Out of all the mass of writing produced in the second half of the sixteenth century in France (or by men who must be assigned to that period but who lived into the seventeenth), which is valuable for one reason or another, all is not literature. Only a part can be read from any other motive than interest in the matter. The historians Palma Cayet, Jean de Serres, and his brother Olivier de Serres, author of the Théâtre d’Agriculture, for instance, will hardly be read for their style, or except by students. |Sully.| As much must be said of the memoirs of Sully, which are called for short Les Œconomies Royales.[104] It is not because this book began to be published at the Château de Sully in 1638 that we must leave it aside, for in matter and spirit it belongs to the previous century. Nor is it because Les Œconomies Royales are wanting in interest. They are of great historical value, and the form is attractive from its mere oddity. Sully employed four secretaries to tell him his own life, so that they are found informing their master, “Monsieur your father had four sons, for whom he had no other ambition than to make them such gallant men that they might raise their house to its ancient splendour, from which the fall of the elder line to the distaff [i.e., to female heirs] three times, and the unthrifty courses of his ancestors, and especially of his father, had much diminished it in goods.” Or a little further on, “This [viz., to be a faithful and obedient servant] you also swore to him in such fair terms, with so much confidence, and in so agreeable a tone of voice, that he at once conceived great hopes of you.” Yet the oddity and the matter are the virtues of the Œconomies Royales. Something equivalent must needs be said of the memoirs of Castelnau, of Gaspard de Saulx-Tavannes—written by his son Jean—of Condé, of François de Guise, and many others.[105]
Bodin.
Jean Bodin (1530-1596) is a great name in political science. His République, first published in French in 1578 and then enlarged and translated into Latin by the author in 1586, must always remain of value, if for no other reason than because it shows how it was possible for men of the sixteenth century who were not merely servile courtiers, to believe in the “right divine” of kings and the excellence of despotism. Bodin’s influence, even among ourselves, was strong in the seventeenth century. Strafford was almost certainly thinking of him when he told the Council that the king was entitled, as representative of the State, to act legibus solutus; and his doctrine was taught in incomparable English by Hobbes. Yet Bodin will hardly be read for his French, and what we cannot read for the form cannot be called literature.
The great memoir-writers.
It shows, as fully as anything well could, the wealth of French prose that we can leave aside so many writers, even in what is not one of the great periods, and yet retain a considerable body of literature in the very fullest sense of the word. Montaigne, who is pre-eminent, stands by himself, alike in form and in matter, and so for other reasons does the Satyre Ménippée. But among the memoir-writers who also were in some cases historians, there are five who would of themselves be enough to make the wealth of any other literature in this kind—Carloix, La Noue, D’Aubigné, Monluc, and Brantôme. They came indeed in a happy hour. The generation was full of strong and violent characters, and of sudden picturesque events to supply them with matter. The language had been developed and shaped by Rabelais, Calvin, and the translators with Amyot at their head, while it had not yet been pruned by the pedantry of the seventeenth century. It still kept its colour. In history the classics and the Italians had supplied models of more capability than the chronicles which Comines had followed. For the model of the memoir, a people who could look back to Joinville and Villehardouin had no need of foreign influence.
Carloix.
The five writers just named are not only excellent in themselves, but each of them is either in his own person the representative of a class, or makes us acquainted with one. Vincent Carloix wrote, not his own life, but that of his master, François de Scépeaux, Marshal de Vieilleville (1509-1571).[106] Carloix was the Marshal’s secretary for thirty-five years, and was fully trusted by him. It was by Vieilleville’s direction that the secretary undertook the memoirs, for which he was supplied with ample materials. He gives, as to the matter, the picture of a very important member of the party called “Les Politiques”—that is, those Frenchmen who, with no wish to separate from the Church of Rome, had yet no fanatical enmity to the Huguenots on religious grounds, but who were the enemies of the Dukes of Guise of the house of Lorraine. “Les Politiques” conquered in the end by alliance with Henry IV., and from them, years after the death of Vieilleville, came one of the most remarkable of political satires, the Satyre Ménippée. The style of Carloix is one of singular life and colour, “although,” as the editor of the edition of 1757 says, “it is full of Gaulish, and antiquated, phrases and expressions.” It would now appear more proper to put “because.” Carloix has been said to have taken “Le Loyal Serviteur,” who wrote the life of Bayard, as his model. But if so, he followed him only in his plain narrative. Carloix has a wit and a share of the quality called by the French malice, wanting to Bayard’s simple-hearted squire. Under his air of candour he is a shrewd experienced man of the world.
La Noue.
François de la Noue, called Iron Arm, was born in Brittany of a well-connected family in 1531, and was killed at the siege of Lamballe in 1591. His character was drawn in the concise words of Henry IV.: “He was a thorough good soldier, and, still more, a thorough good man.” “C’était un grand homme de guerre, encore plus un grand homme de bien.” What are called his memoirs form the twenty-sixth book of his Discours Politiques et Militaires, a great work of description, criticism, and reflection, rather than history, composed while he was a prisoner in the hands of the Spaniards in the Low Countries.[107] La Noue, who was converted to “the religion” by the chaplain of Coligny, was a type of all that was best among the Huguenots. He did not embrace the fanaticism together with the principles of his party. The memoirs, which are in fact an account of the wars of Religion, from the first “taking up of arms” in 1562 till 1570, are remarkably impartial. La Noue was one of the small body of men who can be perfectly loyal to their own party, and yet never falsify the story in its favour. He is just to the chiefs on the other side. Though a profoundly moral man, he was saved from priggery by a very real sense of humour. He could see the laughable side of things. His style wants the inimitable flash of Monluc, and it has not got the very peculiar flavour of the prose of D’Aubigné, but it is nervous, clear, exact, and thoroughly excellent in its own way—the way of a wise temperate man, a quiet gentleman, and modest valiant soldier.
D’Aubigné.