THE CARDINAL DE RETZ
No student of France and literature can afford to neglect this gay and hardy little sinner, though the use of that very word might show that I was not fitted to expound him. It has here, however, an æsthetic significance and not an ethical. Poets and moralists have this in common that, owing their power to the strength of their prejudice, they make bad historians. Carlyle, very much of a poet, illuminating his heroes with his own fire, did no harm to Cromwell, whose wart was a part of his glory; but Frederick the Great showed up oddly. The higher the light rayed upon him the more ghastly stared his gashes under the paint. Michelet was a good deal of a poet too, and rootedly a moralist. Naturally he came to blows with the history of his country. The Fronde made him angry, the grand siècle shocked him. Edification may be served that way, not truth. It is, I grant, difficult to read the History of France as that of a sane, hard-working, penurious people; difficult to decide why the Revolution, instead of coming in 1789, did not come in 1689; or why, having begun in 1649, it did no more, as Bossuet said, than “enfanter le siècle de Louis.” To understand that would be to understand the Fronde, but not how the state of things which evoked the Fronde and made possible the Memoirs of de Retz, could have come about. A royal minority, a foreign regent, a foreign minister, and a feudal aristocracy will account for a good deal—not for all. The Italianisation of manners which began with the last Valois kings, and was renewed by Henry’s Florentine wife, has to be reckoned up. To a nobility convinced of privilege it opened the ways of Il Talento.
Il Talento is the Italian description of the state of mind induced by desire and the means to gratify it on the spot. Iago is the standing type; but Cæsar Borgia is a better. For him and his likes, The Prince of Machiavelli was the golden book. In France the princely families—those of Lorraine, Bouillon, Condé and Savoie—found it a kindly soil; and one of its best products was naturally the Cardinal de Retz, whose memoirs are as good as Dumas, very much like him, and the source of the best chapters of Vingt Ans Après. Here was Il Talento in fine flower, existing for its own sake; whereas Mazarin hid it in avarice, and Richelieu had lost it in statecraft. You cannot read Retz with pleasure, to say nothing of profit, if you do not allow for the point of view—which you will have no difficulty in doing if you remember that, less than a hundred years before the Cardinal’s day, his ancestor, Alberto Gondi, had been as familiar with the Ponte Vecchio as he himself was with the Pont-Neuf.
In his “portrait” of Mazarin, Retz accused his brother-cardinal of common origin, but if you went back to his own family’s beginnings I do not know that the Gondis were more than respectable according to French standards. But the future Cardinal, Jean-Francois-Paul, was born the son of a Duc de Retz, a great man of Brittany, was a Knight of Malta in the cradle, and when, later, it was thought well to make a churchman of him, tumbled into abbacies as became a young prince, and had a bishopric as soon as he cared. He says of Mazarin’s youth that it was shameful, that he was by bent and disposition a cardsharper. He might have said worse and not been wrong; yet the account he gives of himself is so frank, shameless and extremely flagrant that the reproof has an odd sound.
“I did not affect devotion,” he says of himself as Abbé, “because I could never be sure that I should be able to keep up the cheat. But I had great consideration for the devout, and from their point of view that is in itself a mark of piety. I suited my pleasures to the rest of my habits. I could hardly get on without gallantry, but I continued it with Madame de Pommereux, young and a coquette, whose ways suited me because, as she had all the young people not only about her but in her confidence, her apparent affairs with them were a mask for mine with her.”
This equivocal conduct so far succeeded that the pious agreed with St. Vincent de Paul that, though the Abbé de Retz was not truly religious, he was “not far from the Kingdom of Heaven”—quite as near, in fact, as the young gentleman desired to be. And then he tells a story which he thinks is to his credit:
“A short time after I left college, my governor’s valet, who was my humble servant, found living with a wretched pin-maker a niece of hers, fourteen years old and of remarkable beauty. After he had shown her to me, he bought her for one hundred and fifty pistoles, took a little house for her at Issy, and put his sister in to look after her. I went there the day after she was installed, and found her extremely cast down, but attributing it to her modesty, was not at all surprised. She was still more so the next day, a fact about her even more remarkable than her good looks, which is saying a great deal. She talked with me straightforwardly, piously, without extravagance, and cried no more than she could possibly help. I saw that she was so much afraid of her aunt that I felt truly sorry for her, admired her disposition, and presently her virtue. I tested that so far as it could be done, and took shame to myself. I waited till it was dark, then put her into my coach and took her to my aunt de Meignelais. She put the child into a convent of religious, where eight or ten years later she died in the odour of sanctity.”
One must not expect too much from a grand seigneur in a cassock. The story has more implication than he was able to perceive; but at least it shows that he had pity in him, if not piety.
In time he was appointed coadjutor to his uncle, the Archbishop of Paris, with a promise of survivorship, and a fancy title of Archbishop of Corinth. He tells us that he took six days to consider how he should regulate his conduct, how restore the credit of the archiepiscopate (which was very necessary) without losing any of his pleasures. “I decided to do evil with deliberation—no doubt the most criminal course in the eyes of God, but no doubt also the most discreet in those of the world.” In his opinion that was the only way open to him of avoiding “the most dangerous absurdity which can be met with in the clerical profession, that of mixing sin and devotion.” “Absurdity” is remarkable.
His first duty as coadjutor was a severe trial to his fortitude. It was necessary to make a Visitation of the Nuns of the Conception; and as the convent held eighty young ladies, “of whom several were handsome and some adventurous,” he had many qualms about exposing his virtue to such a test. “It had to be done, though; and I preserved it to the edification of my neighbour. I did not see the face of a single one, and never spoke to one unless her veil was down. This behaviour, which lasted six weeks, gave a wonderful lustre to my chastity. I believe, however, that the lessons which I received every evening from Madame de Pommereux strengthened it materially against the morrow.”
Such was the Coadjutor-Archbishop of Paris, and such his efforts to restore the credit of that see. He did not continue them long. Other things engrossed him, one being to obtain from Mazarin a recommendation to the Cardinalate, another by all, or any, means to obtain his benefactor’s disgrace. Before the first could take effect, or the second be effected, the parliamentary Fronde began, and Retz was in it to the neck. What he wanted, except to enjoy himself, is not at all clear. He despised rather than hated Mazarin; he forsook the only man—Condé—for whom he seems to have had any real regard; he invited his country’s enemies to Paris; and he got nothing out of it. But I am sure he enjoyed himself.
His strong card was his popularity with the Parisians. He earned that partly by hard money—the Barricades, he says, cost him some thirty-six thousand écus—and somewhat on his own account too. After he had been enthroned as Coadjutor, he gave himself no airs. On the contrary, “Je donnai la main chez moi à tout le monde; j’accompagnai tout le monde jusqu’au carrosse.” Then, when he was firmly established as the most affable seigneur in the city, suddenly he jumped in a claim for precedence before M. de Guise, and had it adjudged him. It enhanced his prestige incalculably. “To condescend to the humble is the surest way of measuring yourself against the great,” is the moral he draws, but another is that if you aim at popularity, you should stand up to a great man, and beat him. Retz had courage, and the Parisians loved him for it. So did the Parisiennes, according to his own account, though many things were against him. He was an ugly little man, a little deformed, black man, Tallemant reports him, very nearsighted, badly made, clumsy with his hands, unable to fasten his clothes or put on his spurs. No matter. Whatever he could or could not do, there is no doubt he could give a good account of himself in the world, upstairs and downstairs and in my lady’s chamber. Not only does he say so in Memoirs, written, as he is careful to say, for the instruction of Madame de Caumartin’s children, but his enemies allowed it. It may even be that Mazarin paid him the compliment of being jealous of his midnight conferences with Anne of Austria; at any rate, Retz seriously thought of cutting him out. Then he was a good preacher, a ready debater, and a born lobbyist to whom intrigue was daily bread. Those were his cards for beggar-my-neighbour with Mazarin, and not bad ones. The weakness of the hand resided in the player. He had as little heart as conscience. He cared nothing for his country, for his friends or for his mistresses when their interests conflicted with what for the moment were his. If he had an affection for anyone it was for Condé. Yet he was against him all through, and chose rather to back the poor creature, Monsieur—to his own undoing, as he must have foreseen if he had given it a moment’s thought. Gaston simply let in Mazarin again, through mere poltroonery; and Mazarin once in, Retz must be out. And so he was.
The Fronde, the first Fronde, began seriously, like our Civil War, on a question of principle. The Parlement of Paris took advantage of the Regency to restore its old claim to be more than a Court of Record. It claimed the right to examine edicts before registering them—in fact, to be a Parliament. Atop of that came the grievance of the Masters of Requests, who, having paid heavily for their offices, found their value substantially reduced by the creation of twelve new ones. The masters struck, and their offices were sequestrated. Then came the 26th August 1648, when the Court, exalted by Condé’s victory at Lens, first celebrated the occasion by Te Deum in Notre Dame, and immediately afterwards by causing Councillor Broussel, Father of the People, to be arrested and carried off to Saint-Germain. Retz, the coadjutor, was in both celebrations, as we can read in Vingt Ans Après. It was the day before the Barricades. Directly the news of the arrest became known the town, as he says, exploded like a bomb: “the people rose; they ran, they shouted, they shut up their shops.” Retz went out in rochet and hood—to watch, no doubt, over the harvest of his 36,000 sown écus. “No sooner was I in the Marché-Neuf than I was encompassed by masses of people who howled rather than shouted.” He extricated himself by comfortable words, and made his way to the Pont-Neuf, where he found the Maréchal de La Meilleraye, with the Guards, enduring as best he could showers of stones, but far from happy at the look of things. He urged Retz, who (though he had had an interchange of repartees with the Queen overnight) did not need much urging, to accompany him to the Palais-Royal and report. Off they went together, followed by a horde of people crying, “Broussel! Broussel!”
“We found the Queen in the great Cabinet with the Duc d’Orléans, Cardinal Mazarin, Duc de Longueville.... She received me neither well nor ill, being too proud and too hot to be ashamed of what she had said the night before. As for the Cardinal, he had not the decency to feel anything of that kind. Yet he did seem embarrassed, and pronounced to me a sort of rigmarole in which, though he did not venture to say so, he would have been relieved if I had found some new explanation of what had moved the Queen. I pretended to take in all that he was pleased to tell me, and answered him simply that I was come to report myself for duty, to receive the Queen’s commands, and contribute everything that lay in my power towards peace and order. The Queen turned her head sharply as if to thank me; but I knew afterwards that she had noticed and taken badly my last phrase, innocent as it was and very much to the point from the lips of a Coadjutor of Paris.”
Then follows one of his famous Machiavellian aphorisms: “But it is very true that with princes it is as dangerous, almost as criminal, to be able to do good as to wish to do harm.”
Retz might play the innocent, no one better, but neither Queen nor minister were fools. It is not to be supposed that they had heard nothing of his distribution of écus. Then the Maréchal grew angry, finding that the rioting was taken lightly, and said what he had seen. He called for Retz’s testimony, and had it.
“The Cardinal smiled sourly, the Queen flew into a rage.... ‘There is a revolt even in the intention to revolt,’ she said. ‘These are the stories of people who desire revolt.’ The Cardinal, who saw in my face what I thought of such talk, put in a word, and in a soft voice replied to the Queen: ‘Would to God, madame, that all the world spoke with the same sincerity as M. le Coadjuteur. He fears for his flock, for the city, for your Majesty’s authority. I am persuaded that the danger is not so great as he believes; but scruple in such a matter is worthy of his religion.’ The Queen, understanding this jargon, immediately altered her tone, talked civilly, and was answered by me with great respect, and a face so smug that La Rivière whispered to Bautru, ... ‘See what it is not to spend day and night in a place like this. The Coadjutor is a man of the world. He knows what he is about, and takes what she says for what it is worth.’”
The whole scene, he says, was comedy. “I played the innocent, which I by no means was; the Cardinal the confident, though he had no confidence at all. The Queen pretended to drop honey though she had never been more choked with gall.” But what comedy there was was not there very long. The Queen, who had declared that she would strangle Broussel with her own hands sooner than release him, was to change her mind. La Meilleraye and Retz were sent out again to report, and La Meilleraye, losing his head, nearly lost his life. At the head of his cavalry, he pushed out into the crowd, “sword in hand, crying with all his might, ‘Vive le Roi! Broussel au large!’” More people, naturally, saw him than could hear what he said. His sword had an offensive look; there was a cry to arms, and other swords were out besides his. The Maréchal killed a man with a pistol-shot, the crowd closed in upon him; he was saved by Retz, who himself escaped by the use of his wits. An apothecary’s apprentice, he says, put a musket at his head.
“Although I did not know him from Adam, I thought it better not to let him know that. On the contrary, ‘Ah, my poor lad,’ I said, ‘if your father were to see this!’ He thought that I had been his father’s best friend, though in fact I had never seen his father, and asked me if I was the Coadjutor. When he understood that I was, he cried out, ‘Vive le Coadjuteur!’ and they all came crowding round me with the same cry.”
La Meilleraye knew very well what he had done. He said to Retz, “I am a fool, a brute—I have nearly ruined the State, and it is you that have saved it. Come, we will talk to the Queen like Frenchmen and men of worth.” So they did, but to no purpose. She believed that Retz was at the bottom of the whole émeute, and was not far wrong. But there was no stopping it now. The barricades were up at dawn the next morning, and it was clear that Broussel must be given back. He was. Then came the flight of the Court, which Dumas tells so admirably.
After the evasion of the royalties, the Fronde became largely comic opera. Certain of the princes—for reasons of their own—joined the popular party: Beaufort, le roi des Halles, who wanted the Admiralty; Bouillon, with claims upon his principality of Sedan; Conti, Elbeuf, Longueville. Retz had the idea of bringing their, and his, ladies into it. He himself fetched Mesdames de Longueville and de Bouillon with their children to the Hôtel de Ville, “avec une espèce de triomphe.”
“The small-pox had spared Mme. de Longueville all her astounding beauty; Mme. de Bouillon’s, though on the wane, was still remarkable. Now imagine, I beg you, those two upon the steps of the Hôtel de Ville, the handsomer in that they appeared to be in undress, though they were not at all so. Each held one of her children in her arms, as lovely as its mother. The Grève was full of people over the roofs of the houses. The men shouted their joy, the women wept for pity. I threw five hundred pistoles out of the window of the Hôtel de Ville.”
After their debonair fashion these high people played at revolution. “Then you might see the blue scarves of ladies mingling with steel cuirasses, hear violins in the halls of the Hôtel de Ville, and drums and trumpets in the Place—the sort of thing which you find more of in romance than elsewhere.” Nothing came of it all; a peace was patched up with the Parlement, and each of the grandees got something for himself, which had been his only reason for levying civil war. Beaufort was assured of his Admiralty, Longueville was made Viceroy of Normandy, Bouillon compensated for Sedan—and so on. La Rochefoucauld, too, who had taken up arms for the sake of Mme. de Longueville—
“Pour mériter son cœur, pour plaire à ses beaux yeux,
J’ai fait la guerre aux rois; je l’aurais fait aux dieux”—
we must suppose that he also was rewarded. There is an interesting page in the Memoirs of André d’Ormesson, one of an upright family of lawyers, which by stating the mere facts lets in the light upon the Fronde. All he does is to draw up a list of the grands seigneurs of 1648-55, with a statement of how often they changed sides in the seven years. It should be studied by all who wish to know how not to make civil war. But Retz too gives the spirit of the thing equally well. When his quarrel with Condé was coming to a head, and he was preparing, as he threatened, to push that prince off the pavement, he collected his friends about him, and among them two light-hearted marquises, Rouillac and Canillac. But when Canillac saw Rouillac he said to Retz, “I came to you, sir, to assure you of my services; but it is not reasonable that the two greatest asses in the kingdom should be on the same side. So I am off to the Hôtel de Condé.” And, he adds, you are to observe that he went there!
Retz alone, who, if he had been serious, might have been master of Paris, had nothing—except, of course, his Cardinal’s hat, which he would have had anyhow. The Court came back, Mazarin was forced out of France for a couple of years. But the Queen had him in again; and then it was his turn. Retz was persuaded into the Louvre, immediately arrested and carried off to Vincennes. It was a shock to his vanity that the populace took it calmly. There were no barricades for him. From Vincennes he was presently removed to Nantes, whence, with the assistance of his friends—and I cannot but suspect the connivance of the governor—he escaped to the coast, landed at San Sebastian, was allowed to cross Spain and re-embark for Italy. He fetched up in Rome, where he remained for a year or two, taking part in conclaves and thoroughly enjoying himself. He spent large sums of money, which he did not possess, but never failed to receive from his friends. The French Ambassador and all the French clergy steadily cut him—but he did not take any notice. The Pope did, though, and Retz was given to understand that he had better remove himself. He went to Germany, to Switzerland, Holland, England in turn. Mazarin was dead, and Charles II restored by the time he came here. I don’t think that he did anything to the purpose with our Court, though no doubt Charles was glad of him. Neither Evelyn nor Pepys have anything to say about him; and I fancy that he was only a passing guest. As soon as he could he crept back to Court, to which he had already surrendered his coadjutorship. Louis employed him once or twice; but his day was over. He lived mostly at Commercy, where he tried economy, and made periodical retreats, as La Rochefoucauld unkindly says, “withdrawing himself from the Court which was withdrawing itself from him.” He was four million livres in debt, but managed to pay them off, and even to contemplate a snug residuary estate which he intended for Mme. de Grignan, Mme. de Sévigné’s high-stomached daughter. But Mme. de Grignan snubbed him consistently and severely, and nothing came of it. He died in 1679, drained of his fiery juices, making a “good end.” The stormy Coadjutor had become “notre cher Cardinal.”
His Memoirs, taken on end, are wearisome, because endless intrigue, diamond-cut-diamond and chicanery are wearisome, as well as intricate, unless some discernible principle can be made out of them. It seems that Retz did nothing except talk—but, as Michelet points out, that was what France at large did when the Gascons were let into Paris with Henri IV. Read desultorily, they are delightful, witty, worldly-wise, untirably vivacious, thrilling and glittering like broken ice. His Machiavellisms are worth hunting out:
“The great inconvenience of civil war is that you must be more careful of what you ought not to tell your friends than of what you ought to do to your enemies.
“The most common source of disaster among men is that they are too much afraid of the present and not enough of the future.
“In dealing with princes it is as dangerous, if not as criminal, to be able to do good as to wish to do harm.
“One of Cardinal Mazarin’s greatest faults was that he was never able to believe that anyone spoke to him with honest intention.”
When the Queen-Regent was working her hardest for Mazarin’s return, she tried to win Retz over to help her. He told her bluntly that such a move would mean the ruin of the State. How so, she asked him, if Monsieur and M. le Prince should agree to it? “Because, Madam,” said Retz, “Monsieur would never agree to it until the State was already in danger, and M. le Prince never, except to put it in danger.” Excellent, and quite true.
After Retz’s death, the Président Hénault, writing about his Memoirs, asked how one was to believe that a man would have the courage, or the folly, to say worse things about himself than his greatest enemy could have said. The answer, of course, is that Retz had no suspicion that he was saying bad things about himself. He said a great deal that was not true. Other chronicles of the Fronde give detailed accounts of such days as that of the Barricades, with not a word of the Coadjutor in them. But even if it had all been true, it would have seemed a perfectly simple matter to him. If you have no moral sense, the words “good” and “bad” have only a relative meaning. It is much harder to understand why he did the things which he relates, or why, if he did not do them, he said that he did. What was he trying to get done? Did he hate Mazarin? There is no evidence that he did anything more than despise him. La Rochefoucauld, whom he accuses, by the way, of having tried to assassinate him, explains him and his Memoirs alike by vanity. “Far from declaring himself Mazarin’s enemy in order to supplant him, his only aim was to seem formidable, and to indulge the foolish vanity of opposing him.” If Retz knew of that “portrait”—and he did, because Mme. de Sévigné sent it him—his own more benevolent one of its author must be reckoned in his favour. He had written it in his Memoirs, but allowed it to stand there unaltered except for one little word. He had originally said that La Rochefoucauld was the most accomplished courtier and most honest man of his age. He scratched out the honesty.
Personally, I picture a happy rencontre in the Elysian Fields in or about 1679, when the Cardinal de Retz should have arrived and greeted his brother in the purple. A lifting of red hats, a pressing of hands—“Caro Signore, sta sempre bene?” and so on. There had been bitter war on earth; each was a keen blade, each an Italian. Each had had his triumphs. Retz had twice driven Mazarin out of Paris and once out of France. But Mazarin had proved the better stayer. He had returned, put Retz to flight, and died worth forty millions. Retz came back, made a good end, and only just cleared his debts. And what had it all been about? Some say, Anne of Austria, an elderly, ill-tempered, fat woman; some say vanity, some ambition. I say, Il Talento and the joy of battle: the brain taut, the eye alert, the sword-hand flickering like lightning on a summer night. Greek was meeting Greek. Inevitably that must have been. There was not room for two Italians of that stamp in France.
But let us always remember that he was mourned by Mme. de Sévigné, who said that he had been her friend for thirty years. There is the best thing to be known about him.