One day his grandson took him along the Left Bank of the river so that he could gaze down the huge southern sweep to the cold facade of Les Invalides, to which King Louis had added a splendid royal chapel with a gilded dome. “I’ve seen pictures of St. Peter’s, Rome,” his grandson told him, “and this looks exactly the same. Paris is the new Rome.” Another time, they went to the northern part of the city where King Louis had demolished parts of the old city wall and built handsome boulevards there instead. “The king’s made France more glorious than she’s ever been before,” the younger man declared confidently.

“That may be,” Hercule said, but he was too old to be easily impressed.

Yes, he thought, King Louis had added to the glory of Bourbon France. The great nobles obeyed him. The country was better run. Across the ocean in the New World, French adventurers had just made good their claim to the territory centered on the vast Mississippi basin and called it Louisiana.

In Europe, the power of the mighty Hapsburgs of Austria and Spain was waning. By force and clever bargaining, the Sun King had grabbed rich border territories like Alsace out of Hapsburg hands and into his own. By marrying his heirs to Hapsburg princesses, King Louis had done even better. For when the inbred Hapsburgs couldn’t even provide an heir for Spain, one of his grandsons had inherited the Spanish throne. True, the Bourbons had to promise the rest of Europe that France and Spain would never be ruled by a single monarch, but it was a friendly Bourbon, rather than a rival Hapsburg, who now lay over France’s southern border.

French culture was the fashion. All over Europe, French was becoming the language of diplomacy and the aristocracy.

I, myself, as a Frenchman, am proud of all this, Hercule admitted.

Yet the Bourbon glory had come at a cost. The Sun King’s ambition had alarmed his fellow rulers, especially the Protestant ones. When he’d attacked the Netherlands, he’d gone too far. And the last two decades had seen a long drawn-out war in which the great English general Churchill, now Duke of Marlborough, had smashed the French army several times, proving to all the world that mighty France was not invincible. The war had left the Sun King’s treasury depleted, and France with few friends. Was that so good?

And yet beyond that, it seemed to Hercule, there was something else. Something intangible, like a cloud obscuring the sun.

The ancient Greeks told it as the tragedy of hubris. A king grows too proud, and the gods punish him. Medieval men spoke of the wheel of fortune, which never ceases to turn. Or perhaps God, for His own good reasons, had turned His face away from the King of France.