ared at every trial," says the Marquis of
Torcy, "he felt within him just sorrow for a war whereof the weight
overwhelmed his subjects. More concerned for their woes than for his own
glory, he employed, to terminate them, means which might have induced
France to submit to the hardest conditions before obtaining a peace that
had become necessary, if God, protecting the king, had not, after
humiliating him, struck his foes with blindness."

There are regions to which superior minds alone ascend, and which are not
attained by the men, however distinguished, who succeed them. William
III. was no longer at the head of affairs in Europe; and the triumvirate
of Heinsius, Marlborough, and Prince Eugene did not view the aggregate of
things from a sufficiently calm height to free themselves from the
hatreds and, bitternesses of the strife, when the proposals of Louis XIV.
arrived at the Hague. "Amidst the sufferings caused to commerce by the
war, there was room to hope," says Torcy, "that the grand pensionary,
thinking chiefly of his country's interest, would desire the end of a war
of which he felt all the burdensomeness. Clothed with authority in his
own republic, he had no reason to fear either secret design or cabals to
displace him from a post which he filled to the satisfaction of his
masters, and in which he conducted himself with moderation. Up to that
time the United Provinces had borne the principal burden of the war. The
emperor alone reaped the fruit of it. One would have said that the
Hollanders kept the temple of peace, and that they had the keys of it in
their hands."

The king offered the Hollanders a very extended barrier in the Low
Countries, and all the facilities they had long been asking for their
commerce. He accepted the abandonment of Spain to the archduke, and
merely claimed to reserve to his grandson Naples, Sardinia, and Sicily.
This was what was secured to him by the second treaty of partition lately
concluded between England, tine United Provinces, and France; he did not
even demand Lothringen. President Rouille, formerly French envoy to
Lisbon, arrived disguised in Holland; conferences were opened secretly at
Bodegraven.

The treaties of partition negotiated by William of Orange, as well as
the wars which he had sustained against Louis XIV. with such persistent
obstinacy, had but one sole end, the maintenance of the European
equilibrium between the houses of Bourbon and Austria, which were