As all classes had grievances, all were represented in this general undoing of the last minister's great work. But as no two classes desired the same thing, the miserable war, without genius and without system, miserably failed. The royal cause triumphed; and Richelieu's political structure was not even shaken. Mazarin stood inflexibly by the work of his great predecessor. Turenne and Conde were the military heroes of this, as well as of the subsequent foreign wars, resulting in the acquisition of Alsace (1648) and other great territorial expansion. When Cardinal Mazarin died in 1661, the young king was asked to whom the ministers should bring their portfolios. To which came the unexpected reply, "_To me_." CHAPTER XIII. The wily Italian was gone, and Louis XIV. settled himself upon the throne which Richelieu had rendered so exalted and immovable. Cardinal Mazarin had said of the young Louis that "there was enough in him to make four kings, and one honest man." His greatness consisted more in amplitude than in kind. Nature made him in prodigal mood. He was an average man of colossal proportions. His ability, courage, dignity, industry, greed for power and possessions, were all on a magnificent scale, and so were his vanity, his loves, his cruelties, his pleasures, his triumphs, and his disappointments. No king more wickedly oppressed France, and none made her more glorious. He made her feared abroad and magnificent at home, but he desolated her, and drained her resources with ambitious wars. He crowned her with imperishable laurels in literature, art, and every manifestation of genius, but he signed the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and drove out of his kingdom 500,000 of the best of his subjects. The marriage of the Dauphin with the Infanta of Spain had occurred before he attained his majority. It was planned by Mazarin, and was a part of the policy left as a fatal bequest to Louis XIV. by that minister. The Salic Law was not recognized in Spain. Hence, the crown might descend to an heiress, and by her be transmitted to her husband. 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.