PIERRE DE L’ESTOILE
Rich as they are in the possession of the diverticula amoena of history—and much richer than we are—for all that the French have no Pepys. “Many an old fool,” said Byron of Coleridge at his lecture, “but such as this, never.” So it may be put of the French memoirists: many a burgess of plain habit and shrewd observation, many a rogue husband too; but the like of one who, being both, turned himself inside out for the wonder of posterity, never. Indeed, it would be hard to imagine a Latin Pepys. The French do not discharge their bosoms on paper without reason; and the reasons which moved Pepys, whatever they were, would not approve themselves to their minds. Cynicism, or vanity, might suggest self-exhibition to one or another, as it did to Casanova the Venetian, but the truth is not served that way. There was a leaven of puritanism in Pepys such as Huguenotry never deposited in a Frenchman. That leaven did double work in our man. It seasoned for him his pleasant vices, and gave also a peculiar thrill to his confessions, as if his pen, like his hair, was standing on end as he wrote. No Frenchman needed a relish for his foibles of the kind; and as for thrills, his nation has always kept faith and works in separate compartments. We cannot do that.
However, they are rich enough without him. If they have no Pepys, they have in their Pierre de L’Estoile one whom we cannot match. Imagine a citizen of London in Elizabeth’s last and James’s first years, observing, recording each day as it came. We have in John Evelyn, fifty years later, a diarist of higher quality, who yet, and for that reason, was of less historical value. He seldom stooped to the detail in which the Parisian was versed: would that he had! L’Estoile will furnish no such picture as Evelyn’s of the Gallery at Hampton Court on a specimen afternoon. On the other hand, in L’Estoile, the brawling, buzzing, swarming streets of old Paris come before us at every turn of the leaf—and there at least he was like Pepys. If by happy chance one John Chamberlain, a private citizen of London, whose letters were published last year, had kept a diary, and could have kept it out of harm’s way, he might have given just such a particularised account of his town as L’Estoile gives of the Paris of the League, the Seize, and La Religion. But he was fearful of the post, and never committed himself. Nor would he, of course, have had such cataclysmic matter to report, England in James’s reign was drifting towards the whirlpool: France was already spinning madly in it.
Pierre de L’Estoile was an official of the Chancellery in Paris. His title was “Audiencier,” and his duties, as nearly as I can ascertain, were more like those of one of the Six Clerks of our Court than of him whom we call Auditor. He was a man of family, of the noblesse de Robe, of landed estate, of education, and of taste. He had Greek, and Latin, bigotry and virtue; he collected coins and medals, books, ballads, pamphlets, bibelots of all sorts. He began to keep a diary on the day when Charles IX died, “enferme, comme un chien qui enrage”—Whitsunday, 1574; maintained it through the riot and effrontery, the anarchy and intrigue in which Henry III and the mignons killed and were killed; through the open war of the League, and through the Siege of Paris. He saw the entry of Henry IV; judged while he loved that ribald king; and caught up the flying rumours of that day which hushed all the city, that day when he was stabbed to the heart, “au coing de la rue de la Ferronnerie, vis-à-vis d’un notaire nommé Poutrain,” as he sat in his coach listening to a letter which Epernon was reading to him. He went on until 1611, and only laid his pen down because he was about to lay down his life. His last entry is of the 27th September: on the 8th October he was buried. He had lived under six kings of France, had three of them die violent deaths, had been an eyewitness of the Saint-Bartholomew. A seasoned vessel.
As he was never a courtier he could not have witnessed all the great events which he relates. I think he saw the entry of Henry of Navarre, if not his shocking exit. But he was out and about, all agog; he had highly placed friends; and collected for his diary as he did for his cabinet. I imagine he must be a “source” for such a tragic scene as the murder of the Duc de Guise, which might have gone bodily into Les Quarante-Cinq if that fine novel had not stopped a few months short of it. Everything is there to the hand. As first, the presages: how on the 21st of December (1588),
“the Archbishop of Lyon, having overheard the proud speeches which the Duke had made the King in the gardens of Blois, told him that he would have done well to use more respect, and that a more modest bearing would have been becoming: whereupon, ‘You are wrong,’ the Duke replied: ‘I know him better than you do. You have to take him boldly. He is a king who likes to be made frightened.’”
And then another: on the next day,
“As the Duke went to table, to his dinner, he found a note under his napkin wherein was written that he ought to be on his guard, because they were on the point of doing him a bad turn. Having read it, he wrote upon it these three words, ‘They dare not,’ and threw it under the table. The same day he was told by his cousin the Duc d’Elbœuf that on the morrow there would be an attempt against his life, and answered with a laugh that, plainly, he had been searching the almanacs.”
On the 23rd he and his brother the Cardinal attended the Council, on summons:
“They found the guard strengthened, and more hardy than usual. They demanded money, and asked the Duke to see to it that they were paid, using (as it seemed) a new manner of address, less respectful than he had been accustomed to hear. Taking no notice, they went their ways; and for all that the Duke had had warnings from many quarters of what was working against him—nine of them, indeed, on that very day, whereof he put the last in his pocket, saying aloud, ‘That is the ninth to-day’—nevertheless, so blind was that high mind of his to things as clear as daylight, he could not bring himself to believe that the King intended to do him an ill turn; for God had blindfolded his eyes, as He generally does of those whom He designs to chasten. Being then come into the Council, in a new coat, grey in colour and very light for the time of year, the eye on the scarred side of his face was seen to weep, and he to let two or three drops at the nose—on account of which he sent a page out for a handkerchief.... Presently the King sent Revel, one of the Secretaries of State, for him, who came up just as he was shutting down into the silver box he used to carry, the plums and raisins which he used for his heart-weakness. He rose immediately to attend his Majesty, and just as he came into the ante-chamber one of the Guards in there trod upon his toe; and though he knew very well what that meant, notwithstanding he made no sign, but went on his way to the Chamber, as one who cannot avoid his fate. Then, suddenly, he was seized by the arms and legs by ten or a dozen of the Quarante-Cinq ambushed behind the arras, and by them stabbed and murdered, uttering among other lamentable cries this last, which was plainly heard, ‘God! I am dying! My sins have found me out. Have mercy on me!’ Over his poor body they flung a mean carpet, and there he lay exposed to the gibes and indignities of them of the Court, who hailed him ‘fair King of Paris’—the King’s name for him.”
Detail like that must have been got at first hand. When he comes to the Cardinal, he contents himself by saying that he was despatched in the Capuchin Convent on Christmas Eve. But the account of the Duke carries conviction. L’Estoile had a friend at Blois—an official of the Council, or an usher of the door. Though there is pity in his words, “Sur ce pauvre corps fut jetté un meschant tapis,” his judgment was not disturbed. His account closes with the stern words,
“Et ici finist le règne de Nembrot le Lorrain.”
Henry being what he was, and whose son he was, it was plain to him that the only thing to do with the head, and crownable head, of the League was to remove it. After the Saint-Bartholomew murder was a recognised arm of kingship, a sort of jus regale, in France. But Catherine de Médicis, who taught her sons the uses of the dagger and the dark, was not consenting to this particular use of them. Her worthless son might be the last of the Valois; but she dreaded the first of the Bourbons much more than the extinction of her own race; and when Henry was fool enough to boast, “Now I am the only King,” and (says L’Estoile) “began immediately to be less of one than ever,” she, sickening of such inanity, took to her bed, and died in it on the 5th of January following the coup d’état.
A year later the League gave the counterstroke. Henry was murdered at Blois by its creature, Clément the Jacobin: “poorly and miserably slain,” says L’Estoile, “in the flower of his age, in the midst of his garrison, surrounded, as always, by guards; in his chamber, close to his bed, by a little rapscallion of a monk, with a jerk of his nasty little knife.” The thing was miraculously simple, a touch-and-go which just came off. Clément asked for an audience, was refused: Henry heard of it and insisted on seeing him. The man was let in, found his victim undressed and at disadvantage, gave him a letter, and while he was reading, drove a knife into his bowels and left it there. He was himself killed on the spot, having done what the League intended, and more than that by a good deal. L’Estoile notes it at the moment: “The King of Navarre is made King of France by the League.” So he was.
Civil war followed: Paris in the grip of the Seize, with the Duc de Mayenne as Regent for the League. L’Estoile lost his appointment; for the Chancery followed the King, and he himself could not. A Court of a kind was maintained in the city, and he, in order to live, was forced to serve the Seize, whom he detested and feared. He had good reason for that. Famine and pestilence were on all sides of him, and treachery and suspicion—under the bed, at the street corners, in the churches, wherever people came together—and the gibbet expecting its daily tribute. When the news came in of Arques or Ivry, of the capitulation of Chartres or what not, it was as much as your neck was worth to be seen to smile. Lists of names went about—you might see your own on it any day. By a letter attached to it you could know your portion. P. stood for pendu, D. for dagué, C. for chassé. L’Estoile saw his own, with D. against it. He went in fear, naturally, but I think he was more scandalised than afraid when they began their new Saint-Bartholomew by hanging the President of the Council, Brisson, and two of his fellow members. It took place in prison, and L’Estoile, though he was not present, reports the manner of it, and the harangues of the victims. His conclusion is good enough: “Thus, on this day, a First President of the Court was hanged—by his clerk.” The King, he hears, “gossant à sa manière accoustoumée,” said that he had no better servants in all Paris than the Seize, who did his business for him better than anything they did for their masters, and cost him no doubloons neither.
Meantime the city was beleaguered, and very soon hungry. Cauldrons of broth and boiled horse were set up at street-corners, and people fought each other to get at them; bread was made of oats and bran, and doled out by pennyweights as long as it lasted. When they had eaten all the horses they came to the dogs, then to the cats. The siege was maintained, the people starved. They ate tallow, dog-skin, rat-skin, cat-skin. They made bread of men’s bones from the cemeteries; they hunted children—L’Estoile has no doubts; many lay still, awaiting the mercy of death. “The only things which went cheap in Paris,” he says, “were sermons, where they served out wind to the famished people, giving them to understand that it was very pleasing to God to die of starvation—yea, and far better to kill one’s children than to admit a heretic as king.” A man, he says, came to his door to beg a crust of him to save a child’s life. While L’Estoile was fetching the bread the baby died, in the father’s arms. He himself sent away his wife and infant son to Corbeil: the leaguer had been raised for that purpose, and many took advantage of the grace. Unfortunately Corbeil was taken by the Spaniards, and his people held to ransom. There were fierce riots; but the Seize knew that their own necks were in peril (as proved to be true), and held out. Finally, after the farce of conversion solemnly enacted, Henry entered his good town. As a last resource the League had ordered the descent and procession of the Châsse of Ste-Geneviève a few days before. L’Estoile gives the warrant in full, with this note in addition: “Its virtue was shown forth, five days afterwards, in the reduction of Paris.” He always girded at the Châsse. It was brought down in July 1587 to make the rain stop. “She did no miracle, though liberally assisted. The moon before had been a rainy one, and they brought her down on the fifth of the new moon when there was promise of a little fine weather. Nevertheless, it began to rain harder than ever the next day.” He called Madame Sainte-Geneviève Diana of the Parisians.
Well, the Béarnois came in, and heard Te Deum at Notre Dame. He made a torchlight entry, dressed in grey velvet, with a grey hat and white panache. His face was “fort riant”; his hat always in his hand to the ladies at the windows, particularly to three, “very handsome, who were in mourning, and at a window high up, opposite Saint-Denys-de-la-Chartre.” L’Estoile must have seen that, and admired the ladies. And he certainly saw—he says so—the reception of Mesdames de Nemours and Montpensier. They were held up by the passing of troops, and put out of countenance by the insolence of the bystanders, who “stared them full in the face without any sign of knowing who they were.” And that to Madame de Montpensier—“Queen-Mother” to Paris besieged!
Next day Henry played tennis all the afternoon, and hazard all night; but L’Estoile loved that king without approving of him. His tales tell for him and against, his esteem rises and falls. He liked his easy manners, his old clothes, his Ventre-Saint-Gris, his cynicisms and mocking humour. He does not seem to think the monarchy let down by such sans façon. Anyhow, there it is; and two things are made clear by the diary—first, that Henry was not the good fellow he is generally reputed, and second, that he was not then thought to be so. He himself, may be, had been too much knocked about by the world to have any illusions left him. There was an attempt against his life in 1595. The people seemed frantic with delight at his escape. L’Estoile relates how he went in procession to Notre Dame.
“You never heard,” he says, “such approbation of a king by his people as was given that day to our good Prince whenever he showed himself. Seeing it, a lord who was close to his Majesty, said to him, ‘Remark, sir, how happy are all your subjects at the sight of you.’ Shaking his head, the King replied, ‘That is the people all over. And if my greatest enemy was where I am now, and they saw him go by, they would do as much for him as for me, and shout even louder than they are doing now.’”
No, there were no rose-coloured curtains between Henry of Navarre and this transitory life. He did not even pretend to approve of himself; and if he was ashamed, as it seems he was, of his amorous entanglements with the young Princesse de Condé, it is certain that they shocked L’Estoile to the heart. When it comes to apologies there, there was no spirit left in the respectable man. For this diarist was as moral as our John Evelyn, and so far as I can find out on as good a foundation. He could express himself on such matters with point. For instance:
“Sunday the 12th February, which was Dimanche des Brandons, Madame had a splendid ballet at the Louvre, where nothing was forgotten that could possibly be remembered—except God.”
A sharper saying than Evelyn would have allowed himself. But it is the fact, as I have said, that good King Henry was not found so good living as dead. Afterwards—under Richelieu, under Mazarin, during the Fronde, under the Edict of Nantes—by comparison he shone. During his lifetime he had many more enemies and far fewer friends than was supposed. The Maréchal D’Ornano, in 1609, told him in so many words that he was not beloved by his people, and that a very little more on the taxes would bring back the civil war. The King said that he knew all that, and was ready for it. D’Ornano then said that he could not advise rough measures. “I shall freely tell you, sir, that the late King had more of the noblesse for him than you have for yourself, and more of the people too than you will have if there be trouble. For all that, he was obliged to leave Paris and his own house to rebels and mutineers, and the rest of us thought ourselves lucky to get off with our heads on our shoulders.” L’Estoile had that from “a brave and trustworthy gentleman” who was close by at the time. The gentleman said that the King was at first moved to anger by D’Ornano’s plain speaking, but thanked him for it afterwards.
Bad stories of King Henry are to be had for the asking; perhaps the worst in L’Estoile is told in a poem which he picked up, and reports. A Madame Esther had been the King’s mistress in La Rochelle, and had borne him a son. The child died, the King tired, and forsook her. She came to see him at Saint-Denis when he was busy, distracted, seeking other game: he refused to see her or hear what she had to say. She was ill, and died in the town where he actually was, and being of the religion, a grave was denied her. What became of her body is not known, but “they raised to her memory,” L’Estoile says, “the following Tombeau (epitaph), which was rehearsed at Saint-Denis and everywhere:
“Tombeau de Madame Esther
“Here Esther lies, who from Rochelle,
Called by the King, her master, came,
Risking the life of her fair fame
With him to whom her beauty fell.
“Faithful she was, and served him well,
Bore him a son who had no name,
And died: so then her lover’s flame
Sought other kindling for a spell.
“Forsaken, hitherward her steps
Strayed, and to God she tuned her lips
For mercy, dying so: but earth
“Was closed against her. Ah, it’s bad—
No yard of all his lands and worth
For her who gave him all she had!”
A touching and simple piece. It should have gone home to a man whose intentions were always better than his inclinations, yet always gave way to them. The end of him, sudden and shocking as it was, can have surprised nobody. He had enemies everywhere, and few friends. The Catholics had never believed in him, the Protestants had ceased to believe in him. The day before his last he had had Marie de Médicis crowned with all the forms, though unwillingly. L’Estoile was there, and observed two notable facts: “the first was that it had been thought proper, on account of the subject-matter, to change the gospel of the day, which is from Mark x—“And the Pharisees came to him, and asked him, Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife, tempting him.” That sounds to me a little too apt to be likely.
“The other was that at the largesse of gold and silver coins, which is usual at coronations of kings and queens, there was never a cry Vive le Roy, nor yet a Vive la Reine—which, it was remarked, had never happened but at this coronation.” His next entry relates to the assassination:
“Luctus ubique, pavor, et plurima mortis imago,” is his conclusion of it all: “the shops are shut; everyone goes weeping or holding up his hands, great and small, young and old; women and maids pluck at their hair. The whole town is very quiet: instead of running for arms we run to our prayers, and make vows for the health and welfare of the new king. The fury of the people, contrary to the expectation and intent of the wicked, is turned upon the infamous parricide and his accomplices, seeking only to ensue vengeance and to have it.”
De mortuis! That is always the way. And distrusting the Queen as he plainly did, and abhorring Concini, not the first, and not the best, of the implanted Italians, there is little wonder at the diarist’s dismay. He goes on, without circumlocution, to lay the crime at the door of the “Society of Judas,” as he calls a famous companionship, a society to whose new church the King’s heart had been promised, by whose means, he as good as says, it was now obtained. Not without scandal, it was presently conveyed there.
Enormous crowds viewed the king’s body, which lay in state in the Louvre. The Jesuits were among the first to come; he says:
“Class them as you please: everybody knows the maxim they preach, that it is lawful to kill the king who suffers two religions in his realm. Nevertheless (vultibus compositis ad luctum) they played affliction above everyone. Father Cotton, with an exclamation truly smacking of the Court and the Society, ‘Who is the villain,’ cries he, ‘to have killed this good prince, this pious, this great king? Was it not a Huguenot, then?’ They tell him, No, it was a Roman Catholic. ‘Ah, deplorable, if it be so!’ he says, and signs himself with three great crosses. Someone present, who had overheard him, was himself overheard to say, ‘The Huguenots don’t play those tricks.’”
But the Society took the heart to Notre-Dame-de-Boulogne.
L’Estoile survived to see the little king in Paris. He watched him benevolently always, and has tales to tell of him, of which the prettiest is about Pierrot, a village boy of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. When Louis had been there as Dauphin, Pierrot used to play with him; and now that he was King, and at the Tuileries, he had the notion of going to see him.
“The King was playing down by the lake, with a fine company about him; but as soon as he was aware of Pierrot, his old play-fellow (who still called him M. le Dauphin, and to those who reproved him, swore his round Mordienne that he did not know what else to call him), he left them all where they were to go to Pierrot, into whose arms he flew, and kissed him in the face of everybody. He told M. de Souvrai that they must find clothes for his friend the very next day, so that he might stay with him, but Pierrot said he could not do that, but must go home for fear of being beaten. His father and mother had not been willing to let him go—but he had gone for all that, and had brought M. le Dauphin (he called him) a present of some sparrows.”
“Simplicité rustique,” L’Estoile calls it, and praises Louis for going half-way to meet it. He is then very near the end of his record, and of his earthly tether too.
Misfortunes were gathered thickly about the honest man. He was out of his employment through age; money was very short with him. He sold his collections piecemeal, and was glad to make fifty francs or so here and there. He does not name the most serious of his ailments, but I fear that it was malignant, and put recovery out of the case. In September 1610, feeling himself in extremities, he demanded the Sacrament, and it became a question of confession. Father des Landes, a Jacobin and a friend of his, was chosen for the office, and demanded of him a protestation that he would die in the Catholic, Apostolic, Roman faith. The first two—yes, said L’Estoile; but boggled over the third. He relates the course of the argument which he held with the Jacobin. It branched off, as they will, into all sorts of side issues: invocation of the Saints, Council of Trent, errors of the Popes, and what not. He comes as near as he ever does here to putting down what he really did—or at least what he really did not—believe. He was an eclectic, but desperate of remedy. He would have seen the Reformed Church Catholic, and the Catholic reformed. But that, he is aware, is a counsel of perfection. “Three things forbid: lack of charity, lack of zeal for the glory of God, and stubbornness, which is the last trench of the ignorant.” And he concludes on the whole matter: “I shall hold on then to that old stock, rotten as it is, of the Papacy. The Church is in it, though it is not the Church.” And thereupon he had his absolution and the Sacrament. Father des Landes was a liberal-minded Jacobin.
I have fallen into the old easy way of confounding historical persons and history, but that is L’Estoile’s fault at least as much as mine. I might have stuffed my account of his book with criminal records, or with sermons; for next to the doings of the great those are the matters which concern him. Few days pass, never a week, in which he does not record an execution or several of them. I don’t know whether the Paris of the Henrys was worse than the London of James, and failing an English L’Estoile, I shall never know. But Paris would be bad to beat—not only for bestial crime but for bestial requital of it. In London you might be decapitated or hanged: burning was rare towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign. In Paris you might be hanged, or hanged and strangled, or broken on the wheel, or hanged and burned; or, if you were respectable enough you could be executed with a sword. Burning was reserved for heresy: for lèse-majesté there was death by horses—four of them. L’Estoile saw Ravaillac die that death. He died, the wretch, at the “deuxième tirage.” These things are shocking, as the crimes were which they were designed, after the ideas of the times, to fit. Then there were the duels which reached in France a point not known in our country. The mignons quarrelled in companies. That happened when Quélus, Maugiron and Livarrot met d’Entragues, Ribérac and Schomberg in the Marché-aux-Chevaux. Maugiron and Schomberg were killed outright; Ribérac died the next day, and Quélus, with nineteen wounds, lingered for a month, and died then. The King kissed the dead, cut off and kept their fair hair, and took from Quélus the ear-rings which he had himself put into his ears. “Such and the like ways of doing,” says L’Estoile, “unworthy indeed of a great king and a high-hearted, as this one was, caused him by degrees to be despised ... and in the Third-Estate, to be made little by little their faction, which was the League.” No doubt that is true.
Let me remember, as I end, this curious piece of news: on January 8th, 1608, it was so cold that the chalice froze in Saint-André-des-Ars, and they had to get a brazier from the baker’s to thaw it. Saint-André was L’Estoile’s favourite, or perhaps his parish church. The law cares nothing for trifles, but history lives upon them. My last scrap, however, is not of an age but of all time. “J’ay trente mil livres de rente, et cependant je meurs!” said the Abbé of Bonport in his last agony.