During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the stake in the great game played in Europe was the headship, the pre-eminent position held by the house of Hapsburg. The entire reign of Louis XIV. had had this for its ultimate object. He seemed many times near it; but was never to reach the goal. The absorption of Spain was a last and desperate attempt. It had failed. France had not won the leadership of European civilization.
In the coming reign, new forces, new conditions, were to widen the field of national ambitions. And it was the nation across the channel which would grasp these forces and distance her rivals in an advance along the untried paths of commerce and a world-wide expansion.
With a strange apathy France had seen herself mistress of a large part of the American Continent, won for her by adventurous Frenchmen and Catholic missionaries. She did practically nothing to develop this magnificent colonial empire. Failing to comprehend changing conditions, the same old problem, with a towering house of Hapsburg, obscured her view, and remained the great unchanging fact about which her policy revolved.
Louis XV. was five years old when, in 1715, he became heir to a throne absolutely rigid. The best work of Richelieu and Mazarin and Louis XIV. had been expended upon it. Absolutism could go no farther. The king was all; next below him a fawning, obsequious nobility, and then that vague entity known as "the people," a remote invisible force, sustaining the weight of the splendid pyramid, the apex of which was this boy of five.
The young Louis was being prepared to sit upon this giddy elevation. The Duke of Orleans, his accomplished cousin, a competent instructor in vice, was chosen as regent, and the royal education began. The best and rarest of the world's culture was at his service. Fénelon, the polished ecclesiastic, fed him the classics in tempting form from his own Télémaque, written for the purpose. Although this work was later suppressed by the boy's royal father under the suspicion of being a covert satire upon his own reign, in which Madame de Montespan was represented by Calypso; and other famous or infamous members of his court also appeared in thin disguise.
The handsome boy was breathing the atmosphere of genius created by an age which compares well with those of Pericles and Augustus and the Medici, and nourished at the same time by the exhalations from a new crop of vices growing out of the decaying remains of those left by the old court.
CHAPTER XIV.
Such was the preparation for a supreme crisis in the life of the Kingdom.
The enormous debt left by the last reign taxed the ingenuity of the regent to its utmost. Then it was that John Law, the Scotchman, presented his great financial scheme of making unlimited wealth out of paper, which was just what the regent needed. The collapse came quickly, in 1720, bringing ruin to thousands, and leaving the country in more desperate need than before.