The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, vol 7 | Page 5

grave fault of approaching any
one else than me about this marriage. Answer him, if you please, that it
is my province alone to marry the daughters, and even the sons of my
ministers. Louvois has thus far helped me to spend enormous sums. M.
Colbert has assisted me to heap up treasure. It is for one of the Colberts
that I destine your nephew; for I have made up my mind that the three
sisters shall be duchesses."
In effect, his Majesty caused this marriage; and the Marquis de Louvois
had the jaundice over it for more than a fortnight.
Since that time his assiduities have been enlightened. He puts respect
into his reverences; and when our two coachmen carried our equipages
past each other on the same, road, he read some documents in order to
avoid saluting me.
In the affair of the Protestants, he caused what was at first only anxiety,
religious zeal, and distrust to turn into rebellion. In order to make
himself necessary, he proposed his universal and permanent patrols and
dragoons. He caused certain excesses to be committed in order to raise
a cry of disorder; and a measure which could have been effective
without ceasing to be paternal became, in his hands, an instrument of
dire persecution.
Madame de Maintenon, having learnt that Louvois, to exonerate
himself, was secretly designating her as the real author of these
rigorous and lamentable counsels, made complaint of it to the King,
and publicly censured his own brother, who, in order to make himself
agreeable to the Jesuits, to Bossuet, and to Louvois, had made himself a
little hero in his provincial government.
The great talents of M. de Louvois, and the difficulty of replacing him,

became his refuge and safeguard. But, from the moment that he no
longer received the intimate confidence of the King, and the esteem of
the lady in waiting who sits upon the steps of the throne, he can only
look upon himself at Versailles as a traveller with board and lodging.
His revenues are incalculable. The people, seeing his enormous
corpulence, maintain, or pretend, that he is stuffed with gold. His
general administration of posts alone is worth a million. His other
offices are in proportion.
His chateau of Meudon-Fleury, a magical and quite ideal site, is the
finest pleasure-house that ever yet the sun shone on. The park and the
gardens are in the form of an amphitheatre, and are, in my opinion,
sublime, in a far different way from those of Vaux. M. Fouquet,
condemned to death, in punishment for his superb chateau, died slowly
in prison; the Marquis de Louvois will not, perhaps, die in a stronghold;
but his horoscope has already warned that minister to be prepared for
some great adversity. He knows it; sometimes he is concerned about it;
and everything leads one to believe that he will come to a bad end. He
has done more harm than people believe.

CHAPTER XXXVIII
.
The Reformed Religion and Painting on Enamel--Petitot and
Heliogabalus.-- Theological Discussion with the Marquise.--The King's
Intervention.-- Louis XIV. Renders His Account to the Christian and
Most Christian Painter.--The King's Word Is Not to Be
Resisted.--Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
At the moment when the first edicts, were issued against the public
exercise of the Reformed Religion, the famous and incomparable
Petitot, refusing all the supplications of France and of Europe, executed
for me, in my chateau of Clagny, five infinitely precious portraits, upon
which it was his caprice only to work alternately, and which still
demanded from him a very great number of sittings. One of these five
portraits was that of the King, copied from that great and magnificent

picture of Mignard, where he was represented at the age of twenty, in
the costume of a Greek hero, in all the lustre of his youth. His Majesty
had given me this little commission for more than a year, and I desired,
with all my heart, to be able soon to fulfil his expectation. He destined
this miniature for the Emperor of China or the Sultan.
I went to see M. Petitot at Clagny. When he saw me he came to me
with a wrathful air, and, presenting me his unfinished enamel, he said
to me: "Here, madame, is your Greek hero; his new edicts finish us, but,
as for me, I shall not finish him. With the best intentions in the world,
and all the respect that is due to him, my just resentment would pass
into my brush; I should give him the traits of Heliogabalus, which
would probably not delight him."
"Do you think so, monsieur?" said I to my artist. "Is it thus you speak
of the King, our master,--of a King who has affection for you, and