Part 11

After Retz’s death, the Président Hénault, writing about his Memoirs, asked how one was to believe that a man would have the courage, or the folly, to say worse things about himself than his greatest enemy could have said. The answer, of course, is that Retz had no suspicion that he was saying bad things about himself. He said a great deal that was not true. Other chronicles of the Fronde give detailed accounts of such days as that of the Barricades, with not a word of the Coadjutor in them. But even if it had all been true, it would have seemed a perfectly simple matter to him. If you have no moral sense, the words “good” and “bad” have only a relative meaning. It is much harder to understand why he did the things which he relates, or why, if he did not do them, he said that he did. What was he trying to get done? Did he hate Mazarin? There is no evidence that he did anything more than despise him. La Rochefoucauld, whom he accuses, by the way, of having tried to assassinate him, explains him and his Memoirs alike by vanity. “Far from declaring himself Mazarin’s enemy in order to supplant him, his only aim was to seem formidable, and to indulge the foolish vanity of opposing him.” If Retz knew of that “portrait”--and he did, because Mme. de Sévigné sent it him--his own more benevolent one of its author must be reckoned in his favour. He had written it in his Memoirs, but allowed it to stand there unaltered except for one little word. He had originally said that La Rochefoucauld was the most accomplished courtier and most honest man of his age. He scratched out the honesty.

Personally, I picture a happy _rencontre_ in the Elysian Fields in or about 1679, when the Cardinal de Retz should have arrived and greeted his brother in the purple. A lifting of red hats, a pressing of hands--“Caro Signore, sta sempre bene?” and so on. There had been bitter war on earth; each was a keen blade, each an Italian. Each had had his triumphs. Retz had twice driven Mazarin out of Paris and once out of France. But Mazarin had proved the better stayer. He had returned, put Retz to flight, and died worth forty millions. Retz came back, made a good end, and only just cleared his debts. And what had it all been about? Some say, Anne of Austria, an elderly, ill-tempered, fat woman; some say vanity, some ambition. I say, _Il Talento_ and the joy of battle: the brain taut, the eye alert, the sword-hand flickering like lightning on a summer night. Greek was meeting Greek. Inevitably that must have been. There was not room for two Italians of that stamp in France.

But let us always remember that he was mourned by Mme. de Sévigné, who said that he had been her friend for thirty years. There is the best thing to be known about him.

“L’ABBESSE UNIVERSELLE”: MADAME DE MAINTENON

Few of the outstanding names in history have received the hard measure which has been meted out to Madame de Maintenon’s. She has had it, so to speak, both ways; been blamed for what she did not, and for what she did. First, she was to be held abominable because she was not the King’s wife; next, and even more so, because she was. All that falls to the ground if it can be shown that her life before the marriage was as irreproachable, morally, as it was after it. Madame Saint-René Taillandier, in a recent admirable study of the misjudged lady, has no difficulty in proving that it was so. She proves it positively by showing of what nature Madame de Maintenon really was, and negatively by exploring all possible sources of contemporary evidence, and finding nothing worth consideration. Dull, narrow, bigoted, obstinate, over-busy about many things, more occupied with to-day than to-morrow, falling in too readily with Louis’ view of himself and his place in the universe (a view which she shared with the entire French nation)--these things she may have been, and done. But she was a good woman, a pious woman, one who was severely tried, one who did her immediate duty and gave to the poor. She had a long and unhappy life, and died worn out. There can be no doubt of all this. All sorts of reasons for hating and slandering her can be urged: none of them good ones.

The reproaches of the historians are not so summarily to be dismissed. It is not necessary to go so far as Michelet did when he said that the price of her marriage with Louis was the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. That’s absurd. Madame de Maintenon neither bargained nor sold her hand. But it is hard to believe--impossible to believe--that she was not in consultation with the King, and Louvois, and the priests about the Revocation, or that, if consulted, she would not have urged it. Saint-Simon, who is her first accuser here, is writing after her death, and writing as an historian. I feel sure that he is right. It is, of course, true that she was a Huguenot by descent, a grand-daughter of that truculent, serio-comic old Agrippa d’Aubigné, whose portrait, savagely grinning, is so extraordinarily like those of his king, _le Béarnais;_ and it is true also that, though she was converted before she was a grown woman, she never lost her fanatic hold upon religion, but simply changed its direction. Throughout her life, says Madame Taillandier, she showed Huguenot characteristics. She could never take to the devotion of the rosary; she could never find any enthusiasm for convents; she invoked neither the Virgin nor the Saints; continued the reading of her Bible. No matter for that: she was hungry for souls. As Saint-Simon puts it, with evident truth: “Elle eut la maladie des directions ... elle se croyait l’abbesse universelle.... Elle se figurait être une mère d’église.” She converted whomsoever she could touch, and as she grew in influence she could touch a many. Concerned in the Revocation, besides Louis, there were Louvois, Father le Tellier, Bossuet, her own spiritual director, the Bishop of Chartres, and all the Jesuits. Everything that we know about her shows to which side she would incline; and nothing that we know about her makes it likely that she had any conception what statesmanship meant. Louis called her “Sa Solidité.” Her solidity showed itself in her care for detail: nothing was too small for her--she loved to order a household, knew how many chickens you should get in for a small family, how much wine for the servants, how many pounds of candles. She could design the quasi-conventual robes for Saint-Cyr, costumes for ballets and so on. But the economic or political outcome of the Revocation of the Edict; the ruin of her country, the humiliation of the King, all the immediate results of the “affreux complot” were entirely outside her power of vision. “Four regiments of infantry,” Madame Taillandier pleasantly says, “two of cavalry were ordered to follow the Duc de Noailles into Languedoc, and _trample a little_ on the Huguenots.” My italics! Well, Madame de Maintenon expected to save souls like that. I don’t think that she can be let off her share in the _dragonnades_, or in the Revocation.

Never mind. She was more of a saint than a sinner, though she lacked the severity and suavity, the “sweet reasonableness” of the true Saints. She was bleak, in herself and in her outlook; her life had always been, and after her marriage was long to be, cheerless and unutterably dull. What a life it was, throughout its eighty-three years! Born in a prison in 1635, and living thereafter on charity, with one relative or another; hounded from Huguenot pillar to Catholic post; clinging to the faith in which she had been reared until she was “converted” almost literally by force; still a pauper, often a drudge; then at seventeen married to an elderly balladist, crippled by disease, Paul Scarron, a scribbler of pasquinades and squibs, author of a travesty of Virgil and what not; married to this incapacitated rip; living with him in Grub Street on what he could pick up by the hire of his pen--a libel here, a dedication there, a lampoon elsewhere, a broadside for the street corner or bridge-end; living so from hand to mouth, married but not a wife--what a life for a young girl gently born, grand-daughter of King Henry’s old friend! Nothing is more pathetic in Madame Taillandier’s account of her than the gallant fight she put up in her little salon in the Rue Neuve Saint-Louis--polite conversation in her bed-chamber with her friends, while Paul and his tore the decencies to shreds below-stairs. And she succeeded, too, in making good and herself respected. She had valuable friends. Madame de Sévigné was one, Madame de Coulanges another, Madame de Lafayette a third. Through them she became acquainted with yet higher persons, among them with Madame de Montespan, then in league with the highest of all. By those means she fell under the King’s eye. He did not like, but he esteemed her, and chose her out of all the Court and all Paris to govern Madame de Montespan’s children. She did it, by all accounts, admirably. If she had no other qualities, she had two rare ones: she did her duty, and held her tongue.

When, by public Act, the children were made Enfants de France, they were removed from Paris to Saint-Germain; and there was Madame Scarron in daily intercourse with Louis. That was the beginning of her astounding ascent. Madame de Montespan was uneasy, and had reason to be. The _gouvernante’s_ influence was steadily against her. Madame Scarron disapproved of her and all her kind; and sure enough, from the hour of her entry into the King’s family, the mistress’s star began to wane. Finally, what the preachers--Bossuet, Bourdaloue--could not do the ghastly business of “the Poisons” settled. La Montespan was in that up to the neck, and Louis knew that she was, and held his peace, not to save her neck, but to save his face. Montespan was exiled, and took, as George Meredith said, “to religion and little dogs.” Madame Scarron remained in charge of the children, and was ennobled with a fief and a Marquisate. The Court called her “Madame de Maintenant”--but she had not fully earned that. The Queen died--and Louis almost immediately married the Marquise. There is not a ghost of a doubt of it. Saint-Simon gives the date, the hour, and the names of celebrant, assistants, and witnesses. Everybody knew it--but nothing was said. From that hour Louis was hardly ever out of her company until the end, when she was forced to leave him before the breath was out of his body.

What did she gain except unutterable weariness, suspicion, fear, slander, and unending labour? Read Dangeau’s diary of the dreary, splendid routine of Versailles, Marly and Fontainebleau; read in Madame Taillandier a letter from the poor woman describing one of her days. She had her Saint-Cyr in which she really delighted. She could play universal Abbess there, and be interested and at peace for a time. But even there chagrin and disappointment dogged her. She brought in Madame Guyon, Quietism, and other things taboo. She became involved in Fénélon’s disgrace; and presently she had to submit to Rome and turn her beloved “Institution” of ladies into a convent of nuns.

No--she was bleak, and had a narrow mind; but, as she saw her duty, so she did it. Her duty led her into thorny wastes and desert places; it led her to be one of the thousand idle parasites yawning and stretching at Versailles, slowly and endlessly revolving like dead moons round le Roi Soleil. We may pity Madame de Maintenon for what life made of her, but not blame her.

PIERRE DE L’ESTOILE

Rich as they are in the possession of the _diverticula amoena_ of history--and much richer than we are--for all that the French have no Pepys. “Many an old fool,” said Byron of Coleridge at his lecture, “but such as this, never.” So it may be put of the French memoirists: many a burgess of plain habit and shrewd observation, many a rogue husband too; but the like of one who, being both, turned himself inside out for the wonder of posterity, never. Indeed, it would be hard to imagine a Latin Pepys. The French do not discharge their bosoms on paper without reason; and the reasons which moved Pepys, whatever they were, would not approve themselves to their minds. Cynicism, or vanity, might suggest self-exhibition to one or another, as it did to Casanova the Venetian, but the truth is not served that way. There was a leaven of puritanism in Pepys such as Huguenotry never deposited in a Frenchman. That leaven did double work in our man. It seasoned for him his pleasant vices, and gave also a peculiar thrill to his confessions, as if his pen, like his hair, was standing on end as he wrote. No Frenchman needed a relish for his foibles of the kind; and as for thrills, his nation has always kept faith and works in separate compartments. We cannot do that.

However, they are rich enough without him. If they have no Pepys, they have in their Pierre de L’Estoile one whom we cannot match. Imagine a citizen of London in Elizabeth’s last and James’s first years, observing, recording each day as it came. We have in John Evelyn, fifty years later, a diarist of higher quality, who yet, and for that reason, was of less historical value. He seldom stooped to the detail in which the Parisian was versed: would that he had! L’Estoile will furnish no such picture as Evelyn’s of the Gallery at Hampton Court on a specimen afternoon. On the other hand, in L’Estoile, the brawling, buzzing, swarming streets of old Paris come before us at every turn of the leaf--and there at least he was like Pepys. If by happy chance one John Chamberlain, a private citizen of London, whose letters were published last year, had kept a diary, and could have kept it out of harm’s way, he might have given just such a particularised account of his town as L’Estoile gives of the Paris of the League, the Seize, and _La Religion_. But he was fearful of the post, and never committed himself. Nor would he, of course, have had such cataclysmic matter to report, England in James’s reign was drifting towards the whirlpool: France was already spinning madly in it.

Pierre de L’Estoile was an official of the Chancellery in Paris. His title was “Audiencier,” and his duties, as nearly as I can ascertain, were more like those of one of the Six Clerks of our Court than of him whom we call Auditor. He was a man of family, of the _noblesse de Robe_, of landed estate, of education, and of taste. He had Greek, and Latin, bigotry and virtue; he collected coins and medals, books, ballads, pamphlets, bibelots of all sorts. He began to keep a diary on the day when Charles IX died, “enferme, comme un chien qui enrage”--Whitsunday, 1574; maintained it through the riot and effrontery, the anarchy and intrigue in which Henry III and the _mignons_ killed and were killed; through the open war of the League, and through the Siege of Paris. He saw the entry of Henry IV; judged while he loved that ribald king; and caught up the flying rumours of that day which hushed all the city, that day when he was stabbed to the heart, “au coing de la rue de la Ferronnerie, vis-à-vis d’un notaire nommé Poutrain,” as he sat in his coach listening to a letter which Epernon was reading to him. He went on until 1611, and only laid his pen down because he was about to lay down his life. His last entry is of the 27th September: on the 8th October he was buried. He had lived under six kings of France, had three of them die violent deaths, had been an eyewitness of the Saint-Bartholomew. A seasoned vessel.

As he was never a courtier he could not have witnessed all the great events which he relates. I think he saw the entry of Henry of Navarre, if not his shocking exit. But he was out and about, all agog; he had highly placed friends; and collected for his diary as he did for his cabinet. I imagine he must be a “source” for such a tragic scene as the murder of the Duc de Guise, which might have gone bodily into _Les Quarante-Cinq_ if that fine novel had not stopped a few months short of it. Everything is there to the hand. As first, the presages: how on the 21st of December (1588),

“the Archbishop of Lyon, having overheard the proud speeches which the Duke had made the King in the gardens of Blois, told him that he would have done well to use more respect, and that a more modest bearing would have been becoming: whereupon, ‘You are wrong,’ the Duke replied: ‘I know him better than you do. You have to take him boldly. He is a king who likes to be made frightened.’”

And then another: on the next day,

“As the Duke went to table, to his dinner, he found a note under his napkin wherein was written that he ought to be on his guard, because they were on the point of doing him a bad turn. Having read it, he wrote upon it these three words, ‘They dare not,’ and threw it under the table. The same day he was told by his cousin the Duc d’Elbœuf that on the morrow there would be an attempt against his life, and answered with a laugh that, plainly, he had been searching the almanacs.”

On the 23rd he and his brother the Cardinal attended the Council, on summons:

“They found the guard strengthened, and more hardy than usual. They demanded money, and asked the Duke to see to it that they were paid, using (as it seemed) a new manner of address, less respectful than he had been accustomed to hear. Taking no notice, they went their ways; and for all that the Duke had had warnings from many quarters of what was working against him--nine of them, indeed, on that very day, whereof he put the last in his pocket, saying aloud, ‘That is the ninth to-day’--nevertheless, so blind was that high mind of his to things as clear as daylight, he could not bring himself to believe that the King intended to do him an ill turn; for God had blindfolded his eyes, as He generally does of those whom He designs to chasten. Being then come into the Council, in a new coat, grey in colour and very light for the time of year, the eye on the scarred side of his face was seen to weep, and he to let two or three drops at the nose--on account of which he sent a page out for a handkerchief.... Presently the King sent Revel, one of the Secretaries of State, for him, who came up just as he was shutting down into the silver box he used to carry, the plums and raisins which he used for his heart-weakness. He rose immediately to attend his Majesty, and just as he came into the ante-chamber one of the Guards in there trod upon his toe; and though he knew very well what that meant, notwithstanding he made no sign, but went on his way to the Chamber, as one who cannot avoid his fate. Then, suddenly, he was seized by the arms and legs by ten or a dozen of the Quarante-Cinq ambushed behind the arras, and by them stabbed and murdered, uttering among other lamentable cries this last, which was plainly heard, ‘God! I am dying! My sins have found me out. Have mercy on me!’ Over his poor body they flung a mean carpet, and there he lay exposed to the gibes and indignities of them of the Court, who hailed him ‘fair King of Paris’--the King’s name for him.”

Detail like that must have been got at first hand. When he comes to the Cardinal, he contents himself by saying that he was despatched in the Capuchin Convent on Christmas Eve. But the account of the Duke carries conviction. L’Estoile had a friend at Blois--an official of the Council, or an usher of the door. Though there is pity in his words, “Sur ce pauvre corps fut jetté un meschant tapis,” his judgment was not disturbed. His account closes with the stern words,

“Et ici finist le règne de Nembrot le Lorrain.”

Henry being what he was, and whose son he was, it was plain to him that the only thing to do with the head, and crownable head, of the League was to remove it. After the Saint-Bartholomew murder was a recognised arm of kingship, a sort of _jus regale_, in France. But Catherine de Médicis, who taught her sons the uses of the dagger and the dark, was not consenting to this particular use of them. Her worthless son might be the last of the Valois; but she dreaded the first of the Bourbons much more than the extinction of her own race; and when Henry was fool enough to boast, “Now I am the only King,” and (says L’Estoile) “began immediately to be less of one than ever,” she, sickening of such inanity, took to her bed, and died in it on the 5th of January following the _coup d’état_.

A year later the League gave the counterstroke. Henry was murdered at Blois by its creature, Clément the Jacobin: “poorly and miserably slain,” says L’Estoile, “in the flower of his age, in the midst of his garrison, surrounded, as always, by guards; in his chamber, close to his bed, by a little rapscallion of a monk, with a jerk of his nasty little knife.” The thing was miraculously simple, a touch-and-go which just came off. Clément asked for an audience, was refused: Henry heard of it and insisted on seeing him. The man was let in, found his victim undressed and at disadvantage, gave him a letter, and while he was reading, drove a knife into his bowels and left it there. He was himself killed on the spot, having done what the League intended, and more than that by a good deal. L’Estoile notes it at the moment: “The King of Navarre is made King of France by the League.” So he was.

Civil war followed: Paris in the grip of the Seize, with the Duc de Mayenne as Regent for the League. L’Estoile lost his appointment; for the Chancery followed the King, and he himself could not. A Court of a kind was maintained in the city, and he, in order to live, was forced to serve the Seize, whom he detested and feared. He had good reason for that. Famine and pestilence were on all sides of him, and treachery and suspicion--under the bed, at the street corners, in the churches, wherever people came together--and the gibbet expecting its daily tribute. When the news came in of Arques or Ivry, of the capitulation of Chartres or what not, it was as much as your neck was worth to be seen to smile. Lists of names went about--you might see your own on it any day. By a letter attached to it you could know your portion. P. stood for _pendu_, D. for _dagué_, C. for _chassé_. L’Estoile saw his own, with D. against it. He went in fear, naturally, but I think he was more scandalised than afraid when they began their new Saint-Bartholomew by hanging the President of the Council, Brisson, and two of his fellow members. It took place in prison, and L’Estoile, though he was not present, reports the manner of it, and the harangues of the victims. His conclusion is good enough: “Thus, on this day, a First President of the Court was hanged--by his clerk.” The King, he hears, “gossant à sa manière accoustoumée,” said that he had no better servants in all Paris than the Seize, who did his business for him better than anything they did for their masters, and cost him no doubloons neither.