festations of Providence on earth. The
seigneur, generally owning the greater part of all freehold property,
not only weighed as a landlord but exercised many exclusive privileges,
and applied the most drastic of sanctions to the whole as the local
administrator of justice. There were hundreds of devout priests and of
humane seigneurs, but a proportion, conspicuous if small, were
otherwise; and the system gave such an opportunity for evil doing, that
opinion naturally, but unjustly, {13} converted the ill deeds of the
few into the characteristic of the whole class.

The culmination of this system, its visible and emphatic symbol,
fastened on Paris like a great bloated tumour eating into the heart of
France, was Versailles. But compared with class privilege, the Church,
and the seigneur, Versailles was a recent phenomenon, invented by Louis
XIV little more than one hundred years before the outbreak of the
Revolution. At the beginning of the 17th century the French monarchy
had somewhat suddenly emerged from the wars of religion immensely
strengthened. Able statesmen, Henry IV, Sully, Richelieu, Mazarin,
Louis XIV, had brought it out of its struggle with the feudal
aristocracy triumphant. Before the wars of religion began the French
noble was still mediaeval in that he belonged to a caste of military
specialists and that his provincial castle was both his residence and
his stronghold. The struggle itself was maintained largely by his
efforts, by the military and political power of great nobles, Guises,
Montmorencys and others. But when the struggle closes, both religion,
its cause, and the great noble its supporter, sink somewhat into the
background, while the king, the kingly power, fills the eye. And {14}
the new divine right monarchy, triumphant over the feudal soldier and
gladly accepted as the restorer of order by the middle class, sets to
work to consolidate this success; the result is Versailles.

The spectacular palace built by Louis XIV threw glamour and prestige
about the triumphant monarchy. It drew the great nobles from their
castles and peasantry, and converted them into courtiers, functionaries
and office holders. To catch a ray of royal favour was to secure the
gilt edging of distinction, and so even the literature, the theology,
the intellect of France, quickly learned to revolve about the dazzling
Sun King of Versailles, Louis XIV.

Versailles could not, however, long retain such elements of