Part 26
One of the most remarkable men in the circle of Rambouillet, was the Marquis de Salles, Knight of St. Louis. He was the second son of the Duke de Montausier, and subsequently inherited the title. At the period of his father’s death, his mother found herself with little dower but her title. She exerted herself, however, courageously. She instructed her children herself, brought them up in strict Huguenot principles, and afterward sent them to the Calvinistic college at Sedan, where the young students were famous for the arguments which they maintained against all comers--and they were many--who sought to convert them to popery. At an early age he acquired the profession of arms, the only vocation for a young and portionless noble; and he shed his blood liberally for a king who had no thanks to offer to a protestant. His wit, refinement, and gallant bearing, made him a welcome guest at Rambouillet, where his famous attachment to Julie, who was three years his senior, gave matter for conversation to the whole of France. Courageous himself, he loved courage in others, and his love for Julie d’Angennes, was fired by the rare bravery exhibited by her in tending a dying brother, the infectious nature of whose disorder had made even his hired nurses desert him. In the season of mourning, the whole court, led by royalty, went and did homage to this pearl of sisters. But no admiration fell so sweetly upon her ear as that whispered to her by the young Montausier. One evidence of his chivalrous gallantry is yet extant. It is in that renowned volume called the “Guirlande de Julie,” of which he was the projector, and in the accomplishing of which, knights, artists, and poets, lent their willing aid. It is superb vellum tome. The frontispiece is the garland or wreath, from which the volume takes its name. Each subsequent page presents one single flower from this wreath (there are eighteen of them) with verses in honor of Julie, composed by a dozen and a half of very insipid poets. This volume was sold some years ago to Madame D’Uzes, a descendant of the family, when its cost amounted to nearly one thousand francs per page.
As everything was singular at Rambouillet, so of course was the wooing of Julie and her knight. It was very “long a-doing,” and we doubt if in the years of restrained ardor, of fabulous constancy, of reserve, and sad yet pleasing anguish, the lover ever dared to kiss the hand of his mistress, or even to speak of marriage, but by a diplomatic paraphrase.
The goddesses of Rambouillet entertained an eloquent horror of the gross indelicacy of such unions, for which Molière has whipped them with a light but cutting scourge. The lover, moreover, was a Huguenot. What was he to do? Like a true knight he rushed to the field, was the hero of two brilliant campaigns, and then wooed her as knight of half-a-dozen new orders, marechal-du-camp, and Governor of Alsatia. The nymph was still coy. The knight again buckled on his armor, and in the mêlée at Dettingen was captured by the foe. After a two months’ detention, he was ransomed by his mother, for two thousand crowns. He re-entered Rambouillet lieutenant-general of the armies of France, and he asked for the recompense of his fourteen years of constancy and patience. Julie was shocked, for she only thought how brief had been the period of their acquaintance. At length the marquis made profession of Romanism, and thereby purchased the double aid of the church and the throne. The king, the queen, Cardinal Mazarin, and a host of less influential members, besought her to relent, and the shy beauty at length reluctantly surrendered. The marriage took place in 1645, and Julie was then within sight of forty years of age. The young chevaliers and wits had, you may be sure, much to say thereupon. The elder _beaux esprit_ looked admiringly; but a world of whispered wickedness went on among them, nevertheless.
Montausier, for he now was duke and knight of the Holy Ghost, became the reigning sovereign over the literary circle at Rambouillet, during the declining years of Julie’s mother. Catherine died in 1665, after a long retirement, and almost forgotten by the sons of those whom she once delighted to honor. The most delicate and the most difficult public employment ever held by the duke, was that of governor to the dauphin. This office he filled with singular ability. He selected Bossuet and Huet to instruct the young prince in the theoretical wisdom of books, but the practical teaching was imparted by himself. Many a morning saw the governor and his pupil issue from the gilded gates of Versailles to take a course of popular study among the cottages and peasantry of the environs.
The heart of the true knight was shattered by the death of Julie in 1671, at the age of sixty-four. He survived her nineteen years. They were passed in sorrow, but also in continual active usefulness; and when, at length, in 1690, the grave of his beloved wife opened to receive him, Flechier pronounced a fitting funeral oration over both.
The daughter and only surviving child of this distinguished pair gave, with her hand, the lordship of Rambouillet to the Duc d’Uzes, “Chevalier de l’ordre du Saint Esprit.” The knightly family of D’Angennes had held it for three centuries. It was in 1706 destined to become royal. Louis XIV. then purchased it for the Count of Toulouse, legitimatized son of himself and Madame de Montespan. This count was knight and Grand Admiral of France, at the age of five years. In 1704, he had just completed his twenty-fifth year. He is famous for having encountered the fleet commanded by Rook and Shovel, after the capture of Gibraltar, and for having what the cautious Russian generals call, “withdrawn out of range,” when he found himself on the point of being utterly beaten. He behaved himself as bravely as any knight could have done; but the government was not satisfied with him. Pontchartrain, the Minister of Marine, recalled him, sent him to Rambouillet, and left him there to shoot rabbits, and like Diocletian, raise cabbages.
His son and successor, who was the great Duke de Penthièvre, commenced his knighthood early. He was even made Grand Admiral of France before he knew salt water from fresh. He studied naval tactics as Uncle Toby and the corporal fought their old battles--namely, with toy batteries. In the duke’s case, it was, moreover, with little vessels and small sailors all afloat in a miniature fish-pond, made to represent, for the nonce, the mighty and boundless deep. This grand admiral never ventured on the ocean, but he bore himself chivalrously on the bloody field of Dettingen, and he won imperishable laurels by his valor at Fontenoy. For such scenes and their glories, however, the _preux chevalier_ cared but little. Ere the French _Te Deum_ was sung upon the last-named field, he hastened back to his happy hearth at home. Rambouillet was then the abiding-place of all the virtues. There the home-loving knight read the Scriptures while the duchess sat at his side making garments for the poor. There, the Chevalier Florian, his secretary and friend, meditated those graceful rhymes and that harmonious prose, in which human nature is in pretty masquerade, walking about like Watteau’s figures, in vizors, brocades, high heels, and farthingales. When the duchess died in child-birth, of her sixth child, her husband withdrew to La Trappe where, among other ex-soldiers, he for weeks prayed and slept upon the bare ground. Five out of his children died early. Among them was the chivalrous but intemperate Prince de Lamballe, who died soon after his union with the unhappy princess who fell a victim to those fierce French revolutionists--who were ordinarily so amiable, according to M. Louis Blanc, that they were never so delighted as when they could rescue a human being from death.
It was by permission of the duke, who refused to sell his house, that Louis XV. built in the adjacent forest the hunting-lodge of St. Hubert. An assemblage of kings, courtiers, knights and ladies there met, at whose doings the good saint would have blushed, could he have witnessed them. One night the glittering crowd had galloped there for a carouse, when discovery was made that the materials for supper had been forgotten, or left behind at Versailles. “Let us go to Penthièvre!” was the universal cry; but the king looked grave at the proposition. Hunger and the universal opposition, however, overcame him. Forth the famished revellers issued, and played a _reveillée_ on the gates of Rambouillet loud enough to have startled the seven sleepers. “Penthièvre is in bed!” said one. “He is conning his breviary!” sneered another. “Gentlemen, he _is_, probably, at prayers,” said the king, who, like an Athenian, could applaud the virtue which he failed to practise. “Let us withdraw,” added the exemplary royal head of the order of the Holy Ghost. “If we do,” remarked Madame du Barry, “I shall die of hunger; let us knock again.” To the storm which now beset the gates, the latter yielded; and as they swung open, they disclosed the duke, who, girt in a white apron, and with a ladle in his hand, received his visiters with the announcement that he was engaged in helping to make soup for the poor. The monarch and his followers declared that no poor could be more in need of soup than they were. They accordingly seized the welcome supply, devoured it with the appetite of those for whom it was intended, and paid the grave knight who was their host, in the false coin of pointless jokes. How that host contrasted with his royal guest, may be seen in the fact told of him, when a poor woman kissed his hand, and asked a favor as he was passing in a religious procession. “In order of religion before God,” said he, “I am your brother. In all other cases, for ever your friend.” The Order of the Holy Ghost never had a more enlightened member than he.
In 1785 Louis XVI. in some sort compelled him to part with Rambouillet for sixteen million of francs. He retired to Eu, taking with him the bodies of the dead he had loved when living. There were nine of that silent company; and as the Duke passed with them on his sad and silent way, the clouds wept over them, and the people crowded the long line of road, paying their homage in honest tears.
Then came that revolutionary deluge which swept from Rambouillet the head of the order of the Holy Ghost, and the entire chapter with him; and which dragged from the mead and the dairy the queen and princesses, whose pastime it was to milk the cows in fancy dresses. The Duke de Penthièvre died of the Revolution, yet not through personal violence offered to himself. The murder of his daughter-in-law, the Princess de Lamballe, was the last fatal stroke; and he died forgiving her assassins and his own.
During the first Republic there was nothing more warlike at Rambouillet than the merino flocks which had been introduced by Louis XVI. for the great benefit of his successors. A scene of some interest occurred there in the last days of the empire.
On the 27th of March, 1814, the empress Maria Louisa with the King of Rome in her arms, his silver-gray jacket bearing those ribboned emblems of chivalry which may still be seen upon it at the Louvre, sought shelter there, while she awaited the issue of the bloody struggle which her own father was maintaining against her husband. The empress passed three days at Rambouillet, solacing her majestic anguish by angling for carp. Ultimately, the Emperor of Austria entered the hall where his imperial son-in-law had made so many Knights of the Legion of Honor, to carry off his daughter and the disinherited heir. As the three sat that night together before the wood-fire, the Arch-Duchess Maria-Louisa talked about the teeth of the ex-king of Rome, while two thousand Austrian soldiers kept watch about the palace.
The gates had again to be open to a fugitive. On the last of the “three glorious days” of July a poor, pale, palsied fugitive rushed into the chateau, obtained, not easily, a glass of water and a crust, and forthwith hurried on to meet captivity at last. This was the Prince de Polignac. Two hours after he had left came the old monarch Charles X., covered with dust, dropping tears like rain, bewildered with past memories and present realities, and loudly begging for food for the two “children of France,” the offspring of his favorite son, the Duke de Berri. In his own palace a king of France was compelled to surrender his own service of plate, before the village would sell him bread in return. When refreshed therewith, he had strength to abdicate in favor of his son, the Duke d’Angoulême, who at once resigned in favor of his nephew the Duke de Bordeaux; and this done, the whole party passed by easy stages into an inglorious exile. With them was extinguished the Order of the Holy Ghost; and never since that day have the emblematic dove and star been seen on the breast of any knight in France.
Louis Philippe would fain have appropriated Rambouillet to himself; but the government assigned it to the nation, and let it to a phlegmatic German, who had an ambition to sleep on the bed of kings, and could afford to pay for the gratification of his fancy. It was on the expiration of his lease that the house and grounds were made over to a company of speculators, who sadly desecrated fair Julie’s throne. The present sovereign of France has given it a worthy occupation. It is now an asylum and a school for the children of the brave. It began as the cradle of knights; and the orphans of those who were as brave as any of the chevaliers of old now find a refuge at the old hearth of the Knights of Amaury.
I can well conclude, that, by this time, my readers may be weary of foreign scenes and incidents, as we are of real personages. May I venture then, for the sake of variety, to ask them to accompany me “to the well-trod stage, anon?” There I will treat, to the best of my poor ability, of Stage Knights generally; and first, of the greatest of them all--Sir John Falstaff.
SIR JOHN FALSTAFF.
“I accept that heart Which courts my love in most familiar phrase.”--HEYWOOD.
Henry, Earl of Richmond, always creates a favorable impression on young people who see him, for the first time, without knowing much about him, previously, at the end of Shakespeare’s tragedy of Richard the Third. This is a far higher degree of favor than he merited, for Henry was a very indifferent personage indeed. On the other hand Sir John Falstaff has had injustice done him by the actors; and of Shakespeare’s jolly old _gentleman_ they have made what, down to Macklin’s times, they made of Shylock, a mere mountebank.
In the very first scene, in the first part of Henry IV., when the Prince and Sir John appear in company, the knight is, by far, a more accomplished gentleman than the heir-apparent, for he speaks more refinedly of phrase, and indeed seldom indulges in scurrilous epithets, until provoked. Strong language is the result of his infirmity of nature, not of vicious inclination. Lord Castlereagh was not accounted the less a gentleman for using, as he _could_ do, very unsavory phrases occasionally.
The Prince is the first to rail, while Sir John shows his breeding and, I will add, his reading, by quoting poetry. But, if he is poetical, still more is he philosophical. How gravely does he beseech Hal to trouble him no more with vanity! And what a censure does the heavy philosopher fling at the King’s son, when he tells the latter that he was hurt to hear the wise remarks of a lord of the council touching that son’s conduct! The fault of the knight is, that he is easily led away into evil; a common weakness with good-natured people. It is only since he held fellowship with the Prince, that the fat follower of the latter had become knowing in evil, and Heaven help him, little better, as he says, than one of the wicked. Nay, he has enough of orthodoxy left to elicit praise, even from the editor of the _Record_. “O, if a man were to be saved by merit,” he exclaims, “what hole in hell were hot enough to hold him!”
He robs on the highway, it will be said. Well, let us not be too ready to doubt his gentility on that account. There was many a noble cut-purse in the grand gallery at Versailles, when it was most crowded; and George Prince of Wales once nearly lost the diamond-hilt of his sword, at one of his royal mother’s “drawing-rooms.” The offenders here were but petty-larceny rascals, compared with Falstaff on the highway. That he defrauded the King’s exchequer is, certainly, not to be denied. But again, let us not be too hasty to condemn good men with little foibles. Recollect that St. Francis de Sales very often cheated at cards.
Robbery on the highway was, after all, only, as I may call it, a rag of knighthood. Falstaff robbed in good company. It was his vocation. It was the fashion. It was an aristocratic pastime. Young blood would have it so; and Sir John was a boy with the boys. In more recent times, your young noble, of small wit and too ample leisure, flings stale eggs at unsuspecting citizens, makes a hell of his quarters, if he be military, and breaks the necks of stage-managers.
Sir John was, doubtless, one of those of whom Gadshill speaks as doing the robbing profession some grace for mere sport’s sake. “I am joined,” says Gadshill, “with no foot land-rakers, no long-staff sixpenny strikers, none of those mad mustachio, purple-hued, malt-worms, but with nobility, and sanguinity; burgomasters, and great mongers.” Indeed, it is matter of fact that, there were graver, if not greater men than these among the noble thieves, “who would, if matters were looked into, for their own credit-sake, make all whole.” There was one at least who, for being a highway robber, made none the worse justice, charged to administer halters to poorer thieves.
But let us return to our old friend. Poor Sir John, I doubt if he would have gone robbing, even in the Prince’s company, only that he was bewitched by his Royal Highness’s social qualities. But even then, while patiently enduring all sorts of hard jokes, he is really the Mentor of the party, and does not go to rob the travellers without first seriously reminding the gentlemen of the road, that it was a hanging matter. He would keep them from wrong, but as they are resolved on evil commission he accompanies them. He has explained the law, and he is not too proud to share the profits.
He is brave, too, despite all his detractors! When the Prince and Poins, in disguise, set upon the gentle robbers, as they are sharing their booty, Falstaff is the only one who is described as giving “a blow or two,” before he imitates “the rest,” and runs away. When he attacked the travellers he was content to fight his man; there were four to four. And as to the imaginative description of the assault given by Falstaff, I believe it to have been uttered in joke and gayety of heart. I have implicit faith in the assertion, that he knew the disguised parties as well as their mothers did. See how readily he detects the Prince and Poins, when they are disguised as “drawers” at the inn in Eastcheap. If Falstaff was right in the latter case, when he told the Prince that he, Falstaff, was a gentleman, I think, too, he had as sufficient authority for saying to Hal, “Thou _knowest_ I am as valiant as Hercules.” I can not believe otherwise of a man whose taste was so little vitiated that he could at once detect when there was “lime” in his sack, and who no sooner hears that the state is in danger, than he suggests to the young Prince that he _must_ to court. His obesity may be suspected as not being the fruit of much temperance, but there is a Cardinal Archbishop in England who is the fattest man in the fifty-two counties, and why may we not conclude in both cases, that it is as Falstaff says, and that sighing and grief blow up a man like a bladder?
Then, only consider the reproof which Falstaff addresses to the Prince, speaking in the character of King to that illustrious scapegrace. Wisdom more austere, or graver condemnation of excess, could hardly be uttered by the whole college of cardinals, at any time. The prince is a mere plagiarist from the knight, and when he accuses the latter of being given to licentious ways, with what respectful humility does the old man plead guilty to his years, but “saving your reverence,” not to the vices which are said to accompany them?
Not that he is perfect, or would boast of being so. “He _has had_,” he says touchingly, “a true faith and a good conscience, but their date is out.” How ill is he requited by the Prince, in whose service he has lost these jewels, when his Highness remarks, before setting out to the field, “I’ll procure this fat rogue a charge of foot, and I know his death will be a charge of fourscore.” And this is said of one who has forgotten what the inside of a church is like through keeping this Prince’s villanous company; till when, he had been “as virtuously given as a gentleman need be.” What he considers as the requisite practice of a gentleman, is explained by Falstaff in his low estate, and not in the spirit which moved him when he “lived well and in good compass.”
But there is a Nemesis at every man’s shoulder, and if Falstaff was cavalierly careless enough to run up a score at the Boar’s Head, and to accept even a present of Holland shirts, which he ungratefully designates as “filthy dowlas,” the way in which he was _dunned_ must have been harsh to the feelings of a knight and a gentleman. In reviewing his gallantries and his extravagances, we must not, in justice to him, forget that he was a bachelor. If he degraded himself, he inflicted misery on no Lady Falstaff at home. Heroes have been buried, with whole nations for mourners, whose offences in this worse respect have been forgotten. Not that I would apologise for the knight’s familiarity with either the Hostess or that remarkably nice young lady, Miss Dorothea Tearsheet. I do not know what the private life of that Lord Chief Justice may have been who was so very merciless in his censure upon the knight; but I do know that there have been luminaries as brilliant who have hidden their lights in very noisome places and who had not Falstaff’s excuse.
I am as little embarrassed touching Sir John’s character as a soldier, as I am about his morals. I do not indeed like to hear him acknowledge that he has “misused the King’s press most damnably,” or that he has pocketed “three hundred and odd pounds” by illegally releasing a hundred and fifty men. But at this very day practices much worse than this are of constant observance in the Russian service, where officers and officials, whose high-sounding names “exeunt in off,” rob the Czar daily, and are decorated with the Order of St. Catherine.
In the field, I maintain that Falstaff is a hero. As for his catechism on honor, so far from detracting from his reputation, it seems to me to place him on an equality with that modern English hero who said that his body trembled at the thought of the perils into which his spirited soul was about to plunge him. Falstaff did not _court_ death. “God keep lead out of me,” is his reasonable remark; “I need no more weight than mine own bowels!” But the man who makes this prayer and comment was not afraid to encounter death. “_I have led_ my ragamuffins where they are peppered.” He went then at their head. That there was hot work in front of him is proved by what follows. “There’s but three of my hundred and fifty left alive; and they are for the town’s end, to beg during life!” A hundred and forty-seven men killed out of a hundred and fifty-one; of the four who survived, three are illustriously mutilated; while the bold soul who led them on is alone unscathed! Why, it reminds us of Windham and the Redan. It is Thermopylæ, with Leonidas surviving to tell his own story.