Had the influence of the women of France been of a more emotional character, French sculpture would doubtless have approximated much more closely to that of Greece during the age of Praxiteles. As it was, it leaves us cold. It has the feminine grace but not the feminine passion. It seems to be inspired by a love which would stop at flirtation, fearing to lose itself in the depths of complete surrender. THE AGE OF LOUIS QUATORZE The insistence upon the social circumstances which moulded the earliest phase of French sculpture is justified when it is remembered that they were no less important during the two following epochs. Until the coming of the Revolution, France was ruled by an absolute monarch, and practically all the artistic life of the country centred around him. Throughout this time French sculpture was dominated by its connection with a great court, and by the feminine influences which were so potent in French Court life. The great revival of sculpture during the reign of Louis XIV., which now claims consideration, is at once explained when it is correlated with the fact that political considerations forced France to accept an even more absolute monarchical rule, and an even more complete centralization of French culture than had been necessary in the time of the Valois kings. At the end of the sixteenth century Henry IV. had settled the religious difficulties in France, and had proved how heartily the advent of a monarchy able and willing to vindicate its authority was welcomed. The administrative zeal of Sully, Henry’s minister, and the taxation reforms which he carried through, laid the foundations of the vast wealth which Louis XIV. controlled. Without this the great efflorescence of art, a few years later, would not have been possible. But the complete supremacy of the French king in the seventeenth century was due rather to pressure from surrounding nations than to internal considerations. The reign of Louis XIV. was the age in which Europe reconstructed her political system upon the principle of territorialism under a system of absolute monarchy. The natural complement of Sully, with his maxim, “Plough and cow—these are the breasts of France whereat she sucks,” was Richelieu, with his vigorous foreign policy. Richelieu carried the ideals of Francis I. and Henry IV. to their furthest limit. In everything Richelieu was pro-Louis—never pro-France. He was not satisfied until the whole financial and judicial administration had been brought under royal control by means of a bureaucracy depending entirely upon royal favour.