t aware that he has ever been laughed at; certainly never to the
extent which he deserves. The flatterers of his day, inevitable products
of his reign, did their work so thoroughly that even in secret they do
not appear to have dared to utter--possibly they did not even dare
to think--the truth about him. Their work survives, and when you have
assessed the monstrous flattery at its true worth, swept it aside and
come down to the real facts of his life, you make the discovery that
the proudest title their sycophancy could bestow and his own fatuity
accept--Le Roi Soleil, the Sun-King--makes him what indeed he is: a
king of opera bouffe. There is about him at times something almost
reminiscent of the Court buffoons of a century before, who puffed
themselves out with mock pride, and aped a sort of sovereignty to excite
laughter; with this difference, however, that in his own case it was not
intended to be amusing.

A heartless voluptuary of mediocre intelligence, he contrived to wrap
himself in what Saint-Simon has called a "terrible majesty." He was
obsessed by the idea of the dignity, almost the divinity--of kingship. I
cannot believe that he conceived himself human. He appears to have
held that being king was very like being God, and he duped the world by
ceremonials of etiquette that were very nearly sacramental. We find
him burdening the most simple and personal acts of everyday life with a
succession of rites of an amazing complexity. Thus, when he rose in the
morning, princes of the blood and the first gentlemen of France were in
attendance: one to present to him his stockings, another to proffer
on bended knee the royal garters, a third to perform the ceremony of
handing him his wig, and so on until the toilette of his plump, not
unhandsome person was complete. You miss the incense, you feel that some
noble thurifer should have fumigated him at each stage. Perhaps he never
thought of it.

The evil fruits of his reign--evil, that is to say, from the point
of view of his order, which was swept away as so much anachronistic
rubbish--did not come until a hundred years later. In his own day France
was great, and this not because but in spite of him. After all, he was
not the absolute ruler he conceived himself. There were such capable men
as Colbert and Louvois at the King's side'; there was the great genius
of France which manifests itself when and as it will, whatever the
regime--and there was Madame de Montespan to