ment of her beauty," Anne d'Autriche. Though he was as faithful
to his marriage vows as Saint-Louis, it is said, he seems to have always
maintained for his wife a profound contempt, and, when the little Louis
XIV was born, refused to take the infant in his arms, or to kiss it,
which wounded the mother more than all his previous neglect. His
treatment of his own mother in her later days was even more
reprehensible; she was banished, and left in indigence and humiliation
till her death, at Cologne, July 3, 1642. Her sole piece of jewelry, a
cross surrounded with diamonds, and containing a piece of the true
cross, she bequeathed to her daughter Henrietta, wife of Charles I of
England. It was through Marie de Medicis, whom he afterward opposed so
consistently, that the Bishop of Lucon, afterward Cardinal Richelieu,
first was called to court, and during the king's minority and tutelage
the government was administered by "the three robes," the queen-mother,
the Bishop of Lucon, and the wife of the Italian favorite Concini, the
Marechal d'Ancre, killed on the drawbridge of the Louvre when he became
too overbearing and obnoxious.

[Illustration: AFTER A MORNING MEETING IN THE BOIS DE BOULOGNE. From the
painting by Nicolas Sicard.]

"The distinguishing characteristic of the _Siecle de Louis XIV_," says
M. Maxime Petit, in his review of the important work by Emile Bourgeois,
_Le Grand Siecle_, "that which Voltaire selected as the most important,
is not the history of the negotiations and the battles, but that of
the manners and customs, the ideas, the beliefs, the letters, and the
arts.... Never, perhaps, more than in the time of Louis XIV was there a
more complete harmony between the ideas and the life. The political
forces are thoroughly disciplined, and the principle of authority, which
Richelieu had developed to its fullest extent, reigns uncontested.
Polite society--the only one to be considered--believes itself to be in
possession of absolute rules, and, in the court as in the city, the
heart abdicates in favor of reason." "When one speaks of the seventeenth
century in France," says M. Louis Farges, "it appears, to those who are
neither historians nor professional scholars, as one of those rare
epochs in which all the forces of the nation concentrate and develop in
a serene and majestic unity. France seems, then, to be at the summit of
her political power, of her intellectual and artistic development, of
her religious and