The sun. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1833-1916, 1906-03-18

was Louis XIV. without the perruque. which
he made fashionable in all Europe, and
without the blue velvet coat, Venus and
Minerva were La VALERIE OF Montespan;
Apollo, a marquis, with his precise. the
atrical mien; Mars. an elegant. self-con-
scious MIrshaI Of France" Altogether.
Versailles cost the King 10000, 900 livres.
something like $3.50 900 1000 Of our present
money.
As to the much Wanted rvices of Louis
XIV. to French literature, DR.. Philippson
directs attention to the fact that the great
writer's Of LOuis's reign were not his con-
~temporaries, but the product Of a freer
and individually more independent time.
AS a class they we're already moulded
when the sovereign took into his " hand
the reins of the Government on the death
Of Mazarin. THAT his system Of rule was
not favorable to the development Of the
creative power in literature, nor intel
lectually stimulating. there is no clearer
proof than the b~arrenness which set in dur
ing the second half Of his reign, After the
death Of the great men who had been de-
veloped before his personal rule began
nom appeared that could in the remotest
meas fill their places till loftier spirits
came forward when freer times dawned
again during the Regency and the first
decade Of the reign Of Louis XIV. The
favor that lie Roi Sotea" professed to b
to French art only ruined IL. As for his rela-
ton to the sciences, it y enough to note
that there appeared during his whole reign
no great historian, no jurist of importance,
no naturalist Of the first rank, Philosophy,
which in the preceding age had had such
representatives as Deecartes, Pascal and
Gassendi, could not unfold itself unmolested
under an autocratio and ecclesiastical
regime. -,
As for morals, although as we have said
LouiS himself observed outward decorum,
the profiigacy of his mobiles knew no bounds.
The bourgeois initiated the ways of their
social superiors, and this all the moro be-
cause marriage had become entirely a
mercenary matter among them. The
degeneracy in morals could not but be
associated with more heinous crimes. The
poisonings committed by the Marquise
de Brinvilliers belong to this period OF
Louis's reign. She was beheaded in 1915.
Three years later a new poison trial cast
the Brinvilliers crime into the shade. A
special tribunal having been instituted by
the King for thei investigation of poisonings,
the evidence given by a woman named
ia Voisin' caused the arrest Of some Of
the highest percentages at the Court-the
Countess Of Scissors, the Princess Of Tingry,
the Duchesses of Bouillon and Folk, Mar
shall de Luxembourg and others. Most
of these were ultimately liberated, but
without having cleared themselves Of sus-
picion, and others were punished by fine
or Punishment. La Voisin herself and her
accomplices were executed.
Already at this p~eriod-the third quarter
of the seventeenth c~entury-the taxation
had become almost ~insupportable. and
discomfort and disaffection prevailed
throughout the land. In 1878 the mer-
chants of Paris presented a memorial to
the King filed with complaints regarding
the decay Of industry and trade. Scarcely
a year passed without revolts of greater
or less moment In soma province or other.
The most dangerous were the revolts Of
1875, Bordeaux having risen against the
indirect taxes, while in Brittany a veritable
peasants war was waged against all au-
thority, the bureaucracy and the aristoo-
racy. Thus, while the eighth decade Of
the seventeenth century was a brilliant
era In the reign Of Louis XIV, it was for
contemporary France q time Of oppression,
49, --.-~