On this account he was not received with favour by Louis XIV.; so in 1683 he assisted the Imperialists in Hungary, and while there he wrote some letters in which he referred to Louis as le roi du theatre, for which on his return to France he was temporarily banished to Chantilly.
Above the door are the arms of France and of Joan of Arc and an inscription of 1481 reading "Vive labeur; vive le roi Louys."
To him has also been ascribed the work, La generate et fidele Relation de tout ce qui s'est passe en l'isle de Re, envoyee par le roi a la royne sa mere (Paris, 1627).
Next year the great tragic poem of Torquemada came forth to bear witness that the hand which wrote Ruy Blas had lost nothing of its godlike power and its matchless cunning, if the author of Le Roi s'amuse had ceased to care much about coherence of construction from the theatrical point of view as compared with the perfection of a tragedy designed for the devotion of students not unworthy or incapable of the study; that his command of pity and terror, his powers of intuition and invention, had never been more absolute and more sublime; and that his infinite and illimitable charity of imagination could transfigure even the most monstrous historic representative of Christian or Catholic diabolatry into the likeness of a terribly benevolent and a tragically magnificent monomaniac. Two years later Victor Hugo published the third and concluding series of La Legende des siecles.
