Then came the death of the _Grand Monarque_, and with him the tradition of the Renaissance went also to its grave. The old age was outworn, and the new began to supersede it. The world was weary of the majestic, the stiff, and the pompous, whose glamour had blinded it for sixty years. The sun-king was dead, and the sun of the Italian Renaissance had set. French society breathed once more. The ostentation of the court had become an onerous ceremony, the monarchical principle an unendurable constraint. The nightmare that had oppressed it, the ennui that had come from Versailles, disappeared. Air and light and mirth penetrated the salons. People shook off the heavy yoke of majesty from their shoulders, abandoned their heroic, ostentatious palaces, and bought themselves _petites maisons_ in the _Bois_. They had suffered, they wished to be glad; they had been bored, they wished to be amused. Enough of pater-nosters and stately etiquette! they wished to live. Away with the antique temples and goddesses of Poussin! away with those devoted martyrs who mortified themselves and killed the flesh! Away with the semblance of the heroic, with pomp and glamour, with the service of God and the service of lords! Here's to the service of the ladies. Here's to the thatched roofs of farmhouses; the woods in whose thickets one can lose one's way and exchange a kiss; rosy flesh and little turned-up noses; everything which gave a thrill of voluptuousness after the unapproachable, icy-cold nobility of the past. Long live Love! [Illustration: "_L'Art._" GOYA. OTRES LEYES POR EL PUEBLO.] So thought France when Louis XIV was dead, and the man was already grown up in the Low Countries who was chosen to give a shape to these dreams, to abolish the ascendency of gods and kings and heroes, and to show the upper classes their own image reflected in the mirror of art.