Protestantism in France From Death of Henry IV to the Revolution - James Aitken Wylie

field. In the course of his wars, there was scarcely a
country in Europe which he did not water with
French blood. By these long-continued and
sanguinary conflicts he still further humbled the
House of Austria, and annexed cities and provinces
to his dominions, to be stripped of them before his
reign closed; he crowned himself with laurels, to be
torn from his brow before he died. He got the title
of "the Great;" he had two triumphal arches erected
in his honor in Paris; and he contracted an
enormous debt, which paved the way for the
Revolution, that came like a whirlwind in his
grandson's time to sweep away that throne which
he had surrounded, as he believed, with a power
that was impregnable and a glory that was
boundless.
The error of Louis XIV, as a man, was his love
of pleasure. He lived in open and unrestrained
licentiousness. This laid him at the feet of his
confessor, and sank him into a viler vassalage than
that of the meanest vassal in all his dominions. The
"Great" Louis, the master of a mighty kingdom,
whose will was law to the millions who called him
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