so exaggerated his father’s talents and services, that he has convinced everybody how unworthy and incapable he is of succeeding him.”  The influence of Louvois and the king’s ill humor against the Colberts peep out in the injustice of Madame de Maintenon.  Seignelay had received from Louis XIV. the reversion of the navy; his father had prepared him for it with anxious strictness, and he had exercised the functions since 1676.  Well informed, clever, magnificent, Seignelay drove business and pleasure as a pair.  In 1685 he gave the king a splendid entertainment in his castle of Sceaux; in 1686 he set off for Genoa, bombarded by Duquesne; in 1689 he, in person, organized the fleet of Tourville at Brest.  “He was general in everything,” says Madame de la Fayette; “even when he did not give the word, he had the exterior and air of it.”  “He is devoured by ambition,” Madame de Maintenon had lately said:  in 1689 she writes, “Anxious (L’Inquiet, i. e., Louvois) hangs but by a thread; he is very much shocked at having the direction of the affairs of Ireland taken from him; he blames me for it.  He counted on making immense profits; M. de Seignelay counts on nothing but perils and labors.  He will succeed if he do not carry things with too high a hand.  The king would have no better servant, if he could rid himself a little of his temperament.  He admits as much himself; and yet he does not mend.”  Seignelay died on the 3d of November, 1690, at the age of thirty-nine.  “He had all the parts of a great minister of state,” says St. Simon, “and he was the despair of M. de Louvois, whom he often placed in the position of having not a word of reply to say in the king’s presence.  His defects corresponded with his great qualities.  As a hater and a friend he had no peer but Louvois.”  “How young! how fortunate how great a position!” wrote Madame de Sevigne, on hearing of the death of M. de Seignelay, “it seems as if splendor itself were dead.”

Seignelay had spent freely, but he left at his death more than four hundred thousand livres a year.  Colbert’s fortune amounted to ten millions, legitimate proceeds of his high offices and the king’s liberalities.  He was born of a family of merchants, at Rheims, ennobled in the sixteenth century, but he was fond of connecting it with the Colberts of Scotland.  The great minister would often tell his children to reflect “what their birth would have done for them if God had not blessed his labors, and if those labors had not been extreme.”  He had married his daughters to the Dukes of Beauvilliers, Chevreuse, and Mortemart; Seignelay had wedded Mdlle. de Matignon, whose grandmother was an Orleans-Longueville.  “Thus,” said Mdlle de Montpensier, “they have the honor of being as closely related as M. le Prince to the king; Marie de Bourbon was cousin-german to the king my grandfather.  That lends a grand air to M. de Seignelay, who had by nature sufficient vanity.”  Colbert had no need to seek out genealogies, and great alliances were naturally attracted to his power and the favor he was in.  He had in himself that title which comes of superior merit, and which nothing can make up for, nothing can equal.  He might have said, as Marshal Lannes said to the Marquis of Montesquieu, who was exhibiting a coat taken out of his ancestors’ drawers, “I am an ancestor myself.”