The Palace and Park by Phillips, Forbes, Latham, Owen, Scharf, and Shenton

[Born at St. Germain, 1638. Died 1715. Aged 77.] The son of Louis XIII. and Anne of Austria. He ascended the throne at five years old--his mother being Regent during his minority--and reigned 72 years, longer than any other King of France. Until the death of Mazarin in 1661, Louis XIV. suffered the adroit Cardinal to rule. From that hour until his own death, no man governed but himself. This renowned monarch survived nearly the whole of his family, and when he died, the crown, as in his own case, came to the charge of a child--his great grandson--then in his fifth year. The reign of Louis Quatorze was singularly eventful within and without the realm. It embraced wars, marked now with splendid successes, and now with formidable reverses. He aimed at universal monarchy, and endangered his own. He sustained, in the War of the Succession, the defence of Spain and France against united Europe--a war in which the allies hoped to dismember France, that did not lose a province. Under this king, the soil of France was stained with the blood of her children in religious civil conflict; the most industrious and the best, slaughtered for their faith, or exiled. A magnificent Court surrounded his person--the centre to the politeness of Europe, its stately decorum veiling great moral corruption. Jealous of his prerogatives and of his supremacy amongst kings, Louis XIV. was still more jealous to be thought the best bred gentleman of his time. In this reign, the marine, the commerce, and the manufactures of France made a vast stride. Arts, letters, and science were royally encouraged. It is looked back upon as the Augustan age of French literature, when the writings of Corneille, Racine, Molière, and Boileau--of Masillon, Bossuet, Fénélon, seemed to have fixed the language. The age of Louis XIV. was the age of glory to the French monarchy; and splendidly dissolute, and, in many respects, hollow, as it may have been, we still revert to its records with a fascination that never palls, and an interest that becomes more acute the more it is gratified. [This statue, representing Louis as a child, is from a bronze by Guillain, which formed, with a statue of Anne of Austria, and one of Louis XIII., a group of three, as a monument to commemorate the building of the Pont-au-Change, begun by Louis XIII. in 1639, and finished under Louis XIV., 1647, while Anne was Regent. The monument was destroyed in 1787; but the statues are in the Louvre, as well as the great bas-relief. The bust of Anne of Austria (No. 307*) is taken from the statue.] 308A. LOUIS XIV. _King of France._ [From the marble, by Ch. Ant. Coysevox, in the Louvre and at Versailles. The King, kneeling on a cushion where his crown is placed, is dressed in the Royal mantle, with the Orders of the Holy Spirit and St. Michel. There are numbered no fewer than twenty-two busts, statues, and medallions of this favourite King at Versailles. Four are equestrian statues in bronze; one by Martin Bogaert, called Desjardins, and two by Louis Petitot, done in 1834. The statue in bronze by Desjardins, which once stood in the Place des Victoires, was destroyed in 1793. The four slaves which stood chained at the angles of this statue were alone preserved, and are now at the Hotel des Invalides, at Paris.]