under Louis XIV.  Everywhere the power passed into the hands of the superintendents, themselves subjected in their turn to inspection by the masters of requests.  “Acting on the information I had that in many provinces the people were plagued by certain folks who abused their title of governors in order to make unjust requisitions,” says the king in his Memoires, “I posted men in all quarters for the express purpose of keeping myself more surely informed of such exactions, in order to punish them as they deserved.”  Order was restored in all parts of France.  “The Auvergnats,” said a letter to Colbert from President de Novion, “never knew so certainly that they had a king as they do now.”

“A useless banquet at a cost of a thousand crowns causes me incredible pain,” said Colbert to Louis XIV., and yet, when it is a question of millions of gold for Poland, I would sell all my property, I would pawn my wife and children, and I would go afoot all my life to provide for it if necessary.  Your Majesty, if it please you, will forgive me this little transport.  I begin to doubt whether the liberty I take is agreeable to your Majesty; it has seemed to me that you were beginning to prefer your pleasures and your diversions to everything else; at the very time when your Majesty told me at St. Germain that the morsel must be taken from one’s mouth to provide for the increment of the naval armament, you spent two hundred thousand livres down for a trip to Versailles, to wit, thirteen thousand pistoles for your gambling expenses and the queen’s, and fifty thousand livres for extraordinary banquets; you have likewise so intermingled our diversions, with the war on land that it is difficult to separate the two, and, if your Majesty will be graciously pleased to examine in detail the amount of useless expenditure you have incurred, you will plainly see that, if it were all deducted, you would not be reduced to your present necessity.  The right thing to do, sir, is to grudge five sous for unnecessary things, and to throw millions about when it is for your glory.”

Colbert knew, in fact, how to “throw millions about” when it was for endowing France with new manufactures and industries.  “One of the most important works of peace,” he used to say, “is the re-establishment of every kind of trade in this kingdom, and to put it in a position to do without having recourse to foreigners for the things necessary for the use and comfort of the subjects.”  “We have no need of anybody, and our neighbors have need of us;” such was the maxim laid down in a document of that date, which has often been attributed to Colbert, and which he certainly put incessantly into practice.  The cloth manufactures were dying out, they received encouragement; a Protestant Hollander, Van Robais, attracted over to Abbeville by Colbert, there introduced the making of fine cloths; at Beauvais and in the Gobelins establishment at Paris, under the direction of the great painter Lebrun, the French