or a religion of authority, has failed, and that its hold CHAP. over human society and the best intellect of mankind XXXIII. has only been preserved by the irruption of freedom and free principles of thought, of belief, and of polity, might be rendered equally manifest.

Experiments in the science and nature of government have been equally remarkable. Nothing connected with them is more so than the directly opposite paths taken by France and by England: by France towards political and religious despotism, which placed the whole safety of the state, as well as the salvation of its people, in the supremacy of some one man's will; by England, which refused to believe in or to undergo the infallible wisdom or right of any one or any few to dictate to a people conscious of being able to think and act for themselves. Both countries fell into errors and excesses. England underwent the sway of Independent and Fifth Monarchy men. France trembled under a Richelieu, was froward under Mazarin, but prostrated itself under Louis the Fourteenth, as the incarnation of all that it desired, admired, and believed. If the champions of despotic government had had to frame a prince of their choice, they could scarcely have endowed him with other qualities than those which shone in Louis. He had all those which command admiration and respect, whilst his use of power, except in one or two directions, was tempered by the advance of the age in justice and in humanity. The exceptions were his foreign policy and his religious administration. He had been educated to consider glory as the only aim worthy of his efforts, that glory to be achieved by overreaching or overwhelming his neighbours, and taking their territories to augment his own. This was the traditional policy of France for a century, and in following it the French king knew no difference between just and unjust, nor could he see any crime in the latter. He carried on war with the mercilessness

CHAP. of the Hun, devastated whole provinces, his own as XXXIII. well as those of his enemies, with the ruthlessness of barbarism. In religious matters it was the same. His treatment of the Protestants rivalled, if not surpassed, the cruelty of the most infatuated Pagan emperor; the French bishops applauding and inciting him more than ever high-priest of Jupiter incited Nero. And if his persecution of Jansenism was less marked by blood, it was but the more strongly characterised by puerility and ridicule.

The main results of the absorption of all this power and freedom of the country by the monarch, with the suppression of intelligence (for he could not absorb that), this concentration of power exerting itself in the expenditure of more treasure and life than the annual produce of both, were the acquisition of Stras burg and Lille. The first had been won without war, by bribing the civic magistrates; whilst the other would certainly have been torn from France at the peace, but for the traitorous laches of Bolingbroke. The other result of this quarter of a century's rule was to enforce the narrow orthodoxy professed by the most stupid of the religious body, silencing and proscribing every intelligent religionist; the more liberal-minded of the great and the learned being actually forced into infidelity, in order to escape the yoke and the absurdities of the court religion.

Moreover every evil of domestic administration and social order had been aggravated. The division between the two great classes of the nation was widened by exemption from burdens, and enjoyment of privileges and place, being more exclusively reserved to the one; oppression, extortion, and humiliation being the lot of the other. The noble class, the denizens of the court, were all in all, whilst setting the worst example of morality, the meanest of intelligence. Nor was this the fault of individuals so much as of the system, which, rendering education useless, and denying industry or

activity to the mind of the well born, pointed out their CHAP. only road to advancement in servility and court favour.

Although the monarch's long reign bore all the marks of material and moral blight at its close, the blaze of intellectual glory which illumined its more prosperous and successful years cannot be forgotten. The rise and encouragement of such varied genius has of course been attributed to royal patronage and favour. They were still more due to the withdrawal of the proud monarch and his court to Versailles, which left the busy metropolis, its capitalists, its judges and lawyers, its rich citizens and its more independent nobles, to form a mixed society and world of their own, far more intelligent than the upper world of Versailles, which affected to patronise and direct it. It was Paris, not Versailles, which produced a Molière, and applauded the early chef-d'œuvres of Racine. It was Paris which formed the novelist and the satirist, and also taught such divines as Bossuet and Fénelon to be something better than courtiers. It was Paris, with the acumen and irony, indigenous to a capital, that prompted Pascal to expose the Jesuits, and Archbishop Noailles to combat them. It was the Parisian spirit which breathed in the letters of De Sévigné, whose home was in the capital, and to whom the court was known merely by brief visits and busy whispers. Wealth and prosperity are, however, even more necessary to the brilliancy of a capital than even to that of a court. And Paris suffered from the exhaustion, the sacrifices and dearth of the last years of Louis. So much so that the Muses fled, wealth disappeared, and the intellects which criticised the court religion or censured its politics were obliged to conceal themselves to do so. Society, thus walled up, went to the extreme of libertinage, losing delicacy of taste as well as vigour and sanity of thought. And for a time they underwent a syncope, till in the ensuing reign they again awoke in Voltaire.

XXXIII.

136

CHAPTER XXXIV.

СНАР. XXXIV.

THE REGENCY.

1715-1726.

often shown by one age for

STRONG repugnance is very
the tastes and ideas of that preceding it. The repug-
nance is still stronger when an old system of govern-
ment or opinion has been prolonged beyond its time,
overlying, as it were, that which was young and rising.
This was remarkably the case during the last years of
Louis the Fourteenth, whose compressive rule was felt
like a nightmare by his subjects, and even by his court.
There was quite an explosion of impatience when it was
known that he was no more, and the French public,
leaving the remains of the Great Monarch to be poorly
and almost ignominiously huddled off to their burying-
place, pressed forward to welcome and salute that prince
who was known to present in character, in life, and predi-
lections the most complete contrast to the departed king.

The Duke of Orleans had begun life by an act of profound obsequiousness to the will of Louis the Fourteenth. He had married the natural daughter of the king by Madame de Montespan, against the wish of his mother, who showed all possible indignation at the match.* But this did not procure for the young duke the confidence or the reward that he sought. The king shrunk from employing or giving command to princes of the blood. And

* Received the tidings by giving her son a box on the ear—“qui lui faisait voir des chandelles."

the Duke of Orleans, with capacity for any career, was long denied other than that of pleasure. In pursuance of this, he neglected his wife, thereby offending the king, and frequented the Parisian residence of a mistress whose society and converse presented the strongest contrast to that of Versailles. Whilst Louis and Madame de Maintenon became more rigid in their devotions, the Duke of Orleans not only practised but professed libertinism and infidelity. The courtiers retaliated by accusing him of all the extravagance of crime, even to having caused the death of the dauphin and dauphiness, and of those who stood between him and the crown, by poison.

There was a particular motive for this. The devotees and old routinists of the court, including Madame de Maintenon, with the Jesuits, preferred the Duc du Maine, who was all submission to them, and who also enjoyed the decided preference of the king. They flattered the latter that his will and word would suffice to make the Duc du Maine his heir, in case of the failure of his direct legitimate offspring, and to the exclusion of the Houses of Orleans and Condé. Louis listened to them, and obeyed their injunctions, whilst doubting the efficiency, probably even the justice, of his act. He did not believe in the guilt attributed to the Duke of Orleans, and observed that he was more likely to boast than to commit a crime. This was true. For Philip, though driven to mock at religion by the hypocrisy and virulence of those who affected to monopolise it, still prized the virtues of the soldier and the gentleman. The reckless Henry the Fourth was his model, not scrupulously imitated by him indeed, but sufficiently revered to render Philip of Orleans satisfied with vice and abhorrent of crime.

The Duc du Maine was not the only rival of the Duke of Orleans. Philip of Spain, directly descended from Louis the Fourteenth, pretended to succeed to the throne should the infant Duc d'Anjou fail to survive, notwith

* Louis's expression was that the duke was a "fanfaron de crimes."

CHAP.

XXXIV.