REAL CHARACTER OF LOUIS XIV.


Concerning Louis the Fourteenth 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 words, a great king.
Never was there so consummate a master of what our James the First would
have called king-craft,--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 the military
triumphs which gave splendour 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 the
Fourteenth as his valet could see. Five hundred people assembled to see
him shave and put on his breeches in the morning. He then kneeled down
at the side of his bed, and said his prayer, while the whole assembly
awaited the end in solemn silence,--the ecclesiastics on their knees,
and the laymen with their hats before their faces. He walked about his
gardens 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