THE

CABINET CYCLOPÆDIA.

CONDUCTED BY THE

REV. DIONYSIUS LARDNER, LL.D. F.R.S. L. & E.

M.R.I.A. F.R.A.S. F.L.S. F.Z.S. Hon. F.C.P.S. &c. &c.

ASSISTED BY

EMINENT LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC MEN.

Biography.

EMINENT
LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC MEN
OF FRANCE.

VOL. I.

LONDON:
PRINTED FOR
LONGMAN, ORME, BROWN, GREEN, & LONGMANS,
PATERNOSTER-ROW;
AND JOHN TAYLOR,
UPPER GOWER STREET.

1838.

CONTENTS

[MONTAIGNE]
[RABELAIS]
[CORNEILLE]
[ROCHEFOUCAULD]
[MOLIÈRE]
[LA FONTAINE]
[PASCAL]
[SÉVIGNÉ (Madame de)]
[BOILEAU]
[RACINE]
[FÉNÉLON]

LIVES
OF
EMINENT
LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC MEN.

[MONTAIGNE]

1533-1592

There is scarcely any man into whose character we have more insight than that of Montaigne. He has written four volumes of "Essays," which are principally taken up by narrations of what happened to himself, or dissertations on his own nature, and this in an enlightened and philosophical, though quaint and naïve style, which renders him one of the most delightful authors in the world. It were easy to fabricate a long biography, by drawing from this source, and placing in a consecutive view, the various information he affords. We must abridge, however, into a few pages several volumes; while, by seizing on the main topics, a faithful and interesting picture will be presented.

Michel de Montaigne was born at his paternal castle of that name[1], in Périgord, on the 8th of February, 1533. He was the son of Pierre Eyquem, esquire—seigneur of Montaigne, and at one time elected mayor of Bordeaux. This portion of France, Gascony and Guienne, gives birth to a race peculiar to itself; vivacious, warm-hearted, and vain—they are sometimes boastful, but never false; often rash, but never disloyal; and Montaigne evidently inherited much of the disposition peculiar to his province. He speaks of his family as honourable and virtuous:—"We are a race noted as good parents, good brothers, good relations," he says,—and his father himself seems eminently to deserve the gratitude and praise which his son bestows. His description of him is an interesting specimen of a French noble of those days:—"He spoke little and well, and mixed his discourse with allusions to modern books, mostly Spanish; his demeanour was grave, tempered by gentleness, modesty, and humility; he took peculiar care of the neatness and cleanliness of his dress, whether on horseback or on foot; singularly true in his conversation, and conscientious and pious, almost even to superstition. For a short slight man he was very strong; his figure was upright and well proportioned; he was dexterous and graceful in all noble exercises; his agility was almost miraculous; and I have seen him, at more than sixty years of age, throw himself on a horse, leap over the table, with only his thumb on it, and never going to his room without springing up three or four stairs at a time." Michel was the eldest of five sons. His father was eager to give him a good education, and even before his birth consulted learned and clever men on the subject. On these consultations and on his own admirable judgment he formed a system, such as may in some sort be considered the basis of Rousseau's; and which shows that, however we may consider one age more enlightened than another, the natural reason of men of talent leads them to the same conclusions, whether living in an age when warfare, struggle, and the concomitant ignorance were rife, or when philosophers set the fashion of the day. "The good father whom God gave me," says Montaigne, "sent me, while in my cradle, to one of his poor villages, and kept me there while I was at nurse and longer, bringing me up to the hardest and commonest habits of life. He had another notion, also, which was to ally me with the people, and that class of men who need our assistance; desiring that I should rather give my attention to those who should stretch out their arms to me, than those who would turn their backs; and for this reason he selected people of the lowest condition for my baptismal sponsors, that I might attach myself to them." He was taught, also, in his infancy directness of conduct, and never to mingle any artifice or trickery with his games. With regard to learning, his good father meditated long on the received modes of initiating his son in the rudiments of knowledge. He was struck by the time given to, and the annoyance a child suffers in, the acquirement of the dead languages; this was exaggerated to him as a pause why the moderns were so inferior to the ancients in greatness of soul and wisdom. He hit, therefore, on the expedient of causing Latin to be the first language that his son should hear and speak. He engaged the services of a German, well versed in Latin, and wholly ignorant of French. "This man," continues Montaigne, "whom he sent for expressly, and who was liberally paid, had me perpetually in his arms. Two others of less learning, accompanied to relieve him; they never spoke to me except in Latin; and it was the invariable rule of the house, that neither my father nor my mother, nor domestic, nor maid, should utter in my presence any thing except the few Latin phrases they had learnt for the purpose of talking with me. It is strange the progress that every one made. My father and mother learnt enough Latin to understand it, and to speak it on occasions, as did also the other servants attached to me;—in short, we talked so much Latin, that it overflowed even into our neighbouring villages, where there still remain, and have taken root, several Latin names for workmen and their tools. As for me, at the age of six, I knew no more French than Arabic; and, without study, book, grammar, or instruction,—without rod and tears—I learnt as pure a Latin as my schoolmaster could teach, for I could not mix it with any other language. If, after the manner of colleges, I had a theme set me, it was given, not in French, but in bad Latin, to be turned into good; and my early master, George Buchanan and others, have often told me that I was so ready with my Latin in my infancy, that they feared to address me. Buchanan, whom I afterwards saw in the suite of the marshal de Brissac, told me that he was about to write on education, and should give mine as an example. As to Greek, of which I scarcely know any thing, my father intended that I should not learn it as a study, but as a game—for he had been told to cause me to acquire knowledge of my own accord and will, and not by force, and to nourish my soul in all gentleness and liberty, without severity or restraint, and this to almost a superstitious degree; for having heard that it hurts a child's brain to be awoke suddenly, and torn from sleep with violence, he caused me to be roused in the morning by the sound of music, and there was always a man in my service for that purpose.

"The rest maybe judged of by this specimen, which proves the prudence and affection of my excellent father, who must not be blamed if he gathered no fruits worthy of such exquisite culture. This is to be attributed to two causes: the first is the sterile and troublesome soil; for although my health was good, and my disposition was docile and gentle, I was, notwithstanding, so heavy, dull, and sleepy, that I could not be roused from my indolence even to play. I saw well what I saw; and beneath this dull outside I nourished a bold imagination, and opinions beyond my age. My mind was slow, and it never moved unless it was led—my understanding tardy—my invention idle—and, amidst all, an incredible want of memory. With all this it is not strange that he succeeded so ill. Secondly, as all those who are furiously eager for a cure are swayed by all manner of advice, so the good man, fearing to fail in a thing he had so much at heart, allowed himself at last to be carried away by the common opinion; and, not having those around him who gave him the ideas of education which he brought from Italy, sent me, at six years of age, to the public school of Guienne, which was then very flourishing, and the best in France. It was impossible to exceed the care he then took to choose accomplished private tutors; but still it was a school: my Latin deteriorated, and I have since lost all habit of speaking it; and my singular initiation only served to place me at once in the first classes; for when I left college, at the age of thirteen, I had finished my course, but, truly, without any fruit at present useful to me.

"The first love I had for books came to me through the pleasure afforded by the fables in Ovid's Metamorphoses. For, at the age of seven or eight, I quitted every other pleasure to read them; the more that its language was my maternal one, and that it was the easiest book I knew, and, considering the matter, the best adapted to my age. I was more careless of my other studies, and in this was lucky in having a clever man for my preceptor, who connived at this and similar irregularities of mine; for I thus read through the Æneid, and then Terence and Plautus, led on by delight in the subject. If he had been so foolish as to prevent me, I believe I should have brought from college a hatred of all books, as most of our young nobles do. He managed cleverly, pretending not to see; and sharpened my appetite by only allowing me to devour these volumes by stealth, and being easy with me with regard to my other lessons; for the principal qualities which my father sought in those who had charge of me were kindness and good humour; consequently idleness and laziness were my only vices. There was no fear that I should do harm, but that I should do nothing—no one expected that I should become wicked, but only useless. It has continued the same: the complaints I hear are of this sort: that I am indolent, slow to perform acts of friendship, too scrupulous, and disdainful of public employments. Meanwhile my soul had its private operations, and formed sure and independent opinions concerning the subjects it understood, digesting them alone, without communication; and among other things, I believe it had been incapable of submitting to force or violence."

It would require a volume almost to examine the effect that this singular education had on Montaigne's character. If absence of constraint strengthened the defects of his character, at least it implanted no extraneous ones. His defective memory was not cultivated, and therefore remained defective to the end. His indolence continued through life: he became somewhat of a humourist; but his faculties were not deadened, nor his heart hardened, by opposition and severity.

Montaigne's heart was warm; his temper cheerful[2], though unequal; his imagination lively[3]; his affections exalted to enthusiasm; and this ardour of disposition, joined to the sort of personal indolence which he describes, renders him a singular character. On leaving college he studied law, being destined for that profession; but he disliked it; and, though he was made counsellor to the parliament of Bordeaux, he, in the sequel, gave up the employment as by no means suited to him. He lived in troubled times. Religious parties ran high, and were so well balanced, the kingly power being diminished through the minority of Charles IX., and that of the nobles increasing in consequence, that the struggle between the two was violent and deadly. Montaigne was a catholic and a lover of peace. He did not mingle with the dissensions of the times, avoided all public employments, and it is not in the history of his times that we must seek for the events of his life.

1559.
Ætat.
26.

The chief event, so to call it, that he himself records with fondness and care, is his friendship for Étienne de la Boëtie. To judge by the only writing we possess of this friend, composed when he was scarcely more than seventeen, his Essay on "Voluntary Servitude," he evidently deserved the high esteem in which Montaigne held him, though apparently very dissimilar from him in character. Boldness and vigour mark the thoughts and style; love of freedom, founded on a generous independence of soul, breathes in every line; the bond between him and Montaigne rested on the integrity and lofty nature of their dispositions—on their talents—on the warmth of heart that distinguished both—and a fervid imagination, without which the affections seldom rise into enthusiasm. Montaigne often refers to this beloved friend in his essays. "The greatest man I ever knew," he writes, "was Étienne de la Boëtie. His was indeed a soul full of perfections, a soul of the old stamp, and which would have produced great effects had fate permitted, having by learning and study added greatly to his rich natural gifts."[4] In another essay, which is entitled "Friendship," he recounts the history of their intimacy. "We sought each other," he writes, "before we met, on account of what we heard of each other, which influenced our inclinations more than there seems to have been reason for, I think through a command of Heaven. We, as it were, embraced each other's names; and at our first meeting, which was by chance, and at a large assembly, we found ourselves so drawn together, so known to each other, that nothing hereafter was nearer than we were one to the other. He wrote a beautiful Latin poem to excuse the precipitation of our intimacy, which so promptly arrived at its perfection. As it was destined to last so short a time, and began so late, for we were both arrived at manhood, and he was several years the elder, it had no time to lose; it could not regulate itself by slow and regular friendships, which require the precaution of a long preluding acquaintance. Ours had no idea foreign to itself, and could refer to itself alone; it did not depend on one special cause, nor on two, nor three, nor four, nor a thousand, but was the quintessence of all which seized on my will, and forced it to merge and lose itself in his, and which, having seized his will, led him to merge and lose his in mine, with equal desire and eagerness. I use the word lose as the proper one, for we neither reserved any thing that was not common to both. Our souls mingled so entirely, and penetrated with such ardent affection into the very essence of each other, that not only was I as well acquainted with his as with my own, but certainly I should have more readily trusted him than myself. This attachment must not be put in the same rank with common friendships. I have known the most perfect of a slighter kind; and, if the rules are confounded, people will deceive themselves. In other friendships you must proceed bridle in hand; in the more exalted one, the offices and benefits which support other intimacies do not deserve even to be named. The perfect union of the friends causes them to hate and banish all those words that imply division and difference, such as benefit, obligation, gratitude, entreaty, thanks, and the like. All is in common with them; and, if in such a friendship one could give to the other, it would be him who received that would benefit his companion. Menander pronounced him happy who should meet only with the shadow of such a friend: he was right; for if I compare the rest of my life, though, with the blessing of God, I have passed it agreeably and peacefully, and, save from the loss of such a friend, exempt from any poignant affliction, with a tranquil mind, having taken the good that came to me originally and naturally, without seeking others; yet, if I compare the whole of it, I say, with the four years during which it was given me to enjoy the dear society of this person, it is mere smoke,—it is a dark and wearisome night. I have dragged it out painfully since I lost him; and the very pleasures that have offered themselves to me, instead of consoling, doubled the sense of my loss. We used to share every thing, and methinks I rob him of his portion. I was so accustomed to be two in every thing that I seem now but half of myself. There is no action nor idea that does not present the thought of the good he would have done me, for as he surpassed me infinitely in every talent and virtue, so did he in the duties of friendship."

1553.
Ætat.
30.

A severe illness of a few days carried off this admirable friend. Montaigne recounts, in a letter to his father, the progress of the malady, and his death bed; and nothing can be more affecting, nor better prove the noble and virtuous qualities of both, than these sad hours when the one prepared to die, and the other ministered to the dying. This loss was never forgotten; and we find, in the journal of his travels in Italy, written eighteen years after, an observation, that he fell one morning into so painful a reverie concerning M. de la Boëtie that his health was affected by it.

Montaigne married at the age of thirty-three: he married neither from wish nor choice. "Of my own will," he says, "I would have shunned marrying Wisdom herself, had she asked me. But we strive in vain; custom, and the uses of common life, carry us away: example, not choice, leads me in almost all my actions. In this, truly, I did not go of my own accord, but was led, or carried, by extraneous circumstances; and certainly I was then less prepared, and more averse than now that I have tried it. But I have conducted myself better than I expected. One may keep one's liberty prudently; but, when once one has entered on the obligation, one must observe the laws of a common duty." Montaigne made, therefore, a good husband, though not enthusiastically attached, and a good father—indeed, in all the duties of life, he acted better than was expected of him. At his death, his father[5] left him his estate, fancying that it would be wasted through his indolence and carelessness; but Montaigne's faults were negative; and he easily brought himself to regard his income as the limit of his expenses, and even kept within it. His hatred of business and trouble, joined to sound common sense, led him to understand that ease could be best attained by limiting his desires to his means, and by the degree of order necessary to know what these means were; and his practice accorded with this conclusion.

Montaigne's father lived to old age. He married late in life, and we are ignorant of the date of his death; from that period Montaigne himself seems to have lived chiefly at his paternal castle. It would appear that he was at that time under forty[6]; and henceforth his time was, to a great degree, spent in domestic society, among the few books he loved, writing his essays, and attending to the cares that wait upon property. It is not to be supposed, however, that he lived a wholly sedentary and inactive life. Though he adhered to no party, and showed no enthusiasm in the maintenance of his opinions, his disposition was inquisitive to eagerness, ardent and fiery. The troubles that desolated his country throughout his life fostered the activity of mind of which his writings are so full. He often travelled about France, and, above all, was well acquainted with Paris and the court. He loved the capital, and calls himself a Frenchman only through his love of Paris, which he names the glory of France, and one of the noblest ornaments of the world. He attended the courts at the same time of the famous duke de Guise and the king of Navarre, afterwards Henry IV. He had predicted that the death of one or the other of these princes could alone put an end to the civil war, and even foresaw the likelihood there was that Henry of Navarre should change his religion. He was at Blois when the duke de Guise was assassinated; but that event took place long subsequent to the period of which we at present write.

During his whole life civil war raged between catholic and huguenot. Montaigne, attached to the kingly and catholic party, abstained, however, from mingling in the mortal struggles going on.[7] Yet sometimes they intruded on his quiet, and he was made to feel the disturbances that desolated his country. It is a strange thing to picture France divided into two parties, belonging to which were men who risked all for the dearest privilege of life, freedom of thought and faith; and were either forced, or fancied that they were forced, to expose life and property to attain it; and to compare these religionists in arms with the tranquil philosopher, who dissected human nature in his study, and sounded the very depths of all our knowledge in freedom and ease, because he abstained from certain watchwords, and had no desire for proselytes or popular favour. "I regard our king," he says, "with a mere legitimate and political affection, neither attracted nor repelled by private interest; and in this I am satisfied with myself. In the same way I am but moderately and tranquilly attached to the general cause, and am not subject to entertain opinions in a deep-felt and enthusiastic manner. Let Montaigne, if it must, be swallowed up in the public ruin; but, if there is no necessity, I shall be thankful to fortune to save it. I treat both parties equally, and say nothing to one that I could not say to the other, with the accent only a little changed; and there is no motive of utility that could induce me to lie." This moderation, on system, of course led him, in his heart, to be inimical to the reformers. "They seek reformation," he says, in the worst of destructions, "and aim at salvation by the exact modes in which we are sure to reap damnation; and think to aid divine justice and humanity by overturning law and the rulers, under whose care God has placed them, tearing their mother (the church) to pieces, to give portions to be gnawed by her ancient enemies, filling their country with parricidal hatreds." This is no lofty view of the great and holy work of reformation, the greatest and (however stained by crime, the effect of the most cruel persecutions) the most beneficent change operated in modern times in human institutions. Montaigne goes on:—"The people suffered greatly then, both for the present and the future, from the devastation of the country. I suffered worse, for I encountered all those injuries which moderation brings during such troubles—I was pillaged by all parties. The situation of my house, and my alliance with my neighbours, gave me one appearance, my life and actions another; no formal accusations were made, for they could get no hold against me; but mute suspicion was secretly spread. A thousand injuries were done me one after another, which I could have borne better had they come altogether."

His mode of preserving his castle from pillage was very characteristic. "Defence," he says, "attracts enterprise, and fear instigates injury. I weakened the ardour of the soldiery by taking from their exploit all risk or matter for military glory, which usually served them as an excuse: what is done with danger is always honourable at those periods when the course of justice is suspended. I rendered the conquest of my house cowardly and treacherous; it was shut against no one who knocked; a porter was its only guard, an ancient usage and ceremony, and which did not serve so much to defend my abode as to offer an easier and more gracious entrance. I had no centinel but that which the stars kept for me. A gentleman does wrong to appear in a state of defence who is not perfectly so. My house was well fortified when built, but I have added nothing, fearing that such might be turned against myself. So many garrisoned houses being taken made me suspect that they were lost through that very reason. It gave cause and desire for assault. Every guarded door looks like war. If God pleased I might be attacked, but I would not call on the assailant. It is my retreat wherein to repose myself from war. I endeavour to shelter this corner from the public storm, as also another corner in my soul. Our contest vainly changes its forms, and multiplies and diversifies itself in various parties—I never stir. Among so many armed houses, I alone, in France, I believe, confided mine to the protection of Heaven only, and have never removed either money, or plate, or title-deed, or tapestry. I was resolved neither to fear nor to save myself by halves. If an entire gratitude can acquire divine favour, I shall enjoy it to the end; if not, I have gone on long enough to render my escape remarkable; it has lasted now thirty years." And he preserved his philosophy through all. "I write this," he says, in one of his essays, "at a moment when the worst of our troubles are gathering about me; the enemy is at my gates, and I endure all sorts of military outrage at once." He gives an interesting account of how, on one occasion, by presence of mind and self-possession, he saved his castle. A certain leader, bent on taking it and him, resolved to surprise him. He came alone to the gate and begged to be let in. Montaigne knew him, and thought he could rely on him as his neighbour, though not as his friend: he caused his door to be opened to him as to every one. The visitant came in a hurried manner, his horse panting, and said that he had encountered the enemy, who pursued him, and he being unarmed, and with fewer men about him, he had taken shelter at Montaigne's, and was in great trouble about his people, whom he feared were either taken or killed. Montaigne believed the tale and tried to reassure and comfort him. Presently five or six of his followers, with the same appearance of terror, presented themselves; and then more and more, to as many as thirty, well equipped and armed, pretending that they were pursued by the enemy. Montaigne's suspicions were at last awakened; but finding that he must go on as he had begun, or break out altogether, he betook himself to what seemed to him the easiest and most natural course, and ordered all to be admitted; "being," he says, "a man who gladly commits himself to fortune, and believing that we fail in not confiding sufficiently in Heaven." The soldiers having entered remained in the court yard—their chief, with his host, being in the hall, he not having permitted his horse to be put up, saying he should go the moment his people arrived. He now saw himself master of his enterprise,—the execution alone remained. He often said afterwards—for he did not fear to tell the tale—that Montaigne's frankness and composure had disarmed his treachery. He remounted his horse and departed, while his people, who kept their eyes continually upon him to see if he gave the signal, were astonished to behold him ride off and abandon his advantage.

On another occasion, confiding in some truce, he undertook a journey, and was seized by about thirty gentlemen, masked, as was the custom then, followed by a little army of arquebusiers. Being taken, he was led into the forest and despoiled of his effects, which were valuable, and high ransom demanded. He refused any, contending for the maintenance of the truce; but this plea was rejected, and they were ordered to be marched away. He did not know his enemies, nor, apparently, did they know him; and he and his people were being led off as prisoners, when suddenly a change took place: the chief addressed him in mild terms, caused all his effects to be collected and restored, and the whole party set at liberty. "The true cause of so sudden a change," says Montaigne, "operated without any apparent cause, and of repentance in a purpose then through use held just, I do not even now know. The chief among them unmasked, and told his name, and several times afterwards said that I owed my deliverance to my composure, to the courage and firmness of my words, which made me seem worthy of better treatment."

As Montaigne advanced in life he lost his health. The stone, which he believed he inherited from his father, and painful nephritic colics that seized him at intervals, put his philosophy to the test. He would not allow his illnesses to disturb the usual tenor of his life, and, above all, refused medical aid, having also inherited, he says, from his father a contempt for physicians. There was a natural remedy, however, by which he laid store, one much in favour at all times on the continent—mineral and thermal springs. The desire to try these, as well as a wish to quit for a time his troubled country, and the sight of all the misery multiplying around him, caused him to make a journey to Italy. His love of novelty and of seeing strange things sharpened his taste for travelling; and, as a slighter motive, he was glad to throw household cares aside; for, though the pleasures of command were something, he received perpetual annoyances from the indigence and sufferings of his tenants, or the quarrels of his neighbours: to travel was to get rid of all this at once.

Of course, his mode of proceeding was peculiar: he had a particular dislike to coaches or litters,—even a boat was not quite to his mind; and he only really liked travelling on horseback. Then he let every whim sway him as to the route: it gave him no annoyance to go out of his way: if the road was bad to the right, he took to the left: if he felt too unwell to mount his horse, he remained where he was till he got better: if he found he had passed by any thing that he wished to see, he turned back. On the present occasion his mode of travelling was, as usual, regulated by convenience: hired vehicles carried the luggage while he proceeded on horseback. He was accompanied by several friends, and, among others, by his brother, M. de Mattecoulon. Montaigne had the direction of the journey. We have a journal of it, partly written in his own hand, partly dictated to his valet, who, though he speaks of his roaster in the third person, evidently wrote only the words dictated. This work, discovered many years after Montaigne's death, never copied nor corrected, is singularly interesting. It seems to tell us more of Montaigne than the Essays themselves: or, rather, it confirms much said in those, by relating many things omitted, and throws a new light on various portions of his character. For instance, we find that the eager curiosity of his mind led him to inquire into the tenets of the protestants; and that, at the Swiss towns, he was accustomed, on arriving, to seek out with all speed some theologian, whom he invited to dinner, and from whom he inquired the peculiar tenets of the various sects. There creeps out, also, an almost unphilosophical dislike of his own country, springing from the miserable state into which civil war had brought it.[8]

1580.
Ætat.
47.

The party set off from the castle of Montaigne on the 22d of June, 1580: they proceeded through the north-east of France to Plombieres, where Montaigne took the waters, and then went on by Basle, Baden, in the canton of Zurich, to Constance, Augsburgh, Munich, and Trent. It is not to be supposed that he went to these places in a right line: he often changed his mind when half way to a town, and came back; so that at last his zigzag mode of proceeding rendered several of his party restive. They remonstrated; but he replied, that, for his own part, he was bound to no place but that in which he was; and that he could not go out of his way, since his only object was to wander in unknown places; and so that he never followed the same road twice, nor visited the same place twice, his scheme was accomplished. If, indeed, he had been alone, he had probably gone towards Cracovia, or overland to Greece, instead of to Italy; but he could not impart the pleasure he took in seeing strange places, which was such as to cause him to forget ill health and suffering, to any other of his party: they only sought to arrive where they could repose; he, when he rose after a painful uneasy night, felt gay and eager when he remembered that he was in a strange town and country; and was never so little weary, nor complained so little of his sufferings, having his mind always on the stretch to find novelties and to converse with strangers; for nothing, he says, hurt his health so much as indolence and ennui.

With all his windings, after he had visited Venice, which "he had a hunger to see," he found himself in Rome on the last day of November, having the previous morning risen at three hours before daylight in his haste to behold the eternal city. Here he had food in plenty for his inquiring mind; and, getting tired of his guide, rambled about, finding out remarkable objects alone; making his shrewd remarks, and trying to discover those ancient spots with which his mind was familiar. For Latin being his mother-tongue, and Latin books his primers, he was more familiar with Roman history than with that of France, and the names of the Scipios and Metelli were less of strangers to his ear than those of many Frenchmen of his own day. He was well received by the pope, who was eager to be courteous to any man of talent and rank who would still abide by the old religion. Montaigne, before he set out, had printed two books of his "Essays:" these were taken at the custom-house and underwent a censorship: several faults were found—that he had used the word fortune improperly; that he cited heretical poets; that he found excuses for the emperor Julian; that he had said that a man must of necessity he exempt from vicious inclinations while in the act of prayer; that he regarded all tortuous modes of capital punishment as cruel; that he said that a child ought to be brought up to do every thing. Montaigne took this fault-finding very quietly, saying that he had put these things down as being his opinions, and without supposing that they were errors; and that sometimes the censor had mistaken his meaning. Accordingly, these censures were not insisted upon; and when he left Rome, and took leave of the prelate, who had discoursed with him on the subject, he begged him not to pay any regard to the censure, which was a mistaken one, since they honoured his intentions, his affection for the church, and his talents; and so esteemed his frankness and conscientiousness, that they left it to him to make any needful alterations in another edition: and they ended by begging him to assist the church with his eloquence, and to remain at Rome, away from the troubles of his native country. Montaigne was much flattered by this courtesy and much more so by a bull being issued which conferred on him the citizenship of Rome, pompous in seals and golden letters, and gracious in its expressions.1581.
Ætat.
48. Nothing, he tells us, ever pleased him more than this honour, empty as it might seem, and had employed to obtain it, he says, all his five senses, for the sake of the ancient glory and present holiness of the city.

The descriptions which he gives of Rome, of the pope, and all he saw, are short, but drawn with a master's hand—graphic, original, and just; and such is the unaltered appearance of the eternal city, that his pages describe it as it now is, with as much fidelity as they did when he saw it in the sixteenth century. Its gardens and pleasure-grounds delighted him; the air seemed to him the most agreeable he had ever felt; and the perpetual excitement of inquiry in which he lived, his visits to antiquities, and to various beautiful and memorable spots, delighted him; and neither at home nor abroad was he once visited by gloom or melancholy, which he calls his death.

On the 19th of April he left Rome, and passing by the eastern road, and the shores of the Adriatic, he visited Loretto, where he displayed his piety by presenting a silver tablet, on which were hung four silver figures,—that of the virgin, with those of himself, his wife, and their only child, Eleanor, on their knees before her; and performed various religious duties, which prove the sincerity of his catholic faith. In the month of May he arrived at the baths of Lucca, where he repaired for the sake of the waters. He took up his abode at the Bagni di Villa, and with the exception of a short interval, during which he visited Florence and Pisa, he remained till September, when, on the 7th of that month, he received letters to inform him that he had been elected mayor of Bordeaux,—a circumstance which forced him to hasten his return; but he did not leave Italy without again visiting Rome. His journey home during winter, although rendered painful by physical suffering, was yet tortuous and wandering among the northern Italian towns. He re-entered France by Mont Cenis, and, visiting Lyons, continued his route through Auvergne and Périgord, till he arrived at the château de Montaigne.

Montaigne, though flattered by the unsought for election of the citizens of Bordeaux, the more so that his father had formerly been elected to that office, yet, from ill health and natural dislike to public employments, would have excused himself, had not the king interposed with his commands. He represented himself to his electors such as he conceived himself to be,—without party spirit, memory, diligence, or experience. Many, indeed, in the sequel considered him too indolent in the execution of the duties of his office, while he deemed his negative merits as deserving praise, at a period when France was distracted by the dissensions of contending factions: the citizens, probably, entertained the same opinion, since he was re-elected at the end of the two years, when his office expired, to serve two years more.

Montaigne's was a long-lived family; but he attained no great age, and his latter years were disturbed by great suffering. Living in frequent expectation of death, he was always prepared for it,—his affairs being arranged, and he ready to fulfil all the last pious catholic duties as soon as he felt himself attacked by any of the frequent fevers to which he was subject. One of the last events of his life was his friendship with mademoiselle Marie de Gournay le Jars, a young person of great merit, and afterwards esteemed one of the most learned and excellent ladies of the day; and honoured by the abuse of pedants, who attacked her personal appearance and her age, in revenge for her transcending even their sex in accomplishments and understanding: while, on the other hand, she was regarded with respect and friendship by the first men of her time.1585.
Ætat.
52. She was very young when Montaigne first saw her, which happened during a long visit he made to Paris, after his mayorship at Bordeaux was ended. Having conceived an enthusiastic love and admiration of him from reading his essays, she called on him, and requested his acquaintance. He visited her and her mother at their château de Gournay, and allied himself to her by adopting her as his daughter, and entertaining for her a warm affection and esteem. His picture of her is not only delightful, as a testimony of the merits of this young lady[9], but a proof of the unfailing enthusiasm and warmth of his own heart, which, even in suffering and decay, eagerly allied itself to kindred merit.

The illness of which he died was a quinsey, that brought on a paralysis of the tongue. His presence of mind and philosophy did not desert him at the end: he is said, as one of his last acts, to have risen from his bed, and, opening his cabinet, to have paid his servants and other legatees the legacies he had left them by will, foreseeing that his heirs might raise difficulties on the subject. When getting worse, and unable to speak, he wrote to his wife to beg her to send for some gentlemen, his neighbours, to be with him at his last moments. When they arrived, he caused mass to be celebrated in his chamber: at the moment of the elevation he tried to rise, when he fell back fainting, and so died, on the 13th of September, 1592, in the sixtieth year of his age. He was buried at Bordeaux, in a church of the commandery of St. Anthony, and his widow raised a tomb to his memory.

Montaigne was rather short of stature, strong, and thick set: his countenance was open and pleasing. He enjoyed good health till the age of forty-six, when he became afflicted by the stone. Vivacious as a Gascon, his spirits were unequal,—but he hated the melancholy that belonged to his constitution, and his chief endeavour was to nourish pleasing sensations, and to engage his mind, when his body was unemployed, in subjects of speculation and inquiry.

Of three daughters who had been born to him, one, named Eleonora, alone survived.[10] But his other daughter by adoption, mademoiselle de Gournay, deserved also that name, by the honour and care she bestowed on his memory. Immediately on his decease, the widow and her daughter invited her to come and mourn their loss with them; and she crossed all France to Bordeaux in compliance with their desire. She afterwards published several editions of his "Essays," which she dedicated to the cardinal de Richelieu, and accompanied by a preface, in which she ably defended the work from the attacks made against it. This preface, though somewhat heavy, is full of sound reasoning, and displays learning and acuteness, and completely replies to all the blame ever thrown on his works.

Montaigne's "Essays" have also been attacked in modern times. It requires that the reader should possess some similarity to the author's own mind to enter fully into their merits, and relish their discursive style. The profoundest and most original thinkers have ever turned to his pages with delight. His skilful anatomy of his own mind and passions,—his enthusiasm, clothed as it is in apparent indifference, which only renders it the more striking,—his lively and happy descriptions of persons,—his amusing narratives of events,—his happy citations of ancient authors,—and the whole instinct with individuality;—perspicuity of style, and the stamp of good faith and sincerity that reigns throughout;—these are the charms and merits of his "Essays,"—a work that raises him to the rank of one of the most original and admirable writers that France has produced.

[1]This château was situate in the parish of Saint Michael de Montaigne, not far from the town of Saint Foi, in the diocese of Perigueux, at the distance of about ten leagues from the episcopal city. It was solidly and well built, on high ground, and enjoyed a good air.

[2]"Je suis des plus exempt de la passion de tristesse, et ne l'aime ni l'estime; quoique le monde a entreprins, comme à prix faist de l'honnorer de faveur particulière: ils en habillent la sagesse, la vertu, la conscience; sot et monstreux ornement!"

[3]"Je suis de ceulx qui sentent tres grand effort de l'imagination; chascun en est heurte mais aulcuns en sont renversez. Son impression me perce; et mon art est de lui eschapper par faulte de force à luy resister. Je vivroys de la seule assistance de personnes saines et gayes; la veue des angoisses d'autruy m'angoisses materiellement, et a mon sentiment souvent usurpé le sentiment d'un tiers. Je visite plus mal voluntiers les malades auxquels, le devoir m'interesse que ceux auxquels je m'attends moins et que je considere moins, je saisis le mal que j'estudie et le couche en moi."

[4]Tom III. liv. II. chap. 17.

[5]He displayed his affectionate gratitude towards his excellent father by a tender veneration for his memory. He preserved with care the furniture of which he made personal use; and wore, when on horseback, the cloak his father wore,—"Not for comfort," he says, "but pleasure—methinks I wrap myself in him."

[6]In one of his early essays, he says, "Exactly fifteen days ago I completed my thirty-ninth year" (liv. I. chap. 19.); and in a former one he says, "Having lately retired to my own residence, resolved, as well as I can, to trouble myself with nothing but how to pass in repose what of life is left to me, it appeared to me that I could not do better than to allow my mind, in full idleness, to discourse with itself, and repose in itself, which I hoped it would easily do, having become slower and riper with time; but I find, on the contrary, that, like a runaway horse, it takes a far swifter course for itself than it would for another, and brings forth so many fantastic and chimerical ideas, one after the other, without order or end, that, for the sake of contemplating their folly and strangeness at my ease, I have resolved to put them down, hoping in time to make it ashamed of itself."

[7]One of his reasons for abstaining from attacking the huguenots, may be found in the circumstance that one of his brothers, M. de Beauregard, had been converted to the reformed religion.

[8]"M. de Montaigne trouvoit à dire trois choses en son voyage: l'un qu'il n'eut mené un cuisinier pour l'instruire de leurs façons, et en pouvoir un jour faire a preuve chez lui; l'autre qu'il n'avait mené un valet Allemand, on n'avait cherché la compagnie de quelque gentilhomme du pais, car de vivre à la merci d'un belitre de guide il y sentoit une grande incommodité; la tierce qu'avant faire le voyage il n'avait veu les livres qui le pouvoint avertir, des choses rares et remarquables de chaque lieu. Il meloli à la vérité à son jugement un peu de passion de mepris de son pais, qu'il avait à haine et à contre-cœur pour autres considerations."

[9]"J'ai pris plaisir de publier en plusieurs lieux l'espérance que j'ai de Marie de Gournay le Jars, ma fille d'alliance, et certes aimée de moi beaucoup plus que paternellement, et envellopée en ma retraite et solitude comme l'une des meilleures parties de mon propre estre: je ne regarde plus qu'elle au monde. Si l'adolescence peut donner présage, cette alme sera quelque jour capable des plus belles choses, et entre autre de la perfection de cette très sainte amitié, ou nous ne lisons point que son sexe ayt peu monter encores: la sincérité et la solidité de ses mœurs y sont déjà bastantes; son affection vers moi, plus que surrabondante, et telle, en somme, qu'il n'y a rien a souhaiter, sinon que l'appréhension qu'elle a de ma fin par les cinquante et cinq ans auxquels elle ma rencontré, la travaillant moins cruellement. Le jugement qu'elle fait de mes premiers Essais, et femme, et si jeune, et seule en son quartier, et la véhémence fameuse dont elle m'aima et me désira longtemps, sur la seule estime qu'elle eu prins de moi, longtemps avant m'avoir vue, sont des accidents de très digne considération."

[10]Eleonore de Montaigne married twice. She had no children by her first marriage. Her second husband was the viscount de Gamache. From this marriage the counts of Segur are descended in the female line.

[RABELAIS]

1483-1553

Francis Rabelais,—"the great jester of France," as he is designated by Lord Bacon; a learned scholar, physician, and philosopher, as he appears from other and eminent testimonies,—was one of the most remarkable persons who figured in the revival of letters. It is his fortune, like the ancient Hercules, to be noted with posterity for many feats to which he was a stranger,—but which are always to his disadvantage. The gross buffooneries amassed by him in his nondescript romance have made his name a common mark for any extravagance or impertinence of unknown or doubtful parentage. The purveyors of anecdotes have even fixed upon him some of the lazzi, as they are called, which may be found in the stage directions of old Italian farce. Those events and circumstances of his life which are really known, or deserving of belief, may be given within a narrow compass. We, of course, reject, in this notice, all that would offend the decencies of modern and better taste.

Rabelais was born at Chinon, a small town of Touraine. The date of his birth is not ascertained; but the generally received opinion of his death, at the age of 70, in 1553, would place his birth in 1483. There is the same uncertainty respecting the condition of his father; whether that of an innkeeper or apothecary. His predilection for the study of medicine favours the latter supposition, whilst the imputed habits of his life countenance the former. If, however, he was really abandoned to intemperance, as he is represented by his adversaries, who were many and unscrupulous, it may, with equal propriety, be charged to his monastic education, at a time when cloisters were the chosen seats of debauchery and ignorance.

He received his first rudiments at the convent of Seville, near his native town, where his progress was so slow that he was removed to another in Angiers. Here also his career seemed unpromising; and the only advantage he derived was that of becoming known to the brothers Du Bellay, one of whom, afterwards bishop of Paris and cardinal, was his patron and friend through life.

From Angiers he passed to a convent of cordeliers at Fontenaye-le-Compte, in Poitou. He now applied himself, for the first time, to the cultivation of his talents, but under circumstances the most unfavourable. The cordeliers of Fontenaye-le-Compte had no library, or notion of its use. Rabelais assumed the habit of St. Francis, distinguished himself by his preaching, and employed what he received for his sermons and masses in providing himself with books. The animosity of his brother monks was excited against him: they envied and hated him, for his success as a preacher, and for his superior attainments;—but his great and crying sin in their eyes was his knowledge of Greek, the study of which they denounced as an unholy and forbidden art. This was perfectly consistent: they were content with Latin enough to give them an imposing air with the multitude; some did not know even so much, and, instead of a breviary, carried a wine flask exactly resembling it in exterior form.

His brother monks annoyed and harassed Rabelais by all the modes which malice, ignorance, and numbers can employ against an individual, and in a convent. The learned Budeus[11], alluding to the persecutions which he was suffering, says, in one of his letters, "I understand that Rabelais is grievously annoyed and persecuted, by those enemies of all that is elegant and graceful, for his ardour in the study of Greek literature. Oh! evil infatuation of men whose minds are so dull and stupid!" They at last condemned him to live in pace; that is to linger out the remainder of his life, on bread and water, in the prison cell of the convent.

The cause, or the pretence, of Rabelais's being thus buried alive, is described as "a scandalous adventure:" but differently related. According to some the scandal consisted in his disfiguring, by way of frolic, in concert with another young cordelier, the image of their patron saint. Others state, that on the festival of St. Francis he removed the image of the saint, and took its place. Having taken precautions to hear out the imposture, he escaped detection, until the grotesque devotions of the multitude, and the rogueries of the monks, overcame his gravity, and he laughed. The simple people, seeing the image of the saint, as they supposed it, move, exclaimed, "A miracle!" but the monks, who knew better, dismissed the laity, made their false brother descend from his niche, and gave him the discipline, with their hempen cords, until his blood appeared. We will not decide which, or whether either, of these versions be true; but it is certain that he was condemned, as we have said, to solitary confinement for life in the prison cell.

Fortunately for him, his wit, gaiety, and acquirements had made him friends who were powerful enough to obtain his release. These were the Du Bellays already mentioned, and Andre Tiraqueau, chief judge of the province, to whom one of Rabelais's Latin letters is addressed;—a man of learning, it would appear, and an upright judge. The letter is addressed, "Andreo Tiraquello, equissimo judici, apud Pictones," and commences "Tiraquello doctissime." Their influence obtained not only his liberty, but the pope's (Clement VII.) licence to pass from the cordeliers of Fontenaye-le-Compte, to a convent of Benedictines at Maillezieux in the same province. This latter order has been distinguished for learning, and deserves respectful and grateful mention for its share in the preservation of the classic remains of antiquity. It was, no doubt, more agreeable, or less disagreeable, to Rabelais than that which he had left; but wholly disgusted with the monastic life, he soon threw off the frock and cowl, left the convent of his own will and pleasure, without licence or dispensation from his superiors, and for some time led a wandering life as a secular priest.

We next find him divested wholly of the sacerdotal character; and studying medicine at Montpelier. The date of this transition, as too frequently happens in the life of Rabelais, cannot be determined. He, however, pursued his studies, took his successive degrees of bachelor, licentiate, and doctor, and was, after some time, appointed a professor. He lectured, it appears from his letters of a subsequent date, chiefly on the works of Hippocrates and Galen. His superior knowledge of the Greek language enabled him to correct the faults of omission, falsification, and interpolation, committed by former translators of Hippocrates; and he executed this task, he says, by the most careful and minute collation of the text with the best copies of the original. "If this be a fault," says he, speaking of preceding mistranslations, "in other books, it is a crime in books of medicine; for in these the addition or omission of the least word, the misplacing even of a point, compromises the lives of thousands." Accordingly, his edition of Hippocrates, subsequently published by him at Lyons, has been highly prized by physicians and scholars.

Rabelais had less difficulty in restoring and elucidating the text, than in bringing into practice the better medical system of the father of the art. He complains, in his Latin epistle to Tiraqueau, at some length, but in substance, that though the age boasted many learned and enlightened men, yet the multitude was in worse than Cimmerian darkness—the many so besotted by the errors, however gross, which they had first imbibed, and by the books, however absurd, which they had first read, as to seem irremediably blind to reason and truth—clinging to ignorance and absurdity, like those shipwrecked persons who trust to a beam or a rag of the vessel which had split, instead of making aneffort themselves to swim, and finding out their mistake only when they are hopelessly sinking.—Mountebanks and astrologers (he adds) were preferred to learned physicians, even by the great.

But his capacity and zeal were held in just estimation by the medical faculty of Montpelier.—The chancellor Duprat having, for some reason now unknown, deprived that body of its privileges, or, according to Nicéron, one college only having suffered deprivation, Rabelais was deputed to solicit their restoration. There is a current anecdote of the strange mode which he took to introduce himself to the chancellor.—Arrived at the chancellor's door, he spoke Latin to the porter, who, it may be supposed, did not understand him; a person who understood Latin presenting himself, Rabelais spoke to him in Greek; to a person who understood Greek, he spoke Hebrew; and so on, through several other languages and interpreters, until the singularity of the circumstance reached the great man, and Rabelais was invited to his presence. This is in the last degree improbable. Cardinal du Bellay, his patron, was then bishop of Paris, in high favour at the court of Francis I., and, doubtless, ready to present him in a manner much more conducive to the success of his mission. The ridiculous invention was suggested by a passage of Rabelais, in which Panurge addresses Pantagruel, on their first meeting, in thirteen different languages, dead and living, not including French. Rabelais, however, pleaded the cause of the faculty of Montpelier so well, that its privileges were restored, and he was received by his colleagues on his return with unprecedented honours. So great was the estimation in which he was held henceforth, and the reverence for him after his departure, that every student put on Rabelais's scarlet gown when taking his degree of doctor. This curious usage continued from the time of Rabelais down to the Revolution. The gown latterly used was not the identical one of Rabelais. The young doctors, in their enthusiasm for its first wearer, carried off each a piece, by way of relic, until, in process of time, it reached only to the hips, and a new garment was substituted.

Rabelais, having left Montpelier, appears next at Lyons, where he practised as a physician, and published his editions of Hippocrates and Galen, with some minor pieces, including almanacks, which prove him conversant with the science of astronomy. One almanack bearing his name is pronounced spurious, on the ground of his being made to describe himself as "physician and astrologer." He treated the pretended science of astrology with derision. This would add nothing to his reputation in a later age; but, considering the number of his contemporaries, otherwise enlightened, who were not proof against this weakness, it proves him to have been one of those superior spirits whose views are in advance of their generation.

Cardinal du Bellay was sent ambassador by Francis I. to the court of Rome in 1534, and attached Rabelais as physician to his suite. He appears to have made two visits to Italy with the cardinal at this period, but there are no traces by which they can be distinguished, nor is it very material. It is made a question in one of the most recent sketches of the life of Rabelais, whether he attended the ambassador as physician or buffoon. His letters, addressed from Rome, to his friend the bishop of Maillezieux, furnish decisive evidence of his being a a person treated with respect and confidence, independently of the known friendship of the cardinal. They are the letters of a man of business, well informed of all that was passing, and trusted with state secrets. He alludes, in one letter, to the quarrels of Paul III. (now pope) and Henry VIII. It appears that the cardinal du Bellay and the bishop of Mâcon opposed and retarded, in the consistory, the bull of excommunication against Henry, as an invasion of the rights and interests of Francis I. Writing of the pope, and to a bishop, he treats him as a temporal prince, with the freedom of one man of sense and frankness writing to another, but without the least approach to levity.

We pass over the gross and idle buffooneries which Rabelais is said to have permitted himself at his first audience of the pope, and towards his person. They are too coarse to be mentioned, and too inconsistent with the probabilities of place and person to be believed. One anecdote only may be excepted, as not altogether incredible. The pope, it is said, expressed his willingness to grant Rabelais a favour, and he, in reply, begged his holiness to excommunicate him. Being asked why he preferred so strange a request, he accounted for it by saying, that some very honest gentlemen of his acquaintance in Touraine had been burned, and finding it a common saying in Italy, when a faggot would not take fire, that it was excommunicated by the pope's own mouth, he wished to be rendered incombustible by the same process. Rabelais appears to have indulged and recommended himself by his writ and gaiety at Rome; and it is not absolutely incredible that he may have gone this length with Paul III., who was a bad politician rather than a persecutor. But it is still unlikely, that whilst he was soliciting absolution from one excommunication, which he had already incurred by his apostacy from his monastic vows, he should request the favour of another, even in jest. It appears untrue that he gave offence by his buffooneries, and was punished or disgraced. This assertion is negatived by his letters, and, more conclusively, by the pope's granting him the bull of absolution, which he had been soliciting for some time.

Rabelais returned to Lyons after his first visit to Rome. After the second, he appears to have gone to Paris. No credit is due to the ridiculous artifice by which, it has been stated so often in print, he got over the payment of his hotel bill at Lyons, and travelled on to Paris at the public charge. He made up, it is pretended, several small packets, and employed a boy, the son of his hostess, to write on them "poison for the king," "poison for the queen," &c. through the whole royal family. His injunctions of secrecy of course ensured the disclosure of the secret by the young amanuensis to his mother, and Rabelais was conveyed a state prisoner to the capital. Arrived at Paris, and at court too, he proved the innocuous quality of his packets, and amused Francis I. by swallowing the contents. It has been justly remarked by Voltaire, that at a moment when the recent death of the dauphin had taken place under the suspicion of poison, this freak would have subjected Rabelais to be questioned upon the rack. Other ridiculous expedients, said to have been used by him, to extricate himself from his tavern bills, when he was without money to pay them, are undeserving of notice. There is no good evidence of his having been at any time under the necessity of resorting to them. His letters from Rome to the bishop of Maillezieux, of whom he was the pensioner, make it appear that his mode of life there was frugal and regular. But the common source of all these impertinent fictions is the mistake, as we have already said, of confounding an author with his book. Rabelais, the eulogist of debts and drunkenness, the high priest of "the oracle of the holy bottle," must of course have been reduced to such expedients! There cannot be a greater error. Doctor Arbuthnot, who approached the broad humour of Rabelais, even nearer than Swift, was remarkable for the gravity of his character and deportment.

Cardinal du Bellay, on his return from Rome to Paris, took Rabelais into his family, as his physician, his librarian, his reader, and his friend. It is stated, that he confided to him even the government of his household; which is itself a proof that Rabelais was not the reckless, dissolute buffoon he is represented. The cardinal's regard for him did not rest here. He obtained from the pope a bull, which secularized the abbey of St. Maur-des-Fosses, in his diocese of Paris, and conferred it on Rabelais. The next favour bestowed upon Rabelais by his patron was the cure or rectory of Meudon, which he held to his death, and from which he is familiarly styled "Le curé de Meudon."

It is not known at what periods or places Rabelais wrote his "Lives of the great Giant Garagantua and his Son Pantagruel;" to which he owes, if not all his reputation, certainly all his popularity; but he appears to have completed and republished it after his return from Italy. The date of the earliest existing edition of the first and second books is 1535; but there were previous editions, which have disappeared. The "Champ Fleury," of Geoffroy Tory, quoted by Lacroix du Maine, refers to them as existing before 1529. The royal privilege, dated 1545, granted by Francis I. to "our well-beloved Master Francis Rabelais," for reprinting a correct and complete edition of his work, sets forth that many spurious publications of it had been made; that the book was useful and delectable and that its continuance and completion had been solicited of the author "by the learned and studious of the kingdom."

The book and the author were attacked on all sides, and from opposite quarters. The champions for and against Aristotle, who disputed with a sectarian animosity, equalling in fury the theological controversies of the time, suspended their warfare to turn their arms against Rabelais; he was assailed, as a common enemy, by the champions of the Romish and reformed doctrines; by the anti-stagyrite Peter Ramus, and his antagonist Peter Gallandus; by the monk of Fontevrault, Puits d'Herbault, and by Calvin. But the most formidable quarter of attack was the Sorbonne, and its accusations against him the most perilous to which he could be exposed—heresy and atheism. The book was condemned by the Sorbonne, and by the criminal section of the court of parliament.

When it is considered that Rabelais, in the sixteenth century, and in France, chose for the subjects of his ridicule and buffoonery the wickedness and vices of popes, the lazy luxurious lives and griping avarice of the prelates, the debauchery, libertinism, knavery, and ignorance of the monastic orders, the barbarous and absurd theology of the Sorbonne, and the no less barbarous and absurd jurisprudence of the high tribunals of the kingdom, the wonder is not that he was persecuted, but that he escaped the stake. His usual good fortune and high protection, however, once more saved him. Francis I. called for the obnoxious and condemned book, had it read to him from the beginning to the end, pronounced it innocent and "delectable," and protected the author. The sentence of condemnation became a dead letter, the book was read with avidity, and Rabelais admired and sought as the first wit and scholar of his age.

Some expositors of Rabelais will have it, that his romance is the history of his own time burlesqued. The fictitious personages and events have even been resolved into the real. Nothing can be more uncertain, or indeed more improbable. The simple fact, that of two the most copious and diligent commentators of Rabelais,—Motteux and Duchat,—one has identified Rabelais's personages with the D'Albrets of Navarre, Montluc bishop of Valence, &c., whilst the other has discovered in Grandgousier, Garagantua, Pantagruel, Panurge, friar John, the characters of Louis XII., Francis I., Henry II., cardinal Lorraine, cardinal du Bellay. This fact alone proves the hopeless uncertainty of the question. Passing over the glaring want of congruity, which any reader of history and of Rabelais must observe between the personages here identified, how improbable the supposition that Rabelais should have held up to public ridicule the sovereign who protected him, and the friend upon whom he was mainly dependant! How absurd the supposition that neither of them should have discovered it, or been made sensible of it by others! We more particularly notice this baseless hypothesis,—for such it really is,—because it is the most confidently and frequently reproduced.

But, independently of what we have said, there is an outrageous disregard of all design and probability in the work, which defies any such verification. The most reasonable opinion, we think, is, that Rabelais attached himself to no series of events, and to no particular persons, but burlesqued classes and conditions of society, and even arts and sciences, as they presented themselves to his wayward humour and ungoverned or ungovernable imagination. This view is borne out by what we read in the memoirs of the president De Thou, who describes the author and the book as follows:—"Rabelais had a perfect knowledge of Greek and Latin literature, and of medicine, which he professed. Discarding, latterly, all serious thoughts, he abandoned himself to a life of gaiety and sensuality, and, to use his expression, embracing as his own the art of ridiculing mankind, produced a book full of the mirth of Democritus, sometimes grossly scurrilous, yet most ingeniously written, in which he exhibited, under feigned denominations, as on a public stage, all orders of the community and of the state, to be laughed at by the public."

Perhaps the real secret of his enigmatical book may be found on the surface, in his own declaration,—that he wrote for the amusement of his patients, and of the sick and sad of mankind, "those jovial follies (cez folastreries joyeuses), whilst taking his bodily refreshment, that is, eating and drinking, the proper time for treating matters of such high import and profound science."

The charge of heresy, as understood by the church of Rome, could be easily proved against him; but there appears no good ground for that of atheism, or of infidelity. He applies texts of Scripture improperly and indecently, but rather from wanton levity of humour than deliberate profaneness; and he may have retained this part of his early habits as a cordelier,—for the monks were notorious for the licence with which they applied, in their orgies, the texts of Scripture in their breviaries,—probably the only portions of Scripture which they knew: allowance is also to be made for the tone of manners and language in an age when the most zealous preachers and theologians, Romish and reformed, indulged in profane applications and parodies of Scripture without reproach. Rabelais was in principle a reformer, but of a humour too light and careless to embark seriously in the great cause.

No writer has had more contemptuous depreciators and enthusiastic admirers: his book has been called a farrago of impurity, blasphemy, and trash; a masterpiece of wit, pleasantry, erudition, and philosophy, composed in a charming style. An unqualified judgment for or against him would mislead. The most valuable opinions of him are those of his own countrymen, since the French language and literature have attained their highest cultivation. Labruyere, after discarding the idea of any historic key to Rabelais, says of him, that "where he is bad, nothing can be worse, he can please only the rabble; where good, he is exquisite and excellent, and food for the most delicate." Lafontaine, who in his letters calls him "gentil Maitre Français," has versified several of his tales, and even imitated his diction. Boileau called him "reason in masquerade" (la raison en masque). Bayle, however, made so light of him, that he has not deigned him an article in his dictionary, and only names him once or twice in passing. This was surely injustice from one who gives a separate and copious notice to the buffoon and bigot. Father Garasse. Voltaire has treated Rabelais contemptuously; called him "a physician playing the part of Punch," "a philosopher writing in his cups," "a mere buffoon." But these opinions, expressed in his philosophical letters, were recanted by him, after some years, in a private letter to Madame du Deffand; and he avows in it that he knew "Maitre Français" by heart. Voltaire appropriated both the matter and manner of Rabelais in some of his tales and "facéties," and he has been accused of this petty motive for decrying him. It was discovered, at the French revolution, that Rabelais was another Brutus, counterfeiting folly to escape the despotism of which he meditated the overthrow; and the late M. Ginguené proved, in a pamphlet of two hundred pages, that Rabelais anticipated all the reforms of that period in the church and state.

The detractors of Rabelais's book may be more easily justified than his admirers. The favour which it obtained in his lifetime, and the popularity which it has maintained through three centuries, may be ascribed to other causes besides its merits. It had the attraction of satire, malice, and mystery, which all were at liberty to expound at their pleasure; and many, doubtless, read it for its ribald buffooneries. There is in it, at the same time, a fund of wit, humour, and invention—a rampant, resistless gaiety, which gives an amusing and humorous turn to the most outrageous nonsense. There are touches of keen and witty satire, which bear out the most favourable part of the judgment of Labruyere. The condemnation of Panurge, who is left to guess his crime, is most happily humorous and satirical, whether applied to the Inquisition or to the barbarous jurisprudence of the age. Panurge protests his innocence of all crime: "Ha! there!" exclaims Grippe-Menaud; "I'll now show you that you had better have fallen into the claws of the devil than into ours. You are innocent, are you? Ha! there! as if that was a reason why we should not put you through our tortures. Ha! there! our laws are spiders' webs; the simple little flies are caught, but the large and mischievous break through them." There is in Rabelais a variety of erudition, less curious than Butler's, but more elegant. His stock of learning, it has been said, would be indigence in later times: but it should be remembered at how little cost a great parade of erudition may now be made out of indexes and encyclopedias, whilst Rabelais, Erasmus, and the other scholars of their time, had to purvey for themselves.

Rabelais most frequently quotes; but he also appropriates sometimes, without acknowledgment, what he had read. Some of his tales are to be found in the "Facetiæ" of Poggius;—that, for instance, which has been versified by Lafontaine and Dryden: and he applied to himself, after Lucian (in his treatise of the manner of writing history), the story of Diogenes rolling his tub during the siege of Corinth. Lucian has been called his prototype. Their essentially distinctive traits may be seen at a glance in their respective uses of this anecdote of the cynic philosopher: in the redundant picturesque buffoonery of dialogue and description of the one; the felicity, humour, severer judgment, and chaster style of the other.

It is impossible to characterise the fantastic cloud of words, so far beyond any thing understood by copiousness or diffuseness, conjured up sometimes by Rabelais; his vagrant digressions, astounding improbabilities, and monstrous exaggerations: but he has that rare endowment which all but redeems these faults, and charms the reader,—the talent of narrating. His great and fatal blemish is his grossness, his disregard of all decency, his sympathy with nastiness, his invasion of all that is weak and vile in the recesses of nature and the imagination. But it should be said for him, at the same time, that his is the coarseness which revolts, rather than the depravity which contaminates; and not only his affectation of a diction more antique than even his own age, but his use of the vulgar provincialisms called in France Patois, limit his popularity in the original to readers of his own country, and the better informed of other countries.

Rabelais had a host of imitators in his own age, and that which immediately succeeded: they have all sunk into utter and just oblivion, with the exception, perhaps, of Beroalde de Verville, author of the "Moyen de Parvenir." Scarron more recently made Rabelais his model, with a congenial taste for buffoonery and burlesque. Molière has not disdained to borrow from him in his comedies. Lafontaine has versified several of the tales introduced in his romance, and has even inclined to his diction. Swift has condescended to be indebted to him. "Gulliver's Travels" and the "Tale of a Tub" both bear decisive evidence, not only in particular passages, but in their respective designs, of the author's being well acquainted with the romance of "Garagantua and Pantagruel." But the imitations only prove Swift's incomparable superiority of judgment and genius. No two things can be more different, than the grave and governed humour of Swift, and the laughing mask of everlasting buffoonery worn by Rabelais: both employ in their fictions the mock-marvellous and gigantic; but Swift observes, throughout, a proportioned scale in his creations, whilst Rabelais outrages all proportion and probability: for instance, in his absurd yet laughable fiction of Panurge's six months' travels, and his discovery of mountains, valleys, rocks, cities, in the mouth of the great giant Pantagruel. Sterne's "Tristram Shandy" is more closely modelled upon the romance of Rabelais. There is the same love of farce, whim, and burlesque, even to the theology of the schoolmen; the same love of digression and wandering: but in Sterne, a superior finesse of perception and expression, the relief of mirth and pathos intermingled, and, above all, a tone of finer humanity.

Rabelais left, besides his romance, "Certain Books of Hippocrates;" and "The Ars Medicinalis of Galen," revised, edited, and commented by him; "The Second Part of the Medical Epistles of Manardi, a physician of Ferrara," edited and commented; "The Will of Lucius Cuspidius;" and "A Roman Agreement of Sale—venerable Remains of Antiquity:" (Rabelais was deceived—they were forgeries: the one by Pomponius Lætus; the other by Pontanus, whom Rabelais, on discovering his mistake, gibbeted in his romance). "Marliani's Topography of Ancient Rome," merely republished by him; "Several Almanacks, calculated under the Meridian of the noble City of Lyons;" "Military Stratagems and Prowess of the renowned Chevalier de Langey," a relative of his patron cardinal du Bellay (doubtful whether his); "Letters from Italy, addressed to the Bishop of Maillezieux," with a historical commentary, far exceeding the bulk of the text, by the brothers St. Marthe; "La Sciomachie" (sham battle)—a description of the fête given at Rome by cardinal du Bellay, in honour of the birth of the duke of Orleans, son of Francis I.; "Epistles," in Latin prose and French verse; "Smaller Pieces" of French poetry; "The Pantagrueline Prognostication," connected with the romance; and "The Philosophical Cream," a burlesque on the disputations of the schoolmen and the Sorbonne.

"The heroic Lives of the great Giants Garagantua and Pantagruel" have gone through countless editions, various expurgations, and endless commentaries; but the most valuable or curious are Duchat's, with a historical and critical commentary, in French; Motteux's, with similar commentaries, in English; an edition by the bookseller Bernard, of Amsterdam, in 1741, with the annotations of the two former, revised and criticised, and illustrations of the text engraved from drawings by Picart; an edition, in three volumes, Paris, 1823, with a copious glossary, a curious and highly illustrative table of contents, and "Rabelæsiana," collected from the author's book, not from his life; another Paris edition, of the same date, in nine volumes, with a "variorum" commentary, from the earliest annotators down to Ginguené, valuable from its copiousness rather than discernment. This last edition gives the 120 wood-cut Pantagruelian caricatures, first published in 1655, under the title of "Songes drolatiques," and ascribed, upon questionable grounds, to Rabelais.

It has been said, with every appearance of truth, that the conversation and character of Rabelais were greatly superior to his book. He knew fourteen languages, dead and living, including Hebrew and Arabic, and wrote Greek, Latin, and Italian. The Greek which he puts into the mouth of Panurge, though not the purest, even for a modern, is fluent and correct. We may remark, in passing, that the Greek word "αὐτὸ" given as part of the text in the common character, is written "afto." He was conversant with all the sciences and most of the arts of his time: a physician, a naturalist, a mathematician, an astronomer, a theologian, a jurist, an antiquary, an architect, a grammarian, a poet, a musician, a painter. His person and deportment are described as noble and graceful, his countenance engaging and expressive, his society agreeable, his disposition generous and kind. He was the physician as well as pastor of his parishioners at Meudon, where he passed his time between the society of men of letters and his friends, his clerical and medical duties, and teaching the children who chanted in the choir the elements of music. He died, it is supposed, in 1553, at the age of seventy, in Paris, and was buried in the churchyard of St. Paul, Rue des Jardins, at the foot of a tree, which, out of respect to his memory, was religiously spared, until it disappeared by natural decay.

It is untrue that he sent to cardinal du Bellay, from his deathbed, this idle message, by a page whom the cardinal had sent to know his state—"Tell the cardinal I am going to try the great 'perhaps'—you are a fool—draw the curtain—the farce is done;" or that he made this burlesque will,—"I have nothing—I owe much—I leave the rest to the poor;" or that he put on a domino when he felt his death approaching, because it is written, "beat! qui moriuntur in Domino." They are impertinent fictions. Duverdier (quoted by Nicéron in his Literary Memoirs, vol. XXXII.) had spoken ill of Rabelais in his "Bibliothèque Française," but retracted in his "Prosographie," and bore testimony to the Christian sentiments in which he died.

No monument has been placed over the grave of Rabelais, but he has been the subject of many epitaphs. We select two of them; one in Latin, the other in French:—

Ille ego Gallorum Gallus Democritus, ill.
Gratius, aut si quid Gallia progenuit.
Sic homines, sic et cœlestia Numina lusi,
Vix homines, vix ut Numina læsa putes.

Pluton, prince du sombre empire,
Ou les tiens ne rient jamais,
Reçois aujourd'hui Rabelais,
vous aurez, tous, de quoi rire.

[11]Guillaume Budé.

[CORNEILLE]

1606-1684

There is something forcible and majestic attached to the name of the father of French tragedy. As Æschylus displayed a sublime energy before the beauty of Sophocles, and the tenderness of Euripides threw gentler graces over the Greek theatre, so (if we may compare aught French to the mightier Athenian), before Racine added elegance and pathos, did Corneille, in heroic verse and majestic situation, impart a dignity and simplicity to the French drama afterwards wholly lost. We know little of him—a sort of shadowy indistinctness confounds the course of his life; but in the midst of this obscurity we trace the progress of a master mind—a man greater than his works, and yet not so great; who conceived ideas more sublime than any he executed, and who yet was held back from achieving all of which he might have been capable by a certain narrowness of taste. Had Corneille been English or Spanish, unfettered by French dramatic rules, unweakened by the jejune powers of French verse, his talent had shown itself far more mighty. As it is, however imperfect his plays may be, we admire the genius of the man far more than that of his successors, as displayed in the same career. It has been observed, that Shakspeare himself never portrayed a hero—a man mastering fate through the force of virtue. Corneille has done this; and some of his verses are instinct with an heroic spirit worthy a language more capable of expressing them.

Pierre Corneille, master of waters and forests in the viscounty of Rouen, and Marthe Le Pesant, a lady of noble family, were the parents of the poet, Pierre Corneille, surnamed the great. They had two other children; Thomas, who followed his brother's career, and was a dramatic author; and Marthe, who also shared the talents of this illustrious family. She was consulted by her brother, who read his plays to her before they were acted. She married, and was the mother of Fontenelle, the author. Pierre was a pupil of the Jesuits of Rouen, and always preserved feelings of gratitude towards that society. He was educated for the bar, but neither displayed taste for, nor obtained any success in, this career; while the spirit of the age and his own genius pointed out another, in which he acquired high renown.

The civil dissensions which had hitherto desolated France prevented the cultivation of the refined arts. Henry IV. bestowed peace on his country; but the men of his day, brought up in the lap of war, were rough and unlettered. It is generally found that national struggles develope, in the first instance, warriors and statesmen; and, when these are at an end, intellectual activity, finding no stage for practical exertion, turns itself to the creation of works of the imagination. Thus, at least, it was in Rome, where Virgil and Horace succeeded to Cato and Cæsar;—thus in France, where Corneille and Fénélon replaced Sully and his hero king. The influence of Henry IV. had been exerted to raise men fitted for the arts of government—that of Richelieu, to depress them. In the midst of the peace of desolation, bestowed by this minister on his country, which crushed all generous ardour for liberty or political advancement, the arts had birth; and the cardinal had not only sufficient discernment to encourage them in others, but entertained the ambition of shining himself. The theatre as yet did not exist in France; monastic exhibitions, mysteries and pageants, had been in vogue, which displayed neither invention nor talent. By degrees the French gathered some knowledge of the Spanish stage—the true source of modern drama, but they imitated them badly. The total want of merit in the plays of Hardy has condemned them to entire oblivion; and the dramas of Richelieu, though mended and patched by the best authors in Paris, were altogether execrable: but the spirit was born and spread abroad. 1629.
Ætat.
23. Pierre Corneille, in the provincial town of Rouen, imbibed it, and was incited to write. His first play was a comedy called "Melite." The plot was simple enough, and suggested by an incident that occurred to himself. A friend who was in love, and met with no return, introduced Corneille to the lady, and asked him to write a sonnet, addressed to her, in his name. The young poet found greater favour in the lady's eyes, and became a successful rival; and this circumstance, which he mixed up with others less credible, forms the plot of "Melite." "This," writes Corneille, "was my coup d'essai. It is not in the rules, for I did not then know that such existed. Common sense was my only guide, added to the example of Hardy. The success of my piece was wonderful; it caused the establishment of a new company of players in Paris; it equalled the best which had then appeared, and made me known at court." The comedy itself has slight merit, and reads dully. Perhaps the spectators felt this, for it had its critics. Corneille made a journey to Paris to see it acted.1634.
Ætat.
23. He there heard that the action of a play ought to be confined within the space of twenty-four hours; and he heard the meagerness of his plot and the familiarity of the language censured. As a sort of bravado, to show what he could do, he undertook to write a tragedy full of events, all of which should occur during the space of twenty-four hours, and raised the language to a sort of tragic elevation, while he took no pains to tax his genius to dc its best. At this time Corneille neither understood the basis on which theatrical interest rests (the struggle of the passions), nor had he acquired that force of expression which elevates him above all other French dramatic writers. He went on writing plays whose mediocrity renders them absolutely unreadable, and produced six comedies, which met with great success, as being the best which had then appeared, but which are now neither read nor acted. Thus brought into notice, he became one among five authors who corrected the plays of cardinal de Richelieu. His associates were L'Etoile, Boisrobert, Colletet, and Rotrou; of whom the last only was a man of genius, and he alone appreciated Corneille's merit. The others envied and depreciated him. They were joined in this sort of cabal by men of greater talent, and who ranked as the first literati of the day. Scuderi and Mairet both attacked him; and at last he had the misfortune to awaken the ill feelings of the cardinal-minister-author. Richelieu had caused a play to be acted at his palace, called the "Comédie des Tuileries," the scenes of which he himself arranged. Corneille ventured, unhidden, to alter something in the third act.1634.
Ætat.
29. Two of his associates represented this as an impertinence; and the cardinal reproved him, saying, that it was necessary to have "un esprit de suite," or an orderly mind, meaning a cringing one. This circumstance probably disgusted Corneille with his occupation of corrector to greatness; for, under the pretext that his presence was required at Rouen for the management of his little property, he retired from his subaltern employment.

Another reason may have induced him to take up his principal abode at Rouen. The same lady who inspired the first conception of "Melite" continued to have paramount influence over his thoughts. Her name was madame du Pont; she was wife of a maitre des comptes of Rouen, and perfectly beautiful. This was the serious and enduring passion of his life. He addressed many love poems to her, which he always refused to publish, and burnt two years before his death. She first inspired him with the love of poetry; and her secret admiration for his productions rendered him eager to write.[12] His genius was industrious and prolific.

We have few traces to denote that Corneille was a scholar. However, of course, he read Latin, and Seneca furnished him with the idea of a tragedy on the subject of Medea. The "Sophonisba" of Mairet was the only regular tragedy that had appeared on the French stage. 1635.
Ætat.
29. Corneille aspired to classic correctness in this new play; but his piece met with little success. It was a cold imitation of a bad original—the interest was null. Corneille was afterwards aware of its defects, and speaks openly of them when he subsequently printed it. After "Medea" he wrote another comedy, in his old style, called "The Illusion." It is strange that a writer whose merit consists in energy and grandeur should have spent his youth in writing tame and mediocre comedies.

At length Corneille broke through the sort of cloud which so long obscured his genius and his glory. And let not the French ever forget that he owed his initiation into true tragic interest to the Spanish drama. Difference of manners, religion, and language renders the heroic subjects, which are so sublime and vehement in their native Greek dress, in modern plays either tame expositions of book learning, or false pictures, in which Frenchmen take ancient names, but express modern sentiments. Spanish poets at once escaped from these trammels: they portrayed men such as they knew them to be; they represented events such as they witnessed; they depicted passions such as they felt warm in their own hearts; and Corneille, by recurring to these writers, at once entered into the spirit of stage effect and interest, and opened to his countrymen a career, which, if they and he had had discernment to follow, might have raised them far higher in the history of modern drama. The incongruities of the Spanish theatre are, it is true, numerous; and, in following their example, much was to be avoided, both in plot and dialogue. Corneille felt this; but, in some degree, he fell into the opposite extreme.

An Italian secretary of the queen, Mary d'Medici, named Chalons, having retired to Rouen, advised Corneille to learn Spanish, and pointed out the "Cid" of Guillen de Castro as affording an admirable subject for a drama.[13] There are several old Spanish romances which narrate the history of the blow received by the father of the Cid from the Count Lozano—the death of the former by the youthful hand of the avenging son—and the subsequent demand which Ximena, daughter of Lozano, makes the king of the hand of Rodrigo. The Spanish poet saw that, by interweaving the idea of a prior attachment between Rodrigo and Ximena, the struggle of passion that must ensue, ere she could consent to marry the slayer of her father, presented a grand, deeply moving subject for a drama. Corneille followed closely in Guillen de Castro's steps: he rejected certain puerilities adopted by the Spaniard from the ancient ballads of their country, which were venerable in Spain, but might excite ridicule in France; but he at the same time injured his subject by too much attention to French rules. The senseless notion of unity of time takes away from the probability of the circumstances; and that which becomes natural after a lapse of years, is monstrous when crowded into twenty-four hours; so that we repeat Scuderi's exclamation, "How actively his personages were employed!" The French rule of having but two or three persons on the stage at a time detracts from the spirited scene, where, in the Spanish play, the nobles quarrel, and the blow is given at the council board of the sovereign. Corneille mentions one or two defects himself, which show rather his erroneous notions than defects in his play. Speaking of the weakness of purpose and want of power which the king displays as a fault, he says, no king ought to be introduced but as powerful and prudent; though he gives no reason why a dramatic sovereign should be an abstract idea, instead of an historic and real personage. When the king, in Guillen de Castro, shows himself as he was, the lord paramount of turbulent feudal nobles, whom he was unable to control, and yet to whom he will not yield, and exclaims——

"Rey soy mal obecido,
Castigarè mis vasallos!"—

we see at once the various motives of action which rendered him eager to crush a quarrel between two influential families by uniting them in marriage. Corneille makes the scene take place at Seville, a city not in possession of the Spaniards till many years after. Certainly, the countryman of Shakspeare have no right to be severe on anachronisms; but the reason Corneille gives for his choice of place displays slender knowledge of the ancient state of a neighbouring country, or even of its geography. He says he does it to make the sudden incursion of the Moors, and the unprepared state of the king, more probable, by causing the attack to come by sea; when, in fact, in those days the boundaries of the warring powers were so uncertain, and the inroads so predatory, that nothing was more frequent than unforeseen invasions; and, besides, Seville is on the Guadalquivir, and several miles from the coast.

The real interest of the play, resting on the position of Rodrigo, who, despite his affection for Ximena, avenges his father, and of the miserable daughter, who feels her attachment for her lover survive the death of her parent, and the mutual struggles that ensue, overpowers these minor defects, aided as it is by powerful language and energy of passion. The success of the tragedy was unprecedented, it was received with enthusiasm in Paris, and all France re-echoed the praise, till a sort of epidemic transport was spread through the country. It became a national phrase to applaud any thing or person by calling them as excellent as the Cid (beau comme de Cid); the name spread through the world; translations of the play were made in all languages; a knowledge of it became incorporated with all minds. "I knew two men," says Fontenelle, in his life of Corneille, "a soldier and a mathematician, who had never heard of any other play that had ever been written; but the name of the Cid had penetrated even the barbarous state in which they lived."

So much renown of course inspired his would be rivals with rancour; they tried to detract from the merit of the successful play, and to show that at least it ought not to have succeeded. Scuderi published a bitter and elaborate attack, remarkable chiefly for the entire ignorance it displays of all the real springs of human passion and human interest. He calls Chimene a monster, and speaks of "the odious struggle of love and honour." He appealed to the French academy to decide on the justice of his criticism. The academy, not long before instituted by the cardinal de Richelieu, penetrated the minister's annoyance at Corneille's success, and his wish to have a rival crushed; so they by no means liked to come forward in defence of the poet; nor, on the other hand, did they relish the invidious task of pronouncing against him; they signified, therefore, that they should remain silent, unless invited by the author himself to decide on his merits. The cardinal, eager for a blow against the young poet, commissioned Corneille's intimate friend Boisrobert to write to him at Rouen on the subject. Corneille evaded giving an assent, on the score that the task in question was unworthy to occupy the academy; but, pressed by reiterated letters, he at last replied, that the academy could do as it liked; adding, "and as you say that his eminence would be glad to see their decision, and be diverted by it, I can have no objection." On this, Richelieu urged the academy to its task. Three of their number. De Bourzey, Des Marets, and Chapelain, were commissioned to draw up a judgment: each performed his work apart; and Chapelain cooked it into form, and presented it to the cardinal for his approbation. Richelieu wrote his observations in the margin, and his grudge against the poet suggested at least one ill-natured one. The academy, as an excuse for their criticisms, remarked, that the discussions concerning the greatest works, the "Jerusalem" of Tasso, and the "Pastor Fido," tended to improve the art of poetry. Richelieu observed on this, "The praise and blame of the 'Cid' is a dispute between the learned and the ignorant, while the discussions on the other works mentioned were between clever men."[14] The work of the academy was, however, not over. The cardinal recommended that a few handsful of flowers should be scattered over Chapelain's criticism; but, when these flowers were added, he found them far too fragrant and ornamental, and had them plucked up and thrown away. 1637.
Ætat.
31. After a good deal of discussion, and five months' labour, the judgment of the academy was got up and printed. Scuderi hailed it as a sentence in his favour: Corneille was not so well pleased; but, after some indecision, he resolved to abstain from all reply. Such a course was the most dignified; and he excused the failure of respect it might show to the academy on the score that it marked a higher degree towards the cardinal.

He never, it may be believed, forgot the cardinal's ill offices on this occasion, though his fear of offending caused him to dedicate his play of "Horace" to him in an adulatory address. 1639.
Ætat.
33. This tragedy shows a considerable advance in the power of expressing noble and heroic sentiments. The framework is too slight, being the duel of the Horatii and the Curiatii, and the subsequent murder of his sister by the surviving Horatius, when she reproached him for slaying her betrothed. Such a subject in the hands of Shakspeare had not, indeed, been threadbare. He would have brought the jealousies of the states of Rome and Alba in living scenes before our eyes. We should have beheld the collision of turbulent, ambitious spirits, and felt that the world was not large enough for both. The pernicious rule of unity of time and place prevented this: the ambition of Rome could be displayed only in the single person of Horatius. All we have, therefore, are various scenes between him, his sister, his wife, and the Curiatius, betrothed to the former, and brother to the latter; and these scenes are, for the most part, repetitions one of another; for the same rules confining the time of action, restrict the whole play to the delineation of the catastrophe; variety of incident and feeling is excluded, and the art of the French dramatist consists principally in petty devices, to delay the catastrophe, and so to drag it through long tête-à-tête conversations, till the fifth act: often they are unable to defer it beyond the fourth, and then the fifth is an appendix of little account.

"Horace" is, however, a masterpiece. Corneille could speak as a Roman, and the character of the hero is conceived with a simplicity and severity of taste worthy of his country.

In his next piece Corneille rose yet higher. "Cinna" is usually considered his chef d'œuvre. It contains admirable scenes, unsurpassed by any author. Did the scene in which Augustus asks the advice of Cinna and Maximus as to his meditated abdication pass between the personages (Mecænas and Agrippa) who really were called into consultation on the subject, it had been faultless. The mixture of admirable reasoning, covert and delicate flattery, forcible eloquence, and happy versification, is perhaps unequalled in any work that exists. It is, to a degree, spoiled as it stands; for the false part which the conspirators act, and the peculiarly base conduct of Cinna, deteriorate from the interest of the whole drama; and, although in subsequent portions of the play he appears in the more interesting light of a man struggling between remorse and love, we cannot recover from the impression, and thus the character wants that congruity and likelihood necessary for an ideal hero. As works of art, we may say, once for all, Corneille's tragedies are far from perfect. Very inferior poets have attained happier combinations of plot: but not one among his countrymen—few of any nation—have equalled him in scenes; in declamations full of energy and poetry; in single expressions that embody the truth of passion and the result of a life of experience; in noble sentiments, such as made the great Condé weep from admiration. In this play he did not happily confine himself to absolute unity of place. Such was his erroneous notion that he mentions this as a fault; while Voltaire drolly, yet seriously, observes that unity of place had been preserved had the stage represented two apartments at once. How far this would have helped the imagination it is impossible to say; but in real life no spectator commands a view of the interior of two separate rooms at once, except, indeed, in a penitentiary.

1640.
Ætat.
34.

The tragedies that followed "Cinna" continued to sustain the reputation of the poet. "Polyeucte," which succeeded to it the following year, is, perhaps, the most delightful of all his plays. I know no other work of the imagination in which a woman, loving one man and marrying another, preserves at once dignity and sweetness. Pauline loves Severus with all the enthusiasm of a girl's first passion;—she fears to see him again, so well does she remember the power of that love; but, though she fears, she does not lament: we perceive that conjugal tenderness for a young and virtuous husband, a sense of duty, hallowed by purity of feeling and softened by affection, have gathered over the ruins of a former attachment for another, while the heroism and generosity of Severus adds dignity to the character of her who once loved him so fondly. The only fault that strikes at all forcibly in this piece is a sort of brusquerie, or want of keeping, in the character of the martyr. The tragedy opens with his wishing to defer the sacrament of baptism because his wife had had a bad dream; and, after this, we are not prepared for his sudden resolution to overthrow the altars of his country, and to devote himself on the instant to martyrdom. The poet meant that we should feel this increase of fervour as the effect of baptism; but he has somewhat failed, by not making us expect it: and to raise expectation, so that no event should appear startling, is the great art of dramatic writing. The real fault is in the senseless notion of unity of time: had the author given his personages space to breathe, all had been in harmony. It must not be omitted, that when Corneille read this play, before its representation, to an assembly of beaux esprits, at the hotel de Rambouillet, the learned conclave came to the decision that it would not succeed, and deputed Voiture to persuade the author to withdraw it, as Christianity introduced on the stage had offended many. Corneille, frightened at this sentence, endeavoured to get it out of the hands of the actors, but was persuaded by one among them to let it take its chance.[15] The fine people of Paris could not imagine that a Christian martyr would command the interest and sympathy of an audience. Where the scene, however, is founded on truth and nature, the hearts of the listeners are carried away; and Corneille could always command admiration for his heroes, through the power of the situations he conceived, and the elevation and beauty of his language.

Corneille again attempted a comedy. Voltaire justly observes, that the French owe their first tragedy and their first comedy of character to the Spanish. The "Menteur" of Corneille is taken from "El Verdad sospechosa" of Lope de Vega; and bears marks of its Spanish origin in the intricacy of its intrigue, and its love-making out of window, so usual in Spain, and unnatural elsewhere. This comedy had the greatest success; many of the verses passed into sayings—the very situations became proverbs. "The Liar" had just arrived from Poietiers; and it grew into a fashion, when any man told an incredible story, to ask whether he had come from Poietiers?

1646.
Ætat.
40.

"Rodogune," which succeeded, is (with the lamentable defect of the unlucky unity of time and place) more like a Spanish or an English play than any other of Corneille's, except the "Cid." The very intricacy and faults of the plot, founded, as it is, on some old forgotten tale, give it the same wild romantic interest. Corneille, indeed, says he took the story from Appian and other historical sources; but, as the tale existed, perhaps he saw that first, and then consulted the ancient authorities. Voltaire, in his remarks, scarcely knows what to say to it. It succeeded brilliantly, kept possession of the stage, and always ranks as one of Corneille's best tragedies. He is forced, therefore, to acknowledge its merit, although the fault in the conduct and story struck him forcibly. He repeats, perpetually, "The pit was pleased; so we must allow this play to have merit, though there is so much in it to shock an enlightened critic." Corneille himself favoured this tragedy with particular regard. "I have often been asked at court," he says, "which of my poems I preferred; and I found all those who questioned me so partial either to 'Cinna or the 'Cid,' that I never dared declare all the tenderness I felt for this one, to which I would willingly have given my suffrage, had I not feared to fail in some degree in the respect I owed to those who inclined the other way. My preference is, perhaps, the result of one of those blind partialities which fathers sometimes feel for one child rather than another: perhaps some self-love mingles with it, since this tragedy seems to me more entirely my own than any of its predecessors, on account of its surprising incidents, which are all my own invention, and which had never before been witnessed on the stage; and, finally, perhaps a little real merit renders this partiality not entirely unjust." Fontenelle mentions, as another cause for it, the labour he bestowed; since he spent a year in meditating the subject. There might be another reason, to which neither Corneille nor his biographer allude—that this play occasioned him a triumph over a rival. Gilbert brought out a tragedy on the same subject a few months before: as it is acknowledged that Corneille's was written first, he, perhaps, heard of the subject, and took the details from the novel in question. However that may be, Gilbert's play was never acted a second time; yet it met with powerful patrons in its fall, and was published, with a flourishing dedication to the king's brother; but nothing could preserve it from oblivion. The German critics are particularly severe on "Rodogune," and with some justice: there is want of nature in the situations and sentiments; we are attached to none of the characters; and the heroine herself is utterly insignificant.

Corneille had now reached the acme of his fame. Other plays succeeded, which did not deserve the name of tragedies, but ought, as Voltaire remarks, to be entitled heroic comedies.[16] These pieces were of unequal merit; having here and there traces of the great master's hand, but defective as wholes. Usually, he introduces one character of power and interest that elevates them, and which, when filled by a good actor, rendered them successful; but they were not hailed with the enthusiasm that attended his earlier plays. The great Condé looked cold on "Don Sancho," and it was heard of no more; while the fastidious taste of the French revolted from the subject of "Theodore." Worse overthrow was in store. "Pertharite," founded on a Lombard story, failed altogether; and its ill fortune, he tells us, so disgusted him as to induce him to retreat entirely from the theatre. He turned his thoughts to other works. He wrote his "Essays on the Theatre," which contain much acute and admirable criticism; though, like all French writers on that subject, he misses the real subject of discussion. He translated, also, the "Imitation of Jesus Christ" into French—being persuaded to this design by the jesuits. He fails, as our poets are apt to fail, when they versify the psalms; the dignified simplicity of the original being lost in the frippery of modern rhyme.

It had been happy for Corneille had he adhered to his resolves to write no more for the theatre. But M. Fouquet, the celebrated and unfortunate minister of finances to Louis XIV., caused him to break it. Fouquet begged him to dramatise one of three subjects which he mentioned. Corneille chose Œdipus, "Its success," he writes, "compensated to me for the failure of the other; since the king was sufficiently pleased to cause me to receive solid testimonials of his satisfaction; and I took his liberality as a tacit order to consecrate to the amusement of his majesty all the invention and power which age and former labours had spared." This was a melancholy resolve—his subsequent plays were not worthy of their predecessors. They contain fine scenes and eloquent passages; but a hard dry spirit crept over him, which caused him to mistake exaggerated sentiments for nobleness of soul. The plots, also, were bad; the conduct enfeebled by uninteresting episodes, or by the worse expedient of giving the hero himself some under amatory interest that lowered him entirely. Voltaire remarks, "Corneille's genius was still in force. He ought to have been severe on himself, or to have had severe friends. A man capable of writing fine scenes might have written a good play. It was a great misfortune that no one told him that he chose his subjects badly." It is sad to be obliged to make excuses for genius. No doubt Corneille failed in invention as he grew older. His former power of boldness and felicity of expression often shed rays of light upon his feebler works; but he could no longer conceive a whole, whose parts should be harmonious, whose entire effect should be sublime.

The bounty of the king in bestowing a pension on him, it is probable, was one cause of his establishing himself in Paris, and his brother's recent success as a dramatist a yet more urgent one. Hitherto Corneille had resided at Rouen, visiting the capital only at intervals, when he brought out any new play. In 1642 he had been elected member of the French academy; but that circumstance caused no change in his mode of life. He was not formed to shine at court, nor in the gay Parisian circles. Simple, almost rustic, in his manners and appearance, his genius was not discernible to the casual observer. "The first time I saw him," says a writer of the day, "I took him for a merchant of Rouen—his exterior gave no token of his talents, and he was slow, and even dull, in conversation." Corneille certainly neglected the refinements of society too much; or, rather, nature, who had been so liberal to him in rich gifts, had withheld minor ones. When his familiar friends, who desired to see him perfect, spoke to him of his defects, he replied with a smile, "I am not the less Pierre Corneille." La Bruyère bears the same testimony: "Simple and timid; tiresome in conversation—he uses one word for another—he knows not how to recite his own verses."[17]

In truth, Corneille's merit did not, as with many Frenchmen, lie on the surface. Conscious of his own desert, ambitious of glory, proud, yet shy, he shrunk from society where all excellence is despised that does not sparkle and amuse. We are inclined to believe from these considerations that his migration to Paris is attributable rather to his brother than to himself.

Thomas Corneille was twenty years the junior. The brothers had married two sisters of the name of De Lampériere, between whom existed the same difference of age. The family was united by all the bonds of affection and virtue. Their property, even, was in common; and it was not until after Corneille's death that the inheritance of their wives was divided, and that each sister received her share. The brothers were fondly attached, and lived under the same roof. We are told that Thomas wrote verses with much greater facility than Pierre, and he well might, considering what his verses are; and, when Pierre wanted a rhyme, he opened a trap door communicating with his brother's room, and asked him to give one. Nor was Pierre less attached to his sister, to whom he was accustomed to read his pieces when written. She had good taste and an enlightened judgment, and was worthy of her relationship to the poet.

Thomas Corneille had lately met with success in the same career as his brother. His play of "Timocrates" was acted for six months together; and the king went to the unfashionable theatre of the Marais, at which it was brought out, for the purpose of seeing it. Nothing could be more dissimilar than the productions of the brothers. Thomas Corneille had merit, and one or two of his plays ("Le Comte d'Essex" in particular) kept possession of the stage: he had, however, knack instead of genius. He could contrive interesting situations to amuse the audience; but his verses are tame, his dialogue trivial, his conceptions altogether mediocre. Still, in its day, success is success, and, under its influence, the younger Corneille aspired to the delights of a brilliant career in the capital.

1662.
Ætat.
56.

The establishment of the family in Paris is ascertained by a procuration or power of attorney given by the brothers, empowering a cousin to manage their affairs at Rouen. Corneille seemed to feel the change as a new spur to exertion; but, unfortunately, invention no longer waited on industry, as of old. Considering it his duty to write for the stage, he brought out piece after piece, in which he mistook involved intrigue for interest, crime on stilts for heroism, and declamation for passion. His tragedies fell coldly on the public ear; and, as he could not understand why this should he, he always alleges some trivial circumstance as the cause of his ill success; for, having laboured as sedulously as in his early plays, he was insensible to the fact, that arid though pompous dialogues were substituted for sublime eloquence. Boileau's epigram on these unfortunate testimonies of decayed genius is well known:—when the wits of Paris repeated after him:

"J'ai vu l'Agésilas;
Hélas!
Mais après Attila,
Hola!"

Corneille might well regret that he had not persevered in the silence to which he condemned himself when Pertharite failed.

A young rival also sprung up—a rival whose graceful diction, whose impassioned tenderness, and elegant correctness, are the delight of French critics to this day. Yet, though Voltaire and others have set Racine far above Corneille, and though Saint Evremond wrote at the time that the advanced age of Corneille no longer alarmed him, since the French drama would not die with him, the younger poet's superiority was by no means universally acknowledged in his own time. Corneille had a party who still adhered to their early favourite, and called Racine's elegance feebleness, compared with the rough sublimity of the father of the art. "Racine writes agreeably," says madame de Sévigné, in a letter to her daughter; "but there is nothing absolutely beautiful, nothing sublime—none of those tirades of Corneille which thrill. We must never compare him with Racine; but be aware of the difference. We must excuse Corneille's bad verses in favour of those divine and sublime beauties which fill us with transport—these are traits of genius which are quite inimitable. Despréaux says even more than me,—in a word, this is good taste; let us preserve it." If, therefore, Corneille had ceased to write, if he had let his nobler tragedies remain as trophies of past victory, and not aimed at new, he might have held a proud position, guarded by numerous partisans, who exalted him far above his rival. But he continued to write, and he was unsuccessful—thus it became a living struggle, in which he had the worst. He did not like to appear envious: he felt what he said, and he said justly, that Racine's Greek or Mahometan heroes were but Frenchmen with ancient or Turkish names; but he was aware that this remark might be considered invidious. Yet he could not conceal his opinion, nor the offence he took, when Racine transplanted a verse from the Cid into his comedy of The "Plaideurs"—

"Ses rides sur son front ont gravés ses exploits."

"It ill becomes a young man," he said, "to make game of other people's verses." It was still worse when he was seduced into what the French have named a duel with Racine. Henrietta, daughter of our Charles I., wife of the brother of Louis XIV., was a principal patroness of men of genius;—her talents, her taste, her accomplishments; the generosity and kindness of her disposition, made her respected and loved. Louis and she had been attached to one another; their mutual position forced them to subdue the passion; but their triumph over it was not achieved without struggles, which, no doubt, appeared romantic and even tragical to the poor princess. She wished this combat to be immortalised; and, finding in the loves and separation of Titus and Berenice a similarity with her own fate, she deputed the marquis de Dangeau to engage Corneille and Racine, unknown to one another, each to write a tragedy on this subject—not a very promising one at best—and still more difficult on the French stage, where the catastrophe alone forms the piece. But Racine conquered these difficulties;—tenderness and truth of passion interested in place of incident—the audience wept—and criticism was mute. Corneille floundered miserably: love with him is always an adjunct and an episode, but not the whole subject: it helps as a motive—it is never the end. He fancied that his young rival was angry with him for competing with him; and he gave signs of a querulousness which he had no right to feel[18]; but there is something so naïve in his self praises, and such ingenuousness in his repinings, that we look on them as traits portraying the simplicity and singleness of his character, rather than as marks of vanity or invidiousness.

After "Berenice," he wrote two other plays, "Pulcherie" and "Surena," and then, happily, gave up composition. Though he saw the pieces of his young rival hailed with delight, he had the gratification of knowing that his own chef-d'œuvres were often acted with applause, that the best critics regarded them with enthusiasm, and that his position was firmly established as the father of French tragedy. He lived to a considerable age; and his mind became enfeebled during the last year of his life. He died on the 1st September, 1584, in the seventy-ninth year of his age.

There is a harmony between the works of Corneille and his character, which his contemporaries, who appreciated only the brilliant, mistook, but which strikes forcibly. He was proud and reserved. Though his dedications are phrased according to the adulatory ceremonial of the day, his conduct was always dignified and independent. He seldom appeared at court, where his lofty, though simple, character found nothing to attract. He was, besides, careless of the gifts of fortune: he detested the cares of property, shrinking, with terror, from such details. Serious, and even melancholy, trifles had no charms for him: dramatic composition absorbed his whole thoughts; his studies tended to improvement in that vocation only. Strait-forward and simple in manner,—his person, though tall, was heavy—his face was strongly marked and expressive—his eyes full of fire,—there was something in the whole man that bespoke strength, not grace—yet a strength full of dignity.

His fortunes were low. The trifling pension allowed him by Cardinal Richelieu expired with that minister. Many years afterwards, Louis XIV. granted him a pension of 2000 francs as the first dramatic poet of the world. He was wholly indifferent to gain; the actors paid him what they pleased for his pieces; he never called them to account. He lived frugally, but had little to live on. A few days before his death his family were in considerable straits for want of money, and the king, hearing of this, sent him 200 louis.

In these traits, recorded chiefly by his brother and his nephew, Fontenelle, we see the genuine traces of a poet. Of a man whose heart is set on the ideal, and whose mind is occupied by conceptions engendered within itself—to whom the outward world is of slight account, except as it influences his imagination or excites his affections. The political struggles and civil wars, in which his youth was spent, gave a sort of republican loftiness to his mind, energy without fierceness, somewhat at variance with the French character.

Once, on entering a theatre at Paris, after a longer retreat than usual in his native town, the actors stopped short: the great Condé, the prince of Conti, together with the whole audience, rose: the acclamation was general and long continued. Such flattering testimonials embarrassed a man modest by nature, and unused to make a show of himself; but they evince the generous spirit of his country. Marks of veneration followed his death.

His character commanded and met with respect. He had long been the eldest member of the academy: on his death his brother was elected to succeed him. Racine contended for the honour of receiving the new academician; on which occasion it was the custom to make a speech in praise of the late member whose place the new one took. Racine's eulogy on Corneille met with great applause, and he recited it a second time before the king. He spoke with enthusiasm of his merits, and, in particular, of "a certain strength, a certain elevation, which transports, and renders his very defects, if he had any, more venerable than the excellence of others." This testimony was honourable to Racine, who had, indeed, so heartfelt an appreciation of his best passages, that, although he interdicted dramas and poetry from his children, he caused them to learn, and taught them to admire, various scenes in Corneille. Many years after Voltaire discovered a descendant of the great poet[19]: he spread the discovery abroad; he invited the young lady to Ferney as to her home; and published for her benefit his two volumes of commentary on her great ancestor's works. This commentary has been found fault with for the degree of blame it contains. Voltaire says himself, he wrote it chiefly to instruct future dramatic poets, and he was sincere in his views, even if he were mistaken. It is chiefly remarkable for the extent of its verbal criticism, and his earnest endeavour to banish all familiar expressions from tragic dialogue, thus rendering French tragedies more factitious than ever. It is strange to remark the different genius of various languages. We endeavour perpetually to bring back ours to the familiar and antique Saxon. We regard our translation of the Bible as a precious treasure, even in this light, being a source to which all good writers resort for true unadulterated English. It has been remarked that the sublimest passages of our greatest poets are written in short words, that is, in Anglo-Saxon, or pure English. While Voltaire, on the contrary, tried to substitute words unused in conversation, strangers to the real living expression of passion, and which give a factitious and false air, peculiar to the French buskin, and alien to true elevation of language.

So much has been said of Corneille's tragedies in the preceding pages that we need scarcely revert to them. He originated the French theatre. It was yet in the block when he took up his artist-tools. We grieve at the mistakes he made—mistakes, as to the structure of the drama, confirmed by subsequent writers, which mark classic French tragedy as an artificial and contracted offspring of a school, instead of being the free and genuine child of nature and genius. Corneille's originality, however, often bursts through these trammels: he has more truth and simplicity than any of his successors, and, as well as being the father of the French drama, we may name him the most vigorous and sublime poet that France has produced.

[12]

"J'ai brûlé fort longtemps d'une amour assez grande,
Et que jusqu'au tombeau je dois bien estimer,
Puisque ce fut par-là que j'appris à rimer.
Mon bonheur commença quand mon ame fut prise.
Je gagnai de la gloire en perdant ma franchise.
Charmé de deux beaux yeux, mon vers charma la cour;
Et ce que j'ai de nom je le dois à l'amour.
J'adorai donc Phylis, et la secrète estime
Que ce divin esprit faisait de notre rime.
Me fit devenir poète aussitôt qu'amoureux:
Elle eut mes premiers vers, elle eut mes premiers feux,
Et bien que maintenant cette belle inhumaine
Traite mon souvenir avec un peu de haine,
Je me trouve toujours en état de l'aimer;
Je me sens tout ému quand je l'entends nommer;
Et par le doux effet d'une prompte tendresse,
Mon cœur, sans mon aveu, reconnaît sa maîtresse.
Après beaucoup de vœux et de soumissions,
Un malheur rompt le cours de nos affections;
Mais tout mon amour en elle consommée,
Je ne vois rien d'aimable après l'avoir aimée;
Aussi n'aimé-je plus, et nul objet vainqueur
N'a possédé depuis ma veine ni mon cœur."

CORNEILLE.—Poésies Diverses.

[13]See Voltaire's preface to his Commentary on the Cid, and also the admirable account of Guillen de Castro, by Lord Holland.

[14]Voltaire says that he gives the cardinal credit for good faith in this remark, since he saw and felt the defects of the "Cid." Voltaire was himself accused of envy on account of the mass of criticism he accumulated on Corneille, and was glad to show toleration for that which he desired to be tolerated. Both, probably, were sincere in their blame. The question is, how far covert envy (unacknowledged even to themselves) opened their eyes to defects, which otherwise had passed unnoticed.

[15]Fontenelle.

[16]It is curious enough that such pieces often replace the higher tragedy with great effect in days when poetry is at a low ebb, and an audience desires rather to be amused than deeply moved. Such at this time are the delightful dramas of Sheridan Knowles, such the charming "Lady of Lyons," which portray the serious romance of real life, and impart the interest of situation and character, without pretending to the sublime terrors or pathos of heroic tragedy.

[17]Corneille gives much the same account of himself in some verses written in his youth, and which he calls a slight picture of himself:—

"En matière d'amour je suis fort inégal;
J'en écris assez bien, et le fais assez mal;
J'ai la plume féconde, et la bouche sterile:
Bon galant au théâtre, et fort mauvais en ville;
Et l'on peut rarement m'écouter sans ennui;
Que quand je me produis par la bouche d'autrui."

[18]See his "Excuse à Arioste." In another place he says,—

"Si mes quinze lustres
Font encore quelque peine aux modernes illustres;
S'il en est de fâcheux jusqu'à se chagriner,
Je n'aurai pas longtemps à les importuner."

[19]Corneille had three sons: two entered the army; the third became an ecclesiastic; one fell at the battle of Grave, in 1677; they all died without posterity. He had one daughter, from whom descended the family of Guenebaud.

[ROCHEFOUCAULD]

1613-1680

Grimm, in his correspondence, records, that it was a saying of d'Alembert, that, in life, "Ce n'est qu'heur et malheur," that it was all luck or ill luck. The same thing may be said of many books; and, perhaps, of none more than that which has given literary celebrity to François, duke de la Rochefoucauld. The experience of a long life, spent for the most part in the very nucleus of the intrigues of party and the artifices of a court, reduced into sententious maxims, affords food for curiosity, while it flatters our idleness. The most indolent person may read a maxim, and ponder on its truth, and be led to meditate, without any violent exertion of mind. In addition, knowledge of the world, as it is called, always interests. Voltaire says of the "Maxims," "Though there is but one truth in this collection, which is that self-love is the motive of all, yet this thought is presented under such various aspects that it is always impressive. If we considered the pervading opinion of the book theoretically, we might be inclined to parody this remark, and say, "though there is but one multiformed falsehood in this collection,"—but we defer our consideration of the principles of this work till we have given an account of its author, who was no obscure man, meditating the lessons of wisdom in solitude, but the leader of a party, a soldier, a man of gallantry and of fashion; one such as is only produced, in its perfection, in a society highly cultivated; yet the foundations of his character were thrown in times of ignorance and turbulence."

The family of La Rochefoucauld is one of the noblest in France: it ranks equal with that of the sovereign, and enjoyed almost monarchical power when residing on its own possessions; while its influence might give preponderance to the party it espoused, and even shake the throne. François, the eldest son of the duke then in possession, was born at his paternal castle of Rochefoucauld, in Angoumois, in 1613, two years subsequent to the assassination of Henry IV. He grew up, therefore, during the reign of Louis XIII., and first came to court during the height of cardinal de Richelieu's power. His education had been neglected. Madame de Maintenon said of him, in after times, that "his physiognomy was prepossessing, his demeanour dignified; that he had great talent, and little knowledge." We have no details of his early life at court. He was the friend of the duchess de Chevreuse, favourite of the queen, Anne of Austria; and, when this lady was banished, the family of la Rochefoucauld fell into disgrace, and retired to the shelter of their estates.

But a few years before the nobles of France possessed greater power than the king himself. The short reign and wise administration of Henry IV. and Sully had infused a somewhat better spirit into the body politic of the kingdom than that which for forty years had torn the country with civil war; but the happy effects of that prosperous period were obliterated on the accession of Louis XIII. After a series of struggles, however, Richelieu became prime minister; and with unflinching courage, and resolute and merciless policy, he proceeded to crush the nobility, and to raise the monarchical power (invested, it may be said, in his own person,) into absolute rule. The nobles in those days did not plot to supplant each other in the favour of their royal master, nor to gain some place near the royal person; they aimed at supremacy over the king himself: reluctantly, and not without struggles that cost the lives and fortunes of many of the chief among them, did the nobles yield to the despotism of Richelieu. The mother of their sovereign was banished; his brother disgraced; his queen enslaved; the prisons filled with victims; the provinces with exiles; the blood of many flowed: the cardinal reigned secure, and the power of the contending nobles was reduced to feudal command in their own domains.

At length Richelieu died; and, for a moment, his vanquished enemies fancied that their turn was come for acquiring dominion. The state prisons were thrown open; the exiles hastened to return. The friends of the family of la Rochefoucauld wrote to advise them to appear at court. The reigning duke and his sons immediately followed this counsel.[20] 1642.
Ætat.
29. His eldest son was called prince de Marsillac: his name and person were well known as the friend of the duchess of Chevreuse, and as a favourite of Anne of Austria. He has left us an account of that period, in which he details the high hopes of his party and subsequent disappointment.

"The persecution I had suffered," he writes[21], "during the power of the cardinal de Richelieu, having finished with his life, I thought it right to return to court. The ill health of the king, and the disinclination that he manifested to confide his children and kingdom to the queen, made me hope that I might soon find important occasions for serving her, and of giving her, in the present state of things, the same marks of attachment which she had received from me on all occasions when her interests, and those of madame de Chevreuse, were in opposition to those of cardinal de Richelieu. I arrived at court; and found it as submissive to his will after his death as during his life. His relations and his creatures continued to enjoy all the advantages they had gained through him; and by a turn of fortune, of which there are few examples, the king, who hated him, and desired his fall, was obliged, not only to conceal his sentiments, but even to authorise the disposition made by the cardinal in his will of the principal employments and most important places in his kingdom. He chose cardinal Mazarin to succeed him in the government. Nevertheless, as the health of the king was deplorable, there was a likelihood that every thing would soon change, and that, the queen or monsieur (the duke of Orleans, brother to Louis XIII.) acquiring the regency, they would revenge on the followers of Richelieu the outrages they had received from himself."

Affairs, however, took a very different turn. Mazarin and others, the creatures of and successors to Richelieu, were less arrogant, less ambitious, and less resolute than their master. They were willing to acquire power by allying themselves to the adverse party. Mazarin, in particular, felt that, on the death of Louis XIII., he should not possess influence enough to cope with the persons who, by rank, were destined to the regency; and he perceived, at once, that it was his best policy to become the friend, instead of the rival, of the queen and the duke of Orleans. Anne of Austria saw safety in encouraging him in this conduct. Mazarin grew into a favourite, and supplanted those who had stood by her during her years of adversity. Thus, while the surface of things appeared the same, the spirit was changed. Rochefoucauld saw that the queen entertained new views and new partialities, and was supported by the same party by which she had been hitherto oppressed. As her friend, he perceived the advantages she gained by this line of conduct, and, by prudent concessions, retained her regard. When the king died, and she became regent, Mazarin had made himself necessary to her, for it was by his policy that the other members of the council of the regency were reduced to insignificance; so that the queen, entirely attached to him, anticipated with something of aversion the reappearance of madame de Chevreuse, who, on the death of Louis XIII., hastened 1643 to return to Paris.1643.
Ætat.
30. The prince of Marsillac perceived her apprehensions, and asked her permission to meet madame de Chevreuse on her way, which the queen readily granted, hoping that the prince would dispose her former friend to seek the friendship of Mazarin. This was, indeed, Marsillac's purpose: he gave the fallen favourite the best advice that prudence could suggest, and the duchess promised to follow it. In this she failed. She fancied that she could supplant the cardinal in the queen's favour; she acted with arrogance; and her imprudence insured her ruin.

Le bon temps de la régence followed. For five years France enjoyed external and internal prosperity. The former was insured by the battle of Rocroi, and other successes, obtained by the prince of Condé and Turenne, against the power of Spain. The latter was more fallacious. The intrigues, cabals, and dissensions of the court were carried on with virulence. Manners became every day more and more corrupt—the gulf between Mazarin and his antagonists wider. We have little trace of Marsillac's conduct during this interval. He followed the campaigns, and served gallantly in several actions. He was present at the siege of Mardike, in which he was wounded in the shoulder, which obliged him to return to Paris. He bought the governorship of Poitou, and took up his residence there. He visited Paris, but want of money prevented his remaining. His secretary, Gourville, lets us into a view of the corruption of the times, when he details how he enriched his master by only obtaining from Emery, the comptroller of the finances, a man of low extraction, whose extortion, luxuriousness, and debauchery disgusted the nation, a passport for a thousand tons of wheat, to be brought from Poitou to the capital; and the profit he gained by this transaction enabled the prince, to his infinite joy, to remain in Paris.

There can be little doubt that, at this time, he had immersed himself in political intrigue. Madame de Chevreuse was again banished; but affairs had taken another and more important aspect than mere intrigues and disputes among courtiers for royal favour. The extravagance of the court, and corruption of the times, had thrown the finances into disorder; and every means most subversive of the prosperity of the people, and of justice, was resorted to by Emery to supply the royal treasury. The consequence was universal discontent. Parliament resisted the court by its decrees; the populace of Paris supported parliament; and a regular system of resistance to the regent and her minister was formed. This opposition received the name of the Fronde: the persons who formed it were called Frondeurs. These were bent, the duke de la Rochefoucauld tells us, in his memoirs, on arresting the course of the calamities at hand; having the same object, though urged by a different motive, as those who were instigated by hatred of the cardinal. 1648.
Ætat.
35. At first the remonstrances of parliament, and the opposition of the court, was a war of words only; but when the court, enraged at any opposition to its will, proceeded to arrest three principal members of parliament, the people of Paris rose in a body; the day of the barricades ensued, the members were set free, and the court forced to yield.

But the tumults did not end here: the celebrated De Retz, then coadjutor to the archbishop of Paris, who saw his towering ambition crushed by the distrust of the court, resolved to make himself feared; and, instead of permitting the spirit of sedition in the capital to subside, he excited it to its utmost. It became necessary for him, in the system of opposition that ensued, to secure some prince of the blood at the head of his party. His eyes turned towards the great Condé; but he continued faithful to the queen: the coadjutor was, therefore, forced to centre his hopes in this prince's younger brother, the prince of Conti. Rochefoucauld gives an account, in his memoirs, of the winning over of this prince. "The prince of Conti," he writes, "was ill satisfied at not possessing a place in the council, and even more at the neglect with which the prince of Condé treated him; and as he was entirely influenced by his sister, the duchess de Longueville, who was piqued at the indifference her elder brother displayed towards her, he abandoned himself without reserve to his resentment. This princess, who had a great share afterwards in these affairs, possessed all the advantages of talent and beauty to so great a degree, joined to so many charms, that it appeared as if nature had taken pleasure in forming a perfect and finished work in her: but these qualities lost a part of their brilliancy through a defect which was never before seen in a person of this merit; which was that, far from giving the law to those who had a particular adoration for her, she transfused herself so entirely into their sentiments that she entirely forgot her own. At this time the prince de Marsillac had a share in her heart; and, as he joined his ambition to his love, he inspired her with a taste for politics, to which she had a natural aversion, and took advantage of her wish to revenge herself on the prince of Condé by opposing Conti to him. De Retz was fortunate in his project, through the sentiments entertained by the brother and sister, who allied themselves to the Frondeurs by a treaty, into which the duke de Longueville was drawn by his hopes of succeeding, through the help of parliament, in his ill-founded pretensions of being treated like a prince of the blood."[22]

The state of tumult and street warfare into which Paris was plunged by these intrigues at last determined the queen to the most desperate measures: she resolved to escape from the capital, with the young king, the cardinal, and the whole court, and then to blockade it. In this plan she succeeded, through her admirable presence of mind and fearlessness. The court retreated to St. Germain. Here they were unprovided even with necessaries. They lived in disfurnished apartments, they slept on straw, and were exposed to a thousand hardships. The prince of Conti, and Marsillac, and the duke de Longueville followed the court. De Retz was confounded by their retreat; and sent the marquis de Noirmoutier to learn the cause of their secession, and, if possible, to bring them back. The motive of these princes in apparently deserting their party was, it would seem, to further their own private interests.[23] Marsillac left his secretary, Gourville, behind, to negotiate with the leading members of parliament for the electing the prince of Conti generalissimo of the Parisian troops. When this transaction was arranged, the princes determined on their return to the capital. It was a matter of danger and difficulty to escape from St. Germain. When the method of so doing was arranged, Marsillac held a long conversation with Gourville, telling him what account he was to carry to Paris, in case he should be made prisoner, in which case he felt sure that he should be decapitated. Gourville, however, begged him to write his last instructions, as he was resolved to share his fortunes to the last. Their attempt, however, was attended with success: the adventurers made good their entrance into Paris; and, after some opposition, gained their point, principally through the appearance of the beautiful duchesses de Bouillon and Longueville, who presented themselves before the people of Paris with their children, and excited a commotion in their favour. The prince of Conti was elected generalissimo.

Meanwhile Condé blockaded the metropolis; and the volunteers of Paris, composed of its citizens, poured out to resist the blockade. The warfare was of the most ridiculous kind: the people of Paris made a jest of their own soldiery, which excelled only in the talent of running away. These troops went to the field by thousands, dressed out in feathers and ribands: they fled if they encountered but 200 of the royal troops: when they returned, flying, they were received with laughter and shouts of ridicule. Couplets and epigrams were multiplied and showered upon them and their leaders; the populace were diverted, while the most frightful licence prevailed; blasphemy was added to licentiousness, and the bands of society were loosened, its core poisoned. At length the middling classes, most active at first in the work of sedition and lawlessness, got tired of the wickedness they saw exhibited round them, and of the dangers to which they were perpetually exposed. Blood was spilt, and they scarcely knew for what they fought: each side began to sigh for peace. De Retz failed in gaining the assistance of Turenne, for, corrupted by an emissary of Mazarin, the army of Turenne deserted him. The same arts were used to gain over the partisans of De Retz. The prince de Marsillac was suffering from a severe wound. He had headed a squadron sent out with other troops for the purpose of escorting some convoys of provisions. The party was attacked, and fled on the instant, with the exception of the party led by Marsillac, (who, de Retz observes, had more valour than experience) that kept the ground till the prince had a horse killed under him, and was seriously wounded himself, when he returned to Paris. This circumstance led him, probably, to listen more readily to the representations of Mazarin's emissaries. 1649.
Ætat.
36. He became an entire convert to the desire for peace, and by degrees, though with difficulty, the prince of Conti and the duchess de Longueville were brought to acquiesce in its necessity.

A sort of unsettled tranquillity was thus restored. After a time the court returned to Paris: but the peace was hollow, and the bad passions of men fermented still. The capital, with the exception of not being under arms, was in a state of perpetual and disgraceful tumult. The war of the Fronde has been named a tragic farce; for it was carried on as much by mutual insults and epigrams as by the sword. Never did mankind display so total a disregard for decency and moral law: churchmen acknowledged their mistresses openly; wives made no secret of favouring their lovers; and infamy became too common to render any one conspicuous. As the nobility of the Fronde were the most dissolute, so, by degrees, did it lose favour with the people. Each noble sought his own interests: each changed side as his hopes changed. The Fronde lost many of its chief partisans. The prince of Condé became reconciled to the prince of Conti; and he, and the duke and duchess de Longueville, and the prince Marsillac, now duke de la Rochefoucauld, through the recent death of his father, fell off from the Fronde, at the same time that they continued to oppose and insult the queen and Mazarin. Meanwhile De Retz was eager to renew a warfare which raised him to the rank of leader. He was still intriguing—still, as it were, covertly in arms,—continuing to exercise unbounded influence over the people of Paris, and to carry on intrigues with the discontented nobles. The court, meanwhile, thoroughly frightened by the late events, was bent on weakening its enemies by any means, however treacherous and violent. 1650.
Ætat.
37. While, therefore, the false security of peace prevented their being on their guard, suddenly one day the prince of Condé, his brother, and brother-in-law, were arrested, and sent to Vincennes; and the queen sent to the duchess de Longueville, requiring her immediate attendance. Rochefoucauld had seen reason to suspect this piece of treachery, and had wished to warn the princes; but the person he intrusted with the commission failed to execute it. When the duke de Vrillière brought the order to the duchess requiring her attendance, Rochefoucauld persuaded her, instead of obeying, to quit Paris on the instant, and hasten to Normandy, to raise her friends in Rouen and Havre de Grace, in favour of her husband and brothers. Rochefoucauld accompanied her; but the duchess having failed in her attempt, and being pressed by the enemy, was forced to embark, and take refuge in Holland, while Rochefoucauld repaired to his government at Poitou. All was now prepared for war. Turenne, at Stenay, was in revolt. The dukes of Bouillon and la Rochefoucauld collected troops in Guienne. Rochefoucauld was the first in arms, though he had no resource, except his credit and friends, in collecting troops. He made the ceremony of the interment of his father the pretext for assembling the nobility and tenants of his province, and thus raised 2000 horse and 600 foot.[24] His first attempt was to succour Saumur, besieged by the king's troops. But Mazarin had not been idle: he had engaged what Frederick the Great called his yellow hussars in his favour, and, by bribery and corruption, possessed himself of the town. After this Bordeaux became the seat of war. Bouillon and Rochefoucauld having entrenched themselves in that city, and the royal troops attacking it. Ill defended by fortifications, it soon capitulated, but obtained favourable terms. Bouillon and Rochefoucauld were allowed to retire. Mazarin exerted all his powers of persuasion to gain them, but they continued faithful to the princes. Rochefoucauld retreated once again to his government of Poitou, discontented at having received no compensation for his house of Verteuil, which the king's party had razed.

Soon after the divisions in France took somewhat a new face. De Retz gained over the duke of Orleans, and united himself to the party of the princes. The Fronde, thus reinforced, turned all its force against Mazarin. He was forced to fly, and the princes were liberated. It is not here that a detail of the strange events of the war of the Fronde can be given. They are introduced only because Rochefoucauld took a prominent part. Changes were perpetually taking place in the state of parties; and a sort of confusion reigns throughout, arising from the want of any noble or disinterested object in any of the partisans, that at once confuses and wearies the mind. To detail the conduct of a nobility emancipated from all legal as well as all moral and religious restraint,—bent only on the acquisition of power,—influenced by hatred and selfishness,—is no interesting task. It may be instructive; for we see what an aristocracy may become, when it throws off the control of a court, whose interest it is to enforce order,—and of the people, who spontaneously love and admire virtue,—and at once tramples on religion and law. The nobles of the Fronde had lost the dignity and grandeur of feudal power; they aimed at no amelioration for the state of the kingdom; they neither loved freedom nor power in any way permanently advantageous, even to their own order. Turbulent, dissolute, and unprincipled, they acted the parts of emancipated slaves, not of freemen asserting their rights. We seek for some trace of better things in Rochefoucauld's own views and actions, but do not find it. He avows ambition; that and his love for the duchess de Longueville are all the motives that are discernible in his own account of his conduct. When, however, we find madame de Maintenon, who was an excellent and an impartial judge, praise him, in the sequel, as a faithful, true, and prudent friend, we are willing to throw the blame from him on those from whom he divided. Madame de Longueville was certainly guilty of inconstancy; and we are told how entirely she was influenced by the person to whom she attached herself. She drew the prince of Conti after her. Meanwhile, the party in opposition to Mazarin became divided into the new and old Fronde. No one could tell to which De Retz would adhere long. He, for the moment, headed the old, the prince of Condé the new. Rochefoucauld hated De Retz, we are told, with a hatred seldom felt, except by rival men of talent.[25] He now, therefore, sided with Condé, and endeavoured to alienate him entirely from the coadjutor, and to draw over his brother and sister to the same side. He entered zealously into the plan of breaking off a marriage proposed between the prince of Conti and mademoiselle de Chevreuse, who was known to be the mistress of De Retz, which event widened the separation between the parties. This led to more violent scenes than ever. Condé was forced to retreat, and only appeared strongly guarded; and the queen took advantage of this show of violence to accuse him of high treason to parliament. This occasioned the most tumultuous scenes. The two parties met in the Palace of Justice; both Condé and De Retz surrounded by followers eager to draw their swords on each other,—none more eager than Rochefoucauld, whom De Retz detested, and (if we believe the duke's own account) had several times sought to have assassinated. On this occasion Rochefoucauld was on the alert to revenge himself. Molé, the intrepid and courageous president, alone, by his resolution and firmness, prevented bloodshed. He implored the prince and the coadjutor to withdraw their troops from the palace: they assented. De Retz left the hall to command his followers to retire. Rochefoucauld was sent by Condé on a similar mission to his partisans. This was a more difficult task than they had apprehended: both parties were on the point of coming to blows; and the coadjutor hastened to return to the great chamber, when an extraordinary scene, related by the duke in his memoirs, ensued. He had returned before the coadjutor, and De Retz, pushing the door open, got half in, when Rochefoucauld pressed against it on the other side, and held his enemy's body in the doorway, half in and half out of the chamber. "This opportunity might have tempted the duke de la Rochefoucauld," writes the duke himself. "After all that had passed, both public and private reasons led him to desire to destroy his most mortal enemy; as, besides the facility thus offered of revenging himself, while he avenged the prince for the shame and disgrace he had endured, he saw also that the life of the coadjutor ought to answer for the disorder he occasioned. But, on the other side, he considered that no combat had been begun; that no one came against him to defend the coadjutor; that he had not the same pretext for attacking him as if blows had already been interchanged—the followers of the prince, also, who were near the duke, did not reflect on the extent of the service they might have rendered their master in this conjuncture;—in fine, the duke would not commit an action that seemed cruel, and the rest were irresolute and unprepared; and thus time was given to liberate the coadjutor from the greatest danger in which he had ever found himself."[26] Rochefoucauld adds the description of another incident, not less characteristic of the times, that happened subsequently. After this scene in the Palace of Justice, the coadjutor avoided going there or meeting Condé; but, one day, the prince was in his carriage with Rochefoucauld, followed by an immense crowd of people, when they met the coadjutor, in his pontifical robes, leading a procession of relics and images of saints. The prince stopped, out of respect to the church, and the coadjutor went on till he came opposite to the prince, whom he saluted respectfully, giving both him and his companion his benediction. They received it with marks of reverence; while the people around, excited by the rencontre, uttered a thousand imprecations against De Retz, and would have torn him to pieces, had not the prince caused his followers to interfere to his rescue. In all this we see nothing of the high bearing of a man of birth, nor the gallantry and generosity of a soldier. That Rochefoucauld did not murder De Retz scarcely redeems him, since we find that he entertained the thought, and almost repented not having put it in execution. In the heat of this quarrel the coadjutor had named him coward: ("I lied," De Retz writes in his memoirs, "for he was assuredly very brave;") giving him, at the same time, his nickname, Franchise, which he got in ridicule of his assumption of the appearance of frankness as a cloak to double-dealing and real astuteness of disposition. We are willing, however, to suppose that he practised this sort of astuteness only with his enemies, and that he continued frank and true to his friends. He had now become the firm partisan and friend of Condé. This prince, a soldier in heart and profession, grew impatient of the miserable tumults and brawls of Paris, and resolved to assert his authority in arms. He retreated to the south of France, and raised Guienne, Poitou, and Anjou against the court. He was surrounded by the prince of Conti, the duchess de Longueville, Rochefoucauld, Nemours, and many others of his boldest and most powerful adherents. He was received in Bordeaux with joy and acclamations: ten thousand men were levied; and Spain eagerly lent her succour to support him in his rebellion. This was, for France, the most disastrous period of its civil dissensions. All the blessings of civilisation were lost; commerce, the arts, and the sciences were, as it were, obliterated from the face of society; the industrious classes were reduced to misery and want; the peasantry had degenerated into bandits; lawlessness and demoralisation were spread through the whole country. The total disregard for honour and virtue that characterised the higher classes became ferocity and dishonesty in the lower.

Condé, into whose purposes and aims we have small insight,—that he hated Mazarin, and desired power, is all we know,—reaped little advantage from the state to which he assisted, at least, to reduce his country. His friends and partisans quarrelled with each other; supplies fell off; he saw himself on the brink of ruin; and determined to retrieve himself by a total change of plan. His scheme was to cross the whole of France, and to put himself at the head of the veteran troops of the duke de Nemours. The undertaking was encompassed with dangers. His friends at first dissuaded, but, finding him resolved, they implored permission to accompany him. He made such division as he considered advantageous for his affairs; leaving Marsin behind, with the prince of Conti, to maintain his interests in Guienne, and taking with him Rochefoucauld, his young son, the prince de Marsillac, and several other nobles and officers. Gourville, Rochefoucauld's secretary, who had made several journeys to and fro between Paris and Bordeaux, and was a man of singular activity, astuteness, and presence of mind, was to serve as their guide.

1652.
Ætat.
39.

The party set out on Palm Sunday, disguised as simple cavaliers; the servants and followers being sent forward by water. The journey was continued by day and night, almost with the same horses. The adventurers never remained for two hours together in the same place, either for repose or refreshment. Sometimes they stopped at the houses of two or three gentlemen, friends of one of the party, for a short interval of rest, and for the purpose of buying horses: but these gentlemen were far from suspecting that Condé was among them, and spoke so freely, that he heard much concerning himself and his friends which had never before reached his ears. At other times they took shelter in outhouses, or poor public-houses by the way side, while Gourville went to forage in the towns. Their fare was meager enough. In one little inn they found nothing but eggs. Condé insisted on making the omelet himself, piquing himself on his skill: the hostess showed him how to turn it; but he, using too much force in the manœuvre, threw the supper of himself and his friends into the fire. During the fatigues of this journey Rochefoucauld was attacked by his first fit of the gout; but their greatest embarrassment arose from the young prince de Marsillac, who almost sunk under the fatigues to which he was exposed. Gourville was the safeguard of the party: he foraged for food, answered impertinent questions, invented subterfuges, and executed a thousand contrivances to ensure their safety, or extricate them from danger. When refreshing their horses in a large village a peasant recognised Condé, and named him. Gourville, hearing this, began to laugh, and told his friends as they came up, and they joining in bantering the poor man, he did not know what to believe. All the party, except the prince at the head of it, whose frame was of iron, were overcome by fatigue. After passing the Loire, they were nearly discovered by the sentinels at La Charité, whom they encountered through a mistake of the guide. The sentinel demanded who went there: Gourville replied that they were officers of the court, who desired to enter. The Condé, pursuing the same tone, bade the man go to the governor, and ask leave for them to be admitted into the town; some soldiers, who were loitering near, were about to take this message, when Gourville exclaimed, addressing the prince, "You have time to sleep here, but our congé ends to-morrow, and we must push on;" and he proceeded, followed by the others, who said to the prince, "You can remain if you like;" but Condé, as if discontented, yet not liking to part company, followed, telling them that they were strange people, and sending his compliments to the governor. After passing the river, their dangers were far from over. Some of the companions of the prince were recognised: the report began to spread that he was of the party. They left the high road, and continued their journey to Chatillon in such haste, that they went, according to Rochefoucauld's account, the incredible distance of thirty-five leagues, with the same horses, in one day—a day full of dangerous recognitions and misadventures: they were surrounded by troops; and, one after the other, Condé was obliged to send his companions on various missions to ensure his safety, till he was left at last with only Rochefoucauld, and his son, the prince de Marsillac. They proceeded guardedly, Marsillac an hundred steps in advance of, and Rochefoucauld at the same distance behind, Condé, so that he might receive notice of any danger, and have some chance of saving himself. They had not proceeded far in this manner before they heard various reports of a pistol, and, at the same moment, perceived four cavaliers on their left, approaching at full trot. Believing themselves discovered, they resolved to charge these four men, determined to die rather than be taken; but, on their drawing near, they found that it was one of their own number, who had returned, accompanied by three gentlemen; and altogether they proceeded to Chatillon. Here Condé heard of the situation of the army he was desirous of joining; but he heard, at the same time, that he was in the close neighbourhood of danger, several of the king's guard being then at Chatillon. They set out again at midnight; and were nearly discovered and lost at the end of their adventure, being recognised by many persons. However, as it turned out, this served instead of injuring them, as several mounted on horseback, and accompanied the party till they fell in with the advanced guard of the army, close to the forest of Orleans. They were hailed by a qui vive. The answer, and the knowledge that spread, that Condé had arrived, occasioned general rejoicing and surprise in the army, which greatly needed his presence.

Condé was opposed by Turenne, who now adhered to the court. These two great generals felt that they had a worthy match in each other. Before Condé's presence was generally known, Turenne recognised his influence in an attack that was made; and exclaimed, as he hurried to the spot, "The prince of Condé is arrived!"

Warfare was thus transferred to the immediate neighbourhood of the capital, and intrigues of all kinds varied the more soldierly manœuvres of the contending armies. It is impossible here to detail either the vicissitudes of minor combats, or the artifices of De Retz and the other leaders. Condé found himself forced at last to give way before Turenne. Finding the position he held at St. Cloud do longer tenable, he resolved to take up a new one at Charenton. For this purpose he was obliged to make nearly the circuit of Paris, then held by the duke of Orleans, who considered himself at the head of the Fronde, but who displayed on this, as on every other occasion, his timid and temporising character. As soon as Condé began his march, Turenne became acquainted with it, and pursued him. Condé advanced as far as the suburbs of Paris, and, for a moment, doubted whether he would not ask permission to pass through the city; but, afraid of being refused, he resolved to march on. Danger approaching nearer and gathering thicker, he determined to make a stand in the fauxbourg St. Antoine. Here, therefore, the battle commenced. The combat was hard contested and fierce: it was attended by various changes in the fortune of the day. At one time Condé had been enabled to advance, but he was again driven back to the gates of St. Antoine, where he was not only assailed in front, but had to sustain a tremendous fire carried on from the surrounding houses. Rochefoucauld was at his side: he, and his son, and other nobles dismounted, and sustained the whole attack, without the assistance of the infantry, who refused to aid them. The duke de Nemours received thirteen wounds, and Rochefoucauld was wounded by an arquebuse, just above the eyes, which, in an instant, deprived him of sight; and he was carried off the field by the duke of Beaufort and the prince of Marsillac. They were pursued; but Condé came to their succour, and gave them time to mount. The citizens were averse to opening the gates of the city to the prince's army, fearing that the troops of Turenne would enter with him: its safety, however, entirely depended on taking refuge in Paris. The duke of Orleans, vacillating and dastardly, heard of the peril of his friends, and of the loss they had sustained, and moved no finger to help them. His daughter, mademoiselle de Montpensier, showed a spirit superior to them all. She shamed her father into signing an order for the opening of the gates. She repaired to the Bastille, and turned its cannon on the royal army; and then, going herself to the gate St. Antoine, she not only persuaded the citizens to receive the prince and troops, but to sally out, skirmish with, and drive back their pursuers. Rochefoucauld, seeing the diversion made in their favour, desired to take advantage of it; and, though his eyes were starting from his head through the effects of his wound, he rode to the fauxbourg St. Germain, and exhorted the people to come to Condé's aid. Success crowned these efforts; and the prince, after displaying unexampled conduct and valour, entered Paris with flying colours.

This was the crisis of the war of the Fronde. His success and gallantry had raised Condé high in the affections of the Parisians; but popular favour is proverbially short lived, and, in a very short time, he became the object of hatred. De Retz never slept at the work of intrigue. The court, assisted by Turenne, rallied. A popular tumult ensued, more serious than any that had yet occurred; a massacre was the consequence, and the odium fell on Condé and his party. He lost his power even over his own soldiery, and the utmost license prevailed. Several of the leaders of the Fronde died also. The duke of Nemours fell in a duel with his brother-in-law, the duke of Beaufort: the dukes of Chavigni and Bouillon died of a typhus fever then raging in Paris. Scarcity, the consequence of the presence of the soldiery and the state of the surrounding country, became severely felt. Each party longed for repose. The court acted with discretion. Mazarin was sacrificed for the time; and the royal family returned to Paris, Condé having quitted it shortly before. He hastened to Holland, eager, like a true soldier, to place himself at the head of an army; but ill success pursued him: he was declared a rebel; and, from that hour, his star declined. After much treaty, much intrigue, and various acts of treachery, a peace was concluded between the court and the remnant of the Fronde, and the authority of the king, now declared major, was universally acknowledged.

1653.
Ætat.
40.

On the retreat of Condé from Paris, Rochefoucauld retired with his family to Danvilliers, where he spent a year in retirement; recovering from his wounds; and making up his mind to extricate himself from the web of intrigue in which he had immeshed himself. The Fronde was already at an end: it crumbled to pieces under the influence of fear and corruption. Rochefoucauld had already broken with the prince of Conti and the duchess de Longueville[27]: his last tie was to Condé. He received representations from his friends, and, doubtless, his own mind suggested the advantage of breaking this last link to an overthrown party. One of the bribes held out to him was the marriage of his son with mademoiselle de la Roche-Guyon, his cousin and an heiress. Desirous of acting honourably, he sent Gourville to Brussels, to disengage him from all ties with Condé. Gourville executed the task with his usual sagacity: he represented to the prince that the duke could no longer be of any service to him; and, having family reasons for wishing to return to France, he asked his consent and permission. The prince admitted his excuses, and freed him from every bond. Gourville then went to Paris, to negotiate the duke's return with cardinal Mazarin. After some difficulty he obtained an interview with the minister, who readily granted leave to the duke to return, and completed his work by gaining over Gourville himself.

Thus ended, as far as any trace remains to us, the active life of a man who hereafter reaped lessons of wisdom from the busy scenes through which he had passed. From various passages in Gourville's memoirs it is evident that he spent the years immediately succeeding to the war on his own estate of la Rochefoucauld. He was nearly ruined by the career he had gone through; and, finding his affairs almost hopelessly deranged, he asked Gourville, who had turned financier, to receive his rents and revenues, and to undertake the management of his estate, household, and debts, allowing him forty pistoles a month for dress and private expenses; which arrangement lasted till his death. Subsequently he lived almost entirely in Paris, where he made a part of what may emphatically be called the best society, of which he was the greatest ornament; and was respected and beloved by a circle of intimate and dear friends. He had always been one of the chief ornaments of the Hotel de Rambouillet. We cannot tell how far he deigned to adopt the jargon of the fair Précieuses; but, as the society assembled there was celebrated as the most intellectual and the most virtuous in Paris, it was an honour for a man to belong to it.

It is singular also to remark, that the most unaffected writers of the time of Louis XIV. had once figured as Alcovistes or Précieuses. Madame de la Fayette, who, in her works, adopted a simplicity of sentiment and expression that contrasts forcibly with the bombast of the school of Scuderi; madame de Sévigné, whose style is the most delightful and easy in the world; Rochefoucauld, who, first among moderns, concentrated his ideas, and, abjuring the diffuseness that still reigned in literature, aimed at expressing his thoughts in as few words as possible, had all been frequenters and favourites at the Hotel de Rambouillet. It would seem that intellectual indolence is the mind's greatest foe; and, once incited to think, persons of talent can easily afterwards renounce a bad school. Platonic gallantries, metaphorical conceits, and ridiculous phraseology, were not the only accomplishments prized by the Précieuses. Learning and wit flourished among them; and when Molière, with happy ridicule, had dissolved the charm that had steeped them in folly, these remained, and shone forth brightly in the persons already named, and others scarcely less celebrated—Ménage, Balzac, Voiture, Bourdaloue, &c.

To return to Rochefoucauld himself. His best and dearest friend was madame de la Fayette, the authoress of "La Princesse de Clèves," and other works that mark her excellent taste and distinguished talents. Madame de la Fayette was, in her youth, a pupil of Ménage and Rapin. She learned Latin under their tuition, and rose above her masters in the quickness of her comprehension. In general society she carefully concealed her acquirements. "She understood Latin," Segrais writes, "but she never allowed her knowledge to appear; so not to excite the jealousy of other women." She was intimately allied to all the clever men of the time, and respected and loved by them. She was a woman of a strong mind; witty and discerning, frank, kind-hearted, and true. Rochefoucauld owed much to her, while she had obligations to him. Their friendship was of mutual benefit. "He gave me intellect," she said, "and I reformed his heart."

This heart might well need reform and cure from all of evil it had communicated with during long years of intrigue and adventure. The easiness of his temper, his turn for gallantry, the mobile nature of his mind, rendered him susceptible to the contamination of the bad passions then so active around him. Ardent, ambitious, subtle,—we find him, in the time of the Fronde, busiest among the intriguers; eager in pursuit of his objects, yet readily turned aside; violent in his hatred, passionate in his attachments, yet easily detached from both, after the first fire had burnt out. His vacillation of conduct and feeling at that time caused it to be said, that he always made a quarrel in the morning, and the employment of his day was to make it up by evening. Cardinal de Retz, his great enemy, accuses him or thinking too ill of human nature.[28] Thrown among the fools, knaves, and demoralised women of the Fronde, we cannot wonder that he, seeing the extent of the evil of which human nature is capable, was unaware that these very passions, regulated by moral principle and religion, would animate men to virtue as well as to vice. He read this lesson subsequently in his own heart, when, turning from the libertine society with which he spent his youth, he became the friend of madame de la Fayette, madame de Sévigné, and the most distinguished persons of the reign of Louis XIV. Yet the taint could not quite be effaced. It left his heart, but it blotted his understanding. He could feel generous, noble, and pious sentiments; but having once experienced emotions the reverse of these, and having found them deep-rooted in others, he fancied that both virtue and vice, good and evil, sprang from the same causes, and were based on the same foundations. Added to this, we may observe that his best friends belonged to a court. True and just as was madame de la Fayette,—amiable and disinterested as madame de Sévigné,—brave as Turenne,—noble as Condé,—pious as Racine,—honest as Boileau,—devout and moral as madame de Maintenon might be, and were, the taint of a court was spread over all; the desire of being well with the sovereign, and making a monarch's favour the cynosure of hearts and the measure of merit. Rochefoucauld fancied that he could discern selfishness in all; yet, had he turned his eye inward with a clearer view, he had surely found that the impulses that caused his own heart to warm with friendship and virtue, were based on a power of forgetting self in extraneous objects; for he was a faithful, affectionate, and disinterested friend, a fond father, and an honourable man. He was brave also; though madame de Maintenon tells us that he was accustomed to say that he looked on personal bravery as folly. This speech lets us into much of the secret recesses of his mind. His philosophy was epicurean; and, wanting the stoic exaltation of sentiment, and worship of good for good's sake, he mistook the principles of the human mind, and saw no excellence in a forgetfulness of self, the capacity for which he was thus led to deny.[29] Madame de Maintenon adds, in her portrait, "M. de Rochefoucauld had an agreeable countenance, a dignified manner, much intellect, and little knowledge. He was intriguing, supple, foreseeing. I never knew a friend more constant, more frank, nor more prudent in his advice. He loved to reign: he was very brave. He preserved the vivacity of his mind till his death; and was always lively and agreeable, though naturally serious."

The latter part of his life was embittered by the gout, which seldom left him free from pain. The society of madame de la Fayette and other friends were his resource during the intervals of his attacks, and his comfort throughout. Madame de Sévigné makes frequent mention of him in her letters, and always in a way that marks approbation and respect. She often speaks of his fortitude in suffering bodily pain, and his sensibility when domestic misfortunes visited him severely. His courage never abandoned him, except when death deprived him of those he loved. One of his sons was killed and another wounded in the passage of the Rhine. "I have seen," writes madame de Sévigné, "his heart laid bare by this cruel disaster. He is the first among all the men I ever knew for courage, goodness, tenderness, and sense. I count his wit and agreeable qualities as nothing in comparison." It is from her letters that we gather an account of his death. Mention is made of him, as well and enjoying society, in the month of February. 1680.
Ætat.
67. On the 13th of March she writes, "M. de la Rochefoucauld has been and is seriously ill. He is better to-day; but there is every appearance of death: he has a high fever, an oppression, a suppressed gout. There has been question of the English doctor and other physicians: he has chosen his godfather; and frère Ange will kill him, if God has thus disposed. M. de Marsillac is expected: madame de la Fayette is deeply afflicted." On the 15th of the same month she writes, "I fear that this time we shall lose M. de la Rochefoucauld: his fever continues. He received the communion yesterday. He is in a state worthy of admiration. He is excellently disposed with regard to his conscience,—that is clear: for the rest, it is to him as if his neighbour were ill: he is neither moved nor troubled. He hears the cause of the physicians pleaded before him with an unembarrassed head, and almost without deigning to give his opinion. It reminded me of the verse,

Trop dessous de lui, pour y prêter l'esprit.

He did not see madame de la Fayette yesterday, because she wept, and he was to take the sacrament: he sent at noon to inquire after her. Believe me that he has not made reflections all his life to no purpose. He has in this manner approached so near to the last moments that their actual presence has nothing new nor strange for him. M. de Marsillac arrived at midnight, the day before yesterday, overwhelmed with grief. He was long before he could command his countenance and manner. He entered at last, and found his father in his chair, little different from his usual appearance. As M. de Marsillac is his friend among his children, there must have been some internal emotion; but he manifested none, and forgot to speak to him of his illness. I am continually with madame de la Fayette, who could never have experienced the delights of friendship and affection were she less afflicted than she is." On the 17th of March the scene closed; and madame de Sévigné writes, "M. de la Rochefoucauld died this night. My head is so full of this misfortune, and of the extreme affliction of my poor friend, that I must write about it. On Saturday, yesterday, the remedies had done wonders; victory was proclaimed; his fever had diminished. In this state, yesterday, at six o'clock, he turned to death: fever recurred; and, in a word, gout treacherously strangled him: and, although he was still strong, and had not been weakened by losing blood, five or six hours sufficed to carry him off. At midnight he expired in the arms of M. de Condom (Bossuet). M. de Marsillac never quitted him for a moment: he is plunged in inexpressible affliction. Yet he will return to his former life; find the king and the court as they were; and his family will still be around him. But where will madame de la Fayette find such a friend, such society; a similar kindness, resource, and reliance, or equal consideration for herself and her son? She is infirm; she is always at home, and cannot run about town. M. de la Rochefoucauld was sedentary. This state rendered them necessary to each other and nothing could equal their mutual confidence, and the charm of their friendship." This grief, this friendship, is the most honourable monument a man can receive: who would not desire thus to be sepultured in the heart of one loved and valued? One might regret the pain felt; but, as madame de la Sévigné so beautifully observes, this pain is the proof of the truth and warmth of the affection that united them, and the pleasure they mutually imparted and received. In successive letters there are traces of the inconsolable affliction of madame de la Fayette. "She has fallen from the clouds: every moment she perceives the loss she has suffered;" and again, "Poor madame de la Fayette knows not what to do with herself. The loss of M. de la Rochefoucauld makes so terrible a void in her life that she feels more sensibly the value of so delightful an intimacy. Every one will be consoled at last, except her." A sadder testimonial of her affection is contained in a short passage, saying, "I saw madame de la Fayette. I found her in tears: a writing of M. de la Rochefoucauld had fallen into her hands which surprised and afflicted her." We are not told the subject of this paper, nor the cause of her affliction: was it some trace of past unkindness or secret injustice? These are the stings, this the poison, of death. There is no recall for a hasty word; no excuse, no pardon, no forgetfulness, for injustice or neglect;—the grave that has closed over the living form, and blocked up the future, causes the past to be indelible; and, as human weakness for ever errs, here it finds the punishment of its errors. While we love, let us ever remember that the loved one may die,—that we ourselves may die. Let all be true and open, let all he faithful and single-hearted, or the poison-harvest reaped after death may infect with pain and agony one's life of memory. We may say, in defence of Rochefoucauld, that Gourville, in his memoirs, alludes to a circumstance that annoyed him with regard to madame de la Fayette: he says that, taking advantage of Gourville's attachment to his former master, she and M. de Langlade plotted together to do him an ill turn, which would have turned greatly to the lady's advantage; and that, at the time of the duke's death, it was said that he was much hurt at having discovered this little intrigue. At the same time madame de la Fayette may have been innocent of the charge. Gourville disliked her, and might accuse her unjustly, and have deceived Rochefoucauld by representations which were false, though he believed in them himself.

We have entered thus fully into all the details known of Rochefoucauld's life, that we might understand better on what principles and feelings the "Maxims" were founded. We find a warm heart, an impetuous temper, joined to great ductility, some insincerity, and no imagination we find a penetrating understanding, joined to extreme subtlety, that might well overshoot itself in its aim;—strong attachments, which took the colour greatly of their object. Disease tamed his passions; but his mind was still free to observe, and to form opinions. The result was an Epicurean philosophy, which answered the cui bono by a perpetual reference to self—to pleasure and to pain; while he passed over the first principle of morals, which is, that it is not the pleasure we receive from good actions which actuates us, but love of good. This passion produces pleasure or pain in its result; but the latter is the effect forgotten till it arrives; the former the cause, the impelling motive, the true source, from which our virtues spring. Were we to praise a knife for being sharp, and a stander-by should say, "It deserves no praise. No wonder that it is sharp: it is made of the finest tempered steel, and infinite labour has been bestowed on the manufacture of it:" should we not reply, "Therefore we praise it: because the material is good, and has been rendered better by care, we consider it excellent." The passions and the affections, by their influence over the soul, produce pleasure or pain; but shall we not love and approve those who take pleasure in cultivating virtuous affections, and rejecting vicious ones? Thus considered, it may be said that the question is reduced to a mere war of words; but in practice it is not so. No person could habitually entertain the idea that he was selfish in all he did without weakening his love of good, and, at last, persuading himself to make self-interest, in a confined and evil sense, the aim of his actions; while if, on the contrary, we recognise and appreciate that faculty of the soul, that permits us to forget self in the object of our desire, we shall be more eagerly bent to entertain piety, virtue, and honour, as objects to be attained; satisfied that thus we render ourselves better beings, though, probably, not happier than those of meaner aspirations.

We turn to Rochefoucauld's maxims, and find ample field for explanation of our view in the observations that they suggest. We cannot turn to them without discussing inwardly their truth and falsehood. Some are true as truth: such as—

"There is in the human heart a perpetual generation of passions; so that the destruction of one is almost always the birth of another."

"We promise according to our hopes; we perform according to our fears."

"No one is either so happy or so unhappy as he imagines."

"Fortune turns every thing to the advantage of those whom she favours."

"There is but one true love; but there are a thousand copies."

"It is more shameful to distrust our friends than to be deceived by them."

"A fool has not stuff enough in him to be virtuous."

"Our minds are more indolent than our bodies."

"Jealousy is always born with love, but does not always die with it."

"It would seem that nature has concealed talents and capacities in the depths of our minds of which we have no knowledge: the passions alone can bring these into day, and give us more certain and perfect views than art can afford."

"We arrive quite new at the different ages of life; and often want experience in spite of the number of years we have lived."

"It is being truly virtuous to be willing to be always exposed to the view of the virtuous."

Some maxims are too subtle; and among such is to be ranked the celebrated one, "That we often find something in the misfortunes of our best friends that is not displeasing to us." Taking this in its most obvious sense it merely means, that no evil is so great but that some good accompanies it. Our own personal misfortunes even bring, at times, some sort of compensation, without which they would be intolerable. Regarded more narrowly, it appears that Rochefoucauld meant that we are ready to look upon the sorrows of our friends as something advantageous to ourselves. This, in a precise sense, is totally false, where there is question of real affection and true friendship. There is an emotion, however, of a singular description that does often arise in the heart on hearing bad news. The simple-minded Lavater, in his journal, was aware of this. He mentions that, on hearing that a friend had fallen into affliction, he felt an involuntary emotion of pleasure. Examination explains to us the real nature of this feeling. The human mind is adverse (we talk of the generality of instances, not of exceptions,) to repose: any thing that gives it hope of exercise, and puts it in motion, is pleasurable. The consciousness of existence is a pleasure; and any novelty of sensation that is not personally painful brings this. When Lavater heard that his friend was in affliction he was roused from the monotony of his daily life. Novelty had charms: he had to tell his wife to set out on a journey for the purpose of seeing and consoling his friend. All this made him conscious of existence, gave him the hope of being useful, caused his blood to flow more freely, and thus even imparted physical pleasure; and, indeed, I should be apt to reduce the essence of this emotion to mere physical sensation, occasioned by an accelerated pulsation, the result of excitement. It may be, and it is, right to record this sensation in any history of the human mind; but it ought to be appreciated at its true value as the mere operation of the lower part of our nature for the most part, and, added to that, pleasure in the expectation of being of use.

This sort of anatomy of mind, when we detect evil in the involuntary impulses of the soul, resembles the scruples felt by an over-pious person, who regards the satisfying hunger and receiving pleasure in eating a dry crust as sin. Dissecting things thus, it becomes difficult to say what is a misfortune. It is a misfortune to lose one's child; so natural and instinctive is the sorrow that ensues that, perhaps, no other can be purer. If a friend lose a child, if we loved that child also, the misfortune becomes our own, and our sympathy may be perfect. If the child promised ill, the pain we feel from our friend's grief may be mitigated by the sense that it is ill-founded, and even that we may derive benefit from the loss lamented: not being blinded by parental passion, we may rejoice in the alleviations foresight and reason present to us. To call this selfishness is to quarrel with the structure of human nature, which is based on personal identity and consciousness. Passion enables us to throw off even these, sometimes, and totally to amalgamate our interests with those of another. But this is, indeed, of rare occurrence.

We may remark, also, that even in those instances in which the mind does recognise benefit to arise from the misfortune of a friend, and feel involuntary self-gratulation, we regard this as a crime or a vice, and reject it as such, showing the power of disinterestedness over selfishness by dismissing and abhorring the feeling.

The Fronde was the soil in which the "Maxims" had root: better times softened their harshness, and inspired better and higher thoughts. But the younger life of Rochefoucauld was spent in a society demoralised to a degree unknown before—when self-interest was acknowledged as the principle of all; and the affections alone kept a "few green spots"—rare oases of beauty and virtue—amidst the blighted and barren waste of ambition and vice. Usually public revulsions give birth to heroism as well as crime; and war and massacre are elevated and redeemed by courage and self-devotion. But, in the time of the Fronde, there were no very great crimes, and no exalted actions: vice and folly, restless desire of power, and an eager, yet aimless, party spirit, animated society. Hence the mean opinion Rochefoucauld formed of human nature; and the very subtlety and penetration of his intellect occasioned him to err yet more widely in his conclusions. To adopt a maxim of his own, he erred, not by not reaching the mark, but going beyond it. Not that he went so far as his followers. Dry Scotch metaphysicians, men without souls, reduced to a system what he announced merely as of frequent occurrence. They tell us that self-interest is the mover of all our actions: Rochefoucauld only says "self-interest puts to use every sort of virtue and vice." But he does not say that every sort of virtue, or even vice, in all persons is impregnated with self-interest, though with many it is; and there are a multitude of his remarks which display a thorough appreciation of excellence. The maxims themselves are admirably expressed; the language is pure and elegant; the thoughts clearly conceived, and forcibly worded.

Besides the maxims, Rochefoucauld wrote memoirs of various periods of the regency of Anne of Austria and the wars of the Fronde. Bayle bestows great encomium on this work: "I am sure," he says, "there are few partisans of antiquity who will not set a higher value on the duke de la Rochefoucauld's memoirs than on Cæsar's commentaries."[30] To which remark the only reply must be, that Bayle was better able to dissect motives, appreciate actions, and reason on truth and falsehood, than to discover the merit of a literary work. "Rochefoucauld's memoirs are still read:" such is Voltaire's notice, while he bestows great praise on the maxims. The chief fault of the memoirs is the subject of them,—the wars of the Fronde,—a period of history distinguished by no men of exalted excellence; neither adorned by admirable actions nor conducing to any amelioration in the state of society: it was a war of knaves (not fools) for their own advancement, ending in their deserved defeat.

[20]Mémoires de Gourville.

[21]Mémoires de la Regence d'Anne d'Autriche, par le duc de la Rochefoucauld.

[22]It is well known that the history of the troubles of the Fronde is recounted by a variety of eye-witnesses, no two of which agree in their account of motives—scarcely of facts. Cardinal de Retz, in his memoirs, gives a somewhat different account of the adhesion of madame de Longueville to his party. It is singular to remark how each person in his relation makes himself the prime mover. Rochefoucauld makes us to almost understand that he drew over the princess to the Fronde. The cardinal tells us that, seeing madame de Longueville one day by chance, he conceived a hope, soon realised, of bringing her over to his party. He tells us that at that time M. de la Rochefoucauld was attached to her. He was living at Poitou; but came to Paris about three weeks afterwards; and thus Rochefoucauld and De Retz were brought together. The former had been accused of deserting his party, which rendered De Retz at first disinclined to join with him; but these accusations were unfounded, and necessity brought them much together. The cardinal allows that madame de Longueville had no natural love for politics,—she was too indolent;—anger, arising from her elder brother's treatment, first led her to wish to oppose his party; gallantry led her onward; and this causing party spirit to be but the second of her motives, instead of being a heroine, she became an adventuress.

[23]Rochefoucauld's Mémoires; Mémoires de Gourville; James's Life and Times of Louis XIV.

[24]Mémoires du duc de Rochefoucauld.

[25]Cardinal de Retz relates a scene in which he spoke disparagingly of Rochefoucauld. He supposes that this was reported to the duke: "I know not whether this was the case," he says; "but I could never discover any other cause for the first hatred that M. de la Rochefoucauld conceived against me."

[26]Cardinal de Retz, in describing this scene, declares that Rochefoucauld called out to Coligny and Recousse to kill De Retz, as he held him pinned in the doorway: they refused; while a partisan of the coadjutor came to his aid, and, representing that it was a shame and a horror to commit such an assassination, Rochefoucauld allowed the door to open. Joly relates the occurrence in the same manner; and, although a little softened in expression, the duke's account does not materially differ.

[27]The couplet, written by Rochefoucauld at the bottom of a portrait of the duchess de Longueville is well known.

"Pour mériter son cœur, pour plaire à ses beaux yeux,
J'ai fait la guerre aux rois: je l'aurois faite aux dieux."

When he quarrelled with her, after his wound in the combat of the fauxbourg de St. Antoine, he parodied it.

"Pour ce cœur inconstant, qu'enfin je connois mieux,
J'ai fait la guerre aux rois; j'en ai perdu les yeux."

It may here be mentioned, that the prince of Conti and the duchess of Longueville held out in Bordeaux and Guienne against the royal authority for several years. Through the interposition of Gourville they acceded to terms in 1658. The conclusion of madame de Longueville's life was singular. Cardinal de Retz and Rochefoucauld both describe her as naturally indolent; but they both so inoculated her with a love of party intrigue, that, when the war of the Fronde ceased, she found it impossible to reconcile herself to a quiet life. She became jansenist. She built herself a dwelling close to the abbey of Port Royal aux Champs. She put herself forward in all the disputes, and was looked up to with reverence by the leaders of the party, and contrived, when every one else had failed, to suspend the disturbances caused by the formula. "A singular woman," the French biographer writes, "who even became renowned while working out her salvation, and saved herself on the same plank from hell and from ennui." Her piety was sincere, for she submitted to great personal privations, and fasted so strictly, that she died, it is said, from inanition. She died about a month after the duke de la Rochefoucauld. The bishop of Autun preached her funeral oration, as madame de Sévigné says, with all the ability, tact, and grace that it was possible to conceive. The children and friends of Rochefoucauld were among his audience, and wept his death anew.

[28]"Il y a toujours eût du je ne sais quoi en tout M. de la Rochefoucauld. Il a voulu se mêler d'intrigues dès son enfance, et en un temps où il ne sentait pas les petits intérêts, qui n'ont jamais été son faible, et où il ne connoissait pas les grands, qui, d'un autre sens, n'ont pas été son tort. Il n'a jamais été capable d'aucune affaire, et je ne sais pourquoi; car il avait des qualités qui eussent suplié, en tout autre celles qu'il n'avait pas. Sa vue n'était pas assez étendue, et il ne voyait pas même tout ensemble ce qui était à sa portée; mais son bon sens, très bon dans la speculation, joint à sa douceur, à son insinuation, et à sa facilité de mœurs, qui est admirable, devait recompenser plus qu'il n'a fait le défaut de sa pénétration. Il a toujours eût une irrésolution habituelle; mais je ne sais même à quoi attribuer cette irrésolution: elle n'a pu venir en lui de la fécondité de son imagination, qui est rien moins que vive. Je ne puis la donner à la stérilité de son jugement, car quoiqu'il ne l'ait pas exquis dans l'action, il à un bon fonds de raison. Nous voyons l'effect de cette irrésolution, quoique nous n'en connaissons pas la cause. Il n'a jamais été guérier, quoiqu'il fut très soldat. Il n'a jamais été par lui même bon courtisan, quoiqu'il ait eût toujours bonne intention de l'être. Il n'a jamais été bon homme de parti, quoique toute sa vie il y ait été engagé. Cet air de honte et de timidité que vous lui voyez dans la vie civile s'était tourné dans les affaires en air d'apologie. Il croyait toujours en avoir besoin, ce qui jointes a ses maximes, qui ne marquent pas assez de foi à la vertu, et à sa pratique, qui a toujours été à sortir des affaires avec autant d'impatience qu'il y est entré, me fait conclure qu'il eut beaucoup mieux fait de se connaître et de se réduire à passer, comme il eût pu, pour le courtisan le plus poli et pour le plus honnête homme, à l'égard de la vie commune, qui eût paru dans le siècle."

Such is the character de Retz gives of his rival. Madame de Sévigné has preserved a portrait of the cardinal by Rochefoucauld. He gives him high praise for good understanding and an admirable memory. He represents him as high minded, and yet more vain than ambitious; an easy temper, ready to listen to the complaints of his followers; indolent to excess, when allowed to repose, but equal to any exertion when called into action; and aided on all occasions by a presence of mind which enabled him to turn every chance so much to his advantage that it seemed as if each had been foreseen and desired by him. He relates that he was fond of narrating his past adventures; and his reputation was founded chiefly on his ability in placing his very defects in a good light. He even regards his last retreat as resulting from vanity, while his friend, madame de Sévigné, more justly looks upon it as resulting from the grandeur of his mind and love of justice.

[29]We doubt the exact truth of these assertions even while we write them. It is true that Rochefoucauld detects self-love as mingling in many of our actions and feelings, but he does not advance the opinion that no disinterested virtue can exist, and, still less, the Helvetian metaphysical notion that self-love is the spring of every emotion, which it is, inasmuch as it is we that feel, and that our emotions cause our pulses to beat, not another's; but is not, inasmuch as we do not consult our own interest or pleasure in all we feel and do. Madame de Sévigné relates an anecdote of an officer who had his arm carried off by the same cannon-ball that killed Turenne, but who, careless of the mutilation, threw himself weeping on the corpse of the hero. She adds that Rochefoucauld shed tears when he heard this told. Such tears are a tribute paid to disinterested virtue; and prove, though the author of the "Maxims" could trace dross in ore wherever it existed, yet that he believed that virtue could be found in entire purity.

[30]Bayle's Dictionary, article Cæsar.

[MOLIÈRE]

1622-1673

Louis XIV. one day asked Boileau "Which writer of his reign he considered the most distinguished;" Boileau answered, unhesitatingly, "Molière." "You surprise me," said the king; "but of course you know best." Boileau displayed his discernment in this reply. The more we learn of Molière's career, and inquire into the peculiarities of his character, the more we are struck by the greatness of his genius and the admirable nature of the man. Of all French writers he is the least merely French. His dramas belong to all countries and ages; and, as if as a corollary to this observation, we find, also, an earnestness of feeling, and a deep tone of passion in his character, that raises him above our ordinary notions of Gallic frivolity.

Molière was of respectable parentage. For several generations his family had been traders in Paris, and were so well esteemed, that various members had held the places of judge and consul in the city of Paris; situations of sufficient importance, on some occasions, to cause those who filled them to be raised to the rank of nobles. His father, Jean Poquelin, was appointed tapestry or carpet-furnisher to the king: his mother, Marie Cressé[31], belonged to a family similarly situated; her father, also, was a manufacturer of carpets and tapestry. Jean Baptiste Poquelin (such was Molière's real name) was horn on the 15th January, 1622, in a house in Rue Saint Honoré, near the Rue de la Tonnellerie. He was the eldest of a numerous family of children, and destined to succeed his father in trade. The latter being afterwards appointed valet de chambre to the king, and the survivorship of the place being obtained for his son, his prospects in life were sufficiently prosperous. His mother died when he was only ten years of age, and thus a family of orphans were left on his father's hands.

Brought up to trade, Poquelin's education during childhood was restricted to reading and writing; and his boyish days were passed in the warehouse of his father. His heart, however, was set on other things. His paternal grandfather was very fond of play-going, and often took his grandson to the theatre of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, where Corneille's plays were being acted. From this old man the youth probably inherited his taste for the drama, and he owed it to him that his genius took so early the right bent. To him he was indebted for another great obligation. The boy's father reproached the grandfather for taking him so often to the play. "Do you wish to make an actor of him?" he exclaimed. "Yes, if it pleased God that he became as good a one as Bellerose[32]," the other replied. The prejudices of the age were violent against actors. We almost all take our peculiar prejudices from our parents, whom, in our nonage (unless, through unfortunate circumstances, they lose our respect), we naturally regard as the sources of truth. To this speech, to the admiration which the elder Poquelin felt for actors and acting, no doubt the boy owed his early and lasting emancipation from those puerile or worse prejudices against the theatre, which proved quicksands to swallow up the genius of Racine.

1637.
Ætat.
14.

The youth grew discontented as he grew older. The drama enlightened him as to the necessity of acquiring knowledge, and to the beauty of intellectual refinement: he became melancholy, and, questioned by his father, admitted his distaste for trade, and his earnest desire to receive a liberal education. Poquelin thought that his son's ruin must inevitably ensue: the grandfather was again the boy's ally; he gained his point, and was sent as an out-student to the college of Clermont, afterwards of Louis-le-Grand, which was under the direction of the jesuits, and one of the best in Paris. Amand de Bourbon, prince of Conti, brother of the grand Condé, was going through the classes at the same time. After passing through the ordinary routine at this school, the young Poquelin enjoyed a greater advantage than that of being a schoolfellow of a prince of the blood. L'Huilier, a man of large fortune, had a natural son, named Chapelle, whom he brought up with great care. Earnest for his welfare and good education, he engaged the celebrated Gassendi to be Iris private tutor, and placed another boy of promise, named Bernier, whose parents were poor, to study with him. There is something more helpful, more truly friendly and liberal, often in French men of letters than in ours; and it is one of the best traits in our neighbours' character. Gassendi perceived Poquelin's superior talents, and associated him in the lessons he gave to Chapelle and Bernier. He taught them the philosophy of Epicurus; he enlightened their minds by lessons of morals; and Molière derived from him those just and honourable principles from which he never deviated in after life.

Another pupil almost, as it were, forced himself into this little circle of students. Cyrano de Bergerac was a youth of great talents, but of a wild and turbulent disposition, and had been dismissed from the college of Beauvais for putting the master into a farce. He was a Gascon—lively, insinuating, and ambitious. Gassendi could not resist his efforts to get admitted as his pupil; and his quickness and excellent memory rendered him an apt scholar. Chapelle himself, the friend afterwards of Boileau and of all the literati of Paris, a writer of songs, full of grace, sprightliness, and ease, displayed talent, but at the same time gave tokens of that heedless, gay, and unstable character that followed him through life, and occasioned his father, instead of making him his heir as he intended, to leave him merely a slight annuity, over which he had no control. Bernier became afterwards a great eastern traveller.

1641.
Ætat.
19.

Immediately on leaving college Poquelin entered on his service of royal valet de chambre. Louis XIII. made a journey to Narbonne; and he attended instead of his father.[[33] This journey is only remarkable from the public events that were then taking place. Louis XIII. and cardinal de Richelieu had marched into Rousillon to complete the conquest of that province from the house of Austria—both monarch and minister were dying. The latter discovered the conspiracy of Cinq-Mars, the unfortunate favourite of the king, and had seized on him and his innocent friend De Thou—they were condemned to death; and conveyed from Tarrascon to Lyons in a boat, which was towed by the cardinal's barge in advance. Terror at the name of the cardinal, contempt for the king, and anxiety to watch the wasting illnesses of both, occupied the court: the passions of men were excited to their height; and the young and ardent youth, fresh from the schools of philosophy, witnessed a living drama, more highly wrought than any that a mimic stage could represent.

The cardinal had a magnificent spirit; he revived the arts, or rather nursed their birth in France. It has been mentioned in the life of Corneille, that he patronised the theatre; and even wrote pieces for it. The tragedy of the "Cid," while it electrified France, by what might be deemed a revelation of genius, gave dignity as well as a new impulse to the drama. Acting became a fashion, a rage; private theatricals were the general amusement, and knots of young men formed themselves into companies of actors.1643.
Ætat.
21. Poquelin, having renounced his father's trade, and having received a liberal education, entered, it is believed, on the study of the law; having been sent to Orleans for that purpose. 1645.
Ætat.
23. He returned to Paris, to commence his career of advocate; here he was led to associate with a few friends of the same rank, in getting up plays: by degrees he became wedded to the theatre; and when the private company resolved to become a public one, and to derive profit from their representations, he continued belong to it; and, according to the fashion of actors in those days assumed a new name—that of Molière. His father was displeased, and took every means to dissuade him from his new course; but the enthusiasm of Molière overcame all opposition. There is a story told, that one respectable friend, who was sent by his father to argue against the theatre, was seduced by the youth's arguments to adopt a taste for it, and led to turn comedian himself. His relations did not the less continue their opposition; they exiled him as it were from among them; and erased the most illustrious name in France for their genealogical tree. What would their tree be worth now did it not bear the name of Molière as its chief bloom, which more rare than the flower of the aloe, which blossoms once in a hundred years, has never had its match.

There were many admirable actors in Molière's time, chiefly however in comedy. There were the three, known in farce under the names of Gauthier Garguille, Turlupin, and Gros Guillaume, who in the end died tragically, through the effects of fear. Arlechino (Harlequin) and Scaramouche, both Italians, were however the favourites: the latter is said to have been Molière's master in the art of acting; and he never missed a representation at the Italian theatre when he could help it. The native comedy of the Italians gave him a taste for the true humour of comic situation and dialogue; and we owe to his well-founded predilection what we and the German cities (in contradistinction to the French, who judge always by rule and measure, and not by the amusement they receive, nor the genius displayed) prefer to his five act pieces. Nor was this the only source whence he derived instruction. The bustle and intrigue of the Spanish comedies had been introduced by Corneille in his translation of Lope de Vega's "Verdad Sospechosa." Corneille, however, made the character of the Liar, who is the hero, more prominent. Molière is said to have declared, that he owed his initiation into the true spirit of comedy from this play. He took the better part; rejecting the intrigue, disguises, and trap-doors, and discerning the great effect to be produced by a character happily and truly conceived, and then thrown into apposite situations.

There is much obscurity thrown over the earlier portion of Molière's life. We know the names of some of his company. There was Gros René, and his beautiful wife; there were the two Bejarts, brothers, whose excellent characters attached Molière to them, and Madeleine Bejart, their sister, a beautiful girl, the mistress of a gentleman of Modena—to whom Molière was also attached. Molière himself succeeded in the more farcical comic characters.

The disorders of the capital during the regency at the beginning of Louis XIV.'s reign, and the war of the Fronde, replunged France in barbarism; and torn by faction, the citizens of Paris had no leisure for the theatre.1646.
Ætat.
24. Molière and his troop quitted the city for the provinces, and among other places visited Bordeaux, where he was powerfully protected by the duc d'Epernon, governor of Guienne. It is said, that Molière wrote and brought out a tragedy, called "The Thebaid," in this town, which succeeded so ill, that he gave up the idea of composing tragic dramas, though his chief ambition was to succeed in that higher walk of his art. When we consider the impassioned and reflective disposition of Molière, we are not surprised at his desire to succeed in impersonating the nobler passions; we wonder rather how it was that he should have wholly failed in delineating such, while his greatest power resided in the talent for seizing and portraying the ridiculous.

After a tour in the provinces he returned to Paris. His former schoolfellow, the prince of Conti, renewed his acquaintance with him; and caused him and his company to bring out plays in his palace: and when this prince went to preside at the states of Languedoc, he invited them to visit him there.

1653.
Ætat.
31.

Finding Paris still too distracted by civil broils to encourage the theatre, Molière and his company left it for Lyons. Here he brought out his first piece, "L'Etourdi," which met with great and deserved success. We have an English translation, under the name of "Sir Martin Marplot," originally written by the celebrated duke of Newcastle, and adapted for the stage by Dryden; the French play, however, is greatly superior. In that the lover, Lelie, is only a giddy coxcomb, full of conceit and gaiety of heart. Sir Martin is a heavy plodding fool; and the mistakes we sympathise with, even while we laugh, when originating in mere youthful levity, excite our contempt when occasioned by dull obesity. Thus in the English play, the master appears too stupid to deserve his lady at last—and she is transferred to the servant; a catastrophe which must shock our manners; and we are far more ready to rejoice in the original, when the valet at last presents Celie, with her father's consent, to his master, asking him whether he could find a way even then to destroy his hopes.

The "Dépit Amoureux" followed, which is highly amusing. Although Molière improved afterwards, these first essays are nevertheless worthy his genius.

The company to which he belonged possessed great merit, both in public and private. We cannot expect to find strictness of moral conduct in French comedians, in an age when the manners of the whole country was corrupt, and civil war loosened still more the bonds of society, and produced a state characterised as being "a singular mixture of libertinism and sedition, rife with wars at once sanguinary and frivolous; when the magistrates girded on the sword, and bishops assumed a uniform; when the heroines of the court followed at once the camp and church processions, and factious wits made impromptus on rebellion, and composed madrigals on the field of battle." The war of the Fronde produced a state of license and intrigue: and of course it must be expected that such should be found in a company of strolling actors; to detail the loves of Molière at this time would excite little interest, except inasmuch as it would seem that he brought an affectionate heart and generous spirit, to ennoble what in a less elevated character would have been mere intrigue. Madeleine Bejart was a woman of talent as well as beauty; her brothers were men of good principles and conduct. The sort of liberal, friendly, and frank-hearted spirit that characterised the circle of friends, is well described in the autobiography of a singular specimen of the manners of those times. D'Assouçy was a sort of troubadour; a good musician, and an agreeable poet, who travelled from town to town, lute in hand, and followed by two pages, who took parts in his songs; gaining his bread, and squandering what he gained without forethought. At Lyons, he fell in with Molière, and the brothers Bejart. He continues: "The stage has charms, and I could not easily quit these delightful friends. I remained three months at Lyons, amidst plays and feasts, though I had better not have staid three days, for I met with various disasters in the midst of my amusements (he was stripped of all his money in a gambling-house.) Having heard that I should find a soprano voice at Avignon, whom I could engage to join me, I embarked on the Rhone with Molière, and arrived at Avignon with forty pistoles in my pocket, the relics of my wreck." He then goes on to state how he was stripped of this sum among gamblers and jews; and adds, "But a man is never poor while he has friends; and having Molière and all the family of Bejart as allies, I found myself, despite fortune and jews, richer and happier than ever; for these generous people were not satisfied by assisting me as friends, they treated me as a relation. When they were invited to the States, I accompanied them to Pezenas, and I cannot tell the kindness I received from all. They say that the fondest brother tires of a brother in a month; but these, more generous than all the brothers in the world, invited me to their table during the whole winter; and, though I was really their guest, I felt myself at home. I never saw so much kindness, frankness, or goodness, as among these people, worthy of being the princes whom they personated on the stage."

At Pezenas, to which place they were invited by the prince of Conti, Molière's company found a warm welcome and generous pay from the prince himself. Molière got up, for the prince's amusement, not only the two regular plays which he had written, but other farcical interludes, which became afterwards the groundwork of his best comedies. Among these were the "Le Docteur Pedant;[34]" "Gorgibus dans le Sac" (the forerunner of "La Fourberies de Scapin"); "Le grand Benet de Fils," who afterwards flourished as "Le Médecin malgré Lui;" "Le grand Benet de fils," who appears to have blossomed hereafter into Thomas Diafoirus, in the "Malade Imaginaire." There were also "Le Docteur Amoureux," "Le Maître d'École," and "La Jalousie de Barbouillé." All these farces perished. Boileau, notwithstanding his love for classical correctness, lamented their loss; as he said, there was always something spirited and animating in the slightest of Molière's works.

These theatrical amusements delighted the prince of Conti; and their author became such a favourite, that he offered him the place of his secretary, which Molière declined. We are told that the prince, with all his kindness of intention, was of such a tyrannical temper, that his late secretary had died in consequence of ill treatment, having been knocked down by the prince with the fire-tongs, and killed by the blow. We do not wonder, therefore, at Molière's refusing the glittering bait. And in addition to the independence of his spirit, he loved his art, and no doubt felt the workings of that genius which hereafter gave such splendid tokens of its existence, and which is ever obnoxious to the trammels of servitude.

He continued for some time in Languedoc and Provence, and formed a friendship at Avignon with Mignard, which lasted to the end of their lives, and to which we owe the spirited portrait of Molière, which represents to the life the eager, impassioned, earnest and honest physiognomy of this great man. As Paris became tranquil Molière turned his eyes thitherward, desirous of establishing his company in the metropolis. He went first to Grenoble and then to Rouen, where, after some negotiation and delay, and several journeys to Paris, he obtained the protection of monsieur, the king's brother; was presented by him to the king and queen-mother, and finally obtained permission to establish himself in the capital.

The rival theatre was at the Hôtel de Bourgogne; here Corneille's tragedies were represented by the best tragic actors of the time.[34] The first appearance of Molière's company before Louis XIV. and his mother, Anne of Austria, took place at the Louvre. "Nicomede" was the play selected; success attended the attempt, and the actresses in particular met with great applause. Yet even then Molière felt that his company could not compete with its rival in tragedy: when the curtain fell, therefore, he stepped forward, and, after thanking the audience for their kind reception, asked the king's leave to represent a little divertisement which had acquired a reputation in the provinces: the king assented; and the performers went on, to act "Le Docteur Amoureux" one those farces, several of which he had brought out in Languedoc, conceived in the Italian taste, full of buffoonery and bustle. The king was amused, and the piece succeeded; and hence arose the fashion of adding a short farce after a long serious play. The success also secured the establishment of his company; they acted at first at the Theatre du Petit Bourbon, and afterwards, when that theatre was taken down to give place to the new building of the colonnade of the Louvre, the king gave him that of the Palais Royal, and his company assumed the name of Comédiens de Monsieur.

Parisian society opened a new field for Molière's talents; subjects for ridicule multiplied around him. The follies which appeared most ludicrous were so nursed and fostered by the high-born and wealthy, that he almost feared to attack them. But they were too tempting. In addition to the amusement to be derived from exhibiting in its true colours an affectation the most laughable, he was urged by the hope of vanquishing by the arms of wit, a system of folly, which had taken deep root even with some of the cleverest men in France;—we allude to the coterie of the Hôtel de Rambouillet; and to the farce of the "Précieuses Ridicules," which entered the very sanctum, and caused irremediable disorder and flight to all the darling follies of the clique.

The society of the Hôtel de Rambouillet had a language and conduct all its own; these were embodied in the endless novels of mademoiselle Scuderi. Gallantry and love were the watchwords, and metaphysical disquisitions were the labours of the set. But these were not allowed to subsist in homely phrase or a natural manner. The euphuism of our Elizabethian coxcombs was tame and tropeless in comparison with the high flights of the heroes and heroines of the Hôtel de Rambouillet. All was done by rule; all adapted to a system. The lover had a regular map laid out, and he entered on his amorous journey, knowing exactly the stoppages he must make, and the course he must pass through on his way to the city of Tenderness, towards which he was bound. There was the village of Billets galans; the hamlet of Billets doux; the castle of Petits Soins; and the villa of Jolis Vers. After possessing himself of these, he still had to fear being forced to embark on the sea of Dislike, or the lake of Indifference; but if, on the contrary, he pushed off on the river of Inclination, he floated happily down to his bourne. Their language was a jargon, which, as Sir Walter Scott observes, in his "Essay on Molière," resembled a highlander's horse, hard to catch, and not worth catching. They gave enigmatic names to the commonest things, which to call by their proper appellations, was, as Molière terms it, du dernier bourgeois. When an "innocent accomplice of a falsehood" was mentioned, a Précieuse (they themselves adopted and gloried in this name; Molière only added ridicules, to turn the blow a little aside from the centre of the target at which he aimed) could, without a blush, understand that a night-cap was the subject of conversation; water with them was too vulgar unless dignified as celestial humidity; a thief could be mentioned when designated as an inconvenient hero; and a lover won his mistress's applause when he complained of her disdainful smile, as "a sauce of pride."

Purity of feeling however was the soul of the system. Authors and poets were admitted as admirers, but they never got beyond the villa of Jolis Vers. When Voiture, who had glorified Julie d'Angennes his life-long, ventured to kiss her hand, he was thrown from the fortifications of the castle of Petit Soins, and soused into the lake of Indifference: even her noble admirer, the duke Montauzier, was forced to paddle on the river of Inclination, for fourteen years[35], before he was admitted to the city of Tenderness, and allowed to make her his wife. Their style of life was as eccentric as their talk. The lady rose in the morning, dressed herself with elegance, and then went to bed. The French bed, placed in an alcove, had a passage round it, called the ruelle; to be at the top of the ruelle was the post of honour; and Voiture, under the title of Alcovist, long held this envied post, beside the pillow of his adored Julie, while he never was allowed to touch her little finger. The folly had its accompanying good. The respect which the women exacted, and the virtue they preserved, exalted them, and in spite of their high-flown sentiments, and metaphysical conceits, wits did not disdain to "put a soul into the body of" nonsense. Rochefoucauld, Menage, madame de Sévigné, madame Des Houillères, Balzac, Vaugelas, and others, frequented the Hôtel de Rambouillet, and lent the aid of their talents to dignify their galimathias.

But it was too much for the honest comic poet to bear. He perceived the whole of society infected—nobles and prelates, ladies and poets, marquisses and lacqueys, all wandered about the Pays de Tendre, lost in a very labyrinth of inextricable nonsense. They assumed fictitious names[36], they promulgated fictitious sentiments; they admired each other, according as they best succeeded in being as unnatural as possible. Molière stripped the scene and personages of their gilding in a moment. His fair Précieuses were the daughters of a bourgeois named Gorgibus, who quitted their homely names of Cathos and Madelon, for Aminte and Polixene, dismissed their admirers for proposing to marry them, scolded their father for not possessing le bel air des choses, and are taken in by two valets whom they believe to be nobles, who easily imitate the foppery and sentimentalism, which these young ladies so much admire.[37]

1659.
Ætat.
37.

The success of the piece was complete—from that moment the Hôtel de Rambouillet talked sense. Menage says: "I was at the first representation of the "Précieuses Ridicules" of Molière, at the Petit Bourbon, mademoiselle de Rambouillet, madame de Grignan, M. Chapelain, and others, the select society of the Hôtel de Rambouillet, were there. The piece was acted with general applause; and for my own part I was so delighted that I saw at once the effect that it would produce. Leaving the theatre, I took M. Chapelain by the hand, and said We have been used to approve all the follies so well and wittily satirised in this piece; but believe me, as St. Remy said to king Clovis—'We must burn what we have adored, and adore what we have burnt.' It happened as I predicted, and we gave up this bombastic nonsense from the time of the first representation." A better victory could not have been gained by comic poet: to it may be said to have been added another. While the Précieuses yielded to the blow, unsophisticated minds enjoyed the wit: in the midst of the piece, an old man cried out suddenly from the pit, "Courage, Molière, this is true comedy!" The author himself felt that he had been inspired by the spirit of comic drama. That this consisted in a true picture of the follies of society, idealised and grouped by the fancy, but in every part in accordance with nature. He became aware, that he had but to examine the impression made on himself, and to embody the conceptions they suggested to his mind. As he went on writing, he in each new piece made great and manifest improvement. "Sganarelle" was his next effort: it is, perhaps, not in his best taste; it is like a tale of the Italian novelists—that the husband's misfortune had existence in his fancy only is the author's best excuse.

1661.
Ætat.
39.

Success ought to have taught Molière to abide by comedy, and to become aware that a quick sense of the ridiculous, and a happy art in the scenic representation of it, was the bent of his genius. But a desire to succeed in a more elevated and tragic style still pursued him. He brought out "Don Garcie de Navarre," a very poor play, unsuccessful in its début, and afterwards so despised by the author as not to be comprised in his edition of his works. He quickly dissipated this cloud, however, by bringing out "L'École des Maris," one of his best comedies.

The splendours of the reign of Louis XIV. were now beginning to shine out in all their brilliancy. The first attempt, however, at a fête—superior in magnificence, originality, and beauty to any thing the world had yet seen—was made, not by the king himself. In an evil hour for himself, Fouquet, the minister of finances, got leave to entertain royalty at his villa, or rather palace of Vaux. Blinded by prosperity, this unfortunate man thought to delight the king by the splendor of his entertainment; he awoke indeed a desire to do the like in Louis's mind, but he gave the final blow to his own fortunes, already undermined. Fouquet had admired mademoiselle de la Vallière; he had expressed his admiration, and sought return with the insolence of command rather than the solicitations of tenderness: he was rejected with disdain. His mortification made him suspect another more successful lover: he discovered the hidden and mutual passion of the king and the beautiful girl; and, with the most unworthy meanness, he threatened her with divulging the secret; and added the insolence of an epigram on her personal appearance. La Vallière informed her royal lover of the discovery which Fouquet had made—and his fall was resolved on.

The minister had lavished wealth, taste, and talent on his fête. Le Brun painted the scenes; Le Nôtre arranged the architectural decorations; La Fontaine wrote verses for the occasion; Molière not only repeated his "École des Maris," but brought out a new species of entertainment: a ballet was prepared, of the most magnificent description; but, as the principal dancers had to vary their characters and dresses in the different scenes, that the stage might not be left empty and the audience get weary with waiting, he composed a light sketch, called "Les Fâcheux" (our unclassical word bore is the only translation), in which a lover, who has an assignation with his mistress, is perpetually interrupted by a series of intruders, who each call his attention to some subject that fills their minds, and is at once indifferent and annoying to him. A novel sort of amusement added therefore charms to luxury and feasting; but the very perfection of the scene awoke angry feelings in Louis's mind: he saw a portrait of La Vallière in the minister's cabinet, and was roused to jealous rage: disdaining to express this feeling, he pretended another cause of displeasure, saying that Fouquet must have been guilty of peculation, to afford so vast an expenditure. He would have caused him to be arrested on the instant, had not his mother stopped him, by exclaiming, "What, in the midst of an entertainment which he gives you!"

Louis accordingly delayed his revenge. A glittering veil was drawn over the reality. With courtly ease he concealed his resentment by smiles; and, while meditating the ruin of the master and giver of the feast, entered with an apparently unembarrassed mind on the enjoyment of the scene. He was particularly pleased with "Les Fâcheux;" but, while he was expressing his approbation to Molière, he saw in the crowd Grand Veneur, or great huntsman to the king, a Nimrod devoted to the chase; and he said, pointing to him, "You have omitted one bore." On this Molière went to work; he called on M. de Soyecourt, slily engaged him in one of his too ready narrations of a chase; and, on the following evening, the lover had added to his other bores a courtier, who insists on relating the history of a long hunting-match in which he was engaged. English followers of the field find ample scope for ridicule in this scene, which in their eyes contrasts the rules of French sport most ludicrously with their more manly mode of running down the game. Another more praiseworthy effort to please and flatter the king in this piece was the introducing an allusion to Louis's efforts to abolish the practice of duelling.

The success of Molière and his talent naturally led to his favor among the great. The great Condé delighted in his society; and with the delicacy of a noble mind told him, that, as he feared to trespass on his time inopportunely if he sent for him; he begged Molière when at leisure to bestow an hour on him to send him word, and he would gladly receive him. Molière obeyed; and the great Condé at such times dismissed his other visitors to receive the poet, with whom he said he never conversed without learning something new. Unfortunately this example was not followed by all. Many little-minded persons regarded with disdain a man stigmatised with the name of actor, while others presumed insolently on their rank. The king generously took his part on these occasions. The anecdotes indeed which displays Louis's sympathy for Molière are among the most agreeable that we have of that monarch, and are far more deserving of record than the puerilities which Racine has commemorated. When brutally assaulted by a duke, the king reproved the noble severely. Madame Campan tells a story still more to this monarch's honour. Molière continued to exercise his functions of royal valet de chambre, but was the butt of many impertinences on account of his being an actor. Louis heard that the other officers of his chamber refused to eat with him, which caused Molière to abstain from sitting at their table. The king, resolved to put an end to these insults, said one morning, "I am told you have short commons here, Molière, and that the officers of my chamber think you unworthy of sharing their meals. You are probably hungry, I always get up with a good appetite; sit at that table where they have placed my en cas de nuit" (refreshment, prepared for the king in case he should be hungry in the night, and called an en cas.) The king cut up a fowl; made Molière sit down, gave him a wing, and took one himself, just at the moment when the doors were thrown open, and the most distinguished persons court entered, "You see me," said the king, "employed in giving Molière his breakfast, as my people do not find him good enough company for themselves." From this time Molière did not need to put himself forward, he received invitations on all sides. Not less delicate was the attention paid him by the poet Bellocq. It was one of the functions of Molière's place, to make the king's bed; the other valets drew back, averse to sharing the task with an actor; Bellocq stept forward, saying, "Permit me, M. Molière, to assist you in making the king's bed."

It was however at court only that Molière met these rebuffs; elsewhere his genius caused him to be admired and courted, while his excellent character secured him the affection of many friends. He brought forward Racine; and they continued intimate till Racine offended him by not only transferring a tragedy to the theatre of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, but seducing the best actress of his company to that of the rival stage. With Boileau he continued on friendly terms all his life. His old schoolfellow, "the joyous Chapelle," was his constant associate; though he was too turbulent and careless for the sensitive and orderly habits of the comedian.

Molière indeed was destined never to find a home after his own heart. Madeleine Bejart had a sister[38] much younger than herself, to whom Molière became passionately attached. She was beautiful, sprightly, clever, an admirable actress, fond of admiration and pleasure. Molière is said to describe her in "Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme," as more piquante than beautiful—fascinating and graceful—witty and elegant; she charmed in her very caprices. Another author speaks of her acting; and remarks on the judgment she displays both in dialogue and by-play: "She never looks about," he says, "nor do her eyes wander to the boxes; she is aware that the theatre is full, but she speaks and acts as if she only saw those with whom she is acting. She is elegant and rich in her attire without affectation: she studies her dress, but forgets it the moment she appears on the stage; and if she ever touches her hair or her ornaments, this bye-play conceals a judicious and inartificial satire, and she thus enters more entirely into ridicule of the women she personates: but with all these advantages, she would not please so much but for her sweet-toned voice. She is aware of this, and changes it according to the character she fills." With these attractions, young and lovely, and an actress, madame (or as she was called according to the fashion of the times, which only accorded the madame to women of rank, mademoiselle) Molière, fancying herself elevated to a high sphere when she married, giddy and coquettish, disappointed the hopes of her husband, whose heart was set on domestic happiness, and the interchange of affectionate sentiments in the privacy of home. Yet the gentleness of his nature made him find a thousand excuses for her:—"I am unhappy," he said, "but I deserve it; I ought to have remembered that my habits are too severe for domestic life: I thought that my wife ought to regulate her manners and practices by my wishes; but I feel that had she done so, she in her situation would be more unhappy than I am. She is gay and witty, and open to the pleasures of admiration. This annoys me in spite of myself. I find fault—I complain. Yet this woman is a hundred times more reasonable than I am, and wishes to enjoy life; she goes her own way, and secure in her innocence, she disdains the precautions I entreat her to observe. I take this neglect for contempt; I wish to be assured of her kindness by the open expression of it, and that a more regular conduct should give me ease of mind. But my wife, always equable and lively, who would be unsuspected by any other than myself, has no pity for my sorrows; and, occupied by the desire of general admiration, she laughs at my anxieties." His friends tried to remonstrate in vain. "There is but one sort of love," he said, "and those who are more easily satisfied do not know what true love is." The consequence of these dissensions was in the sequel a sort of separation; full of disappointment and regret for Molière, but to which his young wife easily reconciled herself. Her conduct disgraced her; but she had not sufficient feeling either to shrink from public censure or the consciousness of rendering her husband unhappy. To these domestic discomforts were added his task of manager; the difficulty of keeping rival actresses in good humour, the labour of pleasing a capricious public.

The latter task, as well as that of amusing his sovereign, was by far the easiest; as in doing so he followed the natural bent of his genius. He had begun the "Tartuffe." He brought out "L'École des Femmes," one of his gayest and wittiest comedies. It is known in England, through the adaptation of Wycherly; and called "The Country Girl." Unfortunately, in his days, the decorum of the English stage was less strict than the French; and what in Molière's play was fair and light raillery, Wycherly mingled with a plot of a licentious and disagreeable nature. The part, however, of the Country Girl herself, personated by Mrs. Jordan, animated by her bewitching naïveté, and graced by her frank, joyous, silver-toned voice, was an especial favourite with the public in the days of our fathers. In Paris, the critics were not so well pleased; truth of nature they called vulgarity, familiarity of expression was a sin against the language. Molière deigned so far to notice his censurers as to write the "Critique de l'École des Femmes," in which he easily throws additional ridicule on those who attacked him. The "Impromptu de Versailles" was written in the same spirit, at the command of the king. The war of words thus carried on, and replied to, grew more and more bitter: personal ridicule was exchanged by his enemies for calumny. Monfleuri, the actor, was malicious enough to present a petition to the king, in which he accused Molière of marrying his own daughter. Molière never deigned to reply to his accusation; and the king showed his contempt by, soon after, standing godfather to Molière's eldest child, of whom the duchess of Orleans was godmother.

In those days, as in those of our Elizabeth, the king and courtiers took parts in the ballets.[39] These comédie-ballets were of singular framework; comedies, in three acts, broad almost to farce, were interspersed with dances: to this custom, to the three act pieces that thus came into vogue, we owe some of the best of Molière's plays; when, emancipated from the necessity of verse and five acts, he could give full play to his sense of the ridiculous, and talent for comic situation; and when, unshackled by rhyme, he threw the whole force of his dry comic humour into the dialogue, and by a single word, a single expression, stamp and immortalise a folly, holding it up for ever to the ridicule it deserved. This seizing as it were on the bared inner kernel of some fashionable vanity, and giving it its true and undisguised name and definition, often shocked ears polite. They called that "vulgar," which was only stripping selfishness or ignorance of its cloak, and bringing home to the hearts of the lowly-born the fact, that the follies of the great are akin to their own: the people laughed to find the courtier of the same flesh and blood; but the courtier drew up, and said, that it was vulgar to present him en dishabille to the commonalty. "Let them rail," said Boileau, to the poet, whose genius he so fully appreciated, "let them exclaim against you because your scenes are agreeable to the vulgar. If you pleased less how much better pleased would your censurers be!" "Le Mariage Forcé" was the first of these comédies ballets.1664.
Ætat.
42. The king danced as an Egyptian in the interludes while in the more intellectual part of the performance Molière delighted the audience as "Sganarelle"—the unfortunate man, who with such rough courtesy is obliged to take a lady for better or for worse; a plot, founded on the last English adventure of the count de Grammont, who, when leaving this country, was followed by the brothers of la belle Hamilton, who, with their hands on the pummels of their swords, asked him if he had not forgotten something left behind. "True," said the count, "I forgot to marry your sister and instantly went back to repair his lapse of memory, by making her countess de Grammont." The dialogue of this play is exceedingly amusing; the metaphysical or learned pedants, whom Sganarelle consults, are admirable and witty specimens of advisers, who will only give counsel in their own way, in language understood only by themselves. The "Amants Magnifiques" followed; it was written in the course of a few days: it is now considered the most feeble of Molière's plays; but it suited the occasion, and by a number of delicate and witty impersonations of the manners of the times, lost to us now, it became the greatest ornament of a succession of festivals; which under the name of "Plaisirs de l'Ile enchantée," were got up in honour of mademoiselle de Vallière; and, being prepared by various men of talent, gave the impress of ideal magnificence to the pleasures of Louis XIV. On this occasion Molière ventured to bring out the three first acts of the "Tartuffe," hoping to gain the king's favourable ear at such a moment. But it was ticklish ground; and Louis, while he declared that he appreciated the good intentions of the author, forbade its being acted, under the fear that it might bring real devotion into discredit. The "Tartuffe" was a favourite with Molière, who, degraded by the clergy on account of his profession, and aware that virtue and vice were neither inherent in priest nor actor according to the garb, was naturally very inimical to false devotion. He still hoped to gain leave to represent his satire on hypocrites. He knew the king in his heart approved the scope of his play, and was pleased that his own wit should have been considered worthy of transfer to Molière's scenes—Molière himself venturing to remind him of the incident, which occurred during a journey to Lorraine, when Molière accompanied the monarch as his valet. When travelling, Louis was accustomed to make his supper his best meal, to which, of course, he brought a good appetite: one afternoon he invited his former preceptor, Perefixe, bishop of Rhodes, to join him; but the prelate, with affected sanctity, declined, as he had dined, and never ate a second meal on a fast-day. The king saw a smile on a bystander's face at this answer, and asked the cause. In reply, the courtier said, that it arose from his sense of the bishop's self-denial, considering the dinner he enjoyed. The detail of the dinner followed, dish after dish in long succession; and the king, as each viand was named, exclaimed, le pauvre homme! with such comic variety of voice and look, that Molière, who was present, felt the wit conveyed, and transferred it to his play, in which Orgon, in the simplicity of his heart, repeats this exclamation when the creature-comforts in which Tartuffe indulges are detailed to him. But though this compliment was not lost on the king, he did not yield; and Molière was obliged to content himself—after acting it at Rainey, the country house of the prince of Condé—by reading it in society, and thus giving opportunity for it to awaken the most lively curiosity in Paris. There is a well-known print of his reading it to the celebrated Ninon de l'Enclos, whose talents and wonderful tact for seizing the ridiculous he appreciated highly; and to whom he partly owed the idea of the play, from an occurrence that befel her.[40] Yet he was not consoled by these private readings and the sort of applause he thus gained, and he grew more bitter against the devotees for their opposition: in his play on the subject of Don Juan, "Le Festin de Saint Pierre," brought out soon after, he alludes bitterly to the interdiction laid on his favourite work. "All other vices," he says, "are held up to public censure; but hypocrisy is privileged to place the hand on every one's mouth, and to enjoy impunity." The hypocrites revenged themselves by calling his Festin blasphemous. The king, however, remained his firm friend, and tried to compensate for the hardship he suffered on this occasion by giving his name to his company, and granting him a pension in consequence.

It was the custom for the soldiers of the body guard of the king, and other privileged troops, to frequent the theatre without paying. These people filled the pit, to the great detriment of the profits of the actors. Molière, incited by his comrades, applied to the king, who issued an order to abrogate this privilege. The soldiers were furious; they went in crowds to the theatre, resolved to force an entrance; the unfortunate door-keeper was killed by a thousand sword-thrusts, and the rioters rushed into the house, resolved to revenge themselves on the actors, who trembled at the storm they had brought on themselves. The younger Bejart encountered their fury with a joke, that somewhat appeased them: he was dressed for the part of an old man; and came tottering forward, imploring them to spare the life of a poor old man, seventy-five years of age, who had only a few days of life left. Molière made them a speech; and peace was restored, with no greater injury than fear to the actors—except to one, who in his terror tried to get through a hole in the wall to escape, and stuck so fast that he could neither get out nor in, till, peace being restored, the hole was enlarged. The king was ready to punish the soldiers as mutineers, but Molière was too prudent to wish to make enemies; when the companies were assembled, and put under arms, that the ringleaders might be punished, he addressed them in a speech, in which he declared that he did not wish to make them pay, but that the order was levelled against those who assumed their name and claimed their privilege: and that, in truth, a gratuitous entrance to the theatre was a right beneath their notice; and, by touching their pride, he brought them for a time to submit to the new order.

In holding up follies or vices to ridicule Molière made enemies; and by attacking whole bodies of men, dangerous ones; yet, how much did the public owe to the spirit and wit with which he exposed the delusions to which they were often the victims. He first attacked the faculty, as it is called in "L'Amour Médecin," in which he brings forward four of the physicians in ordinary to the king, empirics of the first order, under Greek names, invented by Boileau for the occasion: nor can we wonder, when we read the mémoires and letters of the times, at the contempt in which Molière held the medicinal art. One specific came into fashion after the other; quack succeeded to quack; and the more ignorant the greater was the pretension, the greater also the number of dupes. Reading these, and turning to the pages of Molière, we see in a minute that he by no means exaggerated, while he with his happy art seized exactly on the most ridiculous traits.

1666.
Ætat.
42.

It has been said that the "Misanthrope," now considered by the French as Molière's chef-d'œuvre, was coldly received at first—a tradition contradicted by the register of the theatre; it went through twenty-one consecutive representations, and excited great interest in Paris. Still in this he raises his voice against the false taste of the age; and this with so little exaggeration, that the pit applauded the sonnet introduced in ridicule of the prevailing poetry, and were not a little astonished when Alceste proves that it possesses no merit whatever. The audience, seeing that ridicule of reigning fashions was the scope of the play, fancied that various persons were intended to be represented; and, among others, it was supposed that the duke de Montauzier, the husband of the Précieuse Julie d'Angennes, was portrayed in Alceste. It is said, that the duke went to see the play, and came back quite satisfied; saying, that the "Misanthrope" was a perfectly honest and excellent man, and that a great honour, which he should never forget, was done him by assimilating them together. There is indeed in Alceste a sensibility, joined to his sincerity and goodness of heart, that renders him very attractive; and thus, as is often the case when genius mirrors nature, the ridicule the author pretends to wish to throw on the victim recoils on the apparently triumphant personages: the time-serving Philinthe is quite contemptible; and every honest heart echoes the disgust Alceste feels for the deceits and selfishness of society. In truth, there is some cause to suspect that Molière found in his own sensitive and upright heart the homefelt traits of Alceste's character, as that of his wife furnished him with the coquetry of Célimène; and when, in the end, the Misanthrope resolves to hide from the world, one of the natures of the author poured itself forth; a nature, checked in real life by the necessities of his situation and the living excitement of his genius.

During the same year the "Médecin malgré Lui" was brought out; whose wit and comedy stamps it as one of his best: other minor pieces, by command, occupied his time, without increasing his fame. His mind was set on bringing out the "Tartuffe." The king had yielded to the outcry against it; but in his heart he was very desirous of having it acted. On occasion of a piece being played, called "Scaramouche Hermite," which also delineated immorality cloaked by religion; the king said to the great Coudé, "I should like to know why those who are so scandalised by Molière's play, say nothing against that of Scaramouche?" The prince replied. "The reason is, that Scaramouche makes game of heaven and religion, which these people care nothing for; but Molière satirises them themselves, and this they cannot bear."[41] Confident in the king's support, and anxious to bring out his play, Molière entertained the hope of mollifying his opponents by concessions: he altered his piece, expunged the parts most disliked, and changed the name Tartuffe, already become odious to bigot ears, to the Imposteur. In this new shape his comedy was acted once; but, on the following day the first president, Lamoignon, forbade it. Molière dispatched two principal actors to the king, then in Flanders, to obtain permission; but Louis only promised that the play should be re-examined on his return. Thus, once more, the piece was laid aside; and Molière forced to content himself with private readings, and the universal interest excited on the subject. Meanwhile he brought out "Amphitryon," "L'Avare," and "George Dandin" all of which rank among his best plays. The first has a more fanciful and playful spirit added to its comedy than any other of his productions, and displays more elegance and a more subtle wit.

As a specimen of mingled wit and humour, let us take the scene between Sosia and Mercury, when the latter, assuming his name and appearance, attempts to deprive him of his identity by force of blows. Sosia exclaims,—

"N'importe. Je ne puis m'anéantir pour toi,
Et souffrir un discours si loin de l'apparence.
Être ce que je suis est-il en ta puissance?
Et puis-je cesser d'être moi?
S'avisa-t-on jamais d'une chose pareille?
Et peut-on démentir cent indices pressants?
Rêvé-je? Est-ce que je sommeille?
Ai-je l'esprit troublé par des transports puissants?
Ne sens-je bien que je veille?
Ne suis-je pas dans mon bon sens?
Mon maître Amphitryon ne m'a-t-il pas commis
À venir en ces lieux vers Alemène sa femme?
Ne lui dois-je pas faire, en lui vantant sa flamme,
Un récit de ses faits contre notre ennemi?
Ne suis-je pas du port arrivé tout à l'heure?
Ne tiens-je pas une lanterne en main?
Ne te trouvé-je pas devant notre demeure?
Ne t'y parlé-je pas d'un esprit tout humain?
Ne te tiens-tu pas fort de ma poltronnerie,
Pour m'empêcher d'entrer chez nous?
N'as-tu pas sur mon dos exercé ta furie?
Ne m'as tu pas roué de coups?
Ah, tout cela n'est que trop veritable;
Et, plût au ciel, le fût-il moins!
Cesse donc d'insulter au sort d'un misérable;
Et laisse à mon dévoir s'acquitter de ses soins.

MERCURE.

Arrête, ou sur ton dos le moindre pas attire
Un assommant éclat de mon juste courroux.
Tout ce que tu viens de dire,
Est à moi, hormis les coups.

SOSIE.

Ce matin du vaisseau, plein de frayeur en l'âme,
Cette lanterne sait comme je suis parti.
Amphitryon, du camp, vers Alemène sa femme,
M'a-t-il pas envoyé?

MERCURE.

Vous avez menti.
C'est moi qu'Amphitryon députe vers Alemène
Et qui du port Persique arrivé de ce pas;
Moi qui viens annoncer la valeur de son bras,
Qui nous fait remporter une victoire pleine,
Et de nos ennemis a mis le chef à bas.
C'est moi qui suis Sosie enfin, de certitude,
Fils de Dave, honnête berger;
Frère d'Arpage, mort en pays étranger;
Mari de Cléanthis la prude,
Dont l'humeur me fait enrager;
Qui dans Thèbes ai reçu mille coups d'étrivière
Sans en avoir jamais dit rien;
Et jadis en public fus marqué par derrière
Pour être trop homme de bien.

SOSIE (bas, à part).

Il a raison. A moins d'être Sosie,
On ne peut pas savoir tout ce qu'il dit;
Et, dans l'étonnement dont mon âme est saisie,
Je commence, à mon tour, a le croire un petit.
En effet, maintenant que je le considère,
Je vois qu'il à de moi taille, mine, action.
Faisons-lui quelque question,
Afin, d'éclaircir ce mystère.

(Haut.)

Parmi tout le butin fait sur nos ennemis,
Qu'est-ce qu'Amphitryon obtient pour son partage?

MERCURE.

Cinq fort gros diamants en nœud proprement mis,
Dont leur chef se paroit comme d'un rare ouvrage.

SOSIE.

A qui destine-t'-il un si riche présent?

MERCURE.

A sa femme, et sur elle il le veut voir paroitre.

SOSIE.

Mais où, pour l'apporter, est-il mis à présent?

MERCURE.

Dans un coffret scellé des armes de mon maître.

SOSIE (à part).

Il ne ment pas d'un mot à chaque repartie,
Et de moi je commence à douter tout de bon.
Près de moi par la force, il est déjà Sosie,
Il pourroit bien encore l'être par la raison;
Pourtant quand je me tâte et que je me rappelle,
Il me resemble que je suis moi.
Où puis-je rencontrer quelque clarté fidèle.
Pour démêler ce que je voi?
Ce que j'ai fait tout seul, et que n'a vu personne,
A moins d'être moi-même, on ne le peut savoir:
Par cette question il faut que je l'étonne;
C'est de quoi le confondre, et nous allons le voir.

(Haut.)

Lorsqu'on étoit aux mains, que fis-tu dans nos tentes,
Où tu courus seul te fourrer?

MERCURE.

D'un jambon——