weakening the kingdom, and filling Europe with their execrations.  Never did a crime have so little justification, and never was a crime followed with severer retribution.  Yet Le Tellier, the chancellor, at the age of eighty, thanked God that he was permitted the exalted privilege of affixing the seal of his office to the act before he died.  Madame de Maintenon declared that it would cover Louis with glory.  Madame de Sevigne said that no royal ordinance had ever been more magnificent.  Hardly a protest came from any person of influence in the land, not even from Fenelon.  The great Bossuet, at the funeral of Le Tellier, thus broke out:  “Let us publish this miracle of our day, and pour out our hearts in praise of the piety of Louis,—­this new Constantine, this new Theodosius, this new Charlemagne, through whose hands heresy is no more.”  The Pope, though at this time hostile to Louis, celebrated a Te Deum.

Among those who fled the kingdom to other lands were nine thousand sailors and twelve thousand soldiers, headed by Marshal Schomberg and Admiral Duquesne,—­the best general and the best naval officer that France then had.  Other distinguished people transferred their services to foreign courts.  The learned Claude, who fled to Holland, gave to the world an eloquent picture of the persecution.  Jurieu, by his burning pamphlets, excited the insurrection of Cevennes.  Basnage and Rapin, the historians, Saurin the great preacher, Papin the eminent scientist, and other eminent men, all exiles, weakened the supports of Louis.  France was impoverished in every way by this “great miracle” of the reign; “so that,” says Martin, “the new temple that Louis had pretended to erect to unity fell to ruin as it rose from the ground, and left only an open chasm in place of its foundations....  The nothingness of absolute government by one alone was revealed under the very reign of the great King.”

The rebound of the revocation overthrew all the barriers within which Louis had intrenched himself.  All the smothered fires of hatred and of vengeance were kindled anew in Holland and in every Protestant country.  William of Orange headed the confederation of hostile states that dreaded the ascendency and detested the policy of Louis XIV.  All Europe was resolved on the humiliation of a man it both feared and hated.  The great war which began in 1688, when William of Orange became King of England on the flight of James II., was not sought by Louis.  This war cannot be laid to his military ambition; he provoked it indeed, indirectly, by his arrogance and religious persecutions, but on his part it was as truly defensive as were the wars of Napoleon after the invasion of Russia.  Whatever is truly heroic in the character of Louis was seen after he was forty-eight.  Whatever claims to greatness he may have had are only to be sustained by the memorable resistance he made to united Europe in arms against him, when his great ministers and his best generals had died, Turenne died in 1675, Colbert