often placed
in the position of having not a word of reply to say in the king's
presence. His defects corresponded with his great qualities. As a hater
and a friend he had no peer but Louvois." "How young! how fortunate how
great a position!" wrote Madame de Sevigne, on hearing of the death of M.
de Seignelay, "it seems as if splendor itself were dead."

Seignelay had spent freely, but he left at his death more than four
hundred thousand livres a year. Colbert's fortune amounted to ten
millions, legitimate proceeds of his high offices and the king's
liberalities. He was born of a family of merchants, at Rheims, ennobled
in the sixteenth century, but he was fond of connecting it with the
Colberts of Scotland. The great minister would often tell his children
to reflect "what their birth would have done for them if God had not
blessed his labors, and if those labors had not been extreme." He had
married his daughters to the Dukes of Beauvilliers, Chevreuse, and
Mortemart; Seignelay had wedded Mdlle. de Matignon, whose grandmother was
an Orleans-Longueville. "Thus," said Mdlle de Montpensier, "they have
the honor of being as closely related as M. le Prince to the king; Marie
de Bourbon was cousin-german to the king my grandfather. That lends a
grand air to M. de Seignelay, who had by nature sufficient vanity."
Colbert had no need to seek out genealogies, and great alliances were
naturally attracted to his power and the favor he was in. He had in
himself that title which comes of superior merit, and which nothing can
make up for, nothing can equal. He might have said, as Marshal Lannes
said to the Marquis of Montesquieu, who was exhibiting a coat taken out
of his ancestors' drawers, "I am an ancestor myself."

Louvois remained henceforth alone, without rival and without check. The
work he had undertaken for the reorganization of the army was pretty
nearly completed; he had concentrated in his own hands the whole
direction of the military service, the burden and the honor of which were
both borne by him. He had subjected to the same rules and the same
discipline all corps and all grades; the general as well as the colonel
obeyed him blindly. M. de Turenne alone had managed to escape from the
administrative level. "I see quite clearly," he wrote to Louvois on the
9th of September, 1673, "what are the king's wishes, and I will do all I
can to conform to them but you will permit me to tell you that I do not
think