[Illustration:  The Edict Of Nantes—­Painted by Jules Girardet—­front2]

The King received from all sides news and details of these persecutions and of these conversions.  It was by thousands that those who had abjured and taken the communion were counted; ten thousand in one place; six thousand in another—­all at once and instantly.  The King congratulated himself on his power and his piety.  He believed himself to have renewed the days of the preaching of the Apostles, and attributed to himself all the honour.  The bishops wrote panegyrics of him, the Jesuits made the pulpit resound with his praises.  All France was filled with horror and confusion; and yet there never was so much triumph and joy—­never such profusion of laudations!  The monarch doubted not of the sincerity of this crowd of conversions; the converters took good care to persuade him of it and to beatify him beforehand.  He swallowed their poison in long. draughts.  He had never yet believed himself so great in the eyes of man, or so advanced in the eyes of God, in the reparation of his sins and of the scandals of his life.  He heard nothing but eulogies, while the good and true Catholics and the true bishops, groaned in spirit to see the orthodox act towards error and heretics as heretical tyrants and heathens had acted against the truth, the confessors, and the martyrs.  They could not, above all, endure this immensity of perjury and sacrilege.  They bitterly lamented the durable and irremediable odium that detestable measure cast upon the true religion, whilst our neighbours, exulting to see us thus weaken and destroy ourselves, profited by our madness, and built designs upon the hatred we should draw upon ourselves from all the Protestant powers.

But to these spearing truths, the King was inaccessible.  Even the conduct of Rome in this matter, could not open his eyes.  That Court which formerly had not been ashamed to extol the Saint-Bartholomew, to thank God for it by public processions, to employ the greatest masters to paint this execrable action in the Vatican; Rome, I say, would not give the slightest approbation to this onslaught on the Huguenots.

The magnificent establishment of Saint-Cyr, followed closely upon the revocation of the edict of Nantes.  Madame de Montespan had founded at Paris an establishment for the instruction of young girls in all sorts of fine and ornamental work.  Emulation gave Madame de Maintenon higher and vaster views which, whilst gratifying the poor nobility, would cause her to be regarded as protectress in whom all the nobility would feel interested.  She hoped to smooth the way for a declaration of her marriage, by rendering herself illustrious by a monument with which she could amuse both the King and herself, and which might serve her as a retreat if she had the misfortune to lose him, as in fact it happened.