THE ABBÉ DE VOISENON AND HIS TIMES.
The province of Brie, in France, divided and subdivided since the Revolution of 1789, into departments, arondissements, and cantons, is filled with châteaux, which, in the reign of Louis XV., were inhabited by those gold-be-spangled marquises, those idle, godless abbés, and those obese financiers, whom the secret memoirs of Grimm and Bachaumont, and the letters of the Marquis de Lauraguais, have held up to such unsparing ridicule and contempt. This milky and cheese-producing Brie, this inexhaustible Io, was, at the epoch of the regent Orleans and his deplorable successor, a literal cavern of pleasures, in the most impure acceptation of the term; every château which the Black Band has not demolished is, as it were, a half-volume of memoirs in which may be read the entire history of the times. Here is the spot where formerly stood the château of Samuel Bernard, the prodigal, it is true, of an anterior age, but worthy of the succeeding one; there is the pavilion of Bourei, another financier, another Jupiter of all the Danaës of the Théâtre Italien: on this side we see Vaux, the residence of that most princely of finance ministers, whose suddenly acquired power and wealth, and as sudden downfall, may surely point a moral for all ministers present and to come; on that side we have the château of Law, the trigonometrical thief; and Brunoy, the residence of the greatest eccentric perhaps in the annals of French history: in a word, wherever the foot is placed, there arises a sort of lamentation of the eighteenth century—that celebrated century, whose limits we do not pretend to circumscribe as the astronomers would, but whose beginning may be dated from the decline of the reign of Louis XIV., its career closing with Barras, whose immodest château still displays at the present day its restored foundations on the soil upon which Vaux, Brunoy, and Voisenon, shone so fatally.
It was in this last named little château that was born and educated the celebrated abbé, the friend of Voltaire, of Madame Favart, and of the Duc de la Valliére; and here it was, also, that in manhood its possessor would occasionally resort, though not the least in the world a man who could appreciate rural enjoyments, for the purpose of reposing from the fatigues of some of his epicurean pilgrimages to his friends at Paris or Montrouge, and which was his final sojourn when age and infirmities rendered it imperatively necessary for him to breathe the pure air of his native place, far away from the heating petits soupers of the capital, and the various other dearly cherished scenes of his earlier years.
Claude Henri Fusée de Voisenon, Abbé of Jard, and Minister Plenipotentiary of the Prince-Bishop of Spire, was born at Voisenon on the 8th of June, 1708. Biographers have, perhaps, laid too much stress on the debility of constitution which he brought with him into the world, inherited, they say, from his mother, an exceedingly delicate woman. Since the examples of longevity given by Fontenelle and Voltaire, of whom the first lived to the use of a hundred, and the second to upwards of four-score years, and yet both of whom came into the world with very doubtful chances of existence, it is become a very hazardous task to determine, or even to foretell, length of days by the state of health at birth. They add, that an unhealthy nurse, aggravating the hereditary weakness of the child, infused with her milk into his blood the germs of that asthma from which he suffered all his life, and of which he eventually died. These facts accepted—a delicate mother, an unhealthy nurse, an asthma, and constant spittings of blood—it follows that, even with these serious disadvantages to contend with, a man may live and even enjoy life up to the age of sixty-eight. How many healthy men there are who would be content to attain this age! And if the Abbé de Voisenon did not exceed the bounds of an age of very fair proportions, we must bear in mind that, though even an invalid, he constantly trifled with his health with the imprudence of a man of vigorous constitution; eating beyond measure, drinking freely, presiding at all the petits soupers—petit only in name—of the capital, passing the nights in running from salon to salon, and seldom retiring to rest before morning: a worthy pupil of that Hercules of debauchery, Richelieu, his master and his executioner. Terrified at the delicate appearance of his child, his father dared not send him to school, but had him brought up under his own eye, with all the patience of an indulgent parent and the solicitude of a physician. Five years' cares were sufficient to develop the intellectual capacities of a mind at once lively and clear, and marvellously fitted by nature to receive and retain the lessons of preceptors. At eleven years of age he addressed a rhyming epistle to Voltaire, who replied,—
"You love verses, and I predict that you will make charming ones. Come and see me, and be my pupil."
If Voisenon justified the prediction, he scarcely surpassed the favorable sense which it incloses. Verbose, incorrect, poor in form, pale and washy as diluted Indian ink, his verses occasionally display witty touches, because every one was witty in the eighteenth century; but to class them with the works of the poets of his day as poetry is impossible—they merit only being considered in the light of lemonade made from Voltaire's well-squeezed lemons.
In many respects the prose of the eighteenth century, not being an art, but rather the resource of unsuccessful poets, lent itself better than did the muse to the idle fantasies of the Abbé de Voisenon. His facetiæ, his historiettes, his Oriental tales, reunited later (at least in part) with the works of the Comte de Caylus, and with the libertine tales of Duclos and the younger Crébillon, prove the facility with which he could imitate Voltaire, while his lucubrations must be considered as far inferior to the short tales of the latter author. For the most part too free, too indecent, in short, to show their faces beside some elaborately serious fragments which form what are called his works, they figure in the work we have just named under the title of Recueil de ces Messieurs; Aventures des Bals des Bois; Etrennes de la St. Jean; Les Ecosseuses; les Œufs de Pàques, &c. We know, by the memoirs of the time, that a society of men of letters, formed by Mademoiselle Quinaut du Frêne, and composed of fourteen members chosen by her, had proposed to itself the high and difficult mission of supping well at stated intervals, and of being immensely witty and extravagantly gay. At the end of the half-year these effusions of wit and gayety were printed by the society at the mutual expense of its members, and given to the world under the title of Recueil de ces Messieurs.[Q] Deprived of the illusive accompaniments of the lights, the sparkling eyes, the tinkling glasses, and the indulgent good-nature engendered by an excellent dinner, good wines, and an ample dessert, these table libertinages, when read nearly a century afterwards, lose all their piquancy of flavor and become simply nauseous. The readings, and consequently the dinners, took place sometimes at the house of Mademoiselle Quinaut, sometimes at that of the Comte de Caylus.
Having conceived a disgust for the profession of arms—for which he had been originally intended—in consequence of having fought with and wounded a young officer in a duel, he determined upon embracing the ecclesiastical state; and shortly after taking orders was inducted by Cardinal Fleury to the royal abbey of Jard—an easy government, the seat of which was his own château of Voisenon.
As soon as he was actually a dignitary of the Church, he turned his thoughts entirely to the stage! In compliance with the request of Mademoiselle Quinaut, the new Abbé of Jard wrote a series of dramatic pieces, among which may be cited, La Coquette fixée, Le Reveil de Thalie, Les Mariages assortis, and Le Jeune Grecque, little drawing-room comedies, which have not kept possession of the stage, and to which French literature knows not where to give a place at the present day, so far are they from offering a single recommendable quality. The only style of composition in which the Abbé de Voisenon might have, perhaps, distinguished himself, had he been seconded by an intelligent musician, was the operatic. In this baladin talent of his there was something of the freedom and sparkle of the Italian abbés; and yet the Abbé de Voisenon enjoyed during his life-time a high degree of celebrity. Seeing the utter impossibility of justifying this celebrity by his works, we must presume that it proceeded chiefly from his amiable character, his pointed epigrammatical conversation, and in a great measure, also, from his brilliant position in the world. And, after all, did celebrity require other causes at a time when a man's success was established, not by the publicity of the press, but from the words dropped from his lips in the "world," and from the occasional enunciation of a sparkling bon mot quickly caught up and for a length of time repeated? Were we to protest against this species of illustration, as the French call it, we should be in the wrong: each epoch has its own; since then times are altered: now-a-days, in France, a man obtains celebrity through the medium of the press, formerly it was by the salons. In general, the French littérateurs, especially the journalists, may be said to write better now than they did then; but where, we should like to know, is there now to be found a young writer of thirty capable of creating and sustaining a conversation in a society consisting of upwards of a hundred distinguished persons? The lackeys of M. de Boufflers were, in all probability, more in their place in a salon than would be the most learned or witty writers of the present day.
If the Abbé de Voisenon was not exactly an eagle as regards common sense and intellectual attainments, what are we to think of M. de Choiseul, who wished to appoint him minister of France at some foreign court? The Abbé de Voisenon a minister! that man whom M. de Lauraguais called a handful of fleas! But if he became not minister of France, it was decreed by fate that he should be minister of somebody or other; he was too incapable to escape this honor. Some years after the failure of this ridiculous project of M. de Choiseul, the Prince-bishop of Spire appointed him his minister plenipotentiary at the Court of France. His admission into the bosom of the French Academy was all that was now required to complete his happiness, and this honor was shortly afterwards conferred upon him, for he was duly elected to the chair vacated by the death of Crébillon.