ber 1638, the first child of parents who hated each other, and
who had been married for twenty-three years. The birth was
hailed as a miracle, the little Dauphin was given the name of
Dieudonné, the wine ran free, and even the hungry were fed.

From his cold-blooded, shifty, suspicious father the child
seems to have inherited nothing but a love of music and an
interest in the minutiae of army administration, whilst to his
mother he owed a magnificent constitution and his indomita-
ble pride.

From the first, Louis was a solemn child, very well aware of
who he was, and what he was to be. His earliest recorded ut-
terance is characteristic; on the 21st April 1643, being then
not five years old, he was taken to the bedside of his dying
father. "Who is it?" said the King. "Louis XIV," replied his
son. He had anticipated his inheritance by some three weeks
only; on 14th May Louis XIII died. His will, under which
the Queen-Mother would have been a puppet, was set aside
by the Parlement, and Anne found herself Regent of France
with Jules Mazarin ( 1602-61) as her Prime Minister. And
perhaps as something very much more, for the relationship
between Anne of Austria and Mazarin remains obscure to this
day. Did the Cardinal make his position safe for life by mar-
rying the Queen-Mother? There was nothing to prevent it,
for he was never a priest, and there is much circumstantial
evidence in favour of the supposition. What is certain is that
this softly smiling, humble, deferential man, this piece of iron
painted to look like a lath, acquired a complete ascendancy
over the Regent, and treated the young King in a manner
which is only to be explained on the assumption that he was
his step-father. In the royal family the Cardinal's word was
absolute and final: and whilst Mazarin was piling up a huge
private fortune, the King, and even the Regent, had to peti-
tion him, often unsuccessfully, for a little pocket money for
their daily needs. Here, at the very apex of the pyramid, one
found a petit bourgeois ménage tyrannically controlled by an
Italian Harpagon.

Few kings have had a worse upbringing than Louis XIV.
His formative years were passed at an impoverished court, pre-
occupied with a seemingly endless continental war, and har-
assed by civil disturbances culminating in the open rebellion
whereby the great nobles tried to restore the anarchy which
Richelieu had extinguished. And Anne, though a fond mother,

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