France at this time, writes in his journal, that the vine-dressers of Bordeaux earned threepence-halfpenny a day, and lived on rye and water; and these, compared with the agricultural labourers, fared well. The misery was not limited to these classes. It penetrated to the highest, through each successive stratum. Every where there was misery and distress, and amid this unregarded distress Louis was building palaces, raising edifices to be witnesses of the wonderful downfall of his race. Not palaces alone: dress, jewellery, and the gambling-table drained the resources of this silly prince. The financial statement expressed as Mr. Yonge well puts it-at the end of Louis' reign, in our form, would be, that the Funds were down to 25. He left behind him a debt of two thousand six hundred millions of livres! Distress begets insurrection; but the desolating force with which he crushed the insurgents in Guienne and Brittany increased the impoverishment of his finances; and, as if only folly itself could do more mischief, he permanently damaged the population, the industry, and the mechanical resources of France by the infatuated course he adopted on the religious question. He had all along been severe and ungenerous to the Huguenots; of late his severity had increased: his hesitating zeal had been fanned by his new confessor, La Chaise; his new mistress, the widow Scarron, determined him. We will make no apology for the following lengthy extract. It is a wholesome lesson in history. There is always much to think about whenever we see piety co-operating with vice, or sin concealing itself under the form of religious zeal. Perhaps, too, here we may be reminded that the convert-making process of our own time is at least two hundred years old; and in extenuation of its baseness, cannot even register the plea of originality.

In 1669, Mdme. de Montespan, who had borne Louis three children, all of which had been formally declared legitimate, was anxious to procure a governess for them; and cast her eyes on a widow lady of good birth but of extreme poverty, a Madame Scarron, for the employment. Her maiden name had been D'Aubigné, and she was the grand-daughter of Theodore d'Aubigné, who had been high in the favour of Henry IV, and had written a history of his reign. But her father dissipated his property, and left her so entirely destitute that she had been glad to accept the hand of a witty but deformed comic poet. After a few years he left her a widow, twentyfive years of age, beautiful, shrewd, accomplished, agreeable, but almost as

poor as ever; her sole subsistence being a small pension which had been granted to Scarron, and which after his death, at the intercession of Mdme. de Montespan, was continued to herself. Scarron had been well received in the fashionable society at Paris, which she continued to frequent after his death, and in which she was enjoying high popularity, when Mdme. de Montespan proposed to her to take charge of the education of her children. Her conduct on receiving this offer was singular, and not very easy to explain. She was at all times ambitious, and must have seen that such a situation offered her unexpectedly favourable opportunities of

gratifying that passion: though none of the imputations which have been cast upon her character have been established, it is certain that she had been the intimate friend of several women notorious for the grossest profligacy, so that it is not easy to believe in the genuineness of her scruples on the score of propriety; and yet she was under personal obligation to the mistress. Yet her reply to the lady who conveyed the offer to her was, that she would only undertake the post proposed to her, if the king himself should desire her to do so; her loyalty to her sovereign would induce her to do her best for his children, but she could not become thereby the governess of Mdme. de Montespan's illegitimate children. Whatever the motives which dictated this answer may have been, it proved a manœuvre of most subtle and successful policy. The mistress took no offence. The king requested Madame Scarron to undertake the duty as a favour to himself. And, as he was very fond of his children, he gradually became acquainted with the high talents of their governess, and took a marked pleasure in her conversation. He raised her pension; gave her a large sum of money, with which she purchased the estate of Maintenon; sent his own architect, Le Notre, to lay out the grounds; and in a few years her influence had become notorious to the whole Court; nor did he attempt to conceal it. When in 1680 the Dauphin married the Princess of Bavaria, she was appointed her lady of the bedchamber, and as by this time she had gradually become devout, she had the boldness occasionally to assume a high religious tone with him, and to remonstrate with him on his connexion with the mother of her pupils. It is doing her no injustice to suspect that she did not thus venture to reprove his vices till her acuteness had shown her that they were beginning to pall upon him. He was annoyed by the jealousies and wranglings of his various mistresses. She whom he most preferred and esteemed, Madame La Vallière, partly from vexation, partly from real repentance, had lately quitted the Court, and had taken the veil as a Carmelite nun, assuming the name of Sister Louise de la Miséricorde. The king often visited her at the convent, sometimes taking Madame de Montespan with him, who seemed to take pleasure in triumphing over her rival, now that she had quitted the field, and in parading her luxury and fastidiousness before her and the other inmates of the convent. But her own reign also was nearly over. She had always been of an imperious and peevish temper, not sparing the king himself in her petulant ill-humour, which, when he could no longer relieve himself by the contrast of La Vallière's gentleness, gradually overpowered his patience, till before the end of the year that followed on her withdrawal, it had become evident to all the courtiers that her rival also had lost her ascendency. Louis, however, in spite of all his assumption of superior capacity, was, in reality, a man of such feeble mind that he must necessarily be governed by some one. And as his wife, the queen, never had any influence over him, the moment that he ceased to be guided by his mistresses, the reins fell almost naturally into the hands of one who was as yet neither wife nor mistress, but something between the two. And so matters went on till the summer of 1683, when the queen died almost suddenly, of an illness, the serious character of which was not suspected until it was too late. Mdme. de Maintenon was with the Court at the time, and by the advice of De la Rochefoucault, whom she had attached to her interests, she presented herself to the king once or twice in the character of a comforter; not that he stood in need of any great consolation, though for a few hours he seemed somewhat softened. And when a day or two afterwards she appeared in ostentatiously deep mourning, he had so far recovered his spirits as to jest with her on her gloomy appearance. Precise details of the events which followed have never been known. Whether the king married her in the course of

the next two or three months, which is the statement of those likely to be well informed, or whether the strange nuptials were postponed for a year and a half, cannot be determined with accuracy; but that a private wedding took place at no very great interval after the queen's death is certain. And from that time the only subject on which the lady's influence was not paramount over every other, was the public recognition of it, which she could never prevail upon the king to grant. She had sufficient influence to damage in his favour those ministers who opposed themselves to her wishes, but not influence enough to overcome their opposition. And she continued to the end of her life the sharer of his most secret counsels without ever being formally acknowledged to have a right to his confidence. From the first moment that she had begun to concern herself about religion, she had surrendered herself to the guidance of the Jesuits, and she had shown herself eager in making proselytes; being the most resolute in her hostility to the Huguenots, because she had been bred up in their doctrines, which she had forsaken about the time of her marriage with Scarron. And she had been little scrupulous in the means by which she procured conversions. Marquis de Villette, the Minister of Marine, and a Huguenot, was married to her aunt; and on one occasion while he was absent with the fleet, she kidnapped his children; and partly by coaxing them with the gorgeous celebration of the mass before the king, and partly by whipping them, induced them to call themselves Catholics before they could know the difference between the two sects. And, now that her influence was greater, she was anxious to practise conversion on a larger scale. It must be allowed that she would have preferred mild to harsh means, if she had believed them to be equally efficacious; but in the eyes of the Jesuits the end to be attained sanctified any measures that might be employed,'

Here we pause for one remark. We are conscious that in quoting this sentiment of our author, not only without remonstrance, but with acquiescence, we are doing a somewhat rash act. But we recall to mind the fact that one of the most exemplary of Roman Pontiffs solemnly, and with all the emphasis to be acquired from his official infallibility, or his personal integrity, disbanded the society, as another 'odium humani generis,' and we proceed, encouraged :—

'And Louis was not likely to feel compunction at any degree of oppression or cruelty. In him the zeal which he had for some time shown to suppress Protestantism inflamed itself; the progress of their conversion, though only effected by the means which have been already described, seemed to him a contest in which, by steady perseverance, he could ensure the victory; and he had at this time especial reason for wishing to show himself a faithful son of the Church, because in some matters affecting his own authority and revenue he was at issue with the Pope, and was not uniformly supported by his clergy. In maintaining the independence of the Gallican Church, they cordially agreed with him, and did not hesitate to publish and uphold doctrines which the Pope formally condemned as heretical and mischievous. But on the regale, or the right claimed by the king to appoint to vacant benefices whomsoever he might

There is a certain Rev. Father who has achieved some notoriety in our own day in London, by following the plan of the devout widow Scarron.

choose, without regard to age, or to any other consideration but his own pleasure, and to enjoy their incomes during vacancy, they steadily opposed the pretensions set up by him, and at last even procured some modification of them. In such a state of affairs a more rigorous persecution of the Huguenots seemed to offer a happy compromise; and, as before it had been allowed to outweigh the sin of habitual licentiousness, so now it might be set in the scale by both Pope and clergy against the disposition to think more of his own temporal and personal authority than of the purely spiritual interests of the Church. Accordingly, the year after the queen's death saw the commencement of a persecution scarcely paralleled in its extent and cruelty, which was not to cease till the Reformed religion was entirely suppressed throughout the length and breadth of the kingdom. Colbert had died in the same year as the queen, otherwise his influence might have abated, or at least softened, the measures now adopted. For he was well-disposed to protect the Huguenots, not indeed on account of their religion, but because they were the most industrious artisans in the kingdom, and, as such, of the greatest service to the revenue. For their gradual exclusion from the service of the State, and from all such employments as were considered most honourable, had drawn them to trade as their only resource; and the most valuable manufactures were almost entirely in their hands. But after her death Le Tellier and Louvois had the chief sway in the king's councils; and Louvois, who piqued himself as being at all times above all economical considerations, though he cared little about religious doctrines and disputes, was eager for the suppression of Protestantism in the kingdom, because he was meditating a war with the foreign Protestant powers, and feared that a Huguenot brotherhood in France might be not unwilling to ally itself with them; while his father, who had lately been chancellor, was so stern a bigot that he was wont to say that his one great wish was to live long enough to affix the Great Seal to an ordinance for the revocation of the Edict of Nautes. The two ministers, therefore, added their influence to the arguments of the lady and the confessor, and fresh enactments of increased severity against all who resisted the royal command to join the Catholic Church began to multiply with fearful rapidity. Flight appeared the only resource, and numbers of Huguenots emigrated to other countries, chiefly to England, and became a source of wealth to many of our counties, where they introduced arts previously unknown, or practised old ones with an ingenuity of design and perfection of execution with which our own workmen were previously unacquainted. It was then that the silkweavers fled to London, and established their manufactures in Spitalfields; laceworkers took refuge in Nottingham and Limerick. The Germans too, who had been hitherto a purely agricultural community, learnt to make cloths and stuffs, and one body of refugees fled to Bohemia, one of the earliest nurseries of the Reformation, and taught the natives to make glass. The army had contained many thousands of Protestant soldiers; these also fled, many to Holland, where William of Orange gladly received them, and a year or two later derived no small assistance from the military counsels and experience of the most illustrious of their number, the veteran Marshal Schomberg. Others took service with other Catholic sovereigns; even the Duke of Savoy, inclined as he was to persecute his own Protestant peasantry, being glad to strengthen his army with their proved valour. And in the wars which in the next quarter of a century shook the power of France, thousands of her own sons were arrayed against her, driven to become her enemies by this faithless violation of all the treaties which had been made with them. But it was not the purpose of Louis and the instigators of his cruelty that those against whom his edicts

had been fulminated, should escape their operation by flight; and fresh edicts were enacted forbidding emigration, or the act of assisting others to emigrate, under the severest penalties. The head of a family who was detected in leaving or preparing to leave the kingdom was liable to be sent to the galleys for life; the sale of all property by such persons was declared illegal, and its price could not be recovered from purchasers; while ruinous fines might be inflicted on all, even on Catholics, who were privy to the emigration of a neighbour. But still every port was filled with emigrant vessels, none of which sailed forth empty; and the futility of his ordinances and threats exasperated Louis to fresh contrivances of cruelty. He directed Louvois to issue a notice to the commanders of his troops that it was his personal desire that all those who would not adopt his religion (for it was the fact of its being his that made the rejection of it so offensive) should suffer the most extreme rigour; and the method now devised has stamped his memory with undying infamy; while the name "Dragonnade," by which it was known, has become almost proverbial for atrocity. The great bulk of the Huguenots were in the southern provinces; and at the beginning of 1685 Louvois sent instructions to Marshal Boufflers, the commander of the army in those districts, to quarter his men exclusively on the Protestants, keeping some in each house till the inhabitants should be converted, and then transferring them to another whose owners were still stubborn. The dragoons so employed were well aware that a peaceful residence in their quarters was not what was expected of them, and they entered with a brutal joy into the purposes of their employers. In blasphemous mockery they fastened cross-bars to their muskets, and compelled the peasantry to kiss the cross so made, beating them cruelly if they refused. They drove them in crowds, like cattle, to the Catholic churches, pricking them as they went with swords or bayonets, to quicken their pace. They dragged the women through the mud by the hair; stripped them and scourged them; often cutting the faces of those whom they supposed vain of their personal attractions. Against cruelties like these the faith of the greater number of Protestants was not firm enough to resist. Ordinary torture, agonising as it was, was brief and endurable in comparison with the protracted incessant misery inflicted by the studied ferocity of soldiers, who knew that they were sent as tormentors, and who hoped to gain the favour of their superiors by acting up to, or, if possible, exceeding their instructions. Thousands consented to sign the recantation demanded of them, hastening to deliver themselves from their oppressors. It was evident that the bulk of these converts must, in reality, retain their previous opinions; but even their most bigoted persecutors cared nothing about their sincerity, and were contented with the outward adoption of the king's religion; Madame de Maintenon herself remarking that it would be all the same in the next generation, since, though the parents who were converted by such means might be hypocrites, their children, who would necessarily be educated as Catholics, would be orthodox enough. Yet all did not yield even to the Dragonnades. Multitudes were only the more attached to their religion. Often the soldiers, exciting themselves to fury at the sight, and secure of impunity, would rush in and massacre the unresisting congre gations. Often they would drag them to the public prisons and tribunals of the different towns, where obsequious or terrified magistrates would pass on them sentences of death, which were instantly executed.'-Vol. ii. p. 273.

And so this crowned Robespierre, anticipating the very measures of the Terror, laid waste his kingdom; and in 1635,