In his secret heart, and beneath the veil of his majestic observance of the proprieties, the king thought that his business, as well as the agreeableness of his life, would probably gain from being no longer subject to the tempers and the roughnesses of Louvois. The Grand Monarque considered that he had trained (instruit) his minister, but he felt that the pupil had got away from him. He appointed Barbezieux secretary for war. “I will form you,” said he. No human hand had formed Louvois, not even that of his father, the able and prudent Michael le Tellier; he had received straight from God the strong qualities, resolution, indomitable will, ardor for work, the instinct of organization and command, which had made of him a minister without equal for the warlike and ambitious purposes of his master. Power had spoiled him, his faults had prevailed over his other qualities without destroying them; violent, fierce, without principle and without scruple in the execution of his designs, he had egged the king on to incessant wars, treating with disdain the internal miseries of the kingdom as well as any idea of pity for the vanquished; he had desired to do everything, order everything, grasp everything, and he died at fifty-three, dreaded by all, hated by a great many, and leaving in the government of the country a void which the king felt, all the time that he was angrily seeking to fill it up.
Louvois was no more; negotiations were beginning to be whispered about, but the war continued by land and sea; the campaign of 1691 had completely destroyed the hopes of James II. in Ireland; it was decided to attempt a descent upon England; a plot was being hatched to support the invasion. Tourville was commissioned to cover the landing. He received orders to fight, whatever might be the numbers of the enemy. The wind prevented his departure from Brest; the Dutch fleet had found time to join the English. Tourville wanted to wait for the squadrons of Estrees and Rochefort; Pontchartrain had been minister of finance and marine since the death of Seignelay, Colbert’s son, in 1690; he replied from Versailles to the experienced sailor, familiar with battle from the age of fourteen, “It is not for you to discuss the king’s orders; it is for you to execute them and enter the Channel; if you are not ready to do it, the king will put in your place somebody more obedient and less discreet than you.” Tourville went out and encountered the enemy’s squadrons between the headlands of La Hogue and Barfleur; he had forty-four vessels against ninety-nine, the number of English and Dutch together. Tourville assembled his council of war, and all the officers were for withdrawing; but the king’s orders were peremptory, and the admiral joined battle. After three days’ desperate resistance, backed up by the most skilful manoeuvres, Tourville was obliged to withdraw beneath the forts of La Hogue in hopes of running his ships ashore; but in this King James and Marshal Bellefonds opposed him.
Tourville remained at sea, and lost a dozen vessels. The consternation in France was profound; the nation had grown accustomed to victory; on the 20th of June the capture of Namur raised their hopes again; this time again William III. had been unable to succor his allies; he determined to—revenge himself on Luxembourg, whom he surprised on the 31st of August, between Enghaep and Steinkirk; the ground was narrow and uneven, and the King of England counted upon thus paralyzing the brilliant French cavalry. M. de Luxembourg, ill of fever as he was, would fain have dismounted to lead to the charge the brigades of the French guards and of the Swiss, but he was prevented; the Duke of Bourbon, the Prince of Conti, the Duke of Chartres, and the Duke of Vendome, placed themselves at the head of the infantry, and, sword in hand, led it against the enemy; a fortunate movement on the part of Marshal Boufflers resulted in rendering the victory decisive. Next year at Neerwinden (29th of July, 1693) the success of the day was likewise due to the infantry. On that day the French guards had exhausted their ammunition; putting the bayonet at the end of their pieces they broke the enemy’s battalions; this was the first charge of the kind in the French armies. The king’s household troops had remained motionless for four hours under the fire of the allies: William III. thought for a moment that his gunners made bad practice; he ran up to the batteries; the French squadrons did not move except to close up the ranks as the files were carried off; the King of England could not help an exclamation of anger and admiration. “Insolent nation!” he cried.
The victory of Neerwinden ended in nothing but the capture of Charleroi; the successes of Catinat at Marsaglia, in Piedmont, had washed out the shame of the Duke of Savoy’s incursion into Dauphiny in 1692. Tourville had remained with the advantage in several maritime engagements off Cape St. Vincent, and burned the English vessels in the very roads of Cadiz. On every sea the corsairs of St. Malo and Dunkerque, John Bart and Duguay-Trouin, now enrolled in the king’s navy, towed at their sterns numerous prizes; the king and France, for a long time carried away by a common passion, had arrived at that point at which victories no longer suffice in the place of solid and definitive success. The nation was at last tiring of its glory. “People were dying of want to the sound of the Te Deum,” says Voltaire in the Siecle de Louis XIV.; everywhere there was weariness equal to the suffering. Madame de Maintenon and some of her friends at that time, sincerely devoted to the public good, rather Christians than warriors, Fenelon, the Dukes of Beauvilliers and Chevreuse, were laboring to bring, the king over to pacific views; he saw generals as well as ministers falling one after another; Marshal Luxembourg, exhausted by the fatigues of war and the pleasures of the court, died on the 4th of January, 1695, at sixty-seven years of age. An able general, a worthy pupil of the great Conde, a courtier of much wits and no shame, he was more corrupt than his age, and his private life was injurious to his fame; he died, however, as people did die in his time, turning to God at the last day. “I haven’t lived like M. de Luxembourg,” said Bourdaloue, “but I should like to die like him.” History has forgotten Marshal Luxembourg’s death and remembered his life.
Louis XIV. had lost Conde and Turenne, Luxembourg, Colbert, Louvois, and Seignelay; with the exception of Vauban, he had exhausted the first rank; Catinat alone remained in the second; the king was about to be reduced to the third: sad fruits of a long reign, of an incessant and devouring activity, which had speedily used up men and was beginning to tire out fortune; grievous result of mistakes long hidden by glory, but glaring out at last before the eyes most blinded by prejudice! “The whole of France is no longer anything but one vast hospital,” wrote Fenelon to the king under the veil of the anonymous. “The people who so loved you are beginning to lose affection, confidence, and even respect; the allies prefer carrying on war with loss to concluding a peace which would not be observed. Even those who have not dared to declare openly against you are nevertheless impatiently desiring your enfeeblement and your humiliation as the only resource for liberty and for the repose of all Christian nations. Everybody knows it, and none dares tell you so. Whilst you in some fierce conflict are taking the battle-field and the cannon of the enemy, whilst you are storming strong places, you do not reflect that you are fighting on ground which is sinking beneath your feet, and that you are about to have a fall in spite of your victories. It is time to humble yourself beneath the mighty hand of God; you must ask peace, and by that shame expiate all the glory of which you have made your idol; finally you must give up, the soonest possible, to your enemies, in order to save the state, conquests that you cannot retain without injustice. For a long time past God has had His arm raised over you; but He is slow to smite you because He has pity upon a prince who has all his life been beset by flatterers.” Noble and strong language, the cruel truth of which the king did not as yet comprehend, misled as he was by his pride, by the splendor of his successes, and by the concert of praises which his people as well as his court had so long made to reverberate in his ears.
Louis XIV. had led France on to the brink of a precipice, and he had in his turn been led on by her; king and people had given themselves up unreservedly to the passion for glory and to the intoxication of success; the day of awakening was at hand.