France owed to Louis XIII. eighteen years of Cardinal Richelieu’s government; and that is a service which she can never forget.  “The minister made his sovereign play the second part in the monarchy and the first in Europe,” said Montesquieu:  “he abased the king, but he exalted the reign.”  It is to the honor of Louis XIII. that he understood and accepted the position designed for him by Providence in the government of his kingdom, and that he upheld with dogged fidelity a power which often galled him all the while that it was serving him.

CHAPTER XIII.——­LOUIS XIII., RICHELIEU, AND LITERATURE.

Cardinal Richelieu was dead, and “his works followed him,” to use the words of Holy Writ.  At home and abroad, in France and in Europe, he had to a great extent continued the reign of Henry IV., and had completely cleared the way for that of Louis XIV.  “Such was the strength and superiority of his genius that he knew all the depths and all the mysteries of government,” said La Bruyere in his admission-speech before the French Academy; “he was regardful of foreign countries, he kept in hand crowned heads, he knew what weight to attach to their alliance; with allies he hedged himself against the enemy. . . .  And, can you believe it, gentlemen? this practical and austere soul, formidable to the enemies of the state, inexorable to the factious, overwhelmed in negotiations, occupied at one time in weakening the party of heresy, at another in breaking up a league, and at another in meditating a conquest, found time for literary culture, and was fond of literature and of those who made it their profession!” From inclination and from personal interest therein this indefatigable and powerful mind had courted literature; he had foreseen its nascent power; he had divined in the literary circle he got about him a means of acting upon the whole nation; he had no idea of neglecting them; he did not attempt to subjugate them openly; he brought them near to him and protected them.  It is one of Richelieu’s triumphs to have founded the French Academy.

We must turn back for a moment and cast a glance at the intellectual condition which prevailed at the issue of the Renaissance and the Reformation.

For sixty years a momentous crisis had been exercising language and literature as well as society in France.  They yearned to get out of it.  Robust intellectual culture had, ceased to be the privilege of the erudite only; it began to gain a footing on the common domain; people no longer wrote in Latin, like Erasmus; the Reformation and the Renaissance spoke French.  In order to suffice for this change, the language was taking form; everybody had lent a hand to the work; Calvin with his Christian Institutes (Institution Chretienne) at the same time as Rabelais with his learned and buffoonish romance, Ramus with his Dialectics, and Bodin with his Republic, Henry Estienne