The pamphleteers of the day had reason to write, "It is clearly seen that the religion of the court of France is a pure matter of interest; the king does nothing but what is for that which he calls his glory and grandeur; Catholics and heretics, Holy Pontiff, church, and anything you please, are sacrificed to his great pride; everything must be reduced to powder beneath his feet; we in France are on the high road to putting the sacred rights of the Holy See on the same footing as the privileges granted to Calvinists; all ecclesiastical authority is annihilated.

Nobody knows anything of canons, popes, councils; everything is swallowed up in the authority of one man." "The king willeth it:" France had no other law any longer; and William III.
saved Europe from the same enslavement.
The Palatinate was in flames; Louvois was urging on the generals and armies everywhere, sending despatch after despatch, orders upon orders.
"I am a thousand times more impatient to finish this business than you can be," was the spirited reply he received from M.de la Hoguette, who commanded in Italy, in the environs of Cuneo; "besides the reasons of duty which I have always before my eyes, I beg you to believe that the last letters I received from you were quite strong enough to prevent negligence of anything that must be done to prevent similar ones, and to deserve a little more confidence; but the most willing man can do nothing against roads encumbered with ice and snow." Louvois did not admit this excuse; he wanted soldiers to be able to cross the defiles of mountains in the depths of winter just as he would have orange trees travel in the month of February.

"I received orders to send off to Versailles from La Meilleraye the orange trees which the Duke of Mazarin gave the king," writes Superintendent Foucauld in his journal.

"M.

Louvois, in spite of the representations I made him, would have them sent by carriage through the snow and ice.