The title of memoir-writer must be understood in a very wide sense when it is applied to D’Aubigné. Strictly speaking, the short Vie à ses Enfants is his memoir.[108] The Histoire Universelle, his main work in prose, is a great general history of contemporary events at home and abroad. But then it is also a history of events in which D’Aubigné himself played an active part, and which he tells from an intensely personal point of view. It is to be noted that it ends with the wars of Religion, and the peace which was brought about by the abjuration of the king—that is to say, when D’Aubigné himself ceased to take a prominent share in public affairs. To judge by his other prose work, which is considerable,[109] D’Aubigné was by nature a vehement—or even virulent—pamphleteer. His Baron de Fœneste and his Confession de Sancy are fiercely satirical. They are also rather obscure, and not easily readable. It was on the suggestion of Henry IV. that he first began to think of writing the history of his time. He was to have worked in co-operation with the President Jeannin, an ex-Leaguer, and another thorough-going partisan. It is difficult to imagine what they could have produced between them. This fantastic scheme was dropped, and the Histoire Universelle was written after the king’s death. The style of D’Aubigné shows the influence of his learned education, and of his practice in the poetic school of Ronsard. He sometimes uses purely pedantic words, as when he says that his father put him under the charge of a tutor, “Jean Costin, homme astorge et impiteux.” Astorge is a Greek word (ἄστοργος), which would never have been used by Carloix, La Noue, or Monluc. Again, he deliberately followed classic models in the long speeches, frequently delivered by himself, which abound in his History, and are the most carefully written parts. When he tells Henry IV. in one of these addresses that it is useless for him to endeavour to make peace with the Court, because “you are guilty of your birth, and of the wrongs which have been done you,” the echo of Sallust and of Tacitus is distinctly audible; yet he can also be colloquial, and has no scruple in using idiomatic and proverbial phrases which a later generation would have rejected as unworthy of the “dignity of history.” Dignity is not wanting to D’Aubigné, but it is given by the force of his thoughts and of his character, which is that of a man who might be a tyrannical friend and an exacting servant, but who was brave and high-minded.
Monluc.
For a perfect picture of a partisan on the other side we have only to go to the Commentaries of one whom D’Aubigné describes as “ce vieux renard de Monluc.” Yet Blaise de Lasseran-Massencome, Seigneur de Monluc, is perhaps hardly to be called a party man. Like the Lord Byron of our own civil war, he “was passionately the king’s.” He was born in or about 1503, near Condom, of an ancient and impoverished family of Gascony. Though the eldest son, he had even less than the traditional cadet’s portion. He could boast that, though a gentleman born, he had fought his way up from the lowest rank. After serving in the wars of Italy, he was named Governor of Guyenne by the king, and there distinguished himself by a ferocity exceptional even in those times. An arquebuse-wound in the face at the siege of Rabastens in 1570 disabled him for active service. His Commentaries were dictated in his last years, and he died in 1577.[110] It is one of the many sayings attributed to Henry IV. that the Commentaries of Monluc are “the Soldier’s Bible.” Whether the king said it or not, no truer description of this delightful book could be given. Monluc was a man of his time and his race. He “had the honour to be a Gascon” in every sense of the word, having all the valour, enterprise, craft, humour, and expansive vanity of the type. But he was also a perfect soldier, and profoundly convinced that his business was the greatest a man could follow. His Commentaries were avowedly written to show the “captains and lieutenants of France” what a soldier ought to be, by the example of Blaise de Monluc. The very thoroughness of his vanity gives the book a sincere tone. We feel that he was far too well pleased with himself to think it necessary to lie. That he saw things through the colouring medium of his self-sufficiency is possible—even certain—but at least he gives them as he saw them. Monluc was also a very able man, who was not wanting in appreciation of the humorous side of his own gasconnades, and therefore his vanity is never silly. The style is that of a book dictated by a man with a boundless faconde—that is to say, command of ready language; but it is too vivid and has too much substance ever to be garrulous. At times he can strike out images of great force.
Brantôme.
Different though they were in life and character, there is a certain resemblance between Monluc and Brantôme. Both have the same air of perfect satisfaction with themselves, and both pour out the fruits of their varied experience with the same appearance of colloquial confidence.[111] Pierre de Bourdeilles, called Brantôme from the name of an abbey of which he was lay abbot—that is to say, of which he drew the abbot’s portion by favour of the king, without taking the vows—was a younger son of a distinguished family of Perigord. He was born about 1540, and died in 1614. During many years he travelled much, fought more or less, and lived at Court in the intervals of journeys or campaigns. Being disappointed of a place which the king had promised him, he was preparing to revenge himself by treason, when his horse fell with him, and crippled him for life. Brantôme now betook himself to writing his reminiscences as a consolation. Though he professed a certain contempt for letters, he spent great pains on his work, and its bulk is considerable. In addition to some minor treatises—the so-called Discours des Duels, the Rodomontades Espaignolles, and a few others—he made two great collections, which he named Des Hommes and Des Femmes. These he rewrote and revised not a little. It was his wish that they should be published as he left them, but his heirs neglected his directions. His manuscripts were copied, handed about, and finally straggled into print by fragments, to which the booksellers gave fancy names, such as Les Grandes Dames, Les Dames Galantes, and so forth. The admiration which Monluc felt for his own business of soldiering, Brantôme extended to every manifestation of energetic character by deed or word, moral or immoral, with a marked, but mainly artistic, preference for good sayings and immorality. He is not to be trusted in details, but he is in himself an invaluable witness to the time which produced him. Nowhere else can we see so fully the combination of the French love of showy action, and indifference to what we call morality, with the cruel wickedness of Italy, which distinguished the Court of the later Valois. He does not seem to have been in himself a bad man, and yet it does not appear that he saw any difference between right and wrong. Murders, and breaches of the seventh commandment, committed by ladies and gentlemen in a spirited way, have his admiration quite as easily as the most honourable actions. He tells all in the same brightly coloured, rapid, gossipping style, and stops to rejoice over every striking story which runs from his pen, whether it be a trait of magnanimity on the part of the Duke of Guise, or the brutal murder of three unarmed traders by one of his own friends, who was angry, and relieved his feelings by a butchery.
The attempt to enumerate all the writers who may be classed with one or another of the five just named could lead to nothing but a catalogue of mere names. Marguerite de Valois (1553-1615), the wife whom Henry IV. married at the “red wedding” of Saint Bartholomew, and afterwards repudiated, wrote memoirs under the direct inspiration of her friend and admirer Brantôme. Pierre de l’Estoile (1545-1611)[112] wrote Mémoires-Journaux—i.e., a diary of his time. The Correspondence of Catherine de Medici—recently edited by M. de Ferrière—of Duplessis-Mornay (1549-1623), and of the Cardinal D’Ossat (1557-1604), which have long been known, the Negotiations of Pierre Jeannin (1546-1632), the great History of De Thou, written in Latin, are all of value, and are all well written. The list could easily be swollen, but it would be to little purpose where space does not allow of more than mention. From the literary point of view they are notable as showing that the autobiographical, anecdotic, historical, and, in short, average practical writing faculty of the French, which has given their literature its unrivalled continuity, was in full vigour during these generations, when, as one is tempted to think, men must have been far too intent on keeping themselves alive in the prevailing anarchy to have leisure for the use of the pen. Spain, in its happier days, produced something approaching the French historical and memoir work of the later sixteenth century. Elizabethan England, rich beyond comparison in poetic genius, has nothing like it to show. It could not be, of course; and yet we could have spared, not Marlowe, but perhaps Greene and Peele, and certainly Nash, Lodge (the lyrics apart), and Breton, to see the Armada, and the voyages to the Isles, through the eyes of an English Monluc, or the pacification of Ireland as told by a La Noue of our own, or such a picture of the Court of Elizabeth as could have been painted by the nearest conceivable English approach to Brantôme.
The Satyre Ménippée.
There is, however, one piece of French prose of what may be called the practical order—written, that is to say, to secure a definite business end—which is far too good in itself, as well as too important in its consequences, to be passed with a mere mention. This is the famous, and in some ways still unrivalled, Satyre Ménippée.[113] The book is a small collection of pamphlets, burlesques, and satiric verse. When due precaution is taken to avoid exaggeration and misunderstanding, it may be compared to our own Martin Mar-Prelate pamphlets. Both were the work of a body of men not individually of importance, who yet produced a great effect by combined action for a cause. Each is the beginning of journalism in its own country. They were nearly contemporary, but Martin Mar-Prelate came a little earlier. His dates are 1589-1592, and the Satyre Ménippée belongs to 1593 and 1594. The comparison must not be pushed further, since the Satyre Ménippée is markedly superior to Martin in artistic skill, and, it must be allowed, in dignity of purpose also, however kindly we may wish to think of the Puritan writers. Neither is there any reason to suppose that any connection existed between the two. If the writers of the Satyre Ménippée had any inspiration other than their own desire to answer the virulent sermons and speeches of the League, they probably found it in Erasmus, and in the Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum of Ulrich von Hutten. The fact that the Satyre and Martin appeared almost side by side, only shows that the causes which were making for the establishment of journalism were working in France as well as in England. Use had already been made of the printing-press, the pulpit, and, in France at least, of the stage, for controversy. But much had been written in Latin, whether of the study or of the kennel. The anti-papal “sotties” of Gringore, played by the encouragement of Louis XII., the anti-Church farces of the Reformers, the sermons and the pamphlets of the League, were individual work, the still uncollected raw material of possible journalism. The next step was to organise collective action. It was done roughly, and unhappily for a party purpose, in England, but in France with skill, with much literary finish, and for a national cause.
Its origin.