Another day the king’s favorite, the Duchess of Etampes, was present with the two monarchs. “Brother,” said Francis, “you see yonder a fair dame who is of opinion that I should not let you out of Paris without your having revoked the treaty of Madrid.” “Ah! well,” said Charles, “if the opinion is a good one, it must be followed.” Such freedom of thought and speech is honorable to both sovereigns. Charles V., impressed with the wealth and cheerful industry that met his eye, said, according to Brantome, “There is not in the world any greatness such as that of a King of France.” After having passed a week at Paris he started for the Low Countries, halted at Chantilly, at the Constable de Montmorency’s, who, as well as the king’s two sons, the dauphin and the Duke of Orleans, was in attendance upon him, and did not separate from his escort of French royalty until he arrived at Valenciennes, the first town in his Flemish dominions. According to some historians there had been at Chantilly, amongst the two young princes and their servants, some idea of seizing the emperor and detaining him until he had consented to the concessions demanded of him; others merely say that the constable, before leaving him, was very urgent with him that he should enter into some positive engagement as to Milaness. “No,” said Charles, “I must not bind myself any more than I have done by my words as long as I am in your power; when I have chastised my rebellious subjects I will content your king.”

He did chastise, severely, his Flemish subjects, but he did not content the King of France. Francis I. was not willing to positively renounce his Italian conquests, and Charles V. was not willing to really give them up to him. Milaness was still, in Italy, the principal object of their mutual ambition. Navarre, in the south-east of France, and the Low Countries in the north, gave occasion for incessantly renewed disputes between them. The two sovereigns sought for combinations which would allow them to make, one to the other, the desired concessions, whilst still preserving pretexts for and chances of recovering them. Divers projects of marriage between their children or near relatives were advanced with that object, but nothing came of them; and, after two years and a half of abortive negotiations, another great war, the fourth, broke out between Francis I. and Charles V., for the same causes and with the same by-ends as ever. It lasted two years, from 1542 to 1544, with alternations of success and reverse on either side, and several diplomatic attempts to embroil in it the different European powers. Francis I. concluded an alliance in 1543 with Sultan Soliman II., and, in concert with French vessels, the vessels of the pirate Barbarossa cruised about and made attacks upon the shores of the Mediterranean. An outcry was raised against such a scandal as this. “Sir Ambassador,” said Francis I. to Marino Giustiniano, ambassador from Venice, “I cannot deny that I eagerly desire to see the Turk very powerful and ready for war; not on his own account, for he is an infidel and all we are Christians, but in order to cripple the power of the emperor, to force him into great expense, and to give all other governments security against so great an enemy.” “As for me,” says the contemporary Montluc in his Memoires, “if I could summon all the spirits of hell to break the head of my enemy who would fain break mine, I would do it with all my heart, God forgive me!” On the other hand, on the 11th of February, 1543, Charles V. and Henry VIII., King of England, concluded an alliance against Francis I. and the Turks. The unsuccess which had attended the grand expedition conducted by Charles V. personally in 1541, with the view of attacking Barbarossa and the Mussulmans in Algiers itself, had opened his eyes to all the difficulty of such enterprises, and he wished to secure the co-operation of a great maritime power before engaging therein afresh. He at the same time convoked a German diet at Spires in order to make a strong demonstration against the alliance between Francis I. and the Turks, and to claim the support of Germany in the name of Christendom. Ambassadors from the Duke of Savoy and the King of Denmark appeared in support of the propositions and demands of Charles V. The diet did not separate until it had voted twenty-four thousand foot and four thousand horse to be employed against France, and had forbidden Germans, under severe penalties, to take service with Francis I. In 1544 the war thus became almost European, and in the early days of April two armies were concentrated in Piedmont, near the little town of Ceresole, the Spanish twenty thousand strong and the French nineteen thousand; the former under the orders of the Marquis del Guasto, the latter under those of the Count d’Enghien; both ready to deliver a battle which was, according to one side, to preserve Europe from the despotic sway of a single master, and, according to the other, to protect Europe against a fresh invasion of Mussulmans.

Francis of Bourbon, Count d’Enghien, had received from the king a prohibition to give battle. He was believed to be weaker than the Marquis del Guasto, who showed eagerness to deliver it. Convinced that such a position was as demoralizing as it was disagreeable for him, the young Count d’Enghien sent a valiant and intelligent gentleman, Blaise de Montluc, who had already had experience in the great wars of the reign, to carry his representations to the king. Francis I. summoned the messenger to a meeting of the council, at which the dauphin, Henry, stood behind his father’s chair. “Montluc,” said the king, “I wish you to return and report my deliberation and the opinion of my council to M. d’Enghien, and to listen here to the difficulty that stands in the way of our being able to grant him leave to give battle, as he demands.” The Count de St. Pol spoke and set forth the reasons the king had for not desiring battle; and the end of them all was that there was a chance of losing, which would be a matter for regret beyond all comparison with the advantage to be gained from winning. “I stamped with impatience to speak,” says Montluc, “and would have broken in; but M. de St. Pol made me a sign with his hand, saying, ‘Quiet! quiet!’ which made me hold my tongue, and I saw that the king set on a-laughing. Then he told me that he wished me to say freely what I thought about it. ‘I consider myself most happy, sir,’ said I, ‘for when you were dauphin, and before you were called to this great charge which God hath given you, you tried the fortune of war as much as any king that ever hath been in France, without sparing your own person any more than the meanest gentleman. Well, a soldier-king is the only one I can address.’ The dauphin, who was facing me,” continued Montluc, “made me a sign with his head, which caused me to think that he wished me to speak boldly. Then said I, ‘Sir, I count that there will be forty-five hundred or forty-six hundred of us Gascons, all told; and all of us, captains and soldiers, will give you our names and the places whence we come, and will stake our heads that we will fight on the day of battle, if it should please you to grant it. It is a matter that we have been awaiting and desiring this long while, without much taking of counsel; be assured, sir, there are not more resolute soldiers than yonder. There are, besides, thirteen companies of Swiss, who will give you the same pledge as we who are your subjects; and we will hand in to you the names of them all for to be sent to their cantons in order that, if there be any who shall not do his duty, he may die. You have thus nine thousand men and more of whom you may be certain that they will fight to the last gasp of their lives. As for the Italians and Provencals, I will not answer to you for them; but perhaps they will all do as well as we, when they see us getting to work;’ and then I raised my arm up, as if to strike, whereat the king smiled. Sir,’ said I, ‘I have heard from wise captains that it is not the great number that wins, but the stout heart; on a day of battle, a moiety doth not fight at all. We desire no more; leave it to us.’ The king, who had very favorably listened to me, and who took pleasure in seeing my impatience, turned his eyes towards M. de St. Pol, who said, ‘Sir, would you change your opinion at the words of this madcap, who has no thought for the calamity it would be if we were to lose the battle? It is a matter too important to be left for settlement to the brains of a young Gascon.’ I answered him, ‘Sir, let me assure you that I am no braggart, nor so hare-brained as you consider me. All we have to do is not to go and attack the enemy in a stronghold, as we did at La Bicocca; but M. d’Enghien has too many good and veteran captains about him to commit such an error. The only question will be to find means of coming at them in open country, where there is neither hedge nor ditch to keep us from setting to work; and then, sir, you shall hear talk of the most furious fights that ever were. I do entreat you most humbly, sir, to admit no thought of anything but a victory.’ The dauphin,” continues Montluc, “went on more and more smiling, and making signs to me, which gave me still greater boldness in speaking. All the rest spoke and said that the king must not place any reliance upon my words. Admiral d’Annebaut said not a syllable, but smiled; I suppose he had seen the signs the dauphin was making to me. M. de St. Pol turns to speak to the king, and says, ‘How, sir! You seem disposed to change your opinion, and listen to the words of this rabid madman!’ To whom the king replied, ‘On my honor as a gentleman, cousin, he has given me such great and clear reasons, and has represented to me so well the good courage of my men, that I know not what to do.’ ‘I see quite well,’ said the Lord of St. Pol, ‘that you have already turned round.’ Whereupon the king, addressing the admiral, asked him what he thought about it. ‘Sir,’ answered the admiral, ‘you have a great mind to give them leave to fight. I will not be surety to you, if they fight, for gain or loss, since God alone can know about that; but I will certainly pledge you my life and my honor that all they whom he has mentioned to you will fight, and like good men and true, for I know what they are worth from having commanded them. Only do one thing; we know well that you are half brought round and inclined rather to fighting than the contrary; make, then, your prayer to God, and entreat Him to be pleased this once to aid you and counsel you as to what you ought to do.’ Then the king lifted his eyes towards heaven, and, clasping his hands and throwing his cap upon the table, said, ‘O God, I entreat Thee that it may please Thee to this day give me counsel as to what I ought to do for the preservation of my kingdom, and that all may be to Thy honor and glory!’ Whereupon the admiral asked him, ‘Sir, what opinion occurs to you now?’ The king, after pausing a little, turned towards me, saying, with a sort of shout, ‘Let them fight! let them fight!’ ‘Well, then, there is no more to be said,’ replied the admiral; ‘if you lose, you alone will be the cause of the loss; and, if you win, in like manner; and you, all alone, will have the satisfaction of it, you alone having given the leave.’ Then the king and every one rose up, and, as for me, I tingled with joy. His Majesty began talking with the admiral about my despatch and about giving orders for the pay which was in arrears. And M. de St. Pol accosted me, saying with a laugh, ‘Rabid madman, thou wilt be cause of the greatest weal that could happen to the king, or of the greatest woe.’”

Montluc’s boldness and Francis I.‘s confidence in yielding to it were not unrewarded. The battle was delivered at Ceresole on the 14th of April, 1544; it was bravely disputed and for some time indecisive, even in the opinion of the anxious Count d’Enghien, who was for a while in an awkward predicament; but the ardor of the Gascons and the firmness of the Swiss prevailed, and the French army was victorious. Montluc was eagerly desirous of being commissioned to go and carry to the king the news of the victory which he had predicted and to which he had contributed; but another messenger had the preference; and he does not, in his Memoires, conceal his profound discontent; but he was of those whom their discontent does not dishearten, and he continued serving his king and his country with such rigorous and stubborn zeal as was destined hereafter, in the reign of Henry III., to make him Marshal of France at last. He had to suffer a disappointment more serious than that which was personal to himself; the victory of Ceresole had not the results that might have been expected. The war continued; Charles V. transferred his principal efforts therein to the north, on the frontiers of the Low Countries and France, having concluded an alliance with Henry VIII. for acting in concert and on the offensive. Champagne and Picardy were simultaneously invaded by the Germans and the English; Henry VIII. took Boulogne; Charles V. advanced as far as Chateau-Thierry and threatened Paris. Great was the consternation there; Francis I. hurried up from Fontainebleau and rode about the streets, accompanied by the Duke of Guise, and everywhere saying, “If I cannot keep you from fear, I will keep you from harm.” “My God,” he had exclaimed, as he started from Fontainebleau, “how dear Thou sellest me my kingdom!” The people recovered courage and confidence; they rose in a body; forty thousand armed militiamen defiled, it is said, before the king. The army arrived by forced marches, and took post between Paris and Chateau-Thierry.

Charles V. was not rash; he fell back to Crespy in Laonness, some few leagues from his Low Countries. Negotiations were opened; and Francis I., fearing least Henry VIII., being master of Boulogne, should come and join Charles V., ordered his negotiator, Admiral d’Annebaut, to accept the emperor’s offers, “for fear lest he should rise higher in his demands when he knew that Boulogne was in the hands of the King of England.” The demands were hard, but a little less so than those made in 1540; Charles V. yielded on some special points, being possessed beyond everything with the desire of securing Francis I.‘s co-operation in the two great contests he was maintaining, against the Turks in eastern Europe and against the Protestants in Germany. Francis I. conceded everything in respect of the European policy in order to retain his rights over Milaness and to recover the French towns on the Somme. Peace was signed at Crespy on the 18th of September, 1544; and it was considered so bad an one that the dauphin thought himself bound to protest, first of all secretly before notaries and afterwards at Fontainebleau, on the 12th of December, in the presence of three princes of the royal house. This feeling was so general that several great bodies, amongst others the Parliament of Toulouse (on the 22d of January, 1545), followed the dauphin’s example.

Francis I. was ill, saddened, discouraged, and still he thought of nothing but preparing for a fifth great campaign against Charles V. Since his glorious victory at Melegnano in the beginning of his reign, fortune had almost invariably forsaken his policy and all his enterprises, whether of war or of diplomacy; but, falling at one time a victim to the defects of his mind and character, and being at another hurried away by his better qualities and his people’s sympathy, he took no serious note of the true causes or the inevitable consequences of his reverses, and realized nothing but their outward and visible signs, whilst still persisting in the same hopeful illusions and the same ways of government. Happily for the lustre of his reign and the honor of his name, he had desires and tastes independent of the vain and reckless policy practised by him with such alternations of rashness and feebleness as were more injurious to the success of his designs than to his personal renown, which was constantly recovering itself through the brilliancy of his courage, the generous though superficial instincts of his soul, and the charm of a mind animated by a sincere though ill-regulated sympathy for all the beautiful works of mankind in literature, science, and art, and for all that does honor and gives embellishment to the life of human beings.

CHAPTER XXIX.

FRANCIS I. AND THE RENAISSANCE.

Francis I., in his life as a king and a soldier, had two rare pieces of good fortune: two great victories, Melegnano and Ceresole, stand out at the beginning and the end of his reign; and in his direst defeat, at Pavia, he was personally a hero. In all else, as regards his government, his policy was neither an able nor a successful one; for two and thirty years he was engaged in plans, attempts, wars, and negotiations; he failed in all his designs; he undertook innumerable campaigns or expeditions that came to nothing; he concluded forty treaties of war, peace, or truce, incessantly changing aim, and cause, and allies; and, for all this incoherent activity, he could not manage to conquer either the empire or Italy; he brought neither aggrandizement nor peace to France.

Outside of the political arena, in quite a different field of ideas and facts, that is, in the intellectual field, Francis I. did better and succeeded better. In this region he exhibited an instinct and a taste for the grand and the beautiful; he had a sincere love for literature, science, and art; he honored and protected, and effectually too, their works and their representatives. And therein it is that more than one sovereign and more than one age have found their purest glory to consist. Virgil, Horace, and Livy contributed quite as much as the foundation of the empire to shed lustre on the reign of Augustus. Bossuet, Pascal, and Fenelon, Corneille, Racine, Boileau, Moliere, and La Fontaine, count for quite as much as his great warriors and his able administrators in regard to the splendor of the age of Louis XIV. People are quite right to set this estimate upon the heroes of the human mind and upon their works; their portion in the history of mankind is certainly not the most difficult, but it is that which provides both those who give and those who take with the purest delights, and which is the least dear in respect of what it costs the nation.

The reign of Francis I. occupies the first half of the century (the sixteenth), which has been called the age of Renaissance. Taken absolutely, and as implying a renaissance, following upon a decay of science, literature, and art, the expression is exaggerated, and goes beyond the truth; it is not true that the five centuries which rolled by between the establishment of the Capetians and the accession of Francis I. (from 987 to 1515), were a period of intellectual barrenness and decay; the middle ages, amidst the anarchy, violence, and calamities of their social condition, had, in philosophy, literature, and art, works of their own and a glory of their own, which lacked not originality, or brilliancy, or influence over subsequent ages. There is no idea of telling their history here; we only desire to point out, with some sort of precision, their special character and their intellectual worth.

At such a period, what one would scarcely expect to find is intellectual ambition on a very extensive scale and great variety in the branches of knowledge and in the scope of ideas. And yet it is in the thirteenth century that we meet for the first time in Europe and in France with the conception and the execution of a vast repertory of different scientific and literary works produced by the brain of man, in fact with a veritable Encyclopaedia. It was a monk, a preaching friar, a simple Dominican reader (lector qualiscumque), whose life was passed, as he himself says, by the side and under the eye of the superior-general of his order, who undertook and accomplished this great labor. Vincent of Beauvais, born at Beauvais between 1184 and 1194, who died at his native place in 1264, an insatiable glutton for books (librorum helluo), say his contemporaries, collected and edited what he called Bibliotheca Mundi, Speculum majus (Library of the World, an enlarged Mirror), an immense compilation, the first edition of which, published at Strasbourg in 1473, comprises ten volumes folio, and would comprise fifty or sixty volumes octavo. The work contains three, and, according to some manuscripts, four parts, entitled Speculum naturale (Mirror of Natural Science), Speculum historiale (Mirror of Historical Science), Speculum doctrinale (Mirror of Metaphysical Science), and Speculum morale (Mirror of Moral Science). M. Daunou, in the notice he has given to it [in the xviiith volume of the Histoire litteraire de la France, begun by the Benedictines and continued by the Academie des Inscriptions et Belleslettres de l’Institut, pp. 449-519], disputes, not without reason, the authenticity of this last part. Each of these Specula contains a summary, extracted from the various writings which have reference to the subject of it, and the authors of which Vincent of Beauvais takes care to name. M. Daunou, at the end of his learned notice, has described the nature, the merit, and the interest of the work in the following terms: “The writings and documents which we have to thank Vincent of Beauvais for having preserved to us are such as pertain to veritable studies, to doctrines, to traditions, and even to errors which obtained a certain amount of credit or exercised a certain amount of influence in the course of ages. . . . Whenever it is desirable to know what were in France, about 1250, the tendency and the subjects of the most elevated studies, what sciences were cultivated, what books, whether ancient, or, for the time, modern, were or might have been read, what questions were in agitation, what doctrines were prevalent in schools, monasteries, churches, and the world, it will be to Vincent of Beauvais, above all, that recourse must be had.” There is nothing to be added to this judicious estimate; there is no intention of entering here into any sort of detail about the work of Vincent of Beauvais; only it is desirable to bring some light to bear upon the intellectual aspirations and activity of the middle ages in France previously to the new impulse which was to be communicated to them by the glorious renaissance of Greek and Roman antiquity. A scientific, historical, and philosophical encyclopaedia of the thirteenth century surely deserves to find a place in the preface to the sixteenth.

After the encyclopaedist of the middle ages come, naturally, their philosophers. They were numerous; and some of them have remained illustrious. Several of them, at the date of their lives and labors, have already been met with and remarked upon in this history, such as Gerbert of Aurillac, who became Pope Sylvester II., St. Anselm, Abelard, St. Bernard, Robert of Sorbon, founder of the Sorbonne, and St. Thomas Aquinas.

To these names, known to every enlightened man, might be added many others less familiar to the public, but belonging to men who held a high place in the philosophical contests of their times, such as John Scot Erigena, Berenger, Roscelin, William of Champeaux, Gilbert of La Poree, &c. The questions which always have taken and always will take a passionate hold of men’s minds in respect of God, the universe, and man, in respect of our origin, our nature, and our destiny, were raised and discussed, from the eleventh to the fifteenth century, if not with so much brilliancy, at any rate with as much boldness and earnest thought, as at any other period. The middle ages had, in France, their spiritualists, their materialists, their pantheists, their rationalists, their mystics, and their sceptics, not very clear or refined in their notions, but such as lacked neither profundity in their general view of the questions, nor ingenious subtilty in their argumentative process. We do not care to give in this place any exposition or estimate of their doctrines; we shall simply point out what there was original and characteristic in their fashion of philosophizing, and wherein their mental condition differed essentially from that which was engendered and propagated, in the sixteenth century, by the resuscitation of Greek and Roman antiquity.

It is the constant idea of the philosophers and theologians of that period to affirm and to demonstrate the agreement between Christian faith and reason. They consider themselves placed between two fixed points, faith in the Christian truths inculcated from the very first or formally revealed by God to man, and reason, which is the faculty given to man to enable him to recognize the truth. “Faith,” wrote Hildebert, Archbishop of Tours, in the eleventh century, “is not contrary to reason, but it is above reason. If, like the philosophers, one willeth not to believe anything but what reason comprehends, faith, in this case, hath no merit. The merit is in believing that which, without being contrary to reason, is above it. . . . Faith is certainty in respect of things which fall not under the perceptions of the body; it is below knowledge, for to believe is less than to know; and it is above opinion, for to believe is more than to imagine.” “I do not seek to understand in order to believe,” says St. Anselm; “I believe in order to understand. . . . Authority requires faith in order to prepare man for reason.” But “authority,” said St. Columban, in the sixth century, “proceeds from right reason, not at all reason from authority. Every authority whereof the decrees are not approved of by right reason appears mighty weak.” Minds so liberal in the face of authority, and at the same time attached to revealed and traditional faith, could not but be sometimes painfully perplexed. “My wounded spirit,” said Adam of the Premontre-order (le premontre), in the twelfth century, “calls to her aid that which is the source of all grace and all life. But where is it? What is it? In her trouble the spirit hath love abiding; but she knows no longer what it is she loves, what she ought to love. She addresseth herself to the stones and to the rocks, and saith to them, ‘What are ye?’ And the stones and the rocks make answer, ‘We are creatures of the same even as thou art.’ To the like question the sun, the moon, and the stars make the like answer. The spirit doth interrogate the sand of the sea, the dust of the earth, the drops of rain, the days of the years, the hours of the days, the moments of the hours, the turf of the fields, the branches of the trees, the leaves of the branches, the scales of fish, the wings of birds, the utterances of men, the voices of animals, the movements of bodies, the thoughts of minds; and these things declare, all with one consent, unto the spirit, ‘We are not that which thou demandest; search up above us, and thou wilt find our Creator!’” In the tenth century, Remigius the theologian had gone still farther: “I have resolved,” said he, “to make an investigation as to my God; for it doth not suffice me to believe in Him; I wish further to see somewhat of Him. I feel that there is somewhat beyond my spirit. If my spirit should abide within herself without rising above herself, she would see only herself; it must be above herself that my spirit will reach God.”

God, creator, lawgiver, and preserver of the universe and of man, everywhere and always present and potent, in permanent connection, nay, communication, with man, at one time by natural and at another by supernatural means, at one time by the channel of authority and at another by that of free-agency, this is the point of departure, this the fixed idea of the philosopho-theologians of the middle ages. There are great gaps, great diversities, and great inconsistencies in their doctrines; they frequently made unfair use of the subtile dialectics called scholastics (la scolastique), and they frequently assigned too much to the master’s authority (l’autorite du maitre); but Christian faith, more or less properly understood and explained, and adhesion to the facts, to the religious and moral precepts, and to the primitive and essential testimonies of Christianity, are always to be found at the bottom of their systems and their disputes. Whether they be pantheists even or sceptics, it is in an atmosphere of Christianity that they live and that their thoughts are developed.

A breath from the grand old pagan life of Greece and Rome heaved forth again and spread, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, throughout this Christian atmosphere of the middle ages. Greek and Roman antiquity, with its ideas and its works, had never been completely forgotten therein. Aristotle and Plato, Seneca, Epictetus, Boetius, and other ancients had taken their place amongst the studies and philosophical notions of that period; but their influence had been limited to professional scholars, and had remained without any social influence. In spite of the stateliness of its ceremonies and the charm of its traditions, paganism had never been, in plain truth, a religion; faith and piety had held but a paltry place in it; instead of a God, the creator and acting sovereign of the world, its gods were of human invention and human nature: their adventures and the parts they played were pleasing to the imagination, but gave no sort of satisfaction to the deep instincts and higher aspirations of the soul. Christianity is God hovering over, watching over, and descending to earth; paganism is earth, its children and the stories of their lives transported, with their vices rather than their virtues, to heaven. Olympus was peopled with nothing but personages belonging to popular tradition, mythology, or allegory; and in the fifteenth century this mythology was in full course of decay; all that it might have commanded of credence or influence had vanished; there remained of it nothing but barren memories or a contemptuous incredulity. Speaking from the religious point of view, the Renaissance was but a resurrection of paganism dying out before the presence of the Christian world, which was troubled and perplexed, but full of life and futurity.

The religious question thus set on one side, the Renaissance was a great and happy thing, which restored to light and honor the works and glories of the Greek and Roman communities, those two communities which, in history anterior to the sixteenth century, had reached the greatest prosperity and splendor under a civil regimen, in the midst of a more or less stormy but real and strong political freedom, and had attained by the mere development of human thought and human energy the highest degree of civilization yet known in Europe, and, one would be inclined to say, in the world. The memorials and monuments of this civilization, which were suddenly removed, at the fall of the Greek empire, to Italy first and then from Italy to France, and throughout the whole of Western Europe, impressed with just admiration people as well as princes, and inspired them with the desire of marching forward in their turn in this attractive and glorious career. This kind of progress, arrived at by the road of imitation, often costs dear in the interruption it causes to the natural course of the peculiar and original genius of nations; but this is the price at which the destinies of diverse communities get linked together and interpenetrate, and the general progress of humanity is accomplished.

It was not only in religious questions and by their philosopho- theologians that the middle ages, before the Renaissance, displayed their activity and fecundity. In literature and in art, in history and in poesy, in architecture and in sculpture, they had produced great and beautiful works, which were quite worthy of surviving, and have, in fact, survived the period of their creation. Here, too, the Renaissance of Greek and Roman antiquity came in, and altered the originality of the earliest productions of the middle ages, and gave to literature and to art in France a new direction. It will be made a point here to note with some exactness the peculiar and native character of French literature at its origin. It is a far cry from the middle ages to the time of Louis XIV.; but the splendors of the most lovely days do not efface the charm belonging to the glimmerings of dawn.

The first amongst the literary creations of the middle ages is that of the French language itself. When we pass from the ninth to the thirteenth century, from the oath of Charles the Bald and Louis the Germanic at Strasbourg, in 842, to the account of the conquest of Constantinople in 1203, given by Geoffrey de Villehardouin, seneschal of Champagne, what a space has been traversed, what progress accomplished in the language of France! It was, at first, nothing but a coarse and irregular mixture of German and Latin, the former still in a barbarous and the latter already in a corrupted state; and amidst this mixture appear some fragments of the Celtic idioms of Gaul, without any literary tradition to regulate this mass of incoherence and confusion. As for following the development, regulation, and transformation of the French national language during these three centuries, and marking how it issued from this formless and vulgar chaos, there are not facts and documents enough for our guidance throughout that long travail; but when the thirteenth century begins, when Villehardouin tells the tale of the crusade, which put, for seventy years, Constantinople and the Greek empire of the East in the hands of the Latin and German warriors of the West, the French language, though still rude and somewhat fluctuating, appears already rich, varied, and capable of depicting with fidelity and energy events, ideas, characters, and the passions of men. There we have French prose and French poesy in their simple and lusty youth; the Conquest of Constantinople by Geoffrey de Villehardouin, and the Song of Roland by the unknown poet who collected and put together in the form of an epopee the most heroic amongst the legends of the reign of Charlemagne, are the first great and beautiful monuments of French literature in the middle ages.

The words are French literature; and of that alone is there any intention of speaking here. The middle ages had, up to the sixteenth century, a Latin literature; philosophers, theologians, and chroniclers all wrote in Latin. The philosophers and theologians have already been spoken of. Amongst the chroniclers some deserve the name of historians; not only do they alone make us acquainted with the history of their times, but they sometimes narrate it with real talent as observers and writers. Gregory of Tours, Eginhard, William of Tyre, Guibert of Nogent, William of Jumieges, and Orderic Vital are worthy of every attention from those whose hearts are set upon thoroughly understanding the history of the periods and the provinces of which those laborers of the middle ages have, in Latin, preserved the memorials. The chief of those works have been gathered together and translated in a special collection bearing the name of Guizot. But it is with the reign of Francis I. that, to bid a truce to further interruption, we commence the era of the real grand literature of France, that which has constituted and still constitutes the pride and the noble pleasure of the French public. Of that alone we would here denote the master-works and the glorious names, putting them carefully at the proper dates and places in the general course of events; a condition necessary for making them properly understood and their influence properly appreciated. As to the reign of Francis I., however, it must be premised as follows: several of the most illustrious of French writers, in poesy and prose, Ronsard, Montaigne, Bodin, and Stephen Pasquier, were born during that king’s lifetime and during the first half of the sixteenth century; but it is to the second half of that century and to the first of the seventeenth that they belong by the glory of their works and of their influence; their place in history will be assigned to them when we enter upon the precise epoch at which they performed and shone. We will at present confine ourselves to the great survivors of the middle ages, whether in prose or poesy, and to the men who shed lustre on the reign of Francis I. himself, and led French literature in its first steps along the road on which it entered at that period.

The middle ages bequeathed to French literature four prose-writers whom we cannot hesitate to call great historians: Villehardouin, Joinville, Froissart, and Commynes. Geoffrey de Villehardouin, after having taken part, as negotiator and soldier, in the crusade which terminated in the capture of Constantinople, and having settled in Thessaly, at Messinopolis, as holder of considerable fiefs, with the title of Marshal of Romania (Roumelia), employed his leisure in writing a history of this great exploit. He wrote with a dignified simplicity, epic and at the same time practical, speaking but little of himself, narrating facts with the precision of one who took part in them, and yet without useless detail or personal vanity, finding pleasure in doing justice to his comrades, amongst others the veteran Doge of Venice, Henry Dandolo, and sometimes intermingling with his story the reflections of a judicious and sincere Christian, without any pious fanaticism and without ostentation. Joinville wrote his History of St. Louis at the request of Joan of Navarre, wife of Philip the Handsome, and five years after that queen’s death; his manuscripts have it thus: “The things which I personally saw and heard were written in the year of grace 1309, in the month of October.” He was then eighty-five, and he dedicated his book to Louis le Hutin (the quarreller), great-grandson of St. Louis. More lively and more familiar in style than Villehardouin, he combines the vivid and natural impressions of youth with an old man’s fond clinging to the memories of his long life; he likes to bring himself upon the scene, especially as regards his relations towards and his conversations with St. Louis, for whom he has a tender regard and admiration, at the same time that he maintains towards him a considerable independence of ideas, conduct, and language; he is a valiant and faithful knight, who forms a very sensible opinion as to the crusade in which he takes part, and who will not enter upon it a second time even to follow the king to whom he is devoted, but whose pious fanaticism and warlike illusions he does not share; his narrative is at one and the same time very full of himself without any pretension, and very spirited without any show of passion, and fraught with a graceful and easy carelessness which charms the reader and all the while inspires confidence in the author’s veracity. Froissart is an insatiable Fry, who revels in all the sights of his day, events and personages, wars and galas, adventures of heroism or gallantry, and who is incessantly gadding about through all the dominions and all the courts of Europe, everywhere seeking his own special amusement in the satisfaction of his curiosity. He has himself given an account of the manner in which he collected and wrote his Chronicles. “Ponder,” says he, “amongst yourselves, such of ye as read me, or will read me, or have read me, or shall hear me read, how I managed to get and put together so many facts whereof I treat in so many parts. And, for to inform you of the truth, I began young, at the age of twenty years, and I came into the world amidst the deeds and adventures, and I did always take great delight in them, more than in aught else. And God gave me such grace that I was well with all parties, and with the households of the kings, and, especially, the household of King Edward of England, and the noble queen his wife, Madame Philippa of Hainault, unto whom, in my youth, I was clerk, and I did minister unto her with beautiful ditties and amorous treatises. And for love of the service of the noble and valiant dame with whom I was, all the other lords, kings, dukes, counts, barons, and knights, of whatsoever nation they might be, did love me and hear me and see me gladly, and brought me great profit. . . . Thus, wherever I went, I made inquiry of the old knights and squires who had been at deeds of arms, and who were specially fit to speak thereof, and also of certain heralds in good credit for to verify and justify all matters. Thus have I gotten together this lofty and noble history.” This picture of Froissart and his work by his own hand would be incomplete without the addition of a characteristic anecdote. In one of his excursions in search of adventures and stories, “he fell in at Pamiers with a good knight, Messire Espaing of Lyons, who had been in all the wars of the time, and managed the great affairs of princes. They set out to travel together, Messire Espaing telling his comrade what he knew about the history of the places whereby they passed, and Froissart taking great care to ride close to him for to hear his words. Every evening they halted at hostels where they drained flagons full of white wine as good as the good canon had ever drunk in his life; then, after drinking, so soon as the knight was weary of relating, the chronicler wrote down just the substance of his stories, so as to better leave remembrance of them for time to come, as there is no way of retaining so certain as writing down.”

There is no occasion to add to these quotations; they give the most correct idea that can be formed of Froissart’s chronicles and their literary merit as well as their historical value.

Philip de Commynes is quite another affair, and far more than Froissart, nay, than Joinville and Villehardouin. He is a politician proficient in the understanding and handling of the great concerns and great personages of his time. He served Charles the Rash and Louis XI.; and, after so trying an experience, he depicted them and passed judgment upon them with imperturbable clearsightedness and freedom of thought. With the recital of events, as well as the portrayal of character, he mingles here and there the reflections, expressed in precise, firm, and temperate language, of a profound moralist, who sets before himself no other aim but that of giving his thoughts full utterance. He has already been spoken of in the second volume of this History, in connection with his leaving the Duke of Burgundy’s service for that of Louis XI., and with his remarks upon the virtues as well as the vices of that able but unprincipled despot. We will not go again over that ground. As a king’s adviser, Commynes would have been as much in place at the side of Louis XIV. as at that of Louis XI.; as a writer, he, in the fifteenth century, often made history and politics speak a language which the seventeenth century would not have disowned.

Let us pass from the prose-writers of the middle ages to their poets.

The grand name of poesy is here given only to poetical works which have lived beyond their cradles and have taken rank amongst the treasures of the national literature. Thanks to sociability of manners, vivacity of intellect, and fickleness of taste, light and ephemeral poesy has obtained more success and occupied more space in France than in any other country; but there are successes which give no title to enter into a people’s history; quality and endurance of renown are even more requisite in literature than in politics; and many a man whose verses have been very much relished and cried up in his lifetime has neither deserved nor kept in his native land the beautiful name of poet. Setting aside, of course, the language and poems of the troubadours of Southern France, we shall find, in French poesy previous to the Renaissance, only three works which, through their popularity in their own time, still live in the memory of the erudite, and one only which, by its grand character and its superior beauties, attests the poetical genius of the middle ages and can claim national rights in the history of France. The Romance of the Rose in the erotic and allegorical style, the Romances of Renart in the satirical, and the Farce of Patelin, a happy attempt in the line of comedy, though but little known nowadays to the public, are still and will remain subjects of literary study. The Song of Roland alone is an admirable sample of epic poesy in France, and the only monument of poetical genius in the middle ages which can have a claim to national appreciation in the nineteenth century. It is almost a pity not to reproduce here the whole of that glorious epopee, as impressive from the forcible and pathetic simplicity of its sentiments and language as from the grandeur of the scene and the pious heroism of the actors in it. It is impossible, however, to resist the pleasure of quoting some fragments of it. The best version to refer to is that which has been given almost word for word, from the original text, by M. Leon Gaultier, in his beautiful work, so justly crowned by the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-lettres, on Lee Epopees Francaises.

In 778 Charlemagne was returning from a great expedition in Spain, during which, after having taken Pampeluna, he had failed before Saragossa, and had not considered himself called upon to prolong his struggle with the Arab Mussulmans. He with the main body of his army had crossed the Pyrenees, leaving as rearguard a small division under his nephew Roland, prefect of the Marches of Brittany, Anselm, count of the palace, Oliver, Roland’s comrade, Archbishop Turpin, and several other warriors of renown. When they arrived at the little valley of Roncesvalles, between the defiles of Sizer and Val Carlos, this rearguard was unexpectedly attacked by thousands of Basque mountaineers, who were joined by thousands of Arabs eager to massacre and plunder the Christians and Franks, who, indeed, perished to a man in this ambuscade. “The news of this disaster,” says Eginhard, in his Annales, “obscured the glory of the successes the king had but lately obtained in Spain.” This fact, with large amplifications, became the source of popular legends and songs, which, probably towards the end of the eleventh century, became embodied in the Song of Roland, attributed, in two manuscripts, but without any certainty, to a certain Thuroulde (Turold), Abbot of Malmesbury and Peterborough under William the Conqueror. It must suffice to reproduce here only the most beautiful and most characteristic passages of this little national epopee, a truly Homeric picture of the quasi-barbarous times and manners of knightly Christendom.

The eighty-second strophe of the poem commences thus:

(Oliver dies: Roland and Archbishop Turpin continue the fight.)

(A last encounter takes place: a Saracen left wounded on the battle-field, seeing Roland in a swoon, gets up, and approaches him, saying, “Vanquished, he is vanquished, the nephew of Charles! There is his sword, which I will carry off to Arabia!”)

It is useless to carry these quotations any further; they are sufficient to give an idea of the grand character of the poem in which so many traits of really touching affection and so many bursts of patriotic devotion and pious resignation are mingled with the merest brute courage. Such, in its chief works, philosophical, historical, and poetical, was the literature which the middle ages bequeathed to the reign of Francis I. In history only, and in spite of the new character assumed afterwards by the French language, this literature has had the honor of preserving its nationality and its glory. Villehardouin, Joinville, Froissart, and Commynes have remained great writers. In philosophy and in poesy a profound revolution was approaching; the religious reform and the fine literary genius as well as the grand French language of the seventeenth century were preparing to rise above the intellectual horizon. But between the moment when such advances dawn and that when they burst forth there is nearly always a period of uncertain and unfruitful transition: and such was the first half of the sixteenth century, that is to say, the actual reign of Francis I.; it is often called the reign of the Renaissance, which certainly originated in his reign, but it did not grow and make any display until after him; the religious, philosophical, and poetical revolution, Calvin, Montaigne, and Ronsard, born in the earlier half of the seventeenth century, did not do anything that exercised any power until the later. One single poet, a third-rate one, Clement Marot, attained lustre under Francis I. Rabelais is the only great prose writer who belongs strictly to that period. The scholars, the learned critics of what had been left by antiquity in general and by Greek and Roman antiquity in particular, Bude (Budaeus), J. C. Scaliger; Muretus, Danes (Danesius), Arnyot, Ramus (Peter la Ramee), Robert Estienne (Stephanus), Vatable (Watebled), Cujas, and Turnebius make up the tale of literature specially belonging to and originating in the reign of Francis I., just as the foundation of the College Royal, which became the College de France, is his chief personal claim to renown in the service of science and letters.

Let us return to the poets of the actual reign of Francis I. The first we encounter speaks thus of himself:—

Now who was this who, with perfect confidence, indulged in such proud language? Was it a Homer, a Dante, a Corneille, one of those great poetical geniuses whose works can move a whole people, are addressed to all the world, and “will live forever”? No; it was a poet of the court and of the fashionable world of Paris, of Blois, and of Amboise, in the sixteenth century, a groom-of-the-chamber to Marguerite de Valois, and one of Francis I.‘s favorites, who had written elegies, eclogues, epistles, complaints, roundelays, and epigrams on the incidents and for his masters and mistresses of the hour; France owed to him none of those great poetical works consecrated to description of the grand destinies and grand passions of man, and to the future as well as to the writer’s own time.