Each of these kings held the policy of weakening Calvinism as a state maxim, as if men and circumstances were the same as they had been under Charles IX. These princes had been taught that the Reformation was the enemy of thrones, and they thought they could never do enough against this vain phantom of their imagination. The result was, that the chief employments at court and in the army, of the magistracy and the finances, were systematically refused to the Calvinists, except in extraordinary cases. Turenne and Duquesne broke through this barrier by the splendour of their services; the others were left disregarded, or condemned to grow grey in inferior situations. The Edict of Nantes had, no doubt, made the Reformed admissible to office, but it did not guarantee to them the favours of the court; “and royalty,” to use the expression of Louis XIV. himself, “restricted them to the narrowest limits that justice and a regard for appearances would permit.” Even these conditions, however, were not long respected. Louis XIV. has, moreover, said, in the memoirs which he dictated for the instruction of the dauphin: “As for the favours that depended upon me alone, I resolved, and I have punctually kept that resolution ever since, not to grant any to the people of that religion, and this out of kindness, and not from hatred, that they might be obliged thereby to consider from time to time by themselves, and _apart from violence_, whether they were acting wisely in voluntarily depriving themselves of the advantages they might enjoy in common with my other subjects.” Nothing can be more _naïf_ and instructive than these avowals. The ministers of state naturally followed the bent of the prince. No favour [was to be allowed] to heretics; ill-will [was to be accorded,] when it was possible [to manifest it] without too open an attack upon acquired rights; and a constant inequality of treatment, that urged the lukewarm and the ambitious to change their religion. The intendants of the provinces—the new creation of a government, that aspired to a stronger national unity—anxious to make themselves agreeable to the court and the council, did not omit to pronounce for the Jesuits against the pastors, and for the bishops against the provincial synods or the consistories, whenever there was a pretext, however frivolous, that could be made available. Nearly all the Parliaments pursued the same course, not through religious fanaticism, but through that spirit which in all ages, among the Pagans as in Christendom, has constituted the magistracy the guardians of ancient laws and traditional customs. The advocate-general, Omer Talon, said, in the great days of Poitiers, in 1634, that the pretended Reformed, being only suffered by toleration, the matters regarding them ought not to be counted as _favourable_, and that the most rigorous interpretation ought, on the contrary, to be applied against them.