greater men than either Bossuet, Bourdaloue, Flechier, or Massillon.

Not one of the clergy we have named, powerful orators though they
were, ever ventured to call in question the cruelties with which the
King sought to compel the Protestants to embrace the dogmas of their
Church. There were no doubt many Catholics who deplored the force
practised on the Huguenots; but they were greatly in the minority,
and had no power to make their opposition felt. Some of them
considered it an impious sacrilege to compel the Protestants to take
the Catholic sacrament--to force them to accept the host, which
Catholics believed to be the veritable body of Christ, but which the
Huguenots could only accept as bread, over which some function had
been performed by the priests, in whose miraculous power of conversion
they did not believe.

Fenelon took this view of the forcible course employed by the Jesuits;
but he was in disgrace as a Jansenist, and what he wrote on the
subject remained for a long time unknown, and was only first published
in 1825. The Duc de Saint-Simon, also a Jansenist, took the same view,
which he embodied in his "Memoirs;" but these were kept secret by his
family, and were not published for nearly a century after his death.

Thus the Catholic Church remained triumphant. The Revocation was
apparently approved by all, excepting the Huguenots. The King was
flattered by the perpetual conversions reported to be going on
throughout the country--five thousand persons in one place, ten
thousand in another, who had abjured and taken the communion--at once,
and sometimes "instantly."

"The King," says Saint-Simon, "congratulated himself on his power and
his piety. He believed himself to have renewed the days of the
preaching of the Apostles, and attributed to himself all the honour.
The Bishops wrote panegyrics of him; the Jesuits made the pulpits
resound with his praises.... He swallowed their poison in deep
draughts."[8]

[Footnote 8: "Memoirs of the Duke of Saint-Simon," translated
by Bayle St. John, vol. III. p 250.]

Louis XIV. lived for thirty years after the Edict of Nantes had been
revoked. He had therefore the fullest opportunity of observing the
results of the policy he had pursued. He died in the hands of the
Jesuits, his body covered with relics of the true cross. Madame de
Maintenon, the "famous and fatal witch," as Saint-Simon called her,
abandoned him at last; and the King died, lamented