16. Life at Louis XIV's Court. This splendor and luxury helped to attract the nobility, who no longer lived on their estates in well-fortified castles, planning how they might escape the royal control. They now dwelt in the effulgence of the king's countenance. They saw him to bed at night and in stately procession they greeted him in the morning. It was deemed a high honor to hand him his shirt as he was being dressed or, at dinner, to provide him with a fresh napkin. Only by living close to the king could the courtiers hope to gain favors, pensions, and lucrative offices for themselves and their friends, and perhaps occasionally to exercise some little influence upon the policy of the government. For they were now entirely dependent upon the good will of their monarch.

17. The Reforms of Colbert. The reforms which Louis XIV carried out in the earlier part of his reign were largely he work of the great financier Colbert, to whom France still looks back with gratitude. He early discovered that the king's officials were stealing and wasting vast sums. The offenders were arrested and forced to disgorge, and a new system of bookkeeping was introduced, similar to that employed by business men. He then turned his attention to increasing the manufactures of France by establishing new industries and seeing that the older ones kept to a high standard, which would make French goods sell readily in foreign markets.

18. Art and Literature in the Reign of Louis XIV. It was, however, as a patron of art and literature that Louis XIV gained much of his celebrity. Molière, who was at once a playwright and an actor, delighted the court with comedies in which he delicately made fun of the silly people and customs of his time. Corneille, who had gained renown by the great tragedy of The Cid in Richelieu's time, found a worthy successor in Racine, the most distinguished, perhaps, of French tragic poets.

Men of letters were generously aided by the king with pensions. Colbert encouraged the French Academy, which had been created by Richelieu. This body gave special attention to making the French tongue more eloquent and expressive by determining what

words should be used. It is now the greatest honor that a Frenchman can obtain to be made one of the forty members of this association. A magazine which still exists, the Journal des Savants, was founded for the promotion of science at this time. Colbert had an astronomical observatory built at Paris; and the Royal Library, which possessed only about sixteen thousand volumes, began to grow into that great collection of two and a half million volumes by far the largest in existence-which to-day attracts scholars to Paris from all parts of the world. In short, Louis XIV and his ministers believed one of the chief objects of any government to be the promotion of art, literature, and science, and the example they set has been followed by almost every modern state.

All free discussion of political and religious questions was, however, stifled. Pamphlets and books praising the king and his works flowed from the printing presses, but all of them bore the stamp of servility or credulity. So it happened that when long afterward the people of France undertook to abolish absolutism their leaders had to turn to England for example and inspiration.

IV. LOUIS XIV ATTACKS HIS NEIGHBORS

19. Louis XIV's Warlike Enterprises. Unfortunately for France, the king's ambitions were by no means exclusively peaceful. Indeed, he regarded his wars as his chief glory. He employed a carefully reorganized army and the skill of his generals in a series of inexcusable attacks on his neighbors, in which he finally squandered all that Colbert's economies had accumulated and led France to the edge of financial ruin.

Louis XIV's predecessors had had, on the whole, little time to think of conquest. Louis himself was, however, now at liberty to look about him and consider how he might best realize the dream of his ancestors and perhaps reëstablish the ancient boundaries which Cæsar reported that the Gauls had occupied. The "natural limits" of France appeared to be the Rhine on the north and east, the Jura Mountains and the Alps on the southeast, and to the south the Mediterranean and the Pyrenees. Richelieu had believed

that it was the chief end of his ministry to restore to France the boundaries determined for it by nature. Mazarin had labored hard to win Savoy and Nice and to reach the Rhine on the north. Before his death France at least gained Alsace and reached the Pyrenees (Vol. I., §§ 815, 817).

20. The Invasion of the Netherlands (1667). Louis XIV first turned his attention to the conquest of the Spanish Netherlands, to which he laid claim through his wife, the elder sister of the Spanish king, Charles II (1665-1700). He easily took a number of towns on the border of the Netherlands and then turned south and completely conquered Franche-Comté. This was an outlying province of Spain, isolated from her other lands, and a tempting morsel for the hungry king of France.

These conquests alarmed Europe, and especially Holland, which could not afford to have the barrier between it and France removed, for Louis XIV would be an uncomfortable neighbor. A Triple Alliance, composed of Holland, England, and Sweden, was accordingly organized to induce France to make peace with Spain. Louis contented himself for the moment with the dozen border towns that he had taken and which Spain ceded to him on condition that he would return Franche-Comté.

21. Louis XIV's Invasion of Holland (1672). Louis XIV then startled Europe again by seizing the duchy of Lorraine, which brought him to the border of Holland. At the head of a hundred thousand men he crossed the Rhine (1672) and easily conquered southern Holland. For the moment the Dutch cause appeared to be lost. But William of Orange showed the spirit of his great ancestor William the Silent; the sluices in the dikes were opened and the country flooded, so the French army was checked before it could take Amsterdam and advance into the north. The emperor, Leopold I, sent an army against Louis, and England showed a disposition to intervene on the side of Holland.

When a general peace was concluded at the end of six years, the chief provisions were that Holland should be left intact and that France should this time retain Franche-Comté, which had been conquered by Louis XIV in person. For the ten years

following there was no open war, but Louis seized the important free city of Strassburg and made many other less conspicuous but equally unwarranted additions to his territory.

V. LOUIS XIV AND HIS PROTESTANT SUBJECTS

22. Situation of the Huguenots at the Beginning of Louis XIV's Reign. Louis XIV exhibited as woeful a want of statesmanship in the treatment of his Protestant subjects as in the prosecution of disastrous wars. The Huguenots, deprived of their former military and political power, had turned to manufacture, trade, and banking; "as rich as a Huguenot" had become a proverb in France. There were perhaps a million of them among fifteen million Frenchmen, and they undoubtedly formed a thrifty and enterprising part of the nation. The Catholic clergy, however, did not cease to urge the complete suppression of heresy.

23. Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and its Results. Louis XIV had scarcely taken the reins of government into his own hands before the perpetual nagging and injustice to which the Protestants had been subjected at all times took a more serious form. Upon one pretense or another their churches were demolished. Children were authorized to renounce Protestantism when they reached the age of seven. Rough dragoons were quartered upon the Huguenots with the hope that the insulting behavior of the soldiers might frighten the heretics into accepting the religion of the king.

At last Louis XIV was led by his officials to believe that practically all the Huguenots had been converted by these harsh measures. In 1685, therefore, he revoked the Edict of Nantes, and the Protestants thereby became outlaws and their ministers subject to the death penalty. Thousands of the Huguenots succeeded in eluding the vigilance of the royal officials and fled, some to England, some to Prussia, some to America, carrying with them their skill and industry to strengthen France's rivals. This was the last great and terrible example in western Europe of fierce religious intolerance.

24. Louis's Operations in the Rhenish Palatinate. Louis XIV now set his heart upon conquering the Palatinate, a Protestant land, to which he easily discovered that he had a claim. The rumor of his intention and the indignation occasioned in Protestant countries by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes resulted in an alliance against the French king headed by William of Orange. Louis speedily justified the suspicions of Europe by a frightful devastation of the Palatinate, burning whole towns and destroying many castles, including the exceptionally beautiful one of the elector at Heidelberg. Ten years later, however, Louis agreed to a peace which put things back as they were before the struggle began. He was preparing for the final and most ambitious undertaking of his life, which precipitated the longest and bloodiest war of all his warlike reign.

VI. WAR OF THE SPANISH SUCCESSION

25. The Question of the Spanish Succession. The king of Spain, Charles II, was childless and brotherless, and Europe had long been discussing what would become of his vast realms when his sickly existence should come to an end. Louis XIV had married one of his sisters, and the emperor, Leopold I, another, and these two ambitious rulers had been considering for some time how they might divide the Spanish possessions between the Bourbons of France and the Austrian Hapsburgs. But when Charles II died in 1700, it was discovered that he had left a will in which he made Louis's younger grandson, Philip, the heir to his twentytwo crowns, but on the condition that France and Spain should never be united.

26. Louis's Grandson Philip becomes King of Spain. It was a weighty question whether Louis XIV should permit his grandson to accept this hazardous honor. Should Philip become. king of Spain, Louis and his family would control all of France. and all the vast Spanish possessions and colonies; namely, southwestern Europe from Holland to Sicily, as well as a great part of North and South America. This would mean the establishment