an piety, and
_belles-lettres_. A vast domed edifice was raised on the site of the
Tour de Nesle, and became famous as the College of the Four Nations.
It was subsequently expropriated and given by the Convention to the
five learned academies of France, and is now known as the Institut de
France.

[Illustration: THE INSTITUT DE FRANCE.]

CHAPTER XV

_The Grand Monarque--Versailles and Paris_

The century of Louis XIV., whose triumphs have been so extravagantly
celebrated by Voltaire, saw the culmination and declension of military
glory and literary splendour at Paris, and of regal magnificence at
Versailles. Gone were the times of cardinal dictators. When the
ministers came after Mazarin's death to ask the king whom they should
now address themselves to, the answer came like a thunderbolt: "To
me!"

What brilliant constellations of great men cast their influences over
the beginning of Louis XIV.'s reign! "Sire," said Mazarin, when dying,
"I owe you all, but I can partially acquit myself by leaving you
Colbert:"--austere Colbert, whose Atlantean shoulders bore the burden
of five modern ministries; whose vehement industry, admirable science
and sterling honesty created order out of financial chaos and found
the sinews of war for an army of 300,000 men before the Peace of
Ryswick and 450,000 for the war of the Spanish succession; who
initiated, nurtured and perfected French industries; who created a
navy that crushed the combined English and Dutch fleets off Beachy
Head, swept the Channel for weeks, burnt English ports, carried terror
into English homes, and for a time paralysed English commerce.
Louvois, his colleague, organised an army that made his master the
arbiter of Europe; Conde and Turenne were its victorious captains.
Vauban, greatest of military engineers, captured towns in war and made
them impregnable in peace, and shared with Louvois the invention of
the combined musket and bayonet, the deadliest weapon of war as yet
contrived. De Lionne, by masterly diplomacy, prepared and cemented the
conquests of victorious generals. Supreme in arts of peace were
Corneille, Moliere, Racine, La Fontaine, Lebrun, Claude Lorrain,
Puget, Mansard, and Perrault. We shall learn in the sequel what the
Grand Monarque did with this unparalleled inheritance.

None of the great ones of the earth is so intimately known to us as
the magnificent histrion, whose tinselled grandeur and pompous egoism
have been laid bare by