PIERRE DE L’ESTOILE
Rich as they are in the possession of the diverticula amoena of history—and much richer than we are—for all that the French have no Pepys. “Many an old fool,” said Byron of Coleridge at his lecture, “but such as this, never.” So it may be put of the French memoirists: many a burgess of plain habit and shrewd observation, many a rogue husband too; but the like of one who, being both, turned himself inside out for the wonder of posterity, never. Indeed, it would be hard to imagine a Latin Pepys. The French do not discharge their bosoms on paper without reason; and the reasons which moved Pepys, whatever they were, would not approve themselves to their minds. Cynicism, or vanity, might suggest self-exhibition to one or another, as it did to Casanova the Venetian, but the truth is not served that way. There was a leaven of puritanism in Pepys such as Huguenotry never deposited in a Frenchman. That leaven did double work in our man. It seasoned for him his pleasant vices, and gave also a peculiar thrill to his confessions, as if his pen, like his hair, was standing on end as he wrote. No Frenchman needed a relish for his foibles of the kind; and as for thrills, his nation has always kept faith and works in separate compartments. We cannot do that.
However, they are rich enough without him. If they have no Pepys, they have in their Pierre de L’Estoile one whom we cannot match. Imagine a citizen of London in Elizabeth’s last and James’s first years, observing, recording each day as it came. We have in John Evelyn, fifty years later, a diarist of higher quality, who yet, and for that reason, was of less historical value. He seldom stooped to the detail in which the Parisian was versed: would that he had! L’Estoile will furnish no such picture as Evelyn’s of the Gallery at Hampton Court on a specimen afternoon. On the other hand, in L’Estoile, the brawling, buzzing, swarming streets of old Paris come before us at every turn of the leaf—and there at least he was like Pepys. If by happy chance one John Chamberlain, a private citizen of London, whose letters were published last year, had kept a diary, and could have kept it out of harm’s way, he might have given just such a particularised account of his town as L’Estoile gives of the Paris of the League, the Seize, and La Religion. But he was fearful of the post, and never committed himself. Nor would he, of course, have had such cataclysmic matter to report, England in James’s reign was drifting towards the whirlpool: France was already spinning madly in it.
Pierre de L’Estoile was an official of the Chancellery in Paris. His title was “Audiencier,” and his duties, as nearly as I can ascertain, were more like those of one of the Six Clerks of our Court than of him whom we call Auditor. He was a man of family, of the noblesse de Robe, of landed estate, of education, and of taste. He had Greek, and Latin, bigotry and virtue; he collected coins and medals, books, ballads, pamphlets, bibelots of all sorts. He began to keep a diary on the day when Charles IX died, “enferme, comme un chien qui enrage”—Whitsunday, 1574; maintained it through the riot and effrontery, the anarchy and intrigue in which Henry III and the mignons killed and were killed; through the open war of the League, and through the Siege of Paris. He saw the entry of Henry IV; judged while he loved that ribald king; and caught up the flying rumours of that day which hushed all the city, that day when he was stabbed to the heart, “au coing de la rue de la Ferronnerie, vis-à-vis d’un notaire nommé Poutrain,” as he sat in his coach listening to a letter which Epernon was reading to him. He went on until 1611, and only laid his pen down because he was about to lay down his life. His last entry is of the 27th September: on the 8th October he was buried. He had lived under six kings of France, had three of them die violent deaths, had been an eyewitness of the Saint-Bartholomew. A seasoned vessel.
As he was never a courtier he could not have witnessed all the great events which he relates. I think he saw the entry of Henry of Navarre, if not his shocking exit. But he was out and about, all agog; he had highly placed friends; and collected for his diary as he did for his cabinet. I imagine he must be a “source” for such a tragic scene as the murder of the Duc de Guise, which might have gone bodily into Les Quarante-Cinq if that fine novel had not stopped a few months short of it. Everything is there to the hand. As first, the presages: how on the 21st of December (1588),
“the Archbishop of Lyon, having overheard the proud speeches which the Duke had made the King in the gardens of Blois, told him that he would have done well to use more respect, and that a more modest bearing would have been becoming: whereupon, ‘You are wrong,’ the Duke replied: ‘I know him better than you do. You have to take him boldly. He is a king who likes to be made frightened.’”
And then another: on the next day,
“As the Duke went to table, to his dinner, he found a note under his napkin wherein was written that he ought to be on his guard, because they were on the point of doing him a bad turn. Having read it, he wrote upon it these three words, ‘They dare not,’ and threw it under the table. The same day he was told by his cousin the Duc d’Elbœuf that on the morrow there would be an attempt against his life, and answered with a laugh that, plainly, he had been searching the almanacs.”
On the 23rd he and his brother the Cardinal attended the Council, on summons: