What brilliant constellations of great men cast their fair influences over the birth of Louis XIV.! “Sire,” said Mazarin, when dying “I owe you all—but I can partially acquit myself by leaving you Colbert.” Austere Colbert was a merchant’s son of Rheims; his Atlantean shoulders bore the burden of five modern ministries; his vehement industry, admirable science and sterling honesty created order out of financial chaos and found the sinews of war for an army of 300,000 men before the Peace of Ryswick and 450,000 for the war of the Spanish succession; he initiated, nurtured and perfected French industries; he created a navy that crushed the combined English and Dutch fleets off Beachy Head, swept the Channel for weeks, burnt English ports, carried terror into English homes, and for a time paralysed English commerce. Louvois, his colleague, organised an army that made his master the arbiter of Europe; Condé and Turenne were its victorious captains. Vauban, greatest of military engineers, captured towns in war and made them impregnable in peace; fortified 333 cities and places, and shared with Louvois the invention of the combined musket and bayonet, the deadliest weapon of war as yet contrived. De Lionne, by masterly diplomacy, prepared and cemented the conquests of victorious generals. Supreme in arts of peace were Corneille, Molière, Racine, La Fontaine, Lebrun, Claude Lorrain, Puget, Mansard, and Perrault. We shall learn in the sequel what the Grand Monarque did with this unparalleled inheritance.
None of the great ones of the earth is so intimately known to us as the magnificent histrion, whose tinselled grandeur and pompous egoism has been laid bare by the Duke of St. Simon, prince of memoirists. Never has the frippery of a court been shrivelled by such fierce and consuming light glaring like a fiery sun on its meretricious splendours. And what a court it is! What a gilded crowd of princes and paramours, harlots and bastards, struts, fumes, intrigues through the Memoirs of the Duke of St. Simon! By a few strokes of his pen he etches for us, in words that bite like acid, the fools and knaves, the wife-beaters and adulterers, the cardsharpers and gamesters, the grovelling sycophants with their petty struggles for precedence or favour, their slang, their gluttony and drunkenness, their moral and physical corruption.
External grandeur and regal presence,[135] a profound belief in his divinely-appointed despotism, and in earlier years a capacity for work rare among his predecessors, the lord of France certainly possessed. “He had a grand mien,” says St. Simon, “and looked a veritable king of the bees.” Much has been made of Louis’ incomparable grace and respectful courtesy to women; but the courtesy of a king who doffs his hat to every serving wench yet contrives a staircase to facilitate the debauching of his queen’s maids-of-honour, and exacts of his mistresses and the ladies of his court submission to his will and pleasure, even under the most trying of physical disabilities, is at least wanting in consistency. The king’s mental equipment was less than mediocre; he was barely able to read and write, was ignorant of the commonest facts of history, and fell into the grossest blunders in public. Like all small-minded men, Louis was jealous of superior merit and preferred mediocrity rather than genius in his ministers. Small wonder that his reign ended in shame and disaster.
On the 6th of June 1662, the young king, notwithstanding much public misery consequent on two years of bad harvests, organised a magnificent carrousel (tilting) in the garden that fronted the Tuileries. Five companies of nobles, each led by the king or one of the princes, were arrayed in gorgeous costumes as Romans, Persians, Turks, Armenians and Savages. Louis, who of course led the Romans, was followed by a superb train of many squires, twenty-four pages, fifty horses each led by two grooms, and fifty footmen dressed as lictors, carrying gilded fasces. The royal princes headed similar processions. So great was the display of jewels that all the precious stones in the world seemed brought together; so richly were the costumes of the knights and the trappings of the horses embroidered with gold and silver that the cloth beneath could barely be seen. The king and the princes rode by with a prodigious quantity of diamonds and rubies glittering on their costumes and equipages; an immense amphitheatre afforded seats for a multitude of spectators, and in a smaller pavilion, richly gilded, sat the two queens of France, the queen of England, and the royal princesses. The first day was spent in tilting at Medusa heads and heads of Moors: the second at rings. Louis is said to have greatly distinguished himself by his skill. Maria Theresa, his young queen, distributed the prizes, and the garden was afterwards named the Place du Carrousel.
Louis, however, hated Paris, for his forced exile during the troubles of the Fronde rankled in his memory. Nor were the associations of St. Germain any more pleasant. A lover of the chase and all too prone to fall into the snares of “fair, fallacious looks and venerial trains,” the retirement of his father’s hunting lodge at Versailles, away from the prying eyes and mocking tongues of the Parisians, early attracted him. There he was wont to meet his mistress, Madame de la Vallière, and there he determined to erect a vast pleasure-palace and gardens. The small château, built by Lemercier in the early half of the seventeenth century, was handed over to Levau in 1668, who, carefully respecting his predecessor’s work in the Cour de Marbre, constructed two immense wings, which were added to by J. H. Mansard, as the requirements of the court grew. The palace stood in the midst of a barren, sandy plain, but Louis’ pride demanded that Nature herself should bend to his will, and an army of artists, engineers and gardeners was concentrated there, who at the sacrifice of incredible wealth and energy, had so far advanced the work that the king was able to come into residence in 1682.
In spite of seas of reservoirs fed by costly hydraulic machinery at Marly, which lifted the waters of the Seine to an aqueduct that led to Versailles, the supply was deemed inadequate, and orders were given to divert the river Eure between Chartres and Maintenon to the gardens of the palace. For years an army of thirty thousand men were employed in this one task, at a cost of money and human life greater than that of many a campaign. So heavy was the mortality in the camp that it was forbidden to speak of the sick, and above all of the dead, who were carried away in cartloads by night for burial. All that remains of this cruel folly are a few ruins at Maintenon.