Such was the hope in the marriage of Louis with the Infanta; the hope of some happy turn of fortune, some break in the line of succession whereby the Spanish kingdom might be absorbed into a Bourbon empire, as it had once been in the empire of the Hapsburgs.

This was the _ignis fatuus_ which was to control the policy of this stormy reign, and which was to envelop it at last in the clouds of defeat and disaster.
The secret of Louis' greatness was his instinctive recognition of greatness in others.

His new minister, Colbert, to whom he owed so much, was a man of the people, and a protestant.

He it was who discovered the peculations of Fouquet, the magnificent Minister of Finance, who was building a palace at Vaux greater than the king himself could afford, and who was suddenly swept from this princely residence into the Bastille, where he spent the remaining years of his life with plenty of leisure in which to think upon the forty thousand pounds he had expended upon that fete he gave in honor of his royal master; and to recall the splendors of the supper and the size of the banqueting-hall, which Mansart, Le Brun, and the best that Italy could furnish at that time had made beautiful.
It is said that the unfortunate visit of the king to his minister's abode resulted in the creation of Versailles as a suburban residence.
From the Palais de St.Germain, on the heights in the suburbs of Paris, Louis could see the Cathedral of St.Denis, where were the royal vaults and the ancestors he must some day join.

So depressing was this view to him, and so charmed was he with the plan of Fouquet's palace and gardens, that artists were immediately set to work to make one more royal at Versailles, where his father, Louis XIII., used to have his hunting-box; the place where that much-governed king used to go to hide away from his scheming mother and his argus-eyed minister.