The modern history of love opens with laughter, the rich faunesque laugh of Francois I{er}.  In Italy he had lost, as he expressed it, everything-fors l’honneur.  For his consolation he found there gallantry, which Montesquieu defined as love’s light, delicate and perpetual lie.

Platonism is the melody of love; gallantry the parody.  Platonism beautifies virtue, gallantry embellishes vice.  It makes it a marquis, gives it brilliance and brio.  However it omit to spiritualize it does not degrade.  Moreover it improves manners.  Gallantry was the direct cause of the French Revolution.  The people bled to death to defray the amours of the great sent in their bill.  Love in whatever shape it may appear is always educational.

Hugo said that the French Revolution poured on earth the floods of civilization.  Mignet said that it established a new conception of things.  Both remarks apply to love.  But before it disappeared behind masks, patches, falbalas and the guillotine, to reappear in the more or less honest frankness which is its Anglo-Saxon garb to-day, there were several costumes in its wardrobe.

In Germany, and in the North generally, the least becoming fashions of the Middle Ages were still in vogue.  In Spain was the constant mantilla.  Originally it was white.  The smoke of the auto-da-fe had, in blackening it, put a morbid touch of hysteria beneath.  In France, a brief bucolic skirt, that of Amaryllis, was succeeded by the pretentious robes of Rambouillet.  In England, the Elizabethan ruff, rigid and immaculate-when seen from a distance-was followed by the yielding Stuart lace.  Across the sea fresher modes were developing in what is now the land of Mille Amours.

In Italy at the moment, gallantry was the fashion.  Francois I{er} adopted it, and with it splendor, the magnificence that goes to the making of a monarch’s pomp.  In France hitherto every castle had been a court than which that of the king was not necessarily superior.  Francois I{er} was the first of French kings to make his court first of all courts, a place of art, luxury, constant display.  It became a magnet that drew the nobility from their stupid keeps, detaining them, when young, with adventure; when old, with office, providing, meanwhile, for the beauty of women a proper frame.  Already at a garden party held on a field of golden cloth the first Francis of France had shown the eighth Henry of England how a king could shine.  He was dreaming then of empire.  The illusion, looted at Pavia, hovered over Fontainebleau and Chambord, royal residences which, Italian artists aiding, he then constructed and where, though not emperor, for a while he seemed to be.

Elsewhere, in Paris, in his maison des menus plaisirs-a house in the rue de l’Hirondelle-the walls were decorated with salamanders-the fabulous emblems of inextinguishable loves; or else with hearts, which, set between alphas and omegas, indicated the beginning and the end of earthly aims.  The loves and hearts were very many, as multiple as those of Solomon.  Except by Brantome not one of them was compromised.  Francois I{er} was the loyal protector of what he called l’honneur des dames, an honor which thereafter it was accounted an honor to abrogate for the king.

“If,” said Sauval, “the seraglio of Henri II was not as wide as that of Francois I{er}, his court was not less elegant.”

The court at that time had succumbed to the refinements of Italy.  Women who previously were not remarkable for fastidiousness, had, Brantome noted, acquired so many elegancies, such fine garments and beautiful graces that they were more delectable than those of any other land.  Brantome added that if Henri II loved them, at least he loved but one.

That one was Dianne de Poytiers.  Brantome suspected her of being a magician, of using potable gold.  At the age of seventy she was, he said, “aussy fraische et aussy aymable comme en l’aage de trente ans.”  Hence the suspicion, otherwise justified.  In France among queens-de la main gauche-she had in charm but one predecessor, Agnes Sorel, and but one superior, La Valliere.  The legendary love which that charm inspired in Henri II had in it a troubadourian parade and a chivalresque effacement.  In its fervor there was devotion, in its passion there was poetry, there was humility in its strength.  At the Louvre, at Fontainebleau, on the walls without, in the halls within, on the cornices of the windows, on the panels of the doors, in the apartments of Henri’s wife, Catherine de’ Medici, everywhere, the initials D and H, interlaced, were blazoned.  Dianne had taken for device a crescent.  It never set.  No other star eclipsed it.  When she was sixty her colors were still worn by the king who in absence wrote to her languorously: 

Madame ma mye, je vous suplye avoir souvenance de celuy quy n’a jamais connu que ung Dyeu et une amye, et vous assurer que n’aurez poynt de honte de m’avoyr donne lé nom de serviteur, lequel je vous suplye de me conserver pour james.

Dianne too had but ung Dyeu et un amy-one God and one friend.  It was not the king.  More exactly it was a king greater than he.  This woman who fascinated everybody even to Henri’s vampire-wife was, financially, insatiable.  The exactions of the Pompadour and the exigencies of the Du Barry were trumpery beside the avidity with which she absorbed castles, duchies, provinces, compelling her serviteur to grant her all the vacant territories of the realm-a fourth of the kingdom.  At his death, beautiful still, “aussy fraische et aussy belle que jamais,” she retreated to her domain, slowly, royally, burdened with the spoils of France.

Brantome was right.  She did drink gold.  She was an enchantress.  She was also a precedent for women who in default of royal provinces for themselves got royal dukedoms for their children.

By comparison Catherine de’ Medici is spectral.  In her train were perfumes that were poisons and with them what was known as moeurs italiennes, customs that exceeded anything in Suetonius and with which came hybrid-faced youths whose filiation extended far back through Rome, through Greece, to the early Orient and who, under the Valois, were mignons du roi.  Apart from them the atmosphere of the queen had in it corruption of decay, an odor of death from which Henri II recoiled as from a serpent, issued, said Michelet, from Italy’s tomb.  Cold as the blood of the defunct, at once sinister and magnificent, committing crimes that had in them the grandeur of real majesty, the accomplice if not the instigator of the Hugenot massacre, Satan gave her four children:-Francois II, the gangrened husband of Mary Stuart; Charles IX, the maniac of St. Bartholomew; Henri III who, pomp deducted, was Heliogabalus in his quality of Imperatrix, and the Reine Margot, wife of Henri IV.

It would have been interesting to have seen that couple, gallant, inconstant, memorable, popular, both, to employ a Gallicism, franchement paillards.  But it would have been curious to have seen Margot, as a historian described her, carrying about a great apron with pockets all around it, in each of which was a gold box and in each box, the embalmed heart of a lover-memorabilia of faces and fancies that hung, by night, at her bed.

“All the world published her as a goddess,” another historian declared, “and thence she took pleasure all her life in being called Venus Urania, as much to show that she participated in divinity as to distinguish her love from that of the vulgar, for she had a higher idea of it than most women have.  She affected to hold that it is better practised in the spirit than in the flesh, and ordinarily had this saying in her mouth:  ‘Voulez-vous cesser d’aimer, possedez la chose aimée.’"

The historian added:  “I could make a better story about it than has ever been written but I have more serious matters in hand.”

What Dupleix omitted Brantome supplied.  To the latter the pleasure of but beholding Margot equalled any joy of paradise.

Henri IV must have thought otherwise.  He tried to divorce her.  Margot objected.  The volage Henri had become interested in the beaux yeux of Gabrielle d’Estrees.  Margot did not wish to be succeeded by a lady whom she called “an ordinary person.”  But later, for reasons dynastic, she consented to abdicate in favor of Marie de Medici, and, after the divorce, remained with Henri on terms no worse than before, visited by him, a contemporary has stated, reconciled, counselled, amused.

Gabrielle, astonishingly delicate, deliciously pink, apparently very poetic, but actually prosaic in the extreme, entranced the king who ceaselessly had surrendered to the fair warriors of the Light Brigade.  But to Gabrielle the surrender was complete.  He delivered his sword to mes chers amours, as he called her, mes belles amours, regarding as one yet multiple this fleur des beautés du monde, astre clair de la France, whose portrait, painted as he expressed it in all perfection, was in his soul, his heart, his eyes-temporarily that is, but, while it lasted, so coercive that it lifted this woman into a sultana who shared as consort the honors of the triumphal entry of the first Bourbon king into the Paris that was worth to him a mass.

“It was in the evening,” said L’Estoile, “and on horseback he crossed the bridge of Notre Dame, well pleased at the sight of all the people crying loudly ‘Live the King!’ And, it was laughingly, hat in hand, that he bowed to the ladies and demoiselles.  Behind him was a flag of lilies.  A little in advance, in a magnificent litter, was Gabrielle covered with jewels so brilliant that they offended (offusquoient) the lights.”

However much or little the gems then affected the lights, later they pleased the Medician Marie.  She draped herself with them.  In the interim a divorce had been got from Margot.  Death had brought another from Gabrielle.  The latter divorce poison probably facilitated.  Gabrielle, through the sheer insolence of her luxury had made herself hated by the poverty-stricken Parisians.  The detail is unimportant.  There was another hatred that she had aroused.  Not Henri’s however.  When she died he declared that the root of his love, dead with her, would never grow again-only to find it as flourishing as ever, flourishing for this woman, flourishing for that, budding ceaselessly in tropic profusion, until the dagger put by Marie in the hand of Ravaillac, extirpated it, but not its blossoms, which reflowered at Whitehall.

Henri’s daughter, Henriette de France, was mother of Charles the Second.

The latter’s advent in Puritan England effected a transformation for which history has no parallel.  In the excesses of sanctimoniousness in which the whole country swooned, it was as though piety had been a domino and the Restoration the stroke of twelve.  In the dropping of masks the world beheld a nation of sinners where a moment before had been a congregation of saints.

Previously, in the Elizabethan age, social conditions had made up in winsomeness what they lacked in severity.  Whitehall, under James, became a replica, art deducted, of the hermaphroditisms of the Valois court.  Thereafter the quasi-divinity of the sovereign evaporated in a contempt that endured unsatiated until Charles I, who had discovered that a king can do no wrong, discovered that he could lose his head.  In the amputation a crown fell which Cromwell disdained to gather.  Meanwhile the false spirit of false godliness that generated British cant and American hypocrisy made a nation, as it made New England, glum.  In Parliament where a Bible lay open for reference, it was resolved, that no person should be admitted to public service of whose piety the House was not assured.  In committees of ways and means, members asked each other had they found the Lord.  Amusements were sins; theatres, plague-spots; trifles, félonies; art was an abomination and love a shame.

Israel could not have been more depressing than England was then.  A reaction was indicated.  Even without Charles it would have come.  But when the arid air was displaced by the Gallic atmosphere which he brought, England turned a handspring.  The godliness that hitherto had stalked unchecked was flouted into seclusion.  Anything appertaining to Puritanism was jeered away.  Only in the ultra-conservatism of the middle-classes did prudery persist.  Elsewhere, among criminals and courtiers, the new fashion was instantly in vogue.  The memoirs and diaries of the reign disclose a world of rakes and demi-reps, a life of brawls and assignations, much drink, high play, great oaths, a form of existence summarizable in the episode of Buckingham and Shrewsbury in which the former killed the latter, while Lady Shrewsbury, dressed as a page, held the duke’s horse, and approvingly looked on.

The Elizabethan and intermediate dramatists, mirroring life as they saw it, displayed infidelity as a punishable crime and constancy as a rewardable virtue.  By the dramatists of the Restoration adultery was represented as a polite occupation and virtue as a provincial oddity.  Men wooed and women were won as readily as they were handed in to supper, scarcely, Macaulay noted, with anything that could be called a preference, the men making up to the women for the same reason that they wore wigs, because it was the fashion, because, otherwise, they would have been thought city prigs, puritans for that matter.  Love is not discernible in that society though philosophy is.  But it was the philosophy of Hobbes who taught that good and evil are terms used to designate our appetites and aversions.

Higher up, Charles II, indolent, witty, debonair, tossing handkerchiefs among women who were then, as English gentlewomen are to-day, the most beautiful in the world, was suffering from that nostalgia for mud which affected the fifteenth Louis.

The Du Barry, who dishonored the scaffold as well as the throne, has a family likeness to Nell Gwynne.  Equally canaille, the preliminary occupations of these grisettes differed only in taste.  One sold herrings, the other hats.  The Du Barry’s sole heirs were the cocottes of the Second Empire.  From Nell, the dukes of St. Albans descend.  From Barbara Palmer come the dukes of Grafton; from Louise de la Querouaille, the dukes of Richmond; from Lucy Walters, the dukes of Buccleuch.  These ladies, as Nell called them, were early miniatures of the Châteauroux and the Pompadour.  Like them they made the rain and the fine weather, but, though dukes also, not princes of the blood.  Charles cared for them, cared for others, cared for more but always cavalierly, indifferent whether they were constant or not, yet most perhaps for Nell, succumbing ultimately in the full consciousness of a life splendidly misspent, apologizing to those that stood about for the ridiculous length of time that it took him to die, asking them not to let poor Nelly starve and bequeathing to the Georges the excellence of an example which those persons were too low to grasp.

Anteriorly, before Charles had come, at the period of London’s extremest piety, Paris was languishingly sentimental.  Geography, in expanding surprises, had successively disclosed the marvels of the Incas, the elder splendors of Cathay and the enchantments of fairyland.  Then a paradise virgin as a new planet swam into the general ken.  In Perrault’s tales, which had recently appeared, were vistas of the land of dreams.  Directly adjoining was the land of love.  Its confines extended from the Hotel de Rambouillet.

In that house, to-day a department store, conversation was first cultivated as an art.  From the conversation a new theory of the affections developed.  For the first time people young and old learned the precious charm of sentiment.  The originator, Mme. de Rambouillet, was a woman of much beauty who, in days very lax, added to the allurement of her appearance the charm of exclusiveness.  It was so novel that people went to look at it.  Educated in Italy, imbued with its pretentious elegancies, saturated with platonic strains, physically too fragile and temperamentally too sensitive for the ribald air of a reckless court, she drew society to her house, where, without perhaps intending it she succeeded in the chimerical.  Among a set of people to whom laxity was an article of faith she made the observance of the Seventh Commandment an object of fashionable meditation.  She did more.  In gallantry there is a little of everything except love.  To put it there is not humanly possible.  Mme. de Rambouillet did not try.  She did better.  She inserted respect.

In her drawing-room-historically the first salon that the world beheld-this lady, in conjunction with her collaborators, exacted from men that deference, not of bearing merely, but of speech, to which every woman is entitled and which, everywhere, save only in Italy, women had gone without.  Hitherto people of position had not been recognizable by their manners, they had none; nor by their language which was coarse as a string of oaths.  They were known by the elegance of their dress.  In the Hotel de Rambouillet, and thereafter little by little elsewhere, they became known by the elegance of their address.  It was a great service and an enduring one and though, through the abolition of the use of the exact term, it faded the color from ink, it yet induced the lexical refinement from which contemporaneous good form proceeds.  In polishing manners it sandpapered morals.  It gave to both the essential element of delicacy which they possess to-day.  Subsequently, under the dissolvent influences of Versailles and through ridicule’s more annihilating might, though manners persisted morals did not.  But before the reaction came attar of rose was really distilled from mud.  Gross appetites became sublimated.  Instead of ribaldry there were kisses in the moonlight, the caress of eyes from which recklessness had gone.  Petrarchism returned, madrigals came in vogue, the social atmosphere was deodorized again.  Into gallantry an affected sentimentality entered, loitered awhile and languished away.  Women, hitherto disquietingly solid, became impalpable as the Queens of Castile whom it was treason to touch.  Presently, when, in the Precieuses Ridicules, Moliere laughed at them, the shock was too great, they disintegrated.  In the interim, sentiment dwindled into nonsense and love, evaporating in pretentiousness, was discoverable, if anywhere, only on a map.

That surprising invention was the work of Mlle. de Scudery, one of the affiliated in the Hotel de Rambouillet.  A little before, Honore d’Urfe had written a pastoral in ten interminable volumes.  Entitled Astree it was a mirror for the uncertain aspirations of the day, a vast flood of tenderness in which every heart-throb, every reason for loving and for not loving, every shape of constancy and every form of infidelity, every joy, every deception, every conscience twinge that can visit sweethearts and swains was analyzed, subdivided and endlessly set forth.  To a world still in fermentation it provided the laws of Love’s Twelve Tables, the dream after realism, the high flown after the matter of fact.  Its vogue was prodigious.  Whatever it omitted Mlle. de Scudery’s Clelie, another novel, equally interminable, equally famous, equally forgotten, supplied.

The latter story which was translated into all polite tongues, Arabic included, taught love as love had never been taught before.  It taught it as geography is taught to-day, providing for the purpose a Carte du Tendre, the map of a country in which everything, even to I hate you, was tenderly said.

A character described it.

The first city at the lower end of the map is New Friendship.  Now, inasmuch as love may be due to esteem, to gratitude, or to inclination, there are three cities called Tenderness, each situated on one of three different rivers that are approached by three distinct routes.  In the same manner, therefore, that we speak of Cumes on the Ionian Sea and Cumes on the Sea of Tyrrhinth, so is there Tenderness-on-Inclination, Tenderness-on-Esteem, and Tenderness-on-Gratitude.  Yet, as the affection which is due to inclination needs nothing to complete it, there is no stopping place on the way from New Friendship there.  But to go from New Friendship to Tenderness-on-Esteem is very different.  Along the banks are as many villages as there are things little and big which create that esteem of which affection is the flower.  From New Friendship the river flows to a place called Great Wit, because it is there that esteem generally begins.  Beyond are the agreeable hamlets of Pretty Verses and Billets Doux, after which come the larger towns of Sincerity, Big Heart, Honesty, Generosity, Respect, Punctuality, and Kindness.  On the other hand, to go from New Friendship to Tenderness-on-Gratitude, the first place reached is Complaisance, then come the borough of Submission, and, next, Delicate-Attentions.  From the latter Assiduousness is reached and, finally, Great Services.  This place, probably because there are so few that get there is the smallest of all.  But adjoining it is Obedience and contiguous is Constancy.  That is the most direct route to Tenderness-on-Gratitude.  Yet, as there are no routes in which one may not lose one’s way, so, if, after leaving New Friendship, you went a little to the right or a little to the left, you would get lost also.  For if, in going from Great Wit, you took to the right, you would reach Negligence, keeping on you would get to Inequality, from there you would pass to Lukewarm and Forgetfulness, and presently you would be on the lake of Indifference.  Similarly if, in starting from New Friendship you took to the left, one after another you would arrive at Indiscretion, Perfidiousness, Pride, Tittle-Tattle, Wickedness and, instead of landing at Tenderness-on-Gratitude, you would find yourself at Enmity, from which no boats return.

The vogue of Astree was enormous.  That of Clelie exceeded it.  Throughout Europe, wherever lovers were, the map of the Pays du Tendre was studied.  But its indications, otherwise excellent, did not prevent Mlle. de Scudery from reaching Emnity herself.  The Abbe d’Aubignac produced a history of the Kingdom of Coquetry in which were described Flattery Square, Petticoat Lane, Flirtation Avenue, Sweet Kiss Inn, the Bank of Rewards and the Church of Good-by.  Between the abbe and the demoiselle a conversation ensued relative to the priority of the idea.  It was their first and their last.  The one real hatred is literary hate.

Meanwhile the puerilities of Clelie platitudinously repeated across the Channel, resulted at Berlin in the establishment of an Academy of True Love.  Then, into the entire nonsense, the Cid blew virilly a resounding note.

In that splendid drama of Corneille, Rodrigue and Chimene, the hero and heroine, are to love what martyrs were to religion, all in all for it and for nothing else whatever.  They moved to the clash of swords, to the clatter of much duelling, a practice which Richelieu opposed.  Said Boileau: 

     En vain contre lé Cid un ministre se ligue,
     Tout Paris pour Chimene a les yeux de Rodrigue.

They merited the attention.  Theirs was real love, a love struggling between duty and fervor, one that effected the miracle of an interchange of soul, transferring the entity of the beloved into the heart of the lover and completed at last by a union entered into with the pride of those who recognize above their own will no higher power than that of God.  Admirable and emulative the beauty of it passed into a proverb:-“C’est beau comme lé Cid.”

The Cid was a Spaniard.  But of another age.  Melancholy but very proud, the Spaniard of the seventeenth century lived in a desert which the Inquisition had made.  The Holy Office that had sent Christ to the Aztecs brought back Vizlipoutzli, a Mexican deity whose food was hearts.  His carnivorousness interested the priests at home.  They put night around them, a night in which there was flame, fireworks of flesh at which a punctilious etiquette required that royalty should assist and which, while inducing the hysteria that there entered into love, illuminated the path of empire from immensity to nothingness.

At the close of the seventeenth century, Spain, bankrupt through the expulsion of the Jews, barren through loss of the Moors, was a giant, moribund and starving.  Only the Holy Office, terribly alive, was terribly fed.  Every man was an object of suspicion and every man was suspicious.  The secret denunciation, the sudden arrest, the dungeon, the torture, the stake, these things awaited any one.  The nation, silent, sombre, morbid, miserably poor, none the less was draped proudly enough in its tatters.  The famine, haughty itself, that stalks through the pages of Cervantes is the phantom of that pride.  Beside it should be placed the rigid ceremonial of an automaton court where laughter was neither heard nor permitted, where men had the dress and the gravity of mutes, where women counted their beads at balls, where a minutious etiquette that inhibited a queen from looking from a window and assumed that she had no legs, regulated everything, attitudes, gifts, gestures, speech, the etiquette of the horrible Escorial through which gusts of madness blew.

Other courts had fools.  The court of Spain had Embevecidos, idiots who were thought to be drunk with love and who, because of their condition, were permitted, like grandees, to wear the hat in the presence.  On festivals there were other follies, processions semi-erotic, wholly morbid, through cathedrals haunted by entremetteuses, through chapels in which hung Madonnas that fascinated and shocked, Virgins that more nearly resembled Infantas serenaded by caballeros than queens of the sky and beneath whose indulgent eyes rendez-vous were made by lovers whom, elsewhere, etiquette permitted only the language of signs.

To journey then from Madrid to Paris was like passing from a picture by Goya to a tale of Perrault.  Paris at the time was marvelling at two wonders, an earthly Olympus and real love.  The first was Versailles, the second La Valliere.  Louis XIV created the one and destroyed the other.  Already married, attentive meanwhile to his brother’s wife, he was coincidentally epris with their various maids of honor.  Among them was a festival of beauty in the festival of life, a girl of eighteen who had been made for caresses and who died of them, the only human being save Louis XIV that ever loved the fourteenth Louis.  Other women adulated the king.  It was the man that Louise de la Valliere adored.  To other women his sceptre was a fan.  To her it was a regret.  Could he have been some mere lieutenant of the guards she would have preferred it inexpressibly.  The title of duchess which he gave her was a humiliation which she hid beneath the name of Soeur Louise de la Misericorde.  For her youth which was a poem of love had the cloister for climax.  That love, a pastime to him, was death to her.  At its inception she fled from it, from the sun, from the Sun-King, and flinging at him a passionate farewell, flung herself as passionately into a convent.

Louis stormed it.  If necessary he would have burned it.  He strode in booted and spurred as already he had stalked into Parliament where he shouted:-“L’Etat c’est moi.”  Mlle. de la Valliere c’était lui aussi.  The girl, then prostrate before a crucifix, was clinging to the feet of a Christ.  But her god was the king.  He knew it.  When he appeared so did she.  For a moment, Louis, he to whom France knelt, knelt to her.  For a moment the monarch had vanished.  A lover was there.  From a chapel came an odor of incense.  Beyond, a knell was being tolled.  For background were the scared white faces of nuns, alarmed at this irruption of human passion in a retreat where hearts were stirred but by the divine.  A moment only.  Louis, with his prey, had gone.

Thereafter for a few brief years, this girl who, had she wished could have ruled the world, wanted, not pomp, not power, not parade, love, merely love, nothing else.  It was very ambitious of her.  Yet, precisely as through fear of love she had flung herself into a cloister, at the loss of it she returned there, hiding herself so effectually in prayer that the king himself could hardly have found her-had he tried.  He omitted to.  Louis then was occupied with the Marquise de Montespan.  Of trying he never thought.  On the contrary.  Mme. de Montespan was very fetching.

A year later, in the Church of the Carmélites, in the presence of the patient queen, of the impatient marquise, of the restless court-complete, save for Louis who was hunting-Mlle. de la Valliere, always semi-seraphic but then wholly soul, saw the severe Bossuet slowly ascend the pulpit, saw him bow there to the queen, make the sign of the cross and, before he motioned the bride to take the black veil which was a white shroud, heard, above the sobs of the assistants, his clear voice proclaim:-

     ‘Et dixit qui sedebat in throno:  Ecce nova facio omnia.’

Behind the bars, behind the veil, wrapped in that shroud, for thirty-six years Louise de la Misericorde, dead to love and dead to life, expiated her ambition.

The fate of Louis Quatorze was less noble.  The Olympus in which he was Jupiter with the Montespan for Venus became a prison.  The jailer was Mme. de Maintenon.  Intermediately was the sun.  That was his emblem.  About him the spheres revolved.  To him incense ascended.  A nobody by comparison to Alexander, unworthy of a footnote where Cæsar is concerned, through sheer pomp, through really royal magnificence, through a self-infatuation at once ridiculous and sublime, through the introduction of a studied politeness, a ceremonial majestic and grave, through a belief naively sincere and which he had the ability to instil, that from him everything radiated and to him all, souls, hearts, lives, property, everything, absolutely belonged, through these things, in a gilded balloon, this pigmy rose to the level of heroes and hung there, before a wondering world, over a starving land, until the wind-inflated silk, pierced by Marlborough, collapsed.

In the first period Versailles was an opera splendidly given, the partition by Lully, the libretto by Moliere, in which the monarch, as tenor, strutted on red heels, ogling the prime donne, eyeing the house, warbling airs solemn yet bouffe.  In the second the theatre was closed.  Don Juan had turned monk.  The kingdom of Louis XIV was no longer of this world.  It was then only that he was august.  In the first period was the apogee of absolutism, the incarnation of an entire nation in one man who in pompous scandals, everywhere imitated, gave a ceremonious dignity to sin.  Over the second a biblical desolation spread.