Louis XIV and La Grande Mademoiselle, 1652-1693
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Title: Louis XIV and La Grande Mademoiselle, 1652-1693
Author: Arvède Barine
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Language: English
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_By ARVEDE BARINE_
=The Youth of La Grande Mademoiselle
1627-1652=
Authorized English Version. Octavo. Fully
Illustrated. (By mail, $3.25.) Net, $3.00
=Louis XIV. and La Grande Mademoiselle
1652-1693=
Authorized English Version. Octavo. Fully
Illustrated. (By mail, $3.25.) Net, $3.00
=_G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS_=
=_New York_= =_London_=
[Illustration: Cliche Braun, Clement & Cie. =MADEMOISELLE DE
MONTPENSIER= She is holding the portrait of her father, Gaston D'Orleans
From the painting by Pierre Bourgnignon in the Musee de Versailles. By
permission of Messrs. Hachette & Co.]
Louis XIV
and
La Grande Mademoiselle
1652-1693
By
Arvede Barine
Author of "The Youth of La Grande Mademoiselle"
_Authorised English Version_
G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press
1905
COPYRIGHT, 1905
BY
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
PREFACE
In the volume entitled _The Youth of La Grande Mademoiselle_ I have
tried to present the conditions of France during the period in which the
ancient liberties of the people and the turbulent society which had
abused its privileges suffered, in the one case death, in the other
extinction.
As is always the case, a lack of proper discipline had prepared the way
for absolute rule, and the young King who was about to assume full power
was an enigma to his subjects. The nearest relatives of Louis had always
found him impenetrable. The Grande Mademoiselle had been brought up side
by side with her cousin, but she was entirely ignorant of his real
character, knowing only that he was silent and appeared timid. In her
failure to understand the King, Mademoiselle showed herself again a true
child of her century.
At the moment in which the Prince assumed full power, his true
disposition, thoughts, and beliefs were entirely hidden from the public,
and Saint-Simon has contributed to this ignorance by prolonging it to
posterity. Louis XIV. was over fifty when this terrible writer appeared
at Court. The _Memoires_ of Saint-Simon present the portrait of a man
almost old; this portrait however is so powerful, so living that it
obliterates every other. The public sees only the Louis of Saint-Simon;
for it, the youthful King as he lived during the troubled and passionate
period of his career, the period that was most interesting, because most
vital, has never existed.
The official history of the times aids in giving a false impression of
Louis XIV., figuring him in a sort of hieratic attitude between an idol
and a manikin. The portraits of Versailles again mask the Louis of the
young Court, the man for whose favour Moliere and the Libertines fought
with varying chances of success.
In the present volume I have tried to raise a corner of this mask.
The _Memoires_ of Louis XIV., completely edited for the first time
according to any methodical plan in 1860, have greatly aided me in this
task. They abound in confessions, sometimes aside, sometimes direct, of
the matters that occupied the thoughts of the youthful author. The
Grande Mademoiselle, capable of neither reserve nor dissimulation, has
proved the next most valuable guide in the attempt to penetrate into the
intimate life of Louis. As related by her, the perpetual difficulties
with the Prince throw a vivid light upon the kind of incompatibility of
temper which existed at the beginning of the reign between absolute
power and the survivors of the Fronde.
How the young King succeeded in directing his generation toward new
ideas and sentiments and how the Grande Mademoiselle, too late carried
away by the torrent, became in the end a victim to its force, will be
seen in the course of the present volume, provided, that is, that I have
not overestimated my powers in touching upon a subject very obscure,
very delicate, with facts drawn from a period the most frequently
referred to and yet in some respects the least comprehended of the
entire history of France.
A. B.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
PAGE
Exile--Provincial Life--Conversation at Saint-Fargeau--Sentiment
towards Nature in the Seventeenth Century--Differences
between Mademoiselle and her Father--Mademoiselle Returns
to Court 1-57
CHAPTER II
The Education of Louis XIV.--Manners--Poverty--Charity--Vincent
de Paul, a Secret Society--Marriage of Louis XIV.--His
Arrival at Power on the Death of Mazarin--He Re-educates
Himself 58-119
CHAPTER III
Mademoiselle at the Luxembourg--Her Salon--The "Anatomies"
of the Heart--Projects of Marriage, and New Exile--Louis
XIV. and the Libertines--Fragility of Fortune in Land--_Fetes
Galantes_ 120-184
CHAPTER IV
Increasing Importance of the Affairs of Love--The Corrupters of
Morals--Birth of Dramatic Music and its Influence--Love
in Racine--Louis XIV. and the Nobility--The King is
Polygamous 185-236
CHAPTER V
The Grande Mademoiselle in Love--Sketch of Lauzun and their
Romance--The Court on its Travels--Death of Madame--Announcement
of the Marriage of Mademoiselle--General Consternation--Louis
XIV. Breaks the Affair 237-303
CHAPTER VI
Was Mademoiselle secretly Married?--Imprisonment of Lauzun--Splendour
and Decadence of France--_La Chambre Ardente_--Mademoiselle
Purchases Lauzun's Freedom--Their Embroilment--Death
of the Grande Mademoiselle--Death of Lauzun--Conclusion 304-377
INDEX 379
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
MADEMOISELLE DE MONTPENSIER _Frontispiece_
She is holding the portrait of her father, Gaston d'Orleans.
From the painting by Pierre Bourguignon in the
Musee de Versailles. By permission of Messrs. Hachette
& Co.
ANNE MARIE LOUISE D'ORLEANS, DUCHESSE DE MONTPENSIER 4
From the enamel by Petitot in the South Kensington Museum.
CARDINAL DE RETZ 24
Showing him in his coadjuteur days. After the painting
by Deveria.
JULIUS HARDOUIN MANSART 26
After the painting by Vivien.
JEAN DE LA FONTAINE 54
From an engraving by Grevedon.
LOUIS XIV. AS A BOY, DEDICATING HIS CROWN 62
After the painting by Greg Huret.
LOUIS XIV. AS A YOUNG MAN 72
From a chalk drawing in the British Museum Print Room.
FRANCOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD 130
From the engraving by Hopwood after the painting by Petitot.
HELENE LAMBERT, MADAME DE MOTTEVILLE 150
After the painting by De Largilliere.
LOUISE DE LA VALLIERE 154
From the engraving by Flameng after the painting by
Petitot.
JEAN BAPTISTE COLBERT 170
After the painting by Champaign.
"PLEASURES OF THE ISLAND OF ENCHANTMENT."
SCENE ON THE FIRST DAY OF THE PLAY, BEFORE
THE KING AT VERSAILLES 172
From the engraving by Israel Silvestre.
"PLEASURES OF THE ISLAND OF ENCHANTMENT." SECOND DAY 174
From the engraving by Israel Silvestre.
GENERAL VIEW OF THE CHATEAU OF VERSAILLES 176
From the engraving by Israel Silvestre, 1664.
THE FRONT OF THE LOUVRE IN COURSE OF ERECTION 178
From the engraving by S. le Clerc, 1677.
JEAN BAPTISTE POQUELIN MOLIERE 180
After the painting by Noel Coypel.
MADAME HENRIETTE D'ORLEANS 194
From the painting by Mignard in the National Portrait
Gallery. (Photograph by Walker, London.)
MADAME DE MONTESPAN 200
From the engraving by Flameng after the painting by Mignard.
LA VOISIN 206
From a print in the Bibliotheque Nationale.
JEAN BAPTISTE DE LULLI 216
After a contemporary print by Bonnart.
BOILEAU 220
After the painting by H. Rigaud.
Duc de Lauzun 244
By permission of Messrs. Hachette & Co.
MADAME DE SEVIGNE 282
From the painting by Pietro Mignard in the Uffizi Gallery,
Florence. (Photograph by Alinari.)
VIEW OF THE PALACE AND GARDENS OF THE TUILERIES 330
From an engraving by Israel Silvestre, 1673.
VIEW OF THE RESIDENCE OF COLBERT, SHOWING ALSO HIS SEAL 332
From an engraving by Israel Silvestre, 1675.
VIEW OF THE CHATEAU OF VERSAILLES, SHOWING THE
FOUNTAIN OF THE DRAGON 334
From an engraving by Israel Silvestre, 1676.
DUCHESSE DE LA VALLIERE AND HER CHILDREN 336
From the painting by P. Mignard in the possession of the
Marquise d'Oilliamson.
LOUISE DE LA VALLIERE, IN THE GARB OF THE ORDER
OF THE CARMELITES 338
After the painting by D. Plaats.
MADAME DE MAINTENON 340
After the painting by P. Mignard in 1694.
LOUIS XIV. AND LA GRANDE MADEMOISELLE
CHAPTER I
Exile--Provincial Life--Conversation at
Saint-Fargeau--Sentiment towards Nature in the Seventeenth
Century--Differences between Mademoiselle and her
Father--Mademoiselle Returns to Court.
The Fronde was an abortive revolution. It was condemned in advance, the
leaders having never clearly known what ends they were seeking. The
consequences of its failure proved to be of profound importance to
France. The civil disorders existing between 1648 and 1652 were the last
efforts of the French against the establishing of absolute monarchy, to
the strengthening of which the entire regency of Anne of Austria had
tended. The end of these disorders signified that the nation, wearied
and discouraged, had accepted the new regime. The result was a great
transformation, political and moral, so great that the Fronde may be
considered as clearly marking a separation between two periods of French
history--a deep abyss as it were between the times which precede and
those which follow.
The leaders of the Fronde had been dispersed by the return of the King
to his capital on October 21, 1652. When the exiles returned, some
sooner, some later, the last after the Peace of the Pyrenees (November
7, 1659), so great a change had taken place in ideas and customs that
more than one exile felt himself in a strange land.
It was necessary to adjust oneself to the new atmosphere. It was very
much the same situation--though the Frondeurs were under much lighter
accusations--as that experienced by the _emigres_ returning under the
Consulate. The Princess, the events of whose heroic years have been
related, offers an excellent example of this condition.
When the Grande Mademoiselle, who had urged on the civil war in order to
force Louis XIV. into marriage with herself, obtained at the end of five
years, permission to return to Court, she brought with her the old
undisciplined habits which were no longer in fashion, and in the end
incurred much that was disagreeable. Exile had not weakened her pride.
According to a celebrated formula, she had learned nothing, she had
forgotten nothing; she remained that person of impulse of whom Mme. de
Sevigne said, "I do not care to mix myself with her impetuosities."[1]
Far be it from me to reproach Mademoiselle! All honour be to her who
stood firm in the age of servility which succeeded the Fronde! In other
respects exile had been most healthful for her. She had been obliged to
seek in herself resources the finding of which surprised her.
Mademoiselle naively admires herself in her _Memoires_[2] for never
having experienced a single moment of ennui "in the greatest desert in
the world," and surely she deserves praise, as her first experiences at
Saint-Fargeau would have crushed most women.
The reader will be convinced of this if he imagines himself in her
company the night of arrival in the early days of November, 1652. At the
end of _The Youth of La Grande Mademoiselle_ we left her weeping without
shame before her entire suite. Her dream of glory had evaporated.
Anne-Marie-Louise d'Orleans would never be queen of France. She would
take no more cities; pass no more troops at review to the sound of
trumpet and cannon. Three weeks previous, the great Conde had treated
her as a companion in arms. She rejoiced the soldiers by her martial
carriage, and any one of them would have been not only surprised but
very indignant if it had been suggested that she was capable of being
almost as cowardly as her father, the "_triste_ Gaston."
Now all that was finished, even the romantic flight. While playing
hide-and-seek with imaginary pursuers, the Grande Mademoiselle had
fallen into a state of physical and moral prostration. The heroine of
Orleans and of Porte Saint-Antoine sobbed like a little child because
she "had too much grief" and was "too afraid"[3]; the aspect of her
future home had taken away the last remnants of courage.
The Chateau of Saint-Fargeau, begun under Hugh Capet and often repaired,
particularly during the fifteenth century, seemed more like a fortress
than a peaceful dwelling. Its heavy mass dominated the valley of the
Loing, a region of great and dense forests, with few clearings. Itself
enveloped with brushwood and protected by deep moats, the chateau
harmonised well with the surroundings. Its windows opened at a great
height above the ground, and its towers were strong. The body of the
building was massive and bare, united by strong ramparts forming an
_enceinte_ irregular with severe appearance.
The _ensemble_ was imposing, never smiling. Saint-Fargeau, long
uninhabited, was almost a ruin filled with rats at the time when
Mademoiselle presented herself as a fugitive. She was shown into a room
with a prop in the centre. Coming from the palace of the Tuileries, this
sight overwhelmed her, and made her realise the depth of her fall. She
had an access of despair: "I am most unfortunate to be absent from
Court, to have only a dwelling as ugly as this, and to realise that this
is the best of my chateaux." Her fear became terror when she discovered
that doors and windows were lacking. A report came from a valet that she
was sought for imprisonment, and she was too confused to reflect that
if the King had ordered her arrest locks would have been useless.
[Illustration: =ANNE MARIE LOUISE D'ORLEANS, DUCHESSE DE MONTPENSIER=
From the enamel by Petitot in the South Kensington Museum]
She continued her journey to reach a little chateau, situated two
leagues from Saint-Fargeau, which was reported safer. "Imagine," says
she, "with what pleasure I made the extra journey. I had risen two hours
before daylight; I had ridden twenty-two miles upon a horse already worn
out with previous travel. We arrived at our destination at three in the
morning; I went to bed in haste." The crisis was short. The next day it
was explained to Mademoiselle that Saint-Fargeau had two exits in case
of alarm. She returned in consequence on the fourth day, and there was
no more question of grief, nor even ill-temper; from that moment the
place was "good and strong."
The Princess adapted herself to the glassless windows, the broken
ceilings, the absence of doors, and all the rest. The great ladies of
the seventeenth century were fortunately not too particular.
Mademoiselle encamped in a cellar while the apartment above was being
repaired, and was forced to borrow a bed. She recovered all her gaiety
before the comicality of the situation: "for the first cousin of the
King of France." "Happily for me," wrote she, "the bailiff of the
chateau had been recently married; therefore he possessed a new bed."
The bed of Madame the Bailiff was the great resource of the chateau. It
was returned as soon as the Princess received her own from Paris, but it
was again used to give a resting-place to the Christmas guests, many of
whom appeared--a fact to the credit of the French nobility--as soon as
it was known where the illustrious unfortunate was passing her period of
banishment.
Mademoiselle did not know how to provide for these guests and the most
important were lodged with the bailiff. The Duchess of Sully and her
sister, the Marquise of Laval, came together for a prolonged sojourn and
performed the office of shuttle between the cellar in which the Grande
Mademoiselle held her court and "the new bed of the city of
Saint-Fargeau." Ladies of quality arriving at this time lodged where
they could with small regard to comfort, and this condition lasted until
the chateau was put in order. Every one suffered but nobody complained.
There was a certain elegance in this haughty fashion of ignoring
comfort, the importance of which in our own days seems in comparison
rather bourgeois, in the worst sense of the word.
Gradually all was arranged. The chateau was restored, the apartments
enlarged.[4] The overgrowth of the approaches gave place to a terrace
from which to the surprise of all a charming view was discovered. The
Saint-Fargeau of the Capets and of the first Valois, "a place so wild,"
says Mademoiselle, "that when I arrived, only herbs fit for soup were to
be found," became a beautiful residence, hospitable and animated.
The mistress of the place loved open air and movement, as did all the
French nobility before an absolute monarchy, in the interest of order
and peace, had trained them to rest tranquilly in the salons of
Versailles. Muscular decadence commenced with the French at the epoch
when it became the fashion to pass the days in silk stockings and
practising bows, under punishment of being excluded from all society.
Violent exercises were abandoned or made more gentle.[5] Attention was
paid only to what gave majestic grace to the body in harmony with the
Versailles "Galerie of Mirrors."
The bourgeoisie were eager to imitate the people of quality, and the
higher classes paid for their fine manners or their attempts at fine
manners with the headaches and nervous disorders of the eighteenth
century. The taste for sport has only reappeared in France during our
own times. We are now witnessing its resurrection.
This taste, however, was still lively immediately after the Fronde, and
Mademoiselle abandoned herself to it with passion. She ordered from
England a pack of hounds and hunters. She possessed many equipages. With
a game of marl before the chateau, indoor games for rainy days, violins
from the Tuileries to play for dancing, it would be difficult to find a
court more brisk, more constantly in joyous movement.
Mademoiselle, whom nothing tired, set an example, and seasoned these
"games of action" with _causeries_, some of which happily have been
preserved for us by Segrais,[6] her Secretary of the Commandments.
Thanks to him, we know, even admitting that he may have slightly
rearranged his reports, what they talked about at the court of
Saint-Fargeau, and one cannot fail to be somewhat surprised. He tells us
all sorts of things of which we never should have dreamed, things that
we have never imagined as subjects of interest in the seventeenth
century. In this age which believed itself entirely indifferent towards
nature, conversation nevertheless fell ceaselessly upon the beauties of
landscape. People paused to admire "points of view," sought them, and
endeavoured to explain why they were beautiful. The reasons given were,
that those who knew how to enjoy a large forest and "the beautiful
carpet of moss at the feet," actually preferred landscapes made more
intelligible through the intervention of man. A desert pleased them less
than an inhabited country, a wild landscape less than sunny collections
of cultivated fields and orchards symmetrically planted, recalling "the
agreeable variety of parterres made by the ingenuity of man."
Mademoiselle praises in her _Memoires_ the view from the end of the
terrace. She attempts to describe it and fails. Segrais also tries in
vain. It was impossible at that epoch. The vocabulary did not exist
which could furnish words to describe a landscape. The creation of our
descriptive vocabulary is one of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's[7] greatest
glories. In compensation, Segrais knew very well how to explain why the
beauty of the view, about which he had so ineffectively written, pleased
him and his companions. He said that, arranged by chance, it conformed
to the rules of classic pictures and in no way appeared the sole work of
nature. Neither the valley of the Loing nor the immense marsh which
closed this side of the chateau, nor the island in the midst of this
marsh, with clumps of trees, nor the church and small height which could
be perceived, seemed placed without human intervention. "And this,"
writes Segrais, "is so well represented in those excellent landscapes of
the great artists, that all who look upon it believe that they have seen
the marsh, church, and little island in a thousand pictures."
Literature, imaginative literature at least, also held a considerable
place in the conversation. Mademoiselle, who had read nothing before her
sojourn at Saint-Fargeau, was anxious to make up for lost time. "I am a
very ignorant creature," writes she, at the beginning of her exile,
"detesting reading and having seen only the gazettes. Henceforth I am
going to apply myself and see if it be possible to like a thing from
deliberate determination."
Success surpassed her hopes; she conceived a passion for reading. In the
winter of 1652-1653, during which there were few distractions, and the
chateau was given over to workmen; when the bad weather and the rough
roads rendered Saint-Fargeau unapproachable, and left the castle
solitary, she read, or listened to reading while plying her needle,
without being bored.
I laboured from morning till night at my work and descended
from my chamber only to dine or to be present at mass. The
winter weather was so bad that walking was impossible. If there
ever was a moment of fine weather I rode, or if the ground was
too frozen I walked a little to watch my workmen. While I sewed
some one read to me, and it was at this period that I began to
love reading as I have done ever since.
At the end of some years of banishment her "erudition" struck Dr. Huet,
who met her at the baths of Forges. "She loves history passionately,"
says he in his _Memoires_, "but above all, romances, so-called. While
her women were dressing her hair, she desired me to read aloud, and no
matter what the subject, it provoked a thousand questions on her part.
In this I well recognised the acuteness of her mind."
The fashionable romances easily pleased a Princess who had a grandeur of
soul and loved to meet it in others. They were the works of
Gomberville,[8] of La Calprenede, and of Mlle. de Scudery, in which the
sheepfolds and dove-cotes of l'Astree had yielded to the heroic
adventures and grand sentiments of princes warlike and proud, who,
notwithstanding their exotic names, were the same who resisted under
Richelieu, and lead the Fronde under Mazarin. The generations born in
the first third of the century were charmed with the resemblance to
their own heroes which these tales offered them. They went wild with
delight over Scythe, Oroondate, or the Grand Cyrus, as they were
fascinated with Saint-Preux and Lelia, and many readers remained
faithful till death to these writers who had so well expressed the
ideals of their youth.
At sixty, La Rochefoucauld re-read La Calprenede. Mme. de Sevigne was a
grandmother when she found herself "glued" to _Cleopatre_. "The beauty
of the sentiments," writes she, "and the violence of the passions, the
grandeur of the events, and the marvellous successes of the redoubtable
swords, all enchain me as if I were still a little child. The sentiments
are of a perfection which satisfy my conception of beautiful souls."[9]
Realism and Naturalism have in the present day destroyed the capacity
for enthusiasm for heroes of romance. One's imagination can hardly be
kindled by a Coupeau or a Nana, nor even by a Madame Bovary, whatever
may be the literary value of the works in which they figure. For the
little court of Saint-Fargeau it was hardly possible to speak calmly of
the favourite heroes. One day, followed by a numerous assemblage,
Mademoiselle drove in the fresh valley of the Loing and descended from
her chariot under the tall willows which bordered the little river. It
was spring and the sun was radiant. The new grass and the growing leaves
offered a picture so "laughing" that nothing else could at first be
spoken of. While walking, the conversation finally turned upon romance,
and each fought for the favourite hero. The discussion was waxing warm
when the Princess, who had hardly spoken, intervened to moderate its
ardour. After avowing that she had read but little, she gave an eulogium
upon Roman history, or rather what it might become, better comprehended
in the hands of a learned writer, and criticised the custom of giving
French manners to Greeks, Persians, or Indians.
Mademoiselle desired greater "historic truth" and what might be
designated as more local colour. Why not frankly take characters from
French contemporaries? "I am astonished," she said in ending, "that so
many people of intelligence who have created for us such worthy
Scythians and such generous Parthians have not taken the same pleasure
in imagining as accomplished French cavaliers or princes: whose
adventures would not have been less pleasing." After a moment's
silence, objections were advanced. The idea of writing a romance upon
the "war of Paris" seemed very daring. One young lady very naively urged
that the author would not know how to name his characters. "The French,"
said she, "naturally love foreign names. Arabaze, Iphidamante, Crosmane,
are beautiful names; Rohan, Lorraine, Montmorency, are nothing of the
kind."
The old Mme. de Choissy, with the authority given by her noted
intelligence, tried to prove that in an imaginative recital both time
and space must be distant. One Marquise appeared wearied of the kings
and emperors of romance, and desired heroes taken from the middle class.
Another, Mme. de Mauny, who was supposed[10] to have invented the
expression "_s'encanailler_" asserted that it was forbidden to heroes of
romance to do or say anything derogatory to pure sentiment, which was
possible to those of "high birth only." Mademoiselle maintained the
necessity of observation and truth for the tale, but she admitted that
the author of a great romance, writing as a "poet," had the right to
imagine events, instead of servilely copying them. "The tale," said she,
"relates things as they are, the romance as they should be."
This distinction neither lacks acuteness nor a certain justice, and we
should like to know how much Segrais had contributed to it. No one
having replied to this last remark, the Princess remounted her carriage,
and gave the order to follow the pack of hounds, which had just started
a hare a few steps off. She was obeyed, in spite of the obstacles which
the country presented, and she returned to the chateau, very well
satisfied with her afternoon.
At Saint-Fargeau they talked more frequently of love than of either
literature or the beauties of nature. Love is a subject of which women
never weary, and about which they always have something to say.
Mademoiselle lent herself completely to such conversation; it was she
who one day posed a question the subtlety of which the Hotel Rambouillet
might have enjoyed. "Whose absence causes the greater anguish, a lover
who should be loved or one who should not be?"
She consented to admit the ideas of l'Astree upon the fatality of
passion, on the condition that the effects should be limited to
personages of romance, or in real life to those of humble birth. Segrais
makes her say without protest in a tale[11] ascribed to her "Man is not
free to love or not to love as he pleases." In the depths of her soul,
in her most intimate thoughts, Mademoiselle had never been further from
comprehending love, never had she more energetically refused for it any
beauty, any grandeur. One of her ladies, the gracious Frontenac, with
her eyes "filled with light," had made a marriage of inclination, an act
absurd, base, and shameful in the judgment of Mademoiselle, her
mistress. The marriage turned out badly. M. de Frontenac was eccentric.
His young wife at first feared, then hated him, and at Saint-Fargeau
there passed between the couple tragi-comic scenes, of which no one
could be ignorant.
Mademoiselle had just commenced her _Memoires_.[12] She eagerly relates
the conjugal quarrels of M. and Mme. de Frontenac with more details than
it would be suitable to repeat, and this was the opportunity for an
outburst against the folly of trying to found marriage upon the most
fickle of human feelings. She writes:
I have always had a strong aversion for even legitimate love.
This passion appears to me unworthy of a noble soul; but I am
now confirmed in this opinion, and I comprehend well that
reason has but little to do with affairs of passion. Passion
passes quickly, is never, in fact, of long duration. One may be
unhappy for life in entering upon marriage for so transient a
feeling, but on the other hand, happy if one marries for reason
and other imaginable considerations, even if physical aversion
exists; for I believe that one often loves more with this
aversion conquered.
The principle may be sage, but the Grande Mademoiselle is too sure of
her fact. This "even if aversion exists" is difficult to digest. The
Princess was nearing her thirtieth year, when she treated love with
contempt, and nothing had yet warned her of the imprudence of defying
nature; so she believed herself well protected.
In the spring of 1683, the rumour had spread that she and M. le Prince
de Conde had promised to marry, in the expectation and hope of being
soon relieved of the Princess de Conde, now a hopeless invalid, and that
the imagination of Mademoiselle, for lack of heart, pressed her
"furiously" in this affair. The Parisian salons had discovered no other
explanation for the hostile attitude which she persisted in maintaining
towards the Court of France, which she had so much interest in
conciliating. It was inconceivable that without some reason of this kind
she should compromise herself as she did, for a Prince who had become an
alien and whom she might never again see. Why betray news through
letters which always fell into the hands of Mazarin? Why leave to Conde,
now a Spanish General, the companies raised under the Fronde with the
funds of Mademoiselle and bearing her name? Either she had lost her
senses or one might expect some romantic prank, which could only be
unravelled by marriage.
"Have you told everything?" demanded Mademoiselle of the old Countess de
Fiesque, her former governess, one morning, when this last poured out
the comments of the world. "No," said the good woman. Her mistress let
her proceed, then expressed herself as indignant that she should have
been believed capable of marrying on account of a sudden passion; the
other reproaches had not touched her.
She declared that M. le Prince had never spoken of marriage, that it
would be time to think of this if Madame la Princesse should die, when
M. le Prince should be pardoned, when he should formally demand her
hand, and the King should approve the affair.
I believe [continued she] that I should marry him finding in
his personality only what is grand, heroic, and worthy of the
name I bear. But that I should marry like a young lady of
romance, that he should come to seek me upon a palfrey
destroying all barriers in the road; and on the other hand that
I should mount another palfrey like Mme. Oriane[13]; I assure
you this would not suit my temper, and I am very indignant
against those people who have thought it possible.
At this point the Princess was silent. It would have been the moment to
confess the true key to her conduct; but one must avow that, in spite of
her fine words and her expressed contempt for lovers, she was after all
a true Princess of romance, led by her imagination.
The idea of making war upon the King from the bottom of a cellar had
amused her, and still more the thinking of herself as the price of peace
between her cousin and Conde, and she had not wished to look further.
While the tempest gathered over her head, the great preoccupation of
Mademoiselle was the installation of a theatre in her dilapidated
chateau, in which the country workmen had not yet succeeded in arranging
a suitable bedroom for her. She could no longer live without the comedy;
the theatre must come first. It was ready in February, 1653, and
inaugurated immediately by a wandering troop, engaged for the season.
The hall was commodious, but very cold. The court of Saint-Fargeau
descended from its garrets entirely muffled, the ladies in fur hoods.
The country people, only too delighted to be invited to shiver in such
good company, hastened from distances of ten leagues. Mademoiselle was
perfectly contented: "I listened to the play with more pleasure than
ever before."
We no longer understand what it means to love truly the theatre.
According to the gazette of Loret, the opening piece was a pastoral,
"half gay, half moral." Mademoiselle loved this sort, slightly out of
fashion; Segrais has preserved an agreeable reminiscence of a summer's
evening passed in the forest, with the natural background of high trees,
listening to an ancient "Amaryllis" repolished and arranged for the
stage by some penny-a-liner.
Mademoiselle loved, what is more, everything pertaining to the theatre
from tragedy to trained dogs. One reads in a little squib written by her
as a pastime,[14] and printed for the diversion of her friends,
"Comedians are essentials--at least for the French and Italians.
Jugglers, rope dancers, _buveurs d'eau_, without forgetting marionettes
and bell players, dogs trained to leap, and monkeys as examples to our
own; violins and merry-andrews and good dancers." This skit should not
be taken too seriously, but it well accords with the account left us by
an eye-witness of one of the representations at Saint-Fargeau. The piece
was called _Country Pleasures_, an operetta. The greatest applause fell
neither to the Goddess Flora, nor to the "melancholy lover," but to two
children disguised as monkeys, and executing songs with the "cadence
which belongs to those animals."
Twice a week, the pleasures and cares of Saint-Fargeau were varied by
the arrival of messengers bringing letters and gazettes. News not to be
trusted to the post was received through guests from Paris or by special
messengers. The news consisted mainly of political events, but it fell
to the exiles to discover the springs and to draw the morals from the
facts. This talent of divining, possessed in a high degree by the
Parisians, has never passed the _banlieue_. It cannot be carried away.
Mademoiselle herself had never attained the art. Even at the Tuileries
she used to say: "I can never guess anything." Once in her place of
refuge, she comprehended nothing of the real significance of passing
events. For those who were not Provincials there was nothing clearer
than the conduct of the Court of France, after its return to the
capital. Mademoiselle had fled from the Tuileries October 21, 1652. The
next day the young King held a _Lit de Justice_, in which the Parliament
was forbidden to occupy itself with the general affairs of the kingdom.
Banishments and pursuits immediately commenced, but the gazettes hardly
referred to them. From their pages one might have gathered that Paris
was entirely absorbed in its pleasures.
The post of November brought to Saint-Fargeau description of the first
Court ball and some lines on a new _Lit de Justice_ (November 13th), in
which the Prince de Conde and his adherents had been declared criminals
"de lese majeste." The December number of the _Gazette_ gave news of the
arrest of Retz, who had rallied before the end of the Fronde, and the
account of a great marriage with enumeration of gifts and names of
donors, exactly as in our modern journals. The January number was made
interesting by the accounts of the several successes of Turenne over
Conde and the Spanish troops, and by the news of the death of an ancient
aunt of Mademoiselle who had been in retreat for seven or eight years.
The necrological article took a larger space in the gazette of Loret
than that absorbed by the warlike and political news together.
The third of the following month the revolutionary era was closed by the
triumphal return of Mazarin. Louis XIV. travelled three leagues to meet
him,
_Encor qu'il fait un temps etrange
Temps de vent, de pluie et de fange_,
and took him back in his own carriage to the Louvre, where a sumptuous
festival, fireworks, and homage, more or less sincere, from the crowds
of courtiers, awaited him.
The attention of the Parisians was at once directed to a grand ballet
with mechanical devices and changes of scene, danced three times by the
King and the flower of his nobility,[15] before a public analogous to
that of the free representations of July 14th in Paris. Places were
reserved for the Court and its guests, who really made part of the
spectacle, but otherwise all entered who desired. The crowd besieged the
doors to see what will probably never again be witnessed: a monarch
sufficiently sure of his prestige to dare to pirouet, costumed as a
mythological divinity, or stagger as a thief who had drunk too much,
before the _canaille_ of his capital.
The following day, a journalist bitterly bewails in his paper having
seen nothing at all, although he had stood in line three hours and
waited eight hours in the hall. This journalist exacted and obtained
consideration; at the second representation, the chronicler before
carelessly treated was lead in ceremony to the "reserved places." He was
not yet content, not being in front. He showed himself, however, a good
fellow and wrote an article admiring all, even a scene in which the joke
to-day seems somewhat inhuman. It was a dance of cripples, the
contortions of these miserable beings causing much laughter.
Of the abuses which gave rise to the Fronde, no living soul breathed a
word. Not one of these abuses had disappeared. For the most part they
had been aggravated by the general disorder; but France resembled an
invalid who had so far found only charlatans for physicians; it was
weary of remedies. "The people of Paris," wrote Andre d'Ormesson, "were
disgusted with Princes and did not longer wish to feed upon war."
One might say the same of the Provinces. They remained for the most part
troubled and miserable, their hate now turning against the nobility,
with whom the four years of anarchy had brought back the manners of the
feudal brigands. Deceived on all sides, betrayed by all its pretended
saviours, the country began again to put its faith in the central power.
It was only necessary that this last should regain its strength day by
day, and it was clear to the Parisians as well as to the Provinces that
the first use royalty would make of convalescence would be to cripple
the nobility so that a revival of the Fronde would be impossible.
The period had passed in which the King could be aided by the nobles
according to their own methods not his, as at the time in which they had
fought against him, to deliver him from his first minister. Louis XIV.
wished now to be served in his own way, which was to be obeyed, and he
felt the strength to impose obedience. It required all the naivete of
Mademoiselle to be able to imagine that she could make the King as an
old Frondeur admit the distinctions between M. le Prince whose success
one had the right to desire, and the Spanish soldiers led by this same
Prince in whom one must not be interested. She had so little realisation
of the change which had taken place in sentiments, from the date of her
exile, that she did not even attempt to conceal her grief at the news of
the victory at Arras brought back by Turenne, August 27, 1654.
The Grande Mademoiselle believed herself in accord with her King and
country when she wrote in her _Memoires_: "I have not desired the
Spaniards to gain advantage over the French, but I do wish that M. le
Prince might do so and I cannot persuade myself that this is against the
service of the King." It was then four months since the young monarch
had entered, whip in hand, into his Parliament and forbade it to mix
itself with his affairs; but his cousin had no more comprehended this
warning than the others which had preceded it. It had not once occurred
to her that the cadet branches of the royal family were amongst the
vanquished and that the relations of the King of France, very far from
being in a position to dictate to him, would henceforth be the most
strictly held in leash of all his subjects. Only the approach of the
great revolution gave them an opportunity to regain their importance and
we know how much Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette were able to
congratulate themselves over this fact.
Monsieur Gaston undertook to bring his daughter to a realisation of the
truth. It had been said that as long as he lived bitter experiences
would come to Mademoiselle through this dangerous Prince.
Gaston d'Orleans had disappeared from the stage at the end of the
Fronde, like a true hero of comedy. His wife said, half weeping, half
laughing, that he seemed to her a Tewlin, a celebrated comic actor who
filled the role designated to-day as the "king of operetta."
The return of the Court to Paris had been announced to the Luxembourg by
a letter from Louis XIV. This news had entirely upset Monsieur and he
blustered with so much appearance of truth that Mademoiselle had once
more been convinced. "He was so completely beside himself," relates de
Retz, "that one would judge from his manner of speaking, that he was
already on horseback, completely armed and ready to cover with blood the
plains of St. Denis and Grenelle."
Madame was terrified; she endeavoured to pacify him, but the more she
tried the more vigorously he threatened to annihilate everything. His
martial ardour vanished when he received a decree of banishment (October
21, 1652). It was at the date the King was entering Paris, and cannon
were heard on all sides, the populace, according to the custom of the
times, firing in the air as a sign of joy. Nothing, however, could
persuade Monsieur, old Parisian as he was, that these charges did not
come from the King's guards, and that the palace was not being besieged.
[Illustration: =CARDINAL DE RETZ= Showing him in his Coadjuteur days.
After the painting by Deveria.]
He was overcome with terror; moved to and fro with agitation; sent
constantly to inquire what was going on, and finally hastened his
departure, which should not have taken place till the next day before
dawn. He drew a free breath only upon arriving at the valley of
Chevreuse. No one dreamed of retaining him--on the contrary, Mazarin,
who governed France from the depths of his exile, was resolved to have
no more trouble with him. "Let his Royal Highness depart with his
appanage,"[16] wrote he. His Royal Highness having arrived at the
Chateau of Limours, Michel Le Tellier, Secretary of State and War,
hastened to find him, and it was a repetition of the former scenes with
Richelieu.
In his final adieus to public life, Gaston d'Orleans denounced Retz as
before he had denounced Chalais, Montmorency, Cinq-Mars, and many
others. When he had said all that he wished, thus preparing the arrest
of the Cardinal, who was to astonish Mademoiselle by arriving at
Saint-Fargeau, the King permitted him to retire to Blois.[17] Monsieur
obeyed with ill-grace; he felt that they were burying him alive.
This was not the first time that he had dwelt at Blois in spite of
himself. The forced sojourn made at that place under Louis XIII. had not
been disagreeable, constraint aside, because he was not definitely
limited, and he succeeded, being young and gay, in living like "a little
king of Yvetot." He had rebuilt according to his own taste (1635-1638)
a portion of the chateau after the plans of Francois Mansard, "the
cleverest architect of his times,"[18] the uncle of the builder of the
Palace of Versailles.
Chambord served him for a country-seat, near at hand, and fruitful for
the kitchen garden, with forests teeming with game for hunting-grounds,
and amiable people for subjects, who had guarded a monarchical faith and
considered themselves much honoured when the brother of the King deigned
to flatter them and their daughters.
Saint-Fargeau was steep and gloomy; Blois, on the contrary, with its sky
full of caresses, showed itself the worthy forerunner of the Angevine
gentleness:
Coteaux riants y sont des deux cotes,
Coteaux non pas si voisins de la nue,
Qu'en Limousin, mais coteaux enchantes,
Belles maisons, beaux parcs et bien plantes,
Pres verdoyants donc ce pays abonde,
Vignes et bois, tant de diversites
Qu'on croit d'abord etre en un autre monde.[19]
It is a tourist of the time who so speaks, La Fontaine, who visited
Blois in 1663, and described it to his wife in a letter half prose, half
verse. The city had charmed him on account of its beautiful situation
and the amiable manners of its inhabitants: "Life is very polished
here, possibly has always been so, the climate and the beauty of the
country contributing to its charm; probably the sojourn of Monsieur or
the number of pretty women has caused this politeness."
[Illustration: =JULIUS HARDOUIN MANSART= After the painting by Vivien]
As a man of taste, La Fontaine had admired the portion of the chateau of
Francis I., without regularity and order; as a good liver he had
appreciated the excellent breakfast at the inn. As a good traveller, he
had gossiped sufficiently with the people of the place to realise how
happy they were under the gentle reign of Gaston.
The traces of the civil wars had been quickly effaced in these fertile
and populous provinces. La Fontaine gaily retook his route towards
Amboise; he saw the smile of France, and he was made to enjoy it.
In this first time of peaceful enjoyment one of the great pleasures of
Monsieur was to pass through his domains as an idle prince; descending
here from his carriage to chase a stag, stopping there his boat to dine
upon the grass, inviting himself into any dwellings belonging to either
nobles or bourgeoisie in which he found pretty women.
He embarked one day on one of those covered boats which the pictures of
the seventeenth century show us. They were called "galiotes," and were
used in voyaging upon rivers and canals. "Monsieur," relates an
eye-witness, "had commanded a second boat in which he put a quantity of
provisions, and the officers of his _menage_, those of the kitchen as
well as the wardrobe; the horses were led along the bank."
He took ten or twelve of his suite with himself, and when he reached
some beautiful and agreeable island, he disembarked and ordered dinner
and supper to be served under the shade.
"Certainly one might say that all cares were banished from our society,
that life went on without restraint, playing, drinking, eating, sleeping
at will, that time meant nothing; at last the master, although son and
brother of great kings, had put himself in the rank of his
servants."[20]
Thus they drifted down the stream as far as Brittany. The weather was
perfect. The chateaux of the Loire defiled before the galiote. These
people travelled as if they were poets.
As soon, however, as Richelieu permitted, Gaston rushed to Paris and
again plunged into politics; which meant to him only cowardice and
betrayals, but which nevertheless fascinated him. This was his favourite
vice which nothing would have induced him to correct, for politics gave
him a round of new sensations. To hold the life of a friend in one's
hand, knowing in advance that he will be delivered to the executioner,
and at the same time bitterly to bewail his loss; to realise also that
the present grief will surely vanish and that one can joyously take
another life in the hand,--such events evidently make days most
interesting, when neither conscience nor heart are tender. These
excitements had filled the public career of Gaston, and when he found
himself again in his chateau of Blois, almost twenty years after the
radiant voyage down the Loire, for ever deprived, according to all
probabilities, of the strong emotions whose savour Le Tellier had
permitted him to taste for the last time in the interview at Limours,
existence appeared to him intolerably pale and empty.
The good which he could do and actually was doing, did not interest him;
he bitterly regretted the evil no longer in his power.
No one, even amongst his enemies, has ever accused him of being wicked.
Only physicians can analyse such morbid natures. Monsieur had commenced
by struggling against ennui. He had collected a fine library and had
attracted literary people to his court, in the hopes of refinding the
taste for literature which had animated his youth. He recalled his
collections of objects of art and curiosities, continued them and began
new. Nothing, however, really interested him, except a botanical garden
with which he occupied himself with pleasure.
Everything seemed infinitely puerile to a man who had contributed so
long to the making of history; it had become impossible for him to
attach any importance to the little verses of his "beaux esprits," or to
become impassioned over impaled birds or even an antique medal.
Weary of war, he threw himself into devotion. The gazette of Loret made
this fact part of the official news of France and kept the country
informed of his progress in the path of piety. The first sign which he
gave of his conversion was to correct himself of a fault which had
formerly brought from Richelieu useless remonstrances. This Prince with
so refined a taste, cursed and swore abominably. The habit had been
caught by those near him; we know that Mademoiselle herself used lively
words in moments of irritation. In December, 1652, oaths and blasphemies
were severely forbidden at the court of Blois, and Monsieur insisted
upon obedience.
To-day, reports the gazette[21]:
Aucun de ceux qui sont a lui,
Quelque malheur qui lui survienne,
N'oserait jurer la mordienne.
One learns, afterwards, that these fine beginnings were not belied, and
that Monsieur was now "less often at home than in the church." The
Parisians and the Court of France had much difficulty in believing that
repentance should have come to a spirit so free and so skeptical. His
piety would have been entirely estimable "if his laziness had not in
some portion aided his virtue." But however this may be, the devotion of
Gaston was not the less sincere. He reformed his life, and succeeded in
finding, at the foot of the altar, not perhaps contentment, but some
patience and resignation.
This did not come, however, for a long time; the beginning of his
definite exile was filled with miserable agitations and complaints
without dignity. Madame rejoined him with their little flock of
daughters.[22] This Princess did not add to the animation of the
chateau. Entirely occupied with her own health, she lived shut up,
without any other distraction than that of eating from morning till
night, "in order to cure her melancholies," relates the Grande
Mademoiselle, "but which really increases her ills." She gave no orders,
only sent for her daughters ten minutes in the morning and evening,
never spoke to them except to say "Hold yourselves erect, raise your
head"; this was her sole instruction. She never saw them again during
the day and never inquired what they were doing.
The governess in her turn neglected her pupils, who were abandoned to
the care of inferiors. Their father found nothing to criticise in these
educational methods; Anne of Austria had not brought up her sons very
differently. Besides, Monsieur was a submissive husband. He considered
his wife's judgment good, and that she possessed much more intelligence
than was indicated by her large, frightened eyes.
"This one," said Tallemant, "is a poor idiot, who nevertheless has
intelligence." Mme. de Motteville judged her exactly the same. Madame
was not loved because she was not amiable, but no one was astonished at
her ascendancy over her husband.
Gaston's court, contrary to that of his daughter, was almost deserted.
Disgrace for this couple had been the signal for general abandonment.
During the first years, Gaston took the trouble to entertain his guests;
he became again, for some hours, the incomparable talker, who knew a
thousand beautiful tales and found charming methods of telling them.[23]
Chapelle and Bachaumont were received at the chateau on their passage to
Blois in 1656, and brought back the pleasantest remembrances of the
dinners of the Duc d'Orleans.
La d'une obligeante maniere,
D'un visage ouvert et riant,
Il nous fit bonne et grande chere,
Nous donnant a son ordinaire
Tout ce que Blois a de friand.
"The table arrangements were the neatest possible, not even a crumb of
bread was allowed on the table. Well polished glasses of all sorts stood
upon the buffet, and ice was abundant. The hall was prepared for the
evening dance, all the beauties of the neighbouring cities invited, all
the violins from the provinces collected."[24] After a short time,
however, the effort of entertaining became a burden upon Monsieur. He
cared for nothing but repose, and he would have passed the remainder of
his days in sleeping with open eyes, if it had not been for his daughter
of Saint-Fargeau, the terrible Mademoiselle, from whom he had separated
at Paris after a painful explanation, and who had never left him in
peace since that time.
She had commenced by coming to seek him in spite of frequent commands,
to which she paid not the least attention. The Grande Mademoiselle,
openly allied to Conde, was a compromising guest for a Prince possessed
at this epoch with the desire to retake his place near the throne. In
vain she declared that she had recalled her troops from the army of the
Prince, her father knew very well that she was mocking him, and received
her coldly on the evening of her first arrival (December, 1652). "He
came to meet me at the door of his room, and said, 'I do not dare to
come out because I have a swollen cheek.'" A moment after Monsieur heard
from afar a joyous voice; it was Mademoiselle relating the adventures
during her flight to Saint-Fargeau. Monsieur could hold out no longer.
He approached, made her recommence, and laughed with the others. The ice
was broken. The fourth day, however, he said to Prefontaine, the man of
confidence of Mademoiselle, while walking in the park of Chambord, "I
love my daughter very much, but I have many obligations, and shall be
easier if she stays here but little."
Mademoiselle departed the next day. The following month (January, 1653),
Monsieur and Madame made a sojourn at Orleans. In spite of new orders,
Mademoiselle came to pass a day with them. "I did not wait for escort,"
wrote she, "I departed suddenly from Saint-Fargeau and went to
Orleans."
This determination to impose herself upon people whom she saw with but
little pleasure, is difficult to explain. Monsieur and Madame, who
feared her, welcomed her, and her father said in bidding her farewell,
"The affairs of your minority have never been settled. I wish to close
this business. Give orders for this to your people."
Mademoiselle did not wait for a second request. "In consequence I wrote
to Paris, then to Blois, a host of writings which were somewhat
wearisome." Monsieur had his own projects. It was the single opportunity
to extract a little money for the daughters by his second wife.
These young princesses had nothing to expect from their own mother, and
very little from their father, whose pensions and appointments were
destined to disappear with him. Madame was preoccupied with this
situation.
For a long time [reports one of their intimates][25] Madame has
skilfully urged Monsieur to think of his affairs, and to put
some solid property aside for her children, telling him that he
possessed nothing in the world not reversible to the crown in
case he had no male children, and that their daughters would be
left to the mercy of the court and the ministers for their
subsistence.
Until Gaston's disgrace, Madame had obtained nothing, and for cause. Her
husband ruined himself at play; he had been seen to lose a half-million
francs to the famous Chevalier de Gramont. He reformed only at Blois,
too late to begin to save; his debts crushed him, and his pensions were
paid most irregularly. The fortune of Mademoiselle presented itself as
the sole means of floating the House of Orleans, and the accounts of her
minority were the troubled waters in which it was proposed to fish.
Monsieur did not suspect how much the exile and the influence of
Prefontaine had changed his daughter.
The Prefontaine type has disappeared with the ancient regime. There is
no place in our democratic society for these men at once servants and
friends; friends however who remained in the background. Persons of this
kind were frequently met with in the great families of former times, and
nothing appeared more natural than the dog-like devotion to their
masters, always exacting and often ungrateful. The Grande Mademoiselle
was not ungrateful but she was violent, and it was always upon the
patient Prefontaine that she vented her anger. He was the counsellor,
the factotum shrewd and firm, to whom all affairs came, the confidant
who knew her most secret projects of marriage without ceasing to be the
domestic of no account.
His mistress could do nothing without him, and she does not even tell
us--she who loses herself in the smallest details when they concerned
people of quality in her suite--at what date this precious man entered
her service. She mentions him for the first time in 1651, without
saying who he is or where he comes from. From that date she never ceased
to speak of him as long as the troubled times lasted, but left him in
the shadow nevertheless in her _Memoires_. When we have said that he was
a gentleman, that there was no reason for his devotion to Mademoiselle
but his own choice, we have told all we know about him. He had found the
affairs of his mistress in a very bad condition, and so he warned her;
Monsieur, her father, had been a negligent guardian and what is more an
untrustworthy one. At first Mademoiselle would not listen to
Prefontaine. It was at Paris in the midst of the fire of the Fronde, and
she had other things to think of.
Prefontaine returned to the charge at Saint-Fargeau, where time
abounded, and was better received. A new sentiment had awakened in
Mademoiselle. She commenced to love money. She took interest in her
affairs, and skilfully applied herself to economising with so much
success that she would have soon risen to be a Countess Pimbesche.
Ideas of order and economy, rarely found with princesses of this epoch,
occurred to her. "It is not sufficient," said she one day to
Prefontaine, "to have an eye upon my legal affairs and the increase of
my revenues; but it is also necessary to supervise the expenses of my
house. I am convinced that I am robbed, and to prevent this, I wish to
be accounted to as if I were a private person."
This was not beneath a great Princess. Examination proved that she _was_
robbed by her people. After being assured of this, she took upon herself
the duty of supervising all the accounts twice a week, "even to the
smallest."
She knew the price of everything; "who could have predicted when I lived
at Court, that I should ever know how much bricks, lime, plaster,
carriages cost, what are the daily wages of the workmen, in fine all the
details of a building, and that every Saturday I should myself settle
the accounts: every one would have been skeptical." And still more the
people at large; it was really almost incredible. She quickly perceived
that Monsieur had not taken his duties as guardian very seriously. It
was in his belief both the right and duty of the chief of the Orleans
family to advance the general interests of the House, even at the
expense of individual members. The daughter by the first marriage was
enormously rich. What could be more just than to use her fortune for the
common good? What more natural than to throw upon her the burden of
debts contracted to add to the eclat of the family? or to give a little
of her superfluity to her young sisters in view of their establishment?
Gaston sent to his daughter for signature an act conceived in this
spirit, and received the clearest refusal. Very respectfully but with
firmness Mademoiselle assured him that henceforth she intended to hold
to her legal rights, which guaranteed the integrity of her fortune.
Monsieur threw himself into a great rage, but knew not what more to do.
Politics gave him unexpected aid. A gentleman sent as courier by Conde
into France had just been arrested. Among other letters was found one
without address, but evidently destined for Mademoiselle and most
compromising for her.
Mazarin charged the Archbishop of Embrun to take a copy of this to
Gaston. The dispatch in which the prelate renders account of his mission
has been preserved. Here is one of the significant passages:
BLOIS, March 31, 1653.
MONSEIGNEUR:
I arrived Sunday evening in this city where I was received most
warmly by Monsieur.... Immediately upon arrival I had a
conference of an hour with him alone in his cabinet. I pointed
out to him through the letter addressed to Mademoiselle her
relations to M. le Prince, the Spaniards, and M. de Lorraine,
which were all visibly marked in the letter. He declared
himself very ill satisfied with Mademoiselle, but that the
Queen knew that they had never been eight hours at a time
together: and that at this moment she was trying to cause
trouble in demanding account of his care of her wealth when he
was guardian, and that it was thus impossible to doubt his
anger. I told him that I had orders to beseech his Royal
Highness to make two observations upon the letter; the first:
that Mademoiselle as long as she enjoyed the free possession of
her immense wealth could assist any party she pleased, and that
the King in order to check this had resolved to place
administrators or a commission over her property to preserve it
for her own use, but without permitting its abuse. His Royal
Highness should be left the choice of these commissioners.
The second remark was, that it was to be feared, according to
the news in the letter, that if M. le Prince advanced,
Mademoiselle would join him, and that the King in this
difficulty demanded counsel of him as the person most
interested in the conduct of Mademoiselle. Gaston replied: that
he had ordered his daughter to join him at Orleans, Tuesday of
Holy Week; and he would bring her back to Blois, and keep her
near him.
I have also, my Lord, talked over the same subjects with Madame
as with Monsieur, knowing that she was very intelligent, and
also that Monsieur deferred much to her opinions.
Mazarin took no action upon this communication of the Archbishop of
Embrun.
It was sufficient to intimate to Monsieur that he was authorised not to
worry himself about a rebel, and Gaston on his side asked nothing
better.
Sure of being for the present under Court protection, he poured forth
bitter words and threats against this disobedient and heartless
daughter, who forgot her duty. Sometimes he wrote to her that "if she
did not willingly give everything he demanded he would take possession
of all the property and only give her what he pleased."
Sometimes he cast fire and flame between her and the public: "She does
not love her sisters; says they are beggars; that after my death she
will see them demand alms, without giving a penny. She wishes to see my
children in the poor-house," and other sentiments of the same kind,
which were repeated at Saint-Fargeau.
Mademoiselle herself dreamed one day that Monsieur thought of enclosing
her in a convent, "that this was the intention of the King," and that
she must prepare for his coming. At the same time she was warned from
Paris that her father had promised the Court to arrest her as soon as
she arrived at Blois. Things reached such a pass that Gaston could no
longer hear the name of his daughter without flying into a passion.
The Princess had at first showed herself fearless. Knowing that the
letter of Conde did not have any address, she denied that it was meant
for her and took a high hand with her father; "I assert that they cannot
take away my property unless I am proved either mad or criminal and I
know very well that I am neither one nor the other."
Reflection, however, diminished her assurance. The idea of "being
arrested" terrified her, and it was this fate, in the opinion of her
ladies, which awaited her at Blois--for which reason Monsieur, having
previously forbidden her to come, now ordered her to meet him.
She wept torrents of tears; she was ill when she was obliged to obey and
she confesses that on arriving at Blois she quite lost her head from
terror. It was the story of the hare and the frogs. The projects of
Gaston, whatever they may have been, vanished at sight of this agitated
person and he had no other thought than of calming his daughter and
avoiding scenes.
For this he exerted all his grace, which was much, and forced
Mademoiselle, reassured and calmed, to acknowledge that her father could
be "charming."
The days rolled by and the question of their differences was not touched
upon. "I wanted one day to speak to him about my affairs and he fled and
would pay no attention."
Mademoiselle felt the delights of a country covered with superb chateaux
in which she was feted, and amiable cities which fired cannon in her
honour. She made excursions during a large part of the summer (1653) and
finally separated from her father most amicably. Eight days after, the
situation however was more sombre than before her departure for Blois.
The demands of Monsieur had not diminished, his language became still
more hard and menacing.
These differences lasted many years. Mademoiselle lets it be understood
that it was a question of considerable sums. She relates sadly the
progress of the ill-will of her father; how painful her sojourn at Blois
had been, so that she wept from morning till night; how without the
influence of Prefontaine she would have retired into a Carmelite
convent; "not to be a religieuse, God having never given me that
vocation, but to live away from the world for some years." The ennui of
the cloister life would have been compensated by the thought that it was
an economical one. "I should save much money," said she; and this
thought consoled her. Once it was believed that an amicable solution was
imminent. The father and daughter had submitted themselves to the
arbitration of the maternal grandmother of Mademoiselle, the old Mme.
de Guise, who had made them promise in writing to sign "all that she
wished without reading the stipulations."
The only result was a more definite embroilment. Mme. de Guise[26] "was
devoted to her House,"[27] that ambitious and intriguing House of
Lorraine into which she had married, and with which she was again
connected through the second wife of Gaston, sister of the Duke
Henri.[28] When Mademoiselle, after "signing without reading," realised
the force of the "transaction" into which she had been led by her
grandmother, she declared that Mme. de Guise had despoiled her with
shocking bad faith, in order that her half-sisters, the little
Lorraines, should no longer be menaced with the "poor-house." The love
of family had extinguished with Mme. de Guise, as with Monsieur, all
considerations of justice and sense of duty towards her own
granddaughter. All this happened at Orleans in the month of May, 1655.
Mademoiselle, indignant, ran to her grandmother:
I told her that it was evident that she loved the House of
Lorraine better than the House of Bourbon; that she was right
in seeking to give money to my sisters, that they would have
little from Madame, and this showed me, indeed, to be a lady of
great wealth, enough to provide for others, and that
the fortune of my family should be established upon what could be
seized from me; but as I was so much above them that they could
receive my benefactions, it would serve them better to depend upon
my liberality rather than to attempt to swindle me; that this would
be better before both God and man.
This scene lasted three hours. The same day Monsieur was warned that
Mademoiselle refused to be "duped." He gave a precipitate order for
departure, and declined to receive his daughter. In the disorder that
ensued Madame almost went dinnerless and appeared much disconcerted.
The attendants intervened to save appearances at least, and a formal
leave was taken, but this was all; the complete rupture was consummated.
Upon the return to Saint-Fargeau, Mademoiselle at once learned that
Monsieur had taken away her men of business, including the indispensable
Prefontaine, and had left her without even a secretary. This gives a
vision of the authority possessed by the chief of a family, and its
limitations, with the princely houses of this epoch. We perceive how
much better the fortune of Mademoiselle was defended against her father
than her person and her independence. Monsieur did not dare to take away
her money without a free and formal assent; he knew that if things were
not done regularly "in a hundred years the heirs of Mademoiselle could
torment the children of Monsieur." In revenge for this disability he
tyrannised over her household. And here he was in his full right.
He could shut her up in a convent or in the Chateau of Amboise, as many
counselled him to do, and this again would be within his legal powers.
If he did nothing of the kind, it was only because, being nervous and
impressionable, he dreaded feminine tears.
Mademoiselle realised that she was at his mercy; it did not occur to her
to contest the parental authority--outside of the question of money. She
wept, "suffered much," but she did not attempt to save Prefontaine.
The years which followed were sad ones for her. Until this time she had
had but two days of grief a week, those upon which the courier arrived,
on account of the business letters which must be read and answered. She
confined herself to her study to conceal her red eyes, but her
correspondence once sent off, "I only thought," says she, "of amusing
myself."
Conditions changed when she was forced to understand that Monsieur, that
father so contemptible, from whom she had suffered so much since her
infancy, but so amiable that she admired and loved him notwithstanding,
had no kind of affection for her. Very sensitive, in spite of her
brusqueness, Mademoiselle experienced a profound grief at this
reflection. Her temper gave way in a moment in which the young ladies of
her suite, commencing to find the exile long, and to regret Paris, were
ill-disposed to patience. There was coldness, frictions, and finally
that domestic war, the account of which fills a large space in the
_Memoires_ of Mademoiselle.
Petty griefs, small intrigues, and much gossip rendered insupportable to
one another persons condemned to daily intercourse. Affairs became so
strained between some of the parties that communication was impossible,
and this state of things lasted until the most discontented, Mmes. de
Fiesque and de Frontenac, had formed the determination to return to
Paris.
These quarrels had the effect of spoiling for Mademoiselle
Saint-Fargeau, inclining her to submission to the Court; but mere
mention is sufficient, and we shall not again refer to them.
Mademoiselle commenced to be convinced of the imprudence of being at
odds with the Court and her father at the same time. Her obstinacy in
sustaining Conde had ended by seriously vexing Mazarin. The nobility
felt this attitude and showed less fondness for the Princess. In 1655
she approached to six leagues from Paris. She counted much upon
visitors; very few appeared. "I was responsible for so many illnesses,"
says she wittily, "for all those who did not dare to confess that they
feared to embroil themselves with the Court, feigned maladies or
accidents in extraordinary numbers."
The third day she received an order to "return." This misadventure
enlightened her; Mademoiselle admitted the necessity of making peace
with royalty. Just at this period the Prince de Conde grew less
interesting to her, as his chances of becoming a widower diminished.
Mme. la Princesse became gradually re-established in health, and each of
her steps towards recovery made Mademoiselle a little less warm for M.
le Prince. This latter perceived the change, and at once altered his
tone. "There is no rupture," says the Duc d'Aumale, "but one can
perceive the progress of the coolness and its accordance with _certain_
news."
A letter from Conde, received after the journey to the environs of
Paris, gave warning of the end of a friendship which on one side at
least was entirely political.
BRUSSELS, March 6, 1655.
... As to this change which you declare to perceive in me, you do me
much injustice and it seems to me that I have more right to reproach you
than you me. Since your long silence the tone of your letters plainly
indicates how different your present sentiments are from those of past
times. This is not true of my own; they remain always the same and if
you believe otherwise and if you lend faith to the rumours which my
enemies start, it is my misfortune, not crime; for I protest there is
nothing in them, that affairs are not in this state, and if they were I
should never listen to a proposition without full consideration for your
interests and satisfaction, also not without your consent and
participation.
You will recognise the truth of this statement through my conduct and
not one of my actions will ever give the lie to the words which I now
give you, even if you should have forgotten all the fine sentiments you
had when you came to see our army, which I can hardly consider possible
for a generous person like you.
I knew that you came to Lesigny and that, the Court disapproving
of this, you received orders to return, which fact gave me much
displeasure.
Mademoiselle did not longer want a pretext for withdrawing her pin from
the game. The embroilment with her father furnished it. She immediately
prayed Conde to write to her no more. "It is necessary to hold back,"
said she to herself, "and if I am able without baseness to come into
accord with the Cardinal Mazarin, I will do it in order to withdraw
myself from the persecutions of his Royal Highness."
Some days later the Comte de Bethune transmitted to the Cardinal
overtures of peace from the Grande Mademoiselle. The Cardinal desired
pledges. She sent a recall for the companies from the Spanish army, upon
which M. le Prince without warning "held the soldiers and put the
officers in prison."
In vain the indignation of Mademoiselle. "It is seven or eight years,"
wrote Conde to one of the agents, "since I have really had the favour of
Mademoiselle; I formerly possessed her good graces, but if she now
wishes to withdraw them I must accept, without desperation."[29] Here is
a man liberated rather than grieved.
Thus failed, one after the other, the menaces directed by the Fronde
against royalty. The project of alliance between the two cadet branches
of the House of Bourbon had been inspired in Mademoiselle by the desire
to marry. Few of the ideas of all those which menaced the throne which
had entered into the brain of the revolutionary leaders seemed so
dangerous and caused so much care to Mazarin. We must recollect that he
would have been ready, in order to appease the cadet branches, to marry
the little Louis XIV. to his great cousin.
Reassured at length by the promises of Mademoiselle, who engaged herself
to have nothing more to do with M. le Prince, Mazarin took the trouble
to overcome his wrath and permitted her to expect the recompense for her
submission.
In general, Mazarin had shown himself easy with the repentant Frondeurs.
The Prince de Conti had been feted at the Louvre in 1654. It is true
that he accepted the hand of a niece of Mazarin in marriage, Anne Marie
Martinozzi, on conditions which put him in bad odour with the public.
"This marriage," wrote d'Ormesson,[30] "is one of the most signal marks
of the inconsistency of human affairs and the fickleness of the French
character to be seen in our times."
After Conti, another Prince, Monsieur, in person, entirely submerged as
he was in laziness and devotions, exerted himself sufficiently to come
to Court. The welcome involved conditions which contained nothing hard
nor unusual for Gaston d'Orleans; it cost him nothing but the
abandonment of some last friends. In truth, he received but little in
exchange. When he came to salute the King everyone made him feel that he
was already "in the ranks of the dead," according to the expression of
Mme. de Motteville. The ill-humour caused by this impression quickly
sent him back to Blois, which was precisely what was wished.
It was the men of business who profited above all by this
reconciliation. They had greater freedom to harass Mademoiselle, and
left her neither time nor repose. Their end was to make her execute the
transaction signed at Orleans, but she held her own, without counsel or
secretary. She only suffered from an enormous labour, of which her
minority accounts were only a chapter, and not the most considerable.
The administration of the immense domains had fallen entirely upon
herself. It was now Mademoiselle who opened the mass of letters arriving
from her registers, foresters, controllers, lawyers, farmers, and single
subjects--in short, from all who in the principalities of Dombes or of
Roche-sur-Yonne, in the duchies of Montpensier or of Catellerault, had
an account to settle with her, an order to demand of her, or a claim to
submit.
It was Mademoiselle herself who replied; she who followed the numerous
lawsuits necessitated by the paternal management; she who terminated the
great affair of Champigny, of which the echo was wide-spread on account
of the rank of the parties and of the remembrances awakened by the
pleaders.
Champigny was a productive territory situated in Touraine, and an
inheritance of Mademoiselle. Richelieu had despoiled her of it when she
was only a child, through a forced exchange for the Chateau of
Bois-le-Vicomte, in the environs of Meaux.
Become mistress of her own fortune, Mademoiselle summoned the heirs of
the Cardinal to give restitution, and had just gained her suit when
Monsieur took away Prefontaine. The decree returning Champigny to her
allowed her also damages, the amount to be decided by experts, for
buildings destroyed and woods spoiled. Mademoiselle estimated that these
damages might reach a large sum; she knew that with her father at Blois
the rumour ran that she had been placed in cruel embarrassments and that
it would be repeated to all comers that she had obtained almost nothing
from this source. This report excited her to action. The moment arrived;
Mademoiselle went to Champigny, and remained there during several weeks,
spending entire days upon the heels of eighteen experts, procurers,
lawyers, gentlemen, masons, carpenters, wood merchants, collected
together to value the damages. She had long explanations with that "good
soul Madelaine," counsellor of the Parliament, and charged with
directing the investigation, who was confounded at the knowledge of the
Princess. He said to her: "You know our business better than we
ourselves, and you talk of affairs like a lawyer." Operations finished,
Mademoiselle had the pleasure of writing to Blois that this doubtful
affair from which she was supposed to receive only "50,000 francs,
really amounted to 550,000." She came out less generously from her
litigation with her father. Mazarin rendered Mademoiselle the bad
service of having her suit introduced by the King's counsellor. A decree
confirmed the decision of Mme. de Guise, and there was nothing to do but
to obey. Mademoiselle signed, "furiously" weeping, the act which
despoiled her, and submitted with despair to the departure for Blois.
She was going to visit her father, after having the thought flash
through her mind that he could order her assassination. It is said there
had been some question of this at Blois. "Immersed in melancholy
reveries, I dreamed that his Royal Highness was a son of the Medicis,
and I even reflected that the poison of the Medicis must have already
entered my veins and caused such thoughts."
Her father, on the other hand, was going to overwhelm her with
tenderness after having permitted it to be said without protest that
Mademoiselle was preparing a trap, with the purpose of poisoning one of
his gentlemen.
Considering the times and the family, this was a situation only a little
"strained"; but Mademoiselle was so little a "Medicis" that she made her
journey a prey to a poignant grief, which was plainly to be read upon
her countenance by the attendants at her arrival at Blois.
"Upon my arrival I felt a sudden chill. I went directly to the chamber
of Monsieur; he saluted me and told me he was glad to see me. I replied
that I was delighted to have this honour. He was much embarrassed."
Neither the one nor the other knew what more to say. Mademoiselle
silently forced back her tears. Monsieur, to give himself composure,
caressed the greyhounds of his daughter, La Reine and Madame Souris.
Finally he said: "Let us go to seek Madame."
"She received me very civilly and made many friendly remarks. As soon as
I was in my own chamber, Monsieur came to see me and talked as if
nothing disagreeable had passed between us." A single quarter of an hour
had sufficed to bring back to him his freedom of spirit, and he made an
effort to regain the affections of his daughter.
She had never known him to continue to be severe; Monsieur counted upon
this fact. He was attentive, flattered her weaknesses great and small,
amused her with projects of marriage, and treated her greyhounds as
personages of importance; he could be seen at midnight in the lower
court in the midst of the dunghill, inquiring about Madame Souris, who
had met with an accident. He did still better; he wrote to Mazarin
asking for an accommodation with Mademoiselle.
After the rupture with Conde, it was evident from signs not to be
mistaken that the hour was approaching in which the all-powerful
minister would pardon the heroine of Orleans and of Porte Saint-Antoine.
In the month of July, 1656, Mademoiselle went to the baths of Forges, in
Normandy. She had passed in sight of Paris; had sojourned in the suburbs
without anxiety, and her name this time had not made "every one ill."
Visitors had flocked. Mademoiselle had entertained at dinner all the
princesses and duchesses then in Paris; and she drew the conclusion,
knowing the Court and the courtiers, that her exile was nearing an end.
"In truth," says she, "I do not feel as much joy at the thought as I
should have believed. When one reaches the end of a misery like mine,
its remembrance lasts so long and the grief forms such a barrier against
joy that it is long before the wall is sufficiently melted to permit
happiness to be again enjoyed."
Nevertheless the news of the letter from her father to Mazarin put her
in a great agitation. The Court of France was then in the east of France
where Turenne made his annual campaign against M. le Prince and the
Spaniards. Mademoiselle resolved to approach in order to sooner receive
the response of the Cardinal.
She quitted Blois as she had arrived there, a stranger. One single thing
could have touched her: the recall of Prefontaine and of her other
servitors struck down for having been faithful. This Monsieur had
absolutely refused; his exaggerated politeness and his grimaces of
tenderness had only the result of alienating his daughter. She felt
that he detested her and she no longer loved him.
Upon the route to Paris she doubled the length between her
stopping-places. Impatience gained as she neared the end and the
"barrier of grief" permitted itself gradually to be penetrated by joy.
She again saw, in passing, Etampes[31] and its ruins, which already
dated back five years and were found untouched by La Fontaine in 1663.
So long and difficult in certain regions was the uplifting of France,
after the wars of the Fronde, never taken very seriously by historians,
doubtless because too many women were concerned in them.
"We looked with pity at the environs of Etampes," wrote La Fontaine.[32]
"Imagine rows of houses without roofs, without windows, pierced on all
sides; nothing could be more desolate and hideous." He talked of it
during an entire evening, not having the soul of a heroine of the
Fronde, but Mademoiselle had traversed with indifference these same
ruins in which the grass flourished in default of inhabitants to wear it
away. No remorse, no regret, however light, for her share in the
responsibility for the ruin of this innocent people, had touched her
mind, and yet she was considered to possess a tender heart.
[Illustration: =JEAN DE LA FONTAINE= From an engraving by Grevedon]
She learned at Saint-Cloud that she had been invited to rejoin the Court
at Sedan. Mademoiselle took a route through Reims. She thus traversed
Champagne, which had been a battle-field during the more than twenty
years of the wars with Spain[33]; and which appeared the picture of
desolation. The country was depopulated, numbers of villages burned, and
the cities ruined by pillage and forced contributions of war.
More curious in regard to things which interest _la canaille_,
Mademoiselle might have heard from the mouths of the survivors that of
all the enemies who had trampled upon and oppressed this unfortunate
people, the most cruel and barbarous had been her ally, the Prince de
Conde, with whom were always found her own companies. She would not the
less have written in her _Memoires_, entirely unconsciously, apropos of
her trouble in obtaining pardon from the Court: "I had really no
difference with the Court, and I was criminal only because I was the
daughter of his Royal Highness."
We have hardly the right to reproach her with this monstrous phrase. To
betray one's country was a thing of too frequent occurrence to cause
much embarrassment. The only men of this epoch who reached the point of
considering the common people[34] and attaching the least importance to
their sufferings were revolutionary spirits or disciples of St. Vincent
de Paul.
Mademoiselle had no leaning towards extremes. Neither her birth nor the
slightly superficial cast of her mind fostered free opinions. During her
journey in Champagne, she was delighted to hear again the clink of arms
and the sound of trumpets. Mazarin had sent a large escort. The
skirmishers of the enemy swept the country even to the environs of
Reims. A number of the people of the Court, seizing the occasion, joined
themselves to her, in order to profit by her gens d'armes and light
riders.
Colbert also placed himself under her protection with chariots loaded
with money which he was taking to Sedan, and this important convoy was
surrounded by the same "military pomp, as if it had guarded the person
of the King."
The great precautions were, perhaps, on account of the chariots of
money; the honours, however, were for Mademoiselle, and they much
flattered her vanity. The commandant of the escort demanded the order
from her. When she appeared the troops gave the military salute. A
regiment which she met on her route solicited the honour of being
presented to her. She examined it closely, as a warlike Princess who
understood military affairs, and of whom the grand Conde had said one
day, apropos of a movement of troops, that "Gustavus Adolphus could not
have done better." A certain halt upon the grass in a meadow through
which flowed a stream left an indelible impression. Mademoiselle offered
dinner this day to all the escort and almost all the convoy. The sight
of the meadow crowded with uniformed men and horses recalled to her the
campaigns of her fine heroic times. "The trumpets sounded during dinner;
this gave completely the air of a true army march." She arrived at Sedan
intoxicated by the military spectacle of her route, and her entry showed
this. Considering her late exile the lack of modesty might well be
criticised. The Queen, Anne of Austria, driving for pleasure in the
environs of Sedan, saw a chariot appear with horses at full gallop
surrounded by a mass of cavalry: "I arrived in this field at full speed
with gens d'armes and light riders, their trumpets sounding in a manner
sufficiently triumphant."
The entire Court of France recognised the Grande Mademoiselle before
actually seeing her. Exile had not changed her, and this entrance truly
indicated her weaknesses.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: Letter of January 19, 1689.]
[Footnote 2: _Memoires de Mademoiselle de Montpensier._ Edited by
Cheruel.]
[Footnote 3: _Memoires de Mademoiselle de Montpensier._ Edited by
Cheruel.]
[Footnote 4: The Chateau of Saint-Fargeau still exists, but the interior
has been transformed since a great fire which occurred in 1752; the
apartments of Mademoiselle no longer remain. Cf. _Les Chateaux
d'Ancy-le-Franc, de Saint-Fargeau_, etc., by the Baron Chaillou des
Barres.]
[Footnote 5: Cf. _Les Sports et jeux d'exercice dans l'ancienne France_,
by J. J. Jusserand.]
[Footnote 6: LES NOUVELLES FRANCAISES, ou _Les divertissements de la
princesse Aurelie_, by Segrais, Paris, 2 vols., 1656-1657. The last of
the "Nouvelles francaises," _Floridon, ou l'amour imprudent_, is the
history of the intrigues in the harem which led to the death of Bajazet.
Racine had certainly read it when he wrote his tragedy.]
[Footnote 7: See _Bernardin de Saint-Pierre_, in the Collection of
Grands ecrivains. Paris, Hochette.]
[Footnote 8: His _Polexandre_ had appeared, 1629-1637; his last romance,
_La Jeune Alcidiane_, in 1651; _Cassandre_ and _Cleopatre_, by La
Calprenede, in 1642-1647. _Arlamene, ou le Grand Cyrus_, by Mlle. de
Scudery, was published 1649-1653.]
[Footnote 9: Letters of the 12th and 15th of July, 1671, to Mme. de
Grignan.]
[Footnote 10: See _Le dictionnaire des Precieuses_, by Somaize.]
[Footnote 11: _Eugenie, ou la force du destin._]
[Footnote 12: Mademoiselle commenced her _Memoires_ shortly after her
arrival at Saint-Fargeau. She interrupted them in 1660, resumed them in
1677, and definitely abandoned them in 1688, five years before her
death.]
[Footnote 13: Oriane was the mistress of Amadis.]
[Footnote 14: _La relation de l'Isle imaginaire_, printed in 1659, also
_L'histoire de la Princesse de Paphlagonie_. We shall again refer to
them.]
[Footnote 15: These representations took place in the grand hall of the
Petit Bourbon, near the Louvre. (Cf. _L'Histoire de Paris_, by
Delaure.)]
[Footnote 16: Letter of October 12th, to the Abbe Foucquet.]
[Footnote 17: _Memoires de Montglat._]
[Footnote 18: _Memoires du Marquis de Sourches._ Cf. _L'Histoire du
chateau de Blois_, by La Saussaye.]
[Footnote 19: Letter of September 3, 1663.]
[Footnote 20: Nicolas Goulas, _Memoires_.]
[Footnote 21: Gazette of August 22, 1654.]
[Footnote 22: Four, but the last died at an early age.]
[Footnote 23: _Memoires de Bussy-Rabutin._]
[Footnote 24: _Voyage de Chapelle et de Bachaumont._]
[Footnote 25: _Memoires de Nicolas Goulas._]
[Footnote 26: Saint-Simon, _Ecrits inedits_.]
[Footnote 27: Henriette-Catherine, Duchesse de Joyeuse, first married to
Henri de Bourbon, Duc de Montpensier, by whom she had Marie de Bourbon,
mother of Mademoiselle; married for the second time to Charles de
Lorraine, Duc de Guise, by whom she had several children.]
[Footnote 28: Henri de Lorraine reigned from 1608 to 1624.]
[Footnote 29: Letter of August 10, 1657, to the Comte d'Auteuil.]
[Footnote 30: Andre d'Ormesson died in 1665, dean of the Council of
State. Some fragments of his memoirs have been published by Cheruel, in
the course of the Journal of his son, Olivier d'Ormesson.]
[Footnote 31: Turenne had conquered the troops of the Prince at Etampes
(May, 1652), upon the occasion of a review in honour of Mademoiselle and
of the disorder which resulted. See _The Youth of La Grande
Mademoiselle_. Some weeks later, he besieged the town.]
[Footnote 32: Letter to his wife, August 3, 1663.]
[Footnote 33: Richelieu had declared war with Spain March 26, 1635.]
[Footnote 34: The phrase is by Bussy-Rabutin.]
Chapter II
The Education of Louis XIV.--Manners--Poverty--Charity--Vincent
de Paul, a Secret Society--Marriage of Louis XIV.--His Arrival
at Power, on the Death of Mazarin--He Re-educates himself.
The remembrance of the Fronde was destined to remain a heavy weight
during the remainder of the reign of Louis XIV. Its shadow dominated for
more than half a century interior politics and decided the fate, good
and bad, of the great families.
The word "Liberty" had become synonymous with "Licence, Confusion,
Disorder,"[35] and the ancient Frondeurs passed the remainder of their
lives in disgrace, or at least in disfavour. The Grande Mademoiselle was
never pardoned, although she did not wish to avow this, even to herself.
She might have realised the fact at once upon her return to Court, if
she had not decided to believe the contrary. Warnings were not wanting.
The first was her encounter with the Queen Mother in the field of Sedan.
When Anne of Austria saw arrive to sound of trumpets, with manner at
ease and triumphant, this insolent Princess who had drawn her cannon
upon the King, hardly embracing her niece, the Queen Mother burst into
reproaches, and declared that after the battle of Saint-Antoine, "if she
had held her, she would have strangled her."[36] Mademoiselle wept; the
Court looked on. "I have forgotten everything," said the Queen at
length, and her niece was eager to believe her. The meeting with the
King was still more significant. He arrived on horseback, soaked and
muddy, from the city of Montmedy, taken that same day from the Spaniards
(August 7, 1657).
His mother said to him, "Behold a young lady, whom I present to you and
who is very sorry to have been so naughty; she will be 'very good' in
future." The young King only laughed and replied by talking of the siege
of Montmedy.
Mademoiselle nevertheless departed from Sedan filled with joyous
thoughts. She imagined reading in all eyes the news of marriage with the
brother of the King, the little Monsieur. He was seventeen, she thirty,
with hair already partially white.
Some months ensued, passed in a half retreat, and the Grande
Mademoiselle remained with the Court during the years of transition in
which the personal government of Louis XIV. was maturing. A new regime
was being born and a new world with it.
One could gradually see this new formation relegating to the shadow of
the past the old spirit of independence, and stifling the confused
aspirations of the country towards any legal liberties. Mazarin
incarnated this great political movement. On the eve of disappearance,
this unpopular minister had become all France.
He was master; no one thought any longer of resisting him; but he was
always detested, never admired. France having at this date neither
journals nor parliamentary debates, the foreign policy of Mazarin, which
in our eyes did him so much honour, remained very little known even at
Paris. This explains why his glory has been in large part posthumous. It
has increased in measure as it has been possible to judge of his entire
policy, from documents contained in our national archives or in those of
other countries. His correspondence displays so fine a diplomatic
genius, that the historians have turned aside from the evil side of the
man, his littlenesses, in order to give full weight to his services as
minister. Precisely a contrary course had been taken in the seventeenth
century. Little besides the Cardinal's defects, open to all eyes, were
realised. Bad fortune had redoubled his rapacity. Mazarin had guarded in
his heart the experience of poverty at the time in which he was expelled
from the kingdom. He had sworn to himself that he would not again be
taken without "ammunition." He had worked industriously since his return
in putting aside millions in safe keeping. Everything aided him in
raising this kind of war treasure. He sold high functions of State, and
also those belonging to low degree, even to that of laundress to the
Queen. He shared the benefits with the corsairs to whom he gave letters
of marque. He undertook contracts for public service, pocketed the
money, left our ambassadors without salaries, our vessels and
fortifications without means of subsistence. The army was crying with
hunger and thirst as soon as he made himself its sutler and its
commissariat. He furnished bread of diminished purity and even found
means, said the courtiers, to make the soldiers, so rarely paid
themselves, pay for the water they drank. Turenne once broke up his
plate to distribute the pieces to his troops, who were perishing from
want.
Comical scenes mingled with these tragic ones. Bussy-Rabutin, who served
in the army of Turenne, had been fortunate at play. The Cardinal had
learned of this, and ordered it to be represented to Bussy that his pay
which had been pledged in the game would be guarded by the Cardinal as
his portion of the gain. He had extended his traffic into the royal
palace. It was he who furnished furniture and utensils. He undertook to
provide the Court mourning, and costumes for the fetes: when the King
danced a ballet, his first minister gained by the decorations and
accessories. The housekeeping accounts passed through his hands. During
the campaign of 1658, he suppressed the King's cook, in order to
appropriate to himself what the table would have cost. Louis XIV. was
forced to invite himself to dine with this one and that one. Mazarin
touched even his pocket money and the young King permitted it with a
patience which was a constant source of astonishment to the courtiers.
His mother was neither better treated nor less submissive.
The Cardinal was as jealous of his authority as of his money. The King
had no voice in his council; when he accorded a pardon, however trivial,
his first minister revoked it, "scolding him like a schoolboy."[37]
It was said of the Queen Mother that her influence was only worth a
hundred crowns, and she agreed. Still more, she was scolded from morning
till night. Age had rendered Mazarin insupportable. He had no delicacy
with the King, still less with the King's mother: the courtiers shrugged
their shoulders in hearing him speak to Anne of Austria "as to a
chambermaid."[38]
The Queen was not insensible to this rudeness. She confessed to the
faithful Motteville "that the Cardinal had become so bad tempered and so
avaricious that she did not know how in the future it was going to be
possible to live with him." But it did not seem to occur to her that it
might be possible to live without the Cardinal. Can it be believed that
Anne of Austria and Mazarin were married, as La Palatine,[39] mother of
the Regent, asserted? As they gradually grew old, one is tempted to
believe it, so strongly the spectacle offered by these illustrious
persons, he so disagreeable, she so submissive, gives the impression
of two destinies "united together," according to the expression of the
Cardinal himself,[40] "by bonds which could not be broken." The question
to be solved is, could Mazarin marry? According to tradition he was not
a priest. According to the Euridite that point is open to
discussion.[41] Until this matter is fixed, the marriage of Anne of
Austria with her minister will remain among historical enigmas, for
everything said will be words in the air.
PRIERE DU ROY.
Jesus-Christ Roy du Ciel et de la Terre, ie vous adore et
reconnois pour le Roy des Roys. C'est de vostre Majeste Diuine
que ie tiens ma Couronne: mon Dieu ie vous l'offre, pour la
Gloire de la tres Saincte Trinite, et pour l'honneur de la
Reine des Agnes la Sacree Vierge Marie que iay choisy pour ma
Protectrice, et des Estats que vous m'auez donne; Seigneur
baillez moy vostre crainte et une si grande Sagesse et
humilite, que ie puisse deuenir un homme selon vostre coeur; en
sorte que ie merite efficacement le tiltre aimable de Louis
Dieu donne le Pacifique pour maintenir vostre Peuple en Paix,
afin qu'il vous serve avec tranquilite, et l'acomplissement de
toutes les Vertus.
VOEU ET PRIERE DES PEUPLES POUR LE ROY.
Adorable Redempteur Jesus-Christ, qui estes le distributeur des
Couronnes, receuez la piete du Roy tres-Crestien, et exaucez
ses Prieres respectueses faites par l'entremise de vostre
Saincte Mere Vierge, que linfluence des Graces du St. Esprit
luy soit donnee, afin croissant en aage, it croisse aussi en
telle Sagesse, qu'il puisse maintenir vostre peuple in Paix,
pour mieux obseruer vos saincts commandemens.
(Translation of the above.)
PRAYER OF THE KING.
Jesus Christ, King of the Heavens and the Earth, I adore Thee
and recognize Thee for the King of Kings, the divine majesty
from whom I receive my crown, which I offer to Thee for the
Glory of the Most Holy Trinity, and for the honor of the Queen
of Angels, the blessed Virgin Mary, whom I have chosen as my
Protector, and also of the States which Thou hast given me.
Lord grant me due reverence and that I may possess so much
wisdom and humility that I may become a man after Thine own
heart, so that I may truly merit the title of the Beloved
Louis, the God-given and peaceful, and be able to maintain Thy
people in peace that they may live in tranquillity and
virtuously serve Thee.
VOW AND PRAYER OF THE PEOPLE.
Adorable Redeemer Jesus Christ; who art the giver of crowns;
regard the piety of the most Christian King and listen to his
prayers for the intervention of the most blessed Mother Virgin;
and grant that the influence of the Holy Spirit may so be
poured out upon him that as he increases in years he may also
grow in wisdom; and that he may keep Thy people in peace that
they may better be able to preserve Thy commands.
[Illustration: =LOUIS XIV. AS A BOY, DEDICATING HIS CROWN= After the
painting by Greg Huret]
The patience of Louis XIV. can only be explained by his entire bringing
up and by the state of mind which had been its fruit.
Louis's cradle had been surrounded by a crowd of servitors charged to
watch over his least movement. His mother adored him and, for a queen,
occupied herself much with him. Nevertheless, there could hardly a child
be found throughout the entire kingdom so badly cared for as the son of
the King.
Louis XIV. had never forgotten this neglect and spoke of it all his life
with bitterness.
"The King always surprises me," relates Mme. de Maintenon at Saint Cyr,
"when he speaks to me of his education. His governesses gossiped the
entire day, and left him in the hands of their maids without paying any
attention to the young Prince." The maids abandoned him to his own
devices and he was once found in the basin of the fountain in the Palais
Royal. One of his greatest pleasures was to prowl in the kitchens with
his brother, the little Monsieur. "He ate everything he could lay his
hands on without paying attention to its healthfulness. If they were
frying an omelette, he would break off a piece, which he and Monsieur
devoured in some corner."[42] One day when the two little Princes thus
put their fingers into the prepared dishes, the cooks impatiently drove
them away with blows from dishcloths. He played with any one. "His most
frequent companion," again relates Mme. de Maintenon, "was the daughter
of the Queen's own maid." When he was withdrawn from such surroundings,
to be led to his mother, or to figure in some ceremony, he appeared a
bashful boy who looked at people with embarrassment without knowing what
to say, and who cruelly suffered from this shyness.
One day after they had given him a lesson, his timidity prevented him
from remembering the right words and he burst into tears with rage and
anger. The King of France to make a fool of himself!
At five and a half years, they gave him a tutor and many masters,[43]
but he learned nothing. Mazarin for reasons known to himself would not
force him to work; and circumstances favoured the views of the first
minister. The Fronde came, and rendered any study impossible on account
of the complete upsetting of the daily life of the Court of France,
which was only encamped when it was not actually on the move. Louis XIV.
was fourteen at the date of the reinstallation of the Court at the
Louvre and there was no question of making him recover the lost time; he
thenceforth passed his days in hunting, in studying steps for the
ballet, and in amusing himself with the nieces of the Cardinal. The
political world believed that it divined the reason for this limited
education and severely expressed its opinion about it. "The King," wrote
the Ambassador from Venice,[44] "applies himself the entire day to
learning the ballet.... Games, dances, and comedies are the only
subjects of conversation with the King, the intention being to turn him
aside from affairs more solid and important." The Ambassador returns to
the same subject upon the occasion of an Italian opera,[45] in which the
King exhibited himself as Apollo surrounded by beautiful persons
representing the nine muses:
Certain people blame this affair, but these do not understand the
politics of the Cardinal, who keeps the King expressly occupied
with pastimes, in order to turn his attention from solid and
important pursuits, and whilst the King is concerned in rolling
machines of wood upon the stage, the Cardinal moves and rolls at
his good pleasure, upon the theatre of France, all the machines of
state.
Some few observers, of whom Mazarin himself was one, divined that this
youth, with his air of being absorbed in tomfooleries, secretly
reflected upon his profession of King, and upon the means of rendering
himself capable of sustaining it. Nature had endowed him with the
instinct of command, joined to a very lively sentiment of the duties of
his rank. Louis says in his _Memoires_, "even from infancy the names
alone of the kings _faineants_ and mayors of the palace gave me pain if
pronounced in my presence."[46]
His preceptor, the Abbe of Perefixe, had encouraged this sentiment, at
the same time, however, permitting his pupil, by a contradiction for
which perhaps he was not responsible, to take the road which leads in
the direction of idleness, and thus making it possible for Louis to
become a true King _faineant_ himself.
Perefixe had written for the young King a history of King Henry the
Great in which one reads
that royalty is not the trade of a do-nothing, that it consists
almost entirely of action, that a King should make a pleasure
of his duty, that his enjoyment should be in reigning and he
only should know how to reign, that is, he should himself hold
the helm of the state. His glory is interested in this.
In truth, who does not know that there can be no honour in bearing
a title whose functions one does not fulfil--
a doctrine which would suppress the first ministers and by which Louis
XIV. profited later.
Chance came to the aid of the preceptor. On June 19, 1651, the ancient
governess of the King, Mme. de Lansac, disturbed him in the midst of a
lesson, in order to make a gift of "three letters written by Catherine
de Medicis to Henry III.,[47] her son, for his edification." Perefixe
took the letters and read them aloud, the King listening "with much
attention." One of them was almost a memorial.[48] In it, Catherine gave
to her son the same precept as Perefixe to his pupil: "a king must
reign," that is to say, carry out the functions belonging to his title.
In order to "reign," one must begin to work at once upon awakening, read
all the dispatches and afterwards the replies, speak personally to the
agents, receive every morning accounts of receipts and expenditures;
pursue this course from morning till night, and every day of one's life.
It was the programme for a slave to power. Louis XIV. made it his own,
in the bottom of his soul; he was not yet thirteen.
Such beautiful resolutions however, were destined to remain dead so long
as Mazarin lived. They could only be executed to the detriment of his
authority, and the idea of entering into a struggle with the Cardinal
was repugnant to the young King, partially on account of old affection,
partially on account of timidity and the habit of obedience.
The mind of Louis XIV. had however been awakened and the fruits of this
awakening were later visible, but for a time he was content to find good
excuses for leaving affairs alone. He explains in his _Memoires_ that he
was arrested by political reasons; as he had too much experience also
(however strange this word may appear when applied to a child so
foolishly brought up) not to realise the danger of a revolution in the
royal palace in the present condition of France after the devastations
of the civil wars.
In default of the science which one draws from books, Louis XIV. had
received lessons in realities from the Fronde: The riots and barricades,
the vehement discourse of the Parliament to his mother, the humiliating
flights with the Court, the periods of poverty in which his servants had
no dinner and he himself slept with his sheets full of holes, and wore
clothes too short, the battles in which his subjects fired upon him, the
treasons of his relations and of his nobility and their shameful
bargains; nothing of all this had been lost upon the young King.
With a surface order re-established, he perceived how troubled the
situation remained at bottom, how precarious, and he judged it prudent
to defer what he both "wished" and "feared," says very clearly his
_Memoires_. He queries if this were an error:
It is necessary [says he] to represent to one's self the state
of affairs: Agitations throughout the entire kingdom were at
their height; a foreign war continued in which a thousand
advantages had been lost to France owing to these domestic
troubles; a Prince of my own blood and a very great name at the
head of my enemies; many cabals in the state; the Parliaments
still in possession of usurped authority; in my own Court very
little of either fidelity or interest, and above all my
subjects, apparently the most submissive, were as great a care
and as much to be suspected as those most openly rebellious.
Was this the moment in which to expose the country to new shocks?
Louis XIV. had remained convinced[49] to the contrary, avowing, however,
that he had much to criticise in the fashions of Mazarin,
a minister [pursued he] re-established in spite of so many
factions, very able, very adroit, who loved me and whom I
loved, and who had rendered me great services, but whose
thoughts and manners were naturally very different from mine,
and whom I could not always contradict nor discredit without
anew exciting, by that image, however erroneous, of disgrace,
the same tempests which had been so difficult to calm.
The King had also to take into consideration his own extreme youth, and
his ignorance of affairs. He relates in regard to this point his ardent
desire for glory, his fear of beginning ill, "for one can never retrieve
one's self"; his attention to the course of events "in secret and
without a confidant"; his joy when he discovered that people both able
and consummate shared his fashion of thinking.
Considering everything, had there ever been a being urged forward and
retarded so equally, in his design to take upon himself "the guidance of
the state"?
This curious page has no other defect than that of having been dictated
by a man matured, in whose thoughts things have taken a clearness not
existing in the mind of the youth, and who believes himself to recollect
"determinations" when there existed in reality only "desires."
Louis XIV. would be unpardonable if full credit were given to his
_Memoires_. Why, if he saw so clearly, did he grumble at any kind of
work? When Louis was sixteen, Mazarin had arranged with him some days in
which he might be present at a council. The King was bored and retired
to talk of the next ballet and to play the guitar with his intimates.
Mazarin was obliged to scold him to force him to return and remain at
the council.
With a capacity for trifling, he cared for nothing serious, and there
was much laziness contained in his resolution to leave all to his
minister. The Court had formed its own opinion: it considered the young
King incapable of application. It was also said that he lacked
intelligence, and in this belief there was no error. Louis himself
alluded to this and said with simplicity, "I am very stupid."
The libertine youth who surrounded him, and whom his solemn air
restrained, did not conceal the fact that they found him a great bore,
as probably did also Madame de Maintenon a half-century later. The
Guiche and the Vardes believed him doomed to insignificance and did not
trouble themselves much about him. The city was less convinced that he
was a cipher, perhaps because otherwise it could not so easily have
taken his part. Paris was commencing to fear those princes with whom,
for one reason or another, first ministers were necessary, and the
Parisian bourgeoisie was on the watch for some proof of intelligence in
the young monarch. "It is said that the mind of the King is awakening,"
wrote Guy Patin in 1654; "God be thanked!"
This first light not having an apparent development, Paris, whilst
waiting for something better, admired the looks of the sovereign. "I
have to-day seen the King on his way to the chase," again wrote Guy
Patin four years later. "A fine Prince, strong and healthy; he is tall
and graceful; it is a pity that he does not better understand his
duties."[50] His serious air was also lauded, his dislike to debauchery
in any form, and the modesty which made him bravely reply before the
entire Court, to a question about a new play: "I never judge a subject
about which I know nothing."[51]
This was not the response of a fool.
In fine, as he was very cold, very capable of dissimulation, as he spoke
little, through calculation as much as through instinct, and generally
confined his conversation to trifles, this youth upon whom all France
had its eyes fixed remained an unknown quantity to his subjects.
In September, 1657, two strangers crossing the Pont Neuf found
themselves in the midst of a pressure of people. The crowd precipitated
itself with cries of joy towards a carriage whose livery had been
recognised.
It was the Grande Mademoiselle returning from exile, and coming to take
possession of the palace of the Luxembourg, in which her father
permitted her to lodge, feeling certain that he himself should never
return to it. The two strangers noted in their _Journal de Voyage_[52]
that the Parisians bore a "particular affection" for this Princess,
because she had behaved like a "true amazon" during the civil war.
The Court had resigned itself to the inevitable. Mademoiselle had
remained popular in Paris, and her exploits during the Fronde and her
fine bearing at the head of her regiment were remembered with
enthusiasm. She only passed through the city at this time, having
affairs to regulate in the Provinces. Upon her definite return on
December 31st, the Court and the city crowded to see her. The Luxembourg
overflowed during several days, after which, when society had convinced
itself that Mademoiselle had no longer a face "fresh as a fully blown
rose,"[53] its curiosity was satisfied and it occupied itself with
something else.
[Illustration: =LOUIS XIV. AS A YOUNG MAN= From a chalk drawing in the
British Museum Print Room]
Mademoiselle herself had much to do. The idea of marrying the little
Monsieur had not left her mind since the meeting at Sedan. She was
assured that the Prince was dying of desire for her, and Mademoiselle
naively responded that she very well perceived this. "This does not
displease me," adds she; "a young Prince, handsome, well-made, brother
of the King, appears a good match."
In expectation of the betrothal, she stopped her pursuits of the happy
interval at Saint-Fargeau in which she had loved intellectual pleasures,
in order to make herself the comrade of a child only absorbed in
pastimes belonging to his age, and passed the winter in dancing, in
masquerading, in rushing through the promenades and the booths of the
fair of Saint-Germain.[54]
The public remarked that the little Monsieur appeared "not very gay"
with his tall cousin, and troubled himself but little to entertain
her,[55] and that he would have preferred other companions better suited
to his seventeen years.
Mademoiselle did not perceive this. Philip, Duke of Anjou, had a face of
insipid beauty posed upon a little round body. He did not lack _esprit_,
had not an evil disposition, and would have made an amiable prince if
reasons of state had not tended to reduce him to the condition of a
marionette.
His mother and Mazarin had brought him up as a girl, for fear of his
later troubling his elder brother, and this education had only too well
succeeded. By means of sending him to play with the future Abbe de
Choisy, who put on a robe and patches to receive him; by means of having
him dressed and barbered by the Queen's maids of honour and putting him
in petticoats and occupying him with dolls, he had been made an
ambiguous being, a species of defective girl having only the weaknesses
of his own sex. Monsieur had a new coat every day and it worried him to
spot it, and to be seen with his hair undressed or in profile when he
believed himself handsomer in full face. Paris possessed no greater
gossip; he babbled, he meddled, he embroiled people by repeating
everything, and this amused him.
Mademoiselle considered it her duty to "preach" to him of "noble deeds,"
but she wasted her time. He was laziness and weakness itself. The two
cousins were ill-adapted to each other in every way.
When they entered a salon together, Monsieur short and full, attired in
the costume of a hunter, his garments sewed from head to foot with
precious stones, Mademoiselle a little masculine of figure and manner
and negligent in her dress, they were a singular couple. Those who did
not know them opened their eyes wide, and they were often seen together
in the winter at least, for the society was at this date most mixed,
even in the most elite circles.
From Epiphany to Ash-Wednesday, the Parisians had no greater pleasure
than to promenade masked at night, and to enter without invitation into
any house where an entertainment was taking place. Louis XIV. gladly
joined in these gaieties. Upon one evening of Mardi-Gras, when he was
thus running the streets with Mademoiselle, they met Monsieur dressed as
a girl with blond hair.[56] Keepers of inns sent their guests to profit
by this chance of free entry. A young Dutchman related that he went the
same night "with those of his inn" to five great balls, the first at the
house of Mme. de Villeroy, the last with the Duchess of Valentinois, and
that he had seen at each place more than two hundred masks.[57]
The crowd would not permit that entrance should be refused on any
pretext.
The same Dutchman reports with a note of bitterness that on another
evening it had been impossible to penetrate into the house of the
Marechal de l'Hopital, because the King being there, measures had been
taken to avoid too great a crowd. Custom obliged every one to submit to
receiving society, choice or not. At a grand fete given by the Duc de
Lesdiguieres, which in the bottom of his heart he was offering to Mme.
de Sevigne, "The King had hardly departed when the crowd commenced to
scuffle and to pillage every thing, until, as it was stated, it became
necessary to replace the candles of the chandeliers four or five times
and this single article cost M. de Lesdiguieres more than a hundred
pistoles."[58]
Such domestic manners had the encouragement of the King, who also left
his doors open upon the evenings on which he danced a ballet. He did
better still. He went officially to sup "with the Sieur de la
Baziniere," ancient lackey become financier and millionaire, and having
the bearing, the manners, and the ribbon cascades of the Marquis de
Mascarille. He desired that Mademoiselle should invite to the
Luxembourg, Mme. de l'Hopital, ancient laundress married twice for her
beautiful eyes; the first time by a _partisan_, the second by a Marshal
of France. These lessons were not lost upon the nobility. Mesalliances
were no more discredited, even the lowest, the most shameful, provided
that the dot was sufficient. A Duke and Peer had married the daughter of
an old charioteer. The Marechal d'Estrees was the son-in-law of a
_partisan_ known under the name of Morin the Jew. Many others could be
cited, for the tendency increased from year to year.
In 1665, the King having entered Parliament,[59] in order to confirm an
edict, a group of men amongst whom was Olivier d'Ormesson were regarding
the Tribune in which were seated the ladies of the Court. Some one
thought of counting how many of these were daughters of parvenues or of
business men; he found three out of six. Two others were nieces of
Mazarin, married to French nobles.[60] The single one of aristocratic
descent was Mlle. d'Alencon, a half-sister of the Grande Mademoiselle.
One could hardly have anticipated such figures, even allowing for
chance.
The King, however, approved of this state of affairs and the nobility
was ruined; every one seized on what support he could. The general
course of affairs was favourable to this confusion of rank. From the
triumphal re-entry of Mazarin in 1653, until his death in 1661, a kind
of universal freedom continued at the Court which surprised the ancient
Frondeurs on their return from exile. The young monarch himself
encouraged familiarities and lack of etiquette.
It was the nieces of the Cardinal who were largely responsible for these
changes in manners and who gained their own profit through the
additional freedom, since Marie, the third of the Mancini, was soon to
almost touch the crown with the tip of her finger. Mademoiselle had some
trouble in accustoming herself to the new manners towards the King.
For me [says she], brought up to have great respect, this is
most astonishing, and I have remained long time without
habituating myself to this new freedom. But when I saw how
others acted, when the Queen told me one day that the
King hated ceremony, then I yielded; for without this high
authority the faults of manner could not be possible with others.
The pompous Louis XIV. wearing the great wig of the portraits did not
yet exist, and the Louvre of 1658 but little resembled the particular
and formal Versailles of the time of Saint-Simon.[61]
The licence extended to morals. Numbers of women of rank behaved badly,
some incurred the suspicion of venality, and no faults were novelties;
but vice keeps low company and it was this result which proud people
like Mademoiselle could not suffer.
When it was related to her that the Duchesse de Chatillon, daughter of
Montmorency-Boutteville, had received money from the Abbe Foucquet[62]
and wiped out the debt by permitting such lackey-like jokes as breaking
her mirrors with blows of the foot, she was revolted. "It is a strange
thing," wrote she, "this difference of time; who would have said to the
Admiral Coligny, 'The wife of your grandson will be maltreated by the
Abbe Foucquet'?--he would not have believed it, and there was no mention
at all of this name of Foucquet in his time."
In the mind of Mademoiselle, who had lived through so many periods, it
was the low birth of the Abbe which would have affected the Admiral.
"Whatever may be said," added she, "I can never believe that persons of
quality abandon themselves to the point which their slanderers say. For
even if they did not consider their own safety, worldly honour is in my
opinion so beautiful a thing that I do not comprehend how any one can
despise it."
Mademoiselle did not transgress upon the respect due to the hierarchy of
rank; for the rest, she contented herself with what are called the
morals of respectable people, which have always been sufficiently
lenient. She understood, however, all the difference between this
morality and Christian principles.
The _Provinciales_ (1656) had made it clear to the blindest that it was
necessary to choose between the two. Mademoiselle had under this
influence made a visit to Port Royal des Champs[63] and had been
entirely won by these "admirable people" who lived like saints and who
spoke and wrote "the finest eloquence," while the Jesuits would have
done better to remain silent, "having nothing good to say and saying it
very badly," "for assuredly there were never fewer preachers amongst
them than at present nor fewer good writers, as appears by their
letters. This is why for all sorts of reasons they would have done
better not to write."
Seeing Mademoiselle so favourably impressed, one of the Monsieurs of
Port Royal, Arnauld d'Andilly, said upon her departure, "You are going
to the Court; you can give to the Queen account of what you have
seen."--"I assure you that I will willingly do this."
Knowing her disposition, there is but little doubt that she kept her
word; but this was all. The worthy Mademoiselle, incapable of anything
low or base, did not dream for a second of allowing the austere
morality, ill fitted for the needs of a court, to intervene in
influencing her judgments upon others, or in the choice of her friends.
She blamed the Duchesse de Chatillon for reasons with which virtue,
properly named, had nothing to do. We see her soon after meeting Mme. de
Montespan, because common morality has nothing to blame in a King's
mistress.
Mme. de Sevigne agreed with Mademoiselle and they were not alone. This
attitude gave a kind of revenge to the Jesuits.
Tastes became as common as sentiments; those of the King were not yet
formed, and the pleasure taken in the ballet in the theatre of the
Louvre injured the taste for what was, in fact, no longer tragedy.
Corneille had given up writing for the first time in 1652, after the
failure of his _Pertharite_. The following year, Quinault made his debut
and pleased. He taught in his tragi-comedies, flowery and tender, that
"Love makes everything permissible," which had been said by Honore
d'Urfe in _l'Astree_, a half-century previous, and he retied, without
difficulty, after the Corneillian parenthesis, the thread of a doctrine
which has been transmitted without interruption to our own days.
Love justifies everything, for the right of passion is sacred, nothing
subsists before it.
Dans l'empire amoureux,
Le devoir n'a point de puissance.
L'eclat de beaux yeux adoucit bien un crime;
Au regard des amants tout parait legitime.[64]
The idea which this verse expresses can be found throughout the works of
Quinault. He has said it again and again, with the same langourous,
insinuating sweetness, for a period which lasted more than thirty years,
and in the beginning no one very seriously divided with him the
attention of the public.
At the appearance of his first piece in 1653, Racine was fourteen;
Moliere did not return to Paris until 1658. Corneille, in truth, was
preparing his return to the theatre; but he found when his last
tragedies were played, that he had done well to study Quinault, and in
doing this he had not wasted his time;--a decisive proof of the echo to
which souls responded,[65] and of the increasing immorality of the new
era.
Thus the Court of France lost its prestige. The eclat cast by the Fronde
upon the men and women seeking great adventures had been replaced by no
new enthusiasms. The pleasures to which entire lives were devoted had
not always been refining, as we have seen above, and people had not
grown in intelligence. The bold crowd of the Mazarins gave the tone to
the Louvre, and this tone lacked delicacy. The Queen, Anne of Austria,
groaned internally, but she had loosed the reins; except in the affair
of her son's marriage she had nothing to refuse to the nieces of
Cardinal Mazarin.
Because the Court was in general lazy and frivolous, a hasty opinion of
the remainder of France should not be formed. The Court did not fairly
represent the entire nation; outside of it there was room for other
opinions and sentiments. It was during the years of 1650 to 1656, which
appear to us at first sight almost a moral desert, that private charity
made in the midst of France one of its greatest efforts, an effort very
much to the honour of all concerned in it.
I have noticed elsewhere[66] the frightful poverty of the country during
the Fronde. This distress which was changing into desert places one
strip after another of French territory, must be relieved, and amongst
those in authority no one was found capable of doing it.
It is hardly possible to represent to one's self to-day the condition
left by the simple passage of an army belonging to a civilised people,
through a French or German land, two or three hundred years ago.
The idea of restricting the sufferings caused by war to those which are
inevitable is a novel one. In the seventeenth century, on the contrary,
the effort was to increase them. The chiefs for the most part showed a
savage desire to excite the mania for destruction which is so easily
aroused with soldiers during a campaign. Towards the end of the Fronde,
some troops belonging to Conde, then in the service of the King of
Spain, occupied his old province of Bourgogne. If any district of France
could have hoped to be respected by the Prince, it was this one; his
father had possessed it before him and it was full of their friends.
Ties of this kind, however, were of no advantage. March 23, 1652, the
States of Bourgogne wrote to M. de Bielle, their deputy at Court:
The enemies having already burned fourteen villages [the names
follow], besides others since burned, these fire-fiends are
still in campaign and continuing these horrible ravages, all
which has been under the express order of M. le Prince, which
the commandant [de la ville] de Seurre has received, to burn
the entire Province if it be possible. The same Sieur de Bielle
can judge by the account of these fires, to which there has so
far been no impediment presented, in what state the Province
will be in a short time.
The common soldier troubled himself little whether the sacked region was
on the one or the other side of the frontier. He made hardly any
difference.
Some weeks after the fires in Bourgogne, two armies tortured the Brie.
The one belonged to the King, the other to the Duc de Lorraine, and
there was only a shade less of cruelty with the French forces than with
the others. When all the troops had passed, the country was filled with
charnel houses, and there are charnel houses and charnel houses.
That of Rampillon,[67] particularly atrocious, must be placed to the
account of the Lorraines: "at each step one met mutilated people, with
scattered limbs; women cut in four quarters after violation; men
expiring under the ruins of burning houses, others spitted."[68] No
trouble was taken to suppress these hells of infection.
It would be difficult to find any fashion of carrying on a war both more
ferocious and more stupid. Some chiefs of divisions, precursers of
humanitarian ideas, timidly protested, in the name of interest only,
against a system which always gave to campaigning armies the plague,
famine, and universal hatred. A letter addressed to Mazarin, and signed
by four of these, Fabert at the head, supplicates him to arrest the
ravages of a foreigner in the services of France, M. de Rosen. Mazarin
took care to pay no attention to this protest: it would have been
necessary first to pay Rosen and his soldiers. If it is expected to find
any sense of responsibility in the State, in the opinion of
contemporaries, for saving the survivors, left without bread, animals,
nor harvests, without roof and without working tools, there is
disappointment; the State held itself no more responsible for public
disasters than for the poor, always with it.
The conception of social duty was not yet born. Public assistance was in
its infancy, and the little which existed had been completely
disorganised by the general disorders; like everything else. Each city
took care of its beggars or neglected them according to its own
resources and circumstances. On the other hand, the idea of Christian
charity had taken a strong hold upon some circles, under the combined
influence of the Jansenism which exacted from its devotees a living
faith; of a secret Catholic society whose existence is one of the most
curious historical discoveries of these last years[69]; and of a poor
saint whose peasant airs and whose patched _soutane_ caused much
laughter when he presented himself before the Queen. Vincent de Paul is
easily recognised. Relations with great people had not changed him. It
was said of him after years of Court society, "M. Vincent is always M.
Vincent," and this was true: men of this calibre never change, happily
for the world.
He became the keynote of the impulse which caused the regeneration of
provincial life, almost ruined by the wars of the Fronde. Even after the
work was ended it would be difficult to decide upon the share of each of
these bodies in this colossal enterprise. The society to which allusion
has been made was founded in 1627, by the Duc de Ventadour, whose
mystical thought had led him, as often happens, to essentially practical
works. The name of Compagnie du Saint Sacrement was given it, and
without doubt its supreme end was "to make honoured the Holy Sacrament."
Precisely on account of this, the society sought to "procure" for itself
"all the good" in its power, for nothing is more profitable to religion
than support, material as well as spiritual and moral, distributed under
its inspiration and as one might say on its own part.
One passes easily from the practice of charity, a source of precious
teaching, to the correction of manners. After comes the desire to
control souls, which naturally leads to the destruction of heresies,
with or without gentleness.
This programme was responsible for many admirable charitable works, two
centuries in advance of current ideas, and, at the same time, for
cruelties, infamies, all the vices inseparable from the sectarian spirit
in which the end justifies the means.
Once started, the society rapidly increased, always hidden, and
multiplying precautions not to be discovered, since neither clergy nor
royalty were well disposed towards this mysterious force, from which
they were constantly receiving shocks without being able to discover
whence came the blows.
It was an occult power, analogous in its extent and its intolerance, and
even in the ways and means employed, to the Free Masonry of the present.
The Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement had links throughout France and in all
classes. Anne of Austria was included in its sacred band and a shoemaker
played in it an important role. Vincent de Paul enrolled himself in the
ranks towards the year 1635, contributed to the good, and probably was
ignorant of the evil to be found in its folds. Dating from his
affiliation, his charitable works so mingled with those of the society
that it was no longer to be recognised. The society brought to the Saint
powerful succour, and aided him effectively in finding the support of
which he had need; it would be difficult to say from whom came the first
idea of many good works.
As for what at present concerns us, however, the point of departure is
known. It was neither Vincent de Paul nor the Compagnie du
Saint-Sacrement which conceived and put in train the prodigious work of
relieving the Provinces. The first committee of relief was founded in
Paris, in 1649, by a Janseniste, M. de Bernieres, who was also
responsible for the invention of the printed "Relations" which were
informing all France of the miseries to be relieved. It was the first
time that Charity had aided itself through publicity. It soon found the
value of this. M. de Bernieres and his committee, in which the wives of
members of Parliament dominated, were soon able to commence in Picardie
and Champagne the distribution of bread, clothing, grain, and working
implements. Hospitals were established. They put an end to the frightful
feeling of desolation of these unfortunate populations, pillaged during
so many years by mercenaries of all races and tongues. But the number of
workers was small even if their zeal was great, and the Janseniste
community was not equipped for a task of this dimension. From the end of
the following year, the direction of the enterprise passed entirely into
the hands of Vincent de Paul, who led with him his army of sisters of
charity, his mission priests, and an entire contingent of allies, secret
but absolutely devoted.
It does not seem as if at first there was any conflict. Mme. de
Lamoignon and the Presidente de Herse were the right arms of M. Vincent
as they had been of M. de Bernieres. When the Queen of Poland,[70] a
spiritual daughter of Port-Royal and brought up in France, wished to
subscribe to the work, she sent her money to the Mother Angelique,
telling her to communicate with M. Vincent. But this harmony was of
short duration. The members of what the public were going to baptise
with the sobriquet of "Cabale des Devots," not being able to discover
the real name, could not suffer the Janseniste concurrence in charitable
works. They showered upon M. de Bernieres a mass of odious calumnies and
denunciations which resulted in the exile of this good man.
This was one of the most abominable of the bad actions to which a
sectarian spirit has pushed human beings.
The "Relations" were continued under the direction of Vincent de Paul.
One knows through them and through the documents of the time, the
details of the task undertaken. The first necessity for the public
health was the clearing the surface of the ground, in the provinces in
which there had been fighting, of the putrifying bodies, and of the
filthiness left by the armies. There was one village from which such an
odour exhaled that no one would approach it. A "Relation" of 1652
describes in these terms the environs of Paris:
At Etrechy, the living are mingled with the dead, and the
country is full of the latter. At Villeneuve-Saint-Georges,
Crosne, Limay, one hundred and seventy-four ill people were
found in the last extremity, with neither beds, clothes, nor
bread.
It was necessary to commence by taking away the seeds of
infection which increased the maladies, by interring the
corpses of men, of dead horses and cattle, and removing the
heaps of dirt which the armies had left behind. The cleansing
of the soil was the specialty of M. Vincent and one of his most
signal benefits. He employed for this work his mission priests
and his sisters of charity. The missionaries placed themselves
at the head of the workmen, the sisters sought the abandoned
sick. Cloth and cap died at need "the arms in the hand," said
their chief, but their work was good; and finally the work was
taken hold of in the right way.
After the dead the living:
The cure of Boult[71] [reports another "Relation"] assures us
that he buried three of his parishioners dead from hunger;
others were living only upon cut-up straw mixed with earth, of
which was composed a food called bread. Five tainted and
decaying horses were devoured; an old man aged seventy-five years
had entered the presbytery to roast a piece of horse-flesh, the
animal having died of scab fifteen days previously, was infected
with worms, and had been found cast into a foul ditch.... At
Saint-Quentin, in the faubourgs, in which the houses had been
demolished, the missionaries discovered the last inhabitants in
miserable huts, "in each of which," wrote one of them, "I found one
or two sick, in one single hut ten; two widows, each having four
children, slept together on the ground, having nothing whatever,
not even a sheet." Another Ecclesiastic, in his visit, having met
with many closed doors, upon forcing them open discovered that the
sick were too feeble to open them having eaten nothing during two
days, and having beneath them only a little half rotten straw; the
number of these poor was so great that without succour from Paris,
the citizens under the apprehension of a siege, not being able to
nourish them, had resolved to cast them over the walls.
Millions were needed to relieve such distress, but Vincent de Paul and
his associates had a better dream; they wished to put these dying
populations in a condition to work again and to undertake the reparation
of the ruins themselves. The enterprise was organised in spite of
obstacles which appeared insurmountable, the exhaustion of France and
the difficulty of communication being the principal. The Parisians
raised enormous sums and sent gifts of all kinds of materials, and found
the means of transporting provisions. The committee divided the environs
of Paris; Mme. Joly took the care of one village; the Presidente de
Nesmond, four villages; and so on. Missionaries were sent outside the
boundaries. One of the later biographers of Vincent de Paul[72] values
at twelve millions of francs, at this date worth about sixty millions,
the sums distributed, without counting money spent directly for the work
of piety nor for the support of those engaged in it. However this may
be, this latter body certainly consumed a large portion. The immensity
of the enterprise, and its apparent boldness, gives us an idea of the
wealth and power of the middle classes of the seventeenth century. After
Vincent de Paul and M. de Bernieres, the honour for this work of relief
belongs to the parliamentary world and the Parisian bourgeoisie; the
aristocracy only playing a very secondary role. The middle classes
provided for this enormous effort, at a period in which all revenues
failed at once. We are told that many were forced to borrow, that others
sold their jewels and articles of silver; still this supposes luxury and
credit. In one way or another, the citizen was in a position to give,
while the small noble of Lorraine or of Beauce was obliged to receive;
and this emphasises an historic lesson. Gentlemen as well as peasants
lacked bread. After remaining two days without eating, one is ready to
accept alms; at the end of three days, to demand them on account of the
children. The decadence of the one class, the ascension of the other
until their turn comes; it has always been the same since the world
began.
One last detail, and perhaps the most significant:
There is no reference in the Memoirs of the times[73] to the principal
work of Vincent de Paul. Their authors would have made it a matter of
conscience not to forget a Court intrigue or a scandalous adventure; but
what can be interesting in people who are naked and hungry? One avoids
speaking of them. It is even better not to think of them. In 1652, the
year in which poverty was at its height in oppressed Paris, the Mother
Angelique wrote from Port-Royal, to the Queen of Poland (June 28th):
With the exception of the few actually engaged in charity, the
rest of the world live in as much luxury as ever. The Court and
the Tuileries are as thronged as ever, collations and the rest
of the superfluities go on as always. Paris amuses itself with
the same fury as if its streets were not filled with frightful
spectacles. And, what is more horrible, fashion will not suffer
the priests to preach penitence (Letter of July 12th).
The lack of pity for the poor was almost general among the so-called
higher classes. There is no need of too carefully inquiring as to what
is passing in hovels.
Vincent de Paul and his allies struggled six years. Not once did the
government come to their aid, and the war always continued; for one ruin
relieved, the armies made ten others. The group of the "good souls" who
had made these prodigious sacrifices was at length used up, as one might
say, and was never reinforced, in spite of the inexhaustible source of
devotion offered by the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement. This body had been
composed of men and women so exceptional in character, as well as in
intelligence, that its ranks, emptied by death, and by the exhaustion of
means and courage, could not be filled up. In 1655, the receipts of the
committee were visibly diminished. Two years later, the resources were
entirely exhausted and the work of relief remained unfinished.
It was well that it was attempted; a leven of good has remained from it
in the national soul.
The actual benefits however, were promptly effaced; the famine of 1659
to 1662, especially in the latter year, counts amongst the most
frightful of the century, perhaps in our entire history. The excess of
material poverty engendered immense moral misery, particularly in the
large cities, in which luxury stood side by side with the most frightful
conditions, and Paris became both excitable and evil, as always when it
suffers.
The Carnival of 1660 was the most noisy and disorderly which old
Parisians had ever known. Great and small sought amusement with a kind
of rage, and dissensions and quarrels abounded from the top to the
bottom of the social scale. Public places were noisy with riots and
affrays. During the nights, masks were masters of the streets, and as
has been seen above, no security existed with these composite crowds,
which stole candles from the houses into which they had surged.
One ball alone received in a single evening the visit of sixty-five
masks, who ran through the city three nights in succession. These
hysterics in Paris, while France was dying with hunger, are so much the
more striking, inasmuch as the Court was not there to communicate to the
outer world its eternal need of agitation and amusement. Louis XIV.
spent a large portion of these critical years in journeying through his
kingdom. One of the first journeys, lasting from October 27th to the
following January 27th, had for its end the meeting of the Princess of
Savoie at Lyons. There had been some question of marrying this Princess
to the young King. On passing to Dijon, the Court stopped more than
fifteen days. Mademoiselle tells us the reason for this delay; it is not
very glorious for royalty. The Parliament of Dijon refused to register
certain edicts which aggravated the burdens of the province. Le Tellier,
"on the part of the King," promised that there should be no more
difficulty if the states of Bourgogne would bring their subsidy to a sum
which was indicated. "Upon which they agreed to what was demanded and
presented themselves to account to the King."
Upon the next day, with a cynical contempt for the royal promise, "Her
Majesty went to the Dijon Parliament to register the deeds."[74]
Mademoiselle had the curiosity to be present at the session. The first
president did the only thing in his power. He courageously expressed his
"regrets" and was praised by all those who heard him.
The Court hastily departed the following day, leaving Dijon and the
entire province "in a certain consternation." Mademoiselle blamed only
the manner of action. At the bottom of her heart, she had the belief of
her times: that the sovereign owed only control to his people, and that
there was no question of giving them happiness.
Some weeks after the incident at Lyons, the vicinity of the principality
of Dombes[75] gave her the desire to visit this place, which she had
never seen. Dombes did not pay any impost to the King, and this fact
alone sufficed to render it prosperous. Mademoiselle was scandalised at
this prosperity. The peasants were well clothed, "they ate meat four
times a day," and there were "no really poor people" in the country;
"also," pursued Mademoiselle, "they, up to this time, have paid no
duties, and it would perhaps be better that they should do so, for they
are do-nothings, taking no interest in either work or trade."
The people had left everything and dressed themselves in their fine
clothes to receive Mademoiselle. In order to thank them, Mademoiselle
drew from them all the money she could. It is necessary to recollect,
however, that in the eyes of the great, even those of the better sort, a
peasant was hardly a man. It would hardly be worth while for us to be
indignant at this attitude. We now admit that the so-called superior
races have the right to exploit those considered inferior, and thus at
need destroy them. It was the habit of our fathers to treat a lower
class as to-day we treat a less advanced race; the sentiment is
precisely the same.
Upon her return from Dombes, Mademoiselle found the Court again at
Lyons. Every one was all eyes and ears for a spectacle which might
derange the admitted ideas of kings. Marie Mancini was trying to make
Louis XIV. marry her, and the attempt had not so absurd an air as might
be imagined. The Savoie project had failed under painful conditions,
which gave subject of thought to the courtiers. The King had conducted
himself like an ill-bred man to the Princess Marguerite.
People were demanding whether the Spanish marriage was also going to
fail, and with it the so greatly desired peace, because it pleased two
lovers, one of whom ought not to have forgotten his kingly duties, to
proclaim the sovereign rights of passion. Anne of Austria became uneasy.
Mazarin, yielding to temptation, left the field to his niece, who "took
possession" of the young King with looks and speech. She fascinated him,
and he swore all that she wished. The contest was not an equal one
between the passionate Italian and the timid and somewhat unformed Louis
XIV.
On his return from Lyons, Louis knelt down before his mother and
Mazarin, supplicating them to permit him to marry the one he loved. He
found them inflexible. The Queen realised that such a _mesalliance_
would cast disrepute on royalty. The Cardinal was torn by conflicting
emotions, but in the end sent away his niece.
A second journey lasted more than a year. The Court set out on June 29,
1659, and passed through Blois. It stopped with Gaston. We owe to the
_Memoires_ of Mademoiselle a last glimpse of this Prince, formerly so
brilliant, now become a lazy good-for-nothing in his provincial life,
where nothing of Parisian fashion was found; neither toilettes nor
cooking, nor household elegance, nor even Monsieur himself, who no
longer knew how to receive, and was vexed that the King should kill his
pheasants. He permitted it to be seen that he was put out, and this
became so plain that every one was eager to depart, and there was a
sudden scattering.
The eldest of his daughters by his last marriage, Marguerite d'Orleans,
had a great reputation for beauty. Her parents had for a long time
anticipated seeing her Queen of France.
On the night of the King's arrival at Blois, this damsel was disfigured
with mosquito bites. Her dancing was much extolled, but on this special
evening, she danced very badly. Gaston had announced that this little
girl of ten "would astonish every one with her brilliant conversation."
No one could draw a single word from her. In short, nothing succeeded.
Mademoiselle was not especially vexed at this failure; she had trembled
at the thought of seeing her younger sister "above her."
Hardly had the Court remounted their carriages, before the royal
cavalcade, according to the universal custom, commenced to mock its
hosts. The King joked at the sight of his uncle's face on seeing the
pheasants fall dead. Mademoiselle laughed with the others. She had,
however, been moved by a tender scene played by her father.
He had come to awaken her at four o'clock in the morning:
He seated himself on my bed and said: "I believe that you will
not be vexed at being waked since I shall not soon have the
chance of again seeing you. You are going to take a long
journey. I am old, exhausted; I may die during your absence. If
I do die, I recommend your sisters to you. I know very well
that you do not love Madame: that her behaviour towards you has
not been all it should be; but her children have had nothing to
do with this, for my sake take care of them. They will have
need of you; as for Madame, she will be of little help to
them."
He embraced me three or four times. I received all this with
much tenderness; for I have a good heart. We separated on the
best terms, and I went again to sleep.
Mademoiselle believed that at length they again loved each other. Six
weeks later a scandal broke out at the Court of France, then at
Bordeaux.
The Duc de Savoie had refused to marry the Princess Marguerite
d'Orleans, and Mademoiselle was accused of having secretly written to
him that her sister was a humpback. The accusation came from Gaston
himself, who said that he had proof of it. This was a most disagreeable
incident for Mademoiselle and further illusion was impossible; Gaston
was always Gaston, the most dangerous man in France.
From Bordeaux, the Court went to Toulouse; there it was rejoined by
Mazarin, who had just signed the peace of the Pyrenees (November 7, 1659).
All histories give the articles of this peace. The results for Europe
have been summed up in some brilliant lines written by the great German
historian, Leopold Ranke, who had been struck with the advantages which
this treaty gave France over Germany:
If it were necessary to characterise in a general fashion the
results of this peace ... we would say that the importance of
the treaty consisted in the formation and extension of the
great (geographically) military system of the French monarchy.
On all sides, to the Pyrenees, to the Alps, above all, to the
frontiers of the German Empire and of the Netherlands, France
acquired new fortified points ... many positions as important
for defence as favourable for attack. The position of France
upon the upper Rhine, which it owes to the peace of Westphalia,
received by this new treaty its greatest extension.[76]
Mazarin found that he had done well in himself following the
campaigning armies. He knew the military importance of most of the
places. The Spanish negotiator could not have said as much. In the
interior, the first comer could easily comprehend the political benefits
of a treaty which should as far as possible abolish the past. Conde had
been included in the terms of the peace and returned to France, well
resolved to keep quiet. He rejoined the Court at Aix, January 27, 1660,
and found there was a certain curiosity exhibited as to how he would be
received.
Mademoiselle hastened to Anne of Austria: "My niece," said the Queen to
her, "return to your own dwelling; M. le Prince has especially asked
that I should be absolutely alone when I first receive him."
I began to smile with vexation, but said: "I am nobody; I
believe that M. le Prince will be very astonished if he does
not find me here." The Queen insisted in a very sharp tone; I
went away resolved to complain to M. le Cardinal; this I did on
the following day, saying that if such a thing happened again,
I should leave the Court. He made many excuses. This was
Mazarin's system. He poured forth explanations but in no way
changed his methods in the future.
It is known that M. le Prince demanded pardon on his knees, and that he
found before him in Louis XIV. a judge grave and cold, who held himself
"very straight."[77] To fight against the King was decidedly no more to
be considered a joke; it could not be overlooked, even if one were the
conqueror of Rocroy.
Mademoiselle did not succeed in comprehending the real situation. Conde,
surprised and deceived, felt his way. One evening at a dance, when
talking with Mademoiselle, the King joined them. The conversation fell
upon the Fronde. On the part of a man of as much _esprit_ as M. le
Prince, one can well believe that this was not by chance: "The war was
much spoken of," relates Mademoiselle, "and we joked at all the follies
of which we had been guilty, the King with the best grace in the world
joining in these pleasantries. Although I was suffering with a severe
headache, I was not in the least bored." Mademoiselle had laughed
without any second thoughts. Conde, clearer sighted, trembled during the
remainder of his days, before this monarch so capable of dissimulation,
and so perfectly master of himself.
Almost at the same moment there expired another of those belated feudal
ideas, which neither royalty nor manners could any longer suffer among
the nobility. Gaston d'Orleans died at Blois, February 2nd,[78] his
death being caused by an attack of apoplexy. They had heard him murmur
from his bed regarding his wife and children, _Domus mea domus
desolationis vocabitur_ ("My house will be called the House of
Desolation"). He spoke better than he knew. Madame surpassed herself in
blunders, and still more. She went to dinner while her husband was
receiving the last unction, sent away the servants of Monsieur
immediately after the final sigh, locked up everything, and concerned
herself no more. Her women refused a sheet in which to wrap the body; it
was necessary to beg one from the ladies of the Court. Some priests came
to sit up with the dead, but finding neither "light nor fire" they
returned, and the corpse remained alone, more completely abandoned than
had been that of his brother, the King, Louis XIII. The body was borne
without "pomp or expense"[79] to Saint-Denis, and the widow hastened to
Paris, to take possession of the Palace of the Luxembourg, in the
absence of Mademoiselle.
The Court did not take the trouble to feign regrets. The King gave the
tone in saying to his cousin, gaily, after the first formal compliments:
"You will see my brother to-morrow in a training mantle. I believe that
he is delighted at the news of your father's death. He believes that he
is heir to all his belongings and state; he can talk of nothing else;
but he must wait awhile."
Anne of Austria heard this, and smiled. "It is true," pursues
Mademoiselle, "that Monsieur appeared the next day in a wonderful
mantle." Mademoiselle had great difficulty in keeping her own
countenance. Her grief was, however, very real, notwithstanding the
past, or rather, perhaps, on account of what had gone before; it was,
however, only an impulse affected by the impression of the moment. She
exhibited this sorrow a little too effectively:
I wished to wear the most formal and deepest mourning. Every
one of my household was clad in black, even to the cooks, the
servants, and the valets; the coverings of the mules, all the
caparisons of my horses and of the other beasts of burden.
Nothing could be more beautiful the first time we marched than
to see this grand train, expressive of grief. It had an air
very magnificent and of real grandeur. Everybody says how much
wealth she must possess!
The mules' mourning is well worth the training mantle of the little
Monsieur. This magnificent funeral pomp had the one inconvenience of
recalling to all comers that Mademoiselle must resign other pleasures.
At the end of some weeks, she would have willingly resumed her share in
Court gaieties; Anne of Austria kindly commanded her to return to life.
The summer was, however, approaching. The Court continued to drag itself
from city to city, waiting until it should please the King of Spain to
bring his daughter, and the time seemed long. Mazarin shut himself up to
work. Louis drilled the soldiers of his guard. The Queen Mother spent
long days in convents. Mademoiselle wrote, or worked tapestry. A large
number of the courtiers, no longer able to stand the ennui, had returned
to Paris; those who remained, lived lives of complete idleness. The King
had at this time a fine occasion to study the condition of his
provinces; but he did not possess an investigating mind. He spent long
months in front of the Pyrenees, without seeking to know anything of
their formation, showing an unusual indifference to knowledge, even for
this period. One of the few persons who risked themselves in the
Pyrenees, Mme. de Motteville, relates her astonishment at discovering
valleys, torrents, cultivated fields, and inhabitants. She had believed
that she should only find a great wall of rock, "deserted and untilled."
The journey went on; but nature had not yet the right of entrance into
literature, and society spoke but rarely of its charms. Of the vast
world, only what came directly under the eyes of the individual was
known.
At length, on June 2d (1660), the Court of France, "kicking its heels"
at Saint-Jean-de-Luz during an entire month, received news of the
arrival at Fontarabia of Philip IV. and of the Infanta Marie Therese.
The next day, the marriage ceremonies commenced.
Six long days and the best intentions on both sides were needed to
consummate this great affair without offending etiquette. The problem
presented was this: How to marry the King of France with the daughter of
the King of Spain, without permitting the King of France to put his foot
on Spanish territory, nor the King of Spain on that belonging to France,
and at the same time not to allow the Infanta to quit her father before
the ceremony had actually taken place?
On the side of the French Court, whose discipline left much to be
desired, difficulties of detail arose constantly to complicate affairs.
The little Monsieur wept for desire to go to Fontarabia to see a Spanish
ceremony; but etiquette made it necessary to consider this brother of
the King the present heir presumptive to the crown, and, alleged Louis
XIV., "the heir presumptive of Spain could not enter France to see a
ceremony."[80]
After consideration of this point, the heir was forbidden to pass the
frontier. Then Mademoiselle arrived, who wished to be of the party. She
represented that the order was not applicable to her, and cited the
Salic law which gave her the right to traverse the Bidassoa: "I do not
inherit," said she; "I should have some compensation. Since daughters
are of no value in France, they should at least be permitted to enjoy
spectacles."
Mazarin convoked the ministers to submit this argument. The discussion
lasted "three or four hours." Finally, Mademoiselle gained her cause,
although the King himself was rather against her. The important question
of "trains" gave also some embarrassment to the Cardinal. A duke had
offered to bear the train of Mademoiselle in the nuptial cortege.
Mazarin was obliged to seek two other dukes for the younger sisters of
Mademoiselle, two children whom the lady of honour of their mother had
led to the marriage. He could only find a marquis and a count; the dukes
hid themselves. The lady of honour uttered loud protests; "her
Princesses must have 'tail-bearers' as titled as those of their tall
sister, or they should not go at all." "I will do what I can," replied
the Cardinal; "but no one wishes the task."
Mademoiselle had the good grace to sacrifice her duke, and Mazarin
believed the affair terminated, when the Princess Palatine[81] caused a
novel incident, upon the day of the ceremony, and even when the last
moment was approaching. She appeared in the Queen's chamber, wearing a
train, to which, being a foreign Princess, she had no right. La Palatine
had counted upon the general confusion to smuggle herself in and to
create a precedent. It was needful to delay matters. The train had been
reported to Mademoiselle, and no marriage should prevent her protest.
The Cardinal and after him the King were forced to listen to a discourse
upon the limitations of foreign princesses. "I believe," writes
Mademoiselle, "that I was very eloquent." She proved herself at least
very convincing, for La Palatine received the order to take off her
train.
But it is necessary to retrace our steps; trains have carried us too
far. The relations between the two monarchs had been regulated with a
minutia worthy of Asiatic courts. They met only in a hall, built
expressly for the purpose upon the Isle des Faisans, and on horseback
upon the frontier. The building was half in French, half in Spanish
territory. The decorations of the two sides were different. Louis XIV.
must walk upon French carpets, Philip IV. upon Spanish ones. The one
must only sit upon a French chair, write only upon a French table with
French ink, seek the time only from a French clock, placed in his half
of the hall; the other guarded himself with the same care from every
object not Spanish. Two opposite doors gave passage at precisely the
same instant. An equal number of steps led them to the place where the
red carpet of France joined the gold and silver one of Spain; and the
two Kings addressed each other and embraced over the frontier. Thus
demanded the laws of ceremonial monarchy. Their rigour commenced to
astonish the good people of France. The interviews upon the Isle des
Faisans became legendary. La Fontaine has alluded to them in one of his
last fables, _Les Deux Chevres_,[82] in which he has found no better
comparison for the solemnity with which the two goats, equally "tainted"
with their rank, equally curbed, advanced towards each other upon the
fragile and narrow bridge.
Je m'imagine voir, avec Louis le Grand,
Philippe quatre qui s'avance
Dans l'isle de la Conference[83]
Ainsi s'avancaient pas a pas,
Nez a nez, nos aventurieres.
When all was arranged, on June 3rd, neither the bride and bridegroom nor
their parents having seen each other, the King of France, represented by
Don Luis de Haro, was married by proxy in the church of Fontarabia to
the Infanta Marie-Therese.
This was the expedient which saved the dignity of the two crowns. After
the ceremony, the new Queen returned to her father. She wrote the next
day a letter of official compliment to her husband. We possess the
response of Louis XIV., in which he has well performed a somewhat
difficult task.
SAINT-JEAN-DE-LUZ, June 4, 1660.
To receive at the same time a letter from your Majesty, and the
news of the celebration of our marriage, and to be on the eve
of seeing you, these are assuredly causes of indelible joy for
me.
My cousin, the Duke of Crequi, first gentleman of my chamber,
whom I am sending expressly to your Majesty, will communicate
to you the sentiments of my heart, in which you will remark
always increasingly an extreme impatience to convey these
sentiments in person.
He will also present to you some trifles on my part.
The same day, in the afternoon, Anne of Austria met for the first time
with her brother and niece together. The interview took place in the
hall of the Isle des Faisans. Philip IV. astonished the French,
decidedly less bound up in tradition than the Spanish. Philip dwelt so
immobile in his gravity that one would have hardly taken him for a
living man.[84]
Anne of Austria wishing to embrace her brother, whom she had not seen
for forty-five years, he decided to make a movement, but it was only "to
withdraw his head so far that she could not catch it."[85] The Queen
Mother had forgotten the customs of her own land. To embrace in Spain
was not to kiss; it only consisted in giving a greeting without touching
the lips, as we see done at the Comedie Francaise by personages of the
classic repertoire. Kissing was, as we read in Moliere only permitted in
certain rare cases. In the _Malade Imaginaire_, Thomas Diafoirus
consults his father before kissing his fiancee: "Shall I kiss her?"
"Yes," replies M. Diafoirus.
The evening of the interview, June 4th, Mademoiselle was curious to know
whether the King of Spain had kissed the Queen Mother. "I asked her; she
told me 'no'; that they had embraced according to the fashion of their
own country."
How was this strange fashion established at the Court of France, and
from there transferred to our theatres? Was it after the marriage of
Louis XIV.? I leave to the amateurs of the theatre the solving of this
little problem in dramatic history.
They brought a French chair for the Queen Mother, a Spanish one for
Philip IV., and they seated themselves nearly "upon the line which
separated the two kingdoms."[86]
Marie-Therese, Infanta of Spain and bride by proxy of the King of
France, was still to be seated. Should this be done in France or Spain?
upon a Spanish or French chair? They brought one Spanish and two French
cushions; piled them upon Spanish territory, and the young Queen found
herself seated in a mixed fashion, suitable to her ambiguous situation.
Louis XIV. did not accompany his mother. Etiquette did not yet permit
the new couple to address a word to each other. It had been arranged
that the King of France should ride along the banks of the Bidassoa and
that the Infanta should regard him from afar through the window. A
romantic impatience which seized the husband with longing to become
acquainted with his wife caused this part of the programme to fail.
Louis XIV. looked at Marie-Therese through a half-open door. They
regarded each other some seconds, and then returned, she to Fontarabia,
he to Saint-Jean-de-Luz.
On Sunday, the sixth, they saw each other officially at the Isle des
Faisans. Affairs were but little further advanced; Philip IV. had
declared that the Infanta must conceal her impressions until she arrived
on French territory. On the seventh, Anne of Austria brought her
daughter-in-law to Saint-Jean-de-Luz, where the young people could at
length converse together, awaiting the definite celebration of the
marriage, which took place June 9th in the church of Saint-Jean-de-Luz.
Some days later, the Court retook the road to Paris. Marie-Therese made
her solemn entrance into the capital, August 20th. The procession
departed from Vincennes. "It was necessary to rise at four o'clock in
the morning," reports Mademoiselle, who had a frightful sick headache.
At five o'clock, every one was in gala costume, and they reached the
Louvre at seven in the evening. Mademoiselle was at the end of her
endurance; but a Princess of the blood had no right to be ill on the day
of a Queen's entrance. Sometimes ridiculous and sometimes ferocious;
such appears ancient etiquette to our democratic generation. Monarchs
formerly felt the value of its services too keenly to shrink from
submitting to its dictates. They knew that a demi-god never descends
with impunity from his pedestal. It is impossible to witness his efforts
at remounting without laughter. To-day the Princes themselves desire
less etiquette. The monarchical sentiment is not sufficiently strong to
make them willing to support the ennui of ceremonial; they are capable
of any sacrifice of dignity to escape it. We see them resign to others
their rank and privileges in the hope of finding in obscurity the
happiness which they have missed in the King's palace.
The present lack of form makes it difficult for the mass to take royalty
seriously, and thus vanish together the respect for formal courtesies
and for aristocracies. Louis XIV. and Philip IV. in spite of La
Fontaine, were in the right in attaching capital importance to the
placing their feet upon the right carpets. This precision of etiquette
prolonged the existence of the monarchy.
Life retook its habitual course in the Palace of the Louvre. The King
was studying a new ballet. Very few persons remarked that he found time
also to make long visits upon Mazarin. The Cardinal, feeling himself in
the clutches of death, was preparing his pupil for his "great trade" of
sovereign. He made him acquainted with affairs, spoke to him in
confidence of the people connected with the administration of the
kingdom; discussed political questions, and recommended him to have no
longer a first minister.[87] The one thing which he could not yet
resolve to do was to permit the King to give a direct order. His dying
hands would not let fall a half-crown or relax an atom of authority.
The young Queen was astonished at the money restrictions which had
oppressed her since her sojourn in France; Mazarin supervised her
household through the intermediary of Colbert, "who saved upon
everything,"[88] and he (Mazarin) pocketed the savings. On New Year's
day, he absorbed for himself three-fourths of the gifts of
Marie-Therese. The Queen Mother having shown some discontent, "the poor
Monsieur the Cardinal," as she called him, cried out boldly, "Alas! if
she knew from whence comes this money and that it is the blood of the
people, she would not be so liberal."
In vain Mazarin hastened; he did not have time to finish his task.
February 11, 1661, the King, realising that his minister was lost, began
to weep and to say that he did not know what he should do. All France
experienced the same fears. It did not occur to any that the King was
capable of governing, or that he would take the trouble to do so. The
doubt was only as to the name of the one who should take the helm in
place of the Cardinal. Anne of Austria believed in chance; Conde had one
party amongst the nobility. The Parisian bourgeoisie said to itself that
Retz was perhaps going to return from over sea "for necessity."[89] The
ministers admitted that there was only one man fitted for the position.
While these various intrigues were progressing, Mazarin expired (March
6th), and some hours later there came that _coup de theatre_ of which
one reads in all histories. Louis XIV. signified to his ministers and
grandees his intention of himself governing. Those who knew him well,
beginning with his own mother, did nothing but laugh, persuaded that it
was only a fire of straw. Louis at first shut himself up entirely alone
during two hours, in order to establish a "rule of life"[90] as an
effective monarch. The programme resulting from this meditation
surprisingly resembles the one given by Catherine de Medicis in the
letter already cited. It exacts the qualities of a great worker. From
that day, Louis showed these qualities. "For above all," says he in his
_Memoires_, "I resolved not to have a first minister, and not to permit
to be filled by another the functions belonging to the King, as long as
I bear the title."
The passage in which he describes his "wedding" with the joy of work is
moving and beautiful. It is even poetical.
I felt immediately my spirit and courage elevated. I found
myself a different individual. I discovered in myself a mind
which I did not know existed, and I reproached myself for
having so long ignored this joy. The timidity which judgment at
first gave caused me pain, above all when it was necessary to
speak in public a little lengthily. This timidity, however, was
dissipated little by little.
At length it seemed to me I was really King and born to rule. I
experienced a sense of well-being difficult to express.
Louis would now have need of all his courage. In measure as his mind
became "elevated," shame for his gross ignorance overcame him. "When
reason," says he, "commences to become solid, one feels a cutting and
just chagrin in finding oneself ignorant of what all others know."
The practical utility of his neglected studies was realised by him. Not
to know history with his "trade" was a difficulty felt every instant.
Not to be capable of deciphering alone a Latin letter when Rome and the
Empire wrote their dispatches only in Latin, was an insupportable
slavery to others. Never to have read anything upon the "art of war"
when the ambition was aroused to become an expert in this art and to
acquire glory through it, "was to put brakes on one's own wheels." The
young King's education must be remade; the only difficulty was the
finding sufficient leisure. He would not allow himself to be hindered by
other difficulties, of which the principal one was the danger of
hazarding the newly acquired authority by returning to the schoolroom.
Louis XIV. braved public opinion with remarkable courage. This is one of
the finest periods of his life. He proved himself truly great by his
sentiment of professional duty, and by his empire over himself, the day
upon which he dared to say to himself as the bourgeois gentleman of
Moliere was forced to say, knowing well the ridicule to which he was
exposed: "I wish ... to be able to reason among intelligent people."
In order to do him full justice, it is necessary to remember the foolish
effect at that date produced by a scholar of twenty-three.[91] Classes
were then finished at fifteen or sixteen, and the memory of them was
inseparably connected with birch rods, without whose aid there was no
teaching in the seventeenth century. When it was known that the King was
again taking Latin lessons from his ancient preceptor, and that he
passed hours in writing themes, the courtiers might easily have had it
upon the end of their tongues to demand as Mme. Jourdain of M. Jourdain:
"Are you at your age going to college to be whipped?"
He did not console himself with the illusion that his rank would save
him from such railleries. He confesses _a propos_ of history, which he
wished to study again, how keenly sensitive he was to the thought of
what might be said. "One single scruple embarrassed me, which was, that
I had a certain shame, considering my position in the world, of
redescending into an occupation to which I should earlier have devoted
myself." Everything had yielded to the desire "not to be deprived of the
knowledge that every worthy man should have."
In spite of these efforts, Louis was never educated; he never knew
Latin, which was deemed the real knowledge of the seventeenth century,
in which century the language was well taught. Too much business or too
many pleasures prevented the young King from pursuing his design during
a sufficiently long period. It is possible, also, that his lack of
natural facility may have discouraged him. Louis XIV. had memory and
judgment, but his intelligence was slow. In short, he abandoned his
studies too soon; he felt, and repeated till the day of his death the
confession, "I am ignorant."
But Louis never relaxed the labours belonging to him as chief of the
State. His days were regulated once for all. Mme. de Motteville tells
the arrangement the day following the death of Mazarin. Saint-Simon
gives it again a half-century later, and it is identical. Apart from
extraordinary and unexpected business, and formal functions, so numerous
and important at this epoch, the King regularly devoted six to eight
hours daily to ordinary business. Add to these hours the time for
sleeping and eating, for seeing his family and taking the fresh air, and
but little time would have been left for diversion if the King had not
had the capacity of doing without sleep almost at will. It was this
physical gift which permitted him to provide as largely for pleasure as
for work. Nevertheless, the Court had trouble in adapting itself to the
new regime. It did not know what to do while the King worked.
"It is more wearisome here than can be imagined," wrote the Duc
d'Enghien, son of the great Conde, in 1664. "The King is shut up almost
the entire afternoon."[92] Outside the Court, the people could have
cried with joy. It had been a delightful surprise to discover a great
worker in this ballet dancer. Paris was ready to permit him to indulge
in his little weaknesses, provided that he would govern, that he himself
would use his power. The bourgeoisie Frondeuse was disarmed.
It is necessary [wrote Guy Patin to a friend] that I should
share with you a thought which I find very amusing. M. de
Vendome has said that our good King resembles a young doctor
who has much ardour for his profession, but who demands some
_quid pro quo_. I know those who see him intimately, who have
assured me that he has very good intentions and, that as soon
as he is _completely the master_, he will persuade all the
world of them. Amen.[93]
The italicised words are significant of the opinion of Guy Patin. In
establishing absolute monarchy, Louis XIV. had the good wishes of all.
Other testimony quite as remarkable exists to confirm this statement.
After the death of Mazarin, Olivier d'Ormesson, who had been of the
opposition party in the Parliament, and whose independence would soon
cost him his career, let three entire years roll by before admitting any
statement in his journal to the detriment of the King. This writer also
believes in Louis, and, on the whole, approves of the compensations
(_quid pro quo_) demanded by the governing novice.
After the first astonishment, the sudden change in Louis's methods
provoked but few commentaries in the immediate surroundings of the King.
Anne of Austria had a fit of vexation in realising that she would never
again have any influence; after which, indolence aiding, her course was
taken. The Queen Mother had no objection on principle to absolute
monarchy: she had always favoured it. She could not, as a Spanish
Princess, conceive of royalty being the least limited. Once resigned to
the new situation, she became a truly maternal old Queen, who preached
virtue to youth, and endeavoured to lighten the monotony of her
daughter-in-law's life.
Marie-Therese had only one single political opinion; good government was
that under which a king could pass much time with his wife. This poor
little wife died without having ever really lived with her husband.
Mademoiselle had no reason to regret the first ministers; there had been
too little reason to enjoy the two with whom she had had intercourse.
She imagined herself liberated from all dependence through the death of
the Cardinal, succeeding that of her father, and this thought was most
agreeable to her. She did not perceive that she had only changed
masters, and that the new one would prove himself infinitely more
difficult to please, more exacting, than that sceptical Italian who
confined himself to watching that she did not carry away her millions to
strangers and who simply mocked at everything else.
Mademoiselle finally passed through the state of apprenticeship to
absolute monarchy. Her eyes were opened only on the day on which the
thunder cloud burst upon her.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 35: See the _Memoires de Louis XIV._, edited by Charles
Dreyss. The _Memoires_ of Louis XIV. were not written by himself. He
dictated them to his secretaries afterward adding notes in his own
handwriting and correcting the proofs. See the _Introduction_ by M.
Dreyss.]
[Footnote 36: _Memoires de Mademoiselle de Montpensier. Memoires de
Montglat._]
[Footnote 37: Montglat.]
[Footnote 38: _Id._]
[Footnote 39: Letters of January 3, 1717, of September 27, 1718, and of
July, 1722. Madame adds in this last: "Now, all the circumstances are
known."]
[Footnote 40: Letter to the Queen, Anne of Austria, October 27, 1651.]
[Footnote 41: March 23, 1865, Pere Theiner, Guardian of the Secret
Archives of the Vatican, replied to some one who had pressed the
question: "Our acts of December 16, 1641, in which Jules Mazarin was
created Cardinal, do not say whether or not he was a priest. How could
he then have been admitted to the order of Cardinal-priest? No doubt he
was a priest." The letter of Pere Theiner has been published by M. Jules
Loiseleur in his _Problemes historiques_.]
[Footnote 42: _Letters of Madame de Maintenon_ edited by Geoffroy.]
[Footnote 43: For further details see the excellent volume of M.
Lacour-Gayet, _L'education politique de Louis XIV._]
[Footnote 44: December 24th, _Relations des ambassadeurs venitiens_.]
[Footnote 45: The letter is dated April 21, 1654. Louis XIV. was then
fifteen and a half years of age.]
[Footnote 46: Mme. de Motteville had heard him express the same idea.
_Cf._ his _Memoires_, v., 101, ed. Petitot.]
[Footnote 47: _Les fragments des memoires inedits_ by Dubois, valet of
Louis XIV., published by Leon Aubineau in the _Biblotheque de l'Ecole
des Chartes_, and in his _Notices litteraires_ upon the 17th century.]
[Footnote 48: _Cf._ Lacour-Gayet, p. 203.]
[Footnote 49: M. Dreyss dates the writing of this portion of the
_Memoires_ about 1670.]
[Footnote 50: Letters of June 9, 1654, and April 9, 1658.]
[Footnote 51: _Segraisiana._ Louis XIV. was seventeen when he made this
remark.]
[Footnote 52: _Journal de voyage de deux jeunes Hollandais a Paris_
(1656-1658).]
[Footnote 53: _Memoires de Mme. de Motteville._]
[Footnote 54: The fair of Saint-Germain was held between Saint-Sulpice
and Saint-Germain-des-Pres, from February 3d to the evening before Palm
Sunday. The Court and the populace elbowed each other there.]
[Footnote 55: _Journal de deux jeunes Hollandais._]
[Footnote 56: _Memoires_ of Mademoiselle.]
[Footnote 57: _Journal de deux jeunes Hollandais._]
[Footnote 58: _Journal de deux jeunes Hollandais._]
[Footnote 59: April 29th.]
[Footnote 60: To the Duc de Bouillon and to the son of the Marshal Duc
de La Meilleraye, who took the title of Duc de Mazarin.]
[Footnote 61: It must not be forgotten that Saint-Simon was presented at
Court in 1692. Louis XIV. was then fifty-four, and had reigned
forty-nine years. Saint-Simon only knew the end of the reign.]
[Footnote 62: Brother of the Superintendent of Finances.]
[Footnote 63: In the summer of 1657.]
[Footnote 64: _Vers d'Atys_, opera played in 1676, and _d'Astrate_,
tragedy of 1663.]
[Footnote 65: The phrase is M. Jules Lemaitre's.]
[Footnote 66: See _The Youth of La Grande Mademoiselle_. For this
chapter _cf._ _La misere au temps de la Fronde et Saint-Vincent de
Paul_, by Feillet; _La cabale des devots_, by Raoul Allier;
_Saint-Vincent de Paul_, by Emanuel Broglie; _Saint-Vincent de Paul et
les Goudi_, by Chantelauze; _Port-Royal_, by Sainte-Beuve.]
[Footnote 67: Village of the arrondissement of Provins.]
[Footnote 68: Feillet, _La misere au temps de la Fronde_.]
[Footnote 69: See the volume of Raoul Allier, _La cabale des devots_.]
[Footnote 70: Marie de Gonzague.]
[Footnote 71: En Picardie.]
[Footnote 72: M. Emanuel de Broglie.]
[Footnote 73: Saul in the _Journal des guerres civiles de
Dubuisson-Aubenay_. He mentions the date of December 2, 1650, upon which
"large donations" were sent into Champagne, by Mmes. de Lamoignon and de
Herse, Messieurs de Bernieres, Lenain, etc.]
[Footnote 74: The Parliament of Dijon had a bad reputation with the
ministers, who accused it of refusing all reform. This does not excuse
such a lack of good faith.]
[Footnote 75: Dombes was a small independent principality which had only
been definitely united to France on March 28, 1782; its capital was
Trevoux.]
[Footnote 76: _Histoire de France._ Tr. by Jacques Porchat and Miot.
Paris, 1886.]
[Footnote 77: _Memoires de Montglat; Memoires de Mme. de Motteville._]
[Footnote 78: The ball took place on the 3rd. Several days elapsed
before the news of the death reached Aix.]
[Footnote 79: _Memoires_ of Mademoiselle.]
[Footnote 80: _Memoires_ of Mademoiselle.]
[Footnote 81: Anne de Gonzague.]
[Footnote 82: This appeared in 1691.]
[Footnote 83: Isle des Faisans was also called _Isle de la Conference_,
since Mazarin had there discussed the treaty of the Pyrenees with Luis
de Haro.]
[Footnote 84: _Memoires de Montglat._]
[Footnote 85: _Memoires de Mme. de Motteville._]
[Footnote 86: _Ibid._]
[Footnote 87: There exists in the _Archives d'Affaires etrangeres_ a
fragment of the instructions of Mazarin to Louis XIV., written under the
dictation of the King. M. Chantelauze, who discovered it, published it
in the _Correspondant_ of August 10, 1881.]
[Footnote 88: Motteville.]
[Footnote 89: Guy Patin. Letter of January 28, 1661.]
[Footnote 90: Motteville.]
[Footnote 91: He was even twenty-four when he asked Perefixe again to
give him Latin lessons.]
[Footnote 92: Letter of June 27th to the Queen of Poland (_Archives de
Chantilly_). The King dined at one o'clock.]
[Footnote 93: Letter of July 15, 1661.]
CHAPTER III
Mademoiselle at the Luxembourg--Her Salon--The "Anatomies" of
the Heart--Projects of Marriage, and New Exile--Louis XIV. and
the Libertines--Fragility of Fortune in Land--_Fetes Galantes_.
With the approach of her thirty-fifth year, the Grande Mademoiselle
perceived by diverse signs that she was no longer young. She was forced
to recognise that her strength had its limitations, which fact had never
before been forced upon her. On February 7, 1662, Louis XIV. danced for
the first time a grand ballet entitled the "Amours of Hercules," and his
cousin of Montpensier took part. She was ill from fatigue. Another kind
of weariness overcame her; she became bored with fetes. She had been
present at so many gala occasions since her entrance into the world, and
had seen so many festivals and fireworks, garlands of flowers and
allegorical chariots, that she was now quickly satiated.
The King still loved this kind of abundant pleasure; those which he
offered to his Court sometimes lasted successive days and nights,
without giving time to breathe, and all being expected to feel continued
amusement. Mademoiselle was no longer capable of this. She was beginning
to long for the repose of home. Her sick headaches contributed to this
disability; age had increased them, and all women know that it is better
to suffer a headache in solitude. After a lively struggle, she had
returned to the palace of the Luxembourg and was lodging under the same
roof as her stepmother. The old Madame would have gladly relinquished a
neighbour whose presence presaged nothing good, but no one had sustained
the contention as no one was in the least interested in her welfare. One
reads in a fugitive leaf of the times issued on July 21, 1660: "This
affair was deliberated upon in the Court, and it was found that
Mademoiselle had the right to demand one of the apartments free, and
that Madame could not refuse it." It is said that the King wrote to
Madame in order to soften the blow; it was necessary to drain the bitter
cup to the dregs, and at a time in which Madame had great need of
tranquillity to install at her very door this tempestuous stepdaughter,
with whom no peace was possible.
Madame had "vapours," otherwise called a nervous malady. She was afraid
of noise, of movement, and of being forced to speak, and Mademoiselle
insisted upon making "scenes." "I teased her often," says the Princess
in her _Memoires_, "and very much despised her (in which I was wrong),
and she always responded as one who feared me, and with much
submission." The public did not consider it worth while to waste pity
upon Madame, because she bored every one; a fault never pardoned. Anne
of Austria, herself a very amiable woman, when not opposed, could never
suffer her inoffensive sister-in-law. The Queen Mother said to
Mademoiselle, who did not need this encouragement: "Her person, her
temper, and her manners are odious to me." The public was fundamentally
right in its antipathy. Madame was one of those people who render virtue
hateful, and in thus doing are very injurious to humanity.
The Luxembourg was commodious and gay. Mademoiselle enjoyed it, and it
pleased her to arrange for herself a grand existence as a Princess, rich
and independent. Nothing could be more displeasing to the Court. As soon
as Louis XIV. had assumed full power, he let it be seen that he wished
no social centre in his kingdom other than his own palace. His cousin
did not take this fact into account. This was not bravado. It was due to
the impossibility of comprehending that "a person of her quality" could
be reduced to the role of satellite.
It is certain that nature had not prepared her for this role. "I would
rather pass my life in solitude," wrote she, "than restrain in any way
my proud humour, even at the expense of my fortune. I have no
complaisance, and I demand a great deal from others."[94] She also adds:
"I do not willingly praise others and very rarely blame myself." With
this avowed disposition, it would perhaps have been wiser not to go too
often to the Louvre. It was a great imprudence to attract the crowd to
herself as she had done at the time in which she was openly opposing the
Tuileries.
The salon of Mademoiselle became the first in Paris, the most
interesting and select. Since Paris had tasted the pleasures of clever
conversation and discovered, under the direction of Mme. de Rambouillet,
the genius of this delicate art, it could not do without it. The
initiator was still living, but she was old and ill, and her circle had
long been dispersed.[95]
Mlle. de Scudery had collected together as many of the remnants of her
first salon as she could, and had thus laid the foundation for the
famous Saturdays, at which wit and knowledge were dispensed in
abundance. Nevertheless, it was not the same. The Saturdays of "Sapho"
brought back the literary people to the pedantry from which Mme. de
Rambouillet had more or less delivered them. They were left too much to
themselves, and, thus isolated, they had lost a certain intellectual
grace acquired by the friction between the aristocrats and the
blue-stockings.
The mind as well as the body has its own manners, and they may be bad or
good. In 1661, the Court alone had breeding. There existed no other
society in which the first comer understood how to speak a language easy
and _galant_, well adapted to plumed hats and elegant bows. These
belonged to the traditions of the place. Such courtesies were lacking
with the learned friends of Mlle. de Scudery, who no longer felt
themselves spurred on by the fine gentlemen, so alert, capable of such
light railleries, and detesting pedants.
The feminine society of the Saturdays had also too little intercourse
with duchesses and marquises to replace the Hotel Rambouillet. Mlle.
Bocquet, who filled a large place in the chronicles of the Saturdays,
was very amiable and played the lute "marvellously,"[96] but she
belonged to the small bourgeoisie. Mlle. Dupre, another intimate, was an
intelligent and educated girl, who had made a special study of
philosophy. She quoted Descartes too often to have "the air _galant_" in
conversation. As much could be said of others. Mlle. de Scudery herself,
who had been received in the best company and who had formally combated
the "Blue-stockingism" with admirable good sense, had not written
thirty-two octavo volumes with impunity. There still remained a little
ink on the end of her fingers. It seemed as if all the pedants of France
held their classes in her house. Plays upon words filled the papers
scattered about, upon which "Prosecutions" were held. The "Illustrious
Sapho" had truly inspired Moliere when he wrote _Les Precieuses
Ridicules_; in vain, M. Cousin refuses to believe it.[97] I do not
myself think that she escaped.
Mademoiselle rendered to the wits of the day the service of sending them
back to the Court for lessons in language and manners. We are well
informed of this, thanks to the fantasy of a Princess which produced a
little literature upon the model offered by the Luxembourg.
In 1657, Mademoiselle, being at Champigny for the Richelieu lawsuit, the
Princess of Tarente[98] and Mlle. de la Tremouille[99] showed her their
literary portraits written by themselves.[100] These were imitations of
those which Mlle. de Scudery, creator of the kind, gave in her
romances,--the personalities to be divined with a key. "I had never
before seen anything of the kind; I found them very _galants_, and wrote
my own." After her own, she made others, and exacted them from those
about her.
From this resulted a repertoire unique of its kind, in which noble
personages, of both sexes and all ages, have been so obliging as not to
leave us ignorant of themselves, from the state of their teeth to their
opinions upon love, nor have they omitted to present similar details
concerning their friends.
The collection of these _Portraits_[101] reveals to us how the
aristocracy then viewed itself, or, at least, how it wished to be
estimated by others. The ordinary beginning was to picture the face and
bearing. The fashion was to do this with sincerity, which by no means
indicates modesty. The famous Duchesse de Chatillon warned readers that
she was going to speak with a naivete "the greatest possible."
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