LOUIS XIV OF FRANCE. By THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY.

[Grandson of Henry IV, the greatest of the French Bourbon kings, though he himself was also called Le Grand, or The Great. Born 1638, died 1715. His reign was distinguished for the brilliant men he gathered at his court and the unparalleled reverses which befell his power and prosperity in his closing years.]

The reign of Louis XIV is the time to which ultra-royalists refer as the golden age of France. It was, in truth, one of those periods which shine with an unnatural and delusive splendor. Concerning Louis XIV himself, the world seems at last to have formed a correct judgment. He was not a great general; he was not a great statesman; but he was, in one sense of the word, a great king. Never was there so consummate a master of what our James I would have called kingcraft—of all those arts which most advantageously display the merits of a prince and most completely hide his defects. Though his internal administration was bad, though military triumphs which gave splendor to the early part of his reign were not achieved by himself, though his later years were crowded with defeats and humiliations, though he was so ignorant that he scarcely understood the Latin of his mass-book, though he fell under the control of a cunning Jesuit and of a more cunning old woman, he succeeded in passing himself off on his people as a being above humanity.

And this is the more extraordinary, because he did not seclude himself from the public gaze, like those Oriental despots whose faces are never seen, and whose very names it is a crime to pronounce lightly. It has been said that no man is a hero to his valet; and all the world saw as much of Louis XIV as his valet could see. Five hundred people assembled to see him shave and put on his breeches in the morning. He then knelt down by the side of his bed and said his prayer, the ecclesiastics on their knees and the laymen with their hats before their faces. He walked about his garden with a train of two hundred courtiers at his heels. All Versailles came to see him dine and sup. He was put to bed at night in the midst of a crowd as great as that which had met to see him rise in the morning. He took his very emetics in state, and vomited majestically in the presence of all the grandes and petites entrées. Yet, though he constantly exposed himself to the public gaze in situations in which it is scarcely possible for any man to preserve much personal dignity, he to the last impressed those who surrounded him with deepest awe and reverence. The illusion which he produced on his worshipers can be compared only to those illusions to which lovers are proverbially subject during the season of courtship; it was an illusion which affected even the senses.

The contemporaries of Louis thought him tall. Voltaire, who might have seen him, and who had lived with some of the most distinguished members of his court, speaks repeatedly of his majestic stature. Yet it is as certain as any fact can be that he was rather below than above the middle size. He had, it seems, a way of holding himself, a way of walking, a way of swelling his chest and rearing his head, which deceived the eyes of the multitude. Eighty years after his death the royal cemetery was violated by the revolutionists; his coffin was opened, his body was dragged out, and it appeared that the prince whose majestic figure had been so extolled was, in truth, a little man. His person and his government have had the same fate. He had the art of making both appear grand and august, in spite of the clearest evidence that both were below the ordinary standard. Death and time have exposed both the deceptions. The body of the great king has been measured more justly than it was measured by the courtiers who were afraid to look above his shoe-tie. His public character has been scrutinized by men free from the hopes and fears of Boileau and Molière. In the grave the most majestic of princes is only five feet eight. In history the hero and the politician dwindles into a vain and feeble tyrant, the slave of priests and women; little in war, little in government, little in everything but the art of simulating greatness.

He left to his infant successor a famished and miserable people, a beaten and humbled army, provinces turned into deserts by misgovernment and persecution, factions dividing the court, a schism raging in the Church, an immense debt, an empty treasury, immeasurable palaces, an innumerable household, inestimable palaces and furniture. All the sap and nutriment of the state seemed to have been drawn to feed one bloated and unwholesome excrescence. The nation was withered. The court was morbidly flourishing. Yet it does not appear that the associations which attached the people to the monarchy had lost strength during his reign. He had neglected or sacrificed their dearest interests, but he had struck their imaginations.