THE RECORD OF RAMBOUILLET.
“Imagine that this castle were your court,
And that you lay, for pleasure, here a space,
Not of compulsion or necessity.”— Kit Marlowe.
Rambouillet is an old château where feudal knights once lived like little kings. In its gardens Euphuism reigned supreme. It is a palace, in whose chambers monarchs have feasted, and at whose gates they have asked, when fugitives, for water and a crust of bread. It commenced its career as a cradle of knights; it is finishing it as an asylum for the orphan children of warriors. The commencement and finale are not unworthy of one another; but, between the two, there have been some less appropriate disposals of this old chevalier’s residence. For a short period it was something between Hampton Court and Rosherville. In the very place where the canons of the Sainte Chapelle were privileged to kiss the cheeks of the Duchess of Burgundy, the denizens of the Faubourg St. Antoine could revel, if they could only pay for their sport. Where the knightly D’Amaurys held their feudal state, where King Francis followed the chase, and the Chevalier Florian sang, and Penthièvre earned immortality by the practice of heavenly virtues; where Louis enthroned Du Barry, and Napoleon presided over councils, holding the destiny of thrones in the balance of his will, there the sorriest mechanic had, with a few francs in his hand, the right of entrance. The gayest lorettes of the capital smoked their cigarettes where Julie D’Angennes fenced with love; and the bower of queens and the refuge of an empress rang with echoes, born of light-heartedness and lighter wine. Louis Napoleon has, however, established a better order of things.
To a Norman chief, of knightly character, if not of knightly title, and to the Norman tongue, Rabouillet, as it used to be written, or the “Rabbit warren,” owes the name given to the palace, about thirteen leagues from Paris, and to the village which clusters around it. The former is now a quaint and confused pile, the chief tower of which alone is now older than the days of Hugues Capet. Some authors describe the range of buildings as taking the form of a horseshoe; but the hoof would be indescribable to which a shoe so shaped could be fittingly applied. The changes and additions have been as much without end as without taste. In its present architectural entirety it wears as motley an aspect as Cœur de Lion might, were he to walk-down Pall Mall with a modern paletót over his suit of complete steel.
The early masters of Rambouillet were a knightly, powerful but uninteresting race. It is sufficient to record of the chivalric D’Amaurys that they held it, to the satisfaction of few people but themselves, from 1003 to 1317. Further record these sainted proprietors require not. We will let them sleep on undisturbedly, their arms crossed on their breast, in the peace of a well-merited oblivion. Requiescat!
One relic of the knightly days, however, survived to the period of the first French Revolution. In the domain of Rambouillet was the fief of Montorgueil. It was held by the prior of St. Thomas d’Epernon, on the following service: the good prior was bound to present himself yearly at the gate of Rambouillet, bareheaded, with a garland on his brow, and mounted on a piebald horse, touching whom it was bad service if the animal had not four white feet.
The prior, fully armed like a knight, save that his white gloves were of a delicate texture, carried a flask of wine at his saddle-bow. In one hand he held a cake, to the making of which had gone a bushel of flour—an equal measure of wheat was also the fee of the lord. The officers of the latter examined narrowly into the completeness of the service. If they pronounced it imperfect the prior of Epernon was mulcted of the revenues of his fief for the year ensuing.
In later days the ceremony lost much of its meaning; but down to the period of its extinction, the wine, the cake, and the garland, were never wanting; and the maidens of Rambouillet were said to be more exacting than the baronial knights themselves, from whom many of them were descended. The festival was ever a joyous one, as became a feudal lord, whose kitchen fireplace was of such dimensions that a horseman might ride into it, and skim the pot as he stood in his stirrups.
It is a singular thing that scarcely a monarch has had anything to do with the knightly residence of Rambouillet, but mischance has befallen him. The kings were unjust to the knights, and the latter found for the former a Nemesis. Francis I. was hunting in the woods of Rambouillet when he received the news of the death of Henry VIII. that knight-sovereign, with whom he had struggled on the Field of the Cloth of Gold. With the news, he received a shock, which the decay sprung from various excesses could not resist. He entered the chateau as the guest of the Chevalier d’Angennes, in whose family the proprietorship then resided. The chamber is still shown wherein he died, roaring in agony, and leaving proof of its power over him, in the pillow, which, in mingled rage and pain, he tore into strips with his teeth.
The French author, Leon Gozlau, has given a full account of the extraordinary ceremonies which took place in honor of Francis after his death. In front of the bed on which lay the body of the king, says M. Gozlau, “was erected an altar covered with embroidered cloth; on this stood two gold candlesticks, bearing two lights from candles of the whitest wax. The cardinals, prelates, knights, gentlemen, and officers, whose duty it was to keep watch, were stationed around the catafalque, seated on chairs of cloth of gold. During the eleven days that the ceremony lasted, the strictest etiquette of service was observed about the king, as if he had been a living monarch in presence of his court. His table was regularly laid out for dinner, by the side of his bed. A cardinal blessed the food. A gentleman in waiting presented the ewer to the figure of the dead king. A knight offered him the cup mantling with wine: and another wiped his lips and fingers. These functions, with many others, took place by the solemn and subdued light of the funeral torches.”
The after ceremonies were quite as curious and extraordinarily magnificent; but it is unnecessary to rest upon them. A king, in not much better circumstances than Francis, just before his death, slept in the castle for one night in the year 1588. It was a night in May, and the knight proprietor Jean d’Angennes, was celebrating the marriage of his daughter. The ceremony was interrupted by a loud knocking at the castle gates. The wary Jean looked first at the clamorous visitors through the wicket, whence he descried Henri III. flurried, yet laughing, seated in an old carriage, around which mustered dusty horsemen, grave cavaliers, and courtiers scantily attired. Some had their points untrussed, and many a knight was without his boots. An illustrious company, in fact; but there were not two nobles in their united purses. Jean threw open his portals to a king and his knights flying from De Guise. The latter had got possession of Paris, and Henri and his friends had escaped in order to establish the regal authority at Chartres. The two great adversaries met at Blois: and after the assassination of Guise, the king, with his knights and courtiers, gallopped gayly past Rambouillet on his return to Paris, to profit by his own wickedness, and the folly of his trusty and well-beloved cousin, the duke.
Not long before this murder was committed, in 1588, the Hotel Pisani in Paris was made jubilant by the birth of that Catherine de Vivonnes, who was at once both lovely and learned. She lived to found that school of lingual purists whose doings are so pleasantly caricatured in the Précieuses Ridicules of Molière. Catherine espoused that noble chevalier, Charles d’Angennes, Lord of Rambouillet, who was made a marquis for her sake. The chevalier’s lady looked upon marriage rather as a closing act of life than otherwise; but then hers had been a busy youth. In her second lustre she knew as many languages as a lustrum has years. Ere her fourth had expired, her refined spirit and her active intellect were disgusted and weary with the continual sameness and the golden emptiness of the court. She cared little to render homage to a most Christian king who disregarded the precepts of Christianity; or to be sullied by homage from a monarch, which could not be rendered without insult to a virtuous woman. Young Catherine preferred, in the summer eve, to lie under the shadow of her father’s trees, which once reared a world of leafy splendor on the spot now occupied by the Palais Royal. There she read works coined by great minds. During the long winter evenings she lay in stately ceremony upon her bed, an unseemly custom of the period, and there, surrounded by chevaliers, wits, and philosophers, enjoyed and encouraged the “cudgelling of brains.” At her suggestion the old hotel was destroyed, and after her designs a new one built; and when, in place of the old dark panelling, obscurely seen by casements that kept out the light, she covered the walls of her reception-rooms with sky-blue velvet, and welcomed the sun to shine upon them, universal France admiringly pronounced her mad, incontinently caught the infection, and broke out into an incurable disease of fancy and good taste.
The fruit of the union above spoken of was abundant, but the very jewel in that crown of children, the goodliest arrow in the family quiver, was that Julie d’Angennes who shattered the hearts of all the amorous chevaliers of France, and whose fame has, perhaps, eclipsed that of her mother. Her childhood was passed at the feet of the most eminent men in France; not merely aristocratic knights, but as eminent wits and philosophers. By the side of her cradle, Balzac enunciated his polished periods, and Marot his tuneful rhymes, Voiture his conceits, and Vaugelas his learning. She lay in the arms of Armand Duplessis, then almost as innocent as the little angel who unconsciously smiled on that future ruthless Cardinal de Richelieu; and her young ear heard the elevated measure of Corneille’s “Melite.” To enumerate the circles which was wont to assemble within the Hôtel Rambouillet in Paris, or to loiter in the gardens and hills of the country château, whose history I am sketching, would occupy more space than can be devoted to such purpose. The circle comprised parties who were hitherto respectively exclusive. Knights met citizen wits, to the great edification of the former; and Rambouillet afforded an asylum to the persecuted of all parties. They who resisted Henry IV. found refuge within its hospitable walls, and many nobles and chevaliers who survived the bloody oppression of Richelieu, sought therein solace, and balm for their lacerated souls.
Above all, Madame de Rambouillet effected the social congregation of the two sexes. Women were brought to encounter male wits, sometimes to conquer, always to improve them. The title to enter was, worth joined with ability. The etiquette was pedantically strict, as may be imagined by the case of Voiture, who, on one occasion, after conducting Julie through a suite of rooms, kissed her hand on parting from her, and was very near being expelled for ever from Rambouillet, as the reward of his temerity. Voiture subsequently went to Africa. On his return, he was not admitted to the illustrious circle, but on condition that he narrated his adventures, and to these the delighted assembly listened, all attired as gods and goddesses, and gravely addressing each other as such. Madame de Rambouillet presided over all as Diana, and the company did her abundant homage. This, it is true, was for the nonce; but there was a permanent travesty notwithstanding. It was the weak point of this assembly that not only was every member of it called by a feigned, generally a Greek, name, but the same rule was applied to most men and things beyond it; nay, the very oaths, for there were little expletives occasionally fired off in ecstatic moments, were all by the heathen gods. Thus, as a sample, France was Greece. Paris was Athens; and the Place Royale was only known at Rambouillet as the Place Dorique. The name of Madame de Rambouillet was Arthemise; that of Mademoiselle de Scudery was Aganippe; and Thessalonica was the purified cognomen of the Duchess de Tremouille. But out of such childishness resulted great good, notwithstanding that Molière laughed, and that the Academie derided Corneille and all others of the innovating coterie. The times were coarse; things, whatever they might be, were called by their names; ears polite experienced offence, and at Rambouillet periphrasis was called upon to express what the language otherwise conveyed offensively by the medium of a single word. The idea was good, although it was abused. Of its quality some conjecture may be formed by one or two brief examples; and I may add, by the way, that the French Academy ended by adopting many of the terms which it at first refused to acknowledge. Popularity had been given to much of the remainder, and thus a great portion of the vocabulary of Rambouillet has become idiomatic French. “Modeste,” “friponne,” and “secrète,” were names given to the under-garments of ladies, which we now should not be afraid to specify. The sun was the “amiable illuminator;” to “fulfil the desire which the chair had to embrace you,” was simply to “sit down.” Horses were “plushed coursers;” a carriage was “four cornices,” and chairmen were “baptized mules.” A bed was the “old dreamer;” a hat, the “buckler against weather;” to laugh was to “lose your gravity;” dinner was the “meridional necessity;” the ear was the “organ, or the gate of hearing;” and the “throne of modesty” was the polished phrase for a fair young cheek. There is nothing very edifying in all this, it is true; but the fashion set people thinking, and good ensued. Old indelicacies disappeared, and the general, spoken language was refined. If any greater mental purity ensued from the change, I can scarcely give the credit of it to the party at Rambouillet, for, with all their proclaimed refinement, their nicety was of the kind described in the well-known maxim of the Dean of St. Patrick.
One of the most remarkable men in the circle of Rambouillet, was the Marquis de Salles, Knight of St. Louis. He was the second son of the Duke de Montausier, and subsequently inherited the title. At the period of his father’s death, his mother found herself with little dower but her title. She exerted herself, however, courageously. She instructed her children herself, brought them up in strict Huguenot principles, and afterward sent them to the Calvinistic college at Sedan, where the young students were famous for the arguments which they maintained against all comers—and they were many—who sought to convert them to popery. At an early age he acquired the profession of arms, the only vocation for a young and portionless noble; and he shed his blood liberally for a king who had no thanks to offer to a protestant. His wit, refinement, and gallant bearing, made him a welcome guest at Rambouillet, where his famous attachment to Julie, who was three years his senior, gave matter for conversation to the whole of France. Courageous himself, he loved courage in others, and his love for Julie d’Angennes, was fired by the rare bravery exhibited by her in tending a dying brother, the infectious nature of whose disorder had made even his hired nurses desert him. In the season of mourning, the whole court, led by royalty, went and did homage to this pearl of sisters. But no admiration fell so sweetly upon her ear as that whispered to her by the young Montausier. One evidence of his chivalrous gallantry is yet extant. It is in that renowned volume called the “Guirlande de Julie,” of which he was the projector, and in the accomplishing of which, knights, artists, and poets, lent their willing aid. It is superb vellum tome. The frontispiece is the garland or wreath, from which the volume takes its name. Each subsequent page presents one single flower from this wreath (there are eighteen of them) with verses in honor of Julie, composed by a dozen and a half of very insipid poets. This volume was sold some years ago to Madame D’Uzes, a descendant of the family, when its cost amounted to nearly one thousand francs per page.
As everything was singular at Rambouillet, so of course was the wooing of Julie and her knight. It was very “long a-doing,” and we doubt if in the years of restrained ardor, of fabulous constancy, of reserve, and sad yet pleasing anguish, the lover ever dared to kiss the hand of his mistress, or even to speak of marriage, but by a diplomatic paraphrase.
The goddesses of Rambouillet entertained an eloquent horror of the gross indelicacy of such unions, for which Molière has whipped them with a light but cutting scourge. The lover, moreover, was a Huguenot. What was he to do? Like a true knight he rushed to the field, was the hero of two brilliant campaigns, and then wooed her as knight of half-a-dozen new orders, marechal-du-camp, and Governor of Alsatia. The nymph was still coy. The knight again buckled on his armor, and in the mêlée at Dettingen was captured by the foe. After a two months’ detention, he was ransomed by his mother, for two thousand crowns. He re-entered Rambouillet lieutenant-general of the armies of France, and he asked for the recompense of his fourteen years of constancy and patience. Julie was shocked, for she only thought how brief had been the period of their acquaintance. At length the marquis made profession of Romanism, and thereby purchased the double aid of the church and the throne. The king, the queen, Cardinal Mazarin, and a host of less influential members, besought her to relent, and the shy beauty at length reluctantly surrendered. The marriage took place in 1645, and Julie was then within sight of forty years of age. The young chevaliers and wits had, you may be sure, much to say thereupon. The elder beaux esprit looked admiringly; but a world of whispered wickedness went on among them, nevertheless.
Montausier, for he now was duke and knight of the Holy Ghost, became the reigning sovereign over the literary circle at Rambouillet, during the declining years of Julie’s mother. Catherine died in 1665, after a long retirement, and almost forgotten by the sons of those whom she once delighted to honor. The most delicate and the most difficult public employment ever held by the duke, was that of governor to the dauphin. This office he filled with singular ability. He selected Bossuet and Huet to instruct the young prince in the theoretical wisdom of books, but the practical teaching was imparted by himself. Many a morning saw the governor and his pupil issue from the gilded gates of Versailles to take a course of popular study among the cottages and peasantry of the environs.
The heart of the true knight was shattered by the death of Julie in 1671, at the age of sixty-four. He survived her nineteen years. They were passed in sorrow, but also in continual active usefulness; and when, at length, in 1690, the grave of his beloved wife opened to receive him, Flechier pronounced a fitting funeral oration over both.
The daughter and only surviving child of this distinguished pair gave, with her hand, the lordship of Rambouillet to the Duc d’Uzes, “Chevalier de l’ordre du Saint Esprit.” The knightly family of D’Angennes had held it for three centuries. It was in 1706 destined to become royal. Louis XIV. then purchased it for the Count of Toulouse, legitimatized son of himself and Madame de Montespan. This count was knight and Grand Admiral of France, at the age of five years. In 1704, he had just completed his twenty-fifth year. He is famous for having encountered the fleet commanded by Rook and Shovel, after the capture of Gibraltar, and for having what the cautious Russian generals call, “withdrawn out of range,” when he found himself on the point of being utterly beaten. He behaved himself as bravely as any knight could have done; but the government was not satisfied with him. Pontchartrain, the Minister of Marine, recalled him, sent him to Rambouillet, and left him there to shoot rabbits, and like Diocletian, raise cabbages.
His son and successor, who was the great Duke de Penthièvre, commenced his knighthood early. He was even made Grand Admiral of France before he knew salt water from fresh. He studied naval tactics as Uncle Toby and the corporal fought their old battles—namely, with toy batteries. In the duke’s case, it was, moreover, with little vessels and small sailors all afloat in a miniature fish-pond, made to represent, for the nonce, the mighty and boundless deep. This grand admiral never ventured on the ocean, but he bore himself chivalrously on the bloody field of Dettingen, and he won imperishable laurels by his valor at Fontenoy. For such scenes and their glories, however, the preux chevalier cared but little. Ere the French Te Deum was sung upon the last-named field, he hastened back to his happy hearth at home. Rambouillet was then the abiding-place of all the virtues. There the home-loving knight read the Scriptures while the duchess sat at his side making garments for the poor. There, the Chevalier Florian, his secretary and friend, meditated those graceful rhymes and that harmonious prose, in which human nature is in pretty masquerade, walking about like Watteau’s figures, in vizors, brocades, high heels, and farthingales. When the duchess died in child-birth, of her sixth child, her husband withdrew to La Trappe where, among other ex-soldiers, he for weeks prayed and slept upon the bare ground. Five out of his children died early. Among them was the chivalrous but intemperate Prince de Lamballe, who died soon after his union with the unhappy princess who fell a victim to those fierce French revolutionists—who were ordinarily so amiable, according to M. Louis Blanc, that they were never so delighted as when they could rescue a human being from death.
It was by permission of the duke, who refused to sell his house, that Louis XV. built in the adjacent forest the hunting-lodge of St. Hubert. An assemblage of kings, courtiers, knights and ladies there met, at whose doings the good saint would have blushed, could he have witnessed them. One night the glittering crowd had galloped there for a carouse, when discovery was made that the materials for supper had been forgotten, or left behind at Versailles. “Let us go to Penthièvre!” was the universal cry; but the king looked grave at the proposition. Hunger and the universal opposition, however, overcame him. Forth the famished revellers issued, and played a reveillée on the gates of Rambouillet loud enough to have startled the seven sleepers. “Penthièvre is in bed!” said one. “He is conning his breviary!” sneered another. “Gentlemen, he is, probably, at prayers,” said the king, who, like an Athenian, could applaud the virtue which he failed to practise. “Let us withdraw,” added the exemplary royal head of the order of the Holy Ghost. “If we do,” remarked Madame du Barry, “I shall die of hunger; let us knock again.” To the storm which now beset the gates, the latter yielded; and as they swung open, they disclosed the duke, who, girt in a white apron, and with a ladle in his hand, received his visiters with the announcement that he was engaged in helping to make soup for the poor. The monarch and his followers declared that no poor could be more in need of soup than they were. They accordingly seized the welcome supply, devoured it with the appetite of those for whom it was intended, and paid the grave knight who was their host, in the false coin of pointless jokes. How that host contrasted with his royal guest, may be seen in the fact told of him, when a poor woman kissed his hand, and asked a favor as he was passing in a religious procession. “In order of religion before God,” said he, “I am your brother. In all other cases, for ever your friend.” The Order of the Holy Ghost never had a more enlightened member than he.
In 1785 Louis XVI. in some sort compelled him to part with Rambouillet for sixteen million of francs. He retired to Eu, taking with him the bodies of the dead he had loved when living. There were nine of that silent company; and as the Duke passed with them on his sad and silent way, the clouds wept over them, and the people crowded the long line of road, paying their homage in honest tears.
Then came that revolutionary deluge which swept from Rambouillet the head of the order of the Holy Ghost, and the entire chapter with him; and which dragged from the mead and the dairy the queen and princesses, whose pastime it was to milk the cows in fancy dresses. The Duke de Penthièvre died of the Revolution, yet not through personal violence offered to himself. The murder of his daughter-in-law, the Princess de Lamballe, was the last fatal stroke; and he died forgiving her assassins and his own.
During the first Republic there was nothing more warlike at Rambouillet than the merino flocks which had been introduced by Louis XVI. for the great benefit of his successors. A scene of some interest occurred there in the last days of the empire.
On the 27th of March, 1814, the empress Maria Louisa with the King of Rome in her arms, his silver-gray jacket bearing those ribboned emblems of chivalry which may still be seen upon it at the Louvre, sought shelter there, while she awaited the issue of the bloody struggle which her own father was maintaining against her husband. The empress passed three days at Rambouillet, solacing her majestic anguish by angling for carp. Ultimately, the Emperor of Austria entered the hall where his imperial son-in-law had made so many Knights of the Legion of Honor, to carry off his daughter and the disinherited heir. As the three sat that night together before the wood-fire, the Arch-Duchess Maria-Louisa talked about the teeth of the ex-king of Rome, while two thousand Austrian soldiers kept watch about the palace.
The gates had again to be open to a fugitive. On the last of the “three glorious days” of July a poor, pale, palsied fugitive rushed into the chateau, obtained, not easily, a glass of water and a crust, and forthwith hurried on to meet captivity at last. This was the Prince de Polignac. Two hours after he had left came the old monarch Charles X., covered with dust, dropping tears like rain, bewildered with past memories and present realities, and loudly begging for food for the two “children of France,” the offspring of his favorite son, the Duke de Berri. In his own palace a king of France was compelled to surrender his own service of plate, before the village would sell him bread in return. When refreshed therewith, he had strength to abdicate in favor of his son, the Duke d’Angoulême, who at once resigned in favor of his nephew the Duke de Bordeaux; and this done, the whole party passed by easy stages into an inglorious exile. With them was extinguished the Order of the Holy Ghost; and never since that day have the emblematic dove and star been seen on the breast of any knight in France.
Louis Philippe would fain have appropriated Rambouillet to himself; but the government assigned it to the nation, and let it to a phlegmatic German, who had an ambition to sleep on the bed of kings, and could afford to pay for the gratification of his fancy. It was on the expiration of his lease that the house and grounds were made over to a company of speculators, who sadly desecrated fair Julie’s throne. The present sovereign of France has given it a worthy occupation. It is now an asylum and a school for the children of the brave. It began as the cradle of knights; and the orphans of those who were as brave as any of the chevaliers of old now find a refuge at the old hearth of the Knights of Amaury.
I can well conclude, that, by this time, my readers may be weary of foreign scenes and incidents, as we are of real personages. May I venture then, for the sake of variety, to ask them to accompany me “to the well-trod stage, anon?” There I will treat, to the best of my poor ability, of Stage Knights generally; and first, of the greatest of them all—Sir John Falstaff.