Part 12

Meantime the city was beleaguered, and very soon hungry. Cauldrons of broth and boiled horse were set up at street-corners, and people fought each other to get at them; bread was made of oats and bran, and doled out by pennyweights as long as it lasted. When they had eaten all the horses they came to the dogs, then to the cats. The siege was maintained, the people starved. They ate tallow, dog-skin, rat-skin, cat-skin. They made bread of men’s bones from the cemeteries; they hunted children--L’Estoile has no doubts; many lay still, awaiting the mercy of death. “The only things which went cheap in Paris,” he says, “were sermons, where they served out wind to the famished people, giving them to understand that it was very pleasing to God to die of starvation--yea, and far better to kill one’s children than to admit a heretic as king.” A man, he says, came to his door to beg a crust of him to save a child’s life. While L’Estoile was fetching the bread the baby died, in the father’s arms. He himself sent away his wife and infant son to Corbeil: the leaguer had been raised for that purpose, and many took advantage of the grace. Unfortunately Corbeil was taken by the Spaniards, and his people held to ransom. There were fierce riots; but the Seize knew that their own necks were in peril (as proved to be true), and held out. Finally, after the farce of conversion solemnly enacted, Henry entered his good town. As a last resource the League had ordered the descent and procession of the Châsse of Ste-Geneviève a few days before. L’Estoile gives the warrant in full, with this note in addition: “Its virtue was shown forth, five days afterwards, in the reduction of Paris.” He always girded at the Châsse. It was brought down in July 1587 to make the rain stop. “She did no miracle, though liberally assisted. The moon before had been a rainy one, and they brought her down on the fifth of the new moon when there was promise of a little fine weather. Nevertheless, it began to rain harder than ever the next day.” He called Madame Sainte-Geneviève Diana of the Parisians.

Well, the Béarnois came in, and heard _Te Deum_ at Notre Dame. He made a torchlight entry, dressed in grey velvet, with a grey hat and white _panache_. His face was “fort riant”; his hat always in his hand to the ladies at the windows, particularly to three, “very handsome, who were in mourning, and at a window high up, opposite Saint-Denys-de-la-Chartre.” L’Estoile must have seen that, and admired the ladies. And he certainly saw--he says so--the reception of Mesdames de Nemours and Montpensier. They were held up by the passing of troops, and put out of countenance by the insolence of the bystanders, who “stared them full in the face without any sign of knowing who they were.” And that to Madame de Montpensier--“Queen-Mother” to Paris besieged!

Next day Henry played tennis all the afternoon, and hazard all night; but L’Estoile loved that king without approving of him. His tales tell for him and against, his esteem rises and falls. He liked his easy manners, his old clothes, his _Ventre-Saint-Gris_, his cynicisms and mocking humour. He does not seem to think the monarchy let down by such _sans façon_. Anyhow, there it is; and two things are made clear by the diary--first, that Henry was not the good fellow he is generally reputed, and second, that he was not then thought to be so. He himself, may be, had been too much knocked about by the world to have any illusions left him. There was an attempt against his life in 1595. The people seemed frantic with delight at his escape. L’Estoile relates how he went in procession to Notre Dame.

“You never heard,” he says, “such approbation of a king by his people as was given that day to our good Prince whenever he showed himself. Seeing it, a lord who was close to his Majesty, said to him, ‘Remark, sir, how happy are all your subjects at the sight of you.’ Shaking his head, the King replied, ‘That is the people all over. And if my greatest enemy was where I am now, and they saw him go by, they would do as much for him as for me, and shout even louder than they are doing now.’”

No, there were no rose-coloured curtains between Henry of Navarre and this transitory life. He did not even pretend to approve of himself; and if he was ashamed, as it seems he was, of his amorous entanglements with the young Princesse de Condé, it is certain that they shocked L’Estoile to the heart. When it comes to apologies there, there was no spirit left in the respectable man. For this diarist was as moral as our John Evelyn, and so far as I can find out on as good a foundation. He could express himself on such matters with point. For instance:

“Sunday the 12th February, which was Dimanche des Brandons, Madame had a splendid ballet at the Louvre, where nothing was forgotten that could possibly be remembered--except God.”

A sharper saying than Evelyn would have allowed himself. But it is the fact, as I have said, that good King Henry was not found so good living as dead. Afterwards--under Richelieu, under Mazarin, during the Fronde, under the Edict of Nantes--by comparison he shone. During his lifetime he had many more enemies and far fewer friends than was supposed. The Maréchal D’Ornano, in 1609, told him in so many words that he was not beloved by his people, and that a very little more on the taxes would bring back the civil war. The King said that he knew all that, and was ready for it. D’Ornano then said that he could not advise rough measures. “I shall freely tell you, sir, that the late King had more of the _noblesse_ for him than you have for yourself, and more of the people too than you will have if there be trouble. For all that, he was obliged to leave Paris and his own house to rebels and mutineers, and the rest of us thought ourselves lucky to get off with our heads on our shoulders.” L’Estoile had that from “a brave and trustworthy gentleman” who was close by at the time. The gentleman said that the King was at first moved to anger by D’Ornano’s plain speaking, but thanked him for it afterwards.

Bad stories of King Henry are to be had for the asking; perhaps the worst in L’Estoile is told in a poem which he picked up, and reports. A Madame Esther had been the King’s mistress in La Rochelle, and had borne him a son. The child died, the King tired, and forsook her. She came to see him at Saint-Denis when he was busy, distracted, seeking other game: he refused to see her or hear what she had to say. She was ill, and died in the town where he actually was, and being of the religion, a grave was denied her. What became of her body is not known, but “they raised to her memory,” L’Estoile says, “the following _Tombeau_ (epitaph), which was rehearsed at Saint-Denis and everywhere:

“TOMBEAU DE MADAME ESTHER

“Here Esther lies, who from Rochelle, Called by the King, her master, came, Risking the life of her fair fame With him to whom her beauty fell.

“Faithful she was, and served him well, Bore him a son who had no name, And died: so then her lover’s flame Sought other kindling for a spell.

“Forsaken, hitherward her steps Strayed, and to God she tuned her lips For mercy, dying so: but earth

“Was closed against her. Ah, it’s bad-- No yard of all his lands and worth For her who gave him all she had!”

A touching and simple piece. It should have gone home to a man whose intentions were always better than his inclinations, yet always gave way to them. The end of him, sudden and shocking as it was, can have surprised nobody. He had enemies everywhere, and few friends. The Catholics had never believed in him, the Protestants had ceased to believe in him. The day before his last he had had Marie de Médicis crowned with all the forms, though unwillingly. L’Estoile was there, and observed two notable facts: “the first was that it had been thought proper, on account of the subject-matter, to change the gospel of the day, which is from Mark x--“_And the Pharisees came to him, and asked him, Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife, tempting him._” That sounds to me a little too apt to be likely.

“The other was that at the _largesse_ of gold and silver coins, which is usual at coronations of kings and queens, there was never a cry _Vive le Roy_, nor yet a _Vive la Reine_--which, it was remarked, had never happened but at this coronation.” His next entry relates to the assassination:

“_Luctus ubique, pavor, et plurima mortis imago_,” is his conclusion of it all: “the shops are shut; everyone goes weeping or holding up his hands, great and small, young and old; women and maids pluck at their hair. The whole town is very quiet: instead of running for arms we run to our prayers, and make vows for the health and welfare of the new king. The fury of the people, contrary to the expectation and intent of the wicked, is turned upon the infamous parricide and his accomplices, seeking only to ensue vengeance and to have it.”

_De mortuis!_ That is always the way. And distrusting the Queen as he plainly did, and abhorring Concini, not the first, and not the best, of the implanted Italians, there is little wonder at the diarist’s dismay. He goes on, without circumlocution, to lay the crime at the door of the “Society of Judas,” as he calls a famous companionship, a society to whose new church the King’s heart had been promised, by whose means, he as good as says, it was now obtained. Not without scandal, it was presently conveyed there.

Enormous crowds viewed the king’s body, which lay in state in the Louvre. The Jesuits were among the first to come; he says:

“Class them as you please: everybody knows the maxim they preach, that it is lawful to kill the king who suffers two religions in his realm. Nevertheless (_vultibus compositis ad luctum_) they played affliction above everyone. Father Cotton, with an exclamation truly smacking of the Court and the Society, ‘Who is the villain,’ cries he, ‘to have killed this good prince, this pious, this great king? Was it not a Huguenot, then?’ They tell him, No, it was a Roman Catholic. ‘Ah, deplorable, if it be so!’ he says, and signs himself with three great crosses. Someone present, who had overheard him, was himself overheard to say, ‘The Huguenots don’t play those tricks.’”

But the Society took the heart to Notre-Dame-de-Boulogne.

L’Estoile survived to see the little king in Paris. He watched him benevolently always, and has tales to tell of him, of which the prettiest is about Pierrot, a village boy of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. When Louis had been there as Dauphin, Pierrot used to play with him; and now that he was King, and at the Tuileries, he had the notion of going to see him.

“The King was playing down by the lake, with a fine company about him; but as soon as he was aware of Pierrot, his old play-fellow (who still called him M. le Dauphin, and to those who reproved him, swore his round Mordienne that he did not know what else to call him), he left them all where they were to go to Pierrot, into whose arms he flew, and kissed him in the face of everybody. He told M. de Souvrai that they must find clothes for his friend the very next day, so that he might stay with him, but Pierrot said he could not do that, but must go home for fear of being beaten. His father and mother had not been willing to let him go--but he had gone for all that, and had brought M. le Dauphin (he called him) a present of some sparrows.”

“Simplicité rustique,” L’Estoile calls it, and praises Louis for going half-way to meet it. He is then very near the end of his record, and of his earthly tether too.

Misfortunes were gathered thickly about the honest man. He was out of his employment through age; money was very short with him. He sold his collections piecemeal, and was glad to make fifty francs or so here and there. He does not name the most serious of his ailments, but I fear that it was malignant, and put recovery out of the case. In September 1610, feeling himself in extremities, he demanded the Sacrament, and it became a question of confession. Father des Landes, a Jacobin and a friend of his, was chosen for the office, and demanded of him a protestation that he would die in the Catholic, Apostolic, Roman faith. The first two--yes, said L’Estoile; but boggled over the third. He relates the course of the argument which he held with the Jacobin. It branched off, as they will, into all sorts of side issues: invocation of the Saints, Council of Trent, errors of the Popes, and what not. He comes as near as he ever does here to putting down what he really did--or at least what he really did not--believe. He was an eclectic, but desperate of remedy. He would have seen the Reformed Church Catholic, and the Catholic reformed. But that, he is aware, is a counsel of perfection. “Three things forbid: lack of charity, lack of zeal for the glory of God, and stubbornness, which is the last trench of the ignorant.” And he concludes on the whole matter: “I shall hold on then to that old stock, rotten as it is, of the Papacy. The Church is in it, though it is not the Church.” And thereupon he had his absolution and the Sacrament. Father des Landes was a liberal-minded Jacobin.

I have fallen into the old easy way of confounding historical persons and history, but that is L’Estoile’s fault at least as much as mine. I might have stuffed my account of his book with criminal records, or with sermons; for next to the doings of the great those are the matters which concern him. Few days pass, never a week, in which he does not record an execution or several of them. I don’t know whether the Paris of the Henrys was worse than the London of James, and failing an English L’Estoile, I shall never know. But Paris would be bad to beat--not only for bestial crime but for bestial requital of it. In London you might be decapitated or hanged: burning was rare towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign. In Paris you might be hanged, or hanged and strangled, or broken on the wheel, or hanged and burned; or, if you were respectable enough you could be executed with a sword. Burning was reserved for heresy: for _lèse-majesté_ there was death by horses--four of them. L’Estoile saw Ravaillac die that death. He died, the wretch, at the “deuxième tirage.” These things are shocking, as the crimes were which they were designed, after the ideas of the times, to fit. Then there were the duels which reached in France a point not known in our country. The _mignons_ quarrelled in companies. That happened when Quélus, Maugiron and Livarrot met d’Entragues, Ribérac and Schomberg in the Marché-aux-Chevaux. Maugiron and Schomberg were killed outright; Ribérac died the next day, and Quélus, with nineteen wounds, lingered for a month, and died then. The King kissed the dead, cut off and kept their fair hair, and took from Quélus the ear-rings which he had himself put into his ears. “Such and the like ways of doing,” says L’Estoile, “unworthy indeed of a great king and a high-hearted, as this one was, caused him by degrees to be despised ... and in the Third-Estate, to be made little by little their faction, which was the League.” No doubt that is true.

Let me remember, as I end, this curious piece of news: on January 8th, 1608, it was so cold that the chalice froze in Saint-André-des-Ars, and they had to get a brazier from the baker’s to thaw it. Saint-André was L’Estoile’s favourite, or perhaps his parish church. The law cares nothing for trifles, but history lives upon them. My last scrap, however, is not of an age but of all time. “J’ay trente mil livres de rente, et cependant je meurs!” said the Abbé of Bonport in his last agony.

LA BRUYÈRE

If we can still contrive to hold up our heads in the world it is not the fault of the writers of maxims, who have seldom had a good word to say for us. We may ask, as we wilt but read on, Have we then nothing which can face unashamed the microscopic eye? Does not virtue lend itself to aphorism? Should it not be possible to make pithy summaries of our good qualities, of our reasonable institutions? La Rochefoucauld’s answer would be, Inform me of your virtues, show me your tolerable institutions, and I will tell you if I can reduce them to maxims. Nobody took the trouble to do it. He was read, as he wrote, for entertainment; and entertainment certainly comes if we don’t read too much of him at a time. He is for the bedside or the dressing-table. You can glance at him as you shave: but if you linger on him, you had better put away the razors. He has himself detected the source of the entertainment. “In the misfortunes of our best friends we can always find something which is not unpleasing.” He is dreadfully right; and it was his accuracy, no doubt, which Madame de Sévigné found to be “divine.” I obtain my own consolation out of the fact that, poor things as we are, it has been possible for one at least of us to write us down so well. But I am under no delusions about this duke. He is not necessarily a good man struggling with adversity, but as human as the rest of us. His only right to the microscope is that of user; and the pose that he who sees so many beams in his neighbour’s eyes has no motes in his own, it is fair to say, is not consciously assumed, but inseparable from the aphoristic method.

In La Bruyère, the French Theophrastus, who has tempered his maxims with “portraits,” I think that the Rhadamanthus-attitude is deliberate. La Bruyère is indignant, and takes it for righteousness. You cannot call him cynical; he is a _censor morum_. He combines the methods of La Rochefoucauld and Tallemant des Réaux, but is more human than the first because he condescends to scold his victims, and much less so than the other because he cannot bring himself to consider them as of the same clay with himself. La Bruyère, you may say, never takes off his wig and gown; Tallemant never puts his on. In _Les Caractères_ is but one paragraph of unstinted praise; the _Historiettes_ is full of them. Tallemant, however, did not write for publication, and La Bruyère did. It is possible that he would have praised more generally than he did if it had been as safe to praise as to condemn. But it was not. He had been rash enough at starting to call attention to Bishop Le Camus, and to be astonished at the red hat conferred upon a pious and devoted man. Then he learned, first, that the King had been very much offended by the Pope’s action, and secondly, that the Pope had intended him to be. Just in time he cancelled the passage. No--a writer had to be sure of his ground when he went about to praise. You were only perfectly safe, indeed, in praising His Majesty.

His “pleasant” saying of Dangeau, as Saint-Simon calls it, that he was not a grandee, but “after a grandee,” is typical of him, at once acute and direct. It says more exactly what Dangeau was than a page. The page is there too, but the few words shine out of it like an electric light. It is as if he was talking round about his subject, seeking the best aspect of it, and then, suddenly, with a pointing finger, you get “_Pamphilius_ in a word desires to be a great man, and believes himself to be one; but he is not; he is after a great man.” The rest of the page goes for little. It is Thackerayan, as we should say. Whether Thackeray owed anything directly to La Bruyère I am not able to determine; but he owed a fair amount to Steele, who assuredly did.

If La Bruyère had desired to learn the worst of mankind he could not have been trained in a better school than that which he found for himself. He had been one of the Accountants-General in the Bureau of Finance at Caen for a few years when M. le Prince--le Grand Condé--called him to Chantilly to be tutor--one of several--to his grandson the Duc de Bourbon. There, and at Versailles, he remained for the rest of his life, and at Versailles he died. Of Condé, of Henri-Jules, his terrible son, and of the grandson, “very considerably smaller than the smallest of men,” as Saint-Simon declares him, and very considerably more of a degenerate than most men, this learned, accurate, all-observant, deeply-meditating man was content to be the servant and the butt. When his pupil left his hands he stayed on as “gentleman” to the father, who was in his turn M. le Prince. Prince as he was, he was also, quite simply, a wild beast, biting mad; and his son was little better: a pervert and proud of it, crafty, malicious, tyrannical, and “extremely ferocious.” One does not know how life with such masters can have been tolerable. La Bruyère was both neglected and despised. He had nothing to do, for even as “gentleman” he was a supernumerary--yet he must be there. To understand it you must accept the _sang royal_ in its fullest implications. His book, which yielded eight editions in his lifetime, went for nothing at Chantilly, though the King himself had heard of it, and had his harangue at the Academy read to him at Marly. Yet one of the inmates of Chantilly (Valincourt), while admitting that “La Bruyère meditated profoundly and agreeably, two things which are rarely found together,” went on to say that “he was a good fellow at bottom, whom, however, the fear of seeming pedantic had thrown into its ridiculous opposite ... with the result that during all the time he spent in the household of M. le Duc, in which he died, he was always held for a figure of fun.” It seems that he tried to be sprightly, would dance, put on airs and graces, make jokes, and walk on his toes. We may regard all that as protective colouring, the instinct of the creature to hide his continual mortifications. Elsewhere--in Paris, naturally--he had made himself a personage. His book sold, if not to his profit, very much to his credit; he had made himself imposing enemies, and had the better of them at every turn; Bossuet was his friend, Pontchartrain, Racine and the like. He still held his sinecure office at Caen. Why, then, did he hang about Chantilly, and lodge in an attic at Versailles when M. le Prince was there? Who is to say? That particular prince was a human tiger--but in his service he lived on, and died. I think he ought to have put himself into his own book--and perhaps he did:

“I see a man surrounded, and followed--he is in office. I see another man whom all the world salutes--he is in favour. Here is one caressed and flattered, even by the great--he is rich. There is another, observed curiously on all hands--he is learned. Here is another whom nobody omits to greet--a dangerous man.”

At any rate, his experiences provided that one of the shrewdest sections of _Les Caractères_ is that headed “Of the Court.”

“The Court does not satisfy; it prevents you from satisfaction anywhere else.

“It is like a house built of marble: I mean that it is made up of men, very hard, but polished.

“One goes there very often in order to come away again and be therefore respected by one’s country gentry, or the bishop.

“The most honourable reproach which can be made against a man is to say of him that he knows nothing of the Court. In that one remark there are no virtues unimputed to him.

“You speak well of a man at Court for two reasons: the first, that he may learn that you have done so; the second that he may so speak of you.

“It is as dangerous at Court to make advances as it is awkward not to make them.”

The man who penned those caustic little sentences knew what he was talking of. Yet La Bruyère’s portrait of himself sets him forth as a creature apart, pointedly distinguishes him from _Clitiphon_, who has been too busy to heed him.