He was also a superior market-gardener, and prided himself on having the earliest and finest spring vegetables, superintending all the details of their cultivation himself. None of these early crops, however, appeared on his own table, but were furnished, at fancy prices, to such luxurious consumers as the wealthy Pierre de Puget, Seigneur de Montauron, Conseiller du roi. One day, in 1628, being, as usual, at a loss for occupation, and having successfully concocted a fricandeau for dinner, he amused himself by shaving all his courtiers, leaving them only a little tuft on the chin. This, naturally, set the fashion for beards for some time.
It also became the custom for gentlemen to perfume themselves, to disguise the odor of the pipe, which was now coming into general use. In October, 1645, the King of Poland sent a magnificent embassy, with an escort of four hundred cavaliers, to Paris to demand in marriage the hand of Marie-Louise de Gonzague, daughter of Charles I, Duke of Mantua, and Catherine de Lorraine; a formal entry into the city was arranged, and the Parisians were much impressed with the grand costumes of the Polish nobility,—"their stuffs were embossed with gold and silver, and precious stones glittered from every portion of their adornment, whilst the French nobility, which came out to meet them, displayed only plumes and ribbons." Nevertheless, it appeared that the French nobles had shaved themselves and washed their hands, which the Poles had forgotten to do. This mediæval lack of cleanliness continued down to the time of Louis XIV; Marguerite de Navarre, in a pretty, amorous dialogue of her composition, makes the fair lady admit that she had not washed her hands for a week.
In 1612, the queen-mother, Marie de Médicis, then regent, arranged a double Spanish marriage for two of her children: the Princess Elisabeth, a child of twelve, was sent to Spain to wed the Prince of the Asturias, afterward Philip IV, and Louis brought back to Paris "a fine tall girl, a Spanish blonde, wanting yet two or three summers for the full development of her beauty," Anne d'Autriche. Though he was as faithful to his marriage vows as Saint-Louis, it is said, he seems to have always maintained for his wife a profound contempt, and, when the little Louis XIV was born, refused to take the infant in his arms, or to kiss it, which wounded the mother more than all his previous neglect. His treatment of his own mother in her later days was even more reprehensible; she was banished, and left in indigence and humiliation till her death, at Cologne, July 3, 1642. Her sole piece of jewelry, a cross surrounded with diamonds, and containing a piece of the true cross, she bequeathed to her daughter Henrietta, wife of Charles I of England. It was through Marie de Médicis, whom he afterward opposed so consistently, that the Bishop of Luçon, afterward Cardinal Richelieu, first was called to court, and during the king's minority and tutelage the government was administered by "the three robes," the queen-mother, the Bishop of Luçon, and the wife of the Italian favorite Concini, the Maréchal d'Ancre, killed on the drawbridge of the Louvre when he became too overbearing and obnoxious.
"The distinguishing characteristic of the Siècle de Louis XIV," says M. Maxime Petit, in his review of the important work by Émile Bourgeois, Le Grand Siècle, "that which Voltaire selected as the most important, is not the history of the negotiations and the battles, but that of the manners and customs, the ideas, the beliefs, the letters, and the arts.... Never, perhaps, more than in the time of Louis XIV was there a more complete harmony between the ideas and the life. The political forces are thoroughly disciplined, and the principle of authority, which Richelieu had developed to its fullest extent, reigns uncontested. Polite society—the only one to be considered—believes itself to be in possession of absolute rules, and, in the court as in the city, the heart abdicates in favor of reason." "When one speaks of the seventeenth century in France," says M. Louis Farges, "it appears, to those who are neither historians nor professional scholars, as one of those rare epochs in which all the forces of the nation concentrate and develop in a serene and majestic unity. France seems, then, to be at the summit of her political power, of her intellectual and artistic development, of her religious and philosophical unity. Taken altogether, and in a very general manner, this is a very just idea; ... it must be admitted that at no other epoch has the genius of France manifested itself in the divers branches of human activity in a manner so complete, so abundant, and so united." "France was really," says M. Duruy, "at the head of modern civilization, and, by the recognized superiority of her genius and of her taste, she caused to be accepted by the whole of Europe the pacific empire of her artists and of her writers."
Apparently, at least, the visible instrument that accomplished this great result was the dogma of absolute power, the monarchical régime; the king was the earthly image of God, divine, inviolable: loyalisme was a veritable religion, it had its symbols, its mysteries, and its rites. "If the king were not afraid of the devil," said Saint-Simon, "he would cause himself to be worshipped." This faith and this worship were already manifested "in their incomparable splendor by the ceremonies attending the opening of the États Généraux in 1614, dominated, not, as in 1789, by the august and abstract idea of the nation, but by the pale and melancholy figure of a boy of thirteen." For the tremendous and elaborate pomp of his court, the ceremonial ostentation which hedged around his own redoubtable figure, the tedious and suffocating etiquette which attended all approach to his person, Louis XIV himself had very definite reasons, which he expressed with an appreciable logic in his Mémoires. "Those who deem that these are only matters of ceremony deceive themselves greatly. The people over whom we reign, not being able to penetrate to the depths of things, form their judgments usually on that which they see on the surface, and most frequently measure their respect and their obedience by precedence and rank. As it is important to the public to be governed by one only, it is also of importance to it that he who fills this function should be elevated in such a manner above the others that there should be no person who can be either confounded or compared with him, and it is not possible, without injury to the whole body of the State, to deprive its chief of the slightest marks of superiority which distinguish him from all the other members."
Hence, three conditions were imposed absolutely upon all those who sought in any way to find favor with the head of the State,—to ask and to obtain a residence at Versailles; to follow the court everywhere, even when sick, even when dying, and to approve of everything. Of the universal abasement of spirit which this régime brought about, the memoirs of the time are full. La Bruyère said: "Whoever considers how the happiness of the courtier lies wholly in the face of the prince, that he makes it the one occupation of his life to look on it, and to be seen by it, may, in some degree, comprehend how, in looking on the face of God, consists all the glory and happiness of the saint." The Duc de Richelieu wrote: "I pray the king on my knees that he will permit me to come sometimes to pay my court to him, for I had rather die than be two months without seeing him." A court-preacher, preaching one day before the king on the familiar topic, dwelt upon it: "We shall all die, all, all!" A sudden and involuntary movement of the monarch reminded him that he had touched upon a theme displeasing to royalty. In his dismay and confusion he hastened to qualify his assertion: "Yes, sire, almost all." Louis XIV, it is said, looked forward to continuing his rôle of Grand Monarque, even in the next world.
