As the Marchioness de Montespan lost her power over the royal egotist, Madame de Maintenon gained hers. She was the wife of the poet Scarron, and was first known to the king as the governess of the children of Montespan. She was an estimable woman on the whole, very intellectual, very proper, very artful, and very ambitious. No person ever had so great an influence over Louis XIV. as she; and hers was the ascendency of a strong mind over a weak one. She endeavored to make peace at court, and to dissuade the king from those vices to which he had so long been addicted. And she partially reclaimed him, although, while her counsels were still regarded, Louis was enslaved by Madame de Fontanges--a luxurious beauty, whom he made a duchess, and on whom he squandered the revenues of a province. But her reign was short. Mere physical charms must soon yield to the superior power of intellect and wit, and, after her death, the reign of Madame de Maintenon was complete. As the king could not live without her, and as she refused to follow the footsteps of her predecessors, the king made her his wife. And she was worthy of his choice; and her influence was, on the whole, good, although she befriended the Jesuits, and prompted the king to many acts of religious intolerance. It was chiefly through her influence, added to that of the Jesuits, that the king revoked the edict of Nantes, and its revocation was attended by great sufferings and privations among the persecuted Huguenots. He had, on ascending the throne, in 1643, confirmed the privileges of the Protestants; but, gradually, he worried them by exactions and restraints, and, finally, in 1685, by the revocation of the edict which Henry IV. had passed, he withdrew his protection, and subjected them to a more bitter persecution than at any preceding period. All the Protestant ministers were banished, or sent to the galleys, and the children of Protestants were taken from their parents, and committed to the care of their nearest Catholic relations, or such persons as judges appointed. All the terrors of military execution, all the artifices of priestcraft, were put forth to make converts and such as relapsed were subjected to cruel torments. A twentieth part of them were executed, and the remainder hunted from place to place. By these cruelties, France was deprived of nearly six hundred thousand of the best people in the land--a great misfortune, since they contributed, in their dispersion and exile, to enrich, by their agriculture and manufactures, the countries to which they fled.