Catholic church, the holy priests exiled or imprisoned, the nuns driven from their convent, the division among the bishops, the scandal amongst the faithful.  The great burden of absolute power was evident to his eyes; he sought to let it fall back upon the shoulders of those who had enticed him or urged him upon that fatal path.  A vain attempt in the eyes of men, whatever may be the judgment of God’s sovereign mercy.  History has left weighing upon Louis XIV. the crushing weight of the religious persecutions ordered under his reign.

CHAPTER XLVIII.——­LOUIS XIV., LITERATURE AND ART.

It has been said in this History that Louis XIV. had the fortune to find himself at the culminating point of absolute monarchy, and to profit by the labors of his predecessors, reaping a portion of their glory; he had likewise the honor of enriching himself with the labors of his contemporaries, and attracting to himself a share of their lustre; the honor, be it said, not the fortune, for he managed to remain the centre of intellectual movement as well as of the court, of literature and art as well as affairs of state.  Only the abrupt and solitary genius of Pascal or the prankish and ingenuous geniality of La Fontaine held aloof from king and court; Racine and Moliere, Bossuet and Fenelon, La Bruyere and Boileau lived frequently in the circle of Louis XIV., and enjoyed in different degrees his favor; M. de la Rochefoucauld and Madame de Sevigne were of the court; Lebrun, Rigaud, Mignard, painted for the king; Perrault and Mansard constructed the Louvre and Versailles; the learned of all countries considered it an honor to correspond with the new academies founded in France.  Louis XIV. was even less a man of letters or an artist than an administrator or a soldier; but literature and art, as well as the superintendents and the generals, found in him the King.  The puissant unity of the reign is everywhere the same.  The king and the nation are in harmony.

Pascal, had he been born later, would have remained independent and proud, from the nature of his mind and of his character as well as from the connection he had full early with Port-Royal, where they did not rear courtiers; he died, however, at thirty-nine, in 1661, the very year in which Louis XIV. began to govern.  Born at Clermont, in Auvergne, educated at his father’s and by his father, though it was not thought desirable to let him study mathematics, he had already discovered by himself the first thirty-two propositions of Euclid, when Cardinal Richelieu, holding on his knee little Jacqueline Pascal, and looking at her brother, said to M. Pascal, the two children’s father, who had come to thank him for a favor, “Take care of them; I mean to make something great of them.”  This was the native and powerful instinct of genius divining genius; Richelieu, however, died three years later, without having done anything for the children