Part 2

René Louis de Voyer d'Argenson was born at Paris in 1694, in the same year as two puissant men whose fortunes were to intersect his own, the Englishman, Henry St. John, and his friend and countryman Voltaire. Two years later he was joined by his brother, Marc Pierre, known to history as the astute and charming Count d'Argenson. His father, who had but lately come to Paris, was as yet known only as a rising Master of Requests; his mother was a sister of the distinguished de Caumartin, M. d'Argenson's patron and sponsor in the official world. Among his other natural endowments, the young René Louis possessed, and was possessed by, an expansive imagination; he early conceived and resolved upon a career. Before he was well in his teens, he was leading his brother along those devious courses by which a wholesome boy was to be turned into a fine gentleman and a man of the world.

"We were not born libertines, but are become so. I saw all the sights, I was at all the gatherings, I knew all the women. I thought to myself, what a fine figure I was making in the world."[50]

The boys were not overburdened with parental solicitude. "My mother was good-natured and indulgent, and a clever woman; our escapades did not induce her to interfere with our habits."[51] The annoyance came from another quarter. The boys had a tutor, who is described with the true d'Argenson stroke as "fou, imbécile, ignorant, libertin, et hypocrite;"[52] one of those persons who, when you have executed some very bad drawings and love them very dearly, will vent his spleen by tearing them up.[53] It became too much for mortal endurance; and when one day the tutor "advanced upon his desk," the boy received him with doubled fists.[54] From that time forward d'Argenson went his way in peace; and the little rake's progress was proceeding apace, when it was overtaken by one of those strokes of destiny which it is equally impossible to foresee and to resist.[55]

He was sent to school.

In 1709, at the age of fifteen, he went with his brother to the Jesuit College of Louis-le-Grand, which had become, under the patronage of the Great King, the most fashionable of French public schools.[56] Thither, thirty years later, he was followed by another d'Argenson--one who, in the fulness of time and the sunshine of circumstance, was to leave a record, not of maimed and weary aspiration, but of rapid, resolute achievement--Anne Robert Jacques Turgot. But the lad was busied with other thoughts. From "a man of the world who could count his conquests,"[57] he had dwindled to the compass of a mere schoolboy; and his heart was heavy over his fallen state. Occasionally the boys acted tragedies at the College; and as d'Argenson sat in the amphitheatre, pilloried in his hateful gown, a glimpse of some fair spectator whom he had known in happier days would cover him with unutterable shame.[58] But he had the tenacity of purpose which distinguished his race; his time would come; and the modest treasure he was able to amass from the savings of his pocket-money, was dissipated upon those rare occasions when he could shake off the class-room dust from his feet, and plume himself in the great world again. "Why," he asks, with that strange recurrent smile of his, "why should one laugh at such an ambition? Surely it is upon the same canvas that that of conquerors is built (bâtie)!"[59] He possessed that keen, yet kindly humour of the man who knows himself, and can laugh at himself, without ceasing to be himself.

One incident in his school career he never forgot. It began with pea-shooters, and ended with a tragedy. One morning, as the venerable professor of rhetoric, Père Lejay,[60] entered the class-room, he was received with a raking fire of peas. The culprit platoon consisted of the Duc de Boufflers, Count d'Argenson, and his faithful apparitor, Marc Pierre. Boufflers received a flogging, and died from the effect of it. His father was only a duke. But when it came to the sons of M. d'Argenson, the retributive rod was stayed by the timely remembrance of that dark and dangerous person: Jesuitical discretion came into play,[61] and the youthful malefactors escaped. It is curious that the brothers should have lived, the one to be the powerful patron of the Jesuits, the other to attack them, for the eyes of posterity, with a weapon which carries further than a "Sarbacane."

But the young Count d'Argenson was not long to trouble the repose of his spiritual task-masters. He was to complete his education in another school, deemed no less necessary to the training of the whole and perfect man. From the sallow austerity of the reverend fathers, with their hard beds and their unspeakable soup, he passed to the gracious converse of ladies' society, where knowledge was savoured with a joyous sweetness, and where the rewards of success were great indeed. Dreaming long afterwards of the year 1712 and of the gallantries of that golden age, he sighs regretfully over the hearts that fell, and over those that might have fallen had the siege been pressed.

"What a fool I was not to have profited by them! I have repented at leisure."[62]

A votary of pleasure, he was never its slave; and an event was approaching which was soon to engage him in the more sober interests of life. On the morning of September 1st, 1715, the eyelids of the Grand Monarque closed upon a long and fateful chapter in French history; and the hearts of men beat high again with the generous hopes of a newer time. France, and the humblest of her children, d'Argenson, had reached the parting of the ways. The "epic of royalty"[63] was over; the epic of revolution was about to begin. In the development of the drama d'Argenson was to bear a modest, but no mean part. He was now twenty-one. The time for dreaming had passed away; the time for action was at hand. On the threshold of his career, we may pause to gather up those early half-conscious political impressions, which, in the case of quick-minded men, have a real, if only half-recognised, influence upon the direction of future thought.

He had been but a boy of eight when great events occurred.[64] We can well imagine with what childish pleasure he must have watched the stirring of the troops in Paris on the renewal of the great War; and the wide-eyed wonderment with which he may have heard how an army of France was cutting down French citizens for the pleasure of those great black men, whom every one laughed with and called abbé; and how everybody said that one Cavalier was as brave as he was beautiful, and that he and the like of him should have been at Blenheim! And then, as he grew in wit, the excitement of boyhood may have been clouded, if ever so little, by the growing desolation, as defeat followed upon disaster. He could remember how haggard men began to cry for bread; until at last, in 1709, the stones of Paris rose in mutiny, and his own father, the Chief of Police, went in fear of his life.[65] And through it all there was no comfort, but only men said that this Great King had been too great, that he had aroused the alarm of Europe, and that at last Europe had turned to bay. And then when the peace had come, and the people were beginning to breathe, Jesuit and Jansenist reopened their feud and reviled each other in the name of God; while d'Argenson suspected, what his friend Arouet and the wits who supped with the Grand Prior disdainfully averred,[66] that there was no truth to be found upon either side, but only arrogant unspirituality. And now the King, great though he had been, had gone the way of little men; and the hearts of his own people rejoiced, even as the nations whom he had humbled in the dust.

D'Argenson never forgot those fatal years. They haunted his memory and moulded his thought; and he could realise the gravity of the course before him, when, in 1716, he began his career as a councillor of the Parlement of Paris. Shortly afterwards, he received his first official appointment as Director of the Press.

As yet he had excited no great hopes. His father saw but little of him, and was inclined to regard him as rather a fool; the paternal hopes were centred upon his brother, the pleasing, popular and imposing Marc Pierre, then a young man of twenty. This unhappy partiality left a fatal mark upon the character of the elder son; and though d'Argenson never speaks of his father but with affection and respect,[67] he cannot disguise how deeply he felt it. And yet, it is curious to remember, he was before all things else his father's son. He inherited from him his passion for work;[68] to him he owed that instinctive regard for "le bien public,"[69] which afterwards ripened into absolute devotion; from him he drew that soundness of heart and incisiveness of mind which are d'Argenson's prime distinction as a thinker and a man. But there was another strand in the stout complexity of the father's nature, something which had led him, when he came to Paris, to shun the companionship of the great, and to seek his pleasure in a self-chosen society of the baser sort,[70] which had surrounded his life with the infernal obscurity of a magician's cell,[71] something of self-sufficience, of self-contentment, self-concentration. That too, for his own confusion, d'Argenson had inherited. It might have remained harmless; but nourished by his father's indifference and neglect, it grew with the rankness of a noxious weed. He came to find comfort in his own society. As his own company became dearer to him, so did the distance widen between himself and his fellows. Alone, he could be natural, forceful, even great at times; in society, he was pursued by a haunting self-distrust, which attracted disparagement and very often ridicule. As yet, it is true, beyond a touch of depreciation here and there,[72] we see very little of it; the energy of youth and his own strength of will enabled him to fight with his misfortune. But it had afflicted him with one disability which no effort, however determined, could overcome. It had rendered him for ever incapable of coping with the blatancy, the loud insistence, the insensate, trumpet-tongued vulgarity, with which every man of affairs is called upon to deal; and he relates an incident in his present experience as Director of the Press which shows that he was as helpless in the face of it now as he afterwards proved in the more august circle of the Council of State. He was arranging some matter with Machault,[73] who was then in charge of the police; his colleague was for carrying things off with a high hand; d'Argenson laid down his pen, looked at the man, rose, and retired from the business.[74] It was an act of weakness, but the weakness was invincible.

In spite of it, and of those defects of manner which led others to hold him in such scant esteem, there was one person who believed in d'Argenson, his aunt, Charlotte Emilie de Caumartin, Marquise de Balleroy. In one of the earlier letters of that famous correspondence[75] in which most of the materials for his life at this period are preserved, he tries to excuse his slackness in the friendly office of literary purveyor. "If I am not sending you any books," he writes (March 23, 1717), "it is not for want of will. I have brought misfortune on the Press. My censorial severity is silencing all our authors." There were more solid reasons for the unwonted lull in the activity of the Press Bureau.[76] There were no authors to silence. The literary efflorescence of the Grand Age was long since dead; while the new spirit, which was to be so fruitful in trouble to d'Argenson's successors, was only fermenting beneath the surface. It made its appearance with the "Lettres Persanes," which came--from Holland--in 1721. The Censor was not even made the tool of a political party. It is true that the battle of the "Constitution"[77] was raging as fiercely as ever; but Madame de Maintenon had disappeared, and it was no concern of Philippe d'Orléans. When the Government at last interfered (by declaration of October 7, 1717),[78] it was to proscribe the publications of both parties. It is very clear, and it is worth remarking, that d'Argenson was in entire accord with the policy of the Regent. His father, still in command of the police, was constantly behind the scenes, and was under no illusion as to the character of the actors.[79] He used to tell Marais that "if the Jansenists were rogues, the Jesuits were as bad, and that he held the proofs with regard to both of them."[80] The attitude of the son may readily be guessed. His one desire was for peace. In a letter to the Marquise (April 2, 1717) he describes a political brochure by one of her friends as "too bad to read, and not silly enough to laugh at. The Abbé de Guitaut had no reason to write that he detested the Constitution, and he had every reason to refrain from publishing his letter."[81] In short, he viewed the controversy with much concern, and the "Constitution" with none whatever.

Another question was coming to the front, which touched him more nearly as parliamentary councillor (Conseiller au Parlement). The Bank was flourishing, and in August, 1717, the Mississippi Company was successfully floated.[82] On the 2nd of September d'Argenson writes a letter:--

"Our Court of Parlement has received a scurvy compliment." It was a question of money, and they "desired explanations." The Regent replied "that it would be a strange thing if the factious opposition of the Parlement were to arrest the course of those advantageous measures which he wished to secure for the public; that we had no right to meddle with matters of finance; and that he would not suffer the royal authority to be made light of so long as it were entrusted to his care."[83]

He appears to be recording the first brush between the forces of the Parlement and of the Crown, and the opening of the hot battle which ended, exactly three years later (August 28, 1720), at Pontoise.[84] The young councillor was soon to be even more deeply interested in the progress of events. Five months afterwards (January 28, 1718) his father became Warden of the Seals, and President of the Council of Finance; and it was soon plain, from the threatening attitude of the Parlement, that their redoubtable enemy had not entered the ministry one moment too soon. For the present, indeed, the Government was content to hold its hand; for Dubois, the demon of the play, had not yet returned from London, where he was sedulously wooing the Hanoverian interest.[85] As for d'Argenson, his heart wavered 'twixt love for his father and loyalty to his brethren of the long robe. He had recourse to argument--for the Marquis was by this time impressed with his son's substantial worth.[86] "A tout ce que je lui exposai" the black-bearded minister had but one reply: "My good fellow! that Parlement of yours, has it any troops? For our part, we have 150,000 men! That's what it all comes to." "Et voilà parler en grand homme!" exclaims his son,[87] with an admiration which is the more natural for its inconsistency. But the "grand homme" was preparing to act. On August 16th Dubois arrived in Paris bearing a treaty of alliance with England; and the great _coup d'état_ which crushed the pretensions of the Parlement and silenced the opposition to Law, followed upon the 26th.[88]

In December d'Argenson married,[89] and cast about for the means to feather his nest. Retiring discomfited from the Palais de Justice, he took refuge, like many an irate but thrifty parliamentarian, in the Rue Quincampoix. In November, 1719, when the tide of elation was in full flood and trembling on the ebb, we hear that d'Argenson "is in for (y est pour) 500,000 livres."[90] Three weeks afterwards, by decree of the 1st of December, the Bank and the Treasury refuse to receive cash. Before the end of the year the shares are falling.[91] On the 3rd of January M. d'Argenson withdraws from the control of the finances; on the 5th, Law takes the helm as Controller-General, and proceeds with the series of desperate decrees designed to save the credit of the Bank.[92] Upon one of the commissions which followed in quick succession d'Argenson was appointed[93] to serve as Master of Requests.[94] He could do so with a light heart. Warned in time, he had managed to extricate himself; and in a letter of the 22nd of February, 1720, we read: "Talking of shares, no one is coming off more prettily than M. d'Argenson _l'aîné_; he has just completed the purchase of an estate on the Réveillon road; it is his principal acquisition."[95]

Meanwhile he had obtained a provision of another kind. The Warden of the Seals, on withdrawing in January from the control of the finances, had managed, with his usual dexterity, to cover his retreat. Directly afterwards, to the no small scandal of St. Simon,[96] the young Chevalier was entrusted with the Lieutenancy of Police, while the elder brother, Count d'Argenson, received a seat at the Council of State, with an immediate promise of the Intendancy of Maubeuge. Thus it was that about the middle of March,[97] 1720, d'Argenson set out for his seat of government at Valenciennes, leaving Paris to face the appalling ruin created by the crash of the great "System." Though removed from the centre of the drama, a place was reserved for him in the final act. On the 21st of May appeared the suicidal decree which shattered what vestige of credit remained. It was inspired by d'Argenson's father,[98] and cost him the seals. He fell in the beginning of June. In July Law's carriage was wrecked under the very windows of the Regent in the court of the Palais Royal. In December the great adventurer took to flight; and Count d'Argenson had the supreme satisfaction of arresting him at Valenciennes, and, by an order from Paris, detaining his jewel case, the last resource of the broken man.[99] Personally the young Intendant has not much reason to complain. The "System" had left him with the valuable property of Réveillon; he was already a Councillor of State; and at the age of twenty-six he was comfortably established at Valenciennes as the chief magistrate of the important frontier province of Hainaut.

"I am sure I shall entreat you so much that you will come here; my house is not at all bad; it is scarcely in order, but you will find it even better than they usually are. An opera is coming to Valenciennes; we have very pretty lansquenet, ombre, picquet--you get plenty of that in the country[100]--quadrille and even brélan; a carriage; this summer your choice of drives, if you wish to see a country quite new to you, the towns in the environs. In a word, what shall I tell you? You will see people who love you very much, though I am speaking of one who does not know you yet, but for whom I bespeak your friendship." In this letter, a few weeks after his arrival, when the house-warming is complete, d'Argenson commends himself, his establishment and his young wife, to his trusted and right loyal friend, Madame de Balleroy. We may glance for an instant at this remarkable lady. At the age of nineteen, by a marriage with a country nobleman, she was widowed of the bright buoyancy of life at Paris; and amid the flat fields and uneventful hedgerows of Normandy[101], her heart yearned for the patter of the distant pavement. Her forlorn beauty, her wasted wit, drew round her a little army of friends, held faithful by the affectionate discipline of pity; and in the goodly company of correspondents who reflect for her the gaieties of the Regency,[102] not the least honourable place is held by her nephew d'Argenson.

Certain features which his letters disclose must be brought for a moment into relief. In the first place, he shows himself a devoted friend and a dutiful correspondent; in the latter regard he is a shining example to his brilliant young brother.[103]

Moreover, we occasionally come across a story, which, if we forget the manners of the time, it seems as strange that a gentleman should have been able to write as that a lady should been willing to read. Yet it is comforting to find, in reading such passages, that if there is an utter absence of delicacy or reserve, there is an equal freedom from mere smirking prurience; the man's breath is tainted by the fashion of the time, but at least his heart is whole.

Sometimes again d'Argenson's feeling for the ideal, which explains so many of amiable vagaries, is seen taking wing and soaring away to the sound of his own laughter. "I mean my bust (February 18, 1718[104]) to be in the library of Balleroy, with that of Pico de la Mirandola, and some great personage or other who, after all, could do no more than read. The proposal, perhaps, is not very reasonable as yet;[105] of the two, I am more like the latter."

In one letter we get a glimpse of d'Argenson's most cherished interior, and so of the man who loved it.

"I assure you, Rouillon (Réveillon) is becoming a fine house. In a gallery on the wing will be my library, with a little reading-room at one end, plenty of desks, sofas, cushions, upholstery in morocco--all the novelties of Holland; and from the windows a vista of avenues, kitchen gardens, woods, meadows, sheep. Won't you be charmed with it when you are at Paris this summer?" (August 8, 1722).[106]

His occasional reference to "le cadet" is interesting, in the light of their subsequent relations. With a touch of good-natured envy he remarks, "My brother is surpassing himself as Chief of Police. He is a perfect courtier; in that regard he has nothing to learn" (August 8, 1722).[107] Perhaps indeed the most precious thing about these letters is the light they throw upon the real character of the younger brother, and on d'Argenson's subsequent portrait of him. A comparison of the young "Chevalier" who writes over his own signature, with the eternal "Mon Frère" of d'Argenson's Journal, enables us to estimate the personal equation in d'Argenson's political criticism. It tends to suggest that the impression of high colouring, exaggeration, unfairness, which is left by the perusal of many of his more trenchant pages, is due, not to the intrinsic falsity of his judgments, but to the violence and heat with which they are pronounced. We see that to many of his indictments the question, "Well! what of it? how could he help it?" would have been at least a valid reply; and we suspect that had d'Argenson judged his own contemporaries with that same deep-sounding charity which, after a century and a half, one can claim no credit for applying to himself, we should have been spared much of that bitterness which he expends so lavishly upon the men of his time, and above all upon his brother, Count d'Argenson. So far as one can see, the truth was this. Marc Pierre was his mother's son, the blood of the Caumartins in every vein.[108] In him the rough-hewn strength of the d'Argenson character was fashioned to a form of lightness and grace; and losing in massiveness, it gained in charm. He had his father's strength without his seriousness; his power of work without his love of it. He impressed his contemporaries[109] by his singular union of facile effectiveness with absolute unconcern. Such a passage as this, which appears in a letter of 1715,[110] needed no signature for identification.