eulogiums, and even sermons were rehearsed before the committee of taste in the Hotel de Rambouillet, and a wonderful new stimulus was there given, not only to ornamental but to solid literature.  Many of the great men who made France illustrious were either ending or beginning their careers at this time.  Memoir writing specially flourished, and the characters of the men and women of the court are known to us on all sides.  Cardinal de Retz and the Duke of Rochefoucauld, both deeply engaged in the Fronde, have left, the one memoirs, the other maxims of great power of irony.  Mme. de Motteville, one of the queen’s ladies, wrote a full history of the court.  Blaise Pascal, one of the greatest geniuses of all times, was attaching himself to the Jansenists.  This religious party, so called from Jansen, a Dutch priest, whose opinions were imputed to them, had sprung up around the reformed convent of Port Royal, and numbered among them some of the ablest and best men of the time; but the Jesuits considered them to hold false doctrine, and there was a continual debate, ending at length in the persecution of the Jansenists.  Pascal’s “Provincial Letters,” exposing the Jesuit system, were among the ablest writings of the age.  Philosophy, poetry, science, history, art, were all making great progress, though there was a stateliness and formality in all that was said and done, redolent of the Spanish queen’s etiquette and the fastidious refinement of the Hotel Rambouillet.

5.  Court of Louis XIV.—­The attempt from the earliest times of the French monarchy had been to draw all government into the hands of the sovereign, and the suppression of the Fronde completed the work.  Louis XIV., though ill educated, was a man of considerable ability, much industry, and great force of character, arising from a profound belief that France was the first country in the world, and himself the first of Frenchmen; and he had a magnificent courtesy of demeanour, which so impressed all who came near him as to make them his willing slaves.  “There is enough in him to make four kings and one respectable man besides” was what Mazarin said of him; and when in 1661 the cardinal died, the king showed himself fully equal to becoming his own prime minister.  “The State is myself,” he said, and all centred upon him so that no room was left for statesmen.  The court was, however, in a most brilliant state.  There had been an unusual outburst of talent of every kind in the lull after the Wars of Religion, and in generals, thinkers, artists, and men of literature, France was unusually rich.  The king had a wonderful power of self-assertion, which attached them all to him almost as if he were a sort of divinity.  The stately, elaborate Spanish etiquette brought in by his mother, Anne of Austria, became absolutely an engine of government.  Henry IV. had begun the evil custom of keeping the nobles quiet by giving them situations at court, with pensions attached, and these offices were multiplied to the most enormous and absurd degree, so that every royal personage had some hundreds of personal attendants.  Princes of the blood and nobles of every degree were contented to hang about the court, crowding into the most narrow lodgings at Versailles, and thronging its anterooms; and to be ordered to remain in the country was a most severe punishment.