It seemed, indeed, like a demoniacal caricature of our British troubles: no sternness, no reality; love-letters and witty verses supplying the place of the Biblical language and awful earnestness of the words and deeds of the Covenanters and Independents; the gentlemen of France utterly debased and frivolized; religion ridiculed; nothing left of the old landmarks; and no Cromwell possible. But, while all these elements of confusion were heaving and tumbling in what seemed an inextricable chaos, Mazarin, the vainest and most selfish of charlatans, died, and the young king, whom he had kept in distressing dependence and the profoundest political inactivity, found himself delivered from a master and free to choose his path. This was in 1661. Charles and Louis were equally on their recovered thrones; for what exile had been to the one, Mazarin had been to the other. [A.D. 1641-1660.] Charles had had the experience of nineteen years and of various fortunes to guide him. He had seen many men and cities, and he deceived every expectation. Louis had been studiously brought up by his mother and her Italian favourite in the abasement of every lofty aspiration. He was only encouraged in luxury and vice, and kept in such painful vassalage that his shyness and awkwardness revealed the absence of self-respect to the very pages of his court; and he, no less than Charles, deceived all the expectations that had been formed of his career. He found out, as if by intuition, how brightly the monarchical principle still burned in the heart of all the French. Even in their fights and quarrellings there was a deep reverence entertained for the ideal of the throne. The King's name was a tower of strength; and when the nation, in the course of the miserable years from 1610 to 1661, saw the extinction of nobility, religion, law, and almost of civilized society, it caught the first sound that told it it still had a king, as an echo from the past assuring it of its future. It forgot Louis the Thirteenth and Anne of Austria, and only remembered that its monarch was the grandson of Henry the Fourth. Nobody remembered that circumstance so vividly as Louis himself; but he remembered also that his line went upwards from the Bourbons, and included the Saint Louis of the thirteenth century and the renewer of the Roman Empire of the ninth. He let the world know, therefore, that his title was Most Christian King as well as foremost of European powers. He forced Spain to yield him precedence, and, for the first time in history, exacted a humiliating apology from the Pope. The world is always apt to take a man at his own valuation. Louis, swelling with pride, ambitious of fame, and madly fond of power, declared himself the greatest, wisest, and most magnificent of men; and everybody believed him. Every thing was soon changed throughout the land. Ministers had been more powerful than the crown, and had held unlimited authority in right of their appointment. A minister was nothing more to Louis than a _valet-de-chambre_. He gave him certain work to do, and rewarded him if he did it; if he neglected it, he discharged him. At first the few relics of the historic names of France, the descendants of the great vassals, who carried their heads as lofty as the Capets or Valois, looked on with surprise at the new arrangements in camp and court. But the people were too happy to escape the oligarchic confederacy of those hereditary oppressors to encourage them in their haughty disaffection. Before Louis had been three years on the unovershadowed throne, the struggle had been fairly entered on by all the orders of the State, which should be most slavish in its submission. Rank, talent, beauty, science, and military fame all vied with each other in their devotion to the king. He would have been more than mortal if he had retained his senses unimpaired amid the intoxicating fumes of such incense. Success in more important affairs came to the support of his personal assumptions. Victories followed his standards everywhere. Generals, engineers, and administrators, of abilities hitherto unmatched in Europe, sprang up whenever his requirements called them forth. Colbert doubled his income without increasing the burdens on his people. Turenne, Condé, Luxembourg, and twenty others, led his armies. Vauban strengthened his fortifications or conducted his sieges, and the dock-yards of Toulon and Brest filled the Mediterranean and the Atlantic with his fleets. Poets like Molière, Corneille, and Racine ennobled his stage; while the genius of Bossuet and Fénélon inaugurated the restoration of religion. For eight-and-twenty years his fortunes knew no ebb. He was the object of all men's hopes and fears, and almost of their prayers.