Confessions of a Book-Lover

by Maurice Francis Egan

It must be admitted that Cardinal de Retz, like a later French prelate, Talleyrand, made no pretense of being fitted for the Church. Talleyrand's only qualification was that he was lame; and, as a younger son, he had to be provided for. But Cardinal de Retz, with all his faults, had a saving grace in spite of many unsaving graces. He did his best to escape the priesthood. He fought his first duel with Bassompierre behind the Convent

of the Minims, in the Bois de Vincennes; but it was of no use. His friends stopped the inquiry of the Attorney General, "and so I remained in my cassock notwithstanding my duel." His next duel was with Praslin. He tried his best to give it the utmost publicity, but, he says, "there's no use in opposing one's destiny; nobody took the slightest notice of the scandal."

The elder Dumas has probably had his day, though "Monte Cristo" and "The Three Musketeers" are still read. The newer romance writers are less diffuse, and, not writing feuilletons, are not forced to be diffuse. The constant reader of French memoirs of the seventeenth century can hardly help wondering why anybody should read Dumas who could go directly to the sources of his romances.

Speaking of the relation of books to books, it was the "Memoirs" of Madame Campan that took me into the society of Benjamin Franklin. There were legends about him in Philadelphia, where we thought we knew more about this distinguished American than anybody else; but it was through certain passages in the "Memoirs on Marie Antoinette and her Court" that I turned to his auto

biography, and then to such letters of his as could be found. That autobiography is one of the gems of American history, though it does not reveal the whole man. If he had been as frank as Cardinal de Retz, his autobiography would have been suppressed; but, then, no Philadelphian could ever be quite frank in his memoirs. It has never been done! Even the seemingly reckless James Huneker understood that thoroughly. But the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is sufficiently frank. It is of its own time, and it seems to me that it should be read just after one has finished for the second or third time the memoirs of Gouverneur Morris. Everybody feels it his duty to acclaim the charm of the confessions of Benvenuto Cellini, and I have known a young woman who read them reverently in the holy service of culture as a pendant to a textbook on the Renascence, and followed him by Jowett's translation of the "Republic of Plato." She may safely be left to her fate. The diaries of Gouverneur Morris were not in her course of reading, and they seem almost to have been forgotten. I do not recommend them to anybody. There are passages in them which might shock the Prohibitionist, and

also those persons who believe in divorce à la mode de Madame de Staël.

For me, they are not only constantly amusing, constantly instructive, but they give the best pictures of Parisian interiors of the time before and during the French Revolution. Because I am firmly convinced of this, is it necessary that I should be expected to place them among the Best One Hundred Books? To me they will be always among my best twenty-five books.

In the first place Gouverneur Morris knew well how to serve his country efficiently; and he was too sensible of the debt of that country to France and too sympathetic with the essential genius of the French people not to do his best to serve her, too. The original verses in his memoirs are the worst things in the volumes; but then, everybody has the faults of his virtues, and nearly everybody wrote verses at that time. He was one of the wisest of all our diplomatists. He was broad minded, cultivated, plastic within reasonable limits, and not corroded with a venom of partisan politics. I repeat, with a polite anticipation of contradiction, that no better picture has ever been given of the aristocratic society of the late eighteenth century in Paris.

His gallantries are amusing; yet there is underneath his affectation of the frivolous vice of the time, which might be euphemistically called "exaggerated chivalry, a fundamental morality which one does not find in that class of systematic roués" who were astonished at the virtue of the ladies at Newport when the Count de Lauzun and his friends dwelt in that town. There may be dull pages in these memoirs, but if so I have not yet found them.