are such terrible brutes that, by way of exterminating a good number of these, you could not do anything more worthy of you than suppress those,” wrote Colbert to the criminal magistrate of Orleans. “I am at this moment promoting two suits against the collectors of talliages, in which I expect at present to get ten thousand crowns’ damages, without counting another against an assessor’s officer, who wounded one Grimault, the which had one of his daughters killed before his eyes, his wife, another of his daughters, and his female servant wounded with swords and sticks, the writ of distrainment being executed whilst the poor creature was being buried.” The bailiffs were suppressed, and the king’s justice was let loose not only against the fiscal officers who abused their power, but also against tyrannical nobles. Masters of requests and members of the Parliament of Paris went to Auvergne and Velay and held temporary courts of justice, which were called _grands jours_. Several lords were found guilty; Sieur de la Mothe actually died upon the scaffold for having unjustly despoiled and maltreated the people on his estates. “He was not one of the worst,” says Flechier, in his _Journal des Grands Jours d’Auvergne_. The Duke of Bouillon, governor of the province, had too long favored the guilty. “I resolved,” says the king in his _Memoires,_ “to prevent the people from being subjected to thousands and thousands of tyrants, instead of one lawful king, whose indulgence alone it is that causes all this disorder.” The puissance of the provincial governors, already curtailed by Richelieu, suffered from fresh attacks under Louis XIV. Everywhere the power passed into the hands of the superintendents, themselves subjected in their turn to inspection by the masters of requests. “Acting on the information I had that in many provinces the people were plagued by certain folks who abused their title of governors in order to make unjust requisitions,” says the king in his _Memoires,_ “I posted men in all quarters for the express purpose of keeping myself more surely informed of such exactions, in order to punish them as they deserved.” Order was restored in all parts of France. “The _Auvergnats,_” said a letter to Colbert from President de Novion, “never knew so certainly that they had a king as they do now.”
“A useless banquet at a cost of a thousand crowns causes me incredible pain,” said Colbert to Louis XIV., and yet, when it is a question of millions of gold for Poland, I would sell all my property, I would pawn my wife and children, and I would go afoot all my life to provide for it if necessary. Your Majesty, if it please you, will forgive me this little transport. I begin to doubt whether the liberty I take is agreeable to your Majesty; it has seemed to me that you were beginning to prefer your pleasures and your diversions to everything else; at the very time when your Majesty told me at St. Germain that the morsel must be taken from one’s mouth to provide for the increment of the naval armament, you spent two hundred thousand livres down for a trip to Versailles, to wit, thirteen thousand pistoles for your gambling expenses and the queen’s, and fifty thousand livres for extraordinary banquets; you have likewise so intermingled our diversions, with the war on land that it is difficult to separate the two, and, if your Majesty will be graciously pleased to examine in detail the amount of useless expenditure you have incurred, you will plainly see that, if it were all deducted, you would not be reduced to your present necessity. The right thing to do, sir, is to grudge five sous for unnecessary things, and to throw millions about when it is for your glory.”
Colbert knew, in fact, how to “throw millions about” when it was for endowing France with new manufactures and industries. “One of the most important works of peace,” he used to say, “is the re-establishment of every kind of trade in this kingdom, and to put it in a position to do without having recourse to foreigners for the things necessary for the use and comfort of the subjects.” “We have no need of anybody, and our neighbors have need of us;” such was the maxim laid down in a document of that date, which has often been attributed to Colbert, and which he certainly put incessantly into practice. The cloth manufactures were dying out, they received encouragement; a Protestant Hollander, Van Robais, attracted over to Abbeville by Colbert, there introduced the making of fine cloths; at Beauvais and in the Gobelins establishment at Paris, under the direction of the great painter Lebrun, the French tapestries soon threw into the shade the reputation of the tapestries of Flanders; Venice had to yield up her secrets and her workmen for the glass manufactories of St. Gobain and Tourlaville. The great lords and ladies were obliged to give up the Venetian point with which their dresses had been trimmed; the importation of it was forbidden, and lace manufactories were everywhere established in France; there was even a strike amongst the women at Alencon against the new lace which it was desired to force them to make. “There are more than eighty thousand persons working at lace in Alencon, Seez, Argentan, Falaise, and the circumjacent parishes,” said a letter to Colbert from the superintendent of Alencon, “and I can assure you, my lord, that it is manna and a blessing from heaven over all this district, where even little children of seven years of age find means of earning a livelihood; the little shepherd-girls from the fields work, like the rest, at it; they say that they will never be able to make such fine point as this, and that one wants to take away their bread and their means of paying their talliage.” Point d’Alencon won the battle, and the making of lace spread all over Normandy. Manufactures of soap, tin, arms, silk, gave work to a multitude of laborers; the home trade of France at the same time received development; the bad state of the roads was “a dreadful hinderance to traffic;” Colbert ordered them to be every where improved. “The superintendents have done wonders, and we are never tired of singing their praises,” writes, Madame de Sevigne to her daughter during one of her trips; “it is quite extraordinary what beautiful roads there are; there is not a single moment’s stoppage; there are malls and walks everywhere.” The magnificent canal of Languedoc, due to the generous initiative of Riquet, united the Ocean to the Mediterranean; the canal of Orleans completed the canal of Briare, commenced by Henry IV. The inland custom-houses which shackled the traffic between province and province were suppressed at divers points; many provinces demurred to the admission of this innovation, declaring that, to set their affairs right, “there was need of nothing but order, order, order.” Colbert also wanted order, but his views were higher and broader than those of Breton or Gascon merchants; in spite of his desire to “put the kingdom in a position to do without having recourse to foreigners for things necessary for the use and comfort of the French,” he had too lofty and too judicious a mind to neglect the extension of trade; like Richelieu, he was for founding great trading companies; he had five, for the East and West Indies, the Levant, the North, and Africa; just as with Richelieu, they were with difficulty established, and lasted but a little while; it was necessary to levy subscriptions on the members of the sovereign corporations; “M. de Bercy put down his name for a thousand livres,” says the journal of Oliver d’Ormesson. “M. de Colbert laughed at him, and said that it could not be for his pocket’s sake; and the end of it was, that he put down three thousand livres.” Colbert could not get over the mortifying success of the company of the Dutch Indies. “I cannot believe that they pay forty per cent.,” said he. It was with the Dutch that he most frequently had commercial difficulties. The United Provinces produced but little, and their merchant navy was exclusively engaged in the business of transport; the charge of fifty sous per ton on merchandise carried in foreign vessels caused so much ill humor amongst the Hollanders that it was partly the origin of their rupture with France and of the treaty of the Triple Alliance. Colbert made great efforts to develop the French navy, both the fighting and the merchant. “The sea-traffic of all the world,” he wrote in 1669 to M. de Pomponne, then ambassador to Holland, “is done with twenty thousand vessels or thereabouts. In the natural order of things, each nation should have its own share thereof in proportion to its power, population, and seaboard. The Hollanders have fifteen or sixteen thousand out of this number, and the French perhaps four or five hundred at most. The king is employing all sorts of means which he thinks useful in order to approach a little more nearly to the number his subjects ought naturally to have.” Colbert’s efforts were not useless; at his death, the maritime trade of France had developed itself, and French merchants were effectually protected at sea by ships of war. “It is necessary,” said Colbert in his instructions to Seignelay, “that my son should be as keenly alive to all the disorders that may occur in trade, and all the losses that may be incurred by every trader, as if they were his own.” In 1692 the royal navy numbered a hundred and eighty-six vessels; a hundred and sixty thousand sailors were down on the books; the works at the ports of Toulon, Brest, and Rochefort were in full activity; Louis XIV. was in a position to refuse the salute of the flag which the English had up to that time exacted in the Channel from all nations. “The king my brother and those of whom he takes counsel do not quite know me yet,” wrote the king to his ambassador in London, “when they adopt towards me a tone of haughtiness and a certain sturdiness which has a savor of menace. I know of no power under heaven that can make me move a step by that sort of way; evil may come to me, of course, but no sensation of fear. The King of England and his chancellor may, of course, see pretty well what my strength is, but they do not see my heart; I, who feel and know full well both one and the other, desire that, for sole reply to so haughty a declaration, they learn from your mouth that I neither seek nor ask for any accommodation in the matter of the flag, because I shall know quite well how to maintain my right whatever may happen. I intend before long to place my maritime forces on such a footing that the English shall consider it a favor if it be my good pleasure then to listen to modifications touching a right which is due to me more legitimately than to them.” Duquesne and Tourville, Duguay-Trouin and John Bart, permitted the king to make good on the seas such proud words. From 1685 to 1712 the French fleets could everywhere hold their own against the allied squadrons of England and Holland.
So many and such sustained efforts in all directions, so many vast projects and of so great promise, suited the mind of Louis XIV. as well as that of his minister. “I tell you what I think,” wrote Louis XIV. to Colbert in 1674; “but, after all, I end as I began, by placing myself entirely in your hands, being certain that you will do what is most advantageous for my service.” Colbert’s zeal for his master’s service merited this confidence. “O,” he exclaimed one day, “that I could render this country happy, and that, far from the court, without favor, without influence, the grass might grow in my very courts!”
[Illustration: Marly—-525]
Louis XIV. was the victim of three passions which hampered and in the long-run destroyed the accord between king and minister: that for war, whetted and indulged by Louvois; that for kingly and courtly extravagance; and that for building and costly fancies. Colbert likewise loved “buildments” (_les batiments_), as the phrase then was; he urged the king to complete the Louvre, plans for which were requested of Bernini, who went to Paris for the purpose; after two years’ infructuous feelers and compliments, the Italian returned to Rome, and the work was intrusted to Perrault, whose plan for the beautiful colonnade still existing had always pleased Colbert. The completion of the castle of St. Germain, the works at Fontainebleau and at Chambord, the triumphal arches of St. Denis and St. Martin, the laying out of the Tuileries, the construction of the Observatory, and even that of the Palais des Invalides, which was Louvois’ idea, found the comptroller of the finances well disposed, if not eager.
[Illustration: Colonnade of the Louvre 525a]
Versailles was a constant source of vexation to him. “Your Majesty is coming back from Versailles,” he wrote to the king on the 28th of September, 1685. “I entreat that you will permit me to say two words about the reflections I often make upon this subject, and forgive me, if it please you, for my zeal. That mansion appertains far more to your Majesty’s pleasure and diversion than to your glory; if you would be graciously pleased to search all over Versailles for the five hundred thousand crowns spent within two years, you would assuredly have a difficulty in finding them. If your Majesty thinks upon it, you will reflect that it will appear forever in the accounts of the treasurers of your buildments that, whilst you were expending such great sums on this mansion, you neglected the Louvre, which is assuredly the most superb palace in the world, and the most worthy of your Majesty’s grandeur. You are aware that, in default of splendid deeds of arms, there is nothing which denotes the grandeur and spirit of princes more plainly than buildments do, and all posterity measures them by the ell of those superb mansions which they have erected during their lives. O, what pity it were that the greatest king and the most virtuous in that true virtue which makes the greatest princes should be measured by the ell of Versailles! And, nevertheless, there is room to fear this misfortune. For my part, I confess to your Majesty that, notwithstanding the repugnance you feel to increase the cash-orders [_comptants_], if I could have foreseen that this expenditure would be so large, I should have advised the employment of cash-orders, in order to hide the knowledge thereof forever.” [The cash-orders (_ordonnances au comptant_) did not indicate their object, and were not revised. The king merely wrote, Pay cash; I know the object of this expenditure (_Bon au comptant: je sais l’objet de cette depense_).]
[Illustration: Versailles—526]
Colbert was mistaken in his fears for Louis XIV.’s glory; if the expenses of Versailles surpassed his most gloomy apprehensions, the palace which rose upon the site of Louis XIV.’s former hunting-box was worthy of the king who had made it in his own image, and who managed to retain all his court around him there, by the mere fact of his will and of his royal presence.
Colbert was dead before Versailles was completed; the bills amounted then to one hundred and sixteen millions; the castle of Marly, now destroyed, cost more than four millions; money was everywhere becoming scarce; the temper of the comptroller of finances went on getting worse. “Whereas formerly it had been noticed that he set to his work rubbing his hands with joy,” says his secretary Perrault, brother of the celebrated architect, “he no longer worked but with an air of vexation, and even with sighs. From the good-natured and easy-going creature he had been, he became difficult to deal with, and there was not so much business, by a great deal, got through as in the early years of his administration.” “I do not mean to build any more, Mansard; I meet with too many mortifications,” the king would say to his favorite architect. He still went on building, however; but he quarrelled with Colbert over the cost of the great railings of Versailles. There’s swindling here,” said Louis XIV. “Sir,” rejoined Colbert, “I flatter myself, at any rate, that that word does not apply to me?” “No,” said the king; “but more attention should have been shown. If you want to know what economy is, go to Flanders; you will see how little those fortifications of the conquered places cost.”
It was Vauban whose praise the king thus sang, and Vauban, devoted to Louvois, had for a long time past been embroiled with Colbert. The minister felt himself beaten in the contest he had so long maintained against Michael Le Tellier and his son. In 1664, at the death of Chancellor Seguier, Colbert had opposed the elevation of Le Tellier to this office, “telling the king that, if he came in, he, Colbert, could not serve his Majesty, as he would have him thwarting everything he wanted to do.” On leaving the council, Le Tellier said to Brienne, “You see what a tone M. Colbert takes up; he will have to be settled with.” The antagonism had been perpetuated between Colbert and Louvois; their rivalry in the state had been augmented by the contrary dispositions of the two ministers. Both were passionately devoted to their work, laborious, indefatigable, honest in money matters, and both of fierce and domineering temper; but Louvois was more violent, more bold, less scrupulous as to ways and means of attaining his end, cruel in the exercise of his will and his wrath, less concerned about the sufferings of the people, more exclusively absorbed by one fixed idea; both rendered great service to the king, but Colbert performing for the prince and the state only useful offices in the way of order, economy, wise and far-sighted administration, courageous and steady opposition; Louvois ever urging the king on according to his bent, as haughty and more impassioned than he, entangling him and encouraging him in wars which rendered his own services necessary, without pity for the woes he entailed upon the nation. It was the misfortune and the great fault of Louis XIV. that he preferred the counsels of Louvois to those of Colbert, and that he allowed all the functions so faithfully exercised by the dying minister to drop into the hands of his enemy and rival.
At sixty-four years of age Colbert succumbed to excess of labor and of cares. That man, so cold and reserved, whom Madame de Sevigne called North, and Guy-Patin the Man of Marble (_Vir marmoreus_), felt that disgust for the things of life which appears so strikingly in the seventeenth century amongst those who were most ardently engaged in the affairs of the world. He was suffering from stone; the king sent to inquire after him and wrote to him. The dying man had his eyes closed; he did not open them. “I do not want to hear anything more about him,” said he, when the king’s letter was brought to him; “now, at any rate, let him leave me alone.” His thoughts were occupied with his soul’s salvation. Madame de Maintenon used to accuse him of always thinking about his finances, and very little about religion. He repeated bitterly, as the dying Cardinal Wolsey had previously said in the case of Henry, “If I had done for God what I have done for that man, I had been saved twice over; and now I know not what will become of me.” He expired on the 6th of September, 1683; and on the 10th, Madame de Maintenon wrote to Madame de St. Geran, “The king is very well; he feels no more now than a slight sorrow. The death of M. de Colbert afflicted him, and a great many people rejoiced at that affliction. It is all stuff about the pernicious designs he had; and the king very cordially forgave him for having determined to die without reading his letter, in order to be better able to give his thoughts to God. M. de Seignelay was anxious to step into all his posts, and has not obtained a single one; he has plenty of cleverness, but little moral conduct. His pleasures always have precedence of his duties. He has so exaggerated his father’s talents and services, that he has convinced everybody how unworthy and incapable he is of succeeding him.” The influence of Louvois and the king’s ill humor against the Colberts peep out in the injustice of Madame de Maintenon. Seignelay had received from Louis XIV. the reversion of the navy; his father had prepared him for it with anxious strictness, and he had exercised the functions since 1676. Well informed, clever, magnificent, Seignelay drove business and pleasure as a pair. In 1685 he gave the king a splendid entertainment in his castle of Sceaux; in 1686 he set off for Genoa, bombarded by Duquesne; in 1689 he, in person, organized the fleet of Tourville at Brest. “He was general in everything,” says Madame de la Fayette; “even when he did not give the word, he had the exterior and air of it.” “He is devoured by ambition,” Madame de Maintenon had lately said: in 1689 she writes, “_Anxious (L’Inquiet, i. e., Louvois_) hangs but by a thread; he is very much shocked at having the direction of the affairs of Ireland taken from him; he blames me for it. He counted on making immense profits; M. de Seignelay counts on nothing but perils and labors. He will succeed if he do not carry things with too high a hand. The king would have no better servant, if he could rid himself a little of his temperament. He admits as much himself; and yet he does not mend.” Seignelay died on the 3d of November, 1690, at the age of thirty-nine. “He had all the parts of a great minister of state,” says St. Simon, “and he was the despair of M. de Louvois, whom he often placed in the position of having not a word of reply to say in the king’s presence. His defects corresponded with his great qualities. As a hater and a friend he had no peer but Louvois.” “How young! how fortunate how great a position!” wrote Madame de Sevigne, on hearing of the death of M. de Seignelay, “it seems as if splendor itself were dead.”
Seignelay had spent freely, but he left at his death more than four hundred thousand livres a year. Colbert’s fortune amounted to ten millions, legitimate proceeds of his high offices and the king’s liberalities. He was born of a family of merchants, at Rheims, ennobled in the sixteenth century, but he was fond of connecting it with the Colberts of Scotland. The great minister would often tell his children to reflect “what their birth would have done for them if God had not blessed his labors, and if those labors had not been extreme.” He had married his daughters to the Dukes of Beauvilliers, Chevreuse, and Mortemart; Seignelay had wedded Mdlle. de Matignon, whose grandmother was an Orleans-Longueville. “Thus,” said Mdlle de Montpensier, “they have the honor of being as closely related as M. le Prince to the king; Marie de Bourbon was cousin-german to the king my grandfather. That lends a grand air to M. de Seignelay, who had by nature sufficient vanity.” Colbert had no need to seek out genealogies, and great alliances were naturally attracted to his power and the favor he was in. He had in himself that title which comes of superior merit, and which nothing can make up for, nothing can equal. He might have said, as Marshal Lannes said to the Marquis of Montesquieu, who was exhibiting a coat taken out of his ancestors’ drawers, “I am an ancestor myself.”
Louvois remained henceforth alone, without rival and without check. The work he had undertaken for the reorganization of the army was pretty nearly completed; he had concentrated in his own hands the whole direction of the military service, the burden and the honor of which were both borne by him. He had subjected to the same rules and the same discipline all corps and all grades; the general as well as the colonel obeyed him blindly. M. de Turenne alone had managed to escape from the administrative level. “I see quite clearly,” he wrote to Louvois on the 9th of September, 1673, “what are the king’s wishes, and I will do all I can to conform to them but you will permit me to tell you that I do not think that it would be to his Majesty’s service to give precise orders, at such a distance, to the most incapable man in France.” Turenne had not lost the habit of command; Louvois, who had for a long while been under his orders, bowed to the will of the king, who required apparent accord between the marshal and the minister, but he never forgave Turenne for his cool and proud independence. The Prince of Conde more than once turned to advantage this latent antagonism. After the death of Louvois and of Turenne, after the retirement of Conde, when the central power fell into the hands of Chamillard or of Voysin, the pretence of directing war from the king’s closet at Versailles produced the most fatal effects. “If M. de Chamillard thinks that I know nothing about war,” wrote Villars to Madame de Maintenon, “he will oblige me by finding somebody else in the kingdom who is better acquainted with it.” “If your Majesty,” he said again, “orders me to shut myself up in Bavaria, and if you want to see your army lost, I will get myself killed at the first opportunity rather than live to see such a mishap.” The king’s orders, transmitted through a docile minister, ignorant of war, had a great deal to do with the military disasters of Louis XIV.’s later years.
Meanwhile order reigned in the army, and supplies were regular. Louvois received the nickname of great Victualler (_Vivrier_). The wounded were tended in hospitals devoted to their use. “When a soldier is once down, he never gets up again,” had but lately been the saying. “Had I been at my mother’s, in her own house, I could not have been better treated,” wrote M. D’Alligny on the contrary, when he came out of one of the hospitals created by Louvois. He conceived the grand idea of the Hotel des Invalides. “It were very reasonable,” says the preamble of the king’s edict which founded the establishment, “that they who have freely exposed their lives and lavished their blood for the defence and maintenance of this monarchy, who have so materially contributed to the winning of the battles we have gained over our enemies, and who have often reduced them to asking peace of us, should enjoy the repose they have secured for our other subjects, and should pass the remainder of their days in tranquillity.” Up to his death Louvois insisted upon managing the Hotel des Invalides himself.
Never had the officers of the army been under such strict and minute supervision; promotion went, by seniority, by “the order on the list,” as the phrase then was, without any favor for rank or birth; commanders were obliged to attend to their corps. “Sir,” said Louvois one day to M. de Nogaret, “your company is in a very bad state.” “Sir,” answered Nogaret, “I was not aware of it.” “You ought to be aware,” said M. de Louvois: “have you inspected it?” “No, sir,” said Nogaret. “You ought to have inspected it, sir.” “Sir, I will give orders about it.” “You ought to have given them. A man ought to make up his mind, sir, either to openly profess himself a courtier or to devote himself to his duty when he is an officer.” Education in the schools for cadets, regularity in service, obligation to keep the companies full instead of pocketing a portion of the pay in the name of imaginary soldiers who appeared only on the registers, and who were called dummies (_passe-volants_), the necessity of wearing uniform, introduced into the army customs to which the French nobility, as undisciplined as they were brave, had hitherto been utter strangers.
Artillery and engineering were developed under the influence of Vauban, “the first of his own time and one of the first of all times” in the great art of besieging, fortifying, and defending places. Louvois had singled out Vauban at the sieges of Lille, Tournay, and Douai, which he had directed in chief under the king’s own eye. He ordered him to render the places he had just taken impregnable. “This is no child’s play,” said Vauban on setting about the fortifications of Dunkerque, “and I would rather lose my life than hear said of me some day what I hear said of the men who have preceded me.” Louvois’ admiration was unmixed when he went to examine the works. “The achievements of the Romans which have earned them so much fame show nothing comparable to what has been done here,” he exclaimed; “they formerly levelled mountains in order to make highroads, but here more than four hundred have been swept away; in the place where all those sand-banks were there is now to be seen nothing but one great meadow. The English and the Dutch often send people hither to see if all they have been told is true; they all go back full of admiration at the success of the work and the greatness of the master who took it in hand.” It was this admiration and this dangerous greatness which suggested to the English their demands touching Dunkerque during the negotiations for the peace of Utrecht.
The honesty and moral worth of Vauban equalled his genius; he was as high-minded as he was modest; evil reports had been spread about concerning the contractors for the fortifications of Lille. Vauban demanded an inquiry. “You are quite right in thinking, my lord,” he wrote to Louvois, to whom he was united by a sincere and faithful friendship, “that, if you do not examine into this affair, you cannot do me justice, and, if you do it me not, that would be compelling me to seek means of doing it myself, and of giving up forever fortification and all its concomitants. Examine, then, boldly and severely; away with all tender feeling, for I dare plainly tell you that in a question of strictest honesty and sincere fidelity I fear neither the king, nor you, nor all the human race together. Fortune had me born the poorest gentleman in France, but in requital she honored me with an honest heart, so free from all sorts of swindles that it cannot bear even the thought of them without a shudder.” It was not until eight years after the death of Louvois, in 1699, when Vauban had directed fifty-three sieges, constructed the fortifications of thirty-three places, and repaired those of three hundred towns, that he was made a marshal, an honor that no engineer had yet obtained. “The king fancied he was giving himself the baton,” it was said, “so often had he had Vauban under his orders in besieging places.”
[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 term, for I believe that by the end of the month all will be settled. I will not, however, omit to tell you that all we have done in these conversions will be nothing but useless, if the king do not oblige the bishops to send good priests to instruct the people who want to hear the gospel preached. But I fear that the king will be worse obeyed in that respect by the priests than by the religionists. I do not tell you this without grounds.” “There is not a courier who does not bring the king great causes for joy,” writes Madame de Maintenon, “that is to say, conversions by thousands. I can quite believe that all these conversions are not sincere, but God makes use of all ways of bringing back heretics. Their children, at any rate, will be Catholics; their outward reunion places them within reach of the truth; pray God to enlighten them all; there is nothing the king has more at heart.”
In the month of August, 1684, she said, “The king has a design of laboring for the entire conversion of the heretics. He often has conferences about it with M. Le Tellier and M. de Chateauneuf, whereat I was given to understand that I should not be one too many. M. de Chateauneuf proposed measures which are not expedient. There must be no precipitation; it must be conversion, not persecution. M. de Louvois was for gentleness, which is not in accordance with his nature and his eagerness to see matters ended. The king is ready to do what is thought most likely to conduce to the good of religion. Such an achievement will cover him with glory before God and before men. He will have brought back all his subjects into the bosom of the church, and will have destroyed the heresy which his predecessors could not vanquish.”
The king’s glory was about to be complete; the _gentleness_ of Louvois had prevailed; he had found himself obliged to moderate the zeal of his superintendents; “nothing remained but to weed out the religionists of the small towns and villages;” by stretching a point the process had been carried into the principality of Orange, which still belonged to the house of Nassau, on the pretext that the people of that district had received in their chapels the king’s subjects. The Count of Tesse, who had charge of the expedition, wrote to Louvois, “Not only, on one and the same day, did the whole town of Orange become converted, but the state took the same resolution, and the members of the Parliament, who were minded to distinguish themselves by a little more stubbornness, adopted the same course twenty-four hours afterwards. All this was done gently, without violence or disorder. There is only a parson named Chambrun, patriarch of the district, who persists in refusing to listen to reason; for the president, who did aspire to the honor of martyrdom, would, as well as the rest of the Parliament, have turned Mohammedan, if I had desired it. You would not believe how infatuated all these people were, and are still, about the Prince of Orange, his authority, Holland, England, and the Protestants of Germany. I should never end if I were to recount all the foolish and impertinent proposals they have made to me.” M. de Tesse did not tell Louvois that he was obliged to have the pastors of Orange seized and carried off. They were kept twelve years in prison at Pierre-Encise; none but M. de Chambrun, who had been taken to Valence, managed to escape and take refuge in Holland, bemoaning to the end of his days a moment’s weakness. “I was quite exhausted by torture, and I let fall this unhappy expression: ‘Very well, then, I will be reconciled.’ This sin has brought me down as it were into hell itself, and I have looked upon myself as a dastardly soldier who turned his back on the day of battle, and as an unfaithful servant who betrayed the interests of his master.”
The king assembled his council. The lists of converts were so long that there could scarcely remain in the kingdom more than a few thousand recalcitrants. “His Majesty proposed to take an ultimate resolution as regarded the Edict of Nantes,” writes the Duke of Burgundy in a memorandum found amongst his papers. “Monseigneur represented that, according to an anonymous letter he had received the day before, the Huguenots had some expectation of what was coming upon them, that there was perhaps some reason to fear that they would take up arms, relying upon the protection of the princes of their religion, and that, supposing they dared not do so, a great number would leave the kingdom, which would be injurious to commerce and agriculture, and, for that same reason, would weaken the state. The king replied that he had foreseen all for some time past, and had provided for all; that nothing in the world would be more painful to him than to shed a single drop of the blood of his subjects, but that he had armies and good generals whom he would employ in case of need against rebels who courted their own destruction. As for calculations of interest, he thought them worthy of but little consideration in comparison with the advantages of a measure which would restore to religion its splendor, to the state its tranquillity, and to authority all its rights. A resolution was carried unanimously for the suppression of the Edict of Nantes.” The declaration, drawn up by Chancellor Le Tellier and Chateauneuf, was signed by the king on the 15th of October, 1685; it was despatched on the 17th to all the superintendents. The edict of pacification, that great work of the liberal and prudent genius of Henry IV., respected and confirmed in its most important particulars by Cardinal Richelieu, recognized over and over again by Louis XIV. himself, disappeared at a single stroke, carrying with it all hope of liberty, repose, and justice, for fifteen hundred thousand subjects of the king. “Our pains,” said the preamble of the edict, “have had the end we had proposed, seeing that the better and the greater part of our subjects of the religion styled Reformed have embraced the Catholic. The execution of the Edict of Nantes consequently remaining useless, we have considered that we could not do better, for the purpose of effacing entirely the memory of the evils which this false religion has caused in our kingdom, than revoke entirely the aforesaid Edict of Nantes, and all that has been done in favor of the said religion.”
[Illustration: Revocation of the Edict of Nantes—-556]
The edict of October 15, 1685, supposed the religion styled Reformed to be already destroyed and abolished. It ordered the demolition of all the chapels that remained standing, and interdicted any assembly or worship; recalcitrant (_opiniatres_) ministers were ordered to leave the kingdom within fifteen days; the schools were closed; all new-born babies were to be baptized by the parish priests; religionists were forbidden to leave the kingdom on pain of the galleys for the men and confiscation of person and property for the women. “The will of the king,” said superintendent Marillac at Rouen, “is, that there be no more than one religion in this kingdom; it is for the glory of God and the well-being of the state.” Two hours were allowed the Reformers of Rouen for making their abjuration.
One clause, at the end of the edict of October 15, seemed to extenuate its effect. “Those of our subjects of the religion styled Reformed who shall persist in their errors, pending the time when it may please God to enlighten them like the rest, shall be allowed to remain in the kingdom, country, and lands, which obey the king, there to continue their trade and enjoy their property without being liable to be vexed or hindered on pretext of prayer or worship of the said religion of whatsoever nature they may be.” “Never was there illusion more cruel than that which this clause caused people,” says Benoit, in his _Histoire de l’Edit de Nantes_.” It was believed that the king meant only to forbid special exercises, but that he intended to leave conscience free, since he granted this grace to all those who were still Reformers, pending the time when it should please God to enlighten them. Many gave up the measures they had taken for leaving the country with their families, many voluntarily returned from the retreats where they had hitherto been fortunate enough to lie hid. The most mistrustful dared not suppose that so solemn a promise was only made to be broken on the morrow. They were all, nevertheless, mistaken; and those who were imprudent enough to return to their homes were only just in time to receive the dragoons there.” A letter from Louvois to the Duke of Noailles put a stop to all illusion. “I have no doubt,” he wrote, “that some rather heavy billets upon the few amongst the nobility and third estate still remaining of the religionists will undeceive them as to the mistake they are under about the edict M. de Chateauneuf drew up for us. His Majesty desires that you should explain yourself very sternly, and that extreme severity should be employed against those who are not willing to become of his religion; those who have the silly vanity to glory in holding out to the last must be driven to extremity.” The pride of Louis XIV. was engaged in the struggle; those of his subjects who refused to sacrifice their religion to him were disobedient, rebellious, and besotted with silly vanity. “It will be quite ridiculous before long to be of that religion,” wrote Madame de Maintenon.
Even in his court and amongst his most useful servants the king encountered unexpected opposition. Marshal Schomberg with great difficulty obtained authority to leave the kingdom; Duquesne was refused. The illustrious old man, whom the Algerian corsairs called “the old French capitan, whose bride is the sea, and whom the angel of death has forgotten,” received permission to reside in France without being troubled about his religion. “For sixty years I have rendered to Caesar that which was Caesar’s,” said the sailor proudly; “it is time to render unto God that which is God’s.” And, when the king regretted that his religion prevented him from properly recognizing his glorious career, “Sir,” said Duquesne, “I am a Protestant, but I always thought that my services were Catholic.” Duquesne’s children went abroad. When he died, 1688, his body was refused to them. His sons raised a monument to him at Aubonne, in the canton of Berne, with this inscription: “This tomb awaits the remains of Duquesne. Passer, should you ask why the Hollanders have raised a superb monument to Ruyter vanquished, and why the French have refused a tomb to Ruyter’s vanquisher, the fear and respect inspired by a monarch whose power extends afar do not allow me to answer.”
Of the rest, only the Marquis of Ruvigny and the Princess of Tarento, daughter-in-law of the Duke of La Tremoille and issue of the house of Hesse, obtained authority to leave France. All ports were closed, all frontiers watched. The great lords gave way, one after another. Accustomed to enjoy royal favors, attaching to them excessive value, living at court, close to Paris, which was spared a great deal during the persecution, they, without much effort, renounced a faith which closed to them henceforth the door to all offices and all honors. The gentlemen of the provinces were more resolute; many realized as much as they could of their property, and went abroad, braving all dangers, even that of the galleys in case of arrest. The Duke of La Force had abjured, then repented of his abjuration, only to relapse again. One of his cousins, seventy-five years of age, was taken to the galleys. He had for his companion Louis de Marolles, late king’s councillor. “I live just now all alone,” wrote the latter to his wife. “My meals are brought from outside; if you saw me in my beautiful convict-dress, you would be charmed. The iron I wear on my leg, though it weighs only three pounds, inconvenienced me at first far more than that which you saw me in at La Tournelle.” Files of Protestant galley-convicts were halted in the towns, in the hope of inspiring the obstinate with a salutary terror.
The error which had been fallen into, however, was perceived at court. The stand made by Protestants astounded the superintendents as well as Louvois himself. Everywhere men said, as they said at Dieppe, “We will not change our religion for anybody; the king has power over our persons and our property, but he has no power over our consciences.” There was fleeing in all directions. The governors grew weary of watching the coasts and the frontiers. “The way to make only a few go,” said Louvois, “is to leave them liberty to do so without letting them know it.” Any way was good enough to escape from such oppression. “Two days ago,” wrote M. de Tesse, who commanded at Grenoble, “a woman, to get safe away, hit upon an invention which deserves to be known. She made a bargain with a Savoyard, an ironmonger, and had herself packed up in a load of iron rods, the ends of which showed. It was carried to the custom-house, and the tradesman paid on the weight of the iron, which was weighed together with the woman, who was not unpacked until she was six leagues from the frontier.” “For a long time,” says M. Floquet, “there was talk in Normandy of the Count of Marance, who, in the middle of a severe winter, flying with thirty-nine others on board a fishing-smack, encountered a tempest, and remained a long time at sea without provisions, dying of hunger, he, the countess, and all the passengers, amongst whom were pregnant women, mothers with infants at the breast, without resources of any sort, reduced for lack of everything to a little melted snow, with which they moistened the parched lips of the dying babes.” It were impossible to estimate precisely the number of emigrations; it was probably between three and four hundred thousand. “To speak only of our own province,” writes M. Floquet in his _Histoire du Parlement de Normandie,_ “about one hundred and eighty-four thousand religionists went away; more than twenty-six thousand habitations were deserted; in Rouen there were counted no more than sixty thousand men instead of the eighty thousand that were to be seen there a few years before. Almost all trade was stopped there as well as in the rest of Normandy. The little amount of manufacture that was possible rotted away on the spot for want of transport to foreign countries, whence vessels were no longer found to come. Rouen, Darnetal, Elbeuf, Louviers, Caudebec, Le Havre, Pont-Audemer, Caen, St. Lo, Alencon, and Bayeux were falling into decay, the different branches of trade and industry which had but lately been seen flourishing there having perished through the emigration of the masters whom their skilled workmen followed in shoals.” The Norman emigration had been very numerous, thanks to the extent of its coasts and to the habitual communication between Normandy, England, and Holland; Vauban, however, remained very far from the truth when he deplored, in 1688, “the desertion of one hundred thousand men, the withdrawal from the kingdom of sixty millions of livres, the enemy’s fleets swelled by nine thousand sailors, the best in the kingdom, and the enemy’s armies by six hundred officers and twelve thousand soldiers, who had seen service.” It is a natural but a striking fact that the Reformers who left France and were received with open arms in Brandenburg, Holland, England, and Switzerland carried in their hearts a profound hatred for the king who drove them away from their country, and everywhere took service against him, whilst the Protestants who remained in France, bound to the soil by a thousand indissoluble ties, continued at the same time to be submissive and faithful. “It is right,” said Chanlay, in a Memoire addressed to the king, “whilst we condemn the conduct of the new converts, fugitives, who have borne arms against France since the commencement of this war up to the present, it is right, say I, to give those who have staid in France the praise and credit they deserve. Indeed, if we except a few disturbances of little consequence which have taken place in Languedoc, we have, besides the fact of their remaining faithful to the king in the provinces, and especially in Dauphiny, even whilst the confederated armies of the emperor, of Spain, and of the Duke of Savoy were in the heart of that province in greater strength than the forces of the king, to note that those who were fit to bear arms have enlisted amongst the troops of his Majesty and done good service.” In 1745, after sixty years’ persecution, consequent upon the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, Matthew Desubas, a young pastor accused before the superintendent of Languedoc, Lenain, said with high-spirited modesty, “The ministers preach nothing but patience and fidelity to the king.” I am aware of it, sir,” answered the superintendent. The pastors were hanged or burned, the faithful flock dragged to the galleys and the Tower of Constance. Prayers for the king, nevertheless, were sent up from the proscribed assemblies in the desert, whilst the pulpit of Saurin at the Hague resounded with his anathemas against Louis XIV., and the regiments of emigrant Huguenots were marching against the king’s troops under the flags of England or Holland.
The peace of Ryswick had not brought the Protestants the hoped-for alleviation of their woes. Louis XIV. haughtily rejected the petition of the English and Dutch plenipotentiaries on behalf of “those in affliction who ought to have their share in the happiness of Europe.” The persecution everywhere continued,–with determination and legality in the north, with violence and passion in the south, abandoned to the tyranny of M. de Lamoignon de Baville, a crafty and cold-bloodedly cruel politician, without the excuse of any zealous religious conviction. The execution of several ministers who had remained in hiding in the Cevennes, or had returned from exile to instruct and comfort their flocks, raised to the highest pitch the enthusiasm of the Reformers of Languedoc. Deprived of their highly-prized assemblies and of their pastors’ guidance, men and women, graybeards and children, all at once fancied themselves animated by the spirit of prophecy. Young girls had celestial visions; the little peasant lasses poured out their utterances in French, sometimes in the language and with the sublime eloquence of the Bible, sole source of their religious knowledge. The rumor of these marvels ran from village to village; meetings were held to hear the inspired maidens, in contempt of edicts, the galleys, and the stake. A gentleman glass-worker, named Abraham de la Serre, was, as it were, the Samuel of this new school of prophets. In vain did M. de Baville have three hundred children imprisoned at Uzes, and then send them to the galleys; the religious contagion was too strong for the punishments. “Women found themselves in a single day husbandless, childless, houseless, and penniless,” says Court; they remained immovable in their pious ecstasy; the assemblies multiplied; the troops which had so long occupied Languedoc had been summoned away by the war of succession in Spain; the militia could no longer restrain the Reformers growing every day more enthusiastic through the prophetic hopes which were born of their long sufferings. The arch-priest of the Cevennes, Abbe du Chayla, a tyrannical and cruel man, had undertaken a mission at the head of the Capuchins. His house was crammed with condemned Protestants; the breath of revolt passed over the mountains on the night of July 27, 1702, the castle of the arch-priest was surrounded by Huguenots in arms, who demanded the surrender of the prisoners. Du Chayla refused. The gates were forced, the condemned released, the priests who happened to be in the house killed or dispersed. The archpriest had let himself down by a window; he broke his thigh; he was found hiding in a bush; the castle was in flames. “No mercy, no mercy!” shouted the madmen; “the Spirit willeth that he die.” Every one of the Huguenots stabbed the poor wretch with their poniards: “That’s for my father, broken on the wheel; that’s for my brother, sent to the galleys; that’s for my mother, who died of grief; that’s for my relations in exile!” He received fifty-two wounds. Next day the Cevennes were everywhere in revolt. A prophet named Seguier was at the head of the insurrection. He was soon made prisoner. “How dost thou expect me to treat thee?” asked his judge. “As I would have treated thee, had I caught thee,” answered the prophet. He was burned alive in the public square of Pont-de-Montvert, a mountain burgh. “Where do you live?” he had been asked at his examination. “In the desert,” he replied, “and soon in heaven.” He exhorted the people from the midst of the flames. The insurrection went on spreading. “Say not, What can we do? we are so few; we have no arms!” said another prophet, named Laporte. “The Lord of hosts is our strength! We will intone the battle-psalms, and, from the Lozere to the sea, Israel shall arise! And, as for arms, have we not our axes? They will beget muskets!” The plain rose like the mountain. Baron St. Comes, an early convert, and colonel of the militia, was assassinated near Vauvert; murders multiplied; the priests were especially the object of the revolters’ vengeance. They assembled under the name of _Children of God,_ and marched under the command of two chiefs, one, named Roland, who formerly served under Catinat, and the other, a young man, whiles a baker and whiles a shepherd, who was born in the neighborhood of Anduze, and whose name has remained famous. John Cavalier was barely eighteen when M. de Baville launched his brother-in-law, the Count of Broglie, with a few troops upon the revolted Cevenols. The Catholic peasants called them Camisards, the origin of which name has never been clearly ascertained. M. de Broglie was beaten; the insurrection, which was entirely confined to the populace, disappeared all at once in the woods and rocks of the country, to burst once more unexpectedly upon the troops of the king. The great name of Lamoignon shielded Baville; Chamillard had for a long while concealed from Louis XIV. the rising in the Cevennes. He never did know all its gravity. “It is useless,” said Madame de Maintenon, “for the king to trouble himself with all the circumstances of this war; it would not cure the mischief, and would do him much.” “Take care,” wrote Chamillard to Baville, on superseding the Count of Broglie by Marshal Montrevel, “not to give this business the appearance of a serious war.” The rumor of the insurrection in Languedoc, however, began to spread in Europe. Conflagrations, murders, executions in cold blood or in the heat of passion, crimes on the part of the insurgents, as well as cruelties on the part of judges and generals, succeeded one another uninterruptedly, without the military authorities being able to crush a revolt that it was impossible to put down by terror or punishments. “I take it for a fact,” said a letter to Chamillard from M. de Julien, an able captain of irregulars, lately sent into Languedoc to aid the Count of Broglie, “that there are not in this district forty who are real converts, and are not entirely on the side of the Camisards. I include in that number females as well as males, and the mothers and daughters would give the more striking proofs of their fury if they had the strength of the men. . . . I will say but one word more, which is, that the children who were in their cradles at the time of the general conversions, as well as those who were four or five years old, are now more Huguenot than the fathers; nobody, however, has set eyes upon any minister; how, then, comes it that they are so Huguenot? Because the fathers and mothers brought them up in those sentiments all the time they were going to mass. You may rely upon it that this will continue for many generations.” M. de Julien came to the conclusion that the proper way was to put to the sword all the Protestants of the country districts and burn all the villages. M. de Baville protested. “It is not a question of exterminating these people,” he said, “but of reducing them, of forcing them to fidelity; the king must have industrious people and flourishing districts preserved to him.” The opinion of the generals prevailed; the Cevenols were proclaimed outlaws, and the pope decreed a crusade against them. The military and religious enthusiasm of the Camisards went on increasing. Cavalier, young and enterprising, divided his time between the boldest attempts at surprise and mystical ecstasies, during which he singled out traitors who would have assassinated him or sinners who were not worthy to take part in the Lord’s Supper. The king’s troops ravaged the country; the Camisards, by way of reprisal, burned the Catholic villages; everywhere the war was becoming horrible. The peaceable inhabitants, Catholic or Protestant, were incessantly changing from wrath to terror. Cavalier, naturally sensible and humane, sometimes sank into despondency. He would fling himself on his knees, crying, Lord, turn aside the king from following the counsels of the wicked!” and then he would set off again upon a new expedition. The struggle had been going on for two years, and Languedoc was a scene of fire and bloodshed. Marshal Montrevel had gained great advantages when the king ordered Villars to put an end to the revolt. “I made up my mind,” writes Villars, in his Memoires, “to try everything, to employ all sorts of ways except that of ruining one of the finest provinces in the kingdom, and that, if I could bring back the offenders without punishing them, I should preserve the best soldiers there are in the kingdom. They are, said I to myself, Frenchmen, very brave and very strong, three qualities to be considered.” “I shall always,” he adds, “have two ears for two sides.”
“We have to do here with a very extraordinary people,” wrote the marshal to Chamillard, soon after his arrival; “it is a people unlike anything I ever knew–all alive, turbulent, hasty, susceptible of light as well as deep impressions, tenacious in its opinions. Add thereto zeal for religion, which is as ardent amongst heretics as Catholics, and you will no longer be surprised that we should be often very much embarrassed. There are three sorts of Camisards: the first, with whom we might arrange matters by reason of their being weary of the miseries of war. The second, stark mad on the subject of religion, absolutely intractable on that point; the first little boy or little girl that falls a-trembling and declares that the Holy Spirit is speaking to it, all the people believe it, and, if God with all his angels were to come and speak to them, they would not believe them more; people, moreover, on whom the penalty of death makes not the least impression; in battle they thank those who inflict it upon them; they walk to execution singing the praises of God and exhorting those present, insomuch that it has often been necessary to surround the criminals with drums to prevent the pernicious effect of their speeches. Finally, the third: people without religion, accustomed to pillage, to murder, to quarter themselves upon the peasants; a rascalry furious, fanatical, and swarming with prophetesses.”
Villars had arrived in Languedoc the day after the checks encountered by the Camisards. The despondency and suffering were extreme; and the marshal had Cavalier sounded.
“What do you want to lay down your arms?” said the envoy. “Three things,” replied the Cevenol chief: “liberty of conscience, the release of our brethren detained in the prisons and the galleys, and if these demands are refused, permission to quit France with ten thousand persons.” The negotiators were intrusted with the most flattering offers for Cavalier. Sensible, and yet vain, moved by his country’s woes, and flattered by the idea of commanding a king’s regiment, the young Camisard allowed himself to be won. He repaired formally to Nimes for an interview with the marshal. “He is a peasant of the lowest grade,” wrote Villars to Chamillard, “who is not twenty-two, and does not look eighteen; short, and with no imposing air, qualities essential for the lower orders, but surprising good sense and firmness. I asked him yesterday how he managed to keep his fellows under. ‘Is it possible,’ said I, ‘that, at your age, and not being long used to command, you found no difficulty in often ordering to death your own men?’ ‘No, sir,’ said he, ‘when it seemed to me just.’ ‘But whom did you employ to inflict it?’ ‘The first whom I ordered, and nobody ever hesitated to follow my orders.’ I fancy, sir, that you will consider this rather surprising. Furthermore, he shows great method in the matter of his supplies, and he disposes his troops for an engagement as well as very experienced officers could do. It is a piece of luck if I get such a man away from them.”
Cavalier’s fellows began to escape from his sway. They had hoped, for a while, that they would get back that liberty for which they had shed their blood. “They are permitted to have public prayer and chant their psalms. No sooner was that known all round,” writes Villars, “than behold my madmen rushing up from burghs and castles in the neighborhood, not to surrender, but to chant with the rest. The gates were closed; they leap the walls and force the guards. It is published abroad that I have indefinitely granted free exercise of the religion.” The bishops let the marshal be.
“Stuff we our ears,” said the Bishop of Narbonne, “and make we an end.” The Camisards refused to listen to Cavalier.
“Thou’rt mad,” said Roland; “thou bast betrayed thy brethren; thou shouldst die of shame. Go tell the marshal that I am resolved to remain sword in hand until the entire and complete restoration of the Edict of Nantes!” The Cevenols thought themselves certain of aid from England; only a handful followed Cavalier, who remained faithful to his engagements. He was ordered with his troop to Elsass; he slipped away from his watchers and threw himself into Switzerland. At the head of a regiment of refugees he served successively the Duke of Savoy, the States-General, and England; he died at Chelsea in 1740, the only one amongst the Camisards to leave a name in the world.
[Illustration: Death of Roland the Camisard—-569]
The insurrection still went on in Languedoc under the orders of Roland, who was more fanatical and more disinterested than Cavalier; he was betrayed and surrounded in the castle of Castelnau on the 16th of August, 1704. Roland just had time to leap out of bed and mount his horse; he was taking to flight with his men by a back door when a detachment of dragoons came up with him; the Camisard chief put his back against an old olive and sold his life dearly. When he fell, his lieutenants let themselves be taken “like lambs” beside his corpse. “They were destined to serve as examples,” writes Villars, “but the manner in which they met death was more calculated to confirm their religious spirit in these wrong heads than to destroy it. Lieutenant Maille was a fine young man of wits above the common. He heard his sentence with a smile, passed through the town of Nimes with the same air, begging the priest not to plague him; the blows dealt him did not alter this air in the least, and did not elicit a single exclamation. His arms broken, he still had strength to make signs to the priest to be off, and, as long as he could speak, he encouraged the others. That made me think that the quickest death is always best with these fellows, and that their sentence should above all things bear reference to their obstinacy in revolt rather than in religion.” Villars did not carry executions to excess, even in the case of the most stubborn; little by little the chiefs were killed off in petty engagements or died in obscurity of their wounds; provisions were becoming scarce; the country was wasted; submission became more frequent every day. The principals all demanded leave to quit France. “There are left none but a few brigands in the Upper Cevennes,” says Villars. Some partial risings, alone recalled, up to 1709, the fact that the old leaven still existed; the war of the Camisards was over. It was the sole attempt in history on the part of French Protestantism since Richelieu, a strange and dangerous effort made by an ignorant and savage people; roused to enthusiasm by persecution, believing itself called upon by the spirit of God to win, sword in hand, the freedom of its creed under the leadership of two shepherd soldiers and prophets. Only the Scottish Cameronians have presented the same mixture of warlike ardor and pious enthusiasm, more gloomy and fierce with the men of the North, more poetical and prophetical with the Cevenols, flowing in Scotland as in Languedoc from religious oppression and from constant reading of the Holy Scriptures. The silence of death succeeded everywhere in France to the plaints of the Reformers and to the crash of arms; Louis XIV. might well suppose that Protestantism in his dominions was dead.
It was a little before the time when the last of the Camisards, Abraham Mazel and Claris, perished near Uzes (in 1710), that the king struck the last blow at Jansenism by destroying its earliest nest and its last refuge, the house of the nuns of Port-Royal des Champs. With truces and intervals of apparent repose, the struggle had lasted more than sixty years between the Jesuits and Jansenism. M. de St. Cyran, who left the Bastille a few months after the death of Richelieu, had dedicated the last days of his life to writing against Protestantism, being so much the more scared by the heresy in that, perhaps, he felt himself attracted thereto by a secret affinity. He was already dying when there appeared the book Frequente Communion, by M. Arnauld, youngest son and twentieth child of that illustrious family of Arnaulds in whom Jansenism seemed to be personified. The author was immediately accused at Rome, and buried himself for twenty years in retirement. M. de St. Cyran was still working, dictating Christian thoughts and points touching death. _Stantem mori oportet_ (One should die in harness), he would say. On the 3d of October, 1643, he succumbed suddenly, in the arms of his friends. “I cast my eyes upon the body, which was still in the same posture in which death had left it,” writes Lancelot, “and I thought it so full of majesty and of mien so dignified that I could not tire of admiring it, and I fancied that he would still have been capable, in the state in which he was, of striking with awe the most passionate of his foes, had they seen him.” It was the most cruel blow that could have fallen upon the pious nuns of Port-Royal. “_Dominus in coelo!_ (Lord in heaven!)” was all that was said by Mother Angelica Arnauld, who, like M. de St. Cyran himself, centred all her thoughts and all her affections upon eternity.
With his dying breath M. de St. Cyran had said to M. Gudrin, physician to the college of Jesuits, “Sir, tell your Fathers, when I am dead, not to triumph, and that I leave behind me a dozen stronger than I.” With all his penetration the director of consciences was mistaken; none of those he left behind him would have done his work; he had inspired with the same ardor and the same constancy the strong and the weak, the violent and the pacific; he had breathed his mighty faith into the most diverse souls, fired with the same zeal penitents and nuns, men rescued from the scorching furnace of life in the world, and women brought up from infancy in the shade of the cloister. M. Arnauld was a great theologian, an indefatigable controversialist, the oracle and guide of his friends in their struggle against the Jesuits; M. de Sacy and M. Singlin were wise and able directors, as austere as M. de St. Cyran in their requirements, less domineering and less rough than he; but M. de St. Cyran alone was and could be the head of Jansenism; he alone could have inspired that idea of immolation of the whole being to the sovereign will of God, as to the truth which resides in Him alone. Once assured of this point, M. de St. Cyran became immovable. Mother Angelica pressed him to appear before the archbishop’s council, which was to pronounce upon his book _Theologie familiere_. “It is always good to humble one’s self,” she said. “As for you,” he replied, “who are in that disposition, and would not in any respect compromise the honor of the truth, you could do it; but as for me, I should break down before the eyes of God if I consented thereto; the weak are more to be feared sometimes than the wicked.”
Mother Angelica Arnauld, to whom these lines were addressed, was the most perfect image and the most accomplished disciple of M. de St. Cyran. More gentle and more human than he, she was quite as strong and quite as zealous. “It is necessary to be dead to everything, and after that to await everything; such was the motto of her inward life and of the constant effort made by this impassioned soul, susceptible of all tender affections, to detach herself violently and irrevocably from earth. The instinct of command, loftiness and breadth of views, find their place with the holy priest and with the nun; the mind of M. de St. Cyran was less practical and his judgment less simple than that of the abbess, habituated as she had been from childhood to govern the lives of her nuns as their conscience. A reformer of more than one convent since the day when she had closed the gates of Port-Royal against her father, M. Arnauld, in order to restore the strictness of the cloister, Mother Angelica carried rule along with her, for she carried within herself the government, rigid, no doubt, for it was life in a convent, but characterized by generous largeness of heart, which caused the yoke to be easily borne.
“To be perfect, there is no need to do singular things,” she would often repeat, after St. Francis de Sales; “what is needed is to do common things singularly well!” She carried the same zeal from convent to convent, from Port-Royal des Champs to Port-Royal de Paris; from Maubuisson, whither her superiors sent her to establish a reformation, to St. Sacrement, to establish union between the two orders; ever devoted to religion, without having chosen her vocation; attracting around her all that were hers; her mother, a wife at twelve years of age, and astonished to find herself obeying after having commanded her twenty children for fifty years; five of her sisters; nieces and cousins; and in “the Desert,” beside Port-Royal des Champs, her brothers, her nephews, her friends, steeped like herself in penitence. Before her, St. Bernard had “dispeopled the world ” of those whom he loved, by an error common to zealous souls and exclusive spirits, solely occupied with thoughts of salvation. Even in solitude Mother Angelica had not found rest. “I am not fit to live on earth,” she would say; “I know not why I am still there; I can no longer bear either myself or others; there is none that seeketh after God.” She was piously unjust towards her age, and still more towards her friends; it was the honorable distinction of M. de St. Cyran and his disciples that they did seek after God and holiness, at every cost and every risk.
Mother Angelica was nearing the repose of eternity, the only repose admitted by her brother M. Arnauld, when the storm of persecution burst upon the monastery. The Augustinus of Jansenius, Bishop of Ypres, a friend of M. de St. Cyran’s, had just been condemned at Rome. Five propositions concerning grace were pronounced heretical. “The pope has a right to condemn them,” said the Jansenists, “if they are to be found in the Augustinus, but, in fact, they are not to be found there.” The dispute waxed hot; M. Arnauld threw himself into it passionately. He, in his turn, was condemned by the Sorbonne. “This is the very day,” he wrote to his sister, Mother Angelica, “when I am to be wiped out from the number of the doctors; I hope of God’s goodness that He will not on that account wipe me out from the number of His servants. That is the only title I desire to preserve.” M. Arnauld’s friends pressed him to protest against his condemnation. “Would you let yourself be crushed like a child?” they said. He wrote in the theologian’s vein, lengthily and bitterly; his friends listened in silence. Arnauld understood them. “I see quite well that you do not consider this document a good one for its purpose,” said he, “and I think you are right; but you who are young,” and he turned towards Pascal, who had a short time since retired to Port-Royal, “you ought to do something.” This was the origin of the _Lettres Provinciales_. For the first time Pascal wrote, something other than a treatise on physics. He revealed himself all at once and entirely. The recluses of Port-Royal were obliged to close their schools; they had to disperse. Arnauld concealed himself with his friend Nicole. “I am having search made everywhere for M. Arnauld,” said Louis XIV. to Boileau, who was supposed to be much attached to the Jansenists.