No such concealment, no such late discovery, has marked the course of Voiture, whose letters and poems were published by his nephew Pinchesne in 1650, only two years after the poet's death. In this remarkable miscellany, which has been incessantly reprinted, and which forms one of the recognized lesser classics of France, we find ourselves breathing the very atmosphere of the Hôtel de Rambouillet. It is, indeed, amusing to reflect that, for fifteen years before her death, the Marquise and all her circle possessed, and shared with a wide public, this elaborate body of evidence as to their friendships, their tastes, and their amusements. In the Œuvres of Voiture, reprinted at least seventeen times during the lifetime of the Marquise, the world at large was admitted to the conversations of the Blue Room, and it eagerly responded to the invitation. There was something about the supple genius of Voiture, at once daring and discreet, apparently tearing every veil off an intimacy, and yet in fact wrapping it in an impenetrable gauze of mystery, which made him the ideal revealer to excite and baffle curiosity, so that though he tells so much, as he stands at the top of the stairs of the Hôtel and takes the town into his confidence, yet he leaves plenty of things untold, to be whispered into the ears of posterity by Tallemant and Conrart.
The father of Voiture was a shopkeeper who sold wine at the sign of the Chapeau de Roses at Amiens, and there his son Vincent was born in 1595. The author of Alcidalis et Zélide, was therefore the contemporary of Herrick and of George Herbert. If the last-mentioned had not rejected "the painted pleasures of a Court-life" for the retirements of a saint, he might have been the English Voiture, with his charming gifts and ingenious graces. The year 1626, which saw Herbert adopt the solemn vocation of a priest, is probably that in which Voiture, introduced by Chardebonne, took up his station for the rest of his life, as principal literary oracle and master of the gaieties in the Hôtel de Rambouillet. His father was honestly supplying wine to the Queen-Mother, Marie de Médicis, and there was no question in his son's case, as in that of some others, of doubtful or partial nobility. Vincent Voiture was frankly and openly a bourgeois, admitted into that strictly guarded aristocracy because of his abundant talents, his wit, his pleasantness, his delicious social qualities, and also because it was part of the scheme of the Marquise de Rambouillet to break down the boredom of the exclusive privilege of rank for its own sake.
The main principle of the Hôtel was a study of the art of how to behave. The rules of la bienséance were strictly laid down there, after close discussion among persons of light and leading. There was a strong resistance made to the roughness of the country noble, to the awkwardness of the ordinary citizen, to the inky fingers of the pedant, to the slovenly petticoat, the disordered wig, the bespattered boot. The attention of both sexes was persistently called to these matters of behaviour and tenue, which had an importance at that date which we may easily, in our twentieth-century intolerance, ridicule and ignore. We see the comic side of this extreme solicitude about dress and ceremony, etiquette and behaviour, in such a book as Furetière's amusing Roman Bourgeois (1666), but we may see the seriousness, the stately value of it, in the tragedies of Corneille and the maxims of La Rochefoucauld. The school of la politesse became that in which every talent must graduate, however grave its after-labours were to be. Even the solemn Baillet, writing the life of no less dignified a person than Descartes, mentions that the philosopher passed, like all other well-bred lads, "aux promenades, au jeu et aux autres divertissements qui font l'occupation des personnes de qualité et des honnêtes gens du siècle." In this school, the elegant and supple Voiture, impregnated with the literature of Amadis de Gaule, and with the language of Spanish chivalry, intimidated by no hyperbole of compliment, capable alike of plunging into the deep waters and of swimming safe to shore, always on the verge of absurdity, always gliding down the agreeable side of it, persistent, subtle, entertaining, extravagant—in this school Voiture was the triumphant, the unmastered master. His best letters, his best sonnets, show him to have been able, at his most vibrating moments, to rise out of this element of billets-doux to better things. He is of all composers of society verse and prose the lightest and the swiftest, and we may say to those who sneer at so unique a talent what Madame de Sévigné said of them in her day: "Tant pis pour ceux qui ne l'entendent pas!"
If one literary figure is more closely identified with the Hôtel de Rambouillet than Voiture, it must be Chapelain. It is therefore curious that while M. Magne was preparing his picturesque volumes on the former, M. Collas should be independently writing the earliest biography of the latter. These coincidences are odd, but we are accustomed to them; they show that a subject is "in the air." When Chapelain made his first appearance at the Hôtel, perhaps in 1635, Voiture had long been installed there. They fell out at first sight, like dog and cat. When the author of the Préface de l'Adone stumbled over the precious floor, dressed like a scarecrow, in hunting boots and dirty linen, and made his clownish obeisance to the Marquise, she shrank a little from him, and Voiture broke into a scream of elfish laughter. Madame de Rambouillet never learned to care for Chapelain, and when he made clumsy love to Mlle. Paulet, "the lioness," the Blue Room shook with mirth. But when Mlle. Julie became a great personage, and especially as soon as the Duc de Montausier introduced the pure cultivation of pedantry into the Hôtel, the strong character of Chapelain asserted itself, while the death of Voiture left him unquestioned in authority. Grotesque as Chapelain was, he had a wonderful talent for adapting himself to circumstances, and his conversation, though massive and solemn, had charm, which even his enemies admitted to be extraordinary. Chapelain was never on those terms of petted intimacy with his host and hostess which the insinuating Voiture enjoyed, but he conquered a position of more genuine respect and esteem.
But to follow M. Collas and M. Magne into the later years of the Hôtel, when Mlle. de Rambouillet gave to the Blue Room a peculiar air of her own, would be impossible for us, with the limited space at our command. We must not go further than 1641, the year in which was produced the celebrated Guirlande de Julie. After this point, not merely does the character of the scene change, and its tone become less pleasing, or at least less sympathetic, but for the reviewer the abundance of trees makes the wood itself almost invisible. Here we may point to an example of the superabundance of French material, which may almost console us for the comparative dimness and bareness of the contemporary English landscape. In dealing with this crowded age, M. Magne and M. Collas have shown a learned adroitness and the happy logic to which scholars of their race are trained. Of the two, M. Magne is the more vivacious, as befits the biographer of Voiture. M. Collas has more difficulty in reconciling us with the tedious and pedantic Chapelain, who, nevertheless, as the founder of modern criticism and the mainstay of the infant Académie Française, deserved to find a biographer at last. The worst of it is that while Voiture, dancing-master to the Muses if you will, and petit-maître in excelsis, is at least a brisk and highly diverting personality, poor Chapelain, the typical academician, the mediocre poet, the spider at the heart of the wide intellectual web of his time, is not man enough to awaken our vivid sympathies. Moreover, to conclude on a note of bathos, M. Collas has neglected to append an index to his vast compendium of facts.
We must therefore refrain from entering the labyrinths of the later préciosité, amusing as they are, and must continue to concentrate our attention on the clearness, the sweetness, the purity with which the founder of the Hôtel, the great Madame de Rambouillet, throughout her long life, created an atmosphere of sympathy and unity around her. As long as she was paramount there, and until the influence of her daughter and her daughter's husband, together with her own languor, pushed her a little into the second line, gaiety was in the ascendant at the famous Hôtel. It is needful to assure ourselves of this, because in the later days it became purely intellectual, and dry in its priggishness. M. Magne, it is true, attributes this change not so much to the pedantic Latinism of the Duc de Montausier, and the hair-splitting of the academicians, as to the decay produced by gaiety itself. In an ingenious passage he says:
The taste for badinage perverted in Voiture the taste for beauty. His genius glittered, quivered, frisked and palpitated, and the smile he wore was ever melting into irony. To depth he deliberately preferred an elegant futility. He was impregnated with the quality to which the age had given, in a noble sense, the name of gallantry. But, in reacting everywhere against vulgar roughness, the very excess of his effort landed him at last in preciosity.
It never had that deplorable effect upon Madame de Rambouillet herself, on whose charming figure, swaying like a young pine-tree of the forest, we must fix our attention, if we would see only what was best in that remarkable and so vividly French revival of civilization which took place under Louis XIII. Her purity of conduct was combined with no uncouth prudery. She refrained from judging others hardly, but she preserved, without a lapse, her own high standard of behaviour. She had a lively horror of scandal, and desired that those about her, if they could not contrive to be virtuous, should at least be discreet. It was detestable to her to hear the gallants of the court boasting of their conquests. She said, in her amusing way, that if she herself could ever have been persuaded to leave the path of propriety, she must have chosen for a paramour some unctuous and secret prelate, but that she had never discovered one whom she could trust. It was her temperament, both of heart and brain, which led her to rejoice in the new spirit of Malherbe, whose simple, firm and lucid verses responded, after a revel of romanticism, to her classic craving for harmony and dignity. In Racan's pastoral poems, she welcomed a recovered love of country pleasures, and the graceful convention of a shepherd. She liked private letters, hitherto so pompous, to be composed in such terms that one seemed to hear the writer's voice chatting at the chimney-corner. Richelieu, although M. Magne denies the legend of his Discours sur l'Amour, used to come to the Blue Room to have a good laugh with its delightful occupant, and everyone unbent in her sweet and easy presence. Tallemant has a story of no less dignified a personage than the Cardinal de La Valette romping with the Rambouillet children, and discovered by the Marquise hiding from them under a bed.
The close of the life of this marvellous woman was a sad one. She outlived all her early friends, even outlived the prestige of her own Blue Room. Six days after her death, Robinet composed a sort of funeral ode to her memory, closing with an epitaph, which, as it is little known, may be given here. It was written in January, 1666:
Ci gist la divine Arthénice,
Qui fut l'illustre protectrice
Des Arts que les neuf Sœurs inspirent aux humains.
Rome luy donna la naissance;
Elle vint rétablir en France
La gloire des anciens Romains.
Sa maison, des vertus le temple,
Sert aux particuliers d'un merveilleux exemple,
Et pourrait bien instruire encor les souverains.