La Meilleraye knew very well what he had done. He said to Retz, “I am a fool, a brute—I have nearly ruined the State, and it is you that have saved it. Come, we will talk to the Queen like Frenchmen and men of worth.” So they did, but to no purpose. She believed that Retz was at the bottom of the whole émeute, and was not far wrong. But there was no stopping it now. The barricades were up at dawn the next morning, and it was clear that Broussel must be given back. He was. Then came the flight of the Court, which Dumas tells so admirably.
After the evasion of the royalties, the Fronde became largely comic opera. Certain of the princes—for reasons of their own—joined the popular party: Beaufort, le roi des Halles, who wanted the Admiralty; Bouillon, with claims upon his principality of Sedan; Conti, Elbeuf, Longueville. Retz had the idea of bringing their, and his, ladies into it. He himself fetched Mesdames de Longueville and de Bouillon with their children to the Hôtel de Ville, “avec une espèce de triomphe.”
“The small-pox had spared Mme. de Longueville all her astounding beauty; Mme. de Bouillon’s, though on the wane, was still remarkable. Now imagine, I beg you, those two upon the steps of the Hôtel de Ville, the handsomer in that they appeared to be in undress, though they were not at all so. Each held one of her children in her arms, as lovely as its mother. The Grève was full of people over the roofs of the houses. The men shouted their joy, the women wept for pity. I threw five hundred pistoles out of the window of the Hôtel de Ville.”
After their debonair fashion these high people played at revolution. “Then you might see the blue scarves of ladies mingling with steel cuirasses, hear violins in the halls of the Hôtel de Ville, and drums and trumpets in the Place—the sort of thing which you find more of in romance than elsewhere.” Nothing came of it all; a peace was patched up with the Parlement, and each of the grandees got something for himself, which had been his only reason for levying civil war. Beaufort was assured of his Admiralty, Longueville was made Viceroy of Normandy, Bouillon compensated for Sedan—and so on. La Rochefoucauld, too, who had taken up arms for the sake of Mme. de Longueville—
we must suppose that he also was rewarded. There is an interesting page in the Memoirs of André d’Ormesson, one of an upright family of lawyers, which by stating the mere facts lets in the light upon the Fronde. All he does is to draw up a list of the grands seigneurs of 1648-55, with a statement of how often they changed sides in the seven years. It should be studied by all who wish to know how not to make civil war. But Retz too gives the spirit of the thing equally well. When his quarrel with Condé was coming to a head, and he was preparing, as he threatened, to push that prince off the pavement, he collected his friends about him, and among them two light-hearted marquises, Rouillac and Canillac. But when Canillac saw Rouillac he said to Retz, “I came to you, sir, to assure you of my services; but it is not reasonable that the two greatest asses in the kingdom should be on the same side. So I am off to the Hôtel de Condé.” And, he adds, you are to observe that he went there!
Retz alone, who, if he had been serious, might have been master of Paris, had nothing—except, of course, his Cardinal’s hat, which he would have had anyhow. The Court came back, Mazarin was forced out of France for a couple of years. But the Queen had him in again; and then it was his turn. Retz was persuaded into the Louvre, immediately arrested and carried off to Vincennes. It was a shock to his vanity that the populace took it calmly. There were no barricades for him. From Vincennes he was presently removed to Nantes, whence, with the assistance of his friends—and I cannot but suspect the connivance of the governor—he escaped to the coast, landed at San Sebastian, was allowed to cross Spain and re-embark for Italy. He fetched up in Rome, where he remained for a year or two, taking part in conclaves and thoroughly enjoying himself. He spent large sums of money, which he did not possess, but never failed to receive from his friends. The French Ambassador and all the French clergy steadily cut him—but he did not take any notice. The Pope did, though, and Retz was given to understand that he had better remove himself. He went to Germany, to Switzerland, Holland, England in turn. Mazarin was dead, and Charles II restored by the time he came here. I don’t think that he did anything to the purpose with our Court, though no doubt Charles was glad of him. Neither Evelyn nor Pepys have anything to say about him; and I fancy that he was only a passing guest. As soon as he could he crept back to Court, to which he had already surrendered his coadjutorship. Louis employed him once or twice; but his day was over. He lived mostly at Commercy, where he tried economy, and made periodical retreats, as La Rochefoucauld unkindly says, “withdrawing himself from the Court which was withdrawing itself from him.” He was four million livres in debt, but managed to pay them off, and even to contemplate a snug residuary estate which he intended for Mme. de Grignan, Mme. de Sévigné’s high-stomached daughter. But Mme. de Grignan snubbed him consistently and severely, and nothing came of it. He died in 1679, drained of his fiery juices, making a “good end.” The stormy Coadjutor had become “notre cher Cardinal.”
His Memoirs, taken on end, are wearisome, because endless intrigue, diamond-cut-diamond and chicanery are wearisome, as well as intricate, unless some discernible principle can be made out of them. It seems that Retz did nothing except talk—but, as Michelet points out, that was what France at large did when the Gascons were let into Paris with Henri IV. Read desultorily, they are delightful, witty, worldly-wise, untirably vivacious, thrilling and glittering like broken ice. His Machiavellisms are worth hunting out:
“The great inconvenience of civil war is that you must be more careful of what you ought not to tell your friends than of what you ought to do to your enemies.
“The most common source of disaster among men is that they are too much afraid of the present and not enough of the future.
“In dealing with princes it is as dangerous, if not as criminal, to be able to do good as to wish to do harm.
“One of Cardinal Mazarin’s greatest faults was that he was never able to believe that anyone spoke to him with honest intention.”
When the Queen-Regent was working her hardest for Mazarin’s return, she tried to win Retz over to help her. He told her bluntly that such a move would mean the ruin of the State. How so, she asked him, if Monsieur and M. le Prince should agree to it? “Because, Madam,” said Retz, “Monsieur would never agree to it until the State was already in danger, and M. le Prince never, except to put it in danger.” Excellent, and quite true.
After Retz’s death, the Président Hénault, writing about his Memoirs, asked how one was to believe that a man would have the courage, or the folly, to say worse things about himself than his greatest enemy could have said. The answer, of course, is that Retz had no suspicion that he was saying bad things about himself. He said a great deal that was not true. Other chronicles of the Fronde give detailed accounts of such days as that of the Barricades, with not a word of the Coadjutor in them. But even if it had all been true, it would have seemed a perfectly simple matter to him. If you have no moral sense, the words “good” and “bad” have only a relative meaning. It is much harder to understand why he did the things which he relates, or why, if he did not do them, he said that he did. What was he trying to get done? Did he hate Mazarin? There is no evidence that he did anything more than despise him. La Rochefoucauld, whom he accuses, by the way, of having tried to assassinate him, explains him and his Memoirs alike by vanity. “Far from declaring himself Mazarin’s enemy in order to supplant him, his only aim was to seem formidable, and to indulge the foolish vanity of opposing him.” If Retz knew of that “portrait”—and he did, because Mme. de Sévigné sent it him—his own more benevolent one of its author must be reckoned in his favour. He had written it in his Memoirs, but allowed it to stand there unaltered except for one little word. He had originally said that La Rochefoucauld was the most accomplished courtier and most honest man of his age. He scratched out the honesty.
Personally, I picture a happy rencontre in the Elysian Fields in or about 1679, when the Cardinal de Retz should have arrived and greeted his brother in the purple. A lifting of red hats, a pressing of hands—“Caro Signore, sta sempre bene?” and so on. There had been bitter war on earth; each was a keen blade, each an Italian. Each had had his triumphs. Retz had twice driven Mazarin out of Paris and once out of France. But Mazarin had proved the better stayer. He had returned, put Retz to flight, and died worth forty millions. Retz came back, made a good end, and only just cleared his debts. And what had it all been about? Some say, Anne of Austria, an elderly, ill-tempered, fat woman; some say vanity, some ambition. I say, Il Talento and the joy of battle: the brain taut, the eye alert, the sword-hand flickering like lightning on a summer night. Greek was meeting Greek. Inevitably that must have been. There was not room for two Italians of that stamp in France.
But let us always remember that he was mourned by Mme. de Sévigné, who said that he had been her friend for thirty years. There is the best thing to be known about him.
Few of the outstanding names in history have received the hard measure which has been meted out to Madame de Maintenon’s. She has had it, so to speak, both ways; been blamed for what she did not, and for what she did. First, she was to be held abominable because she was not the King’s wife; next, and even more so, because she was. All that falls to the ground if it can be shown that her life before the marriage was as irreproachable, morally, as it was after it. Madame Saint-René Taillandier, in a recent admirable study of the misjudged lady, has no difficulty in proving that it was so. She proves it positively by showing of what nature Madame de Maintenon really was, and negatively by exploring all possible sources of contemporary evidence, and finding nothing worth consideration. Dull, narrow, bigoted, obstinate, over-busy about many things, more occupied with to-day than to-morrow, falling in too readily with Louis’ view of himself and his place in the universe (a view which she shared with the entire French nation)—these things she may have been, and done. But she was a good woman, a pious woman, one who was severely tried, one who did her immediate duty and gave to the poor. She had a long and unhappy life, and died worn out. There can be no doubt of all this. All sorts of reasons for hating and slandering her can be urged: none of them good ones.
The reproaches of the historians are not so summarily to be dismissed. It is not necessary to go so far as Michelet did when he said that the price of her marriage with Louis was the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. That’s absurd. Madame de Maintenon neither bargained nor sold her hand. But it is hard to believe—impossible to believe—that she was not in consultation with the King, and Louvois, and the priests about the Revocation, or that, if consulted, she would not have urged it. Saint-Simon, who is her first accuser here, is writing after her death, and writing as an historian. I feel sure that he is right. It is, of course, true that she was a Huguenot by descent, a grand-daughter of that truculent, serio-comic old Agrippa d’Aubigné, whose portrait, savagely grinning, is so extraordinarily like those of his king, le Béarnais; and it is true also that, though she was converted before she was a grown woman, she never lost her fanatic hold upon religion, but simply changed its direction. Throughout her life, says Madame Taillandier, she showed Huguenot characteristics. She could never take to the devotion of the rosary; she could never find any enthusiasm for convents; she invoked neither the Virgin nor the Saints; continued the reading of her Bible. No matter for that: she was hungry for souls. As Saint-Simon puts it, with evident truth: “Elle eut la maladie des directions ... elle se croyait l’abbesse universelle.... Elle se figurait être une mère d’église.” She converted whomsoever she could touch, and as she grew in influence she could touch a many. Concerned in the Revocation, besides Louis, there were Louvois, Father le Tellier, Bossuet, her own spiritual director, the Bishop of Chartres, and all the Jesuits. Everything that we know about her shows to which side she would incline; and nothing that we know about her makes it likely that she had any conception what statesmanship meant. Louis called her “Sa Solidité.” Her solidity showed itself in her care for detail: nothing was too small for her—she loved to order a household, knew how many chickens you should get in for a small family, how much wine for the servants, how many pounds of candles. She could design the quasi-conventual robes for Saint-Cyr, costumes for ballets and so on. But the economic or political outcome of the Revocation of the Edict; the ruin of her country, the humiliation of the King, all the immediate results of the “affreux complot” were entirely outside her power of vision. “Four regiments of infantry,” Madame Taillandier pleasantly says, “two of cavalry were ordered to follow the Duc de Noailles into Languedoc, and trample a little on the Huguenots.” My italics! Well, Madame de Maintenon expected to save souls like that. I don’t think that she can be let off her share in the dragonnades, or in the Revocation.
Never mind. She was more of a saint than a sinner, though she lacked the severity and suavity, the “sweet reasonableness” of the true Saints. She was bleak, in herself and in her outlook; her life had always been, and after her marriage was long to be, cheerless and unutterably dull. What a life it was, throughout its eighty-three years! Born in a prison in 1635, and living thereafter on charity, with one relative or another; hounded from Huguenot pillar to Catholic post; clinging to the faith in which she had been reared until she was “converted” almost literally by force; still a pauper, often a drudge; then at seventeen married to an elderly balladist, crippled by disease, Paul Scarron, a scribbler of pasquinades and squibs, author of a travesty of Virgil and what not; married to this incapacitated rip; living with him in Grub Street on what he could pick up by the hire of his pen—a libel here, a dedication there, a lampoon elsewhere, a broadside for the street corner or bridge-end; living so from hand to mouth, married but not a wife—what a life for a young girl gently born, grand-daughter of King Henry’s old friend! Nothing is more pathetic in Madame Taillandier’s account of her than the gallant fight she put up in her little salon in the Rue Neuve Saint-Louis—polite conversation in her bed-chamber with her friends, while Paul and his tore the decencies to shreds below-stairs. And she succeeded, too, in making good and herself respected. She had valuable friends. Madame de Sévigné was one, Madame de Coulanges another, Madame de Lafayette a third. Through them she became acquainted with yet higher persons, among them with Madame de Montespan, then in league with the highest of all. By those means she fell under the King’s eye. He did not like, but he esteemed her, and chose her out of all the Court and all Paris to govern Madame de Montespan’s children. She did it, by all accounts, admirably. If she had no other qualities, she had two rare ones: she did her duty, and held her tongue.
When, by public Act, the children were made Enfants de France, they were removed from Paris to Saint-Germain; and there was Madame Scarron in daily intercourse with Louis. That was the beginning of her astounding ascent. Madame de Montespan was uneasy, and had reason to be. The gouvernante’s influence was steadily against her. Madame Scarron disapproved of her and all her kind; and sure enough, from the hour of her entry into the King’s family, the mistress’s star began to wane. Finally, what the preachers—Bossuet, Bourdaloue—could not do the ghastly business of “the Poisons” settled. La Montespan was in that up to the neck, and Louis knew that she was, and held his peace, not to save her neck, but to save his face. Montespan was exiled, and took, as George Meredith said, “to religion and little dogs.” Madame Scarron remained in charge of the children, and was ennobled with a fief and a Marquisate. The Court called her “Madame de Maintenant”—but she had not fully earned that. The Queen died—and Louis almost immediately married the Marquise. There is not a ghost of a doubt of it. Saint-Simon gives the date, the hour, and the names of celebrant, assistants, and witnesses. Everybody knew it—but nothing was said. From that hour Louis was hardly ever out of her company until the end, when she was forced to leave him before the breath was out of his body.
What did she gain except unutterable weariness, suspicion, fear, slander, and unending labour? Read Dangeau’s diary of the dreary, splendid routine of Versailles, Marly and Fontainebleau; read in Madame Taillandier a letter from the poor woman describing one of her days. She had her Saint-Cyr in which she really delighted. She could play universal Abbess there, and be interested and at peace for a time. But even there chagrin and disappointment dogged her. She brought in Madame Guyon, Quietism, and other things taboo. She became involved in Fénélon’s disgrace; and presently she had to submit to Rome and turn her beloved “Institution” of ladies into a convent of nuns.
No—she was bleak, and had a narrow mind; but, as she saw her duty, so she did it. Her duty led her into thorny wastes and desert places; it led her to be one of the thousand idle parasites yawning and stretching at Versailles, slowly and endlessly revolving like dead moons round le Roi Soleil. We may pity Madame de Maintenon for what life made of her, but not blame her.
Rich as they are in the possession of the diverticula amoena of history—and much richer than we are—for all that the French have no Pepys. “Many an old fool,” said Byron of Coleridge at his lecture, “but such as this, never.” So it may be put of the French memoirists: many a burgess of plain habit and shrewd observation, many a rogue husband too; but the like of one who, being both, turned himself inside out for the wonder of posterity, never. Indeed, it would be hard to imagine a Latin Pepys. The French do not discharge their bosoms on paper without reason; and the reasons which moved Pepys, whatever they were, would not approve themselves to their minds. Cynicism, or vanity, might suggest self-exhibition to one or another, as it did to Casanova the Venetian, but the truth is not served that way. There was a leaven of puritanism in Pepys such as Huguenotry never deposited in a Frenchman. That leaven did double work in our man. It seasoned for him his pleasant vices, and gave also a peculiar thrill to his confessions, as if his pen, like his hair, was standing on end as he wrote. No Frenchman needed a relish for his foibles of the kind; and as for thrills, his nation has always kept faith and works in separate compartments. We cannot do that.
However, they are rich enough without him. If they have no Pepys, they have in their Pierre de L’Estoile one whom we cannot match. Imagine a citizen of London in Elizabeth’s last and James’s first years, observing, recording each day as it came. We have in John Evelyn, fifty years later, a diarist of higher quality, who yet, and for that reason, was of less historical value. He seldom stooped to the detail in which the Parisian was versed: would that he had! L’Estoile will furnish no such picture as Evelyn’s of the Gallery at Hampton Court on a specimen afternoon. On the other hand, in L’Estoile, the brawling, buzzing, swarming streets of old Paris come before us at every turn of the leaf—and there at least he was like Pepys. If by happy chance one John Chamberlain, a private citizen of London, whose letters were published last year, had kept a diary, and could have kept it out of harm’s way, he might have given just such a particularised account of his town as L’Estoile gives of the Paris of the League, the Seize, and La Religion. But he was fearful of the post, and never committed himself. Nor would he, of course, have had such cataclysmic matter to report, England in James’s reign was drifting towards the whirlpool: France was already spinning madly in it.
Pierre de L’Estoile was an official of the Chancellery in Paris. His title was “Audiencier,” and his duties, as nearly as I can ascertain, were more like those of one of the Six Clerks of our Court than of him whom we call Auditor. He was a man of family, of the noblesse de Robe, of landed estate, of education, and of taste. He had Greek, and Latin, bigotry and virtue; he collected coins and medals, books, ballads, pamphlets, bibelots of all sorts. He began to keep a diary on the day when Charles IX died, “enferme, comme un chien qui enrage”—Whitsunday, 1574; maintained it through the riot and effrontery, the anarchy and intrigue in which Henry III and the mignons killed and were killed; through the open war of the League, and through the Siege of Paris. He saw the entry of Henry IV; judged while he loved that ribald king; and caught up the flying rumours of that day which hushed all the city, that day when he was stabbed to the heart, “au coing de la rue de la Ferronnerie, vis-à-vis d’un notaire nommé Poutrain,” as he sat in his coach listening to a letter which Epernon was reading to him. He went on until 1611, and only laid his pen down because he was about to lay down his life. His last entry is of the 27th September: on the 8th October he was buried. He had lived under six kings of France, had three of them die violent deaths, had been an eyewitness of the Saint-Bartholomew. A seasoned vessel.
As he was never a courtier he could not have witnessed all the great events which he relates. I think he saw the entry of Henry of Navarre, if not his shocking exit. But he was out and about, all agog; he had highly placed friends; and collected for his diary as he did for his cabinet. I imagine he must be a “source” for such a tragic scene as the murder of the Duc de Guise, which might have gone bodily into Les Quarante-Cinq if that fine novel had not stopped a few months short of it. Everything is there to the hand. As first, the presages: how on the 21st of December (1588),
“the Archbishop of Lyon, having overheard the proud speeches which the Duke had made the King in the gardens of Blois, told him that he would have done well to use more respect, and that a more modest bearing would have been becoming: whereupon, ‘You are wrong,’ the Duke replied: ‘I know him better than you do. You have to take him boldly. He is a king who likes to be made frightened.’”
And then another: on the next day,
“As the Duke went to table, to his dinner, he found a note under his napkin wherein was written that he ought to be on his guard, because they were on the point of doing him a bad turn. Having read it, he wrote upon it these three words, ‘They dare not,’ and threw it under the table. The same day he was told by his cousin the Duc d’Elbœuf that on the morrow there would be an attempt against his life, and answered with a laugh that, plainly, he had been searching the almanacs.”
On the 23rd he and his brother the Cardinal attended the Council, on summons:
“They found the guard strengthened, and more hardy than usual. They demanded money, and asked the Duke to see to it that they were paid, using (as it seemed) a new manner of address, less respectful than he had been accustomed to hear. Taking no notice, they went their ways; and for all that the Duke had had warnings from many quarters of what was working against him—nine of them, indeed, on that very day, whereof he put the last in his pocket, saying aloud, ‘That is the ninth to-day’—nevertheless, so blind was that high mind of his to things as clear as daylight, he could not bring himself to believe that the King intended to do him an ill turn; for God had blindfolded his eyes, as He generally does of those whom He designs to chasten. Being then come into the Council, in a new coat, grey in colour and very light for the time of year, the eye on the scarred side of his face was seen to weep, and he to let two or three drops at the nose—on account of which he sent a page out for a handkerchief.... Presently the King sent Revel, one of the Secretaries of State, for him, who came up just as he was shutting down into the silver box he used to carry, the plums and raisins which he used for his heart-weakness. He rose immediately to attend his Majesty, and just as he came into the ante-chamber one of the Guards in there trod upon his toe; and though he knew very well what that meant, notwithstanding he made no sign, but went on his way to the Chamber, as one who cannot avoid his fate. Then, suddenly, he was seized by the arms and legs by ten or a dozen of the Quarante-Cinq ambushed behind the arras, and by them stabbed and murdered, uttering among other lamentable cries this last, which was plainly heard, ‘God! I am dying! My sins have found me out. Have mercy on me!’ Over his poor body they flung a mean carpet, and there he lay exposed to the gibes and indignities of them of the Court, who hailed him ‘fair King of Paris’—the King’s name for him.”
Detail like that must have been got at first hand. When he comes to the Cardinal, he contents himself by saying that he was despatched in the Capuchin Convent on Christmas Eve. But the account of the Duke carries conviction. L’Estoile had a friend at Blois—an official of the Council, or an usher of the door. Though there is pity in his words, “Sur ce pauvre corps fut jetté un meschant tapis,” his judgment was not disturbed. His account closes with the stern words,
“Et ici finist le règne de Nembrot le Lorrain.”
Henry being what he was, and whose son he was, it was plain to him that the only thing to do with the head, and crownable head, of the League was to remove it. After the Saint-Bartholomew murder was a recognised arm of kingship, a sort of jus regale, in France. But Catherine de Médicis, who taught her sons the uses of the dagger and the dark, was not consenting to this particular use of them. Her worthless son might be the last of the Valois; but she dreaded the first of the Bourbons much more than the extinction of her own race; and when Henry was fool enough to boast, “Now I am the only King,” and (says L’Estoile) “began immediately to be less of one than ever,” she, sickening of such inanity, took to her bed, and died in it on the 5th of January following the coup d’état.
A year later the League gave the counterstroke. Henry was murdered at Blois by its creature, Clément the Jacobin: “poorly and miserably slain,” says L’Estoile, “in the flower of his age, in the midst of his garrison, surrounded, as always, by guards; in his chamber, close to his bed, by a little rapscallion of a monk, with a jerk of his nasty little knife.” The thing was miraculously simple, a touch-and-go which just came off. Clément asked for an audience, was refused: Henry heard of it and insisted on seeing him. The man was let in, found his victim undressed and at disadvantage, gave him a letter, and while he was reading, drove a knife into his bowels and left it there. He was himself killed on the spot, having done what the League intended, and more than that by a good deal. L’Estoile notes it at the moment: “The King of Navarre is made King of France by the League.” So he was.
Civil war followed: Paris in the grip of the Seize, with the Duc de Mayenne as Regent for the League. L’Estoile lost his appointment; for the Chancery followed the King, and he himself could not. A Court of a kind was maintained in the city, and he, in order to live, was forced to serve the Seize, whom he detested and feared. He had good reason for that. Famine and pestilence were on all sides of him, and treachery and suspicion—under the bed, at the street corners, in the churches, wherever people came together—and the gibbet expecting its daily tribute. When the news came in of Arques or Ivry, of the capitulation of Chartres or what not, it was as much as your neck was worth to be seen to smile. Lists of names went about—you might see your own on it any day. By a letter attached to it you could know your portion. P. stood for pendu, D. for dagué, C. for chassé. L’Estoile saw his own, with D. against it. He went in fear, naturally, but I think he was more scandalised than afraid when they began their new Saint-Bartholomew by hanging the President of the Council, Brisson, and two of his fellow members. It took place in prison, and L’Estoile, though he was not present, reports the manner of it, and the harangues of the victims. His conclusion is good enough: “Thus, on this day, a First President of the Court was hanged—by his clerk.” The King, he hears, “gossant à sa manière accoustoumée,” said that he had no better servants in all Paris than the Seize, who did his business for him better than anything they did for their masters, and cost him no doubloons neither.
Meantime the city was beleaguered, and very soon hungry. Cauldrons of broth and boiled horse were set up at street-corners, and people fought each other to get at them; bread was made of oats and bran, and doled out by pennyweights as long as it lasted. When they had eaten all the horses they came to the dogs, then to the cats. The siege was maintained, the people starved. They ate tallow, dog-skin, rat-skin, cat-skin. They made bread of men’s bones from the cemeteries; they hunted children—L’Estoile has no doubts; many lay still, awaiting the mercy of death. “The only things which went cheap in Paris,” he says, “were sermons, where they served out wind to the famished people, giving them to understand that it was very pleasing to God to die of starvation—yea, and far better to kill one’s children than to admit a heretic as king.” A man, he says, came to his door to beg a crust of him to save a child’s life. While L’Estoile was fetching the bread the baby died, in the father’s arms. He himself sent away his wife and infant son to Corbeil: the leaguer had been raised for that purpose, and many took advantage of the grace. Unfortunately Corbeil was taken by the Spaniards, and his people held to ransom. There were fierce riots; but the Seize knew that their own necks were in peril (as proved to be true), and held out. Finally, after the farce of conversion solemnly enacted, Henry entered his good town. As a last resource the League had ordered the descent and procession of the Châsse of Ste-Geneviève a few days before. L’Estoile gives the warrant in full, with this note in addition: “Its virtue was shown forth, five days afterwards, in the reduction of Paris.” He always girded at the Châsse. It was brought down in July 1587 to make the rain stop. “She did no miracle, though liberally assisted. The moon before had been a rainy one, and they brought her down on the fifth of the new moon when there was promise of a little fine weather. Nevertheless, it began to rain harder than ever the next day.” He called Madame Sainte-Geneviève Diana of the Parisians.
Well, the Béarnois came in, and heard Te Deum at Notre Dame. He made a torchlight entry, dressed in grey velvet, with a grey hat and white panache. His face was “fort riant”; his hat always in his hand to the ladies at the windows, particularly to three, “very handsome, who were in mourning, and at a window high up, opposite Saint-Denys-de-la-Chartre.” L’Estoile must have seen that, and admired the ladies. And he certainly saw—he says so—the reception of Mesdames de Nemours and Montpensier. They were held up by the passing of troops, and put out of countenance by the insolence of the bystanders, who “stared them full in the face without any sign of knowing who they were.” And that to Madame de Montpensier—“Queen-Mother” to Paris besieged!
Next day Henry played tennis all the afternoon, and hazard all night; but L’Estoile loved that king without approving of him. His tales tell for him and against, his esteem rises and falls. He liked his easy manners, his old clothes, his Ventre-Saint-Gris, his cynicisms and mocking humour. He does not seem to think the monarchy let down by such sans façon. Anyhow, there it is; and two things are made clear by the diary—first, that Henry was not the good fellow he is generally reputed, and second, that he was not then thought to be so. He himself, may be, had been too much knocked about by the world to have any illusions left him. There was an attempt against his life in 1595. The people seemed frantic with delight at his escape. L’Estoile relates how he went in procession to Notre Dame.
“You never heard,” he says, “such approbation of a king by his people as was given that day to our good Prince whenever he showed himself. Seeing it, a lord who was close to his Majesty, said to him, ‘Remark, sir, how happy are all your subjects at the sight of you.’ Shaking his head, the King replied, ‘That is the people all over. And if my greatest enemy was where I am now, and they saw him go by, they would do as much for him as for me, and shout even louder than they are doing now.’”
No, there were no rose-coloured curtains between Henry of Navarre and this transitory life. He did not even pretend to approve of himself; and if he was ashamed, as it seems he was, of his amorous entanglements with the young Princesse de Condé, it is certain that they shocked L’Estoile to the heart. When it comes to apologies there, there was no spirit left in the respectable man. For this diarist was as moral as our John Evelyn, and so far as I can find out on as good a foundation. He could express himself on such matters with point. For instance:
“Sunday the 12th February, which was Dimanche des Brandons, Madame had a splendid ballet at the Louvre, where nothing was forgotten that could possibly be remembered—except God.”
A sharper saying than Evelyn would have allowed himself. But it is the fact, as I have said, that good King Henry was not found so good living as dead. Afterwards—under Richelieu, under Mazarin, during the Fronde, under the Edict of Nantes—by comparison he shone. During his lifetime he had many more enemies and far fewer friends than was supposed. The Maréchal D’Ornano, in 1609, told him in so many words that he was not beloved by his people, and that a very little more on the taxes would bring back the civil war. The King said that he knew all that, and was ready for it. D’Ornano then said that he could not advise rough measures. “I shall freely tell you, sir, that the late King had more of the noblesse for him than you have for yourself, and more of the people too than you will have if there be trouble. For all that, he was obliged to leave Paris and his own house to rebels and mutineers, and the rest of us thought ourselves lucky to get off with our heads on our shoulders.” L’Estoile had that from “a brave and trustworthy gentleman” who was close by at the time. The gentleman said that the King was at first moved to anger by D’Ornano’s plain speaking, but thanked him for it afterwards.
Bad stories of King Henry are to be had for the asking; perhaps the worst in L’Estoile is told in a poem which he picked up, and reports. A Madame Esther had been the King’s mistress in La Rochelle, and had borne him a son. The child died, the King tired, and forsook her. She came to see him at Saint-Denis when he was busy, distracted, seeking other game: he refused to see her or hear what she had to say. She was ill, and died in the town where he actually was, and being of the religion, a grave was denied her. What became of her body is not known, but “they raised to her memory,” L’Estoile says, “the following Tombeau (epitaph), which was rehearsed at Saint-Denis and everywhere:
“Tombeau de Madame Esther
A touching and simple piece. It should have gone home to a man whose intentions were always better than his inclinations, yet always gave way to them. The end of him, sudden and shocking as it was, can have surprised nobody. He had enemies everywhere, and few friends. The Catholics had never believed in him, the Protestants had ceased to believe in him. The day before his last he had had Marie de Médicis crowned with all the forms, though unwillingly. L’Estoile was there, and observed two notable facts: “the first was that it had been thought proper, on account of the subject-matter, to change the gospel of the day, which is from Mark x—“And the Pharisees came to him, and asked him, Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife, tempting him.” That sounds to me a little too apt to be likely.
“The other was that at the largesse of gold and silver coins, which is usual at coronations of kings and queens, there was never a cry Vive le Roy, nor yet a Vive la Reine—which, it was remarked, had never happened but at this coronation.” His next entry relates to the assassination:
“Luctus ubique, pavor, et plurima mortis imago,” is his conclusion of it all: “the shops are shut; everyone goes weeping or holding up his hands, great and small, young and old; women and maids pluck at their hair. The whole town is very quiet: instead of running for arms we run to our prayers, and make vows for the health and welfare of the new king. The fury of the people, contrary to the expectation and intent of the wicked, is turned upon the infamous parricide and his accomplices, seeking only to ensue vengeance and to have it.”
De mortuis! That is always the way. And distrusting the Queen as he plainly did, and abhorring Concini, not the first, and not the best, of the implanted Italians, there is little wonder at the diarist’s dismay. He goes on, without circumlocution, to lay the crime at the door of the “Society of Judas,” as he calls a famous companionship, a society to whose new church the King’s heart had been promised, by whose means, he as good as says, it was now obtained. Not without scandal, it was presently conveyed there.
Enormous crowds viewed the king’s body, which lay in state in the Louvre. The Jesuits were among the first to come; he says:
“Class them as you please: everybody knows the maxim they preach, that it is lawful to kill the king who suffers two religions in his realm. Nevertheless (vultibus compositis ad luctum) they played affliction above everyone. Father Cotton, with an exclamation truly smacking of the Court and the Society, ‘Who is the villain,’ cries he, ‘to have killed this good prince, this pious, this great king? Was it not a Huguenot, then?’ They tell him, No, it was a Roman Catholic. ‘Ah, deplorable, if it be so!’ he says, and signs himself with three great crosses. Someone present, who had overheard him, was himself overheard to say, ‘The Huguenots don’t play those tricks.’”
But the Society took the heart to Notre-Dame-de-Boulogne.
L’Estoile survived to see the little king in Paris. He watched him benevolently always, and has tales to tell of him, of which the prettiest is about Pierrot, a village boy of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. When Louis had been there as Dauphin, Pierrot used to play with him; and now that he was King, and at the Tuileries, he had the notion of going to see him.
“The King was playing down by the lake, with a fine company about him; but as soon as he was aware of Pierrot, his old play-fellow (who still called him M. le Dauphin, and to those who reproved him, swore his round Mordienne that he did not know what else to call him), he left them all where they were to go to Pierrot, into whose arms he flew, and kissed him in the face of everybody. He told M. de Souvrai that they must find clothes for his friend the very next day, so that he might stay with him, but Pierrot said he could not do that, but must go home for fear of being beaten. His father and mother had not been willing to let him go—but he had gone for all that, and had brought M. le Dauphin (he called him) a present of some sparrows.”
“Simplicité rustique,” L’Estoile calls it, and praises Louis for going half-way to meet it. He is then very near the end of his record, and of his earthly tether too.
Misfortunes were gathered thickly about the honest man. He was out of his employment through age; money was very short with him. He sold his collections piecemeal, and was glad to make fifty francs or so here and there. He does not name the most serious of his ailments, but I fear that it was malignant, and put recovery out of the case. In September 1610, feeling himself in extremities, he demanded the Sacrament, and it became a question of confession. Father des Landes, a Jacobin and a friend of his, was chosen for the office, and demanded of him a protestation that he would die in the Catholic, Apostolic, Roman faith. The first two—yes, said L’Estoile; but boggled over the third. He relates the course of the argument which he held with the Jacobin. It branched off, as they will, into all sorts of side issues: invocation of the Saints, Council of Trent, errors of the Popes, and what not. He comes as near as he ever does here to putting down what he really did—or at least what he really did not—believe. He was an eclectic, but desperate of remedy. He would have seen the Reformed Church Catholic, and the Catholic reformed. But that, he is aware, is a counsel of perfection. “Three things forbid: lack of charity, lack of zeal for the glory of God, and stubbornness, which is the last trench of the ignorant.” And he concludes on the whole matter: “I shall hold on then to that old stock, rotten as it is, of the Papacy. The Church is in it, though it is not the Church.” And thereupon he had his absolution and the Sacrament. Father des Landes was a liberal-minded Jacobin.
I have fallen into the old easy way of confounding historical persons and history, but that is L’Estoile’s fault at least as much as mine. I might have stuffed my account of his book with criminal records, or with sermons; for next to the doings of the great those are the matters which concern him. Few days pass, never a week, in which he does not record an execution or several of them. I don’t know whether the Paris of the Henrys was worse than the London of James, and failing an English L’Estoile, I shall never know. But Paris would be bad to beat—not only for bestial crime but for bestial requital of it. In London you might be decapitated or hanged: burning was rare towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign. In Paris you might be hanged, or hanged and strangled, or broken on the wheel, or hanged and burned; or, if you were respectable enough you could be executed with a sword. Burning was reserved for heresy: for lèse-majesté there was death by horses—four of them. L’Estoile saw Ravaillac die that death. He died, the wretch, at the “deuxième tirage.” These things are shocking, as the crimes were which they were designed, after the ideas of the times, to fit. Then there were the duels which reached in France a point not known in our country. The mignons quarrelled in companies. That happened when Quélus, Maugiron and Livarrot met d’Entragues, Ribérac and Schomberg in the Marché-aux-Chevaux. Maugiron and Schomberg were killed outright; Ribérac died the next day, and Quélus, with nineteen wounds, lingered for a month, and died then. The King kissed the dead, cut off and kept their fair hair, and took from Quélus the ear-rings which he had himself put into his ears. “Such and the like ways of doing,” says L’Estoile, “unworthy indeed of a great king and a high-hearted, as this one was, caused him by degrees to be despised ... and in the Third-Estate, to be made little by little their faction, which was the League.” No doubt that is true.
Let me remember, as I end, this curious piece of news: on January 8th, 1608, it was so cold that the chalice froze in Saint-André-des-Ars, and they had to get a brazier from the baker’s to thaw it. Saint-André was L’Estoile’s favourite, or perhaps his parish church. The law cares nothing for trifles, but history lives upon them. My last scrap, however, is not of an age but of all time. “J’ay trente mil livres de rente, et cependant je meurs!” said the Abbé of Bonport in his last agony.
If we can still contrive to hold up our heads in the world it is not the fault of the writers of maxims, who have seldom had a good word to say for us. We may ask, as we wilt but read on, Have we then nothing which can face unashamed the microscopic eye? Does not virtue lend itself to aphorism? Should it not be possible to make pithy summaries of our good qualities, of our reasonable institutions? La Rochefoucauld’s answer would be, Inform me of your virtues, show me your tolerable institutions, and I will tell you if I can reduce them to maxims. Nobody took the trouble to do it. He was read, as he wrote, for entertainment; and entertainment certainly comes if we don’t read too much of him at a time. He is for the bedside or the dressing-table. You can glance at him as you shave: but if you linger on him, you had better put away the razors. He has himself detected the source of the entertainment. “In the misfortunes of our best friends we can always find something which is not unpleasing.” He is dreadfully right; and it was his accuracy, no doubt, which Madame de Sévigné found to be “divine.” I obtain my own consolation out of the fact that, poor things as we are, it has been possible for one at least of us to write us down so well. But I am under no delusions about this duke. He is not necessarily a good man struggling with adversity, but as human as the rest of us. His only right to the microscope is that of user; and the pose that he who sees so many beams in his neighbour’s eyes has no motes in his own, it is fair to say, is not consciously assumed, but inseparable from the aphoristic method.
In La Bruyère, the French Theophrastus, who has tempered his maxims with “portraits,” I think that the Rhadamanthus-attitude is deliberate. La Bruyère is indignant, and takes it for righteousness. You cannot call him cynical; he is a censor morum. He combines the methods of La Rochefoucauld and Tallemant des Réaux, but is more human than the first because he condescends to scold his victims, and much less so than the other because he cannot bring himself to consider them as of the same clay with himself. La Bruyère, you may say, never takes off his wig and gown; Tallemant never puts his on. In Les Caractères is but one paragraph of unstinted praise; the Historiettes is full of them. Tallemant, however, did not write for publication, and La Bruyère did. It is possible that he would have praised more generally than he did if it had been as safe to praise as to condemn. But it was not. He had been rash enough at starting to call attention to Bishop Le Camus, and to be astonished at the red hat conferred upon a pious and devoted man. Then he learned, first, that the King had been very much offended by the Pope’s action, and secondly, that the Pope had intended him to be. Just in time he cancelled the passage. No—a writer had to be sure of his ground when he went about to praise. You were only perfectly safe, indeed, in praising His Majesty.
His “pleasant” saying of Dangeau, as Saint-Simon calls it, that he was not a grandee, but “after a grandee,” is typical of him, at once acute and direct. It says more exactly what Dangeau was than a page. The page is there too, but the few words shine out of it like an electric light. It is as if he was talking round about his subject, seeking the best aspect of it, and then, suddenly, with a pointing finger, you get “Pamphilius in a word desires to be a great man, and believes himself to be one; but he is not; he is after a great man.” The rest of the page goes for little. It is Thackerayan, as we should say. Whether Thackeray owed anything directly to La Bruyère I am not able to determine; but he owed a fair amount to Steele, who assuredly did.
If La Bruyère had desired to learn the worst of mankind he could not have been trained in a better school than that which he found for himself. He had been one of the Accountants-General in the Bureau of Finance at Caen for a few years when M. le Prince—le Grand Condé—called him to Chantilly to be tutor—one of several—to his grandson the Duc de Bourbon. There, and at Versailles, he remained for the rest of his life, and at Versailles he died. Of Condé, of Henri-Jules, his terrible son, and of the grandson, “very considerably smaller than the smallest of men,” as Saint-Simon declares him, and very considerably more of a degenerate than most men, this learned, accurate, all-observant, deeply-meditating man was content to be the servant and the butt. When his pupil left his hands he stayed on as “gentleman” to the father, who was in his turn M. le Prince. Prince as he was, he was also, quite simply, a wild beast, biting mad; and his son was little better: a pervert and proud of it, crafty, malicious, tyrannical, and “extremely ferocious.” One does not know how life with such masters can have been tolerable. La Bruyère was both neglected and despised. He had nothing to do, for even as “gentleman” he was a supernumerary—yet he must be there. To understand it you must accept the sang royal in its fullest implications. His book, which yielded eight editions in his lifetime, went for nothing at Chantilly, though the King himself had heard of it, and had his harangue at the Academy read to him at Marly. Yet one of the inmates of Chantilly (Valincourt), while admitting that “La Bruyère meditated profoundly and agreeably, two things which are rarely found together,” went on to say that “he was a good fellow at bottom, whom, however, the fear of seeming pedantic had thrown into its ridiculous opposite ... with the result that during all the time he spent in the household of M. le Duc, in which he died, he was always held for a figure of fun.” It seems that he tried to be sprightly, would dance, put on airs and graces, make jokes, and walk on his toes. We may regard all that as protective colouring, the instinct of the creature to hide his continual mortifications. Elsewhere—in Paris, naturally—he had made himself a personage. His book sold, if not to his profit, very much to his credit; he had made himself imposing enemies, and had the better of them at every turn; Bossuet was his friend, Pontchartrain, Racine and the like. He still held his sinecure office at Caen. Why, then, did he hang about Chantilly, and lodge in an attic at Versailles when M. le Prince was there? Who is to say? That particular prince was a human tiger—but in his service he lived on, and died. I think he ought to have put himself into his own book—and perhaps he did:
“I see a man surrounded, and followed—he is in office. I see another man whom all the world salutes—he is in favour. Here is one caressed and flattered, even by the great—he is rich. There is another, observed curiously on all hands—he is learned. Here is another whom nobody omits to greet—a dangerous man.”
At any rate, his experiences provided that one of the shrewdest sections of Les Caractères is that headed “Of the Court.”
“The Court does not satisfy; it prevents you from satisfaction anywhere else.
“It is like a house built of marble: I mean that it is made up of men, very hard, but polished.
“One goes there very often in order to come away again and be therefore respected by one’s country gentry, or the bishop.
“The most honourable reproach which can be made against a man is to say of him that he knows nothing of the Court. In that one remark there are no virtues unimputed to him.
“You speak well of a man at Court for two reasons: the first, that he may learn that you have done so; the second that he may so speak of you.
“It is as dangerous at Court to make advances as it is awkward not to make them.”
The man who penned those caustic little sentences knew what he was talking of. Yet La Bruyère’s portrait of himself sets him forth as a creature apart, pointedly distinguishes him from Clitiphon, who has been too busy to heed him.
“O man of consequence and many affairs,” he says to Clitiphon, “when you in your turn have need of my good offices, walk into my lonely study. The philosopher is at your service, and will not put you off to another day. You will find him there, deep in Plato’s dialogues, dealing with the spiritual nature of the soul, distinguishing its essence from that of the body; or, pen in hand, calculating the distance from us of Jupiter or Saturn. I am adoring God in those books of his, seeking by knowledge of the truth to conduct my own spiritual part into better ways. Nay, come in, the door is open; there is no ante-chamber in which to be wearied while you wait. Come straight in, without announcement. You are bringing me something more to be desired than gold and silver if it is a chance of serving you. Speak then, what do you desire me to do for you? Am I to leave my books, studies, work, the very line which I am now penning? Happy interruption, which is to make me of service to you!”
Overwhelming invitation! The butter, you will agree, is spread too thick. On another page he quotes the saying of the Roman patriarch, that he had rather people should inquire why there was no statue to Cato, than why there was one. But it had perhaps not occurred to Cato as calculable that he might have to erect a statue to himself.
“Voilà de quoi vous attirer beaucoup de lecteurs, et beaucoup d’ennemis,” said M. de Malezieu to La Bruyère on perusing Les Caractères. There was no doubt about that. Although he set out with a translation of Theophrastus, in going on to be a Theophrastus himself the temptation to draw from nature was obvious, and not resisted. Theophrastus generalised; he wrote of abstractions, Stupidity, Brutality, Avarice and what not. If he had had instances in his head, nobody knew what they were, and nobody cared. But La Bruyère did not write of qualities: he wrote of things and of people—women, men, the Court, the sovereign; and by his treatment of them in examples, in short paragraphs, with italicised names, with anecdotes, snatches of dialogue and other aids to attention, provided the quidnuncs with a fascinating game. “Keys” sprang up like mushrooms in a night. The guess-work was dangerously unanimous. The instances he had chosen were recent: there could not be much doubt who were Menalcas and Pamphilius, Clitiphon and Arténice. Three editions were called for in 1688, a fourth in 1689, and then one a year until 1694. On the whole he came off very lightly. The Mercure Galant and its supporters furiously raged together. But the King had been elaborately flattered, and no harm came to La Bruyère.
Les Caractères is a book both provocative and diverting, written in the clear, sinewy, reasonable language of Pascal and Fénélon: by no means without malice, but with a malice robbed of its virus by the air of detachment which La Bruyère has been careful to give it. When he pleases to be severe he uses the dramatic method. The portraits interspersed with his judgments enable him to move more freely than La Rochefoucauld. He is better, because livelier, reading, and the effect is not so depressing. However, his debt cannot be denied. He would be an acute critic who knew which was which in these:
“A woman with but one lover believes that she is not a coquette: she who has several that she is only that.
“A woman forgets of the man she no longer loves even the favours he has had of her.
“In her first passion a woman loves her lover. In the others she loves love.”
Here is La Rochefoucauld at his best: “Hypocrisy is the tribute which vice pays to virtue”; and here is La Bruyère when he chooses to sting: “There is wanting nothing to an old lover from the woman who claims him except the name of husband; but that is much. If it were not for that he would be a thousand times lost.” As a rule he is more of a moralist than the Duke, as here where his reflection flows from his axiom:
“A woman unfaithful, if the interested party knows it, is just faithless; if he believes her true, she is false. This advantage at least accrues from a woman’s falsity, that you are cured of jealousy.”
The reflection flows, I say—but is it true? It is safe to say that the man who generalises about women is as often wrong as right. “Women,” he says, “are always in the extreme, better or worse than men”; and again, “The generality of women have no principles. Their hearts direct them; they depend for their conduct upon those they love.” I should say that there were as many exceptions to those rules as examples of them. Then, what of this: “It costs a woman very little to say something which she does not feel; and a man still less to say something which he does”? It needs La Bruyère himself to determine from that which of the sexes is the more sentimental; but he leaves it there. I like the following, and believe it to be entirely true:
“It is certain that a woman who writes with transport is carried away, less so that she is touched. It would seem that a tender passion would render her mournful and taciturn; and that the most urgent need of a woman whose heart is engaged is less to persuade that she loves than to be sure that she is loved.”
The second term of that aphorism is an enlargement of the first. A woman, he would say, really in love would hide it by instinct. Her need is rather to be loved.
Try him on another tack. Here is a parallel with La Rochefoucauld. The Duke says, “Old men are fond of giving good advice, to console themselves for being no longer able to set bad examples.” La Bruyère’s is equally sharp:
“A modern writer will generally prove to you that the ancients are inferior in two ways—by reason and example. The reason will be drawn from his own taste, and the examples from his own works.” Very neat both, but I think La Bruyère’s has the more comic turn. If the Duke had had less prudence, or more bitterness (with as much reason for it), we might have been able to compare his treatment of la Cour. But he hardly touches it. La Bruyère cannot leave it alone. “Let a favourite,” he says, “have a sharp eye on himself; for if he keep me in his ante-chamber a shorter time than usual; if his look be more open; if he frown less, listen more willingly, show me a little further from the door, I shall be thinking him in the way of losing credit; and I shall be right.” Then he breaks into this bitter reflection: “A man can have little resource in himself if he must fall into disgrace or be mortified in order to become more human, more tractable, less of a brute and more of a good fellow.”
There is a note very familiar to us in this:
“How comes it about that Alciopus bows to me this morning, smiles, throws himself half-way out of the carriage window for fear of missing my eye? I am not a rich man—and I am on foot. By all the rules he ought not to have seen me. Is it not rather so that he himself may be seen in the same coach with a lord?”
Thackeray all over; but I don’t think Thackeray had it straight from Les Caractères. The first translation into English was in 1699, and by “Eustace Budgell, Esq.” There were many others—two, anonymous, in 1700 and 1702, one by Nicholas Rowe in 1709, one by “H. Gally” in 1725. Was not Budgell one of the Spectator’s men? Steele and Addison both may have quarried in his version. Here is a specimen Spectator paragraph:
“Narcissus rises in the morning in order that he may go to bed at night. He takes his time for dressing like a woman, and goes every day regularly to mass at the Feuillants or the Minims. He is an affable fellow, who may be counted on in a certain quarter of the town to take a tierce or a cinquième at Ombre or Reversi. So engaged you will see him in his chair for hours on end at Aricia’s, where every evening he will lay out his five gold pistoles. He reads punctually the Gazette de Hollande and the Mercure Galant; he will have read his Cyrano, his des Marete, his Lesclache, Barbin’s story books, assorted poetry. He walks abroad with the ladies; he is serious in paying calls. He will do to-morrow what he does to-day and did yesterday; and after having so lived, so he will die.”
The sting in the tail is perhaps too sharp for Steele, though it is not for Addison. You will find the former more exactly foreshadowed in the fable of Emira, an insensible beauty of Smyrna, who finds that she cannot love until she has first been jealous, and finds that out too late. Style and handling are the very spit of Steele’s. I have not seen the suggestion anywhere, and put it forward for what it may be worth, that Budgell’s translation inspired our pair of essayists to hit off friends and foes under the stock names of Belinda, Sacharissa, Eugenio and the like. The “portrait” had been a popular literary form in France from the days of Richelieu; but it was new to England when Addison and Steele went into journalism. Are there “keys” to the Spectator and Tatler? I suppose so.
Not all his portraits are malicious, not all of them so simple as that of Narcissus; but some of them are really malignant. It is safe to say that a man of whom Saint-Simon had nothing but good to report, had nothing but good to be reported. Such a man was the Duc de Beauvilliers. La Bruyère says of him that he was greedy after office—exactly what he was not. The Comte de Brancas, who figures as Menalcas, is very good fun. Brancas was the George Dyer of Paris and his day, distrait in ways which a knowledge of his time will excuse. The best story of him, when he failed to see the Queen Mother using a certain prie-dieu, and knelt on her, has been told. Another shows him at home, putting down his book to nurse a grandchild; then, when a visitor was announced, jumping to his feet, and flinging the baby on to the floor, where he had just flung the book. There are dozens of such tales, none of them ill-natured. Probably even La Bruyère could not have been unkind to Brancas.
He is certainly more severe than Tallemant, but that is because he will always introduce himself into the story, and always to his own advantage. Tallemant never does that, but uses the historical method invariably. A good example of La Bruyère’s intrusion is in his dealing with a Lord Strafford of ours, a peer whom Saint-Simon calls “une espèce d’imbécile,” and accuses of having 50,000 livres de rentes in England and spending them in Paris. La Bruyère calls him Philémon, and strikes the attitude of Diogenes in his regard:
“Gold, you tell me, glitters upon Philémon’s coat? It glitters as keenly at the tailor’s. He is clothed in the finest tissue? Is it less well displayed in shop-lengths? But the embroideries, the enrichments make him splendid! I praise the needlewoman. But ask him the time, and he will pull out a masterpiece of a watch: the guard of his sword is of onyx; there is a diamond on his finger of a water ...! You have managed to make me curious at last. I must see these priceless things. Send me Philémon’s clothes and gimcracks. You may keep Philémon.”
That is the better part of it. In the next paragraph he turns to scold the old lord, and calls him a fool in so many words. That is a mistake of his. It is not playing the game of satire, but the kind of game which is played at the street corner. On the same page is Harlay, the very unepiscopal Archbishop of Paris, but only a part of him. He leaves the bishop out of the question (as assuredly he was), and gives us the courtier. Harlay was famous for his manners. Theognis, as he calls him,
“is careful of his appearance, goeth forth adorned like a woman. He is hardly out of doors before he has composed his looks and countenance so that he may appear all of a piece when he is in public, the same thing to all men. Passers-by are to find him graciously smiling upon them; and nobody must miss it. He goes into the corridor, turns to the right where everybody is, or to the left where there is no one: he will salute those who are there, and those who are not. He will embrace the first man he comes across and press his head to his bosom; then he will ask you who it was he was greeting. Perhaps you have need of him in some little business or other, you go to him, ask him to help. Theognis lends you a ready ear, is overjoyed to be of use, implores you to find him other chances of serving your occasions. Then, when you urge your immediate affair, he will tell you that he cannot manage that; he will ask you to put yourself in his place, judge for yourself. So you take your leave, escorted to the door, caressed, and puzzled, but almost gratified to have been refused.”
That is excellent, done with a light-hearted malice worth all the coquins, fats and sots in the world. But of all his “portraits” by far the most agreeable is that of Madame de Boislandry, whom he calls Arténice. It appears as a fragment in the section Des Jugements, but I don’t think really belongs there. There is nothing else like it; it has a gusto and charm of its own. Steele comes to mind again, with his Lady Elizabeth Hastings. It must be my last example:
“ ... He was saying that the mind of that beautiful person was like a well-cut diamond; and continuing his talk of her, ‘There is,’ he added, ‘a ray of reasonableness and charm in it which engages at once the eyes and the hearts of those who converse with her. One hardly knows whether one loves or admires: she has that in her to make her a perfect friend, and that too which might lead you beyond friendship. Too young and too lovely not to please, too modest to dream of it, she makes little account of men but upon their merits, and looks for no more from them than their friendship. Brimming over with life and quick to feel, she surprises and attracts; and while perfectly aware of the delicate shades and subtleties of the best conversation, she is yet capable of happy improvisations which among other charms have that of inspiring repartee. Her intercourse is that of one who, without learning of her own, is aware of it, and desires to inform herself; and yet she listens to you as one who, after all, knows a good deal, can appraise the worth of what you say and will lose nothing that you may choose to impart. Far from seeking to contradict you, she takes up your points, considers them as her own, enlarges and enhances them. You find yourself gratified to have thought them out so well and to have put them forward better than you had supposed....’”
There is more in that strain of intense appreciation, done by a writer who knows that what he says of you is worth having, even if it be flattery. La Bruyère had his reasons for flattering Arténice: it is agreed that he was very fond of her. So were many others: she had her adventures, though he did not share them. Evidently he knew that she was not for him; for there is no tarnish of jealousy upon his praise. He was one whom there were few to love, and he found very few to praise. But he praised and loved Madame de Boislandry.
Although he became a person of consequence from the day his book was out, he was not chosen to the Academy until 1693, and then not without several postponements, considerable effort on the side of his friends and strenuous opposition from Fontenelle and his partisans, whom he had fustigated as Les Théobaldes in his Caractères. When he was in fact chosen it was a very near thing. A M. de la Loubère, who blocked his road, retired in his favour and transferred to him the suffrages of his own supporters. For that generous act La Bruyère paid him a handsome and a happy compliment in his address of reception: