It has been said in this History that Louis XIV. had the fortune to find
himself at the culminating point of absolute monarchy, and to profit by
the labors of his predecessors, reaping a portion of their glory; he had
likewise the honor of enriching himself with the labors of his
contemporaries, and attracting to himself a share of their lustre; the
honor, be it said, not the fortune, for he managed to remain the centre
of intellectual movement as well as of the court, of literature and art
as well as affairs of state. Only the abrupt and solitary genius of
Pascal or the prankish and ingenuous geniality of La Fontaine held aloof
from king and court; Racine and Moliere, Bossuet and Fenelon, La Bruyere
and Boileau lived frequently in the circle of Louis XIV., and enjoyed in
different degrees his favor; M. de la Rochefoucauld and Madame de Sevigne
were of the court; Lebrun, Rigaud, Mignard, painted for the king;
Perrault and Mansard constructed the Louvre and Versailles; the learned
of all countries considered it an honor to correspond with the new
academies founded in France. Louis XIV. was even less a man of letters
or an artist than an administrator or a soldier; but literature and art,
as well as the superintendents and the generals, found in him the King.
The puissant unity of the reign is everywhere the same. The king and the
nation are in harmony.
Pascal, had he been born later, would have remained independent and
proud, from the nature of his mind and of his character as well as from
the connection he had full early with Port-Royal, where they did not rear
courtiers; he died, however, at thirty-nine, in 1661, the very year in
which Louis XIV. began to govern. Born at Clermont, in Auvergne,
educated at his father's and by his father, though it was not thought
desirable to let him study mathematics, he had already discovered by
himself the first thirty-two propositions of Euclid, when Cardinal
Richelieu, holding on his knee little Jacqueline Pascal, and looking at
her brother, said to M. Pascal, the two children's father, who had come
to thank him for a favor, "Take care of them; I mean to make something
great of them." This was the native and powerful instinct of genius
divining genius; Richelieu, however, died three years later, without
having done anything for the children who had impressed him beyond giving
their father a share in the superintendence of Rouen; he thus put them in
the way of the great Corneille, who was affectionately kind to
Jacqueline, but took no particular notice of Blaise Pascal. The latter
was seventeen; he had already written his Traite des Coniques (Treatise
on Conics) and begun to occupy himself with "his arithmetical machine,"
as his sister, Madame Perier calls it. At twenty-three he had ceased to
apply his mind to human sciences; "when he afterwards discovered the
roulette (cycloid), it was without thinking," says Madame Perier, "and to
distract his attention from a severe tooth-ache he had." He was not
twenty-four when anxiety for his salvation and for the glory of God had
taken complete possession of his soul. It was to the same end that he
composed the Lettres Provinciales, the first of which was written in
six days, and the style of which, clear, lively, precise, far removed
from the somewhat solemn gravity of Port-Royal, formed French prose as
Malherbe and Boileau formed the poetry. This was the impression of his
contemporaries, the most hard of them to please in the art of writing.
"That is excellent; that will be relished," said the recluses of
Port-Royal, in spite of the misgivings of M. Singlin. More than thirty
years after Pascal's death, Madame de Sevigne, in 1689, wrote to Madame
de Grignan, "Sometimes, to divert ourselves, we read the little Letters
(to a provincial). Good heavens, how charming! And how my son reads
them! I always think of my daughter, and how that excess of correctness
of reasoning would suit her; but your brother says that you consider
that it is always the same thing over again. Ah! My goodness, so much
the better! Could any one have a more perfect style, a raillery more
refined, more natural, more delicate, worthier offspring of those
dialogues of Plato, which are so fine? And when, after the first ten
letters, he addresses himself to the reverend Jesuit fathers, what
earnestness, what solidity, what force! What eloquence! What love for
God and for the truth! What a way of maintaining it and making it
understood! I am sure that you have never read them but in a hurry,
pitching on the pleasant places; but it is not so when they are read at
leisure." Lord Macaulay once said to M. Guizot, "Amongst modern works I
know only two perfect ones, to which there is no exception to be taken,
and they are Pascal's Provincials and the Letters of Madame de
Sevigne."
Boileau was of Lord Macaulay's opinion; at least as regarded Pascal.
"Corbinelli wrote to me the other day," says Madame de Sevigne, on the
15th of January, 1690: "he gave me an account of a conversation and a
dinner at M. de Lamoignon's: the persons were the master and mistress of
the house, M. de Troyes, M. de Toulon, Father Bourdaloue, a comrade of
his, Despredaux, and Corbinelli. The talk was of ancient and modern
works. Despreaux supported the ancient, with the exception of one single
modern, which surpassed, in his opinion, both old and new. Bourdaloue's
comrade, who assumed the well-read air, and who had fastened on to
Despreaux and Corbinelli, asked him what in the world this book could be
that was so remarkably clever. Despreaux would not give the name.
Corbinelli said to him, 'Sir, I conjure you to tell me, that I may read
it all night.' Despreaux answered, laughing, 'Ah! sir, you have read it
more than once, I am sure.' The Jesuit joins in, with a disdainful air,
and presses Despreaux to name this marvellous writer. 'Do not press me,
father,' says Despreaux. The father persists. At last Despreaux takes
hold of his arm, and squeezing it very hard, says, 'You will have it,
father; well, then, egad! it is Pascal.' 'Pascal,' says the father, all
blushes and astonishment; 'Pascal is as beautiful as the false can be.'
'False,' replied Despreaux: 'false! Let me tell you that he is as true as
he is inimitable; he has just been translated into three languages.' The
father rejoined, 'He is none the more true for that.' Despreaux grew
warm, and shouted like a madman: 'Well, father, will you say that one of
yours did not have it printed in one of his books that a Christian was
not obliged to love God? Dare you say that that is false?' 'Sir,' said
the father, in a fury, 'we must distinguish.' 'Distinguish!' cried
Despreaux; 'distinguish, egad! distinguish! Distinguish whether we are
obliged to love God!' And, taking Corbinelli by the arm, he flew off to
the other end of the room, coming back again, and rushing about like a
lunatic; but he would not go near the father any more, and went off to
join the rest of the company. Here endeth the story; the curtain falls."
Literary taste and religious sympathies combined, in the case of Boileau,
to exalt Pascal.
The provincials could not satisfy for long the pious ardor of Pascal's
soul; he took in hand his great work on the Verite de la Religion.
He had taken a vigorous part in the discussions of Port-Royal as to
subscription of the formulary: his opinion was decidedly in favor of
resistance. It was the moment when MM. Arnauld and Nicole had discovered
a restriction, as it was then called, which allowed of subscribing with a
safe conscience. "M. Pascal, who loved truth above all things," writes
his niece, Marguerite Perier; "who, moreover, was pulled down by a pain
in the head, which never left him; who had exerted himself to make them
feel as he himself felt; and who had expressed himself very vigorously in
spite of his weakness, was so grief-stricken that he had a fit, and lost
speech and consciousness. Everybody was alarmed. Exertions were made to
bring him round, and then those gentlemen withdrew. When he was quite
recovered, Madame Perier asked him what had caused this incident. He
answered, 'When I saw all those persons that I looked upon as being those
whom God had made to know the truth, and who ought to be its defenders,
wavering and falling. I declare to you that I was so overcome with grief
that I was unable to support it, and could not help breaking down.'"
Blaise Pascal was the worthy brother of Jacqueline; in the former, as
well as the latter, the soul was too ardent and too strong for its
covering of body. Nearly all his relatives died young. "I alone am
left," wrote Mdlle. Perier, when she had become, exceptionally, very
aged. "I might say, like Simon Maccabeus, the last of all his brethren,
All my relatives and all my brethren are dead in the service of God and
in the love of truth. I alone am left; please God I may never have a
thought of backsliding!"
Pascal was unable to finish his work. "God, who had inspired my brother
with this design and with all his thoughts," writes his sister, "did not
permit him to bring it to its completion, for reasons to us unknown."
The last years of Pascal's life, invalid as he had been from the age of
eighteen, were one long and continual torture, accepted and supported
with an austere disdain of suffering. Incapable of any application, he
gave his attention solely to his salvation and the care of the poor.
"I have taken it into my head," says he, "to have in the house a sick
pauper, to whom the same service shall be rendered as to myself;
particular attention to be paid to him, and, in fact, no difference to be
made between him and me, in order that I may have the consolation of
knowing that there is one pauper as well treated as myself, in the
perplexity I suffer from finding myself in the great affluence of every
sort in which I do find myself." The spirit of M. de St. Cyran is there,
and also the spirit of the gospel, which caused Pascal, when he was
dying, to say, "I love poverty, because Jesus Christ loved it. I love
wealth, because it gives the means of assisting the needy." A genius
unique in the extent and variety of his faculties, which were applied
with the same splendid results to mathematics and physics, to philosophy
and polemics, disdaining all preconceived ideas, going unerringly and
straightforwardly to the bottom of things with admirable force and
profundity, independent and free even in his voluntary submission to the
Christian faith, which he accepts with his eyes open, after having
weighed it, measured it, and sounded it to its uttermost depths, too
steadfast and too simple not to bow his head before mysteries, all the
while acknowledging his ignorance. "If there were no darkness," says he,
"man would not feel his corruption; if there were no light, man would
have no hope of remedy. Thus it is not only quite right, but useful, for
us that God should be concealed in part, and revealed in part, since it
is equally dangerous for man to know God without knowing his own misery,
and to know his own misery without knowing God." The lights of this
great intellect had led him to acquiesce in his own fogs. "One can be
quite sure that there is a God, without knowing what He is," says he.
In 1627, four years after Pascal, and, like him, in a family of the long
robe, was born, at Dijon, his only rival in that great art of writing
prose which established the superiority of the French language. At
sixteen, Bossuet preached his first sermon in the drawing-room of Madame
de Rambouillet, and the great Conde was pleased to attend his theological
examinations. He was already famous at court as a preacher and a
polemist when the king gave him the title of Bishop of Condom, almost
immediately inviting him to become preceptor to the dauphin. A difficult
and an irksome task for him who had already written for Turenne an
exposition of the Catholic faith, and had delivered the funeral orations
over Madame Henriette and the Queen of England. "The king has greatly at
heart the dauphin's education," wrote Father Lacoue to Colbert; "he
regards it as one of his grand state-strokes in respect of the future."
The dauphin was not devoid of intelligence. "Monseigneur has plenty of
wits," said Councillor Le Gout de Saint-Seine in his private journal,
"but his wits are under a bushel." The boy was indolent, with little
inclination for work, roughly treated by his governor, the Duke of
Montausier, who was endowed with more virtue than ability in the
superintendence of a prince's education. "O," cried Monseigneur, when
official announcement was made to him of the project of marriage which
the king was conducting for him with the Princess Christine of Bavaria,
"we shall see whether M. Huet (afterwards bishop of Avranches) will want
to make me learn ancient geography any more!" Bossuet had better
understood what ought to be the aim of a king's education. "Remember,
Monseigneur," he constantly repeated to him, "that destined as you are to
reign some day over this great kingdom, you are bound to make it happy."
He was in despair at his pupil's inattention. "There is a great deal to
endure with a mind so destitute of application," he wrote to Marshal
Bellefonds; "there is no perceptible relief, and we go on, as St. Paul
says, hoping against hope." He had written a little treatise on
inattention, De Incogitantia,—in the vain hope of thus rousing his
pupil to work. "I dread nothing in the world so much," Louis XIV would
say, "as to have a sluggard (faineant) dauphin; I would much prefer to
have no son at all!" Bossuet foresaw the innumerable obstacles in the
way of his labors. "I perceive, as I think," he wrote to his friends,
"in the dauphin the beginnings of great graces, a simplicity, a
straightforwardness, a principle of goodness, an attention, amidst all
his flightiness, to the mysteries, a something or other which comes with
a flash, in the middle of his distractions, to call him back to God. You
would be charmed if I were to tell you the questions he puts to me, and
the desire he shows to be a good servant of God. But the world! the
world! the world! pleasures, evil counsels, evil examples! Save us,
Lord! save us! Thou didst verily preserve the children from the furnace,
but Thou didst send Thine angel; and, as for me, alas! what am I?
Humility, trepidation, absorption into one's own nothingness!"
It was not for Bossuet that the honor was reserved of succeeding in the
difficult task of a royal education. Fenelon encountered in the Duke of
Burgundy a more undisciplined nature, a more violent character, and more
dangerous tendencies than Bossuet had to fight against in the
grand-dauphin; but there was a richer mind and a warmer heart; the
preceptor, too, was more proper for the work. Bossuet, nevertheless,
labored conscientiously to instruct his little prince, studying for him
and with him the classical authors, preparing grammatical expositions,
and, lastly, writing for his edification the Traite de la Connaissance
de Dieu et de soi-mime (Treatise on the Knowledge of God and of Self),
the Discours sur l'Histoire Universelle (Discourse on Universal
History), and the Politique tiree de l'Ecriture Sainte (Polity derived
from Holy Writ). The labor was in vain; the very loftiness of his
genius, the extent and profundity of his views, rendered Bossuet unfit to
get at the heart and mind of a boy who was timid, idle, and kept in fear
by the king as well as by his governor. The dauphin was nineteen when
his marriage restored Bossuet to the church and to the world; the king
appointed him almoner to the dauphiness, and, before long, Bishop of
Meaux.
Neither the assembly of the clergy and the part he played therein, nor
his frequent preachings at court, diverted Bossuet from his duties as
bishop; he habitually resided at Meaux, in the midst of his priests. The
greater number of his sermons, written at first in fragments, collected
from memory in their aggregate, and repeated frequently with divergences
in wording and development, were preached in the cathedral of Meaux. The
dauphin sometimes went thither to see him. "Pray, sir," he had said to
him, in his childhood, "take great care of me whilst I am little; I will
of you when I am big." Assured of his righteousness as a priest and his
fine tact as a man, the king appealed to Bossuet in the delicate
conjunctures of his life. It is related that it was the Bishop of Meaux
who dissuaded him from making public his marriage with Madame de
Maintenon. She, more anxious for power than splendor, did not bear him
any ill-will for it; amidst the various leanings of the court, divided as
it was between Jansenism and Quietism, it was to the simple teaching of
the Catholic church, represented by Bossuet, that she remained
practically attached. Right-minded and strong-minded, but a little
cold-hearted, Madame de Maintenon could not suffer herself to be led away
by the sublime excesses of the Jansenists or the pious reveries of Madame
Guyon; the Jesuits had influence over her, without her being a slave to
them; and that influence increased after the death of Bossuet. The
guidance of the Bishop of Meaux, in fact, answered the requirements of
spirits that were pious and earnest without enthusiasm: less ardent in
faith and less absolute in religious practice than M. de St. Cyran and
Port-Royal, less exacting in his demands than Father Bourdaloue,
susceptible now and then of mystic ideas, as is proved by his letters to
Sister Cornuau, he did not let himself be won by the vague ecstasies of
absolute (pure) love; he had a mind large enough to say, like Mother
Angelica Arnauld, "I am of all saints' order, and all saints are of my
order;" but his preferences always inclined towards those saints and
learned doctors who had not carried any religious tendency to excess, and
who had known how to rest content with the spirit of a rule and a faith
that were practical. A wonderful genius, discovering by flashes, and as
if by instinct, the most profound truths of human nature, and giving them
expression in an incomparable style, forcing, straining the language to
make it render his idea, darting at one bound to the sublimest height by
use of the simplest terms, which he, so to speak, bore away with him,
wresting them from their natural and proper signification. "There, in
spite of that great heart of hers, is that princess so admired and so
beloved; there, such as Death has made her for us!" Bossuet alone could
speak like that.
He was writing incessantly, all the while that he was preaching at Meaux
and at Paris, making funeral orations over the queen, Maria Theresa, over
the Princess Palatine, Michael Le Tellier, and the Prince of Conde. The
Edict of Nantes had just been revoked; controversy with the Protestant
ministers, headed by Claude and Jurieu, occupied a great space in the
life of the Bishop of Meaux. He at that time wrote his Histoire des
Variations, often unjust and violent, always able in its attacks upon
the Reformation; he did not import any zeal into persecution, though all
the while admitting unreservedly the doctrines universally propagated
amongst Catholics. "I declare," he wrote to M. de Baville, "that I am
and have always been of opinion, first, that princes may by penal laws
constrain all heretics to conform to the profession and practices of the
Catholic church; secondly, that this doctrine ought to be held invariable
in the church, which has not only conformed to, but has even demanded,
similar ordinances from princes." He at the same time opposed the
constraint put upon the new converts to oblige them to go to mass,
without requiring from them any other act of religion.
"When the emperors imposed a like obligation on the Donatists," he wrote
to the Bishop of Mirepoix, "it was on the supposition that they were
converted, or would be; but the heretics at the present time, who declare
themselves by not fulfilling their Easter (communicating), ought to be
rather hindered from assisting at the mysteries than constrained thereto,
and the more so in that it appears to be a consequence thereof to
constrain them likewise to fulfil their Easter, which is expressly to
give occasion for frightful sacrilege. They might be constrained to
undergo instruction; but, so far as I can learn, that would hardly
advance matters, and I think that we must be reduced to three things; one
is, to oblige them to send their children to the schools, or, in default,
to find means of taking them out of their hands; another is, to be firm
as regards marriages; and the last is, to take great pains to become
privately acquainted with those of whom there are good hopes, and to
procure for them solid instruction and veritable enlightenment; the rest
must be left to time and to the grace of God. I know of nothing else."
About the same time Fenelon, engaged upon the missions in Poitou, being
as much convinced as the Bishop of Meaux of a sovereign's rights over the
conscience of the faithful, as well as of the terrible danger of
hypocrisy, wrote to Bossuet, telling him that he had demanded the
withdrawal of the troops in all the districts he was visiting: "It is no
light matter to change the sentiments of a whole people. What difficulty
must the apostles have found in changing the face of the universe,
overcoming all passions, and establishing a doctrine till then unheard
of, seeing that we cannot persuade the ignorant by clear and express
passages which they read every day in favor of the religion of their
ancestors, and that the king's own authority stirs up every passion to
render persuasion more easy for us! The remnants of this sect go on
sinking little by little, as regards all exterior observance, into a
religious indifference which cannot but cause fear and trembling. If one
wanted to make them abjure Christianity and follow the Koran, there would
be nothing required but to show them the dragoons; provided that they
assemble by night, and withstand all instruction, they consider that they
have done enough." Cardinal Noailles was of the same mind as Bossuet and
Fenelon. "The king will be pained to decide against your opinion as
regards the new converts," says a letter to him from Madame de Maintenon;
"meanwhile the most general is to force them to attend at mass. Your
opinion seems to be a condemnation of all that has been hitherto done
against these poor creatures. It is not pleasant to hark back so far,
and it has always been supposed that, in any case, they must have a
religion." In vain were liberty of conscience and its inviolable rights
still misunderstood by the noblest spirits, the sincerity and
high-mindedness of the great bishops instinctively revolted against
the hypocrisy engendered of persecution. The tacit assuagement of the
severities against the Reformers, between 1688 and 1700, was the fruit of
the representations of Bossuet, Fenelon, and Cardinal Noailles. Madame
de Maintenon wrote at that date to one of her relatives, "You are
converted; do not meddle in the conversion of others. I confess to you
that I do not like the idea of answering before God and the king for all
those conversions."
At the same time with the controversial treatises, the Elevations sur
les Mysteres and the Meditations sur l'Evangile were written at Meaux,
drawing the bishop away to the serener regions of supreme faith. There
might he have chanced to meet those Reformers, as determined as he in the
strife, as attached, at bottom, as he, for life and death, to the
mysteries and to the lights of a common hope. "When God shall give us
grace to enter Paradise," St. Bernard used to say, "we shall be above all
astonished at not finding some of those whom we had thought to meet
there, and at finding others whom we did not expect." Bossuet had a
moments glimpse of this higher truth; in concert with Leibnitz, a great
intellect of more range in knowledge and less steadfastness than he in
religious faith, he tried to reconcile the Catholic and Protestant
communions in one and the same creed. There were insurmountable
difficulties on both sides; the attempt remained unsuccessful.
The Bishop of Meaux had lately triumphed in the matter of Quietism,
breaking the ties of old friendship with Fenelon, and more concerned
about defending sound doctrine in the church than fearful of hurting his
friend, who was sincere and modest in his relations with him, and humbly
submissive to the decrees of the court of Rome. The Archbishop of
Cambrai was in exile at his own diocese; Bossuet was ill at Meaux, still,
however, at work, going deeper every day into that profound study of Holy
Writ and of the fathers of the church which shines forth in all his
writings. He had stone, and suffered agonies, but would not permit an
operation. On his death-bed, surrounded by his nephews and his vicars,
he rejected with disdain all eulogies on his episcopal life. "Speak to
me of necessary truths," said he, preserving to the last the simplicity
of a great and strong mind, accustomed to turn from appearances and
secondary doctrines to embrace the mighty realities of time and of
eternity. He died at Paris on the 12th of April, 1704, just when the
troubles of the church were springing up again. Great was the
consternation amongst the bishops of France, wont as they were to shape
themselves by his counsels. "Men were astounded at this mortal's
mortality." Bossuet was seventy-three.
A month later, on the 13th of May, Father Bourdaloue in his turn died.
A model of close logic and moral austerity, with a stiff and manly
eloquence, so impressed with the miserable insufficiency of human
efforts, that he said as he was dying, "My God, I have wasted life; it is
just that Thou recall it." There remained only Fenelon in the first
rank, which Massillon did not as yet dispute with him. Malebranche was
living retired in his cell at the Oratory, seldom speaking, writing his
Recherches sur la Verite (Researches into Truth), and his Entretiens
sur la Metaphysique (Discourses on Metaphysics), bolder in thought than
he was aware of or wished, sincere and natural in his meditations as well
as in his style. In spite of Flechier's eloquence in certain funeral
orations, posterity has decided against the modesty of the Archbishop of
Cambrai, who said at the death of the Bishop of Nimes, in 1710, "We have
lost our master." In his retirement or his exile, after Bossuet's death,
it was around Fenelon that was concentrated all the lustre of the French
episcopate, long since restored to the respect and admiration it
deserved.
Fenelon was born in Perigord, at the castle of Fenelon, on the 6th of
August, 1651. Like Cardinal Retz he belonged to an ancient and noble
house, and was destined from his youth for the church. Brought up at the
seminary of St. Sulpice, lately founded by M. Olier, he for a short time
conceived the idea of devoting himself to foreign missions; his weak
health and his family's opposition turned him ere long from his purpose,
but the preaching of the gospel amongst the heathen continued to have for
him an attraction which is perfectly depicted in one of the rare sermons
of his which have been preserved. He had held himself modestly aloof,
occupied with confirming new Catholics in their conversion or with
preaching to the Protestants of Poitou; he had written nothing but his
Traite de l'Education des Filles, intended for the family of the Duke
of Beauvilliers, and a book on the ministere du pasteur. He was in bad
odor with Harlay, Archbishop of Paris, who had said to him curtly one
day, "You want to escape notice, M. Abbe, and you will;" nevertheless,
when Louis XIV. chose the Duke of Beauvilliers as governor to his
grandson, the Duke of Burgundy, the duke at once called Fenelon, then
thirty-eight years of age, to the important post of preceptor.
Whereas the grand-dauphin, endowed with ordinary intelligence, was
indolent and feeble, his son was, in the same proportion, violent, fiery,
indomitable. "The Duke of Burgundy," says St. Simon, "was a born demon
(naquit terrible), and in his early youth caused fear and trembling.
Harsh, passionate, even to the last degree of rage against inanimate
things, madly impetuous, unable to bear the least opposition, even from
the hours and the elements, without flying into furies enough to make you
fear that everything inside him would burst; obstinate to excess,
passionately fond of all pleasures, of good living, of the chase madly,
of music with a sort of transport, and of play too, in which he could not
bear to lose; often ferocious, naturally inclined to cruelty, savage in
raillery, taking off absurdities with a patness which was killing; from
the height of the clouds he regarded men as but atoms to whom he bore no
resemblance, whoever they might be. Barely did the princes his brothers
appear to him intermediary between himself and the human race, although
there had always been an affectation of bringing them all three up in
perfect equality; wits, penetration, flashed from every part of him, even
in his transports; his repartees were astounding, his replies always went
to the point and deep down, even in his mad fits; he made child's play of
the most abstract sciences; the extent and vivacity of his wits were
prodigious, and hindered him from applying himself to one thing at a
time, so far as to render him incapable of it."
As a sincere Christian and a priest, Fenelon saw from the first that
religion alone could triumph over this terrible nature; the Duke of
Beauvilliers, as sincere and as christianly as he, without much wits,
modestly allowed himself to be led; all the motives that act most
powerfully on a generous spirit, honor, confidence, fear and love of
God, were employed one after the other to bring the prince into
self-subjection. He was but eight years old, and Fenelon had been only
a few months with him, when the child put into his hands one day the
following engagement:—
"I promise M. l'Abbe de Fenelon, on the honor of a prince, to do at once
whatever he bids me, and to obey him the instant he orders me anything,
and, if I fail to, I will submit to any kind of punishment and disgrace."
"Done at Versailles the 29th of November, 1689.
"Signed: Louis."
The child, however, would forget himself, and relapse into his mad fits.
When his preceptor was chiding him one day for a grave fault, he went so
far as to say, "No, no, sir; I know who I am and what you are." Fenelon
made no reply; coldly and gravely he allowed the day to close and the
night to pass without showing his pupil any sign of either resentment or
affection. Next day the Duke of Burgundy was scarcely awake when his
preceptor entered the room. "I do not know, sir," said he, "whether you
remember what you said to me yesterday, that you know what you are and
what I am. It is my duty to teach you that you do not know either one or
the other. You fancy yourself, sir, to be more than I; some lackeys, no
doubt, have told you so, but I am not afraid to tell you, since you force
me to it, that I am more than you. You have sense enough to understand
that there is no question here of birth. You would consider anybody out
of his wits who pretended to make a merit of it that the rain of heaven
had fertilized his crops without moistening his neighbors. You would be
no wiser if you were disposed to be vain of your birth, which adds
nothing to your personal merit. You cannot doubt that I am above you in
lights and knowledge. You know nothing but what I have taught you; and
what I have taught you is nothing compared with what I might still teach
you. As for authority, you have none over me; and I, on the contrary,
have it fully and entirely over you; the king and Monseigneur have told
you so often enough. You fancy, perhaps, that I think myself very
fortunate to hold the office I discharge towards you; disabuse yourself
once more, sir; I only took it in order to obey the king and give
pleasure to Monseigneur, and not at all for the painful privilege of
being your preceptor; and, that you may have no doubt about it, I am
going to take you to his Majesty, and beg him to get you another one,
whose pains I hope may be more successful than mine." The Duke of
Burgundy's passion was past, and he burst into sobs. "Ah! sir," he
cried, "I am in despair at what took place yesterday; if you speak to
the king, you will lose me his affection; if you leave me, what will be
thought of me? I promise you. I promise you . . . that you shall be
satisfied with me; but promise me . . ."
Fenelon promised nothing; he remained, and the foundation of his
authority was laid forever in the soul of his pupil. The young prince
did not forget what he was, but he had felt the superiority of his
master. "I leave the Duke of Burgundy behind the door," he was
accustomed to say, "and with you I am only little Louis."
God, at the same time with Fenelon, had taken possession of the Duke of
Burgundy's soul. "After his first communion, we saw disappearing little
by little all the faults which, in his infancy, caused us great
misgivings as to the future," writes Madame de Maintenon. "His piety has
caused such a metamorphosis that, from the passionate thing he was, he
has become self-restrained, gentle, complaisant; one would say that that
was his character, and that virtue was natural to him." "All his mad
fits and spites yielded at the bare name of God," Fenelon used to say;
"one day when he was in a very bad temper, and wanted to hide in his
passion what he had done in his disobedience, I pressed him to tell me
the truth before God; then he put himself into a great rage and bawled,
'Why ask me before God? Very well, then, as you ask me in that way, I
cannot deny that I committed that fault.' He was as it were beside
himself with excess of rage, and yet religion had such dominion over him
that it wrung from him so painful an avowal." "From this abyss," writes
the Duke of St. Simon, "came forth a prince affable, gentle, humane,
self-restrained, patient, modest, humble, and austere towards himself,
wholly devoted to his obligations and feeling them to be immense; he
thought of nothing but combining the duties of a son and a subject with
those to which he saw himself destined."
"From this abyss" came forth also a prince singularly well informed,
fond of study, with a refined taste in literature, with a passion for
science; for his instruction Fenelon made use of the great works composed
for his father's education by Bossuet, adding thereto writings more
suitable for his age; for him he composed the Fables and the Dialogues
des Morts, and a Histoire de Charlemagne which has perished. In his
stories, even those that were imaginary, he paid attention before
everything to truth. "Better leave a history in all its dryness than
enliven it at the expense of truth," he would say. The suppleness and
richness of his mind sufficed to save him from wearisomeness; the
liveliness of his literary impressions communicated itself to his pupil.
"I have seen," says Fenelon in his letter to the French Academy, "I have
seen a young prince, but eight years old, overcome with grief at sight of
the peril of little Joash; I have seen him lose patience with the chief
priest for concealing from Joash his name and his birth; I have seen him
weeping bitterly as he listened to these verses:—
'O! miseram Euridicen anima fugiente vocabat;
Euridicen toto referebant flumine ripx.'"
The soul and mind of Fenelon were sympathetic; Bossuet, in writing for
the grand-dauphin, was responsive to the requirements of his own mind,
never to those of the boy's with whose education he had been intrusted.
Fenelon also wrote Telemaque. "It is a fabulous narrative," he himself
says, "in the form of an heroic poem, like Homer's or Virgil's, wherein I
have set forth the principal actions that are meet for a prince whose
birth points him out as destined to reign. I did it at a time when I was
charmed with the marks of confidence and kindness showered upon me by the
king; I must have been not only the most ungrateful but the most
insensate of men to have intended to put into it satirical and insolent
portraits; I shrink from the bare idea of such a design. It is true that
I have inserted in these adventures all the verities necessary for
government and all the defects that one can show in the exercise of
sovereign power; but I have not stamped any of them with a peculiarity
which would point to any portrait or caricature. The more the work is
read, the more it will be seen that I wished to express everything
without depicting anybody consecutively; it is, in fact, a narrative done
in haste, in detached pieces and at different intervals; all I thought of
was to amuse the Duke of Burgundy, and, whilst amusing, to instruct him,
without ever meaning to give the work to the public."
Telemaque was published, without any author's name and by an
indiscretion of the copyist's, on the 6th of April, 1699. Fenelon was in
exile at his diocese; public rumor before long attributed the work to
him; the Maximes des Saints had just been condemned, Telemaque was
seized, the printers were punished; some copies had escaped the police;
the book was reprinted in Holland; all Europe read it, finding therein
the allusions and undermeanings against which Fenelon defended himself.
Louis XIV. was more than ever angry with the archbishop. "I cannot
forgive M. de Cambrai for having composed the Telemaque," Madame de
Maintenon would say. Fenelon's disgrace, begun by the Maximes des
Saints touching absolute (pure) love, was confirmed by his ideal picture
of kingly power. Chimerical in his theories of government, high-flown in
his pious doctrines, Fenelon, in the conduct of his life as well as in
his practical directions to his friends, showed a wisdom, a prudence, a
tact which singularly belied the free speculations of his mind or his
heart. He preserved silence amid the commendations and criticisms of the
Telemaque. "I have no need and no desire to change my position," he
would say; "I am beginning to be old, and I am infirm; there is no
occasion for my friends to ever commit themselves or to take any doubtful
step on my account. I never sought out the court; I was sent for
thither. I staid there nearly ten years without obtruding myself,
without taking a single step on my own behalf, without asking the
smallest favor, without meddling in any matter, and confining myself to
answering conscientiously in all matters about which I was spoken to.
I was dismissed; all I have to do is to remain at peace in my own place.
I doubt not that, besides the matter of my condemned work, the policy of
Telemaque was employed against me upon the king's mind; but I must
suffer and hold my tongue."
Every tongue was held within range of King Louis XIV. It was only on the
22d of December, 1701, four years after Fenelon's departure, that the
Duke of Burgundy thought he might write to him in the greatest secrecy:
"At last, my dear archbishop, I find a favorable opportunity of breaking
the silence I have kept for four years. I have suffered many troubles
since, but one of the greatest has been that of being unable to show you
what my feelings towards you were during that time, and that my affection
increased with your misfortunes, instead of being chilled by them. I
think with real pleasure on the time when I shall be able to see you
again, but I fear that this time is still a long way off. It must be
left to the will of God, from whose mercy I am always receiving new
graces. I have been many times unfaithful to Him since I saw you, but He
has always done me the grace of recalling me to Him, and I have not,
thank God, been deaf to His voice. I continue to study all alone,
although I have not been doing so in the regular way for the last two
years, and I like it more than ever. But nothing gives me more pleasure
than metaphysics and ethics, and I am never tired of working at them. I
have done some little pieces myself, which I should very much like to be
in a position to send you, that you might correct them as you used to do
my themes in old times. I shall not tell you here how my feelings
revolted against all that has been done in your case, but we must submit
to the will of God and believe that all has happened for our good.
Farewell, my dear archbishop. I embrace you with all my heart; I ask
your prayers and your blessing. —Louis."
"I speak to you of God and yourself only," answered Fenelon in a letter
full of wise and tender counsels; "it is no question of me. Thank God, I
have a heart at ease; my heaviest cross is that I do not see you, but I
constantly present you before God in closer presence than that of the
senses. I would give a thousand lives like a drop of water to see you
such as God would have you."
Next year, in 1702, the king gave the Duke of Burgundy the command of the
army in Flanders. He wrote to Fenelon, "I cannot feel myself so near you
without testifying my joy thereat, and, at the same time, that which is
caused by the king's permission to call upon you on my way; he has,
however, imposed the condition that I must not see you in private. I
shall obey this order, and yet I shall be able to talk to you as much as
I please, for I shall have with me Saumery, who will make the third at
our first interview after five years' separation." The archbishop was
preparing to leave Cambrai so as not to be in the prince's way; he now
remained, only seeing the Duke of Burgundy, however, in the presence of
several witnesses; when he presented him with his table-napkin at supper,
the prince raised his voice, and, turning to his old master, said, with a
touching reminiscence of his childhood's passions, "I know what I owe
you; you know what I am to you."
The correspondence continued, with confidence and deference on the part
of the prince, with tender, sympathetic, far-sighted, paternal interest
on the part of the archbishop, more and more concerned for the perils and
temptations to which the prince was exposed in proportion as he saw him
nearer to the throne and more exposed to the incense of the world. "The
right thing is to become the counsel of his Majesty," he wrote to him on
the death of the grand dauphin, "the father of the people, the comfort of
the afflicted, the defender of the church; the right thing is to keep
flatterers aloof and distrust them, to distinguish merit, seek it out and
anticipate it, to listen to everything, believe nothing without proof,
and, being placed above all, to rise superior to every one. The right
thing is to desire to be father and not master. The right thing is not
that all should be for one, but that one should be for all, to secure
their happiness." A solemn and touching picture of an absolute monarch,
submitting to God and seeking His will alone. Fenelon had early imbued
his pupil with the spirit of it; and the pupil appeared on the point of
realizing it; but God at a single blow destroyed all these fair hopes.
"All my ties are broken," said Fenelon; "I live but on affection, and of
affection I shall die; we shall recover ere long that which we have not
lost; we approach it every day with rapid strides; yet a little while,
and there will be no more cause for tears." A week later he was dead,
leaving amongst his friends, so diminished already by death, an
immeasurable gap, and amongst his adversaries themselves the feeling of a
great loss. "I am sorry for the death of M. de Cambrai," wrote Madame de
Maintenon on the 10th of January, 1715; "he was a friend I lost through
Quietism, but it is asserted that he might have done good service in the
council, if things should be pushed so far." Fenelon had not been
mistaken, when he wrote once upon a time to Madame de Maintenon, who
consulted him about her defects, "You are good towards those for whom you
have liking and esteem, but you are cold so soon as the liking leaves
you; when you are frigid your frigidity is carried rather far, and, when
you begin to feel mistrust, your heart is withdrawn too brusquely from
those to whom you had shown confidence."
Fenelon had never shown any literary prepossessions. He wrote for his
friends or for the Duke of Burgundy, lavishing the treasures of his mind
and spirit upon his letters of spiritual guidance, composing, in order to
convince the Duke of Orleans, his Traite de l'Existence de Dieu,
indifferent as to the preservation of the sermons he preached every
Sunday, paying more attention to the plans of government he addressed to
the young dauphin than to the publication of his works. Several were not
collected until after his death. In delivering their eulogy of him at
the French Academy, neither M. de Boze, who succeeded him, nor M. Dacier,
director of the Academy, dared to mention the name of Telemaque.
Clever (spirituel) "to an alarming extent" (faire peur) in the
minutest detail of his writings, rich, copious, harmonious, but not
without tendencies to lengthiness, the style of Fenelon is the reflex of
his character; sometimes, a little subtle and covert, like the prelate's
mind, it hits and penetrates without any flash (eclat) and without
dealing heavy blows. "Graces flowed from his lips," said Chancellor
d'Aguesseau, "and he seemed to treat the greatest subjects as if, so to
speak, they were child's play to him; the smallest grew to nobleness
beneath his pen, and he would have made flowers grow in the midst of
thorns. A noble singularity, pervading his whole person, and a something
sublime in his very simplicity, added to his characteristics a certain
prophet-like air. Always original, always creative, he imitated nobody,
and himself appeared inimitable." His last act was to write a letter to
Father Le Tellier to be communicated to the king. "I have just received
extreme unction; that is, the state, reverend father, when I am preparing
to appear before God, in which I pray you with instance to represent to
the king my true sentiments. I have never felt anything but docility
towards the church and horror at the innovations which have been imputed
to me. I accepted the condemnation of my book in the most absolute
simplicity. I have never been a single moment in my life without feeling
towards the king personally the most lively gratitude, the most genuine
zeal, the most profound respect, and the most inviolable attachment. I
take the liberty of asking of his Majesty two favors, which do not
concern either my own person or anybody belonging to me. The first is,
that he will have the goodness to give me a pious and methodical
successor, sound and firm against Jansenism, which is in prodigious
credit on this frontier. The other favor is, that he will have the
goodness to complete with my successor that which could not be completed
with me on behalf of the gentlemen of St. Sulpice. I wish his Majesty a
long life, of which the church as well as the state has infinite need.
If peradventure I go into the presence of God, I shall often ask these
favors of Him."
How dread is the power of sovereign majesty, operative even at the
death-bed of the greatest and noblest spirits, causing Fenelon in his
dying hour to be anxious about the good graces of a monarch ere long,
like him, a-dying!
Our thoughts may well linger over those three great minds, Pascal,
Bossuet, and Fenelon,—one layman and two bishops; all equally absorbed
by the great problems of human life and immortality. With different
degrees of greatness and fruitfulness, they all serve the same cause.
Whether as defenders or assailants of Jansenism and Quietism, the
solitary philosopher or the prelates engaged in the court or in the
guidance of men, all three of them serving God on behalf of the soul's
highest interests, remained unique in their generation, and without
successors as they had been without predecessors.
Leaving the desert and the church, and once more entering the world, we
immediately encounter, amongst women, one, and one only, in the first
rank—Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marchioness of Sevigne, born at Paris on
the 5th of February, 1627, five months before Bossuet. Like a
considerable number of women in Italy in the sixteenth century, and in
France in the seventeenth, she had received a careful education. She
knew Italian, Latin, and Spanish; she had for masters Menage and
Chapelain; and she early imbibed a real taste for solid reading, which
she owed to her leaning towards the Jansenists and Port-Royal. She was
left a widow at five and twenty by the death of a very indifferent
husband, and she was not disposed to make a second venture. Before
getting killed in a duel, M. de Sevigne had made a considerable gap in
the property of his wife, who, however, had brought him more than five
hundred thousand livres. Madame de Sevigne had two children: she made up
her mind to devote herself to their education, to restore their fortune,
and to keep her love for them and for her friends. Of them she had many,
often very deeply smitten with her; all remained faithful to her, and,
she deserted none of them, though they might be put on trial and
condemned like Fouquet, or perfidious and cruel like her cousin M. de
Bussy-Rabutin. The safest and most agreeable of acquaintances, ever
ready to take part in the joys as well as the anxieties of those whom she
honored with her friendship, without permitting this somewhat superficial
sympathy to agitate the depths of her heart, she had during her life but
one veritable passion, which she admitted nobody to share with her. Her
daughter, Madame de Grignan, the prettiest girl in France, clever,
virtuous, business-like, appears in her mother's letters fitful,
cross-grained, and sometimes rather cold. Madame de Sevigne is a friend
whom we read over and over again, whose emotions we share, to whom we go
for an hour's distraction and delightful chat. We have no desire to chat
with Madame de Grignan; we gladly leave her to her mother's exclusive
affection, feeling infinitely obliged to her, however, for having
existed, inasmuch as her mother wrote letters to her. Madame de
Sevigne's letters to her daughter are superior to all her other letters,
charming as they are. When she writes to M. de Pomponne, to M. de
Coulanges, to M. de Bussy, the style is less familiar, the heart less
open, the soul less stirred. She writes to her daughter as she would
speak to her; it is not letters, it is an animated and charming
conversation, touching upon everything, embellishing everything with an
inimitable grace. She gave her daughter in marriage to Count de Grignan
in January, 1669; next year her son-in-law was appointed lieutenant-
general of the king in Provence; he was to fill the place there of the
Duke of Vendome, too young to discharge his functions as governor. In
the month of January, 1671, M. de Grignan removed his wife to Aix: he was
a Provencal, he was fond of his province, his castle of Grignan, and his
wife. Madame de Sevigne found herself condemned to separation from the
daughter whom she loved exclusively. "In vain I seek my darling
daughter; I can no longer find her, and every step she takes removes her
farther from me. I went to St. Mary's, still weeping and still dying of
grief; it seemed as if my heart and my soul were being wrenched from me;
and, in truth, what a cruel separation! I asked leave to be alone: I was
taken into Madame du Housset's room, and they made me up a fire. Agnes
sat looking at me without speaking: that was our bargain. I staid there
till five o'clock, without ceasing to sob: all my thoughts were mortal,
wounds to me. I wrote to M. de Grignan, you can imagine in what key.
Then I went to Madame de La Fayette's, who redoubled my griefs by the
interest she took in them. She was alone, ill and distressed at the
death of one of the nuns; she was just as I could have desired. I
returned hither at eight; but when I came in, O! can you conceive what I
felt as I mounted these stairs? That room into which I used always to
go, alas! I found the doors of it open, but I saw everything
disfurnished, everything disarranged, and your little daughter, who
reminded me of mine. The wakenings of the night were dreadful; I think
of you continuously: it is what devotees call an habitual thought, such
as one should have of God, if one did one's duty. Nothing gives me any
distraction. I see that carriage, which is forever going on and will
never come near me. I am forever on the highways; it seems as if I were
afraid sometimes that the carriage will upset with me. The rains there
have been for the last three days reduce me to despair; the Rhone causes
me strange alarm. I have a map before my eyes, I know all the places
where you sleep. This evening you are at Nevers; on Sunday you will be
at Lyons, where you will receive this letter. I have received only two
of yours; perhaps the third will come; that is the only comfort I desire:
as for others, I seek for none." During five and twenty years Madame de
Sevigne could never become accustomed to her daughter's absence. She set
out for the Rochers, near Vitry, a family estate of M. de Sevigne's. Her
friend the Duke of Chaulnes was governor of Brittany. "You shall now
have news of our states as your penalty for being a Breton. M. de
Chaulnes arrived on Sunday evening, to the sound of everything that can
make any in Vitry. On Monday morning he sent me a letter; I wrote back
to say that I would go and dine with him. There are two dining-tables in
the same room; fourteen covers at each table. Monsieur presides at one,
Madame at the other. The good cheer is prodigious; joints are carried
away quite untouched, and as for the pyramids of fruit, the doors require
to be heightened. Our fathers did not foresee this sort of machine,
indeed they did not even foresee that a door required to be higher than
themselves. Well, a pyramid wants to come in, one of those pyramids
which make everybody exclaim from one end of the table to the other; but
so far from that boding damage, people are often, on the contrary, very
glad not to see any more of what they contain. This pyramid, then, with
twenty or thirty porcelain dishes, was so completely upset at the door,
that the noise it made put to silence the violins, hautbois, and
trumpets. After dinner, M. de Locmaria and M. de Coetlogon danced with
two fair Bretons some marvellous jigs (passe pipeds) and some minuets in a
style that the court-people cannot approach; wherein they do the Bohemian
and Breton step with a neatness and correctness which are charming. I
was thinking all the while of you, and I had such tender recollections of
your dancing and of what I had seen you dance, that this pleasure became
a pain to me. The States are sure not to be long; there is nothing to do
but to ask for what the king wants; nobody says a word, and it is all
done. As for the governor, he finds, somehow or other, more than forty
thousand crowns coming in to him. An infinity of presents, pensions,
repairs of roads and towns, fifteen or twenty grand dinner-parties,
incessant play, eternal balls, comedies three times a week, a great show
of dress, that is the States. I am forgetting three or four hundred
pipes of wine which are drunk; but, if I did not reckon this little item,
the others do not forget it, and put it first. This is what is called
the sort of twaddle to make one go to sleep on one's feet; but it is what
comes to the tip of your pen when you are in Brittany and have nothing
else to say."
Even in Brittany and at the Rochers, Madame de Sevigne always has
something to say. The weather is frightful; she is occupied a good deal
in reading the romances of La Calprenede and the Grand Cyrus, as well
as the Ethics of Nicole. "For four days it has been one continuous
tempest; all our walks are drowned; there is no getting out any more.
Our masons, our carpenters keep their rooms; in short, I hate this
country, and I yearn every moment for your sun; perhaps you yearn for my
rain; we do well, both of us. I am going on with the Ethics of Nicole,
which I find delightful; it has not yet given me any lesson against the
rain, but I am expecting it, for I find everything there, and conformity
to the will of God might answer my purpose, if I did not want a specific
remedy. In fact, I consider this an admirable book; nobody has written
as these gentlemen have, for I put down to Pascal half of all that is
beautiful. It is so nice to have one's self and one's feelings talked
about, that, though it be in bad part, one is charmed by it. What is
called searching the depths of the heart with a lantern is exactly what
he does; he discloses to us that which we feel every day, but have not
the wit to discern or the sincerity to avow. I have even forgiven the
swelling in the heart (l'enflure du coeur) for the sake of the rest,
and I maintain that there is no other word to express vanity and pride,
which are really wind: try and find another word. I shall complete the
reading of this with pleasure."
Here we have the real Madame de Sevigne, whom we love, on whom we rely,
who is as earnest as she is amiable and gay, who goes to the very core of
things, and who tells the truth of herself as well as of others. "You
ask me, my dear child, whether I continue to be really fond of life. I
confess to you that I find poignant sorrows in it, but I am even more
disgusted with death; I feel so wretched at having to end all this
thereby, that, if I could turn back again, I would ask for nothing
better. I find myself under an obligation which perplexes me: I embarked
upon life without my consent, and I must go out of it; that overwhelms
me. And how shall I go? Which way? By what door? When will it be?
In what condition? Shall I suffer a thousand, thousand pains, which will
make me die desperate? Shall I have brain-fever? Shall I die of an
accident? How shall I be with God? What shall I have to show Him?
Shall fear, shall necessity bring me back to Him? Shall I have no
sentiment but that of dread? What can I hope? Am I worthy of heaven?
Am I worthy of hell? Nothing is such madness as to leave one's salvation
in uncertainty, but nothing is so natural; and the stupid life I lead is
the easiest thing in the world to understand. I bury myself in these
thoughts, and I find death so terrible, that I hate life more because it
leads me thereto than because of the thorns with which it is planted.
You will say that I want to live forever then: not at all; but, if my
opinion had been asked, I should have preferred to die in my nurse's
arms; that would have removed me from vexations of spirit, and would have
given me Heaven full surely and easily."
Madame de Sevigne would have very much scandalized those gentlemen of
Port-Royal, if she had let them see into the bottom of her heart as she
showed it to her daughter. Pascal used to say, "There are but three
sorts of persons: those who serve God, having found Him; those who employ
themselves in seeking Him, not having found Him; and those who live
without seeking Him or having found Him. The first are reasonable and
happy; the last are mad and miserable; the intermediate are miserable and
reasonable." Without ever having sought and found God, in the absolute
sense intended by Pascal, Madame de Sevigne kept approaching Him by
gentle degrees. "We are reading a treatise by M. Namon of Port-Royal on
continuous prayer; though he is a hundred feet above my head, he
nevertheless pleases and charms us. One is very glad to see that there
have been and still are in the world people to whom God communicates His
Holy Spirit in such abundance; but, O God! when shall we have some
spark, some degree of it? How sad to find one's self so far from it, and
so near to something else! O, fie! Let us not speak of such plight as
that: it calls for sighs, and groans, and humiliations a hundred times a
day."
After having suffered so much from separation, and so often traversed
France to visit her daughter in Provence, Madame de Sevigne had the
happiness to die in her house at Grignan. She was sixty-nine, and she
had been ill for some time; she was subject to rheumatism; her son's
wildness had for a long while retarded the arrangement of her affairs;
at last he had turned over a new leaf, he was married, he was a devotee.
Madame de Grignan had likewise found a wife for her son, whom the king
had made a colonel at a very early age; and a husband for her daughter,
little Pauline, now Madame de Simiane. "All this together is extremely
nice, and too nice," wrote Madame de Sevigne to M. de Bussy, "for I find
the days going so fast, and the months and the years, that, for my part,
my dear cousin, I can no longer hold them. Time flies, and carries me
along in spite of me; it is all very fine for me to wish to stay it, it
bears me away with it, and the idea of this causes me great fear; you
will make a pretty shrewd guess why." Death came at last, and Madame de
Sevigne lost all her terrors. She was attacked by small-pox whilst her
sick daughter was confined to her bed, and died on the 19th of April,
1696, thanking God that she was the first to go, after having so often
trembled for her daughter's health. "What calls far more for our
admiration than for our regrets," writes M. de Grignan to M. de
Coulanges, "is the spectacle of a brave woman facing death, of which she
had no doubt from the first days of her illness, with astounding firmness
and submission. This person, so tender and so weak towards all that she
loved, showed nothing but courage and piety when she believed that her
hour was come; and we could not but remark of what utility and of what
importance it is to have the mind stocked with good matter and holy
reading, for the which Madame de Sevigne had a liking, not to say a
wonderful hungering, from the use she managed to make of that good store
in the last moments of her life." She had often taken her daughter to
task for not being fond of books. "There is a certain person who
undoubtedly has plenty of wits, but of so nice and so fastidious a sort,
that she cannot read anything but five or six sublime works, which is a
sign of distinguished taste. She cannot bear historical books; a great
deprivation this, and of that which is a subsistence to everybody else.
She has another misfortune, which is, that she cannot read twice over
those choice books which she esteems exclusively. This person says that
she is insulted when she is told that she is not fond of reading: another
bone to pick." Madame de Sevigne's liking for good books accompanied her
to the last, and helped her to make a good end.
All the women who had been writers in her time died before Madame de
Sevigne. Madame de Motteville, a judicious and sensible woman, more
independent at the bottom of her heart than in externals, had died in
1689, exclusively occupied, from the time that she lost Queen Anne of
Austria, in works of piety and in drawing up her Memoires. Mdlle. de
Montpensier, "my great Mademoiselle," as Madame de Sevigne used to call
her, had died at Paris on the 5th of April, 1693, after a violent
illness, as feverish as her life. Impassioned and haughty, with her head
so full of her greatness that she did not marry in her youth, thinking
nobody worthy of her except the king and the emperor, who had no fancy
for her, and ending by a private marriage with the Duke of Lauzun, "a
cadet of Gascony," whom the king would not permit her to espouse
publicly; clever, courageous, hare-brained, generous, she has herself
sketched her own portrait. "I am tall, neither fat nor thin, of a very
fine and easy figure. I have a good mien, arms and hands not beautiful,
but a beautiful skin and throat too. I have a straight leg and a
well-shaped foot; my hair is light, and of a beautiful auburn; my face is
long, its contour is handsome, nose large and aquiline; mouth neither
large nor small, but chiselled, and with a very pleasing expression; lips
vermilion; teeth not fine, but not frightful either. My eyes are blue,
neither large nor small, but sparkling, soft, and proud, like my mien. I
talk a great deal, without saying silly things or using bad words. I am
a very vicious enemy, being very choleric and passionate, and that, added
to my birth, may well make my enemies tremble; but I have also a noble
and a kindly soul. I am incapable of any base and black deed; and so I
am more disposed to mercy than to justice. I am melancholic; I like
reading good and solid books; trifles bore me, except verses, and them I
like, of whatever sort they may be, and undoubtedly I am as good a judge
of such things as if I were a scholar."
A few days after Mademoiselle, died, likewise at Paris, Madelaine de la
Vergne, Marchioness of La Fayette, the most intimate friend of Madame de
Sevigne. "Never did we have the smallest cloud upon our friendship," the
latter would say; "long habit had not made her merit stale to me, the
flavor of it was always fresh and new; I paid her many attentions from
the mere prompting of my heart, without the propriety to which we are
bound by friendship having anything to do with it. I was assured, too,
that I constituted her dearest consolation, and for forty years past it
had always been the same thing." Sensible, clever, a sweet and safe
acquaintance, Madame de La Fayette was as simple and as true in her
relations with her confidantes as in her writings. La Princesse de
Olives alone has outlived the times and the friends of Madame de La
Fayette. Following upon the "great sword-thrusts" of La Calprenede or
Mdlle. de Scudery, this delicate, elegant, and virtuous tale, with its
pure and refined style, enchanted the court, which recognized itself at
its best, and painted under its brightest aspect; it was farewell forever
to the "Pays de Tendre." Madame de La Fayette had very bad health; she
wrote to Madame de Sevigne on the 14th of July, 1693, "Here is what I
have done since I wrote to you last. I have had two attacks of fever;
for six months I had not been purged; I am purged once, I am purged
twice; the day after the second time, I sit down to table. O, dear!
I feel a pain in my heart; I do not want any soup. Have a little meat
then. No, I do not want any. Well, you will have some fruit. I think I
will. Very well, then, have some. I don't know, I think I will have
something by and by; let me have some soup and a chicken this evening.
Here is the evening, and there are the soup and the chicken: I don't want
them. I am nauseated; I will go to bed; I prefer sleeping to eating. I
go to bed, I turn round, I turn back, I have no pain, but I have no sleep
either. I call, I take a book, I shut it up. Day comes, I get up, I go
to the window. It strikes four, five, six; I go to bed again, I doze
till seven, I get up at eight, I sit down to table at twelve, to no
purpose, as yesterday. I lay myself down in my bed again in the evening,
to no purpose, as the night before. Are you ill? Nay. I am in this
state for three days and three nights. At present I am getting some
sleep again, but I still eat merely mechanically, horse-wise, rubbing my
mouth with vinegar otherwise I am very well, and I haven't even so much
pain in the head." Fault was found with Madame de La Fayette for not
going out. "She had a mortal melancholy. What absurdity again! Is she
not the most fortunate woman in the world? That is what people said,"
writes Madame de Sevigne; "it needed that she should be dead to prove
that she had good reason for not going out, and for being melancholy.
Her reins and her heart were all gone was not that enough to cause those
fits of despondency of which she complained? And so, during her life,
she showed reason, and after death she showed reason, and never was she
without that divine reason which was her principal gift."
Madame de La Fayette had in her life one great sorrow, which had
completed the ruin of her health. On the 16th of March, 1680, after the
closest and longest of intimacies, she had lost her best friend, the Duke
of La Rochefoucauld. Carried away in his youth by party strife and an
ardent passion for Madame de Longueville, he had at a later period sought
refuge in the friendship of Madame de La Fayette. "When women have
well-formed minds," he would say, "I like their conversation better than
that of men; you find with them a certain gentleness which is not met
with amongst us, and it seems to me, besides, that they express
themselves with greater clearness, and that they give a more pleasant
turn to the things they say." A meddler and intriguer during the
Fronde, sceptical and bitter in his Maximes, the Duke of La
Rochefoucauld was amiable and kindly in his private life. Factions and
the court had taught him a great deal about human nature; he had seen it
and judged of it from its bad side. Witty, shrewd, and often profound,
he was too severe to be just. The bitterness of his spirit breathed
itself out completely in his writings; he kept for his friends that
kindliness and that sensitiveness of which he made sport. "He gave me
wit," Madame de La Fayette would say, "but I reformed his heart." He
had lost his son at the passage of the Rhine, in 1672. He was ill,
suffering cruelly. "I was yesterday at M. de La Rochefoucauld's,"
writes Madame de Sevigne, in 1680. "I found him uttering loud shrieks;
his pain was such that his endurance was quite overcome without a single
scrap remaining. The excessive pain upset him to such a degree that he
was sitting out in the open air with a violent fever upon him. He
begged me to send you word, and to assure you that the wheel-broken do
not suffer during a single moment what he suffers one half of his life,
and so he wishes for death as a happy release." He died with Bossuet at
his pillow. "Very well prepared as regards his conscience," says Madame
de Sevigne again; "that is all settled; but, in other respects, it might
be the illness and death of his neighbor which is in question, he is not
flurried about it, he is not troubled about it. Believe me, my daughter,
it is not to no purpose that he has been making reflections all his
life; he has approached his last moments in such wise that they have had
nothing that was novel or strange for him." M. de La Rochefoucauld
thought worse of men than of life. "I have scarcely any fear of
things," he had said; "I am not at all afraid of death." With all his
rare qualities and great opportunities he had done nothing but
frequently embroil matters in which he had meddled, and had never been
anything but a great lord with a good deal of wit. Actionless
penetration and sceptical severity may sometimes clear the judgment and
the thoughts, but they give no force or influence that has power over
men. "There was always a something (je ne sais quoi) about M. de La
Rochefoucauld," writes Cardinal de Retz, who did not like him; "he was
for meddling in intrigues from his childhood, and at a time when he had
no notion of petty interests, which were never his foible, and when he
did not understand great ones, which, on the other hand, were never his
strength. He was never capable of doing anything in public affairs, and
I am sure I don't know why. His views were not sufficiently broad, and
he did not even see comprehensively all that was within his range, but
his good sense,—very good, speculatively,—added to his suavity, his
insinuating style, and his easy manners, which are admirable, ought to
have compensated more than it did for his lack of penetration. He
always showed habitual irresolution, but I really do not know to what to
attribute this irresolution; it could not, with him, have come from the
fertility of his imagination, which is anything but lively. He was
never a warrior, though he was very much the soldier. He was never a
good partyman, though he was engaged in it all his life. That air of
bashfulness and timidity which you see about him in private life was
turned in public life into an air of apology. He always considered
himself to need one, which fact, added to his maxims, which do not show
sufficient belief in virtue, and to his practice, which was always to
get out of affairs with as much impatience as he had shown to get into
them, leads me to conclude that he would have done far better to know
his own place, and reduce himself to passing, as he might have passed,
for the most polite of courtiers and the worthiest (le plus honnete)
man, as regards ordinary life, that ever appeared in his century."
Cardinal de Retz had more wits, more courage, and more resolution than
the Duke of La Rochefoucauld; he was more ambitious and more bold; he
was, like him, meddlesome, powerless, and dangerous to the state. He
thought himself capable of superseding Cardinal Mazarin, and far more
worthy than he of being premier minister; but every time he found himself
opposed to the able Italian he was beaten. All that he displayed, during
the Fronde, of address, combination, intrigue, and resolution, would
barely have sufficed to preserve his name in history, if he had not
devoted his leisure in his retirement to writing his Memoires.
Vigorous, animated, always striking, often amusing, sometimes showing
rare nobleness and high-mindedness, his stories and his portraits
transport us to the very midst of the scenes he desires to describe and
the personages he makes the actors in them. His rapid, nervous,
picturesque style is the very image of that little dark, quick, agile
man, more soldier than bishop, and more intriguer than soldier,
faithfully and affectionately beloved by his friends, detested by his
very numerous enemies, and dreaded by many people, for the causticity of
his tongue, long after the troubles of the Fronde had ceased, and he was
reduced to be a wanderer in foreign lands, still Archbishop of Paris
without being able to set foot in it. Having retired to Commercy, he
fell under Louis XIV.'s suspicion. Madame de Sevigne, who was one of his
best friends, was anxious about him. "As to our cardinal, I have often
thought as you," she wrote to her daughter; "but, whether it be that the
enemies are not in a condition to cause fear, or that the friends are not
subject to take alarm, it is certain that there is no commotion. You
show a very proper spirit in being anxious about the welfare of a person
who is so distinguished, and to whom you owe so much affection." "Can I
forget him whom I see everywhere in the story of our misfortunes,"
exclaimed Bossuet, in his funeral oration over Michael Le Tellier,
"that man so faithful to individuals, so formidable to the state, of a
character so high that he could not be esteemed, or feared, or hated by
halves, that steady genius whom, the while he shook the universe, we saw
attracting to himself a dignity which in the end he determined to
relinquish as having been too dearly bought, as he had the courage to
recognize in the place that is the most eminent in Christendom, and as
being, after all, quite incapable of satisfying his desires, so conscious
was he of his mistake and of the emptiness of human greatness? But, so
long as he was bent upon obtaining what he was one day to despise, he
kept everything moving by means of powerful and secret springs, and,
after that all parties were overthrown, he seemed still to uphold himself
alone, and alone to still threaten the victorious favorite with his sad
but fearless gaze." When Bossuet sketched this magnificent portrait of
Mazarin's rival, Cardinal de Retz had been six years dead, in 1679.
Mesdames de Sevigne and de La Fayette were of the court, as were the Duke
of La Rochefoucauld and Cardinal de Retz. La Bruyere lived all his life
rubbing shoulders with the court; he knew it, he described it, but he was
not of it, and could not be of it. Nothing is known of his family. He
was born at Dourdan in 1639, and had just bought a post in the Treasury
(tresorier de France) at Caen, when Bossuet, who knew him, induced him
to remove to Paris as teacher of history to the duke, grandson of the
great Conde. He remained forever attached to the person of the prince,
who gave him a thousand crowns a year, and he lived to the day of his
death at Conde's house. "He was a philosopher," says Abbe d'Olivet in
his Histoire de l'Academie Francaise; "all he dreamt of was a quiet
life, with his friends and his books, making a good choice of both; not
courting or avoiding pleasure; ever inclined for moderate fun, and with
a talent for setting it going; polished in manners, and discreet in
conversation; dreading every sort of ambition, even that of displaying
wit." This was not quite the opinion formed by Boileau of La Bruyere.
"Maximilian came to see me at Auteuil," writes Boileau to Racine on the
19th of May, 1687, the very year in which the Caracteres was published;
"he read me some of his Theophrastus. He is a very worthy (honnete)
man, and one who would lack nothing, if nature had created him as
agreeable as he is anxious to be. However, he has wit, learning, and
merit." Amidst his many and various portraits, La Bruyere has drawn his
own with an amiable pride. "I go to your door, Ctesiphon; the need I
have of you hurries me from my bed and from my room. Would to Heaven I
were neither your client nor your bore. Your slaves tell me that you are
engaged and cannot see me for a full hour yet; I return before the time
they appointed, and they tell me that you have gone out. What can you be
doing, Ctesiphon, in that remotest part of your rooms, of so laborious a
kind as to prevent you from seeing me? You are filing some bills, you
are comparing a register; you are signing your name, you are putting the
flourish. I had but one thing to ask you, and you had but one word to
reply: yes or no. Do you want to be singular? Render service to those
who are dependent upon you, you will be more so by that behavior than by
not letting yourself be seen. O man of importance and overwhelmed with
business, who in your turn have need of my offices, come into the
solitude of my closet; the philosopher is accessible; I shall not put you
off to another day. You will find me over those works of Plato which
treat of the immortality of the soul and its distinctness from the body;
or with pen in hand, to calculate the distances of Saturn and Jupiter. I
admire God in His works, and I seek by knowledge of the truth to regulate
my mind and become better. Come in, all doors are open to you; my
antechamber is not made to wear you out with waiting for me; come right
in to me without giving me notice. You bring me something more precious
than silver and gold, if it be an opportunity of obliging you. Tell me,
what can I do for you? Must I leave my books, my study, my work, this
line I have just begun? What a fortunate interruption for me is that
which is of service to you!"
From the solitude of that closet went forth a book unique of its sort,
full of sagacity, penetration, and severity, without bitterness; a
picture of the manners of the court and of the world, traced by the hand
of a spectator who had not essayed its temptations, but who guessed them
and passed judgment on them all,—"a book," as M. de Malezieux said to La
Bruyere, "which was sure to bring its author many readers and many
enemies." Its success was great from the first, and it excited lively
curiosity. The courtiers liked the portraits; attempts were made to name
them; the good sense, shrewdness, and truth of the observations struck
everybody; people had met a hundred times those whom La Bruyere had
described. The form appeared of a rarer order than even the matter; it
was a brilliant, uncommon style, as varied as human nature, always
elegant and pure, original and animated, rising sometimes to the height
of the noblest thoughts, gay and grave, pointed and serious. Avoiding,
by richness in turns and expression, the uniformity native to the
subject, La Bruyere riveted attention by a succession of touches making a
masterly picture, a terrible one sometimes, as in his description of the
peasants' misery:
"To be seen are certain ferocious animals, male and female, scattered over
the country, dark, livid, and all scorched by the sun, affixed to the
soil which they rummage and throw up with indomitable pertinacity; they
have a sort of articulate voice, and, when they rise to their feet, they
show a human face; they are, in fact, men. At night they withdraw to the
caves, where they live on black bread, water, and roots. They spare
other men the trouble of sowing, tilling, and reaping for their
livelihood, and deserve, therefore, not to go in want of the very bread
they have sown." Few people at the court, and in La Bruyere's day, would
have thought about the sufferings of the country folks, and conceived the
idea of contrasting them with the sketch of a court-ninny. "Gold
glitters," say you, "upon the clothes of Philemon; it glitters as well as
the tradesman's. He is dressed in the finest stuffs; are they a whit the
less so when displayed in the shops and by the piece? Nay; but the
embroidery and the ornaments add magnificence thereto; then I give the
workman credit for his work. If you ask him the time, he pulls out a
watch which is a masterpiece; his sword-guard is an onyx; he has on his
finger a large diamond which he flashes into all eyes, and which is
perfection; he lacks none of those curious trifles which are worn about
one as much for show as for use; and he does not stint himself either of
all sorts of adornment befitting a young man who has married an old
millionaire. You really pique my curiosity: I positively must see such
precious articles as those. Send me that coat and those jewels of
Philemon's; you can keep the person. Thou'rt wrong, Philemon, if, with
that splendid carriage, and that large number of rascals behind thee, and
those six animals to draw thee, thou thinkest thou art thought more of.
We take off all those appendages which are extraneous to thee to get at
thyself, who art but a ninny."
More earnest and less bitter than La Rochefoucauld, and as brilliant and
as firm as Cardinal de Retz, La Bruyere was a more sincere believer than
either. "I feel that there is a God, and I do not feel that there is
none; that is enough for me; the reasoning of the world is useless to me.
I conclude that God exists. Are men good enough, faithful enough,
equitable enough to deserve all our confidence, and not make us wish
at least for the existence of God, to whom we may appeal from their
judgments and have recourse when we are persecuted or betrayed?" A very
strong reason and of potent logic, naturally imprinted upon an upright
spirit and a sensible mind, irresistibly convinced, both of them, that
justice alone can govern the world.
La Bruyere had just been admitted into the French Academy, in 1693. In
his admission speech he spoke in praise of the living, Bossuet, Fenelon,
Racine, La Fontaine; it was not as yet the practice. Those who were not
praised felt angry, and the journals of the time bitterly attacked the
new academician. He was hurt, and withdrew almost entirely from the
world. Four days before his death, however, "he was in company. All at
once he perceived that he was becoming deaf, yes, stone deaf. He
returned to Versailles, where he had apartments at Conde's house.
Apoplexy carried him off in a quarter of an hour on the 11th of May,
1696," leaving behind him an incomparable book, wherein, according to his
own maxim, the excellent writer shows himself to be an excellent painter;
and four dialogues against Quietism, still unfinished, full of lively and
good-humored hostility to the doctrines of Madame Guyon. They were
published after his death.
We pass from prose to poetry, from La Bruyere to Corneille, who had died
in 1684, too late for his fame, in spite of the vigorous returns of
genius which still flash forth sometimes in his feeblest works.
Throughout the Regency and the Fronde, Corneille had continued to occupy
almost alone the great French stage. Rotrou, his sometime rival with his
piece of Venceslas, and ever tenderly attached to him, had died, in 1650,
at Dreux, of which he was civil magistrate. An epidemic was ravaging the
town, and he was urged to go away. "I am the only one who can maintain
good order, and I shall remain," he replied. "At the moment of my
writing to you the bells are tolling for the twenty-second person to-day;
perhaps to-morrow it will be for me; but my conscience has marked out my
duty. God's will be done!" Two days later he was dead.
Corneille had dedicated Polyeucte to the regent Anne of Austria. He
published in a single year Rodogune and the Mort de Pompee,
dedicating this latter piece to Mazarin, in gratitude, he said, for an
act of generosity with which his Eminence had surprised him. At the same
time he borrowed from the Spanish drama the canvas of the Menteur, the
first really French comedy which appeared on the boards, and which
Moliere showed that he could appreciate at its proper value. After this
attempt, due perhaps to the desire felt by Corneille to triumph over his
rivals in the style in which he had walked abreast with them, he let
tragedy resume its legitimate empire over a genius formed by it. He
wrote Heraclius and Nicomede, which are equal in parts to his finest
masterpieces. But by this time the great genius no longer soared with
equal flight. Theodore and Pertharite had been failures. "I don't
mention them," Corneille would say, "in order to avoid the vexation of
remembering them." He was still living at Rouen, in a house adjoining
that occupied by his brother, Thomas Corneille, younger than he, already
known by some comedies which had met with success. The two brothers had
married two sisters.
"Their houses twain were made in one;
With keys and purse the same was done;
Their wives can never have been two.
Their wishes tallied at all times;
No games distinct their children' knew;
The fathers lent each other rhymes;
Same wine for both the drawers drew."—[Ducis.]
It is said, that when Peter Corneille was puzzled to end a verse he would
undo a trap that opened into his brother's room, shouting, "Sans-souci, a
rhyme!"
Corneille had announced his renunciation of the stage; he was translating
into verse the Imitation of Christ. "It were better," he had written
in his preface to Pertharite, "that I took leave myself instead of
waiting till it is taken of me altogether; it is quite right that after
twenty years' work I should begin to perceive that I am becoming too old
to be still in the fashion. This resolution is not so strong but that it
may be broken; there is every, appearance, however, of my abiding by it."
Fouquet was then in his glory, "no less superintendent of literature than
of finance," and he undertook to recall to the stage the genius of
Corneille. At his voice, the poet and the tragedian rose up at a single
bound.
"I feel the selfsame fire, the selfsame nerve I feel,
That roused th' indignant Cid, drove home Horatius' steel;
As cunning as of yore this hand of mine I find,
That sketched great Pompey's soul, depicted Cinna's mind,"—
wrote Corneille in his thanks to Fouquet. He had some months before said
to Mdlle. du Pare, who was an actress in Moliere's company, which had
come to Rouen, and who was, from her grand airs, nicknamed by the others
the Marchioness,
"Marchioness," if Age hath set
On my brow his ugly die;
At my years, pray don't forget,
You will be as—old as I.
"Yet do I possess of charms
One or two, so slow to fade,
That I feel but scant alarms
At the havoc Time hath made.
"You have such as men adore,
But these that you scorn to-day
May, perchance, be to the fore
When your own are worn away.
"These can from decay reprieve
Eyes I take a fancy to;
Make a thousand, years believe
Whatsoe'er I please of you.
"With that new, that coming race,
Who will take my word for it,
All the warrant for your face
Will be what I may have writ."
Corneille reappeared upon the boards with a tragedy called OEdipe, more
admired by his contemporaries than by posterity. On the occasion of
Louis XIV.'s marriage he wrote for the king's comedians the Toison
d'or, and put into the mouth of France those prophetic words:—
"My natural force abates, from long success alone;
Triumphant blooms the state, the wretched people groan
Their shrunken bodies bend beneath my high emprise;
Whilst glory gilds the throne, the subject sinks and dies."
Sertorius appeared at the commencement of the year 1662. "Pray where
did Corneille learn politics and war?" asked Turenne when he saw this
piece played. "You are the true and faithful interpreter of the mind and
courage of Rome," Balzac wrote to him; "I say further, sir, you are often
her teacher, and the reformer of olden times, if they have need of
embellishment and support. In the spots where Rome is of brick, you
rebuild it of marble; where you find a gap, you fill it with a
masterpiece, and I take it that what you lend to history is always
better than what you borrow from it. . . ." "They are grander and
more Roman in his verses than in their history," said La Bruyere. "Once
only, in the Cid, Corneille had abandoned himself unreservedly to the
reality of passion; scared at what he might find in the weaknesses of the
heart, he would no longer see aught but its strength. He sought in man
that which resists and not that which yields, thus giving his times the
sublime pleasure of an enjoyment that can belong to nought but the human
soul, a cherished proof of its noble origin and its glorious destiny, the
pleasure of admiration, the appreciation of the beautiful and the great,
the enthusiasm aroused by virtue. He moves us at sight of a masterpiece,
thrills us at the sound of a noble deed, enchants us at the bare idea of
a virtue which three thousand years have forever separated from us."
(Corneille et son temps, by M. Guizot.) Every other thought, every
other prepossession, are strangers to the poet; his personages represent
heroic passions which they follow out without swerving and without
suffering themselves to be shackled by the notions of a morality which
is still far from fixed and often in conflict with the interests and
obligations of parties, thus remaining perfectly of his own time and his
own country, all the while that he is describing Greeks, or Romans, or
Spaniards.
There is no pleasure in tracing the decadence of a great genius.
Corneille wrote for a long while without success, attributing his
repeated rebuffs to his old age, the influence of fashion, the capricious
taste of the generation for young people; he thought himself neglected,
appealing to the king himself, who had ordered Cinna and Pompee to be
played at court:—
"Go on; the latest born have naught degenerate,
Naught have they which would stamp them illegitimate
They, miserable fate! were smothered at the birth,
And one kind glance of yours would bring them back to earth;
The people and the court, I grant you, cry them down;
I have, or else they think I have, too feeble grown;
I've written far too long to write so well again;
The wrinkles on the brow reach even to the brain;
But counter to this vote how many could I raise,
If to my latest works you should vouchsafe your praise!
How soon so kind a grace, so potent to constrain,
Would court and people both win back to me again!
'So Sophocles of yore at Athens was the rage,
So boiled his ancient blood at five-score years of age,'
Would they to Envy cry, 'when OEdipus at bay
Before his judges stood, and bore the votes away.'"
Posterity has done for Corneille more than Louis XIV. could have done: it
has left in oblivion Agesilas, Attila, Titus, and Pulcherie; it
preserved the memory of the triumphs only. The poet was accustomed to
say with a smile, when he was reproached with his slowness and emptiness
in conversation, "I am Peter Corneille all the same." The world has
passed similar judgment on his works; in spite of the rebuffs of his
latter years, he has remained "the great Corneille."
When he died, in 1684, Racine, elected by the Academy in 1673, found
himself on the point of becoming its director; he claimed the honor of
presiding at the obsequies of Corneille. The latter had not been
admitted to the body until 1641, after having undergone two rebuffs.
Corneille had died in the night. The Academy decided in favor of Abbe de
Lavau, the outgoing director. "Nobody but you could pretend to bury
Corneille," said Benserade to Racine, "yet you have not been able to
obtain the chance." It was only when he received into the Academy Thomas
Corneille, in his brother's place, that Racine could praise to his
heart's content the master and rival who, in old age, had done him the
honor to dread him. "My father had not been happy in his speech at his
own admission," says Louis Racine ingenuously; "he was in this, because
he spoke out of the abundance of his heart, being inwardly convinced that
Corneille was worth much more than he." Louis XIV. had come in for as
great a share as Corneille in Racine's praises. He, informed of the
success of the speech, desired to hear it. The author had the honor of
reading it to him, after which the king said to him, "I am very pleased;
I would praise you more if you had praised me less." It was on this
occasion that the great Arnauld, still in disgrace and carefully
concealed, wrote to Racine: "I have to thank you, sir, for the speech
which was sent me from you. There certainly was never anything so
eloquent, and the hero whom you praise is so much the more worthy of your
praises in that he considered them too great. I have many things that I
would say to you about that, if I had the pleasure of seeing you, but it
would need the dispersal of a cloud which I dare to say is a spot upon
this sun. I assure you that the ideas I have thereupon are not
interested, and that what may concern myself affects me very little. A
chat with you and your companion would give me much pleasure, but I would
not purchase that pleasure by the least poltroonery. You know what I
mean by that; and so I abide in peace and wait patiently for God to make
known to this perfect prince that he has not in his kingdom a subject
more loyal, more zealous for his true glory, and, if I dare say so,
loving him with a love more pure and more free from all interest. That
is why I should not bring myself to take a single step to obtain liberty
to see my friends, unless it were to my prince alone that I could be
indebted for it." Fenelon and the great Arnauld held the same language,
independent and submissive, proud and modest, at the same time. Only
their conscience spoke louder than their respect for the king.
At the time when Racine was thus praising at the Academy the king and the
great Corneille, his own dramatic career was already ended. He was born,
in 1639, at La Ferte-Milon; he had made his first appearance on the stage
in 1664 with the Freres ennemis, and had taken leave of it in 1673 with
Phedre. Esther and Athalie, played in 1689 and 1691 by the young
ladies of St. Cyr, were not regarded by their author and his austere
friends as any derogation from the pious engagements he had entered into.
Racine, left an orphan at four years of age, and brought up at Port-Royal
under the influence and the personal care of M. Le Maitre, who called him
his son, did not at first answer the expectations of his master. The
glowing fancy of which he already gave signs caused dismay to Lancelot,
who threw into the fire one after the other two copies of the Greek tale
Theayene et Chariclee which the young man was reading. The third time,
the latter learnt it off by heart, and, taking the book to his severe
censor, "Here," said he, "you can burn this volume too, as well as the
others."
Racine's pious friends had fine work to no purpose; nature carried the
day, and he wrote verses. "Being unable to consult you, I was prepared,
like Malherbe, to consult an old servant at our place," he wrote to one
of his friends, "if I had not discovered that she was a Jansenist like
her master, and that she might betray me, which would be my utter ruin,
considering that I receive every day letter upon letter, or rather
excommunication upon excommunication, all because of a poor sonnet." To
deter the young man from poetry, he was led to expect a benefice, and was
sent away to Uzes to his uncle's, Father Sconin, who set him to study
theology. "I pass my time with my uncle, St. Thomas, and Virgil," he
wrote on the 17th of January, 1662, to M. Vitard, steward to the Duke of
Luynes; "I make lots of extracts from theology and some from poetry. My
uncle has kind intentions towards me, he hopes to get me something; then
I shall try to pay my debts. I do not forget the obligations I am under
to you. I blush as I write; Erubuit puer, salva res est (the lad has
blushed; it is all right). But that conclusion is all wrong; my affairs
do not mend."
Racine had composed at Uzes the Freres ennemis, which was played on his
return to Paris in 1664, not without a certain success; Alexandre met
with a great deal in 1665; the author had at first intrusted it to
Moliere's company, but he was not satisfied and gave his piece to the
comedians of the Hotel de Dourgogne. Moliere was displeased, and
quarrelled with Racine, towards whom he had up to that time testified
much good will. The disagreement was not destined to disturb the equity
of their judgments upon one another. When Racine brought out Les
Plaideurs, which was not successful at first, Moliere, as he left, said
out loud, "The comedy is excellent, and they who deride it deserve to be
derided." One of Racine's friends, thinking to do him a pleasure, went
to him in all haste to tell him of the failure of the Misanthrope at
its first representation. "The piece has fallen flat," said he; "never
was there anything so dull; you can believe what I say, for I was there."
"You were there, and I was not," replied Racine, "and yet I don't believe
it, because it is impossible that Moliere should have written a bad
piece. Go again, and pay more attention to it."
Racine had just brought out Alexandre when he became connected with
Boileau, who was three years his senior, and who had already published
several of his satires. "I have a surprising facility in writing my
verses," said the young tragic author ingenuously. "I want to teach you
to write them with difficulty," answered Boileau, "and you have talent
enough to learn before long." Andromaque was the result of this novel
effort, and was Racine's real commencement.
He was henceforth irrevocably committed to the theatrical cause. Nicole
attacking Desmarets, who had turned prophet after the failure of his
Clovis, alluded to the author's comedies, and exclaimed with all the
severity of Port-Royal, "A romance-writer and a scenic poet is a public
poisoner not of bodies but of souls." Racine took these words to
himself, and he wrote in defence of the dramatic art two letters so
bitter, biting, and insulting towards Port-Royal and the protectors of
his youth, that Boileau dissuaded him from publishing the second, and
that remorse before long took possession of his soul, never to be
entirely appeased. He had just brought out Les Plaideurs, which had
been requested of him by his friends and partly composed during the
dinners they frequently had together. "I put into it only a few
barbarous law-terms which I might have picked up during a lawsuit and
which neither I nor my judges ever really heard or understood." After
the first failure of the piece, the king's comedians one day risked
playing it before him. "Louis XIV. was struck by it, and did not think
it a breach of his dignity or taste to utter shouts of laughter so loud
that the courtiers were astounded." The delighted comedians, on leaving
Versailles, returned straight to Paris, and went to awaken Racine.
"Three carriages during the night, in a street where it was unusual to
see a single one during the day, woke up the neighborhood. There was a
rush to the windows, and, as it was known that a councillor of requests
(law-officer) had made a great uproar against the comedy of the
Plaideurs, nobody had a doubt of punishment befalling the poet who had
dared to take off the judges in the open theatre. Next day all Paris
believed that he was in prison." He had a triumph, on the contrary, with
Britannicus, after which the, king gave up dancing in the court
ballets, for fear of resembling Nero. Berenice was a duel between
Corneille and Racine for the amusement of Madame Henriette. Racine bore
away the bell from his illustrious rival, without much glory. Bajazet
soon followed. "Here is Racine's piece," wrote Madame de Sevigne to her
daughter in January, 1672; "if I could send you La Champmesle, you would
think it good, but without her, it loses half its worth. The character
of Bajazet is cold as ice, the manners of the Turks are ill observed in
it, they do not make so much fuss about getting married; the catastrophe
is not well led up to, there are no reasons given for that great
butchery. There are some pretty things, however, but nothing perfectly
beautiful, nothing which carries by storm, none of those bursts of
Corneille's which make one creep. My dear, let us be careful never to
compare Racine with him, let us always feel the difference; never will
the former rise any higher than Andromaque. Long live our old friend
Corneille! Let us forgive his bad verses for the sake of those divine
and sublime beauties which transport us. They are master-strokes which
are inimitable." Corneille had seen Bajazet. "I would take great care
not to say so to anybody else," he whispered in the ear of Segrais, who
was sitting beside him, "because they would say that I said so from
jealousy; but, mind you, there is not in Bajazet a single character
with the sentiments which should and do prevail at Constantinople; they
have all, beneath a Turkish dress, the sentiments that prevail in the
midst of France." The impassioned loyalty of Madame de Sevigne, and the
clear-sighted jealousy of Corneille, were not mistaken; Bajazet is no
Turk, but he is none the less very human. "There are points by which men
recognize themselves, though there is no resemblance; there are others in
which there is resemblance without any recognition. Certain sentiments
belong to nature in all countries; they are characteristic of man only,
and everywhere man will see his own image in them." [Corneille et son
temps, by M. Guizot.] Racine's reputation went on continually
increasing; he had brought out Mithridate and Iphigenie; Phedre
appeared in 1677. A cabal of great lords caused its failure at first.
When the public, for a moment led astray after the Phedre of Pradon,
returned to the master-work of Racine, vexation and wounded pride had
done their office in the poet's soul. Pious sentiments ever smouldering
in his heart, the horror felt for the theatre by Port-Royal, and
penitence for the sins he had been guilty of against his friends there,
revived within him; and Racine gave up profane poetry forever. "The
applause I have met with has often flattered me a great deal," said he at
a later period to his son, "but the smallest critical censure, bad as it
may have been, always caused me more of vexation than all the praises had
given me of pleasure." Racine wanted to turn Carthusian; his confessor
dissuaded him, and his friends induced him to marry. Madame Racine was
an excellent person, modest and devout, who never went to the theatre,
and scarcely knew her husband's plays by name; she brought him some
fortune. The king had given the great poet a pension, and Colbert had
appointed him to the treasury (tresorier) at Moulins. Louis XIV.,
moreover, granted frequent donations to men of letters. Racine received
from him nearly fifty thousand livres; he was appointed historiographer
to the king. Boileau received the same title; the latter was not
married, but Racine before long had seven children. "Why did not I turn
Carthusian!" he would sometimes exclaim in the disquietude of his
paternal affection when his children were ill. He devoted his life to
them with pious solicitude, constantly occupied with their welfare, their
good education, and the salvation of their souls. Several of his
daughters became nuns. He feared above everything to see his eldest son
devote himself to poetry, dreading for him the dangers he considered he
himself had run. "As for your epigram, I wish you had not written it,"
he wrote to him; "independently of its being commonplace, I cannot too
earnestly recommend you not to let yourself give way to the temptation of
writing French verses which would serve no purpose but to distract your
mind; above all, you should not write against anybody." This son, the
object of so much care, to whom his father wrote such modest, grave,
paternal, and sagacious letters, never wrote verses, lived in retirement,
and died young without ever having married. Little Louis, or Lionval,
Racine's last child, was the only one who ever dreamt of being a writer.
"You must be very bold," said Boileau to him, "to dare write verses with
the name you bear! It is not that I consider it impossible for you to
become capable some day of writing good ones, but I mistrust what is
without precedent, and never, since the world was world, has there been
seen a great poet son of a great poet." Louis Racine never was a great
poet, in spite of the fine verses which are to be met with in his poems
la Religion and la Grace. His Memoires of his father, written for
his son, describe Racine in all the simple charm of his domestic life.
"He would leave all to come and see us," writes Louis Racine; "an equerry
of the duke's came one day to say that he was expected to dinner at
Conde's house. 'I shall not have the honor of going,' said he; 'it is
more than a week since I have seen my wife and children who are making
holiday to-day to feast with me on a very fine carp; I cannot give up
dining with them.' And, when the equerry persisted, he sent for the
carp, which was worth about a crown. 'Judge for yourself,' said he,
'whether I can disappoint these poor children who have made up their
minds to regale me, and would not enjoy it if they were to eat this dish
without me.' He was loving by nature," adds Louis Racine; "he was loving
towards God when he returned to Him; and, from the day of his return to
those who, from his infancy, had taught him to know Him, he was so
towards them without any reserve; he was so all his life towards his
friends, towards his wife, and towards his children."
Boileau had undertaken the task of reconciling his friend with
Port-Royal. Nicole had made no opposition, "not knowing what war was."
M. Arnauld was intractable. Boileau one day made up his mind to take him
a copy of Phedre, pondering on the way as to what he should say to him.
"Shall this man," said he, "be always right, and shall I never be able to
prove him wrong? I am quite sure that I shall be right to-day; if he is
not of my opinion,—he will be wrong." And, going to M. Arnauld's, where
he found a large company, be set about developing his thesis, pulling out
Phedre, and maintaining that if tragedy were dangerous, it was the
fault of the poets. The younger theologians listened to him
disdainfully, but at last M. Arnauld said out loud, "If things are as he
says, he is right, and such tragedy is harmless." Boileau declared that
he had never felt so pleased in his life. M. Arnauld being reconciled to
Phedre, the principal step was made next day the author of the tragedy
presented himself. The culprit entered, humility and confusion depicted
on his face; he threw himself at the feet of M. Arnauld, who took him in
his arms; Racine was thenceforth received into favor by Port-Royal. The
two friends were preparing to set out with the king for the campaign of
1677. The besieged towns opened their gates before the poets had left
Paris. "How is it that you had not the curiosity to see a siege?" the
king asked them on his return: "it was not a long trip." "True, sir,"
answered Racine, always the greater courtier of the two, "but our tailors
were too slow. We had ordered travelling suits; and when they were
brought home, the places which your Majesty was besieging were taken."
Louis XIV. was not displeased. Racine thenceforth accompanied him in all
his campaigns; Boileau, who ailed a great deal, and was of shy
disposition, remained at Paris. His friend wrote to, him constantly, at
one time from the camp and at another from Versailles, whither he
returned with the king. "Madame de Maintenon told me, this, morning,"
writes Racine, "that the king had fixed our pensions at four thousand
francs for me and two thousand for you: that is, not including our
literary pensions. I have just come from thanking the king. I laid more
stress upon your case than even my own. I said, in as many words, 'Sir,
he has more wit than ever, more zeal for your Majesty, and more desire to
work for your glory than ever he had.' I am, nevertheless, really pained
at the idea of my getting more than you. But, independently of the
expenses and fatigue of the journeys, from which I am glad that you are
delivered, I know that you are so noble-minded and so friendly, that I am
sure you would be heartily glad that I were even better treated. I shall
be very pleased if you are." Boileau answered at once: "Are you mad with
your compliments? Do not you know perfectly well that it was I who
suggested the way in which things have been done? And can you doubt of
my being perfectly well pleased with a matter in which I am accorded all
I ask? Nothing in the world could be better, and I am even more rejoiced
on your account than on my own." The two friends consulted one another
mutually about their verses; Racine sent Boileau his spiritual songs.
The king heard the Combat du Chretien sung, set to music by Moreau:—
"O God, my God, what deadly strife!
Two men within myself I see
One would that, full of love to Thee,
My heart were leal, in death and life;
The other, with rebellion rife,
Against Thy laws inciteth me."
He turned to Madame de Maintenon, and, "Madame," said he, "I know those
two men well." Boileau sends Racine his ode on the capture of Namur.
"I have risked some very new things," he says, "even to speaking of the
white plume which the king has in his hat; but, in my opinion, if you are
to have novel expressions in verse, you must speak of things which have
not been said in verse. You shall be judge, with permission to alter the
whole, if you do not like it." Boileau's generous confidence was the
more touching, in that Racine was sarcastic and bitter in discussion.
"Did you mean to hurt me?" Boileau said to him one day. "God forbid!"
was the answer. "Well, then, you made a mistake, for you did hurt me."
Racine had just brought out Esther at the theatre of St. Cyr. Madame
de Brinon, lady-superior of the establishment which was founded by Madame
de Maintenon for the daughters of poor noblemen, had given her pupils a
taste for theatricals. "Our little girls have just been playing your
Andromaque," wrote Madame de Maintenon to Racine, "and they played it so
well that they never shall play it again in their lives, or any other of
your pieces." She at the same time asked him to write, in his leisure
hours, some sort of moral and historical poem from which love should be
altogether banished. This letter threw Racine into a great state of
commotion. He was anxious to please Madame de Maintenon, and yet it was
a delicate commission for a man who had a great reputation to sustain.
Boileau was for refusing. "That was not in the calculations of Racine,"
says Madame de Caylus in her Souvenirs. He wrote Esther. "Madame de
Maintenon was charmed with the conception and the execution," says Madame
de La Fayette; "the play represented in some sort the fall of Madame de
Montespan and her own elevation; all the difference was that Esther was a
little younger, and less particular in the matter of piety. The way in
which the characters were applied was the reason why Madame de Maintenon
was not sorry to make public a piece which had been composed for the
community only and for some of her private friends. There was exhibited
a degree of excitement about it which is incomprehensible; not one of the
small or the great but would go to see it, and that which ought to have
been looked upon as merely a convent-play became the most serious matter
in the world. The ministers, to pay their court by going to this play,
left their most pressing business. At the first representation at which
the king was present, he took none but the principal officers of his
hunt. The second was reserved for pious personages, such as Father
La Chaise, and a dozen or fifteen Jesuits, with many other devotees of
both sexes; afterwards it extended to the courtiers." "I paid my court
at St. Cyr the other day, more agreeably than I had expected writes
Madame de Sevigne to her daughter: listened, Marshal Bellefonds and I,
with an attention that was remarked, and with certain discreet
commendations which were not perhaps to be found beneath the
head-dresses' of all the ladies present. I cannot tell you how
exceedingly delightful this piece is; it is a unison of music, verse,
songs, persons, so perfect that there is nothing left to desire. The
girls who act the kings and other characters were made expressly for it.
Everything is simple, everything innocent, everything sublime and
affecting. I was charmed, and so was the marshal, who left his place to
go and tell the king how pleased he was, and that he sat beside a lady
well worthy of having seen Esther. The king came over to our seats.
'Madame,' he said to me, 'I am assured that you have been pleased.'
I, without any confusion,' replied, 'Sir, I am charmed; what I feel is
beyond expression.' The king said to me, 'Racine is very clever.'
I said to him, 'Very, Sir; but really these young people are very clever
too; they throw themselves into the subject as if they had never done
aught else.' 'Ah! as to that,' he replied, 'it is quite true.' And then
his Majesty went away and left me the object of envy. The prince and
princess came and gave me a word, Madame de Maintenon a glance; she went
away with the king. I replied to all, for I was in luck."
Athalie had not the same brilliant success as Esther. The devotees
and the envious had affrighted Madame de Maintenon, who had requested
Racine to write it. The young ladies of St. Cyr, in the uniform of the
house, played the piece quite simply at Versailles before Louis XIV. and
Madame de Maintenon, in a room without a stage. When the players gave a
representation of it at Paris, it was considered heavy; it did not,
succeed. Racine imagined that he was doomed to another failure like that
of Phedre, which he preferred before all his other pieces. "I am a
pretty good judge," Boileau kept repeating to him: "it is about the best
you have done; the public will come round to it." Racine died before
success was achieved by the only perfect piece which the French stage
possesses,—worthy both of the subject and of the sources whence Racine
drew his inspiration. He had, with an excess of scrupulousness,
abandoned the display of all the fire that burned within him; but beauty
never ceased to rouse him to irresistible enthusiasm. Whilst reading the
Psalms to M. de Seignelay, when lying ill, he could not refrain from
paraphrasing them aloud. He admired Sophocles so much that he never
dared touch the subjects of his tragedies. "One day," says M. de
Valicour, "when he was at Auteuil, at Boileau's, with M. Nicole and some
distinguished friends, he took up a Sophocles in Greek, and read the
tragedy of OEdipus, translating it as he went. He read so feelingly
that all his auditors experienced the sensations of terror and pity with
which this piece abounds. I have seen our best pieces played by our best
actors, but nothing ever came near the commotion into which I was thrown
by this reading, and, at this moment of writing, I fancy I still see
Racine, book in hand, and all of us awe-stricken around him." Thus it
was that, whilst repeating, but a short time before, the verses of
Mithridate, as he was walking in the Tuileries, he had seen the workmen
leaving their work and coming up to him, convinced as they were that he
was mad, and was going to throw himself into the basin.
Racine for a long while enjoyed the favors of the king, who went so far
as to tolerate the attachment the poet had always testified towards
Port-Royal. Racine, moreover, showed tact in humoring the
susceptibilities of Louis XIV. and his counsellors. "Father Bonhours and
Father Rapin (Jesuits) were in my study when I received your letter," he
writes to Boileau. "I read it to them, on breaking the seal, and I gave
them very great pleasure. I kept looking ahead, however, as I was
reading, in case there was anything too Jansenistical in it. I saw,
towards the end, the name of M. Nicole, and I skipped boldly, or, rather,
mean-spiritedly, over it. I dared not expose myself to the chance of
interfering with the great delight, and even shouts of laughter, caused
them by many very amusing things you sent me. They are both of them, I
assure you, very friendly towards you, and indeed very good fellows."
All this caution did not prevent Racine, however, from displeasing the
king. After a conversation he had held with Madame de Maintenon about
the miseries of the people, she asked him for a memorandum on the
subject. The king demanded the name of the author, and flew out at him.
"Because he is a perfect master of verse," said he, "does he think he
knows everything? And because he is a great poet, does he want to be
minister?"—-Madame de Maintenon was more discreet in her relations with
the king than bold in the defence of her friends; she sent Racine word
not to come and see her 'until further orders.' "Let this cloud pass,"
she said; "I will bring the fine weather back." Racine was ill; his
naturally melancholy disposition had become sombre. "I know, Madame,"
he wrote to Madame de Maintenon, "what influence you have; but in the
house of Port-Royal I have an aunt who shows her affection for me in
quite a different way. This holy woman is always praying God to send me
disgraces, humiliations, and subjects for penitence; she will have more
success than you." At bottom his soul was not sturdy enough to endure
the rough doctrines of Port-Royal; his health got worse and worse; he
returned to court; he was re-admitted by the king, who received him
graciously. Racine continued uneasy; he had an abscess of the liver, and
was a long while ill. "When he was convinced that he was going to die,
he ordered a letter to be written to the superintendent of finances,
asking for payment, which was due, of his pension. His son brought him
the letter. 'Why,' said he, 'did not you ask for payment of Boileau's
pension too? We must not be made distinct. Write the letter over again,
and let Boileau know that I was his friend even to death.' When the
latter came to wish him farewell, he raised himself up in bed with an
effort. 'I regard it as a happiness for me to die before you,' he said
to his friend. An operation appeared necessary. His son would have
given him hopes. 'And you, too,' said Racine, 'you would do as the
doctors, and mock me? God is the Master, and can restore me to life, but
Death has sent in his bill.'"
He was not mistaken: on the 21st of April, 1699, the great poet, the
scrupulous Christian, the noble and delicate painter of the purest
passions of the soul, expired at Paris, at fifty-nine years of age;
leaving life without regret, spite of all the successes with which he had
been crowned. Unlike Corneille with the Cid, he did not take tragedy and
glory by assault, he conquered them both by degrees, raising himself at
each new effort, and gaining over, little by little, the most passionate
admirers of his great rival. At the pinnacle of this reputation and this
victory, at thirty-eight years of age, he had voluntarily shut the door
against the intoxications and pride of success; he had mutilated his
life, buried his genius in penitence, obeying simply the calls of his
conscience, and, with singular moderation in the very midst of
exaggeration, becoming a father of a family and remaining a courtier, at
the same time that he gave up the stage and glory. Racine was gentle and
sensible even in his repentance and his sacrifices. Boileau gave
religion the credit for this very moderation. "Reason commonly brings
others to faith; it was faith which brought M. Racine to reason."
Boileau had more to do with his friend's reason than he probably knew.
Racine never acted without consulting him. With Racine, Boileau lost
half his life. He survived him twelve years without ever setting foot
again within the court after his first interview with the king. "I have
been at Versailles," he writes to his publisher, M. Brossette, "where I
saw Madame de Maintenon, and afterwards the king, who overcame me with
kind words; so, here I am more historiographer than ever. His Majesty
spoke to me of M. Racine in a manner to make courtiers desire death, if
they thought he would speak of them in the same way afterwards.
Meanwhile that has been but very small consolation to me for the loss of
that illustrious friend, who is none the less dead though regretted by
the greatest king in the universe." "Remember," Louis XIV. had said,
"that I have always an hour a week to give you when you like to come."
Boileau did not go again. "What should I go to court for?" he would say;
"I cannot sing praises any more."
At Racine's death Boileau did not write any longer. He had entered the
arena of letters at three and twenty, after a sickly and melancholy
childhood. The Art Poetique and the Lutrin appeared in 1674; the
first nine Satires and several of the Epistles had preceded them.
Rather a witty, shrewd, and able versifier than a great poet, Boileau
displayed in the Lutrin a richness and suppleness of fancy which his
other works had not foreshadowed. The broad and cynical buffoonery of
Scarron's burlesques had always shocked his severe and pure taste. "Your
father was weak enough to read Virgile travesti, and laugh over it," he
would, say to Louis Racine, "but he kept it dark from me." In the
Lutrin, Boileau sought the gay and the laughable under noble and
polished forms; the gay lost by it, the laughable remained stamped with
an ineffaceable seal. "M. Despreaux," wrote Racine to his son, "has not
only received from heaven a marvellous genius for satire, but he has
also, together with that, an excellent judgment, which makes him discern
what needs praise and what needs blame." This marvellous genius for
satire did not spoil Boileau's natural good feeling. "He is cruel in
verse only," Madame de Sevigne used to say. Racine was tart, bitter in
discussion; Boileau always preserved his coolness: his judgments
frequently anticipated those of posterity. The king asked him one day
who was the greatest poet of his reign. "Moliere, sir," answered
Boileau, without hesitation. "I shouldn't have thought it," rejoined the
king, somewhat astonished; "but you know more about it than I do."
Moliere, in his turn, defending La Fontaine against the pleasantries of
his friends, said to his neighbor at one of those social meals in which
the illustrious friends delighted, "Let us not laugh at the good soul
(bonhomme) he will probably live longer than the whole of us." In the
noble and touching brotherhood of these great minds, Boileau continued
invariably to be the bond between the rivals; intimate friend as he was
of Racine, he never quarrelled with Moliere, and he hurried to the king
to beg that he would pass on the pension with which he honored him to the
aged Corneille, groundlessly deprived of the royal favors. He entered
the Academy on the 3d of July, 1684, immediately after La Fontaine. His
satires had retarded his election. "He praised without flattery; he
humbled himself nobly" says Louis Racine; "and when he said that
admission to the Academy was sure to be closed against him for so many
reasons, he set a-thinking all the Academicians he had spoken ill of in
his works." He was no longer writing verses when Perrault published his
Parallele des anciens et desmodernes. "If Boileau do not reply," said
the Prince of Conti, "you may assure him that I will go to the Academy,
and write on his chair, 'Brutus, thou sleepest.'" The ode on the capture
of Namur,—intended to crush Perrault whilst celebrating Pindar, not
being sufficient, Boileau wrote his Reflexions sur Longin, bitter and
often unjust towards Perrault, who was far more equitably treated and
more effectually refuted in Fenelon's letter to the French Academy.
Boileau was by this time old; he had sold his house at Auteuil, which was
so dear, but he did not give up literature, continuing to revise his
verses carefully, pre-occupied with new editions, and reproaching himself
for this pre-occupation. "It is very shameful," he would say, "to be
still busying myself, with rhymes and all those Parnassian trifles, when,
I ought to be thinking of nothing but the account I am prepared to go and
render to God." He died on the 13th of March, 1711, leaving nearly all
he had to the poor. He was followed to the tomb by a great throng. "He
had many friends," was the remark amongst the people, "and yet we are
assured that he spoke evil of everybody." No writer ever contributed
more than Boileau to the formation of poetry; no more correct or shrewd
judgment ever assessed the merits of authors; no loftier spirit ever
guided a stronger and a juster mind. Through all the vicissitudes
undergone by literature, and spite of the sometimes excessive severity of
his decrees, Boileau has left an ineffaceable impression upon the French
language. His talent was less effective than his understanding; his
judgment and his character have had more influence than his
verses.
Boileau had survived all his friends. La Fontaine, born in 1621 at
Chateau-Thierry, had died in 1695. He had entered in his youth the
brotherhood of the Oratory, which he had soon quitted, being unable, he
used to say, to accustom himself to theology. He went and came between
town and town, amusing himself everywhere, and already writing a little.
"For me the whole round world was laden with delights;
My heart was touched by flower, sweet sound, and sunny day,
I was the sought of friends and eke of lady gay."
Fontaine was married, without caring much for his wife, whom he left to
live alone at Chateau-Thierry. He was in great favor with Fouquet. When
his patron was disgraced, in danger of his life, La Fontaine put into the
mouth of the nymphs of Vaux his touching appeal to the king's clemency:—
"May he, then, o'er the life of high-souled Henry pore,
Who, with the power to take, for vengeance yearned no more
O, into Louis' soul this gentle spirit breathe."
Later on, during Fouquet's imprisonment at Pignerol, La Fontaine wrote
further,—
"I sigh to think upon the object of my prayers;
You take my sense, Ariste; your generous nature shares
The plaints I make for him who so unkindly fares.
He did displease the king; and lo his friends were gone
Forthwith a thousand throats roared out at him like one.
I wept for him, despite the torrent of his foes,
I taught the world to have some pity for his woes."
La Fontaine has been described as a solitary being, without wit, and
without external charm of any kind. La Bruyere has said, "A certain man
appears loutish, heavy, stupid; he can neither talk nor relate what he
has just seen; he sets himself to writing, and it is a model of
story-telling; he makes speakers of animals, trees; stones, everything
that cannot speak. There is nothing but lightness and elegance, nothing
but natural beauty and delicacy in his works." "He says nothing or will
talk of nothing but Plato," Racine's daughters used to say. All his
contemporaries, however, of fashion and good breeding did not form the
same opinion of him. The Dowager-duchess of Orleans, Marguerite of
Lorraine, had taken him as one of her gentlemen-in-waiting; the Duchess
of Bouillon had him in her retinue in the country; Madame de Montespan
and her sister, Madame de Thianges, liked to have a visit from him. He
lived at the house of Madame de La Sabliere, a beauty and a wit, who
received a great deal of company. He said of her,
"Warm is her heart, and knit with tenderest ties
To those she loves, and, elsewise, otherwise;
For such a sprite, whose birthplace is the skies,
Of manly beauty blent with woman's grace,
No mortal pen, though fain, can fitly trace."
"I have only kept by me," she would say, "my three pets (animaux): my
dog, my cat, and La Fontaine." When she died, M. and Madame d'Hervart
received into their house the now old and somewhat isolated poet. As
D'Hervart was on his way to go and make the proposal to La Fontaine, he
met him in the street. "I was coming to ask you to put up at our house,"
said he. "I was just going thither," answered Fontaine with the most
touching confidence. There he remained to his death, contenting himself
with going now and then to Chateau-Thierry, as long as his wife lived, to
sell, with her consent, some strip of ground. The property was going,
old age was coming:—
"John did no better than he had begun,
Spent property and income both as one:
Of treasure saw small use in any way;
Knew very well how to get through his day;
Split it in two: one part, as he thought best,
He passed in sleep—did nothing all the rest."
He did not sleep, he dreamed. One day dinner was kept waiting for him.
"I have just come," said he, as he entered, "from the funeral of an ant;
I followed the procession to the cemetery, and I escorted the family
home." It has been said that La Fontaine knew nothing of natural
history; he knew and loved animals; up to his time, fable-writers had
been, merely philosophers or satirists; he was the first who was a poet,
unique not only in France but in Europe, discovering the deep and secret
charm of nature, animating it, with his inexhaustible and graceful
genius, giving lessons to men from the example of animals, without making
the latter speak like man; ever supple and natural, sometimes elegant and
noble, with penetration beneath the cloak of his simplicity, inimitable
in the line which he had chosen from taste, from instinct, and not from
want of power to transport his genius elsewhither. He himself has said,
"Yes, call me truly, if it must be said,
Parnassian butterfly, and like the bees
Wherein old Plato found our similes.
Light rover I, forever on the wing,
Flutter from flower to flower, from thing to thing,
With much of pleasure mix a little fame."
And in Psyche:—
"Music and books, and junketings and love,
And town and country—all to me is bliss;
There nothing is that comes amiss;
In melancholy's self grim joy I prove."
The grace, the naturalness, the original independence of the mind and the
works of La Fontaine had not the luck to please Louis XIV., who never
accorded him any favor, and La Fontaine did not ask for any:—
"All dumb I shrink once more within my shell,
Where unobtrusive pleasures dwell;
True, I shall here by Fortune be forgot
Her favors with my verse agree not well;
To importune the gods beseems me not."
Once only, from the time of Fouquet's trial, the poet demanded a favor:
Louis XIV., having misgivings about the propriety of the Contes of La
Fontaine, had not yet given the assent required for his election to the
French Academy, when he set out for the campaign in Luxemburg. La
Fontaine addressed to him a ballad:—
"Just as, in Homer, Jupiter we see
Alone o'er all the other gods prevail;
You, one against a hundred though it be,
Balance all Europe in the other scale.
Them liken I to those who, in the tale,
Mountain on mountain piled, presumptuously
Warring with Heaven and Jove. The earth clave he,
And hurled them down beneath huge rocks to wail:
So take you up your bolt with energy;
A happy consummation cannot fail.
"Sweet thought! that doth this month or two avail
To somewhat soothe my Muse's anxious care.
For certain minds at certain stories rail,
Certain poor jests, which nought but trifles are.
If I with deference their lessons hail,
What would they more? Be you more prone to spare,
More kind than they; less sheathed in rigorous mail;
Prince, in a word, your real self declare
A happy consummation cannot fail."
The election of Boileau to the Academy appeased the king's humor, who
preferred the other's intellect to that of La Fontaine. "The choice you
have made of M. Despreaux is very gratifying to me," he said to the board
of the Academy: "it will be approved of by everybody. You can admit La
Fontaine at once; he has promised to be good." It was a rash promise,
which the poet did not always keep.
The friends, of La Fontaine had but lately wanted to reconcile him to his
wife. They had with that view sent him to Chateau-Thierry; he returned
without having seen her whom he went to visit. "My wife was not at
home," said he; "she had gone to the sacrament (au salut)." He was
becoming old. Those same faithful friends—Racine, Boileau, and Maucroix
—were trying to bring him home to God. Racine took him to church with
him; a Testament was given him. "That is a very good book," said he;
"I assure you it is a very good book." Then all at once addressing Abbe
Boileau, "Doctor, do you think that St. Augustin was as clever as
Rabelais?" He was ill, however, and began to turn towards eternity his
dreamy and erratic thoughts. He had set about composing pious hymns.
"The best of thy friends has not a fortnight to live," he wrote to
Maucroix; "for two months I have not been out, unless to go to the
Academy for amusement. Yesterday, as I was returning, I was seized in
the middle of Rue du Chantre with a fit of such great weakness that I
really thought I was dying. O, my dear friend, to die is nothing; but
thinkest thou that I am about to appear before God? Thou knowest how I
have lived. Before thou hast this letter, the gates of eternity will,
perchance, be opened for me." "He is as simple as a child," said the
woman who took care of him in his last illness; "if he has done amiss, it
was from ignorance rather than wickedness." A charming and a curious
being, serious and simple, profound and childlike, winning by reason of
his very vagaries, his good-natured originality, his helplessness in
common life, La Fontaine knew how to estimate the literary merits as well
as the moral qualities of his illustrious friends. "When they happened
to be together," says he, in his tale of Psyche, "and had talked to
their heart's content of their diversions, if they chanced to stumble
upon any point of science or literature, they profited by the occasion,
without, however, lingering too long over one and the same subject, but
flitting from one topic to another like bees that meet as they go with
different sorts of flowers. Envy, malignity, or cabal had no voice
amongst them; they adored the works of the ancients, refused not the
moderns the praises which were their due, spoke of their own with
modesty, and gave one another honest advice when any one of them fell ill
of the malady of the age and wrote a book, which happened now and then.
In this case, Acanthus (Racine) did not fail to propose a walk in some
place outside the town, in order to hear the reading with less noise and
more pleasure. He was extremely fond of gardens, flowers, foliage.
Polyphile (La Fontaine) resembled him in this; but then Polyphile might
be said to love all things. Both of them were lyrically inclined, with
this difference, that Acanthus was rather the more pathetic, Polyphile
the more ornate."
When La Fontaine died, on the 13th of April, 1695, of the four friends
lately assembled at Versailles to read the tale of Psyche, Moliere
alone had disappeared. La Fontaine had admired at Vaux the young comic
poet, who had just written the Facheux for the entertainment given by
Fouquet to Louis XIV.:—
"It is a work by Moliere;
This writer, of a style so rare,
Is nowadays the court's delight
His fame, so rapid is its flight,
Beyond the bounds of Rome must be:
Amen! For he's the man for me."
In his old age he gave vent to his grief and his regret at Moliere's
death in this touching epitaph:—
"Beneath this stone Plautus and Terence lie,
Though lieth here but Moliere alone
Their threefold gifts of mind made up but one,
That witched all France with noble comedy.
Now are they gone: and little hope have I
That we again shall look upon the three
Dead men, methinks, while countless years roll by,
Terentius, Plautus, Moliere will be."
Moliere and French comedy had no need to take shelter beneath the mantle
of the ancients; they, together, had shed upon the world incomparable
lustre. Shakespeare might dispute with Corneille and Racine the sceptre
of tragedy; he had succeeded in showing himself as full of power, with
more truth, as the one, and as full of tenderness, with more profundity,
as the other. Moliere is superior to him in originality, abundance, and
perfection of characters; he yields to him neither in range, nor
penetration, nor complete knowledge of human nature. The lives of these
two great geniuses, authors and actors both together, present in other
respects certain features of resemblance. Both were intended for another
career than that of the stage; both, carried away by an irresistible
passion, assembled about them a few actors, leading at first a roving
life, to end by becoming the delight of the court and of the world. John
Baptist Poquelin, who before long assumed the name of Moliere, was born
at Paris in 1622; his father, upholstery-groom-of-the-chamber (valet de
chambre tapissier) to Louis XIV., had him educated with some care at
Clermont (afterwards Louis-le-Grand) College, then in the hands of the
Jesuits. He attended, by favor, the lessons which the philosopher
Gassendi, for a longtime, the opponent of Descartes, gave young Chapelle.
He imbibed at these lessons, together with a more extensive course of
instruction, a certain freedom of thinking which frequently cropped out
in his plays, and contributed later on to bring upon him an accusation of
irreligion. In 1645 (?1643), Moliere had formed, with the ambitious
title of illustre theatre, a small company of actors, who, being unable
to maintain themselves at Paris, for a long while tramped the provinces
through all the troubles of the Fronde. It was in 1653 that Moliere
brought out at Lyons his comedy l'Etourdi, the first regular piece he
had ever composed. The Depit amoureux was played at Beziers in 1656,
at the opening of the session of the States of Languedoc; the company
returned to Paris in 1658; in 1659, Moliere, who had obtained a license
from the king, gave at his own theatre les Precieuses ridicules. He
broke with all imitation of the Italians and the Spaniards, and, taking
off to the life the manners of his own times, he boldly attacked the
affected exaggeration and absurd pretensions of the vulgar imitators of
the Hotel de Rambouillet. "Bravo! Moliere," cried an old man from the
middle of the pit; "this is real comedy." When he published his piece,
Moliere, anxious not to give umbrage to a powerful clique, took care to
say in his preface that he was not attacking real precieuses, but only
the bad imitations.
Just as he had recalled Corneille to the stage, Fouquet was for
protecting Moliere upon it. The Ecole des Mans and the Facheux were
played at Vaux. Amongst the ridiculous characters in this latter,
Moliere had not described the huntsman. Louis XIV. himself indicated to
him the Marquis of Soyecour. "There's one you have forgotten," he said.
Twenty-four hours later, the bore of a huntsman, with all his jargon of
venery, had a place forever amongst the Facheux of Moliere. The Ecole
des Femmes, the Impromptu de Versailles, the Critique de l'Ecole des
Femmes, began the bellicose period in the great comic poet's life.
Accused of impiety, attacked in the honor of his private life, Moliere,
returning insult for insult, delivered over those amongst his enemies who
offered a butt for ridicule to the derision of the court and of
posterity. The Festin de Pierre and the signal punishment of the
libertine (free-thinker) were intended to clear the author from the
reproach of impiety; la Princesse d'Elide and l'Amour medecin were
but charming interludes in the great struggle henceforth instituted
between reality and appearance. In 1666, Moliere produced le
Misanthrope, a frank and noble spirit's sublime invective against the
frivolity, perfidious and showy semblances of court. "This misanthrope's
despitefulness against bad verses was copied from me; Moliere himself
confessed as much to me many a time," wrote Boileau one day. The
indignation of Alceste is deeper and more universal than that of Boileau
against bad poets; he is disgusted with the court and the world because
he is honest, virtuous, and sincere, and sees corruption triumphant
around him; he is wroth to feel the effects of it in his life, and almost
in his own soul. He is a victim to the eternal struggle between good and
evil without the strength and the unquenchable hope of Christianity. The
Misanthrope is a shriek of despair uttered by virtue, excited and
almost distraught at the defeat she forebodes. The Tartuffe was a new
effort in the same direction, and bolder in that it attacked religious
hypocrisy, and seemed to aim its blows even at religion itself. Moliere
was a long time working at it; the first acts had been played in 1664, at
court, under the title of l'Hypocrite, at the same time as
la Princesse d'Elide. "The king," says the account of the
entertainment in the Gazette de Loret, "saw so much analogy of form
between those whom true devotion sets in the way of heaven and those whom
an empty ostentation of good deeds does not hinder from committing bad,
that his extreme delicacy in respect of religious matters could with
difficulty brook this resemblance of vice to virtue; and though there
might be no doubt of the author's good intentions, he prohibited the
playing of this comedy before the public until it should be quite
finished and examined by persons qualified to judge of it, so as not to
let advantage be taken of it by others less capable of just discernment
in the matter." Though played once publicly, in 1667, under the title of
l'Imposteur, the piece did not appear definitively on the stage until
1669, having undoubtedly excited more scandal by interdiction than it
would have done by representation. The king's good sense and judgment at
last prevailed over the terrors of the truly devout and the resentment of
hypocrites. He had just seen an impious piece of buffoonery played.
"I should very much like to know," said he to the Prince of Conde, who
stood up for Moliere, an old fellow-student of his brother's, the Prince
of Conti's, "why people who are so greatly scandalized at Moliere's
comedy say nothing about Scaramouche?" "The reason of that," answered
the prince, "is, that Scaramouche makes fun of heaven and religion, about
which those gentry do not care, and that Moliere makes fun of their own
selves, which they cannot brook." The prince might have added that all
the blows in Tartuffe, a masterpiece of shrewdness, force, and fearless
and deep wrath, struck home at hypocrisy.
Whilst waiting for permission to have Tartufe played, Moliere had
brought out le Medecin malgre lui, Amphitryon, Georges Dandin, and
l'Avare, lavishing freely upon them the inexhaustible resources of his
genius, which was ever ready to supply the wants of kingly and princely
entertainments. Monsieur de Pourceaugnac was played for the first time
at Chambord, on the 6th of October, 1669; a year afterwards, on the same
stage, appeared Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, with the interludes and music
of Lulli. The piece was a direct attack upon one of the most frequent
absurdities of his day; many of the courtiers felt in their hearts that
they were attacked; there was a burst of wrath at the first
representation, by which the king had not appeared to be struck. Moliere
thought it was all over with him. Louis XIV. desired to see the piece a
second time. "You have never written anything yet which has amused me so
much; your comedy is excellent," said he to the poet; the court was at
once seized with a fit of admiration.
The king had lavished his benefits upon Moliere, who had an hereditary
post near him as groom-of-the-chamber; he had given him a pension of
seven thousand livres, and the license of the king's theatre; he had been
pleased to stand godfather to one of his children, to whom the Duchess of
Orleans was godmother; he had protected him against the superciliousness
of certain servants of his bedchamber, but all the monarch's puissance
and constant favors could not obliterate public prejudice, and give the
comedian whom they saw every day on the boards the position and rank
which his genius deserved. Moliere's friends urged him to give up the
stage. "Your health is going," Boileau would say to him, "because the
duties of a comedian exhaust you. Why not give it up?" "Alas!" replied
Moliere, with a sigh, "it is a point of honor that prevents me."
"A what?" rejoined Boileau; "what! to smear your face with a mustache as
Sganarelle, and come on the stage to be thrashed with a stick? That is a
pretty point of honor for a philosopher like you!"
Moliere might probably have followed the advice of Boileau, he might
probably have listened to the silent warnings of his failing powers, if
he had not been unfortunate and sad. Unhappy in his marriage, justly
jealous and yet passionately fond of his wife, without any consolation
within him against the bitternesses and vexations of his life, he sought
in work and incessant activity the only distractions which had any charm
for a high spirit, constantly wounded in its affections and its
legitimate pride: Psyche, Les Fourberies de Scapin, La Comtesse
d'Escarbagnas, betrayed nothing of their author's increasing sadness or
suffering. Les Femmes Savantes had at first but little success; the
piece was considered heavy; the marvellous nicety of the portraits, the
correctness of the judgments, the delicacy and elegance of the dialogue,
were not appreciated until later on. Moliere had just composed
Le Malade Imaginaire, the last of that succession of blows which he had
so often dealt the doctors; he was more ailing than ever; his friends,
even his actors themselves pressed him not to have any play. "What would
you have me do?" he replied; "there are fifty poor workmen who have but
their day's pay to live upon; what will they do if we have no play? I
should reproach myself with having neglected to give them bread for one
single day, if I could really help it." Moliere had a bad voice, a
disagreeable hiccough, and harsh inflexions. "He was, nevertheless," say
his contemporaries, "a comedian from head to foot; he seemed to have
several voices, everything about him spoke, and, by a caper, by a smile,
by a wink of the eye and a shake of the head, he conveyed more than, the
greatest speaker could have done by talking in an hour." He played as
usual on the 17th of February, 1673; the curtain had risen exactly at
four o'clock; Moliere could hardly stand, and he had a fit during the
burlesque ceremony (at the end of the play) whilst pronouncing the word
Juro. He was icy-cold when he went back to Baron's box, who was waiting
for him, who saw him home to Rue Richelieu, and who at the same time sent
for his wife and two sisters of charity. When he went up again, with
Madame Moliere, into the room, the great comedian was dead. He was only
fifty-one.
It has been a labor of love to go into some detail over the lives, works,
and characters of the great writers during the age of Louis XIV. They
did too much honor to their time and their country, they had too great
and too deep an effect in France and in Europe upon the successive
developments of the human intellect, to refuse them an important place
in the history of that France to whose influence and glory they so
powerfully contributed.
Moliere did not belong to the French Academy; his profession had shut the
doors against him. It was nearly a hundred years after his death, in
1778, that the Academy raised to him a bust, beneath which was engraved,
"O His glory lacks naught, ours did lack him."
It was by instinct and of its own free choice that the French Academy had
refused to elect a comedian: it had grown, and its liberty had increased
under the sway of, Louis XIV. In 1672, at the death of Chancellor
Seguier, who became its protector after Richelieu, "it was so honored
that the king was graciously pleased to take upon himself this office:
the body had gone to thank him; his Majesty desired that the dauphin
should be witness of what passed on an occasion so honorable to
literature; after the speech of M. Harlay, Archbishop of Paris, and the
man in France with most inborn talent for speaking, the king, appearing
somewhat touched, gave the Academicians very great marks of esteem,
inquired the names, one after another, of those whose faces were not
familiar to him, and said aside to M. Colbert, who was there in his
capacity of simple Academician, 'You will let me know what I must do for
these gentlemen.' Perhaps M. Colbert, that minister who was so zealous
for the fine arts, never received an order more in conformity with his
own inclinations." From that time, the French Academy held its sittings
at the Louvre, and, as regarded complimentary addresses to the king on
state occasions, it took rank with the sovereign bodies.
For thirty-five years the Academy had been working at its Dictionnaire.
From the first, the work had appeared interminable:—
"These six years past they toil at letter F,
And I'd be much obliged if Destiny
would whisper to me, Thou shalt live to G,—
wrote Bois-Robert to Balzac. The Academy had intrusted Vaugelas with the
preparatory labor. "It was," says Pellisson, "the only way of coming
quickly to an end." A pension, which he had, not been paid for a long
time past was revived in his favor. Vaugelas took his plan to Cardinal
Richelieu. "Well, sir," said the minister, smiling with a somewhat
contemptuous air of kindness, "you will not forget the word pension in
this Dictionary." "No, Monsignor," replied M. de Vaugelas, with a
profound bow, "and still less reconnaissance (gratitude)." Vaugelas
had finished the first volume of his Remarques sur la Langue Francaise,
which has ever since remained the basis of all works on grammar. "He
had imported into the body of the work a something or other so estimable
(d'honnete homme), and so much frankness, that one could scarcely help
loving its author." He was working at the second volume when he died, in
1649, so poor that his creditors seized his papers, making it very
difficult for the Academy to recover his Memoires. The Dictionary,
having lost its principal author, went on so slowly that Colbert, curious
to know whether the Academicians honestly earned their modest medals for
attendance (jetons de presence) which he had assigned to them, came one
day unexpectedly to a sitting: he was present at the whole discussion,
"after which, having seen the attention and care which the Academy was
bestowing upon the composition of its Dictionary, he said, as he rose,
that he was convinced that it could not get on any faster, and his
evidence ought to be of so much the more weight in that never man in his
position was more laborious or more diligent."
The Academicians who were men of letters worked at the Dictionary; the
Academicians who were men of fashion had become pretty numerous; Arnauld
d'Andilly and M. de Lamoignon, whom the body had honored by election,
declined to join, and the Academy resolved to never elect anybody without
a previously expressed desire and request. At the time when M. de
Lamoignon declined, the kin, fearing that it might bring the Academy into
some disfavor, procured the appointment, in his stead, of the Coadjutor
of Strasbourg, Armand de Rohan-Soubise. "Splendid as your triumph may
be," wrote Boileau to M. de Lamoignon, "I am persuaded, sir, from what I
know of your noble and modest character, that you are very sorry to have
caused this displeasure to a body which is after all very illustrious,
and that you will attempt to make it manifest to all the earth. I am
quite willing to believe that you had good reasons for acting as you have
done." The Academy from that moment regarded the title it conferred as
irrevocable: it did not fill up the place of the Abbe de St. Pierre when
it found itself obliged to exclude him from its sittings, by order of
Louis XV.; it did not fill up the place of Mgr. Dupanloup, when he
thought proper to send in his resignation. In spite of court intrigues,
it from that moment maintained its independence and its dignity.
"M. Despreaux," writes the banker Leverrier to the Duke of Noailles,
"represented to the Academy, with a great deal of heat, that all was rack
and ruin, since it was nothing more but a cabal of women that put
Academicians in the place of those who died. Then he read out loud some
verses by M. de St. Aulaire. . . . Thus M. Despreaux, before the eyes
of everybody, gave M. de St. Aulaire a black ball, and nominated, all by
himself, M. de Mimeure. Here, monseigneur, is proof that there are
Romans still in the world, and, for the future, I will trouble you to
call M. Despreaux no longer your dear poet, but your dear Cato."
With his extreme deafness, Boileau had great difficulty in fulfilling his
Academic duties. He was a member of the Academy of medals and
inscriptions, founded by Colbert in 1662, "in order to render the acts of
the king immortal, by deciding the legends of the medals struck in his
honor." Pontchartrain raised to forty the number of the members of the
petite acadamie, extended its functions, and intrusted it thenceforth
with the charge of publishing curious documents relating to the history
of France. "We had read to us to-day a very learned work, but rather
tiresome," says Boileau to M. Pontchartrain, "and we were bored right
eruditely; but afterwards there was an examination of another which was
much more agreeable, and the reading of which attracted considerable
attention. As the reader was put quite close to me, I was in a position
to hear and to speak of it. All I ask you, to complete the measure of
your kindnesses, is to be kind enough to let everybody know that, if I am
of so little use at the Academy of Medals, it is equally true that I do
not and do not wish to obtain any pecuniary advantage from it."
The Academy of Sciences had already for many years had sittings in one of
the rooms of the king's library. Like the French Academy, it had owed
its origin to private meetings at which Descartes, Gassendi, and young
Pascal were accustomed to be present. "There are in the world scholars
of two sorts," said a note sent to Colbert about the formation of the new
Academy. "One give themselves up to science because it is a pleasure to
them: they are content, as the fruit of their labors, with the knowledge
they acquire, and, if they are known, it is only amongst those with whom
they converse unambitiously and for mutual instruction; these are bona
fide scholars, whom it is impossible to do without in a design so great
as that of the Academie royale. There are others who cultivate science
only as a field which is to give them sustenance, and, as they see by
experience that great rewards fall only to those who make the most noise
in the world, they apply themselves especially, not to making new
discoveries, for hitherto that has not been recompensed, but to whatever
may bring them into notice; these are scholars of the fashionable world,
and such as one knows best." Colbert had the true scholar's taste; he
had brought Cassini from Italy to take the direction of the new
Observatory; he had ordered surveys for a general map of France; he had
founded the Journal des Savants; literary men, whether Frenchmen or
foreigners, enjoyed the king's bounties. Colbert had even conceived the
plan of a Universal Academy, a veritable forerunner of the Institute.
The arts were not forgotten in this grand project; the academy of
painting and sculpture dated from the regency of Anne of Austria; the
pretensions of the Masters of Arts (maitres is arts), who placed an
interdict upon artists not belonging to their corporation, had driven
Charles Lebrun, himself the son of a Master, to agitate for its
foundation; Colbert added to it the academy of music and the academy of
architecture, and created the French school of painting at Rome. Beside
the palace for a long time past dedicated to this establishment, lived,
for more than thirty-five years, Le Poussin, the first and the greatest
of all the painters of that French school which was beginning to spring
up, whilst the Italian school, though blooming still in talent and
strength, was forgetting more and more every day the nobleness, the
purity, and the severity of taste which had carried to the highest pitch
the art of the fifteenth century. The tradition of the masters in vogue
in Italy, of the Caracci, of Guido, of Paul Veronese, had reached Paris
with Simon Vouet, who had long lived at Rome. He was succeeded there by
a Frenchman "whom, from his grave and thoughtful air, you would have
taken for a father of Sorbonne," says M. Vitet in his charming Vie de
Lesueur: "his black eye beneath his thick eyebrow nevertheless flashed
forth a glance full of poesy and youth. His manner of living was not
less surprising than his personal appearance. He might be seen walking
in the streets of Rome, tablets in hand, hitting off by a stroke or two
of his pencil at one time the antique fragments he came upon, at another
the gestures, the attitudes, the faces of the persons who presented
themselves in his path. Sometimes, in the morning, he would sit on the
terrace of Trinity del Monte, beside another Frenchman five or six years
younger, but already known for rendering landscapes with such fidelity,
such, fresh and marvellous beauty, that all the Italian masters gave
place to him, and that, after two centuries, he has not yet met his
rival."
"Of these two artists, the older evidently exercised over the other the
superiority which genius has over talent. The smallest hints of Le
Poussin were received by Claude Lorrain with deference and respect; and
yet, to judge from the prices at which they severally sold their
pictures, the landscape painter had for the time an indisputable
superiority."
Claude Gelee, called Lorrain, had fled when quite young from the shop of
the confectioner with whom his parents had placed him. He had found
means of getting to Rome; there he worked, there he lived, and there he
died, returning but once to France, in the height of his renown, for just
a few months, without even enriching his own land with any great number
of his works; nearly all, of them remained on foreign soil. Le Poussin,
born at the Andelys in 1593, made his way with great difficulty to Italy.
He was by that time thirty years old, and had no more desire than Claude
to return to France, where painting was with difficulty beginning to
obtain a standing. His reputation, however, had penetrated thither.
King Louis XIII. was growing weary of Simon Vouet's factitious lustre;
he wanted Le Poussin to go to Paris. The painter for a long while held
out; the king insisted. "I shall go," said Le Poussin, "like one
sentenced to be sawn in halves and severed in twain." He passed eighteen
months in France, welcomed enthusiastically, lodged at the Tuileries,
magnificently paid, but exposed to the jealousies of Simon Vouet and his
pupils. Worried, thwarted, frozen to death by the hoarfrosts of Paris,
he took the road back to Rome in November, 1642, on the pretext of going
to fetch his wife, and did not return any more. He had left in France
some of his masterpieces, models of that, new, independent, and
conscientious art, faithfully studied from nature in all its Italian
grandeur, and from the treasures of the antique. "How did you arrive at
such perfection?" people would ask Le Poussin. "By neglecting nothing,"
the painter would reply. In the same way Newton was soon to discover the
great laws of the physical world, "by always thinking thereon."
During Le Poussin's stay at Paris he had taken as a pupil Eustache
Lesueur, who had been trained in the studio of Simon Vouet, but had been
struck from the first with the incomparable genius and proud independence
of the master sent to him by fate. Alone he had supported Le Poussin in
his struggle against the envious; alone he entered upon the road which
revealed itself to him whilst he studied under Le Poussin. He was poor;
he had great difficulty in managing to live. The delicacy, the purity,
the suavity of his genius could shine forth in their entirety nowhere but
in the convent of the Carthusians, whose cloister he was commissioned to
decorate. There he painted the life of St. Bruno, breathing into this
almost mystical work all the religious poetry of his soul and of his
talent, ever delicate and chaste even in the allegorical figures of
mythology with which he before long adorned the Hotel Lambert. He had
returned to his favorite pursuits, embellishing the churches of Paris
with incomparable works, when, overwhelmed by the loss of his wife, and
exhausted by the painful efforts of his genius, he died at thirty-seven,
in that convent of the Carthusians which he glorified with his talent, at
the same time that he edified the monks with his religious zeal. Lesueur
succumbed in a struggle too rude and too rough for his pure and delicate
nature. Lebrun had returned from that Italy which Lesueur had never been
able to reach; the old rivalry, fostered in the studio of Simon Vouet,
was already being renewed between the two artists; the angelic art gave
place to the worldly and the earthly. Lesueur died; Lebrun found himself
master of the position, assured by anticipation, and as it were by
instinct, of sovereign, dominion under the sway of the young king for
whom he had been created.
Old Philip of Champagne alone might have disputed with him the foremost
rank. He had passionately admired Le Poussin, he had attached himself to
Lesueur. "Never," says M. Vitet, "had he sacrificed to fashion; never
had he fallen into the vagaries of the degenerate Italian style." This
upright, simple, painstaking soul, this inflexible conscience, looking
continually into the human face, had preserved in his admirable portraits
the life and the expression of nature which he was incessantly trying to
seize and reproduce. Lebrun was preferred to him as first painter to the
king by Louis XIV. himself; Philip of Champagne was delighted thereat; he
lived, in retirement, in fidelity to his friends of Port-Royal, whose
austere and vigorous lineaments he loved to trace, beginning with M. de
St. Cyran, and ending with his own daughter, Sister Suzanne, who was
restored to health by the prayers of Mother Agnes Arnauld.
Lebrun was as able a courtier as he was a good painter. The clever
arrangement of his pictures, the richness and brilliancy of his talent,
his faculty for applying art to industry, secured him with Louis XIV. a
sway which lasted as long as his life. He was first painter to the king;
he was director of the Gobelins and of the academy of painting. "He let
nothing be done by the other artists but according to his own designs and
suggestions. The worker in tapestry, the decorative painter, the
statuary, the goldsmith, took their models from him: all came from him,
all flowed from his brain, all bore his imprint." The painter followed
the king's ideas, being entirely after his own heart. For fourteen years
he worked for Louis XIV., representing his life and his conquests, at
Versailles; painting for the Louvre the victories of Alexander, which
were engraved almost immediately by Audran and Edelinck. He was jealous
of the royal favor, sensitive and haughty towards artists, honestly
concerned for the king's glory and for the tasks confided to himself.
The growing reputation of Mignard, whom Louvois had brought back from
Rome, troubled and disquieted Lebrun. In vain did the king encourage
him. Lebrun, already ill, said in the presence of Louis XIV. that fine
pictures seem to become finer after the painter's death. "Do not you be
in a hurry to die, M. Lebrun," said the king; "we esteem your pictures
now quite as highly as posterity can."
The small gallery at Versailles had been intrusted to Mignard. Lebrun
withdrew to Montmorency, where he died in 1690, jealous of Mignard at the
end as he had been of Lesueur at the outset of his life. Mignard became
first painter to the king. He painted the ceiling of Val-de-Grace, which
was celebrated by Moliere; but it was as a painter of portraits that he
excelled in France. "M. Mignard does them best," said Le Poussin not
long before, with lofty good nature, "though his heads are all paint,
without force or character." To Mignard succeeded Rigaud as portrait
painter, worthy to preserve the features of Bossuet and Fenelon. The
unity of organization, the brilliancy of style, the imposing majesty
which the king's taste had everywhere stamped about him upon art as well
as upon literature, were by this time beginning to decay simultaneously
with the old age of Louis XIV., with the reverses of his arms, and the
increasing gloominess of his court; the artists who had illustrated his
reign were dying one after another, as well as the orators and the poets;
the sculptor James Sarazin had been gone some time; Puget and the
Anguiers were dead, as well as Mansard, Perrault, and Le Notre; Girardon
had but a few months to live; only Coysevox was destined to survive the
king, whose statue he had many a time moulded. The great age was
disappearing slowly and sadly, throwing out to the last some noble
gleams, like the aged king who had constantly served as its centre and
guide, like olden France, which he had crowned with its last and its most
splendid wreath.
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