The young King Louis XIV. was active, vigorous, and graceful. He excelled in outward accomplishments, in riding, dancing, and fencing; but intellectually he was both idle and ignorant. His education had been purposely neglected by Cardinal Mazarin; and he was so fully aware of it, that he carefully avoided displaying his ignorance by a too facile or rapid address. Even in youth he was grave and ceremonious; in later years he became pompous and overbearing. On the other hand, the refinement of his mother's nature was reproduced in the son of her love. He was brought up by her side in a circle as elegant and refined as the Hôtel de Rambouillet in its palmiest days. He never forgot the lesson he then learnt, that the outward proprieties of life must be studiously observed, whatever freedoms may be permitted in private. He desired all his life to be considered pious, just, and moral. He failed in each, for his passions were strong and his temper was imperious. The vicissitudes of his early life during the civil wars of the Fronde, when he was often obliged to fly at a moment's notice from place to place, gave him, however, a power of assuming calmness and dignity under all circumstances, which he could never have acquired in less eventful times. Above all sovereigns Louis understood the art of reigning, of appearing to be a great king when he was really but a shallow, vain, irresolute man, extraordinarily accessible to flattery. Yet that a son of Louis XIII. should say with truth, "_L'état c'est moi_," and dare to drive out the national Parliament solemnly assembled in the legislative chamber, _whip in hand_, is one of the most striking anomalies in history. In person Louis resembled his father. He was dark, broad shouldered, and rather short, with regular features and a prominent nose. But he had all the fire of his mother's Spanish eyes, and withal the grandest manners and the most royal presence ever seen. From a boy he was an ardent admirer of the fair. All his life he continued to be secretly ruled by female influence. Indeed, his long reign may be divided into three periods, corresponding with the characteristics of the three women who successively possessed all the love he could spare from himself. He was gentle, humane, and domestic with La Vallière; arrogant, heartless, and warlike with De Montespan; selfish, bigoted, and cruel, with De Maintenon. His boyish philandering with the handsome nieces of Cardinal Mazarin has been already noticed. What subtle plans developed themselves in the brain of that unscrupulous schemer never can be known; but he could not have arranged matters better to place one of his nieces on the throne of France. Nor to his Italian notions would this have been extraordinary. Mazarin would have argued that a Mancini was as well born as a Medici, whose arms were a pill, and that Martinozzi was as ancient a name as Bourbon.