At no other time have the conditions of society exercised a more
profound influence upon the works of great writers. Though, with the
ascendancy of Louis, the political power of the nobles finally came to
an end, France remained, in the whole complexion of her social life,
completely aristocratic. Louis, with deliberate policy, emphasized the
existing rigidity of class-distinctions by centralizing society round
his splendid palace of Versailles. Versailles is the _clou_ to the age
of Louis XIV. The huge, almost infinite building, so stately and so
glorious, with its vast elaborate gardens, its great trees transported
from distant forests, its amazing waterworks constructed in an arid soil
at the cost of millions, its lesser satellite parks and palaces, its
palpitating crowds of sumptuous courtiers, the whole accumulated mass of
piled-up treasure and magnificence and power--this was something far
more significant than the mere country residence of royalty; it was the
summary, the crown, and the visible expression of the ideals of a great
age. And what were these ideals? The fact that the conception of society
which made Versailles possible was narrow and unjust must not blind us
to the real nobility and the real glory which it brought into being. It
is true that behind and beyond the radiance of Louis and his courtiers
lay the dark abyss of an impoverished France, a ruined peasantry, a
whole system of intolerance, and privilege, and maladministration; yet
it is none the less true that the radiance was a genuine radiance--no
false and feeble glitter, but the warm, brilliant, intense illumination
thrown out by the glow of a nation's life. That life, with all it meant
to those who lived it, has long since vanished from the earth--preserved
to us now only in the pages of its poets, or strangely shadowed forth to
the traveller in the illimitable desolation of Versailles. That it has
gone so utterly is no doubt, on the whole, a cause for rejoicing; but,
as we look back upon it, we may still feel something of the old