Soon after the succession of Louis XIV. to the throne he became convinced that the maintenance of the Romish hierarchy was essential to the stability of his power. He consequently commenced a series of persecutions of the Protestants, with the determination of driving that faith entirely from France. In 1662 he issued a decree that no Protestant should be buried except after sunset or before sunrise. Protestant mechanics or shop-keepers were not allowed to have apprentices. Protestant teachers were permitted to instruct only in the first rudiments of letters, and not more than twelve Protestants were allowed to meet together for the purposes of worship. No Protestant woman could be a nurse in the chamber of infancy; no Catholic could embrace Protestantism or marry a Protestant woman under pain of exile. Catholic magistrates were empowered to enter the dying chambers of the Protestants to tease them, when gasping in death, to return to the Catholic faith. In four years, between 1680 and 1684, more than twenty royal edicts were issued against the Protestants, decreeing, among other things, that no Protestant should be a lawyer, doctor, apothecary, printer, or grocer. Children were often taken by violence from Protestant parents, that they might be trained in the Catholic faith. Madame de Maintenon, the unacknowledged wife of Louis XIV., wished to bring back into the fold of Rome a young lady, Mademoiselle de Murgay. She consequently wrote to her brother: "If you could send her to me you would do me a great pleasure. There are no other means than violence, for they will be much afflicted in the family by De Murgay's conversion. I will send you a _lettre de cachet_ (secret warrant) in virtue of which you will take her into your own house until you find an opportunity of sending her off."[8] Such outrages as these were of constant occurrence. Zeal for the conversion of the Protestants never rose to a higher pitch. At the same time Louis XIV. could bid defiance to God's commands, and insult the moral sense of the nation by traveling with his wife and his two guilty favorites, Madame de Montespan and Madame la Vallière, all in the same carriage. The profligacy of the ecclesiastics and the debauchery of the court and the nobles, though less disguised during the wild saturnalia of the succeeding regency, was never more universal than during this reign. This was the golden age of kings. Feudality had died, and democracy was not born. The monarchy was absolute. The nobles, deprived of all _political_ power, existed merely as a luxurious appendage and embellishment to the throne, while the people, unconscious of either power or rights, made no movements to embarrass the sovereign.[9]