"It was well I drew the shot from his pistols," said Le Brun, as we were parting. I did not then see any latent meaning in his words, nor would he ever afterwards answer any questions on the subject. I had forgotten to remove my ghostly dresses and decorations, and Grace and Emma both uttered gentle screams as I stalked into their presence. My tale was soon told, and we retired to rest.
Here the whole tale ends. As the events I recorded recede into the past, I begin almost to doubt the truth of them. But I have one living evidence—now I am glad to say not single—and Le Brun may fairly lay it to me that he has at this moment the most agreeable little lady in all Normandy for his wedded wife. I am not aware if Boots still visits the glimpses of the moon at St. Sauveur, for soon after these events I was obliged to return to my parish to put down the Popish fooleries which I found my hack had begun to introduce. If, however, he does, I only hope his reappearance will be as useful as in the above little narrative, but the Brown, the Gray—and the narrator have now done with him for ever.
From Fraser's Magazine.
CREBILLON, THE FRENCH ÆSCHYLUS.
About the year 1670, there lived at Dijon a certain notary, an original in his way, named Melchior Jolyot. His father was an innkeeper; but of a more ambitious nature than his sire, the son, so soon as he had succeeded in collecting a little money, purchased for himself the office of head clerk in the Chambres des Comptes of Dijon, with the title of Greffier of the same. During the following year, having long been desirous of a title of nobility, he acquired, at a very low price, a little abandoned and almost unknown fief, that of Crebillon, situated about a league and a half from the city.
His son, Prosper Jolyot, the future poet, was at that time a young man of about two-and-twenty years of age, a student at law, and then on the eve of being admitted as advocate at the French bar. From the first years of his sojourn in Paris, we find that he called himself Prosper Jolyot de Crebillon. About sixty years later, a worthy philosopher of Dijon, a certain Monsieur J. B. Michault, writes as follows to the President de Ruffey:—"Last Saturday (June 19th, 1762), our celebrated Crebillon was interred at St. Gervais. In his billets de mort they gave him the title of ecuyer; but what appears to me more surprising, is the circumstance of his son adopting that of messire."
Crebillon had then ended by cradling himself in a sort of imaginary nobility. In 1761, we find him writing to the President de Brosse: "I have ever taken so little thought respecting my own origin, that I have neglected certain very flattering elucidations on this point. M. de Ricard, máitre des comptes at Dijon, gave my father one day two titles he had found. Of these two titles, written in very indifferent Latin, the first concerned one Jolyot, chamberlain of Raoul, Duke of Burgundy; the second, a certain Jolyot, chamberlain of Philippe le Bon. Both of these titles are lost. I can also remember having heard it said in my youth by some old inhabitants of Nuits, my father's native place, that there formerly existed in those cantons a certain very powerful and noble family, named Jolyot."
O vanity of vanities! would it be believed that, under the democratic reign of the Encyclop[oe]dia, a man like Crebillon, ennobled by his own talents and genius, could have thus hugged himself in the possession of a vain and deceitful chimera! For truth compels us to own that, from the fifteenth to the end of the seventeenth century, the Jolyots were never any thing more or less than honest innkeepers, who sold their wine unadulterated, as it was procured from the black or golden grapes of the Burgundy hills.
Meanwhile Crebillon, finding that his titles of nobility were uncontested, pushed his aristocratic weakness so far as to affirm one day that his family bore on its shield an eagle, or, on a field, azure, holding in its beak a lily, proper, leaved and sustained, argent. All went, however, according to his wishes; his son allied himself by an unexpected marriage to one of the first families of England. The old tragic poet could then pass into the other world with the consoling reflection that he left behind him here below a name not only honored in the world of letters, but inscribed also in the golden muster-roll of the French nobility. But unfortunately for poor Crebillon's family tree, about a century after the creation of this mushroom nobility—which, like the majority of the nobilities of the eighteenth century, had its foundation in the sand—a certain officious antiquary, who happened at the time to have nothing better to do, bethought himself one day of inquiring into the validity of his claim. He devoted to this strange occupation several years of precious time. By dint of shaking the dust from off the archives of Dijon and Nuits, and of rummaging the minutes of the notaries of the department, he succeeded at length in ferreting out the genealogical tree of the Jolyot family. Some, the most glorious of its members, had been notaries, others had been innkeepers. Shade of Crebillon, pardon this impious archæologist, who thus, with ruthless hands, destroyed "at one fell swoop" the brilliant scaffolding of your vanity!