[Born at St. Germain, 1638. Died 1715. Aged 77.]
The son of Louis XIII. and Anne of Austria. He ascended the throne at
five years old--his mother being Regent during his minority--and reigned
72 years, longer than any other King of France. Until the death of
Mazarin in 1661, Louis XIV. suffered the adroit Cardinal to rule. From
that hour until his own death, no man governed but himself. This
renowned monarch survived nearly the whole of his family, and when he
died, the crown, as in his own case, came to the charge of a child--his
great grandson--then in his fifth year. The reign of Louis Quatorze was
singularly eventful within and without the realm. It embraced wars,
marked now with splendid successes, and now with formidable reverses. He
aimed at universal monarchy, and endangered his own. He sustained, in
the War of the Succession, the defence of Spain and France against
united Europe--a war in which the allies hoped to dismember France, that
did not lose a province. Under this king, the soil of France was stained
with the blood of her children in religious civil conflict; the most
industrious and the best, slaughtered for their faith, or exiled. A
magnificent Court surrounded his person--the centre to the politeness of
Europe, its stately decorum veiling great moral corruption. Jealous of
his prerogatives and of his supremacy amongst kings, Louis XIV. was
still more jealous to be thought the best bred gentleman of his time. In
this reign, the marine, the commerce, and the manufactures of France
made a vast stride. Arts, letters, and science were royally encouraged.
It is looked back upon as the Augustan age of French literature, when
the writings of Corneille, Racine, Molière, and Boileau--of Masillon,
Bossuet, Fénélon, seemed to have fixed the language. The age of Louis
XIV. was the age of glory to the French monarchy; and splendidly
dissolute, and, in many respects, hollow, as it may have been, we still
revert to its records with a fascination that never palls, and an
interest that becomes more acute the more it is gratified.
[This statue, representing Louis as a child, is from a bronze by
Guillain, which formed, with a statue of Anne of Austria, and one of
Louis XIII., a group of three, as a monument to commemorate the
building of the Pont-au-Change, begun by Louis XIII. in 1639, and
finished under Louis XIV., 1647, while Anne was Regent. The monument
was destroyed in 1787; but the statues are in the Louvre, as well as
the great bas-relief. The bust of Anne of Austria (No. 307*) is taken
from the statue.]
308A. LOUIS XIV. _King of France._
[From the marble, by Ch. Ant. Coysevox, in the Louvre and at
Versailles. The King, kneeling on a cushion where his crown is placed,
is dressed in the Royal mantle, with the Orders of the Holy Spirit and
St. Michel. There are numbered no fewer than twenty-two busts,
statues, and medallions of this favourite King at Versailles. Four are
equestrian statues in bronze; one by Martin Bogaert, called
Desjardins, and two by Louis Petitot, done in 1834. The statue in
bronze by Desjardins, which once stood in the Place des Victoires, was
destroyed in 1793. The four slaves which stood chained at the angles
of this statue were alone preserved, and are now at the Hotel des
Invalides, at Paris.]