THE SPELL OF GRAND MONARCHY 359

wonderful 'ladies,5 under towers of powdered hair and wearing
vast expansions of silk and satin sustained on wire. Through it
all postured the great Louis, the sun of his world, unaware of
the meagre and sulky and bitter faces that watched him from
those lower darknesses to which his sunshine did not penetrate."

Louis XIV also decorated his court with poets, playwrights,
philosophers and scientific men. Boileau laid down the can-
ons of style; Corneille gave French drama its rhetorical and
classical form ; and Racine, its final perfection and polish.
The popular Moli&re (1622-73) wrote his incomparable co-
medies, and La Fontaine his simple and satirical fables on
the foibles of society. Voltaire called the age of Louis XIV
" the most enlightened age the world has ever seen" ; it
gave to French culture a stamp and prestige which were to
survive the loss of French political ascendancy, and even the
downfall of Grand Monarchy itself.

But there was also another side to this picture. Louis XIV
revived religious intolerance in France by his revocation of the
Edict of Nantes. Great numbers of his most sober and in-
dustrious subjects were driven abroad by his religious perse-
cutions, taking arts and industries with them. " Under his
rule," writes Mr. Wells, " were carried out the ' dragonnades/'
a peculiarly malignant and effectual form of persecution.
Rough soldiers were quartered in the houses of the Protest-
ants, and were free to disorder the life of their hosts and
insult their woman-kind as they thought fit. Men yielded
to that sort of pressure who would not have yielded to rack
and fire." The worst legacy of Louis XIV was, however, a
legacy of w^rs : ruinous to France and ruinous to Europe and.
the world, though immediately it looked like success.

His reign opened with the French acquisition of Alsace,
as a result of the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) .which ended
the Thirty Years' War, It tempted him to more ambitious
endeavours. Though these raised against him formidable