become attached to Mary de Mancini,
niece of Mazarin, who returned his love with passionate ardor. She
afterwards married Prince Colonna, a Roman noble, and lived a most
abandoned life.

The enormous wealth left by Cardinal Mazarin was, doubtless, one
motive which induced Louis XIV., though only a young man of
twenty-three, to be his own prime minister. Henceforth, to his death,
all his ministers made their regular reports to him, and none were
permitted to go beyond the limits which he prescribed to them.

He accepted, at first, the ministers whom the dying cardinal had
recommended. The most prominent of these were Le Tellier, De Lionne,
and Fouquet. The last was intrusted with the public chest, who found
the means to supply the dissipated young monarch with all the money he
desired for the indulgence of his expensive tastes and ruinous
pleasures.

[Sidenote: Habits and Pleasures of Louis.]

The thoughts and time of the king, from the death of Mazarin, for six
or seven years, were chiefly occupied with his pleasures. It was then
that the court of France was so debauched, splendid, and far-famed. It
was during this time that the king was ruled by La Valliere, one of
the most noted of all his favorites, a woman of considerable beauty
and taste, and not so unprincipled as royal favorites generally have
been. She was created a duchess, and her children were legitimatized,
and also became dukes and princes. Of these the king was very fond,
and his love for them survived the love for their unfortunate mother,
who, though beautiful and affectionate, was not sufficiently
intellectual to retain the affections with which she inspired the most
selfish monarch of his age. She was supplanted in the king's
affections by Madame de Montespan, an imperious beauty, whose
extravagances and follies shocked and astonished even the most
licentious court in Europe; and La Valliere, broken-hearted,
disconsolate, and mortified, sought the shelter of a Carmelite
convent, in which she dragged out thirty-six melancholy and dreary
years, amid the most rigorous severities of self-inflicted penance, in
the anxious hope of that heavenly mansion where her sins would be no
longer remembered, and where the weary would be at rest.

It was during these years of extravagance and pleasure that Versailles
attracted the admiring gaze of Christendom, the most gorgeous palace
which the world has seen since the fall of Babylon. Amid its gardens
and grove