FOOTNOTE:
[1] “Figaro: the Life of Beaumarchais,” by John Rivers. Hutchinson. 18s.
THE CARDINAL DE RETZ
No student of France and literature can afford to neglect this gay and hardy little sinner, though the use of that very word might show that I was not fitted to expound him. It has here, however, an æsthetic significance and not an ethical. Poets and moralists have this in common that, owing their power to the strength of their prejudice, they make bad historians. Carlyle, very much of a poet, illuminating his heroes with his own fire, did no harm to Cromwell, whose wart was a part of his glory; but Frederick the Great showed up oddly. The higher the light rayed upon him the more ghastly stared his gashes under the paint. Michelet was a good deal of a poet too, and rootedly a moralist. Naturally he came to blows with the history of his country. The Fronde made him angry, the grand siècle shocked him. Edification may be served that way, not truth. It is, I grant, difficult to read the History of France as that of a sane, hard-working, penurious people; difficult to decide why the Revolution, instead of coming in 1789, did not come in 1689; or why, having begun in 1649, it did no more, as Bossuet said, than “enfanter le siècle de Louis.” To understand that would be to understand the Fronde, but not how the state of things which evoked the Fronde and made possible the Memoirs of de Retz, could have come about. A royal minority, a foreign regent, a foreign minister, and a feudal aristocracy will account for a good deal—not for all. The Italianisation of manners which began with the last Valois kings, and was renewed by Henry’s Florentine wife, has to be reckoned up. To a nobility convinced of privilege it opened the ways of Il Talento.
Il Talento is the Italian description of the state of mind induced by desire and the means to gratify it on the spot. Iago is the standing type; but Cæsar Borgia is a better. For him and his likes, The Prince of Machiavelli was the golden book. In France the princely families—those of Lorraine, Bouillon, Condé and Savoie—found it a kindly soil; and one of its best products was naturally the Cardinal de Retz, whose memoirs are as good as Dumas, very much like him, and the source of the best chapters of Vingt Ans Après. Here was Il Talento in fine flower, existing for its own sake; whereas Mazarin hid it in avarice, and Richelieu had lost it in statecraft. You cannot read Retz with pleasure, to say nothing of profit, if you do not allow for the point of view—which you will have no difficulty in doing if you remember that, less than a hundred years before the Cardinal’s day, his ancestor, Alberto Gondi, had been as familiar with the Ponte Vecchio as he himself was with the Pont-Neuf.
In his “portrait” of Mazarin, Retz accused his brother-cardinal of common origin, but if you went back to his own family’s beginnings I do not know that the Gondis were more than respectable according to French standards. But the future Cardinal, Jean-Francois-Paul, was born the son of a Duc de Retz, a great man of Brittany, was a Knight of Malta in the cradle, and when, later, it was thought well to make a churchman of him, tumbled into abbacies as became a young prince, and had a bishopric as soon as he cared. He says of Mazarin’s youth that it was shameful, that he was by bent and disposition a cardsharper. He might have said worse and not been wrong; yet the account he gives of himself is so frank, shameless and extremely flagrant that the reproof has an odd sound.
“I did not affect devotion,” he says of himself as Abbé, “because I could never be sure that I should be able to keep up the cheat. But I had great consideration for the devout, and from their point of view that is in itself a mark of piety. I suited my pleasures to the rest of my habits. I could hardly get on without gallantry, but I continued it with Madame de Pommereux, young and a coquette, whose ways suited me because, as she had all the young people not only about her but in her confidence, her apparent affairs with them were a mask for mine with her.”
This equivocal conduct so far succeeded that the pious agreed with St. Vincent de Paul that, though the Abbé de Retz was not truly religious, he was “not far from the Kingdom of Heaven”—quite as near, in fact, as the young gentleman desired to be. And then he tells a story which he thinks is to his credit: