eary solemn state at Versailles, where decorous Madame de
Maintenon was all-powerful. He did not lament {135} his Spanish wife
nor Colbert the minister, who died in the same year, for strict
integrity was not valued too highly by the King of France. Yet
Colbert's work remained in the mighty palaces his constructive energy
had planned, the bridges and fortresses and factories which he had held
necessary for France's future greatness as a nation. Louis paid scant
tribute of regret to the memory of one who had toiled indefatigably in
his service; but he looked complacently on Versailles and reflected
that it would survive, even if the laurels of glory should be wrested
from his brow.

In 1700, Louis' prestige had dwindled in Europe, where he had once been
feared as a sovereign ambitious for universal monarchy. William the
Stadtholder, now ruler of England with his Stuart wife, had been
disgusted by the persecution of the French Protestants and had resolved
to avenge Louis' seizure of his principality of Orange. Chance enabled
this man to ally the greater part of Europe against the ambition of the
Grand Monarch. War had been declared by England against France in
1689, and prosecuted most vigorously till Louis XIV was gradually
deprived of his finest conquests. Though this was concluded in 1697 by
the Peace of Ryswick, the French King's attempt to win the crown of
Spain for his grandson, the Duke of Anjou, caused a renewal of
hostilities.

William III was in failing health, but a mighty general had arisen to
defeat the projects of the French King. The news of the Duke of
Marlborough's victories in Flanders made it evident that the power of
Louis XIV in the battlefield was waning. Yet the French monarch did
not reflect the terror on the faces of his courtiers when the great
defeat of Lille was announced in his royal palace. He observed all the
usual duties of his daily {136} life and affected a serenity that other
men might envy when they bewailed the passing of the Old Order, or
repeated the prophecy once made by an astrologer that the end of Louis
XIV's reign should not be glorious as the beginning.

The King retained his marvellous composure to the last, too haughty to
bend before misfortune or to retire even if the enemy came to the very
gates of Paris. At seventy-six he still went out to hunt the stag; he
held Councils of State long after his health was really broken. He
said farewell to the officers of th