Chapter II (1)

I. Anne of Austria and Richelieu--Birth of Louis XIV.--II.
_L'Astrée_ and its Influence--III. Transformation of the Public
Manners--The Creation of the Salon--The Hôtel de Rambouillet and
Men of Letters.

I

But little information concerning the affairs of the day previous to the last months of the reign of Louis XIII. can be gleaned from the _Mémoires_ of La Grande Mademoiselle. It is hardly credible that a young girl raised at the Court of France, not at all stupid, and because of her birth so situated as to see and to hear everything, could have gone through some of the most thrilling catastrophes of that tragic time without seeing or hearing anything. At a later day Mademoiselle was the first to wonder at it; she furnishes an example surpassing imagination.

In 1637, before starting on her journey into the province, she went to bid adieu to "their Majesties," who were at Chantilly. Mademoiselle fell upon a drama. Richelieu had just disgraced the Queen of France, who had been declared guilty of abusing her religious retreat at the Convent of Val-de-Grâce by holding secret correspondence with Spain. Val-de-Grâce had been ransacked, and one of Anne of Austria's servants had been arrested. Anne herself had been questioned like a criminal, and she had had a very bitter _tête-à-tête_ in her chamber with such a Richelieu as she had never met before.

It was then ten years since Louis XIII., abruptly entering his wife's private apartments, had interrupted a declaration of love made by his Minister. After Marie de Médicis, Anne of Austria! Evidently it was a system of policy in which pride of personal power played its part. Possibly the heart also played some small rôle when Anne of Austria was young and beautiful; but it was the heart of a Richelieu, and unless we know what such a thing is like it is difficult to explain the Minister's attitude at Chantilly. Historians have not taken the trouble to tell us, because there were things more important to them and to the history of Europe than the exploits of so high-flying a Cardinal. Nevertheless, even an historian could have made an interesting chapter out of the sentimental life of Richelieu. It was a violent and cruel life; as violent and as pitiless as the passions that haunted his harrowed soul. Michelet compared the Duke's life to "a lodging that had been ransacked." In him love was a cloak thickly lined with hatred. Mme. de Motteville, who witnessed Richelieu's courtship of the Queen, was astonished by his way of making love. "The first marks of his affection," she writes, "were his persecutions of her. They burst out before everybody, and we shall see that this new way of loving will last as long as the Cardinal lives."

Anne of Austria felt only his persecutions. Richelieu was not pleasing to women. He was the earthly All-powerful. He possessed riches and genius, but they knew that he was cruel--even pitiless--in anger; and he could not persuade them to pretend to love him; all, even Marion de Lorme, mocked and laughed at him, and Retz gave a reason for their conduct:

Not being a pedant in anything else, he was a thorough pedant in
gallantry, and this is the fault that women never pardon. The
Queen detested Richelieu, and she made him feel it; but he took
his revenge at Val-de-Grâce. After the outburst--after the word
_treason_ had been spoken--it rested with him to have mercy, or
to send into shameless banishment the barren Queen. It gave him
pleasure to see her cowering before him, frightened and deprived of
all her pride. He exulted in disdaining her with an exaggerated and
insulting affectation of respect, and fearing lest the scene should
not be known to posterity, he painted it with all the zest of the
reaction of his wounded dignity.[27] He listened complacently while
she drove the nails into her coffin, rendering more proofs of her
docility "than he should have dared to expect"; incriminating
herself, as she explained in her own way, by palpable untruths,
all her treasonable letters to her brothers and to her friends in
Spain. When she had told a great deal more than she knew, Richelieu
put a few sharp questions, and the Queen completely lost her head.

Then [wrote Richelieu, in his chronicle] she confessed to
the Cardinal everything which is in the paper signed by her
afterwards. She confessed with much displeasure and confusion,
because she had taken oaths contrary to what she was confessing.
While she made the said confession to the Cardinal her shame was
such that she cried out several times, "Oh, how kind you must be,
Monsieur the Cardinal!" protesting that all her life she should
be grateful and recognise the obligation she was under to those
who drew her out of the affair. She had the honour to say to the
Cardinal: "Give me your hand," presenting her own as a mark of
the fidelity with which she should keep all her promises. Through
respect the Cardinal refused to give her his hand. From the same
motive he retired instead of approaching her.

Officially Louis XIII. pardoned the intrigue of Val-de-Grâce, but the courtiers were not deceived, and they immediately deserted the Queen's apartment. When they passed her windows they modestly lowered their eyes. It was just at that time that Mademoiselle arrived. It was at the end of August. She read her welcome in every face. Now that she had come gayety became a duty and amusements an obligation. The feeling of relief was general. Mademoiselle wrote:

I put all the Court in good humour. The King was in great grief
because of the suspicions they had awakened against the Queen, and
not long before that they had found the strong box that had made
all the trouble at Val-de-Grâce, about which too much has been said
already. I found the Queen in bed, sick. Any one would be sick
after such an affront as she had received.

Of all at Court, Anne of Austria was not the least happy to see Mademoiselle. Now she could pour out her sorrow. Mme. de Saint Georges, Mademoiselle's governess, was one of her familiar friends. The Queen told her everything. Mademoiselle was permitted to sit with the two ladies to avert suspicion. So the child found herself in possession of secrets whose importance and danger must have been known to her. It may be that she would have liked nothing better than to recount them in her memoirs, but she was "forced to admit with sheepish reticence that to her grief she had never remembered anything of it."

Some months later she was entangled in the King's romance with Mlle. de Hautefort, and "did not notice anything"--and this is to her credit--of all the struggles made by the Cabals to turn the adventure to their profit. In spite of her lack of memory she had opened wide both eyes and ears. The schemes of lovers always interested her, as they interest all little girls. To this instinct of her sex we owe a very pretty picture of the transformation of man by love. And the man was no other than the annoying and annoyed Louis XIII. Mademoiselle gives us the picture in default of more serious proof of her observation. Hunting was the King's chief pleasure.

In 1638, during the luminous springtime, he was seen in the forests gay, at times actually happy--thanks to two great blue eyes. When he followed his dogs he took his niece and other young people with him that he might have an excuse for taking Mlle. de Hautefort.

We were all dressed in colours [recounts Mademoiselle]. We were
on fine, ambling horses, richly caparisoned, and to guarantee us
against the sun each of us had a hat trimmed with a quantity of
plumes. They always turned the hunt so that it should pass fine
and handsome houses where grand collations could be found, and,
coming home, the King placed himself in my coach, between Mme. de
Hautefort and me. When he was in good humour he conversed very
agreeably to us of everything. At that time he suffered us to speak
freely enough of the Cardinal de Richelieu, and the proof that it
did not displease him was that he spoke thus himself.

Immediately after the hunting party returned they went to the
Queen. I took pleasure in serving at her supper, and her maids
carried the dishes (viands). There was a regular programme. Three
times a week we had music, they of the King's chamber sang, and the
most of the airs sung by them were composed by the King. He wrote
the words, even; and the subject was never anything but Mme. de
Hautefort. The King was in humour so gallant that at the collations
that he gave us in the country he did not sit at table at all; and
he served us nearly everything himself, though his civility had
only one object. He ate after us, and did not seem to feel more
complaisance for Mme. de Hautefort than for the others, so afraid
was he that some one should perceive his gallantry.

Despite these precautions, the Court and the city, Paris, and the province were informed of the least incidents of an affair of such importance. The only person whom the King's passion left indifferent was the Queen. Anne of Austria had never been jealous. She did not consider Louis XIII. worth the pains of jealousy,--and now jealousy would have been out of place. Anne, after twenty-three years of marriage, was _enceinte_. The people who had loaded her with outrages while she was bowed by shame now knelt at her feet, sincere in their respectful demonstrations of devotion for the wife of the King who might one day become Queen-mother, or even Regent of France. It was like one of the fairy plays in a theatre. Nature had waved her wand, and the disgraced victim of enchantment had arisen "clothed on with majesty." It was an edifying and delightful transformation. After all her shame, the novelty of being cared for and treated gently was so great and so agreeable that when she saw her royal spouse sighing before the virtuous and malignant de Hautefort--"whose chains" were said to be heavy and hard to bear--she looked upon it very lightly. Anne of Austria smiled at the benumbed attitudes of the King, at his awkward ardour, and equally awkward prudery. The Queen learned with amusement that when among her companions, the young girls of the Court, Mlle. de Hautefort mocked the King, and boasted that he "dared not approach her, though he maintained her," and that she was "bored to death by his talk of dogs, and birds, and the hunt." Friends repeated these criticisms. Louis XIII. heard of them and took offence "at the ingrate," and the Court went into mourning. "If there should be some serious quarrel between them," wrote Mademoiselle, "all the comedies and the entertainments will be over. At that time, when the King came to the Queen's apartments, he did not speak to anybody, and nobody dared to speak to him. He sat in a corner, and very often he yawned and went to sleep. It was a species of melancholy which chilled the whole world, and during this grief he passed the most of the time writing what he had said to Mme. de Hautefort, and what she had answered. It is so true that after he died they found great bundles of papers recounting all his differences with his mistresses--to the praise of whom it must be said, and to his praise also, that he had never loved any women who were not very virtuous."

Mademoiselle never seemed to realise the political importance of the King's favourites. That subject, like all else serious, escaped her. She writes:

"I listened to all that they told me--all that I was old enough to hear."

We need not hope to learn from her what Richelieu thought of the King's chaste affection; why, though he had encouraged it, he was angered by it; why he looked with disfavour upon Mlle. de Lafayette, and manipulated her affairs so well that he introduced her into the cell of a convent, and ordered the King to take medicine whenever he suspected that Louis aspired to contemplate her through the grating of her prison; if Mademoiselle had ever known such things "they had never presented themselves to her memory." Nor will it do us any good to search her memoirs for reasons making it clear why Louis XIII., who worked incessantly against Richelieu, and "did not love him," sacrificed, for the Cardinal's pleasure, all his friends and near relations. Throughout all the reverses of 1635 and 1636, when France was trembling under the trampling feet of the invader, when the enemy's skirmishers lay at the gates of Pontoise, the King was faithful to the dictator, whose policy had drawn ruin on the nation. Mademoiselle had never known these things. They had been far below her horizons. The ungrateful years had buffeted her as they passed. She had been pretty and sprightly in early childhood. At the age of eleven she was a buxom girl, with swollen cheeks, thick lips, and a stupid mien,--in a word: a frankly ill-favoured creature, too absorbed in the preoccupations of animal life (the need to skip and jump, to be seen and heard) to listen, to observe, or to reflect. The Queen's condition gave her one more occasion to manifest the lengths to which she had carried her innocence, though she had lived in a world where innocence was not regarded as the most important item in an outfit. She rejoiced that there was to be a Dauphin. Evidently she did not know that his advent would strip her father of his rights as heir-presumptive to the throne. In her own words, she "rejoiced without the least reflection." Anne of Austria was touched by a simpleness of heart to which her life had not accustomed her. "You shall be my daughter-in-law!" she cried repeatedly to her young niece. For she could not bear the thought that the child's later reflections might awake regret.

Mademoiselle embraced the idea only too ardently, and to it she owed one of the bitterest hours of her existence.

The child who was to be Louis XIV. was born at the Château of Saint Germain, 5th September, 1638. Mademoiselle made him her toy. She writes: "The birth of Monsieur the Dauphin gave me a new occupation. I went to see him every day and I called him _my little husband_. The King was diverted by this and he thought that I did well." She had counted without her godfather the Cardinal, who was more of a Croquemitaine, and more of a spoil-sport than he had ever been. He considered her childish talk very indecorous. Mademoiselle pursues:

Cardinal de Richelieu, who does not like me to accustom myself to
being there, nor to have them accustomed to seeing me there, had me
given orders to return to Paris. The Queen and Mme. de Hautefort
did all that was possible to keep me. They could not obtain their
wish,--which I regretted. It was all tears and cries when I left
there. Their Majesties gave many proofs of friendship, especially
the Queen, who made me aware of a particular tenderness on that
occasion. After this displeasure I had still another to endure.
They made me pass through Rueil to see the Cardinal, who usually
lived there when the King was at Saint Germain. He took it so to
heart that I had called the little Dauphin _my little husband_
that he gave me a great reprimand: he said that I was too large
to use such terms; that I had been ill-behaved to do so. He spoke
so seriously--just as if I had been a person of judgment--that,
without answering him, I began to weep. To pacify me he gave me
collation, but I did not pass it over. I came away from there very
angry at all he had said to me.

Richelieu meant that his orders should be obeyed. Mademoiselle adds: "When I was in Paris I only went to Court once in two months; and when I did go there I only dined with the Queen and then returned to Paris to sleep." It must be said that if the Cardinal had submitted to it for a night or two, she might have found it difficult to sleep at the château. At that time our kings had strange and very inconvenient arrangements for receiving guests; their household appointments had brought them to such a pass that they had suppressed their guest-chamber. When the royal family went to Saint Germain there was a regular house-moving; they carried all their furniture with them, and nothing was left in the Louvre,--not even enough for the King to sleep on when business called him to the capital. Henry IV., a monarch who did not stand on ceremony, invited himself to the house of some lord or of some rich bourgeois, where he put himself at his ease, receiving the Parliament, and also his fair friends, and bidding adieu to his hosts only when he was ready to go home. He took leave of them in his own time and at his own hour.

The timid Louis XIII. had never dared to do such things; he had never thought of having two beds: one in the city, the other in the country.

When the Court came back to Paris they brought all their furniture; not a mattress was left in the palace at Saint Germain. This singular custom had evolved another, which appears to us to have lacked hospitality. When the King of France invited distinguished guests, he never furnished their rooms. He offered them the four walls, and let them arrange themselves as best they could. From as far back as people could remember, they had seen the great arrive at the château closely followed by their beds, their curtains, and even their cooks and their stew-pans. This was the case with Monsieur and his daughter; and so it was with Mazarin, in the following reign. Mademoiselle was not ignorant of the peculiar methods of the royal housekeeping. She knew that the King's friends could not be made comfortable for the night, on the spur of the moment, and she rested very well in Versailles, and thought of nothing but her amusements.

The people saw a gratuitous malevolence in her exile from Court; but the Fronde proved the justice of the Cardinal's action. La Grande Mademoiselle made civil war to constrain Mazarin to marry her to Louis XIV., who was eleven years her junior. Her godfather had guessed well: the idea of being Queen had germinated rapidly in the little head in which the influence of _Astrée_--still active despite its age--was busily forming romantic visions far in advance of its generation. D'Urfé died in 1620; to his glory be it said that we are obliged to go back to him and to his work when we would explain the moral state of the later days.

II

Few books in any country or in any time have equalled the fortune of _Astrée_,[28] a pastoral romance in ten volumes, in which the different effects of honest friendship are deduced from the lives of shepherds and others, under a long title in the style of the century. Honoré d'Urfé's work immediately became the "code of polite society" and of all who aspired to appear polite. Everything was _à l'Astrée_--fashions, sentiments, language, the games of society, and the conversation of love. The infatuation extended to classes of society who read but little. In a comedy familiar to the lesser bourgeoisie,[29] some one reproached marriageable girls for permitting themselves to be captured by the insipid flattery of the first coxcomb who addresses them thus:

----Bien poli, bien frisé
Pourvu qu' il sache un mot des livres d'_Astrée_.

Success had crossed the frontiers of France. People in foreign lands found material for their instruction in _Astrée_. The work was a novel with a key; a story with a meaning. "Celadon" was the author; "Astrée" was his wife (the beautiful Diane de Chateaumorand, with whom he had not been happy). The Court of _le grand Enric_ was the Court of Henry IV. "Galatée" was the Queen (Marguerite) and so on. "All the stories in _Astrée_ were founded on truth," wrote Patru, who had gathered his information from the lips of d'Urfé. But "the author has romanced everything--if I dare use the word." The charm found in the scandalous reality of the scenes and in the truth of the characters crowned the work's success; the book was translated in most languages, and devoured with the same avidity by all countries. In Germany there was an _Académie des Vrais Amants_ copied from the "Academy" of Lignon. In Poland, in the last half of the century, John Sobieski, who was not by any means one of the be-musked knights of the carpet, played at Astrée and Celadon, with Marie d'Arquien. "To grass with the matrimonial love which turns to friendship at the end of three months! ... Celadon am I, now as in the past; the ardent lover of those first glad days!"[30] he wrote after marriage.

When the people's infatuation had passed, the book still remained the standard of all delicate minds, and it continued to wield its literary influence.

Through two centuries [said Montégut] _Astrée_ lost nothing of
its renown. The most diverse and the most opposite minds alike
loved the book; Pellisson and Huet the Bishop of Avranches were
enthusiastic admirers of its qualities. La Fontaine and Mme. de
Sévigné delighted in it. Racine, in his own silent and discreet
way, read it with fond pleasure and profit, but did not say so.

Marivaux had read it and drawn even more benefit from it than
Racine.... Last of all, Jean Jacques Rousseau admired it so much
that he avowed that he had re-read it once a year the greater part
of his life. Now as Jean Jacques exerted a dominant influence upon
the destinies of our modern imaginative literature, it follows
that the success of _Astrée_ has been indirectly prolonged even to
our own day. Madame George Sand, for example, derived some little
benefit from d'Urfé, though she was not too well aware of it.

Montégut had forgotten the Abbé Prévost; but M. Brunetière repairs the omission, and adds: "One may say that _Astrée's_ success shaped the channel for the chief current of our modern literature."

Its social influence was equal to its influence upon literature. And yet, to-day, not one of all the books that had their time of glory and of popularity is more neglected. No one reads _Astrée_ now, and no one can read it; with the best will in the world, the most indulgent must throw the book down, bored by its dulness. It has become impossible to endure the five thousand pages of the amorous dissertations of the shepherds of Lignon. At the best such a debauch of subtlety would be only tolerable, even had it emanated from a writer of genius. And d'Urfé had no genius; he had nothing but talent.

D'Urfé was a little gentleman of Forez, whom his epoch (he was born in 1568) had permitted to examine the society of the Valois. We know that no social body was ever more corrupt; nevertheless those who saw it were dazzled by it; and because they had looked upon it they were considered--in the time of Louis XIII.--exquisitely elegant and polite; they were regarded as the survivors of a superior civilisation.

The ladies of the Court of Anne of Austria were proud of their power to attract the notice of the elderly noblemen "thanks to whom," in the words of a contemporary writer, "remnants of the polite manners brought by Catherine de Médicis from Italy were still seen in France." The homage of the antique gentlemen was insistent, of a kind which refuses to be repelled. Even the Queen accepted it. Anne of Austria, whose habitually correct attitude was notable, felt that she was constrained to receive the attentions of the old Duc de Bellegarde, though the Duke's character and customs were notorious. Duc de Bellegarde had been one of the deplorable favourites of Henri III.

Anne of Austria was hypercritical in regard to forms of conversation; her own language was fastidiously delicate; she exacted minute attention to the superficial details of civility; yet the notorious de Bellegarde sat at ease before the Court, displaying all the peculiar gallantry of his epoch, "and," said the Queen's friend, Mme. de Motteville, "it was the more noticeable and the fame of it was the more scandalous because the Queen did not hesitate to accept from him incense whose smoke might well blacken her reputation. The Queen permitted the Duke to treat her as he had treated the women of his own day, a day when gallantry and women reigned."

The civil wars swept away the splendid but rotten world, but the prestige of the Valois still asserted its power.

In 1646, a posthumous romantic tale appeared in Paris, entitled _Orasie_. It was generally attributed to the pen of Mlle. de Senterre, a maid-of-honour of the Court of Catherine de Médicis. "This book," said the editorial preface, "is a true history, full of very choice events; there is nothing fictitious in it but the names given to its heroes and its heroines. _Orasie_ is a mirror reflecting the most magnificent and the most pompous of kingly Courts, the Court where reigned the truest civility and the purest politeness, where false gallantry, like base action, was unknown."

The Court thus eulogised had been the centre of delicate mannerism and the incubating cell of the refinement of vice. Though the civil wars had annihilated the splendid rottenness of the Court, the memory of the delicacy of the Valois survived. When peace was declared, when men had leisure to look about them, they were confronted by the rude Court of Henry IV. They felt the need of a re-establishment of polite society, but where could they find the elements of such society? Foreign influences had enervated the national imagination, Spanish literature with its romances of cruel chivalry, its pastorals, and its theatrical dramas had imbued the Romanticism of France with its poison, and symptoms of moral debility were generally evident. A period of fermentation and expectancy follows war. When the civil wars were over, the men of France sat waiting; their need was pressing, but they could form no idea of its nature. At such a time the eager watchmen on the towers acclaim the bearer of tidings, be they tidings of good or of evil.

Honoré d'Urfé's chief merit lay in the fact that he was the man of the hour, he came when he was most needed, holding the mirror up to nature, and clearly reflecting the common feeling. If I may use the term, he presented his countrymen with an intelligent mirror reflecting their confused and agitated aspirations. Nature and occasion had fitted him for his work: he had all the accessories and all the requirements of his art; best of all, he had the imperious vocation which is the first and the essential qualification of authorship, without which no man should have the hardihood to lay hold upon an inkstand. D'Urfé knew that war demoralises a people; he comprehended the situation of his country; he had been a member of the League, and one of the last to surrender. He knew that the spirit of love was hovering over France, waiting to find a resting-place. François de Sales and d'Urfé were friends, and in such close communion of thought that, to quote the words of Montégut, "there was not a simple analogy, there was almost an identity of inspiration and of talent between _Astrée_ and the _Introduction à la vie dévote_."

D'Urfé had only to remember the æstheticism which surrounded his expanding youth to comprehend the general weariness caused by the lack of intellectual symmetry and by the rusticity of the manners of the new reign. He was a serious and thoughtful man; he had devoted long months, even years, to meditation and to study before he had touched his pen, and by repeated revisions he had ranged in his book the greater part of the thoughts and the aspirations of his epoch. In a word, the obscure provincial writer who had never entered the Louvre had composed a quasi-universal work resuming all the intellectual and sentimental life of an epoch. _Astrée_ was a powerful achievement; but one, or at most but two, such books can be produced in a century.[31] D'Urfé's laborious efforts attained a double result. While he extricated and brought into the light the ideal for which he had searched years together, he excited his contemporaries to strive to be natural and real, and the first French novel, _Astrée_, was our first romance with a thesis. The subject is commonplace: lovers whose theme is love, and a lovers' quarrel; in the last volume of the book, love triumphs, the quarrel is forgotten, and the lovers marry.

In the beginning of the work, the shepherdess _Astrée_, beside herself with causeless jealousy, overwhelms the shepherd Celadon with reproaches and Celadon, tired of life, throws himself into the Lignon. Standing upon the bank of the river, he apostrophises a ring and the riband left in his hand when his shepherdess escaped his grasp:

"Bear witness, O dear cord! that rather than break one knot of my
affections I will renounce my life, and then, when I am dead, and
my cruel love beholds thee in my hand, thou shalt speak for me,
thou shalt say that no one could be loved as I loved her.... Nor
lover wronged like me!" Then he appeals to the ring. "And thou,
emblem of eternal, faithful love, be glad to be with me in death,
the only token left me of her love!"

Hardly has he spoken when, turning his face toward _Astrée_, he springs with folded arms into the water. The nymphs save him, and his romantic adventures serve as the wire carrying the action of the romance.

But the system is inadequate to its strain. Dead cars bring about a constantly recurring block, and more than an hundred personages of more or less importance stop the way by their gallant intrigues. The romance mirrors the passing loves and the fevered and passionate life of the be-ribanded people who hung up their small arms in their panoplies, twisted their lances into pruning-hooks, and replaced the pitiless art of war by the political arts of peace. Honoré d'Urfé's heroes appear to be more jealously careful of their fine sentiments than of the sword-thrusts lavishly distributed by the lords and gentlemen of their days. They are much more zealous in their search for elegant expressions than in bestirring themselves to serious action. The perfumed students of phraseology have changed since the night of Saint Bartholomew, when more than one of them fought side by side with Henry de Guise; but it is not difficult to recognise the precursors of the Fronde in the druids, shepherds, and chevaliers of _Astrée_, and so thought d'Urfé's first readers.

With extreme pleasure they contemplated themselves in the noble puppets seen in the romance, basking in the sun of peace. Away with care! They had nothing worse to fight than lovers' casuistries, and they lay in the shadows of the trees, enjoying the riches of a country redeemed by their own blood. With them were their ladies; lover and lass were disguised as shepherd and shepherdess, or as mythological god and goddess. Idle and elegant as they were, the happy lovers had been tortured by wounds, racked by pride, stung by the fire of battle; to sleep for ever had been the vision of many a bivouac, and now war was over, and to lie in a day-dream fanned by the summer winds and watched by the eye of woman,--this was the evolution of the hope of death! This was the restorative desired by the provincial nobles when they stood firm as rocks in ranks thinned and broken by thirty years of civil and religious war. Such a rest the jaded knights had hoped for when they accepted their one alternative, and, by their recognition of Henry IV., acknowledged submission to a principal superior to private interest and personal ambition.

The high nobility had soon tired of order and obedience. Never was it more turbulent or more undisciplined than under Louis XIII. and in the minority of Louis XIV., but it must be noted as one of the signs of the times that it no longer carried its jaunty ease of conscience into its plots and its mutinies. Curious proofs of this fact are still in existence; the revolting princes and lords stoutly denied that they had taken arms against the King. If they had openly made war, and so palpably that they could not deny it, they invariably asserted with affirmations that they had done it "to render themselves useful to the King's service." Gaston d'Orléans gave the same reason for his conduct when he deserted France for a foreign country. All averred that they had been impelled to act by a determination to force the King to accept deliverance from humiliating tyranny, or from pernicious influences. During the Fronde, when men changed parties as freely as they changed their gloves, the rebels protested their fidelity to the King, and they did it because the idea of infidelity was abhorrent to them.

No one in France would have admitted that it could be possible to hold personal interests or personal caprice above the interests of the State, and in the opinion of the French cavalier this would have been reason enough for any action; but there was a more practical reason; the descendants of the great barons were beginning to doubt their power to maintain the assertion of their so-called rights. By suggesting subjects for the meditations of all the people of France who could read or write _Astrée_ had contributed a novelty in scruples. In our day such a book as _Astrée_ would excite no interest; the reiteration of the "torrents of tenderness" to which it owed its sentimental influence would make it a doubtful investment for any publisher, and even the thoughtful reader would find its best pages difficult reading; but when all is said and done, it remains, and it shall remain, the book which best divines our perpetually recurring and eternal necessities.

It treats of but one passion, love, and yet it gives the most subtle study in existence. In it all the ways of loving are minutely analysed in interminable conversations. All the reasons why man should love are given, with all the reasons why he should not love. All the joys found by the lover in his sufferings are set forth, with all the sufferings that his joys reserve for him. All the reasons for fidelity and all the reasons for inconstancy are openly dissected. A complete list is given of all the intellectual sensations of love (and of some sensations which are not intellectual). In short, _Astrée_ is a diagnosis of the spiritual, mental, and moral condition of the love-sick. It contains all the "cases of conscience" which may or might arise, under the same or different circumstances, in the lives of people who live to love, and who, thus loving, see but one reason for existence--people who severally or individually, each in his own way and according to his own light, exercise this faculty to love,--still loving and loving even then, now, and always.

D'Urfé's conception was of the antique type. He regarded love as a fatality against which it were vain to struggle. Toward the middle of the book the sorrowful Celadon, crushed by the wrath of _Astrée_, is hidden in a cavern where he "sustains life by eating grasses." The druid Adamas knows that Celadon is perishing by inches, and he essays to bring the lover to reason. Celadon answers him:

"If, as you say, God gave me full possession of power over myself,
why does He ask me to give an account of myself?--for just as He
gave me into my own hands and just as He gave me to myself, so have
I given myself to her to whom I am consigned for ever. First of
all! If He would have account of Celadon, let Him apply to her of
whom I am! Enough for me if I offend not her nor violate my sacred
gift to her. God willed my life, for by my destiny I love; and God
knows it, and has always known it, for since I first began to have
a will I gave myself to her, and still am hers. In brief, I should
not have been blest by love as I have been in all these years had
God not willed it.[32] If He has willed it would it be just to
punish me because I still remain as He ordained that I should be?
No! for I have not power to change my fate. So be it, if my parents
and my friends condemn me! They all should be content and glad,
when for my acts, I give my reason; _that I love her_."

"But," answered Adamas, "do you count on living long in such away?"

"Election," answered Celadon, "depends not on him who has neither
will nor understanding."

La Grande Mademoiselle and most of her contemporaries escaped _Astrée's_ influence in this respect; they did not admit that man has "neither will nor understanding" where his passions are concerned; or that his feelings depend on "destiny." Corneille, who had confronted the question, set forth the principle that the heart should defer to the will. "The love of an honest man," he wrote in 1634,[33]--"The love of an honest man should always be voluntary. One ought never to love to the point where he cannot help loving, and if he carries love so far, he is the slave of a tyranny whose yoke he should shake off."

In her youth Mademoiselle de Montpensier was one of the truest of the Cornéliennes of her generation; she practised what others were contented to restrict to preaching. Love's tyranny appeared to her a shameful thing, and she was so convinced that it rested with the lover whether he should be a slave or free himself "by shaking off the yoke," that even the most honest attacks of moral faintness were, in her eyes, occasions for judgment without mercy. One day--she tells it herself--she turned a young _femme de chambre_ out of her service simply "because the girl had married for love." The shame then attendant upon love increased in proportion to the "condition" of the slaves of the questionable passion. The lower orders were insignificant, and their loves and their antipathies, like their sufferings, were beneath the consideration of reason, but when men were of a certain rank, sentiment was debarred from the conditions of marriage. Mademoiselle followed all the precepts of high quality, and throughout the first half of her life her line of action lay parallel with the noble principles introduced by Corneille. Jansenism, which, like Corneille, raised the veil of life for many of the humbler human hearts, made no impression upon "tall Mademoiselle." Lauzun was needed to break her pride.

Concerning moral questions, public sentiment was calm; the only serious difference raised by d'Urfé's work during a period of half a century was the conflict of opinions[34] on human liberty; on all other subjects, notably the things of taste, d'Urfé was in harmony with public feeling; at times _Astrée_ exceeded public feeling, but it seldom conflicted with it. The sentiments of the book were far in advance of the epoch.

But the nature with which d'Urfé communed and which he loved was the nature viewed by Louis XIII., and fashioned according to the royal taste, improved, repaired, decorated with artificial ornaments, and confined within circumscribed landscapes composed of complicated horticultural figures; a composite nature in which verdure was nothing but a feature. The fashion of landscape-gardening--an invention of the Renaissance--had arrived in France from Italy. In the land of its birth very amusing specimens of the picturesque were maintained by intelligent property-owners.

"There are fountains," [said M. Eugene Muntz,][35] "groves, verdant
bowers, trellises, vine-wreathed arbours, flowers cherished
for their beauty, and plants cultivated for their medicinal
properties; and under ground there are caves and grottoes. There
are bird-houses, hydraulic organs, single statues, groups of
statues, obelisks, vases, pavilions, covered walks, and bathhouses;
everything is brought together within a limited space to charm the
eye and to favour the imagination."

The landscape-gardening of France offered the same spectacle, and the cultivated parks bore close resemblance to the shops of the venders of _bric-à-brac_. "In those rare gardens," said an enthusiastic historian, "he who promenades may pass from one surprise to another, losing himself at every step in all sorts of labyrinths." ("Dedalus" was the name in use, for in those days much was borrowed from mythology and from other ancient sources.) The labyrinths were complicated by ingenious devices intended to deceive the vision. Æstheticism of style demanded such delusions. The most renowned landscape-gardens were the royal parks, on which money had been freely lavished to perfect and to elaborate nature. Among the "rarities" in the gardens of the Gondis and at Saint Cloud, were fountains whose waters played invisible instruments. At the Duke de Bellegarde's (rue de Grenelle Saint Honoré) the most marvellous thing in the garden was an illuminated grotto of arcades, ornamented with grotesques and with marine columns, and covered with a vaulting encrusted with shells and with a quantity of rock-work; and more than that, so full of water-spouts, canals, water-jets, and invisible faucets[36] that even the King had no greater number on his terraces at Saint Germain--nor had Cardinal de Richelieu a greater number in his gardens at Rueil, though the first artificial cascades ever seen in France[2] had been built in his garden.[37] At the Château of Usson, the home of Queen Marguerite, who appears in _Astrée_ under the name of _Galatée_, the garden was provided with all the rarities the place would hold. Nothing that artifice could add to it had been forgotten. The woods were embellished with divers grottoes so well counterfeiting nature that the eye often deceived the judgment.[38] The most remarkable grotto was

the cave of old Mandragora, a place so full of witcheries that
surprise followed surprise, and hour by hour, something continually
occurred to delight the vision. The vaulting of the entrance was
sustained by two sculptured figures very industriously arrayed
with minute stones of divers colours; the hair, the eyebrows, and
the beards of the statues, and the two sculptured horns of the
god Pan were composed of sea shells so neatly and so properly
set in that the cement could not be seen. The outer coping of
the door was formed like a rustic arch, and garlands of shells,
fastened at the four corners, ended close to the heads of the two
statues. The inside of the arch tapered to a rocky point, which,
in several places, seemed to drip saltpetre. The retaining walls
of the arch were set back in niches to form fountains, and all of
the fountains depicted some of the various effects of the power
of love. In the grotto arose a tomb-like monument ornamented with
images representing divers objects, all formed of coloured marble,
and trimmed with pictures; wherever such an effect was possible,
the trees were pruned to take the appearance of some other object
or objects.

Thus the laborious and unrestrained intervention of man evoked a factitious type of nature as far from precious as the false _Précieuses_. By the unreserved admiration of its florid descriptions _Astrée_ had consecrated the artificial mode. Nature demanded Lenôtre to strip her gardens of their ridiculous decorations, and to redeem them by simplicity, but when Lenôtre accomplished the work of regeneration the public taste was wounded; the people had become accustomed to the sight of parks decorated like the stage of the theatre, and the simplicity of nature shocked them. La Grande Mademoiselle considered Chenonceaux incomplete; she complained that it "looked unfinished"; her artificially nourished taste missed something, because the owners of Chenonceaux had respected the work of God, and left their park just as they had received it from the hand of its Creator; she wondered why Provence was called beautiful--to her it seemed "ugly enough." She lived at the gate of the Pyrenees thirty days and never entered the country, yet she delighted in the pretentious trinkets with which the landscape-gardeners of the Italian school decorated French woods and gardens. Honoré d'Urfé was responsible for her ignorance. Many of d'Urfé's tastes[39] were noble, and _Astrée_ was a work of excellent purpose--almost a great work; but it lacked the one thing demanded by true art,--love of nature in its simplicity.

D'Urfé's artificial taste was more regrettable because his successors, they who continued his work, accentuated his faults, as, generally speaking, the disciples of all innovators accentuate the faults of their masters. Few among the _Précieuses_ knew how to sift the chaff from the wheat when the time came to take or to leave the varied gifts of their inheritance. The true _Précieuses_ precipitated the revolution of which d'Urfé had been the prophet; they alone consummated the moral transformation which, according to his light, he had prepared.

During the changing years of half a century the _Précieuses_ "kept the school" of manners and fine language, laying on the ferule whenever they found pupils as recalcitrant as the damsel whose story I am attempting to relate. They did not try--far from it!--to train the public taste, to correct it, or to guide it aright; they urged France into the tortuous by-paths of false ethics and superficial art; but, taken all in all, their influence was good. La Grande Mademoiselle, the abrupt cavalier-maiden, proved its virtue. To the Hôtel de Rambouillet she owed it that she did not end as she began--a dragoon in petticoats, and she recognised the fact, and was grateful for the benefits that she had received.

FROM AN OLD PRINT]

It has been asked: Was the Society of the _Précieuses_ a result of the influence of _Astrée_? With the exception noted, it is probable that d'Urfé made no attempt to form new intellectual or sentimental currents; he confined himself to the observation of the thoughts and the feelings at work in the depths of human souls within his own view; he was a close student of character, his book was a study, and his influence reformed opinions and manners; but as the Society of the _Précieuses_ was in process of incubation before _Astrée_ appeared, it must have taken shape had d'Urfé never written his book. The world of fashion had long deemed it witty to ridicule the _Précieuses_; from too much handling, jests upon that subject had lost their effervescence, and in time it was considered more original to find virtue in the delicate mannerisms of the refined ladies than to adhere to the old fashion of mocking them. Their exaggerations were numerous and pronounced, but their civility was in pleasant contrast with the abrupt indelicacies of the Béarnais; and even now, looking back to them across the separating centuries, we can find few causes for reproach. They subjected their literature to the yoke of the Spanish and Italian schools, but they could hardly have done less at a time when the Court was Italian, and when Spanish influences were entering by all the frontiers. Aside from their submission to foreign influences, the _Précieuses_ were sturdy champions of the right, and unless we are prepared to falsify more than thirty years of our history of morals, and of literature, we must admit that they rendered us services which cannot be forgotten or misunderstood.

They were women of the world, important after the fashion of their day, and by the power of their worldly influence they freed literature from the pedantry with which Ronsard--and Montaigne, also, to a certain extent--had entangled it. They forced the writers to brush the dust from their bookshelves; they imposed upon them some of the exigencies of their own sex, and by the bare fact of their influence literature which had been almost wholly erudite acquired a quality assimilating it to the usages of the world, and an air of decency and of civility which it had always lacked. The _Précieuses_ compelled men to grant them the respect due to all women under civilisation, and to count them as members of the body politic; they exacted concessions to their modesty; they purified language; they obliged "all honest men" to select their topics of conversation; they habituated people to discern the delicate shades of thought and to dissect ideas and find the hidden meanings of words; they made demands for concessions to the rights of precocity, and, as a result, propriety of verbal expression and closely attentive analyses entered conversation hand in hand. Many and eminent were the services rendered unto France by the amiable band of worldly reformers; theirs was a mighty enterprise; we cannot measure the transformation wrought by the influence of women in the indecent manners of that day unless we make a minute examination of the subject. Before the advent of the _Précieuses_, exterior elegance and a graceful bearing had been a cloak covering the words and the conduct of barbarians. Proofs of this fact abound in the records of that day. La Grande Mademoiselle was of the second generation of the _Précieuses_; her wit, her love of wit, and her intellect, gave her rank in the _Livré d'Or_[40]; but the habits of youth are difficult to overcome, and when she first visited the Hôtel de Rambouillet she used the words and the gestures of a pandour, her squared shoulders and out-thrust chest bore evidences of the natural investiture of the Cossack. Speaking of that epoch, her most impartial critic tells us that she "voiced a thousand imprecations."[41] In one of her attacks of indignation she threatened the Maréchal de l'Hôpital: "I will tear your beard out with my own hands!" she cried fiercely, and the marshal took fright and ran away. Several ladies of Mademoiselle's society were known to possess brisk and heavy hands, and feet of the same alert and virile character. Their people and their lovers knew something of their "manuals and pedals," and bore visible tokens of the efficacy of those phenomenal members on their own persons,--and in all the colours of the rainbow. Madame de Vervins, who assisted with La Grande Mademoiselle at the fêtes given in honour of Mademoiselle de Hautefort, "basted her lackeys and other servants at will," and she did it with no slack hand. One of the subjects on whom she plied her dexterity died under the operation, and the people of Paris avenged his death by sacking her palace.[42] Following is the record:

On brisa vitré, on rompit porte, ...
Bref: si fort s'accrut le tumulte
Que de peur de plus grande insulte,
Cette dame s'enfuit exprès,
Et se sauva par le marais.

But if the ladies were not lambs, the gentlemen were not sheep. They were no laggards in war. When they turned the flank of the enemy they did not mince matters, and upon occasion they drew the first blood. Once upon a time, at a dance, Comte de Brégis, having received a slap from his partner, turned upon her and pulled her hair down in the midst of the banquet. At a supper, in the presence of a great and joyous company, the Marquis de la Case snatched a leg of mutton from a trencher and buffeted his neighbour in her face, smearing her with gravy. As she was a lady of an even temper, she laughed heartily,[43] and the incident was closed. Malherbe confessed to Madame de Rambouillet that he had "cuffed the ears of the Viscountess d'Auchy until she had cried for aid." As he was a jealous man, his action was not without cause, and in that day to flog a woman was a thing that any gentleman felt free to do.

The regenerating _Précieuses_ had not arrived too soon. Ignoble jests and obscenities too foul to recount were accepted as conversation by both sexes. The father of the great Condé, who was president of a "social" club whose rules compelled members to imitate every movement made by their leader, ate, and forced his fellow members (including the ladies) to eat--I dare not say what; do not try to guess--you could never do it!

The modest and timid Louis XIII. could--when he set about it--give his Court very unappetising examples. In a book of _Edification_, bearing date 1658, we read that "the late King, seeing a young woman among the crowds admitted to his palace so that they might see the King eat, said nothing, and gave no immediate evidence that he had seen her; but, as he raised his glass for the last sup, before rising from the table, he filled his mouth with wine, and having held it thus sanctuaried for an instant, launched it forth into the uncovered chest of the watchful lady," who had been too eager to witness the mastications of royalty.