No king more wickedly oppressed France, and none made her more glorious.  He made her feared abroad and magnificent at home, but he desolated her, and drained her resources with ambitious wars.  He crowned her with imperishable laurels in literature, art, and every manifestation of genius, but he signed the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and drove out of his kingdom 500,000 of the best of his subjects.

The marriage of the Dauphin with the Infanta of Spain had occurred before he attained his majority.  It was planned by Mazarin, and was a part of the policy left as a fatal bequest to Louis XIV. by that minister.

The Salic Law was not recognized in Spain.  Hence, the crown might descend to an heiress, and by her be transmitted to her husband.  Such was the hope in the marriage of Louis with the Infanta; the hope of some happy turn of fortune, some break in the line of succession whereby the Spanish kingdom might be absorbed into a Bourbon empire, as it had once been in the empire of the Hapsburgs.  This was the ignis fatuus which was to control the policy of this stormy reign, and which was to envelop it at last in the clouds of defeat and disaster.

The secret of Louis’ greatness was his instinctive recognition of greatness in others.  His new minister, Colbert, to whom he owed so much, was a man of the people, and a protestant.  He it was who discovered the peculations of Fouquet, the magnificent Minister of Finance, who was building a palace at Vaux greater than the king himself could afford, and who was suddenly swept from this princely residence into the Bastille, where he spent the remaining years of his life with plenty of leisure in which to think upon the forty thousand pounds he had expended upon that fete he gave in honor of his royal master; and to recall the splendors of the supper and the size of the banqueting-hall, which Mansart, Le Brun, and the best that Italy could furnish at that time had made beautiful.

It is said that the unfortunate visit of the king to his minister’s abode resulted in the creation of Versailles as a suburban residence.  From the Palais de St. Germain, on the heights in the suburbs of Paris, Louis could see the Cathedral of St. Denis, where were the royal vaults and the ancestors he must some day join.  So depressing was this view to him, and so charmed was he with the plan of Fouquet’s palace and gardens, that artists were immediately set to work to make one more royal at Versailles, where his father, Louis XIII., used to have his hunting-box; the place where that much-governed king used to go to hide away from his scheming mother and his argus-eyed minister.  The genius of Colbert was severely taxed to supply the means for Louis’ magnificent tastes and for his foreign wars, at the same time.  Even Colbert could not create money out of nothing.  The burden must rest somewhere, and just as surely must ultimately be borne by the people.