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There he found his daughter, Madame d'Urban, who did all she could to induce him to stay with her; but to do so would have been to flout Louis XIV's orders too publicly, and the marquis was afraid to remain so much in evidence lest evil should befall him; he accordingly retired to the little village of l'Isle, built in a charming spot near the fountain of Vaucluse; there he was lost sight of; none ever heard him spoken of again, and when I myself travelled in the south of France in 1835, I sought in vain any trace of the obscure and forgotten death which closed so turbulent and stormy an existence.
This spirit of adventure specially began to show itself in the colony at the period when M. Talon became intendant, when the government of New France, at the time of Louis XIV's minister, Colbert, became vested directly in the French crown.
With his white, artificially curled hair, which gave the impression of being powdered, he resembled a major-domo of Louis XIV's time. As he stood there, head erect, looking over the swaying hall, he seemed to be the special squire of Captain von Kessel, who sat at the end of the middle prong, in the capacity both of host and most honoured guest.
But on the whole Leibniz's writings suggest that the important decisions cut across all the Churches, and not between them. At the point of Louis XIV's highest success, the Protestant princes had no hope but in Catholic Austria, and Austria was distracted by Turkish pressure in the rear. Leibniz hoped to relieve the situation by preaching a crusade.
I strove hard to curtail the list, but Père Le Tellier" Louis XIV's last confessor and a devoted Jesuit "had pledged his word to the King that the book contained more than one hundred errors, and with his foot on my neck, he compelled me to prove him right. I condemned only one more!"
His successor, Cardinal Mazarin, who conducted the government during Louis XIV's boyhood, was able to put down a last rising of the discontented nobility. When Mazarin died in 1661, he left to the young monarch a kingdom such as no previous French king had enjoyed.
It seems, indeed, probable that the almost magical rapidity and effect of Colbert's early reforms turned Louis XIV's head, and that he was convinced that it only depended on his good pleasure to renew them to obtain the same result. He never found, as he never deserved to find, another Colbert; and he stumbled onward in ever deeper ruin to his disastrous end.
So the little settlement became a crown colony again and came back to the king, but not to him in whose name it had been originally taken, for that king was dead. Louis XIV's name, kept in "Louisiana," claims now but a fragment of that vast territory which might have been his forever.
The addition of five hundred immigrants annually during the whole period of Louis XIV's reign would have given Canada in 1700 a population of five hundred thousand. It was thought that the mother country could not spare so many; and yet the cost in men to France of a single battle, the bloody victory of Senef in 1674, was eight thousand French soldiers.
I thought that fact rather amusing when I found it out, considering that the house I came so near to taking at Poigny was on the Rambouillet estate where his father, the Duke de Toulouse, one of Louis XIV's illegitimate sons, died, where the Duke de Penthievre was born, and where he buried his naughty son, the Duke de Lamballe.
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