It was a fearful dilemma for Monsieur de la Reynie; that it would end in his disgrace he could not doubt, and whenever the king chanced to see the unhappy lieutenant, he flung reproaches at him on account of the terrible “ghost.”
Curious chance came to the rescue of Monsieur de la Reynie; but to the undoing and judicial murder of an innocent man, one Jean Larcher, ending up with a horrible tragedy. This Jean Larcher, who had sustained a loss of some 5000 livres, which had been stolen from his house, came to the lieutenant of police to lodge his complaint, in the hope that the thief might be traced. No sooner had he given his name, than Monsieur de la Reynie summoned a police officer, and whispering a few words in his ear, bade him accompany Larcher, who was a bookbinder, to his house in the rue des Lions St Paul. Larcher, delighted at the prompt and interested attention shown him, grew communicative as he went along, and gave the officer much information as to the exact position of the receptacles in which he stored his money and stock in trade. On arriving, the officer, changing his courteous demeanour, called to two of the small throng of soldiers and police standing about in front of the bookbinder’s door, and bidding them keep him well in their charge, and follow him upstairs in company with another officer, went first to a room on the first floor, where he told the man to climb to the top of a certain cupboard, loaded with papers and pamphlets ready for the binder, and bring them down. Selecting one of these, the officer placed it in the hands of Larcher, who turned white as a sheet, for it was a copy of The Ghost of M. Scarron. The unfortunate man, without more ado, was hurried off under arrest to the Châtelet, and thence, before any great loss of time, to the torture-chamber, three times suffering there, and finally to the gibbet, where he died bravely, and firmly asserting his innocence to the last.
There came a time when he was justified. The whole matter proved to be an infamous plot, concocted by a scoundrel who had an intrigue with Larcher’s wife. This man was Larcher’s assistant, and afterwards married the widow. At a later time Larcher’s son discovered that the wretched fellow had placed the pamphlets where they were come upon in Larcher’s house, and then had written an anonymous letter to Monsieur de la Reynie, informing him of where they were to be found. On tracking the exact truth and circumstances of this abominable treachery, the young man broke, in the dead of night, into the house where the couple lived, and murdered both. He was arrested; but he was saved from public death by brain-fever, which struck him down while he was in prison.
At the time of the conviction of Larcher, it was more than believed that he was innocent; but, in the first place, M. de la Reynie had his own safety and position to consider, and somebody had to bear the brunt; and secondly, riding very hard on the heels of it, Larcher was a Protestant, and furthermore guilty of the enormity of remaining in communication with his child, who had been sent for protection to England.
The pope was far more tolerant in his desires for dealing with the French Protestants, than was the quartette at Versailles. The liberal spirit of the Gallican Church was ignored to feed the contemptible ambition of the converted Françoise d’Aubigné, and to lull to rest the conscience of the pusillanimous nonentity still called the King of France. The persecution of the Huguenots was carried on relentlessly for fifteen years; fire and sword, and rape and murder, were the lot of those who remained to brave the booted emissaries of M. Louvois, if they retaliated where they had the chance, and as they did fiercely in the terrible struggles in the Cévennes. Justice is even-handed: it was no time to turn the cheek to be smitten. Those who emigrated, as in such thousands they did, carried with them the commerce and the prosperity of France. Frugal and industrious for the most part, and in these later days at least, peacefully disposed, rarely seeking more than to be let alone, they were the mainstay of the country. Richelieu had fully recognised their value, and followed it in his policy with them. The “Old Woman of Versailles,” as she was widely called, reversed the great cardinal’s provisions, and in time the avengement fell.
The clergy generally carried out the orders issued from Versailles for the extermination of the heretics. Monseigneur d’Orléans and the Abbé de Fénelon alone resisted. The first afforded time for the Huguenots to make their preparations for emigrating from France, by lodging the soldiery, sent to disperse them by violence, in his own palace, and maintaining them at his own expense, forbidding them meanwhile to harm any one of the Huguenot families in his diocese. For Monsieur de Fénelon, selected to superintend the raid of the booted missionaries in Poitou and Saintonge, he, like the Bishop of Orléans, forbade them to use violence, and brought back more of the errant ones into the Catholic fold by his sweet, persuasive eloquence, than the rest of the priests did, with all their dragonnades and executioner assistants, notwithstanding the view of Madame de Maintenon and of her spiritual director: that if only the holy Apostles had employed such emissaries of fire and sword, the Christian religion would not have been half so long in establishing.
CHAPTER XXII
Mademoiselle de L’Enclos’ Cercle—Madeleine de Scudéri—The Abbé Dubois—“The French Calliope,” and the Romance of her Life—“Revenons à nos Moutons”—A Resurrection?—Racine and his Detractors—“Esther”—Athalie and St Cyr—Madame Guyon and the Quietists.
Among the ladies of distinction forming the cercle of Mademoiselle de L’Enclos at this time, were the Countesses de la Sablière, de la Fayette, and de Sévigné, de Souvré, de la Suza, d’Olonne, de Sandwich, the Marquises de Wardes, de Créquy, de St Lambert; the Duchesses de Sully and de Bouillon, and the Maréchales de Castelnau and de la Ferté. The old antagonism between Ninon and Mademoiselle de Scudéri was smoothed away also by the amiable intervention of Madame de Sévigné, and the autumn of the lives of these two women was cheered by the sunshine of a genuine friendship, which, however, Boileau did his best to dull, by asserting that the famous romanticist of her day did not merit her popularity. Ninon succeeded however, in bringing him to soften his severe criticisms on Madeleine’s works, until they became gentler even than her own views of the voluminous tales which she regarded as far too wordy, and almost destitute of the passion which should be the motive power of romance.