Part 11

"On my arrival at Clermont," says Fléchier, "I remarked universal terror, there, and throughout the country. All the nobility had taken to flight, and not a gentleman remained who did not examine his conscience, recall the evil passages of his life, and endeavour to repair the wrongs done his vassals, in hopes of stifling complaint. Numerous were the conversions wrought, less by the grace of God than by the justice of man, but which were not the less advantageous for being compulsory. Those who had been the tyrants of the poor became their suppliants, and more restitutions were made than had been operated at the great jubilee of the holy year. The arrest of M. de la Mothe Canillac was the chief subject of consternation." Evil was the fate of the unlucky delinquents who fell into the clutches of the dread tribunal, before the severity of its zeal had been appeased by the infliction of punishment, and daunted by the popular effervescence its first sanguinary measures occasioned. The Viscount de la Mothe was the most estimable of the numerous and powerful family of Canillac; he was much esteemed in the province, and by no means the man who should have been selected for condign chastisement, as an example to titled evil-doers. Nevertheless, the judges had scarcely arrived at Clermont, when their president, Monsieur de Novion, (himself distantly connected by marriage with the Canillac family,) and Talon, the advocate-general, agreed to arrest M. de la Mothe. The provost of Auvergne and his archers found him in bed, and so surprised was he at the intimation of arrest, that he lost his presence of mind, and gave up some letters he had just received from a mistress. At dinner, that day, his friends had bantered him about the Grands-Jours, but he thought himself so innocent, that he could not believe his danger. Nor would he, perhaps, have been interfered with, but for reasons which ought never to have swayed ministers of justice. The name of Canillac was in ill repute, as that of a turbulent and tyrannical family: M. de Novion desired to strike terror and prove his impartiality by arresting a man of first-rate importance, who was also a connexion of his own; and, moreover, the Viscount had borne arms against the king in the civil wars. The crime alleged against him could hardly be deemed very flagrant, and did not justify, at least in those days, the rigour of his judges. During the wars, M. de la Mothe had received a sum of money from the Prince de Condé, to be employed in levying cavalry. The Viscount sought assistance from his friends, and especially from a certain M. d'Orsonette, to whom he remitted five thousand francs to equip a troop of horse. The levies not coming in fast enough to please the prince, he flew into a passion with the Viscount, who, proud as Lucifer, would not put up with blame, abandoned Condé, and demanded an account from d'Orsonette of the cash intrusted to him. This person, however, neither produced his recruits nor restored the enlistment money, and, whilst acknowledging the debt, showed little haste to discharge it. Ill blood was the consequence; the two gentlemen met, each with retainers at his back, a fight ensued, D'Orsonette was wounded and his falconer killed. All this was an old story in 1665, and a malicious animus appeared in the eagerness of the court to revive it. La Mothe even obtained letters of pardon for the offence, but by a legal quibble these were nullified and made to serve against him. The evidence was very contradictory as to who had been the assailant, although it seemed well established that the Viscount had greatly the advantage of numbers. At the worst, and to judge from Fléchier's account, the offence did not exceed manslaughter and would have been sufficiently punished by a less penalty than death, to which M. de la Mothe was condemned, and which he suffered four hours afterwards. Fléchier displays some indignation, cloaked by his habitually-guarded phrase, in his comments on the hard measure of justice shown to the poor Viscount. "I know," he says, "that many persons, who judge things very wisely, thought the president and M. Talon might well have consulted the principal of those Messieurs" (the members of the tribunal) "on this affair, and especially M. de Caumartin, who held so high a rank among them; and that they would have done better not to have thus spread the alarm amongst a great number of gentlemen, who took their departure immediately after this arrest. To prevent the escape of a man who was only half guilty, they lost the opportunity of capturing a hundred criminals; and every one agrees that this first arrest is a good hit for the judge, but not for justice." There was one very singular circumstance in the case, and which could have been met with, as the Abbé observes, only in a country so full of crime as Auvergne then was. The accuser, the person who laid the information, and the witnesses, were all more criminal than the accused himself. The first was charged by his own father with having killed his brother, with having attempted parricide, and with a hundred other crimes; the second was a convicted forger; and the others, for sundry crimes, were either at the galleys or in perpetual banishment, or actually fugitives. So that, to all appearance, the Viscount must have been acquitted for want of testimony, had not the president, by a pettifogging manœuvre, not very clearly explained but manifestly unfair, managed to turn against him his own admissions in the letters of pardon granted by M. de Caumartin, and in which it was customary to set down the criminal's full confession of his offences. Fléchier's account is, however, too disconnected and imperfect to afford us a clear view of the singular system of jurisprudence argued by this remarkable trial and sentence. The versatile Abbé does not plume himself on his legal knowledge, and indeed is rather too apt, as many will think, to turn from the rigorous and somewhat partial proceedings of the tribunal, to flowery topics of gallant gossip. The town of Clermont finds little favour in his eyes, and he doubts that there is one more disagreeable in all France, the streets being so narrow that one carriage only can pass along them; so that the meeting of two vehicles caused a terrible blaspheming of coachmen, who swear there, Fléchier thinks, better than anywhere else, and who assuredly would have set fire to the town had they been more numerous, and but for the many beautiful fountains at hand to extinguish the flames. "On the other hand, the town is well peopled, the women are ugly but prolific, and if they do not inspire love, they at least bear many children. It is an established fact, that a lady who died a short time ago, aged eighty years, made the addition of her descendants, and counted up four hundred and sixty-nine living, and more than a thousand dead, whom she had seen during her life. After that, can one doubt the prodigious propagation of Israel during the time of the captivity, and may not one ask here what the Dutch asked when they entered China and saw the immense population, whether the women of that country bore ten children at a time?" If Fléchier, when inditing the lively record of his residence in Auvergne, contemplated the probability of his manuscript some day finding its way into print, it is evident that he cared little for the suffrages of the ladies of Clermont. Had he valued their good opinion, or expected the _Mémoires_ to be submitted to them, he would hardly have ventured to note thus plainly--not to say brutally--his depreciation of their personal attractions. Ugly, child-bearing housewives! Such crude uncivil phrase would have been more appropriate in the day of the eccentric monarch who used firetongs to remove a love-letter from a lady's bosom,[29] than in that of the graceful lover of La Vallière, who cloaked the extremity of egotism under the most exquisite external courtesy. Not often do we catch Fléchier thus transgressing the limits of polite comment. His keen perception of the ridiculous more frequently finds vent in sly and guarded satire. But the rusticity and want of court-usage of the Auvergne dames meet in him a cruel censor. "All the ladies of the town come to pay their respects to our ladies, not successively, but in troops. Each visit fills the room; there is no finding chairs enough; it takes a long time to place all these little people; (_ce petit monde;_) you would think it a conference or an assembly, the circle is so large. I have heard say that it is a great fatigue to salute so many persons at one time, and that one is much embarrassed before and after so many kisses. As the greater number (of the visitors) are not accustomed to court ceremony, and know nothing but their provincial customs, they come in a crowd, to avoid special notice, and to gain courage from each other. It is a pleasant sight to see them enter, one with her arms crossed, another with her hands hanging down like those of a doll; all their conversation is trivial (_bagatelle_;) and it is a happiness for them when they can turn the discourse to their dress, and talk of the _points d'Aurillac_."[30] Even the homage paid to his own talents and growing reputation is insufficient to mollify the Abbé and blunt the point of his sarcastic pen. A capuchin monk of worldly tastes, who passed his time at watering places, coquetting with sick belles and belles lettres, had read some of Fléchier's poetry, and spread his fame amongst the Clermont blue-stockings. Forthwith the Abbé received the visits of two or three of these _précieuses languissantes_, who thought, he informs us with less than his usual modesty,--"that to be seen with me would make them pass for learned persons, and that wit is to be acquired by contagion. One was of a height approaching that of the giants of antiquity, with a face of Amazonian ugliness; the other, on the contrary, was very short, and her countenance was so covered with patches, that I could form no opinion of it, except that she had a nose and eyes. It did not escape me that she was a little lame, and I remarked that both thought themselves beautiful. The pair alarmed me, and I took them for evil spirits trying to disguise themselves as angels of light." Then comes a dialogue, _à la_ Molière--clumsy compliments on the one hand, modestly declined on the other, and at last the ladies take their departure, after turning over the Abbé's books, and borrowing a translation of the "Art of Love." "I wish," concludes the Abbé, "I could also have given them the art of becoming loveable." These incidents and digressions, petty in the abstract, will have a collective worth in the eyes of those who seek in the _Mémoires_ what we maintain ought to be there sought:--a valuable addition to our knowledge of the manners, follies, and foibles of a very interesting period.

The comprehensive nature of the court of the Grands-Jours, competent to judge every description of case, is one cause of the motley appearance of Fléchier's pages. There was little sorting of causes, civil or criminal, but all were taken as they came uppermost, and strong contrasts are the result. We pass from farce to tragedy, and thence again to comedy, with curious rapidity of transition. Now we are horrified by the account of an atrocious assassination or wholesale massacre; turn the leaf, and we trace the derelictions of a rakish husband, or the scandalous details of conventual irregularities. Here we have a puissant count or baron brought up for judgment, or, more often, condemned by default; thereafter followeth the trial and sentence of a scoundrel-peasant, or unlucky _fille-de-joie_. The Grands-Jours would certainly have been improved by the establishment of a court of appeal; many of the sentences needed revision, and the errors committed were seldom on the side of mercy. The reproach usually made to partial judges, of favouring the rich, and dealing hardly with the poor, would here have been unjustly applied, for it was the wealthy and powerful whom this tribunal chiefly delighted to condemn. These, it is true, in some degree neutralised the effects of such disfavour by getting out of the way; but their houses were razed, their lands confiscated, or struck with a heavy fine, and they themselves were frequently decapitated in effigy, a ceremony to which they attached but slight importance. After the execution of poor Canillac, the court flagged a little in their proceedings, and resumed their energy only towards the close of the session, and under terror of its further prolongation--one having already taken place. "Then," says Fléchier, "they applied themselves without pause or relaxation to the consideration of important offences, and despatched them so rapidly that they did not give us time to make ourselves thoroughly acquainted with the circumstances." Assassinations, abductions, and oppression, were the usual subjects of their deliberations; and so numerous were the condemnations, that in one day thirty persons were executed in effigy. These pasteboard punishments must seriously have diminished the _prestige_ of the Grands-Jours, by imparting an air of ridiculous impotency to their proceedings. And amongst others, the Marquis of Canillac, a cousin of La Mothe, and the biggest and oldest sinner in the province, was greatly diverted by the bloodless beheading of his counterfeit. Fléchier believes it was matter of deep regret to this hardened offender that he could not look on at his own execution, as he had done once before when similarly condemned by the parliament of Toulouse. "He had seen his execution himself from an adjacent window, and had found it very pleasant to be at his ease in a house whilst he was beheaded in the street; and to see himself die out of doors, when perfectly comfortable at his fire-side." Judging from the smallness of the sum (thirty livres) set down in the account of expenses of the Grands-Jours as paid the painter, the decapitated portraits were by no means masterpieces of art, nor probably was it deemed necessary to obtain a very exact resemblance of the contumacious originals.

Although none ever ventured to cast a doubt on Fléchier's strict orthodoxy, he made himself remarkable by a spirit of tolerance unusual in that age, by discountenancing superstition, and by his enlightened disapproval of the abuses of the conventual system. A great doubter of modern miracles, he scrupled not, when a bishop, to protest in a letter to his flock, relating to some miraculous cross, against "those who put their confidence in wood and in lying prodigies." His natural good sense and kindness of heart made him oppose the compulsory profession of young women. In the _Mémoires_, he relates an anecdote of a young girl, at whose reception as a nun M. Chéron, the grand vicar of Bourges, was requested to assist. The vicar, having donned his sacerdotal robes, asked the novice, in the usual formula, what she demanded. "I demand the keys of the monastery, Sir, in order to leave it," was her firm reply, which astonished all present. The vicar could not believe his ears, till she repeated her words, adding, that she had chosen that opportunity to protest against her destiny, because there were abundant witnesses. "If the girls who are daily sacrificed had as much resolution," says Fléchier, "the convents would be less populous, but the sacrifices offered up in them would be more holy and voluntary." When invested with the episcopal purple, the worthy man acted up to these sound opinions. "I may be allowed," says M. Gonod in his appendix, "to cite, to his glory and to that of religion, his conduct with regard to a nun at Nismes, who had not, like her sister at Bourges, had the courage to demand the keys of the convent, and who subsequently yielded to another description of weakness. Fléchier, then bishop of Nismes, extended to her his paternal hand, and in this instance, as in many others, approved himself of the same merciful family as a Vincent de Paul and a Fénelon." This story is told by D'Alembert in his "Eulogiums read at the public sittings of the French Academy," p. 421. An unfortunate girl, whom unfeeling parents had forced into a convent, was unable to conceal the consequences of a deplorable error, and her superior confined her in a dungeon, where she lay upon straw, scarcely nourished by an insufficient ration of bread, and praying for death as a rescue from suffering. Fléchier heard of it, hastened to the convent, and after encountering much resistance, obtained admission into the wretched cell where the unfortunate creature languished and despaired. On beholding her pastor, she extended her arms as to a liberator sent by divine mercy. The prelate cast a look of horror and indignation at the abbess. "I ought," he said, "if I obeyed the voice of human justice, to put you in the place of this unhappy victim of your barbarity; but the God of clemency, whose minister I am, bids me show, even to you, an indulgence you have not had for her. Go, and for sole penance, read daily in the Evangelists the chapter of the woman taken in adultery." He released the nun, and caused every care to be taken of her, but she was past recovery, and died soon afterwards, blessing his name.

How can we, after reading such traits as this, criticise with any severity the occasional levity displayed in the _Mémoires_? How dwell invidiously on the small frivolities and flippancies of the Abbé, whose after life was a pattern of Christian virtue and charity? Short of a degree of perfection impossible to humanity, we can scarcely imagine a more charming character than that of Fléchier, whose very failings "leaned to virtue's side." His sincere benevolence and gentle temper display themselves in each page of his book, in every recorded action of his life. His professed principles--from which we can nowhere trace his practice to have differed--breathed a very different spirit to that usually attributed to the Roman Catholic priesthood. "Violence and oppression," he says, in a letter to M. Vignier, "are not the paths the gospel has marked out for us." His smallest actions were inspired by the same kindly maxims, by a spirit of tolerance and compassion for human frailty. The vein of satire we have exemplified by extracts is tempered by a tone of good-humoured _bonhomie_; and such sallies, moreover, could not have been intended to wound the feelings of persons in whose lifetime, it is pretty evident, Fléchier did not destine his book to publication. Neither can fault be fairly found with the occasional freedom of his language and peculiarity of his topics. What we esteem license in these strait-laced days, was regarded as decorous, and passed without censure or observation in those in which he wrote; and the most rigorous will admit the absence of all offensive intention. The Abbé is a chronicler; as such he puts down facts, unmutilated and unabridged. If the words in which he clothes them have sometimes more of the courtier's easy pleasantry than of the churchman's grave reserve, we must make allowance for the spirit of the age, look to intention rather than form, and we shall admit that his _gaillardises_ are set down all "in the ease of his heart," without the least design of conveying impure thoughts or immodest images to the imaginations of his contemporaries or of future generations. "If any wonder," says M. Gonod, "at Fléchier's language, as being sometimes rather free, I tell them he derived his freedom from his virtue; unreproached by his conscience, he thought he might speak plainly: _omnia munda mundis_. As an historian, he understood the historian's duty differently from the Abbé Ducreux, differently from this or that obscure critic who may dare attack him; he took as a guide this maxim: 'Ne quid falsi dicere audeat, ne quid veri non audeat.'--(_Cic. de Orat._ ii. 15.) We must also revert to the times in which he wrote; do we not see, if only by Molière's comedies, how much more prudish and reserved our language has become?"

Amongst the long list of crimes of which the Grands-Jours took cognisance, that of sorcery was not forgotten. "Conversation is an agreeable thing," says Fléchier, after three or four pages of gossip, including an anecdote of Mademoiselle de Scudéry and her brother, who had been arrested at Lyons on suspicion of high treason, for having discussed rather too loudly the manner of slaying the king in a projected tragedy--"but exercise is also necessary, and I know nothing pleasanter than to take the country air after having passed several hours discoursing in one's apartment. So we got into our coaches with some ladies, and went to visit the source of the Clermont fountains, one of the curiosities of the country." His elegant account of these springs and the surrounding scenery is alone sufficient to establish his reputation as a proficient in the descriptive art, and loses little by comparison with Charles Nodier's brilliant description of the same spot, the Tivoli of Auvergne. "On our return home we found M. l'Intendant there before us. He had come from Aurillac, and had had great difficulty in getting through the snow which had already fallen in the mountains. He had caused a president of the election of Brioude to be arrested, accused of several crimes, and especially of magic. One of his servants deposed that he had given him certain characters which made him sometimes rise from the ground, when at church, in sight of all the congregation. The Intendant having questioned the accused on this subject, he was so disconcerted that he nearly lost his senses; he fell into a furious passion, and then entreated they would not press him further, that he was not disposed to acknowledge any thing that day, but that on the morrow he would confess all the irregularities of his life. His prayer was granted, and M. de Fortia gave him in charge to four of his people. I do not know if the devil had promised to rescue him from the hands of a Master of Requests, or if, by his art, he bewitched his keepers; but it is certain he made his escape to the woods and mountains, where they have now for three days pursued him. Here is an instance how the devil is friendly and of good faith with those who love him, and how he deceives even Intendants. I was very sorry to miss this opportunity of hearing news of the witches' sabbath and of learning the secret of the characters; perhaps some good angel, hostile to his demon, will deliver him again into the hands of justice." This tone of mockery, when referring to a belief pretty universal in those days,--the belief, namely, in witchcraft and sorcerers--contrasts oddly enough with the strain of grave credulity in which the same writer tells the touching tale of a shepherd and shepherdess who gathered flowers together in the meadows, held tender rendezvous in a green alley formed by nature at the foot of a rock, made reciprocal presents of fruits and flowers, and drank the water of the limpid fountain out of the hollow of each other's hands. This loving pair, the Corydon and Phillis of Auvergne, were ultimately united in the bonds of wedlock, when, behold, a malicious farmer, two of whose ducks had been devoured by Phillis's poodle, laid a spell upon them, greatly to the hindrance of the connubial felicity they had so fondly anticipated. The charm was dissolved by the prayers and interposition of Mother Church; and this little history, Fléchier admonishes us, "shows that we ought not to treat these enchantments as fables." Notwithstanding which injunction we should think the Abbé was indulging in a bit of grave fun, did he not quote Hincmar, archbishop of Rheims, and Virgil's Eclogues and other authorities, in support of the authenticity of these malevolent practices.