BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE.
We are not of those who think that readers are without curiosity as to the position in life, actions, and fortunes of the authors who afford them instruction or pleasure; the eagerness with which the birthplaces of men of genius are sought for and commemorated; the fondness with which their most trifling actions are dwelt upon; and the endless collections that are made of their conversations and sayings, prove that this cannot be the case.
In a prefatory memoir, we can scarcely go into so many details of the life of Michaud, as, perhaps, the subject deserves. Michaud was not a mere author, whose history may be read in his works. He lived at a momentous period, and was no idle spectator of passing events; a complete life of Michaud would, indeed, swell to a history of France from 1790 to 1839.
Joseph François Michaud, born at Albens, in Savoy, on the 19th of June, in the year 1767, was descended from a family that traced its nobility beyond the tenth century. One of his ancestors, Hugh Michaud de Corcelles, was deservedly distinguished by the emperor Charles V. The father of Joseph was obliged to leave his country, in consequence of what is termed by his biographer, a piece of boyish rashness, but which we prefer relating to any of the warlike deeds of the abovenamed Hugh. Whilst on a shooting party, he sought refreshment in a cottage, and found the mistress of it in the greatest distress; for, at the moment of his entrance, officers were bearing away her humble furniture, for the paltry sum of sixty francs. He offered to pay the amount if they would come with him to his home; but they refused, and continued their operations in his presence. This irritated him to such a degree, that he threatened to make use of his gun; and, at length, struck one of them so severe a blow with the stock of it, that the fellow died immediately. He retired to a place near Bourg, in Bresse, where he married; and he afterwards established himself as a notary and commissary at Terrier, in that province. An early death left his widow burdened with a numerous family, of which Joseph was the eldest. Notwithstanding this calamity, he received an excellent education at the college of Bourg, and acquired great credit as a rhetorician and a composer of French verses. His studies and some juvenile travels completed, it became necessary for him to fix upon a mode of getting a living; and the narrowness of his mother’s resources confining his efforts to trade, he went into the house of a bookseller at Lyon, attracted, no doubt, by the affinity between the bookseller and the man of letters. He remained here till 1790, when the passage of the rich, influential, and intellectual Countess Fanny de Beauharnais through that city, aroused all the provincial muses to make their offerings to the great lady. Among the poets, Michaud was so successful, that he thought himself warranted in following her to Paris, with the view of pursuing a literary career under her auspices. Immediately on his arrival, he laid the contents of his poetical portfolio before the public, and soon became the associate of Cerisier, in the Gazette Universelle, and with Esménard, in the Postillon de la Guerre. His opinions and early associations led him towards the Royalist party, to which the accession of his talents was very acceptable. He may be said to have been faithful to his colours, through all the disasters of the unhappy cause he had embraced; for, in spite of imprisonment, banishment, and repeated concealments, we find him, in 1799, publishing two satirical pamphlets against Buonaparte, by the orders of Louis XVIII. One of his escapes was so well managed, and so opportunely effected, that we will offer an account of it to our readers. He had been sent prisoner to Paris, walking between two mounted gendarmes, who were directed not to spare him, and if fatigue relaxed his speed, they were to refresh him with the flat sides of their sabres. As he entered Paris in this forlorn condition, he was met by his zealous friend Giguet, whose sorrow only set his fertile brain to work to devise means for his escape. As Michaud was, during many days, conducted from his prison to the Tuileries, to undergo examination, Giguet at first thought that the best way would be to blow out the brains of the two gendarmes that escorted him; but this he rejected as unworthy of a man of genius. Choosing a point in Michaud’s passage that would answer his purpose, he stopped the party, and affecting to know nothing of the matter, and not to have seen his friend since his arrival in Paris, was eager in his inquiries as to how his health was, what he was doing, where he was going, and insisted upon his breakfasting with him. “No, no,” answered Michaud, “I have a little affair yonder, at the Tuileries, just a few words of explanation to give—only the business of a minute or two.—Begin breakfast without me, I shall be back presently.” “That won’t do; that won’t do; they do not despatch people so quickly as all that. Perhaps they won’t begin with you; let us have our breakfast first. I dare say these gentlemen (pointing to the gendarmes) have not breakfasted, and will have no objection to a cutlet and a glass of Bourdeaux wine! and here’s the best house in Paris, close at hand.” The gendarmes, after a little faint hesitation, suffered themselves to be seduced; and prisoner, guards, and friends were soon comfortably seated at table. They eat, they drink, they pass bumper toasts, and talk a little about everything; but most particularly about Bresse and the good cheer that was there always to be met with—but the pullets of Bresse! never was such eating as the pullets of Bresse! The mouths of the gendarmes watered at the bare description of them. “Parbleu, gentlemen,” cried Giguet, “since you have never partaken of our country pullets, I will undertake to convince you that there are none such in the eighty-three departments. We have plenty of time; you can eat a little bit more, and appetite comes with—— drinking (and he filled the glasses). Waiter, here! a Bresse pullet! no tricks, mind; it must be from Bresse—not from Mans. But, stop; Michaud, you understand these things better than anybody; have an eye to these fellows, go down into the kitchen, and see that they don’t cheat us. Good health to you, gentlemen.” Whilst they are drinking, Michaud rises, and is soon out of the house. Giguet had the art to keep the guards another half-hour at table, by saying his friend was only watching the cooking, for a Bresse pullet was worth nothing if not roasted à la Bresse; and when they discovered Michaud was not in the kitchen, he asserted it must either be a joke, or else he was ill, and gone home; and contrived to lead them a long useless search in a way directly opposite to that which he knew the late prisoner had taken. Michaud’s escape was a happy one; for that very day, the council had condemned him to death. Poor Giguet’s friendly zeal cost him nearly a month’s imprisonment, and placed his life even in jeopardy.
The career of Buonaparte was so successful, that, at length, further resistance seemed useless, and Michaud even wrote complimentary verses on the marriage of Napoleon with Maria Louisa, and upon the birth of the young king of Rome. But this submission to circumstances was no voluntary homage; he was still at heart faithfully attached to the Bourbons. For a length of time he resisted the tempting offers of the emperor, and one of his refusals, for its wit, if not for its patriotism, almost deserves to be placed by the side of Andrew Marvel’s. Fontaines, Buonaparte’s emissary, said to him: “There must be an end to all resistance; it is diminishing every day. Come, do as other men do. Look at Delille, for instance, he has just accepted a pension of six thousand francs.” “Oh! as to that,” replied Michaud, “he is so frightened, that he would accept a pension of a hundred thousand francs, if you were to offer it to him.” Posterity, perhaps, may be thankful that he was driven from politics to literature. During one of his necessary exiles, he had written his beautiful poem of “Le Printemps d’un Proscrit:” he afterwards became associated with his brother as a bookseller, and planned and executed the works of which we will furnish a list. Whatever opinion might be entertained of his talents, it is more than probable that without his implied submission to Buonaparte, he never would have obtained that object of the hopes of all French authors, the immortal fauteuil in the Academy. This honour he attained in 1813, and, upon the publication of his fourth volume of the “History of the Crusades,” had the gratification of signing himself “Knight of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem,” and “Knight of the Holy Sepulchre:” titles bestowed upon him, unasked, by the commanders representing the order of St. John of Jerusalem in France.
He watched with intense anxiety the madly ambitious career of Buonaparte, and hailed with unfeigned delight the return of his patrons, the Bourbons. He had no cause to complain of their ingratitude, and occupied as good a position as a literary man could expect, when the escape from Elba, during a hundred days, disturbed his occupations, and placed him in considerable danger. He left Paris; returned again, and put himself forward for a struggle: but finding resistance dangerous and useless, he retired to the department of the Ain, where he concealed himself till the tempest had blown over; his celebrated journal, the Quotidienne, in the mean time, degenerating into the Feuille du Jour, or rather, as a wit said, “La Feuille de la veille ’last night’s journal); for it was only edited by scissors, and contained nothing but scraps from the Moniteur and other inoffensive journals.” The Nain Jaune ’yellow dwarf) took unfair advantage of an enemy, who, he knew, could not answer him, and bestowed upon Michaud the sobriquet of “Grand Master of the Order of the Extinguishers,” which stuck to him with the burlike pertinacity of sobriquets, for many years after the second restoration of the Bourbons. He welcomed this last event by the publication of a pamphlet entitled “The History of the Fifteen Weeks, or the Last Reign of Buonaparte,” which had a great sale, twenty-seven editions of it appearing in a very short period. Having, since his success as an author, separated from his brother as a bookseller, and sold his share in the printing office, he, after 1815, gave himself up to the prosecution of his great work on the crusades, and even parted with his portion of “La Biographie Universelle.” His love of politics led him, at this time, to get returned as deputy for the department of the Ain: but alas! he found it a very different thing for a man with a weak voice, and totally “unaccustomed to public speaking,” to sit and write uncontrolled and unobserved in his closet,—and to be subject to the “retort courteous” of an enemy who watches for your mistakes, corrects your errors, and mercilessly refutes all your favourite arguments: after the trial of one session, he retired from his deputyship, and gave up all hopes of fame as an orator.
During the celebrity of his journal, the Quotidienne, he was made reader to the king, with a salary of 3,000 francs; to which appointment was attached the somewhat strange stipulation, that he should never be called upon to perform its duties. After 1819, when a plan was devised of buying up the influential journals, Michaud and his fellow-proprietors were offered 500,000 francs for theirs, which our author declined. “Monseigneur,” said he to the excellency who solicited him, “there is but one thing for which I could be tempted to sell the Quotidienne, and that would be a little health. If you could give me that, I might allow myself to be corrupted.” The minister, Villéle, returned repeatedly to the charge, but when, in consequence of the increasing weakness of his health, the sexagenarian Michaud parted with the greater part of his shares of the journal, it was only to pass them over to another self, his friend Laurentie.
Whilst carrying on his great work, he had been surprised to meet with a vast quantity of matter which he had not dreamt of when he began it; and he conceived the idea of not only reconstructing his history, but of going to the Holy Land, in search of more information. Although it was too late for such an attempt, his fame procured him encouragement; and the king, Charles X., so far favoured it as to give him 25,000 francs to defray his expenses. He set out at the beginning of 1830. Whatever gratification he derived from his voyage, it must have been sadly damped by the news he received from France during that eventful year. To complete his griefs, he likewise at this period lost 200,000 francs, the greater part of his fortune, which he had imprudently placed in unsafe hands. He still, however, had a moderate competence, and might have passed the remainder of his days in ease, but for that mismanagement to which the families of literary men are so frequently subject. On his return from the Holy Land he sojourned for a time in Italy, where he was kindly welcomed by his natural sovereign, Charles Albert. In 1837 he was named member of the Académie des Inscriptions; but honours from monarchs and academies could not put off the fatal hour, and he died at the elegant village of Passy on the 30th of September, 1839. On this occasion was exhibited an instance of what our poet calls “the ruling passion, strong in death.” Few authors had received more adulation, and no one could be more covetous of it. Extraordinary instances are told of the copious draughts of this intoxicating beverage that were offered to him, and of the greediness with which he swallowed them. “Never,” says his biographer, “although he loved to be called the La Fontaine of journalism, did he think of the second fable of the good man.”[1] One of the most extravagant of his flatterers said to a friend, admitted for a last interview, “With all his weakness, not the least trace of decline of intellect; still the same facility of expression, still the same lucidity.”—This aroused Michaud, upon whom the affectionate words of a sincere friend had just before produced no effect. He started, and sitting upright in his bed, exclaimed, in a tremulous voice, “Yes! yes! still the same! still——” and he sunk exhausted and dying on his pillow: these were his last words!
To criticise the works of Michaud properly would require a volume; we can therefore only lay before our readers a list of such as from their merit and celebrity are ever likely to fall under the eye of English readers. His greatest claim to the attention of posterity is doubtless the one before us, “The History of the Crusades,” of which his biographer, who is certainly less of an eulogist than any one we ever saw assume a similar task, very justly says, “It may be said, without exaggeration, that it is one of the most valuable historical works that our age has produced. To its completion he sacrificed almost every moment of twenty of the best years of his life.” No reader requires to be told that it was a labour of love.—He was the founder of, and a considerable contributor to, “La Biographie Universelle,” a work which England may envy France the conception and execution of; and if to these we add his beautiful poem of “Le Printemps d’un Proscrit,” we think we name all that he wrote that would be interesting at the present day: the other historical works are feeble, and the political squibs of a journalist after a lapse of half a century, are only acceptable to him who may be writing the history of the time. In this latter vein we may, however, suppose him to have excelled; mixed up from an early age with politics and journalism; possessed of a lively imagination and great facility of expression; constantly in the world, and deeply interested in its movements; we can fancy his vers de société, of which so much is said, to have been piquant and sparkling. We subjoin a specimen, written upon Buonaparte’s expedition to Egypt:—
Que de lauriers tombés dans l’eau,
Et que de fortunes perdues!
Que d’hommes courent au tombeau,
Pour porter Bonaparte aux nues!
Ce héros vaut son pesant d’or;
En France, personne n’en doute;
Mais il vaudrait bien plus encore,
S’il valoit tout ce qu’il nous coute.
————
What laurels in the waters fall,
What fortunes sink no more to rise!
What men lie shrouded in death’s pall,
That Bonaparte may gain the skies!
This hero’s worth his weight in gold;
In France of that there’s no one doubts;
But greater far his worth, if sold
At what he costs—or thereabouts!
As a conversationalist his reputation stands even higher than that of our Coleridge; for the stream was quite as constant and abundant, and at the same time much more pellucid. One of our English biographical dictionaries says he was censor of the press under Louis XVIII., but this we believe is not correct; indeed it was an office scarcely suitable for the editor and proprietor of such a journal as the Quotidienne. He was a member of the Academy and of the Institute, a knight of St. John of Jerusalem and of the Holy Sepulchre, and for a short time representative of the department of the Ain. These were his temporary honours—much more durable and brilliant ones belong to him as the author of the work before us.
W. R.
[INTRODUCTION.]
The history of the middle ages presents no spectacle more imposing than the Crusades, in which are to be seen the nations of Asia and of Europe armed against each other, two religions contending for superiority, and disputing the empire of the world. After having been several times threatened by the Mussulmans, and a long time exposed to their invasions, all at once the West arouses itself, and appears, according to the expression of a Greek historian,[2] to tear itself from its foundation, in order to precipitate itself upon Asia. All nations abandon their interests and their rivalries, and see upon the face of the earth but one single country worthy of the ambition of conquerors. One would believe that there no longer exists in the universe any other city but Jerusalem, or any other habitable spot of earth but that which contains the tomb of Jesus Christ. All the roads which lead to the holy city are deluged with blood, and present nothing but the scattered spoils and wrecks of empires.
In this general confusion we may contemplate the sublimest virtues mixed with all the disorders of the wildest passions. The Christian soldiers have at the same time to contend against famine, the influence of climate, and enemies the most formidable; in the greatest dangers, in the midst of their successes and their constant discords, nothing can exhaust either their perseverance or their resignation. After four years of fatigue, of miseries, and of victories, Jerusalem is taken by the Crusaders; but as their conquests are not the work of wisdom and prudence, but the fruit of blind enthusiasm and ill-directed heroism, they create nothing but a transient power.
The banner of the cross soon passes from the hands of Godfrey de Bouillon into those of his weak and imbecile successors. Jerusalem, now a Christian city, is obliged again to apply for succour to the West. At the voice of St. Bernard, the Christians take arms. Conducted by an emperor of Germany and a king of France, they fly to the defence of the Holy Land; but they have no longer great captains among them; they have none of the magnanimity or heroic resignation of their fathers. Asia, which beholds their coming without terror, already presents a new spectacle. The disciples of Mahomet awaken from their apathy; they are at once seized with a frenzy equal to that which had armed their enemies; they oppose enthusiasm to enthusiasm, fanaticism to fanaticism, and in their turn burn with a desire to shed their blood in a religious war.
The spirit of discord which had destroyed their power is no longer felt but among the Christians. Luxury and the manners of the East weaken the courage of the defenders of the cross, and make them forget the object even of the holy war. Jerusalem, which had cost the Crusaders so much blood, falls again into the power of the infidels, and becomes the conquest of a wise and warlike prince, who had united under his banner the forces of Syria and Egypt.
The genius and fortune of Saladin inflict a mortal blow upon the ill-assured power of the Christians in the East. In vain an emperor of the West, and two kings celebrated for their bravery, place themselves at the head of the whole powers of their states to deliver Palestine; these new armies of Crusaders meet everywhere with brave enemies and invincible barriers, and all their united efforts produce nothing but illustrious disasters. The kingdom of Jerusalem, for whose ruins they contend, is no longer anything but a vain name; soon even the captivity and the miseries of the holy city cease to inspire the sentiments of piety and enthusiasm that they had given birth to among the Christians. The Crusaders who had taken up arms for its deliverance, suffer themselves to be seduced by the wealth of Greece, and stop short to undertake the conquest of Constantinople.
From that time the spirit of the Crusaders begins to change; whilst a small number of Christians still shed their blood for the deliverance of the tomb of Jesus Christ, the princes and the knights are deaf to everything but the voice of ambition. The popes complete the corruption of the true spirit of the Crusaders, by urging them on, by their preaching, against other Christian people, and against their own personal enemies. The holy wars then degenerate into civil wars, in which both religion and humanity are outraged.
These abuses of the crusades, and the dire passions which had mixed themselves with them, plunge Europe in disorder and anarchy; when a pious king undertakes once more to arm the powers of the West against the infidels, and to revive among the Crusaders the spirit which had animated the companions of Godfrey. The two wars directed by this pious chief, are more unfortunate than all the others. In the first, the world is presented with the spectacle of a captive army and a king in fetters; in the second, that of a powerful monarch dying in its ashes. Then it is that the illusion disappears, and Jerusalem ceases to attract all the attention of the West.
Soon after, the face of Europe is changed; intelligence dissipates barbarism; the crusades no longer excite the same degree of enthusiasm, and the first effect of the civilization it begins to spread is to weaken the spirit of the fanaticism which had given them birth. Some few useless efforts are at times made to rekindle the fire which had burnt so fiercely in Europe and Asia. The nations are so completely recovered from the pious delirium of the Crusades, that when Germany finds itself menaced by the Mussulmans who are masters of Constantinople, the banner of the cross can with difficulty gather an army around it; and Europe, which had risen in a mass to attack the infidels in Asia, opposes but a feeble resistance to them on its own territories.
Such is, in a few words, the picture of the events and revolutions which the historian of the crusades has to describe. A writer who has preceded us by two centuries and who calls the history of the Crusades a right royal history, is surprised at the silence preserved to his time.[3] “I esteem it,” says he, “a deplorable thing that such persons inferior in no way to those who have been so much celebrated by the Greeks and the Romans, should have fallen into such obscurity, that we search in vain to discover who they were and what they did; and they appear to me highly culpable, who, possessing learning and the skill to write, have left these histories neglected.” Everybody ought now to be of this opinion, and regret that our great writers have not entertained the noble subject of the Crusades. When I undertake to supply the want created by their silence, I am duly impressed with the difficulty of the task.
They who, among us, have written ancient history, had for guides the historians of Rome and Athens. The brilliant colours of Livy, of Tacitus, of Thucydides presented themselves naturally to their pencils; but I have no models to follow, and am compelled to make those historians of the middle ages speak whom our times despise. They have rarely sustained me in my labour by the charm of their style, or the elegance of their narrations; but if they have afforded me no lessons in the art of writing, they transmit to me at least events whose interest will make up for the deficiency of their talent or mine. Perhaps it will be found, in the perusal of this history, that a period in which everything is astonishing loses nothing by being presented in a simple and faithful picture. The unaffected style of our old historians, in my view, appears to reanimate the persons and the characters they describe; and if I have profited by that which they have taught me, the age in which they lived will not be ill represented in my pages. It would have been easy for me to have censured with severity, as has usually been done, their ignorance and their credulity, but I respect in them the frankness and the candour of the periods of which they are the interpreters. Without yielding faith to all they say, I have not disdained the fables they relate to us, and which were believed by their contemporaries; for that which was thought worthy of credit then serves to picture to us the manners of our ancestors, and forms an essential part of the history of past ages.
We do not now require much sagacity to discover in our ancient chronicles what is fabulous and what is not. A far more difficult thing is to reconcile, upon some points, the frequent contradictory assertions of the Latins, the Greeks, and the Saracens, and to separate, in the history of the crusades, that which belongs to religious fanaticism, to policy, or to human passions. I do not pretend to resolve more skilfully than others these difficult problems, or to elevate myself above my subject, by offering positive judgments upon the nations and ages which will present themselves before me. Without giving myself up to digressions in which it is always easy to make a display of learning, after having scrupulously examined the historical monuments which remain to us, I will tell honestly what I believe to be the truth, and will leave dissertations to the erudite, and conjectures to philosophers.
In an age in which some value is set upon an opinion of the crusades, it will be first asked, if the wars of the Crusades were just. Upon this head we have but little to answer: whilst the Crusaders believed that they were obeying God himself, by attacking the Saracens in the East, the latter, who had invaded a part of Asia possessed by Christian people, who had got possession of Spain, who threatened Constantinople, the coasts of Italy, and several countries of the West, did not reproach their enemies with making an unjust war, and left to fortune and victory the care of deciding a question almost always useless.
We shall think it of more importance in this history to examine what was the cause and the nature of these remote wars, and what has proved to be their influence on civilization. The crusades were produced by the religious and military spirit which prevailed in Europe during the middle ages. The love of arms and religious fervour were two dominant passions, which, mingling in some way, lent each other a mutual energy. These two great principles united and acting together, gave birth to the holy war; and carried, among the Crusaders, valour, resignation, and heroism of character to the highest degree of eminence.
The part which the union of these two principles necessarily had in the undertaking of the holy wars will be plainly perceived in our narration. It will be much less easy for us to make all the results of the crusades appreciated. Some writers have seen nothing in these great expeditions but the most deplorable excesses, without any advantage to the ages that succeeded them; others, on the contrary, maintain that we owe to them all the benefits of civilization. It is not, at present, my business to examine these two conflicting opinions. Without believing that the holy wars have done either all the good or all the harm that is attributed to them, it must be admitted that they were a source of bitter sorrow to the generations that saw them or took part in them; but, like the ills and tempests of human life, which render man better, and often assist the progress of his reason, they have forwarded the experiences of nations; and it may be said, that after having for a time seriously agitated and shaken society, they have, in the end, much strengthened the foundations of it. This opinion, when stripped of all spirit of exaggeration or system, will, perhaps, appear the most reasonable; I, besides, experience some pleasure in adopting it, from its being consolatory to the age in which we live. The present generation which has witnessed the outbreak of so many passions on the political scene, which has passed through so many calamities, will not see without interest that Providence sometimes employs great revolutions to enlighten mankind, and to ensure the future prosperity of empires.