This picture would seem sufficiently black had we no more to describe. But a deeper, darker shade was yet to be added, by the strange mania which towards the end of the century spread far and wide through Protestant and Catholic Germany.
This finishing touch was unconsciously given by "The Most Christian King," Louis XIV. of France. Up to this time, in the midst of coarse and brutalizing vices, there were still to be found here and there the traces of the simple, homely manners and pleasures of olden times.
There were princes and ancient families who still preserved a love of order, and a sense of duty ; who were in these respects the models to which the more depraved looked up with some sort of reverence.
But twenty years after the Peace of Westphalia a new order of things had begun. The splendour, the extravagance, the despotism, the utter immorality of Versailles, became the pattern and admiration of Protestant and Catholic Germany.
The change seems to have come more or less suddenly. Towards the end of the century the German princess, Elizabeth Charlotte, who had married the Duke of Orleans, wrote sorrowfully to her sister in Germany that the life of Paris and Versailles was a weariness and oppression to her. She looked back to the old times in her German home, where she had natural and simple pleasures, and thoroughly enjoyed her girlish days.
She remembered the merry games, and the free out-of-doors life, when she could laugh and talk, and have no rules of etiquette to make her miserable. She remembered the feasts of cold milk and simple food with cheerful friends, out on the green grass by some little stream, and she thought how happy and innocent were those pleasures, which she had exchanged for stiff and stately splendour.
But a few years after she wrote, "I hear that all is changed, and you seem in Germany to be no better off than I am here in France."
And so it was ; but the picture at this point needs to be covered with the thickest veil. It would be an unprofitable and hateful task to attempt a description of the manner of living of German princes and nobles, when the rage for all that was French had taken possession of them.
The history of many a heathen would appear decent and dignified when compared with the lives of the " Christian " Sultans of Germany, with their harems, their feasts of Venus in luxurious gardens, their feasts of Diana in shady groves their festivals of nymphs upon their lakes and rivers, and of Saturn on the wooded lulls.
Did no awakened conscience ever speak to these descendants of the princes who had listened to Luther, and restored the Bible to Germany ?
On the contrary, we are told that the more they were sunk in the most shameless self-indulgence, the more did they regard themselves as " the Davids and Solomons of their time." We read in a letter addressed to one of these princes, one who excelled the rest in every vice, " Above all must we remember that magnificence is necessary to a prince, for he is the representative of God, God displays His magnificence in all His works. He shows Himself to be great and mighty in His mighty universe, in His radiant sun, His terrible lightning and thunder. So should the prince shine and glitter in all that surrounds him."
But no more of this " Saxon man of sin," as Carlyle would have him called, for, as he further says, "human language is unequal to the history of such things " as the life and manners of this " representative of God."
And so the world went on in these palaces and castles, with none to speak a word of warning, or to remind these dying men and women of the great eternity before them, For even from the beginning of the seventeenth century, the chaplains in the Catholic courts and castles had been replaced by Spanish or Italian Jesuits, and the Protestant chaplains gave place as the years went on to French abbes.
For all things were now to be French—French tutors and dancing masters, French dress, French wigs and curls, French manners, French morals, French language.
"And thus," complained Prince Frederick II. of Gotha, " instead of estimable virtues, and state craft, the young princes have their heads continually filled with atheism, and indifference, and self-conceit, and impertinence, and contempt of their fatherland, and moreover they are ruined in bodily health by vice and luxury."
Nor was the curse limited to princes and nobles. The middle class became ashamed of the plain and simple ways of their fathers. They too must follow the shining examples set before them of extravagance and luxury and immorality of all sorts.
The insane pride of birth and rank, which kept them entirely apart from the upper classes, did not hinder this, but rather encouraged it. For they had accustomed themselves to think that a count or a baron were positively superior beings—a prince or a king something half-divine—and could they have nobler models than these men and women in splendid attire, and glittering with gold and jewels ?
Deeply were they flattered, when at some court festivities they were invited with wives and daughters to take part in masked balls and masquerades. Little did they suspect that it was one of the noble pleasures of their hosts to watch their awkward attempts at French grace and manners, to make merry over their vulgar finery, and their rustic innocence, which made them the sport of the still more vulgar tricks of the aristocratic.
Thus downwards did the degradation and ruin spread amongst all classes—till we reach the half-savage, the starving, the homeless victims of war and pestilence.