Louvois remained henceforth alone, without rival and without check.  The work he had undertaken for the reorganization of the army was pretty nearly completed; he had concentrated in his own hands the whole direction of the military service, the burden and the honor of which were both borne by him.  He had subjected to the same rules and the same discipline all corps and all grades; the general as well as the colonel obeyed him blindly.  M. de Turenne alone had managed to escape from the administrative level.  “I see quite clearly,” he wrote to Louvois on the 9th of September, 1673, “what are the king’s wishes, and I will do all I can to conform to them but you will permit me to tell you that I do not think that it would be to his Majesty’s service to give precise orders, at such a distance, to the most incapable man in France.”  Turenne had not lost the habit of command; Louvois, who had for a long while been under his orders, bowed to the will of the king, who required apparent accord between the marshal and the minister, but he never forgave Turenne for his cool and proud independence.  The Prince of Conde more than once turned to advantage this latent antagonism.  After the death of Louvois and of Turenne, after the retirement of Conde, when the central power fell into the hands of Chamillard or of Voysin, the pretence of directing war from the king’s closet at Versailles produced the most fatal effects.  “If M. de Chamillard thinks that I know nothing about war,” wrote Villars to Madame de Maintenon, “he will oblige me by finding somebody else in the kingdom who is better acquainted with it.”  “If your Majesty,” he said again, “orders me to shut myself up in Bavaria, and if you want to see your army lost, I will get myself killed at the first opportunity rather than live to see such a mishap.”  The king’s orders, transmitted through a docile minister, ignorant of war, had a great deal to do with the military disasters of Louis XIV.’s later years.

Meanwhile order reigned in the army, and supplies were regular.  Louvois received the nickname of great Victualler (Vivrier).  The wounded were tended in hospitals devoted to their use.  “When a soldier is once down, he never gets up again,” had but lately been the saying.  “Had I been at my mother’s, in her own house, I could not have been better treated,” wrote M. D’Alligny on the contrary, when he came out of one of the hospitals created by Louvois.  He conceived the grand idea of the Hotel des Invalides.  “It were very reasonable,” says the preamble of the king’s edict which founded the establishment, “that they who have freely exposed their lives and lavished their blood for the defence and maintenance of this monarchy, who have so materially contributed to the winning of the battles we have gained over our enemies, and who have often reduced them to asking peace of us, should enjoy the repose they have secured for our other subjects, and should pass the remainder of their days in tranquillity.”  Up to his death Louvois insisted upon managing the Hotel des Invalides himself.