Part 45
The fashion of different families wearing the same devices had, however, its inconveniences. Thus, it happened that at this very battle of Poictiers, or a little before it, Sir John Chandos reconnoitring the French army, fell in with the Seigneur de Clerment, who was reconnoitring the English army. Each saw that the device on the upper vestment of his adversary was the same as his own, blue worked with rays of gold round the border. They each fell to sharp, and not very courteous words. The French lord at length remarked that Sir John’s claim to wear the device was just like “the boastings of you English. You can not invent anything new,” added the angry French knight, “but when you stumble on a pretty novelty, you forthwith appropriate it.” After more angry words they separated, vowing that in next day’s fight, they would make good all their assertions.
As the general rule was, that squires could not bear a cognizance, so also was it a rule that knights should only fight with their equals.
For knights are bound to feel no blows From paltry and unequal foes; Who, when they slash and cut to pieces, Do all with civilest addresses.
It is in allusion to this rule that Don Quixote says to Sancho Panza: “Friend Sancho, for the future, whenever thou perceivest us to be any way abused by such inferior fellows, thou art not to expect that I should offer to draw my sword against them; for I will not do it in the least; no, do thou then draw and chastise them as thou thinkest fit; but if any knight come to take their part, then will I be sure to step in between thee and danger.”
Knights, as I have said, have had honor conferred on them for very strange reasons, in many countries, but in none for slighter reasons, perhaps, than in France. We may probably except Belgium; for there is a living knight there, who obtained his order of chivalry for his pleasant little exhibition of gallantry in furnishing new-laid eggs every morning at the late queen’s table, when every hen but his, in the suburban village of Laecken had ceased to lay!
Dumas, in his “Salvandire,” satirically illustrates how knights were occasionally made in the days of Louis XIV. The hero of that dashing romance finds himself a captive in the prison of Fort l’Evêque; and as the king will not grant him permission to leave, he resolves to leave without permission. He makes the attempt by night, descends from the window in the dark, is caught by the thigh on a spike, and is ultimately carried to a cell and a bed within his prison-walls. The following day the governor waits upon him, and questions him upon the motives for his dangerous enterprise. The good governor’s curiosity is founded solely on his anxiety to elicit from the prisoner, that the desire of the latter to escape was not caused by his dissatisfaction with any of the prison arrangements, whether of discipline or diet. The captive signs a certificate to that effect, adding, that his sole motive for endeavoring to set himself free, was because he had never done anything to deserve that he should be put under restraint. A few days after, the governor announces to the recluse that the certificate of the latter has had an excellent effect. Roger supposes that it has gained him his liberty; but the governor complacently remarks that it has done better than that, and that the king, in acknowledgment of the strict character of the governor’s surveillance, has created him chevalier of the order of St. Louis. If all the prisoners had succeeded in escaping, as nearly as Roger, the governor would probably have been made Knight of the Holy Ghost! The king of France had many such faithful servants; but history affords many examples of a truer fidelity than this; particularly the old romances and legendary history--examples of faithfulness even after death; but, though there may be many more romantic in those chronicles, I doubt if there is any one so touching as the proof of fidelity which a knighted civilian, Sir Thomas Meautis, gave of his affection for Lord Bacon, to whom that ancient servant of the great lawyer, erected a monument at his own cost. Hamond Lestrange relates a curious incident, to show that these two were not divided even after death. “Sir Thomas,” says Lestrange, “was not nearer to him living than dead; for this Sir Thomas ending his life about a score of years after, it was his lot to be inhumed so near his lord’s sepulchre, that in the forming of his grave, part of the viscount’s body was exposed to view; which being espied by a doctor of physic, he demanded the head to be given to him; and did most shamefully disport himself with that skull which was somewhile the continent of so vast treasures of knowledge.”
Other knights have been celebrated for other qualities. Thus, Sir Julius Cæsar never heard Bishop Hackett preach without sending him a piece of money. Indeed, the good knight never heard any preacher deliver a sermon without sending him money, a pair of gloves, or some other little gift. He was unwilling, he said, to hear the Word of God, gratis.
Other knights have cared less to benefit preachers, than to set up for makers or explainers of doctrines themselves. Thus the Chevalier Ramsay held that Adam and Eve begot the entire human race in Paradise, the members of which fell with their procreators; and in this way the chevalier found in an intelligible form “the great, ancient, and luminous doctrine of our co-existence with our first parents.” The Chevalier deemed that in teaching such doctrine he was rearing plants for a new Paradise; but he was not half so usefully engaged as some brother knights who were practically engaged as planters. We may cite Sir John St. Aubyn, who introduced plane-trees into Cornwall in 1723; and Sir Anthony Ashley, the Dorchester knight, who enjoys the reputation of having introduced cabbages into England about the middle of the sixteenth century.
In contrast with these useful knights, the person of the once famous Chevalier de Lorenzi seems to rise before me, and of him I will now add a few words, by way of conclusion to my miscellaneous volume.
It is perhaps the tritest of platitudes to say that men are distinguished by various qualities; but it is among the strangest if not most novel of paradoxes, that the same man should be remarkable for endowments of the most opposite quality. The eccentric knight whose name and title I have given above, is, however, an illustration of the fact; namely, that a man may be at once stupid and witty. It was chiefly for his stupidity that Lorenzi was famous, a stupidity which excited laughter. I must, nevertheless, say in behalf of the brother of the once celebrated minister of France at the Court of Florence, in the days of Louis XV., that his stupidity so often looks like wit, as to induce the belief that it was a humor too refined for his hearers to appreciate.
Acute as Grimm was, he seems to have undervalued the chevalier in this respect. That literary minister-plenipotentiary of the Duke of Saxe Gotha could only see in the chevalier the most extraordinary of originals. He acknowledges, at the same time, Lorenzi’s high feeling of honor, and his frank and gentle spirit. The chevalier was crammed with scientific knowledge, but so confusedly that, according to Grimm, he could never explain himself in an intelligible way, or without exciting shouts of laughter on the part of his hearers. Madame de Geoffrin, when comparing the chevalier with the ungraceful M. de Burigny, said that the latter was awkward in body, but that Lorenzi was awkward in mind. As the latter never spoke without, at least, an air of profound reflection, and had therewith a piquant Florentine accent, his mistakes were more relished. I do not think much of his misapprehension when introduced, at Lyons, to M. de la Michaudière, in whose company he dined, at the residence of the commandant of the city. The gentleman was addressed by an old acquaintance as Le Michaudière, and Lorenzi, mistaking this for L’Ami Chaudière, persisted in calling the dignified official by the appellation of Monsieur _Chaudière_, which, to the proud _intendant_ of Lyons, must have been as bad as if the chevalier had certified that the _intendant’s_ father was a brazier.
He was far more happy, whether by chance or design, I can not say, at a subsequent supper at M. de la Michaudière’s house. At the table sat M. le Normant, husband of Madame de Pompadour, then at the height of her brilliant infamy. Lorenzi hearing from a neighbor, in reply to an inquiry, that the gentleman was the consort of the lady in question, forthwith addressed him as Monsieur de Pompadour, which was as severe an infliction as husband so situated could well have endured.
This honorable chevalier was clearly not a religious man--but among knights and other distinguished personages in France, and elsewhere, at the period of which I am treating, the two terms were perfectly distinct, and had no necessary connection. Accordingly, a lady who had called on Lorenzi one Sunday morning, before eleven o’clock, proposed, at the end of their conversation, to go with him to mass. “Do they still celebrate mass?” asked the chevalier, with an air of astonishment. As he had not attended mass for fifteen years, Grimm gravely asserts that the Florentine imagined that it was no longer celebrated. “The more,” adds the epistolary baron, “that as he never went out before two o’clock, he no longer recollected that he had seen a church-door open.”
The chevalier, who was Knight of the Order of St. Stephen of Tuscany, and who had withdrawn from the French Army, with the rank of colonel, after the conquest of Minorca, had a great devotion toward the abstract sciences. He studied geometry and astronomy, and had the habit, says Grimm, to measure the events of life, and reduce them to geometrical value. As he was thoughtful, he more frequently, when addressed, made reply to abstruse questionings of his own brain than to persons who spoke to him. Grimm, after saying that the Knight of St. Stephen was only struck by the true or false side of a question, and never by its pleasant or amusing aspect, illustrates his saying by an anecdote, in which many persons will fail to find any remarkable point. Grimm encountered him at Madame Geoffrin’s, after his return from a tour in Italy. “I saw him embroiling his senses with the genealogies of two ladies in whose society he passes his life, and who bear the same name, although they are of distinct families. Madame Geoffrin endeavored to draw him from these genealogical snares, observing to him:--‘Really, chevalier, you are in your dotage. It is worse than ever.’ ‘Madame,’ answered the chevalier, ‘life is so short!’” Grimm thought he should have done rank injustice to posterity if he had not recorded this reply for the benefit of future students of laconic wit. And again:--Grimm shows us the chevalier walking with Monsieur de St. Lambert toward Versailles. On the way, the latter asked him his age. “I am sixty,” said the knight. “I did not think you so old,” rejoined his friend. “Well,” replied the chevalier, “when I say sixty, I am not indeed quite so old, just yet; but--” “But how old are you then, in reality?” asked his companion. “Fifty-five, exactly; but why may I not be allowed to accustom myself to change my age every year, as I do my shirt?”
One day, he was praising the figure of a lady, but instead of saying that she had the form of a nymph, he said that her shape was like that of Mademoiselle Allard. “Oh!” cried Grimm, “you are not lucky, chevalier, in your comparison. Mademoiselle Allard may be deservedly eulogized for many qualities, but nobody ever thought of praising her shape.” “Likely enough,” said Lorenzi, “for I do not know, nor, indeed, have I ever seen her; but as everybody talks about Mademoiselle Allard, I thought I might talk about her too.”
If there was satire in this it was not of so neat a quality as that exhibited by him at Madame Greffon’s, where he was spending an evening with Grimm and D’Alembert. The last two were seated, and conversing. Lorenzi stood behind them, with his back to the chimney-piece, and scarcely able to hold up his head, so overcome was he by a desire to sleep. “Chevalier,” said Grimm, “you must find our conversation a horrid bore, since you fall asleep when you are on your legs.” “Oh, no!” exclaimed the chevalier, “you see I go to sleep when I like.” The naïveté with which he insinuated that he liked to go to sleep rather than listen to the small talk of a wit and a philosopher, was expressed with a delicious delicacy.
Of his _non-sequential_ remarks Grimm supplies several. He was once speaking disparagingly of M. de St. Lambert’s knowledge of chess. “You forget,” said the latter, “that I gained fifteen louis to your thirty sous, during our campaign in Minorca.” “Oh, ay,” answered the knight, “but that was toward the end of the siege!”
It was at this siege that he used to go to the trenches with his astronomical instruments, to make observations. He one day returned to his quarters without his instruments, having left them all in the trenches. “They will certainly be stolen,” said a friend. “That can’t be,” said Lorenzi, “for I left my watch with them.”
And yet this “distraught” knight was the cause, remote cause, of the death of Admiral Byng. He discovered, by mere chance, in his quarters at Minorca, a book of signals as used by the English fleet. He hastened with it to the Prince de Beaubeau, who, in his turn, hastened to place it before the Marshal de Richelieu. The commanders could scarcely believe in their good fortune, but when the naval combat commenced it was seen that the English observed this system of signals exactly. With this knowledge it was easy to anticipate all their manœuvres, and they were obliged to withdraw with disgrace, which Byng was made to expiate by his death. The chevalier never thought of asking for a reward, and his government entirely forgot to give him one.
When about to accompany M. de Mirepoix, who was appointed embassador to London, he packed up his own things and that so perfectly that it was not till he had sent them off that he discovered he had left himself nothing to travel in but the shirt and robe-de-chambre which he wore while employed in thus disposing of the rest of his wardrobe.
He lived in a small apartment at the Luxembourg, as persons of like rank and small means reside in the royal palace at Hampton Court. One day, on descending the staircase he slipped, and broke his nose. On looking round for the cause of his accident, he observed a whitish fluid on the steps; and, calling the porter, he rated him soundly for allowing this soapy water to remain on the staircase. “It is _barley_ water,” said the porter, “which a waiter from the café spilled as he carried it along.” “Oh! if that be the case,” replied the chevalier, in a mild tone, and with his hand up to his mutilated nose, “if that be the case, it is I who am in the wrong.”
Grimm adds, in summing up his character, that he was richer in pocket handkerchiefs than any other man. As his apartment was just under the roof of the palace, and that he, almost every day on going out, forgot to take a handkerchief with him, he found it less trouble to buy a new than to ascend to his room and procure an old one. Accordingly, a mercer in his neighborhood had a fresh handkerchief ready for him every day.
The history of eccentric knights would make a volume of itself. Here, therefore, I will conclude, grateful to the readers who may have honored me by perusing any portion of the miscellaneous pages which I have devoted to illustrations of chivalry, and, adding a remark of Johnson, who says, touching the respect paid to those who bear arms, that “The naval and military professions have the dignity of danger, and that mankind reverence those who have got over fear, which is so general a weakness.”
THE END.
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