In order to appreciate the full merit of the Satyre Ménippée, the reader must call to mind that after the murder of Henry III. his cousin of Navarre became King of France by inheritance. Henry IV. had the support not only of his own subjects and the Huguenots, but of the “Politiques,”—the moderate men, as we might say, among the Roman Catholics. The ardent partisans of the Church turned against him, and banded themselves with the princes of the house of Guise. The Catholic League, which had been first founded by Gaspard de Saulx-Tavannes nearly thirty years before, after the conspiracy of Amboise, was extended, and became a great organisation for the purpose of setting aside the heretic King of Navarre, and putting some assured Romanist on the throne. In reality it was little more than a cloak for the ambition of the Guises, and the partisans who saw a chance of profiting by anarchy. It had the support of the King of Spain. Paris was held, partly by the help of the more fanatical Roman Catholic clergy and the mob, partly by a so-called Spanish garrison—Moors, Neapolitans, and what not—made up out of the sweepings of Philip II.’s army. Even the conversion of Henry did not disarm the League. It called a sham meeting of the Estates of the realm to debate the question of setting him aside. At this moment a body of men in Paris combined to assail these so-called États with ridicule; and when we remember how brutally the “Guisards” had disposed of opponents and critics, it is hard to exaggerate the courage they showed.
Its authors.
The leader of the band was Pierre Leroy, canon of the Sainte Chapelle. It was to him that the idea first suggested itself, and he drew about him his friends Gillot, Passerat, Rapin, Chrestien, Pithou, and Durant. As may well be supposed, the early history of an anonymous work is somewhat obscure. It was at first a small manuscript pamphlet, handed about quietly. Additions were made. The verse seems to have been introduced at the later stages. Whether it was actually printed in 1593 appears very doubtful. The first known example is of 1594, and, as was natural enough, the Satyre was subject to a good deal of modification. The names of men who had been attacked, and who passed over later to Henry IV., were dropped out. Even the title was altered. The first chosen was “Abbrégé et l’Ame des Estatz convoquez à Paris en l’an 1593 le 10 Febvrier. Jouxte la relation de Mademoiselle de la Lande, Messieurs Domay et Victon Penitens blancqs.” An alternative title was “Le Catholicum de la Ligue, 1593.” The name of Satyre Ménippée (taken from Lucian) seems to have been given by common consent rather than by the authors, and the first undoubted edition is called “La Vertu du Catholicon d’Espagne, avec un Abrégé de la tenue des Estats de Paris convoquez aux de Febvrier 1593 par les chefs de la Ligue. Tiré des mémoires de Mademoiselle de la Lande, alias la Bayonnoise, et des secrettes confabulations d’elle et du Père Commelaid.”
Its form and spirit.
In its final form the Satyre Ménippée has some resemblance in form, and a marked likeness in spirit, to our own Anti-Jacobin as it was in the first and most militant stage. The authors of both were fighting with a combination of ridicule and argument against anarchy, and in the name of common-sense and patriotism. There is the same resistance to the foreigner in both. The Gallican clergy of the stamp of Leroy were no friends to the interference of the Pope in French affairs. That Philip II. was a foreigner could be disputed by nobody; and though the Lorraine princes had played a great part in France, and were connected with the Valois by marriage, they were still considered strangers. The Satyre Ménippée opens by a burlesque speech delivered by a quack in praise of the Catholicon or universal cure of Spain—of the bribes which Philip II. was lavishing in order to promote the misfortunes of his neighbours. Then comes a description of the procession at the opening of the Estates, and of the tapestry on the walls, in which the different chiefs of the League are ridiculed, and the misfortunes they were bringing on the country shown. Then Mayenne makes a speech as Lieutenant-General of the kingdom—the sort of speech he would have made if he had told the truth. Various churchmen then speak—Italian or Italianate priests who were prepared to sacrifice France to the Pope, or mere beaters of the drum ecclesiastic. Then comes what is perhaps the best single thing in the Satyre, the speech of M. des Rieux, who speaks for the noblesse. The choice of this man—an historical character who was finally hanged as a brigand—to speak for the nobles is in itself a most ingenious stroke. He was a thorough military ruffian of the worst stamp, low-born and ignorant, who had obtained command of a castle, and who lived by plundering his neighbours. Des Rieux begins by giving it as his opinion that nothing could prove the excellence of the League more fully than just this, that the like of him could come to speak for the nobles. He goes on in the same tone, which is the swagger of a vulgar adventurer who feels himself safe. No more artful way of showing to what the League was reducing France could have been chosen. The speech of Des Rieux is attributed to Jacques Gillot, clerk to the Parliament of Paris. Then the tone of burlesque is dropped, and a vigorous denunciation of the League is delivered by M. d’Aubray as the spokesman of the Third Estate, the Burgesses. This, the longest of all, is said to be the work of Pierre Pithou. The verse, partly scattered through the book and partly collected at the end, belongs to Jean Passerat, the successor of Ramus at the Collége Royal, and to Gilles Durant, a lawyer and country gentleman. Both Passerat and Durant wrote other verse of excellence.
All this memoir, history, and satire is interesting, but no part of it belongs to the literature which every thinking man in every country has read, or knows that it would be good to read. They may be all left aside, not without loss indeed, yet without irreparable loss. But whoever has not read the Essays of Montaigne has missed something necessary for the “criticism of life”—the exposition of a habit of thought, a way of looking at things, of discussing and deciding questions of conduct and principle, which are not only French and peculiar to one time, but human and universal.
Montaigne.
Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne, was born at the Château de Montaigne in Perigord, near Bordeaux, in 1533. A legend, which appears to have no foundation, asserts that the family was of English origin. It had risen by the salt-fish trade, and its nobility was of recent origin, facts which Montaigne did not recognise so calmly as a philosopher should. His father served under Francis I. in the wars of Italy, and increased the considerable fortune he had inherited, by a rich marriage with Antoinette de Louppes, or Lopes, a Spanish Jewess by descent. Michel was educated at the College of Bordeaux by Buchanan, Muretus, and other famous scholars. By a fad of his father’s, he was surrounded from the beginning by people who only spoke Latin, and so learned the language naturally. His schooling came to an end when he was thirteen. Although he inherited a strong frame from his father, and did possibly serve one or two campaigns, he applied himself to the law, and not to arms, as a profession. He held a judicial post, first at Périgueux, then at Bordeaux, but resigned it early, and retired to his own house. Montaigne was known at Court, which he visited several times, even before he published the first two books of his Essays in 1580. During one visit to Paris in 1588 to superintend the publication of the third book, he was an eye-witness of the “day of the barricades,” and was imprisoned in the Bastille by Leaguers. He travelled abroad, and returned to hold municipal office at Bordeaux, where he showed more caution than courage during a visitation of the plague. He died at his own house of Montaigne in 1592, just as the long anarchy of the wars of Religion, which he had never allowed to ruffle the calm of his life, was coming to an end.[114]
The fame of Montaigne was great in his own time, and has never suffered eclipse. Nor is it possible that it ever should, since, in addition to personal qualities of an amusing and attractive kind, he was the thorough type of a certain stamp of intellect. He was as complete a Gascon as his countryman Monluc, and may even be said to have carried the peculiar quality of his race to a yet higher pitch. Monluc was resolved that all the world should know him for the astute and intrepid soldier he was. Montaigne did not condescend to justify himself by his deeds. He asked the world to be interested in him, not as a soldier, nor indeed as anything, except just a thinking man. And the world has never denied that the man and his thoughts were worth knowing. |His Essays.| The subject of his Essays is always substantially Michel of Montaigne, his health, his reading, his views of men, things, and opinions, his habits of mind and body. In matter, in form, and in intellectual scope he is all the world apart from Brantôme, and yet he is not wholly unlike the old disappointed courtier of the Valois, discoursing Des Hommes and Des Femmes. Both talk out all that was in them, with a certain affectation of carelessness, but in reality with thought, and no small toil over the manner of saying. During his later years Montaigne employed himself much in covering the margins of a copy of the so-called fifth edition of his Essays with corrections and additions. The book still exists in the library at Bordeaux. After his death his widow intrusted his friend, Pierre de Brach, with the task of editing a revised edition. Brach, who had the help of Montaigne’s adopted daughter, Mdlle. de Gournay, produced what was for long the accepted text in the edition of 1595. But though Pierre de Brach and Mdlle. de Gournay worked with care, they omitted a good deal, and misunderstood something. Successive editors in this century have laboured to correct their errors of omission and commission, but the text of Montaigne has never yet been fixed to the satisfaction of exacting critics.