s; if you succeed, you will render me a great service; if
you are not successful, I shall not hold you to blame for circumstances."
Desmarets succeeded better than could have been expected without being
able to rehabilitate the finances of the state. Pontchartrain had
exhausted the resource of creating new offices. "Every time your Majesty
creates a new post, a fool is found to buy it," he had said to the king.
Desmarets had recourse to the bankers; and the king seconded him by the
gracious favor with which he received at Versailles the greatest of the
collectors (_traitants_), Samuel Bernard. "By this means everything was
provided for up to the time of the general peace," says M. d'Argenson.
France kept up the contest to the end. When the treaty of Utrecht was
signed, the fleet was ruined and destroyed, the trade diminished by two
thirds, the colonies lost or devastated by the war, the destitution in
the country so frightful that orders had to be given to sow seed in the
fields; the exportation of grain was forbidden on pain of death;
meanwhile the peasantry were reduced to browse upon the grass in the
roads and to tear the bark off the trees and eat it. Thirty years had
rolled by since the death of Colbert, twenty-two since that of Louvois;
everything was going to perdition simultaneously; reverses in war and
distress at home were uniting to overwhelm the aged king, alone
upstanding amidst so many dead and so much ruin.

[Illustration: Misery of the Peasantry----543]

"Fifty years' sway and glory had inspired Louis XIV. with the
presumptuous belief that he could not only choose his ministers well, but
also instruct them and teach them their craft," says M. d'Argenson. His
mistake was to think that the title of king supplied all the endowments
of nature or experience; he was no financier, no soldier, no
administrator, yet he would everywhere and always remain supreme master;
he had believed that it was he who governed with Colbert and Louvois;
those two great ministers had scarcely been equal to the task imposed
upon them by war and peace, by armies, buildments, and royal
extravagance; their successors gave way thereunder and illusions
vanished; the king's hand was powerless to sustain the weight of affairs
becoming more and more disastrous; the gloom that pervaded the later
years of Louis XIV.'s reign veiled from his people's eyes the splendor of
that reign which had so long been brilliant and prosperous, though