Amidst the bustle of judicial proceedings, whilst each day some sanguinary drama was recapitulated before the court, whilst sentences, often of savage severity, were recorded, and executions, for the most part in effigy, were of daily occurrence, time was still found for gaiety and amusement. Balls and assemblies went on, encouraged by the President de Novion, in order to do pleasure to his daughters; and all the ladies of quality in the province, as well as those gentlemen who had managed to compound their offences, having established themselves for the time at Clermont, there was no lack of dancers. And the grave members of the tribunal did not disdain to mingle in these terpsichorean gambols. But somehow or other there was always disorder at the assemblies. Decidedly the demon of discord was abroad in Auvergne. "Sometimes the ladies quarrelled, menaced each other, after the manner of provincial dames, with what little credit they chanced to possess, and were on the point of seizing each other by the hair and fighting with their muffs. This disturbed the company, but they managed to appease the disputants; and a few more bourrées and goignades were danced." The bourrée d'Auvergne, now confined to peasants and water-carriers, was at that time a favourite and fashionable dance. "There are very pretty women here," says Madame de Sévigné, writing from Vichy, the 26th May, 1676. "Yesterday, they danced the bourrées of the country, which are truly the prettiest in the world. They give themselves a great deal of movement, and dégogne themselves exceedingly. But if at Versailles these dancers were introduced at masquerades, people would be delighted by the novelty, for they even surpass the Bohemiennes." Fléchier was scandalised by this peculiar movement or dégognement, esteemed so captivating by the Marchioness. He makes no doubt that these dancers are worthy successors of "the Bacchantes of whom so much is spoken in the books of the ancients. The bishop of Aleth excommunicates in his diocese those who dance in that fashion. Nevertheless, the practice is so common in Auvergne, that children learn at one time to walk and to dance."
Did space permit, we would gladly accompany the Abbé on other of the excursions in the environs of Clermont, for which he continually finds excuse in the necessity either of escorting ladies or of enjoying the winter sunbeams. As at Riom, he always manages to pick up some anonymous but intelligent acquaintance, to enlighten him concerning the gossip of the country, and to father those sallies and inuendoes of which he himself is unwilling to assume the responsibility. His account of a visit to the Dominican convent is full of quiet satire. He was accompanied by his friend Monsieur de B—— "a sensible man, well acquainted with the belles lettres, and of very agreeable conversation." M. de B—— is made the scapegoat for the sly hits at the abuses of the church, and at the pictures and records of miracles to which they are introduced by a simple and garrulous monk. There were few founders of religious orders, they were informed, of such good family as St Dominick, who was a grandee of Spain, and consequently far superior to St Ignatius, whose nobility the Jesuits vaunted, and who, after all, was but a mere gentleman. There were, of course, many pictures of the grandee upon the church and cloister walls, representing him engaged in various pious acts. "In one of them he was depicted presenting a request to the Pope, surrounded by his cardinals, whilst on the same canvass was seen the horse of Troy, dragged by Priam and by the gentlemen and ladies of the town, with all the circumstances related by Virgil in the second book of the Æneid." Fléchier was considerably puzzled by this mixture of sacred and profane personages; but his guide explained its singularity by assigning the picture to a pious and learned monk, as well read in Virgil and Homer as in his breviary, who made a good use of his reading, and was particularly happy in employing it to the glorification of God and the saints. Another picture represented a Dominican holding a pair of scales, in one of which was a basket full of fruit, and in the other an empty basket, with the inscription Retribuat tibi Deus. The promissory note of the Jacobins was so heavy that it outweighed the laden basket. The guide would fain have expatiated on the beauty of this allegory, suggested, as he maintained, by a miracle actually wrought in favour of his order, but Fléchier cut him short in his homily, and passed on to the next painting, the representation of one of those "piously impious" legends, as M. Gonod justly styles them, so often met with in monkish chronicles. This one, in which the Saviour of mankind is represented as supping with and converting a beautiful Roman courtesan, shocked the religious feelings of the Abbé Fléchier in the year 1666, although in the year 1832, it was not deemed too irreverent for reproduction in a work entitled "Pouvoir de Marie," written by the notorious Liguori, and published at Clermont Ferrand, by the Catholic Society for pious books. "I could not help telling him," says Fléchier, "that I had seen pictures more devout and touching than this one; that these disguises of Jesus Christ as a gallant, were rather extraordinary; that there are so many other stories more edifying, and, perhaps, truer...." Here the monk interrupted the Abbé, and was about to repeat a whole volume of miracles, compiled by one of the brotherhood, when the vesper bell summoned him to prayer, to the great relief of Fléchier, who manifestly disapproved as much the profane travesty of holy things, as the lying miracles by which the Dominicans strove to attract into their begging-box and larder the contributions of the credulously charitable.
We perhaps risk censure by terminating this paper without a more minute consideration of the Grands-Jours themselves, the ostensible subject of Fléchier's book, and without examining in greater detail the nature of the crimes and characters of the culprits brought before the arbitrary tribunal. Although we have shown that a large portion of the Mémoires consists of matters wholly unconnected with the proceedings of the court, it must not be thence inferred that the Abbé neglects his reporting duties, and does not frequently apply himself to give long and elaborate accounts of the trials, especially of the criminal ones. Many of these are sufficiently remarkable to merit a place in the pages of the Causes Célébres. Some have actually found their way thither. In Fléchier's narrative, their interest is often obscured and diminished by wordiness and digression; and persons interested in the civil or criminal jurisprudence of the period will surely quarrel with the divine, who is a poor lawyer, apt to shirk legal points, or, when he endeavours to unravel them, to make confusion worse confounded. The state of society in Auvergne, in the seventeenth century, is exhibited in a most unfavourable light. We find a brutal and unchivalrous nobility, deficient in every principle of honour, and even of common honesty, unfeeling to their dependents, discourteous to ladies, perfidious to each other. Here we behold a nobleman of ancient name offering his adversary in a duel the choice of two pistols, from one of which he has drawn the ball, with a resolution to take his advantage if the loaded weapon is left him, and to find a pretext for discharging and reloading the other, should it fall to his share. He gets the loaded pistol, and shoots his man. A gentleman of rank and quality enforces the droit de nôces, formerly known in Auvergne by a less decent name—but language, as Fléchier says, purifies itself even in the most barbarous countries. And certainly there was much of the barbarian in the Auvergnat, even so late as 1666. The odious exaction referred to was compounded by payment of heavy tribute, often amounting to half the bride's dowry. The Baron d'Espinchal was another brilliant specimen of the aristocracy of Auvergne. After committing a series of crimes we have no inclination to detail, he pursued his wife (a daughter of the Marquis of Châteaumorand) with gross insult, even in her convent-sanctuary at Clermont. The unfortunate lady had contracted such a habit of fear, that she could not be in his presence without trembling; and on his putting his hand to his pocket to take out his watch, whilst separated from her by the grating of the convent parlour, she thought he was about to draw a pistol, and fell fainting from her chair. Numerous traits of this description prove baseness and brutality as well as vice on the part of the higher orders of the province, who appear to have been deficient in the military virtues and redeeming qualities sometimes found in outlawed and desperate banditti. We should have had less gratification in dwelling upon the crimes and excesses narrated in the Mémoires, than we have derived from the consideration of their lighter passages, and of the occasional eccentricities and many admirable qualities of their estimable and reverend author.
DON JOHN OF AUSTRIA.
Don John of Austria, the illegitimate son of the Emperor Charles V. (for an account of whose life we purpose to lay under contribution several curious documents lately published at Madrid) was born in 1545. His parentage on the mother's side is not quite so certain. Brantôme, Moreri, and others, after mentioning the Countess Barbe de Blomberghe as Don John's putative mother, assert that, although Charles's mistress, she certainly was not mother to Don John, whose parentage, they hint, should be laid at the door of some far nobler dame. But Ranke, and the best informed modern historians, affirm that Barbe de Blomberghe was really Don John's mother. This lady belonged to a noble family of Flanders, and was a celebrated beauty of her day. After his love for her was extinct, Charles V. gave Barbe de Blomberghe, with a large dowry, in marriage, to a certain Seigneur Rechem, who held considerable possessions in the province of Luxemburg, and lived constantly at Antwerp.
Don John's early life was passed in the farm-house of a rich peasant in the vicinity of Liege, where the young lad was subjected to all manner of privations, and early inured to hard labour and coarse fare,—a fitting preparation for his future career. Brantôme mentions it as a fact much to Don John's credit, that, in spite of this humble education as a peasant, he showed no trace of vulgarity in after life, but, on the contrary, that he had excellent and noble manners in the field and in drawing-rooms. The emperor, Charles V., sent for the lad, when he grew up, to come to Spain, rewarded the honest peasant for his trouble, and announced to Don John the secret of his birth. Although the Emperor loved the boy as the son of his old age, he gave him nothing during his lifetime, of which the ardent young prince much complained, saying that "the Emperor, having acknowledged him as his son, should have given him the means of living befitting his rank and birth." At his death, Charles left Don John nothing but a strong recommendation to his successor Philip II. The only wish which escaped the dying monarch was, that Don John should be educated for the church.
Meanwhile, Don John, who was but one year younger than Don Carlos, was brought up with Philip's ill-starred son: and at this period of his life a circumstance occurred which greatly influenced Don John's future destiny. The boy revealed to Philip II. some hare-brained folly of his son Don Carlos. This conduct gave the Spanish monarch so high an opinion of his young brother's integrity and honour, that he determined not to follow out Charles V.'s intentions, but to educate Don John for the military, instead of the ecclesiastical profession. This was not done, however, without strong opposition from some of Philip's royal council. The conduct of Don John, however pleasing to Philip II., drew upon the young prince the bitter animosity of Don Carlos who, ever after, treated his companion with marked indignity: his hatred one day went to the length of twitting Don John with his illegitimacy. Don Carlos called him a bastard, hijo de puta. "Yes," said Don John, "I am a bastard; but my father is a better man than yours:" whereupon the two lads came to blows.
Passing over much of his early life, we come to the year 1569, when Don John was sent against the Moors of Grenada. In this expedition he developed considerable military talents, and gave such evidence of personal courage, that the old captains and veteran soldiers who remembered the early campaigns of his father, Charles V., called out with one accord, "Ah! this is a true son of the Emperor." Ea! es verdadero hijo, del Emperador. Don John returned from this campaign covered with glory, and with the reputation of being one of the best captains of the age.