Chapter II (2)

La Meilleraye knew very well what he had done. He said to Retz, “I am a fool, a brute--I have nearly ruined the State, and it is you that have saved it. Come, we will talk to the Queen like Frenchmen and men of worth.” So they did, but to no purpose. She believed that Retz was at the bottom of the whole _émeute_, and was not far wrong. But there was no stopping it now. The barricades were up at dawn the next morning, and it was clear that Broussel must be given back. He was. Then came the flight of the Court, which Dumas tells so admirably.

After the evasion of the royalties, the Fronde became largely comic opera. Certain of the princes--for reasons of their own--joined the popular party: Beaufort, le roi des Halles, who wanted the Admiralty; Bouillon, with claims upon his principality of Sedan; Conti, Elbeuf, Longueville. Retz had the idea of bringing their, and his, ladies into it. He himself fetched Mesdames de Longueville and de Bouillon with their children to the Hôtel de Ville, “avec une espèce de triomphe.”

“The small-pox had spared Mme. de Longueville all her astounding
beauty; Mme. de Bouillon’s, though on the wane, was still
remarkable. Now imagine, I beg you, those two upon the steps of
the Hôtel de Ville, the handsomer in that they appeared to be in
undress, though they were not at all so. Each held one of her
children in her arms, as lovely as its mother. The Grève was full
of people over the roofs of the houses. The men shouted their joy,
the women wept for pity. I threw five hundred pistoles out of the
window of the Hôtel de Ville.”

After their debonair fashion these high people played at revolution. “Then you might see the blue scarves of ladies mingling with steel cuirasses, hear violins in the halls of the Hôtel de Ville, and drums and trumpets in the Place--the sort of thing which you find more of in romance than elsewhere.” Nothing came of it all; a peace was patched up with the Parlement, and each of the grandees got something for himself, which had been his only reason for levying civil war. Beaufort was assured of his Admiralty, Longueville was made Viceroy of Normandy, Bouillon compensated for Sedan--and so on. La Rochefoucauld, too, who had taken up arms for the sake of Mme. de Longueville--

“Pour mériter son cœur, pour plaire à ses beaux yeux,
J’ai fait la guerre aux rois; je l’aurais fait aux dieux”--

we must suppose that he also was rewarded. There is an interesting page in the Memoirs of André d’Ormesson, one of an upright family of lawyers, which by stating the mere facts lets in the light upon the Fronde. All he does is to draw up a list of the _grands seigneurs_ of 1648-55, with a statement of how often they changed sides in the seven years. It should be studied by all who wish to know how not to make civil war. But Retz too gives the spirit of the thing equally well. When his quarrel with Condé was coming to a head, and he was preparing, as he threatened, to push that prince off the pavement, he collected his friends about him, and among them two light-hearted marquises, Rouillac and Canillac. But when Canillac saw Rouillac he said to Retz, “I came to you, sir, to assure you of my services; but it is not reasonable that the two greatest asses in the kingdom should be on the same side. So I am off to the Hôtel de Condé.” And, he adds, you are to observe that he went there!

Retz alone, who, if he had been serious, might have been master of Paris, had nothing--except, of course, his Cardinal’s hat, which he would have had anyhow. The Court came back, Mazarin was forced out of France for a couple of years. But the Queen had him in again; and then it was _his_ turn. Retz was persuaded into the Louvre, immediately arrested and carried off to Vincennes. It was a shock to his vanity that the populace took it calmly. There were no barricades for him. From Vincennes he was presently removed to Nantes, whence, with the assistance of his friends--and I cannot but suspect the connivance of the governor--he escaped to the coast, landed at San Sebastian, was allowed to cross Spain and re-embark for Italy. He fetched up in Rome, where he remained for a year or two, taking part in conclaves and thoroughly enjoying himself. He spent large sums of money, which he did not possess, but never failed to receive from his friends. The French Ambassador and all the French clergy steadily cut him--but he did not take any notice. The Pope did, though, and Retz was given to understand that he had better remove himself. He went to Germany, to Switzerland, Holland, England in turn. Mazarin was dead, and Charles II restored by the time he came here. I don’t think that he did anything to the purpose with our Court, though no doubt Charles was glad of him. Neither Evelyn nor Pepys have anything to say about him; and I fancy that he was only a passing guest. As soon as he could he crept back to Court, to which he had already surrendered his coadjutorship. Louis employed him once or twice; but his day was over. He lived mostly at Commercy, where he tried economy, and made periodical retreats, as La Rochefoucauld unkindly says, “withdrawing himself from the Court which was withdrawing itself from him.” He was four million _livres_ in debt, but managed to pay them off, and even to contemplate a snug residuary estate which he intended for Mme. de Grignan, Mme. de Sévigné’s high-stomached daughter. But Mme. de Grignan snubbed him consistently and severely, and nothing came of it. He died in 1679, drained of his fiery juices, making a “good end.” The stormy Coadjutor had become “notre cher Cardinal.”

His Memoirs, taken on end, are wearisome, because endless intrigue, diamond-cut-diamond and chicanery are wearisome, as well as intricate, unless some discernible principle can be made out of them. It seems that Retz did nothing except talk--but, as Michelet points out, that was what France at large did when the Gascons were let into Paris with Henri IV. Read desultorily, they are delightful, witty, worldly-wise, untirably vivacious, thrilling and glittering like broken ice. His Machiavellisms are worth hunting out:

“The great inconvenience of civil war is that you must be more
careful of what you ought not to tell your friends than of what
you ought to do to your enemies.

“The most common source of disaster among men is that they are too
much afraid of the present and not enough of the future.

“In dealing with princes it is as dangerous, if not as criminal,
to be able to do good as to wish to do harm.

“One of Cardinal Mazarin’s greatest faults was that he was never
able to believe that anyone spoke to him with honest intention.”

When the Queen-Regent was working her hardest for Mazarin’s return, she tried to win Retz over to help her. He told her bluntly that such a move would mean the ruin of the State. How so, she asked him, if Monsieur and M. le Prince should agree to it? “Because, Madam,” said Retz, “Monsieur would never agree to it until the State was already in danger, and M. le Prince never, except to put it in danger.” Excellent, and quite true.

After Retz’s death, the Président Hénault, writing about his Memoirs, asked how one was to believe that a man would have the courage, or the folly, to say worse things about himself than his greatest enemy could have said. The answer, of course, is that Retz had no suspicion that he was saying bad things about himself. He said a great deal that was not true. Other chronicles of the Fronde give detailed accounts of such days as that of the Barricades, with not a word of the Coadjutor in them. But even if it had all been true, it would have seemed a perfectly simple matter to him. If you have no moral sense, the words “good” and “bad” have only a relative meaning. It is much harder to understand why he did the things which he relates, or why, if he did not do them, he said that he did. What was he trying to get done? Did he hate Mazarin? There is no evidence that he did anything more than despise him. La Rochefoucauld, whom he accuses, by the way, of having tried to assassinate him, explains him and his Memoirs alike by vanity. “Far from declaring himself Mazarin’s enemy in order to supplant him, his only aim was to seem formidable, and to indulge the foolish vanity of opposing him.” If Retz knew of that “portrait”--and he did, because Mme. de Sévigné sent it him--his own more benevolent one of its author must be reckoned in his favour. He had written it in his Memoirs, but allowed it to stand there unaltered except for one little word. He had originally said that La Rochefoucauld was the most accomplished courtier and most honest man of his age. He scratched out the honesty.

Personally, I picture a happy _rencontre_ in the Elysian Fields in or about 1679, when the Cardinal de Retz should have arrived and greeted his brother in the purple. A lifting of red hats, a pressing of hands--“Caro Signore, sta sempre bene?” and so on. There had been bitter war on earth; each was a keen blade, each an Italian. Each had had his triumphs. Retz had twice driven Mazarin out of Paris and once out of France. But Mazarin had proved the better stayer. He had returned, put Retz to flight, and died worth forty millions. Retz came back, made a good end, and only just cleared his debts. And what had it all been about? Some say, Anne of Austria, an elderly, ill-tempered, fat woman; some say vanity, some ambition. I say, _Il Talento_ and the joy of battle: the brain taut, the eye alert, the sword-hand flickering like lightning on a summer night. Greek was meeting Greek. Inevitably that must have been. There was not room for two Italians of that stamp in France.

But let us always remember that he was mourned by Mme. de Sévigné, who said that he had been her friend for thirty years. There is the best thing to be known about him.

“L’ABBESSE UNIVERSELLE”: MADAME DE MAINTENON

Few of the outstanding names in history have received the hard measure which has been meted out to Madame de Maintenon’s. She has had it, so to speak, both ways; been blamed for what she did not, and for what she did. First, she was to be held abominable because she was not the King’s wife; next, and even more so, because she was. All that falls to the ground if it can be shown that her life before the marriage was as irreproachable, morally, as it was after it. Madame Saint-René Taillandier, in a recent admirable study of the misjudged lady, has no difficulty in proving that it was so. She proves it positively by showing of what nature Madame de Maintenon really was, and negatively by exploring all possible sources of contemporary evidence, and finding nothing worth consideration. Dull, narrow, bigoted, obstinate, over-busy about many things, more occupied with to-day than to-morrow, falling in too readily with Louis’ view of himself and his place in the universe (a view which she shared with the entire French nation)--these things she may have been, and done. But she was a good woman, a pious woman, one who was severely tried, one who did her immediate duty and gave to the poor. She had a long and unhappy life, and died worn out. There can be no doubt of all this. All sorts of reasons for hating and slandering her can be urged: none of them good ones.

The reproaches of the historians are not so summarily to be dismissed. It is not necessary to go so far as Michelet did when he said that the price of her marriage with Louis was the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. That’s absurd. Madame de Maintenon neither bargained nor sold her hand. But it is hard to believe--impossible to believe--that she was not in consultation with the King, and Louvois, and the priests about the Revocation, or that, if consulted, she would not have urged it. Saint-Simon, who is her first accuser here, is writing after her death, and writing as an historian. I feel sure that he is right. It is, of course, true that she was a Huguenot by descent, a grand-daughter of that truculent, serio-comic old Agrippa d’Aubigné, whose portrait, savagely grinning, is so extraordinarily like those of his king, _le Béarnais;_ and it is true also that, though she was converted before she was a grown woman, she never lost her fanatic hold upon religion, but simply changed its direction. Throughout her life, says Madame Taillandier, she showed Huguenot characteristics. She could never take to the devotion of the rosary; she could never find any enthusiasm for convents; she invoked neither the Virgin nor the Saints; continued the reading of her Bible. No matter for that: she was hungry for souls. As Saint-Simon puts it, with evident truth: “Elle eut la maladie des directions ... elle se croyait l’abbesse universelle.... Elle se figurait être une mère d’église.” She converted whomsoever she could touch, and as she grew in influence she could touch a many. Concerned in the Revocation, besides Louis, there were Louvois, Father le Tellier, Bossuet, her own spiritual director, the Bishop of Chartres, and all the Jesuits. Everything that we know about her shows to which side she would incline; and nothing that we know about her makes it likely that she had any conception what statesmanship meant. Louis called her “Sa Solidité.” Her solidity showed itself in her care for detail: nothing was too small for her--she loved to order a household, knew how many chickens you should get in for a small family, how much wine for the servants, how many pounds of candles. She could design the quasi-conventual robes for Saint-Cyr, costumes for ballets and so on. But the economic or political outcome of the Revocation of the Edict; the ruin of her country, the humiliation of the King, all the immediate results of the “affreux complot” were entirely outside her power of vision. “Four regiments of infantry,” Madame Taillandier pleasantly says, “two of cavalry were ordered to follow the Duc de Noailles into Languedoc, and _trample a little_ on the Huguenots.” My italics! Well, Madame de Maintenon expected to save souls like that. I don’t think that she can be let off her share in the _dragonnades_, or in the Revocation.

Never mind. She was more of a saint than a sinner, though she lacked the severity and suavity, the “sweet reasonableness” of the true Saints. She was bleak, in herself and in her outlook; her life had always been, and after her marriage was long to be, cheerless and unutterably dull. What a life it was, throughout its eighty-three years! Born in a prison in 1635, and living thereafter on charity, with one relative or another; hounded from Huguenot pillar to Catholic post; clinging to the faith in which she had been reared until she was “converted” almost literally by force; still a pauper, often a drudge; then at seventeen married to an elderly balladist, crippled by disease, Paul Scarron, a scribbler of pasquinades and squibs, author of a travesty of Virgil and what not; married to this incapacitated rip; living with him in Grub Street on what he could pick up by the hire of his pen--a libel here, a dedication there, a lampoon elsewhere, a broadside for the street corner or bridge-end; living so from hand to mouth, married but not a wife--what a life for a young girl gently born, grand-daughter of King Henry’s old friend! Nothing is more pathetic in Madame Taillandier’s account of her than the gallant fight she put up in her little salon in the Rue Neuve Saint-Louis--polite conversation in her bed-chamber with her friends, while Paul and his tore the decencies to shreds below-stairs. And she succeeded, too, in making good and herself respected. She had valuable friends. Madame de Sévigné was one, Madame de Coulanges another, Madame de Lafayette a third. Through them she became acquainted with yet higher persons, among them with Madame de Montespan, then in league with the highest of all. By those means she fell under the King’s eye. He did not like, but he esteemed her, and chose her out of all the Court and all Paris to govern Madame de Montespan’s children. She did it, by all accounts, admirably. If she had no other qualities, she had two rare ones: she did her duty, and held her tongue.

When, by public Act, the children were made Enfants de France, they were removed from Paris to Saint-Germain; and there was Madame Scarron in daily intercourse with Louis. That was the beginning of her astounding ascent. Madame de Montespan was uneasy, and had reason to be. The _gouvernante’s_ influence was steadily against her. Madame Scarron disapproved of her and all her kind; and sure enough, from the hour of her entry into the King’s family, the mistress’s star began to wane. Finally, what the preachers--Bossuet, Bourdaloue--could not do the ghastly business of “the Poisons” settled. La Montespan was in that up to the neck, and Louis knew that she was, and held his peace, not to save her neck, but to save his face. Montespan was exiled, and took, as George Meredith said, “to religion and little dogs.” Madame Scarron remained in charge of the children, and was ennobled with a fief and a Marquisate. The Court called her “Madame de Maintenant”--but she had not fully earned that. The Queen died--and Louis almost immediately married the Marquise. There is not a ghost of a doubt of it. Saint-Simon gives the date, the hour, and the names of celebrant, assistants, and witnesses. Everybody knew it--but nothing was said. From that hour Louis was hardly ever out of her company until the end, when she was forced to leave him before the breath was out of his body.

What did she gain except unutterable weariness, suspicion, fear, slander, and unending labour? Read Dangeau’s diary of the dreary, splendid routine of Versailles, Marly and Fontainebleau; read in Madame Taillandier a letter from the poor woman describing one of her days. She had her Saint-Cyr in which she really delighted. She could play universal Abbess there, and be interested and at peace for a time. But even there chagrin and disappointment dogged her. She brought in Madame Guyon, Quietism, and other things taboo. She became involved in Fénélon’s disgrace; and presently she had to submit to Rome and turn her beloved “Institution” of ladies into a convent of nuns.

No--she was bleak, and had a narrow mind; but, as she saw her duty, so she did it. Her duty led her into thorny wastes and desert places; it led her to be one of the thousand idle parasites yawning and stretching at Versailles, slowly and endlessly revolving like dead moons round le Roi Soleil. We may pity Madame de Maintenon for what life made of her, but not blame her.

PIERRE DE L’ESTOILE

Rich as they are in the possession of the _diverticula amoena_ of history--and much richer than we are--for all that the French have no Pepys. “Many an old fool,” said Byron of Coleridge at his lecture, “but such as this, never.” So it may be put of the French memoirists: many a burgess of plain habit and shrewd observation, many a rogue husband too; but the like of one who, being both, turned himself inside out for the wonder of posterity, never. Indeed, it would be hard to imagine a Latin Pepys. The French do not discharge their bosoms on paper without reason; and the reasons which moved Pepys, whatever they were, would not approve themselves to their minds. Cynicism, or vanity, might suggest self-exhibition to one or another, as it did to Casanova the Venetian, but the truth is not served that way. There was a leaven of puritanism in Pepys such as Huguenotry never deposited in a Frenchman. That leaven did double work in our man. It seasoned for him his pleasant vices, and gave also a peculiar thrill to his confessions, as if his pen, like his hair, was standing on end as he wrote. No Frenchman needed a relish for his foibles of the kind; and as for thrills, his nation has always kept faith and works in separate compartments. We cannot do that.

However, they are rich enough without him. If they have no Pepys, they have in their Pierre de L’Estoile one whom we cannot match. Imagine a citizen of London in Elizabeth’s last and James’s first years, observing, recording each day as it came. We have in John Evelyn, fifty years later, a diarist of higher quality, who yet, and for that reason, was of less historical value. He seldom stooped to the detail in which the Parisian was versed: would that he had! L’Estoile will furnish no such picture as Evelyn’s of the Gallery at Hampton Court on a specimen afternoon. On the other hand, in L’Estoile, the brawling, buzzing, swarming streets of old Paris come before us at every turn of the leaf--and there at least he was like Pepys. If by happy chance one John Chamberlain, a private citizen of London, whose letters were published last year, had kept a diary, and could have kept it out of harm’s way, he might have given just such a particularised account of his town as L’Estoile gives of the Paris of the League, the Seize, and _La Religion_. But he was fearful of the post, and never committed himself. Nor would he, of course, have had such cataclysmic matter to report, England in James’s reign was drifting towards the whirlpool: France was already spinning madly in it.

Pierre de L’Estoile was an official of the Chancellery in Paris. His title was “Audiencier,” and his duties, as nearly as I can ascertain, were more like those of one of the Six Clerks of our Court than of him whom we call Auditor. He was a man of family, of the _noblesse de Robe_, of landed estate, of education, and of taste. He had Greek, and Latin, bigotry and virtue; he collected coins and medals, books, ballads, pamphlets, bibelots of all sorts. He began to keep a diary on the day when Charles IX died, “enferme, comme un chien qui enrage”--Whitsunday, 1574; maintained it through the riot and effrontery, the anarchy and intrigue in which Henry III and the _mignons_ killed and were killed; through the open war of the League, and through the Siege of Paris. He saw the entry of Henry IV; judged while he loved that ribald king; and caught up the flying rumours of that day which hushed all the city, that day when he was stabbed to the heart, “au coing de la rue de la Ferronnerie, vis-à-vis d’un notaire nommé Poutrain,” as he sat in his coach listening to a letter which Epernon was reading to him. He went on until 1611, and only laid his pen down because he was about to lay down his life. His last entry is of the 27th September: on the 8th October he was buried. He had lived under six kings of France, had three of them die violent deaths, had been an eyewitness of the Saint-Bartholomew. A seasoned vessel.

As he was never a courtier he could not have witnessed all the great events which he relates. I think he saw the entry of Henry of Navarre, if not his shocking exit. But he was out and about, all agog; he had highly placed friends; and collected for his diary as he did for his cabinet. I imagine he must be a “source” for such a tragic scene as the murder of the Duc de Guise, which might have gone bodily into _Les Quarante-Cinq_ if that fine novel had not stopped a few months short of it. Everything is there to the hand. As first, the presages: how on the 21st of December (1588),

“the Archbishop of Lyon, having overheard the proud speeches
which the Duke had made the King in the gardens of Blois, told
him that he would have done well to use more respect, and that a
more modest bearing would have been becoming: whereupon, ‘You are
wrong,’ the Duke replied: ‘I know him better than you do. You have
to take him boldly. He is a king who likes to be made frightened.’”

And then another: on the next day,

“As the Duke went to table, to his dinner, he found a note under
his napkin wherein was written that he ought to be on his guard,
because they were on the point of doing him a bad turn. Having
read it, he wrote upon it these three words, ‘They dare not,’ and
threw it under the table. The same day he was told by his cousin
the Duc d’Elbœuf that on the morrow there would be an attempt
against his life, and answered with a laugh that, plainly, he had
been searching the almanacs.”

On the 23rd he and his brother the Cardinal attended the Council, on summons:

“They found the guard strengthened, and more hardy than usual.
They demanded money, and asked the Duke to see to it that they
were paid, using (as it seemed) a new manner of address, less
respectful than he had been accustomed to hear. Taking no notice,
they went their ways; and for all that the Duke had had warnings
from many quarters of what was working against him--nine of them,
indeed, on that very day, whereof he put the last in his pocket,
saying aloud, ‘That is the ninth to-day’--nevertheless, so blind
was that high mind of his to things as clear as daylight, he could
not bring himself to believe that the King intended to do him an
ill turn; for God had blindfolded his eyes, as He generally does
of those whom He designs to chasten. Being then come into the
Council, in a new coat, grey in colour and very light for the time
of year, the eye on the scarred side of his face was seen to weep,
and he to let two or three drops at the nose--on account of which
he sent a page out for a handkerchief.... Presently the King sent
Revel, one of the Secretaries of State, for him, who came up just
as he was shutting down into the silver box he used to carry, the
plums and raisins which he used for his heart-weakness. He rose
immediately to attend his Majesty, and just as he came into the
ante-chamber one of the Guards in there trod upon his toe; and
though he knew very well what that meant, notwithstanding he made
no sign, but went on his way to the Chamber, as one who cannot
avoid his fate. Then, suddenly, he was seized by the arms and legs
by ten or a dozen of the Quarante-Cinq ambushed behind the arras,
and by them stabbed and murdered, uttering among other lamentable
cries this last, which was plainly heard, ‘God! I am dying! My
sins have found me out. Have mercy on me!’ Over his poor body they
flung a mean carpet, and there he lay exposed to the gibes and
indignities of them of the Court, who hailed him ‘fair King of
Paris’--the King’s name for him.”

Detail like that must have been got at first hand. When he comes to the Cardinal, he contents himself by saying that he was despatched in the Capuchin Convent on Christmas Eve. But the account of the Duke carries conviction. L’Estoile had a friend at Blois--an official of the Council, or an usher of the door. Though there is pity in his words, “Sur ce pauvre corps fut jetté un meschant tapis,” his judgment was not disturbed. His account closes with the stern words,

“Et ici finist le règne de Nembrot le Lorrain.”

Henry being what he was, and whose son he was, it was plain to him that the only thing to do with the head, and crownable head, of the League was to remove it. After the Saint-Bartholomew murder was a recognised arm of kingship, a sort of _jus regale_, in France. But Catherine de Médicis, who taught her sons the uses of the dagger and the dark, was not consenting to this particular use of them. Her worthless son might be the last of the Valois; but she dreaded the first of the Bourbons much more than the extinction of her own race; and when Henry was fool enough to boast, “Now I am the only King,” and (says L’Estoile) “began immediately to be less of one than ever,” she, sickening of such inanity, took to her bed, and died in it on the 5th of January following the _coup d’état_.

A year later the League gave the counterstroke. Henry was murdered at Blois by its creature, Clément the Jacobin: “poorly and miserably slain,” says L’Estoile, “in the flower of his age, in the midst of his garrison, surrounded, as always, by guards; in his chamber, close to his bed, by a little rapscallion of a monk, with a jerk of his nasty little knife.” The thing was miraculously simple, a touch-and-go which just came off. Clément asked for an audience, was refused: Henry heard of it and insisted on seeing him. The man was let in, found his victim undressed and at disadvantage, gave him a letter, and while he was reading, drove a knife into his bowels and left it there. He was himself killed on the spot, having done what the League intended, and more than that by a good deal. L’Estoile notes it at the moment: “The King of Navarre is made King of France by the League.” So he was.

Civil war followed: Paris in the grip of the Seize, with the Duc de Mayenne as Regent for the League. L’Estoile lost his appointment; for the Chancery followed the King, and he himself could not. A Court of a kind was maintained in the city, and he, in order to live, was forced to serve the Seize, whom he detested and feared. He had good reason for that. Famine and pestilence were on all sides of him, and treachery and suspicion--under the bed, at the street corners, in the churches, wherever people came together--and the gibbet expecting its daily tribute. When the news came in of Arques or Ivry, of the capitulation of Chartres or what not, it was as much as your neck was worth to be seen to smile. Lists of names went about--you might see your own on it any day. By a letter attached to it you could know your portion. P. stood for _pendu_, D. for _dagué_, C. for _chassé_. L’Estoile saw his own, with D. against it. He went in fear, naturally, but I think he was more scandalised than afraid when they began their new Saint-Bartholomew by hanging the President of the Council, Brisson, and two of his fellow members. It took place in prison, and L’Estoile, though he was not present, reports the manner of it, and the harangues of the victims. His conclusion is good enough: “Thus, on this day, a First President of the Court was hanged--by his clerk.” The King, he hears, “gossant à sa manière accoustoumée,” said that he had no better servants in all Paris than the Seize, who did his business for him better than anything they did for their masters, and cost him no doubloons neither.

Meantime the city was beleaguered, and very soon hungry. Cauldrons of broth and boiled horse were set up at street-corners, and people fought each other to get at them; bread was made of oats and bran, and doled out by pennyweights as long as it lasted. When they had eaten all the horses they came to the dogs, then to the cats. The siege was maintained, the people starved. They ate tallow, dog-skin, rat-skin, cat-skin. They made bread of men’s bones from the cemeteries; they hunted children--L’Estoile has no doubts; many lay still, awaiting the mercy of death. “The only things which went cheap in Paris,” he says, “were sermons, where they served out wind to the famished people, giving them to understand that it was very pleasing to God to die of starvation--yea, and far better to kill one’s children than to admit a heretic as king.” A man, he says, came to his door to beg a crust of him to save a child’s life. While L’Estoile was fetching the bread the baby died, in the father’s arms. He himself sent away his wife and infant son to Corbeil: the leaguer had been raised for that purpose, and many took advantage of the grace. Unfortunately Corbeil was taken by the Spaniards, and his people held to ransom. There were fierce riots; but the Seize knew that their own necks were in peril (as proved to be true), and held out. Finally, after the farce of conversion solemnly enacted, Henry entered his good town. As a last resource the League had ordered the descent and procession of the Châsse of Ste-Geneviève a few days before. L’Estoile gives the warrant in full, with this note in addition: “Its virtue was shown forth, five days afterwards, in the reduction of Paris.” He always girded at the Châsse. It was brought down in July 1587 to make the rain stop. “She did no miracle, though liberally assisted. The moon before had been a rainy one, and they brought her down on the fifth of the new moon when there was promise of a little fine weather. Nevertheless, it began to rain harder than ever the next day.” He called Madame Sainte-Geneviève Diana of the Parisians.

Well, the Béarnois came in, and heard _Te Deum_ at Notre Dame. He made a torchlight entry, dressed in grey velvet, with a grey hat and white _panache_. His face was “fort riant”; his hat always in his hand to the ladies at the windows, particularly to three, “very handsome, who were in mourning, and at a window high up, opposite Saint-Denys-de-la-Chartre.” L’Estoile must have seen that, and admired the ladies. And he certainly saw--he says so--the reception of Mesdames de Nemours and Montpensier. They were held up by the passing of troops, and put out of countenance by the insolence of the bystanders, who “stared them full in the face without any sign of knowing who they were.” And that to Madame de Montpensier--“Queen-Mother” to Paris besieged!

Next day Henry played tennis all the afternoon, and hazard all night; but L’Estoile loved that king without approving of him. His tales tell for him and against, his esteem rises and falls. He liked his easy manners, his old clothes, his _Ventre-Saint-Gris_, his cynicisms and mocking humour. He does not seem to think the monarchy let down by such _sans façon_. Anyhow, there it is; and two things are made clear by the diary--first, that Henry was not the good fellow he is generally reputed, and second, that he was not then thought to be so. He himself, may be, had been too much knocked about by the world to have any illusions left him. There was an attempt against his life in 1595. The people seemed frantic with delight at his escape. L’Estoile relates how he went in procession to Notre Dame.

“You never heard,” he says, “such approbation of a king by his
people as was given that day to our good Prince whenever he showed
himself. Seeing it, a lord who was close to his Majesty, said to
him, ‘Remark, sir, how happy are all your subjects at the sight of
you.’ Shaking his head, the King replied, ‘That is the people all
over. And if my greatest enemy was where I am now, and they saw
him go by, they would do as much for him as for me, and shout even
louder than they are doing now.’”

No, there were no rose-coloured curtains between Henry of Navarre and this transitory life. He did not even pretend to approve of himself; and if he was ashamed, as it seems he was, of his amorous entanglements with the young Princesse de Condé, it is certain that they shocked L’Estoile to the heart. When it comes to apologies there, there was no spirit left in the respectable man. For this diarist was as moral as our John Evelyn, and so far as I can find out on as good a foundation. He could express himself on such matters with point. For instance:

“Sunday the 12th February, which was Dimanche des Brandons, Madame
had a splendid ballet at the Louvre, where nothing was forgotten
that could possibly be remembered--except God.”

A sharper saying than Evelyn would have allowed himself. But it is the fact, as I have said, that good King Henry was not found so good living as dead. Afterwards--under Richelieu, under Mazarin, during the Fronde, under the Edict of Nantes--by comparison he shone. During his lifetime he had many more enemies and far fewer friends than was supposed. The Maréchal D’Ornano, in 1609, told him in so many words that he was not beloved by his people, and that a very little more on the taxes would bring back the civil war. The King said that he knew all that, and was ready for it. D’Ornano then said that he could not advise rough measures. “I shall freely tell you, sir, that the late King had more of the _noblesse_ for him than you have for yourself, and more of the people too than you will have if there be trouble. For all that, he was obliged to leave Paris and his own house to rebels and mutineers, and the rest of us thought ourselves lucky to get off with our heads on our shoulders.” L’Estoile had that from “a brave and trustworthy gentleman” who was close by at the time. The gentleman said that the King was at first moved to anger by D’Ornano’s plain speaking, but thanked him for it afterwards.

Bad stories of King Henry are to be had for the asking; perhaps the worst in L’Estoile is told in a poem which he picked up, and reports. A Madame Esther had been the King’s mistress in La Rochelle, and had borne him a son. The child died, the King tired, and forsook her. She came to see him at Saint-Denis when he was busy, distracted, seeking other game: he refused to see her or hear what she had to say. She was ill, and died in the town where he actually was, and being of the religion, a grave was denied her. What became of her body is not known, but “they raised to her memory,” L’Estoile says, “the following _Tombeau_ (epitaph), which was rehearsed at Saint-Denis and everywhere:

“TOMBEAU DE MADAME ESTHER

“Here Esther lies, who from Rochelle,
Called by the King, her master, came,
Risking the life of her fair fame
With him to whom her beauty fell.

“Faithful she was, and served him well,
Bore him a son who had no name,
And died: so then her lover’s flame
Sought other kindling for a spell.

“Forsaken, hitherward her steps
Strayed, and to God she tuned her lips
For mercy, dying so: but earth

“Was closed against her. Ah, it’s bad--
No yard of all his lands and worth
For her who gave him all she had!”

A touching and simple piece. It should have gone home to a man whose intentions were always better than his inclinations, yet always gave way to them. The end of him, sudden and shocking as it was, can have surprised nobody. He had enemies everywhere, and few friends. The Catholics had never believed in him, the Protestants had ceased to believe in him. The day before his last he had had Marie de Médicis crowned with all the forms, though unwillingly. L’Estoile was there, and observed two notable facts: “the first was that it had been thought proper, on account of the subject-matter, to change the gospel of the day, which is from Mark x--“_And the Pharisees came to him, and asked him, Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife, tempting him._” That sounds to me a little too apt to be likely.

“The other was that at the _largesse_ of gold and silver coins, which is usual at coronations of kings and queens, there was never a cry _Vive le Roy_, nor yet a _Vive la Reine_--which, it was remarked, had never happened but at this coronation.” His next entry relates to the assassination:

“_Luctus ubique, pavor, et plurima mortis imago_,” is his
conclusion of it all: “the shops are shut; everyone goes weeping
or holding up his hands, great and small, young and old; women and
maids pluck at their hair. The whole town is very quiet: instead
of running for arms we run to our prayers, and make vows for
the health and welfare of the new king. The fury of the people,
contrary to the expectation and intent of the wicked, is turned
upon the infamous parricide and his accomplices, seeking only to
ensue vengeance and to have it.”

_De mortuis!_ That is always the way. And distrusting the Queen as he plainly did, and abhorring Concini, not the first, and not the best, of the implanted Italians, there is little wonder at the diarist’s dismay. He goes on, without circumlocution, to lay the crime at the door of the “Society of Judas,” as he calls a famous companionship, a society to whose new church the King’s heart had been promised, by whose means, he as good as says, it was now obtained. Not without scandal, it was presently conveyed there.

Enormous crowds viewed the king’s body, which lay in state in the Louvre. The Jesuits were among the first to come; he says:

“Class them as you please: everybody knows the maxim they preach,
that it is lawful to kill the king who suffers two religions
in his realm. Nevertheless (_vultibus compositis ad luctum_)
they played affliction above everyone. Father Cotton, with an
exclamation truly smacking of the Court and the Society, ‘Who is
the villain,’ cries he, ‘to have killed this good prince, this
pious, this great king? Was it not a Huguenot, then?’ They tell
him, No, it was a Roman Catholic. ‘Ah, deplorable, if it be so!’
he says, and signs himself with three great crosses. Someone
present, who had overheard him, was himself overheard to say, ‘The
Huguenots don’t play those tricks.’”

But the Society took the heart to Notre-Dame-de-Boulogne.

L’Estoile survived to see the little king in Paris. He watched him benevolently always, and has tales to tell of him, of which the prettiest is about Pierrot, a village boy of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. When Louis had been there as Dauphin, Pierrot used to play with him; and now that he was King, and at the Tuileries, he had the notion of going to see him.

“The King was playing down by the lake, with a fine company about
him; but as soon as he was aware of Pierrot, his old play-fellow
(who still called him M. le Dauphin, and to those who reproved
him, swore his round Mordienne that he did not know what else to
call him), he left them all where they were to go to Pierrot, into
whose arms he flew, and kissed him in the face of everybody. He
told M. de Souvrai that they must find clothes for his friend the
very next day, so that he might stay with him, but Pierrot said he
could not do that, but must go home for fear of being beaten. His
father and mother had not been willing to let him go--but he had
gone for all that, and had brought M. le Dauphin (he called him) a
present of some sparrows.”

“Simplicité rustique,” L’Estoile calls it, and praises Louis for going half-way to meet it. He is then very near the end of his record, and of his earthly tether too.

Misfortunes were gathered thickly about the honest man. He was out of his employment through age; money was very short with him. He sold his collections piecemeal, and was glad to make fifty francs or so here and there. He does not name the most serious of his ailments, but I fear that it was malignant, and put recovery out of the case. In September 1610, feeling himself in extremities, he demanded the Sacrament, and it became a question of confession. Father des Landes, a Jacobin and a friend of his, was chosen for the office, and demanded of him a protestation that he would die in the Catholic, Apostolic, Roman faith. The first two--yes, said L’Estoile; but boggled over the third. He relates the course of the argument which he held with the Jacobin. It branched off, as they will, into all sorts of side issues: invocation of the Saints, Council of Trent, errors of the Popes, and what not. He comes as near as he ever does here to putting down what he really did--or at least what he really did not--believe. He was an eclectic, but desperate of remedy. He would have seen the Reformed Church Catholic, and the Catholic reformed. But that, he is aware, is a counsel of perfection. “Three things forbid: lack of charity, lack of zeal for the glory of God, and stubbornness, which is the last trench of the ignorant.” And he concludes on the whole matter: “I shall hold on then to that old stock, rotten as it is, of the Papacy. The Church is in it, though it is not the Church.” And thereupon he had his absolution and the Sacrament. Father des Landes was a liberal-minded Jacobin.

I have fallen into the old easy way of confounding historical persons and history, but that is L’Estoile’s fault at least as much as mine. I might have stuffed my account of his book with criminal records, or with sermons; for next to the doings of the great those are the matters which concern him. Few days pass, never a week, in which he does not record an execution or several of them. I don’t know whether the Paris of the Henrys was worse than the London of James, and failing an English L’Estoile, I shall never know. But Paris would be bad to beat--not only for bestial crime but for bestial requital of it. In London you might be decapitated or hanged: burning was rare towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign. In Paris you might be hanged, or hanged and strangled, or broken on the wheel, or hanged and burned; or, if you were respectable enough you could be executed with a sword. Burning was reserved for heresy: for _lèse-majesté_ there was death by horses--four of them. L’Estoile saw Ravaillac die that death. He died, the wretch, at the “deuxième tirage.” These things are shocking, as the crimes were which they were designed, after the ideas of the times, to fit. Then there were the duels which reached in France a point not known in our country. The _mignons_ quarrelled in companies. That happened when Quélus, Maugiron and Livarrot met d’Entragues, Ribérac and Schomberg in the Marché-aux-Chevaux. Maugiron and Schomberg were killed outright; Ribérac died the next day, and Quélus, with nineteen wounds, lingered for a month, and died then. The King kissed the dead, cut off and kept their fair hair, and took from Quélus the ear-rings which he had himself put into his ears. “Such and the like ways of doing,” says L’Estoile, “unworthy indeed of a great king and a high-hearted, as this one was, caused him by degrees to be despised ... and in the Third-Estate, to be made little by little their faction, which was the League.” No doubt that is true.

Let me remember, as I end, this curious piece of news: on January 8th, 1608, it was so cold that the chalice froze in Saint-André-des-Ars, and they had to get a brazier from the baker’s to thaw it. Saint-André was L’Estoile’s favourite, or perhaps his parish church. The law cares nothing for trifles, but history lives upon them. My last scrap, however, is not of an age but of all time. “J’ay trente mil livres de rente, et cependant je meurs!” said the Abbé of Bonport in his last agony.

LA BRUYÈRE

If we can still contrive to hold up our heads in the world it is not the fault of the writers of maxims, who have seldom had a good word to say for us. We may ask, as we wilt but read on, Have we then nothing which can face unashamed the microscopic eye? Does not virtue lend itself to aphorism? Should it not be possible to make pithy summaries of our good qualities, of our reasonable institutions? La Rochefoucauld’s answer would be, Inform me of your virtues, show me your tolerable institutions, and I will tell you if I can reduce them to maxims. Nobody took the trouble to do it. He was read, as he wrote, for entertainment; and entertainment certainly comes if we don’t read too much of him at a time. He is for the bedside or the dressing-table. You can glance at him as you shave: but if you linger on him, you had better put away the razors. He has himself detected the source of the entertainment. “In the misfortunes of our best friends we can always find something which is not unpleasing.” He is dreadfully right; and it was his accuracy, no doubt, which Madame de Sévigné found to be “divine.” I obtain my own consolation out of the fact that, poor things as we are, it has been possible for one at least of us to write us down so well. But I am under no delusions about this duke. He is not necessarily a good man struggling with adversity, but as human as the rest of us. His only right to the microscope is that of user; and the pose that he who sees so many beams in his neighbour’s eyes has no motes in his own, it is fair to say, is not consciously assumed, but inseparable from the aphoristic method.

In La Bruyère, the French Theophrastus, who has tempered his maxims with “portraits,” I think that the Rhadamanthus-attitude is deliberate. La Bruyère is indignant, and takes it for righteousness. You cannot call him cynical; he is a _censor morum_. He combines the methods of La Rochefoucauld and Tallemant des Réaux, but is more human than the first because he condescends to scold his victims, and much less so than the other because he cannot bring himself to consider them as of the same clay with himself. La Bruyère, you may say, never takes off his wig and gown; Tallemant never puts his on. In _Les Caractères_ is but one paragraph of unstinted praise; the _Historiettes_ is full of them. Tallemant, however, did not write for publication, and La Bruyère did. It is possible that he would have praised more generally than he did if it had been as safe to praise as to condemn. But it was not. He had been rash enough at starting to call attention to Bishop Le Camus, and to be astonished at the red hat conferred upon a pious and devoted man. Then he learned, first, that the King had been very much offended by the Pope’s action, and secondly, that the Pope had intended him to be. Just in time he cancelled the passage. No--a writer had to be sure of his ground when he went about to praise. You were only perfectly safe, indeed, in praising His Majesty.

His “pleasant” saying of Dangeau, as Saint-Simon calls it, that he was not a grandee, but “after a grandee,” is typical of him, at once acute and direct. It says more exactly what Dangeau was than a page. The page is there too, but the few words shine out of it like an electric light. It is as if he was talking round about his subject, seeking the best aspect of it, and then, suddenly, with a pointing finger, you get “_Pamphilius_ in a word desires to be a great man, and believes himself to be one; but he is not; he is after a great man.” The rest of the page goes for little. It is Thackerayan, as we should say. Whether Thackeray owed anything directly to La Bruyère I am not able to determine; but he owed a fair amount to Steele, who assuredly did.