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Love him or hate him, the sun King was sharp at a razor, a decent soldier, and very much on top of all aspects of his government until he started to fail very late in his reign. Most people believe his financial policies played a part in the collapse approximately 77 years after his death, and in the last years of his reign there were military and financial setbacks, but in his heyday in the late 17th century, he was the model of everything a European Ruler aspired to be. He was the perfect Absolute monarch, strong, virile, shrewd, majestic.

One suspects he'd have been spinning in his grave if he could see what happened to his bloodline. The cracks were already showing if one had wit to see it in the relative frailty of his children with La Montespan with her legitimate children, but it really didn't help that his wife was the niece of his mother.

Contemplate Louis XVI with me for a minute. He was harmless, really. His favorite pastime was making keys. It took him something like eight years to consummate his marriage as he didn't really grasp the concept until a relative of Marie Antoinette explained it in simple words with a key metaphor. He was a sweet, dull man with no grasp of things like finance and government. Poor Marie was more than a little inbred herself and kept fashionably ignorant of anything she would have needed to know to help him rule. So they didn't rule. He made keys and she went shopping and threw parties while the country fell apart. They had no way of grasping the realities of the situation, between his congenital weakness of intellect and her deep ignorance.

And so they fell.

In my imagination, the lusty and vital Louis VIV's shade looks on in horror.