And time passed on—passed on. The brilliant century was in its sere and yellow leaf, and one of the best and most amiable of the glorious band, le Nôtre, the gardener _par excellence_, faded and died, to the great grief of Louis, who dearly loved his company, and would walk by his chair in the garden of Versailles, when the invalid’s limbs had failed him. Ninon keenly felt the loss of the kindly friend, who had been one of the party to Rome with Santeuil—who had nearly missed the papal benediction on his hymns, as he always believed, by his witticisms about the carp. And now the good canon was to die, victim of a practical joke on the part of the young Duc de Condé, who amused himself with emptying the contents of his snuff-box into his guest’s glass of champagne. Unawares, Santeuil drained the glass; and the hideous concoction produced a fit of such convulsive sickness, that he died of it. Bitterly enough Condé repented, but that did not bring back his friend. About the time that the zenith of Louis’s power was attained, when his very name was uttered on the bated breath of admiration, hatred and terror—and the yoke of the widow Scarron had not yet entangled him—and while the Doge of Genoa was compelled by Duquesne to sue for mercy at the feet of the French monarch—accused of complicity with the pirates of the Mediterranean—the Court of Rome was compelled to yield to the demands of the Church in France, in the matter of the _régale_. This right, which had ever been the strength and mainstay of religious Catholic independence in France, had fallen in later days somewhat into abeyance; and when, some nine years earlier, it had been put into active force again, the pope opposed it. To establish it on a firm footing was the work of Bossuet, who set forth and substantiated with the bishops of the dioceses of France the existing constitution of the Gallican Church under the ruling of the four famous articles: 1. That ecclesiastical power had no hold upon the temporal government of princes. 2. That a General Council was superior to the pope. 3. That the canons could regulate apostolical power and general ecclesiastical usage. 4. That the judgment of the Sovereign Pontiff is only infallible after the universal and general consent of the Church. The pope and the Court of Rome had no choice but finally to accept these propositions; but unpalatable as they were, they came between the worse evil threatening Catholic Unity, of a schism such as it had suffered in England under Elizabeth and Henry. The splendid gifts of Bossuet place his memory on a lasting and lofty eminence, as it placed him, living, in distinguished positions, Bishop of Meaux, preacher at the Louvre, preceptor to the Dauphin. From his profound theological learning welled forth the splendid eloquence which thrilled the vast assemblages flocking to drink in his orations. One of the most magnificent among these was that at the obsequies of the great Condé, beginning—