On Saturday, the 31st of August, everything went from bad to worse.  The gangrene had reached the knee and all the thigh.  Towards eleven o’clock at night the King was found to be so ill that the prayers for the dying were said.  This restored him to himself.  He repeated the prayers in a voice so strong that it rose above all the other voices.  At the end he recognised Cardinal de Rohan, and said to him, “These are the last favours of the Church.”  This was the last man to whom he spoke.  He repeated several times, “Nunc et in hora mortis”, then said, “Oh, my God, come to my aid:  hasten to succour me.”

These were his last words.  All the night he was without consciousness and in a long agony, which finished on Sunday, the 1st September, 1715, at a quarter past eight in the morning, three days before he had accomplished his seventy-seventh year, and in the seventy-second of his reign.  He had survived all his sons and grandsons, except the King of Spain.  Europe never saw so long a reign or France a King so old.

CHAPTER LXXIII

I shall pass over the stormy period of Louis XIV.’s minority.  At twenty-three years of age he entered the great world as King, under the most favourable auspices.  His ministers were the most skilful in all Europe; his generals the best; his Court was filled with illustrious and clever men, formed during the troubles which had followed the death of Louis XIII.

Louis XIV. was made for a brilliant Court.  In the midst of other men, his figure, his courage, his grace, his beauty, his grand mien, even the tone of his voice and the majestic and natural charm of all his person, distinguished him till his death as the King Bee, and showed that if he had only been born a simple private gentlemen, he would equally have excelled in fetes, pleasures, and gallantry, and would have had the greatest success in love.  The intrigues and adventures which early in life he had been engaged in—­when the Comtesse de Soissons lodged at the Tuileries, as superintendent of the Queen’s household, and was the centre figure of the Court group—­had exercised an unfortunate influence upon him:  he received those impressions with which he could never after successfully struggle.  From this time, intellect, education, nobility of sentiment, and high principle, in others, became objects of suspicion to him, and soon of hatred.  The more he advanced in years the more this sentiment was confirmed in him.  He wished to reign by himself.  His jealousy on this point unceasingly became weakness.  He reigned, indeed, in little things; the great he could never reach:  even in the former, too, he was often governed.  The superior ability of his early ministers and his early generals soon wearied him.  He liked nobody to be in any way superior to him.  Thus he chose his ministers, not for their knowledge, but for their ignorance; not for their capacity, but for their want of it.  He