[Footnote 139: One of the schemes of Francis I. to raise money had been to offer the benches to the highest bidders, and under the law of 1604 the office of councillor became a hereditary property on payment to the court of one-sixtieth of its value. Moreover, the Parlement was but a local body, one among several others in the provinces.]
[Footnote 140: The added indignity of the whip is an invention of Voltaire.]
The years following on the internal peace were a period of triumphant foreign war and diplomacy. Mazarin achieved his purpose of marrying the Infanta of Spain to his royal master; he added to and confirmed Richelieu's territorial gains and guided France at last to triumph over the Imperial House of Austria. On 9th March 1661, after a pathetic scene in his sumptuous palace, where the stricken old cardinal dragged his tottering steps along its vast galleries, casting a despairing look on the marvellous treasures of art he had collected and sorrowing like a child at the idea of separating from them for ever, the great Italian, "whose heart was French if his tongue were not," confronted death at Vincennes with firmness and courage. Mazarin was, however, a costly servant, who bled his adopted country to satisfy his love for the arts and splendours of life, to furnish dowries to his nieces, and to exalt his family. His vast palace (now the Bibliothèque Nationale), with its library of 35,000 volumes, freely open to scholars, was furnished with princely splendour. He left 2,000,000 livres to found a college for the gratuitous education of sixty sons of gentlemen from the four provinces--Spanish, Italian, German and Flemish--recently added to the crown, in order that French culture and grace might be diffused among them; they were to be taught the use of arms, horsemanship, dancing, Christian piety, and _belles-lettres_. A vast domed edifice was raised on the site of the Tour de Nesle, and became famous as the College of the Four Nations. It was subsequently expropriated and given by the Convention to the five learned academies of France, and is now known as the Institut de France.
_The Grand Monarque--Versailles and Paris_
The century of Louis XIV., whose triumphs have been so extravagantly celebrated by Voltaire, saw the culmination and declension of military glory and literary splendour at Paris, and of regal magnificence at Versailles. Gone were the times of cardinal dictators. When the ministers came after Mazarin's death to ask the king whom they should now address themselves to, the answer came like a thunderbolt: "To me!"