Another still more powerful influence gave stability to the throne of Louis:  this was the Catholic Church.  Louis was a devout Catholic in spite of his sins, and was true to the interests of the Pope.  He was governed, so far as he was governed at all, by Jesuit confessors.  He associated on the most intimate terms with the great prelates and churchmen of the day, like Bossuet, Fenelon, La Chaise, and Le Tellier.  He was regular at church and admired good sermons; he was punctilious in all the outward observances of his religion.  He detested all rebellion from the spiritual authority of the popes; he hated both heresy and schism.  In his devotion to the Catholic Church he was as narrow and intolerant as a village priest.  His sincerity in defence of the Church was never questioned, and hence all the influences of the Church were exerted to uphold his domination.  He may have quarrelled with popes on political grounds, and humiliated them as temporal powers, but he stood by them in the exercise of their spiritual functions.  In Louis’ reign the State and Church were firmly knit together.  It was deemed necessary to be a good Catholic in order to be even a citizen,—­so that religion became fashionable, provided it was after the pattern of that of the King and court.  Even worldly courtiers entered with interest into the most subtile of theological controversies.  But the King always took the side devoted to the Pope, and he hated Jansenism almost as much as he hated Protestantism.  Hence the Catholic Church ever rallied to his support.

So, with all these powerful supports Louis began his long reign of seventy-six years,—­which technically began when he was four years old, on the death of his father Louis XIII., in 1643, when the kingdom was governed by his mother, Anne of Austria, as regent, and by Cardinal Mazarin as prime minister.  During the minority of the King the humiliation of the nobles continued.  Protestantism was only tolerated, and the country distracted rather than impoverished by the civil war of the Fronde, with its intrigues and ever-shifting parties,—­a giddy maze, which nobody now cares to unravel; a sort of dance of death, in which figured cardinals, princes, nobles, bishops, judges, and generals,—­when “Bacchus, Momus, and Moloch” alternately usurped dominion.  Those eighteen years of strife, folly, absurdity, and changing fortunes, when Mazarin was twice compelled to quit the kingdom he governed; when the queen-regent was forced also twice to fly from her capital; when Cardinal De Retz disgraced his exalted post as Archbishop of Paris by the vilest intrigues; when Conde and Conti obscured the lustre of their military laurels; when alternately the parliaments made war on the crown, and the seditious nobles ignobly yielded their functions merely to register royal decrees,—­these contests, rivalries, cabals, and follies, ending however in the more solid foundations of absolute royal authority, are not to be here discussed, especially as nobody can thread that political labyrinth; and we begin, therefore, not with the technical reign of the great King, but with his actual government, which took place on the death of Mazarin, when he was twenty-two.