After the battle of Oudenarde, prince Eugene came to besiege Lille with the head of 35 000 men and 200 guns (August 1708).

Boufflers, with 10 000 soldiers only and a few thousands of inhabitants, step by step defended all the outer works of the place, and made several exits which threw the disorder in the enemy batteries, but at the end of two months the garrison, reduced by half, was with end of force, the walls beaten in breach collapsed de.toutes.parts.

Boufflers capitulated for the city, was withdrawn in the citadel, and left there only in December, with the honors of the war.

Denain was a bright return of fortune.

Prince Eugene had more men than Villars, but its forces were disseminated of Sambre in the Scheldt.

Villars, after having misled the enemy by skilful operations, went quickly with all its forces against the fortified camp from Denain, carried it attack under an appalling fire, destroyed there 8000 men and y took sixty flags.

The remainder of the enemies arrived at the noise of the gun, but they found the camp with the capacity of the French and were constrained to be withdrawn; the victory had not cost Villars more than 500 men (July 24, 1712).

Fénelon had been the tutor of the duke of Burgundy, Louis, grandson of Louis XIV: it was for its pupil that it had composed Télémaque.

Appointed Cambric archbishop in 1695, it built everyone by its evangelic softness, its charity and its untiring devotion: it visited the patients, the poor, the unhappy ones; its kindness made him find consolations for all miseries.

During the war of succession of Spain it made évêché vast ambulance, where it looked after itself the casualties.

The end of Louis XIV contrasted curiously with the glare of its reign: as soon as the courtiers were assured that its death was next, they moved away all from him to make their court with the duke of Orleans, and the old king was almost only when it returned the last sigh.

He did not have any more children nor friends to cry it, and the people insulted his convoy: "I saw, tells Voltaire, who had twenty and one years in 1715, I saw small tents drawn up on the way of Saint-Denis; one drank there, one sang there, one laughed "

The power of Russia dates from the beginning of the eighteenth century; deprived hitherto of coasts on the Baltic and the Black Sea, it was without communication with the rest of Europe, and one regarded it as Asian.

It was Pierre the Large one who made a European State of it; beaten in Narva in 1700 by the king of Sweden Charles XII, it took soon a complete revenge; the Baltic provinces, which belonged to Sweden, became Russian provinces; Saint-Pétersbourg was founded (1703), and Charles XII, overcome with Poltava in 1709, was tiny room to be fled in Turkey.

Pierre the Large one removed also vast territories in Perse on the edges of the Caspian Sea; but it was not satisfied to extend its empire, it transformed it.

Helped by foreigners whom it had taken with his service, it improved agriculture, created industries, opened roads and channels, developed the trade and organized a national education.

Russia was involved of sharp force in the way of progress, and quickly became one of the great powers of Europe.