"The distinguishing characteristic of the _Siècle de Louis XIV_," says M. Maxime Petit, in his review of the important work by Émile Bourgeois, _Le Grand Siècle_, "that which Voltaire selected as the most important, is not the history of the negotiations and the battles, but that of the manners and customs, the ideas, the beliefs, the letters, and the arts.... Never, perhaps, more than in the time of Louis XIV was there a more complete harmony between the ideas and the life. The political forces are thoroughly disciplined, and the principle of authority, which Richelieu had developed to its fullest extent, reigns uncontested. Polite society--the only one to be considered--believes itself to be in possession of absolute rules, and, in the court as in the city, the heart abdicates in favor of reason." "When one speaks of the seventeenth century in France," says M. Louis Farges, "it appears, to those who are neither historians nor professional scholars, as one of those rare epochs in which all the forces of the nation concentrate and develop in a serene and majestic unity. France seems, then, to be at the summit of her political power, of her intellectual and artistic development, of her religious and philosophical unity. Taken altogether, and in a very general manner, this is a very just idea; ... it must be admitted that at no other epoch has the genius of France manifested itself in the divers branches of human activity in a manner so complete, so abundant, and so united." "France was really," says M. Duruy, "at the head of modern civilization, and, by the recognized superiority of her genius and of her taste, she caused to be accepted by the whole of Europe the pacific empire of her artists and of her writers." [Illustration: PARISIENNE. From a drawing by L. Marold.]