Louis was timid and prudish, and, like his brother, he had sick nerves. Hérouard, who was his doctor when he was a child, exhibits the young Prince as a somnambulist, who slept with eyes open, and who arose in his sleep, walking and talking in a loud voice. Louis's doctors put an end to any strength that he may have had originally. In one year Bouvard bled him forty-seven times; and during that one twelvemonth the child was given twelve different kinds of medicines and two hundred and fifteen enemas. Is it credible that after such an experience the unhappy King merited the reproach of being "obstreperous in his intercourse with the medical faculty"? He had studied but little; he took no interest in the things that pleased the mind; his pastimes were purely animal. He liked to hunt, to work in his garden, to net pouches for fish and game, to make snares and arquebuses. He liked to make preserves, to lard meat, and to shave. Like his brother, he had one artistic quality: he loved music and composed it. "This was the one smile, the only smile of a natural ingrate." Louis XIII. was of a nature dry and hard. He detested his wife; he loved nothing on earth but his young favourites. He loved them; then, in an instant, without warning, he ceased to love them; and when he had ceased to love them he did not care what became of them,--did not care whether they lived or died. Whenever he could witness the agony of death he did so, and turned the occasion into a picnic or a pleasure trip. He enjoyed watching the grimaces of the dying. His religious devotion was sincere, but it was narrow and sterile. He was jealous and suspicious, forgetful, frivolous, incapable of applying himself to anything serious. He had but one virtue, but that he carried to such lengths that it sufficed to embalm his memory. This virtue was the one which raised the family of Hohenzollern to power and to glory. The sombre soul of Louis XIII. was imbued with the imperious sentiment of royal duty,--the professional duty of the man designed and appointed by Divine Providence to give account to God for millions of the souls of other men. He never separated either his own advantage or his own glory from the advantage and the glory of France. He forced his brother to marry, though he knew that the birth of a nephew would ulcerate his own flesh. He harboured Richelieu with despairing resolution because he believed that France could not maintain its existence without the hated ministry. He had the essential quality, the one quality which supplies the lack of other qualities, without which all other qualities, great and noble though they be, are useless before the State.