[511] This refers to Cardinal Georges dʼAmboise (1460-1510), Prime Minister of Louis XII.
[512] Cardinal Richelieu (1585-1642) is meant.
[513] In politics, La Bruyère was in advance of his age, but not in religious questions. He shared the idea of “the extirpation of heresy,” not alone with almost all the prelates of his time, but with some of the most eminent men in science, art, and literature, who all applauded the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), and advocated the notion of one religion for the whole State.
[514] This is an allusion to the reduction of the interest on the French debt, and the calling in and recoining of certain monies, a measure which was often taken by the French kings, and even by Louis XIV., who, however, made no profit by it. See also page [152], note 300.
[515] Colbert has been wrongly accused of having made money by those means; an accusation which was also brought against Mazarin, Fouquet, and the fermiers généraux, on far better grounds.
[516] Our author had to conciliate Louis XIV. at a time when it was supposed the publication of the “Characters” might make him many enemies. Hence the direct and indirect flatteries he bestows on the king, who prided himself on his complete mastery of details, for which he was praised by some and blamed by others; and amongst these latter must be reckoned Fénelon, who in his Telemachus (Book xvi.) criticises Louis XIV. in the character of Idomeneus. That the king had a talent for mastering details cannot be doubted, and this is even admitted by the late John Richard Green, in his “Short History of the English People,” chap. ix. sect. vii., whose opinion of Louis XIV. I transcribe here, as a corrective of the flatteries scattered on this royal despot by La Bruyère: “Louis the Fourteenth, bigoted, narrow-minded, commonplace as he was, without personal honour or personal courage, without gratitude and without pity, insane in his pride, insatiable in his selfishness, had still many of the qualities of a great ruler; industry, patience, quickness of resolve, firmness of purpose, a capacity for discerning greatness and using it, an immense self-belief and self-confidence, and a temper utterly destitute indeed of real greatness, but with a dramatic turn for seeming to be great.”
[517] An allusion to an operation for fistula performed on Louis XIV. in 1686.
[518] Voltaire, in his Siècle de Louis XIV., says: “From 1663 until 1672 every year some new manufactory was established. The fine cloths formerly imported from England and Holland were manufactured at Abbeville.... The cloth manufactories of Sedan, which had almost gone to wreck and ruin, were re-established.” See also page [48], note 133.
[519] Louis XII. was called by the States-General assembled at Tours (1506) the “father of his people.”
[520] Such was, however, the opinion of Louis XIV. himself, who states in his Mémoires: “Kings are absolute masters, and naturally dispose fully and entirely of all the property possessed by the clergy and laity.”