“Simplicité rustique,” L’Estoile calls it, and praises Louis for going half-way to meet it. He is then very near the end of his record, and of his earthly tether too.
Misfortunes were gathered thickly about the honest man. He was out of his employment through age; money was very short with him. He sold his collections piecemeal, and was glad to make fifty francs or so here and there. He does not name the most serious of his ailments, but I fear that it was malignant, and put recovery out of the case. In September 1610, feeling himself in extremities, he demanded the Sacrament, and it became a question of confession. Father des Landes, a Jacobin and a friend of his, was chosen for the office, and demanded of him a protestation that he would die in the Catholic, Apostolic, Roman faith. The first two—yes, said L’Estoile; but boggled over the third. He relates the course of the argument which he held with the Jacobin. It branched off, as they will, into all sorts of side issues: invocation of the Saints, Council of Trent, errors of the Popes, and what not. He comes as near as he ever does here to putting down what he really did—or at least what he really did not—believe. He was an eclectic, but desperate of remedy. He would have seen the Reformed Church Catholic, and the Catholic reformed. But that, he is aware, is a counsel of perfection. “Three things forbid: lack of charity, lack of zeal for the glory of God, and stubbornness, which is the last trench of the ignorant.” And he concludes on the whole matter: “I shall hold on then to that old stock, rotten as it is, of the Papacy. The Church is in it, though it is not the Church.” And thereupon he had his absolution and the Sacrament. Father des Landes was a liberal-minded Jacobin.
I have fallen into the old easy way of confounding historical persons and history, but that is L’Estoile’s fault at least as much as mine. I might have stuffed my account of his book with criminal records, or with sermons; for next to the doings of the great those are the matters which concern him. Few days pass, never a week, in which he does not record an execution or several of them. I don’t know whether the Paris of the Henrys was worse than the London of James, and failing an English L’Estoile, I shall never know. But Paris would be bad to beat—not only for bestial crime but for bestial requital of it. In London you might be decapitated or hanged: burning was rare towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign. In Paris you might be hanged, or hanged and strangled, or broken on the wheel, or hanged and burned; or, if you were respectable enough you could be executed with a sword. Burning was reserved for heresy: for lèse-majesté there was death by horses—four of them. L’Estoile saw Ravaillac die that death. He died, the wretch, at the “deuxième tirage.” These things are shocking, as the crimes were which they were designed, after the ideas of the times, to fit. Then there were the duels which reached in France a point not known in our country. The mignons quarrelled in companies. That happened when Quélus, Maugiron and Livarrot met d’Entragues, Ribérac and Schomberg in the Marché-aux-Chevaux. Maugiron and Schomberg were killed outright; Ribérac died the next day, and Quélus, with nineteen wounds, lingered for a month, and died then. The King kissed the dead, cut off and kept their fair hair, and took from Quélus the ear-rings which he had himself put into his ears. “Such and the like ways of doing,” says L’Estoile, “unworthy indeed of a great king and a high-hearted, as this one was, caused him by degrees to be despised ... and in the Third-Estate, to be made little by little their faction, which was the League.” No doubt that is true.
Let me remember, as I end, this curious piece of news: on January 8th, 1608, it was so cold that the chalice froze in Saint-André-des-Ars, and they had to get a brazier from the baker’s to thaw it. Saint-André was L’Estoile’s favourite, or perhaps his parish church. The law cares nothing for trifles, but history lives upon them. My last scrap, however, is not of an age but of all time. “J’ay trente mil livres de rente, et cependant je meurs!” said the Abbé of Bonport in his last agony.
LA BRUYÈRE
If we can still contrive to hold up our heads in the world it is not the fault of the writers of maxims, who have seldom had a good word to say for us. We may ask, as we wilt but read on, Have we then nothing which can face unashamed the microscopic eye? Does not virtue lend itself to aphorism? Should it not be possible to make pithy summaries of our good qualities, of our reasonable institutions? La Rochefoucauld’s answer would be, Inform me of your virtues, show me your tolerable institutions, and I will tell you if I can reduce them to maxims. Nobody took the trouble to do it. He was read, as he wrote, for entertainment; and entertainment certainly comes if we don’t read too much of him at a time. He is for the bedside or the dressing-table. You can glance at him as you shave: but if you linger on him, you had better put away the razors. He has himself detected the source of the entertainment. “In the misfortunes of our best friends we can always find something which is not unpleasing.” He is dreadfully right; and it was his accuracy, no doubt, which Madame de Sévigné found to be “divine.” I obtain my own consolation out of the fact that, poor things as we are, it has been possible for one at least of us to write us down so well. But I am under no delusions about this duke. He is not necessarily a good man struggling with adversity, but as human as the rest of us. His only right to the microscope is that of user; and the pose that he who sees so many beams in his neighbour’s eyes has no motes in his own, it is fair to say, is not consciously assumed, but inseparable from the aphoristic method.
In La Bruyère, the French Theophrastus, who has tempered his maxims with “portraits,” I think that the Rhadamanthus-attitude is deliberate. La Bruyère is indignant, and takes it for righteousness. You cannot call him cynical; he is a censor morum. He combines the methods of La Rochefoucauld and Tallemant des Réaux, but is more human than the first because he condescends to scold his victims, and much less so than the other because he cannot bring himself to consider them as of the same clay with himself. La Bruyère, you may say, never takes off his wig and gown; Tallemant never puts his on. In Les Caractères is but one paragraph of unstinted praise; the Historiettes is full of them. Tallemant, however, did not write for publication, and La Bruyère did. It is possible that he would have praised more generally than he did if it had been as safe to praise as to condemn. But it was not. He had been rash enough at starting to call attention to Bishop Le Camus, and to be astonished at the red hat conferred upon a pious and devoted man. Then he learned, first, that the King had been very much offended by the Pope’s action, and secondly, that the Pope had intended him to be. Just in time he cancelled the passage. No—a writer had to be sure of his ground when he went about to praise. You were only perfectly safe, indeed, in praising His Majesty.