Louis ruled--or misruled--for sixty years. In the space of six decades much may happen for good or ill, but this long reign was marked by no rises and by few falls, merely by a gradual, consistent decadence. The country engaged in the War of the Polish Succession, the War of the Austrian Succession, and the Seven Years’ War, and in all lost territory, men and prestige, while the effects of the hated tax collector added to the ever-growing misery. The people were too crushed to do more than look on dully while their sovereign secured in infamous ways the wherewithal for his infamous pleasures. He sold the liberty of his subjects, for any one who could pay for a warrant (_lettre de cachet_) could put a private enemy into prison where he might lie forgotten for years. He sold the lives of his people, for he starved them to death by scores through the negotiation of a successful corner in food stuffs. Even when he disbanded the parliaments (courts) the only bodies that were trying to do anything, there was small stir made about it. Louis encouraged a persecution of the Huguenots, yet, Catholic though he was, he favored the expulsion of the Jesuits against whom the Jansenists, also Catholics, were contending. Friend was pitted against friend, neighbor against neighbor in these fierce quarrels based on religious differences, always the fiercest quarrels that man can know. The persecution was often petty, always bitter, yet it had its serious side when Pascal and the writers who gathered at Port Royal entered into philosophic discussion. This serious addiction of the people was a curious aspect of the mental and moral state of the period. While some people were entering heart and soul into these arguments there was at the same time an ample number of readers who devoured with gusto poems, plays and novels so coarse that to-day they never would reach print. That the same people might be interested in both sorts of literature is attested by the temper of some of the highest ecclesiastics who not only connived at the king’s immoral life, but furthered it. In some temperaments the extremes of the age produced an unbalanced state. This showed itself at one time throughout Paris in the behavior of the “Convulsionaries of Saint Médard,” who hysterically proclaimed the miracles performed at the tombs of two priests buried in the ancient churchyard of Saint Médard, near the Gobelins factory. So wide-spread and so distracting was this belief that the graveyard was closed to the public. This step caused a wit to fasten upon the wall an inscription. “By order of the king, God is forbidden to perform miracles in this place.”