Read "The Power And The Glory" by Gilbert Parker online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
The court assembled in the vast suite of apartments decorated by pictures and sculptures, tapestries, mosaics in light and splendor. Throngs feasted, gamed, promenaded, talked, and nowhere else in the world was there such magnificence. The suite was called the "Halls of Abundance"--of Venus, Mars, Diana, Mercury, Apollo; and Louis XIV met in the salon of Apollo with his courtiers, affable, gracious, august, a marvel of hard work and love of country, which under him was growing great and powerful.
Louis was his own Prime Minister and at the head of each department of state. His brain knew every important detail of every court in Europe. He formed his own policy and had an organization throughout France such as no government ever had. He was behind all the amazing progress of France. He had built it up from a series of fighting duchies from the days of the Fronde.