The boys were not overburdened with parental solicitude.
"My mother was good-natured and indulgent, and a clever woman; our escapades did not induce her to interfere with our habits."[51]
The annoyance came from another quarter. The boys had a tutor, who is described with the true d'Argenson stroke as "fou, imbécile, ignorant, libertin, et hypocrite;"[52] one of those persons who, when you have executed some very bad drawings and love them very dearly, will vent his spleen by tearing them up.[53] It became too much for mortal endurance; and when one day the tutor "advanced upon his desk," the boy received him with doubled fists.[54] From that time forward d'Argenson went his way in peace; and the little rake's progress was proceeding apace, when it was overtaken by one of those strokes of destiny which it is equally impossible to foresee and to resist.[55]
He was sent to school.
In 1709, at the age of fifteen, he went with his brother to the Jesuit College of Louis-le-Grand, which had become, under the patronage of the Great King, the most fashionable of French public schools.[56] Thither, thirty years later, he was followed by another d'Argenson—one who, in the fulness of time and the sunshine of circumstance, was to leave a record, not of maimed and weary aspiration, but of rapid, resolute achievement—Anne Robert Jacques Turgot. But the lad was busied with other thoughts. From "a man of the world who could count his conquests,"[57] he had dwindled to the compass of a mere schoolboy; and his heart was heavy over his fallen state. Occasionally the boys acted tragedies at the College; and as d'Argenson sat in the amphitheatre, pilloried in his hateful gown, a glimpse of some fair spectator whom he had known in happier days would cover him with unutterable shame.[58] But he had the tenacity of purpose which distinguished his race; his time would come; and the modest treasure he was able to amass from the savings of his pocket-money, was dissipated upon those rare occasions when he could shake off the class-room dust from his feet, and plume himself in the great world again. "Why," he asks, with that strange recurrent smile of his, "why should one laugh at such an ambition? Surely it is upon the same canvas that that of conquerors is built (bâtie)!"[59] He possessed that keen, yet kindly humour of the man who knows himself, and can laugh at himself, without ceasing to be himself.
One incident in his school career he never forgot. It began with pea-shooters, and ended with a tragedy. One morning, as the venerable professor of rhetoric, Père Lejay,[60] entered the class-room, he was received with a raking fire of peas. The culprit platoon consisted of the Duc de Boufflers, Count d'Argenson, and his faithful apparitor, Marc Pierre. Boufflers received a flogging, and died from the effect of it. His father was only a duke. But when it came to the sons of M. d'Argenson, the retributive rod was stayed by the timely remembrance of that dark and dangerous person: Jesuitical discretion came into play,[61] and the youthful malefactors escaped. It is curious that the brothers should have lived, the one to be the powerful patron of the Jesuits, the other to attack them, for the eyes of posterity, with a weapon which carries further than a "Sarbacane."
But the young Count d'Argenson was not long to trouble the repose of his spiritual task-masters. He was to complete his education in another school, deemed no less necessary to the training of the whole and perfect man. From the sallow austerity of the reverend fathers, with their hard beds and their unspeakable soup, he passed to the gracious converse of ladies' society, where knowledge was savoured with a joyous sweetness, and where the rewards of success were great indeed. Dreaming long afterwards of the year 1712 and of the gallantries of that golden age, he sighs regretfully over the hearts that fell, and over those that might have fallen had the siege been pressed.
"What a fool I was not to have profited by them! I have repented at leisure."[62]
A votary of pleasure, he was never its slave; and an event was approaching which was soon to engage him in the more sober interests of life. On the morning of September 1st, 1715, the eyelids of the Grand Monarque closed upon a long and fateful chapter in French history; and the hearts of men beat high again with the generous hopes of a newer time. France, and the humblest of her children, d'Argenson, had reached the parting of the ways. The "epic of royalty"[63] was over; the epic of revolution was about to begin. In the development of the drama d'Argenson was to bear a modest, but no mean part. He was now twenty-one. The time for dreaming had passed away; the time for action was at hand. On the threshold of his career, we may pause to gather up those early half-conscious political impressions, which, in the case of quick-minded men, have a real, if only half-recognised, influence upon the direction of future thought.
He had been but a boy of eight when great events occurred.[64] We can well imagine with what childish pleasure he must have watched the stirring of the troops in Paris on the renewal of the great War; and the wide-eyed wonderment with which he may have heard how an army of France was cutting down French citizens for the pleasure of those great black men, whom every one laughed with and called abbé; and how everybody said that one Cavalier was as brave as he was beautiful, and that he and the like of him should have been at Blenheim! And then, as he grew in wit, the excitement of boyhood may have been clouded, if ever so little, by the growing desolation, as defeat followed upon disaster. He could remember how haggard men began to cry for bread; until at last, in 1709, the stones of Paris rose in mutiny, and his own father, the Chief of Police, went in fear of his life.[65] And through it all there was no comfort, but only men said that this Great King had been too great, that he had aroused the alarm of Europe, and that at last Europe had turned to bay. And then when the peace had come, and the people were beginning to breathe, Jesuit and Jansenist reopened their feud and reviled each other in the name of God; while d'Argenson suspected, what his friend Arouet and the wits who supped with the Grand Prior disdainfully averred,[66] that there was no truth to be found upon either side, but only arrogant unspirituality. And now the King, great though he had been, had gone the way of little men; and the hearts of his own people rejoiced, even as the nations whom he had humbled in the dust.