The scoffers gathered round his equipage, books and pen in hand, imploring him to enlighten their ignorance from the depths of his unfathomable erudition; how were they to parse the name of his eminence’s house? Palais and Cardinal—it was most perplexing to their weak intelligence. The conjunction was a turning upside down of all established rules—a topsy-turvy of principles and of all known precedents.
Separately, the two nouns were comprehensible, but joined together, what were they? Was it, mayhap, Greek or Latin construction, or was it taken from the legends of old Gaul French, or a specimen of some new and unknown tongue evolved from the universal genius of the minister? Richelieu, writhing under the pitiless hilarity of the tormentors, lent a deaf ear to them, and rode forth in scornful taciturnity; petitions from imaginary savants, who professed to be laboring in the mazes of a new grammar, flowed in the following days upon the unlucky author of the ungrammatical inscription, beseeching him to let the ignorant world into the secret of its proper parsing; the enemies of the cardinal, in fact, made capital out of his vanity to their heart’s content, but Richelieu’s pride was a match for them. The only answer he condescended to make was to point to the inscription over the Hôtel Dieu. The precedent was no doubt unanswerable; but vanity remained, nevertheless, more prominent in the imitation than either sense or grammar. It held its place, however, in spite of all attempts to laugh it down. The splendors of the Palais Cardinal have been enlarged upon in most of the memoirs and chronicles of that time. Richelieu, while busy making and mending quarrels between the king and the queen-mother, Marie de Medicis, governing France, and pulling the strings of all the governments of Europe, found time to devote to his hobby of enriching and beautifying his palace, overseeing in its most minute details the architectural part of the work, and directing the research after objects of art far and near for its adornment. While he was thus variously occupied, a knot of literary men were in the habit of meeting quietly once a week close to his palace gates, to read aloud their own works, and discuss the state of letters, whose horizon was just then beginning to brighten under the rising sun of the great Corneille. The meetings were held at the house of one of the circle; they were quite unostentatious, and aspired to no notoriety beyond their own circle; the members sought only to encourage each other by honest criticism, and by the emulation that comes of working in common towards a common end. Soon, however, these weekly gatherings became talked about; courtiers heard of them, and begged to be allowed to assist at them. By-and-by Richelieu came to hear of them; his curiosity was excited, first from a political point of view—he feared the so-called réunions littéraires might be a covert for something more dangerous; he was not slow, however, to find out his mistake, and to detect in the modest literary club a germ of future greatness; he expressed his desire that the meetings should be held henceforth at the Palais Cardinal, and under his immediate auspices. The members protested; they were not worthy of so distinguished an honor, etc.; but Richelieu assured them that he saw in their modest labors the promised fulfilment of his long-cherished desire “to raise the French language from the ranks of barbarous tongues, and to cleanse it from the impurities which it had contracted in the mouth of the people and on the lips of courtiers.” The little band of writers yielded reluctantly to the pompous summons so flatteringly sent forth against their independence, and the Académie Française was founded. Louis XIII. gave it letters-patent, and became its chief patron, while Richelieu was named President. The number of academicians was limited to forty. Amongst the great and gifted men who figure at the birth of this modern Areopagus, destined to be glorified in its after-career by so many brilliant members, Pierre Corneille stands out conspicuous. The young poet found in Richelieu a kind and munificent patron, until he had the ill-luck to wound his vanity in one of its most vulnerable points. Not content with being a potentate, a warrior, a financier, and innumerable other things besides, the insatiable cardinal aspired to being a poet—a disastrous form of ambition which gave a cruel handle to his enemies, and furnished them with many a shaft of ridicule wherewith to pierce his thin-skinned susceptibilities. Richelieu, however, pursued his way in serene self-confidence, despising the ignorance and jealousy of the vulgar herd, and periodically bringing forth the offspring of his genius in the shape of plays and poems. One set of verses with which he was particularly satisfied he handed in MS. to Corneille, desiring to secure his approval before launching them on the sea of public criticism, and modestly requesting the young poet to overlook them and make any alteration that he thought advisable. Corneille had not graduated long enough in the school of courtiers to know what this flattering request was worth, so he set about complying with it conscientiously, pruning and altering with his fine critical pen as it ran along the course of the ministerial poem. Richelieu’s amazement on beholding his masterpiece thus audaciously overhauled was only equalled by his indignation. Corneille, instead of falling on his knees and crying peccavi when he saw his mistake, proceeded with infantine naïveté to argue the case with the wrathful poet, and prove to him that every correction had been called for by some glaring fault. This did not mend matters. Such insane honesty met with the fate it deserved—the fate that from time immemorial it has met with in similar circumstances. The scene between Gil Blas and the bishop was enacted in the library of the Palais Cardinal between Corneille and Richelieu, and certainly Gil Bias was not more astonished by the effect of his candid criticism on the bishop’s long-winded sermon than was the young academician by the thunderbolt which fell from his patron’s brow on perusing his MS. revised and corrected. He was dismissed peremptorily, and withdrew cursing his own stupidity, and vowing that never again would he be entrapped into the folly of believing in the common sense of a patron. Shortly after this mishap, while wandering about in listless pursuit of an object at Rouen, his native place, he fell in accidentally with a gentleman who had read his first poetic efforts, and discerned through their faults and trammels the promise of true genius that lay beneath. “Why do you waste and hamper your talent in the threadbare conventionalities of French art?” inquired M. de Chalan. “You want a higher and a wider scope; read Guillen de Castro, and there you will find a subject worthy of you, and which will bring out your powers with a fire and force unsuspected by yourself.”
“Unfortunately, I am not acquainted with Spanish,” replied the young man.
“But I am,” returned M. de Chalan, “and, if you like, I will teach it to you.”
Corneille, having nothing else to do, accepted the proposal, and to this chance circumstance the world apparently owes The Cid. That masterly composition came upon the dramatic world of France—hitherto fed on threadbare conventionalities, as de Chalan had well said—like a revelation, and raised such a tempest of senseless vituperation and malignant opposition as has no parallel in the history of literary cyclones. Richelieu, who was far too good a judge not to see the rare merits of the poem, had not the magnanimity to proclaim his opinion, and thus quell the storm, but fell in with the rioters, and was one of the loudest in crying down the new tragedy. He could not forgive the young poet who, without his patronage, nay, in spite of his own disgrace, had succeeded in climbing to the topmost round of the ladder. Corneille’s star rose steady and clear above the stormy waters, and he lived to see it shine out in glorious lustre through the clouds of envy and hostile criticism. His career was one of unparalleled triumph, till the appearance of his last work, Pertharite, written in 1653. It was played on the boards of the Palais Cardinal theatre, that had echoed to so many of his previous triumphs, and was received with a coldness that was equivalent to condemnation. Corneille saw in this isolated defeat the ruin of his poetic fame; he became possessed by a morbid despair, flung away his lyre, and gave up the theatre in disgust. During the interval of depression that followed this fancied humiliation, he devoted himself to the translation of Thomas à Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ, sacrificing, as he said himself, “his own reputation to the glory of a sovereign author.”
The Palais Cardinal, during Richelieu’s multifarious reign, was the theatre of many boisterous scenes, dark intrigues, and events otherwise important than these literary skirmishes that occasionally engage the thoughts of ambitious statesmen. Its propinquity to the Louvre enabled him to keep his lynx eyes on the busy hive of friends, foes, and tools who gathered round the king; to frustrate the petty plots of courtiers; and forestall the schemes of faction by his ubiquitous presence. Nor are comic chapters lacking in the annals of the Palais Cardinal at this period. One related by the sprightly Duchesse de Chevreuse, in a letter to Mme. de Motteville, is grotesque enough to be worth recording, as characteristic of the cardinal and the court. Richelieu, it was said, had dared to raise his eyes to the queen, then in the full bloom of her youth and beauty. As might be expected, the unwarrantable presumption inspired Anne of Austria with no gentler feeling than contempt, not unmixed with disgust. She gathered up her purple robes, as she might have done at the touch of a viper, and shook them, and passed on with a shudder and a shrug. But her volatile friend, Mme. de Chevreuse, whose rôle was fun at any price, thought the cardinal’s love too good a joke not to be turned to account. She proposed playing him a trick which would have the double advantage of giving herself and her royal mistress an hour’s good fun, and of making Richelieu, whom she hated with a woman’s inventive hate, appear thoroughly ridiculous. “Let me tell him from myself,” she entreated, “that your majesty is only inexorable because you do not believe in the sincerity of his love; but that, if he can give you proof of it, you are open to conviction. I will propose that he come here by the private way, dressed as a harlequin, and dance the saraband before you one of these evenings, assuring him, if he does this, you will believe in the reality of his protestations.” Anne was young, her life had not much sunshine in its splendor, and the demon of frolic which so madly possessed her friend was not without its power over her. She consented that the outrageous joke should be played off on her gloomy swain. The duchess accordingly informed him that the queen was passionately fond of the saraband, and had often expressed a desire to see it danced by one whose dignified deportment and elastic figure were so admirably adapted to bring out the peculiar characteristics of the spirited and stately dance, and that nothing would gratify and flatter her more than to see his eminence yield to this fancy. It was necessary, she added, that he should be dressed as a harlequin, in order to bring out in all their perfection the picturesque points of the dance. Richelieu bit at this outlandish bait, and it was agreed on a given night he would roam to the Louvre, and disport himself in the aforesaid manner for the edification of the queen, he being alone in one room, while her majesty looked on at the performance from behind a screen in an adjoining one; a musician, concealed also from view, was to accompany the performance on the violin. The duchess, who had not bargained for her own share in the sport, took care not to be deprived of it, but stood beside the queen, peeping through the screen, while the haughty statesman, bedizened in the variegated costume of harlequin, “with bells on his fingers, and bells on his toes,” and jingling from his comical fool’s cap, tripped it on the light fantastic toe. Mme. de Chevreuse describes the scene with the mischievous glee of a schoolboy: herself and the queen squeezing each other’s hands, and terrified lest one explosive burst should betray them and suddenly cut short the performance; the musician convulsed in another corner, scratching away frantically at his fiddle to drown the irrepressible laughter of the trio; while Richelieu, the proud, the grave, the vindictive and all-powerful Richelieu, capered backwards and forwards on the polished floor, snapping his fingers at each rapid pirouette, stamping his heel and pointing his toe as the figures of the saraband demanded. The performance over, he donned his cloak, and made his way back discreetly to the Palais Cardinal. No time was lost in recapitulating the farce to the court, and the merriment that it provoked may be readily imagined. But who might laugh with impunity at Richelieu? The true motive of the unseemly burlesque to which he had lent himself was soon made known to the hero, and terrible was the vengeance that awaited its authors. He bided awhile, and then began that series of calumnies and persecutions that poisoned so many years of the young queen’s life. Richelieu had insinuated himself into the confidence of Louis XIII., and his influence over him was boundless. This tremendous weapon he used against the queen with cruel ingenuity. He contrived to implicate her in the odious and diabolical conspiracy of the arch-traitor de Chalais; accused her of having plotted to dethrone and murder the king, with a view to putting Gaston d’Orléans, his brother, on the throne, and marrying him. When Louis XIII. brutally challenged his wife to vindicate herself from the twofold criminal charge, she replied, with spirituelle disdain: “I had too little to gain by the exchange.” It is more than probable that Louis never seriously suspected Anne of Austria of having had any share in the guilt laid to her charge by Richelieu; but the calumny did its work efficiently in another way: it cut at the root of her affection for her husband and of his trust in her—it chilled and alienated them for years. The Duchesse de Chevreuse, accused, with some show of truth, of having conspired with Gaston d’Orléans to dethrone the king, was exiled from France. Richelieu followed up the advantage of his first attack by accusing the queen of keeping up a correspondence with the enemies of the state. Anne, too proud to justify herself, imprudently paraded her contempt for Richelieu’s malevolent intrigues by openly and on every occasion showing her love for her own family, at that time at war with France; expressions full of the warmth of natural affection were made a handle of by her enemies, construed into treason against the king and the state. The birth of Louis XIV. (1638) brought about a partial reconciliation between her and the husband who had insulted and treated her with systematic neglect. But Richelieu’s sway remained unshaken to the end. It was entirely an intellectual sway; the heart had no share in it on either side. The minister hated the king, and the king hated the minister; their natures were essentially antagonistic, and mutual interest alone held them together. Louis, hearing that he was about to be freed from the bondage under which he had chafed so long—that the summons had come for Richelieu—went in haste to the Palais Cardinal to receive the adieux of the dying minister. The interview between them was short and utterly devoid of pathos; no shade of tenderness had entered into the bond that was about to be dissolved. The breaking up of it was simply a matter of business. The king left the death-chamber of the man to whom he owed all the glory of his reign, without a tear in his eye or a passing emotion in his heart, and paced the adjoining room with a steady step and satisfied air, while a smile, amounting at intervals to a suppressed laugh, was visible on his features. When all was over, and the signal came forth that Richelieu was no more, he exclaimed tranquilly: “Voilà un grand politique de mort!”[42] (1642.) A few months later, he himself had joined the great politician in another world.
Richelieu, whose more than royal munificence of state had roused the jealous susceptibilities of the king, atoned for it by bequeathing his beautiful palace, with its accumulated treasures of art and industry, to his unthankful master. Anne of Austria inaugurated her reign as regent by taking up her abode under the roof of the man who had been to the last day of his life her implacable enemy. Immediately after the death of Louis XIII., she came to the Palais Cardinal with the little king and his brother, the Duc d’Anjou. The theatre on which Richelieu had lavished so much taste and wealth was included in the bequest, though he had often expressed his intention of presenting it to the nation, and endowing it for the benefit of rising dramatic artists.
Notwithstanding that Anne of Austria had good reason to execrate the cardinal for his injustice and malignity to herself personally, she did full honor to his merits as a statesman; and years after his death, when at the zenith of her popularity as regent, she said once, looking up at a portrait of Richelieu which hung in the state-saloon of the Palais Cardinal: “Were that man alive now, he would be more powerful than ever.” It was a generous and exhaustive tribute to the memory of those services which had consolidated the monarchy in France, and made her own position what it was.
The name of Palais Cardinal, which, despite its equivocal grammar, was appropriate while Richelieu inhabited it, ceased to be so when it passed into the possession of the crown. Anne was advised to change it, but refused to do so, at the solicitation of the Duchesse d’Aiguillon, who besought her to retain a name which so honorably associated Richelieu with the glorious reign of Louis XIII. Public opinion, however, prevailed before long, and the palace was henceforth by common consent designated as the Palais Royal. With its new name began a new era in its annals.
Anne has been compared by some of her admirers and biographers to Blanche of Castille; but, while rendering full justice to the queenly qualities of the Austro-Spanish regent, we own that the comparison strikes us as being suggested rather by their circumstances than by the characters of the two queen-mothers who each played so remarkable a part in the history of their epochs. Blanche of Castille made it her first and paramount ambition to render her son worthy of that imperishable crown which awaited him in the Kingdom that is not of this world: Anne of Austria aimed at securing for hers the supremacy of earthly glory—at making him a great and powerful king. In each case, as it mostly happens, the omnipotent mother’s will worked out its own ideal. The minority of the future Grand Monarque opened in troubled times; the elements of the Fronde were fermenting deep down under the apparently smooth surface, and the fêtes, and masquerades, and merry-making with which the regent celebrated her tardy accession to sovereign power were soon followed by more exciting events. Mazarin had succeeded to Richelieu—oily, pliant Mazarin, so zealous in his endeavors to keep well with all parties; flattering the ambitious hopes of Gaston d’Orléans, and laying himself out with elaborate zeal to please the regent and secure her confidence; yielding outwardly, with alluring grace, to every caprice of her soft despotic sway; and pulling dexterously the complicated strings of the malcontents, Condé, and Conti, and Longueville, and many other illustrious personages who chafed uneasily under the sceptre of the foreigner; benevolent and outspoken, but irreclaimably despotic. Mazarin, in his desire to please all parties whom it was of use to propitiate, and make money plentiful where it was needed for his purposes, had gone on taxing till he raised the devil in the then much enduring people. Everything was ready for an outbreak. The Te Deum after the victory of Lens gave the signal for it. It was a burning day in August, in the year 1648. The city had turned out to join in the jubilee, and, amidst the inspiriting chorus of trumpets, and cannons, and bells that sent exulting chimes from many belfries, such small matters as hunger and empty hearths and misery in its multiform moods and tenses were forgotten for a moment. But it needed only a touch to rouse the sleeping furies in the hearts of the hungry, rejoicing crowd. Broussel was seized by the troops, who had just played their part in the gay thanksgiving, and carried off to prison—Broussel, the venerable magistrate, the people’s sturdy friend; who had fought their battles over and over again against mighty Mazarin himself; who had stood by them and upheld their rights in the teeth of the foreign queen and her foreign minister; Broussel, whom the people called notre père—were they going to see him seized by soldiers, and carried off before their eyes? No; they would stand by him as he had stood by them. The last notes of the Te Deum were still ringing over the city, when up leaped the shouts of revolution and the cry “To arms!” and chased away their holy echoes. The mob surrounded the carriage in which Broussel was placed, guarded on all sides by armed men; they were beaten back and trodden down; the people returned to the charge undaunted, and finally bore down on the Palais Royal, vociferating unmannerly threats, and demanding Broussel: “Give us Broussel, or we will burn down your house about you!”—pleasant sounds for the queen to hear beneath her windows! Anne of Austria had not foreseen this bursting up of the vulgar depths over which she had hitherto ridden in safe and scornful unconcern; nor, in all probability, had Mazarin. He was with the queen in that sumptuous apartment called the queen’s boudoir, whose one broad window, mounted in a frame of massive silver wrought like a brooch, looked out upon the court; the regent paced the room in feverish excitement, her face flushed, her hands, alternately crossed on her breast with an air of stern resolve, moving in the animated and expressive play that was familiar to her; every now and then she would stand in the embrasure of the rich and cunningly carved window, and cast a glance of mingled scorn and defiance on the vociferous rabble below. They catch sight of her, and greet her with ominous signs and gestures. They see in her cool courage a taunt that rouses them to desperation. All unarmed as they are, except with stones and sticks and such like unmilitary weapons, they are ready to give battle to her troops. At this crisis, when the Fronde was born, a young man named Gondi starts to the surface, shooting up from the dark horizon like a glittering rocket. He is endowed with that peculiar kind of alcoholic eloquence which appears to be in all climes and ages the apanage of demagogues. Gondi had already made himself conspicuous as a discontented spirit whom it would be well either to crush or to conciliate; and Mazarin would in all likelihood have adopted the latter plan but for the fact of his jealousy having been aroused by the queen’s kindly notice of the young firebrand; he foresaw a possible rival in Gondi’s ardor and talents, and forthwith decreed his ruin. Gondi was just now making himself popular by declaiming on the wrongs of the people, and denouncing the seizure of Broussel as iniquitous and tyrannical. There was some talk of sending a despatch to the regent to demand his release; Mazarin caught at this opportunity of lowering Gondi in the estimation of the queen by placing him in the position of a leader of the Fronde, so he sent word to him indirectly to come to the Palais Royal and present the people’s petition. Gondi, who saw in the mission an occasion for distinguishing himself with all parties, accepted it. He told the people that he undertook to ask, and pledged himself to obtain, the liberation of Broussel within an hour. They followed him with enthusiastic cheers to the Palais Royal, where he was admitted to the presence of the queen. She received him with flattering promptitude, unconscious of the motive of his visit. Anne was in no mood for compromises or concessions; the rebellious attitude of her subjects had steeled her heart for the moment against the demands of clemency, and when Gondi, announcing himself the bearer of the demands of the people, asked for the liberation of the magistrate, her anger broke out into violence: “Give up Broussel!” she cried, with a sardonic laugh, “I will strangle him first with my own hands!” And clenching those beautiful little hands that have been sung by every poet of her day, she went close up to Gondi, and shook them in his face. The deputy, confounded, stood rooted to the spot, and uttered not a word; when Anne, abruptly turning away, said, with a quiet sarcasm the more chilling from its sudden contrast with her foregoing vehemence: “Go and rest, Monsieur de Gondi; you have worked hard.”