That bacon fried gives God offence?
Or that a herring hath the charm
Almighty vengeance to disarm?
Wrapt up in Majesty divine,
Doth He regard on what we dine?”
To pass from cooks and church to courtesy and coachmen, I may here speak of a certain Girard who was known in Paris, during the Terror, for his love of what he called liberty and good living. In his early days he was a very independent coachman, and was just on the point of concluding an engagement with an aristocratic old countess, when he remarked—“Before I finally close with madame, I should like to be informed for whom madame’s horses are to make way in the streets.” “For every one,” said the countess. “On questions of precedence, I am not difficult; if it is yielded to me, I take it; if not, I wait.” “In that case,” said the aristocratic John, “I shall not suit, madame, as I myself never draw aside except for the princes of the blood!” Now this great personage in livery was no other than the Girard who became, in 1793, the “public accuser,” and who sent to the scaffold those same nobles who had not been sufficiently noble for him in 1780.
Upon the matter of what became nobility, however, there was always much confusion in the “aristocratic idea” of the highest continental families. Thus who, in contemplating the famous Princess des Ursins, seated among the most honoured at the table of the King of Spain, would dream of her writing the following sentence in one of her letters to Madame de Maintenon? “It is I who have the honour of taking from his majesty his robe de chambre, when he gets into bed; and I am there to give it to him again, with his slippers, when he rises in the morning.”
The flattery paid to royalty in France was never more prodigally offered than at the period when “wit and philosophy” were beginning to undermine the throne. We have an instance of this in what happened when the queen of Louis XV. arrived, in 1765, at Ferté-sous-Jouarre, where she intended to sup and sleep. She was met beneath an avenue of trees, outside the town, by the authorities, who offered to her, according to custom, bread and wine. The queen took a portion of the bread, broke it in two, and ate thereof, as well as of some grapes, sipping also the wine; to the delight and edification of the admiring multitude. The authorities were so struck by the act of condescension on the part of the royal personage, that they made record of the fact in the register of the town council. And this they did in such terms as to cause a commentator to remark, that they could hardly have said more, had her majesty been a genuine goddess.
After all, this sort of homage had fallen off, in 1765, from what it had been two centuries before. When Louis XII. encountered his bride, Mary of England, outside Abbeville, he clapped his feeble hands, and wished the devil might seize him (and he did die soon after) if she were not more beautiful than report had painted her! At the gates of Abbeville, the ill-assorted pair were met by the Bishop of Amiens and the municipal magistrates, to welcome them to the evening banquet ere they betook themselves to repose. The bishop presented the new Queen of France with a piece of the Real Cross. “The mayeurs offered a gift, the nature of which brings it within my subject.” The gift was usual whenever king and queen appeared at the portals of the old monkish city. It consisted of three tuns of wine, three fat oxen, and fifteen quarters of oats, three pecks of which were presented to the astonished lady on bended knee, and in a measure painted light blue, and covered with golden fleurs-de-lys. A complimentary address to the king crowned all. “Sire,” said the chief local magistrate, “you may now conclude your marriage in this our good city, without any fear of committing sin thereby; for, in the year 1409 were reformed, as abuses, those synodal statutes by which men in our city were forbidden to live with their wives, during three whole mortal days after the wedding!” The monarch entered and sat down with his consort to a repast which rendered both ill for more than double the period just mentioned. Louis had well-nigh died, like La Matrie, the infidel philosopher at Berlin, of an indigestion. Had he done so, it might have been said of him, as the infidel Prussian king said of La Matrie: “He was a gourmand, but he died like a philosopher; let us have no more anxiety about him.”
Frederic himself loved philosophy more than faith, and philosophical though profligate kings, more than he did “Most Christian” or “Most Catholic” monarchs. He was wont, therefore, to laugh at the story of the famished beggar who, standing near the statue of Henri IV. on the Pont Neuf, solicited charity of a friend of Voltaire who was passing by. “In the name of God,” said the mendicant. The student of philosophy was deaf. “In the name of the Holy Virgin!”—“In the name of the saints!” The appeal was unheeded. “In the name of Henri IV!” exclaimed the petitioned; and forthwith the Voltairean put his hand in his pocket, giving a crown-piece, in the name of a philosophical profligate, while he refused a sou when asked for in the name of God. But, as Frederic used to say, “How divine is philosophy!” In his mouth the exclamation was like the well-known cry of Marcel, the ecstatic dancing-master: “Que de choses dans un minuit!”