he young king was asked to whom
the ministers should bring their portfolios. To which came the
unexpected reply, "_To me_."

CHAPTER XIII.

The wily Italian was gone, and Louis XIV. settled himself upon the
throne which Richelieu had rendered so exalted and immovable.

Cardinal Mazarin had said of the young Louis that "there was enough in
him to make four kings, and one honest man." His greatness consisted
more in amplitude than in kind. Nature made him in prodigal mood. He
was an average man of colossal proportions. His ability, courage,
dignity, industry, greed for power and possessions, were all on a
magnificent scale, and so were his vanity, his loves, his cruelties,
his pleasures, his triumphs, and his disappointments.

No king more wickedly oppressed France, and none made her more
glorious. He made her feared abroad and magnificent at home, but he
desolated her, and drained her resources with ambitious wars. He
crowned her with imperishable laurels in literature, art, and every
manifestation of genius, but he signed the Revocation of the Edict of
Nantes, and drove out of his kingdom 500,000 of the best of his
subjects.

The marriage of the Dauphin with the Infanta of Spain had occurred
before he attained his majority. It was planned by Mazarin, and was a
part of the policy left as a fatal bequest to Louis XIV. by that
minister.

The Salic Law was not recognized in Spain. Hence, the crown might
descend to an heiress, and by her be transmitted to her husband. Such
was the hope in the marriage of Louis with the Infanta; the hope of
some happy turn of fortune, some break in the line of succession
whereby the Spanish kingdom might be absorbed into a Bourbon empire, as
it had once been in the empire of the Hapsburgs. This was the _ignis
fatuus_ which was to control the policy of this stormy reign, and which
was to envelop it at last in the clouds of defeat and disaster.

The secret of Louis' greatness was his instinctive recognition of
greatness in others. His new minister, Colbert, to whom he owed so
much, was a man of the people, and a protestant. He it was who
discovered the peculations of Fouquet, the magnificent Minister of
Finance, who was building a palace at Vaux greater than the king
himself could afford, and who was suddenly swept from this princely
residence into the Bastille, where he spent the remaining years of his
life with plenty of leisure in which to think upon the forty th