The flight of the Huguenots from France, in 1685 and 1686, enriched Holland, England, and the American colonies with the _élite_ of the French people. Holland being nearest to France, and honored above all lands for nearly a century as the refuge of people persecuted for opinions' sake, received at first the greatest number, especially of the class who could live by intellectual pursuits. The rarest of all rarities in the way of caricature, "the diamond of the pictorial library," is a series of burlesque portraits, produced in Holland in 1686, of the twenty-four persons most guilty of procuring the revocation of the wise edict of Henry IV., which secured to French Protestants the right to practice their religion. The work was entitled "La Procession Monacale conduite par Louis XIV. pour la Conversion des Protestans de son Royaume." The king, accordingly, leads the way, his face a sun in a monk's cowl, in allusion to his adoption of the sun as a device. Madame De Maintenon, his married mistress, hideously caricatured, follows. Père la Chaise, and all the ecclesiastics near the court who were reputed to have urged on the ignorant old king to this superlative folly, had their place in the procession. Several of the faces are executed with a freedom and power not common in any age, but at that period only possible to a French hand. Two specimens are given on the following page. Louis XIV., as the caricature collections alone would suffice to show, was the conspicuous man of that painful period. The caricaturists avenged human nature. No man of the time called forth so many efforts of the satiric pencil, nor was there ever a person better adapted to the satirist's purpose, for he furnished precisely those contrasts which satire can exhibit most effectively. He stood five feet four in his stockings, but his shoe-maker put four inches of leather under his heels, and his wig-maker six inches of other people's hair upon his head, which gave him an imposing altitude. The beginning of his reign was prosperous enough to give some slight excuse for the most richly developed arrogance seen in the world since Xerxes lashed the Hellespont, but the last third of his reign was a collapse that could easily be made to seem ludicrous. There were very obvious contrasts in those years between the splendors of his barbaric court and the disgraceful defeats of his armies, between the opinion he cherished of himself and the contempt in which he was held abroad, between the adulations of his courtiers and the execrations of France, between the mass-attending and the morals of the court. [Illustration: Archbishop of Paris--A Better Friend to Ladies than to the Pope. (Holland, 1686. By an Exiled Huguenot.)] [Illustration: Archbishop of Rheims--Mitred Ass. (Holland, 1686. After the Expulsion of the Huguenots.)]