Cardinal Mazarin had said of the young Louis that "there was enough in him to make four Kings, and one honest man." His greatness consisted more in amplitude than in kind. Nature made him in prodigal mood. He was an average man of colossal proportions. His ability, courage, dignity, industry, greed for power and possessions, were all on a magnificent scale, and so were his vanity, his loves, his cruelties, his pleasures, his triumphs, and his disappointments.
No King more wickedly oppressed France, and none made her more glorious. He made her feared abroad and magnificent at home, but he desolated her, and drained her resources with ambitious wars. He crowned her with imperishable laurels in literature, art, and every manifestation of genius, but he signed the "Revocation of the Edict of Nantes," and drove out of his kingdom 500,000 of the best of his subjects.
If the names of Marlborough and Maintenon could have been stricken out of his life, the story might have had a different ending. From the moment the great Duke checked his victorious army, his sun began to go down; but it was Maintenon who most obscured its setting.
His unloved Queen, the Spanish Marie Therese, had borne his mad infatuation for Louise la Vallière; la Vallière had carried her broken heart to a convent, and been superseded by de Montespan, and de Montespan had invited her own destruction by bringing into her household the pious widow of the poet Scarron, Madame de Maintenon, (grand-daughter of d'Aubigne, the historian of the Reformation). Grave, austere, ambitious, talented, she was not too much engrossed in her duties as governess of de Montespan's children to find ways of establishing an influence over the King.
This man who had absorbed into himself all the functions of the Government, who was Ministers, Magistrates, Parliaments, all in one, this central sun of whom Corneille, Molière, Racine were but single rays, was destined to be enslaved in his old age by a designing adventuress; her will his law. The hey-day of youth having passed, he was beginning to be anxious about his soul. She artfully pricked his conscience, and de Montespan was sent away, but de Maintenon remained.
She next convinced him that the only fitting atonement for his sins was to drive heresy out of his kingdom, and re-establish the true faith. At her bidding he undid the glorious work of Henry IV., signed the "Revocation of the Edict of Nantes," and brutally stamped out Protestantism.
A part of the scheme of penitence seems to have been that on the death of poor Marie Therese, he should make her (de Maintenon) his lawful wife, which he did privately; and his sun went down obscured by crushing griefs and disappointments. His children swept away, the prestige of success tarnished, this demigod was taken to pieces by time's destroying fingers, quite as unceremoniously as are the rest of us, hiding finally behind the bed-curtains while a kneeling courtier passed to him his wig on the end of a stick, and at last lying down like any other old dying sinner, overwhelmed with the vanity of earthly things and with the vastness of eternity.
Still more would the dying moments of the Grand Monarque have been embittered could he have foreseen into what hands his great inheritance was passing.
Upon Louis XV. more than any other rests the responsibility of the crisis which was approaching.
A heartless sybarite, depraved in tastes, without sense of responsibility or comprehension of his times, a brutalized voluptuary governed by a succession of designing women, regardless of national poverty, indulging in wildest extravagance,—such was the man in whom was vested the authority rendered so absolute by Richelieu,—such the man who opened up a pathway for the storm.