The Project Gutenberg eBook of La Grande Mademoiselle, by Arvède Barine and Helen E Meyer.

La Grande Mademoiselle was one of the most original persons of her epoch, though it cannot be said that she was ever of the first order. Hers was but a small genius; there was nothing extraordinary in her character; and she had too little influence over events to have made it worth while to devote a whole volume to her history—much less to prepare for her a second chronicle—had she not been an adventurous and picturesque princess, a proud, erect figure standing in the front rank of the important personages whom Emerson called "representative."

Mademoiselle's agitated existence was a marvellous commentary on the profound transformation accomplished in the mind of France toward the close of the seventeenth century,—a transformation whose natural reaction changed the being of France.

I have tried to depict this change, whose traces are often hidden by the rapid progress of historical events, because it was neither the most salient feature of the closing century nor the result of a revolution.

Essential, of the spirit, it passed in the depths of the eager souls of the people of those tormented[iv] days. Such changes are analogous to the changes in the light of the earthly seasons. From day to day, marking dates which vary with the advancing years, the intense light of summer gives place to the wan light of autumn. So the landscape is perpetually renewed by the recurring influences of natural revolution; in like manner, the moral atmosphere of France was changed and recharged with the principles of life in the new birth; and when the long civil labour of the Fronde was ended, the nation's mind had received a new and opposite impulsion, the casual daily event wore a new aspect, the sons viewed things in a light unknown to their fathers, and even to the fathers the appearance of things had changed. Their thoughts, their feelings, their whole moral being had changed.

It is the gradual progress of this transformation that I have attempted to show the reader. I know that my enterprise is ambitious; it would have been beyond my strength had I had nothing to refer to but the Archives and the various collections of personal memoirs. But two great poets have been my guides, Corneille and Racine, both faithful interpreters of the thoughts and the feelings of their contemporaries; and they have made clear the contrast between the two distinct social epochs—between the old and the new bodies, so different, yet so closely connected.

When the Christian pessimism of Racine had—in the words of Jules Lemaître—succeeded the[v] stoical optimism of Corneille, all the conditions evolving their diverse lines of thought had changed.

The nature of La Grande Mademoiselle was exemplified in the moral revolution which gave us Phédre thirty-four years (the space of a generation) after the apparition of Pauline.

In the first part of her life,—the part depicted in this volume,—Mademoiselle was as true a type of the heroines of Corneille as any of her contemporaries. Not one of the great ladies of her world had a more ungovernable thirst for grandeur; not one of them cherished more superb scorn for the baser passions, among which Mademoiselle classed the tender sentiment of love. But, like all the others, she was forced to renounce her ideals; and not in her callow youth, when such a thing would have been natural, but when she was growing old, was she carried away by the torrent of the new thought, whose echoes we have caught through Racine.

The limited but intimately detailed and somewhat sentimental history of Mademoiselle is the history of France when Louis XIII. was old, and when young Louis—Louis XIV.—was a minor, living the happiest years of all his life.

If I seem presumptuous, let my intention be my excuse for so long soliciting the attention of my reader in favour of La Grande Mademoiselle.

ERRATA.

ILLUSTRATIONS

LA GRANDE MADEMOISELLE

THE YOUTH OF LA GRANDE
MADEMOISELLE

CHAPTER I

In the Château of Versailles there is a full-length portrait of La Grande Mademoiselle,—so called because of her tall stature,—daughter of Gaston d'Orléans, and niece of Louis XIII. When the portrait was painted, the Princess's hair was turning grey. She was forty-five years old. Her imperious attitude and warlike mien befit the manners of the time of her youth, as they befit her Amazonian exploits in the days of the Fronde.

Her lofty bearing well accords with the adventures of the illustrious girl whom the customs and the life of her day, the plays of Corneille, and the novels of La Calprenède and of Scudéry imbued with sentiments much too pompous. The painter of the portrait had seen Mademoiselle as we have seen[2] her in her own memoirs and in the memoirs of her companions.

Nature had fitted her to play the part of the goddess in exile; and it had been her good fortune to find suitable employment for faculties which would have been obstacles in an ordinary life. To become the Minerva of Versailles, Mademoiselle had to do nothing but yield to circumstances and to float onward, borne by the current of events.

In the portrait, under the tinselled trappings the deep eyes look out gravely, earnestly; the thoughtful face is naively proud of its borrowed divinity; and just as she was pictured—serious, exalted in her assured dignity, convinced of her own high calling—she lived her life to its end, too proud to know that hers was the fashion of a bygone age, too sure of her own position to note the smiles provoked by her appearance. She ignored the fact that she had denied her pretensions by her own act (her romance with Lauzun,—an episode by far too bourgeois for the character of an Olympian goddess). She had given the lie to her assumption of divinity, but throughout the period of her romance she bore aloft her standard, and when it was all over she came forth unchanged, still vested with her classic dignity. The old Princess, who excited the ridicule of the younger generation, was, to the few surviving companions of her early years, the living evocation of the past. To them she bore the ineffaceable impression of the thought, the[3] feeling, the inspiration, the soul of France, as they had known it under Richelieu and Mazarin.

The influences that made the tall daughter of Gaston d'Orléans a romantic sentimentalist long before sentimental romanticism held any place in France, ruled the destinies of French society at large; and because of this fact, because the same influences that directed the illustrious daughter of France shaped the course of the whole French nation, the solitary figure—though it was never of a high moral order—is worthy of attention. La Grande Mademoiselle is the radiant point whose light illumines the shadows of the past in which she lived.

Anne-Marie-Louise d'Orléans, Duchess of Montpensier, was the daughter of Gaston of France, younger brother of King Louis XIII., and of a distant cousin of the royal family, Marie of Bourbon, Duchess of Montpensier. It would be impossible for a child to be less like her parents than was La Grande Mademoiselle. Her mother was a beautiful blond personage with the mild face of a sheep, and with a character well fitted to her face. She was very sweet and very tractable. Mademoiselle's father resembled the decadents of our own day. He was a man of sickly nerves, vacillating, weak of purpose, with a will like wax, who formed day-dreams in which he figured as a gallant and warlike knight, always on the alert, always the[4] omnipotent hero of singularly heroic exploits. He deluded himself with the idea that he was a real prince, a typical Crusader of the ancient days. In his chaotic fancy he raised altar against altar, burning incense before his purely personal and peculiar gods, taking principalities by assault, bringing the kings and all the powers of the earth into subjection, bearing down upon them with his might, and shifting them like the puppets of a chess-board. His efforts to attain the heights pictured by his imagination resulted in awkward gambols through which he lost his balance and fell, crushed by the weight of his own folly. Thus his life was a series of ludicrous but tragic burlesques.

In the seventeenth century, in flesh and blood, he was the Prince whom modern writers set in prominent places in romance, and whom they introduce to the public, deluded by the thought that he is the creature of their invention. Louis XIII. was a living and pitiable anachronism. He had inherited all the traditions of his rude ancestors. Yet, to meet the requirements of his situation, nature had accoutred him for active service with nothing but an enervated and unbalanced character. One of his most odious infamies—his first—served as a prologue to the birth of "Tall Mademoiselle." In 1626, as Louis XIII. had no child, his brother Gaston was heir-presumptive to the throne, and he was a bachelor. They who had some interest in the question were pushing him from all sides, urging him not to fetter himself by the inferior[5] marriage of a younger son. They implored him to have patience; to "wait a while"; to see if there would not be some unlooked-for opening for him in the near future. His own apparent future was promising; there was much encouragement in the fact that the King was sickly. What might not a day bring forth?—"under such conditions great changes were possible!"

Monsieur's mind laid a tenacious grasp on the idea that he must either marry a royal princess, or none at all; and he was so imbued with the thought that he must remain free to attain supreme heights that when Marie de Médicis proposed to him a marriage with the richest heiress of France, Mlle. de Montpensier, he tried to evade her offer. He encouraged Chalais's conspiracy, which was to be the means of helping him to effect his flight from Court; he permitted his friends to compromise themselves, then without a shadow of hesitation he sold them all. When the plot had been exposed, he hastily withdrew his irons from the fire by reporting everything to Richelieu and the Queen-mother. His friends tried to excuse him by saying that he had lost his head; but it was not true. His avowals as informer are on record in the archives of the Department of Foreign Affairs, and they prove that he was a man who knew very well what he was doing and why he was doing it, who worked intelligently and systematically, planning his course with matter-of-fact self-possession, selling his treason at the highest market-price of such commodities.

The 12th July, 1626, Monsieur denounced thirty of his friends, or servitors, whose only fault had lain in their devotion to his interests.

Once when Marie de Médicis reproached him for having failed to keep a certain written promise "never to think of anything tending to separate him from the King," Monsieur replied calmly that he had signed that paper but that he never had said that he would not do it,—that he "never had given a verbal promise." They then reminded him that he had "solemnly sworn several times." The young Prince replied with the same serenity, that whenever he took an oath, he did it "with a mental reservation."

The 18th, Monsieur, being in a good humour, made some strong protestations to his mother, who was in her bed. He again took up the thread of his denunciations to Richelieu without waiting to be invited to give his information. The 23d, he went to the Cardinal and told him to say that he, Monsieur, was ready to marry whenever they pleased, "if they would give him his appanage at the time of the marriage,"—after which announcement he remarked that the late M. d'Alençon had had three appanages. Monsieur sounded his seas, and spied out his land in all directions, carefully gathering data and making very minute investigations as to the King's intentions. He intimated his requirements to the Cardinal, who "sent the President, Le Coigneux, to talk over his marriage and his appanage."

His haggling and his denunciations alternated until August 2d. Finally he obtained the duchies of Montpensier and of Chartres, the county of Blois, and pecuniary advantages which raised his income to the sum of a million livres. His vanity was allowed free play on the occasion of the signing of the contract, but this was forgiven him because he was only eighteen years old.

His guardian, Marshal d'Ornano, was a prisoner in Versailles, where the Court was at that time. Investigations against him were in rapid progress; but the face of the young bridegroom was wreathed with smiles when he led his bride to the altar, 5th August, 1626. As soon as he had given his consent they had hastened the marriage. The ceremony took place as best it could. It was marriage by the lightning process. There was no music, the bridegroom's habit was not new. While the cortège was on its way, two of the resplendent duchesses quarrelled over some question of precedence. To quote the Chronicles: "From words they came to blows and from blows to scratches of their skins."

This event scandalised the public, but the splendour of the fêtes effaced the memory of the regrettable incidents preceding them. While the fêtes were in progress, Monsieur exhibited a gayety which astonished the people; they were not accustomed to the open display of such indelicacy. It was known why young Chalais had been condemned to death; it was known that Monsieur had vainly demanded that he be shown some mercy. When the 19th—the day of execution—came, Monsieur saw fit to be absent. The youthful Chalais was beheaded by a second-rate executioner, who hacked at his neck with a dull sword and with an equally dull tool used by coopers. When the twentieth blow was struck, Chalais was still moaning. The people assembled to witness the execution cried out against it.

Fifteen days later Marshal d'Ornano gave proof of his accommodating amiability by dying in his prison. Others who had vital interests at stake either fled or were exiled.

Judging from appearances, Monsieur had had nothing to do with the condemned or the suspected. His callous levity was noted and judged according to its quality. Frequently tolerant to an extraordinary degree, the morality of the times was firm enough where the fidelity of man to master, or of master to man, was concerned. The common idea of decency exacted absolute devotion from the soldier to his chief, from servant to employer, from the gentleman to his seignior. Nor was the duty of master to man less binding. Though his creatures[9] or servants were in the wrong, though their failures numbered seventy times seven, it was the master's part to uphold, to defend, and to give them courage, to stand or to fall with them, as the leader stands with his armies. Gaston knew this; he knew that he dishonoured his own name in the eyes of France when he delivered to justice the men who had worn his colours. But he mocked at the idea of honour, shaming it, as those among our own sons—if they are unfortunate enough to resemble him—mock at the higher and broader idea of home and country,—the idea which, in our day, takes the place of all other ideas exacting an effort or a sacrifice.

It must not be supposed that Monsieur was an ordinary poltroon, bowed down by the weight of his shame, desperately feeble, a mawkish and shambling type of the effeminate adolescent; though a coward in shirking consequences he was a typical "prince": very spirited, very gay, and very brilliant; conscious of the meaning of all his actions; contented in his position,—such as he made it,—and resigned to act the part of a coward before the world.

His vivacity was extraordinary. The people marvelled at his unfailing lack of tact. Though very young, he was well grown. He was no longer a child whose nurse caught him with one hand, forcibly buttoning his apron as he struggled to run away; yet he skipped and gambolled, spinning incessantly on his high heels, his hand thrust into his pocket, his cap over his ear. In one way or in[10] another he incessantly proclaimed his presence. His sarcastic lips were always curved over his white teeth; he was always whistling.

"One can see well that he is high-born," wrote the indulgent Madame de Motteville. "His restlessness and his grimaces show it." But Madame de Motteville was not his only chronicler. Others relished his manners less. A gentleman who had lived in his (Monsieur's) house when Monsieur was very young, saw him again under Mazarin, and finding that despite his age and size he was the same peculiar being that he had been in infancy, the old gentleman turned and ran away. "Well, upon my word," he cried, "if he is not the same deuced scamp as in the days of Richelieu! I shall not salute him."

Monsieur's portraits are not calculated to contradict the impression given by his contemporaries. He is a handsome boy. The long oval face is delicately fine. The eyes are spiritual; and despite its look of self-sufficiency the whole face is infinitely charming. One of the portraits shows a certain shade of sly keenness, but as a whole the face is always indescribably attractive,—and yet as we gaze upon it we are seized by an impulse to follow the example of the old marquis, and run away without saluting. In the portrait the base soul looks out of the handsome face just as it did in life, manifesting its deplorable reality through its mask of natural beauty and intelligence. No one could say that Monsieur was a fool. Retz declared: "M. le[11] Duc d'Orléans had a fine and enlightened mind." It was the general impression that his conversation was admirable; judged by his talk he was a being of a superior order. His manners and his voice were engaging. He was an artist, very fond of pictures and rare and handsome trifles. He was skilful in engraving on metals; he loved literature; he loved to read; he was interested in new ideas and in the march of thought. He knew many curious sciences. He was a cheerful companion, easy-mannered, sprightly, easy of approach, fond of raillery, and full of his jests, but his jests were never ill-natured. Even his enemies were forced to own that he had a good disposition, and that he was naturally kind; and this was the general opinion of the strange being who was a Judas to so many of his most devoted friends.

Had Monsieur possessed but one grain of moral consciousness, and had he been free from an almost inconceivable degree of weakness and of cowardice, he would have made a fine Prince Charming. But his poltroonery and his moral debility stained the whole fabric of his life and made him a lugubrious example of spiritual infirmity. He engaged in all sorts of intrigues because he was too weak to say No, and owing to the same weakness he never honestly fulfilled an engagement.

At times he started out intending to do his duty, then when midway on his route he was seized by fear, he took the bit between his teeth, and ran, and nothing on earth could stop him. He carried[12] out his cowardice with impudence, and his villainy was artful and adroit. However base his action, he was never troubled by remorse. He was insensible to love, and devoid of any sense of honour. Having betrayed his associates, he abandoned them to their fate, then thrust his hand into his pocket, pirouetted, cut a caper, whistled a tune, and thought no more of it.

The third week in October the Duchess of Orleans returned to Paris. The Court was at the Louvre. The young pair, Monsieur and his wife, had their apartments in the palace, and the courtiers were not slow in finding their way to them.

Hardly had she arrived when Madame declared her pregnancy. As there was no direct heir to the crown, this event was of great importance. The people precipitated themselves toward the happy Princess who was about to give birth to a future King of France. Staid and modest though she was, her own head was turned by her condition. She paraded her hopes. It seemed to her that even then she held in her arms the son who was to take the place of a dauphin. Every one offered her prayer and acclamations; and every one hailed Monsieur as if he had been the rising sun.[1]

Monsieur asked nothing better than to play his part; he breathed the incense offered to his brilliant prospects with felicity.

Husband and wife enjoyed their importance to the full; they displayed their triumphant faces in all parts of that palace that had seen so much bitterness of spirit.

In itself, politics apart, the Louvre was not a very agreeable resting-place. On the side toward Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois its aspect was rough and gloomy. The remains of the old fortress of Philip Augustus and of Charles V. were still in existence. Opposite the Tuileries, towards the Quai, the exterior of the palace was elegant and cheerful. There the Valois and Henry IV. had begun to build the Louvre as we know it to-day.

A discordant combination of extreme refinement and of extreme coarseness made the interior of the palace one of the noisiest and dirtiest places in the world. The entrance to the palace of the King of France was like the entrance to a mill; a tumultuous crowd filled the palace from morning until night; and it was the custom of the day for individuals to be perfectly at ease in public,—no one stood on ceremony. The ebbing and flowing tide of courtiers, of business men, of countrymen, of tradesmen, and all the throngs of valets and underlings considered the stairways, the balconies, the corridors, and the places behind the doors, retreats propitious for the relief of nature.

It was a system, an immemorial servitude, existing in Vincennes and Fontainebleau as at the Louvre,—a system that was not abolished without great difficulty. In a document dated posterior to[14] 1670, mention is made of the thousand masses of all uncleanness, and the thousand insupportable stenches, "which made the Louvre a hot-bed of infection, very dangerous in time of epidemic." The great ones of earth accepted such discrepancies as fatalities; they contented themselves with ordering a sweep of the broom.

Neither Gaston nor the Princess, his wife, descended to the level of their critical surroundings. They were habituated to the peculiar features of the royal palaces; and certainly that year, in the intoxication of their prospects, they must have considered the palatial odours very acceptable.

It did not agree with their frame of mind to note that the always gloomy palace was more than usually dismal. Anne of Austria had been struck to the heart by the pregnancy of her sister-in-law. She had been married twelve years and she no longer dared to cherish the hope of an heir. She felt that she was sinking into oblivion. Her enemies had begun to insinuate that her usefulness was at an end and that she had no reason for clinging to life. The Queen of France lived so eclipsed a life that to the world she was nothing but a pretty woman with a complexion of milk and roses. The people knew that she was unhappy, and they pitied her. They never learned her true character until she became Regent. Anne of Austria was not the only one to drain the cup of bitterness that year. Louis XIII. also was jealous of the maternity of Madame. It was a part of his nature to cherish[15] evil sentiments, and his friends found some excuse for his faults in his misfortunes. Since Richelieu had attained power, Louis had succumbed to the exigencies of monarchical duty. His whole person betrayed his distress, exhaling constraint and anxiety. The most mirthful jester quailed at the sight of the long, livid face, so mournful, so expressive of the mental torment of the Prince who "knew that he was hated and who had no fondness for himself."

Louis was timid and prudish, and, like his brother, he had sick nerves. Hérouard, who was his doctor when he was a child, exhibits the young Prince as a somnambulist, who slept with eyes open, and who arose in his sleep, walking and talking in a loud voice. Louis's doctors put an end to any strength that he may have had originally. In one year Bouvard bled him forty-seven times; and during that one twelvemonth the child was given twelve different kinds of medicines and two hundred and fifteen enemas. Is it credible that after such an experience the unhappy King merited the reproach of being "obstreperous in his intercourse with the medical faculty"?

He had studied but little; he took no interest in the things that pleased the mind; his pastimes were purely animal. He liked to hunt, to work in his garden, to net pouches for fish and game, to make snares and arquebuses. He liked to make preserves, to lard meat, and to shave. Like his brother, he had one artistic quality: he loved music[16] and composed it. "This was the one smile, the only smile of a natural ingrate."

Louis XIII. was of a nature dry and hard. He detested his wife; he loved nothing on earth but his young favourites. He loved them; then, in an instant, without warning, he ceased to love them; and when he had ceased to love them he did not care what became of them,—did not care whether they lived or died. Whenever he could witness the agony of death he did so, and turned the occasion into a picnic or a pleasure trip. He enjoyed watching the grimaces of the dying. His religious devotion was sincere, but it was narrow and sterile. He was jealous and suspicious, forgetful, frivolous, incapable of applying himself to anything serious.

He had but one virtue, but that he carried to such lengths that it sufficed to embalm his memory. This virtue was the one which raised the family of Hohenzollern to power and to glory. The sombre soul of Louis XIII. was imbued with the imperious sentiment of royal duty,—the professional duty of the man designed and appointed by Divine Providence to give account to God for millions of the souls of other men. He never separated either his own advantage or his own glory from the advantage and the glory of France. He forced his brother to marry, though he knew that the birth of a nephew would ulcerate his own flesh. He harboured Richelieu with despairing resolution because he believed that France could not maintain its existence without the hated ministry. He had the[17] essential quality, the one quality which supplies the lack of other qualities, without which all other qualities, great and noble though they be, are useless before the State.

Around these chiefs of the Court buzzed a swarm of ambitious rivals and whispering intriguers all animated by one purpose, to effect the discomfiture of Richelieu. The King's health was failing. The Cardinal knew that Louis "had not two days to live"; he was seen daily, steadily advancing toward the grave. In Michelet's writings there is a striking page devoted to the "great man of business wasting his time and strength struggling against I do not know how many insects which have stung him." Marie de Médicis was the only one who united with the King in defending Richelieu in the critical winter of 1626. The Cardinal was the Queen's creature. The pair had many memories in common—and of more than one kind. Some years previous Richelieu had taken the trouble to play lover to the portly quadragenarian, and he had brought to bear upon his effort all the courage requisite for such a suit. The Court of France had looked on while the Cardinal took lessons in lute playing, because the Queen-mother, notwithstanding her age and her proportions, had had a fancy to play the lute as she had done when a little girl. Marie de Médicis had given proof that she was not insensible to such delicate attentions, and she had forgotten nothing; but the moment was approaching when Richelieu would find that it had[18] been to no purpose that he had shouldered the ridicule of France by sighing out his music at the feet of the fat Queen.

That year a stranger would have said that the Court of France had never been more gay. Fête followed fête. In the winter there were two grand ballets at the Louvre, danced by the flower of the nobility, the King at their head. Louis XIII. adored such exhibitions, though they overthrow all modern ideas of a royal majesty.

The previous winter he had invited the Bourgeoisie of Paris to the Hôtel-de-Ville to contemplate their ghastly monarch masked for the carnival, dancing his grand pas. "It is my wish," said he, "to confer honour upon the city by this action." The Bourgeoisie had accepted the invitation; man and wife had flocked to the appointed place at the appointed hour, and there they had waited from four o'clock in the afternoon until five o'clock in the morning, before the royal dancers had made their appearance. The dance had not ended until noon, when the honoured Bourgeoisie had returned to their homes.

Monsieur took his full share of all official pleasures, and he had also some pleasures of his own,—and purely personal they were. Some of them were infantine; some of them, marked by intelligence, were far in advance of the ideas of that epoch. Contemporary customs demanded that people of the world should relegate their serious affairs to the tender mercies of the professional[19] keen wits, who made it their business to attend to such questions. Gaston used to convene the chosen of his lords and gentlemen, to argue subjects of moral and political import. In discussion Monsieur bore himself very gallantly. The resources of his wit were inexhaustible, and the justice of his judgment invariably evoked applause. He was a sleep-walker, because awake or asleep he was so restless that "he could not stay long in one place."[2] But he was not always asleep when he was met in the night groping his way through the noisome alleys. He used to jump from his bed, disguise himself, and run about in the night, leading a life like that of the wretched Gérard de Nerval, lounging on foot through the little streets of Paris which were very dark and suspiciously dirty. It amused him to enter strange houses and invite himself to balls and other assemblies. His behaviour in such places is not recorded, but the gentlemen who followed him (to protect him) let it be understood that there was "nothing good in it."

Gaston of Orleans had all the traits common to those whom we call "degenerate." His chief characteristic was an active form of bare and shameless moral relaxation. He was the mainspring of many and various movements.

One day when Richelieu was present, Louis XIII. twitted the Queen with her fancies. He said that she had "wished to prevent Monsieur from marrying[20] so that she could marry him herself when she became a widow."

(Neither would France have "gained much by the change," and it was fortunate for her that Louis was permitted to retain possession of his feeble rights.)

The child so desired by some, so envied and so dreaded by others, entered the world May 29, 1627. Instead of a dauphin it was a girl—La Grande Mademoiselle. Seven days after the child was born the mother died.

Louis XIII. gave orders for the provision of royal obsequies, and he himself sprinkled the bier with the blessed water, very grateful because Providence had not endowed him with a nephew. Anne of Austria, incognito, assisted at the funeral pomps. This act was received with various interpretations. The simple—the innocent-minded—said that it was a proof of the compassion inspired by Madame's sudden taking off; the malicious supposed that it was just as the King had said: "The Queen loved Monsieur; she rejoiced in his wife's death; she hoped to marry him when she became a widow."

The Queen was sincerely afflicted by Madame's death. She cherished an open preference for her second son, and the thought of his ambitious flight had agreeably caressed her heart.

Richelieu pronounced a few suitable words of regret for the Princess who had never meddled[21] with politics, and Monsieur did just what he might have been expected to do: he wept boisterously, immediately dried his tears, and plunged into debauchery.

The Court executed the regulation manœuvres, and came to the "about face" demanded by the circumstances. Whatever may have been the calculations made by individuals relative to the positions to be taken in order to secure the best personal results, and whatever the secret opinions may have been (as to the advantages to be drawn from the catastrophe), it was generally conceded that the little Duchess had been fortunate in being left sole possessor of the vast fortune of the late Madame her mother.

The latter had brought as marriage-portion the dominion of Dombes, the principality of Roche-sur-Yon, the duchies of Montpensier, Châtellerault, and Saint-Fargeau, with several other fine tracts of territory bearing the titles of marquisates, counties, viscounties, and baronies, with very important incomes from pensions granted by the King and by several private individuals,—in all amounting to three hundred thousand livres of income.[3]

The child succeeding to this immense inheritance was the richest heiress in Europe. As her mother had been before her, so Mademoiselle was raised in all the magnificence and luxury befitting her rank and fortune.

They had brought her from the Louvre to the Tuileries by the balustraded terrace along the Seine.[4]

She was lodged in the Dôme—known to the old Parisians as the pavillon d'Horloge—and in the two wings of the adjoining buildings. At that time the Tuileries had not assumed the aspect of a great barrack. They wore a look of elegance and fantastic grace before they were remodelled and aligned by rule. At its four corners the Dôme bore four pretty little towers; on the side toward the garden was a projecting portico surmounted by a terrace enclosed by a gallery. On this terrace, in time, Mademoiselle and her ladies listened to many a serenade and looked down on many a riot.

The rest of the façade (as far as the pavillon de Flore) formed a succession of angles, now jutting forward, now receding, in conformations very pleasing to the eye. The opposite wing and the pavillon de Marsan had not been built. Close at hand lay an almost unbroken country. The rear of the palace looked out upon a parterre; beyond the parterre lay a chaos from which the Carrousel was not wholly delivered until the Second Empire. There stood the famous Hôtel de Rambouillet, close to the hotel of Madame de Chevreuse, confidential friend of Anne of Austria and interested enemy of Richelieu. There were other hotels, entangled with churches, with a hospital, a "Court of Miracles," gardens, and wild lands overgrown with weeds and grasses. There were shops and stables; and away at the far end of the settlement stood the Louvre, closing the perspective.

The Court and the city crowded together around the Bird House and the Swans' Pond, in the Dedalus and before the Echo, ogling or criticising one another. At that time the Place de la Concorde was a great, green field, called the Rabbit Warren. In one part of the field stood the King's kennels.[5] The city's limits separated the Champs-Élysées from the wild lands running down to the Seine at the point where the Pont de la Concorde now stands. This space, enclosed by the boundaries of the city, assured to the Court a park-like retreat in the green fields of the open country. The enclosure was entered by the gate of the Conférence. The celebrated "Garden of Renard" was associated with Mademoiselle's first memories. It had been taken from that part of La Garenne which lay between the gate of the Conférence [6] and the Garden of the Tuileries. Renard had been valet-de-chambre to a noble house. He was witty, pliable, complaisant to the wishes or the fancied needs of his employers, amiable, and of "easy, accommodating manners"[7]; in short, he was a[24] precursor of the Scapins and the Mascarelles of Molière. Mazarin found pleasure and profit in talking with him. Renard's garden was a bower of delights. It was the preferred trysting-place of the lordlings of the Court, and the scene of all things gallant in that gallant day.

The fair ladies of the Court frequented the place; so did the crowned queens; and there many an amorous knot was tied, and many a plot laid for the fall of many a minister.

There the men of the day gave dinners, and rolled under the table at dessert; and in the bosky glades of the garden the ladies offered their collations. There were balls, comedies, concerts, and serenades in the groves, and all the gay world met there to hear the news and to discuss it. Renard was the man of the hour, no one could live without him.

The Cours la Reine, created by Marie de Médicis, was outside of Paris. It was a broad path, fifteen hundred and forty common steps long, with a "round square," or rond-point, in its centre. In that sheltered path, the fine world, good and bad, displayed its toilets and its equipages.

Mlle. de Scudéry has given us a description of it at the hour when it was most frequented. Two of her characters entered Paris by the village of Chaillot.

In the summer they lingered late in the Cours la Reine, and ended the evening at Renard's. Marie de Médicis and Anne of Austria were rarely absent.

Close by the Champs-Élysées lay a forest, through which the huntsman passed to hunt the wolf in the dense woods of the Bois de Boulogne. In the distance could be seen the village of Chaillot, perched on a height amidst fields and vines. Market gardens covered the quarters of Ville l'Evêque and the Chaussée d'Antin.

Mademoiselle was installed with royal magnificence at the Tuileries. In her own words: "They made my house, and they gave me an equipage much grander than any daughter of France had ever had."

Thirty years later she was still happily surrounded by the retinue provided by her far-seeing[26] guardians. Her servitors were of every grade, from the lowest, who prepared a pathway for her feet, to the highest, whose service added dignity to her presence. By investing her with her nucleus of domestic tributaries, her friends had established her importance, even in her infancy, by manifestations that could not be disputed. In that day people were obliged to attach importance to such details. But a short time had passed since brutal force had been the only recognised right; and it was the way of the world to judge the grandeur of a prince by the length and volume of his train. It was because La Grande Mademoiselle had, from earliest youth, possessed an army of squires, of courtiers, of valets, and of serving-men and serving-women—a horde beginning with the fine milord and ending with the hare-faced scullion, seen now and then in some shadowy retreat of the palace, low-browed, down-trodden, looking out with dazzled eyes upon the world of life and luxury,—it was because she had been a ruler even in her swaddling bands, that she could aspire, naturally and without overweening arrogance, to the hands of the most powerful sovereigns. "The sons of France," says a document of 1649, "are provided with just such officials as surround the King; but they are less numerous.... The Princes have officers in accordance with their revenues and in accordance with the rank that they hold in the kingdom."[8]

The same document furnishes us with details of[27] the installation of Anne of Austria. If, when we estimate the equipage of Mademoiselle, we reduce it by half of the estimate of the Queen's equipage, we fall short of the reality. Like an army in campaign, a Court ought to be sufficient unto itself, able to meet all its requirements. The upper domestic retinue of the Queen comprised more than one hundred persons, maîtres-d'hôtel or stewards, cup-bearers, carvers, secretaries, physicians, surgeons, oculists, musicians, squires, almoners, nine chaplains, "her confessor," a common confessor, and too many other kinds of employees to be enumerated. Under all these officials, each one of whom had his own especial underlings, were equal numbers of valets and of chambermaids who assured the service of the apartments. The Court cooking kept busy one hundred and fifty-nine drilled knife-sharpeners, soup-skimmers, roast-hasteners, and water-handers, or people to hand water as the cooks needed it for their mixtures. There were other servitors whose business it was to await the beck and call of their superiors,—call-boys, always waiting for signals. Then came the busy world of the stables; then fifty merchants or shop-men, and an indefinite number of artisans of all the orders of all the trades. In all there were between six and seven hundred souls, not counting the valets of the valets or the grand "charges," the officials close to the Queen, the Queen's chancellor, the chevaliers d'honneur, or gentlemen-in-waiting, the ladies in-waiting, and maids of honour.

The great and noble people were often very badly served by their hordes of servants. Madame de Motteville tells us how the ladies of the Court of Anne of Austria were nourished in the peaceful year 1644, when the Court coffers were yet full.

The most modern Courts still retain some vestiges of the Middle Ages. Louis XIII. had, or had had, four dwarfs, their salary being three hundred "tournois" or Tours livres. The King paid a man to look after his dwarfs, keep them in order, and regulate their conduct.[9]

To the day of her death, despite her exile and her misery, Marie de Médicis maintained in her service a certain Jean Gassan, who figures in her will as employed in "keeping the parrot."

When a child, Louis XIV. had two baladins. Mademoiselle had a dwarf who did not retire from her service until 1645. The registers of the Parliament (date, 10th May, 1645) contain letters patent and duly verified, by which the King accorded to "Ursule Matton, the dwarf of Mademoiselle, sole daughter of the Duke of Orleans, the power and[29] the right to establish a little market in a court behind the new meat market of Saint Honoré."[10]

Marie de Médicis completed the house and establishment of her granddaughter by giving her, for governess, a person of much virtue, wit, and merit, Madame de Saint Georges, who knew the Court thoroughly. Nevertheless Mademoiselle asserted that she had been very badly raised, thanks to the herd of flattering hirelings who thronged the Tuileries, and who no sooner surrounded her than they became insupportable.

While very young she had reached a degree of folly where it displeased her to have people speak of her maternal grandmother, Madame de Guise. "I used to say: 'She is my distant grandmamma; she is not Queen.'"

It does not appear that Madame Saint Georges, that person of so much merit, had done anything to neutralise evil influences.

Throughout the seventeenth century, opinions on the education of girls were very vacillating because little importance was attached to them. In[30] 1687, after all the progress accomplished through the double influence of Port Royal and Madame de Maintenon, Fénelon wrote:

It was supposed that contact with society would be sufficient to form the mind and to polish the wit of woman. In this fact lay the cause of the inequality then noticeable in women of the same class. They were more or less superior from various points of view, as they had been more or less advantageously placed to profit by their worldly lessons, by the spectacle of life, and by the conversation of honest people.

The privileged ones were women who, like Mademoiselle and her associates, had been accustomed to the social circles where the history of their times was made by the daily acts of life. Their best teachers were the men of their own class, who intrigued, conspired, fought, and died before their eyes,—often for their pleasure. The agitated and peril-fraught lives of those men, their chimeras, and their romanticism put into daily practice, were admirable lessons for the future heroines of the Fronde. To understand the pupils, we must know[31] something of their teachers. What was the process of formation of those professors of energy; in what mould was run that race of venturesome and restless cavaliers who evoked a whole generation of Amazons made in their own image? The system of the education of France of that epoch is in question, and it is worthy of a close and detailed examination.

From their infancy, boys were prepared for the ardent life of their times. They were raised according to a clearly defined and fixed idea common to rich and poor, to noble and to plebeian. The object of a boy's education was to make him a man while he was still very young. The only difference in the opinions of the gentleman and of the bourgeois was this:

The gentleman believed that action was the best stimulant to action. The bourgeois thought that the finer human sentiments, the so-called "humanities," were the only sound foundations for a virile and practical education. But whatever the method used, in that day, a man entered upon life at the age when our sons are but just beginning interminable studies preliminary to their "examinations." At the age of eighteen, sixteen—even fifteen years,—the De Gassions, the La Rochefoucaulds, the Omer Talons, and the Arnauld d'Andillys had become officers, lawyers, or men of business, and in their day affairs bore little resemblance to modern[32] affairs. In our day men do not enter active life until they have been aged and fatigued by the march of years. The time of entrance upon the career of life ought not to be a matter of indifference to a people. At the age of thirty years a man no longer thinks and feels as he thought and felt at the age of twenty. His manner of making war is different; and there is even more difference in his political action. He has different ambitions. His inclinations lead him into different adventures. The moments of history, when the agitators of the nation were young men, glow with the light of no other epoch. There was then an indefinable quality in life,—an active principle, more ardent and more vital. Under Louis XIII. there were scholars to make the unhappy students of our own emasculated times die of envy. Certain examples of our modern school become bald before they rise from the benches of their college.

Jean de Gassion, Marshal of France at the age of thirty years, who "killed men" at the age of thirty-eight years (1647), was the fourth son, but not the last, of a President of Parliament at Navarre, who had raised his offspring with great care (having destined him for the career of "Letters"). The child took such advantage of his opportunities that before he was sixteen years old he was a consummate scholar. He knew several of the living languages—German, Flemish, Italian, and Spanish. Thus prepared for active life, he set out from Pau astride of his father's old horse. When he[33] had gone four or five leagues, the old horse gave out. Jean de Gassion continued his journey on foot. When he reached Savoy, they made war on him. He enlisted as common soldier, and fought so well that he was promoted cornet. When peace was declared, he was in France. He determined to go to the King of Sweden—Gustavus Adolphus,—who was said to be somewhere in Germany. De Gassion had resolved to offer the King the service of his sword, and to ask to be allowed to lead the Swedish armies. But as he had no idea of presenting himself to the King single-handed, he persuaded some fifteen or twenty cavaliers of his own regiment to go with him, and embarked with them on the Baltic Sea. And—so runs the story—he just happened to land where Gustavus Adolphus was walking along the shore.

(Such coincidences are possible only when youths are in their teens; after the age of twenty, no man need hope for similar experience.) Jean saluted the King, and addressed him in excellent Latin. He expressed his desire to be of service. The King was amused; he received the strange offer amiably, and consented to put the learned stripling to the test. And so it was that Gassion was enabled to attain to a colonelcy when he was but twenty-two years old. His early studies had stood him in good stead; had he not known his Latin, he would have missed his career. His Ciceronian harangue, poured out fluently just as the occasion demanded it, attracted the favour of a King who was, by his own might, a prince of letters.

After the King of Sweden died, Gassion returned to France. With Condé he won the battle of Rocroy, and, during the siege, died of a bullet in his head, leaving behind him the reputation of a brilliant soldier and accomplished man of letters, as virtuous as he was brave. He never wished to marry. When they spoke to him of marriage, he answered that he did not think enough of his life to offer a share of it to any one. This was an expression of pessimism far in advance of his epoch.

La Rochefoucauld, who will never be accused of having been naturally romantic, offered another example of the miracles performed by youths. Only once in his life did he play the part of Paladin. He launched himself in politics before he had a beard. When he was sixteen years old, he entered upon his grand campaign, bearing the title of "Master of the Camp."

The following year he was at Court, elbowing his way among all the parties, busily engaged in opposition to Richelieu. But his politics did not add anything to his age; he was still an adolescent, far removed from the enlightened theorist of the Maximes.

The peculiarly special savour of the springtime of life was communicated to his soul at the hour appointed by nature. In him it was impregnated by a faint perfume of heroism and of poetry. He never forgot the happiness with which for a week or more he played the fool. He was then twenty-three[35] years old. Queen Anne of Austria was in the depths of her disgrace, maltreated and persecuted by her husband and by Richelieu.

In truth the adventure would not have been an ordinary one; La Rochefoucauld assumed its duties with enthusiasm, renouncing them only when the Queen changed her mind.

Like all his fellows, La Rochefoucauld had his outburst of youth; but he fell short of its folly. Recalling his extravagant project, he said: "Youth is a continuous intoxication; it is the fever of Reason."

The memoirs of Arnauld d' Andilly tell us how the sons of the higher nobility were educated in the year 1600 and thereabout. Arnauld d' Andilly began to study Greek and Latin at home, under the supervision of a very learned father. Toward his tenth year his family thought that the moment had come to introduce into his little head the meanings and the realities of speculation. The[36] child was destined for "civil employment." His day was divided into two parts; one half was devoted to "disinterested study"; the other half to the study of things practical. So he served his apprenticeship for business by such a system that his themes and his versions lost none of their rights. His mornings were consecrated to lessons and tasks. They were long mornings; the family rose at four o'clock. The little student became a good Latinist, and even a good Hellenist. He wrote very well in French, and he was a good reader.

Ten or twelve volumes which belonged to him are still in existence, and they attest that he knew a great deal more than the graduates of our modern colleges,—though he knew nothing of the things they aim at. At eleven o'clock he closed his lexicons, bade adieu to his preceptor and to the pedagogy, bestrode his horse, and rode to Paris, to the house of one of his uncles, who had taken it upon himself to teach the boy everything that he could not learn from his books. Our forefathers carefully watched their sons' first contact with reality. They tried not to leave to chance the duties of so important an initiation; and as a general thing their supervision left ineffaceable traces. Uncle Claude de la Mothe-Arnauld, Treasurer-General of France, installed his nephew in his private cabinet and gave him various bundles of endorsed papers to decipher. The child was obliged to pick out their meaning and then render a clear analysis of it in a distinct voice. When he[37] was fifteen years old another uncle, a Supervisor of the National Finances, caused the student to "put his fist into the dough" in his own office. At sixteen years of age, "little Arnauld" was "M. Arnauld d' Andilly"; vested with office under the State, received at Court, and permitted to assist behind the chair of the King, at the Councils of Finance, so that he might hear financial arguments, and learn from the Nation's statesmen how to decide great questions. His education was not an exceptional one. The sons of the bourgeoisie were raised in like manner. Attempts to educate boys were more or less successful, according to the natural gifts of the postulants. Omer Talon, Advocate-General of the Parliament of Paris, and one of the great Parliamentary orators of the century, had pursued extensive classical studies, and "as he spoke, Latin and Greek rushed to his lips." He had "vast attainments in law," a science much more complicated in the sixteenth century than in our day. But, learned though he was, he had not lingered on the benches of his school. He was admitted to the Bar when he was eighteen years old, and "immediately began to plead and to be celebrated."

Antoine Le Maïtre, the first "Solitaire" of Port Royal, began his career by appearing in public as the best known and most important and influential lawyer in Paris when he was twenty-one years old.

Generally, the nobility sacrificed learning, which it despised, to an impatient desire to see its sons "in active life." The nobles made pages of their sons as[38] soon as they were thirteen or fourteen years old, or else sent them to the "Academy" to learn how to make proper use of a horse, to fence, to vault, and to dance.[11]

In the eyes of people of quality books and writings were the tools of plebeians; good enough for professional fine wits, or lawyers' clerks, but not fit for the nobility.

In the reign of Louis XIII.,[12] M. d'Avenal wrote thus: "Gentlemen are perfectly ignorant,—the most illustrious and the most modestly insignificant alike. In this respect, with few exceptions, there is absolute equality between them."

The Constable, De Montmorency, had the reputation of a man of sound sense, "though he had no book learning, and hardly knew how to write his own name." Many of the great lords knew no more; and this ignorance was not shameful; on the contrary it was desired, affected, gloried in, and eagerly imitated by the lesser nobility.

"I never sharpen my pen with anything but my sword," proudly declared a gentleman.

The exceptions to the rule resulted from the caprices of the fathers; and they were sometimes found where least expected. The famous Bassompierre, arbiter of fashion and flower of courtiers,[39] who, at one sitting, burned more than six thousand letters from women, who wore habits costing fourteen thousand écus, and could describe their details twenty years after he had worn them, had been very liberally educated, and according to a method which as may be imagined, was far in advance of the methods of his day. He had followed the college course until the sixteenth year of his age, he had laboured at rhetoric, logic, physics, and law, and dipped deep into Hippocrates and Aristotle. He had also studied les cas de Conscience. Then he had gone to Italy, where he had attended the best riding schools, the best fencing schools, a school of fortifications, and several princely Courts. At the age of nineteen years he was a superb cavalier and a good musician, he knew the world, and had made a very brilliant first appearance at Court.

The great Condé, General-in-Chief at the age of twenty-two years, had followed a college course at the school of Bourges, and had been "drilled" at the "Academy." He was tried by the fire of many a hard school. Wherever he went he was preceded by tart letters of instruction from his father. By his father's orders he was always received and treated as impartially as any of the lesser aspirants to education; he was severely "exercised," put on his mettle in various ways, and compelled to start out from first principles, no matter how well he knew them. When seven years old he spoke Latin fluently. When he reached the age of eleven he[40] was well grounded in rhetoric, law, mathematics, and the Italian language. He could turn a verse very prettily; and he excelled in everything athletic.

Louis XIII. applauded this deep and thorough study,—perhaps because he regretted his lost opportunities. He told people that he should "wish to have ... Monsieur the Dauphin," educated in like manner.[13]

In measure as the century advanced it began to be recognised that a nobleman could "study" without detracting from his noble dignity. Louis de Pontis, who started out as a D'Artagnan, and ended at Port Royal,[14] wished that time could be taken to instruct the youth of the nation. Answering some one who had asked his advice as to the education of two young lords of the Court, he wrote [15]:

Notwithstanding this declaration, Pontis desired that great difference should be established between the treatment of a child training for the robes and the treatment of one training for military service. "The first ought never to end his studies; it is sufficient for the second to study until his fifteenth or sixteenth year; after that time he ought to be sent to the Academy...."

In this opinion Pontis echoed the general impression. At the time when La Grande Mademoiselle was born, the man of quality no longer had a right to be "brutal,"—in other words, to betray coarseness of nature. New customs and new manners exacted from the man of noble birth tact and good breeding, not science. But it was requisite that the nobleman's mind should be "formed" by the influence and discourse of a man of letters, so that he might be capable of judging witty and intellectual works ("works of the mind").

Marshal Montmorency,[16] son of the Constable, who "hardly knew how to write his own name," had always in his employ cultured and intellectual people, who "made verses" for him on a multitude of such subjects as it was befitting his high estate that he should know; such subjects as were calculated to give him an air of intelligence and general information. His intellectual advisers informed him what to think and what to say of the current questions of the day.[17] It was good form for great and noble houses to entertain at least one[42] autheur. As there were no public journals or reviews, the autheur took the place of literary chronicles and literary criticism. He talked of the last dramatic sketch, or of the last new novel.

It was not long before another step in advance was taken, by which every nobleman was permitted to entertain his own personal autheur, and to compose "works of the mind" for himself. But he who succumbed to the epidemic (cacoëthes scribendi), owed it to his birth and breeding to hide his malady, or to make excuses for it.

Mlle. de Scudéry puts in the mouth of Sapho (herself) in Le Grand Cyrus[18]:

About the time this opinion saw the light, Tallemant des Réaux wrote to M. de Montausier, husband of the beautiful Julie d'Angennes, and one of the satellites of the Hôtel de Rambouillet: "He plys the trade of a man of mind too well for a man of quality—or at least he plays the part too seriously ... he has even made translations...."[43] This mention is marked by one just feature: the man who wrote, who could write, or who indulged in writing, was supposed to have judgment enough to keep him from attaching importance to his works. The fine world had regained the taste for refinement lost in the fracas of the civil wars; but in the higher classes of society was still reflected the horror of the preceding generations for pedants and for pedantry.

Ignorant or learned, half-grown boys were cast forward by their hasty education into their various careers when they had barely left the ranks of infancy. They were reckless, still in the flower of their giddy youth; but they were enthusiastic and generous. France received their high spirits very kindly. Deprived of the good humour, and stripped of the illusions furnished by the young representatives of their manhood, the times would have been too hard to be endured. The traditions of the centuries when might was the only right still weighed upon the soul of the people. One of those traditions exacted that—from his infancy—a man should be "trained to blood." A case was cited where a man had his prisoners killed by his own son,—a child ten years old. One exaction was that a man should never be conscious of the sufferings of a plebeian.

France had received a complete inheritance of inhuman ideas, which protected and maintained the remains of the savagery that ran, like a stained thread, through the national manners, just falling[44] short of rendering odious the gallant cavaliers. All that saved them from the disgust aroused by the brutal exercise of the baser "rights" was the bright ray of poetry, whose dazzling light gleamed amidst their sombre faults.

They were quarrelsome, but brave. Perchance as wild as outlaws, but devoted, gay, and loving. They were extraordinarily lively, because they were—or had been but a short time before—extraordinarily young, with a youth that is not now, nor ever shall be.

They inspired the women with their boisterous gallantry. In the higher classes the sexes led nearly the same life. They frequented the same pleasure resorts and revelled in the same joys. They met in the lanes and alleys, at the theatre (Comédie), at balls, in their walks, on the hunt, on horseback, and even in the camps. A woman of the higher classes had constantly recurring opportunities to drink in the spirit of the times. As a result the ambitious aspired to take part in public life; and they shaped their course so well, and made so much of their opportunities, that Richelieu complained of the importance of women in the State. They were seen entering politics, and conspiring like men; and they urged on the men to the extremes of folly.

Some of the noblewomen had wardrobes full of disguises; and they ran about the streets and the highways dressed as monks or as gentlemen. Among them were several who wielded the sword in duel and in war, and who rode fearlessly and[45] well. They were all handsome and courageous, and even in the abandon of their most reckless gambols they found means to preserve their delicacy and their grace. Never were women more womanly. Men adored them, trembling lest something should come about to alter their perfection. Their fear was the cause of their desperate and stubborn opposition to the idea of the education of girls, then beginning to take shape among the elder women.

I cannot say that the men were not in the wrong; but I do say that I understand and appreciate their motives. Woman, or goddess, of the order of the nobles of the time of Louis XIII., was a work of art, rare and perfect; and to tremble for her safety was but natural!

It happened that La Grande Mademoiselle came to the age to profit by instruction just when polite circles were discussing the education of girls. The governess whose duty it had been to guide her mind was caught between two opposing forces: the defendants of the ancient ignorance and the first partisans of the idea of "enlightenment for all."

Les Femmes Savantes might have been written under Richelieu. Philamente had not awaited the advent of Molière to protest against the ignorance and the prejudice that enslaved her sex. When the piece appeared, more than half a century had elapsed since people had quarrelled in the little[46] streets about woman's position,—what she ought to know, and what she ought not to know. But if the piece had been written long before its first appearance, the treatment of the subject could not have been the same. It would have been necessary to agree as to what woman ought to be in her home and in her social relations; and at that time they were just beginning to disagree on that very subject. Nearly all men thought that things ought to be maintained in the existing conditions. The nobles had exquisite mistresses and incomparable political allies; the bourgeois had excellent housekeepers; and to one and all alike, noble and bourgeois, it seemed that any instruction would be superfluous; that things were perfect just as they were. The majority of the women shared the opinions of the men. The minority, looking deeper into the question, saw that there might be a more serious and more intellectual way of living to which ignorance would be an obstacle; but at every turn they were met by men stubbornly determined that women should not be made to study. Such men would not admit that there could be any difference between a cultivated woman and "Savante,"—the term then used for "blue-stocking." It must be confessed that there was some justice in their judgment. For a reason which escapes me, when knowledge attempted to enter the mind of a woman it had great trouble to make conditions with nature and simplicity. It was not so easy! Even to-day certain preparations are necessary,—appointment[47] of commandants, the selection of countersigns, establishment of a picket-line—not to say a deadline. We have précieuses in our own day, and their pretensions and their grimaces have been lions in our path whenever we have attempted the higher instruction of our daughters; the truly précieuses, they who were instrumental in winning the cause of the higher education of women—they who, under the impulsion given by the Hôtel de Rambouillet, worked to purify contemporary language and manners—were not ignorant of the baleful affectation of their sisters, nor of the extent of its compromising effect upon their own efforts. Mlle. de Scudéry, who knew "nearly everything that one could know" (by which was probably meant "everything fit to be known"), and who piqued herself upon being not less modest than she was wise, could not be expected to share, or to take part in, and in the mind of the public be confounded with, the female Trissotins whose burden of ridicule she felt so keenly. She would not allow herself to resemble them in any way when she brought them forth in Grand Cyrus, where the questions now called "feminist" were discussed with great good sense.

Damophile, who affects to imitate Sapho, is only her caricature. Sapho "does not resemble a 'Savante'"; her conversation is natural, gallant, and easy (commodious).

Damophile always had five or six teachers. I believe that the least learned among them taught her astrology.

She was always writing to the men who made a profession of science. She could not make up her mind to have anything to say to people who did not know anything. Fifteen or twenty books were always to be seen on her table; and she always held one of them in her hand when any one entered the room, or when she sat there alone; and I am assured that it could be said without prevarication that one saw more books in her cabinet than she had ever read, and that at Sapho's house one saw fewer books than she had read.

More than that, Damophile used only great words, which she pronounced in a grave and imperious voice; though what she said was unimportant; and Sapho, on the contrary, used only short, common words to express admirable things. Besides that, Damophile, believing that knowledge did not accord with her family affairs, never had anything to do with domestic cares; but as to Sapho, she took pains to inform herself of everything necessary to know in order to command even the least things pertaining to the household.

Damophile not only talked as if she were reading out of a book, but she was always talking about books; and, in her ordinary conversation, she spoke as freely of unknown authors as if she were giving public lessons in some celebrated academy.

Mlle. de Scudéry raged when people, who had no tact, took her for a Damophile, and, meaning to compliment her, consulted her "on grammar," or "touching one of Hesiod's verses." Then the vials of her wrath were poured out upon the "Savantes" who gave the prejudiced reason for condemning the education of woman, and who provoked annoying and ridiculous misconception by their insupportable pedantry; when there were so many young girls of the best families who did not even learn their own language, and who could not make themselves understood when they took their pens in hand.

Mademoiselle de Scudéry did not exaggerate; our great-grandmothers did not see the utility of applying a knowledge of spelling to their letters. In that respect each one extricated herself by the grace of God.

The Marchioness of Sablé, who was serious and wise, and, according to the testimony of Sapho, "the type of the perfect précieuse" had peculiar ways of her own in her spelling. She wrote, J'hasse, notre broulerie votre houbly. Another "précieuse," Madame de Brégy, whose prose and verse both appeared in print, wrote to Madame de Sablé, when they were both in their old age:

It is but just to add that as far as orthography was concerned many of the men were women. The following letter of the Duke of Gesvres, "first gentleman of Louis XIV.," has no reason to envy the letter of the old Marchioness.

Enough is as good as a feast! Though we stand in no superstitious awe of orthography, we can but laud Mademoiselle de Scudéry for having crossed lances in its favour. And well might she wish that to the first elements of an education might be added a certain amount of building material suitable for a foundation so solid that something more serious than dancing steps and chiffons might at a later date be introduced into the brains of young girls.

In spite of her strictness, Mlle. de Scudéry was no advocate of the idea which makes a woman her husband's servant, or installs her as the slave of the stew-pan. Whenever she was urged to "tell precisely what a woman ought to know," the problem was so new to her that she did not know how to answer it. She evaded it, rejecting its generalities. She had only two fixed ideas: that science was necessary to women; and that the women who attained it must not let it be known that they had attained it. She expressed her two opinions clearly:

Mademoiselle had in her mind one woman whom she would have liked to set up as a pattern for all other women. That one woman knew Latin, and because of her sense and propriety, was esteemed by Saint Augustine, and yet no one had ever thought of calling her a "Savante."

Mlle. de Scudéry was very grateful to the charming Mme. de Sévigné, because she plead the cause of woman's education by so fine an example, and she depicted her admirable character with visible complaisance, under the name of Clarinte.[20]

The programme used for the distribution of studies by means of which the De Sévignés were fabricated is not revealed. Nature herself must have furnished a portion of the plan. As far as we can judge the part played by education was restricted to the adoption of some of the suggestions of very rich moral endowments.

Mlle. de Chantal had been admirably directed by her uncle, the Abbé de Coulanges, and, aside from the cares of the profession which now presides over the education of woman, it is probable that more efficient means could not be found for the proper formation of the character of a girl than it was Mademoiselle de Chantal's good fortune to enjoy.

Ménage and Chapelain had been her guides in rhetoric. She had read Tacitus and Virgil in the original all her life. She was familiar with Italian and with Spanish, and had ancient and modern history at her tongue's end,—also the moralists and the religious writers.

These serious and well-grounded foundations, which she continually strengthened and renewed until death, did not prevent her from "adoring" poetry, the drama, and the superior novels,—in short, all things of enlightenment and worth wherever she found them and under whatever form. She was graceful in the dance; she sang well,—her contemporaries said that her manner of singing was "impassioned."

The Abbé Coulanges had raised her so carefully that she was orderly; and, unlike the majority, she liked to pay her debts. She was a perfect type of woman. She even made a few mistakes in orthography, taking one, or more, letter, or letters, for another, or for others. In short, she made just the number of errors sufficient to permit her to be a writer of genius without detracting from her air of distinguished elegance, or from the obligations and the quality of her birth.

There were others at Court and in the city who confirmed their right to enlightenment, thereby justifying the theses of Mademoiselle de Scudéry. But a large number of women gave the lie to her theories by their resemblance to Damophile. Of these latter was "the worthy Gournay," Montaigne's "daughter by alliance," who, from the exalted heights of her Greek and Latin, and in a loud, insistent voice, discoursed like a doctor of medicine on the most ticklish of subjects,—subjects far from pleasing when rolled out of the mouth of a woman, even when so displaced in the name of antiquity and all that is venerable! (For in these names "the good Gournay" evoked them.) There was another pedant, the Viscountess d'Auchy, who had "founded conferences" in her own house; the people of the fine world flocked there to smother as they listened while it was proved, for their edification, that the Holy Trinity had natural reasons for its existence. On those "foundations" the Innate Idea also was proved by demonstrative reason by collecting and[56] by analysing the ideas of young children concerning philosophy and theology. The lady who founded the conferences had bought some manuscript Homilies on the Epistles of St. Paul, of a doctor of theology. She had had them imprinted and attached to portraits of herself. Thus accoutred for their mission, they were circulated with great success, and their proceeds formed the endowment fund of the Conférence Library.

"The novelty of seeing a great lady of the Court commenting on the most obscure of the apostles caused every one to buy the book."[21] It ended by the Archbishop of Paris intimating to the "Order of the Conferences" that they "would better leave Theology to the Sorbonne."

Mlle. Des Jardins declaimed her verses in the salons with great "contortions" and with eyes rolling as if in death; and she was not at all pleased when people preferred Corneille's writings to her own.

Mlle. Diodée frightened her hearers so that they took to their heels when she began to read her fine thoughts on Zoroaster or on Hermes Trismegistus. Another learned lady would speak of nothing but solar or lunar eclipses and of comets.

The pedantry of this high order of representative woman transported the "honest man" with horror. The higher the birth of the man the greater his fear lest by some occult means he might be led to slip his neck into the noose of a "Savante." But there was one counter-irritant for this virulent[57] form of literary eruption. The young girls of the highest nobility were all extremely ignorant. Mlle. de Maillé-Brézé, niece of Cardinal de Richelieu, had not an idea of the most limited degree of the knowledge of books when she married the great Condé (1641). She knew nothing whatever. It was considered that ignorance carried to such length proved that neglect of instruction had gone too far, and when the great Condé went on his first campaign, friends seized the opportunity to add a few facets to the uncut jewel. She was turned and turned about, viewed in different lights, and polished so that her qualities could be seen to the best advantage. "The year after her marriage," says Mlle. de Scudéry, "she was sent to the Convent of the Carmelite Nuns of Saint Denis, to be taught to learn to read and write, during the absence of Monsieur her husband."

The Contes de Perrault—faithful mirror of the habits of those days—teaches us what an accomplished princess ought to be like. All the fairies to be found in the country had acted as godmothers to the Belle-au-Bois-dormant,

Perrault had traced his portraits over the strongly defined lines of real life. La Grande Mademoiselle was trained after the manner of the Belle-au-Bois-dormant. Her governess had had too much experience to burden her with a science that would have made her redoubtable in the eyes of men; so she had transferred to the fairies the task of providing her young charge with a suitable investiture. Unhappily for her eternal fame, when she distributed her powers of attorney some of the fairies were absent; so Mademoiselle neither sang like a nightingale, nor displayed classic grace in all her actions. But her resemblance to Perrault's heroines was striking. The fairies empowered to invest her with mind and delicacy of feeling had been present at her baptism, and they had left indisputable proof of the origin of her ideas. Like their predecessors, the elves of the Contes, they had never planned for anything less than the marriage of their god-daughter to the King's son. By all that she saw and heard, Mademoiselle knew that Providence had not closed an eye at the moment of her creation. She knew that her quality was essential. She knew that it was written on high that she should marry the son of a great King.

Her life was a conscientious struggle to "accomplish the oracle"; and the marriages that she missed form the weft of her history.

The first of the Mémoires show us the Court of Louis XIII. and the affairs of the day as seen by a[59] little girl. This is an aspect to which historians have not accustomed us; and as a natural result of the infantine point of view the horizons are considerably narrowed. The little Princess did not know that anything important was taking place in Germany. She could not be ignorant of the fact that Richelieu was engaged in a struggle with the high powers of France; she read the general distress in the clouded faces surrounding her. But in her mind she decided that it was nothing but one of her father's quarrels with the Cardinal. The judgments she rendered against the high personages whose houses she frequented were dictated by purely sentimental considerations. "Some she liked; some she did not like"; consequently the former gained, and the latter lost. Many contestants were struggling before her young eyes; Louis XIII. was among the winners.

He was a good uncle, very affectionate to his niece, and deeply grateful that she was nothing worse than a girl. He could never rid himself of the idea that his brother might have endowed him with an heir. He had Mademoiselle brought to the Louvre by the gallery along the river, and allowed himself to be cheered by her turbulence and uncurbed indiscretions.

Anne of Austria exhibited a deep tenderness for Mademoiselle; but no one can deceive a child. "I think that all the love she showed me was nothing but the effect of what she felt for Monsieur," writes Mademoiselle; and further on she formally declares[60] that the Queen, believing herself destined to a near widowhood, had formed the "plan" of marrying Monsieur. Whatever the Queen's plans may have been, it is certain that she caressed the daughter for love of the father. Anne of Austria never forgave Mademoiselle for the part that she had played before her birth, in the winter of 1626-1627, when the Duchess of Orleans so arrogantly promised to bring forth a Dauphin. Monsieur had no reason to fear the scrutiny of a child. He was a charming playfellow; gay, complaisant, fond of his daughter, at least for the moment,—no one could count upon the future!

Cardinal de Richelieu could not gain anything by thoughtful criticism. To the little Princess he was the Croquemitaine of the Court. When we think of his ogre face—spoil sport that he was! as he appeared to the millions of French people who were incapable of understanding his policy—the silhouette traced by the hand of Mademoiselle appears in a new light, and we are forced to own that its profound and simple ignorance is instructive.

Marie de Médicis had managed to disappear from the Luxembourg and from Paris, after the Journée des Dupes (11 November, 1630), and her little granddaughter had not noticed her departure. She writes: "I was still so young that I do not remember that I ever saw her." The case was not the same after the departure of Monsieur. He had continually visited the Tuileries, and when he came no more the child knew it well enough. She[61] understood that her father had been punished, and she was not permitted to remain ignorant of the identity of the insolent personage who had placed him on the penitential stool. Mademoiselle, then less than four years old, was outraged in all her feelings by the success of Richelieu. She made war upon him in her own way; and, dating from that day, became dear to the people of Paris, who had always loved to vex and to humble the Government. She wrote with a certain pride: "On that occasion my conduct did not at all answer to my years. I did not want to be amused in any way; and they could not even make me go to the assemblies at the Louvre." As she had no better scapegoat, her bad humour was vented on the King. She constantly growled at him, demanding that he should bring back her "papa." But Mademoiselle was never able to pout to such purpose that she could stay away from the palace long, for she was a true courtier, firmly convinced that to be away from Court was to be in a desert, no matter how many servants and companions might surround her. She soon mended her broken relations with the assemblies and the collations of the Louvre, and could not refrain from "entering into the joy of her heart" when "Their Majesties" sent word to her guardians to take her to Fontainebleau. But she never laid down her arms where Richelieu was concerned. She knew all the songs that were written against him.

Meanwhile Monsieur had not taken any steps[62] to make himself interesting. As soon as he had crossed the French frontier he entered upon a pleasure debauch which rendered him unfit for active service, for a time at least. He paid for his high flight in Spanish money. In 1632 he further distinguished himself by entering France at the head of a foreign army. On that occasion he caused the death of the Duke of Montmorency, who was executed for "rebellion."

Immediately after the Duke's execution, it was discovered that Monsieur had secretly married a sister of the Duke of Lorraine. He, Monsieur, crowned his efforts by signing a treaty with Spain (12 May, 1634), for which act France paid by yielding up strips of French territory.

But to his daughter Monsieur was always the victim of an impious persecution. Speaking of the years gorged with events so closely concerning her own life, she says:

The day after the ceremony an incident exciting much comment added to Mademoiselle's grief. Her enemy, the Cardinal, took part in the promotion of the Cordons Bleus. On this occasion Louis XIII. wished to exalt his Minister by giving him a distinguishing mark of superiority. He wished to distinguish him, and him only, by giving him a present. His choice of a present fell upon an object well fitted to evoke the admiration of a child. The chevaliers of the Saint Esprit were at a banquet. At dessert they brought to Richelieu the King's gift, an immense rock composed of various delicate confitures. From the centre of the rock jetted a fountain of perfumed water. Given under solemn circumstances and to a prince of the Church, it was a singular present. It attracted remark, its familiarity tended to give colour to the rumours circulating to the effect that an alliance then in process of incubation would eventually unite the House of France and the family of a very powerful Minister. The people voiced the current rumour volubly; they said that "Gaston's marriage with a Lorraine" would never be recognised, and that the young Prince would buy his pardon by marrying the niece of the Cardinal. Mademoiselle heard the rumours and her heart swelled with anguish at the thought of her father's dishonour.

If it is true that Mademoiselle did not know the details of the quarrels in which the House of France engaged during her childhood, she was not inquisitive. Her knowledge in that respect had been at the mercy of her own inclination. By the thoughtful care of Richelieu, all the correspondence and all the official reports exposing the Court miseries were placed where all might read who ran. Richelieu had divined the power of the press over public opinion, although in that day there was no press in France. There were no journals to defend the Government. The Mercure Française [22] was not a journal; it appeared once a year, and contained only a brief narration of "the most remarkable things that had come to pass" in the "four parts of the world." Renaudot's Gazette [23] was hardly a journal, though it appeared every[65] eight days, and numbered Louis XIII. among its contributors. Louis furnished its military news. Richelieu and "Father Joseph" furnished its politics. Neither Renaudot nor his protectors had any idea of what we call a "premier Paris" or an "article de fond"; they had never seen such things and they would not have been capable of compassing such inventions. The Gazette was not a sheet of official information; it did not contain matter enough for one page of the Journal des Débats. But the necessity of saying something to France was a crying one. It had become absolutely necessary to put modern royalty in communication with the nation, and to explain to the people at large the real meaning of the policy of the Prime Minister. The people must be taught why wars, alliances, and scaffolds were necessary. Something must be done to defend France against the attacks of Marie de Médicis and the cowardly Gaston. At that time placards and pamphlets rendered the services now demanded of the journals. By means of the placards the King could speak directly to the people and take them to witness that he was in difficulty, and that he was trying to do his best. In his public letters he confided to them his family chagrins, and the motives of his conduct toward the foreign powers. His correspondence with his mother and his brothers was printed as fast as it was written or received by him. Apologies for his conduct were supported by a choice of documents. From time to time the pamphlets were[66] collected and put in volumes—the volumes which were the ancestors of our "yellow books."

I have before me one of these volumes, dated 1639, without name of editor or publisher. It bears the title: Recueil de divers pièces pour servir a l'histoire. Two thirds of its space are consecrated to the King's quarrels with his family. Mademoiselle must have learned from it many things which she has not the air of suspecting. Perhaps she found it convenient or agreeable to be ignorant of them. In the pages of this instructive volume none of her immediate relations appear to any advantage. Louis XIII. is invariably dry and bombastic, or constrained and affected; he shows no trace of emotion when, in his letter of 23 February, 1631, he informs the people that

Another letter, from the King to his mother, is revolting in its harshness. After her departure from France, Marie de Médicis addressed to him some very tart pages in which she accused Richelieu of having had designs on her life. In the same letter she represented herself as flying from her son's soldiers:

Instead of feeling pity for the plaints of the old woman who realised that she had been conquered, Louis XIII. replied:

After these words, the King delivered a pompous eulogy on the Cardinal and ended it thus:

It is true that Marie de Médicis received nothing that she did not deserve; but it may be possible that it was not for her son to speak to her with brutality.

In their way Gaston's letters are chefs-d'œuvre. They do honour to the psychological sensibility of the intelligent névrosé. Monsieur knew both the strength and the weakness of his brother. He knew him to be jealous, ulcerated by the consciousness of his own insignificance—an insignificance brought into full relief by the importance of the superior Being then hard at work making "of a France languishing a France triumphant"[24]; and with marvellous art he found the words best qualified to irritate secret wounds.

His letters open with insinuations to the effect that Richelieu had a personal interest in maintaining the enmity between "the King and his own brother," so that the King, "having no one to defend him," could be held more closely in his, Richelieu's, grasp.

In the following letter Monsieur addresses himself directly to Louis XIII.'s worst sentiments and to his kingly conscience. He feigns to be deeply grieved by the deplorable condition of his brother, who, as he says, is reduced, notwithstanding

Monsieur depicted the new "Mayor of the Palace" actually reigning in overburdened, crushed, and oppressed France,

In this Monsieur told the truth. The peasant had come to that point of physical degradation. But his sufferings could not be diminished by provoking a civil war, and Richelieu did not fail to make the fact plain in the polemics of the Recueil, written under his supervision—when it was not written in his own hand. He (Richelieu) defended his policy tooth and nail, he justified his millions, his accumulated official honours.

One of Monsieur's letters bears copious notes made throughout its length and breadth in the Cardinal's own hand. Without any of the scruples of false shame, he inspired long factums to the glory of the Prime Minister of France.

In the pages inspired by him there are passages of peculiar inhumanity. In one place, justifying the King for the treatment inflicted upon his mother, he says that "the pain of the nine months that she carried him would have been sold by her at too high a price, had the King, because of it, been forced to let her set fire to his kingdom."[25]

Other passages are equally heartless: "Do they blame the Prime Minister for his riches?—and if the King had seen fit to give him more? The King is free to give or to take away. Can he not act his pleasure; who has the right to say him nay?"

The Recueil shows passages teeming with cynical and pampered pride. In favour of himself Richelieu wrote:

Among the official documents in the volume just quoted are instruments whose publication would have put any man but Gaston d'Orléans under ground for the rest of his days, among other things, his treaty of peace (1632), signed at Béziers (20th September) after the battle of Castelnaudary, where the Duc de Montmorency had been beaten and taken before his eyes. In that treaty Monsieur had pledged himself to abandon his friends,—not to take any interest in those who had been allied with him "on these occasions," and "not to pretend that he had any[72] cause for complaint when the King made them submit to what they deserved." He promised "to love, especially, his cousin Richelieu." In recompense for this promise and the other articles of the treaty the King re-established his brother "in all his rights." As we know, the treaty of Béziers ended nothing. Gaston saw all his partisans beheaded as he recrossed the frontier. He did not enter France to remain there until October, 1634. Then he went home "on the faith" of the King's declaration, which closes the volume. By this declaration Monsieur was again re-established in the enjoyment of all his rights, appanages, pensions, and appointments. For him this was the important article. As Richelieu took the trouble to have all his monuments of egotism and barrenness of heart re-imprinted, it is probable that he did not intend to let the country forget them. In that case he attained his ends.

The public had formed its opinion, and in consequence it took no further interest in the royal family, always excepting Anne of Austria, who had retired among the shadows.

Marie de Médicis was now free to cry aloud in her paroxysms of fury. Gaston could henceforth pose as a martyr, and Louis XIII., withered by melancholy, dried remnant of his former pompous dignity, might be blown into a corner or be borne away by the wind like a dead leaf in autumn, and not a soul in France would hail it by the quiver of an eyelash. If Richelieu had hoped that profit[73] would accrue to him from the royal unpopularity he had counted without the great French host. Despite the fact that his importance and the terror he inspired had increased tenfold, he also had become tainted by the insignificance of the royal family. But to all the people he seemed the ogre dreaded by Mademoiselle in her infancy, though indisputedly an unnatural ogre, possessing genius far beyond the reach of the normal man. He was universally looked upon as a leader of priceless value to a country in its hour of crisis, and as a companion everything but desirable. He appalled the people. His first interviews with Gaston after the young Prince's return to France were terrible. Monsieur was defenceless; the Cardinal was pitiless.

"Mademoiselle had run ahead to meet her father. In her innocence she had rejoiced to find him unchanged." Richelieu also believed that Monsieur had not changed, and he was all the more anxious to get him out to his (Richelieu's) château at Rueil. He pretended that there was to be a fête at the château. Monsieur did not leave Rueil until he had opened his heart to the Cardinal, just as he had done in regard to the affair Chalais.

Turned, and re-turned, by his terrible cousin, the unhappy wretch denounced mother and friends,—absent or present,—those who had plotted to overthrow the prime ministry and those who had (according to Gaston's story) tried to assassinate the Cardinal on such a day[74] and in such a place. "Not," said Richelieu in his Mémoires,—"not that Monsieur recounted these things of his own accord. He did not do that; but the Cardinal asked him if it was not true that such a person had said such and such things, and he confessed, very ingenuously, that it was."

Monsieur retired to Blois, but he often returned to Paris, and whenever he returned he fulfilled his fatherly duties in his own fashion, romping and chattering with Mademoiselle. He amused himself by listening to her songs against Richelieu, and for her pleasure he organised a corps-de-ballet of children. All the people of the Court flocked to the palace to witness the ballet.

On the occasion of another ballet danced at the Louvre he displayed himself to Mademoiselle in all his glory (18th February, 1635). The King, the Queen, and the principal courtiers of their suite were among the dancers.

This last solemnity left mingled memories, both good and bad, in Mademoiselle's mind. One of her father's most faithful companions in exile was to have danced in the ballet. During a rehearsal, Richelieu had him arrested and conducted to the Wood of Vincennes, "where he died very suddenly."[26] The rôle in which he should have acted was danced by one of the other courtiers, and therefore Gaston did not appear to be affected.

The Gazette informed the public that the fête had "succeeded admirably"; that every one had carried away from the place so teeming with marvels the same idea that Jacob had entertained when, having looked upon the angels all the night, he believed that the earth touched the confines of heaven! But, at least, there was one person for whom the sudden disappearance of Puylaurens had spoiled everything. Mademoiselle had "liked him and wished him well." He had won her heart by giving her bonbons, and she felt that the ugly history reflected upon her father. "I leave it," she said, "to people better instructed and more enlightened than I am to speak of what Monsieur did afterward to Puylaurens' prison."

The following year she had to swallow an insult on her own account. The lines which appeared in one of the gazettes of July, 1636, must have seemed insupportable to a child full of unchecked pride.

"The 17th, Mademoiselle, aged nine years and three months, was baptised in the Louvre, in the Queen's chamber, by the Bishop of Auxerre, First Almoner to the King, having for godmother and godfather the Queen and the Cardinal Duke (Richelieu), and was named Anne Marie."

Mention of this little event is made in Retz's Mémoires. "M. le Cardinal was to hold at the font Mademoiselle, who, as you may judge, had been baptised long before; but the ceremonies of the baptism had been deferred."

This godfather, who was not a prince, was a humiliation to Mademoiselle, and to crown her distress he thought that he ought to make himself agreeable to his god-daughter.

By his intention to be amiable he "made her beside herself" because he treated her—at nine years!—as if she had been a little girl. "Every time that he saw me he told me that that spiritual alliance obliged him to take care of me, and that he would arrange a marriage for me (a discourse that he addressed to me, talking just as they do to children to whom they incessantly repeat the same thing)."

A journey through France, which she made in 1637, "put balm on the wounds of her pride." They chanted the Te Deum, the Army Corps saluted her, a city was illuminated, and the nobility offered her fêtes. She "swam in joy"; for thus she had always thought that the appearance of a person of her quality should be hailed. She ended her tour in Blois where Monsieur, the ever good father, desired that he, in person, should be the one to initiate his child in the morality of princes, which virtue in those aristocratic times had nothing in common with the bourgeois's morality. For the moment he was possessed of an insignificant mistress, a young girl of Tours called "Louison." Monsieur took his daughter to Tours so that he might present his mistress to her. Mademoiselle declared herself satisfied with her father's choice. She thought that Louison had "a very agreeable[77] face, and a great deal of wit for a girl of that quality who had never been to Court." But Mme. de Saint Georges saw the new relations with an anxious eye; she submitted her scruples to Monsieur:

Mademoiselle did not suspect that there was anything comical in this passage; had she done so she would not have written it, because she was not one of those who admit that it is sometimes permissible to smile at the great.

There were also assemblies with comedies at the Queen's, at Richelieu's, and at a number of[78] personages', and Mademoiselle herself received at the Tuileries.

Mademoiselle passed the days and the nights in fêtes. Her studies did not suffer by it because she never studied and never knew anything of study outside of reading and writing, making a courtesy, and carefully observing the rules of a minute etiquette.

It is probable that she owed the little that she knew to several months of forced retreat in a convent, when she was nine years old. She made herself so intolerable to every one,—it is she who tells it,—she was so vexatious, with her "grimaces" and her "mockeries," that they put her in a cloister to try to discipline her and to correct her faults; the plan succeeded: "They saw me return ... wiser, and better than I had been." Yes, more sober, better behaved, and a little less ignorant, but not much less. The following letter, bearing the date of her maturity, shows more clearly than all the descriptions in the world, the degree of instructions which satisfied the seventeenth century's ideas of the education of a princess. The letter is addressed to Colbert ("a Choisy ce 5 Août 1665"):

This orthography did not hinder Mademoiselle when, under the name of "Princess Cassandane" she figured in the Grand Dictionnaire des Précieuses; and according to the distinctions established between the "true précieuse" and the "Savante" by Mademoiselle de Scudéry, she had a right to figure there, as had many of her noble contemporaries, who would have been the shame of the humblest of the schools.

The "true précieuse," she who left comets and the Greek language to the "Savantes," applied herself to the task of penetrating the mysteries of the heart. That was her science, and from certain points of view it was worth as much as any other.

La Grande Mademoiselle devoted her talents and her life to the perfection of her particular art. Keeping well within the limits that she herself had set, she made a special study of the hearts of princesses and of everything concerning them; and she professed that she had established, definitely, the only proper methods by which persons of her quality should, bound in duty to themselves, look upon love, and upon glory.

The wells from which she drew her spiritual draughts were not exclusively her own; she shared their benefits with all honest people, of either sex, engaged in completing the sentimental education by the essential principle of life.

CHAPTER II

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[82] 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[83] 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:

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:

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[85] 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.

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[87] 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[88] 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:

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[89] 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[90] 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:

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[92] 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.

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:

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[94] 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.

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[96] 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[97] 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,[98] 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[99] 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[100] 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:

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[101] 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[103] 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[104] 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:

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[106] 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[107] were maintained by intelligent property-owners.

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,[108] 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

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.[110] 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.

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[112] 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[113] 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[114] 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:

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.

Aristocratic traditions exacted that the nobles should flog their inferiors, and the nobles conformed to the traditional exactions freely. Men and women were flogged for "failures" of the least importance, and knowing those antique customs as we do, we may be permitted to wonder that we have so few records of the music of that eventful day.

Richelieu "drubbed his people," he drubbed his[116] officers, he drubbed (so it was said) his ministers. The celebrated Duke d'Épernon, the last of the great Seigniors after Saint Simon, was "as mild-mannered a man as ever cut a throat or scuttled a ship"; one day when he was discussing some official question with his Eminence, the Archbishop of Bordeaux, he gave the exalted prelate "three clips of his fist full in the archiepiscopal face and breast, supplementing them by several cuts of the end of his cane in the pit of the stomach." We are not told how the priest received his medicine, but history records that "this done, Monsieur the Duke bore witness to his Lordship (the Archbishop) that had it not been for the respect due to his character, he (the Duke) should have tipped him over on the pavement." One day when the feelings of the Maréchal de Mauny were outraged because a farmer had kept the de Mauny servitors waiting for their butter and eggs, he (the Maréchal) rushed from his palace like a madman, fell upon the first peasants who crossed his path, and with sword-thrusts and with pistol-shots wounded two of the "aggressors" mortally. This last event occurred in Burgundy; it was merely an incident. In Anjou, Comte de Montsoreau maintained a private money-coining establishment in the wood near, or on, his property, halted the travellers on the highways, obliged them to pay their ransom, and, at the head of a band of twenty men, all being brigands of his own species, swept over the country, pillaging in all directions. The daily occurring duels[117] accustomed men to look lightly upon death, and contempt for human life prevailed. When the Chevalier d'Andrieux was thirty years old, he had killed seventy-two men. In such cases edicts were worthless; the national need demanded a radical change of morals. Nine years after the death of Louis XIII., Maréchal de Grammont said in one of his letters: "Since the beginning of the Regency, according to the estimate made, nine hundred and forty gentlemen have been killed in duels." That was an official estimate, and it did not include the deaths which, though they were attributed to other causes, were the direct and immediate results of honourable encounters; the dead thus enumerated having been killed on the spot.[44]

At that time the duel was not attended by ceremonies; it was a hand-to-hand encounter between barbarians. The contestants fought with any weapons that came to hand, and in the way most convenient to their needs. All means were considered proper for the killing of men, though it was generally conceded that for killing well the different means were, or might be made, more or less courteous. This being the case, the duel was in more or less good or bad taste, according to the means used in its execution, and according to the regularity, or the lack of regularity, employed in their use.

In 1612, Balagny and Puymorin alighted from[118] their horses and drew swords in the rue des Petits Champs. While they were fighting, a valet took a pitchfork and planted it in Balagny from the back. Balagny died of the wound inflicted by the valet, and Puymorin also died; he had been wounded when the valet interfered. Still another lackey killed Villepreau in the duel between Beaupré and Villepreau. That duel also was fought in the street (rue Saint Honoré.) When young Louvigny [45] fought with d'Hocquincourt, he said: "Let us take our swords!" As the other bent to comply with the suggestion, Louvigny gave a great sword-thrust, which, running his adversary through and through, put him to death. Tallemant des Reaux qualified the act as "appalling," but it bore no consequences for Louvigny.

Maréchal de Marillac (who was beheaded in 1632) killed his adversary before the latter had time to draw his sword. We should have called it an assassination, but our forefathers saw no harm in such duelling. They reserved their criticisms for the timidly peaceable who objected to a fight.

The salon, with its ultra-refinement and its delicacy, followed close upon the heels of these remnants of barbarity. The salon gave form to the civility which forbade a man to pierce the fleshy part of the back of an adversary with a pitchfork. Polite courtesy also restrained gentlemen[119] from forcing ladies to swallow all uncleanness under the pretence of indulging in a merry jest. As good manners make for morality, let us thank the Précieuses for the reform they accomplished when they moulded men for courteous intercourse with their fellow-men; and to Madame de Rambouillet, among others, let thanks be given, for she made the achievement possible by opening the way and beginning at the beginning. Womanly tact, a decorous keeping of her house, love of order and of beauty inspired her with the thought that the arrangements made in the old hotels of Paris for the people of ancient days were not fitted for the use of the enlightened age of the Précieuses. There were no salons in the old hotels; the salon was unknown; therefore there was no room in which to frame the society then in formation. Tallemant tells us that the only houses known at that time were built with a hall upon one side, a room upon the other side, and a staircase in the middle. The salle was a parade-room, a place to pass through, a corridor where no one lingered. People received visitors in the room in which they happened to be when the visitors arrived; at different times they happened to be in different rooms. Very naturally at eating-time they were in rooms where they could sit at meat. There were no rooms devoted to the daily meals. The table on which viands were served was placed in any room large enough to contain the number of persons who were to be[120] entertained. If there were few guests, the table was placed in a small room; when the guests were numerous, they were seated in a large room, or the table, ready served, was carried into any room large enough to hold the company. It was all a matter of chance. Banquets were given in the corridor, in the salle, in the ante-room, or in the sleeping-room,[46] because literary intuition was undeveloped. Madame de Rambouillet was the first to realise that the spirit of conversation is too rare and too delicate a plant to thrive under unfavourable conditions, and that in order to establish conversational groups, a place must be provided in which they who favour conversation may talk at ease. Every one recognises that fact now, and every one ought to recognise it. No one—man or woman—is justified in ignoring the influences of the localities that he or she frequents. It should be generally known that sympathies will not group, that the current of thought will not flow freely when a table is unfavourably placed for the seating of society expected to converse.

Three hundred years ago the creator of the first French salon discovered this fact, and her discovery marked a date in the history of our social life.

Mme. de Rambouillet owned a dilapidated mansion standing between the Tuileries and the courtyard of the Louvre, near the site of the now existing Pavillon de Rohan.[47] She had determined to rebuild[121] the house, and no one could draw a plan suited to her ideas. Her mind was incessantly busy with her architectural scheme, and one evening when she had been sitting alone deep in meditation she cried out! "Quick! A pencil! paper! I have found a way to build my house."[48] She drew her plan at once, and the arrangement was so superior to all known architectural designs that houses were built according to "the plans of Mme. de Rambouillet all over France." Tallemant says:

Until that time the interiors of houses had been painted red or tan colour. Mme. de Rambouillet was the first to adopt another colour and her innovation gave the "Blue Room" its name. The famous Blue Room in which the seventeenth century acquired the even and correct tone of conversation was disposed with a skilful and scientific tact which has survived the rack of three hundred years of changes, and to-day it stands as the perfect type of a temple fully adequate to the exigencies of intellectual intercourse.

In it all spaces were measured and the seats were systematically counted and distributed to the best advantage; there were eighteen seats; neither more nor less. Screens shut off certain portions of the room and facilitated the formation of intimately confidential groups; flowers perfumed the air; objects of art caressed the vision, and, taken all together, so perceptible a spirit of the sanctuary enshrining thought was present that the habitués of the Salon de Rambouillet always spoke of it as "the Temple." Even La Grande Mademoiselle, the irrepressible, felt the subtle influences of that calm retreat of the mind, and when she entered the Blue Room she repressed her Cossack gestures and choked back her imprecations. She knew that she could not evade the restraining influence of the hushed tranquillity which pervaded "the Temple," and she drooped her sparkling eyes, and accepted her discipline with the universally prevalent docility. In her own words, Mme. de Rambouillet was "adorable."

According to the inscription on a stone preserved in the Musée Cluny the Hôtel de Rambouillet was rebuilt in 1618. The mistress of the house consumed ten industriously filled years constituting, installing, and habituating the intellectual groups of her salon; but when she had perfected her arrangements she maintained them in their splendour until the Fronde put an end to all intellectual effort.

When the Hôtel de Rambouillet was in its apogee La Grande Mademoiselle was in the flush of early youth. She was born in 1627. Mme. de Sévigné was Mademoiselle's elder by one year.

When we consider the social and intellectual condition of the times we must regard many features of the enterprise of "fair Arthénice" as wonderful, but its most characteristic feature was the opportunity and the advancement it accorded to men of letters. Whatever "literary" men were elsewhere, they were received as the equals of the nobility in the Salon de Rambouillet. Such a sight had never been seen! Superior minds had always been regarded leniently. They had had their periods of usefulness, when the quality had been forced to recognise their existence, but the possessors of those minds had been treated—well, to speak clearly, they had been treated as they had expected to be treated; for how could the[124] poor fellows have hoped for anything better when they knew that they passed two thirds of their time with spines humbly curved and with palms outstretched soliciting equivocal complaisancies, or inviting écus, or struggling to secure a seat at the lower end of dinner tables by means of heartrending dedications?

Alack! how many Sarrazins and Costars there were to one Balzac, or to one d'Urfé! how numerous were the natural parasites, piteous leeches! whose wit went begging for a discarded bone! How many were condemned by their vocation to die of hunger;—and there was no help for them! Had their talent been ten times greater than it was it would have been equally impossible for them to introduce dignity into their existence. There were no journals, no reviews where an author could present his stuff or his stories for inspection; no one had ever heard of authors' rights; and however successful a play, the end of the dramatist was the same; he was allowed no literary property. How then could he live if not by crooked ways and doubtful means? If a certain amount of respect, not to say honour, were due to his profession, by what means could he acquire his share of it? Any yeoman—the first country squire—could, when so it pleased him, have a play stricken from the roll; if so it pleased him could have the rod laid over the author's back, amidst the plaudits of the contingent which we should call the claque. Was it any wonder that authors were pedants to the marrow of their[125] bones when pedantry was the only paying thing in their profession? Writers who chanted their own praises did good unto themselves and enjoyed the reputation of the erudite. They were regarded as professors of mentality, they reflected credit upon the men who lodged and nourished them. For that reason,—and very logically,—when a man knew that he was being lodged and nourished for the sake of his bel esprit if there was any manhood in him he entered heart and soul into his pretensions; and sleeping or waking, night or day, from head to foot, and without one hour of respite, played the part of "man of letters"; he mouthed his words, went about with brows knit, talked from his chest, and, in short, did everything to prove to the world that he was wise beyond his generation; his every effort was bent to manifest his ability; and his manners, his costumes, and his looks, all proved him to be a student of books. And when this was proven his master—the man who lodged and nourished him—was able to get his full money's worth and to stand up before the world revealed in the character of benefactor and protector of Belles Lettres. In our day things wear a different aspect. The author has reached his pinnacle, and in some cases it may even be possible that his merits are exaggerated.

Knowing this, it is difficult for us to appreciate the conditions existing when the Salon of the Hôtel de Rambouillet was opened. We know that there is nothing essentially admirable in putting black marks on white paper, and we know that a[126] good shoemaker is a more useful citizen than can be made of an inferior writer, and knowing these facts, and others of the same sort, we can hardly realise that only three hundred years ago there were honest boys who entered upon the career of Letters when they might have earned a living selling tallow.

The Hôtel de Rambouillet regulated the scale of social values and diminished the distance between the position accorded to science, intellect, and genius and the position accorded to birth. For the first time within the memory of Frenchmen Men of Letters tasted the sweets of consideration; their eloquence was not forced back, nor was it drawn out by the imperious demands of hunger; authors were placed on a footing with their fellow-men; they were still expected to discourse, but as their wit was the result of normal conditions, it acquired the quality of order and the flavour of nature. In the Blue Room the weary writers were allowed to rest. They were not called upon to give proofs of their intellect; they were led gently forward, placed at a distance that made them appear genial, persuaded to discard their dogmatism, and by inferences and subtle influences taught to be indulgent and to distribute their wisdom with the philosophical civility which was then called "the spirit of the Court,"—and the term was a just one; a great gulf lay between the incisive rushing expression of the thought of Condé, the pupil of Mme. de Rambouillet, and the laboured[127] facitiæ of Voiture and the Academician, Jacques Esprit, although Voiture and Esprit were far in advance of their predecessors. Under the beneficent treatment of the Hôtel de Rambouillet the Men of Letters gradually lost their stilted and pedagogic airs. The fair reformers of "the circle" found many a barrier in their path; the gratitude of the pedants was not exhilarating, the leopards' spots long retained their colour,—Trissotin proved that,—but by force of repeated "dippings" the dye was eventually compelled to take and the stains that it left upon the fingers of "fair Arthénice" were not disfiguring.

A glance at Racine or at Boileau shows us the long road traversed after the Salon de Rambouillet instituted the recognition of merit regardless of rank and fortune. Love of intellectual pleasures, courage, and ambitious determination had ordered a march resumed after forced halts; and at last, when the ardent innovators reached the port from which they were to launch their endeavour, recognition of merit had become a custom, and the first phase of democratic evolution was an accomplished fact. Our own day shows further progress; the same evolution in its untrammelled freedom tends to cast suspicion upon personal merit because it unhinges the idea of equality.

"All Paris" of that day filed through the portals of the Hôtel de Rambouillet and passed in review before the Blue Room. Malherbe was one of the[128] most faithful attendants of the Salon whose Laureate he remained until he died (1628). Yet according to Tallemant and to many others he was boorish and uncivil. He was abrupt in conversation, but he wrote excellent poetry and never said a word that did not reach its mark. When he visited the Salon he was very amiable; and his grey beard made him a creditable dean for the circle of literary companions. He wrote pretty verses in honour of Arthénice, he was diverting and instructive—in a word, he made himself necessary to the Salon. But he was too old to change either his character or his appearance, and his attempts to conform to the fashions of the hour made him ridiculous. He was "a toothless gallant, always spitting."

He had been in the pay of M. de Bellegarde, from whom he had received a salary of one thousand livres, table and lodging, and board and lodging for one lackey and one horse. He drew an income from a pension of five hundred écus granted by Marie de Médicis; he was in possession of numerous gratuities, perquisites, and "other species of gifts" which he had secretly begged by the sweat of his brow. Huet, Archbishop of Avranche, wrote: "Malherbe is trying his best to increase his fortunes, and his poetry, noble though it be, is not always nobly employed." M. d'Yveteaux said that Malherbe "demanded alms sonnet in hand." The greedy poet had one rival at the Hôtel de Rambouillet; a very brilliant Italian addicted to flattery, whom[129] all the ladies loved. Women were infatuated by him, as they are always infatuated by any foreign author—be he good or bad! Marini—in Paris they called him "Marin"—conversed in long sentences joined by antitheses. In his hours of relaxation when his thoughts were supposed to be in literary undress, he called the rose "the eye of the springtide."[50] At the time of which I now speak he was labouring upon a poem of forty-five thousand verses, entitled Adonis. Every word written or uttered by him was calculated to produce its effect. "The Circle," to the disgust of Malherbe, lay at the feet of the Italian pedant, swooning with ecstasy. "Marin's" influence over the first Salon of France was deplorable, and a contemporary chronicler recorded his progress with evident dejection [51]; "In time he relieved the country of his presence; but he had remained in it long enough to deposit in fruitful soil the germs of his factitious preciosity."

Chapelain was of other metal. He began active life as a teacher. M. de Longueville, who was the first to appreciate his merits, granted him his first pension (two thousand livres). Chapelain was fond of his work, a natural writer, industrious, and frugal. He went into retirement, lived upon his little pension, and brought forth La Pucelle. De Longueville was delighted by the zeal and the talent of his protégé and he added one thousand livres to his pension. Richelieu also granted Chapelain a pension (one thousand livres) and when Mazarin came[130] to power he supplemented the gift of his predecessor by a pension of five hundred écus.

It was not a common thing for authors to make favourable arrangements with a publisher, but Chapelain had made excellent terms for that epoch. La Pucelle had sold for three thousand livres. He (Chapelain) was in easy circumstances, but his unique appearance excited unique criticisms. He was described as "one of the shabbiest, dirtiest, most shambling, and rumpled of gallows-birds, and one of the most affectedly literary characters from head to heels who ever set foot in the Blue Room." It was said he was "a complete caricature of his idea." Though Mme. de Rambouillet was accustomed to the aspect of Men of Letters, she was struck dumb when Chapelain first appeared. As his mind was not visible, she saw nothing but an ugly little man in a pigeon-breast satin habit of antique date, covered with different kinds of ill-assorted gimp. His boots were not matched (each being eccentric in its own peculiar way). On his head was an old wig and over the wig hovered a faded hat. Mme. de Rambouillet regained her self-command and decided to close her eyes to his exterior. His conversation pleased her, and before he had left her presence he had impressed her favourably. In truth Chapelain merited respect and friendship. He was full of delicacy of feeling, extremely erudite, and impassioned in his love for things of the mind. His keen, refined, critical instinct had made him an authority on all[131] subjects. His correspondence covered all the literary and learned centres of Europe, and he was consulted as an oracle by the savants of all countries. He was interested in everything. His mind was singularly broad, modest, frank, and open to conviction; and while his nature was essentially French, his mental curiosity, with its innumerable outstretching and receptive channels, made him a representative of cosmopolitan enlightenment.

Chapelain was one of the pillars of the Salon,—or, to speak better, he was the pendentive of the Salon's literary architecture. After a time repeated frequentation of the Salon amended his "exterior" to some extent. He changed his fanciful attire for the plain black costumes worn by Vadius and by Trissotin, but his transformation was accomplished invisibly, and during the transition period he did not cease to be shabby and of a suspiciously neglected aspect, even for one hour. "I believe," said Tallemant, "that Chapelain has never had anything absolutely new."

Ménage, another pillar of the Salon de Rambouillet, was one of the rare literary exceptions to the rule of the solid provincial bourgeoisie. He was the rara avis of his country, and not only a pedant but the pedant par excellence, the finished type of the "litterateur" who "sucks ink and bursts with pride at his achievement." He was always spreading his feathers and bristling like a turkeycock if he was not appreciated according to his estimate of himself. From him descended some[132] of the "literary types" still in existence, who cross-question a man in regard to what he knows of their literary "work." No matter what people were talking about, Ménage would interrupt them with his patronising smile and "Do you remember what I said upon that subject?" he would ask. Naturally no one remembered anything that he had written, and when they confessed that they had forgotten he would cry out all sorts of piquancies and coarseness. Every one knew what he was. Molière used him as a model for Vadius, and the likeness was striking. He was dreaded, and people loved literature to madness and accepted all its excrescences before they consented to endure his presence. "I have seen him," said Tallemant, "in Mme. de Rambouillet's alcove cleaning the insides of his teeth with a very dirty handkerchief, and that was what he was doing during the whole visit." He considered his fine manners irresistible. He pursued Mme. de Rambouillet, bombarding her incessantly with declarations. A pernicious vanity was one of his chief failings. It was his habit to give people to understand that he was on intimate terms with women like Mme. de Lafayette and Mme. de Sévigné; but Mme. de Sévigné did not permit him to carry his boasts to Paradise. One day after she had heard of his reports she invited him to accompany her alone in her carriage. She told him that she was "not afraid that any one would gossip over it." Ménage, whose feelings were outraged by her contempt, burst into a flood[133] of reproaches. "Get into my carriage at once!" she answered. "If you anger me I will visit you in your own house!"[52]

People tolerated Ménage because he was extraordinarily wise, and because his sense of justice impelled him to admirably generous deeds. The Ministers, Mazarin and Colbert, always sent to him for the names of the people who were worthy of recompence, and Ménage frequently nominated the men who had most offended him. Justice was his passion. Under the vulgar motley of the pedant lay many excellent qualities, among them intense devotion to friends. Throughout his life he rendered innumerable services and was kind and helpful to many people. Ménage had a certain amount of money, nevertheless he gave himself into the hands of Retz, and Retz lodged and nourished him as he lodged and nourished his own lackey. Ménage lived with Retz, berating him as he berated every one; and Retz cared for him, endured his fits of anger, and listened to his scoldings ten years. Ménage "drew handsome pecuniary benefits from some other source," saved money, set out for himself, and founded a branch Blue Room in his own house. His receptions, which were held weekly on Wednesday, were in high esteem. The people who had free access to good society considered it an honour to be named as his guests.

Quite another story was "little Voiture," a[134] delicate pigmy who had "passed forty years of his life at death's door." He was an invalid even in early youth. When very young he wrote to Mme. de Rambouillet from Nancy:

"My head is handsome enough; I have many grey hairs. My eyes are soft, but a little distraught.... My expression is stupid, but to counterbalance this discrepancy, I am the best boy in the world."[53]

Voiture was called "the dwarf king." He was a charming conversationalist; he was a precursor of the Parisian of the eighteenth century, of whom his winged wit and foaming gayety made him a fair antetype; he was "the life and the soul" of the Hôtel de Rambouillet, and when the ponderous minds had left the Salon, after he had helped the naturally gay ladies to lift the helmet of Minerva from their heads—and the weights from[135] their heels—he taught them the light laughter which sits so well on "airy nothings." But he had his defects, defects so grave that the critics said: "If Voiture were of our condition it would be impossible to endure him!" He was a dangerous little gossip, constantly taking liberties and forcing people to recall him to his place. Though he was a child in size, he was a man of mature years, and the parents and guardians of young girls were forced to watch him, though it is probable that his intentions were innocent enough. One day, when he was on a visit, he attempted to press his lips to the arm of one of the daughters of the house. That time he "caught it on his fingers"; he begged pardon for his sin; but he did not correct his faults; vanity forbade him to do that, and vanity made him very jealous and hot tempered. Mlle. de Scudéry (who was not censorious) called him "untrustworthy." His literature was like his person and his character. Everything that he wrote was delicate, coquettish, and very graceful, but often puerile. His literary taste was not keen; when the Circle sat wrapt in admiration just after Corneille had read them Polyeucte, Voiture hurried to the author's side and told him that he "would better go home and lock that drama up in his bureau drawer."

Toward the end of his life Voiture dyed both hair and beard, and his manner was just what it had been in his youth; he could not realise that he was not a boy; it was said that he was[136] "tiresome, because he did not know how to grow old."

His irritable disposition made him a trying companion, but to his last day he was the "spoiled child" of Madame de Rambouillet and all the society of the Salon; he was gay, simple, boyish, and natural, and the Circle loved him "because he had none of the affected gravity and the importance of the other men of letters, and because his manners were not precise." More than thirty years after his death Mme. de Sévigné recalled "his free wit and his charming ways" with delight. ("So much the worse," she said, "for them who do not understand such things!"[54])

Voiture might have lived independently and dispensed with the favours and the benefits which he solicited. His father was a very successful business man (he dealt in wines), but in those days it was customary for literary men to depend upon other men, and "little Voiture," thinking that it was a part of his glory to take his share of the general cake, profited by his social relations, and stretched his hands out in all directions, receiving such pensions, benefits, and "offices" as were bestowed upon all prominent men of letters. His income was large, and as he was nourished and cared for by Madame de Rambouillet, he had few expenses.

Valentin Conrart, the first perpetual Secretary of the Académie Française, was the most useful, if not the most brilliant member of the Salon; he was[137] the common sense of the Blue Room: the wise and discreet friend to whom the most delicate secrets were fearlessly confided, the unfailing referee to whom the members of the Circle applied for decisions of all kinds, from the question of a debated signification to the pronunciation of a word; naturally he was somewhat pedagogical; incessant correction of the works of others had impressed him with the instincts and the manners of a teacher; to the younger members of the Circle he was a most awe-inspiring wiseacre. Conrart bore the mark of a deep-seated consciousness of Protestantism, and whether he was speaking, walking, or engaged in his active duties it was evident that he was absorbed in reflections concerning his religious origin; people who had seen him when he was asleep affirmed that he wore an alert air of cogitation when wrapt in slumber, and when he was rhyming his little verses to Alphise or to Lycoris his aspect was the same. His attitude was logical: he knew that he was a Protestant; he knew that that fact was a thing that no man could be expected to forget. In 1647 he wrote to a fellow coreligionist [55]: "As the world regards it, what a disadvantage it is to be a Huguenot!" The Académie Française emanated from social meetings held in Conrart's house and the serious association could not have had a more suitable cradle.

It is a pleasure to think of that easy and independent home, where guests were met with outstretched hands, where wisdom was dispensed[138] without thought of recompense. Conrart was generous and just, a loyal and indulgent friend who did good for the love of goodness. The wife of Conrart was an excellent and worthy creature, who received dukes and peers and the ladies of the Court as simply as she received the friends of her youth; she was not a respecter of persons and she saw no reason for embarrassment when the Marquise de Rambouillet wished to dine with her. She took pride in "pastelles," cordials, and other household delicacies, which she made and offered to her husband's friends with her own hands.

Vaugelas was timid and innocent; misfortune was his habit; he had always been unfortunate, and no one expected him to be anything else. He was very poor; he had been stripped of everything (even to the pension given him by the King) as punishment for following Gaston d'Orléans. Everything that he did turned against him. One day when he was in great need Mme. de Carignan told him that she would hire him as tutor; she had two sons whom she aspired to educate according to the methods of the Hôtel de Rambouillet. Naturally the impecunious Vaugelas thanked God for his rescue. When his pupils were presented to him he found that one of them was deaf and dumb, the other was a phenomenal stutterer, barely able to articulate his name. Vaugelas had been so uniformly unfortunate that his woes had created a nervous tension in the minds of the Circle, and every new report of his afflictions called forth an[139] outburst of hysterical laughter from his sympathisers. The Hôtel de Rambouillet knew his intrinsic value. Fair Arthénice and her company essayed to bring him forward, and failed; he was bashful, an inveterate listener, obstinately silent; in the Salon he sat with head drooping and with lips half open, eagerly listening to catch the delicately turned phrases of the quality, or to surprise some noble error; a grammatical lapsus stung his keen perceptions, and he was frequently seen writhing as if in agony, no one knew why. In a word he was worthless in a salon,—and the same must be said of Corneille. Corneille felt that he was not brilliant, and he never attended the Salon unless he had written something new; he read his plays to "the Circle" before he offered them to the publishers. Men of genius are not always creditable adjuncts to a salon; Corneille was known in the fine world as "that fellow Corneille." As far as his capacity for furnishing the amount of amusement which all men individually owe it to their fellows to provide is concerned, it is enough to say that he was one of the churchwardens in his parochial district; this fact, like the accident of birth, may pass as a circumstance extenuating his involuntary evil. Speaking of the Salon la Bruyère wrote: "Corneille, another one who is seen there, is simple, timid, and—when he talks—a bore; he mistakes one word for another, and considers his plays good or bad in proportion to the money he gains by them. He does not[140] know how to recite poetry, and he cannot read his own writing."

In a club of pretty women ten Corneilles would not have been worth one Antoine Godeau. Godeau was as diminutive in his verse as in his person; but he was a fiery fellow and a dashing gallant, always in love. When he was studying philosophy the German students in his boarding-house so attached themselves to his lively ways that they could not live away from him. The gravest of the bookworms thought that they could study better in his presence, and his chambers presented the appearance of a class-room. He sat enthroned at his table, and the Germans sat cross-legged around him blowing clouds from their china pipes and roaring with laughter at his sallies. He sang, he rhymed, he drank; he was always cracking his funny jokes. He was born to love, and as he was naturally frivolous, his dulcineas were staked out all over the country awaiting his good pleasure. Presented to the Circle of the Hôtel de Rambouillet when he was very young, he paled the star of "little Voiture." When Voiture was at a distance from Paris Mlle. de Rambouillet wrote to him: "There is a man here now who is a head shorter than you are, and who is, I swear to you, a thousand times more gallant!"

Godeau was a conqueror; he had "entrapped all the successes." Every one was amazed when it was discovered that he was a bishop, and they had barely recovered from their amazement when[141] it was learned that he was not only a bishop but a good bishop. He had other titles to distinction (of one kind or another), "and withal he still remained" (as Sainte Beuve said) "the foppish spark of all that world." The only passport required by the Hôtel de Rambouillet was intellect. The Circle caressed Sarrazin, despite his baseness, his knavery, his ignoble marriages, and his ridiculous appearance, because he was capable of a pleasant repartee when in general conversation. George de Scudéry, a "species of captain," was protected by the Circle because he was an author. Scudéry was intolerable! his brain cells were clogged by vanity, he was humming from morning till night with his head high in the clouds, beating his ancestors about the ears of any one who would listen to him, and prating of his "glory," his tragic comedies, and his epic poem Alaric. He was on tiptoe with delight because he had eclipsed Corneille. The Hôtel de Rambouillet smiled upon Colletet, the clever drunkard who had taken his three servants to wife, one after the other, and who had not talent enough to counterbalance his gipsy squalor. But all passed who could hold a pen. Many a scruple and many a qualm clamoured in vain for recognition when the fair creator of the Circle organised the Salon. Nothing can be created—not even a salon—without some sacrifice, and Mme. de Rambouillet laid a firm hand upon her predilections and made literary merit the only title to membership in the Salon. Every one knew[142] the way to the Hôtel de Rambouillet. Every one but Balzac was seen there. Balzac lived in a distant department (la Charente), so it is probable that he knew Mme. de Rambouillet only by letter, though he is named as an attendant of the Salon. Had the Salon existed in this day it is possible that our moderns, who demand a finer mortar, would have left the coarser pebbles in the screen, but Mme. de Rambouillet closed her eyes, put forth her hand, and as blindly as Justice drew authors out of their obscure corners and placed them on a footing with the fine flower of the Court and the choice spirits of the city, with all that was gay or witty, with all who were possessed of curiosity concerning the things of the mind. She forced the frivolous to habituate themselves to serious things, she compelled the pedants to toss their caps to the thistles, to cast aside their pretensions and their long-drawn-out phrases, and to stand forth as men. No one carried the accoutrements of his authorship into the Blue Room, no one was permitted to play the part of "pedant pedantising"; all was light, rapid, ephemeral; the atmosphere was fine and clear, and to add to the tranquil aspect of the scene, several very youthful ladies (the young daughters of Mme. de Rambouillet and "la pucelle Priande" among others) were permitted to pass like butterflies among the thoughtful groups; their presence completed the illusion of pastoral festivity. Before that time young girls had never mingled freely with their elders.

As mixed as the gatherings were, and as radical as was the social revolution of the Salon, the presence of innocent youth imposed the tone of careful propriety. I am not counting "La Belle Paulet" as an innocent young girl, though she too was of the Salon. Paulet was called "the lioness" because of the ardent blonde colour of her hair; she was young enough, and amiable even to excess, but she had had too much experience. She was "a bit of driftwood," one of several of her kind whom Mme. de Rambouillet had fished from the vortex, dried, catechised, absolved, and restored to regular conduct and consideration. Neither do I class "the worthy Scudéry" among young girls. She could not have been called "young" at any age. She was (to quote one of her contemporaries) "a tall, black, meagre person, with a very long face, prolix in discourse, with a tone of voice like a schoolmaster, which is not at all agreeable." Although Tallemant drew this picture, its lines are not exaggerated. It is impossible to regard Mlle. de Scudéry as a young girl. When I say that there were young girls in the Salon, I have in mind the daughters of the house, from whom emanated excess of delicacy, precocity, and decadence, Julie d'Angennes, for whom was created "the garland of Julie," who became Mme. Montausier, Angélique de Rambouillet,—the first of de Grignan's three wives,—and Mlle. de Bourbon, who married de Longueville, and at a later day was known as the heroine of the Hôtel-de-Ville. We must not imagine that a[144] reception at the Hôtel de Rambouillet was a convocation like a seance at the Institute of France. At such an assembly a de Sévigné, a Paulet, a Lafayette would have been out of place, nor would they have consented to sit like students in class discussing whether it were better to say avoine and sarge (the pronunciation given by the Court) or aveine and serge (the pronunciation used by the grain-handlers in the hay-market). Neither would it have been worth while to collect such spirits had the sole object been a discussion of the last new book, or the last new play; but literary and grammatical questions were rocks in the seas on which the brilliant explorer of the Blue Room had set sail and on the rocks she had planted her buoys. She navigated sagaciously, taking the sun, sounding and shaping her course to avoid danger. "Assaults of eloquence," however important, were cut short before they resembled the lessons of the schoolroom. Before the innovation of the Salon, the critics had dealt out discipline with heavy hands. We are confounded by the solemnity with which Conrart informed Balzac of a "tournament" between Voiture and Chapelain on the subject of one of Ariosto's comedies, when "decisions" were rendered with all the precision of legal sentences by "the hermit of Angoumois."[56] So manifest a waste of energy proved that it was time for the world's people to interfere, to restrain the savants from taking to heart things which were not worth their pains.

The authors produced their plays or their poems and carried their manuscripts to the Hôtel de Rambouillet, where they read them in the presence of the company, and the Circle listened, approved, criticised, and exchanged opinions. All of Corneille's masterpieces cleared that port in disguise; their creator presenting them as the works of a strange author. When he read Polyeucte the Salon supposed that the drama was the work of a person unknown to them; all listened intently and criticised freely. No one suspected the real author, and when the last word was read, Voiture made haste to warn Corneille that he "would better lock up the play." When the Circle first heard the Cid they acclaimed it, and declared that it was the work of genius. Richelieu objected to it, and the Salon defended it against him. Books and plays were not the only subjects of discussion; in the Blue Room letters from the absent were read to the company, verses were improvised and declaimed, plays were enacted, and delicately refined expressions were sought with which to clothe the sentiment and the passion of love. Great progress was made in the exercise of wit, and at times the Circle, excited by the clash of mind with mind, exhibited the effervescent joy of children at play when fun runs riot in the last moment of recess, before the bell rings to recall them to the schoolroom. At such a time the members of the Circle were marshalled back to order and set down before the savants to contemplate the "ologies." Such was[146] the first period of the reign of the Précieuses, a period whose history La Bruyère gathered from the recitals of the old men of that day.

Voiture and Sarrazin were born for their century, and they appeared just at the time when they might have been expected; had they come forward with less precipitation they would have been too late; it is probable that had they come in our day they would have been just what they were at their own epoch. When they came upon the stage the light, sparkling conversations, the "circles" of meditative and critical groups convened to argue the literary and æsthetic questions of the day, had vanished, with the finely marked differences, the spiritual jests, the coquettish meanings hidden amidst the overshadowing gravity of serious discussion.

The Circle no longer formed little parties admitting only the men who had proved their title to intellect; but the fame of the first Salon de Rambouillet—or, to speak better, the fame of the ideal Salon of the world—still clung to its successor. As children listen to tales told by their grandfathers, the delicate mind of Voiture listened to the story of those first days; Sarrazin the Gross might scoff, but Voiture gloried in the thought that it had all been true; the lights, the music, the merry jests, the spring flowers growing in the autumn, the flashing lances of the spirit, the gay letters from the absent.... And well might he glory! there had, in truth, been one supreme[147] moment in the literary life of France, a moment as rapid, as fleeting as a smile, lost even as it came, never to appear again until long after the pigmy body which enshrined the winged soul that loved to dream of it had turned to dust.

The memory of that first Salon was still so vivid that Saint Simon wrote: "The Hôtel de Rambouillet was the trysting-place of all then existent of knowledge and of wit; it was a redoubtable tribunal, where the world and the Court were brought to judgment."

But the followers of Arthénice did not shrink from mundane pleasures. In the gracious presence of their hostess the young people danced from love of action, laughed from love of laughter, and, dressed to represent the heroes and the heroines of Astrée, or to represent the tradesmen of Paris, went into the country on picnics, and enacted plays for the amusement of their guests, playing all the pranks of collegians in vacation. One day when they were all at the Château de Rambouillet the Comte de Guiche ate a great many mushrooms. In the night one of the gay party stole into his room and "took in" all the seams in his garments. In the morning it was impossible for de Guiche to dress; everything was too narrow to be buttoned; in vain he tugged at the edges of his garments,—nothing would come together; the Comte was racked by anxiety. "Can it be," he asked anxiously, "because[148] I ate too many mushrooms? Can it be possible that I am bloated?" His friends answered that it might well be possible. "You know," said they, "that you ate till you were fit to burst." De Guiche hurried to his mirror, and when he saw his apparently swollen body and the gaps in his clothing, he trembled, and declared that he was dying; as he was livid and about to swoon, his friends, thinking that the jest had gone far enough, undeceived him. Mme. de Rambouillet was very fond of inventing surprises for her friends, but her jests were of a more gallant character. One day while they were at the Château de Rambouillet she proposed to the Bishop de Lisieux, who was one of her guests, to walk into the fields adjoining the château, where there was, as she said, a circle of natural rocks set among great trees. The Bishop accepted her invitation, and history tells us that "when he was so near the rocks that he could distinguish them through the trees, he perceived in various places, as if scattered about—[I hardly know how to tell it]—objects fairly white and glistening! As he advanced it seemed to him that he could discern figures of women in the guise of nymphs. The Marquise insisted that she could not see anything but trees and rocks, but on advancing to the spot they found—Mlle. de Rambouillet and the other young ladies of the house arrayed, and very effectively, as nymphs; they were seated upon the rocks, where they made the most agreeable of pictures."[149] The good fellow was so charmed with the pleasantry that thereafter he never saw "fair Arthénice" without speaking of "the Rocks of Rambouillet."[57] The Bishop de Lisieux was an excellent priest; decorum did not oppose such surprises, even when the one surprised was a bishop. One day when the ladies were disguised to represent shepherdesses, de Richelieu's brother, the Archbishop of Lyons, appeared among them in the dress of a shepherd.

One of the most agreeable of Voiture's letters (addressed to a cardinal)[58] contains an account of a trip that he had made into the country with the Demoiselles de Rambouillet and de Bourbon, chaperoned by "Madame the Princess," mother of the great Condé; Mlle. Paulet (the bit of driftwood) and several others were of the party.

(Here Voiture, who was under obligations to his correspondent, Cardinal de La Valette, represents himself as having wept because the Cardinal was not there. According to Voiture's account he communicated his grief to all the company.)

The fête ended in a display of fireworks, after which the company "took the road" for Paris by the light of twenty flambeaux, singing with all the strength of their lungs. When they reached the village of La Villette they caught up with the violinists, who had started for the city as soon as the dance was ended and before the party left the château. One of the gayest of the company insisted that the violinists should play, and that they should dance right there in the street of the village. It was between two and three o'clock in the morning[152] and Voiture was tired out; he "blessed Heaven" when it was discovered that the violins had been left at La Barre.

We learn from this letter how the companions of the Hôtel de Rambouillet passed their evenings.

In Paris and in the distant provinces there were many imitations of the Salon; the germs of the enterprise had taken root all over France with literary results, which became the subject of serious study. The political consequences of the literary and social innovations claimed less attention. The domestication of the nobility originated in the Salon. When delicacy of manner was introduced as obligatory, the nobleman was in full possession of the rights of power; he could hunt and torture animals and inferior men, he could make war upon his neighbours, he could live in egotistical isolation, enjoying the luxuries bestowed by his seigniory, while the lower orders died of hunger at his door, because his rank was manifested by his freedom from rules which bound classes below his quality. The diversions introduced at the Salon de Rambouillet exacted sacrifice of self to the convenience of others. In the abstract this was an excellent thing, but its reaction was felt by the aristocracy;[153] from restraining their selfishness the gallant courtiers passed on to the self-renunciation of the ancient Crusaders, and when Louis XIV. saw fit (for his own reasons) to turn his nobles into peaceful courtiers and grand barons of the ante-chamber, he found that his work had all been done; it was not possible to convert his warriors into courtiers, for he had no warriors; all the warriors had turned to knights of the carpet; their swords were wreathed with roses, and the ringing notes which had called men to arms had changed to the sighing murmurs of Durandarte; every man sat in a perfumed bower busily employed in making "sonnets to his mistress's eyebrows." Louis XIV. fumed because his Court resembled a salon; the incomparable Arthénice had given the restless cavaliers a taste for fine conversation and innocent pleasures, and by doing so she had minced the King's spoonmeat too fine; the absolute monarch could only modify a transformation accomplished independent of his will.

We have now to determine how much of their false exalted sentiment and their false ambition the princes, the chevaliers of the Fronde, and all the gallants of the quality owed to the dramatic theatre of their day; that estimated, we shall have gained a fair idea of the chief elements of the social body idealised by Corneille,—of all the elements save one, the element of Religion; that was a thing apart, to be considered especially and in its own time.

CHAPTER III

La Grande Mademoiselle and her companions cherished the still existent passion for the theatre, which is a characteristic of the French people. The great received comedians, or actors, in their palaces; the palace had audience-rooms prepared to permit of the presentation of theatrical plays; in the summer, when the social world went into the country, the comedians accompanied or followed them to their châteaux. Society required the diversion of the play when it journeyed either for pleasure or for duty, and play-acting, whatever its quality and whatever the subject of its action, elicited the indulgent satisfaction and the applause that it elicits to-day, be its subject and its quality good or bad. At the end of the sixteenth century, play-actors superseded the magicians who until that time had afforded public amusement; the people hailed the change with enthusiasm; and the innovation prevailed. The courtiers loved the spectacle, and from the beginning of the reign of Louis XIII. the Court and[156] the comedy were inseparable. Louis XIII. had witnessed the play in early infancy. In 1614, when the King and the Court went upon a journey they lingered upon the road between Paris and Nantes six weeks, halting to witness the plays then being given in the cities along their route, and receiving their favourite actors in their own lodgings. The King was less than thirteen years old, yet it is stated in the journal kept by Hérouard, the King's physician, that the child was regaled with theatrical plays throughout his journey. At Tours he was taken to the Abbey of Saint Julian to witness the French comedy given by de Courtenvaut, who lodged at the abbey. At Paris the little King went to the palace with the Queen to see a play given by the pupils of the Jesuit Brothers. At Loudun the King ordered a play, and it was given in his own house; at La Flèche he attended three theatrical entertainments in one day. To quote from the doctor's (Hérouard's) journal:

When Gaston d'Orléans took his young wife to Chantilly immediately after his marriage, he sent for a troupe of comedians, who went to the château[155] with their band and with violins,—"thus," reports a contemporary, "rendering the little journey very diverting." On the occasion already mentioned, when the same Prince conducted his daughter to Tours so that he might present Louison Roger to her, he did not permit the little Princess to languish for the theatre. "Monsieur sent for the comedians," wrote Mademoiselle, "and we had the comedy nearly every day."[60] When Monsieur returned to his château in Blois his troupe followed him. When Mademoiselle returned to the Tuileries (November, 1637) she found a private theatre in every house to which she was invited.

Actors worked without respite; they had no vacations; they played in the French, in the Spanish, and in the Italian languages; and English comedy also, played by English actors, was seen in Paris. Richelieu's theatre in the Hôtel de Richelieu [61] "was provided with two audience halls,—one large, the other small. Both were luxuriously mounted. The decorations and the costumes of the actors displayed such magnificence that the audience murmured with delight."

The Gazette de France, which bestowed nothing but an occasional casual notice upon the royal theatre of the King's palace, dilated admiringly upon the Théâtre de Richelieu and the marvels with which the Cardinal regaled his guests. The Gazette reported the occasion of the presentation[157] of "the excellent comedy written by Sieur Baro," and the ballet which followed it.

Mademoiselle was one of the company, and she received her basket with profound satisfaction. Three days after the first comedy of Baro was played the Court again visited the Cardinal's theatre to witness a second play by the same author. Baro was a well-known literary hack. He had been d'Urfé's secretary and had continued Astrée when d'Urfé laid down his pen. The success of the second representation was phenomenal.

February 19th was a gala day at the Théâtre de Richelieu. A fête was given in honour of the Duke of Parma. First of all they gave a very fine[158] comedy, with complete change of play, with interludes; lutes, spinnets, viols, and violins were played.

The Gazette de France tells us that there was a ballet, and then a supper, at which the guests saw "the fine buffet, all of white silver," which the Cardinal gave to the King some years later. Though the theatre was the chief amusement in 1636, the theatrical representations and ballets, "interlaced by collations" and by interludes, were considered a good deal of dancing and a good deal of play-acting for a priest, even when disseminated over a period of three weeks.

The conclusion of the report in the Gazette proved that Richelieu was conscious of his acts, and that he did not disdain to justify himself. "Without flattering his Eminence," said the Gazette, "it may be said that all which takes place by his orders is always in conformity with reason and with right, and that the duties which he renders to the State never conflict with those that all Christians owe—and which he, in particular, owes—to the Church." Mademoiselle attended all the fêtes, and she was less than ten years old. She, herself, gave a ball and a comedy in honour of the Queen in the palace of the Tuileries.

In that day children in their nurses' arms were taken to see the play. A contemporary engraving depicts the royal family at the theatre in Richelieu's palace. The "hall" is in the form of an immense salon much longer than it is broad; at[159] one end is the stage, raised by five steps; along the walls are two ranks of galleries for the invited guests. The women sit in the lower gallery, the men sit above them; seats have been brought into the centre of the hall, and on them sit Louis XIII. and his family. In the picture Monsieur is sitting on the King's left hand. On Anne of Austria's right hand, in a little arm-chair made for a child, sits the Dauphin, who must have been three, or possibly four, years old at that time. On the right hand of the Queen, beyond the Dauphin, stands a woman holding a great doll-like infant, the brother of the Dauphin.

The playgoing infantine assiduity, the custom of carrying children in swaddling bands to the theatre to witness comedies of every species, good or bad, assured the theatre of a position in public education; the children of the aristocracy drank in the drama with eye and ear—if I dare express myself thus—and at an age when reason was not present to correct the effect of impressions. The repertory of the theatre was one of the most dramatically romantic and sentimental ever known to France and the one of all others best fitted to turn a generation from sound reality to false and fantastic visions.

The general movement of that day may be classed as an aberration due to the fact that the drama was a new pleasure; the inconveniences attendant upon its influences had not been recognised, but it is probable that some of the condemnations uttered by the moralists and by the preachers of the seventeenth[160] century in the name of religion and of decency were called forth by the presence of children at the play; the men who were most bitter in denunciations which amaze us by the excess of their hostility spoke from experience and had reason for their bitterness. The Prince de Conti, the brother of the great Condé, might have furnished unique commentaries on the criticisms of the day, had he cared to recall a treatise which he wrote (The Plays of the Theatre, and Spectacles) when he was emerging from a youth far from edifying.

The treatise was written for the benefit of light-minded people, who saw no harm in playgoing. In the beginning of his work the Prince said: "I hope to prove that comedy in its present condition is not the innocent amusement that it is considered; I hope to prove that a true Christian must regard it as an evil." As his treatise progressed it became explicit; his arraignment was animated by Astrée; he declared that a play free from the sentimentality and the passions of love and from the thoughts and the actions of lovers was not acceptable to the public. Love forms the foundation of the play, and therefore it must be discussed freely from its first principles. Now a play, however fine its dramatic composition may be, can have no other effect than to disgust refined minds and to ruin the reputations of its actors, unless the love on which it is based is represented delicately, and in a tenderly impassioned manner. And as few actors are capable of producing a perfect[161] representation of the most subtle and many-sided of passions, the general effect of our comedy is deteriorating. As its basis and its structure depend upon one single subject, it can have but one subject of interest. Our comedies are considered commendable according to their manners of discussing love; the divers beauties of our dramas consist in their various exposures of the intimate effects of love. Love is the theme, and the mind must either accept it and work upon it or rest unemployed; there is no choice; no other theme is given. When love is not the chief agent, it serves as an irritant to draw out some other passion and to make sensuous display not only possible but cogent, if not imperatively necessary; be the play what it may, love is represented as the "passion ruling the heart." Conti opposed to the popular "corruption of the drama" the grave lessons offered by the great tragedies. Segrais treated the subject in the same way; he said: "During more than forty years nearly all of the subjects of our plays have been drawn from Astrée, and, generally speaking, the dramatists have been satisfied with their work if they have changed to verse the phrases which d'Urfé put in the mouths of his characters in plain prose."

Segrais exaggerated. Astrée did not furnish "nearly all" of the subjects of the plays; but the extraordinary importance of stage love and of stage lovers was drawn from Astrée, and, despite the temporary reaction due to Corneille, Astrée persuaded the great body of French society that there was[162] nothing pathetic in the world but love, and neither our dramatists nor our moralists have been able to break away from an error which singularly circumscribes their art. Love is now the subject of the romance and of the play, as it was in the early days of La Grande Mademoiselle.

Invitations to the Louvre or to the homes of the great were not too easy to procure, and there were many people who never entered the private theatres; but there were two "paying theatres," or theatres to which the public were admitted on paying a fixed price; one of the two houses was the Hôtel de Bourgogne, which stood in the rue Mauconseil, between the rue Montmartre and the rue Saint Denis; the other was the Théâtre du Marais, in the Veille rue du Temple. The Marais was then an out-of-the-way quarter, very dangerous after nightfall. I have not spoken of this place until now, because it was almost impossible for any one in the polite society of which I have written to visit it. No woman dared to enter the Marais unless she lived there. The woman of quality could not even think of entering it except on gala days, when the Court of France went in a body to visit the play-actors in their own quarter. At ordinary times the Hôtel de Bourgogne "was neither a good place nor a safe place." In form and arrangement the audience hall was like the hall of the Théâtre de Richelieu; two galleries, one above the other, ran the whole length of the walls, and in certain places the walls were connected with the gallery to form[163] stalls or boxes. The parterre was a vast space in which people watched the play standing. In that part of the theatre there were no seats. An hour, or perhaps two hours, before the play began the great unclean space was filled with the most boisterous and ungovernable representatives of the dregs of Paris and with all the active members of the lesser classes [62]: students, pages, lackeys, artisans, drunkards, the scum of the canaille, and professional thieves; and there, on the floor of the parterre, they gambled, lunched, drank, and fought each other with stones, with swords, or with any weapon which came to hand; and as they gratified their appetites or abused their neighbours, all strove in the way best known to them to protect their purses and to keep the thieves from carrying off their cloaks. The air resounded with shouts, shrieks, songs, and obscene apostrophes. Contemporary writers regarded everything as fit for the record, and therefore in all our researches we come upon heartrending evidences of inenarrable depravity. The charivari of the assistants of the pit continued throughout the performance, ending only when the vociferous throngs were turned into the streets so that the theatre might be locked for the night. At their quietest the spectators of the parterre were noisy and obstreperous. To quote one of their chroniclers [63]:

"In their most perfect repose they continued to talk, to whistle, and to scream without ceasing; they did not care at all to hear what the comedians were saying." We differ from the chroniclers as to this last opinion; it is probable that they cared only too much; it was to please the rabble that abominably gross farces were played in the paying theatres. Tragedy was relished only by the higher classes.

An eye-witness, the Abbé d'Aubignac,[64] wrote: "We see that tragedies are liked better than comedies at the Court of France; while among the lesser people comedies, and even farces and unclean buffooneries are considered more amusing than tragedies." The same d'Aubignac wrote in or about the year 1666: "Fifty years ago an honest woman dared not go to the theatre."[65] Between the universally ardent desire to enjoy the fashionable form of pleasure and the efforts to make the stage less licentious the purification of the drama was accomplished.

The increasing delicacy of the public taste demanded a reform, and in deference to it the moral atmosphere of both of the popular theatres was renewed at the same time; a new and decent repertory was adopted, and the foul programme of the past was cast away. Popular feeling acclaimed the change and hastened the accomplishment of the reformation.

At the time when the Cid[66] was played the lower classes had ceased to rule the paying theatres; the masses went out of Paris for their pleasure; to the fairs of Saint Laurent and Saint Germain, and to the entertainments on the Pont-Neuf or the Place Dauphine; they crowded around the trestled planks, they hung about the stands of the charlatans, the buffoons, and the trick players. The paying theatres were filled by the upper middle classes. Women who had not dared to go to the play in 1620 attended the theatre of the Hôtel de Bourgogne as freely as they would have attended or as they did attend the Luxembourg.[67] The fine world of the quality had found its way to the theatre of the Marais; the Cid was in course of representation when the stage of the Marais and the courtiers thronged to the obscure quarter to witness its marvels. The Cid was played in the private theatres as well as in the Hôtel de Bourgogne. M. Lanson tells us that the comedians were summoned to the Louvre three times and twice to the Hôtel de Richelieu, but the great were too impatient to wait for the play to come to them, they ran to meet it; every one longed to see it not at a future time but on the instant, and therefore they flocked to the Veille rue du Temple.

In 1637 (18th January) Mondory, the actor, who played the part of Rodrigue, wrote to Balzac:

All women could attend the play at will; and they all ardently wished to attend it, not once but always. They who saw it at Court, or at the houses of the great, were none the less anxious to frequent the paying theatres, where, though the scene had been purged of many of its abuses, the spectacle differed essentially from that presented to the great. Many distinct peculiarities of the old plays had been retained; added to that was the novelty of the place, and the lack of courtly ceremony, and the diversion afforded two different spectacles: the play and the audience. Like the children of the great, the wives and the daughters of the inferior classes abused their privilege and visited the theatre incessantly and the rich and the poor suffered from the influences of the superficial amusement. The play tended to deceive the mind, and to give a false impression of the aims and the needs of life. The majority of women were ignorant; they had never learned anything. If they could read they read works of fiction, and their literature was calculated to foster illusions. Exaltedly idealistic as Astrée had been, the writings of La Calprenède, de Gomberville, and others of their school were still more sentimentally romantic; compared[167] with his successors, Honoré d'Urfé was a realist. The influence of the theatre was shown in the intellectual development of woman, the imagination of all classes was encouraged, the more useful mental agents were neglected, and the minds of the people were visibly weak and ill-balanced; the general impulse was to seek adventures on any road and at any price. The thirst for unknown sensations was a fully developed desire in their day, so we cannot with justice class it as a "curiosity" emanating from the inventive imaginations of the decadents.

The writer, Pierre Costar, wilfully lingered three weeks in a tertian fever so that he might enjoy the sickly dreams which accompanied the recurrent paroxysms of the disease. In our day Pierre Costar would be an opium-eater, or a morphinomaniac.

La Grande Mademoiselle owed much of her turn of mind to the dramatic plays that she had watched from infancy. I doubt if she was given any lessons in history, or that she had any lessons of the kind before she reached her twenty-fifth year, when she acquired a taste for reading. All that she knew of history had been gleaned by her from the tragedies that she had seen at the theatre, and as she was refractory to the sentiment of Astrée, it cannot be inferred that she had learned much from d'Urfé; so it may be said that Corneille was her teacher in all branches of learning, that no one of that time was in deeper debt to the influence that he exerted over minds, and[168] that no one so plainly manifested his influence. From the education afforded by Corneille came good and evil mingled. As we follow the course of Mademoiselle's life we are forced to admit that however high and noble were the ideas sown broadcast by Corneille, they were not always devoid of inconveniences when they fell among people whose experimental knowledge and practicality were inferior to their susceptibility to impressions.

In the years which followed the advent of the Cid Corneille was the literary head of France; he had discovered the French scene through the influence of d'Urfé, but his power was his own, and it was an inherent power; he was the creator of a tendency.

The unclean farce, which delighted the lockpickers and the gamblers of the Paris of those days, has no place here, because it has no place in literature. When "good company" invaded the paying theatres the farce followed the canaille and took its place upon the trestled stages of the Pont-Neuf. The farce played a part of its own, in a world unknown to Mademoiselle; but the pastoral demands our attention, not only because it was in high favour in Mademoiselle's society, but because Corneille exerted his influence against it.

In the pastoral, love took possession of the stage, as it had been announced to do, in the play which opened the way for its successors, Tasso's Aminta.[68] In the prologue the son of Venus appeared[169] disguised as a shepherd, and declaimed, for the benefit of the other shepherds, a discourse which, little by little, became the programme of all imaginative literature:

Modern poets and novelists do not insist that all men are equal in passion as they are equal in suffering and in death; but the people of the nineteenth century fully believed in such equality. George Sand expresses her real feelings in La Petite Fadette; and Pouvillon meant all that he said in Les Antibel. The contemporaries of Louis XIII. looked askance upon such theories; in their opinion the love, like the suffering, of the inferior was below the conception of the quality, a thing as hard for the noble mind to grasp as the invisible movement of life in an atom; to be ignorant of the needs, the hopes, the anguish of inferiors was one of the first proofs of exalted nobility. But the nobles knew that the shepherds of the dramatic stage were gentlemen travestied, and, therefore, they bestowed the interest formerly accorded to the heroes of the heroic drama upon the woes of the mimic Celadons of the comedy. Love[170] would have become the dramatic pivot had it not been for Corneille's plays; d'Urfé's characters were "sighing like a furnace" when Corneille took command and gave the posts of honour to "the manly passions"; but not even Corneille could reach such a point at a bound; he attained it by strenuous effort. He began his literary career by writing comedies in verse. Before he produced the Cid, between the years 1629 and 1636, he wrote six plays; an inferior serio-comedy, Clitandre; or, Innocence Delivered, and a tragedy, Médée. To quote M. Lemaître:

Even when engaged in the most absorbing of[171] intrigues his lovers pretend that they are their own masters, and that they feel only such sentiments as they have elected to feel. At that early day—when Médée and Clitandre were written—the culte of the will had germinated; and time proved that it was predestined to become the chief director of Corneille's work. In La Place Royale Alidor says of Clitandre[70]:

In Corneille's plays young girls are raised to believe that they can love, or cease to love, at will; and their pride is interested. Ambition demands that they remain in command of their affections. When old Pleirante perceives that his daughter Célidée is fond of Lysandre he lets her know that he has divined her secret and that he approves of her choice, but Célidée answers proudly:

Another ingenuous daughter answers, in an offended tone, when her mother intimates that she seems to be in love with Alcidon, that she

The public approved this language. It commended people who married their daughters without consulting their hearts. And who shall say that this way was not the one best fitted for their times? Faith added to necessity engenders miracles, and miracles are what morality demands.

In the great world, the world of the great and the noble, love was mentioned only as Corneille regarded it in his plays. Every one was in love,—or feigned to be in love; on all hands were heard twitterings as of birds in the springtime; but the pretty music ceased when marriage was suggested, for no one had thought of founding a domestic hearth on a sentiment as personal and as ephemeral as love. It was understood that the collective body came first, that the youth—man or maid—belonged to the family, not to self. Contrary to our way of looking at things, it was considered meet and right for the individual to subject himself to a species of public discipline in everything relating to the essential actions of private life; the demand for the public discipline of individuals was based upon the[173] interests of the community. This law—or social tyranny, if you will—covered marriage, and upon occasion Parliament did police duty and enforced it. Parliament forbade the aged Mme. de Pibrac to marry a seventh time—although her six marriages had all been accomplished under normal conditions—because it was supposed that a seventh marriage might entail ridicule. The reason given by Parliament when it forbade Mme. de Limoges to permit her daughter to marry a very honourable man of whom she was fond, and who was supposed to be fond of her, was this: that her guardian and tutor "did not approve of the marriage." The history of this subject of marriage shows us that our great grandmothers did not bear malice against destiny; they were truly Cornéliennes in their conviction that a decorous control of the will constrained the sentiments of an high-born soul, and they married their daughters without scruple, and without anxiety, as freely and as carelessly as they had married themselves. Religion was always close at hand, waiting to staunch the wounds which social exigencies and family selfishness made in the hearts of the unfortunate lovers.

The understanding between Corneille and his readers was perfect; all that he did pleased the playgoers, and when, as he was searching for what we should call "the realistic," he came upon the idea that he might tempt the public taste by presenting a play with a Spanish setting, his critics were well pleased. He wrote the Cid and it was[174] an unqualified success; but its exotic sentiments and the generous breadth of its morals excited vigorous protestations; the piece was met by resistance like that which greeted the appearance of Ibsen's Doll's House.

These lines are truth itself; the Cid was an immoral play because it was the apotheosis of passionate love, whose rights it proclaimed at the expense of the most imperious duties. There was enough in the Cid to shock any social body holding firmly fixed opinions adverse to the public exhibition of intimate personal feelings; there were such bodies—the Academy was one of them—they made their own conditions, and the license of the prevailing morals was insignificant to them. The national idea of the superior rights of the family was well-grounded, and when the Academy reproached Chimène because she was "too sensible of the feelings of the lover—too conscious of her love ... too unnatural a daughter"—it did no more than echo a large number of voices.

Until he wrote the Cid Corneille was more exigeant[175] than the Academy. The only thing required of lovers by the Academy was that they, the lovers, should govern their feelings and love, or not love, according to the commands of their families or their notaries. The Academy asked nothing of them but to control their actions regardless of their hearts; surely that was indulgence; beyond that there remained but one thing more,—to suppress the mind.

The example was especially pernicious, because the genius of the author had rendered it seductive, and because the part which Chimène played assured her of the sympathy of the audience. Corneille was very sensitive to the criticisms of the Academy, and after the Cid appeared something more serious than synthetic form was placed under the knives of the literary doctors; either because the denunciations of his friends bore fruit, or because, in the depths of his heart, he harboured the[176] feelings which the unbridled ardour of the Cid had aroused in the Academy and in the other honest people "who upbraided him, he retreated from the field of sentimental romanticism, and turned his talents in another direction.... Nature's triumph over a social convention was never given another occasion to display its graces or to celebrate its truths under his auspices and the love passion was not heard of again until it came forth in Horace (Camille), to be very severely dealt with."

We are led to believe that had Corneille met the subject of the Cid fifteen years later, he would never have granted Chimène and Rodrigue a marriage license.[71] Nor is this all. Having reformed, he was as fanatical as the rest of the reformers; having become Catholic, he was more Catholic than the Pope. He disclaimed love, and would have none of it; he affirmed that it was unworthy of a place in tragedy. In his own words, written some time later:

Having chosen his bone in this high-handed fashion, Corneille gnawed at it continually; he could never get enough of it. Love had triumphed in the Cid, but that day was past; in Horace it struggled for existence; in Polyeucte it was vanquished, though not before it had opposed sturdy resistance. It was weak enough in Cinna. After the arrival of Pompée it gave up the struggle, though it was heard piteously murmuring at intervals. When Pompée appeared the ladies disappeared from the drama as if by magic; hardly a woman worthy of the name could be found in literature: a few beings there were draped with the time-worn title, but they were as virile as wild Indians.

Nothing could be seen but ambition, blood, thirst for power, and Fury, cup-bearer to the God of Vengeance. There was no more love-passion, the manly passions ramped upon the stage like lions, and, with few exceptions, all, male and female, were monsters of the Will.

Long years passed before anything but the Will was heard of. After a long reign the "monsters" disappeared. But they have reappeared in the literature of our century. The worship of the Will, which originated with Corneille, was recently revived by Nietzsche, whose famous "Sur-homme" bears a very strong family resemblance to the Cornélien heroes. "Life," said Nietzsche, "is that[178] which ought always to surpass and to exceed itself." Corneille's personages kept all the springs of their will well in hand. They intended to succeed, to surpass, and to get ahead of themselves if the thing was to be done; and when they were convinced that to surpass themselves was impossible their future looked very dark, and they sold their lives at cut prices,—or threw them in for nothing—letting them go to any one who would carry them away. In the fifth act of the play Horace became very anxious to die because, as he expressed it, he feared that, after what he had done, he should be unable to "surpass himself."

The analogy between the "Sur-homme" and the Cornélien heroes does not end here; logic would not permit that; nothing weakens and enslaves the firm and exalted will as effectually as the sentiment of pity, and both Corneille and Nietzsche enfranchised their ideal humanity. Corneille makes some one assure Horace that there is no great merit in exposing himself to death, but that concession to weakness is of an early period; the advanced man—the man out of the common order—is easily recognised by the fact that he does not[179] hesitate to bring the greatest sufferings upon the beings who are dearest to him.

The lines which follow were written by Nietzsche, and they seem a paraphrase of the discourse of Horace:

Corneille's contempt for pity was shared by his contemporaries, and so were his views of marriage as expressed in his first comedies. The seigniors whom he met at the Hôtel de Rambouillet would have blushed to feel compassion. They left the womanish weakness of pity to the inferior beings of the lower orders. The great had always been convinced that elevation in rank raised man above the consciousness of the sufferings of beings of an inferior order; and in the day of Corneille they were fully persuaded that noblemen ought to find higher reasons for justice and for generosity than the involuntary emotions which we of this later day have learned to recognise as symptoms of "nervous disturbance."

The manly characters in Corneille's heroic comedies never lower themselves to the plane of the common people, nor to a plane where they can think as the people think. Corneille was "of the Court" by all his feelings and by all his prejudices, and he shared Mademoiselle's belief that there is a natural difference between the man of quality and the man below the quality, because generous virtues are mingled with the blood which runs in noble veins, while the blood of the man of lower birth is mingled with lower passions. Being a true courtier, Corneille believed that above the two varieties of the human kind—the quality and the lesser people—Providence set the order of Princes who are of an essence apart, elect, and quasi-divine.

In Don Sancho d'Aragon Carlos did his best to prove that he was the son of a fisherman. His natural splendour gave the lie to his pretence.[181] "Impossible that he could have sprung from blood formed by Heaven of nothing but clay."

He discovers that Carlos is the son of a King of Aragon. His extraordinary merit is explained and consistency is satisfied. On the whole Corneille did nothing but develop the maxims and idealise the models offered to his observation on all sides; as much may be said of the plots of his great plays. His subjects were suggested by the events of the day. Had there been no Mme. de Chevreuse and no conspiracies against Richelieu there could have been no Cinna. And it is possible that there might not have been such a work as Polyeucte had there been no Jansenism.[72]

Corneille did not understand actuality as we understand it. His tragedy is never a report of real occurrences, that is evident. But he was besieged, encompassed, possessed, by the life around him, and it left impressions in his mind which worked out and mingled with every subject upon which he entered. He was guided by his impressions,—though he did not know it,—and by their influence he was enabled to find a powerful tragedy in a few[182] indifferent lines dropped by a mediocre historian, or by an inferior narrator of insignificant events. His surroundings furnished him with precise representations, made real to his mind by the vague abstractions of history. In the forms and conditions of the present he saw and felt all the past.[73]

His constant contact with the world of his times favoured the action of his mind upon the minds of his auditors. He exhibited to them their passions, their thoughts, their feelings, their different ways of looking upon social duty, upon politics, and upon the part played, or to be played, by the aristocracy in the general movement. The people of Paris loved the play because it exhibited openly, in different, but always favourable lights, everything in which they had any interest. In it they saw their own life, their aims, their needs, their longing to be great and admirable in all things.[74] They saw depicted all that they had dreamed of being, all that they had wished to be; and something more vital than love of literature animated their transports and lighted the fond glances fixed on the magic mirror reflecting the ideals they so ardently caressed. The people listened to Corneille's plays and trembled as they now tremble at the sound of La Marseillaise. It has been said that they did not understand Racine; if they did not, their lack of comprehension was natural. Racine was of another generation, and he was not in sympathy with his forerunner. Mme. de[183] Sévigné was accused of false judgment in her criticism of Bejazet,[75] but she also was of another school. She had little sympathy for Racine's heroes. She understood Corneille's heroes, and could not listen to his verses without the tremor of the heart which we all feel when something recalls the generous fancies of our youth. The general impression was that Corneille was inspired by the image of Mlle. de Montpensier when he wrote Pulcherie (1672), an heroic comedy in which an empress stifles the cries of her heart that she may listen to the voice of glory.

It is not impossible that Corneille had some such thought in his mind. Certainly Mademoiselle was a model close at hand. One day when her bold poltroon of a father told her, in the course of a sharp reproof, that she was compromising her house for the pleasure of "playing the heroine," she answered haughtily and truthfully:

Given such inclinations, and living in the Louvre, where Corneille's plays were constantly enacted by[184] Queen Anne's order, Mademoiselle was accustomed to regard certain actions as the reverse of common and ignoble, and to consider certain other actions "illustrious."

The justice of super-exalted sentiments was proclaimed by nobility, and they who were disposed to closely imitate the examples set by the literary leader of the day ran the risk of losing all sense of proportions and of substance. Mademoiselle did lose that sense, nor was she the only one to do so among all the children of quality who were permitted to abuse their right to see the play. Through the imprudent fashion of taking young children to the theatre, the honest Corneille, who taught the heroism of duty, the poetry of sacrifice, the value of strong will and self-control, was not absolutely innocent of the errors in judgment and in moral sense by which the wars of the Fronde were made possible. When he attempted to lift the soul of France above its being, he vitiated a principle in the unformed national brain.

Mademoiselle had grown tall. She had lost her awkward ways; she was considered pretty—although the Bourbon type might, at any moment, become too pronounced. She had remained simple and insignificantly innocent and childish, in a world where even the children discussed politics and expressed opinions on the latest uprising. Side by side with all her infantine pleasures were two[185] serious cares which had accompanied her from her cradle, one: her marriage; the other, the honour of her house. The two cares were one, as the two objects were one, because in that day a princess knew her exalted duty and accepted her different forms of servitude without a frown, and certainly the most painful of all those forms was the marriage in which the wife was less than nothing; a being helpless in her inferiority, so situated that she was unable to claim any share of the general domestic happiness. The noble princesses had consented to drink their cup to the dregs because it was part of their caste to do so, and many were they who went to the altar as Racine's "Iphigénie" went to the sacrifice. The idea that woman is a creature possessing a claim upon herself, with the right to love, to be happy, and to seat herself upon the steps of the throne, or even upon the throne, is a purely modern conception. The day when that mediocre thought first germinated in the brain of the noblewoman marked a date in the history of royalty, and it may be that no surer sign was given to warn the nations of contemporary Europe of the decay of the monarchical idea.

La Grande Mademoiselle had faith in the old traditions. She had always been used to the idea that life would be full enough when she had accomplished her high destiny and perpetuated the noble name borne by her ancestors and she was fully satisfied with the idea that her husband should see in her nothing but the "granddaughter of[186] France," and accept her and her princely estates as he would accept any of the other gifts directly bestowed on noblemen by Divine Providence. Her husband had been ordained her husband from all time; and she was prepared to yield her all to him without a murmur. What though he should be ugly, gouty, doddering—or a babe in arms, "brutal," or an "honest man"? Such details were for the lower orders, they were puerile; unworthy of the attention of a great Princess. He would be the husband of Mlle. de Montpensier, niece of Louis XIII., and that would be enough. But in spite of herself she felt a lurking curiosity as to who he should be. What was to be his name.... His Majesty, was he to be a king, "His Highness," or simply "Monseigneur?" there lay the root of the whole matter.

Of what rank were the wives whose right it was to remain seated in the King's presence, ... and on what did they sit, arm-chairs or armless seats?

We should prefer to think that Mademoiselle mourned because she was reduced by her condition to forget that however princely a marriage may be it must entail a husband, but we are the slaves of truth, we must take our history as we find it, and be the fact pleasing or painful,—here it is: Mademoiselle knew that she should marry the first princely aspirant to her hand, and she was well content to let it be so.

The first to arouse her imagination was one of her mother's ancient lovers, Comte de Soissons, a brilliant soldier, but a man of very ordinary intellect. "M. le Comte" had not only aspired to the favour of Anne-Marie's mother, but he had also addressed her cousin Marie, Duchesse de Montpensier, and so lively had been the wooing that there had been some talk of an abduction. Then Gaston had entered the field and carried off the Duchess, and, gnawed by spite and jealous fury, Soissons had quarrelled with him.

Less than a year later the unexpected death of Madame brought about a reconciliation between the rivals. Monsieur, wifeless, charged with an infant daughter, who was the sole heiress to almost incalculable wealth, clasped hands with Soissons, under circumstances favourable to the brightest dreams. Madame's timely death had restored intact a flattering prospect. M. le Comte again and for the third time announced pretensions to the hand of a Montpensier, and Gaston smiled approval. He considered it all very natural; given a like occasion, he would have followed a like course.

So, as far back as her youthful memory could travel, Mlle. Anne-Marie-Louise d'Orléans found along her route traces of the assiduous attentions of the even-then ripe cousin, who had regaled her with sugared almonds through the medium of a gentleman named Campion, accredited and charged with the mission of rendering his master pleasing to Mademoiselle, the infant Princess of[188] the Tuileries. M. le Comte sent Campion to Court with sugared almonds, because he, the Comte de Soissons, rarely set foot in Paris at any time, and at the time which we are now considering a private matter of business (an assassination which he and Gaston had planned together), had definitely retired him from Court.

All this happened about the year 1636. Gaston was living in an obscure way, not to say in hiding; for it would have been difficult to hide so notable a personage,—nor would there have been any logic in hiding him, after all that had passed,—but he was living a sheltered, and, so to speak, a harmless life. He was supposed to be in Blois, but he was constantly seen gliding about the Louvre, tolerated by the King, who practised his dancing steps with him, and treated by Richelieu with all the contempt due to his character. The Cardinal made free with Gaston's rights; he changed and dismissed his servants without consulting their master; and more than one of the fine friends of Monsieur learned the way to the Bastille.

At times Richelieu gave Gaston presents, hoping to tempt the light-minded Prince to reflect upon the advantages attending friendly relations with the Court. Richelieu had tried in vain to force Gaston to consent to the dissolution of his marriage with Marguerite de Lorraine. He had never permitted Gaston to present his wife at Court, but Gaston had always hoped to obtain the permission[189] and the anxious lady had remained just outside of France awaiting the signal to enter. She was generally supposed to be within call of her husband.

The time has come when justice of a new kind must be done to Monsieur, and probably it is the only time when a creditable fact will be recorded in his history. He stood firm in his determination to maintain his marriage. Try as the Cardinal might, and by all the means familiar to him from habitual use, he could not force Monsieur to relax his fidelity to his consort. D'Orléans was virtuous on this one point, but his manner of virtue was the manner of Gaston; there are different ways of sustaining the marriage vows, and Monsieur's way was not praiseworthy. His experience had passed as a veil blown away by the wind. His passion for intrigue still held sway, he always had at least one plot in process of infusion, and his results were fatal to his assistants. In the heat of his desire to rid himself of the Cardinal, he simulated change of heart so well that the Cardinal was deceived. Suspicious at first of the sincerity of Gaston's professions, after long and close observation he became convinced that the Prince was, in truth, repentant. It was at that epoch, when free exercise of an undisciplined will was made possible by Richelieu's conviction of his own security, that Monsieur laid his plan of assassination with de Soissons; at that time there was but opinion in France—de Richelieu was a tyrant, there could be no hope of pleasure[190] while he lived. Let him die, let France hear that he was dead, and all the world could be happy and free to act, not according to the dogmas of an egotist by the grace of God, but by the rule of the greatest good to the greatest number.

The conspirators had found a time and a place favourable to their enterprise. It was during the siege of Corbie. The King was there attended by his Minister. Monsieur and the Count were there; so were the men whom they had engaged to kill the Cardinal. Culpable as the two scoundrels had always been, when the whole country was in arms it was impossible to find a reasonable excuse for refusing them commands, so they were at the front with all the representative men of the country, and they had good reason for supposing that one murder—a movement calculated to relieve the nation—might pass unnoticed in the general noise and motion of the siege. The time was ripe; Monsieur and Soissons had put their heads together and decided that the moment had come to strike the blow and rid the country of the Cardinal.

Their plans were well laid. A council of war had been called. De Richelieu was to pass a certain staircase on his way to it; de Soissons was to accompany Richelieu and distract his attention; Gaston was to be waiting at the foot of the stairs to give the signal to the assassins. But Monsieur had not changed since the days of Chalais, and he could not control his nerves. He was a slave to ungovernable panics. According to his plans the[191] part which he had to play was easy. He had nothing to do but to give the signal; all the accomplices were ready; the assassins were awaiting the word; he himself was at his post; but when the Cardinal passed, haughty and calm, to take his place in his carriage, terror seized Monsieur and he turned and sprang up the stairway. As he fled one of his accomplices, thinking to hold him back, seized him by his cloak, and Gaston, rushing forward, dragged him after him.

The affrighted Prince and his astonished follower reached the first landing with the speed of lightning; and then, carried away by emotion, Monsieur, still dragging his companion, fled into an inner room, where he stopped, dazed; he did not know where he was, nor what he was doing, and when he tried to speak he babbled incoherent words which died in his throat. De Soissons was waiting in the courtyard; he had spoken so calmly that Richelieu had passed on unconscious of the unusual excitement among the courtiers.

Though the plot had failed, there had been no exposure; but the fact that the accomplices held the secret and that they had much to gain from the Cardinal by a denunciation of their principals made it unsafe for the conspirators to remain in Paris; before the Cardinal's policemen were warned they fled, Monsieur to Blois and de Soissons to Sedan. Not long after their flight the story was in the mouths of the gossips, and Mademoiselle knew that she could not hope for the Cardinal's assistance[192] in the accomplishment of her marriage; so the child of the Tuileries advanced to maidenhood while her ambitious cousin (Soissons) turned grey at Sedan. When Anne-Marie-Louise reached her fourteenth year the Comte thought that the time had come to bring matters to a crisis. He was not a coward, and as there was no reason for hypocrisy or secrecy, he boldly joined the enemies of his country and invaded France with the armies of de Bouillon and de Guise. Arrived in France, he charged one of his former mistresses, Mme. de Montbazon, to finish the work begun by Campion. Mme. de Montbazon lent her best energies to the work, and right heartily.

Having been unable to acquire the mother, de Soissons turned his attention to the daughter. Mademoiselle recorded:

Not long after this episode the Comte de Soissons was killed at Marfée (6th July, 1641), and Mademoiselle's eyes were opened to the fact that she and M. le Comte "had not been created for each other." She wrote of his death as follows:

"I could not keep from weeping when he died, and when I went to see Madame his mother at Bagnolet, M. and Mlle. de Longueville and the whole household did nothing but manifest their grief by their continual cries."

Mademoiselle had desired with earnest sincerity to become the Comtesse de Soissons; it is difficult[194] to imagine why,—unless, perhaps, because at her age girls build air-castles with all sorts of materials.

M. le Comte had been wept over and buried and sentiment had nothing more to do with Mademoiselle's dreams of establishment. Her fancy hovered over Europe and swooped down upon the princes who were bachelors or widowers, and upon the married nobles who were in a fair way to become widowers; more than once she was seen closely following the current reports when some princess was taken by sickness; and she abandoned or developed her projects, according to the turn taken by the diseases of the unfortunate ladies. The greater number of the hypothetical postulants upon whom she successively fixed her mind were strangers whom she had never seen, and among them were several who had never thought of her, and who never did think of her at any time; but she pursued her way with unflagging zeal, permitting indiscreet advances when she did not encourage them; she considered herself more or less the Queen or the Empress of France, of Spain, or of Hungary, as the prospect of the speedy bereavement of the incumbents of the different thrones brightened. La Grande Mademoiselle had not entered the world as the daughter of a degenerate with impunity; there were subjects upon which she was incapable of reasoning; in the ardour of her faith in the mystical virtues of the Blood she surpassed Corneille. She believed that the designs of princes ranked with the designs of God, and that they[195] should be regarded as the devout regard the mysteries of religion. To quote her own words: "The intuitions of the great are like the mysteries of the Faith; it is not for men to fathom them! they ought to revere them; they ought to know that the thoughts of the great are given to their possessors for the well-being and for the salvation of the country."

Mademoiselle surpassed the Corneille of Tragedy in her disdainful rejection of love; Corneille was content to station love in the rear rank, and he placed it far below the manly passions in his classification of "the humanities." It will be remembered that by his listings the "manly passions" were Ambition, Vengeance, Pride of Blood, and "Glory." Mademoiselle believed that love could not exist between married people of rank; she considered it one of the passions of the inferior classes.

When we examine the subject we see that it was not remarkable that Mademoiselle recognised illegitimate love, although her own virtue was unquestionable. She liked lovers, and accepted the idea of love in the abstract; she repudiated the idea of love legalised because she was logical; she thought that married love proclaimed false ideas and gave a bad example. If married people loved each other and were happy together because of their common love, young noble girls would long to[196] marry for love and to be happy in marriage because of love, and the time would come when there would be no true quality, because the nobles would have followed their desires or their weaker sentiments and formed haphazard unions brought about by natural selection. Man or maid would "silence the voice of glory in order to listen to the voice of love," should the dignity of hierarchical customs be brought down to the level of the lower passions. So Mademoiselle reasoned, and from her mental point of view her reasoning was sound. She was strong-minded; she realised the danger of permitting the heart to interfere in the marriage of the Elect.

The year 1641 was not ended when Mademoiselle appeared in spiritual mourning for a suitor who seems to us to have been nothing but a vision, the first vision of a series. Anne of Austria had never forgotten the Cardinal's cruel rebuke when he found Mademoiselle playing at man and wife with a child in long clothes. She had tried to console the little girl, and her manner had always been motherly and gentle. "It is true," she had said, "the Cardinal told the truth; my son is too small; you shall marry my brother!" When she had spoken thus she had referred to the Cardinal Infant,[77] who was in Flanders acting as Captain-General of the country and commanding the armies of the King of Spain.

The Prince was Archbishop of Toledo. He had not received Holy Orders. In that day it was not[197] considered necessary to take orders before entering the Episcopate. "They taxed revenues, they delegated vicars-general for judicial action, and when the power of the Church was needed they delegated bishops. There were many prelates who were not priests." Henri de Lorraine II., Duc de Guise (born in 1614), was only fifteen years old when he received the Archbishopric of Rheims; he never received Holy Orders. In priestly vestments he presented every appearance of the most pronounced type of the ecclesiastical hybrid; he was an excellent Catholic, and a gallant and dashing pontiff-cavalier. His life as layman was far from religious. When he was twenty-seven years old he met a handsome widow, Mme. de Bossut. He married her on the spot without drum or cannon; and then, because some formality had been omitted, the marriage was confirmed by the Archbishop of Malines. The Church saw no obstacle to the marriage. Nicolas-François de Lorraine, Bishop of Toul, and Cardinal, was another example; "without being engaged in orders" he became "Duc de Lorraine" (1634) by the abdication of his brother Charles. He had political reasons for marrying his cousin "Claude" without delay, but he was stopped by an obstacle which did not emanate from his bishopric. Claude was his own cousin, and the prohibitions of the Church made it necessary for him to get a dispensation from Rome.

François visited his cousin and made his proposals. As a layman he needed a publication of[198] his bans, and as a Catholic, in order to marry his cousin, he needed a dispensation from the Pope. Therefore he re-assumed the character of Bishop and issued a dispensation eliminating his bans, then, in the name of the Pope, he issued a dispensation making it spiritually lawful for him to marry his cousin to himself; that accomplished, he cast off the character of Bishop and was married by a regularly ordained priest like an ordinary mortal. In those days there was no abyss between the Church and the world. At most there was only a narrow ditch which the great lords crossed and recrossed at will, as caprice or interest moved them. In their portraits this species of oscillation, which was one of their distinguishing movements, is distinctly recorded and made evident even to the people of this century.

In the gallery of the Louvre we see a picture due to the brush of the Le Nain brothers, entitled, Procession in a Church. That part of the procession which is directly in front of the spectator is composed of members of the clergy, vested with all their churchly ornaments. The superb costumes are superbly worn by men of proud and knightly bearing. The portraits betray the true characters of their originals. These men are courtiers, utterly devoid of the collected and meditative tranquillity found in the legions of the Church. In the Le Nain brothers' picture the most notable figures are two warlike priests, who stand, like Norse kings, at the head of the procession, transfixing us with[199] their look of bold assurance. No priests in ordinary, these, but natural soldiers, ready to die for a word or an idea! Their curled moustachios are light as foam; their beards are trimmed to a point, and under the embroidered dalmatica the gallant mien of the worldling frets as visibly as a lion in its cage. It is impossible to doubt it: these are soldiers; cavaliers who have but assumed the habit; who will take back the doublet and the sword, and with them the customs and the thoughts of men of war. Whatever their rank in the Church, hazard and birth alone have placed them there; and thus are they working out the sentence imposed by the ambition of their families; giving the lie to a calling for which they have neither taste nor capacity. The will of a strong man can defeat even pre-natal influences, and, knowing it, they make no hypocritical attempt to hide their character. They were not meant for priests, and every look and every action shows it.

The Cardinal-Infant, Archbishop of Toledo, was only a deacon, so there was nothing extraordinary in the thought that he might marry. I cannot say that he ever thought of marrying Mademoiselle; I have never found any proof that he entertained such a thought; the only thing absolutely certain in the whole affair is that Mademoiselle never doubted that he intended, or had intended, to marry her. Here is her own account of it, somewhat abridged and notably incoherent:

The disappearance of the Cardinal-Infant was followed by events so tragic and so closely connected with Mademoiselle's life that her mind was distracted from her hunt for a husband. Despite her extreme youth, the affair Cinq-Mars constrained her to judge her father, and to the child to whom nothing was as dear as honour the revelation of his treachery was crushing.

The death of Cinq-Mars was the dénouement of a great and tragic passion. Henry d'Effiat, Marquis de Cinq-Mars, was described as a handsome youth with soft, caressing eyes, marvellously graceful in all his movements.[79]

His mother was ambitious; she knew that men had risen to power by the friendship of kings. Richelieu's schemes required a thousand complicated accessories. So it was decided by the Cardinal and by Cinq-Mars's mother to present the child to the King and to place him in the royal presence to minister to the King's pleasure for an hour, as a beautiful flower is given to be cherished for a time, then cast away. The King was capricious and childish and, as Richelieu said, "he must always have his toy"; but elderly children, like very young children, soon tire of their toys and when they tire of them they destroy them; Louis XIII. had broken everything that he had played with, and his admiration inspired terror. Cinq-Mars was determined that he would not be a victim. Though very young, he knew the ways of the world and he had formed plans for his future. He was fond of the world and fond of pleasure. He was a natural lover, always sighing at the feet of women. He was brave and he had counted upon a military career. The thought of imprisonment in the Château of Saint Germain with a grumbling[202] invalid whose ennui no one could vanquish was appalling; but after two years of resistance he yielded and entered the royal apartment as officer nearest to the King. It has been said that he lacked energy, but as he resisted two whole years before he gave up the struggle, and as the will which he opposed was the will of Richelieu, it is difficult to believe that he was not energetic.

History tells us that he was very nervous and that, although his will was feeble, he was subject to fits of anger. In 1638 he was in the King's household as Master of the Robes. He was eighteen years old. It was his business to select and order the King's garments, and the King was wont to reject whatever the boy selected because it was "too elegant." When Cinq-Mars was first seen in the King's apartment he was silent and very sad; the King's displeasure cowed him; the beautiful and gentle face and the appealing glance of the soft eyes irritated the sickly fancies of the monarch and he never noticed or addressed Cinq-Mars when he could avoid it. Cinq-Mars hated Saint Germain, and, truth to tell, even to an older and graver person, the lugubrious château would have seemed a prison. Sick at heart, weak in mind, tortured by fleshly ills, Louis XIII., sinking deeper into insignificance as the resplendent star of his Prime Minister rose, was but sorry company for any one.

Richelieu was the real ruler of France. Ranke, who used his relations with ambassadors as a means[203] for increasing his store of personal and political data, said:

As time went on his success augmented his power. He lived in absolute seclusion at Rueil. He was difficult of approach, and if an ambassador succeeded in gaining admission to his presence it was because he had been able to prove that he had something to communicate to Richelieu which it was of essential interest to the State, or to the Cardinal personally, to know. All the national business was in his hands. He was the centre of all State interests, the King frequently attended his councils. If Richelieu visited the King he was surrounded by a guard; he hired his guard himself, selecting his men with great care and paying them out of his own pocket, so that he might feel that he was safe from his enemies even in the King's presence.

The officers of his personal service were numerous, young and very exalted nobles. His stables were in keeping with his importance; and his house was more magnificent and his table better served[204] than the King's. When in Paris he lived in the Palais Cardinal (now the Palais Royal) surrounded by princely objects, all treasures in themselves; his train was the train of an emperor. The Louvre, the King's residence, was a simple palace, but the Cardinal's palace, called in Court language the "Hôtel de Richelieu," was the symbol of the luxury and the art of France, toward which the eyes of the people of France and of all other lands were turned. In the Hôtel de Richelieu there were cabinets where the high officials sat in secret discussion, boudoirs for the fair ladies, ball-rooms, treasure galleries where works of art were lavishly displayed, a chapel, and two theatres. The basis of the Cardinal's library was the public library of Rochelle, which had been seized after the siege. The chapel was one of the chief sights of Paris. Everything used in the ceremonial of worship was of solid gold, ornamented with great diamonds. Among the precious objects in use were two church chandeliers,[80] all of massive gold, enamelled and enriched with two thousand five hundred and sixteen diamonds. The vases used in the service of the Mass were of fine, richly enamelled gold, and in them were set two hundred and sixty-two diamonds. The cross, which was between twenty and twenty-one inches high, bore a figure of Christ of massive gold and the crown of thorns and the loin-cloth were studded with diamonds.

The Book of Prayer used by the Cardinal was bound in fine morocco leather; each side of the cover was enwreathed with sprigs of gold. On one side of the cover was a golden medallion, on which the Cardinal was depicted, like an emperor, holding the globe of the world in his hand; from the four corners of the cover angels were descending to crown his head with flowers. Beneath the device ran the Latin inscription, "Cadat." The ceiling of the grand gallery of the palace (destroyed under Louis XIV.) bore one of Philip de Champagne's masterpieces—a picture representing the glorious exploits of the Cardinal. One of the picture galleries called the "Gallery of Illustrious Men" contained twenty-five full-length portraits of the great men of France, chosen according to the Cardinal's estimate of greatness. At the foot of each portrait was a little "key," or historical representation of the principal acts of the original of the portrait, arranged as Fra Angelico and Giotto arranged the portraits of Saint Dominick and Saint François d'Assisi. Richelieu, who was not afflicted with false modesty, had placed his own portrait among the portraits in his gallery of the great men of France. Although he had amassed so many monuments of pride, he had passed a large portion of his life in relative poverty. He had travelled from the humble Episcopate to the steps of the throne of France on an income of 25,000 livres. When he died his income was nearly three millions of livres per annum,—the civil list of a powerful monarch. He was not an[206] expert hoarder of riches, like Mazarin; he scattered money with full hands, while his master, the King, netted game-bags in a corner, cooked, or did other useful work, or gave himself up to his frugal pleasures.

Cinq-Mars entered the King's service under the auspices of the Cardinal. When the King saw the new face in his apartment he retired into his darkest humour.

Cinq-Mars was very patient; he was attentive and modest, but the sound of his voice and the sight of his face irritated the sickly monarch. Days passed before the King addressed his new Master of the Robes. One day he caught the long appealing look of the gentle eyes; he answered it with a stare,—frowned, and looked again. That night he could not sleep; he longed for the morning. When Cinq-Mars entered the bed-chamber the King drew[207] him to his side "and suddenly he loved him violently and fatally, as in former times he loved young Baradas."

The courtiers were accustomed to the King's fancies, but his passion for Cinq-Mars astonished them; it surpassed all that had preceded it.

It was an appalling and jealous love; exacting, suspicious, bitter, stormy, and fruitful in tears and quarrels. Louis XIII. overwhelmed his favourite with tokens of his tenderness; had it been possible he would have chained the boy to his side. When Cinq-Mars was away from him he was miserable.

Cinq-Mars was obliged to assist him in his new trade (he was learning to be a carpenter), to stand at the bench holding tools and taking measurements; and to listen to long harangues on dogs and on bird-training. The King and his new favourite were seen together constantly, driving the foxes to their holes and running in the snowy fields catching blackbirds in the King's sweep-net; they hunted with a dozen sportsmen who were said to be "low people and very bad company."

When they returned to the palace the King supped; when he had finished his supper he went to bed, and then Cinq-Mars, "fatigued to exasperation by the puerile duties of the day, cared for nothing but to escape from his gloomy prison, and to forget the long, yellow face and the interminable torrent of hunting stories." Stealing from the château, he mounted his horse and hurried to Paris.[208] He passed the night as he pleased and returned to the château early in the morning, worn out, haggard, and with nerves unstrung. Although he left the château after the King retired to his bed, and returned from Paris early in the morning, before the King awoke, Louis XIII. knew where he had been and what he had been doing. Louis employed spies who watched and listened. He was particularly jealous of Cinq-Mars's young friends; he "made scenes" and reproached Cinq-Mars and the tormented boy answered him hotly; then with cries, weeping bitterly, they quarrelled, and the King went to Richelieu to complain of "M. le Grand." Richelieu was State Confidant, and to him the King entrusted the reconciliations. In 1639 (27th November) Louis wrote to the Cardinal:

The laboured reconciliations were not durable;[209] the months which followed the signing of the certificate were one long tempest. The objects of the King's bitterest jealousy were young men who formed a society called Les messieurs du Marais because they met every evening at Mme. de Rohan's in the Palais Royal (the King then lived at the Louvre). Louis could not be silent; he exposed his spite on all occasions. January 5, 1640, he wrote to the Cardinal:

Cinq-Mars sulked and the King sulked, and as the quarrel promised to endure indefinitely, Richelieu bestirred himself, left his quiet home in Rueil and travelled to the house of the King to make peace between the ill-assorted pair.

Peace restored, Louis became joyful; he could not refuse his favourite anything. Cinq-Mars made the most of his opportunity. But he could not go far; the Cardinal barred his way. Cinq-Mars aspired to the peerage; he aimed to be a duke, to marry a princess, and to sit among the King's counsellors. Richelieu checked him, gave him rude orders, scolded him as he scolded his valet, called him an "insolent little fellow," and threatened to put him in a place "still lower" than the place from which he had raised him.[81] One day, when Richelieu was berating the favourite, he told him that he had appointed him to his office in the King's house so that he (Richelieu) might have a reliable spy, and that as he had been appointed for no other purpose, it would be advisable for him to begin to do the work that he was expected to do.

The revelation was a cruel blow to the proud and sensitive boy, and in the first moment of his anguish he conceived a ferocious hatred. It is probable that the knowledge that the Cardinal had placed him near the King's person against his will and in spite of his long and determined resistance solely to the end that he might be degraded to an ignoble office was the first cause of the Cinq-Mars conspiracy.

De Richelieu's ministry had never appeared more impregnable than it appeared at that time. Far and near its policy had been triumphant. Speaking of the position France had taken in Europe through the guidance of Richelieu, an impartial foreigner said:

Until the Cardinal assumed command the united forces of the Empire, the Catholic League and the Spanish armies, held not only the left bank of the Rhine but all the land divided by that great central artery of European life. By Richelieu's wise policy France regained dominion in Alsace and in the greater part of the Rhenish country, the armies of France took possession of central Germany, the Italian passes, which had been closed to the men of France, were opened to them, and large territories in upper Italy were seized and placed under French control; and the changes were wrought, not by a temporary invasion, but by orderly and skilfully planned campaigns.

The Cardinal's power had been made manifest everywhere. His rule had been to the glory of France. Among other important results were the triumphs of the French navies; the fleets, having proved their strength in the Ligurian Sea, had menaced the ports of Spain. The Ligurian Peninsula had been rent asunder by the revolt of two large provinces, one of which had arisen proclaiming its independent rights as a kingdom. There was, there had been, no end to Richelieu's diplomatic improvements; his victories had carried ruin[213] to the enemy; the skirmishers of France had advanced to a point within two leagues of Madrid. The Croquemitaine of France, who held in terror both the Court and the canaille, had assured the Bourbons of an important place among the empires of the world. The day of Spain was past; the day of France was come.

Richelieu was a man of many ambitions, and he aspired to the admiration of all of the population; he had extended his protecting arms over literature and the lettered; he had founded the French Academy; but he was not content; he was a man of too much independence and of too enterprising a mind to leave all the literary honours to the doctors of the law or to his mediums, Corneille and Rotrou, whose lines of work he fixed to follow a plan outlined to suit his own ideas. Usually, Richelieu's intellectual ambitions were quiescent, but at times the pedant, dormant in his hard nature, awoke and impelled him to add a few personal touches to the work of his agents. When under the influence of his afflatus he collaborated with Desmarets, the author of a dramatic poem entitled Clovis, and by the united efforts of the unique literary team the tragedy Mirame was delivered to the world. Its first appearance was a Parisian event. None of the King's armies had been mounted with such solicitude and prodigality, The grand audience-room of the Palais Cardinal[214] was built for Mirame; it was spaced to hold three thousand spectators; the stage material had been ordered from Italy by "Sieur Mazarini," ex-Papal Nuncio at Paris. Richelieu himself had chosen the costumes and the decorations; and he in person directed the rehearsals, and, as he supposed, superintended the listing of all the invitations. The play was ready for representation early in the year (1641).

First of all there was a general rehearsal for the critics, who were represented by the men of letters and the comedians. The rehearsal took place before the Court and the social world of all Paris. The invited guests were seated by the Bishop of Chartres and by a president of the Parliament of France. Though too new and too fresh in its magnificence, the Audience Hall pleased the people exceedingly; when the curtain rose they could hardly repress cries of admiration. The stage was lined on both sides by splendid palaces and in the open space between the abodes of luxury were most delicious gardens adorned with grottoes, statues, fountains, and grand parterres of flowers descending terrace upon terrace to the sea, which lifted its waves with an agitation as natural as the movements of the real tide of a real ocean; on the broad waters passed two great fleets; one of them appeared as if two leagues away. Both fleets moved calmly on, passing like living things before the spectators.

The same decorations and scenery served the[215] five acts of the play; but the sky was changed in each act, when the light faded, when the sun set or rose, and when the moon and the stars appeared to mark the flight of the hours. The play was composed according to the accepted formulas of the day, and it was neither better nor worse than its fellows. In its course the actors fought, poisoned each other, died, came to life, and quarrelled over a handsome princess; and while the scene-shifters manipulated the somewhat crude inventions of the stage scenery, and while the actors did their utmost to develop the plot to the best advantage, the master of the palace acted as chief of the Claque and tried by every means in his power to arouse the enthusiasm of the audience. He stood in the front of his box and, leaning forward into space, manifested his pleasure by his looks; at times he called the attention of the people and imposed silence so that the finer passages might be heard.[82]

At the end of the play a curtain representing clouds fell upon the scene, and a golden bridge rolled like a tide to the feet of Anne of Austria. The Queen arose, crossed the bridge, and found herself in a magnificent ball-room; then, with the Prince and the Princess, she danced an impetuously ardent and swinging figure, and when that dance was over, the Bishop of Chartres, in Court dress, and baton in hand, like a maître d'hôtel, led the way to a fine collation. Later in the year the[216] serviceable Bishop was made Archbishop of Rheims.

Politics interfered with Mirame. The play was assailed by difficulties similar to those which met Napoleon's Vie de César under the Second Empire. The Opposition eagerly seized the occasion to annoy "Croquemitaine"; open protestations were circulated to the effect that the play was not worth playing. Some, rising above the question of literary merit, said that the piece was morally objectionable because it contained allusions to Anne of Austria's episode with Buckingham. Richelieu became the scapegoat of the hour; even the King had something to say regarding his Minister's literary venture. Louis was not gifted with critical discrimination; he knew it, and his timid pride and his prudence restrained him from launching into observations upon subjects with which he was not fitted to cope; but guided by the cherub detailed to protect the mentally incompetent, he struck with instinctive subtlety at the one vulnerable point in the Cardinal's armour and declared that he had nothing to say regarding the preciosity of the play, but that he had been "shocked by the questionable composition of the audience." It relieved the King's consciousness of his own inferiority to "pinch the Cardinal." He told Monsieur that he had been "shocked" when he realised "what species of society" he had been invited to meet. Monsieur, seizing the occasion to strike his enemy, answered that, to speak "frankly," he also had "been shocked" when he perceived "little Saint Amour[217] among the Cardinal's guests." The royal brothers turned the subject in every light, and the more they studied it the darker grew its aspect. They agreed in thinking that the King's delicacy had been grossly outraged; they worked upon the fact until it assumed the proportions of a personal insult. Richelieu, visited by the indignant pair, was galvanised by the double current of their wrath. He knew that Saint Amour had not been in any earthly locality by his will; tact, if not religious prejudice, would have forbidden the admission of a personage of the doubtful savour of Saint Amour to the presence of the King. But Monsieur and the King had seen with their own eyes, and as no one would have dared to enter the Palais Cardinal uninvited, it was an undisputable fact that some one had tampered with the invitations. Richelieu's detectives were put upon the scent and they discovered that an Abbé who "could not refuse a woman anything" had been entrusted with the invitations-list.

Richelieu could not punish the amiable lady who had unconsciously sealed the Abbé's doom; but justice was wrought, and absolute ignorance of facts permits us to hope that it fell short of the justice meted out to Puylaurens. It was said that the Abbé had been sent back to his village. Wherever he was "sent," Louis XIII. refused to be comforted, and to the end of his days he told the people who surrounded him that the Cardinal had invited him to his palace to meet Saint Amour.

Richelieu's life was embittered by the incident, and to the last he was tormented by a confused impression of the fête which he had believed was to be the coming glory of his career. But an isolated detail could not alter facts, and it was universally known that his importance was "of all the colours." Mirame had given the people an idea of the versatility of Richelieu's grandeur and of the composite quality of his power, and M. le Grand knew what he might expect should he anger the Cardinal. Cinq-Mars was always at the King's heels, and he knew the extent of Louis's docility.

The Cinq-Mars Conspiracy took shape in the months which immediately followed the presentation of Mirame. As the details of the conspiracy may be found in any history, I shall say only this: When an enterprise is based upon sentiments like the King's passion for his Grand Equerry [83] and the general hatred of Richelieu, it is not necessary to search for reasonable causes.

When the first steps in the conspiracy were taken Louis XIII., in his tenderness for Cinq-Mars and his bitter jealousy of Richelieu, unconsciously played the part of instigator.

It soothed the wounded pride of the monarch to hear his tyrant ridiculed, and he incited his "dear friend," the Marquis d'Effiat, to scoff at the Cardinal. Cinq-Mars and all the others were taken red-handed; doubt was impossible. In the words of Mme. de Motteville: "It was one of the most formidable,[219] and at the same time one of the most extraordinary plots found in history; for the King was, tacitly, the chief of the conspirators." Monsieur enthusiastically entered into the plot; he ran to the Queen with the whole story; he told her the names of the conspirators, and urged her to take part in the movement.

"It must be innocent," he insisted; "if it were not the King would not be engaged in it."[84]

Richelieu's peaceful days were over. He was restless and suspicious. Suddenly, in June, 1642, when Louis XIII. was sick in Narbonne (and when Richelieu was sick in Tarascon) M. le Grand was arrested and delivered to the Cardinal for the crime of high treason. He deserved his fate. He had led Monsieur to treat with Spain; but the real cause of his death—if not of his disgrace—lay in the fact that he had lost his hold upon the King's love.

"The King had ceased to love him," said a contemporary. The end came suddenly and without a note of warning. The King, awaking as from a dream, remembered all the services that Richelieu had rendered unto France. He was so grateful that he hastened to Tarascon and begged Richelieu's pardon for having wished "to lose him," in other words, for having wished to accomplish his fall. The King was ashamed, and despite his sickness he ordered his bearers to carry him into Richelieu's bed-chamber where the two gentlemen[220] passed several hours together, each in his own bed, effecting a reconciliation.

But their hearts were not in their words; wrongs like those in question between the Cardinal and the King cannot be forgotten.[85] The King had abetted a conspiracy against the Cardinal's life, and had the Cardinal been inclined to forget it, the King's weak self-reproach would have kept it in the mind of his contemplated victim. Louis could not refrain from harking back to his sin; he humiliated himself, he begged the Cardinal to forgive him; he gave up everything, including the amiable young criminal who, in Scriptural language, had lain in his bosom and been to him as a daughter. The judgment of the moralist is disarmed by the fact that Louis was, and always had been, a physical wreck, morally handicapped by the essence of his being. He had loved Cinq-Mars with unreasoning passion; he was forced by circumstances to sacrifice him; but we need not pity him; there was much of the monster in him, and before the head of Cinq-Mars fell, all the King's love for his victim had passed away.

Louis XIII. was of all the sovereigns of France the one most notably devoted to the public interest; in crises his self-sacrifice resembled the heroism of the martyr; but the defects of his qualities were of such a character that he would have been incomprehensible had he not been sick in body and in mind.

During the crisis which followed the exposure of Cinq-Mars's conspiracy Monsieur surpassed himself; he was alternately trembler, liar, sniveller, and informer; his behaviour was so abject that the echoes of his shame reverberated throughout France and, penetrating the walls of the Tuileries, reached the ears of his daughter. Monsieur shocked Mademoiselle's theological conception of Princes of the Blood; she could not understand how a creature partaking of the nature of the Deity could be so essentially contemptible; she was crushed by the enigma presented by her father.

The close of the reign resembled the dramatic tragedies in which the chief characters die in the fifth act; all the principal personages departed this life within a period of a few months. Marie de Médicis was the first to go. She died at Cologne 3d July, 1642, not, as was reported, in a garret, or in a hovel, but in a house in which Rubens had lived. If we may judge by the names of her legatees, she died surrounded by at least eighty servants. It is true that she owed debts to the tradesmen who furnished her household with the necessaries of life, and it is true that her people had advanced money when their living expenses required such advances; but the two facts prove no more than that royal households in which there is no order closely resemble the disorderly households of the ordinary classes. People of respectability in our own midst are now living regardless of system, devoid of economy, and indebted to their tradesmen,[222] as the household of Marie de Médicis lived in the seventeenth century. To the day of her death the aged Queen retained possession of silver dishes of all kinds, and had her situation justified the rumours of extreme poverty which have been circulated since then she would have pawned them or sold them. We may be permitted to trust that Marie de Médicis did not end her days tormented by material necessities. She died just at the time when she had begun to resort to expedients. The old and corpulent sovereign had lived an agitated life; her chief foes were of her own temperament. She was the victim of paroxysmal wrath and it was generally known that she had made at least one determined though unfruitful attempt to whip her husband, the heroic Henry IV., Conqueror of Paris. Her life had not been of a character to inspire the love of the French people, and when she died no one regretted her. Had not the Court been forced by the prevailing etiquette to assume mourning according to the barbarous and complicated rites of the ancient monarchy, her death would have passed unperceived. The customs of the old regimen obliged Mademoiselle to remain in a darkened room, surrounded by such draperies as were considered essential to the manifestation of royal grief. The world mourned for the handsome boy who had been forced to enter the King's house, and to act as the King's favourite against his will, to die upon the scaffold. Monsieur was despised for his part in Cinq-Mars's death. Mademoiselle was shunned because she was her[223] father's daughter and her obligatory mourning was a convenient veil. Her own record of the death of the Queen is a frankly sorrowful statement of her appreciation of the facts in the case, and of her knowledge of her father's guilt:

Three months after the conspiracy against de Richelieu was exposed, Cinq-Mars was beheaded (12th September), and the Lyonnais, who had assembled in the golden mists of the season of the vintage to see him die, cried out against his death and said that it was "a sin against the earth to take the light from his gentle eyes." De Thou, Cinq-Mars's friend, was beheaded also. The victims faced death like tried soldiers; their attitude as they halted upon the confines of eternity elicited the commendation of the people. The fact that the people called their manner of leaving the world "beautiful and admirable" proves that simplicity in man's conduct, as in literature and in horticultural architecture, was out of date.

When the condemned were passing out of the tribunal they met the judges who had but just pronounced their sentence. Both Cinq-Mars and de Thou "embraced the judges and offered them fine compliments."

The people of Lyons—civilians and soldiers—were massed around the Court House and in the neighbourhood. Cinq-Mars and de Thou bowed low to them all, then mounted into the tumbrel, with faces illumined by spiritual exaltation. In the tumbrel they joyfully embraced and crying "Au revoir," promised to meet in Paradise. They saluted the multitude like conquerors. De Thou clapped his hands when he saw the scaffold; Cinq-Mars ascended first; he turned, took one step forward, and stopped short; his eyes rested fondly upon the people; then with a bright smile he saluted them; after they covered his head he stood for an instant poised as if to spring from earth to heaven, one foot advanced, his hand upon his side. His wide, pathetic glance embraced the multitude, then calmly and without fear, again firmly pacing the scaffold, he went forward to the block.

At the present time it is the fashion to die with less ostentation, but revolutions in taste ought not to prevent our doing justice to the victims of the Cinq-Mars Conspiracy. They were heroically brave to the last, and the people could not forget them. Mademoiselle's grief was fostered by the general sympathy for the unfortunate boy who had paid so dearly for his familiarity with the King. As all her feelings were recorded by her own hand, we are in possession of her opinions on the subjects which were of interest in her day. Of the matter of Cinq-Mars and de Thou she said:

Mademoiselle was artless enough to believe that her father would be sorrowful and embarrassed when he returned.

In the winter after Cinq-Mars died, Gaston returned to the Luxembourg radiant with roguish smiles; he was delighted to be in Paris.

Not long after she thus recorded her impressions she found, to her cost, how little reliance she could place upon her father, and all her filial illusions vanished.

Richelieu was the next to disappear from the scene. He had long been sick; his body was paralysed and putrid with abscesses and with ulcers. Master and Man, Richelieu and Louis were intently watching to see which should be the first to die. Each one of them was forming projects for a time when, freed from the arbitration of the other, he should be in a position to act his independent will and to turn the remnant of his fleeting[226] life to pleasurable profit. In that, his final state, the Cardinal offered the people of France a last and supreme spectacle, and of all the dramas that he had shown them, it was the most original and the most impressive. The day after the execution of Cinq-Mars, Richelieu, who had remained to the last hour in Lyons, entered his portable room and set out for Paris. His journey covered a period of six weeks, and the people who ran to the highway from all directions to see him pass were well regaled. In those last days when the Cardinal travelled he was carried in procession. First of all were heavy wains hauling the material of an inclined plane; at a short distance behind the wains followed a small army corps escorting the Cardinal's travelling room; the room was always transported by twenty-four men of the Cardinal's body-guard, who marched through sun and rain with heads uncovered. In the portable room were three pieces of furniture, a chair, a table, and a splendid bed—and on the bed lay a sick man!—better still for the sightseers, a sick Cardinal! The crowds pressed close to the roadside. They who were masters of the art of death looked on disease with curiosity; they knew that they could lop off the heads of the fine lords whose grandeur embittered the lives of the peasants and the workmen as easily as they could beat down nuts from trees; yet there lay the real King of France in his doll's house, and he could neither live nor die,—that was droll!

The chair in the little room stood ready for the visitors who paid their respects to the sick man when the travellers halted.

The table was carried for the convenience of the secretary, who wrote upon it, sorted his papers, dusted his ink with scented gold-powder, and pasted great wafers over the silken floss and the English ribands which tied his private correspondence.

Richelieu, as he travelled, dictated army orders and diplomatic despatches. When the little procession arrived at a halting-place, everything was ready for its reception; the house in which the Cardinal was to lodge had been prepared, the entire floor to be occupied by him had been gutted so that no inner partitions could interfere with his progress. The wains stopped, the inclined plane was set in position against the side of the house, and the heavy machine bearing the sick-room was rolled slowly into the breach and engulfed without a tremor.

When it was possible the room was drawn aboard a boat and the Cardinal was transported by water; in that case when he reached home he was disembarked opposite his palace near the Port au Foin, and borne through the crowd of people, who struggled and crushed each other so that they might know how a Cardinal-Minister looked, lying in his bed and entering Paris, dying, yet triumphant, after he had vanquished all his enemies.

Richelieu saw all that passed; his perceptions were as keen and his judgment was as just as in the days of his vigorous manhood. Entering Paris in his bed on his return from Lyons, he saw among the prostrate courtiers of his own party a man who had been compromised by the conspiracy, and then and there he summoned him from his knees and ordered him to present himself at the palace and give an account of his actions. Richelieu's word was law; no one questioned it. The weeks which followed the return from Lyons were tedious. After the exposure of the conspiracy the Cardinal suspected every one, the King included. His tired eyes searched the corners of the King's bed-chamber for assassins. He strove to force the King to dismiss some of the officers of his guard, but at that Louis revolted.

After violent discussions and long recriminative dialogues the Cardinal resorted to heroic means. He shut himself up in his palace, refused to receive the King's ambassadors, and threatened to send in his resignation. Then the King yielded, and peace was made.

The two moribunds were together when the precautions for the national safety were taken against Gaston d'Orléans. In his declaration Louis told the deputies that he had forgiven his brother five separate and distinct times, and that he should forgive him once more and once only. The declaration made it plain that the King was firm in his determination to protect himself against his brother.[229] Gaston was to be stripped of all power and to be deprived of the government of Auvergne; his gendarmerie and his light cavalry were to be suppressed. The King made the declaration to Mathieu Molé, December 1, 1642. That same day the Cardinal passed a desperate crisis, and it was known that he must die.

He prepared for death with the firmness befitting a man of his calibre. When his confessor asked him if he had forgiven his enemies, he answered that he had "no enemies save the enemies of the state."[86] There was some truth in the answer, and in that truth lay his title to glory. At home or abroad, in France or in foreign lands, Richelieu received the first force of every blow aimed at France. He was the Obstacle, and all hostility used him as a mark. He was the shield as well as the sword of the State. His policy was governed by two immutable ideas: 1. His own will by the will of the King; 2. France. His object was to subject all individual wills to the supreme royal will, and to develop French influence throughout Europe. We have seen the position which France had taken under his direction; he had accomplished work fully as important in the State. "The idea of monarchical power was akin to a religious dogma," said Ranke, "and he who rejected the idea expected to be pursued with the same rigour, and with nearly the same formalities, with which national justice pursued the heretic. The time for an absolute[230] monarchy was ripe. Louis XIV. might come; he would find his bed ready.

Richelieu gave up the ghost December 4, 1642. The news was immediately carried to the King, who received it with the comment, "A great politician is dead."

In France the feeling of relief was general. No one doubted that the Cardinal's death would change everything. The exiles expected to be recalled; the prisoners expected to be set free; the Opposition looked forward to taking the reins of State, and the great, who in spite of their greatness were probably more or less badly fed, dreamed of an Abbey of Thélème. The mass of Frenchmen loved change for the sake of novelty.

The Parisians had hoped for the spectacle of a fine funeral, and they were not disappointed. Richelieu's body lay in state in its Cardinal's robes, and so many people visited him that the procession consumed one whole day and night passing his bier. The parade lasted nearly a week. The burial took place the thirteenth day of December. It was a public triumph. The funeral car, drawn by six horses, was considered remarkable. But the changes hoped for did not arrive. La Grande Mademoiselle was the first to recognise the fact that Louis XIII. had given the kingdom false hopes. It had been supposed that the Cardinal's demise would give the King power to make the people happy. The Cardinal was dead, and there had been no change. Despite all that Gaston had done, Mademoiselle[231] loved him; she could not separate him from her idea of the glory of her house. She noted in her memoirs the visit made to the Louvre in his behalf:

The 4th December, after Mademoiselle made her unsuccessful visit, Louis XIII. summoned Mazarin to finish the work that Richelieu had begun.

The 5th December Louis sent out a circular letter announcing the death of Richelieu; he cut short the rumours of a political crisis by stating that he was resolved to maintain all the establishments by him decreed in Council with the late Prime Minister, and he further stated that to advance the foreign affairs of France and also to advance the internal interests of the State,—as he had always advanced them,—he should maintain the existent national policy.

The riches amassed by the Cardinal passed into the hands of his heirs, and the King supplemented the legacies by the distribution of a few official appointments. Richelieu was gone from earth, but[232] his spirit still governed France. "All the Cardinal's evils are right here!" cried Mademoiselle; "when he went, they remained."

Montglat said that they "found it difficult to announce the Cardinal's death. No one was willing to take the first step. They spoke in whispers. It was as if they were afraid that his soul would come back to punish them for saying that he could die." It was said that "even the King had so respected the Cardinal when he was alive, that he feared him when he was dead."

Under such conditions it was difficult to make a change of any kind; nevertheless, after weeks had passed—when the King had accustomed himself to independent action—a few changes came about gradually and stealthily, one by one.

The thirteenth day of January, 1643, Monsieur was given permission to call at Saint Germain and pay his respects to the King. The 19th, Bassompierre and two other lords emerged from the Bastille.

In February the Vendômes returned from exile. Old Mme. de Guise also took the road to Paris, and when she arrived her granddaughter, La Grande Mademoiselle, received her with open arms, and gave her a ball and a comedy, and collations composed of confitures, and fruits trimmed with English ribands; and when the ball was over and the guests were departing in the grey fog of early morning, old Madame and young Mademoiselle laid their light heads upon the same pillow[233] and dreamed that Cardinals were always dying and exiles joyfully returning to their own.

As time went on the King's clemency increased and he issued pardons freely. The reason was too plain to every one; the end was at hand. Paris had acquired a taste for her kindly sovereign. Louis knew that he was nearing the tideless sea,—he spoke constantly of his past; he exhibited his skeleton limbs covered with great white scars to his family and his familiar friends; he told the story of his wrongs. He told how he had been brought to the state that he was in by his "executioners of doctors" and by "the tyranny of the Cardinal." He said that the Cardinal had never permitted him to do things as he had wished to do them, and that he had compelled him to do things which had been repugnant to him, so that at last even he "whom Heaven had endowed with all the endurances," had succumbed under the load that had been heaped upon him. His friends listened and were silent.

To the last Louis XIII. was faithful to the sacraments and to France. He performed all his secular duties. When he lay upon his death-bed he summoned his deputies so that they might hear him read the declaration bestowing the title of Regent upon Anne of Austria and delivering the actual power of the Crown into the hands of a prospective Council duly nominated.

Louis XIII. had put his house in order: he had nothing more to do on earth. His sickness was[234] long and tedious, and attended by all that makes death desirable; by cruel pains, by distressful nausea, and by all the torments of a death by inches. The unhappy man was long in dying; now rallying, now sinking, with fluctuations which deranged the intrigues of the Court and agitated Saint Germain.

The King lay in the new château (the one built by his father); nothing remains of it but the "Pavillon Henri IV". Anne of Austria lived with the Court in the old château (the one familiar to all Parisians of the present day).

On "good days" the arrangement afforded the sufferer relative repose; but on "bad days," when he approached a crisis, the etiquette of the Court was torment. The courtiers hurried over to the new château to witness the death-agony. They crowded the sick-room and whispered with the celebrities who travelled daily from Paris to Saint Germain to visit the dying King. In the courtyard of the château the travellers' horses neighed and pawed the ground. Confused sounds and tormenting light entered by the windows; the air of the room was stifling and Louis begged his guests, in the name of mercy, to withdraw from his bed and let him breathe.

The crowds assembled in the courtyard hissed or applauded as the politicians entered or drove away. On the highway before the château the idle people stood waiting to receive the last sigh of the King, to be in at the death, or to make merry at the expense of celebrated men.

While the masters visited the dying King the coachmen, footmen, on-hangers, and other tributaries sat upon the carriage boxes, declared their politics, and issued their manifestos, and their voices rose above the neighing of the horses and ascended to the sick-room. When the tantalising periodically recurrent crises which kept the Court and country on foot were past, the celebrities and men of Parliament, with many of the courtiers, fled to Paris, where they forgot the sights and the sounds of the sick-room in the perfumed air of the Parisian salons.

Mademoiselle wrote of that time: "There never were as many balls as there were that year; and I went to them all."

The final crisis came the thirteenth day of May. Immediately after the King gave up the ghost, the Queen and all the Court retired from the death-chamber and made ready to depart from Saint Germain early in the morning. The moving was like breaking camp. At daybreak long files of baggage wagons laden with furniture and with luggage began to descend the hill of Saint Germain, and soon afterward crowded chariots, drawn by six horses, and groups of cavaliers, joined the lumbering wains. The suppressed droning of many voices accompanied the procession. At eleven o'clock silence fell upon the long, writhing line, and an army corps surrounding the royal mourners passed, escorted by the Marshals of France, dukes and peers, and the gentlemen of the Court,—all mounted.

The last of the battalions filed by the van of the procession, and the chariots and the wains moved on, mingling with the servitors and men of all trades, who in that day followed in the train of all the great.

Saint Germain was vacant. The last errand boy vanished, the murmur of the moving throng died in the distance; the shroud of silence wrapped the new château, and the curtain fell upon the fifth act of the reign of Louis XIII. There remained upon the stage only a corpse, light as a plume, watched by a lieutenant and his guard.

CHAPTER IV

The day after the death of Louis XIII. Paris was in a tumult. The people were on duty, awaiting their young King, Louis XIV., a boy less than five years old.

The country had been notified that the King would enter Paris by the Chemin du Roule and the Faubourg Saint Honoré. Some of the people had massed in the streets through which the procession was to pass; the others were hurrying forward toward the bridge of Neuilly. "Never did so many coaches and so many people come out of Paris," said Olivier d'Ormesson, who, with his family, spent the day at a window in the Faubourg Saint Honoré, watching to see who would follow and who would not follow in the train of Anne of Austria.

Ormesson and his friends were close observers, who drew conclusions from the general behaviour; they believed that they could read the fate of the[238] country in the faces of the courtiers. France hoped that the Queen would give the nation the change of government which had been vainly looked for when Richelieu died.

Anne of Austria was a determined, self-contained woman, an enigma to the world. No one could read her thoughts, but the courtiers were sure of one thing: she would have no prime minister. She had suffered too deeply from the tyranny of Richelieu. She would keep her hands free! There was enough in that thought to assure to the Queen the sympathy of the people, and to arouse all the ambitious hopes of the nobility.

The Parisian flood met the royal cortège at Nanterre and, turning, accompanied it and hindered its progress. "From Nanterre to the gates of the city the country was full of wains and chariots," wrote Mme. de Motteville, "and nothing was heard but plaudits and benedictions." When the royal mourners surrounded by the multitude entered the Chemin du Roule the first official address was delivered by the Provost of the Merchants. The Regent answered briefly that she should instruct her son "in the benevolence which he ought to show to his subjects."[87] The applause was deafening. The cortège advanced so slowly that it was six o'clock in the evening when Anne of Austria ascended the staircase of the Louvre, saying that she could endure no more, and that she must defer the reception of condolences until the following day.

Saturday, the 16th, was devoted to hearing addresses and to receiving manifestations of reverence. The following Monday the Queen led her son to Parliament, where, contrary to the intention expressed in the last will and testament of Louis XIII., she, Anne of Austria, was declared Regent "with full, entire, and absolute authority."

The evening of that memorable day a radiant throng filled the stifling apartments of the Louvre. The great considered themselves masters of France. Some of the courtiers were gossiping in a corner; all were happy. Suddenly a rumour, first whispered, then spoken aloud, ran through the rooms, Mazarin had been made Chief of Council! The Queen had appointed him immediately after she returned to her palace from Parliament!

The courtiers exchanged significant glances. Some were astounded, others found it difficult to repress their smiles. The great had helped Anne of Austria to seize authority because they had supposed that she would be incapable of using it. Now that it was too late for them to protect themselves she had come forth with the energy and the initiative of a strong woman. In reality, though possessed of reticence, she was a weak woman, acting under a strong influence, but that fact was not evident.

The Queen-mother was forty-one years old. Her hair was beautiful; her eyes were beautiful; she had beautiful hands, a majestic mien, and natural wit. Her education had been as summary as Mademoiselle's; she knew how to read and how to[240] write. She had never opened a book; when she first appeared in Council she was a miracle of ignorance. She had always been conversant with the politics of France because her natural love of intrigue had taught her many things concerning many people. She had learned the lessons of life and the world from the plays presented at the theatre, and from the witty and erudite frequenters of the salons. She was enamoured of intellect, she delighted in eloquence, she was a serious woman and a devoted mother. While Louis XIII. lived she was considered amiable and indulgent to the failings of "low people," because her indifference made her appear complaisant. As soon as she assumed the Regency her manner changed and her real nature came to the surface. She astonished her deputies by the breathless resistance which she opposed to any hint of a suggestion adverse to her mandates. After the royal scream first startled Parliament there was hardly a man of the French State who did not shrink at sight of the Regent's fair flushed face and the determined glitter of her eye. Anne of Austria was acting under guidance; the delicate hand of the woman lay under the firm hand of a master, and her lover's will, not the judgment of the deputies, was her law.

The people had received false impressions of the character of the Queen; some had judged her too favourably (Mme. de Motteville considered her beautiful); others—Retz among them—failed to do her justice.

Anne of Austria was neither a stupid woman nor a great Queen, although she was called both "great" and "foolish." She was born a Spaniard, and in thought and in feeling she was a Spaniard to the end of her life. Like all her race, she was imaginative; she indulged in dreams and erected altars to her ideals. Her life had betrayed her illusions, therefore she longed for vengeance; and as she was romantic, her vengeance took a sentimental form. A study of her nature, as furnished by the histories of her early years, makes her after-life and her administration of the Regency comprehensible. Despite the latitude of her morals she exhibited piety so detailed and so persistent that the Parisians were displeased; one of her friends commented upon it sharply. "She partakes of the communion too often, she reveres the relics of the saints, she is devoted to the Virgin, and she offers the presents and the novenas which the devout consider effectual when they are trying to obtain favours from Heaven." This from a Parisian was critical judgment.

As the Queen was born to rule, she could not comprehend any form of government but absolute monarchy. Her Parliament was shocked when she interrupted its Councils by shrill screams of "Taisez-vous!" But her behaviour was consistent; she believed that she expressed the authority of her son's kingship when she raised her high falsetto and shouted to her deputies to hold their tongues.

The new Minister, Mazarin, was of Sicilian origin,[242] and forty years of age. In Paris, where he had officiated two years (1634-1636), as Papal Nuncio, he was known by his original Italian name, Mazarini. When he was first seen at Court he entered without ceremony and installed himself with the natural ease of an habitué returned after a forced absence. No one knew by what right he made himself at home. Richelieu profited by his versatility and made use of him in various ways. Mazarin was gifted with artistic taste, and he wielded a fluent pen. His appointment as representative of the Holy See had proved his capacity and blameless character. Paris knew that Richelieu had written to him from his death-bed: "I give my book into your hands with the approbation of our good Master, so that you may conduct it to perfection."

Almost immediately after de Richelieu breathed his last the King called Mazarin to the palace, where he remained hard at work as long as the King lived. He had no special duties, but he lived close to the royal invalid, did everything that de Richelieu had done, and made himself in every way indispensable. To the wounds of the tired spirit whose peace the scorching splendour of the great Cardinal had withered the calm presence of the lesser Cardinal was balm. Mazarin employed his leisure as he saw fit; how he employed it the world knew later. He was seldom seen either in the palace or out of it. When Louis XIII. died and the people, little and great, thronged the[243] streets and the highways and flocked to Parliament to witness the establishment of the Regent, Mazarin was not in evidence. When the Provost's address and the other addresses were read, and when the people welcomed their young King, Mazarin was not seen, and as he was not at the funeral of the King, and as no one had heard from him since the King's death, it was believed that he had returned to his own country.

Prominent Parisians who knew everything and every one had formed no opinion of Mazarin's character or of his personal appearance. He had been Nuncio; that was all that they knew of him. Olivier d'Ormesson, who went everywhere, knew every one of any importance in Paris, yet when Mazarin had been Prime Minister six months, d'Ormesson spoke of him as if he had seen him but once. In d'Ormesson's Journal we read:

The new Chief of Council was as modest as the unobtrusive Cardinal who assumed the duties of the great de Richelieu. Mazarin found better employment for his talents than the exhibition of his pomp. His design was to render his position impregnable, and we know what means he selected for its achievement. In his pocket diary (which the National Library preserves) he employed three languages, French, Spanish, and Italian. Whenever the Queen is mentioned the language is Spanish. The ingenuous frankness with which the writer of the strange notes recorded his intentions enables us to follow him step by step through all the labyrinths of his relations with royalty. His reflections make it clear that his aim was the Queen's heart: in the record dated August, 1634, we read: "If I could believe what they tell me—that her Majesty is making use of me because she needs my services, and that she has no inclination for me,—I would not stay here three days."

Apropos of his enemies he wrote: "Well, they are laying their heads together and planning a thousand intrigues to lessen my chances with her Majesty."

"The Abbess of the Carmelites has been talking to her Majesty. When she talked the Queen wept. She told the Abbess that in case the subject should be mentioned again she would not visit the convent."

Mazarin's diary conveys the impression that the man who edited it so carefully feared that he might forget something that he wished to say to the Queen. He made a note of everything that he meant to advise her to do, and of all the appeals and all the observations that he intended to make.

Following is a very simple reminder of words to be used when next he should see the Queen alone.

The "memorandum" which follows this last note gave proof of the speed of his wooing, and of his progress: "The jaundice caused by an excessive love...."

That Mazarin felt that he was strong was shown by the fact that he made suggestions to the Queen and offered her advice of a peculiarly intimate character. The note which follows covers the ground of one of the lines of argument used by him for the subjection of his royal lady and mistress:

"Her Majesty ought to apply herself to the winning over of all hearts to my cause; she should do so by making me the agent from whose hand they receive all the favours that she grants them."

After Anne of Austria qualified the Cardinal by the exequatur of her love, Mazarin dictated the language of the State. In his diary we find, verbatim, the diplomatic addresses and suggestions which were to be delivered by the Queen.

While the Queen's lover was engaged in maintaining his position against determined efforts to displace him, France enjoyed a few delightful moments. The long-continued anxiety had passed, the tension of the nation's nerves had yielded to the beneficent treatment of the conscientious counsellors, and the peaceful quiet of a temporary calm gave hope to the light-minded and strength and courage to the far-sighted, who foresaw the coming storm. To the majority of the people the resplendent victory of Rocroy (19th May, 1643), which immediately followed the death of Louis XIII., seemed a proof that God had laid His protecting hand upon the infant King and upon his mother.

This belief was daily strengthened. War had been carried to a foreign country, and the testimony of French supremacy had come back from many a battle-field. In the eyes of the world we occupied a brilliant position. Success had followed success in our triumphant march from Rocroy to the Westphalian treaties. Our diplomacy had equalled our military strategy and the strength of our arms; and a part of our glory had been the result of the efforts of the Prime Minister who ruled our armies and the nation. In the opinion of our[247] foreign enemies Mazarin had fully justified Richelieu's confidence and the choice of Anne of Austria.

His selection of agents had shown that he was in possession of all his senses; he had divined the value of the Duc d'Enghien and appointed him General-in-chief, though the boy was but twenty-two years old; he had sounded the character of Turenne; he had judiciously listed the names of the men to be appointed for the diplomatic missions, and he had proved that he knew the strength of France by ordering the ministers to hold their ground, to "stand firm," and not to concern themselves either with the objections or the resistance of other nations. The majority of the French people failed to recognise Cardinal Mazarin's services until the proper time for their recognition had passed, but Retz distinctly stated that Mazarin was popular in Paris during the first months of his ministry:

The arrest of the Duc de Beaufort and the dispersion of the Importants astonished the people, but did not affright them. Hope was the anchor of the National Soul. They who had formed the party of Marie de Médicis and the party of Anne of Austria hoped to bring about the success of their former projects, and to enforce peace everywhere; they hoped to substitute a Spanish alliance for the Protestant alliance. The great families hoped to regain their authority at the expense of the authority of the King. Parliament hoped to play a great political part. The people hoped for peace; they had been told that the Queen had taken a Minister solely for the purpose of making peace. The entire Court from the first Prince of the Blood to the last of the lackeys lived in hope of some grace or some favour, and as to that they were rarely disappointed, for the Administration "refused nothing." Honours, dignities, positions, and money were freely dispensed, not only to those who needed them, but to those who were already provided with them. La Feuillade said that there were but four words in the French language: "The Queen is good!"

So many cases of private and individual happiness gave the impression of public and general happiness. Paris expressed its satisfaction by entering heart and soul into its amusements. It played by day and it played by night, exhibiting the extraordinary appetite for pleasure which has always distinguished it.

"All, both the little and the great, are happy,"[249] said Saint Evremond; "the very air they breathe is charged with amusement and with love." Mademoiselle preserved a grateful memory of that period of joyous intoxication. "The first months of the Regency," she said in her memoirs, "were the most beautiful that one could have wished. It was nothing but perpetual rejoicing everywhere. Hardly a day passed that there were not serenades at the Tuileries or in the place Royale."

The mourning for the late King hindered no one, not even the King's widow, who passed her evenings in Renard's garden,[89] where she frequently supped with her friends. Though the return of winter drove the people from the public walks, the universal amusements went on. "They danced everywhere," said Mademoiselle, "and especially at my house, although it was not at all according to decorum to hear violins in a room draped with mourning." We note here that at the time Mademoiselle wrote thus she was regarded as a victim. It was rumoured in Paris that her liberty and her pleasures were restricted, and the indignation of the people seethed at thought of it. Mademoiselle had lost her indulgent friend and governess, Mme. de Saint Georges. Her new governess, Mme. de Fiésque, a woman of firm will who looked with disfavour upon her pupil's untrammelled ways, made attempts to discipline her. When Mme. de Fiésque exerted her authority the canaille formed groups and threatened the palace of the Tuileries.[250] Mademoiselle was sixteen years old and the whole world knew it. The people thought, as she thought, that she was too old to be imprisoned like a child. She was quick to avenge her outraged dignity; the governess was headstrong. Slap answered slap and, after the combat, Mademoiselle was under lock and key six days.

Mademoiselle had in mind something more important than her childish punishment. The death of Louis XIII. had enabled Gaston to send for his wife. The Regency made but one condition,—the married pair were to be remarried in France. The Princess Gaston was on the way, travelling openly, entering France with the reputation of a heroine of romance. Mademoiselle revelled in the thought of a step-mother as young and as beautiful as an houri. They would dance together; they would run about like sisters!

Twelve years previous to the death of Louis XIII., when Marguerite de Lorraine committed the so-called "crime" which Richelieu's jurisconsults qualified by a name for which we shall substitute the less discouraging term "abduction," events separated the wedded pair at the church door. The sacrament of marriage had just been administered.

Madame fled before the minions of the law reached Nancy and found her way cut off by the French army. She donned the wig and garments of a man, besmirched her face with suet, crossed[251] the French line in a cardinal's coach, covered twenty leagues on horseback, and joined Monsieur in Flanders. The world called her courageous, and when she exercised her impeccancy during a nine years' separation from her husband, conjugal fidelity rare enough at any time, and especially rare at that time, definitely ranged her among spectacular examples of virtue.

Handsome, brave, free from restraint, and virtuous! Paris was curious to see her.

At Meudon (27th May, 1643) the people made haste to reach the spot before she alighted from her carriage. They were eager to witness her meeting with the light-minded husband with whom France was at last to permit her to cast her lot and from whom she had been separated so long. Mademoiselle wrote:

Both Monsieur and Madame were much embarrassed;[252] it was a trying thing to meet after a separation of nine years.

Monsieur had not materially changed, although he had acquired a habit of the gout which hindered him when he attempted to pirouette. Madame appeared faded and ill-attired, but that was but a natural consequence of the separation; it was to be expected.

When their marriage had been duly regulated and recorded in the Parish Register, the couple established themselves in Gaston's palace, and the Court found that it had acquired an hypochondriac. The romantic type of constancy habitually hung upon the gate of Death. Mme. de Motteville said:

When Madame visited the Queen, as she did once in twenty-four months, she was carried in a sedan chair, as other ladies of her quality were carried, but her movements were attended by such distress and by so much bustle that her arrival conveyed the impression of a miracle. Frequently, when she had started upon a journey, or to pay a visit to the Queen, before she had gone three yards she declared that she had been suddenly seized by faintness, or by some other ill; then her bearers were forced to make haste to return her to the[253] house. She lived in Gaston's palace in the Luxembourg. Mademoiselle's palace was in the Tuileries, and the royal family lived either in the palace of the Louvre, in the Palais Royal, or in the Château of Saint Germain.

Madame declared that her life had been one continuous agony. She announced her evils not singly but in clusters, and although none of them were evident to the disinterested observer, her diagnoses displayed so thorough a knowledge of their essential character that to harbour a doubt of their reality would be to confess a consciousness of uncertainty akin to the skepticism of the ignorant.

At the advent of Madame the spiritual atmosphere of the Luxembourg changed. The Princess was a moralist, and either because of her nervous anxiety for his welfare, or for some other reason, she harangued her husband day and night. The irresponsible Gaston was a signal example of marital patience; he carried his burden bravely, listened attentively to his wife's rebukes, sang and laughed, whistled and cut capers, pulled his elf-locks in mock despair, and, clumsily whirling upon his gouty heels, "made faces" behind Madame's drooping shoulders; but he bore her plaintive polemics without a murmur, and although he freely ridiculed her, he never left her side. "Madame loved Monsieur ardently," and Monsieur returned Madame's love in the disorderly manner in which he did everything. "One may say that he loved her, but that[254] he did not love her often," wrote Mme. de Motteville. The public soon lost its interest in the spectacular household; Madame was less heroic than her reputation. Mademoiselle despaired when Madame urged Monsieur to be prudent; to her mind her father's prudence had invariably exceeded the proportions of virtue. Generally speaking, Madame's first relations with her step-daughter were cordial, but they were limited to a purely conventional exchange of civilities. Speaking of that epoch, Mademoiselle said: "I did all that I possibly could to preserve her good graces, which I should not have lost had she not given me reason to neglect them." Mademoiselle could not have loved her step-mother, nor could she have been loved by her; Madame and Mademoiselle were of different and distinct orders.

The routine requirements of Mademoiselle's periods of mourning diverted her mind from her marriage projects, but she soon resumed her efforts. She had no adviser, and no one cared for her establishment; Gaston was too well employed in spending her money to concern himself with her future, and, as the duties of daily life fatigued Madame, Mademoiselle could not hope for assistance from her step-mother; the Queen was her only hope, and the Queen's executor was jealously guarding her fine principalities and keeping close watch over her person. In 1644 the King[255] of Spain, Philippe IV., the brother of Anne of Austria, became a widower. He was the enemy of France, and it would have been folly to give him a right to any portion of French territory; but Mademoiselle did not consider that fact; her political intuitions were not keen. All that she could see was that the King had a crown, and that it was such a crown as would adorn the title of her own nobility. For some occult reason which, as no one has ever located it, will probably remain enigmatical, Mademoiselle imagined that Philippe IV. desired to espouse her; and she passed her time forming plans and waiting for the Spanish envoy who was to come to France to ask her father for her hand. As it is difficult to believe that she ever could have dreamed the story that she tells in her memoirs, we must suppose that there was some foundation for her hopes. Possibly the expectations upon which she artlessly dilated sprang from the intriguing designs of her subalterns.[90]

Mademoiselle's anxieties and hopes were fed alternately. To add to her distress, a Spaniard was caught on French soil and cast into the Bastille. Mademoiselle grieved bitterly over his fate; she supposed that the prisoner had been sent by the Spanish King to negotiate the marriage; it was her belief that Mazarin's spies had warned him (Mazarin) of the arrival of the envoy, and that the Cardinal had ordered the arrest to prevent the envoy from delivering his despatches; the interpretation was chimerical. Our knowledge is confined to the fact that nothing more was said of Mademoiselle's marriage, and that when the King was ready to marry he married an Austrian.

The troubles of England provided Mademoiselle with a more serious suitor. Queen Henriette, the daughter of Henry of Navarre, had fled to France, and France, in the person of the Regent, had installed her in the Louvre. Before that time Anne of Austria had moved from the Louvre to the Palais Royal, which was a more commodious residence, well fitted to the prevailing taste. Queen Henriette was ambitious, and she began to form projects for an alliance with France before she recovered from the fatigue of her journey.

Mademoiselle was a spirited Princess, very handsome,[257] witty, and an ardent partisan. Such a wife would be a credit to any king, and the Montpensier estates were needed by the throne of England. Queen Henriette was sanguine; she ignored the fact that her son's future was dark and threatening. She made proposals to Mademoiselle and Mademoiselle received them coldly. Her ideas of propriety were shocked by the thought of such an alliance. The Queen of England was a refugee, dependent upon the bounty of France. There could be no honour or profit in marriage to her son!

Queen Henriette was the first of a series of exiled monarchs to whom France gave hospitality, and it must be said that her manner of opening a series was not a happy one. The sovereigns of former times were not familiar with revolutions, and their ignorance made them fearless; they despised precautions; they were improvident, they saved nothing for a rainy day; they scorned foreign stocks; they avoided business, and looked with contempt upon foreign bankers. If they lost their thrones they fled to foreign countries and sought refuge in the kingdoms of their friends, and there their comfort and their respectability were matters of chance; their friends might be in easy circumstances, and they might be on the verge of bankruptcy; a king's crown was not always accompanied by a full purse.

When Queen Henriette arrived in Paris she was received with honours and with promises.[258] The courtiers donned their festive robes "broidered with gold and with silver,"[91] and went to Montrouge to meet her and escort her into Paris. Anne of Austria received her affectionately and seated her at her right hand at banquets. Mazarin announced that she was to draw a salary of twelve hundred francs per diem; in short, everything was done to flatter the English guest. The credulous Henriette accepted the flattery and the promises literally and she was dazed, when, awaking to the truth, she found that she was a beggar. Recording the history of that epoch, Mademoiselle said:

Queen Henriette was obliged to sell her jewels and her silver dishes; debts followed debts, and the penniless sovereign had no way to meet them. The little court of the Louvre owed the baker and could not pay its domestic servants. Mme. de Motteville visited the Louvre and found Queen Henriette practically alone. She was sitting, dejectedly meditating, in one of the great empty salles; her unpaid servitors had abandoned her and her suite had gone where they could find nourishment.

The spectacle of royal poverty and the tragical turn taken by English affairs gave Mademoiselle cause for serious thought. She saw that whatever the Prince might be in the future, he was not a desirable suitor at the epoch existent; and she spoke freely:

Had the Prince of Wales been a hero of the type of the Cid, Mademoiselle would have thrown prudence to the winds. Personal attraction, the magnetism of love, the arguments used by Lauzun would have called her from her dreams of the pomp becoming her rank, and she would have confronted poverty gaily; her whole career proved that she was not of a calculating mind. The Prince of Wales was by three years her junior; he was awkward and bashful, and so ignorant that he had no[260] conception of his own affairs. He lounged distractedly through the vast, empty Louvre, absorbed in purposeless thought, and, goaded by his mother, he frequented the Tuileries and besieged the heart of his cousin, whom he amazed by the sluggish obstinacy of his attentions. He paid his court with the inconsequent air of a trained parrot; the details of his love-making were ordered by his mother, and when, tormented by personal anxieties, the Queen of England forgot to dictate his discourse, he sat before Mademoiselle with lips closed. He talked so little that it was said he "opened his teeth only to devour fat meat." At one of the banquets of the Queen of France he refused to touch the ortolans, and falling upon an enormous piece of beef and upon a shoulder of mutton he "ate as if there had been nothing else in the world, and as if he had never eaten before."

"His taste," mused Mademoiselle, "appeared to me to be somewhat indelicate; I was ashamed because he was not as good in other respects as he bore witness that he was in his feeling for me."

After the banquet at which the Prince refused the ortolans, the cousins were left alone, and, commenting upon the fact later, Anne-Marie-Louise said: "It pleases me to believe that on that occasion his silence resulted from an excess of respect for me rather than from lack of tenderness; but I will avow the truth; I would have been better pleased had he shown less stolidity and less deficiency in the transports of the love-passion." It[261] is but fair to say in behalf of the timid suitor that, according to his feeble light, he acquitted himself conscientiously; he gazed steadfastly in his cousin's pretty face, he held the candle when her hair-dresser coiffed her hair; but as he was only a great boy, just at the age of dumb stupidity, he had few thoughts which were not personal, and few words to express even those. He was neither Chérubin, Fortunio, nor Rodrigue. "He had not an iota of sweetness," declared Mademoiselle. Worse than that, he had none of the exalted sentiments by means of which the heroes of Corneille manifested their identity, and to Mademoiselle that was a serious matter. As the awkward suitor became more insistent Mademoiselle was seized by a determination to be rid of him. Her records fix the date of her adverse inspiration. "In 1647 toward the end of winter [92] a play followed by a ball was given at the Palais Royal [the trago-comedy, Orpheus, in music and Italian verse]." Anne of Austria, who had no confidence in her niece's taste, insisted that the young lady should be coiffed and dressed under her own eye. Mademoiselle said:

After the play a ball was given on a great, well-lighted stage. At the end of the stage was a throne raised three steps high and covered by a dais; according to Mademoiselle's account:

Seen from the height of the throne, the Prince of Wales seemed less of a man than he had ever seemed before, and from that day Mademoiselle spoke of him as "that poor fellow." She said: "I pitied him. My heart as well as my eyes looked down upon him, and the thought entered my mind that I should marry an emperor." The thought of an emperor entered her mind the previous year when Ferdinand III. became a widower. Monsieur's favourite, the Abbé Rivière,—with a view to his own interests, and possibly with some hope of adding to his income,—announced the welcome tidings of the Empress's death as soon as he received them; and Mademoiselle said:

"M. de la Rivière told me that I must marry either the Emperor or his brother. I told him that I should prefer the Emperor."

Paris heard of the project that same evening. Mademoiselle did not receive proposals from the Emperor at that time or at any other time, but the idea that she was to be an Empress haunted her mind, and as she was very frank, she told her hopes freely. La Rivière and others like him, taking advantage of her public position and of her accessibility, told her flattering tales and suggested alliances; she was informed that the Court of Vienna, the Court of Germany, and in fact all the Courts, desired alliance with her, and she believed all that was said. The evening of the ball, Anne of Austria declared, by Mademoiselle's own account, that she "wished passionately that the marriage with the Emperor might be arranged, and that she should do all that lay in her power to bring it about." Mademoiselle did not believe in the Regent's promises, but she listened to them and shaped her course by them. Gaston told her (in one of the rare moments when he remembered that she was his daughter) that the Emperor was "too old," and that she would not be happy in his country. Mademoiselle answered that she cared more for her establishment than for the person of her suitor. Gaston reflected upon the statement and promised to do everything possible for the furtherance of her schemes. Mademoiselle recorded his promise with the comment: "So after that I thought of the marriage continually[264] and my dream of the Empire so filled my mind that I considered the Prince of Wales only as an object of pity." This folly, while it gave free play to other and similar follies, clung to her mind with strange tenacity, and long after the Emperor married the Austrian Mademoiselle said archly: "The Empress is enceinte; she will die when she is delivered, and then—." The Empress did die, either at the moment of her deliverance or at some other moment, and Mademoiselle took the field, determined to march on to victory. One of her gentlemen (of the name of Saujon) whom she fancied "because he was half crazy," secretly placed in her hand a regularly organised correspondence treating of her marriage. Mademoiselle received all the letters, read them, approved of them, and appointed Saujon chargé of her affairs. By her order Saujon travelled to Germany to bring about the marriage. No one had ever heard of a royal or a quasi-royal alliance negotiated by a private individual, but Saujon boldly entered upon his mission. Incidentally he revised Mademoiselle's despatches; adding and eliminating sentences according to his own idea of the exigencies of the case. One of his letters was intercepted and he was arrested and cast into prison. It was rumoured that he had made an attempt to abduct the Princess so that she might marry the Archduke Leopold.

At first Mademoiselle laughed at the rumours. She declared that people knew her too well to think that she could do anything so ridiculous.

Mazarin cross-questioned Saujon,—and no one knew better than he how to conduct an inquest,—but turn his victim as he might the Cardinal could not wring from Saujon anything but the truth. Saujon insisted that Mademoiselle had not known anything concerning the intercepted letter.

Anne of Austria, seconded by Monsieur, feigned to take the affair seriously, and a violent scene ensued.

One evening (May 6, 1648, according to d'Ormesson) the Abbé de la Rivière met Mademoiselle in the corridor of the Palais Royal, and casually informed her that the Queen and Monsieur were angry. Almost at the same instant Monsieur issued from the room adjoining the corridor and ordered his daughter to enter the Queen's room.

Anne of Austria was angry, and her shrill falsetto[266] conveyed an impression of vulgarity. Mademoiselle, calmly contemptuous, on foot and very erect, stood in the embrasure of the long window; Monsieur, who dreaded his daughter's anger, had drawn close to the Queen; directly behind Monsieur was Mazarin, visibly amused.

Mademoiselle listened to her accusers, and answered with a sneer that she had nothing to do with it, that she was not interested in it, that such a scheme was worthy of low people.

Before she "abandoned the field" Mademoiselle rated Monsieur, who had imprudently attempted to interpose a word in favour of the Queen. Mme. de Motteville, to whom Anne of Austria told the story, reported that Mademoiselle reproached her father bitterly because he had not married her to the Emperor, when he "might easily have done so." She told him that it was shameful for a man not to defend his daughter "when her glory appeared to be attacked." The courtiers assembled in the adjoining room, though unable to distinguish the words of the discussion, had listened with curiosity. Mme. de Motteville said:

The day after the discussion guards were mounted at the door of Mademoiselle's apartments. The Abbé de la Rivière visited Mademoiselle to tell her that her father forbade her to[268] receive any one—no matter whom—until she was ready to confess what she knew of the intercepted letter. Mademoiselle remained firm in her denial of any knowledge of it.

Though sick from grief, she held her ground ten days. Murmurs were heard among the canaille, and little groups approached the palace, looked threateningly into the courtyard, and gazed at Mademoiselle's closed windows. It was known that Mademoiselle was in prison and the people resented it. How long could she hold out? How would it end? "It was known," wrote Olivier d'Ormesson, "that the Queen had called her 'an insolent girl' in the presence of her own father, and it was known that she had indignantly repudiated all knowledge of the intercepted letter; it was known that she had defended herself bravely." As the hours passed the people's murmurs increased, the aspect of the canaille became so menacing that the terrified Gaston sought counsel of Mazarin. Mazarin favoured clemency; he believed that Mademoiselle had been disciplined enough. By the advice of the angry Queen, Monsieur waited one day longer; then word was sent to Mademoiselle that she was free and that she might receive visits, and in an hour all the people of the under-world of Paris were hurrying to the palace, laughing, shouting, crying to each other in broken voices. They surged past the sentinel and entered the courtyard; men wept, women, holding their children above their heads, pointed to the open window[269] where Mademoiselle, emaciated by her ten days' trial, but still haughty and determined, looking down into the upturned faces, smiled a welcome. Public sympathy and the sympathy of both the Court and the city endorsed Mademoiselle's conduct and condemned the conduct of Monsieur. According to contemporary judgment Monsieur had betrayed his own flesh and blood: he had been given an opportunity to prove himself a man and he had refused it. Innocent or culpable, the custom of the day commanded the father to defend his child.

All Monsieur's motives were known and they increased the contempt of the people. When Mademoiselle attained her majority she expressed a wish to take possession of her inheritance. She asked her father for an accounting and her father accused her of indelicacy and undutiful conduct. He continued to administer her fortune and to give her such sums as he considered suitable for the maintenance of her home. In justification of his conduct he alleged that he had no money of his own, and that it was impossible to turn her property into funds. "Several times," said Mme. de[270] Motteville, "I have heard him say that he had not a sou that his daughter did not give him. 'My daughter possesses great wealth,' he used to ejaculate; 'were it not for that I should not know where to go for bread.'" People remembered that he had received a million of revenue when he married [93] and they judged his conduct severely, but they were not astonished. "No one can hope much from the conduct of Monsieur," wrote Olivier d'Ormesson.

After the quarrel the first meeting between father and daughter took place in the gallery of the Luxembourg. Monsieur hung his head.

As they talked Monsieur's eyes filled with tears and Mademoiselle wept freely. To all appearances they were on the best of terms when they parted.

Having appeased her father, Mademoiselle went to the Palais Royal hoping to pacify the Queen. Anne of Austria greeted her with icy reserve and Mademoiselle never could forget it. She had looked upon Anne of Austria as children look upon an elder sister. Thenceforth, feeling that she had no hope of support from her own family, she bent[271] every effort to the difficult task of finding a suitable husband and of establishing her life on a firm and independent basis. Mazarin's unswerving determination to prevent Mademoiselle's marriage was classed among the most important of the causes which contributed to the Fronde. The dangers attendant upon his conduct were real and serious; practically he was Mademoiselle's only guardian, and Mademoiselle was not only the favorite of the people but the Princess of the reigning house. As the director of a powerful nation Mazarin had duties which no State's minister is justified in ignoring. There were times when many of his other errors were so represented as to appear pardonable, but there never was a time when he was not blamed for the humiliation of the haughty Princess who, by no fault of her own, had been left upon the shores of life, isolated, hopeless of establishment, an object of ridicule to the unobservant who failed to see the pathetic loneliness of her position. The Parisians, high and low, thought that the Queen's Minister had done Mademoiselle an irreparable wrong, and it was thought that she knew that he had done her a wrong. It was believed that she would be a dangerous adversary in the day when the French people called him to account.

Mademoiselle knew her power and talked openly of what she could do. "I am," she said, "a very bad enemy; hot-tempered, strong in anger; and that, added to my birth, may well make my enemies[272] tremble." She could say it without boasting: she was a Free Lance and the great French People was her clan.

Two years [94] previous to the serio-comic scene in the Palais Royal, Emperor Ferdinand III. had barely escaped causing a catastrophe. Had the catastrophe been effected the victim would have been the Princess of a reigning house. This is a very roundabout way of saying that Mademoiselle's anxiety to marry the Emperor led her to prepare for the alliance by practising religion; and that once engaged in the practice, she was seized by the desire to become a nun.

The turbulent Princess who so ardently aspired to the throne of Ferdinand III. was as free in spirit as she was independent in action, and being hampered by no religion but the religion of culture, she followed her fancies and adopted a line of conduct in singular opposition to her natural behaviour and inclinations. Lured by ambitious policy to affect the attitude of religious devotion, she fell into her own net and was so deceived by her feelings that she supposed that she wished to take the veil. The fact that at heart her wishes tended in a diametrically opposite direction furnished the most striking proof of the power of hypnotic auto-suggestion. I am speaking now of a time previous to Saujon's mission to Germany. In her own words:

Mademoiselle had hung out the sign-board of religion—if I may use such a term—and she multiplied all the symptoms of religious conversion. To quote her own words:

No one was astonished by religious demonstrations of that kind. Custom did not oppose the admission of the public to the spectacle of intimate mental or spiritual crises which it is now considered proper to conceal. The only thing astonishing was that Mademoiselle had harboured the idea of forsaking the world. Her friends ridiculed her, and, stung by their raillery, she recanted. Speaking of it later, she said: "I wondered at my ideas; I scoffed at my infatuation. I made excuses because I had ever dreamed of such a project."

Monsieur was more surprised than his neighbours, and his surprise assumed a more virulent form; when his daughter begged to be permitted to enter a convent, when she declared that she would "better love to serve God than to wear the royal crowns of all the world," he gave way to a violent outburst of fury. Mademoiselle did not repeat her petition; she begged him to let the subject drop; and thus ended the comedy.

In any other quarter curiosity regarding details would have been the only sentiment aroused by such a project. The daughters of many noble families and the daughters of families beyond the pale of the nobility entered convents. In the spiritual slough in which France floundered toward the close of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century, the nun's veil and the monk's[275] habit were the only suitable coverings for mental distress, and in many cases the convent and the monastery were the sole places of refuge in a world so lamentable that Bérulle [95] and Vincent de Paul contemplated it with anguish. The convent was the only safe shelter for souls in which the germs of religious life had resisted the inroads of spiritual disease. In certain parts of the country, the annihilation of the Christian principle had resulted in the degradation of the Sacred Office and in the increase of the number of skeptics in the higher classes.

Saving a few exceptions, who were types of the Temple of the Holy Ghost, the Church set the example of every form and every degree of contempt for its corporate body, for its individual members, and for its consecrated accessories. I have already spoken of the elegant cavaliers, who, in their leisure moments, played the part of priests. In their eyes a bishopric was a sinecure like another sinecure. The office of the priesthood entailed no special conduct, nor any special duty. In general, priests were shepherds who passed their lives at a distance from their flocks, revelling in luxury and in pleasure. "Turning abruptly," said an ecclesiastical writer, "from the pleasures of the Court to the austere duties of the priesthood, without any preparation save the royal ordinance,—an ordinance, peradventure, due to secret and unavowable solicitations,—men assumed the office and[276] became bishops before they had received Holy Orders. Naturally, such haphazard bishops brought to the Episcopate minds far from ecclesiastical." In that day cardinals and bishops were seen distributing the benefits of their dioceses among their lower domestic tributaries. Thus valets, cooks, barbers, and lackeys were covered with the sacred vestments, and called to serve the altar.[96] Being abandoned to their own devices, the lesser clergy—heirs to all the failings and all the weaknesses of the lower classes of the people—grovelled in ignorance and in disorder. The continually augmenting evil was aggravated by the way in which the Church recruited the rank and file of her legions. As a rule, the cure, or living of the curé, was in the gift of the abbot. No one but the abbot had a right to appoint a curé. The abbot's power descended to his successor. That would have been well enough, had the abbot's virtues and good judgment—if such there had been—descended to the man immediately following him in office, but the abbot thus empowered to appoint the curé was seldom capable of making a good choice or even a decent choice.

The Court bestowed the abbeys on infants in the cradle, and the titulars were generally the illegitimate children of the princes, younger sons of great seigniors, notably gallant soldiers, and notoriously "gallant" women. The abbots were laical protégés of every origin, of every profession,[277] and of every character. Henry IV. bestowed abbeys indiscriminately. Among other notables who received the office of abbot at his hands were a certain number of Protestants and an equally certain number of women. Sully possessed four abbeys: "the fair Corisande" possessed an abbey (the Abbey of Chatillon-sur-Seine, where Saint Bernard had been raised). The fantastic abbots did not exert themselves to find suitable curés, and even had they been disposed to do so, where could they have gone to look for them? There were no clerical nursery-gardens in which to sow choice seed and to root cuttings for the parterres of the Church, and this was the chief cause of the prevailing evil. As there were no seminaries, and as the presbyterial schools were in decay, there were no places where men could make serious preparation for the Episcopate. As soon as the youth destined for Orders had learned so much Latin that he could explain the gospels used in the service of the Mass, and translate his breviary well enough to say his Office, he was considered fit for the priesthood. It is not difficult to imagine what became of the sacraments of the Church when they fell into such hands. There were priests who eliminated all pretence of unction from Baptism. Others, though they had received no sacerdotal authority, joined men and women in marriage, and sent them away rejoicing at their escape from a more binding formality. Some of the priests were ignorant of the formula of Absolution, and in their[278] ignorance they changed, abridged, and transposed to suit their own taste the august words of the most redoubtable of mysteries. Dumb as cattle, the ignoble priests deserted the pulpit, so there were no more sermons; there was no catechism, and the people, deprived of all instruction, were more benighted than their pastors. In some parishes there were men and women who were ignorant of the existence of God.[97]

The people had no teachers, and their manners were as neglected as their spiritual education. With rare exceptions, the provincial priest went to the wine-shops with his parishioners; if he saw fit, he went without taking off his surplice,—nor was that the worst; in every respect, and everywhere, and always, he set lamentable examples for his people. "One may say with truth and with horror," cried the austere Bourdoise, the friend of Père Bérulle, "that of all the evil done in the world, the part done by the ecclesiastics is the worst." Père Amelotte expressed his opinion with still more energy: "The name of priest," he cried, "has become the synonym of ignorance and debauchery!"

After the religious wars there were neither churches nor presbyteries, and therefore there were thousands of villages where there were no priests, but it is to be doubted whether such villages were more pitiable than those in which by their daily conduct the priests constantly provoked[279] the people to despise the earthly representative of God. The abandoned villages were not plunged in thicker moral and religious darkness, or in grosser or more abominable superstition, than that into which the ignoble pastors led their flocks. In one half of the total number of the provinces of France, the work that the first missionaries to the Gauls had accomplished had all to be begun again.

In the world of the aristocracy the condition of Catholicism was little better. When Vincent de Paul—by a mischance which was not to be the only one in his career—was appointed Almoner to Queen Marguerite, first wife of Henry IV., he was overwhelmed by what he saw and heard. The Court was two thirds pagan.[98] A loose and reckless line of thought, a moral libertinage, was considered a mark of elegance, and that opinion obtained until the seventeenth century. The jeunesse dorée, the "gilded youths" of the day, imitated the atheists and gloried in manifesting their contempt for the "superstitions of religion." They repeated after Vanini that "man ought to obey the natural law," that "vice and virtue should be classed as products of climate, of temperament, and of alimentation," that "children born with feeble intellects are best fitted to develop into good Christians." Among the higher classes, piety was not entirely extinct; that was proven in the days of the triumphant Renaissance, when the Catholicism of Bossuet and of Bourdaloue flamed with all the strength[280] of a newly kindled fire from the dying embers of the old religion. But the belief in God and in the things of God was not to be avowed among people of intellect. In a certain elegant, frivolous, and corrupt world, impiety and wit marched hand in hand. A man was not absolutely perfect in tone and manners unless he seasoned his conversation with a grain of atheism.[99] Under Louis XIII. in the immediate neighbourhood of royalty the tone changed, because the King's bigotry kept close watch over the appearance of religion. Men knew that they could not air their smart affectation of skepticism with impunity when their chief not only openly professed and practised religion, but frowned upon those who did not. All felt that the only way to be popular at Court was to follow the example of the King, and all slipped their atheism up their sleeves and bowed the knee with grace and dexterity, pulling on long faces and praying as visibly as Louis himself. But many years passed before the practice of religion expressed the feelings of the heart. Richelieu [100] had several intimate friends who were openly confessed infidels, and proud of their infidelity. While they were intellectual and witty and devoted to the Cardinal's interests, they were permitted to think as they pleased.

Long after the day of Richelieu,—in the reign of Louis XIV.,—the great Condé and Princess[281] Anne de Gonzague made vows to the "marvellous victories of grace,"[101] but while they were "waiting for the miracle," the more miscreant of the Court amused themselves by throwing a piece of the wood of the true cross into the fire "to see whether it would burn."

The current of moral libertinage, though it appeared sluggish after the Fronde, had not run dry, and it was seen in the last third of the seventeenth century and in the following century shallow, but flowing freely.[102]

Whatever the general condition, the city was always better fortified against spiritual libertinage than the Court, because it contained stronger elements, and because it lacked the frivolity of the social bodies devoted to pleasure. In the city mingled with the higher bourgeoisie and the middle bourgeoisie were nobles of excellent stock who did not visit the Louvre or the Palais Royal because, as they had no title or position at Court, they could not claim the rank to which their quality gave them right; to cite an instance: Mme. de Sévigné was not of the Court; she was always of the city.

Taken altogether, the Parliamentary world, which had one foot at Court and the other foot in the city, had preserved a great deal of religion and morality. Olivier d'Ormesson's journal shows us the homes of the serious and intellectual people of[282] the great metropolitan centres to whom piety and gravity had descended from their fathers.

The Parliamentary world of the provinces was notable for its moral attitude and for its love of religion. Taken all in all the French bourgeoisie had not felt the inroads of free thought, although there had been a few cases of visible infiltration. In the country districts the people practised religion more or less fervently.

Despite the few exceptions serving as luminous points in the universal darkness, in the reign of Louis XIII. the situation was well fitted to inspire creatures of ardent faith and exalted mysticism with horror. There were many such people in Paris then, as there have been always. Discouraged, hopeless of finding anything better in a world abandoned to blasphemy and vice, the naturally pious fled to the cloisters and too often they found within the walls of their refuges the same scandals that had driven them from their homes. The larger number of the monasteries were given over to depravity [103] and the monks were like the people of the world. As we have seen, a few prelates of rare faith and devotion furnished the exceptions to the rule, but set, as they were, wide distances apart in the swarming mass of vociferous immorality, they excited a pity which swallowed up all appreciation of their importance.

Divers questions which were not connected either with belief as a whole or with the principle of belief[283] combined to make the Protestant minority by far more moral than the Catholic majority. Perhaps the social disadvantage attached to Protestantism was the strongest reason for its superiority. When a practically powerless minority is surrounded and kept under surveillance by a powerful majority, unless pride and vanity have blinded its prudence the minority keeps careful watch of its actions. By a natural process minorities of agitators cast cowardly and selfish members out of their ranks; in other words, they weed out the useless, the feeble, the derogatory elements, and the elements which, being dependent upon the favour of the public, or susceptible to public criticism, flinch if subjected to unfavourable judgment. The Protestant minority eliminated all who, fearing the ridicule or the animosity of the Court, shrank from standing shoulder to shoulder with the men in the fighting ranks of Protestantism. Impelled by personal interest, the converts to the reform movement went back to the Catholic majority. There were so many advantages attendant upon the profession of Catholicism that with few exceptions the great lords declared their faith in the religion powerful to endow them with military commands and with governmental and other lucrative positions. The Protestant ranks were thinned, but the few who stood their ground were the picked men of the reform movement. The ranks of the Catholics were swelled by the hypocrites and the turncoats who had deserted from the army of the Protestants.[284] The Protestants gained morally by the defection of their converts, and the Catholics lost; the few who sustained Protestantism were sincere; the fact of their profession proved it.

The Protestant pastor had no selfish reason for his profession; he had nothing to hope for; he was lured by no promise of an abbey, nor could he expect to be rewarded for his open revolt against the King's church. Looking at it in its most illusive light, his was a bad business; there was nothing in it to tempt the favourites of the great; not even a lackey could find advantage in appointment to the Protestant ministry, and no man entered upon the painful life of the Protestant pastor unless forced by an all-mastering vocation. The cause of the Reformation was safe because it was in the hands of men who boasted of "a judge that no king could corrupt," and who believed that they had armed themselves with "the panoply of God." The pastors laboured with unfailing zeal, first to kindle the spark of a faith separated from all earthly interests; next to nourish sincere belief in God as the vital principle of religious life. Under their influence the Protestants of the upper middle classes and the Protestants of the lower classes—there were still fewer of the latter than of the former—not only practised, but lived their religion, giving an example of good conduct and of intelligent appreciation of the name and the meaning of their profession. Their adversaries were forced to render them the homage due to their efforts and their[285] sincerity. They, the Protestants, were charitable in the true sense of the term; they loved the brethren; they cared for the bodies as well as for the souls of the poor; they proved their love for their fellows by guarding the public welfare; they kept the laws and, whenever it was possible, enforced them. The pastors knew that they must practise what they preached, and, profiting by the examples of the ignoble priests, they set a guard upon their words and movements, lest their disciples should question their sincerity. They were austere, energetic, and devoted to their people and to their cause. They were convinced that they were warders of the inheritance of the saints, and they patrolled their circuit, and went about in the name of Christ proclaiming the mercy of God and warning men of Eternity and of The Judgment.

Let us be loyal to our convictions and give to those early pastors the credit due to their candour and to their efforts; they surpassed us in many ways. They were learned; they were versed in science, kind to strangers, strict in morality, brotherly to the poor.

François de Sales said of them: "The Protestants were Christians; Catholicism was not Christian."[104]

So matters stood—the churches ruined and abandoned, Religion mocked and the priests despised [105]—when a little phalanx of devoted men[286] arose to rescue the wrecked body of the French Clergy. They organised systematically, but their plan of action was independent. François de Sales was among the first who broke ground for the difficult work. He was a calm, cool man, indifferent to abuse, firm in the conviction that his power was from God. There were many representatives of the Church, but few like him. One of his chroniclers dwelt upon his "exalted indifference to insult" another, speaking of his "supernatural patience," said:

"A Du Perron could not have stopped short in an argument with a heretic, but, on the other hand, a Du Perron would not have converted the heretic by the ardour of his forbearing kindness." Strowski said of de Sales that he "saw as the wise see, and lived among men not as a nominal Christian but as a man of God, gifted with omniscience." By living in the world de Sales had learned that a germ of religion was still alive in many of the abandoned souls; he knew that there were a few who were truly Catholic; he knew that those few were cherishing their faith, but he saw that they lived isolated lives, away from the world, and he believed that the limitations of their spiritual hermitage hindered their usefulness. De Sales believed in a community of religion and Christian love. The few who cherished their religion were a class by themselves. They knew and respected each other, they theorised abstractly upon the prevailing evils, but they had no thought of bettering man's[287] condition. Their sorrows had turned their thoughts to woeful contemplation of their helplessness, and all their hopes were straining forward toward the peaceful cloister and the silent intimacy of monachism. For them the uses of life were as a tale that is told. They had no thought of public service, they were timid, they abhorred sin and shrank from sinners, their isolation had developed their tendency to mysticism, and the best efforts of their minds were concentrated upon hypotheses.

Père François believed that they and all who loved God could do good work in the world. He did not believe in controversy, he did not believe in silencing skeptics with overwhelming arguments. He used his own means in his own way; but his task was hard and his progress slow, and months passed before he was able to form a working plan. His idea was to revive religious feeling and spiritual zeal, to increase the piety of life in community, to exemplify the love which teaches man to live at peace with his brother, to fulfil his mission as the son of man made in the likeness of God, and to act his part as an intelligent member of an orderly solidarity. De Sales's first work was difficult, but not long after his mission-house was established he saw that his success was sure, and he then appointed deputies and began his individual labour for the revival of religious thought. He knew that the people loved to reason, and he had resolved to develop their intelligence and to open their minds to Truth: the strong principle of all reform. His[288] doubt of the utility of controversy had been confirmed by the spectacle of the recluses of the Church. Study had convinced him that theologians had taken the wrong road and exaggerated the spiritual influence of the "power of piety." He believed in the practical piety of Charity, and he accepted as his appointed task the awakening of Christian love. His impelling force was not the bigotry which

nor was it the contemplative faith which, by living in convents, deprives the world of the example of its fervour; it was that practical manifestation of the grace of God "which fits the citizen for civil life and forms him for the world."

In the end Père François's religion became purely practical and he had but one aim: the awakening of the soul.

His critics talked of his "dreams," his "visions," and his "religio-sentimental revival." His piety was expressed in the saying: "Religious life is not an attitude, nor can the practice of religion save a man; the true life of the Christian springs from a change of heart, from the intimate and profound transformation of his personality." We know with what ardour Père François went forward to his goal, manifesting his ideals by his acts. By his words and by his writings he worked a revolution in men's souls. His success equalled the success of Honoré[289] d'Urfé; few books have reached the number of the editions of the Introduction à la vie dévote.[106]

In Paris de Sales had often visited a young priest named Pierre de Bérulle, who also was deeply grieved by the condition of Catholicism, and who was ambitious to work a change in the clergy and in the Church. Père Bérulle had discussed the subject with Vincent de Paul, de Sales, Bourdoise, and other pious friends, and after serious reflection, he had determined to undertake the stupendous work of reforming the clergy. In 1611 he founded a mission-house called the Oratoire. "The chief object of the mission was to put an end to the uselessness of so many ecclesiastics." The missionaries began their work cautiously and humbly, but their progress was rapid. Less than fifteen months after the first Mass was offered upon the altar of the new house, the Oratoire was represented by fifty branch missions. The brothers of the company were seen among all classes; their aim, like the individual aim of Père François, was to make the love of God familiar to men by habituating man to the love of his brother. They turned aside from their path to help wherever they saw need; they nursed the sick, they worked among the common people, they lent their strength to the worn-out labourer.

They were as true, as simple, and as earnest as the men who walked with the Son of Mary by the[290] Lake of Galilee. Bound by no tie but Christian Charity, free to act their will, they manifested their faith by their piety, and it was impossible to deny the beneficence of their example. From the mother-house they set out for all parts of France, exhorting, imploring the dissolute to forsake their sin, and proclaiming the love of Christ. Protestants were making a strong point of the wrath of God; the Oratorians talked of God's mercy. They passed from province to province, they searched the streets and the lanes of the cities, they laboured with the labourers, they feasted with the bourgeois. Dispensing brotherly sympathy, they entered the homes of the poor as familiar friends, confessing the adults, catechising the children, and restoring religion to those who had lost it or forgotten it. They demanded hospitality in the provincial presbyteries, aroused the slothful priests to repentant action, and, raising the standard of the Faith before all eyes, they pointed men to Eternal Life and lifted the fallen brethren from the mire.

Shoulder to shoulder with the three chevaliers of the Faith, de Sales, de Bérulle, and Père Vincent, was the stern Saint Cyran (Jean Duvergier de Hauranne) who lent to the assistance of the Oratorians the powerful influence of his magnetic fervour. The impassioned eloquence of the author of Lettres Chrétiennes et Spirituelles was awe-inspiring. The members of the famous convent (Port Royal des Champs) were equally devoted; their fervour was gentler, but always grave and[291] salutary. Saint Cyran's characteristics were well defined in Joubert's Pensée.

They were pervaded, even to their mental habit, by their uncompromising conception of divine justice; their inclinations were antipathetic to the lusts of the flesh. The companions of the community of Port Royal were as pure in heart as the Oratorians, but they were childlike in their simplicity; they delighted in the beauties of nature and in the society of their friends; they indulged their humanity whenever such indulgence accorded with their vocation; they permitted "the fêtes of Christian love," to which we of the present look back in fancy as to visions of the first days of the early Church. Jules Lemaître said in his address at Port Royal:[107]

François de Sales loved the convent of Port Royal; he called it his "place of dear delight"! In its shaded cloisters de Bérulle, Père Vincent, and Saint Cyran laboured together to purify the Church, until the time came when the closest friends were separated by dogmatic differences; and even then the tempest that wrecked Port Royal could not sweep away the memory of the peaceful days when the four friends lent their united efforts to the work which gave the decisive impulsion to the Catholic Renaissance.

Whenever the Church established religious communities, men were called to direct them from all the branches of de Bérulle's Oratoire, because it was generally known that the Oratorians inspired the labourers of the Faith with religious ardour, and in time the theological knowledge gained in the Oratoire and in its branches was considered essential to the true spiritual establishment of the priest. Men about to enter the service of the Church went to the Oratoire to learn how to dispense the sacramental lessons with proper understanding of their meaning; new faces were continually appearing, then vanishing aglow with celestial fire. Once when an Oratorian complained that too many of their body were leaving Paris, de Bérulle answered: "I thank God for it! This congregation was established for nothing else; its mission is to furnish worthy ministers and workmen fitted for the service of the Church."

De Bérulle knew that, were he to give all the members of his community, their number would be[293] too feeble to regenerate the vast and vitiated body of the French clergy. He could not hope to reap the harvest, but he counted it as glory to be permitted to sow the seed.

Vincent de Paul was the third collaborator of the company. It was said of him that he was "created to fill men's minds with love of spiritual things and with love for the Creator." Père Vincent was a simple countryman. In appearance he resembled the disciples of Christ, as represented in ancient pictures. His rugged features rose above a faded and patched soutane, but his face expressed such kindness and such sympathy that, like his heavenly Ensample, he drew men after him. Bernard of Cluny deplored the evil days; but the time of Louis XIII. was worse than the time of Bernard. The mercy proclaimed by the Gospel had been effaced from the minds of men, and the Charity of God had been dishonoured even by the guides sent to make it manifest. Mercy and Charity incarnate entered France with Père Vincent, and childlike fondness and gentle patience crept back into human relations—not rapidly—the influences against them were too strong—but steadily and surely. Père Vincent was amusing; it was said of him that he was "like no one else"; the courtiers first watched and ridiculed, then imitated him. When they saw him lift the fallen and attach importance to the sufferings of the common people, and when they heard him insist that criminals were men and that they had a right to demand the treatment due to men, they[294] shrugged their shoulders, but they knew that through the influence of the simple peasant-priest something unknown and very sweet had entered France.

Vincent de Paul was a worker. He founded the Order of the Sisters of Charity, the Convicts' Mission-Refuge, a refuge for the unfortunate, the Foundling Hospital, and a great general hospital and asylum where twenty thousand men and women were lodged and nourished. To the people of France Père Vincent was a man apart from all others, the impersonation of human love and the manifestation of God's mercy. By the force of his example pity penetrated and pervaded a society in which pity had been unknown, or if known, despised. The people whose past life had prepared them for anything but good works sprang with ardour upon the road opened by the gentle saint who had taught France the way of mercy. Even the great essayed to be like Père Vincent; every one, high and low, each in his own way and to the extent of his power, followed the unique example. Saint Vincent became the national standard; the nobles pressed forward in his footsteps, concerning themselves with the sick and the poor and trying to do the work of priests. They laboured earnestly lavishing their money and their time, and, fired by the strength of their purpose, they came to love their duty better than they had loved their pleasure. They imitated the Oratorians as closely as they had imitated the shepherds of Astrée, and "the[295] monsters of the will," Indifference, Infidelity, and Licence, hid their heads for a time, and Charity became the fashion of the day.

Père Vincent's religious zeal equalled his brotherly tenderness; he was de Bérulle's best ally. A special community, under his direction, assisted in the labours of the Oratoire. The chief purpose of the mother-house and its branches was the purification of the priesthood and the increase of religion. When a young priest was ready to be ordained he was sent to Père Vincent's mission, where, by means of systematic retreats, he received the deep impression of the spiritual devotion and the charity peculiar to the Oratorians.

Bossuet remembered with profound gratitude the retreats that he made in Père Vincent's Oratoire. But there was one at Court to whom the piety of Père Vincent was a thorn in the flesh. We have seen that de Bérulle's work was the purification of the clergy, and that Père Vincent was de Bérulle's chief ally. Mazarin was the Queen's guardian, and the Queen held the list of ecclesiastical appointments. A Council called the Conseil de Conscience had been instituted to guide the Regent in her "Collation of Benefices." The nominees were subject to the approbation of the Council. When their names were read the points in their favour and against them were discussed. In this Conseil de Conscience Père Vincent confronted Mazarin ten years. Before Père Vincent appeared men were appointed abbots regardless of their characters. Chantelauze says[296] in Saint Vincent de Paul et les Gondis that "Mazarin raised Simony to honour." The Cardinal gave the benefices to people whom he was sure of: people who were willing to devote themselves, body and soul, to his purposes. Père Vincent had awakened the minds of many influential prelates, and a few men and women prominent at Court had been aroused to a sense of the condition of the Church. These few priests and laymen were called the "Saints' Party."

They sat in the Council convened for the avowed purpose of purifying the Church. When Mazarin made an ignoble appointment, Père Vincent objected, and the influential prelates and the others of their party echoed his objections. Through the energy of the "Saints," as they were flippantly called by the courtiers, many scandalous appointments were prevented, and gradually the church positions were filled by sincere and devoted men. The determined and earnest objections of so many undeniably disinterested, well-known, and unimpeachable people aroused the superstitious scruples of the Queen, and when her scruples were aroused, she was obstinate. Mazarin knew this. He knew that Anne of Austria was a peculiar woman, he knew that she had been a Queen before he had had any hold upon her, and he knew that he had not been her first favourite. He was quick, keen-sighted, flexible. He was cautious. He had no intention of changing the sustained coo of his turtle-dove for the shrill "Tais-toi!" of the Regent[297] of France. But he was not comfortable. His little diaries contain many allusions to the distress caused by his inability to digest the interference of the "Saints." He looked forward to the time when he should be so strong that it would be safe for him to take steps to free himself from the obsessions of the Conseil de Conscience. He was amiable and indulgent in his intercourse with all the cabals and with all the conflicting agitations; he studied motives and forestalled results; he brought down his own larks with the mirrors of his enemies. He had a thousand different ways of working out the same aims. He did nothing to actively offend, but there was a persistence in his gentle tenacity which exasperated men like Condé and disheartened the frank soldiers of the Faith of the mission of Port Royal and the Oratoire. He foresaw a time when he could dispose of benefices and of all else. A few years later the Conseil de Conscience was abolished, and Père Vincent was ignominiously vanquished. Père Vincent lacked the requisites of the courtier; he was artless, and straightforward, and intriguers found it easy to make him appear ridiculous in the eyes of the Queen.[108] Mazarin watched his moment, and when he was sure that Anne of Austria could not refuse him anything, he drew the table of benefices from her hand. From that time "pick and choose" was the order of the day. "Monsieur le Cardinal" visited the appointments secretly, and secured the[298] lion's share for himself. When he had made his choice, the men who offered him the highest bids received what he had rejected. In later years Mazarin was, by his own appointment, Archbishop of Metz and the possessor of thirty fat benefices. His revenues were considerable.

Nowhere did the Oratorians meet as determined opposition as at Court. The courtiers had gone to Mass because they lost the King's favour if they did not go to Mass, but to be inclined to skepticism was generally regarded as a token of elegance. Men thought that they were evincing superior culture when they braved God, the Devil, and the King, at one and the same time, by committing a thousand blasphemies. Despite the pressure of the new ideas, the "Saints' Party" had been difficult to organise. It was a short-lived party because Mazarin was not a man to tolerate rivals who were liable to develop power enough to counteract his influence over Anne of Austria concerning subjects even more vital than the distribution of the benefices. The petty annoyances to which the Prime Minister subjected the "Saints' Party" convinced people that when a man was of the Court, if he felt the indubitable touch of the finger of Grace, the only way open to him was the road to the cloister. It was known that wasps sting, and that they are not meet adversaries for the sons of God, and the wasps were there in swarms. François de Sales called the constantly recurring annoyances, "that mass of wasps." As there was no[299] hope of relief in sight, it was generally supposed that the most prudent and the wisest course for labourers in the vineyard of the Lord was to enter the hive and take their places in the cells, among the manufacturers of honey. So when La Grande Mademoiselle looked upon the convent as her natural destination, she was carrying out the prevalent idea that retreat from the world was the natural result of conversion to true religion. It was well for her and for the convent which she had decided to honour with her presence that just at the moment when she laid her plans her father had one of his rare attacks of common sense—yes, well for her and well for the convent!

Mademoiselle's crisis covered a period of six months; when she reappeared patches adorned her face and powder glistened in her hair. She said of her awakening: "I recovered my taste for diversions, and I attended the play and other amusements with pleasure, but my worldly life did not obliterate the memory of my longings; the excessive austerity to which I had reduced myself was modified, but I could not forget the aspirations which I had supposed would lead me to the Carmelites!" Not long after she emerged from her religious retreat politics called her from her frivolity. Political life was the arena at that hour, and it is not probable that the most radical of the feministic codes of the future will restore the power[300] which women then possessed by force of their determined gallantry, their courage, their vivacity, their beauty, and their coquetry. The women of the future will lack such power because their rights will be conferred by laws; legal rights are of small importance compared to rights conferred and confirmed by custom. The women of Mademoiselle's day ordered the march of war, led armies, dictated the terms of peace, curbed the will of statesmen, and signed treaties with kings, not because they had a right to do so, but because they possessed invincible force. Richelieu, who had a species of force of his own, and at times wielded it to their temporary detriment, planned his moves with deference to their tactics, and openly deplored their importance. Mazarin, who dreaded women, wrote to Don Luis del Haro: "We have three such amazons right here in France, and they are fully competent to rule three great kingdoms; they are the Duchesse de Longueville, the Princesse Palatine, and the Duchesse de Chevreuse." The Duchesse de Chevreuse, having been born in the early century, was the veteran of the trio. "She had a strong mind," said Richelieu,[109] "and powerful beauty, which, as she knew well how to use it, she never lowered by any disgraceful concessions. Her mind was always well balanced."

Retz completed the portrait: "She loved without any choice of objects for the simple reason that it was necessary for her to love some one; and when[301] once the plan was laid it was not difficult to give her a lover. But from the moment when she began to love her lover, she loved him faithfully,—and she loved no one else." She was witty, spirited, and of a very vigorous mind. Some of her ideas were so brilliant that they were like flashes of lightning; and some of them were so wise and so profound that the wisest men known to history might have been proud to claim them. Rare genius and keen wits which she had trained to intrigue from early youth had made her one of the most dangerous politicians in France. She had been an intimate friend of Anne of Austria, and the chief architect of the Chalais conspiracy. After the exposure of the conspiracy, Richelieu sentenced her to banishment for a term of twenty-five years, and no old political war-horse could have taken revenge sterner than hers. She did not rest on her wrongs; her entrance upon foreign territory was marked by the awakening of all the foreign animosities. Alone and single-handed, the unique Duchess formed a league against France, and when events reached a crisis she had attained such importance in the minds of the allies that England, though vanquished and suing for peace, made it a condition of her surrender that the Duchesse de Chevreuse, "a woman for whom the King of England entertained a particular esteem," should be recalled to France. Richelieu yielded the point instantly; he was too wise to invest it with the importance of a parley; he recalled the woman who[302] had convened a foreign league against her own people, and eliminated the banishment of powerful women from his list of penalties. He had learned an important political lesson; thereafter the presence of the Duchesse de Chevreuse was considered in high diplomatic circles the one thing needful for the even balance of the State of France. After the Spanish intrigue, which ended in Val de Grâce, the Cardinal, fearing another "league," made efforts to keep the versatile Duchess under his hand, but she slipped through his fingers and was seen all over France actively pursuing her own peculiar business. (1637.)

The Duchesse de Chevreuse once traversed France on horseback, disguised as a man, and she used to say that nothing had ever amused her as well as that journey. She must have been a judge of amusements, as she had tried them all. When she ran away disguised as a man, her husband and Richelieu both ran after her, to implore her to remain in France, and, in her efforts to escape her pursuers, she was forced to hide in many strange places, and to resort to stratagems of all kinds. In one place where she passed the night, her hostess, considering her a handsome boy, made her a declaration of love. Her guides, deceived by her appearance gave her a fair idea of the manners worn by a certain class of men when they think that they are among men and free from the constraint of woman's presence. On her journeys through Europe, she slept one night or more in a barn, on a[303] pile of straw, the next night in a field, under a hedge, or in one of the vast beds in which our fathers bedded a dozen persons at once without regard to their circumstances. Alone, or in close quarters, the Duchesse de Chevreuse maintained her identity. Hers was a resolute spirit; she kept her own counsel, and she feared neither man nor devil. Thus, in boys' clothes, in company with cavaliers who lisped the language of the Précieuses, or with troopers from whose mouths rushed the fat oaths of the Cossacks, sleeping now on straw and now with a dozen strangers, drunk and sober, she crossed the Pyrenees and reached Madrid, where she turned the head of the King of Spain and passed on to London, where she was fêted as a powerful ally, and where, incidentally, she became the chief official agent of the enemies of Richelieu.

When Louis XIII. was dying he rallied long enough to enjoin the Duchesse de Chevreuse from entering France.[110] Standing upon the brink of Eternity, he remembered the traitress whom he had not seen in ten years. The Duchesse de Chevreuse was informed of his commands, and, knowing him to be in the agonies of death, she placed her political schemes in the hands of agents and hurried back to France to condole with the widow and to assume the control of the French nation as the deputy of Anne of Austria. She entered the Louvre June 14, 1643, thinking that the ten years which had passed since she had last seen her old confidante[304] had made as little change in the Queen as in her own bright eyes. She found two children at play together,—young Louis XIV. and little Monsieur, a tall proud girl with ash-blonde hair: La Grande Mademoiselle, and a mature and matronly Regent who blushed when she saluted her. One month to a day had passed since Louis XIII. had yielded up the ghost.

The Duchesse de Chevreuse installed herself in Paris in her old quarters and bent her energies to the task of dethroning Mazarin.

The Palatine Princess, Anne de Gonzague, was a ravishingly beautiful woman endowed with great executive ability. "I do not think," said Retz, "that Elizabeth of England had more capacity for conducting a State." Anne de Gonzague did not begin her career by politics. When, as a young girl, she appeared in the world of the Court, she astonished France by the number and by the piquancy of her adventures. She was another of the exalted dames who ran upon the highways disguised as cavaliers or as monks. No one was surprised no matter when or where he saw Anne de Gonzague, though she was often met far beyond the limits of polite society. Fancy alone—and their own sweet will—ruled the fair ladies of those heroic days. During five whole years Anne de Gonzague [111] gave the world to understand that she was "Mme. de Guise, wife of Henri de Guise, Archbishop of Rheims"[305] (the same Henri de Guise who afterward married Mme. de Bossut).

Having passed for "Mme. de Guise" sixty months, the Lady Anne appeared at Court under her own name "as if nothing had happened," reported Mademoiselle. Whatever may have here "happened," Anne de Gonzague reappeared at Court as alluring as in the flower of her first youth; and, as the Chronicle expressed it: "had the talent to marry herself—between two affairs of womanly gallantry—to the Prince Palatine,[112] one of the most rabidly jealous of gentlemen," because, as the pious and truthful Bossuet justly remarked, "everything gave way before the secret charm of her conversation." When nearly thirty years of age she obeyed the instincts of her genius and engaged in politics, with other politically inclined ladies, including Mme. de Longueville, whose only talent lay in her blonde hair and charming eyes.

Despite the poverty of her mental resources, Mme. de Longueville was a natural director of men, and she was but one of a very brilliant coterie. The prominent and fiery amazons of the politics of that epoch are too historically known to require detailed mention. They were: the haughty, dazzlingly superb, but too vicious and too practical in vice, Montbazon; the Duchesse de Chatillon (the imperious beauty who had her hand painted upon a painted lion whose face was the face of the great[306] Condé), and many others who to the measure of their ability played with the honour and the lives of men, with Universal Suffrage, and with the stability of France, and who, like La Grande Mademoiselle, were called from their revelries by the dangers which threatened them.

The daughter of Gaston d'Orléans had grown up firmly convinced that the younger branch of the House of Paris (her own branch) could do anything. That had been the lesson taught for more than a century of history. From Charles VIII. to Louis XIII. the throne had been transmitted from father to son but three times; in all other cases it had passed to brothers or to cousins. The collaterals of the royal family had become accustomed to think of themselves as very near the throne, and at times that habit of thought had been detrimental to the country. Before the birth of Louis XIV. Gaston d'Orléans had touched the crown with the tips of his fingers, and he had made use of his title as heir-presumptive to work out some very unsavoury ends. After the birth of his nephews he had lived in a dream of possible results; he had waited to see what "his star" would bring him, and his hopes had blazed among their ashes at the first hint of the possibility of a change. When Louis XIV. was nine years old he was very sick and his doctors expected him to die; he had the smallpox. Monsieur was jubilant: he exhibited his joy publicly, and the courtiers drank to the health of "Gaston I." Olivier d'Ormesson stated that the courtiers[307] distributed all the offices in the King's gift and planned to dispose of the King's brother. Anne of Austria, agonising in prayer for the life of the King, was horrified to learn that a plot was on foot to abduct little Monsieur. She was warned that the child was to be stolen some time in the night between Saturday and Sunday. Maréchal de Schomberg passed that night on his horse, accompanied by armed men who watched all the windows and doors of the palace. When the King recovered Monsieur apologised for his conduct, and the sponge of the royal forgiveness was passed over that episode as it had been over many others. Under the Regency of Anne of Austria the Court was called upon to resist the second junior branch, whose inferiority of pretensions was more than balanced by its intelligence and audacity.

The pretensions of the Condés had been the cause of one of Mazarin's first anxieties. They were vast pretensions, they were unquestionably just, and they were ably sustained by the father of the great Condé, "Monsieur le Prince," a superior personage whose appearance belied his character. People of his own age remembered him as a handsome man; but debauchery, avarice, and self-neglect had changed the distinguished courtier and made him a repulsive old man, "dirty and ugly."[113] He was stoop-shouldered and wrinkled, with great, red eyes, and long, greasy hair, which he wore passed around his ears in "love-locks." His aspect[308] was formidable. Richelieu was obliged to warn him that he must make a serious attempt to cleanse his person, and that he must change his shoes before paying his visits to the King.[114] His spirit was as sordid as his body. "Monsieur le Prince" was of very doubtful humour; he was dogged, snappish, peevish, coarse, contrary, and thoroughly rapacious. He had begun life with ten thousand livres of income, and he had acquired a million, not counting his appointments or his revenues from the government.[115] His friends clutched their pockets when they saw him coming; but their precautions were futile; he had a way of getting all that he desired. Everything went into his purse and nothing came out of it; but where his purse was not concerned Monsieur le Prince was a different man; there he "loved justice and followed that which was good."[116] He was a rigorous statesman; he defended the national Treasury against the world. His keen sense of equity made him a precious counsellor and he was an eminent and upright judge. His knowledge of the institutions of the kingdom made him valuable as State's reference; he knew the origins, the systems, and the supposititious issues of the secret aims of all the parties.

The laws of France were as chaotic as the situation of the parties, and no one but a finished statesman could find his way among them; but to Monsieur le Prince they were familiar ground. Considerable as[309] were his attainments, his children were his equals. Mme. de Longueville, though shallow, was as keen a diplomat as her father, and by far more dangerous; the Duc d'Enghien was an astute and accomplished politician. The world considered the Condés as important as the d'Orléans', and fully able to meet the d'Orléans' on the super-sacred footing of etiquette. We shall see to what the equality of the two families conducted them. Struggles between them were always imminent; their quarrels arose from the exigencies of symbolical details: the manner of the laying of a carpet, the bearing of the train of a State robe, et cetera. Such details seem insignificant to us, but that they do so is because we have lost the habit of monarchical traditions. When things are done according to hierarchical custom, details are very important. At every session of the King's Council "peckotings" passed between Gaston d'Orléans and Monsieur le Prince and an attentive gallery looked on and listened. But something of sterner stuff than "peckotings" was the order of the day when the Court met for a ceremonious function; material battles marked the meetings between Mlle. de Montpensier and Mme. la Princesse de Condé; Mme. de Longueville was brave, and La Grande Mademoiselle was not only brave, but fully determined to justify her title and defend her honour as the Granddaughter of France. The two princely ladies entered the lists with the same ardour, and they were as heroic as they were burlesque. The 5th December the[310] Court was scheduled to attend a solemn Mass at Notre Dame, and by the law of precedence Mademoiselle was to be followed by Mme. la Princesse de Condé. The latter summoned her physician who bled her in order to enable her to be physically incapable of taking her place behind Mademoiselle. Gossips told Anne-Marie-Louise of her cousin's stratagem, and Mademoiselle resorted to an equally efficient, though entirely different, means of medical art calculated to make bodily motion temporarily undesirable, if not impossible. Mademoiselle was determined that she would not humiliate her quality by appearing at Mass without her attendant satellite (Saint Simon would have applauded the sufferings of both of the heroic ladies, for like them he had been gifted by nature with a subtle appreciation of the duties and the privileges of rank), but the incident was not closed. By a strange fatality, at that instant Church came in conflict with State. Cardinal Mazarin, representing the Church, inspired Queen Anne to resent her niece's indisposition. The Queen became very angry at Mademoiselle, and impelled by her anger, Monsieur commanded his daughter to set out immediately for Notre Dame; he told her rudely that if she was too sick to walk, she had plenty of people to carry her. "You will either go or be carried!" he cried violently, and Mademoiselle, much the worse for her stratagem, was forced to yield. She deplored her fate, and wept because she had lost her father's sympathy.

The reciprocal acidity of the junior branches was constantly manifested by fatalities like the event just noted, and by episodes like the affair of "the fallen letters" (August, 1643). Although all the writers of that day believed that the reaction of that puerile matter was felt in the Fronde, the quarrel, like all the other quarrels, was of so senseless a character that it awakened the shame of the nation. The story is soon told: Mme. de Montbazon picked up—no one knew where—some love letters in which, as she said, she recognised the writing of Mme. de Longueville. Her story was false, and Anne of Austria, who frowned upon the gossip and the jealousies of the Court, condemned Mme. Montbazon to go to the Hôtel de Condé and make apologies for the wrong that she had done the Princess. All the friends of the House of Condé were expected to be present to hear and to witness the vindication of Mme. la Princesse.

On that occasion the relatives of the family were all in the Hôtel de Condé, but their hearts were not in their protestations, and the Condés were not deceived. The petty scandal of the letters fed the flame of enmity, which Mazarin watched and[312] nourished because he knew that it was to his interest and to the interest of the State to foment the quarrel between the rival cousins. An anonymous collection of "memoirs" says:

Apparently Mazarin's position was impregnable. The world would have been blind had it failed to see that the arguments used by the Prime Minister when he conferred with his sovereign were of a character essentially differing from the arguments generally used by politicians, but it was believed that the Cardinal's method was well fitted to his purpose, and that to any woman—and particularly to a woman who had passed maturity—it would be, by force of nature, more acceptable and more weighty than the abstract method of a purely political economist, and more convincing than the reasons given by statesmen,—or, in fact, any reason.

Anne of Austria had not been a widow four months when Olivier d'Ormesson noted, in his journal, that the Cardinal "was recognised as the All-Powerful." For his sake the Queen committed the imprudences of a love-sick schoolgirl. She began by receiving his visits in the evening. The doors were left open, and the Queen said that the Cardinal visited her for the purpose of giving her instructions regarding the business of the State. As time went on the Cardinal's visits lengthened; after a certain time the doors were closed, and, to the scandal of the Court, they remained closed. At Rueil the Queen tried to make Mazarin sit with her in her little garden carriage. Mazarin "had the wisdom to resist her wish, but he had the folly to accompany her with his hat upon his head." As no one ever approached the Queen with head covered, the spectacle of the behatted minister astonished the public. (September, 1644.) A few weeks later every one in Paris knew that an apartment or suite of rooms in the Palais Royal, was being repaired, and that it was to be connected with the Queen's apartments by a secret passage. The public learned gradually, detail by detail, that Mazarin was to occupy the repaired apartment, and that the secret passage had been prepared so that the Prime Minister might "proceed commodiously" to the royal apartments to hold political conferences with the Queen. When everything was ready, the Gazette (19th November) published the following announcement:

The Queen's indiscretion won the heart of the favourite, and he longed for her presence. Twice, once at Rueil and once at Fontainebleau, he displaced La Grande Mademoiselle and installed himself in her room at the Queen's house. The first time that Mazarin supplanted Mademoiselle, the haughty Princess swallowed the affront and found a lodging in the village, but the second time she lost her patience. "It is rumoured in Paris," wrote d'Ormesson, "that Mademoiselle spoke to the Queen boldly, because the Cardinal wished to take her room in order to be near her Majesty." (September, 1645.)

Some historians have inferred that the Queen had been secretly married to her Minister. We have no proof of any such thing, unless we accept as proof the very ambiguous letter which the Cardinal wrote to the Queen when he was in exile. In that letter he spoke of people who tried to injure[315] him in the Queen's mind. "They will gain nothing by it," wrote Mazarin; "the heart of the Queen and the heart of Mazarin are joined[119] by liens which cannot be broken either by time or by any effort,—as you yourself have agreed with me more than once." In the same letter he implores the Queen to pity him: "for I deserve pity! it is so strange for this child to be married, then, at the same time, separated from ... and always pursued by them to whom I am indebted for the obstacles to my marriage." (27th October, 1651.) These words are of obscure meaning, and they may as easily be interpreted figuratively as literally. They who believed that the Queen had married Mazarin secretly must have drawn their conclusions from the intimate fondness of her manner. Anne of Austria was infatuated, and her infatuation made it impossible for her to guard her conduct; her behaviour betrayed the irregularity of the situation, and it is probable that her friends were loth to believe that anything less than marriage could induce such familiarity. However that may have been, Mazarin's letters give no proof of marriage, nor has it ever been proved that he claimed that he had married the Queen.

When judgment is rendered according to evidence deduced from personal manners, changes in time and in the differences of localities should be[316] considered. Our consideration of the Queen's romance dates from the period of the legitimate, or illegitimate, honeymoon. (August, 1643, or within six weeks of that time.)

The public watched the royal romance with irritation. Having greeted the Mazarin ministry with a good grace, they (the people) were unanimously seized by a feeling of shame and hatred for the handsome Italian who made use of woman's favour to attain success. The friends of the Queen redoubled their warnings, and retired from the royal presence in disgrace. One of her oldest servitors, who had given unquestionable proof of his devotion,[120] dared to tell her to her face that "all the world was talking about her and about his Eminence, and in a way which ought to make her reflect upon her position." ... "She asked me," said La Porte, 'Who said that?' I answered, 'Everybody! it is so common that no one talks of anything else.' She reddened and became angry."[121] Mme. de Brienne, wife of the Secretary of State, who had spoken to the Queen on the same subject, told her friends that "More than once the Queen had blushed to the whites of her eyes."[122] Every one wrote to the Queen; she found anonymous letters even in her bed. When she went through the streets she heard people humming songs whose meaning she knew only too well. Her piety and her maternity had endeared her to the common people, and they, the people, had[317] looked indulgently upon her passing weaknesses; but now things had come to a crisis. One day, when the Regent was attending a service in Notre Dame, she was surprised by a band of women of the people, who surrounded her and fell at her feet crying that she was dissipating the fortune of her ward. "Queen," they cried, "you have a man in your house who is taking everything!"[123]

The fact that the young King was being despoiled was a greater grief to the people than the abasement of the Queen. It must be avowed that Mazarin was the most shameless thief who ever devoured a kingdom in the name of official duty and under the eyes and by the favour of a sovereign. His cry was the cry of the daughters of the horseleech. It was understood that Mazarin would not grant a service, or a demand of any kind, until his price had been put down, and in some cases the commission was demanded and paid twice. Bussy-Rabutin received a letter commanding him to "pay over and without delay" the sum of seven hundred livres. The letter is still in existence. Condé wrote it and despatched it, but it bears his personal endorsement to the effect that he had been "ordered" to write it. Montglat states that Anne of Austria asked for a fat office for one of her creatures, that the office was immediately granted, and that the appointee was taxed one hundred thousand écus. Anne of Austria was piqued: she had[318] supposed that her position exempted her from the requirements of the ministerial tariff; she expostulated, but the Cardinal-Minister was firm; he made it clear, even to the dim perceptions of his royal lady, that the duties of the director of the French nation ranked the tender impulses of the lover. Patriotic duty nerved his hand, and the Queen, recognising the futility of resistance, trembling with excitement, and watering her fevered persuasions with her tears, opened her purse and paid Mazarin his commission. By a closely calculated policy the State's coffers were subjected to systematic drainage, the national expenses were cut, and millions, diverted from their regular channels, found their way into the strong box of the favourite. The soldiers of France were dying of starvation on the frontiers, the State's creditors were clamouring for their money, the Court was in need of the comforts of life [124]; the country had been ravaged by passing armies, pillaged by thieving politicians, harrowed by abuses of all kinds. The taxes were wrung from the beggared people by armed men; yet "poor Monsieur, the Cardinal," as the Queen always called him, gave insolently luxurious fêtes and expended millions upon his extravagant fancies. No one cared for his foreign policy. Would political triumphs bring back the dead, feed the starving, rehabilitate the dishonoured wives and daughters of the peasants, restore verdure to the ruined farms?

The Queen's anxiety to create an affection strong enough to blind the eyes of her courtiers to her intimacy with Mazarin had inspired her with a desire to lavish gifts. "The Queen gives everything" had become a proverb; the courtiers knew the value of their complaisancy, and they flocked to the Palais Royal with petitions; offices, benefices, privileges, monopolies either to exploit, to concede, or to sell were freely bestowed upon all who demanded them. Each courtier had some new and unheard-of fancy to gratify, either for his own pleasure or for the pleasure of his friends; anything that could be made visible, anything that could be so represented as to appear visible to the imagination, was scheduled in the minds of the courtiers as dutiable and some one drew revenues from it. One of the ladies of the Court obtained from the Queen the right to tax all the Masses said in Paris.[125] "The 13th January, 1644, the Council of the King employed part of its session in refusing 'a quantity of gifts' which the Queen had accorded, and which were all of a character to excite laughter." The royal horn had ceased to pour; the Queen's strong-box was empty. The courtiers knew that there was nothing more to gain; one and all they raised their voices, and the threatening growl of the people of Paris echoed them. The day of reckoning was at hand; had Anne of Austria possessed all that she had given to buy the indulgence of her world, and had she[320] willed to give it all again, she could not have stilled the tumult; to quote Mme. de Motteville's record: "The people's love for the Queen had diminished; the absolute power which the Queen had placed in the hand of Mazarin had destroyed her own influence, and from too fondly desiring that the Parisians should love her lover she had made them hate him." In the beginning of the Regency Mazarin had been popular; after a time the people had lost confidence in him, and the hatred which followed their distrust was mingled with contempt.

Mazarin had emptied the treasury of France. No better statement of his conduct was ever given than Fénelon gave his pupil, the Duc de Bourgogne, in his Dialogues des Morts. Mazarin and Richelieu are the persons speaking. Each makes known the value of his own work; each criticises the work of the other. Mazarin reproaches Richelieu for his cruelty and thirst for blood; Richelieu answers:

This is a fair portrayal, as far as it goes; but it shows only one side (the worst side) of Mazarin's character. The portrait is peculiarly interesting from the fact that it was especially depicted and set forth for the instruction of the great-grandson of the woman who loved Mazarin.

It is probable that stern appreciation of the duty of the representative of Divine Justice primed the virulence of the pious Fénelon, when he seated himself to point out an historical moral for the descendant of the weak Queen who sacrificed the prosperity of France on the altar of an insensate passion.

La Grande Mademoiselle was one of Mazarin's most hostile enemies, and her memoirs evince unbending severity. The weakness of her criticism detracts from the importance of a work otherwise valuable as a contemporary chronicle. She regarded Mazarin's "lack of intelligence" as his worst fault. She was convinced that he possessed neither capacity nor judgment "because he acted from the belief that he could reject the talents of a Gaston d'Orléans with impunity. His conduct to Princes of the Blood proved that he lacked wisdom; he stinted the junior branches of their legitimate influence; he would not yield to the pillars of the throne the power that belonged to them by right; he thrust aside the heirs-presumptive, when he[322] might have leaned upon them! Manifestly he was witless, stupid, unworthy the consideration of a prince."

Mademoiselle asserted that Mazarin deserved the worst of fates and the scorn of the people. She believed that many evils could have been averted had Monsieur been consulted in regard to the government of the kingdom. She affirmed that it was her conviction that all good servants of the Crown owed it to their patriotism to arm and drive the Cardinal across the frontier of France. That was her conception of duty, and it smiled upon her from all points of the compass.

Not long before the beginning of the Fronde, the fine world of Paris, stirred to action by the spectacle of the royal infatuation and by the subjection of the national welfare to the suppositive exigencies of "the foreigner," embraced the theory of Opposition, and to be of the Opposition was the fashion of the hour. All who aspired to elegance wore their rebellion as a badge, unless they had private reasons for appearing as the friends of Mazarin. The women who were entering politics found it to their interest to join the opposing body.

Politics had become the favourite pastime of the highways and the little streets. Men and women, not only in Paris, but in the châteaux and homes of the provinces, and children—boys and girls—began to express political opinions in early youth.

"Come, then, Grandmamma," said little Montausier[323] to Mme. de Rambouillet, "now that I am five years old, let us talk about affairs of State." Her grandmother could not have reproved with a good grace, because her own "Blue Room" had been one of the chief agents responsible for the new diversion just before the Fronde. A mocking but virile force arose in the Opposition to check the ultra-refinements of the high art, the high intellectual ability, and the other superfine characteristics of the school of Arthénice. The mockery of the Opposition was as keen and its irony was as effective as the mental sword-play of the literary extremists. Wit was its chief weapon and its barbed words, and merry yet sarcastic thrusts had power to overthrow a ministry. The country knew it and gloried in it. The people of France would have entered upon revolution before they would have renounced their "spirituality." In the polemics of the new party the turn of a sentence meant a dozen things at once; a syllable stung like a dagger. Frenchmen are the natural artists of conversation, and they never found field more favourable to their art than the broad plains of the Opposition. Avowed animosity to the pretensions of the pedants and light mockery of the preciosity of the Précieuses offered a varied choice of subjects and an equally varied choice of accessories for their work. The daring cavaliers of the Opposition passed like wild huntsmen over the exhausted ground, with eyes bent upon the trail, and found delicate and amusing shades of meaning in phrases scorned and[324] stigmatised as "common" by the hyper-spiritual enthusiasts of the Salons.

In the exercise of free wit, the women of the new political school found an influence which before their day had been monopolised by the polemists of the State's Councils. They—the women of the Opposition—swept forward and seized positions previously held by men, and since then, either from deep purpose or from pure conviction, they have held their ground and exercised their right to share, or to attempt to share, in the creation and in the destruction of governments. Mademoiselle followed the fashion of the day when she frequented the society of people who were in disgrace at Court. She ridiculed the King's Minister, and as she was influential and popular, outspoken and eager to declare her principles, she was called an agitator, though in the words of Mme. de Motteville, "she was not quite sure what she was trying to do." Mazarin, whom Mademoiselle considered "stupid," had entangled the wires of the cabals and confused the minds of the pretenders with such consummate art that the keenest intriguers gazed in bewilderment upon their own interests, and doubted their truest friends. For instance, Monsieur, who had mind and wit "to burn," could not explain, even to himself, why he repudiated Mademoiselle when she quarrelled with the second junior branch. He knew that he was jealous of his rights and of all that belonged to him; he knew that the power of the Condés was a menace, that his daughter[325] was a powerful ally for any party, that her championship was, and always had been, his strongest arm against an unappreciative world, and after one of the senseless exhibitions of anger against Mademoiselle to which Anne of Austria, impelled by Mazarin, frequently incited him, he asked himself why he maltreated his daughter when she resisted the usurpations of his hated cousins, the Condés.

Why he did so, and why many another as astute as he moved heaven and earth to effect his own downfall was the secret of Mazarin.

Mademoiselle wept bitter tears for the loss of her father's friendship; then she arose in her pride, resolved to tread the path of life alone, according to her independent will. She was twenty years old and in the fulness of her beauty. She described her appearance with complaisancy [126]:

Before the lessons of experience and evil fortune changed Mademoiselle's handsome face, she was thus vivaciously described by an anonymous contemporary:

She was described in divers ways, according to the impressions of her associates. One said that her manner gave evidence of serious reflection; another called her too vivacious. It was supposed that she had been the first to assert that the soul ought not to be susceptible to love, and therefore her admirers sang to her of the aversion felt by Pallas for the allurements of Venus. Mademoiselle had said:

and she had meant what she said, and been glad to have it known that she was heart-free.

She was blamed for her rude manners and for her outbursts of anger. When she declared that she longed to go to war with the soldiers her critics laughed at her pretensions. It was generally believed that her faults were numerous, and that she had few of the qualities considered desirable in woman; but no one ever called her petty, cowardly, or false. La Grande Mademoiselle was never a liar; she never betrayed friend or foe. She was brave and generous; and it was not her fault if when nature placed her soul in the form of a woman it gave her the mien and the inclinations of a man.

CHAPTER V

Few political crises have left, either upon participants or upon witnesses, impressions as diverse as the impressions left by the Fronde. As examples of this fact take Retz (whose Mémoires are the epopee of revolutionary Paris), Omer Talon, the Queen's friend, M. de Motteville, La Rochefoucauld, duke and peer, Gaston d'Orléans, de Beaufort, Anne de Gonzague, Mme. de Chevreuse, and all the messieurs and mesdames whose ways of thinking we know. They furnished the divers views of the Fronde from which we gain our knowledge of that event, and as they deduced their impressions from the effect which the Fronde had upon their personal interests or sympathies, and from their mental conditions, it is difficult to form an independent or a just idea. Versatile and brilliant imaginations have left kaleidoscopic visions of a limited number of very plain realities, and as[329] the only means of giving uniformity and sequency to a narrative which, though it covers various periods, is circumscribed by certain limits, is to make a selection from the many means of study furnished by a voluminous mass of documents, I have detached from history nothing but the facts which were connected with the life of the person around whom I have woven this narrative.

By relating everything concerning La Grande Mademoiselle and by showing her actively engaged in her daily pursuits when the Fronde took shape and during the war, I have hoped to make visible to the reader at least one figure of the most confused of all the harassed epochs of our modern history.

Mademoiselle's point of view may not have been one of the best, but it had at least one merit: it was not the point of view of an ordinary observer. The Fronde was La Grande Mademoiselle's heroic period, and her reasons for embracing the cause were fit for the fabric of a romance. She intended to marry, and a marriage appropriate to her high station required the veiling smoke of the battle-field and the booming music of great guns. She entered the army and played her part with such spirit that, according to her own story, she wondered to the end of her days how she could have committed so many follies. These pages are written to explain the mental condition which evolved not only La Grande Mademoiselle's follies but the follies of many of her countrymen.

It is evident from the memoirs on record that Mademoiselle did not expect a revolution, but in that respect she was as clear-sighted as her contemporaries; no one looked for any change. Four years had passed since the people raised the barricades, and all that time Paris had growled its discontent. Neither the Regent nor the courtiers had cared to ask what the canaille were thinking. The curés had been driven from the devastated country parishes to beg bread and shelter in the monasteries, and the industrious French people who had always been neat and merry lay in rags on their sordid beds, dying of famine because the usurers of the State—the national note-holders—had seized their tools and confiscated all means of paying the labourer.

In 1644 the people invaded the Palais de Justice and noisily protested against the new tax. They ordered Parliament to take their threats to the Queen. The Queen refused to remit the tax, and the city immediately assumed the aspect which it habitually wore on the eve of revolution. Groups of men and women stood about the streets, the people were eager and excited,—they knew not why. Business was suspended. The shopkeepers stood on their doorsteps. The third night after the Queen refused to listen to the appeal of the people, the milk-soup boiled over! Bands of men armed with clubs descended from the faubourgs, crowded the streets of Paris, and, to quote an eye-witness, "they gave fright enough to the city[331] where fear and like emotions were unknown." After a few hours the crowd dispersed and the city became calm. But the road was clear, the canaille had found the way; they knew that it was possible to arm with clubs, or with anything that they could handle, and surge into the streets against the Crown. From that hour forerunners of the approaching storm multiplied. Parliament openly sustained the demands of the people. In Parliament there were natural orators whose denunciations of the causes of the prevailing misery were brilliant and terrible. The people's envoys accused the Regency of permitting the abuses, the injustice, and the oppression which had wrecked the peace of France. They persisted in their protestations, and the Majesty of the Throne could not silence them. At the solemn sessions of the beds of justice and in the Queen's own chambers they presented their arguments, and with voices hoarse with indignation, and with hands raised threateningly toward heaven they cried their philippics in the Queen's ears. Seated beside his mother the child-king looked on and listened. He could not understand the meaning of all the vehement words, but he never pardoned the voices which uttered them. The Court listened, astonished.

Mademoiselle weighed the words of the people, she paid close attention, but her memoirs do not speak of the revolts of public opinion. She was as unconscious of their meaning as the Queen,—and to[332] say that is to tell the whole story. Only sixty years before that time the barricades of the League had closed the streets of Paris, and only ten years before the theatre lovers had witnessed a comedy called Alizon, in which one of the ancient leaguers had fixed such eyes upon the King as our Communardes fixed upon the Versaillais. No one had forgotten anything! The Parisians had kept their old arms bright; they were looking forward to a time when arms would be needed; yet the Regent thought that when she had issued an order commanding the people not to talk politics she had provided against everything.

The nation's depths, as represented by the middle classes, had found a new apostle in the person of a member of the Parliament, "President Barillon." Barillon had been a pillar of the Government, but his feelings had changed. Mme. de Motteville, who was in warm sympathy with the Regent, wrote bitterly of his new opinions. She said:

The Court was as blind as the Queen's friend; it could not see that the day was coming when the determination to abolish abuses would sweep away the ancient social forms before their eyes. In the opinion of the Queen the criticisms and the ideas[333] of the King's subjects constituted felony, and it was Barillon's fate to go down. Barillon had been the Queen's devoted friend and champion. After the King died he had worked hard to seat the royal widow on the throne. He believed—no one knew what excuse he had for believing such a thing—that the Queen shared his ideas of the rights of the poor and the humble, and that she believed as he believed: that kings owed certain duties to their subjects. Barillon was not forced to wait long for his enlightenment. Anne of Austria was a woman of short patience, and advice irritated her. As soon as the President's eyes were opened to the truth he rushed headlong into the arms of the Opposition. Anne of Austria scorned "his treachery to the Crown." His impassioned thoughts of divine justice were enigmatical to the sovereign understanding. She was enraged by the obstinacy of her old friend, and by her orders he was cast into the prison of Saint Piguerol, where he died, as the just Motteville said, "regretted by every one." Barillon was the precursor of the "Idealogues" of the eighteenth century and of the Socialists of our own day.

The Queen was one of the people who seem to have received eyes because they could not be blind without eyes. The King's porringer was empty because the King had no money. The Queen, his mother, had pawned the jewels of the crown to appease her creditors, yet she was indignant when the bourgeois said that France was bankrupt. She[334] did not attach any importance to "that canaille,"—as she called the Parliament,—but she regarded criticism or disapproval as an attempt upon the authority of her son. As she expressed her exotic ideas freely, the bourgeois knew what she thought of them, and her abusive epithets were scored to the credit of the Opposition. As much from interest as from sympathy the Opposition invariably sustained the claims of the people. "The bourgeois were all infected with love for the public welfare," said the gentle Motteville bitterly. So the Court knew that in case of difficulty it could not count upon "that canaille."

Neither could Parliament count upon itself. There were too many counter-currents in its channels, too many individual interests, too many ambitions, too many selfish intrigues, to say nothing of the instinct of self-preservation which had turned the thoughts of the nobles toward a last desperate attempt to prevent the establishment of the absolute monarchy. They had resolved to make the attempt, and by it they hoped to save the remnant of their ancient privileges. They would have been justified in saving anything that they could lay their hands on, for no man is morally bound to commit suicide. In point of fact the only thing which they were morally bound to do was to remember that duty to country precedes all other duties, but in that day people had a very dim idea of duty to country. La Grande Mademoiselle believed that the King's right was divine,[335] but she did not hesitate to act against the Court when her personal interests or the interests of her house demanded such action. After the "Affair Saujon,[127]" she practically retired from Court. Alluding to that fact, she said: "I did not think that the presence of a person whom the Queen had so maltreated could be agreeable to her Majesty."

She made long visits at her château of Bois-le-Vicomte, near Meaux. Her little court knew her prejudices and respected her feelings. She regarded the success of the French arms as a personal misfortune, because a French victory conferred more glory upon Monsieur le Prince. The death of the elder Condé had not lessened the insolent pretensions of the second junior branch, and the honours claimed by the hawk-eyed general afflicted the haughty Princess d'Orléans, who had no valiant soldier to add glory to her name.

This avowal is worthy of note because it furnishes a key to the approaching national crisis. Mademoiselle's treason was the crime of architects of the Fronde; of the Nobility first, afterward of all France. Mademoiselle wept over the battle of[336] Lens, and when her father commanded her to return to Paris to appear with the Queen and to join in the public rejoicings her grief knew no bounds. The scene in the Palais Royal had destroyed her confidence and her sympathy, and she could not have "rejoiced with the Queen" on any occasion; but her father's commands were formal, and she was forced to assist with the Court (August 26th) at Notre Dame, when the Te Deum was chanted in thanksgiving for the victory of France.

The bourgeois had taken arms because of the unexpected arrest of two members of Parliament. "Old Broussel" was one of the two, and to the people he personified the democratic and humanitarian doctrines of President Barillon, who had died in his prison because he had angered the Queen by pleading the people's cause. The news of his arrest fell like a thunderbolt, and the people sprang to arms. The general excitement dispelled Mademoiselle's grief; she was not sorry for the uprising. She could not see anything to regret in the disturbance of the monarchy. Monsieur and the Queen had shown her that her interests were not theirs, they had tormented and humiliated her,[337] and it pleased her wounded pride to think that her enemies were to be punished. The Tuileries were admirably situated for the occasion. Should there be a revolution it could not fail to take place under her windows, and even were she to be imprisoned—as she had been before—she could still amuse herself and witness the uprising at her ease. At that time there were no boulevards; the Seine was the centre of the capital. It was the great street and the great open hall in which the Parisians gave their fêtes. Entering Paris either from Rouen or from Dijon, travellers knew by the animation on the water when they were near the city. From the Cours la Reine to the little isle Saint Louis the river was edged with open-air shops and markets. On the river were barges laden with merchandise, with rafts, with water-coaches (which looked like floating houses), and with all the objects that man sets in the public view to tempt his fellows and to offer means of conveyance either to business or to pleasure. At various points the bargees and other river-men held jousts. All through the city there were exhibitions of fireworks and "water serenades," and along the shore, or moving swiftly among the delicate shallops and the heavy barges were gilded pleasure galleys with pennants flying in the wind.

The light, mirrored by the water, danced upon the damp walls of the streets which opened upon the quays.

The Seine was the light and the joy of Paris,[338] the pride of the public life. Its arms enveloped Notre Dame, the mass of buildings called "the Palais," the Houses of the Parliament and the Bourse, an immense bazar whose galleried shops were the meeting-place of strollers and of gossips. A little below the Palais stretched the Pont-Neuf, with its swarms of street peddlers, jugglers, charlatans, and idlers who passed their days watching the parade of the people of Paris. "The disinherited," unfortunate speculators in the public bounty, sat apart from the stream of travellers, preparing for their business by slipping glass eyes into their heads, or by drawing out their teeth the better to amuse the public and to solicit alms.

All the emotions of the people were manifested first upon the river. The Seine was a queen; we have made it a sewer.

Even then Paris was a great cosmopolitan city, capable of receiving the people of the world; it was the only place in Europe where a palace could be made ready for guests in less than two hours. In less than one hour the hosts of the inns prepared dinner for one hundred guests at twenty écus a cover.

Yet in many respects the powerful city was in a barbarous condition; it was neither lighted nor swept, and as its citizens threw everything out of their windows, the streets were paved with black and infected mud. There was little or nothing like a police system, and the city was sown with "places of refuge" (a survival of the Middle Ages), which[339] served as hiding-places for highwaymen and other malefactors, who enshrined themselves among the shadows and lay in wait for the weak or the unwary.

At that time the Duc d'Angoulême, the illegitimate son of Charles IX., used to send his servants into the streets to collect their wages from the passers-by. Having collected their money, the clever fellows returned to the ducal palace. The Duc d'Angoulême possessed the right of shelter, and his palace was vested with all the power of the horns of the altar: once within his gates, the criminal was in safety and "inviolable."

The Duc de Beaufort used to send his servants out into the streets to rob travellers for his personal benefit. When the robbers were arrested their proprietor demanded their release and made great talk of an indemnification.

The excessively mobile Parisian character has changed many times since the day of the Duc de Beaufort; but the people of the present are counterparts of the people of the times [128] of Louis XIII. and the Regency. One of Mademoiselle's contemporaries said: "The true Parisians love to work; they love the novelty of things; they love changes in their habits; they even love changes in their business. They are very pious, and very—credulous. They are not in the least drunkards; they are polite to strangers."

Subtract the piety and add absinthe, the mother[340] of Folly, and we have the Parisians of our own day. They too are industrious; they are always changing something; they are changeable in themselves; they are credulous; they call religion "superstition," but they believe in "systems," in "panaceas," in high-sounding words, and in "great men"—men truly great, or spuriously great; they still cherish a belief in revolutions. They are as ready now as they were centuries ago to die for an idea, for a Broussel, and for much less than a Broussel. Just such Parisians as we meet in our daily walks raised the barricades in 1648. Broussel's windows looked out upon the river; the boatmen and the people of the water were the first to hear of his arrest, and they rushed crying into the streets; the people of the Halles joined them; and the "good bourgeoisie" followed the people's lead. The tradesmen closed their shops, the chains were drawn across the streets; and in the twinkling of an eye Paris bristled with antiquated firearms like an historical procession.

Mademoiselle, who heard the noise, ordered her carriage, and went out to pass the barricades. She had never seen the mob as she saw it then. The people swayed forward to meet the insolent noble who dared to defy them; but when they recognised their Princess, their hoarse cries turned to shouts of welcome, and eager hands raised the chains. Then, haughtily ignoring their fond smiles, Mademoiselle passed and the chains fell behind her.

So, with the canaille hailing her, she reached the Luxembourg, turned and recrossed the river, firm in her power as the Princess of the people. She had seen the barricades, and the sight was to influence her life.

She returned to the Tuileries in a glow not of triumph,—she had never doubted the people,—but she had passed the barriers raised by the people against her enemies, and the people had confirmed her right to rule, while the Regent trembled!

The Granddaughter of France was the real head of the people, and as the faëries had been present at her baptism, obstacles and monsters vanished at her approach.

With tender pride the people watched her progress; their favour was never based upon reason; they did not ask why they loved the haughty Princess who called them "Knaves" and considered them fit for the scaffold or the fagots. She was their goddess, and whenever she appeared they fell at her feet and worshipped her.

The Court did not approve of Mademoiselle's democratic popularity. When she arrived at the Tuileries she was imprisoned in her room; but as the whole Court was imprisoned, and as no one dared to cross his threshold, she was not inclined to murmur. Upon the whole the situation pleased her. She watched the pale, frightened faces of the courtiers with secret joy. Until then the Court[342] had taken the people's threats for jests, but the barricades had opened their eyes to the danger of their position; the mob was at the palace gates, and no one knew how soon it would be in the palace! Mademoiselle was in high spirits. Standing at her open window, she watched the people; they were massed upon the quays eating and drinking by the light of little bonfires; many of them stretched out upon the ground where they could watch her and slept there until morning.

The canaille crowded the rue des Tuileries; the men carried swords, and they did it so awkwardly that Mademoiselle laughed at them.

The courtiers were prisoners; all the streets were barricaded with wine-butts filled with earth and with manure. Given time, skilled workmen could not have raised a more effective obstacle; it was good work, well done, and as a symbol of the strength and the intention of the people it was redoubtable.

The barricades of the Fronde, floating the old banners of the League, had evoked the past and touched the revolutionary current in the abandoned souls of the Parisians. Retz claimed that[343] his hand fired the powder, and to do him justice, though his Memoirs make a great deal of the part that he played in the Fronde, they tell less than the truth. He might have said without boasting that he held Paris in the hollow of his hand. He had worked hard to acquire the power by which he bent the people to his will. Vincent de Paul had been his tutor, and Retz had been an unworthy pupil; he had remembered but one of Père Vincent's many lessons of brotherly love. His mind had seized the warning: "Know that the people is a Being, to be considered; not an inanimate object to be ignored," and from that simple precept he had deduced utilitarian conclusions fitted for his personal service, and drawn from them a plan for his own conduct. The principle of man's humanity had given him his idea. He had based his system on the susceptibility of men to the influence of intelligent suggestion, and by the judicious warmth of his sympathy he had surrounded himself with just such elements as his plan required.

This young Abbé Retz was the coadjutor of his uncle, the Archbishop of Paris. He was of an excellent family. He was astute, and, having decided to turn the people to account, he applied his mind to the task of learning the opinions of the lockpickers and ruffians of the city. His office gave him the right to go everywhere and to be seen in all company. He frequented the cellars and the garrets, he fraternised with the cut-throats,[344] he distributed alms, and as equivalent for what he gave received instruction in the magic vocabulary of the men who shut the streets of a city as easily as a warder shuts a door; he studied the ways of the canaille seven years, living hand-in-glove and cheek-by-jole with the men of the dens; he studied his world as he studied the policy of the ministry and the face of the Queen; and when he felt that the footing of the Court was insecure he broke away from Royalty and put into action the science of the cut-throats. To act the part of Marius or Coriolanus before the people was to satisfy an ambition which had haunted him since he had first read Plutarch. Retz was the type of the hero of romance at a time when Corneille met his models in the public streets.

He cared more to excite the admiration of the masses than to acquire position or money; he was influenced more by passionate love of brilliant and extraordinary exploits than by ambition, because he knew that his exploits made the people admire him. In his opinion an out-and-out adventure was worth more than all else, and no condition seemed to him as desirable as the life of a conspirator. He was called le petit Catilina, and the title pleased him better than any other. His "popolo," collectively and individually, gloried in him, understood him, trusted him, and sympathised with him in all his longings. He was at home and at ease and as safe as in the archiepiscopal palace in the most dangerous of their dens.

He was the subject of all species of critical judgments; La Rochefoucauld and Saint Simon spoke admiringly of his "prodigious genius." Anne of Austria called him a "factionist." Mazarin, who as he loved neither virtue nor vice, could not judge justly of one of Plutarch's heroes, did not like Retz; but he feared him. Mademoiselle said in her memoirs: "The Cardinal tells me that he believes that Retz has a black soul." People who knew no better laughed at the Archbishop's nephew, and Retz involuntarily fostered their delusion. His swarthy face, crooked legs, and near-sighted awkwardness were well fitted to call forth the gayety of light-minded courtiers. To add to his questionable appearance, he robed himself in the costumes of a cavalier; his doublets and other garments were of gaudy stuffs, belaced and bedecked with baubles which were in all respects, and without any qualifying reservation, beneath the notice of a serious or an appreciative gentleman. His personal carriage (a prancing and tiptoeing swagger) impressed strangers with the idea that he was an unfortunate ballet-master whose troubles had dethroned his reason. But there are men upon the earth who are so constituted that they can support all the ridicule that can be heaped upon them; Retz was one of them; the fact that he was pleasing to women proves it.

While this enterprising episcopal agitator was engaged in earnest contemplation of the first effects of the mischief that he had made in his own quarter[346] (the quarter of Notre Dame) the Parisians were preparing for battle; the fathers were polishing their muskets, the children were sharpening their pocket-knives. But Paris was calm, the rioters had gone back to the faubourgs. The streets were clear between the Tuileries and the Palais Royal, and Mademoiselle paid a visit to the Queen. She was in the Queen's salon when the Parliamentary deputation arrived, acting under stern orders from "the nation's depths," to demand the release of Broussel. Anne of Austria was angry; she refused the demand and the deputies went back to the bourgeoisie. They were not gone long; Mademoiselle was still with the Queen when they returned with the people's ultimatum: The people will have Monsieur Broussel! Anne of Austria was not dull and every possible contingency had been covered by her astute mentor. She ordered Broussel's release and the deputies departed, calm but triumphant.

Mathieu Molé negotiated the release, and while he talked to the Queen a member of Parliament, accompanying him, explained the political situation to Mademoiselle. The deputy's discourse was a clear statement of ugly facts and their consequences; it gave Mademoiselle an insight into the reasons and the secret views of the magistrates. The canaille spoke so loud that all the world could hear; the people's messengers held their heads as high as the nobles. As Mademoiselle watched "the long robes" file out of the royal presence she realised that all the riots and all the menaces had been but the beginning;[347] she knew that the time was coming when, married or not married, every woman in France would be given her chance to do her duty.

When Broussel returned to the people the barricades disappeared; but the canaille was still nervous; a practical joker cried out that the Queen was preparing another Massacre of Saint Bartholomew, and the old muskets followed by the pocket-knives rushed into the streets. Another joker said that the Queen of Sweden with her army was at the gates of Saint Denis, and a prolonged roar was heard and the mob filled the streets and began to pillage. So, amidst alarms and alternations of hope and fear, the days passed for a time. The people of Paris rioted, then returned to their wretched homes. Whatever the day had been, the night brought vigilance. All slept dressed, ready for action. Mademoiselle, who was everywhere at once, was not afraid. When the canaille growled the loudest she went her way. She was happy; she revelled in sound and in movement and in the fears of the Court. At a ball in the rue Saint Antoine she heard shots fired all night and "danced to the music of the guns."

The Queen was anxious to be far from Paris; Mazarin too craved rest; but the royal habit of carrying about all the furniture of the household made secret escape difficult. The people were watching the Palais Royal; they were determined that the Queen should not leave them. Nevertheless the Court decided to make the attempt.

Apparently there had been no change at the royal palace; the roast-hasteners and the soup-skimmers were in their places, and all the mouth-servants were watching with ears pricked to hear the first whisper of an order, ready to hand water or to run at the beck and call of the myrmidons of the myrmidons. In the streets around the palace lounged the people, silent and sullen, giving vent to angry criticisms or watching for "tall Mademoiselle." Mademoiselle appeared frequently at her windows, and the people greeted her with friendly cries. Paris was calm; the silent river, bearing its gilded galleys, its charlatans, jugglers, serenaders, and shouting and singing river-men, ran by under its bridges as it had always run; the Parisians laughed at their own suspicions; one group left its post, then another, and thus, gradually relaxing their vigilance, the King's warders returned to their homes. The 12th September, before daylight, a few wains loaded with furniture crept away from the Palais Royal and took the road to Rueil. At daybreak the more suspicious of the Parisians approached the palace and watched and listened. Evidently the royal life was still progressing in regular order. The following morning before Paris was awake the young King was drawn from his bed, dressed, carried out into the courtyard, hidden in a coach, and set upon the road taken by the furniture. Mazarin accompanied him. Anne of Austria, "as the most valiant" (to quote the words of Mme. de Motteville) remained[349] in the palace to cover the retreat of her Minister. In the course of the morning she was seen in various parts of Paris; that evening she vanished as the King and the Cardinal had done before her.

The royal flight deflected Paris. The members of Parliament reproached themselves for their excess of severity. They made overtures to the Queen.

It was believed that Anne of Austria, assured of the safety of her little brood, would reopen some of her old foreign correspondence and attempt to avenge her wrongs. Broussel had been released against her will—the city had raised the barricades—the Minister was an Italian and the Queen was anything but French! Paris prepared for the worst. Whence would the trouble come, from Spain or from England?

Parliament continued to send deputies to Saint Germain, but the Queen was obdurate. All business was suspended; people slept in their clothes; the bourgeois hid their money. The courtiers, who had remained in their palaces, hurried away followed by their furniture; and the evil faces which appear in Paris on the eve of a revolution were seen all over the city. The wains carrying the courtiers' furniture were pillaged, and the pillagers sacked the bakeries. Parliament had seized the reins of State, but the Parliamentary sessions resembled the stormy meetings of the existing[350] Chamber. Personal interests and the interests of the coteries had entered politics. After a deplorable day in Parliament Olivier d'Ormesson noted sadly in his journal: "The public welfare is now used only as a pretext for avenging private wrongs."

Mademoiselle's feelings in regard to the events of the day were varied; they could not be wholly pleasant, for there was nothing in the revolt of the people to tempt the imagination of a personage fully convinced that the King was the deputy of God. The first Fronde was an outburst of despair provoked by an excess of public anguish. Yet Mademoiselle considered it the adventure of a party of agitators. The preceding century France had been an exceedingly rich country. Under Richelieu Monsieur had depicted it in a state of famine, and in the early days of the Regency, and later, when foreign nations were lauding Mazarin's diplomacy, the people of Paris were perishing from every form of squalid misery. The State paid out its moneys without counting them, lent at usurious interest, and gave the notes of its creditors to its note-holders, the bankers; the note-holders fell upon the debtors like brigands; the taxes were collected by armed men. Wherever the tax-gatherer had passed the land was bare, cattle, tools, carts, household furniture, and all the personal property of the victims of the State had been seized; the farmers had nothing to eat, nothing to sleep on, no shelter; they were homeless and hopeless; they had but one alternative: to go out upon the highways,[351] and, in their turn, force a living from the passers-by at the point of the knife. Through the brigandage of the note-holders every year added a strip of abandoned ground to the waste lands of France.

Barillon raised his voice and the grave opened to receive him. Broussel was saved, but his salvation precipitated the catastrophe. The Queen had fled, abducting the King. The national Treasury was empty; affairs were desperate, and Parliament, its honour menaced, decided upon a measure which, had it been successfully effected, would have changed the course of French history.

England had inaugurated a successful political method by giving the nation a Constitution, and by introducing in France the orderly system with which the House of Commons had endowed England. With that end in view the magistrates and all the officials, who had paid for their offices, tried to seize the legislative and financial power of the State. They thought that by that means they could bring the royal authority to terms, and make the national Government an honest executive and guardian of the people's rights,—in the words of the reformers, "make it what it should be, to reign as it ought to reign."[129]

The nation, individually, approved the Parliamentary initiative. Each citizen, courtier, or man[352] of the lower order urged on the scheme. Some applauded because they wished for the good of France. Others looked forward to "fishing in troubled waters." All knew that a great deal of business could be done under cover of the excitement attendant upon national disturbances. They who had no need of money and no thought of financial speculation hoped that their personal schemes might be advanced by a national crisis. Mademoiselle was of the latter class. She had decided to unite her acres and her millions with the fortunes of the King of France. Louis XIV. was ten years old. Anne-Marie-Louise was one and twenty, and she looked her age; her beauty was of the robust type which, mildly speaking, is not of a character to make a woman look younger than her years. Her manners were easy and assured. To the child who had so recently been dandled upon her knee the tall cousin was neither more nor less than the dreaded though respectable daughter of his uncle; the young King shrank from her. Mademoiselle suspected that he feared rather than loved her, and although her flatterers had told her that age was not an obstacle among people of her rank,[130] she was troubled by a presentiment that she should not be able to capture that particular husband unless she could carry him off by force; the thought unhinged all her political convictions; but the enterprises of Parliament gave promise of utility. Her memoirs show that she[353] studied the situation from every point of view, and that a conflict raged within her breast. At times she believed that a public disturbance would be favourable to her interests; at other times she was worried by the thought of the inconveniences attendant upon war. One day she approved the designs of Parliament; the next day she indignantly denounced the subjects who had attempted to circumscribe the authority of the King. She adapted to the royal situation all the maxims derived from the "Divine Right," yet she rejoiced at all the errors of the Court.

She had errors in plenty to sustain her courage; the situation was so false that anything but error would have been impossible. Married or not married, Anne of Austria allowed herself a dangerous latitude; Mazarin did not protect her, she protected and defended him; to her mind all that he did was charming; she glanced knowingly at her courtiers if he opened his mouth or if he moved his hand. Her eyes beamed upon him with familiar meaning, and while he talked her arch smiles asked the Court if her Chief of Council was not a prince among men and the flower of ministers. She would have been happy in a hovel had she been able to fix him stably among his precious ancient draperies and the thousands of rare objects with which he had surrounded his handsome form. Mazarin had feathered his nest à l'Italien, and the style was by far too superfine for the times and for the taste of France. The[354] gossips of the royal domestic offices had circulated the intimate details of the royal life. The public knew all about the favourite; they knew what he wore, what he ate, and what he did; and they thought of him as always at play with small, strangely rare animals, as graceful, as handsome, and as highly perfumed as their master. In imagination they saw Mazarin steeped in sloth, battening on the public funds, and nourishing his soft beauty by the aid of secrets of the toilet of his own invention. Anne of Austria did not care what the people thought. She delighted in Mazarin. She was happy because she had been able to lay the nation at his feet. The people said that she had laid them under his feet, and they declared with curses that it should not be.

Mazarin had rendered France incalculable services, but no one thanked him or did him justice. No one understood the work that he had accomplished. Paris knew nothing of foreign affairs. The people's minds were engrossed by the local misery, and so little interest was taken in politics that when the Peace of Westphalia was signed no one in France noticed it although the world classed it among great historical events.[131]

Paris knew more of the King's scullions than of Mazarin's diplomacy. The King's cousin: Mademoiselle la Princesse Anne-Marie-Louise d'Orléans,—fit bride for any king! must remain upon the stocks to pleasure "the Queen's thief."

There was little in the royal larder, and that little was not equally distributed; the cohorts of the kitchen had made more than one strong personal drive in the King's interest. The wilful head with its floating veil of curls, the pouting mouth and tear-dimmed eyes were the oriflamme of the cooks' pantries. "Monsieur le Cardinal had forty little fishes [132] on his platter! I only had two on mine!" wailed the young monarch, and the cooks' corps rose in a body to defend the "Divine Right."

"Ma foi!" growled the bourgeois, "but he has toupet, that one! he makes himself master of the King's mother, takes the food out of the King's mouth, and sets up his pomade-pots in the King's house!" The people knew that, if they knew nothing of Westphalia; the handsome fop had eclipsed the diplomatist.

The people called Mazarin "the pomade inventor" and "moustache of the paste-pots" (not to cite their grosser expressions). When the mob cried: Vive le Roi! Retz heard echo answer: Mais point de Mazarin! The Queen was like all women deep in love; she wondered why people blamed her.

Her anger embittered the situation, but after making many futile attempts Parliament persuaded her to resume her duties and (the last day of October) the King, the Queen, the Court, and the retinue, followed by loaded vans, passed through the suburbs homeward bound. Before they reached the city they saw that public feeling had[356] changed. The people had lost their respect for the Court. No one cared either for the Queen or for her Minister. The canaille hummed significant songs and cast bold glances at the mature lovers; the courtiers' eyes furtively lingered upon the walls where coarsely worded posters accused the Queen of her delinquencies. Anne of Austria was brave. She entered Paris with cheeks aflame but with head high. She would change all that! Parliament had urged her to return....

Time passed and the general attitude retained its flippancy. At Court all were counting the cost and planning how they could best turn the coming misfortunes of the Crown to their own profit; écus, dignities, offices, benefits of all kinds, would be within the gift of the new administration. The great were prepared for the emergency. Retz had driven his curés over to the opposition. La Rochefoucauld had urged Mme. de Longueville after the clerical sheep and Conti after her. Anne of Austria's patience was at an end; she had no one to advise her; after she had assured herself that the Condés would sustain her, she set out to the Luxembourg. Monsieur was in the agonies of one of the diplomatic attacks to which he was subject; no one knew whether his pains were real or feigned. He was in bed. He had not changed since the days of Richelieu; he was the same light-hearted, nervous, and bold poltroon, but his intellect was keen, he charmed strangers, he was pleasing even to those who knew him best.[357] Though the Queen was used to his arts, she was dazed by the flood of words with which he welcomed her. From tender anxiety for her well-being he passed to the real anxiety of well-defined personal terror. Then, without stopping to take breath, he gave vent to such sentimental emotions that when Anne of Austria told her errand he had neither the face nor the force to refuse her prayer. She begged him to conduct the King out of Paris secretly, and—"By the faith of Monsieur!" he swore that he would do it.

This second flight was fixed for the night between the 5th-6th January. It was agreed that they should retire to Saint Germain, although there was no furniture in the château. Nothing could be sent out this time—the palace was full of spies—the people were on the watch! Let the furniture follow! Fatality must see to that! Mazarin bought two small camp-beds and sent them to Saint Germain; he left to Providence the task of providing for the rest.

The night of the 5th January Anne of Austria went to bed at her habitual hour for retiring. When she was assured that all the people of the palace were asleep she arose and confided her secret to her femme-de-chambre who awakened the servants, whom she could not do without. At three o'clock they took the King and little Monsieur from their beds and dressed them in their warmest garments. The Queen then led the children down an abandoned flight of steps which[358] opened on the garden. It was moonlight and the cold was stinging. The royal family, followed by one femme-de-chambre and a few officers, passed out of the garden by the small door opening into the rue Richelieu. In the street they found two coaches waiting for them. They reached the Cours la Reine, which had been chosen for the general meeting-place, without difficulty; no one had arrived, and they waited. Mazarin had passed the evening at a soirée; at the appointed hour he entered his carriage and drove straight to the Cours la Reine. Monsieur and Condé had been with Mazarin all the evening, but instead of going directly to the Cours they hurried to their homes to prepare their unconscious families. Mme. de Longueville refused to leave her bed; she declared that she would never abandon Paris. Monsieur awakened his wife; she believed that she was dying, and her cries aroused the children; Monsieur had three infant daughters,[133] the eldest was two years and six months old; the youngest had attained the age of two months and fifteen days. The young Lorraines were vociferous, and mother and babes wept together; Gaston sang and whistled, laughed and grimaced. Finally when all the buckles had been adjusted, when the last limp arm had been introduced into its warm sleeve, the four helpless beings, struggling against the efforts of their natural leader, moved painfully through the dark passages of the Luxembourg[359] into the little streets, and across the river. As the murmuring band passed the Tuileries a light struck in Mademoiselle's apartment illumined all the windows. Mademoiselle was rising at her own time! No need of haste for her, no need of secrecy! Her will was the people's law. At sight of the lighted windows the tears of the feeble wife flowed afresh.

Beyond the Tuileries all was confusion. At the last moment the Queen had despatched messengers to summon the courtiers and the courtiers had sent messengers to warn their relatives that the Court was on the march; all had hurried from their homes, and lord and lady were pressing forward toward the Cours la Reine, the gentlemen fastening their garments askew, or wrong side out as they went; the ladies, still in their nightcaps, moving wearily, soothing or upbraiding their weeping children. All wondered what it meant, all asked what the Canaille had done to force the Court to flee.

Mademoiselle was the last to reach the Cours. To quote her own words, she had been "all troubled with joy" when ordered to prepare for flight, because she had believed that her enemies were about to take a step which would force them to look upon the effects of their folly; but the misery of the sudden flitting, the indecent haste, the broken rest, the consciousness of bodily weakness had swallowed up her glee, and she arrived at the Cours in an ugly humour. She ached with cold; she[360] was crowded in the coach; she sought excuses for intimating that the Queen had brought a useless flight upon the Court. The children voiced their woes. Numb with the cold, worn out and querulous, the ladies chided their husbands and the husbands rudely answered. The moon went down upon the wretched exiles; day had not dawned and black night hid the general woe.

They fled in the darkness, cahin-caha, the children sobbing, the women expressing their sufferings in ways equally tempestuous. The Queen was gay; she was running away with Mazarin! "Never," said Mademoiselle, "had I seen a creature as gay as she was! had she won a battle, taken Paris and had all who displeased her put to death, she could not have been happier." They found Saint Germain bare; they had neither furniture nor clothing; they were worn out and anxious, and the château furnished no means of rest or refreshment; the exiles stood at the gates all day watching the highway and questioning the passers-by. No one had seen the luggage or the furniture. Toward night news arrived from Paris; the wains were not coming; the people were angry because the Queen had run away; they had fallen upon the loads; they had broken the courtiers' furniture. Only one load was on the road,—Mademoiselle's; the King's loads had been respected, but they were not to leave Paris.

Mademoiselle had left the bulk of her commodities to be sent out at a later day; only one load[361] belonging to her had started to leave Paris; the people had examined that tenderly and then despatched it for Saint Germain.

No need to watch longer for the loaded wains! The tired courtiers made the best of a bad business; half a dozen of the highest of the Great "shared the Cardinal's two camp-beds"; the quilts on which the children had been bedded on the way from Paris were spread upon the floor. Those who had no mattresses lay upon straw or upon bare boards. The ladies fared worst of all; they had been used to the tender cares of their femmes-de-chambre.

Mademoiselle's spirits rose; she had always boasted that she was "a creature superior to trifles," and the general difficulty had put her on her mettle. Monsieur's wife wept feebly; she told the courtiers of the luxury of her early life, and of her present sufferings. Monsieur's little daughters were restless and displeased. Mademoiselle noted this adventure in her memoirs:

Louis XIV. and little Monsieur played about Saint Germain in the wintry weather, and as the days passed their garments acquired the marks of use. The King's furniture did not arrive, neither did his boxes; the Parisians would not permit them to leave the city. All the gates of Paris were guarded; no one was passed without papers. It was so difficult for people of quality to obtain passports that the ladies ran away in the garb of monks, or disguised in some other way. The Marquise d'Huxelles went through the gates in the uniform of a soldier, with an "iron pot" on her head.[134] Paris had never refused its favourite anything, and Mademoiselle's chariots went and came and no one asked what they contained; the belongings of her friends were transported as freely as her own if they were in her boxes or in her wains. In after life she used to call those days "the time of plenty." "I had everything!" she wrote exultantly; "they gave me passports for all that I wished taken out, and not only that, but they watched over and escorted my chariots! nothing equalled the civilities that they showed me."

Time passed; the royal garments were unfit for wear and the Queen, reduced to extremities, begged[363] Mademoiselle to smuggle for her. Mademoiselle granted her request with joy. She recorded the event exultantly: "One has enough of it,—when one is in condition to render services to such people, and when one sees that one is of importance!"

The Parisians had given their favourite a convincing token of their love, and she regarded it as a proof that she was the one best fitted to share the throne of France.

As the Parisians slept well on the night of the Queen's second flight, they were not conscious of their separation from royalty until the morning of the 6th January. The first emotion felt was consternation. Parliament made overtures to the Queen; the Queen rudely repulsed the overtures, and Parliament issued an edict of expulsion against Mazarin. Mazarin expelled, Parliament raised money, and set about recruiting an army. The Council of the Hôtel de Ville, representing Parisian commerce, sent a delegation to the King. Arrived in the royal presence, the deputies fell at the King's feet. They portrayed the horrors of civil war, they explained to the child that to be driven to attack Paris would be abominable. In the midst of his supplications the chief speaker, choked by sobs, cut short his plea. His emotion was more effective than any argument; his tears proved the solemnity of the hour. The King wept bitterly, and, in fact, every one wept but the Queen and Condé, who surveyed the general distress dry-eyed.

When calm was restored Anne of Austria refused to yield. The die was cast; civil war was inevitable. After long deliberation the Hôtel de Ville declared for resistance. The masses of the people were defiant; they accused the royal family of treason; they demanded vengeance.[135]

At that moment, when the nation stood alone, without a king, when a mob, driven mad by despair, clamoured for justice from the nobles, Mme. de Longueville entered the political field. Nature had not intended Mme. la Duchesse de Longueville for a business career; she was the impersonation of the soft graces of elegant leisure; and even in her grave she charmed men, as she will always charm them while there exists a portrait of her pale hair and angelic eyes, or an historian to recount "the delights of her calm mind illumined by the reflection of celestial light."[136] The fashionable education of the day had been her ruin; the little court of the Hôtel de Condé, long sojourns at Chantilly, where people lived as the heroes and heroines lived in Astrée,[137] excessive novel-reading and frequent and subtle discussions of "love" had made Mme. de Longueville a finished sentimentalist; and in her path she had found waiting for her a man well disposed and well fitted to exploit her sentimentalism, and bold enough to avow the part played by him in her career.

La Rochefoucauld's ambition was to augment the grandeur of his house, and he could not see why he should not put France to fire and sword, if by doing so he could seat his wife on a tabouret close to the Queen.[138] Under his guidance, Mme. de Longueville cast off her sloth and sacrificing her indolence to what she was assured was her "glory," became a political centre and acquired an influence as romantic as herself. Many of the lords who, after the flight of the Court, offered their swords to Parliament "for the service of the oppressed King" (that was the formula), were urged to that action by the persuasive Mme. de Longueville. M. de Longueville was her first recruit, the Prince de Conti was her second.

As soon as it was known that France was preparing for civil war, Mesdames de Longueville and de Bouillon started for Paris. The day after they arrived at their destination they presented themselves at the Hôtel de Ville, saying that they had come "to live right there, in the Town Hall, under the eye of the municipality, as hostages for the fidelity of their husbands."

So the Parisians were duped in the first days of the Fronde. "Galatée" reigned, and the reign of nymphs is expensive. The Court of the nymphs was daily augmented by general officers who offered themselves to the cause amidst the artless plaudits of the people. The generals were as expensive as the nymphs; they demanded money for themselves and for their soldiers; they exacted from Parliament a promise which Parliament agreed to put into effect whenever it could make terms with the Regent. M. le Prince de Conti demanded an important place at Court, money, and favours for his friends. M. de Beaufort demanded an important position, the government of a province for his father, money and pensions for himself, favours for his friends.

The Duc de Beaufort was a jolly dog whom the people loved. He was called "the King of the Halles," a title which expressed his popularity with the fish-wives, rabbit-pullers, agents of the abattoirs,[367] strong-porters, sellers of mortuary wreaths, cheese merchants, and all the rest. He lounged through the markets and the slums tossing his sumptuous head like a Phœbus-Apollo. He affected the argot of the canaille. His good nature was infectious and although he was an Harpagon and a brigand by proxy, he was a very agreeable courtier.

The Maréchal de la Motte demanded a colonelcy for himself and favours for his friends. Every one wanted something, and all felt that whatever was to be had must be had at once; the time was coming when the nation would have nothing to bestow.

A document now before me contains sixteen names; the greatest names of France.[139] The owners of those names betrayed the King for the people because they hoped to gain honours and benefits by their treason. They would have betrayed the people for the King had they hoped to gain more from the King than from the people. The nobility had taken the position held by certain modern agitators; they resorted to base means because they were at an extremity. Like the farmers of France, the nobles had been ruined by the egotism of the royal policy.

They had been taught to think that they could not stand alone. Richelieu had prepared for an absolute monarchy by making them dependent[368] upon the King's bounty; he had habituated them to look for gifts. This fact does not excuse the sale of their signatures, but it explains it. They knew that they had lost everything, they knew that the time was at hand when, should all go, as they had every reason of believing that it would go, the Government would have favours to bestow; they knew that their only means of speculation lay in their signatures. They were not base hirelings,—their final struggle was proof of that! they were the "fools of habit"; Richelieu had taught them to beg and they begged clamorously with outstretched hands, and not only begged but trafficked.

When they demanded honours and favours they did nothing more than their hierarchical head had habituated them to do. So much for their sale of signatures. The fact that they had resolved to make a supreme fight, not for independence,—they had no conception of independence,—but against an absolute monarchy,[140] explains the Fronde of the Princes. At the other end of the social ladder the mobility, or riff-raff, had taken the upper hand, dishonoured the people's cause, and made the Parisians ridiculous.

Driven to arms by their wrongs, lured by the magnetic eloquence of the skilled agents of political egotists, led by a feverish army of men who held their lives in their hands, and commanded by women who played with war as they played[369] with love, the soldiers of the Fronde wandered over the country encamping with gaily attired and ambitious coquettes, and with ardent cavaliers whose gallant examples fretted their own enforced inaction. They were practical philosophers, moved by the instinct which sends the deer to its sanctuary. "Country" and "Honour" had come to be but shibboleths: they, the Frondeurs, were of a race apart from the stern regulars who blocked the capital under Condé, and when the time to fight came they ran, crying their disgust so loud that the whole country halted to listen. The public shame was unquestionable, and the national culpability, like the culpability of the individual, was well understood; the cry of "treason" aroused a general sense of guilt. Certain of the men of France had been faithful to the country from the beginning; the nation's statesmen, notably the magistrates, had acted for the public good; but in the general accusation Parliament, like all the other factors of the Government, was branded; its motives were questioned, and the names of honest men were made a by-word.

Passing and repassing, in and out of all the groups and among all the coteries, glided the Archbishop's coadjutor; now in the costume of a cavalier, bedizened with glittering tinsel, now in the lugubrious habit of his office. When dressed to represent the Church he harangued the people wherever he chanced to meet them; the night-hawks saw him disguised and masked running to[370] the dens of his conspirators. Whatever else he was doing, he found time to preach religion, and he never missed a gathering of pretty women.

Meanwhile the price of bread had tripled; the Revolution had reached the provinces, and the generals had signed a treaty of alliance with Spain. This was paying dear for the violins of the heroines of the Hôtel de Ville!

In Parliament the magistrates, the solid men of France, revolted against the seigniors as they had revolted against the barricades. They knew what influences had been brought to bear upon individuals, they had seen the royal power exercised to the ruin of the country, they knew the strength of the mobility, and their own honour had been called in question; but their action was the result of an unselfish impulse. National affection, a natural patriotism, had raised them above fear and above rancour. They were determined to rescue the country, and they had lost faith in all intentions save their own.

Acting on their own counsel and on their own responsibility, they hastened to conclude the peace negotiations of Rueil (11th March, 1649). Their action irritated the generals. Peace thus arranged was not in their plan; it brought them no profit: they argued and bargained.

To quote Mme. de Motteville, they "demanded all France" in payment for their part in the treaty. They made it plain that if they should give their[371] signatures it would be because they had been paid for them. Shameless haggling marked this period of the Fronde. After all those who had influence or signatures to dispose of had plucked the many-membered monarchy even to its pin-feathers, and after each of the assistants had taken a leg or a wing for himself, the generals consented to lay down their arms, and peace was proclaimed to the sound of trumpets.

The day after the proclamation was issued, Mademoiselle asked her father and the Queen for permission to return to Paris.

She wished to see how the Parisians regarded her and how they would receive her. She set out from Saint Germain across the devastated country. The soldiers of both parties had burned the houses, cut down the trees, and massacred or put to flight the inhabitants. It was April, the time when all the orchards are in flower, but the suburbs within six miles of Paris were bare and black; the ground was as lifeless as a naked rock.

"Monday, 8th April," noted a contemporary, "Mlle. d'Orléans arrived at her lodgings in the Tuileries, amidst the great applause of the Parisians. Tuesday, the 9th, every one called on Mademoiselle."

Mademoiselle wrote: "As soon as I was in my lodgings every one came to see me; all Paris came, the highest and the lowest of the party.[372] During my three days' stay in Paris my house was never empty." A second visit to the Tuileries was equally triumphant, and Mademoiselle was confirmed in her determination to accomplish her destiny by marrying the King of France. The project was public property; the capital of the kingdom approved it, and the people were ready to barricade the streets in case the King, the Queen, or the Italian objected to it.

At that time a comedy equal to any presented upon the stages of the theatres was played at Saint Germain, and the Queen was leading lady. The chiefs of the Fronde, generals, members of Parliament, representatives of all the corporate bodies and of all the classes—even the humblest—visited the château and assured the Queen of their allegiance. As Mademoiselle said: "No one would confess that he had ever harboured an intention against the King; it was always some one else whom he or she had opposed." The Queen received every one. She was as gracious to the shop-keeper as to the duke and peer. Anne of Austria appeared to believe all the professions that the courtiers made; and all alike, high and low, went away with protestations of joy and love.[141] The only one who lost her cue in this courtly comedy was Mme. de Longueville. Her position was so false[373] that though she was artful she quailed; she was embarrassed, she blushed, stammered, and left the royal presence furiously angry at the Queen, although, to quote an ingenuous chronicler,[142] "the Queen had done nothing to intimidate her."

Saint Germain returned the visits made by the city, and each courtier was received in a manner appropriate to his deserts. Condé was saluted with hoots and hisses. The Parisians had not forgotten the part that he had played in the suburbs. The other members of the Court were well received, and when the Queen, seated in her coach, appeared, holding the little King by her hand, the people's enthusiasm resembled an attack of hysteria. The city had ordered a salute, and the gunners were hard at work, but the public clamour was so great that it drowned the booming of the cannon, and the aldermen fumed because, as they supposed, their orders to fire the salute had been ignored.[143] Exclamations and plaudits hailed the procession at every step. The canaille thrust their heads through the doors of the royal carriage and smiled upon the King; they voiced their praises with vehemence. Mazarin was the success of the day; the women thought him beautiful, and they told him so; the men clasped his hands. Mazarin eclipsed Mademoiselle, and Mademoiselle, neglected by the people, found the time very long.

The beauty of the Queen's favourite won the hearts of the people of the Halles, and the royal party entered the palace in triumph. When Anne of Austria first left her palace, after her return from exile, the women who peddled herrings fell upon her in a mass and with streaming eyes begged her to forgive them for opposing her. Anne of Austria was bewildered by the transports of their admiration. They approved of her choice of a lover; they sympathised with her in her love, and they were determined to make her understand it. The Queen's delicacy was wounded by the latitude of their protestations.

Paris had made the first advances and royalty had accepted them. As there were no public "journals," to speak to the country, a ball was given to proclaim that peace had been made, and the ball and the fireworks which followed—and which depicted a few essential ideas upon the sky by means of symbolical figures—acted as official notices. The fête took place with great magnificence the 5th September.

Louis XIV. was much admired, and his tall cousin almost as much so. "In the first figure the King led Mademoiselle," said the Chronicle "and he did it so lightly and with such delicacy that he might have been taken for a cupid dancing with one of the graces." The guests of the Hôtel de Ville, the little and the large Bourgeoisie, men,[375] wives, and daughters, contemplated the spectacle from the tribunes; they were not permitted to mingle with the Court. Anne of Austria watched them intently; she was unable to conceal her surprise at their appearance. The wives of the bourgeois displayed a luxury equal to that of the wives of the nobles. Apparently their costumes were the work of a Court dressmaker. Their diamonds were superb. Anne of Austria had assisted at all the official fêtes of thirty years, and she had never seen such a thing.

The French Bourgeoisie was to be counted; not ignored. The appearance of the bourgeoises was a warning, but the quality either could not, or would not seize it.

When Paris had wept all the tears of its tenderness it returned to its former state of discontent. The whole country was restless; news of revolts came from the provinces. Condé was hated; he was imperious and exacting; he was in bad odour at Court; he had offended the Queen. As Mazarin was in the way of his plans, he had attempted to present the Queen with another favourite. Jarzé, a witless popinjay, was the man chosen by Condé to supplant the accomplished successor of de Richelieu. Jarzé was a human starling; he was giddy, stupid, and in every way ill-fitted to enter the lists with a rival armed with the gravity, the personal beauty, and the subtlety of Mazarin. Jarzé had full confidence in his own powers; he believed that to win his amorous battles he had only to have his[376] hair frizzed and storm the fort. Anne of Austria was sedate and modest and she was deep in love. Jarzé had hardly opened the attack when she ordered him from her presence. Condé, stunned by the effect of his diplomacy, wavered an instant upon the field, but a sharp order from the Queen sent him after his protégé. Anne of Austria felt the outrage, and she vowed eternal anger to Condé.

Condé's lack of tact, coupled with his determination to work miracles, led him into many false positions. He had no political wit, and nothing could have been less like the great Condé of the battle-field than the awkward and insignificant Condé of civil life. In battle he acted as by inspiration. He surged before his armies like the god of war; he was calm, indifferent to danger, impetuous, and terrible; face to face with death, his mind developed and he could give a hundred orders to a hundred persons at once.[144] In Parliament, or with the chiefs of his political party, he was as nervous as a woman; he stood trembling, with face paling or reddening, laughing when he ought to weep, and bursting into fits of anger when the occasion called for joy. There was nothing fixed, or stable, in his whole make-up, except his overweening pride and an "invincible immoderation,"[145] which eventually precipitated him into the abyss. No one had as much natural wit, yet no one was as[377] fantastic in tastes and in behaviour. He adored literature: sobbed over Cinna and thought Gomberville's Polexandre admirable. He swooned when he parted with Mlle. de Vigean, a few days later he—as Mademoiselle termed it—"forgot her all at one blow." He was a great genius but a crackbrain; a complicated being, full of contrasts and contradictions, but singularly interesting. He has been described as a "lank prince, with unkempt, dusty hair, a face like a bird-of-prey, and a flaming eye whose look tried men's souls."

The summer was barely over when Condé forced the Cardinal to sign a promise not to do any thing without his (Condé's) permission. Condé's imperious nature had driven him head long, and at that moment Monsieur's position depended upon his own activity. He had it in his power to sell support to the Crown; the Queen was on Change as a buyer. One step more and it would be d'Orléans against Condé with the Throne of France at his back! Monsieur's wife and Mademoiselle seldom agreed upon any subject, but they united in urging Monsieur to seize his opportunity. As usual, the household spies informed the people of the family discussions, and the popular balladists celebrated the aspirations of the ladies d'Orléans by a song which was sung all over Paris. France was represented as imploring Monsieur to save her from Condé, and Gaston was represented as answering:

One day when several of his friends had, by their united efforts succeeded in getting him as far as the Saint Chapelle, he turned and ran back to his palace with the precipitation and the grimaces of a client of M. Purgon.[147]

Nothing could be done with Gaston; his conduct made Mademoiselle heart-sick. When the second or new Fronde took shape she had no part in it. She looked, on as a listless spectator, while Mazarin spun his web around his enemies and worked his way toward the old Fronde. Condé was marching on to a species of dictatorship when the King's minions brought him to a halt. He was arrested and cast into prison and the Parisians celebrated his disgrace by building bonfires (18th January). A great political party composed of women from all parts of France arose to champion Condé, and still the bravest of all women, La Grande[379] Mademoiselle, sat with head bowed, deep in grief; her father's cowardice had drained life of its joy.

Having aroused the wrath of France by adventures which were the scandal of their hour, Mme. de Longueville had taken refuge in a foreign land and formed an alliance with Spain. France looked on bewildered by the turn of events; Mme. de Chevreuse and the Princess Palatine were in active life regarded as equals of men of State, consulted, and obeyed. Mme. de Montbazon had her own sphere of action; Mme. de Chatillon had hers [148]; both ladies were powerful and dangerous politicians. Others, by the dozen, and from one end of the kingdom to the other, were engaged in directing affairs of State.

Even the insignificant wife of Condé whom no one—not even her husband—had counted as worthy of notice, had reached the front rank at a bound by the upheaval of Bordeaux; yet La Grande Mademoiselle, who possessed the spirit and the energy of a man, was peremptorily ordered by her father and forced to follow Anne of Austria from province to province suppressing insurrections.

In the many months which Mademoiselle considered as unworthy of note in her memoirs, the only period of time well employed by her was passed in an attack of smallpox, which she received so kindly that it embellished her; she said of it: "Before then my face was all spotted; the smallpox took that all away."

Mme. de Longueville's alliance with Spain had cost France the invasion of the Archduke Leopold and de Turenne. In 1650 the Court went to the siege of Bordeaux and Mademoiselle was compelled to accompany the Queen and to appear as an adherent of the King's party; but before she set out upon her distasteful journey she wrote a letter to the invader (the Archduke Leopold) which she was not ashamed to record and which contained a frank statement of her opinion:

Let us remember the nature of those victories of "benevolence and affection" before we form an opinion. Time has veiled with romance the manœuvres which the amazons of the Fronde made to excite the masses to rebellion, but the legend loses its glamour when we consider the brutal ferocity of the armies of the seventeenth century and the abominations practised in the name of glory. The women who shared the life of the generals of the Fronde were travesties of heroines, devoid of the gentler instincts of woman; there was nothing good in them; their imaginations were perverted, they incited their followers to cruelty, and playing with tigerish grace with the love of men, they babbled[381] musically, in artful and well-turned sentences, of the questions of the day, and mocked and wreathed their arms above their heads when their victims were dying.

The Court arrived at Libourne 1st August and remained there thirty days. The weather was very warm, and the Queen secluded herself in her apartment and forced Mademoiselle to sit at her side working on her tapestry. Mademoiselle fumed; she was imprisoned like a child while all the ladies of France were engaged in military service. To add to her mortification, she felt that the Queen had taken a false step and that all Paris was laughing at the Court. Sitting in the Queen's close rooms, Mademoiselle reflected bitterly on her position. She had again entered into collusion with Saujon. The Emperor was for the second time a widower, and Mademoiselle had re-employed the services of her old ambassador. She had sent Saujon to the Emperor to make a second attempt to arrange a marriage. But she had not renounced the King of France, and one of her confidential friends had opened her eyes to the real character of her enterprise. Until then it had seemed natural enough that she should make efforts to establish herself in life; but through the officious indelicacy of her friend she had learned that she was pursuing two husbands at once. One of the objects of her pursuit was a man of ripe age, doubly widowed, the husband of two dead wives; the other a child of[382] tender years,—and neither one nor the other would consent to marry her. She was glad to be far from Paris, where every one knew and pitied her. She burned incense to all her gods and prayed that civil war might keep the Parisians too busy to remember her. Her grief and shame were at their height when the scene changed. Monsieur awoke; Retz had worked a miracle. By means of his peculiar method, acting upon the principle of humanity's susceptibility to intelligent suggestion, Retz had persuaded Monsieur that he, Monsieur, was the only man in France fit to mediate between the parties; after long-continued series of efforts his clerical insinuations had aroused Gaston from his torpor, and one evening when the Queen, flushed and irritable, and Mademoiselle, dejected but defiant, sat at their needlework Gaston entered the dim salon and announced his importance. The trickster of the pulpit and of the slums had managed to infuse a little of his own spirit into the royal poltroon, and for the first time in his political career Gaston displayed some of the characteristics of a man. In an hour Bordeaux knew that the Prince d'Orléans had arrived in Libourne as the accredited mediator of the parties. The politicians fawned at his feet, and Anne of Austria rose effusively to do honour to Monsieur le Prince d'Orléans. By order of the Regent all despatches were submitted to Gaston, who passed upon them as best he could.

Mazarin rose to meet the situation; he was not bewildered by Retz's tactics; he affected to believe[383] that Monsieur must be consulted upon all matters, and by his orders Monsieur's tables were littered with documents. Mazarin multiplied occasions for displaying his allegiance to the royal arbiter. Mademoiselle met the change in her situation joyfully, but calmly. It was the long-expected first smile of fortune; it was the natural consequence of her birth; things were entering their natural order; but she was observant and her mémoirs show us that she valued her incense at its real worth. While the political world bent the knee before Monsieur Mazarin fortified his own position. He sat with the ladies in the Queen's salon, he betrayed a fatherly solicitude in Mademoiselle's future and, as he acted his part, his enthusiasm increased. One day when he was alone with Mademoiselle he assured her that he had prayed long and earnestly for her establishment upon one of the thrones of the world. Sitting at her tapestry, Mademoiselle listened and averted her head to hide her anger. Mazarin, supposing that he had aroused her gratitude, exposed all his anxiety. Mademoiselle did not answer. At last, astonished by her silence, he cut short his declamation. Mademoiselle counted her stitches and snipped her threads; Mazarin watched her impassive face. After a long silence she arose, pushed aside her embroidery frame, and turning to enter her own apartment, she said calmly: "There is nothing upon earth so base that you have not thought of it this morning." Mazarin was alone; he sat with eyes fixed upon the floor,[384] smiling indulgently, wrapt in thought; he was not angry,—he was never visibly excited to anger; but he did not return to the subject. Mademoiselle had resented his overtures because she had made known her projects freely and he had promised her a king, not an emperor. She reported the Cardinal's conduct to Lenet: "The Cardinal has promised me, a hundred times, that he would arrange to have me marry the King [150]—but the Cardinal is a knave!" The Queen said with truth that Mademoiselle was becoming a rabid Frondeuse. Mademoiselle had her own corps of couriers, who carried her the latest news from Paris; her court was larger than the Regent's. When Bordeaux was taken the people saw nothing and talked of nothing but Monsieur's daughter. Mademoiselle exultantly recorded her triumph:

"No one went to the Queen's, and when she passed in the streets no one cared at all for her. I do not know that it was very agreeable to her to hear that my court was large and that no one was willing to leave my house, when so few cared to go to her house."

While the Regent languished in solitude waiting for visitors who did not arrive her Minister received the rebuffs of the people of Bordeaux. The Queen was sick from chagrin, and as soon as arrangements could be made she returned to Paris. On the way to Paris the Court stopped at Fontainebleau. Gaston descended brusquely from his coach[385] and as his foot touched the ground gave way to a violent outburst of nervous anger. Mazarin was the object of his fury; in some occult way the Cardinal had wounded his feelings. He fled to his room and locked his door, refusing to see either Mazarin or the Queen. As he stood his ground, and as no one could approach him, the Queen implored Mademoiselle to pacify him; and Mademoiselle, carrying her olive branch with a very bad grace, set out to play the part of dove in the ark. After many goings and comings, Monsieur consented to receive the Queen; but the Queen acidulated rather than sweetened the royal broth, and Monsieur broke away from her in a passion of fury. From that time all that Anne of Austria attempted to do failed; her evil hour was approaching. Mazarin had thought of two alternatives: he believed that he might buy Retz by making him a cardinal; or that he might win the good-will of Mademoiselle by marrying her to the King. But could he do either one thing or the other? Could he mortify his own soul by doing anything to give Retz pleasure? Retz was hateful to him.

Despite his powerful diplomatic capacity, Mazarin was not a politician, and some of his instincts bore a curious family resemblance to the characteristic instincts of the average woman; so although he believed that it would be possible to buy Retz with a red hat the thought of giving him the hat distressed him. So much for one of his alternatives!

As to marrying Mademoiselle to the King of[386] France,—that would be difficult, if not impossible; the thought of such a marriage was repugnant to the King. Louis XIV. was wilful and the Queen was an indulgent mother. She pampered her children; she excused the King's failings. Mazarin was patient, but he had often considered Anne of Austria adverse to reason when the King was in question. The Cardinal was master of the Queen, but he was not, he never had been, he never could be, master of the Queen-mother.

In his extremity he resorted to his usual means,—intrigue; but he found that his power had waned. There were people who might have helped him, and who would have helped him in former times, but they had ceased to fear him; they demanded pay and refused to work without it. Mazarin was too normally natural a man to act against nature; he clung to his economies and as his supposititious agents refused to take their pay in "blessed water," his plans failed. His attempts were reported to his intended victims and before the sun set Mademoiselle of the Court and of the people, and the Abbé Retz of the Archbishopric and of the slums had arisen in their might against "the foreigner." Both of the leaders of the masses were implacable; each was powerful in his own way; both believed that they had been duped by the Archbishop's coadjutor; Retz had expected a hat; Mademoiselle had expected a husband; both, vowing vengeance to the death, turned their backs upon Mazarin. Mademoiselle had acquired the habit of suspicion; politics[387] had given her new ideas; Retz had always been suspicious and he had prepared for every emergency. Mazarin, sitting in his perfumed bower, felt that the end was near. What was he? What had they always called him? "The stranger." ... The whole world was against him ... the nobles, the Parliaments ... the old Fronde, the Fronde of the Princes! ... Retz with his adjutants of the mobility! To crown his imprudence and to prove that he was more powerful as a lover than as a politician, Mazarin took the field at Rethel (15th December, 1650) and won the day; Turenne and his foreigners were beaten, and fear seized the people of France. An intriguer of that species could do anything! France was not safe in his presence; he must be driven out! During the Fronde it was common for women to dictate the terms of treaties. Anne de Gonzague, the Palatine Princess, whose only mandate lay in her eyes, her wit, and her bold spirit, drew up the treaty which followed Rethel, and the principal articles were liberty for the princes and exile for Mazarin.

Mademoiselle approved both articles before the treaty was signed. The times were full of possibilities for her; her visions of a marriage with Louis XIV. had been blurred by a sudden apparition. Condé had arisen in her dreams with a promise of something better. Might it not be wiser policy to unite the junior branches of the House of France? Might it not be more practical, more fruitful in results, to[388] marry M. le Prince de Condé than to wage war against him? That he was a married man was of small importance. His wife, the heroine of Bordeaux, was in delicate health and as liable to die as any mortal; in the event of her death the dissent of the Opposition would be the only serious obstacle. Mademoiselle confided all her perplexities to her memoirs; she foresaw that the dissent of the Opposition would be ominous for the royal authority, and therefore ominous for the public peace. She reflected; Condé was a strong man; and who was stronger than the Granddaughter of France? She decided that they two, she and Condé, made one by marriage, might defy the obstacle. Mazarin knew all her thoughts, and he felt that the earth was crumbling under his feet; to quote Mademoiselle's own words: "He was quasi-on-his-knees" before her, offering her the King of France; but he made one condition: she must prevent her father's adhesion to the cause of M. le Prince.[151] Anne of Austria, with eyes swimming in tears, presented herself humbly, imploring Mademoiselle, in the name of their ancient friendship, to soften Monsieur's heart to "Monsieur le Cardinal." The Queen begged Mademoiselle to make her father understand that she, the Queen, "could not refuse Monsieur anything should he render her such service." Mademoiselle was ready to burst with pride when she repeated the Queen's promise. A future as bright as the stars lay before[389] her; for the first time and for the last time she had a reason for her dreams.

Monsieur was the recognised chief of the coalition against Mazarin, but he was afraid to act; he did not like to leave compromising traces; he resisted when it was necessary to sign his name. Knowing that the treaty uniting the two Frondes must be signed and that he must sign it, his political friends went in a body to the Luxembourg treaty in hand. Gaston saw them coming and tried to escape, but they caught him in the opening of a double door, and closing the two sides of the door upon his body, squeezing him as in a vise, they thrust a pen between his fingers; then holding a hat before him for the treaty to rest on, they compelled him to sign his name. An eye-witness said that "he signed it as he would have signed a compact with the devil had he feared to be interrupted by his good angel." A few weeks later Parliament demanded the release of the princes and the exile of Mazarin. Then Mademoiselle was given a vision which filled her cup of joy to overflowing.

At that same hour the Palais Royal was the scene of a drama. Mazarin was taking leave, and the Queen thought that she was looking upon him for the last time. The lovers who shared so many memories, and who must have had so many things to say before they parted, dared not, even for a moment, evade the hundreds of eyes fixed upon them. Mazarin could not conceal his grief; the Queen, though calm, was very grave. To the last moment the unhappy pair were forced to speak in such a way that the courtiers could not judge of their sorrow by their looks. At last it was over; the door closed upon Mazarin, and the wretched Queen was left among her courtiers. Mazarin hurried to his rooms, disguised himself as a cavalier, and went on foot out of the Palais Royal. Finding that the cavaliers and river-men were fighting on the quay, he turned into the rue de Richelieu and went away unmolested. It is known that before going to Germany he went to the prison of Havre and set the princes free. Eleven days after Mazarin took leave of the Queen Paris learned that Condé was en route and that he was to sup at the Luxembourg the following day. Mademoiselle knew that her new projects depended upon her[391] first meeting with M. le Prince. She had sent the olive branch to his prison, but she did not know how he had received it. She awaited his coming at the Luxembourg. She said of that first interview:

During the interview the tumult of a great public fête was heard. At sight of Condé Paris had been seized by one of her sudden infatuations.

At the gates of the Palais Royal the masses mounted guard night and day to prevent the abduction of the King. It was generally supposed that the Queen would try to follow the Cardinal.

The Frondeurs were masters of Paris; their hour had come, and they held it in their power to prove that they had led France into adventures because they had formed a plan which they considered better than the old plan. But if there were any[392] among them who were thinking of reform, their good intentions were not perceptible. The people of the past resembled the people of our day; they thought little of the public suffering. Interest in the actions of the great, or in the actions of the people whose positions gave them relative greatness, excluded interest in the general welfare. The rivalries and the personal efforts of the higher classes were the public events of France. Parliament was working along its own lines, hoping to gain control of the State, to hold a monopoly of reforms, and to break away from the nobility. The nobility, jealous of the "long robes," had directly addressed the nation's depths: the bourgeoisie and the mobility.

Retz had supreme hope: to be a Cardinal. Condé hoped to be Prime Minister. Gaston had staked a throw on all the games. Mme. de Longueville dreamed of new adventures; and the Queen, still guided by her far-off lover, laboured in her own blind way upon a plan to benefit her little brood. She looked upon France, upon the people, and upon the Court as enemies; she had concentrated her mind upon one object; she meant to deceive them all and turn events to her own advantage. By the grace of the general competition of egotism, falsehood, broken promises, and treason, the autumn of 1651 found the Spaniards in the East, civil war in the West, the Court in hot pursuit of the rebels, want and disease stalking the land, and La Grande Mademoiselle still in suspense. In the spring during[393] a period of thirty-six hours she had supposed that she was about to marry Condé. Condé's wife had been grievously sick from erysipelas in the head; to quote Mademoiselle's words: "The disease was driven inward, which gave people reason for saying that were she to die I might marry M. le Prince."

At that critical moment Mademoiselle freely unfolded her hopes and fears; she said:

In the course of the summer the Princess Palatine, who supposed that she could do anything because she had effected, or to say the least concluded the union of the Frondes, offered to marry Mademoiselle to the King "before the end of September." Mme. de Choisy, another prominent politician, exposed the conditions of the bargain to Mademoiselle, who recorded them in the following lucid terms:

Although Mademoiselle did not go as far as to say "no," she ceased to say "yes" to everything. Her reason for doing so was baseless. She had acquired the conviction that the young King, Louis XIV., loved the tall cousin who seemed so old to his thirteen-year mind.[153] La Grande Mademoiselle appalled him; her abrupt ways and her explosions of anger drove back his timid head into its tender shell; but she had persuaded herself that he wished to marry her. And she was so sure of her facts that she dropped the oars provided by Mme. de Choisy, and sat up proudly in her rudderless bark, without sail or compass. She believed that the King loved her, she was thankful to be at rest, and she left to her supposed lover the care of the royal betrothal; she sighed ingenuously: "That way of becoming Queen would have pleased me more than the other." That is easily understood; however, nothing came of it. Anne of Austria had sworn to her niece that she would give her the King; but when Mademoiselle's back was turned she, the Queen, said stiffly: "He would not be for her nose even were he well grown!"[154]

Mazarin had done well in supposing that there would be some advantage in intermarrying the junior branches as a means of ending the family quarrels.

Mazarin dared not insist; he felt that he was no longer in a posture where he could indulge in displeasing exactions. While Parliament was rendering decisions against Mazarin, the people close to the Queen were working to obliterate his image from her heart, and their efforts were successful.[156] They occupied the Queen's mind with other friends, the thought of whom filled Mazarin with the torments of jealousy. He was in retreat in Brühl. May 11th he wrote to the Queen: "I wish that I could express the hatred that I feel for the mischief-makers who are unceasingly working to make you forget me so that we shall never meet again."

The 6th July Mazarin had heard that Lyonne had boasted that he pleased the Queen, and he wrote:

Mazarin spoke passionately of his love; he told the Queen that he was "dying" for her; that his only joy was to read and re-read her letters, and that he "wept tears of blood" when they seemed cold; although, as he said, he knew that no one on earth could break the tie that bound them. We have none of the Queen's answers, but we know that they called forth Mazarin's despairing declaration that he should return to Rome. Three weeks later the Queen caused the King to sign a declaration which the betrayed lover answered by a pathetic letter.

Time passed, and Mazarin regained his senses, "made arrows of all sorts of wood," raised an army, and entered France. As he drew near Poitiers, where the Court was staying, the Queen's heart softened, and when he arrived she had been at her window an hour watching for him.

In 1651 Mademoiselle was busy. She attended all the sessions of Parliament and all the seditious soirées of the Luxembourg. She urged the Frondeurs to violence, and as she was a magnetic speaker, her influence was great. Her leisure was given to the pleasures which Paris offers even in time of revolution. She accompanied the King in his walks and drives; she rode with him to the hunt; whenever he was in Paris they were together. Mademoiselle had again refused the hand of Charles II. of England. Charles was still waiting for his kingdom, but his interest in his future had been awakened; his mind had developed, and he had determined to enter into possession of his States.

Mademoiselle was courted and ardently admired. The people worshipped her, the popular voice echoed the spirit of the "Mazarinades" sung by[398] the street singers. Paris was determined to place her upon the Throne of France. Well employed though her time had been, she had done nothing to distinguish herself, nothing to give her a place among heroines like the Princesse de Condé and the enticing Mme. de Longueville. But the year 1652 was on its way, and it was to bring her her long-awaited glory.

After an unsuccessful attempt to make peace, Condé had again taken the field and called his allies, the Spaniards, to his assistance. He had carried on his parleys as he had carried on his chastisement of the suburbs, and his exactions had confirmed hostilities. Maddened by his failure, he had set out with eyes flaming to break the spirit of the people and to turn the absolute power instituted by Richelieu to his own account. Monsieur sustained him against the King. Retz and a party of Frondeurs were trying to make an alliance with the Queen; they were ready to consent to everything, even to the return of Mazarin. Parliament was working for France upon its own responsibility; it opposed Condé as it opposed Mazarin. Mazarin had bought Turenne and led the army into the West to fight the rebels. Monsieur's appanage, the city of Orléans, was menaced by both parties, and it had called its Prince to its assistance. The people of Orléans had sent word to Paris that either Monsieur or Mademoiselle must go to Orléans at once: "If Monsieur could not go Mademoiselle must take his place." Mademoiselle [399] heard the news and went to the Luxembourg to see her father. She reported her visit thus:

"I found Monsieur very restless. He complained to me that M. le Prince's friends were persecuting him by trying to send him to Orléans; he assured me that to abandon Paris would be to lose our cause. He declared that he would not go."

The evening of the day of the visit thus reported when Mademoiselle was at supper in her own palace, an officer approached her and said in a low voice: "Mademoiselle, we are too happy! it is you who are coming with us to Orléans."

Mademoiselle's joy knew no bounds. She passed the greater part of the night preparing for the journey. In the morning she implored the blessing of God upon her enterprise; and that done, went to the Luxembourg to take leave of her father. She appeared before Monsieur dressed for the campaign and followed by her staff. Under the helmets of her field marshals appeared the bright eyes of women. Inquisitive people, all eager to see Mademoiselle depart for war, had assembled in and around the Luxembourg. Some of Monsieur's friends applauded; others shrugged their shoulders. Monsieur was of too alert a mind to be blind to the ridiculous side of his daughter's chivalry, and though his affections were sluggish, he realised that he had set loose a dangerous spirit. He knew that Mademoiselle was an ardent enemy, that she was impetuous; that she cared nothing for public opinion; when once started what could arrest her[400] progress? His paternalism overcame his prudence, and in a loud, commanding voice he ordered the astonished generals to obey Mademoiselle as if she were himself; then, dragging the most serious officers of his staff into a far corner of the room where Mademoiselle could not hear him, he commanded them to hold his daughter in leash and prevent her from doing anything important "without explicit orders from her father."

Mademoiselle was in high spirits; her fair hair was coiled under her helmet, her cheeks glowed, and her eyes blazed; the records of the day tell us that she was "every inch a handsome queen and soldier," that she was "dressed in grey," and that her habit was "all covered with military lace of pure gold." She took leave of her father amidst the hurrahs of the people, and all through the city her subjects wished her joy, called upon God to bless her arms, or blasphemously proclaimed that such a goddess had no need of the god of the priests. The day following her departure she was met by the escort sent forward in advance of her departure by the generals of the Fronde. She was received by them as chief of the army, and long after that time had passed with all its triumphs, she proudly noted the fact in her memoirs:

To prove her authority she arrested the couriers and seized and read their despatches. At Toury, where the greater part of the army of the Fronde[401] was encamped, she presided over the council of war. The council was all that she could have wished it to be, and her advice was considered admirable. After the council Mademoiselle gave orders for the march. In vain the generals repeated her father's last instructions; in vain they begged her to "await the consent of his Royal Highness." She laughed in their faces; she cried "En avant!" with the strength of her young lungs. All the trumpets of her army answered her; the batons of the tambour majors danced before high Heaven; and, fired by such enthusiasm as French soldiers never knew again until the Little Corporal called them to glory, the army of the Fronde took the road, lords, ladies, gallant gentlemen, and raw recruits.

Night saw them gaily marching; the next morning they thundered at the gates of Orléans (27th March, 1652).

Mademoiselle announced her presence, but the gates did not open. From the parapet of the ramparts the garrison rendered her military honours; she threatened, and the Governor of the city sent her bonbons. The people locked in the city hailed her with plaudits, but not a hinge turned. The authorities feared that to let in Mademoiselle would be to open the city to the entire army. Tired of awaiting the pleasure of the provost of the merchants, Mademoiselle, followed by Mesdames de Fiésque and de Frontenac, her field marshals, went round the city close to the walls,[402] searching for some unguarded or weak spot where she might enter. All Orleans climbed upon the walls to watch the progress of the gallant and handsome cavalier-maiden and her aids. It was an adventure! Mademoiselle was happy; she looked up at the people upon the walls and cried merrily, "I may have to break down the gates, or scale the walls, but I will enter!"

Thus, skirting the city close to the walls, the three ladies reached the banks of the river Loire, and the river-men ran up from their boats to meet them, and offered to break in a city gate which opened upon the quay. Mademoiselle thanked them, gave them sums of money, told them to begin their work, and the better to see them climbed upon a wine-butt. She recorded that feat, as she recorded all her feats, for the benefit of posterity: "I climbed the wine-butt like a cat; I caught my hands on all the thorns, and I leaped all the hedges." Her gentlemen, who had followed her closely, surrounded her and implored her to return to her staff. Their importunities exasperated her, and she ordered them back to their places before the principal gates. She animated the river-men to do their best, and they worked with a will. The people within the walls had become impatient, and while the river-men battered at the outside of the gates they battered at the inside. Gangs of men, reinforced by women, formed living wedges to help on the good work. Suddenly a plank gave way and an opening was made. Mademoiselle[403] descended from her lookout, and the river-men gently carried her forward and helped her to enter the city. To quote her own words:

The people were transported with delight; they carried her in procession; a company of soldiers, with drums beating, marched before the procession to clear the way. Mmes. de Fiésque and de Frontenac trudged after their leader through the "quantity of very bad dirt," surrounded by the people, who did not cease to caress them because, as is explicitly stated, "they looked upon the two fairly beautiful ladies as curiosities." The local contemporary chronicles lead us to suppose that the people were not the only ones who indulged in kisses on that occasion; the beautiful Comtesse de Fiésque is said to have kissed the river-men; she was in gallant spirits; la Frontenac finished the last half of her promenade with "one shoe off and one shoe on," though the legendary dumpling supposed to attend a parade in "stocking feet" was lacking.

After events had resumed their regular course, the people wrote and sung a song which was known all over France:

On the way to the Hôtel de Ville the procession met the city authorities, who stood speechless before them. Mademoiselle feigned to believe that they had started to open the gates. She greeted them blandly, listened to their addresses, returned their greetings, and closed a very successful day by sending a triumphant message to her father. One by one her staff had entered by the broken gate, and the generals saluted her with heads low; they were abashed; they had taken no part in the capture of Orleans.

The Orleanists were firm in their refusal to let the army enter the city, and the young general, accepting the situation, ordered her troops to encamp where they were, outside of the chief gates of the city. The following day at seven o'clock in the morning, Mademoiselle, enthroned upon the summit of one of the city's towers, looked down scornfully upon "a quantity of people of the[405] Court" who had hurried after her hoping to share her victory. The people of Orleans were quick to catch the spirit of their Princess; they climbed upon the city walls and jeered at the wornout laggards, and Mademoiselle's cup of joy was full. She looked with delight upon the discomfiture of the belated courtiers and upon the envious tears of the travel-stained ladies.

That day she made her first appearance as an orator. Her memoirs tell us that at first she was "as timid as a girl"; then, regaining her self-possession, she expounded the theories of the Fronde and told the people why the nobles had arisen to deliver the country from the foreigner. When she had said all that she had to say she returned to her quarters. In her absence the Duc de Beaufort had sallied out, attacked a city, and been repulsed. Mademoiselle was indignant; she had not given de Beaufort orders to leave the camp. She called a court-martial to try him for insubordination and breach of discipline. Court was convened very early in the morning, in a wine-shop outside of the city. Despite the long skirts of the field marshals, it was a stormy meeting. Messieurs de Beaufort and de Nemours came to words, and from words to blows. They tore off each other's wigs; they drew their swords. Mademoiselle's hands were full. She passed that day and the night which followed it in strenuous efforts to calm the tumult. All the people within hearing of the mêlée had hastened to the field of action, and being on the spot and in[406] fighting trim, every man had seized his occasion and settled his difficulty with his neighbour, and all, civil and military, had fought equally well.

The 30th, letters of congratulation arrived from Paris. Monsieur wrote: "My daughter, you have saved my appanage, you have assured the peace of Paris; this is the cause of public rejoicing. You are in the mouths of the people. All say that your act did justice to the Granddaughter of Henry the Great." This, from her father, was praise. Condé supplemented it: "It was your work and due to you alone, and it was a move of the utmost importance."

Mademoiselle's officers assured her that she had "the eye of a general," and she accepted as truth all that they told her and considered it all her due. About that time she wrote to some one at Court a letter which she intended for the eyes of the Queen, and in the letter she said in plain words that she intended to espouse the King of France, and that any one—no matter who it might be—would be unwise to attempt to thwart her wishes, because she, Mademoiselle, held it in her power to put affairs in such a state that people would be compelled to beg favours of her on their knees.[158] Anne of Austria read the letter and scoffed at it.

Despite her brilliant débuts, Mademoiselle was tired of life. The authorities of Orleans considered her a girl, and no one in the city government honoured her orders. Her account of those days is a[407] record of paroxysms: "I was angry!... I flew into a passion.... I was in a rage.... I berated them furiously.... I was so angry that I wept!"

Yes, Mademoiselle, whose will had been law to the people of Paris, could not make the people of Orleans obey her. In answer to her commands the town authorities sent her sweetmeats, bonbons, and fair words. When Mademoiselle commanded them, they answered: "Just what Mademoiselle pleases we shall do!" and having given their answer, they acted to please themselves. The general commanding the army of the Fronde was ill-at-ease, sick for Paris, tired of Orleans. She begged to be permitted to leave Orleans, but her father commanded her to remain. He enjoyed her absence. She had tried in vain to persuade him to relieve her of her command; human nature could endure no more; forgetting her first duty as a soldier, she disobeyed orders and joined the army of the Fronde at Étampes (May 2d). The weather was perfect; she had escaped from Orleans, she was on her horse, surrounded by her ladies. All the generals and "a quantity of officers" had gone on before, and she could see them, as in a vision, in the golden dust raised by the feet of their horses; the cannon of the fortified towns thundered, the drums of her own army rolled; she was in her element; she was a soldier! Condé once told her, when speaking of a march which she had ordered, that Gustavus Adolphus could not have done better.

The morning after her arrival at Étampes she went to Mass on foot, preceded by a military band.[159] After Mass she presided at a council of war, mounted. After the council she rode down the line and her troops implored her to lead them to battle.

The review over, she turned her horse toward Paris, not knowing that Turenne had planned to circumvent the army of the Fronde. Turenne knew that the presence of the Amazons distracted the young generals, and he considered the moment favourable to his advance. Near Bourg la Reine Condé appeared, followed by his staff. Immediately after his return from the South he had set out for Étampes to salute the General-in-Chief of the army of the Fronde.

The people had missed their Princess. In her absence they had rehearsed the sorrows of her life, and she had become doubly dear to them; they had magnified her trials and idealised her virtues; they had gloried in her exploits. Relaying one another along the road beyond the city's gates, they had waited for her coming. At last, after many days, the outposts of the canaille descried the upright grey figure followed by the glittering general staff and guarded by the staff of Condé.

The beloved of the people, insulted by the Queen, despoiled by the Queen's lover of the right of woman to a husband, imprisoned and forsaken by her father in her hour of need, had risen above[409] humanity! She had been a heroine, she had forgiven all her enemies, had captured Orleans, had assured the safety of her own city,—and now she had come home! They laid their cheeks to the flanks of her horse; they clasped the folds of her habit; and a cry arose from their wasted throats that scared the wild doves in the blighted woods along the highway. Mademoiselle had come home! "Vive Anne-Marie-Louise, la petite-fille de la France!"

Anne-Marie-Louise d'Orléans, Duchesse de Montpensier, who had taken a stronghold unaided save by a few boatmen, heard thanksgiving on all hands, and to crown her joy—for she loved to dance—the city gave a great fête in her honour. But there was one bitter drop in her cup: her father had been made sick by her arrival. He dared not punish her in the face of the people's joy; but he retired to his bed and abandoned himself to the pangs of colic and, when Mademoiselle, flushed with pride, arrived at the Luxembourg, he refused to see her; he sent word to her to "Begone!" he was "too sick to talk of affairs of State."

Monsieur had cares of various species. Condé and his associates had forced him to take a prominent position in politics, and his terror of possible consequences made his life a torment. Condé was deep in treasonable plots. He had returned from[410] his Southern expedition flaming with anger; he had goaded the people to the verge of fury, and reduced Parliament to such a state that it had adjourned its assemblies without mention of further sessions. He had made all possible concessions to the foreigners; he had so terrified Monsieur that the unhappy Prince saw an invasion in every corner. But Gaston had still another master; he had fallen a victim to the machinations of the wily Retz. For reasons of his own, the Archbishop's coadjutor had found it expedient to familiarise Monsieur with the canaille, and he had so impressed the people with the idea that "d'Orléans" sympathised with them that they fawned upon Gaston and dogged his footsteps. An incoming and outgoing tide of ignoble people thronged the Luxembourg. Monsieur's visitors were the lowest of the mobility, and they forced their way even into his bed-chamber. They sat by him while his coiffeur dressed his hair, they assisted at his colics, and officiously dropped sugar in his café-au-lait. Among his visitors were ex-convicts, half-grown daughters of the pavement, and street urchins, and they all offered him advice, sympathised with him, urged him to take courage, and assured him of their protection, until Gaston, helpless in his humiliation, writhed in his bed. When he had been alone and free from the sharp scrutiny of his natural critic, his daughter, his lot had been hard, but with Mademoiselle at hand it was torment. Mademoiselle was a general of the army; she had taken[411] her father's place; she felt that her exploits had given her the right to speak freely, and one day when she visited Madame (she told the story herself), she "rated her like a dog." Madame was in her own apartment; she studied her complaints, sipped her "tisanes," swathed her head in aromatised linen, and neither saw nor heard the droning of the throngs who buzzed like flies about her husband.

It is worthy of note that the princes did not forecast the future. Reason ought to have shown them that the revolution would sweep them away as it swept all else should not Royalty intervene in their behalf. The Canaille was mistress of the streets, and her means was always violent. Her leaders were strong men. In 1651 she had her Marats and her Héberts, who used their pens to incite France to massacre; and her Maillards, who urged her on to pillage the homes of the nobility and to fell, as an ox is felled in the shambles, all, however innocent, whom it served their purpose to call suspicious. Such men did bloody work, and they did not ask what the nobles thought of it. Insolent, on fire with hate, lords of a day! they sprang from the slimy ooze with the first menace of Revolution to vanish with the Revolution when the last head rolled in the sawdust; cruel, but useful instruments, used by immutable Justice to avenge the wrongs of a tormented people!

When Mademoiselle returned from Orleans Paris[412] wore the aspect of the early days of the Terror. Even the peaceable and naturally thrifty sat in idleness, muttering prayers for help or for vengeance, either to God or to the devil. All were afraid. The people of the Bourgeoisie had set their faces against the entrance of Condé's troops. The devastated suburbs were still in evidence; it was supposed that Condé would bring with him drunkenness, rapine, fire, and all the other horrors of a military possession. So matters stood when the army of the King and the army of the Fronde, after divers combats for divers issues, fought the fight which gave Mademoiselle her glory.

She was then the Queen of Paris. Her palace was the political centre as well as the social centre of France. Of those days she said:

"I was honoured to the last point. I was held in great consideration." Yes, she was "honoured," but the honour was in name only; the ceremonial was all that there was of it and—worst of all for her proud heart—she knew that it was so. It was the affair of Orleans over again. In Orleans, when she had issued orders, the city government had sent her bonbons, paid her compliments, and followed their own counsel. They had answered blandly, "As Mademoiselle pleases"; but, in point of fact, Mademoiselle was of no practical importance. To her, flattery and fine words; to others, confidence and influence. The statesmen thought that she was neither discreet nor capable of wise counsel. She was too frank and too upright to be[413] useful as a politician. Monsieur hid his secrets from her. Condé's manner told her everything, but he never gave her the assurance which would have established her on firm ground; and, looking practically upon that matter, what assurance could he have given her? What, in honour, was he free to say?

The Prince de Condé, who was continually spoken of as Mademoiselle's possible husband, paid hypothetical court to Mademoiselle, but when he had serious subjects to discuss he carried them to the salon of the beautiful Duchesse de Chatillon, who was then the rising star of the political world of Paris. Mesdames de Longueville and de Chevreuse were setting suns, and very close to the horizon. Ignoring Mademoiselle, they had made an independent attempt to reconcile the princes and restore them to the good graces of the Court; their attempt had failed. The Duchesse de Montpensier was the only one at Court who had maintained friendly relations with the princes.

One night, in the Cours la Reine, Mademoiselle found herself close to a marching army. Condé's troops, pressed by Turenne, were hurrying into Paris close to the ramparts (which then stood where we now see the Place de la Concorde and the great boulevards).

Mademoiselle was mounted; she was talking with an officer. She watched the winding line of the troops thoughtfully, and when the Cours[414] hid it from view she went into Renard's garden, where she could watch it out of sight. Her heart ached with forebodings; the army had marched in disorder at the pace of utter rout and with flank exposed. She wrote in her memoirs:

Mademoiselle had intended to take a medicine which she considered necessary, but as she thought that it might interfere with her usefulness, she countermanded the doctor's orders. On what a slender thread hangs glory!

July 2d, at six o'clock in the morning, some one knocked at Mademoiselle's door, and Mademoiselle sprang from her bed but half awake. Condé had sent to ask for help. He was with his army held at bay against the closed gates of Paris attacked by the army of de Turenne. The messenger had been sent to Monsieur, but Monsieur, declaring that he was in agony, had refused to see him. On that answer the messenger sped to the palace of the Tuileries. Mademoiselle dressed and hurried to the Luxembourg. As she entered the palace[415] Monsieur came down the stairs, and Mademoiselle attacked him angrily; she accused him of disloyalty, and reproached him for his pretence of sickness. Gaston assured her calmly: "I am sick; I am not sick enough to be in bed, but I am too sick to leave this house."

"Either mount your horse or go to bed!" cried Mademoiselle. She stormed, she wept, all in a breath (as she always did when she could not force her father to do his duty), but Monsieur was a coward and nature was too strong to be controlled; she could not move him. Retz had worked upon Gaston's cowardice as a means of furthering his own plans; his plans included the death of Condé and the failure of the Fronde; therefore tortures would not have drawn Gaston from his house upon that occasion, even had he favoured intervention in behalf of Condé.

Long before the messenger of Monsieur le Prince had knocked at the door of the Tuileries, the army of the Fronde, at bay against the wall of the city, had awaited the word required to open the gates of Paris. Still another hour had passed and Mademoiselle's endeavour had been vain. Years after she recorded the fact with sorrow: "I had begged an hour, and I knew that in that time all my friends might have been killed—Condé as well as the others! ... and no one cared; that seemed to me hard to bear!"

While Mademoiselle was imploring her father to help her Condé's friends arrived; they beset Gaston and commanded him to send help at once to the Faubourg Saint Antoine. Condé and his men were fighting for their lives; the people of the Faubourg had mounted the heights to see the battle.

Gaston was exasperated, and to rid himself of the importunities of his party he ordered his daughter to go to the Hôtel de Ville and tell the authorities that he commanded them to issue an order to open the gates. As Mademoiselle ran through the streets the bourgeois, who had gathered in groups to give each other countenance, begged her for passports; they were ready to leave the city.

A half-starved, ragged mob filled the Place de Grève; the canaille blocked the adjoining streets. The palace was like an abandoned barrack. The sunlight fell upon the polished locks of the old muskets of the League, and not a head dared approach the windows. Mademoiselle ran through the mob and entered the Hôtel de Ville. Let her tell her errand in her own way:

They went into the council-room. Mademoiselle fell upon her knees at the open window, and, in silence, the people watched her; they were on[417] guard, waiting for her orders. In the church of Saint Gervais priests were offering the Mass; she could hear them and she tried to pray. Minutes had passed and nothing had been done. She arose from her knees and, entering the council-room, urged the men to act; she implored, she threatened; then, hurrying back to the window, she fell upon her knees. Rising for the last time, pale and resolute, she entered the council-room; she pointed to the Grève where the people stood with eyes fixed upon the windows, then, stretching her arm high above her head, she cried violently: "Sign that order! or—I swear it by my Exalted Name! I will call in my people and let them teach you what to do!"

They fell upon the paper like wolves upon a lamb, and an instant later Mademoiselle, grasping the order, hurried up the rue Saint Antoine to open the city's gates.

Not far from the Hôtel de Ville a cavalier in a blood-stained doublet, blinded by blood from a wound in his forehead, passed her, led like a child between two soldiers; both of the soldiers were weeping: it was La Rochefoucauld.

Mademoiselle called his name, but he did not answer. At the entrance to the rue Saint Antoine another wounded man appeared, bareheaded, with blood-stained raiment; a man walking beside him held him on his horse. Mademoiselle asked him:[418] "Shalt thou die of thy wounds?" he tried to move his head as he passed on. He was "little Guiteau," Mademoiselle's friend who had carried the "olive branch" to Condé's prison. But they were coming so fast that it was hard to count them—another—then another! Mademoiselle said: "I found them in the rue Saint Antoine at every step! and they were wounded everywhere ... head ... arms ... legs! ... they were on horse—on foot—on biers—on ladders—on litters! Some of them were dead."

An aristocratic procession! The quality of France, sacrificed in the supreme attempt against man's symbol of God's omnipotence: the Royalty of the King!

By the favour of the leader of the tradesmen the gates of Paris had opened to let pass the high nobility. Paris enjoyed the spectacle. The ramparts swarmed with sightseers; and Louis XIV., guarded by Mazarin, looked down upon them all from the heights of Charonne.

The soldiers of the Fronde had had enough! Crying, "Let the chiefs march!" they broke ranks. So it came to pass that all who fought that day were nobles. The faubourg saw battalions formed of princes and seigniors, and the infantry who manned the barricades bore the mighty names of ancient France. Condé was their leader and, culpable though he had been, that day he purged his[419] crimes against the country by giving France one of the visions of heroism which exalt the soul.

Condé was everywhere! "A demon!" said the soldiers of the King; "superhuman" his own men called him. Like the preux chevaliers of the legends, he plunged into the fray, went down and rose with cuirass dented and red with blood, to plunge and to come forth again.

The friends dearest to his heart fell at his feet, and still he bore his part. He fought with all-mastering courage; he inspired his men; and the stolid bourgeois and the common people upon the ramparts, moved to great pity, cried out with indignation that it was a shame to France to leave such a man to perish. That combat was like a dream to the survivors. Condé's orders were so sharp and clear that they rang like the notes of a trumpet; his action was miraculous, and in after years, when his officers talked of Roland or of Rodrigue, they asserted, to the astonishment of their hearers, that they had known both those redoubtable warriors and fought in their company on many a hard won, or a hard lost, field. To their minds there was neither Rodrigue nor Roland; they knew but one hero, and he was "Condé."

That day in the Faubourg Saint Antoine, at the gates of Paris, bathed with the blood and the sweat of the combat, when he had all but swooned in his[420] cuirass, he rushed from the field, stripped, and rolled in the grass as a horse rolls; then slipped into his war harness and took his place at the head of his army, as fresh as he had been before the battle.

But neither his courage nor his strength could have saved him, and he, and all his men, would have perished by the city ditch if Mademoiselle had not forced Paris to open the gates.

Some one living in the rue Saint Antoine offered Mademoiselle shelter, and she retired an instant from the field. Soon after she entered her refuge Condé visited her and she thus recorded her impressions of the day:

Mademoiselle spoke to Condé of the battle. They agreed upon a plan for ending it, and Condé returned to the field to lead the retreat. Mademoiselle went to the window to watch the men take out the baggage and make ready for the march. She could see the guns. The people of[421] the faubourgs carried drink to the men in the ranks and tried to help the wounded; and she who had been taught to ignore the emotions and the actions of inferiors wept when she saw the famished people of the lower orders depriving themselves to comfort the men who had laid waste the suburbs; Condé and his troops were well known to them all.

Disgust for the prevailing disorder had turned the thoughts of the bourgeois toward Mazarin, whose earlier rule had given the nation a taste of peace. Mademoiselle, who knew nothing of the bourgeois, was aghast at their indifference to the sufferings of the wounded. The men of peace looked with curiosity upon the battle; some laughed aloud; others stood upon the ramparts and fired upon the retreating Frondeurs. Mademoiselle left her window but once; then she ran through the rue Saint Antoine to the Bastille, and, climbing to the summit of the tower, looked through the glass. The battle was raging; she saw the order given to cut off Condé, and, commanding the gunners to train their guns on the King's army, she returned to her post, veiled by smoke and choked by powder, to enjoy her glory; and it was glory enough. Twice in the same day she had saved M. le Prince. As one man the retreating army of the Fronde turned to salute her, and all cried: "You have delivered us!" Condé was so grateful that his voice failed him.

That evening at the Luxembourg, and the evening[422] following, at the Tuileries, after a night robbed of sleep by thoughts of the dead and the wounded of her army, Mademoiselle heard praise which called her back to the demands of life.

Her father did not address her, and his manner repelled her advances. Toward evening, when he supposed that all danger had passed, he went to congratulate Condé. His bearing was gay and pleasant and his face was roguish and smiling. In the evening his expression changed, and Mademoiselle noted the change and explained it to his credit; she said: "I attributed that change to his repentance. He was thinking that he had let me do what he ought to have done." We know that Gaston was not given to repentance; all that he regretted was that he had permitted his daughter to take an important place among the active agents of the Fronde; he was envious and spiteful; but neither envy nor spite could have been called his ruling failing; his prevailing emotion was fear.

The 4th July the bourgeois of Paris met in the Hôtel de Ville to decide upon future action. The city was without a government. The princes, Monsieur, and Condé attended the meeting; they supposed that the Assembly would appoint them Directors of Public Affairs. The supposition was natural enough. However, the Assembly ignored them and discussed plans for a reconciliation with the Regency, and they, the princes, retired from the meeting furiously angry. When they went out[423] the Grève was full of people; in the crowd were officers of the army, soldiers, and priests.[161]

Several historians have said that the princes, or their following, incited the people to punish the bourgeois for the slight offered by them to their natural directors. No one knew how it began. As Monsieur and Condé left the Grève and crossed the river, shots were fired behind them. They went their way without looking back. Mademoiselle was awaiting them at the Luxembourg. Her account of the night's work follows:

That was what was unanimously declared. It was the most barbarous action known since the beginning of the Monarchy.[162] Outraged in his pride and in his will because the bourgeois had dared to offer him resistance, the splendid hero of the Faubourg Saint Antoine, at the fatal moment, fell to the level of Septembrist; and as Monsieur must[424] have known all about it, and as he did nothing to prevent it, he was Condé's accomplice.

As de Beaufort was on excellent terms with the mob, the princes sent him to the Hôtel de Ville; he set out upon his mission and Mademoiselle, who had followed close upon his heels, loitered and listened to the comments of the people. When she returned and told her father what she had heard Gaston was terrified; he ordered her to go back to the Hôtel de Ville and reconnoitre.

It was long past midnight, and the streets were deserted. The Hôtel de Ville was a ruin; the doors and windows were gone, and the flames were still licking the charred beams; the interior had been pillaged. "I picked my way," said Mademoiselle, "among the planks; they were still flaming. I had never seen such a desolate place; we looked everywhere, but we could see no one." They were about to leave the ruins when the provost of the merchants emerged from his hiding-place (probably in the cellar) with the men who had been with him.

Mademoiselle found them a safe lodging and went back to her palace. Day had dawned; people were gathering in the Place de Grève; some were trying to identify the dead. Among the dead were priests, members of Parliament, and between thirty and forty bourgeois. Many had been wounded.

The people blessed Mademoiselle, but she turned[425] sorrowfully away. She thought that nothing could atone for such a murder. She said of the event:

Immediately after the fire, when the city was panic-stricken, M. le Prince's future promised success; he had every reason to hope. Many of the political leaders had left Paris, and taking advantage of that fact, and of the general fear, Condé marshalled the débris of the Parliament, and they nominated a cabinet. Gaston was the nominal head; Condé was generalissimo. The Hôtel de Ville had been repaired, the cabinet was installed there, and Broussel was provost of merchants, but the knock-down "blow with the club" had made his power illusory. Generally the public conscience was callous enough where murders were concerned, but it rebelled against the murder of 4th July. The common saying in Paris was that the affair was a cowardly trap, deliberately set. Public opinion was firm, and the Condé party fell. Before the massacre the country had been tired of civil war. After the massacre it abhorred it. The people saw the Fronde in its true light. With the exception[426] of a few members of Parliament,—patriots and would-be humanitarians,—who had thought of France? The two junior branches, or the nobility? They had called the Spaniards to an alliance against Frenchmen, and, to further their selfish interests, they had led their own brothers into a pitfall.

Who had cared for the sufferings of the people? The Fronde had been a deception practised upon the country; a systematic scheme fostered by men and women for personal benefit. To the labourer hunted from his home to die in the woods, to the bourgeois whose business had been tied up four years, what mattered it that the wife of La Rochefoucauld was seated before the Queen? Was it pleasure to the people dying of famine to know that M. de Longueville was drawing a salary as Governor of Pont de l'Arche? A fine consolation, truly! it clothed and fed the children, it brought back the dead, to maintain a camp of tinselled merry-makers, "among whom nothing could be seen but collations of gallantry to women."

Those were not new reflections, but they had acquired a force which acted directly upon the currents established by Mazarin; and just at the moment when the people awoke to their meaning, the Queen's clairvoyant counsellor removed the last scruple from the public conscience by voluntarily returning to his exile (19th August).

Then came the general break-up. Every man of any importance in Paris raised his voice; deputies were sent to ask the King to recall Mazarin. Retz,[427] whose manners had accommodated themselves to his hat, was among the first to demand the recall, and his demand was echoed by his clergy. Monsieur (and that was a true sign) judged that the time had come to part company with his associates; he engaged in private negotiations with the Court. The soldiers vanished; Condé, feeling that his cause was lost, essayed to make peace, and failed, as he always failed, because no one could accept such terms as he offered. As his situation was critical, his friends shunned him. Mademoiselle still clung to him, and she was loved and honoured; but, as it was known that she lacked judgment, her fondness for him did not prove anything in his favour.

Mademoiselle was convinced of her own ability; she knew that she was a great general. She formed insensate projects. One of her plans was to raise, to equip, and to maintain an army at her own expense: "The Army of Mademoiselle." Such an army would naturally conquer difficulties. Some foreign Power would surrender a strong city,—or even two strong cities; and then the King of France would recognise his true interests, and capitulate to the tall cousin who had twice saved Condé and taken Orleans single-handed,—and at last, after all her trials, having done her whole duty, she would drain the last drops of her bitter draught, and find the closed crown lying at the bottom of her cup,—unless—. There was a very powerful alternative. Mademoiselle's mind vacillated[428] between the King of France and the great French hero: M. le Prince de Condé. An alliance with Condé was among the possibilities. The physical condition of Condé's wife permitted a hope,—twice within a period of two weeks she had been at death's door. On the last occasion Paris had been informed of her condition in the evening.

That night the courtiers paid court to Mademoiselle,—they spoke freely of the re-marriage of M. le Prince,—in short, they did everything but congratulate her in plain words.

Though Mademoiselle knew that her fairy tales were false, she half believed in them. In her heart she felt that her heroinate—if I may use the term—was drawing to a close, and she desired to enjoy all that remained to her to the full. In her ardour she made a spectacle of herself. She appeared with her troops before Paris, playing with her army as a child plays with leaden soldiers. She loved to listen to the drums and trumpets, and to look upon the brilliant uniforms. One night M. le Prince invited her to dine at his headquarters, and she arrived, followed by her staff. She never forgot that evening. "The dirtiest man in the world" had had his hair and his beard trimmed, and put[429] on white linen in her honour,—"which made great talk." Condé and his staff drank to her health kneeling, while the trumpets blared and the cannon thundered. She reviewed the army and pressed forward as far as the line of the royal pickets. Of that occasion she said: "I spoke to the royal troops some time, then I urged my horse forward, for I had great longing to enter the camp of the enemy. M. le Prince dashed on ahead of me, seized my horse's bridle, and turned me back."

That evening she published the orders of the day, did anything and everything devolving upon any and all of the officers on duty, and proved by look and by word that she was a true soldier. When it was all over she rode back to Paris in the moonlight, followed by her staff and escorted by Condé and his general officers. The evening ended with a gay supper at the Tuileries.

That visit went to her head, and a few days later she besought her father to hang the chiefs of the Reaction. "Monsieur lacked vigour." That was the construction which Mademoiselle put upon his refusal to hang her enemies, and it was well for her that he did, for the hour of the accounting was at hand. The 13th October she was intoxicated for the last time with the sound of clanking arms and the glitter of uniforms. M. le Prince with all his army visited her to say "farewell." The Prince was to lead his army to the East; no one knew to what fortune. She wrote mournfully:

The princes left Paris on Sunday. The following Saturday, in the morning, when Mademoiselle was in the hands of her hair-dresser, she received a letter from the King notifying her that, as he should arrive in Paris to remain permanently, and as he had no palace but the Tuileries in which to lodge his brother, he should require her to vacate the Tuileries before noon on the day following. Mademoiselle was literally turned out of the house, and on notice so short that anything like orderly retreat was impossible. Borne down by the weight of her chagrin, she sought shelter where best she could. We are told that she "hid her face at the house of one of her friends," and it is probable that to say that she hid her face but feebly expresses the bitterness of the grief with which she turned from the only home that she had ever known, in which she had lived with her princely retinue, and which she had thought to leave only to enter the King's palace as Queen of France. She was brave; she talked proudly of her power to overthrow royalty, and to carry revolution to the gates of the Palais Royal, and until the people saw their young King[431] her boasts were not vain; but her better nature triumphed, and in the end her wrath was drowned in tears. The day after she received notice to vacate the palace she was informed that her father had been exiled. She went to the Luxembourg to condole with him. On the way she saw the King. She passed him unseen by him. He had grown tall; he saluted the people gracefully and with the air of a king; he was a bright, handsome boy. The people applauded him with frenzy.

Mademoiselle found her father bristling with fury; his staring eyes transfixed her. At sight of her he cried angrily that he had no account to render to her; then, to quote Mademoiselle's words, "Each told the other his truths." Monsieur reminded her that she had "put herself forward with unseemly boldness," and that she had compromised the name of d'Orléans by her anxiety to "play the heroine." She answered as she thought it just and in accordance with the rights of her quality to answer. She demonstrated to her father that there were "characters" upon earth who refused to give written orders because they feared to be confronted by their signatures when personal safety required a denial of the truth. She explained the principle of physical timidity and incidentally rehearsed all the grievances of her life. Gaston answered her. The quarrel ended, Mademoiselle piteously begged her father to let her live under his protection. She recorded his answer word for word, with all the incidents of the interview:

The day after that interview, at a word from the King, all the Frondeurs left Paris. The highways were crowded with great lords in penance and with heroines "retired." Poor broken idols! the people of Paris were still chanting their glory! Monsieur departed, bag and baggage, at break of day,

The daughter of the victim of degeneracy had developed her father's weakness. Although Mademoiselle was in safety, she trembled. She who had challenged death in the last combat of the Fronde, laughing merrily as she trained the guns on the King of France, thrilled with terror when letter followed letter warning her to leave Paris, and giving her the names of people destined for the Bastille. All the letters, were anonymous, and all were in different and unknown hands.

She did not wait to ask who wrote the letters; she did not listen to her faithful Préfontaine, who assured her that there was no danger and begged her to be calm.

La Grande Mademoiselle, appalled, beside herself, unmindful of her glory and her dignity, crying out wild orders to the people who blocked her way, fled from Paris in a hired coach driven by a common coachman. She did not breathe freely until the scene of her triumphs lay far behind her, and even then, the appearance of a cavalier, however peaceable, caused her new terror; she prayed, she trembled; a more piteous retreat was never made!

But the adventures of the route distracted her thoughts. She was masked, travelling as "Mme. Dupré," a woman of an inferior order. She dined with her fellow-travellers in public rooms, talked freely with common people, and faced life on an equality with the canaille. For a royal personage such experience had savour. One day in the kitchen of an inn a monk talked to her long and earnestly of the events of the day and of Mademoiselle, the niece of Louis XIII., and her high feats. "Yes!" said the priest, "she is a brave girl; a brave girl indeed! She is a girl who could carry a spear as easily as she could wear a mask!"

Mademoiselle's journey ended at the château of a friend, who welcomed her and concealed her with romantic satisfaction; being as sentimental as the shepherdesses of Astrée, it pleased the chatelaine to fancy that her guest was in peril of death and[434] that a price was set upon her head. She surrounded Mademoiselle with impenetrable mystery. A few tried friends fetched and carried the heroine's correspondence with Condé. Condé implored her to join the legion on the frontier; he wrote to her: "I offer you my places and my army. M. de Lorraine offers you his quarters and his army, and Fuensaldagne [164] offers you the same."

Mademoiselle was wise enough to refuse their offers; but she was homeless; she knew that she must make some decisive move; she could not remain in hiding, like the princess of a romance. Monsieur was at Blois, but he was fully determined that she should not live with him.

When Préfontaine begged him not to refuse his daughter a father's protection, he answered furiously: "I will not receive her! If she comes here I will drive her back!"

Mademoiselle determined to face her destiny. She was alone; they who loved her had no right to protect her. She had a château at Saint Fargeau, and she looked upon it as a refuge.

Again the heroine took the road, and she had hardly set foot upon the highway when the King's messenger halted her and delivered a letter from his royal master.

Louis XIV. guaranteed her "all surety and freedom in any place in which she might elect to live." Mademoiselle, who had trembled with fear when the King's messenger appeared, read her letter[435] with vexation; she had revelled in the thought that the Court was languishing in ignorance of her whereabouts.

She had gone fast and far and accomplished twenty leagues without a halt, when such a fit of terror seized her that she hid her head. Had she been in Paris, the courtiers would have called her seizure "one of the attacks of Monsieur." It was an ungovernable panic; despite the King's warrant she thought that the royal army was at her heels, and that the walls of a dungeon confronted her. Her attendants could not calm her. The heroine was dead and a despairing, half-distracted woman entered the Château of Saint Fargeau. She said of her arrival:

"The bridge was broken and the coach could not cross it, so I was forced to go on foot. It was two o'clock in the morning. I entered an old house—my home—without doors or windows; and in the court the weeds were knee-high.... Fear, horror, and grief seized me, and I wept."

Let her weep. It was no more than she deserved to do as penalty for all the evil that she had brought about by the Fronde. Four years of a flagitious war, begun as the effort of conscientious patriots, under pressure of the general interest, then turned to a perambulating exhibition of selfish vanities and a hunt for écus which wrecked the peace and the prosperity of France!

In one single diocese (Laon) more than twenty curés were forced to desert their villages because[436] they had neither parishioners nor means of living. Throughout the kingdom men had been made servile by physical and moral suffering and by the need of rest; borne down by the imperious demands of worn-out nature, they loathed action. The heroes of Corneille (of the ideal "superhuman" type of the heroes of Nietzsche) had had their day and the hour of the natural man—human, not superhuman—had come.

Five years later, when Mademoiselle returned to Paris, she found a new world, with manners in sharp contrast with her own. It was her fate to yield to the influence of the new ideal, when, forgetting that a certain degree of quality "lifts the soul above tenderness," she yielded up her soul to Lauzun in romantic love. Some day, not far distant, we shall meet her in her new sphere.

INDEX

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Mémoires de Gaston.

[2] Mémoires de Gaston.

[3] Mémoires de Gaston.

[4] Mémoires de Mademoiselle de Montpensier.

[5] Sauval (1620-1670), Histoire et recherches sur les antiquités de Paris.

[6] The gate of the "Conférence" was built at the time the great improvements were begun, in 1633. It was built after the grand plans of Cardinal de Richelieu and according to his own instructions (Gamboust).

[7] Piganiol de la Force (1673-1753), Description of the City of Paris, etc.

[8] Estat de la France (Collection Danjou).

[9] Extraits des comptes et dépenses du roi pour l'année 1616 (Collection Danjou).

[10] Mémoires de Mathieu Molé.

[11] Letter written by Pontis.

[12] Richelieu et la monarchie absolue.

[13] Mémoires of Lenet.

[14] See his Mémoires.

[15] A few years before his death, which occurred in 1670.

[16] Beheaded in 1632, aged thirty-seven years.

[17] Tallemant.

[18] The first volume of Le Grand Cyrus appeared in 1649; the last in 1653.

[19] Mademoiselle de Scudéry uses the word propre, meaning "elegant," etc.

[20] In Clélie.

[21] Tallemant.

[22] The first number bears date 1605.

[23] The first number appeared May 1, 1631.

[24] Recueil, etc. Discours sur plusieurs points importants de l'état present des affaires de France.

[25] Recueil, etc. Avertissement aux provinces sur les nouveaux mouvements du royaume, by the Sieur de Cléonville (1631).

[26] Mémoires of Mademoiselle.

[27] Relation de ce que c'est passé en l'affaire de la reyne au mois d'août, 1637, sui le sujet de la Porte et de l'Abbesse du Val-de-Grâce. See document in the Bibliothèque National.

[28] The first part appeared in 1610, or perhaps [says M. Brunetière], in 1618. The rest followed at long intervals. The four last volumes bear date 1627 and consequently are posthumous. The part written by d'Urfé cannot be distinguished from the part written by Baro, who continued the work begun by d'Urfé.

[29] Manuel de l'histoire de la littérature française, by M. Ferdinand Brunetière. Cf. En Bourbonnais et en Forez, by Emile Montégut, and Le roman (XVII. Century) by Paul Morillot in L'histoire de la langue et de la littérature française, published under the direction of M. Petit de Julleville. Les vendanges de Suresnes, by Pierre du Ryer.

[30] Waliszeffski: Marysienka.

[31] Paul Morillot, loc. cit.

[32] In the Dedication of Place Royale.

[33] In the Dedication of Place Royale.

[34] M. Lemaître's address, delivered at Port Royal. (Racine's Centennial.)

[35] Histoire de l'art, pendant la renaissance.

[36] Sauval, Les antiquités de Paris.

[37] Dulaure, Environs de Paris.

[38] Astrée.

[39] Montégut, loc. cit.

[40] Somaize's Dictionnaire des Précieuses.

[41] Mémoires, Conrart.

[42] Gazette de Loret. (Letter bearing date August 13, 1651.)

[43] Tallemant.

[44] Mémoires, de Richelieu.

[45] Young Louvigny was killed in a duel in 1629; he was entering his twenty-first year.

[46] Vicomte d'Avenel, Richelieu et la Monarchie absolue.

[47] See Gamboust's map, Paris en 1652.

[48] Tallemant.

[49] In one of the angles at the end of the courtyard (Tallemant).

[50] M. Bourciez loc. cit.

[51] Ibid.

[52] Bussy-Rabutin, Histoire amoreuse des Gaules.

[53] Oh, no! not such a good boy as all that!—Arvède Barine.

[54] Mme. de Sévigné.

[55] Valentin Conrart, Réné Kerviler and Ed. de Barthélemy.

[56] Mme. de Kerviler and Ed. de Barthélemy, loc. cit.

[57] Tallemant.

[58] Cardinal La Valette.

[59] Near Enghien.

[60] Mademoiselle was ten years old at that time.

[61] The Palais-Royal of to-day.

[62] >Alex. Hardy et le théâtre français, Eugène Rigal.

[63] Sorel, La maison des jeux. The book was published in 1642, but M. E. Rigal supposes that the disorders and the complaints cited in it date from a previous epoch.

[64] La pratique du théâtre.

[65] Certainly the desire was not lacking.—Author.

[66] Le théâtre au temps du Corneille, Gustave Reynier. The first representation of the Cid took place either in December, 1636, or in January, 1637.

[67] See dedicatory letter accompanying a comedy played in 1632 and published in 1636. Galanteries du duc d'Ossonne. Mairet.

[68] Aminta was played in 1573, but it was not imprinted until 1581, when it was first known outside of Italy.

[69] Pierre Corneille, Petit de Julleville.

[70] Pierre Corneille, Petit de Julleville.

[71] Jules Lemaître.

[72] Manual de l'histoire de la littérature française. F. Brunetière.

[73] Corneille, Lanson.

[74] Cyrano de Bergerac, E. Rostand.

[75] "There are agreeable things in Bejazet, but there is nothing perfectly beautiful in it, nothing to carry you away in spite of yourself, none of the tirades which make you shiver when you read Corneille. My daughter, take good care not to compare Racine to him. Distinguish the difference between them" (16th March, 1672).

[76] Henriette, third daughter of Henry IV., was "accorded with" or promised in betrothal to Comte de Soissons a few months after her birth; the Comte was between five and six years old. Marie de Médicis did not consider the infantile betrothal binding; when she saw fit to marry her daughter she bestowed her hand upon Charles I., the King of England (1625).

[77] Ferdinand, third son of Philip III.

[78] The Cardinal-Infant had been forced to leave his camp and go to Brussels to recover his health. He died in Brussels soon after his arrival, more beloved by the French people—so it was said—than was becoming to a King of Spain. (See l'Histoire de la France sous Louis XIII. A. Bazin.)

[79] Mémoires de Michel de Marolles (Abbé de Villeloin); La Conspiration Cinq-Mars (Mlle. J. P. Basserie).

[80] Dulaure's Histoire de Paris.

[81] Mémoires, Montglat.

[82] Fontenelle's Vie de Pierre Corneille.

[83] Cinq-Mars had been promoted to the position of Grand Equerry.

[84] Motteville.

[85] Motteville.

[86] Montglat.

[87] Registres de l'Hôtel de Ville (Collection Danjou).

[88] Mémoire du roi au plénipotentiaires (6th January, 1644). ("Il ne faut pas s'étonner de tout ce que disent nos enemies; C' est à nous de tenir: il est indubitable qu'ils se rangeront peu à peu.")

[89] The first of our casinos.

[90] Mémoires of Mademoiselle.

[91] Olivier d'Ormesson.

[92] Mademoiselle erred as to the date; the Gazette de France fixes it March 8th.

[93] About six millions of francs.

[94] Mademoiselle errs in supposing (in her memoirs) that it was but one year. Such errors are frequent in her writings.

[95] Père de Bérulle et l'Oratoire de Jésus, M. l'Abbé Houssaye.

[96] Saint François de Sales, Fortunat Strowski.

[97] The Abbé Houssaye, loc cit.

[98] Saint Vincent de Paul et les Gondis, Chantelauze.

[99] Le Cardinal de Bérulle et Richelieu, the Abbé Houssaye.

[100] Les Libertins en France au XVII. Siècle, F. T. Perrens.

[101] Oraison funèbre d'Anne de Gonzague, Bossuet.

[102] Port Royal, Sainte Beuve.

[103] Bérulle et l'Oratoire, the Abbé Houssaye.

[104] Fortunat Strowski.

[105] Their uselessness, their ignorance have made us despise them.—Bossuet.

[106] Manuel de l'histoire de la littérature française, F. Brunetière.

The first edition of La vie dévote appeared in 1688, the Traité de l'amour de Dieu appeared in 1612.

[107] The address delivered on the occasion of Racine's Centennial, 26th April 1899.

[108] Motteville.

[109] Mémoires.

[110] Declaration pour la Régence (21st April, 1643).

[111] Born in 1616.

[112] Édouard, Prince Palatine, a younger son of the Elector Palatine, Frédéric V.

[113] Motteville.

[114] Duc d'Aumale's Histoire des princes de Condé.

[115] Among other emoluments he had 800,000 livres.

[116] Mémoires of Lenet.

[117] Manuscript Mémoires published in fragments with Olivier d'Ormesson's Journal, by M. Chervel (who appears to have been a member of the House of Condé).

[118] Mazarin lived in a palace which became the Bibliothèque Nationale.

[119] In Mazarin's letters the words in italics are either in cipher or in words which he had agreed upon with the Queen when arranging the details of his absence; in this instance we have used the translation given by M. Ravenel in his Lettres du Cardinal Mazarin à la Reine, etc.

[120] La Porte.

[121] Mémoires of La Porte.

[122] Mémoires of de Brienne, junior.

[123] See the journal of Olivier d'Ormesson. This scene took place March 19, 1645.

[124] Motteville.

[125] La misère au temps de la Fronde (quoted from the records of the Council).

[126] La Galerie des portraits de Mlle. de Montpensier. (New edition.) Édouard de Barthélemy.

[127] May, 1648.

[128] Gamboust.

[129] André d'Ormesson. (See note accompanying Olivier d'Ormesson's journal.)

[130] Lenet's Mémoires.

[131] See official documents. (Paris, 31st October, 1648.)

[132] Forty sole. (See Olivier de Ormesson's journal.)

[133] Monsieur's second marriage had endowed him with five heirs, three of whom (daughters) had lived.

[134] Journal des guerres civiles, Dubuisson-Aubenay.

[135] Retz.

[136] Unpublished and anonymous memoirs cited by Chévruel.

[137] La jeunesse de Mme. de Longueville, Cousin.

[138] La Rochefoucauld, J. Bourdeau.

[139] Demandes des princes et Seigneurs qui ont pris les armes avec le Parlement et Peuple de Paris (15th March, 1649.) See Choix de Mazarinades, M. C. Moreau.

[140] For a study of the complicated causes of the fall of the nobility see Richelieu et la Monarchie absolue, G. d'Avenel.

[141] d'Ormesson.

[142] Registres de l'Hôtel de Ville pendant la Fronde.

[143] Registres de l'Hôtel de Ville pendant la Fronde.

[144] Segraisiana.

[145] Mémoires of La Rochefoucauld.

[146]

. . . "Je veux dormir,

Je naquis en dormant, j'y veux passer ma vie.

Jamais de m'éveillen il ne me prit envie,

Toi, ma femme et ma fille, y perdez vos efforts,

Je dors."

[147] Le Journal de Dubuisson-Aubenay.

[148] La jeunesse du Mareschal du Luxembourg, Pierre de Ségur.

[149] M. Feillet cites this letter in La misére au temps de la Fronde, but he does not give its date.

[150] Lenet's Mémoires.

[151] Motteville.

[152] The street separating the terrace from the garden, rue des Tuileries.

[153] He was less than thirteen years old.

[154] Mémoires, La Porte.

[155] This name is of doubtful authenticity; Mazarin's letters to the Queen are in cipher in some parts. In this book I have followed the text of M. Ravenel, Lettres du Cardinal Mazarin à la Princesse Palatine, etc. (1651-1652).

[156] Les Mémoires of Guy Joly and of Mme. de Nemours.

[157] Mazarin's apartments in the Palais Royal, next to the Queen's apartments. Lyonne lodged in the rue Vivienne.

[158] Motteville.

[159] Mademoiselle's memoirs.

[160] The city ditch.

[161] Mémoires of Conrart and the Registres de l'Hôtel de Ville.

[162] Omer Talon.

[163] La muse historique, de Loret.

[164] Governor of the Spanish Low Countries.

	page
La Grande Mademoiselle Frontispiece
From a steel engraving.
Marie de Médicis	6
From a steel engraving.
The Château of Versailles from the Terrace	8
After the painting by J. Rigaud.
The Tuileries from the Seine in the 16th Century	22
From a contemporary print.
Madame de Sévigné	54
From an engraving of the painting by Muntz.
Cardinal Richelieu	84
The Abbey of St. Germain Des-pres in the 16th Century	110
From an old print.
Louis XIII., King of France and of Navarre	152
From an old print.
Corneille	168
From an engraving of the painting by Lebrun.
Racine	182
From a steel engraving.
The Hôtel de Richelieu in the 17th Century	204
From a contemporary print.
A Game of Chance in the 17th Century	210
From an engraving by Sébastien Leclerc.
Marquis de Cinq-Mars	212
Anne of Austria	242 [x]
View of the Louvre from the Seine in the 17th Century	254
From an old print.
Henriette, Duchesse d'Orléans	258
From a steel engraving.
St. Vincent De Paul	292
From a steel engraving.
Duchesse de Chevreuse	300
Cardinal Mazarin	320
Mademoiselle de Montpensier	324
From a steel engraving.
The Tower of Nesle	342
From a contemporary print.
Cardinal de Retz	344
Madame de la Vallière	366
From a steel engraving.
Vicomte de Turenne	398
View of the Luxembourg (Later Called the Palais
d'Orléans) in the 17th Century	410
From an old print.
La Rochefoucauld	416
From a steel engraving.
Prince de Condé	420
Duc d'Orléans	422

LA GRANDE
MADEMOISELLE

PREFACE

ERRATA.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

LA GRANDE MADEMOISELLE

THE YOUTH OF LA GRANDE
MADEMOISELLE

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

INDEX

FOOTNOTES:

LA GRANDE MADEMOISELLE

PREFACE

ERRATA.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

LA GRANDE MADEMOISELLE

THE YOUTH OF LA GRANDE MADEMOISELLE

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

INDEX

FOOTNOTES:

LA GRANDE
MADEMOISELLE

THE YOUTH OF LA GRANDE
MADEMOISELLE