LAVATER
(After the engraving by William Blake)
In nobody were the curiosity and admiration that he inspired greater than in the notorious Cardinal de Rohan. His Eminence was one of the darlings of Fortune, whose choicest favours had been showered on him with a lavish hand. Of the most illustrious birth, exceptionally handsome, enormously rich, and undeniably fascinating, no younger son ever started life under more brilliant auspices. The Church seemed to exist solely for the purpose of providing him with honours. Bishop of Strasburg, Grand Almoner of France, Cardinal, Prince of the Empire, Landgrave of Alsace—his titles were as numerous as the beads of a rosary. Nor were they merely high-sounding and empty dignities. From the Abbey of St. Waast, the richest in France, of which he was the Abbot, he drew 300,000 livres a year, and from all these various sources combined his revenue was estimated at 1,200,000 livres.
Nature had endowed him no less bounteously than Fortune. To the honours which he owed to the accident of birth, his intellect had won him another still more coveted. At twenty-seven he had been elected to the Académie Française, where, as he was particularly brilliant in conversation, it is not surprising that the Immortals should have “declared themselves charmed with his company.”
He possessed all the conspicuous qualities and defects which in the eighteenth century were characteristic of the aristocrat. High ecclesiastic that he was, he had nothing of the ascetic about him. Like so many of the great dignitaries of the Church under the ancien régime, he was worldly to the last degree. As he was not a hypocrite, he did not hesitate to live as he pleased. Appointed Ambassador to Vienna, he had scandalized the strait-laced Maria Theresa by his reckless extravagance and dissipation. The Emperor, to her disgust, “loved conversing with him to enjoy his flippant gossip and wicked stories.” “Our women,” she wrote to her Ambassador at Versailles, “young and old, beautiful and ugly, are bewitched by him. He is their idol.”
His character was a mosaic of vice and virtue. With him manners took the place of morals. “He possessed,” says Madame d’Oberkirch, “the gallantry and politeness of a grand seigneur such as I have rarely met in any one.” Madame de Genlis considered that, “if he was nothing that he ought to be, he was as amiable as it was possible to be.” In him vice lost all its grossness and levity acquired dignity. Anxious to please, he was also susceptible to flattery. “By my lording him,” says Manuel, who disliked him, “one can get from him whatever one desires.” At the same time he was obliged to confess that the Cardinal “had a really good heart.”
It was to his excessive good-nature that he owed most of his misfortunes. The entire absence of intolerance in his character caused him to be regarded as an atheist, but his unbelief, like his vices, was greatly exaggerated. Men in his position never escape detraction, but in the case of the Cardinal he deliberately invited it. Gracious to all, he was generous to a fault. He dispensed favour and charity alike without discernment, giving to the poor as readily and as bountifully as to his mistresses. Of these he had had many; the memoirs of the period contain strange, and often untranslatable, stories of his private life. For some years he was followed wherever he went by the beautiful Marquise de Marigny dressed as a page.
Besides his weakness for a pretty face, this splendid tare had a fondness amounting to passion for pomp and alchemy. “On state occasions at Versailles,” says Madame d’Oberkirch, “he wore an alb of lace en point à l’aiguille of such beauty that the assistants were almost afraid to touch it.” It was embroidered with his arms and device—the famous device of the Rohans, Roy ne puis, prince ne daigne, Rohan je suis. It was said to be worth a million livres.
In gratifying his taste for luxury, the cost was the last thing he considered. On going to Vienna as Ambassador he took with him two gala coaches worth 40,000 livres each; fifty horses, two equerries, two piqueurs, seven pages drawn from the nobility of Brittany and Alsace with their governors and tutors, two gentlemen-in-waiting, six footmen, whose scarlet and gold liveries cost him 4000 livres apiece, etc.