r the peace of
Tilsit, he now sets aside the rights of other nations, heaps galling
insults on independent potentates, and assumes the most arrogant tone in
all his relations with his neighbors or subjects. He makes conquests in
the midst of peace. He cites the princes of Europe before his councils.
He deprives the Elector Palatine and the Elector of Treves of some of
their most valuable seigniories. He begins to persecute the
Protestants. He seizes Luxembourg and the principality which belonged to
it. He humbles the republic of Genoa, and compels the Doge to come to
Versailles to implore his clemency. He treats with haughty insolence the
Pope himself, and sends an ambassador to his court on purpose to insult
him. He even insists on giving an Elector to Cologne.

And the same inflated pride and vanity which led Louis to trample on the
rights of other nations, led him into unbounded extravagance in
palace-building. Versailles arose,--at a cost, some affirm, of a
thousand millions of livres,--unrivalled for magnificence since the fall
of the Caesars. In this vast palace did he live, more after the fashion
of an Oriental than an Occidental monarch, having enriched and furnished
it with the wonders of the world, surrounded with princes, marshals,
nobles, judges, bishops, ambassadors, poets, artists, philosophers, and
scholars, all of whom rendered to him perpetual incense. Never was such
a grand court seen before on this earth: it was one of the great
features of the seventeenth century. There was nothing censurable in
collecting all the most distinguished and illustrious people of France
around him: they must have formed a superb society, from which the proud
monarch could learn much to his enlightenment. But he made them all
obsequious courtiers, exacted from all an idolatrous homage, and
subjected them to wearisome ceremonials. He took away their intellectual
independence; he banished Racine because the poet presumed to write a
political tract. He made it difficult to get access to his person; he
degraded the highest nobles by menial offices, and insulted the nation
by the exaltation of abandoned women, who squandered the revenues of the
state in their pleasures and follies, so that this grand court, alike
gay and servile, intellectual and demoralized, became the scene of
perpetual revels, scandals, and intrigues.

It was at this period that Louis abandoned himself to those adulterous
pleasures which have ever disgraced