Chapter II (3)

I say "appear to be," because I am convinced, and my conviction is supported by the evidence of those who lived with him, that he adopted in later life the practice of composing and practically finishing his poems in his head before he put anything down on paper. He used to be heard walking up and down his room at The Pines, and then pausing awhile, evidently to write down what he had polished in his head. This accounts for the "clean" look of most of his later MSS., which appear to be first drafts, and yet have few corrections. What we now discover from the undergraduate MSS. of which I have spoken above is that, apparently, he adopted in early youth the plan to which he was to revert in old age. But of this plan there might be two varieties; Swinburne might work up his stanzas to perfection in his brain before writing anything, or he might be inspired with such a flow of language that the finished poem would slip smoothly from his brain. Doubtless there was something of both these in his practice, but I incline to think the former by far the most frequent. From neither can we obtain much impression of the mechanism of his invention.

But there was a third method, of which I am about to describe a peculiarly interesting example, which the poet adopted in the hey-dey of his poetical career. Soon after he left Oxford, perhaps in 1860, his handwriting changed its character; it became less boyish, but more crabbed and careless. I think that the weakness of his wrist may have been the cause of this alteration. It is particularly marked in the period from 1862 to 1870. His later writing was emphatic in its stiff inelegance, but usually legible; the script of his middle period was, at its best, lax and straggling, at its worst almost indecipherable. But it varied extravagantly, so much so that it is often difficult to believe that the same pen, and still more that the same hour, could have produced such violently diverse exhibitions. It has gradually dawned upon me, while helping Mr. Wise to disentangle an accumulation of rough copies and fragments, that the cause of this diversity lay in the degree of excitement which Swinburne put into the act of composition. He was always paroxysmal, always the victim of excruciating intellectual excitement which descended upon him like the beak of the Promethean vulture. To discover the points at which, in a particular composition, this fury of inspiration fell upon him, is to get a little closer to the secret of Swinburne's astonishing virtuosity, and is my excuse for the following observations.

So many of Swinburne's MSS. have been preserved, principally in the newspaper bundles which he so oddly carried with him, without ever examining, through all his peregrinations from Oxford to Putney, that it is particularly vexatious that those which we could least afford to spare, those of his blossoming period from 1861 to 1868, are very exiguously represented. No scrap of _The Queen Mother_ has turned up, nor of the published form of _Rosamond_ (an undergraduate sketch of this play remains). The original MS. of _Chastelard_ exists only in a few fragments, the MS. sold in New York in 1913 being a clean copy for the press. According to the evidence of George Meredith, the first draft of _Laus Veneris_ was written in red ink; the existing version, though containing corrections and cancelled passages, is written in black ink, and shows no sign of the frenzy of composition; it is evidently a transcript. Of _Poems and Ballads_ no general MS. exists, but portions of the "copy" sent to the printers are in various collections. Most of these are transcripts, and show no sign of emotion or excitement. Several first drafts of _Poems and Ballads_, however, have been preserved, and of these the most remarkable that I have examined is that of _Anactoria_, of which I will now give some account.

Swinburne's first drafts offer none of the attractions which collectors of autographs commonly desiderate. They are never signed and rarely headed. That of the long poem afterwards called _Anactoria_ has neither a title nor the Greek epigraph from Sappho. It is written, or rather wildly scribbled, on both sides of six sheets of blue foolscap, the water-mark of one of which is 1863, doubtless the date of the composition of the poem. These sheets were thrown away, and came into our hands in a great disorder of papers, mostly worthless, which left The Pines after Watts-Dunton's death. As we turned them over, in the welter of manuscript, my eye caught the line

Lilies, and languor of the Lesbian air,

and I realized what lay before us. Scattered through the bundle, five sheets were identified, but unfortunately one sheet was missing. By a happy chance, this also turned up in another parcel three years later, and the first draft is now, I believe, complete, although one passage in the published poem, as I shall presently show, is absent.

The text begins high up on the first sheet, and offers no peculiarity in the opening eight lines, which, with the slight exception of "Sting" instead of "Blind" in line 2, are identical with the published version of 1866. The handwriting is the usual script of Swinburne in the 60's, crabbed, but plain and calm. Suddenly, with line 7, a sort of frenzy takes the poet's pen, and at the side of the paper, in lines that slope more and more rapidly downwards, and in such a stumbling and trembling hand that they are with great difficulty to be spelt out, are interpolated the lines:

Severed the bones that bleach, the flesh that cleaves,
And let our sifted ashes drop like leaves.
I feel thy blood against my blood; my pain
Pains thee, and lips bruise lips, and vein stings vein.

Then, in very small clear script, opposite this outburst, is written, by itself, like a solo on a flute:

Let fruit be crushed on fruit, let flower on flower,
Breast kindle breast and either burn one hour.

To this immediately follows:

In her high place in Paphos,

which is the opening of line 64 in the published version. But the first draft stops here, leaving that half-line uncancelled, and proceeds quietly, in a large hand,

Saw love, a burning flame from crown to feet,

and so on for six lines which are now to be found in the middle of the poem. Thereupon follows a breathless interlude of six couplets, scribbled with extreme violence and so curiously interwoven that the only way to explain their relation is to quote them:

I would my love could slay thee; I am satiated
With seeing thee live, and fain would have thee dead,
Vex thee with amorous agonies, and shake
Life at thy lips, and leave it there to ache;
Strain out thy soul with pangs too soft to kill,
Intolerable interludes, and infinite ill;
I would earth had thy body as fruit to eat,
And no mouth but some serpent's found thee sweet.
I would find grievous ways to have thee slain,
Intense device, and superflux of pain,
Relapse and reluctation of the breath,
Dumb tunes and shuddering semitones of death.

If this passage be compared with the published text, it will be observed that firstly, there are, with the single alteration of "kill" for "slay," no verbal modifications whatever: and that secondly the couplets are shifted about like counters in a game, or as if they were solid objects which might be put here, there, or anywhere in a liquid setting. The first draft of _A Song of Italy_, now in the possession of Mr. Thos. J. Wise, presents the same characteristics, though in a less degree.

We are still on the opening sheet of the draft of _Anactoria_, and it now presents to us, quietly and conscientiously written in the middle of the page:

For I beheld in sleep the light that is
In her high place in Paphos, heard the kiss
Of body and soul that mix with eager tears,
And laughter stinging thro' the eyes and ears,

a sort of _tessera_ evidently left there to be fitted in whenever a favourable blank presented itself; we find it, without the smallest change of language, fixed in the middle of the poem. It is noticeable that the fragment "In her high place in Paphos" is now utilized.

A storm of excitement presently ruffles the poet, and he turns the sheet in such agitation that he holds it upside-down. Without leading up to it in any way, he starts a passage

_She came and touched me, saying_ "Who doth thee wrong,
Sappho?"

which closes abruptly with lines which may be cited because they contain several of the very rare instances in which the draft slightly differs verbally from the text of 1866:

Ah, wilt thou slay me lest I kiss thee dead?
_"Be of good cheer, wilt thou forget?" she_ said:
_"For_ she that flies shall follow for thy sake,
_For_ she shall give thee gifts that _will_ not take,
Shall kiss that _will_ not kiss thee" (yea, kiss me)
"When _I would_ not, etc."

We presently come across the only Couplet in the whole poem which was cancelled in the first draft, and yet reappears in the published text. This is:

Bound with her myrtles, beaten with her rods,
The young men and the maidens and the gods,

now very effectively introduced into the argument, but in the first draft destroyed with a whirling movement of the pen, so that it looks as if a dust-storm involved it. Written with frenzied violence, almost perpendicularly, the draft then presents a couplet:

Taught the sun ways to travel, woven most fine
The moonbeams, shed the starbeams forth as wine,

for which a place is now found immediately before the "Bound with her myrtles" couplet. The ecstasy of the poet seems to have suddenly flagged here, and there follows immediately, in sedate script, with even lines, the passage

Alas, that neither moon nor sun nor dew
Nor all cold things can purge me wholly through,
Assuage me nor allay me nor appease,
Till supreme sleep shall bring me bloodless ease,
Till time wax faint in all his periods,

which now takes its place near the very close of the poem. The actual closing lines are, in like fashion, appended to the third page of the draft. They read as follows:

Till fate undo the bondage of the gods,
And lay to slake _the unquenchable desire
Lethean lotus on a lip of fire,_
And _pour_ around and over and under me
_The wake of_ the insuperable sea.

There was evidently on the poet's part no original intention of utilizing these lines as a conclusion to the poem. I give them here because they present the solitary instance of important verbal alteration to be found in the whole text of 1866.

It would baffle the most meticulous investigation to restore the innumerable false starts, broken lines, and rejected readings which underlie the text of the Draft. There is no question here of Swinburne's creating or polishing anything in his mind, the whole work of composition proceeds on the paper itself, and what is very curious is the fact that nothing of any merit or technical beauty seems, so far as it is possible to decipher the cancelled verses, to be lost. As soon as ever the expression became adequate the line was left, and was never modified; as long as it was inadequate, it was pitilessly rejected, and the verse not passed till it satisfied the ear and imagination of the poet. What is interesting is that this work was carried out with the pen, and not, as was the practice in Swinburne's later years, with the mind; and nothing could be more opposed to the popular notion of Swinburne as the inspired improvisatore than all this evidence of intense laborious application to his creative task. In fact the more the original MSS. of Swinburne are examined, the more clearly is he revealed to us as an artist equally sedulous and sensitive, working by fits and starts, in gusts of overwhelming emotion, but always sufficiently master of himself to recognize, with finality, when the exact form of expression had been reached. Having recognized it, he did not, like Tennyson, Landor and other poets, fidget any further with it, but left it verbally permanent.

On the other hand, the draft of _Anactoria_ proves, what we might have suspected, that if Swinburne completed his verbal text in his first movement of laboured inspiration, he made no effort then to build up his poem. It may be observed that _Dolores_ is a rosary of stanza-beads on an invisible string; in other words, that the string might be broken, the beads shaken together, and the stanzas arranged in an entirely new sequence, without any injury to the effect of the poem. In other cases, and these some of Swinburne's finest lyrics, the same want of progression is to be noted. But we have not been able to witness the process before, nor were we prepared to find it working in a poem which is so elegiacal as _Anactoria_. Yet the evidence of the First Draft is positive. It is now clear that Swinburne forged his brilliant Dryden-like couplets as though each one were a stanza, and practically treated them as bits of mosaic to be fitted, in cooler blood, into a scheme not present to his mind when his inspiration seized him.

We seem, therefore, to be in the presence of a curious phenomenon. Whereas in the case of most poets the general outline of the work precedes the execution of it in detail, Swinburne offers us the paradox of an execution carried to the utmost finish before the act of evolution begins. He takes a bag-ful of couplets, all polished to the finest point, and--on some subsequent occasion--he builds these up into a poem which has the aspect of inevitable growth. The First Draft of _Anactoria_, which I have attempted to describe, is totally unintelligible, a chaos of Rodin-like fragments, unless we accept this theory of the poet's method.

One point remains to be stated. The published text of _Anactoria_ contains 304 lines. Of these I have found, scattered over the tract of delirious manuscript, 270. It is curious that not a single verse should have been added by the poet when he came to distribute and arrange his cluster of couplets, the solitary accession to the text being the solid passage of 34 lines in the middle of the poem, beginning

Or say what God above all gods and years
With offering and blood-sacrifice of tears.

Of this, not a single trace is to be found in the Draft. My first supposition was that the sheet containing these lines was lost, as might well be when we consider the accidental and fortuitous way in which the rest was retrieved. But I have come to the conclusion that this is not the case. The text in the Draft stops at the line

_The mystery of the cruelty of things_

without any sign that the idea of the impassive harshness of Fate was to be expanded. The 34 lines which now follow have, moreover, a character that distinguishes them from the rest of _Anactoria_, with which they are not quite in keeping. They leave the individual passion of Sappho entirely out of sight, and they are instinct with an order of theological ideas which occupied Swinburne in 1864 and 1865, when he was writing _Atalanta in Calydon_ and the earliest of _Songs before Sunrise_. They are on a higher philosophical plane than the melodious ravings of the love-sick poetess, and the more we read them, the more may we be persuaded that they are an after-thought.

THE HOTEL DE RAMBOUILLET

THE fashion of the moment, whether in literature or in art, whether in England or in France, favours what is rough, vivid and undisciplined. A new generation of readers welcomes the lyrical effusions of the cowboy, the lumberman, the tramp, and even the apache. It accepts Bubu de Montparnasse as a hero and does not shrink from overhearing the confidences of a burglar. There is no reason why we should exercise our sarcasm over these _naivetes_ of taste, while indeed, as social beings, we are even entitled to rejoice at them, since, in the language of practical aestheticism, a positive always involves a negative. If this age dotes on the dirtiness of tramps, it is because every one of us is obliged to be occupied and clean; and if the apache is the object of our poetry, it is because, in our extremely settled, confident and comfortable lives, we miss the excitement of being in personal danger. But let the delicate social balance of our existence be again disturbed, let us become practically accustomed to starvation and outrage and murder, and not another strophe would our poets address to the drunken navvy or the grimy bathchair-man. If London or Paris were to burn, if only for a fortnight, literature and art would hurry back to the study of princesses and to the language of the Golden Age.[1]

No more striking instance of this oscillation is to be found in history than is afforded by France at the opening of the seventeenth century, in the creation of what is called the vie de salon. This movement, the most civilizing, the most refining in the intellectual life of France, was the direct outcome of the convulsion of the civil wars. It was the ugliness, the wickedness, the brutality of the reigns of the later Valois which made the best minds of Paris determine to be gentle, beautiful and delicate under Louis XIII. Forty years of savage rapine had laid a severe embargo upon civilization, and no picture of France in 1625 can be complete without a glance at the background of 1575. In that half-century of administrative disorder, in the bitter and distracted state of country life, the population had lost confidence in virtue, and had become rude and dishonest. One of the Venetian ambassadors, travelling through France, declared of the Frenchmen whom he met, that "the sight of blood had made them cunning, coarse and wild." If such was the condition of the countryside, the towns were even worse. There resulted from the misery after the siege of Paris a universal weariness, a longing for tolerance in man to man, a yearning for refinement in private life, for security, for cultivation, for repose of mind and body and estate.

That Henri IV was a Protestant has led, perhaps, to some injustice being done to his memory in a Catholic country. But he deserved well of France in this critical moment. Every necessity of life had become extravagantly dear, every branch of industry depressed, if not extinct, when he came to the throne. He set himself to be the guardian of trade, and of the arts. He rebuilt cities, and a contemporary reported of him that "no sooner was he master of Paris, than the streets were swarming with masons." The shrewdness of Henri IV broke down the old superstition, of which Sully made himself the obstinate spokesman, that agriculture was the only source of wealth for France. The King persisted in encouraging the manufactures of silk and linen; in widening the circle of commercial interests; in teaching Frenchmen to achieve wealth and honour as architects, painters, sculptors and cabinet-makers. The prestige of the military nobles grew less and less, that of the _bourgeoisie_ grew more and more, while between them a new class, refined, intelligent, a little timid and supple in their professional adroitness, that _nouvelle aristocratic de robe_, of which M. Lavisse has spoken, came to the front and gave its tone to the surface of life.

The general trend of the best thought, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, was towards the polishing of society, left roughened and rusty by the long wars of religion. But the court of Henri IV was too coarse, and too little in sympathy with the mental aspirations of the age, to carry out this design, which needed other influences than those which could emanate from Marie de Medicis. Meanwhile, the great importance of the provincial centres had rapidly declined, and it was Paris that gave the tone to France. This then was the moment when a peculiarly Parisian centre was needed, independent of the court, yet in political sympathy with it, a centre of imagination and intelligence not too austere in its morals, not too pedantic in its judgments, to include the characteristic minds of the age, whatever their limitation or peculiarity; and yet definitely, unflinchingly and for a sufficient length of time, radiating politeness and authority. Such a Parisian centre must be aristocratic, yet liberal and intelligent; it must lay down rules of conduct, and contrive to get them obeyed; it must be recognized and haunted by the first men and women of the century; it must be actuated in equal proportions by the genius of discipline, and by that of easy grace and accomplished gallantry. In short, it must be what Providence astonishingly provided for French society at that moment of its sorest need, the unparalleled Hotel de Rambouillet, with, as its prophetess and chatelaine, one of the most charming women who have ever occupied the pen of the memoir-maker.

In observing the history of the famous Chambre Bleue, it cannot but strike an English critic how far more articulate French opinion was than English in the seventeenth century. Although, as we shall presently see, documents have been slow in forthcoming, they existed, and still exist, in profusion. But while we can now study, almost from day to day, the intrigues, the amusements and the enthusiasms of the group in the Rue Saint-Thomas, the record of a similar _salon_ open in England at the same epoch is still shrouded in a darkness which is likely never to be penetrated. So far as we can venture to judge there must have been many points of likeness between the Marquise de Rambouillet and Lucy Countess of Bedford. The circle of the friends of each was illustrious. Donne was a greater poet-divine than Cospeau or Godeau; our national vanity may fairly set Daniel and Drayton against Voiture and Chapelain, while even Corneille is not shamed by being balanced by Ben Jonson. The coterie of the Countess of Bedford may probably have been less wealthy, less sparkling, more provincial than that of Madame de Rambouillet, but the melancholy thing is that we lack the opportunity of comparing them. Save for vague allusions in the poets, and for a dim tradition of politeness, we form no detailed impression of the feasts of wit at Twickenham, whereas about those in the Rue Saint-Thomas we know almost as much as heart can wish. In the communication of social impressions England stood much farther behind France in the seventeenth century than the individual genius of her writers accounts for. We have, however, one possible recompense: the field of irresponsible conjecture is infinitely wider in our island chronicle. In France, even the craziest of faddists could not hope for a hearing if he suggested that the tragedies of Pierre Corneille were secretly written by Richelieu in his lighter moments.

On the history of the Hotel de Rambouillet the documents which survive are very numerous, and probably have not yet been exhaustively examined. The seventeenth century in France was awake to the importance of its own immortality, and set down the records of its social and literary glory with complacency. The memorials of the Hotel de Rambouillet to be found scattered over the works of such contemporaries as Segrais, Pellisson and Conrart have long been known. The poems and correspondence of Voiture, of course, form a mine of treasure, which was first competently worked by Ubicini in his edition of Voiture's works. It is now sifted to its last crumb of gold by M. Emile Magne in the eloquent and learned volumes which he has just published. There is also, and most important of all, Tallemant des Reaux, of whom I shall presently speak at greater length. M. Magne and M. Collas, with Voiture and Chapelain respectively in their particular thoughts, have turned over the priceless wealth of MSS. in the _Archives nationales_. It is probable that we now possess, thanks to the researches of these scholars, as full an account of the Hotel de Rambouillet as we are likely to obtain. It may be pointed out that these exact records, founded upon positive documents, show the danger of such hypotheses as not a few previous historians have rashly taken up. In the light of present knowledge, it is necessary to use not merely Roederer (1835), but even the more accurate Livet (1870), with caution.

The Hotel existed, as a centre of light and civility, for nearly seventy years, and involved the whole careers of two generations. Its history, which was developed by circumstances, and somewhat modified in its course by changes of taste, found no chronicler until it had existed some twenty years. That preliminary period, from the death of Henri IV to the arrival of Tallemant and Voiture, is precisely the time about which we should like to know most, and about which we are doomed to know least. The violent close of the reign, in a last wild crime, had, as we see from every species of evidence, brought with it a longing for serenity and repose. The keynote of the best society became a cultivation of simplicity, refinement, and delicacy. This growth of a new spirit was identified with the Marquis and Marquise of Rambouillet, but exactly how at first we are at a loss to tell, and even M. Magne is silent. A careful setting side by side of scattered impressions may enable us, however, while avoiding these hypotheses of which we have given warning, to form some idea of the foundation of the Hotel and its prestige.

Charles d'Angennes, Marquis of Rambouillet and Pisani, who has given its title to the celebrated union of hearts, must not long detain us, for the excellent reason that not much is recorded about him. He was probably born about 1577, and he died in Paris in 1652, having become blind about twelve years earlier. His eyesight was very peculiar; perhaps he was colour-blind. On this subject he was sensitive, and tried to conceal his condition. On one occasion, when the Duc de Montausier, who was known to have recently ordered a gorgeous scarlet costume, appeared at the Hotel de Rambouillet, his host called out "Ah! Monsieur, la belle escarlate!"--which was unlucky, because the Duc had happened to call in a black suit. Tallemant says that the Marquis "avait terriblement d'esprit, mais un peu frondeur." In this he doubtless resembled most of the wits of that age, who liked to let their antagonists feel that there were claws under the fur. In wit his wife, with her sweet consideration and delicate humorous tact, was immeasurably his superior; it was she, and not he, who gave the Hotel its famous amenity. We must not measure this in all things by our standards. About 1625 there was quite an inundation of spiteful, and sometimes obscene, verse in France, and this has to be taken into consideration in dealing with the _salons_. The Hotel de Rambouillet kept this in some check, but was amply aware of the entertainment to be got by clothing satire--what Agrippa d'Aubigne called _la malplaisante verite_--in smooth and well-turned verse. The Marquis was himself a versifier, and he shared to the full his wife's respect for letters.

There is nothing, however, to show that this agreeable man would have been able, by his unaided talents, to make a mark upon the age he lived in. He was the satellite of an infinitely more refulgent luminary, his extraordinary wife. If there is such a thing as social genius, on the same lines as literary or artistic genius, this was undoubtedly possessed, in a very high degree, by Catherine de Vivonne, Marquise de Rambouillet. She was born at Rome in 1588; half an Italian, her mother was a Roman princess, Julia Savella; and when, long afterwards, the Marquise had become not merely French, but almost the culture of France incarnate, she loved to dwell on her Italian parentage. Tallemant tells us that she always thought the Savelli the best family in the world; it was her faith. At the age of six, she became a naturalized French citizen, and in January, 1600, being in her twelfth year, she was married to Charles d'Angennes, who, his father being still alive, was then Vidame du Mans. Her own sober and stately father, the Marquis de Pisani, was just dead. He had left Catherine a conspicuous heiress. In later years, she spoke with characteristic humour of the way in which she was intimidated, poor child of twelve, by her husband's years, since he was twenty-three, and she said that she had never become quite used to feeling grown-up in his presence. But this was her whimsical way of talking, for there really existed between them the closest and most intimate affection. The Marquis and the Marquise were always in love with one another, throughout their extended married life of more than half a century; and in that age of light loves and cynical relationships, even baseless ill-nature never found any serious charge of frivolity to bring against this gracious lady.

It is true that it could not be difficult to show complaisance to Catherine de Rambouillet. She was never dull, never inattentive, never indiscreet. We hear that she had an extraordinary native gift for being present when she was wanted, and occupied elsewhere when her company would have been inconvenient. As years grew upon her, it seems as though this instinct for pleasing became a little too emphatic. Almost the only fault which any chronicler brings against her is that, towards the end, she was not critical enough, that she liked too many people, that her individuality melted into a general indulgence. But she was surrounded by petulant poets and snarling courtiers, and that this mild censure of her should be insinuated is, probably, but another tribute to her tact. She was like Milton's Lady; not indeed "chained up in alabaster," but serene, open-eyed and gay in the midst of a monstrous rout of ambitions and vanities which often resembled "stabled wolves or tigers at their prey." One of her most striking characteristics obviously was her power of ruling a society from its centre without making her rule oppressive. All the anecdotes of her discipline in her _salon_ show the coolness of her judgment and the velvet strength of her hand. She was capable of strong dislike, yet with an Italian faculty for concealing it. She hated Louis XIII to the inmost fibre of her being, for what seemed to her his despicable qualities, yet he never discovered it.

Those who regard Catherine de Rambouillet as one of the most engaging figures of Europe in the seventeenth century, must regret that, from an age where portrait-painting was so largely cultivated, no picture of her has come down to us. All we know is that she was beautiful and tall; the poets compared her to a pine tree. It was supposed that she never consented to sit to a painter, but M. Magne has discovered that there were portraits. Scudery, he believes, possessed engravings from paintings by Van Mol and by du Cayer. The earlier of these, painted in 1645, represented her gazing at the dead body of her father. These works of art appear to be hopelessly lost. We are thrown back on the written "portraits," in the alembicated style of the middle of the century, which adorn a host of novels and poems. Of these the fullest is that introduced by Madeleine de Scudery into the seventh volume of her huge romance, _Le Grand Cyrus_. M. Emile Magne, confronted with the "precious" terms of this description, and the vagueness of it, loses his temper with poor Mlle. de Scudery, whom he calls _cette pecore_. It is true that the physical details which would interest us are omitted, but it is hardly true to say, that "il est impossible de rien demeler au griffonage [de Mlle. de Scudery], sinon que Mme. de Rambouillet etait belle." This is not quite just, and to avenge the great Madeleine for being called a _pecore_, I will quote, what M. Magne surprisingly omits, part of the character of Cleomire, the pseudonym of Mme. de Rambouillet in _Cyrus_:

She is tall and graceful. The delicacy of her complexion is beyond
expression. The eyes of Cleomire are so admirably beautiful that no
painter has ever been able to do justice to them. All her passions
are in subjection to her good sense.

This might be more precise, but the touch about the eyes is helpful. Chapelain celebrated (in 1666, just after her death)

Cet air, cette douceur, cette grace, ce port,
Ce chef d'oeuvre admire du Midi jusqu'au Nord;

And Tallemant, always the best reporter, speaks of the permanent beauty of her complexion, which she would never consent to touch artificially. The only concession to fashion which she made in old age was to rouge her lips, which had turned blue. Tallemant wished she would not do even this. When she was very old, her head shook with a sort of palsy; this was attributed to her having indulged too much in the eating of pounded ambergris, but perhaps a more obvious reason could be found for so natural an infirmity.

In an age so troubled and so turbulent as that of Henri IV, public attention was concentrated in wonderment on the serene beatitude of the Rambouillets. "So rest, for ever rest, O princely pair!" the admiring court might be conceived as saying to a couple so dignified, so calm and so unaffected in their attachment. "Tout le monde admire la magnifique entente, a travers leur vie limpide, du Marquis et de la Marquise." Their limpid life--that was the just description of a mode of conduct so rare in that age, and at that social elevation, as to be relatively unique. What existences the reverse of limpid, lives tortured and turbid and mud-stained, do memoir-writers of that time, the Segrais and the Tallemants, reveal on all sides of them! Both were gifted, and each was persuaded of the excellence of learning and literature, although in talents the wife considerably surpassed the husband. Madame de Rambouillet was versed in several literatures. She spoke Italian and Spanish, the two fashionable languages of the time, to perfection. She loved all beautiful objects, and not one of the fine arts failed to find eager appreciation from her. In order to enjoy the sources of poetic distinction, she taught herself Latin, that she might read Virgil in the original. But she soon relaxed these studies, which might easily have landed her in pedantry. She became the mother of seven children, to whose bringing-up she gave strict attention. She found that her health, although her constitution was good, needed care. Perhaps she gave way, a little, to an amiable Italian indolence; at all events, the strenuousness which her early years had threatened subsided into a watchful, hospitable, humorous and memorable hospitality. If there could be rank maintained in such matters, Madame de Rambouillet would probably take place as the most admirable hostess in history.

But, to entertain, a house was needed. The old Marquis de Pisani had bought, in 1599, a ramshackle dwelling, close to the Louvre, in the Rue Saint-Thomas, which became, at his death, the property of his daughter. In 1604 when, it is to be noted, she was only sixteen years of age, she pulled it down and built the famous Hotel on the site.

Young as she was, it is certain that the Marquise was herself the architect of the Hotel de Rambouillet. A professional architect had been called in to rebuild the house, but when he submitted his designs to her they dissatisfied her by their conventionality. Tallemant describes them--a saloon on one side, a bedroom on the other, a staircase in the middle, nothing could be more poor. Moreover, the courtyard was pinched in extent and irregular in shape. One evening, after she had been dreaming over the drawings, the young Marquise called out "Quick! some paper! I have thought of what I want!" She had been trained to use a pencil, and she immediately drew out an elevation, which the builders followed point by point. Her design was so bold, so original, and so handsome, that the house made a sensation in Paris. The Queen-Mother, when she built the Luxembourg, sent her architects to study the Hotel de Rambouillet before they started their plans.

In all this matter of the foundation of the Hotel and the opening of the famous _salon_, M. Magne has made considerable discoveries, which should be distinguished from much in his charming books in which he has had no choice but to follow earlier published authorities. He has made excellent use of the _Inventaires_ of 1652, 1666 and 1671, to which attention had, however, already been drawn by M. Charles Sauze. But a ground plan of the Hotel de Rambouillet, from a contemporary map of Paris by Gomboust, is less known, and a reproduction of this is a singular aid to the reader of M. Magne's _Voiture_. We see that it stood actually next door to the famous Hotel de Chevreuse, in comparison with which, in its sparkling newness, in its slated turrets and its charming combinations of pale stone and salmon-coloured brick, it seemed an expression of the new age in a triumphant defiance of the old. From both houses could be seen, just across the quiet Rue Saint-Thomas, and over a strip of waste ground, the massive contour of the Louvre; a great garden, on the west side, stretched away behind the house, down to the corner of the Rue de Richelieu.

M. Magne has discovered that M. and Mme. de Rambouillet took up their abode in their new house early in 1607; this fixes what has hitherto been quite vague, the commencement of the Hotel de Rambouillet. But the Marquise was still only nineteen years of age, and it would be a mistake to suppose that, precocious as people were in those days, she began at once to exercise her celebrated hospitality, or to fill the rooms with tapestry, statues and men of wit. This came on gradually and naturally, without any violence of forethought. It has been suggested that the Marquise founded her _salon_, or, less pompously, began to gather congenial friends about her, in 1613. It is difficult to say on what documents this exact date is based. Her known aversion from Louis XIII, and her growing preference for receiving her friends at home over appearing in a crowd at court--both of them, doubtless, symptoms of her personal delicacy, which shrank from the suspicion of roughness--were probably emphasized after the murder of Concini in 1617, when the great nobles, who had defied the weak regency of Marie de Medicis, boldly swept back into Paris. Doubtless this was the time when Madame de Rambouillet began to practise a more cloistered virtue among the splendour and fragility of her treasures, and first intimated to noble and elegant friends, who were scandalized by the rowdiness of the Louvre, that here was an asylum where they might discuss poetry for hours on the velvet of her incrusted couches, or walk, in solemn ranks, among the parterres of her exquisite walled garden.

The character of pedantry and preciosity which the Hotel afterwards incurred, is not to be traced in any of its original features. In its early years there was no atmosphere of "intellectual beatitude" about it. But that a certain intellectual standard was set up from the very first it is impossible to question. From the compliments of the earliest inmates of the Hotel to the eulogistic epitaphs which were scattered on the hearse of the Marquise, all her devotees agree in celebrating her passionate love of literature. Clumsy phrases, rude expressions, the coarseness of a language still in process of purification, were a positive distress to her; and Tallemant has a droll anecdote about the agitation into which she was thrown by the use of so vulgar a word as "scurvy," _teigneux_, in an epigram which was being read to her. With these tendencies, she was peculiarly fitted to welcome to her intimacy the man who of all others was at that time most occupied with the task of correcting and clarifying the French language. An inevitable attraction must have drawn Malherbe to the doors of the Hotel de Rambouillet.

It would be of interest, and even of some importance, if we could discover the date at which Malherbe began to frequent the Hotel de Rambouillet, since there can be little doubt that it was to him that it owed its intellectual direction. Unfortunately, this is not easy to do. The poet Racan, whose invaluable notes and anecdotes were adopted by Tallemant to form the body of the _historiette_ on Malherbe, did not anticipate how grateful posterity would be for a few dates sprinkled here and there over his narrative. But the fact that Tallemant here took the line, so very unusual with him, of adopting somebody else's life of one of his heroes, can only be accounted for by the double supposition that Malherbe could not be omitted from his gallery, and yet had quitted the scene too early for Tallemant to know much about him at first hand. He must indeed have arrived at the Hotel very soon after its formation, since he was sixty-two years of age when we suppose it to have begun, and in 1628 he died. The Duc de Broglie was probably right when he conjectured that Malherbe was practically the first, and as long as he lived the foremost, of the literary clan which met in the Chambre Bleue. Racan, who accompanied and may have introduced the elder poet to the Hotel de Rambouillet, says that it was "sur les vieux jours de Malherbe" that the latter had the curious conversation about the proper heroic name, or poetic pseudonym, which ought to fix all future references to the Marquise, a conversation which led to his writing an eclogue in which he calls himself Melibee and his disciple Arcan. I quote Tallemant, who is quoting Racan:

"The very day that he sketched out this eclogue, fearing that the
name Arthenice [Catherine] if it were used of two persons [for
Racan had addressed Catherine Chabot as Arthenice, in a pastoral]
would make a confusion between those two persons, Malherbe passed
the whole afternoon with Racan turning the name about. All they
could make of it was Arthenice, Eracinte and Carintee. The first of
those they considered the prettiest, but as Racan was using this
also in a pastoral, Malherbe concluded by choosing Rodante."

Unfortunately Madame de Rambouillet, who had plenty of humour, declined the name of Rodante, which would better have adorned a mouse than a great lady, and Malherbe threw his consideration for Racan to the winds. Madame de Rambouillet became for him and remained

Celle pour qui je fis le beau nom d'Arthenice,

and he called her

Cette jeune bergere a qui les destinees
Sembloient avoir donne mes dernieres annees.

We gather that the sound judgment and the exquisite charm of Madame de Rambouillet attracted Malherbe away from the other _salons_ which he affected, particularly from those of the Vicomtesse d'Aulchy and of Madame des Loges. It was the latter lady whose ears the grim poet soundly boxed in her own house on a celebrated occasion. He was a formidable guest as well as a tyrant in literature.

But the relations of Malherbe with Madame de Rambouillet during the last ten years of his life were kept on a level of unruffled dignity on the one side and on the other. It is evident that the Marquise was predisposed to accept _la Doctrine_ which Malherbe, with so splendid a force and pride, was about to impose upon his countrymen. No man of letters has lived, in any country, who was more possessed than he by the necessity of watching over the purity of language, of cultivating in prose and verse a simple, lucid, and logical style, of removing from the surface of literature, by an arrogant discipline, all traces of obscurity, pomposity and looseness. He held the honour of the French language above all other obligations, and the stories of his sacrificing questions of personal interest, and even affection, to his passion for correct diction, for a noble manner of writing and speaking, are eloquent of the austere and dry genius of this masterful rather than charming poet, who, nevertheless, had so profound and so lasting an influence on French letters. Such a man as this, fanatically possessed by an abstract ambition, needs the sympathy of a wise and beneficent woman, and the old Malherbe, in the twilight of his days, found such an Egeria in Catherine de Rambouillet. It was in the Hotel that the famous discussions on the value, selection, and meaning of words, on nobility in eloquence, on purity and force in versification, first took place, and the heat from them radiated through France. The new era of style found its cradle in the Chambre Bleue.

But what was this Blue Room, this mysterious and azure grot in which the genius of French classic poetry went through its transformation? There was not much mystery about it. It was a room, deep in the magnificence of the Hotel, where the Marquise was in the habit of receiving the familiar visits of her best friends. The novelty of it was its colour; all other _salons_ in Paris being at that time painted red or drab. Out of the Blue Room there opened a more secret retreat, her _cabinet_ or _alcove_, where she could withdraw from all companionship, and spend her time in reading or meditating. The furniture of the whole Hotel de Rambouillet was on a scale of opulent splendour, but the rarity of the objects brought together was concentrated in the _cabinet_, which was, as M. Magne puts it, a sort of altar which the Marquise raised to herself. Every object in it was fragile, brilliant, and precious. In the days when Malherbe frequented the Hotel, it is probable that no inner room existed. Tallemant gives us the very odd history of what led to its formation. The Marquise in her youth was active and ready to expose herself to the weather, but about 1623 she began to be threatened by an _incommodite_, which made her unable to bear exposure to heat. She had been in the habit of taking long walks in Paris, but one summer's day, when the sun suddenly came out while she was strolling at La Cour-la-Reine, on the Champs Elysees, she nearly fainted, and was threatened with erysipelas. The following winter, the first time that she drew up her chair to read by the fire, the same phenomenon came on. She was now divided between perishing with cold or suffering miseries of heat, and she therefore invented, taking the idea from the Spanish "alcove," a little supplementary room, where she could sit close to her friends, while they gathered round the hearth, and yet not be smitten by the flames. In 1656, in the great winter, we hear of her, now an elderly woman, lying on her bed, heaped over with furs, but not daring to have a fire in sight.

Her energy did not leave her because of this disability. The letter-writers of the period describe her extraordinary activity. She had a great love of pretty and elaborate practical jokes which were in the taste of the time. Hers, however, were distinguished by the fact that they were never indecent and never ill-natured. But when an idea occurred to Madame de Rambouillet, she rested not until the wild scheme was accomplished. Voiture and Tallemant are full of instances of her fertility. One instance out of many was the passion which she expended in making a cascade in the park at Rambouillet, to startle a party of guests. The water had to be brought up from the little tarn of Montorgueil, and the Marquise superintended every spade and every pipe. Carried on by her enthusiastic presence, a team of workmen laboured night and day to complete the prodigious plaything, conducting their ingenious hydraulics by the flare of torches. I could fill pages with the proofs of her gaiety, her ingenuity, the amazing freshness and vivacity of her mind, but the reader can turn to the original sources for them. It may be suggested that, while the various independent authorities really confirm the legend in its outline, when they tell the same story, it will generally be found that Tallemant tells it more naturally and more exactly than Segrais or Voiture. It is also to be remembered that it was Tallemant who observed longest and most closely, and brought least suspicion of vanity to bear on his relation. There is a phrase buried somewhere in the vast tissue of the _Historiettes_ which deserves to be better known. Speaking incidentally of the Marquise de Rambouillet, Tallemant betrays that she was really the source of all his inspiration: "c'est d'elle que je tiens la plus grande et la meilleure partie de ce que j'ai escrit et que j'escriray dans ce livre." This gives his statements their peculiar authority with regard to that Blue Room, which he elsewhere calls "le rendez-vous de ce qu'il y avait de plus galant a la Cour, et de plus joly parmy les beaux-esprits du siecle." He quite frequently introduces an anecdote with the words "J'ay ouy dire a Mme. de Rambouillet."

It would therefore be ungrateful to speak of the Hotel de Rambouillet without paying a tribute to the strange quality of Tallemant des Reaux. French criticism, in applauding his industry, has hardly done justice to the talent, almost the genius, of this extraordinary man. With an unrivalled gift of observation, he combined that clear objective sense of the value of little things, which is so valuable in a memoir-writer, and he is the very prince of those biographers to whom nothing regarding the subjects of their art seems common or unclean. He has the keen eye for detail of his English contemporary, John Aubrey, and his _Historiettes_ are really, in the sense of Aubrey, _Minutes of Lives_. But Tallemant has much more design in his work, and a broader sense of the relation of moral and intellectual values. Saint-Simon, who was a child when Tallemant died, has more passion, a more impetuous and broader sweep of style, and a more intelligent appreciation of the scene of life. It was not for Tallemant des Reaux to paint "des grands fresques historiques." He is as trivial and as picturesque as Boswell, as crude as Pepys, and, like them both, he is completely indifferent to what other people may find scandalous. He moved in the best society, and he was of it; but in his lifetime no one seems to have paid him much attention. Voiture was often in the centre of the stage at the Hotel de Rambouillet, and what answered in those days to limelight followed him whenever he made one of his brilliant appearances; Tallemant was a shadowy super, hanging about in the wings, but he was always there.

He had the best right in the world to be there. Gedeon Tallemant was a close kinsman of the Marquis, whose sister, Marie de Rambouillet, had married the biographer's father, a Huguenot banker of Bordeaux, head of one of the best provincial families of the day. Gedeon was born at La Rochelle in 1619, and was therefore thirty years younger than his cousin's wife, the famous chatelaine of the Hotel de Rambouillet, whom he adored.[2] When he came to Paris, about 1637, her coterie was already at its height, but he was immediately admitted to it, and no doubt began no less immediately to ask questions and to take notes. He had every possible opportunity; his brother and a cousin were members of the new French Academy: his father was a Maecenas to Corneille and others: he himself married (in January, 1646) his cousin Elizabeth de Rambouillet, a union which made him the familiar of La Fontaine and La Sabliere. In 1650 he bought the chateau and estate of Plessis-Rideau, in Touraine, and by letters-patent changed the name to Les Reaux, which he then adopted as a surname. Here he entertained his lifelong friends--the associates of the Hotel, and other men of high professional rank, Patru, Ablancourt, the Pere Rapin. He knew absolutely everybody; he was adorably indiscreet; and those who associated with him perceived in him only a wonderful talker (Maucroix says that he "racontait aussy bien qu'homme de France"), and a lover of poetry who started writing an _OEdipe_ before Corneille. What few of them knew was that this obliging friend and graceful companion was putting down in an immense MS. all the anecdotes, all the intrigues, all the tricks of manner, all the traits of character, of the multitude of his polite acquaintances. He has left more than 500 of his little highly finished portraits of people he knew, and he knew everyone in that age and place worth knowing.