ds, and humiliated them as temporal powers, but he stood
by them in the exercise of their spiritual functions. In Louis' reign
the State and Church were firmly knit together. It was deemed necessary
to be a good Catholic in order to be even a citizen,--so that religion
became fashionable, provided it was after the pattern of that of the
King and court. Even worldly courtiers entered with interest into the
most subtile of theological controversies. But the King always took the
side devoted to the Pope, and he hated Jansenism almost as much as he
hated Protestantism. Hence the Catholic Church ever rallied to
his support.

So, with all these powerful supports Louis began his long reign of
seventy-six years,--which technically began when he was four years old,
on the death of his father Louis XIII., in 1643, when the kingdom was
governed by his mother, Anne of Austria, as regent, and by Cardinal
Mazarin as prime minister. During the minority of the King the
humiliation of the nobles continued. Protestantism was only tolerated,
and the country distracted rather than impoverished by the civil war of
the Fronde, with its intrigues and ever-shifting parties,--a giddy maze,
which nobody now cares to unravel; a sort of dance of death, in which
figured cardinals, princes, nobles, bishops, judges, and generals,--when
"Bacchus, Momus, and Moloch" alternately usurped dominion. Those
eighteen years of strife, folly, absurdity, and changing fortunes, when
Mazarin was twice compelled to quit the kingdom he governed; when the
queen-regent was forced also twice to fly from her capital; when
Cardinal De Retz disgraced his exalted post as Archbishop of Paris by
the vilest intrigues; when Conde and Conti obscured the lustre of their
military laurels; when alternately the parliaments made war on the
crown, and the seditious nobles ignobly yielded their functions merely
to register royal decrees,--these contests, rivalries, cabals, and
follies, ending however in the more solid foundations of absolute royal
authority, are not to be here discussed, especially as nobody can thread
that political labyrinth; and we begin, therefore, not with the
technical reign of the great King, but with his actual government,
which took place on the death of Mazarin, when he was twenty-two.

It is said that when that able ruler passed away so reluctantly from his
pictures and his government, the ministers asked of the young
King,--thus far only known for his ple