By the provisions of the treaty (the Peace of Utrecht) Gibraltar passed to England; Spain ceded the Netherlands and all her possessions in Italy to the German empire.  And so the fine threads diplomacy had been spinning over the Continent for two centuries were ruthlessly brushed away as a spider’s web.

An imbittered, broken old man, shorn of his omnipotence, who had outlived his fame and his worshippers, was dying in his great palace at Versailles; his only solace the austere woman who had inspired the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and who upon the death of his unhappy queen he had privately made his wife.  Marie Therese had borne his mad infatuation for Louise la Valliere; la Valliere had carried her broken heart to a convent, and been superseded by de Montespan, and de Montespan had invited her own destruction by bringing into her household Madame de Maintenon, the pious widow of the poet Scarron, in order that the austere virtues of that lady might be engrafted upon the children of the royal household.  Grave, ambitious, talented, the governess of de Montespan’s children was not too much absorbed in her duties to find ways of establishing an influence over the king.

This man, who had absorbed into himself all the functions of the government, who was ministers, magistrates, parliaments, all in one, this central sun of whom Corneille, Moliere, Racine were but single rays, was destined to be enslaved in his old age by a designing adventuress; her will his law.  The hey-day of youth having passed, he was beginning to be anxious about his soul.  She artfully pricked his conscience, and de Montespan was sent away, but de Maintenon remained.

She next convinced him that the only fitting atonement for his sins was to drive heresy out of his kingdom, and re-establish the true faith.  At her bidding he undid the glorious work of Henry IV., signed the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and brutally stamped out Protestantism.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the stake in the great game played in Europe was the headship, the pre-eminent position held by the house of Hapsburg.  The entire reign of Louis XIV. had had this for its ultimate object.  He seemed many times near it; but was never to reach the goal.  The absorption of Spain was a last and desperate attempt.  It had failed.  France had not won the leadership of European civilization.

In the coming reign, new forces, new conditions, were to widen the field of national ambitions.  And it was the nation across the channel which would grasp these forces and distance her rivals in an advance along the untried paths of commerce and a world-wide expansion.

With a strange apathy France had seen herself mistress of a large part of the American Continent, won for her by adventurous Frenchmen and Catholic missionaries.  She did practically nothing to develop this magnificent colonial empire.  Failing to comprehend changing conditions, the same old problem, with a towering house of Hapsburg, obscured her view, and remained the great unchanging fact about which her policy revolved.