Knights and their days

by Dr. Doran

The heart of the true knight was shattered by the death of Julie in 1671, at the age of sixty-four. He survived her nineteen years. They were passed in sorrow, but also in continual active usefulness; and when, at length, in 1690, the grave of his beloved wife opened to receive him, Flechier pronounced a fitting funeral oration over both.

The daughter and only surviving child of this distinguished pair gave, with her hand, the lordship of Rambouillet to the Duc d’Uzes, “Chevalier de l’ordre du Saint Esprit.” The knightly family of D’Angennes had held it for three centuries. It was in 1706 destined to become royal. Louis XIV. then purchased it for the Count of Toulouse, legitimatized son of himself and Madame de Montespan. This count was knight and Grand Admiral of France, at the age of five years. In 1704, he had just completed his twenty-fifth year. He is famous for having encountered the fleet commanded by Rook and Shovel, after the capture of Gibraltar, and for having what the cautious Russian generals call, “withdrawn out of range,” when he found himself on the point of being utterly beaten. He behaved himself as bravely as any knight could have done; but the government was not satisfied with him. Pontchartrain, the Minister of Marine, recalled him, sent him to Rambouillet, and left him there to shoot rabbits, and like Diocletian, raise cabbages.

His son and successor, who was the great Duke de Penthièvre, commenced his knighthood early. He was even made Grand Admiral of France before he knew salt water from fresh. He studied naval tactics as Uncle Toby and the corporal fought their old battles—namely, with toy batteries. In the duke’s case, it was, moreover, with little vessels and small sailors all afloat in a miniature fish-pond, made to represent, for the nonce, the mighty and boundless deep. This grand admiral never ventured on the ocean, but he bore himself chivalrously on the bloody field of Dettingen, and he won imperishable laurels by his valor at Fontenoy. For such scenes and their glories, however, the preux chevalier cared but little. Ere the French Te Deum was sung upon the last-named field, he hastened back to his happy hearth at home. Rambouillet was then the abiding-place of all the virtues. There the home-loving knight read the Scriptures while the duchess sat at his side making garments for the poor. There, the Chevalier Florian, his secretary and friend, meditated those graceful rhymes and that harmonious prose, in which human nature is in pretty masquerade, walking about like Watteau’s figures, in vizors, brocades, high heels, and farthingales. When the duchess died in child-birth, of her sixth child, her husband withdrew to La Trappe where, among other ex-soldiers, he for weeks prayed and slept upon the bare ground. Five out of his children died early. Among them was the chivalrous but intemperate Prince de Lamballe, who died soon after his union with the unhappy princess who fell a victim to those fierce French revolutionists—who were ordinarily so amiable, according to M. Louis Blanc, that they were never so delighted as when they could rescue a human being from death.

It was by permission of the duke, who refused to sell his house, that Louis XV. built in the adjacent forest the hunting-lodge of St. Hubert. An assemblage of kings, courtiers, knights and ladies there met, at whose doings the good saint would have blushed, could he have witnessed them. One night the glittering crowd had galloped there for a carouse, when discovery was made that the materials for supper had been forgotten, or left behind at Versailles. “Let us go to Penthièvre!” was the universal cry; but the king looked grave at the proposition. Hunger and the universal opposition, however, overcame him. Forth the famished revellers issued, and played a reveillée on the gates of Rambouillet loud enough to have startled the seven sleepers. “Penthièvre is in bed!” said one. “He is conning his breviary!” sneered another. “Gentlemen, he is, probably, at prayers,” said the king, who, like an Athenian, could applaud the virtue which he failed to practise. “Let us withdraw,” added the exemplary royal head of the order of the Holy Ghost. “If we do,” remarked Madame du Barry, “I shall die of hunger; let us knock again.” To the storm which now beset the gates, the latter yielded; and as they swung open, they disclosed the duke, who, girt in a white apron, and with a ladle in his hand, received his visiters with the announcement that he was engaged in helping to make soup for the poor. The monarch and his followers declared that no poor could be more in need of soup than they were. They accordingly seized the welcome supply, devoured it with the appetite of those for whom it was intended, and paid the grave knight who was their host, in the false coin of pointless jokes. How that host contrasted with his royal guest, may be seen in the fact told of him, when a poor woman kissed his hand, and asked a favor as he was passing in a religious procession. “In order of religion before God,” said he, “I am your brother. In all other cases, for ever your friend.” The Order of the Holy Ghost never had a more enlightened member than he.

In 1785 Louis XVI. in some sort compelled him to part with Rambouillet for sixteen million of francs. He retired to Eu, taking with him the bodies of the dead he had loved when living. There were nine of that silent company; and as the Duke passed with them on his sad and silent way, the clouds wept over them, and the people crowded the long line of road, paying their homage in honest tears.

Then came that revolutionary deluge which swept from Rambouillet the head of the order of the Holy Ghost, and the entire chapter with him; and which dragged from the mead and the dairy the queen and princesses, whose pastime it was to milk the cows in fancy dresses. The Duke de Penthièvre died of the Revolution, yet not through personal violence offered to himself. The murder of his daughter-in-law, the Princess de Lamballe, was the last fatal stroke; and he died forgiving her assassins and his own.

During the first Republic there was nothing more warlike at Rambouillet than the merino flocks which had been introduced by Louis XVI. for the great benefit of his successors. A scene of some interest occurred there in the last days of the empire.

On the 27th of March, 1814, the empress Maria Louisa with the King of Rome in her arms, his silver-gray jacket bearing those ribboned emblems of chivalry which may still be seen upon it at the Louvre, sought shelter there, while she awaited the issue of the bloody struggle which her own father was maintaining against her husband. The empress passed three days at Rambouillet, solacing her majestic anguish by angling for carp. Ultimately, the Emperor of Austria entered the hall where his imperial son-in-law had made so many Knights of the Legion of Honor, to carry off his daughter and the disinherited heir. As the three sat that night together before the wood-fire, the Arch-Duchess Maria-Louisa talked about the teeth of the ex-king of Rome, while two thousand Austrian soldiers kept watch about the palace.

The gates had again to be open to a fugitive. On the last of the “three glorious days” of July a poor, pale, palsied fugitive rushed into the chateau, obtained, not easily, a glass of water and a crust, and forthwith hurried on to meet captivity at last. This was the Prince de Polignac. Two hours after he had left came the old monarch Charles X., covered with dust, dropping tears like rain, bewildered with past memories and present realities, and loudly begging for food for the two “children of France,” the offspring of his favorite son, the Duke de Berri. In his own palace a king of France was compelled to surrender his own service of plate, before the village would sell him bread in return. When refreshed therewith, he had strength to abdicate in favor of his son, the Duke d’Angoulême, who at once resigned in favor of his nephew the Duke de Bordeaux; and this done, the whole party passed by easy stages into an inglorious exile. With them was extinguished the Order of the Holy Ghost; and never since that day have the emblematic dove and star been seen on the breast of any knight in France.

Louis Philippe would fain have appropriated Rambouillet to himself; but the government assigned it to the nation, and let it to a phlegmatic German, who had an ambition to sleep on the bed of kings, and could afford to pay for the gratification of his fancy. It was on the expiration of his lease that the house and grounds were made over to a company of speculators, who sadly desecrated fair Julie’s throne. The present sovereign of France has given it a worthy occupation. It is now an asylum and a school for the children of the brave. It began as the cradle of knights; and the orphans of those who were as brave as any of the chevaliers of old now find a refuge at the old hearth of the Knights of Amaury.