Richelieu’s keenness of intellect and political intuition were not matched by the delicate wit and lightness of touch that are usually a Frenchman’s birthright. He was rather fond of making jokes, but they were often heavy, if not grim, and better calculated to amuse himself than his hearers. Mademoiselle de Gournay had experience of this. She was a clever literary woman in a time when such women were rare. Montaigne adopted her as a daughter, and by his wish she published an edition of his works after his death, with a preface of her own. This was in 1595. At the height of Richelieu’s fame she was an old and eccentric woman, living in Paris, known as the author of L’Ombre, a poetical work full of ancient and far-fetched words and high-flown sentiments. The fashionable young poets and literary men of Paris found pleasure in teasing and ridiculing Mademoiselle de Gournay.
In 1635 she edited a new edition of Montaigne, which she dedicated to Cardinal de Richelieu. She was invited to an audience at the Palais-Cardinal. Richelieu paid her the necessary compliments, but in obsolete words which he had carefully chosen out of L’Ombre. He was highly pleased with himself, and his attendants were choking with laughter. But Mademoiselle de Gournay was an aristocrat. Not for nothing was she bien demoiselle, as Tallemant says. “Elle avoit vu le beau monde.”
“‘You are laughing at the poor old woman,’ she said. ‘Laugh, great genius, laugh: it is right that every one should contribute to your diversion.’”
The Eminentissime was ashamed of himself, and asked her pardon. Afterwards he pensioned her handsomely, and not only her, but her old servant Mademoiselle Jamyn and her favourite cat Piaillon, not forgetting Piaillon’s kittens. The Abbé de Boisrobert, Mademoiselle de Gournay’s good friend, brought these claims irresistibly before a lover of cats.
At the height of favour as jester, verse-maker and confidential gossip, Boisrobert was a fount of honours and pensions at the Palais-Cardinal. Poor poets and other literary men were the special objects of his care. He was a clever busybody who went everywhere and knew every one of the scribblers in verse and prose, social, political, theological, classical, dramatic, or of more trifling kind, who had drifted up mostly from the provinces into Parisian garrets and hung about the hôtels of the great, depending on patronage for their daily bread. It was among these scattered units of varied birth and talent, all belonging to “the republic of letters,” that the French Academy began to exist, and Boisrobert has the right to be called one of its founders.
His character of favourite and of universal patron, as well as his literary skill, admitted him to weekly meetings of a few chosen spirits in the Marais, at the house of Valentin Conrart, bourgeois, Protestant, and man of letters. Boisrobert’s position at the Palais-Cardinal made it natural that he should carry the report of these meetings direct to Richelieu. The Minister was not altogether pleased. He disliked private assemblies; too often, in his experience, they meant conspiracy, and he would gladly have made them illegal.
The arguments of Boisrobert, if they did not quite reassure the Cardinal, suggested to him a means of utilising these literary meetings to the advantage of the State and of the French language. He proposed to Conrart and his friends, through Boisrobert, that they should become a public body with letters-patent, bound by its own statutes and holding its assemblies under royal authority, with the object of purifying and regularising the language and literature of France. The men of letters struggled a little, for liberty was sweet. But they soon submitted, and the Forty Immortals took their place among those French institutions which have survived the old world in which they were born.
As long as Richelieu lived the Academy worked under his presiding authority. He encouraged no frivolity, no discussion of trifles, but insisted on hard, steady work. The great Dictionary, first planned by the poet Chapelain, was seriously begun in 1634 and carried on by the most methodical among the new academicians, some of whom were considerably laughed at by the free literary world outside. They were, in fact, slaves to a Minister who, besides having an unfounded faith in his own taste, was a critic swayed by reasons extra-literary: one need hardly mention that the Academy, under Richelieu, snubbed Corneille and condemned Le Cid, too Spanish and too independent to please His Eminence.
The slavery was profitable: places and pensions made life liveable for the wiser academicians of Richelieu’s day—whose survivors were described by La Bruyère as “vieux corbeaux,” croaking as their master had taught them. And they grew to love their chains, while pouring flattery at the great man’s feet. Guillaume Colletet, more drunkard than poet, composed a rondeau which was presented by Boisrobert to the Cardinal:
“Au grand Armand je vous invite à boire!