circonstances où elles auraient fait un extrême plaisir.' And life
itself, what is it? how does it pass?--'Il n'y a pour l'homme que trois
événements: naître, vivre, et mourir; il ne se sent pas naître, il
souffre à mourir, et il oublie de vivre.'

The pages of La Bruyère--so brilliant and animated on the surface, so
sombre in their fundamental sense--contain the final summary--we might
almost say the epitaph--of the great age of Louis XIV. Within a few
years of the publication of his book in its complete form (1694), the
epoch, which had begun in such a blaze of splendour a generation
earlier, entered upon its ultimate phase of disaster and humiliation.
The political ambitions of the overweening king were completely
shattered; the genius of Marlborough annihilated the armies of France;
and when peace came at last it came in ruin. The country was not only
exhausted to the farthest possible point, its recuperation had been made
well-nigh impossible by the fatal Revocation of the Edict of Nantes,
which, in circumstances of the utmost cruelty, had driven into exile the
most industrious and independent portion of the population. Poverty,
discontent, tyranny, fanaticism--such was the legacy that Louis left to
his country. Yet that was not quite all. Though, during the last years
of the reign, French literature achieved little of lasting value, the
triumphs of the earlier period threw a new and glorious lustre over the
reputation of France. The French tongue became the language of culture
throughout Europe. In every department of literature, French models and
French taste were regarded as the supreme authorities. Strange as it
would have seemed to him, it was not as the conqueror of Holland nor as
the defender of the Church, but as the patron of Racine and the
protector of Molière that the superb and brilliant Louis gained his
highest fame, his true immortality.