V. had had this
for its ultimate object. He seemed many times near it; but was never
to reach the goal. The absorption of Spain was a last and desperate
attempt. It had failed. France had not won the leadership of European
civilization.

In the coming reign, new forces, new conditions, were to widen the
field of national ambitions. And it was the nation across the channel
which would grasp these forces and distance her rivals in an advance
along the untried paths of commerce and a world-wide expansion.

With a strange apathy France had seen herself mistress of a large part
of the American Continent, won for her by adventurous Frenchmen and
Catholic missionaries. She did practically nothing to develop this
magnificent colonial empire. Failing to comprehend changing
conditions, the same old problem, with a towering house of Hapsburg,
obscured her view, and remained the great unchanging fact about which
her policy revolved.

Louis XV. was five years old when, in 1715, he became heir to a throne
absolutely rigid. The best work of Richelieu and Mazarin and Louis
XIV. had been expended upon it. Absolutism could go no farther. The
king was all; next below him a fawning, obsequious nobility, and then
that vague entity known as "the people," a remote invisible force,
sustaining the weight of the splendid pyramid, the apex of which was
this boy of five.

The young Louis was being prepared to sit upon this giddy elevation.
The Duke of Orleans, his accomplished cousin, a competent instructor in
vice, was chosen as regent, and the royal education began. The best
and rarest of the world's culture was at his service. Fenelon, the
polished ecclesiastic, fed him the classics in tempting form from his
own Telemaque, written for the purpose. Although this work was later
suppressed by the boy's royal father under the suspicion of being a
covert satire upon his own reign, in which Madame de Montespan was
represented by Calypso; and other famous or infamous members of his
court also appeared in thin disguise.

The handsome boy was breathing the atmosphere of genius created by an
age which compares well with those of Pericles and Augustus and the
Medici, and nourished at the same time by the exhalations from a new
crop of vices growing out of the decaying remains of those left by the
old court.

CHAPTER XIV.

Such was the preparation for a supreme crisis in the life of the
Kingdom.

The enormous debt left by the