The speech was certainly not a very gallant one; but I half suspect that our admiration of royal attainments is founded upon a similar principle.
Kings can rarely be good talkers, because they have not gone through the great training-school of talk—which is, conversation. This is impossible where there is no equality; and how often does it occur to monarchs to meet each other, and when they do, what a stilted, unreal thing, must be their intercourse! Of reigning sovereigns, the King of Prussia is perhaps the most gifted in this way; of course, less endowed with that shrewd appreciation of character, that intuitive perception of every man’s bias, which marks the Monarch of the Tuileries, but possessed of other and very different qualities, and with one especially which never can be overvalued—an earnest sincerity of purpose in every thing. There is no escaping from the conviction, that here is a man who reflects and wills, and whose appeal to conscience is the daily rule of life. The Nationality of Germany is his great object, and for it he labours as strenuously—may it be as successfully!—as ever his “Great” predecessor did to accomplish the opposite. What a country would it be if the same spirit of nationality were to prevail from the Baltic to the Black Sea, and “Germany” have a political signification as well as a geographical one!
After all, if we have outlived the age of heroic monarchy, we have happily escaped that of royal débauchés. A celebrated Civil Engineer of our day is reported to have said, in his examination before a parliamentary committee, that he regarded “rivers as intended by Providence to supply navigable canals;” in the same spirit one might opine certain characters of royalty were created to supply materials for Vaudevilles.
What would become of the minor theatres of Paris if Louis XIV., and Richelieu, and the Regency were to be interdicted? On whose memory dare they hang so much of shameless vice and iniquitous folly? Where find characters so degraded, so picturesque, so abandoned, so infamous, and so amusing? What time and trouble, too, are saved by the adoption of this era! No need of wearisome explanations and biographical details of the dramatis persono. When one reads the word “Marquis,” he knows it means a man whose whole aim in life is seduction; while “Madame la Marquise” is as invariably the easy victim of royal artifice.
It might open a very curious view into the distinctive nature of national character to compare the recognised class to which vice is attributed in different countries; for while in England we select the aristocracy always, as the natural subjects for depravity, in the Piedmontese territory all the stage villains are derived from the mercantile world. Instead of a Lord, as with us, the seducer is always a Manufacturer or a Shipowner; and vice a Captain of Dragoons, their terror of domestic peace, is a Cotton-spinner or a Dealer in Hardware.
Let it not be supposed that this originates in any real depravity, or any actual want of honesty, in the mercantile world. No! the whole is attributable to the “Censor.” By his arbitrary dictate the entire of a piece is often re-cast, and so habituated have authors become to the prevailing taste, that they now never think of occasioning him the trouble of the correction. Tradesman there stands for scoundrel, as implicitly as with us an Irishman is a blunderer and a Scotchman a knave. Exercised as this power is, and committed to such hands as we find it in foreign countries, it is hard to conceive any more quiet but effectual agent for the degradation of a national taste. It is but a few weeks back I saw a drama marked for stage representation in a city of Lombardy, in which the words “Pope” and “Cardinal” were struck out as irreverent to utter; but all the appeals—and most impious they were—to the Deity were suffered to remain unmutilated.
And now I am reminded of rather a good theme for one of those little dramatic pieces which amuse the public of the Palais Royal and the Variétés. I chanced upon it in an old French book, called “Mémoires et Souvenirs de Jules Auguste Prévost, premier Valet de Charge de S. A. le Duc de Courcelles.” Printed at the Hague, anno 1742.
I am somewhat sceptical about the veraciousness of many of M. Prévost’s recitals; the greater number are, indeed, little else than chronicles of his losses at Ombre, with a certain Mdlle. Valencay, or narratives of “petits soupers,” where his puce-coloured shorts and coat of ambre velvet were the chief things worthy of remembrance. Yet here and there are little traits that look like facts, too insignificant for fiction, and preserving something of the character of the time to which they are linked. The whole bears no trace of ever having been intended for publication; and it is not difficult to see where the new touches have been laid on over the original picture. It was in all probability a mere commonplace book, in which certain circumstances of daily life got mixed up with the written details of his station in the Duke’s household.
Neither its authenticity nor correctness, however, are of any moment to my purpose, which was to jot down—from memory if I can,—the subject I believe to be invested with dramatic material.
M. Prévost’s narrative is very brief; indeed it barely extends beyond a full allusion to a circumstance very generally known at the time. The events run somewhat thus, or at least should do so, in the piece. At the close of a brilliant fête at Versailles, where every fascination that an age of unbounded luxury could procure was assembled, the King retired to his apartment, followed by that prince of vaudeville characters, the Maréchal Richelieu. His Majesty was wearied and out of spirits; the pleasures of the evening, so far from having, as usual, elevated his spirits and awakened his brilliancy, had depressed and fatigued him. He was tired of the unvarying repetition of what his heart had long ceased to have any share in; and, in fact, to use the vulgar, but most fitting phrase, he was bored!