Among the many puzzles met in history and biography is the retaining of his place by Louvois, prime minister to Louis XIV. Every student of history is aware of the great self-esteem which dwelt within the monarch; and it would be natural to suppose that, in order to retain his favor, officer or minister should diligently cultivate obsequiousness, and have no will or opinion but that of his master. It was not so, however, with this minister; and it is a historic fact that the king resolved on a great public undertaking on account of a difference he had with his minister in their guesses at the breadth of the window at which they were standing. Louis said it was such a breadth, Louvois guessed it was an inch or two more or less, and insisted on the exactness of his eye-calculation so persistently that the king called for a ruler to decide the matter, and resolved on a transaction which he knew would be distasteful to his opinionative contradictor.
In Louis' reign, and under the superintendence of Louvois, was raised the noble pile of the Invalides—a building which will be, or ought to be, at least, visited by every one who takes interest in the well being of men who have suffered in the defence or for the glory of their country. Mansard, the architect, who has given his name to French attics (Mansardes?) was much incommoded by the impatience of the minister, whose self appreciation would be content with nothing less than the carving of his bourgeois coat of arms in the neighborhood of the royal achievement wherever it was set up. He gained only mortification by the movement, as Louis had them all effaced. The great man was enraged at this instance of disrespect, and was obliged to content himself with a posthumous revenge. He would be buried at the Invalides, and, through the complaisance of the curé, M. de Mauray, it was done. His body was laid in one of the vaults, but, after all, was not allowed to remain there. The king's parasites gave him information, and the corpse was removed.
Louvois, fearing that something of this kind would happen, was resolved to attach his memory to the Invalides by surer means. In one mansarde he got sculptured a barrel of powder in the act of explosion, signalizing the war he had originated; in another, a plume of ostrich feathers; and, in two others, an owl and a bat, all emblematic of his high dignity, his wisdom, and wakefulness. The masterpiece, however, was a wolf, the upper part only seen, surmounted by a tuft of palm-leaves, holding the OEil de Boeuf between his forepaws and looking intently into the court. Thus was a pun in marble executed: (le) Loup voit (the wolf is looking)—Louvois, both having the same sound, and the great man's name inseparably connected with the Invalides.
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Playing With Fire
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There was a fine specimen in Birmingham, the other day, of a style of theological disputation which we hoped had gone out of vogue. A poor wretch named Murphy, a paid agent of the London Protestant Electoral Union, had been travelling for some months about the counties of Stafford and Warwick, circulating obscene tracts upon the confessional, ranting about priests and nuns, retailing all the absurd and wicked stories against the Catholic religion which have formed the stock in trade of a certain class of zealots and religious demagogues for the last three hundred years; and very naturally his disgusting tirades had stirred up a dangerous sort of public feeling. The lower classes of the Protestants were taught to look upon the Catholics as savage, wild beasts, given up to all manner of immoral practices, enemies to all human happiness, thirsting for blood, rapine, and revolution, and wedded to the stake, the faggot, and the thumb-screw. The lower classes of the Catholics were compelled to bear the taunts and insults which were certain to be provoked by this rage of popular prejudice, and moreover to listen to the grossest attacks upon what they held in most affectionate reverence. Of course, sensible Protestants, as well as educated Catholics, felt nothing but pity and contempt for the ravings of such a man as Murphy; but unfortunately it is not educated and sensible people who make all the trouble in the world, nor were they educated and sensible people who formed the bulk of Mr. Murphy's audiences. Wherever he went, he made a popular disturbance. Blows and brickbats followed in his train like dust behind rolling wheels. The magistrates in one town confiscated his books on account of their indecency. At last he came to Birmingham. The mayor and council refused him the use of a public hall, but his disciples built him an immense wooden tabernacle; and there, while an angry crowd raged and threatened about the doors, he began a five weeks' course of lectures on the atrocities of popery. What an instructive contrast was then presented! In the streets Catholic priests were going about among the mob, begging and commanding them to drop their menacing hands and withdraw peaceably to their homes. In the tabernacle this fiery ranter was declaring that every Catholic priest was "a murderer, a cannibal, a liar, and a pickpocket;" that the papists were thirsting for his blood, but durst not take it; that they might pelt him with stones, but God would put forth his arm and prevent his being hurt; they might raise their bludgeons against him, but God would ward off the blows. Need anybody ask what was the result of all this? A riot broke out and raged for two days; and, as always happens in riots, the greater part of the disorder and destruction was caused not by those who began the fray, but by professional thieves and rowdies who seized the opportunity to plunder.
Now, of course, we have no desire to apologize for the unwarrantable mode taken by the Birmingham Catholics to silence this itinerant preacher. Rioting is both a great blunder and a great crime. But who was the more to blame? Was it the pulpit mountebank who pelted his audience with well-nigh intolerable insults, or the uneducated laborers who resented them? Our Lord tells us, when we are smitten upon one cheek, to turn the other; but we all know that the custom of human nature is to smite back. If you first stir up the angry passions of a crowd of excitable Irishmen, and then dance into the midst of them, and dare them to come on, it will not be surprising if you dance out again with a bloody nose and a torn coat. If you shake your fist at a man, and assure him that he cannot hit you if he tries ever so hard, it is very probable that he will try; and if you are hurt, you will have yourself to blame. It is not safe to go near gunpowder with a lighted candle. All England seems to have thought as we do about the Birmingham affair, and Murphy has been unanimously awarded the responsibility for the outrage by the ministers in parliament, and by all the respectable newspapers, even by such prejudiced journals as The Times.
There have been many religious riots in Great Britain and America, but the story is nearly always the same. They have had them in Birmingham before; they have had them in Belfast and Dublin. Lord George Gordon got up a famous one in London, and Gavazzi was the cause of one in Montreal. The Native American movement in 1844 gave us two dreadful riots in Philadelphia, and, but for the firmness and sagacity of Bishop Hughes, would have provoked another in New-York. In the train of the Know-Nothing excitement ten years later followed a long array of incendiary preachers, some of whom were proved to have been expressly hired to provoke disturbance; and what was the result? Churches were sacked, torn down, burned, or blown up with gunpowder in Manchester and Dorchester, New-Hampshire, in Bath, Maine, and in Newark, New-Jersey. A church in Williamsburg was barely saved from the flames by the opportune arrival of the military. A street-preacher in New-York named Parsons was very nearly the cause of a riot in December, 1853; but in this instance also Archbishop Hughes succeeded in keeping the Catholics quiet. All over the country, in fact, rapine and incendiarism seemed rampant; but The New-York Tribune justly observed: "It is worthy of remark that, while five or six Catholic churches in this country have been destroyed or ruined by an excited populace, not a single Protestant church can be pointed out which Catholics have even thought of attacking."