The answer of William of Nassau was an unexpected one.  The history of modern times has nothing more heroic than this little mercantile state defying the greatest potentate in Europe.  William of Nassau knew perfectly well that every battle meant defeat.  The thing to do was to make battles impossible by inundating their fertile fields.  When he saw the destruction of life and property in one scale and political slavery in the other, he did not hesitate.  The dikes were quietly opened.  Turenne and Luxembourg and Vauban were baffled as completely as Napoleon in Russia.  And when the magnificent army had evacuated the flooded country, the dikes were quietly closed again and time and windmills restored their fields to fertility.

In the meantime William had been drawing to himself powerful allies.  Half of Europe was in league with him in the battles he now fought upon the Rhine.  But the French were victorious.  And after the peace of Nymwegen, 1678, Louis had reached the zenith of his power.

Human pretension and arrogance could go no farther.  He began to feel that France was his own personal possession and that Europe might be.  It was the combination of a great king with a small man which produced this composite being.  He had built Versailles, a palace unmatched since the Caesars.  He not only commanded the presence, but the obsequious presence of all that was illustrious and great at a time when France was in the full flower of her splendid genius.  Corneille, Racine, Moliere, if permitted to be, must pay him an almost idolatrous homage.  The beautiful Valliere was sent away, and de Montespan’s reign had commenced.

But when Colbert died in 1685, Louis fell under an influence which was to be transforming.  He had been burning the illuminating oil of youth at very high pressure.  Perhaps it was exhausted.  He grew serious.  De Montespan was sent away—­the orgies at Versailles ceased, the court became decorous, almost austere, and with the awakening of conscience, of course, the king became more sensitive to the heresies of the Huguenots!

He was drifting toward the fatal mistake of his life.  He revoked the Edict of Nantes.  Two millions of people by the stroke of his pen, at the bidding of de Maintenon, were disfranchised; prohibited under severe penalties from any observance of their religion; their property confiscated, an attempt to flee from the country punished by the galleys.

The prisons were full of Protestants and the scaffolds dyed with their blood.  Two hundred thousand perished by imprisonment, by the galleys, and the executioner; while two hundred thousand more managed to escape to America and to the lands of the enemies of France, which they would enrich with their skill.

Not a word of protest came from a person in France.  Not even from Fenelon or Bossuet!  Madame de Maintenon told him it was the “glorious climax of a glorious reign.”  Madame de Sevigne said it was “magnificent!” And Bossuet, greatest of French divines, exclaimed, “It is the miracle of the century!”