And the same inflated pride and vanity which led Louis to trample on the rights of other nations, led him into unbounded extravagance in palace-building.  Versailles arose,—­at a cost, some affirm, of a thousand millions of livres,—­unrivalled for magnificence since the fall of the Caesars.  In this vast palace did he live, more after the fashion of an Oriental than an Occidental monarch, having enriched and furnished it with the wonders of the world, surrounded with princes, marshals, nobles, judges, bishops, ambassadors, poets, artists, philosophers, and scholars, all of whom rendered to him perpetual incense.  Never was such a grand court seen before on this earth:  it was one of the great features of the seventeenth century.  There was nothing censurable in collecting all the most distinguished and illustrious people of France around him:  they must have formed a superb society, from which the proud monarch could learn much to his enlightenment.  But he made them all obsequious courtiers, exacted from all an idolatrous homage, and subjected them to wearisome ceremonials.  He took away their intellectual independence; he banished Racine because the poet presumed to write a political tract.  He made it difficult to get access to his person; he degraded the highest nobles by menial offices, and insulted the nation by the exaltation of abandoned women, who squandered the revenues of the state in their pleasures and follies, so that this grand court, alike gay and servile, intellectual and demoralized, became the scene of perpetual revels, scandals, and intrigues.

It was at this period that Louis abandoned himself to those adulterous pleasures which have ever disgraced the Bourbons.  Yet scarcely a single woman by whom he was for a while enslaved retained her influence, but a succession of mistresses arose, blazed, triumphed, and fell.  Mancini, the niece of Mazarin, was forsaken without the decency of the slightest word of consolation.  La Valliere, the only woman who probably ever loved him with sincerity and devotion, had but a brief reign, and was doomed to lead a dreary life of thirty-six years in penitence and neglect in a Carmelite convent.  Madame de Montespan retained her ascendency longer for she had talents as well as physical beauty; she was the most prodigal and imperious of all the women that ever triumphed over the weakness of man.  She reigned when Louis was in all the pride of manhood and at the summit of his greatness and fame,—­accompanying him in his military expeditions, presiding at his fetes, receiving the incense of nobles, the channel of court favor, the dispenser of honors but not of offices; for amid all the slaveries to which women subjected the proudest man on earth by the force of physical charms, he never gave to them his sceptre.  It was not till Madame de Maintenon supplanted this beautiful and brilliant woman in the affections of the King, and until he was a victim of superstitious fears, and had met with great reverses, that state secrets were intrusted to a female friend,—­for Madame de Maintenon was never a mistress in the sense that Montespan was.