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!"

France at one stroke was impoverished. The skill, the trained hand,
the element which was at the foundation of her excellence, and of that
which was to constitute her future supremacy in the world, had gone to
enrich her enemies. And whether in Germany, in England, or America, no
foreign peop