rival, and died in 1704, a month before Bourdaloue, and two years before Bayle.  France intellectually, under the despotic intolerance of the King, was going through an eclipse or hastening to a dissolution, while the material state of the country showed signs of approaching bankruptcy.  The people were exhausted by war and taxes, and all the internal improvements which Colbert had stimulated were neglected.  “The fisheries of Normandy were ruined, and the pasture lands of Alsace were taken from the peasantry.  Picardy lost a twelfth part of its population; many large cities were almost abandoned.  In Normandy, out of seven hundred thousand people, there were but fifty thousand who did not sleep on straw.  The linen manufactures of Brittany were destroyed by the heavy duties; Touraine lost one-fourth of her population; the silk trade of Tours was ruined; the population of Troyes fell from sixty thousand to twenty thousand; Lyons lost twenty thousand souls since the beginning of the war.”

In spite of these calamities the blinded King prepared for another exhausting war, in order to put his grandson on the throne of Spain.  This last and most ruinous of all his wars might have been averted if he only could have cast away his ambition and his pride.  Humbled and crippled, he yet could not part with the prize which fell to his family by the death of Carlos II. of Spain.  But Europe was determined that the Bourbons should not be further aggrandized.

Thus in 1701 war broke out with even intensified animosities, and lasted twelve years; directed on the one part by Marlborough, Eugene, and Heinsius, and on the other part by Villars, Vendome, and Catinat, during which the finances of France were ruined and the people reduced to frightful misery.  It was then that Louis melted up the medallions of his former victories, to provide food for his starving soldiers.  He offered immense concessions, which the allies against him rejected.  He was obliged to continue the contest with exhausted resources and a saddened soul.  He offered Marlborough four millions to use his influence to procure a peace; but this general, venal as he was, preferred ambition to money.  The despair which once overwhelmed Holland now overtook France.  The French marshals encountered a greater general than William III., whose greatness was in the heroism of his soul and his diplomatic talents, rather than in his genius on the battlefield.  But Marlborough, who led the allies, never lost a battle, nor besieged a fortress he did not take.  His master-stroke was to transfer his operations from Flanders to the Danube.  At Blenheim was fought one of the decisive battles of the world, in which the Teutonic nations were marshalled against the French.  The battle of Ramillies completed the deliverance of Flanders; and Louis, completely humiliated, agreed to give up ten Flemish provinces to the Dutch, and to surrender to the Emperor of Germany all that France had gained since the peace of Westphalia in 1648.  He also agreed to acknowledge Anne, as Queen of Great Britain, and to banish the Pretender from his dominions; England was to retain Gibraltar, and Spain to cede to the Emperor of Germany her possessions in Italy and the Netherlands.  But France, with all her disasters, was not ruined; the treaty of Utrecht, 1713, left Louis nearly all his inherited possessions, except in America.