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 Caesar 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.

IX

LOVE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

To the cradle of the eighteenth century came the customary gifts, in
themselves a trifle unusual. Queen Anne sent the dulness of perfect
gentility. Queen Maintenon gave bigotry. Louis XIV provided the spectacle
of a mythological monster. But Molinos, a Spanish fairy, uninvited at the
christening, malignantly sent his blessing. The latter, known as quietism,
was one of love's aberrations. It did not last for the reason that nothing
does. Beside