ter her death, the reign of Madame de Maintenon was
complete. As the king could not live without her, and as she refused
to follow the footsteps of her predecessors, the king made her his
wife. And she was worthy of his choice; and her influence was, on the
whole, good, although she befriended the Jesuits, and prompted the
king to many acts of religious intolerance. It was chiefly through her
influence, added to that of the Jesuits, that the king revoked the
edict of Nantes, and its revocation was attended by great sufferings
and privations among the persecuted Huguenots. He had, on ascending
the throne, in 1643, confirmed the privileges of the Protestants; but,
gradually, he worried them by exactions and restraints, and, finally,
in 1685, by the revocation of the edict which Henry IV. had passed, he
withdrew his protection, and subjected them to a more bitter
persecution than at any preceding period. All the Protestant ministers
were banished, or sent to the galleys, and the children of Protestants
were taken from their parents, and committed to the care of their
nearest Catholic relations, or such persons as judges appointed. All
the terrors of military execution, all the artifices of priestcraft,
were put forth to make converts and such as relapsed were subjected to
cruel torments. A twentieth part of them were executed, and the
remainder hunted from place to place. By these cruelties, France was
deprived of nearly six hundred thousand of the best people in the
land--a great misfortune, since they contributed, in their dispersion
and exile, to enrich, by their agriculture and manufactures, the
countries to which they fled.

From this period of his reign to his death, Louis XIV. was a religious
bigot, and the interests of the Roman Church, next to the triumph of
absolutism, became the great desire of his life. He was punctual and
rigid in the outward ceremonials of his religion, and professed to
regret the follies and vices of his early life. Through the influence
of his confessor, the Jesuit La Chaise, and his wife, Madame de
Maintenon, he sent away Montespan from his court, and discouraged
those gayeties for which it had once been distinguished. But he was
always fond of ceremony of all kinds, and the etiquette of his court
was most irksome and oppressive, and wearied Madame de Maintenon
herself, and caused her to exclaim, in a letter to her brother, "Save
those who fill the highest stations, I know of none more unf