The unique individuality and the extraordinary merit of the various

pieces which make up Moliere's theatre have made it necessary to give a

tolerably minute account of them, and that account will to a certain

extent dispense us from dealing with his general characteristics at

great length, especially as a few remarks on French comedy of the

Molieresque kind as a whole will have to be given at the end of this

chapter. Independently of the characters which Moliere shares with all

the great names of literature, his fertility and justness of thought,

the felicity of the expression in which he clothes it, and his accurate

observation of human life, there are two points in his drama which

belong, in the highest degree, to him alone. One is the extraordinary

manner in which he manages to imbue farce and burlesque with the true

spirit of refined comedy. This manner has been spoken of by unfriendly

critics as 'exaggerated,' but the reproach argues a deficiency of

perception. Even the most roaring farces of Moliere, even such pieces as

_M. de Pourceaugnac_ and the _Bourgeois Gentilhomme_, demand rank as

legitimate comedy, owing to his unmatched faculty of intimating a

general purpose under the cloak of the merely ludicrous incidents which

are made to surround the fortunes of a particular person. This general

purpose (and here we come to the second point) is invariably a moral

one. Of all dramatists, ancient and modern, Moliere is perhaps that one

who has borne most constantly in mind the theory that the stage is a

lay-pulpit and that its end is not merely amusement, but the reformation

of manners by means of amusing spectacles. Occasionally, no doubt, he

has pushed this purpose too far and has missed his mark. He has never

given us, and perhaps could not have given us, such examples of dramatic

poetry of the non-tragic sort as Shakespeare and Calderon have given.

Indeed, it seems to be a mistake to call Moliere a poet at all, despite

his extraordinary creative faculty. He was too positive, too much given

to literal transcription of society, too little able to convey the vague

suggestion of beauty which, as cannot be too often repeated, is of the

essence of poetry. But, if we are content to regard drama as a middle

term between poetry and prose, he, with the two poets just named, must

be appointed to the first place in it among modern authors. In

brilliancy of wit he is, among dramatists, inferior only to Aristophanes

and Congreve. But he took a less Rabelaisian licence of range than

Aristophanes, and he never, like Congreve, allows his action to drift

aimlessly while his characters shoot pleasantries at one another. If we

leave purely poetic merit out of the question and restrict the

definition of comedy to the dramatic presentment of the characters and

incidents of actual life, in such a manner as at once to hold the mirror

up to nature and to convey lessons of morality and conduct, we must

allow Moliere the rank of the greatest comic writer of all the world.

_Castigat ridendo mores_ is a motto which no one challenges with such a

certainty of victory as he.

Although the number and the diversity of Moliere's works were well

calculated to encourage imitators, it was some time before the imitators

appeared. Unlike Racine, whose method was at once caught up, Moliere saw

during his lifetime no one who could even pretend to be a rival. Those

who are now classed as being in some degree of his time were for the

most part in their cradles when his masterpieces were being acted.

Regnard, the best of them, was born two years after the appearance of

_Le Depit Amoureux_ and only three years before the appearance of _Les

Precieuses Ridicules_. Baron was his pupil and adoring disciple.

Dufresny was but just of age, and Dancourt but ten years old, at his

death. Brueys and Palaprat (the Beaumont and Fletcher, _mutatis

mutandis_, of the French stage) did not make up their curious

association till long after that event, at the date of which Le Sage was

five years old. Quinault, Boursault, and Montfleury alone were in active

rivalry with him, and though none of them was destitute of merit, the

merit of none of them was in the least comparable to his. He owed this

advantage, for such it was, to his relatively early death and to the

wonderfully short space of time in which his masterpieces were produced.

Moliere is identified with the age of Louis XIV., yet _Les Precieuses

Ridicules_ was written years after the king's nominal accession, and

even after his actual assumption of the reins of government from the

hands of Mazarin, while _Le Malade Imaginaire_ was acted by its dying

author more than forty years before the great king's reign ended.

[Sidenote: Contemporaries of Moliere.]

The three authors just mentioned as actually contemporary with Moliere

require no very lengthy notice. Quinault may almost be said to have

founded a new literary school (in which none of his pupils has surpassed

him) by the excellence of his operas. Of these _Armida_ is held the

best. His comedies proper are not quite so good as his operas, but much

better than his tragedies. One of them, _L'Amant Indiscret_, supplied

Newcastle and Dryden with hints to eke out _L'Etourdi_, and most of them

show a considerable command of comic situation, if not of comic

expression. Montfleury, whose real name was Antoine Jacob, was, like

Moliere, an actor. He belonged to the old or rival company of the Hotel

de Bourgogne, and was born in 1640. He wrote sixteen comedies, partly on

contemporary subjects and partly adaptations of Spanish originals. The

two best are _La Femme Juge et Partie_ and _La Fille Capitaine_. They

belong to an older style of comedy than Moliere's, being both

extravagant and coarse, but there is considerable _vis comica_ in them.

Boursault, who was born in 1638 and died in 1701, had still more merit,

though he too was an enemy of Moliere. His _Mercure Galant_ is his

principal play, besides which _Esope a la Cour_, _Esope a la Ville_, and

_Phaeton_ may be mentioned. He was decidedly popular both as a man and a

writer. Vanbrugh imitated more than one of his plays. In all these

comedies a certain smack of the pre-Molieresque fancy for _Comedies des

Chansons_ and other _tours de force_ may be perceived. Besides these

three writers others of Moliere's own contemporaries wrote comedies with

more or less success. La Fontaine himself was a dramatist, though his

dramas do not approach his other work in excellence. Thomas Corneille

wrote comedies, but none of importance; and Campistron attained a

certain amount of success in comic as in tragic drama. No one of these,

however, approached the authors of the younger generation who have been

mentioned.

[Sidenote: The School of Moliere-Regnard.]

Jean Francois Regnard, the second of French comic dramatists in general

estimation (though it is doubtful whether any single piece of his equals

_Turcaret_), was born at Paris in 1656, and lived a curious life. He was

heir to considerable wealth and increased it, singular to say, by

gambling. He had also a mania for travelling, and when he was only

two-and-twenty was captured by an Algerian corsair and enslaved. After

some adventures of a rather dubious character he was ransomed, but

continued to travel for some years. At last he returned to France,

bought several lucrative offices and an estate in the country, and lived

partly there and partly at Paris, writing comedies and indulging largely

in the pleasures of the table. He died at his chateau of Grillon in

1710, apparently of a fit of indigestion; but various legends are

current about the exact cause of his death. He wrote twenty-three plays

(including one tragedy of no value) and collaborated with Dufresny in

four others. Many of these pieces were comic operas. At least a dozen

were represented by the 'Maison de Moliere.' The best of them are _Le

Joueur_, _Le Distrait_, _Les Menechmes_, _Le Legataire_, the first and

the last named being his principal titles to fame. Regnard trod as

closely as he could in the steps of Moliere. He was destitute of that

great dramatist's grasp of character and moral earnestness; but he is a

thoroughly lively writer, and well merited the retort of Boileau (by no

means a lenient critic, especially to the young men who succeeded his

old friend), when some one charged Regnard with mediocrity, 'Il n'est

pas mediocrement gai.'

Baron the actor was born in 1643 and died in 1729, after having long

been the leading star of the French stage. He wrote, though it is

sometimes said that he was aided by others, seven comedies. One of

these, _L'Andrienne_, is a clever adaptation of Terence, and another,

_L'Homme aux Bonnes Fortunes_, has considerable merit in point of

writing and of that stage adaptability which few writers who have not

been themselves actors have known how to master.

Charles Riviere Dufresny, a descendant of 'La Belle Jardiniere,' one of

Henri IV.'s village loves, was born in 1648 and died in 1724. He was a

great favourite of Louis XIV. and a kind of universal genius, devoting

himself by turns to almost every branch of literature and of the arts.

He was, however, incurably desultory, and was besides a man of

disorderly life. His comedies were numerous and full of wit and

knowledge of the world, but somewhat destitute of finish. Besides those

in which Regnard collaborated he was the author of eleven pieces, of

which _L'Esprit de Contradiction_, _Le Double Veuvage_, _La Coquette de

Village_, and _La Reconciliation Normande_ are perhaps the best.

Florent Carton Dancourt was born in 1661 and died in 1725. He too was a

favourite of Louis XIV., but, unlike Dufresny, he was an actor as well

as an author. Towards the end of his days, having made a moderate

fortune, he betook himself to a country life and to the practice of

religious duties. His _theatre_ is considerable, extending to twelve

volumes. The great peculiarity of his comedies is that they deal almost

exclusively with the middle class. _Les Bourgeoises de Qualite_ and _Le

Chevalier a la Mode_, perhaps also _Le Galant Jardinier_ and _Les Trois

Cousines_, deserve mention.

The collaboration of Brueys and Palaprat resulted in the modern version

of the famous mediaeval farce, _L'Avocat Pathelin_, and in an excellent

piece of the Moliere-Regnard type, _Le Grondeur_. Some other plays of

less merit were written by the friends, while each is responsible for

two independent pieces. Both were Provencals, David Augustin de Brueys

having been born at Aix in 1640, Jean Palaprat at Toulouse ten years

later. Brueys, who, as an abbe converted by Bossuet and engaged actively

in propagating his new faith, had some difficulty in appearing publicly

as a dramatic author, is understood to have had the chief share in the

composition of the joint dramas.

[Sidenote: Characteristics of Molieresque Comedy.]

The general characteristics of this remarkable comedy are not hard to

define. Based as it was, after Moliere had once set the example, on the

direct study of the actual facts of society and human nature, it could

not fail to appeal to universal sympathy in a very different degree from

the artificial tragedy which accompanied it. It was, moreover, far less

trammelled by rules than the sister variety of drama. Unities did not

press very heavily on the comic dramatist; his choice and number of

characters, his licence of action on the stage, and so forth, were

unlimited; he could write in prose or verse at his pleasure, and, if he

chose verse, he was bound to a much less monotonous kind of it than his

tragic brother. Consequently the majority of the objections which lie

against the masterpieces of Corneille and Racine, and which make the

work of their imitators almost unreadable, leave Moliere and his

followers unscathed. One drawback only remained, the drawback already

commented on in the case of tragedy, and admitted by French critics

themselves in some such terms as that Shakespeare took individuals,

Moliere took types. The advantage of the latter method for enforcing a

moral lesson is evident; its literary disadvantages are evident

likewise. It leads to an ignoring of the complexity of human nature and

to an unnatural prominence of the 'ruling passion.' The highest dramatic

triumphs of single character in comedy, Falstaff, Rosalind, Beatrice,

become impossible. As it has been remarked, the very titles of these

plays, _Le Misanthrope_, _Le Joueur_, _Le Grondeur_, show their defects.

No man is a mere misanthrope, a mere gambler, a mere grumbler; and the

dramatist who approaches comedy from the side of Moliere is but too apt

to forget the fact in his anxiety to enforce his moral and deepen the

strokes of his general type.

FOOTNOTES:

[233] Ed. Stengel. 5 vols. Marburg, 1884. Cf. Rigal, _Alexandre Hardy_.

Paris, 1889.

[234] This singular work has been published in vol. 8 of the _Ancien

Theatre Francais_ in the Bibliotheque Elzevirienne. It consists of two

parts (or, as the author calls them, days), and fills some two hundred

pages. The traditions of the classical drama are thrown to the winds in

it, and the liberty of action, the abundance of personages, the bustle

and liveliness of the presentation are almost equal to those of the

contemporary English theatre.

[235] Ed. Viollet-le-Duc. Also in a convenient selection of his best

plays, by L. de Ronchaud. Paris, 1882.

[236] It is pretty generally known that Richelieu himself (besides other

dramatic work) composed the whole, or nearly the whole, of a play

_Mirame_, which he had sumptuously performed, and which was fathered by

Desmarest. It possessed no merit.

[237] Ed. Marty-Laveaux. 12 vols. Paris, 1862-67.

[238] Ed. Mesnard. 8 vols. Paris, 1867.

[239] The work of (or attributed to) this singular and obscure person

has been edited by M. G. Aventin in 2 vols, of the Bibliotheque

Elzevirienne (Paris, 1858). The name was certainly assumed, and the date

and history of the bearer are quite uncertain. The third decade of the

seventeenth century seems to have been his most flourishing time. He was

the most remarkable of a class of charlatans, others of whom bore the

names of Gaultier-Garguille, Gros-Guillaume, etc., and the work which

goes under his name is typical of a large mass of _facetiae_. It

consists of dialogues between Tabarin and his master, of farcical

adventures in which figure Rodomont (the typical hero of romance) and

Isabelle (the typical heroine), etc., etc.

[240] These will be found in the dramatic collection of the Bibliotheque

Elzevirienne already cited, as well as other pieces, of which the most

remarkable is the _Corrivaux_ of Troterel (1612). Saint-Evremond among

his earlier works produced a _Comedie des Academistes_, satirising the

then young Academy.

[241] Ed. Moland. 7 vols. Paris, 1863. Ed. (in 'Grands Ecrivains'

series) Despois, Regnier, and Mesnard. Paris (in progress).

CHAPTER III.

NOVELISTS.

[Sidenote: D'Urfe.]

Prose fiction, for reasons which it is not at all hard to discover, is

in its more complete forms always a late product of literature. Up to

the beginning of the seventeenth century, France had known nothing of it

except the short prose tales which had succeeded the Fabliaux, and which

had been chiefly founded on imitation of the Italians, with the late and

inferior prose versions of the romances of chivalry, the isolated

masterpiece of _Gargantua_ and _Pantagruel_, and the translated and

adapted versions of the _Amadis_ and its continuations. The imitation of

Spanish literature was constant in the early seventeenth century, and

the great wave of conceited style which, under the various names of

Euphuism, Gongorism, Marinism, invaded all the literary countries of

Europe, did not spare France. The result was a very singular class of

literature which, except for a few burlesque works, almost monopolised

the attention of novelists during the first half of the century. The

example of it was in a manner set by Honore d'Urfe in the _Astree_,

which was, however, rather pastoral than heroic. D'Urfe, who was a man

of position and wealth in the district of Forez, imagined, on the banks

of the Lignon, a stream running past his home, a kind of Arcadia, the

popularity of which is sufficiently shown by the adoption of the name of

the hero, Celadon, as one of the stock names in French for a lover. He

took, perhaps, some of his machinery from the _Aminta_ of Tasso and from

the other Italian pastorals, but he emulated the _Amadis_ in the

interminable series of adventures and the long-windedness of his

treatment. He had, however, some literary power, while the necessary

verisimilitude was provided for by the adaptation of numerous personal

experiences, and the book has preserved a certain reputation for

graceful sentiment and attractive pictures of nature. It was

extraordinarily popular at the time and long afterwards, so much so that

a contemporary ecclesiastic, Camus de Pontcarre, considered it necessary

to supply an antidote to the bane in the shape of a series of Christian

pastorals, the name of one of which, _Palombe_, is known, because of an

edition of it in the present century.

[Sidenote: The Heroic Romances.]

D'Urfe belonged as much to the sixteenth as to the seventeenth century,

though the _Astree_ was the work of the latter part of his life, and was

indeed left unfinished by him. It was shortly afterwards, under the

influence chiefly of the growing fancy for literary _coteries_, that the

heroic romance properly so called was born. This was usually a narration

of vast length, in which sometimes the heroes and heroines of classical

antiquity, sometimes personages due more or less to the author's

imagination, were conducted through a more than Amadis-like series of

trials and adventures, with interludes and a general setting of

high-flown gallantry. This latter possessed a complete jargon of its

own, and (though the hypothesis of its power over the classical French

drama is for the most part exaggerated) continued to exercise a vast

influence on literature and on society, even after Moliere had poured on

its chief practitioners and advocates the undying mockery of his

_Precieuses Ridicules_. There were three prominent authors in this

style, Mademoiselle de Scudery, La Calprenede, and Gomberville.

Mademoiselle de Scudery, known in the _coterie_ nomenclature of the time

as 'Sapho,' was the sister of Georges de Scudery, and a woman of

considerable talent and more considerable industry. Madeleine de Scudery

was born at Havre in 1607, and died at Paris in 1701, her life thus

covering nearly the whole of the century of which she was one of the

most conspicuous literary figures. She had no beauty--indeed she was

very ugly--but the eccentric military and literary reputation of her

brother and her own talents made her the centre and head of an important

_coterie_ in the capital. Her romances, the earliest of which was

_Ibrahim_, were published under her brother's name, but their

authorship was well known. She was extremely accomplished, not merely in

the accomplishments of a blue-stocking but in art, and even in

housewifery. After her series of romances was finished she published

many volumes, chiefly condensed or extracted from them, containing

_Conversations_ of the moral kind, which attracted attention from some

persons who had not condescended to the romances themselves. It ought

never to be forgotten that among the most fervent admirers of her books

and of their fellows was Madame de Sevigne, who was certainly almost as

acute in literary criticism as she was skilful in literary composition.

Her novels, the most famous of their class, are the _Grand Cyrus_,

otherwise _Artamene_, _Clelie_, _Ibrahim_, or the _Illustrious Bassa_,

and _Almahide_, the latter being partly, but chiefly in the name of the

heroine, the source of Dryden's _Conquest of Granada_. The _Grand Cyrus_

is, at least by title, the best remembered, but it is in _Clelie_ that

the best-known and most characteristic trait appears, the delineation

and description namely of the _Carte de Tendre_[242]. Tendre is the

country of love, through which flows the river of Inclination watering

the villages of 'Pretty Verses,' 'Gallant Epistles,' 'Assiduity,' etc.,

while elsewhere in the region are the less cheerful localities of

'Levity,' 'Indifference,' 'Perfidy,' and so forth. La Calprenede, a

Gascon by birth, was the author of _Cleopatre_ (which ranks perhaps with

_Cyrus_ as the chief example of the style), of _Cassandre_ and of

_Pharamond_. Gauthier de Coste (which was his personal name) figures,

like most of the notable persons of the middle of the century, in the

_Historiettes_ of Tallemant, who says of him, 'Il n'y a jamais eu un

homme plus Gascon que celui-ci.' The assertion is supported by some

characteristic but not easily quotable anecdotes. The criticism of

Tallemant, however, does not apply badly to the whole class of

compositions. 'Les heros,' says he, speaking of _Cassandre_, 'se

ressemblent comme deux gouttes d'eau, parlent tous _Phebus_ (the

euphuist jargon of the time), et sont tous des gens a cent mille lieues

au dessus des autres hommes.' Marin le Roy, Seigneur de Gomberville, who

was something of a Jansenist, attended rather to edification than

gallantry in his _Alcidiane_, _Caritee_, _Polexandre_, and _Cytheree_.

Though earlier in date he is inferior in power to Mademoiselle de

Scudery and to La Calprenede, the first of whom had some wit and much

culture, while La Calprenede possessed a decided grasp of heroic

character and some notion of the method of composing historical novels.

Gomberville, a man of wealth and position, was also a writer of moral

works. Putting the artificiality of the general style out of the

question, the chief fault to be found with these books is their enormous

length. They fill eight, ten, or even twelve volumes; they consist of

five, six, or even seven thousand pages, though the pages are not very

large and the print by no means close. Even the liveliest work--work

like Fielding's or Le Sage's--would become tiresome on such a scale as

this; and it is still incomprehensible how any one not having some

special object to serve by it could struggle through such enormous

wastes of verbiage and unreality as form the bulk of these novels. Even

when the passion for the heroic style strictly so called began to wane

no great improvement at first manifested itself. Catherine

Desjardins[243] (who wrote under the name of Madame de Villedieu)

produced numerous books (the chief of which is _Le Grand Alcandre_), not

indeed so absolutely preposterous in general conception, but even more

vapid and destitute of originality and distinction[244].

These impracticable and barren styles of fiction were succeeded in the

latter half of the century by something much better. The Picaroon

romance of Spain inspired Paul Scarron with the first of a long line of

novels which, in the hands of Le Sage, Defoe, Fielding, and Smollett,

enriched the literature of Europe with remarkable work. Madame de la

Fayette laid the foundation of the novel proper, or story of analysis of

character; and towards the close of the century the fairy tale attained,

in the hands of Anthony Hamilton, Perrault and Madame d'Aulnoy, its

most delightful and abundant development.

[Sidenote: Scarron.]

Paul Scarron was one of the most remarkable literary figures of the

century in respect of originality and eccentric talent, though few

single works of his possess formal completeness. He was of a family of

Piedmontese origin and very well connected, his father, of the same

name, being a member of the Parliament of Paris, and of sufficiently

independent humour to oppose Richelieu. Paul Scarron the younger (he had

had an elder brother of the same name who had died an infant) was born

in 1610, and his mother did not outlive his third year. His father

married again; the stepmother did not get on well with Paul, and he was

half obliged and half induced to become an abbe. For some years he lived

a merry life, partly at Rome, partly at Paris. But when he was still

young a great calamity fell on him. A cock-and-bull story of his having

disguised himself as a savage in a kind of voluntary tar-and-feather

suit, and having been struck with paralysis in consequence of plunging

into an ice-cold stream to escape the populace, is usually told, but

there seems to be no truth in it. An attack of fever, followed by

rheumatism and mismanaged by the physicians of the day, appears to have

been the real cause of his misfortune. At any rate, for the last twenty

years of his life he was hopelessly deformed, almost helpless, and

subject to acute attacks of pain. But his spirit was unconquerable. He

had some preferment at Le Mans and a pension from the queen, which he

lost on suspicion of writing _Mazarinades_. Besides these he had what he

called his 'Marquisat de Quinet,' that is to say, the money which Quinet

the bookseller paid him for his wares. In 1652 he astonished Paris by

marrying Francoise d'Aubigne, the future Madame de Maintenon, the

granddaughter of Agrippa d'Aubigne. The strange couple seem to have been

happy enough, and such unfavourable reports as exist against Madame

Scarron may be set down to political malice. But Scarron's health was

utterly broken, and he died in 1660 at the age of fifty. His work was

not inconsiderable, including some plays and much burlesque poetry, the

chief piece of which was his 'Virgil travestied,' an ignoble task at

best, but very cleverly performed. His prose, however, is of much

greater value. Many of his _nouvelles_, mostly imitated from the

Spanish, have merit, and his _Roman Comique_[245], though also inspired

to some extent from the peninsula, has still more. It is the unfinished

history of a troop of strolling actors, displaying extraordinary truth

of observation and power of realistic description in the style which, as

has been said, Le Sage and Fielding afterwards made popular throughout

Europe.

[Sidenote: Cyrano de Bergerac.]

With Scarron may be classed another writer of not dissimilar character,

but of far less talent, whose eccentricities have given him a

disproportionate reputation even in France, while they have often

entirely misled foreign critics. Cyrano de Bergerac was a Gascon of not

inconsiderable literary power, whose odd personal appearance, audacity

as a duellist, and adherence, after conversion, to the unpopular cause

of Mazarin, gave him a position which his works fail to sustain. They

are not, however, devoid of merit. His _Pedant Joue_, a comedy, gave

Moliere some useful hints; his _Agrippine_, a tragedy, has passages of

declamatory energy. But his best work comes under the head of fiction.

The _Voyages a la Lune et au Soleil_[246], in which the author partly

followed Rabelais, and partly indulged his own fancy for rodomontade,

personal satire, and fantastic extravagance, have had attributed to them

the great and wholly unmerited honour of setting a pattern to Swift.

Cyrano, let it be repeated, was a man of talent, but his powers (he died

before he was thirty-five) had not time to mature, and the reckless

boastfulness of his character would probably have disqualified him at

all times from adequate study and self-criticism. Personally, he is an

amusing and interesting figure in literary history, but he is not much

more. In company with him and with Scarron may be mentioned Dassoucy,

alternately a friend and enemy of Cyrano, and a light writer of some

merit.

[Sidenote: Furetiere.]

Charles Sorel, an exceedingly voluminous author, historiographer of

France, deserves mention in passing for his _Histoire Comique de

Francion_[247], in which, as in almost all the fictitious work of the

time, serious as well as comic, living persons are introduced. The

chief remarkable thing about _Francion_ is the evidence it gives of an

attempt at an early date (1623) to write a novel of ordinary manners. It

is a dull story with loose episodes. More interesting is Antoine

Furetiere, author of the _Roman Bourgeois_[248]. Furetiere, who was a

man of varied talent, holds no small place in the history of the

calamities of authors. He wrote poems, short tales, fables, satires,

criticisms. He is said to have given both Boileau and Racine not

inconsiderable assistance. Unfortunately for him, though he had been

elected an academician in 1662, he conceived and executed the idea of

outstripping his tardy colleagues in their dictionary work. He produced

a book of great merit and utility, but one which brought grave troubles

on his own head. It was alleged that he had infringed the privileges of

the Academy; he was expelled from that body, his own privilege for his

own book was revoked, and it was not published till after his death,

becoming eventually the well-known _Dictionnaire de Trevoux_.

Furetiere's side has been warmly taken in these days, and it has been

sought, not without success, to free him from the charge of all

impropriety of conduct, except the impropriety of continuing to be a

member of the Academy, while what he was doing could hardly be regarded

as anything but a slight on it. The _Roman Bourgeois_ is an original and

lively book, without any general plot, but containing a series of very

amusing pictures of the Parisian middle-class society of the day, with

many curious traits of language and manners. It was published in 1666.

[Sidenote: Madame de la Fayette.]

Of very different importance is the Countess de la Fayette, who has the

credit, and justly, of substituting for mere romances of adventure on

the one hand, and for stilted heroic work on the other, fiction in which

the display of character is held of chief account. In the school,

indeed, of which Scarron set the example in France, especially in _Gil

Blas_, its masterpiece, the most accurate knowledge and drawing of human

motives and actions is to be found. But it is knowledge and drawing of

human motives and actions in the gross rather than in particular. Gil

Blas, and even Tom Jones, are types rather than individuals, though the

genius of their creators hides the fact. It is, perhaps, an arguable

point of literary criticism, whether the persevering analysis of

individual, and more or less unusual, character does not lead novelists

away from the best path--as it certainly leads in the long run to

monstrosities of the modern French and English 'realist' type. But this

is a detail of criticism into which there is no need to enter here. It

is sufficient that the style has produced some of the most admirable,

and much of the most characteristic, work of the last century, and that

Madame de la Fayette is on the whole entitled to the credit of being its

originator. Her pen was taken up in the next century by the Abbe Prevost

and by Richardson, and from these three the novel, as opposed to the

romance, may be said to descend. The maiden name of Madame de la

Fayette[249] was Marie Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne, and she was born

at Paris in 1634. Her father was governor of Havre. She was carefully

brought up under Menage and Rapin, among others, and was one of the most

brilliant of the _precieuses_ of the Hotel Rambouillet. In 1655 she

married the Count de la Fayette, but was soon left a widow. After his

death she contracted a kind of Platonic friendship with La

Rochefoucauld, who was then in the decline of life, tormented with gout,

and consoling himself for the departure of the days when he was one of

the most important men in France by the composition of his undying

Maxims. She survived him thirteen years, and died herself in 1693.

During the whole of her life she was on the most intimate terms with

Madame de Sevigne, as well as with many of the foremost men of letters

of the time. In particular there are extant a large number of letters

between her and Huet, bishop of Avranches, one of the most learned,

amiable, and upright prelates of the age. Her first attempt at

novel-writing was _La Princesse de Montpensier_. This was followed by

_Zaide_, published in 1670, a book of considerable excellence; and this

in its turn by _La Princesse de Cleves_, published in 1677, which is one

of the classics of French literature. The book is but a small one, not

amounting in size to a single volume of a modern English novel, and this

must of itself have been no small novelty and relief after the

portentous bulk of the Scudery romances. Its scene is laid at the court

of Henri II., and there is a certain historical basis; but the principal

personages are drawn from the author's own experience, herself being the

heroine, her husband the Prince of Cleves, and Rochefoucauld the Duke de

Nemours, while other characters are identified with Louis XIV. and his

courtiers by industrious compilers of 'keys.' If, however, the interest

of the book had been limited to this it would now-a-days have lost all

its attraction, or have retained so much at most as is due to simple

curiosity. But it has far higher merits, and what may be called its

court apparatus, and the multitude of small details about court

business, are rather drawbacks to it now. Such charm as it has is

derived from the strict verisimilitude of the character drawing, and the

fidelity with which the emotions are represented. This interest may,

indeed, appear thin to a modern reader fresh from the works of those who

have profited by two centuries of progress in the way which Madame de la

Fayette opened. But when it is remembered that her book appeared thirty

years before _Gil Blas_, forty before the masterpieces of Defoe, and

more than half a century before the English novel properly so called

made its first appearance, her right to the place she occupied will

hardly be contested[250].

The precise origin of the fancy for writing fairy stories, which took

possession of polite society in France at the end of the seventeenth

century, has been the subject of much discussion, and cannot be said to

have been finally settled. Probably the fables of La Fontaine, which are

very closely allied to the style, may have given the required impulse.

As soon as an example was set this style was seen to lend itself very

well to the still surviving fancy for _coterie_ compositions, and the

total amount of work of the kind produced in the last years of the

seventeenth and the first of the eighteenth century must be enormous.

Much of it has not yet been printed, and the names of but few of the

authors are generally known, or perhaps worth knowing[251]. Three,

however, emerge from the mass and deserve attention--Anthony Hamilton,

Madame d'Aulnoy, and above all, Charles Perrault, the master beyond all

comparison of the style.

[Sidenote: Fairy Tales.]

Marie Catherine, Comtesse d'Aulnoy, was born about the middle of the

seventeenth century, and died in 1720. It is sufficient to say that

among her works are the 'Yellow Dwarf' and the 'White Cat,' stories

which no doubt she did not invent, but to which she has given their

permanent and well-known form. She wrote much else, memoirs and novels

which were bad imitations of the style of Madame de la Fayette, but her

fairy tales alone are of value. Anthony Hamilton was one of the rare

authors who acquire a durable reputation by writing in a language which

is not their native tongue. He was born in Ireland in 1646, and followed

the fortunes of the exiled royal family. He returned with Charles II.,

but adhering to Catholicism, was excluded from preferment in England

until James II.'s reign, and he passed most of his time before the

Revolution, and all of it afterwards, in France. Hamilton produced

(besides many fugitive poems and minor pieces) two books of great note

in French, the _Memoires de Grammont_, his brother-in-law, which perhaps

is the standard book for the manners of the court of Charles II., and a

collection of fairy tales, less simple than those of Perrault and Madame

d'Aulnoy and more subordinated to a sarcastic intention, but full of wit

and written in French, which is only more piquant for its very slight

touch of a foreign element. Many phrases of Hamilton's tales have passed

into ordinary quotation, notably 'Belier, mon ami, tu me ferais plaisir

si tu voulais commencer par le commencement.'

[Sidenote: Perrault.]

The master of the style was, however, as has been said, Charles

Perrault, whose literary history was peculiar. He was born at Paris in

1628, being the son of Pierre Perrault, a lawyer, who had three other

sons, all of them of some distinction, and one of them, Claude Perrault,

famous in the oddly conjoined professions of medicine and architecture.

Charles was well educated at the College de Beauvais, and at first

studied law, but his father soon afterwards bought a place of value in

the financial department, and Charles was appointed clerk in 1662. He

received a curious and rather nondescript preferment (as secretary to

Colbert for all matters dependent on literature and arts), which, among

other things, enabled him to further his brother's architectural career.

In 1671 he was, under the patronage of Colbert, elected of the Academy,

into the affairs and proceedings of which he imported order almost for

the first time. He had done and for some time did little in literature,

being occupied by the duties which, under Colbert, he had as controller

of public works. But after a few essays in poetry, partly burlesque and

partly serious, notably a _Siecle de Louis XIV._, he embarked on the

rather unlucky work which gave him his chief reputation among his own

contemporaries, the _Parallele des Anciens et des Modernes_, in which he

took the part of the moderns. The dispute which followed, due

principally to the overbearing rudeness of Boileau, has had something

more than its proper place in literary history, and there is no need to

give an account of it. It is enough to say that while Boileau as far as

his knowledge went (and that was not far, for he knew nothing of

English, not very much of Greek, and it would seem little of Italian or

Spanish) had the better case, Perrault, assisted by his brother, made a

good deal the best use of his weapons, Boileau's unlucky 'Ode on Namur'

giving his enemies a great hold on him. After six years' fighting,

however, the enemies made peace, and, indeed, it does not seem that

Perrault at any time bore malice. He produced, besides some memoirs and

the charming trifles to be presently spoken of[252], a good many

miscellanies in prose and verse of no particular value, and died in

1703.

His first tale, _Griselidis_ (in verse, and by no means his best),

appeared in 1691, _Peau d'Ane_ and _Les Souhaits Ridicules_ in 1694, _La

Belle au Bois Dormant_ in 1696, and the rest in 1697. These are _Le

Petit Chaperon Rouge_, _La Barbe Bleue_, _Le Maitre Chat ou le Chat

Botte_, _Les Fees_, _Cendrillon_, _Riquet a la Houppe_, and _Le Petit

Poucet_. It is needless to say that Perrault did not invent the subjects

of them. What he contributed was an admirable and peculiar narrative

style, due, as seems very probable, in great part to the example of La

Fontaine, but distinguished therefrom by all the difference of verse and

prose. The characteristics of this style are an extreme simplicity

which does not degenerate into puerility, great directness, and at the

same time vividness in telling the story, and a remarkable undercurrent

of wit which is never obtrusive, as is sometimes the case in the verse

tales. Perrault's stories deserve their immense popularity, and they

found innumerable imitators chiefly among persons of quality, who, as M.

Honore Bonhomme, the best authority on the obscurer fairy-tale writers,

observes, probably found an attraction in the style because of the way

in which it lent itself to cover personal satire. This, however, is

something of an abuse, and little or nothing of it is discernible in

Perrault's own work, though later, and especially in the eighteenth

century, it was frequently if not invariably present.

NOTE TO THE LAST THREE CHAPTERS.

Although the list of names mentioned here under the respective heads of

poets, dramatists, and novelists is considerable, it is very far indeed

from being exhaustive. It may, indeed, be said generally that it is only

possible in this history, especially as we leave the invention of

printing farther and farther behind, to mention those names which have

left something like a memory behind them. The dramas and novels of the

seventeenth century are extremely numerous, and have been but very

partially explored. In regard to the poems there is an additional

difficulty. It was a fashion of the time to collect such things in

_recueils_--miscellaneous collections--in which the work of very large

numbers of writers, who never published their poems separately or

obtained after their own day any recognition as poets, is buried.

Specimens, published here and there by the laborious editors of the

greater classics in illustration of these latter, show that with

leisure, opportunity, and critical discernment, this little-worked vein

might be followed up not without advantage. But for such a purpose, as

for the similar exploration of many other out-of-the-way corners of this

vast literature, conditions are needed which are eminently 'the gift of

fortune.' These remarks apply more or less to all the following chapters

and books of this history. But they may find an appropriate place here,

not merely because it is from this period onwards that they are most

applicable, but because this special department of French literary

history--the earlier seventeenth century--contains, perhaps, the

greatest proportion of this wreckage of time as yet unrummaged and

unsorted by posterity.

FOOTNOTES:

[242] Not _du_ Tendre, as it is often erroneously cited in French and

English works.

[243] The learned editor of Tallemant des Reaux calls her Marie

Hortense. She also wrote verses and plays. There were many other romance

writers of the period now forgotten, or remembered only for other

things, such as the Abbe d'Aubignac.

[244] I cannot boast of an intimate or exhaustive acquaintance with the

'heroic' romances; but I have taken care to satisfy myself of the

accuracy of the statements in the text.

[245] Ed. Dillaye. 2 vols. Paris, 1881.

[246] The full title is _Histoire Comique des Etats de la Lune et du

Soleil_. Cyrano's works have been edited by P. L. Jacob. 2 vols. Paris,

1858.

[247] Ed. Colombey. Paris, 1877.

[248] Ed. Jannet. 2 vols. Paris, 1878.

[249] Ed. Garnier. Paris, 1864.

[250] Madame de la Fayette also wrote _La Comtesse de Tende_, and

interesting Memoirs of Henrietta of England. _Zaide_ was published under

the name of Segrais, who was a _nouvelle_-writer of no great merit,

though a pleasant poet.

[251] See H. Bonhomme, _Le Cabinet des Fees_.

[252] Ed. Lefevre. Paris, 1875. Ed. Lang. Oxford, 1888.

CHAPTER IV.

HISTORIANS, MEMOIR-WRITERS, LETTER-WRITERS.

Although the seventeenth century did not witness the acceptance in

France of what may be called a philosophical conception of history, and

though few or none of the regular histories of the time (with the

exception of that of Mezeray) hold high rank as literature, no period

was more fruitful in memoirs, letters, and separate historical sketches

of the first merit. The names of Madame de Sevigne, of the Cardinal de

Retz, of La Rochefoucauld, and at the extreme end of the period of Saint

Simon, rank among those of the most original writers of France, while

the historical essay has rarely assumed a more thoroughly literary form

than in the short sketches of Retz, Sarrasin, and others. The subject of

the present chapter may, therefore, be divided into four parts, the

historians properly so called (the least interesting of the four), the

historical essayists, the memoir-writers, and the letter-writers, with

an appendix of erudite cultivators of historical science and of

miscellaneous authors of historical gossip and other matters.

[Sidenote: General Historians. Mezeray.]

[253]It is said not unfrequently that the only historical work of this

particular period, combining magnitude of subject with elevation and

originality of thought and literary excellence of expression, is

Bossuet's discourse on universal history. There is not a little truth in

the saying. Still there are a few authors whose work deserves mention.

The great history of De Thou was written in Latin. But the century

produced in Mezeray's History of France the first attempt of merit on

the subject. Francois Eudes de Mezeray was the son of a surgeon, who

seems to have been of some means and position. Mezeray was educated at

Caen (he was born in 1610), and he early betook himself to historical

studies. After beginning by supervising a translated history of the

Turks, he set to work on his masterpiece, the _History of France_, which

appeared in three huge and splendid folios in 1643, 1646, and 1651. He

was accused of treating his predecessors with too great contempt; but

this was more than justified by the superiority, not merely in style but

in historical conception and attention to documentary evidence, which he

showed. Mezeray had been protected and pensioned by Richelieu, but under

Mazarin he became a violent pamphleteer and author of _Mazarinades_.

Later, when Louis XIV. was settled on the throne, he published an

abridgment of his own history, in which the keen scent of Colbert

discovered uncourtly strictures on the fiscal abuses of the kingdom.

Mezeray refused to alter them, and was mulcted accordingly of part of

his pension. He died in 1683, having earned the title of the first

historian, worthy of the name, of France. With due allowance for his

period, he may challenge comparison with almost any of his successors,

though his style, excellent at its best, is somewhat unequal. Perefixe

(who may have been assisted by Mezeray) is responsible for a history of

Henri IV.; Maimbourg for a history of the League which has some interest

for Englishmen because Dryden translated it. The same great English

writer projected but did not accomplish a translation from a much more

worthless historian, Varillas, who is notorious among his class for

indifference to accuracy. It is indeed curious that this century, side

by side with the most laborious investigators ever known, produced a

school of historians who, with some merits of style, were almost

deliberately unfaithful to fact. If the well-known saying ('Mon siege

est fait') attributed to the Abbe Vertot is not apocryphal[254], he must

be ranked in the less respectable class. But his well-known histories,

the chief of which is devoted to the Knights of Malta, were not wholly

constructed on this principle. Pellisson wrote a history of the Academy,

of which he was secretary, and one of the living Louis XIV., which, as

might be expected, is little more than an ingenious panegyric. The Pere

Daniel wrote a history of France, the Pere d'Orleans one of the English

revolutions; while Rapin de Thoyras, a Huguenot and a refugee, had the

glory of composing in a foreign language the first book deserving the

title of a History of England. Superior to all these writers, except to

Mezeray, are the ecclesiastical historians Fleury and Tillemont. Fleury

was a good writer, very learned and exceedingly fair. Tillemont, with

less pretentions to style, is second to no writer of history in

learning, industry, accuracy, and judgment.

[Sidenote: Historical Essayists.]

[Sidenote: Saint Real.]

The historical essay, like much else of value at the time, was in great

part due to the mania for _coteries_. In these select societies

literature was the favourite occupation, and ingenuity was ransacked to

discover forms of composition admitting of treatment in brief space and

of the display of literary skill. The personal 'portrait,' or elaborate

prose character, was of this kind, but the ambition of the competitors

soared higher than mere character-drawing. They sought for some striking

event, if possible contemporary, which offered, within moderate compass,

dramatic unity and scope for something like dramatic treatment.

Sometimes, as in the _Relation du Passage du Rhin_, by the Count de

Guiche, personal experiences formed the basis, but more frequently

passages in the recent history of other nations were chosen. Of this

kind was the _Conspiration de Walstein_ of Sarrasin, which, though

incomplete, is admirable in style. Better still is the _Conjuration de

Fiesque_ of the Cardinal de Retz, his first work, and one written when

he was but seventeen. Not a few of the scattered writings of Saint

Evremond may be classed under this head, notably the Letter to Crequi on

the Peace of the Pyrenees, which was the cause of his exile, though this

was rather political than historical. Towards the end of the century,

the Abbe Vertot preluded his larger histories by a short tract on the

revolutions of Portugal, and another on those of Sweden, which had both

merit and success. It will be observed that conspiracies, revolutions,

and such-like events formed the staple subjects of these compositions.

Of this class was the masterpiece of the style--the only one perhaps

which as a type at least merits something more than a mere mention--the

_Conjuration des Espagnols contre Venise_[255] of Saint Real, a piece

famous in French literature as a capital example of historical narration

on the small scale, and not unimportant to English literature as the

basis of Otway's principal tragedy. Cesar Vichard, Abbe de Saint Real,

was born at Chambery in 1631, and died at the same place in 1692. He was

sent early to Paris, betook himself to historical studies, and published

various works, including certain discourses on history, a piece on Don

Carlos, and the _Conjuration des Espagnols_ itself, which appeared in

1672. Shortly afterwards he visited London, and was for a time a member

of the _coterie_ of Saint Evremond and Hortense Mancini. He returned to

Paris and thence, in 1679, to his native town, where the Duke of Savoy

made him his historiographer and a member of the Academy of Turin. Not

long before his death he was employed in political work. Saint Real's

chief characteristics as a historian are the preference before

everything else of a dramatic conception and treatment, and the

employment of a singularly vivid and idiomatic style, simple in its

vocabulary and phrase and yet in the highest degree picturesque. He has

been accused of following his master, Varillas, in want of strict

accuracy, but in truth strict accuracy was not aimed at by any of these

essayists. Their object was to produce a creditable literary

composition, to set forth their subject strikingly and dramatically, and

to point a moral of some kind. In all three respects their success was

not contemptible.

[Sidenote: Memoir-writers.]

[Sidenote: Rohan]

[Sidenote: Bassompierre.]

The memoir-writers proper, who confine themselves to what they in their

own persons have done, heard, or thought, are, as has been said, of far

more importance. Their number is very great, and investigations into the

vast record treasures which, after revolutionary devastation, France

still possesses, is yearly increasing the knowledge of them. Only a

brief account can here be attempted of most of them; and where the

historical importance of the writer exceeds or equals his importance as

a literary figure, biographical details will be but sparingly given, as

they are easily and more suitably to be found elsewhere. The earliest

writer who properly comes within our century (the order of the

collection of Michaud and Poujoulat is followed for convenience sake) is

Francois Duval, Marquis de Fontenay Mareuil. Fontenay was a soldier, a

courtier, and a diplomatist, in which last character he visited England.

He has left us connected memoirs from 1609 to 1624, and some short

accounts of later transactions, such as the siege of La Rochelle, and

his own mission to Rome. Fontenay is a simple and straightforward

writer, full of good sense, and not destitute of narrative power. To

Paul Phelypeaux de Pontchartrain (1566-1621) we owe a somewhat jejune

but careful and apparently faithful account of the minority of Louis

XIII. A short and striking relation of the downfall of Concini is

supposed to be the work of Michel de Marillac, keeper of the seals

(1573-1632), afterwards one of the victims of Richelieu. Henri de Rohan

(1579-1638) is very far superior to the writers just named. Of the

greatest house, save one or two, in France, he travelled much,

distinguished himself in battle, both in foreign and civil war; was once

condemned to death, made head for a time against all the strength of

Richelieu; was near purchasing the principality of Cyprus from the

Venetians, and establishing himself in the east; was recalled, commanded

the French forces with brilliant success in the Valtelline, and met his

death under Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar at Rheinfeld. Besides his memoirs he

wrote a book called the _Parfait Capitaine_, and some others. The

memoirs extend from the death of Henri IV. to the year 1629, and have

all the vigour and brilliancy of the best sixteenth-century work of the

kind. A further account of the Valtelline campaign is also most probably

Rohan's, though it is not written in the first person, and has been

attributed to others. Of still greater personal interest are the memoirs

of Francois, Marechal de Bassompierre, another of the adversaries of

Richelieu, and who, less fortunate than Rohan, languished twelve years

in the Bastille. Few persons played a more active part in the first

years of the reign of Louis XIII. than Bassompierre, and no one has left

a livelier description, not merely of his own personal fortunes, but of

the personality of his contemporaries, the habits and customs of the

time, the wars, the loves, the intrigues of himself, his friends and his

enemies. He has not the credit of being very accurate, but he is

infinitely amusing. His memoirs were written during his sojourn in the

Bastille. This was terminated by the death of Richelieu, but

Bassompierre followed his enemy before very long in consequence of an

attack of apoplexy.

In singular contrast to Bassompierre's work are the memoirs of another

chronicler of the same time, Francois Annibal, Marechal d'Estrees,

brother of the mistress of Henri IV. D'Estrees excludes all gossip,

confines himself strictly to matters of public business, and recounts

them apparently with scrupulous accuracy, and in a plain but clear and

sufficient style. Among the most curious and not the least interesting

of the works of this class are the memoirs of Pontis--one of the famous

solitaries of Port Royal in his old age. Pontis died at the age of

eighty-seven, and had been for fifty-six years in the army. His memoirs,

which are strictly confined to his personal experiences, obtained the

approbation of two such undeniably competent judges as Conde and Madame

de Sevigne, and are by no means unworthy of the honour. The actual

composition of the memoirs is said to be the work of Thomas du Fosse.

The memoirs called Richelieu's are different from all these, and,

notwithstanding their great extent and the illustrious name they bear,

of very inferior interest, at least from the literary point of view.

Richelieu's talents, it is sufficiently notorious, were not literary;

and even if they had been, but little of these memoirs comes from his

own hand. They are the work of secretaries, confidants, and

under-strappers of all sorts, writing at most from the cardinal's

dictation, and probably in many cases merely constructing _precis_ of

documents. There is, therefore, no need to dwell on them.

In the memoirs of Arnauld d'Andilly and of his son, the Abbe Arnauld,

the personal interest and the abundance of anecdote and

character-drawing which characterise the memoir work of the time

reappear; the latter are, indeed, particularly full of them. Those of

the father are chiefly interesting, as exhibiting the curious mixture of

worldly and spiritual motives which played so large a part in the

history of the time. For Arnauld who was the fervent friend and disciple

of Saint Cyran, the practical founder of Jansenism in France, was also

an assiduous courtier of Gaston d'Orleans, and not too well satisfied

with the results of his courtiership. There are memoirs attributed to

Gaston himself, but they are almost certainly the work of another hand;

their historical value is not inconsiderable, but they have little

literary interest. Those of Marie, Duchess de Nemours, and daughter of

the Duke de Longueville, are short, but among the most interesting of

all those dealing with the Fronde, from the vividness and decision of

their personal traits.

[Sidenote: Madame de Motteville.]

More important still among the memoirs of this time are those of

Francoise Bertaut, Madame de Motteville, a member of the family of the

poet Bertaut. She was introduced by her mother, when very young, to Anne

of Austria, and soon became her most intimate confidante. The jealousy

of Richelieu banished her for a time from the court, and she married M.

de Motteville, a man of wealth and position in the civil service of the

province of Normandy. Shortly before Richelieu's death she lost her

husband; and as soon as Anne of Austria succeeded to the regency she was

recalled to court, and spent her time there during the queen's life. She

survived her mistress many years, and was a member of the society of

Madame de Sevigne. She died in 1689. Her memoirs, which were not

published till many years after her death, contain many curious

revelations of the court history of the time, for she was not only

intimate with Anne of Austria, but also with the unfortunate Henrietta

Maria of England, and with La Grande Mademoiselle. With the latter she

interchanged some curious and characteristic letters on a fantastic

project of Mademoiselle's for founding a new abbey of Thelema. The

general style of her memoirs is sober and intelligent, but it is injured

by the abundance of moral reflections, in matter according to the

taste, but in manner lacking much of the piquancy, of the time. These

memoirs are somewhat voluminous, and extend to the death of Anne of

Austria. Madame de Motteville, notwithstanding her affection for her

mistress, is one of the best authorities for the period of the Fronde,

because, unlike Retz and La Rochefoucauld, she was only secondarily

interested in the events she relates. Some curious details of the later

Fronde are found in the short memoirs of Pere Berthod, of whom nothing

is known. Of the Comte de Brienne, who was a favourite and minister of

Anne of Austria, and whose book contains much information on foreign,

and especially English affairs; of Montresor and Fontrailles, both

followers of Gaston of Orleans, and the latter the author of a relation

of the Cinq Mars conspiracy, short, but minute and striking; of La

Chatre, an industrious courtier and intriguer, and a vivid and

picturesque writer, whose work, as will presently be mentioned, became

entangled in a strange fashion with that of La Rochefoucauld; of the

great Turenne, a worthy follower of Montluc and Rohan in the art of

military writing, little more than mention can be made. There are some

military memoirs of interest, which go under the name of the Duke of

York (James II).

[Sidenote: Cardinal de Retz.]

The works and personages of some other writers demand a fuller notice.

Paul de Gondi[256], Cardinal de Retz, who occupies with Saint Simon, and

perhaps La Rochefoucauld, the first place among French memoir-writers of

the seventeenth century, was born in 1614, and died in 1679. He was a

younger son of an ancient and noble house, uniting French and Italian

honours, and was early destined for the church, for which probably no

churchman ever had less vocation. He intrigued in society and politics,

was a practised duellist, and though he was not more than seven-or

eight-and-twenty at Richelieu's death, had already caballed against him.

His appointment by Louis XIII., almost on his deathbed, to the

coadjutorship (involving the reversion) of the archbishopric of Paris,

which was then held by his uncle, a very old man of no personal capacity

or influence, put into his hands a formidable political weapon, and he

was not long in making use of it. He was more than any other man the

instigator of the Fronde, that singular alliance of the privileged

bourgeoisie of the great towns with the still more privileged nobility

against the royal authority as exercised through ministers. The history

of this confused and turbulent period is in great part the biography of

Retz. It is not easy to see that he had any definite political views

except the jealousy of Mazarin, which he shared with almost all his

order, an inveterate habit of insubordination, and a still more

inveterate habit of conspiracy. The Fronde was and could have been but a

failure, and Retz was a failure with it. He was for some time in exile,

but at last reconciled himself to the inevitable, and even enjoyed some

public employments under Louis XIV. His principal occupation, however,

was the payment of his enormous debts, which he effected with an honesty

not common at the time among his class by rigorously reducing his

expenditure, selling and mortgaging his numerous benefices, and, as

Madame de Sevigne put it, 'living for his creditors.' He is said thus to

have paid off four millions of francs, a vast sum for the time.

Meanwhile he was writing the Memoirs which, like the Maxims of his rival

and half-enemy, La Rochefoucauld, unexpectedly gained for him a higher

reputation in literature than he could have hoped for in politics. When

a mere boy he had shown in the _Conjuration de Fiesque_ no small

literary talent, and his sermons deepened the impression. His Memoirs,

however, are different in style from both. They are addressed to a lady

friend, and contain a most extraordinary mixture of anecdote,

description, personal satire, moral reflection, and political

portraiture. In the three points of anecdote, portrait-drawing, and

maxim-making, Retz has no rival except in the acknowledged masters of

each art respectively.

The Memoirs of Guy Joly, a lawyer and the friend and confidant of Retz,

in a manner supplement this latter's work. Joly was faithful to his

master even in exile, but at last they quarrelled, and the Memoirs do

not always throw a very favourable light on the proceedings of the

turbulent cardinal. They are very well written. Claude Joly, the uncle

of Guy, an ecclesiastic, has also left anti-Mazarin writings of less

literary worth.

[Sidenote: Mademoiselle.]

Of very great importance historically, and by no means unimportant as

literature, are the Memoirs of Pierre Lenet, a man of business long

attached to the house of Conde. These memoirs are, in fact, memoirs of

the great Conde himself, until the peace of the Pyrenees. Personal and

literary interest both appear in a very high degree in the Memoirs of

Anne Marie Louise de Montpensier, commonly called La Grande

Mademoiselle. The only daughter of Gaston of Orleans and of the Duchess

de Montpensier, she inherited enormous wealth, and a position which made

it difficult for her to marry any one but a crowned head. In her youth

she was self-willed, and by no means inclined to marriage, and prince

after prince was proposed to her in vain. During the Fronde she took an

extraordinary part--heading armies, mounting the walls of Orleans by a

scaling ladder, and saving the routed troops of Conde, after the battle

of the Faubourg Saint Antoine, by opening the gates of Paris to them,

and causing the cannon of the Bastille to cover their flight. Mazarin

never forgave her this, nor perhaps did Louis XIV. When she was past

middle age, Mademoiselle conceived an unfortunate affection for Lauzun,

then merely a gentleman of the South named Puyguilhem. By dint of great

entreaties she obtained permission from the king to marry him, but the

combined efforts of the queen and the princes of the blood caused this

to be rescinded, and Lauzun was imprisoned in Pignerol. After many years

Mademoiselle purchased his release by making over a great part of her

immense possessions to Louis' bastard, the Duke du Maine, and secretly

married her lover, who was not only younger than herself, but a

notorious adventurer. He was basely ungrateful, and she separated from

him before her death. Her memoirs, which are voluminous, contain a

minute history of her singular life, written with not a little egotism,

but with all the vivacity and individuality of savour which characterise

the best work of the time. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about them

is that, although entirely occupied with herself and her fortunes,

Mademoiselle does not appear either to exaggerate her own merits, or to

disguise her faults. She photographs herself, which is not common.

Valentin Conrart, a man of letters, who figures repeatedly in the

history of the time, who was the real founder of the Academy, who

published but little in his lifetime, and who has only recently been the

subject of a sufficient study, left memoirs of no great length, but of

value in reference to the Fronde. The Marquis de Montglat, of whom not

much is known, wrote important military memoirs of the latter portion of

the Thirty Years' War, and of the campaigns between France and Spain,

which continued until the peace of the Pyrenees.

[Sidenote: La Rochefoucauld.]

The Memoirs of La Rochefoucauld[257] would have assured him a

considerable place in the history of literature, even had he never

written the _Maxims_, and the singular fate of these Memoirs would have

deserved notice even had they been far less intrinsically interesting in

matter and style than they are. The seventeenth century was the palmy

time of literary piracy, and this piracy was facilitated not merely by

the absence of any international copyright, but by the common habit of

circulating books in manuscript long before their appearance in print.

They were thus copied and re-copied, and the number of unauthorised

duplicates made it impossible for the author to protect his work. Not

unfrequently the difficulties of authors were increased by the custom

(inherited from the middle ages) of simultaneously or rather

continuously transcribing different works in the same large notebook,

without any very scrupulous attention to their separate origin, plan,

and authorship. When La Rochefoucauld, after the conclusion of the

Fronde and the triumph of Mazarin, retired in dudgeon and disgrace to

his estates, he devoted himself to the writing of memoirs, and the fact

soon became known. He succeeded once in preventing an unauthorised

publication at Rouen. But the Elzevirs (who were as much princes of

piracy as of printing) were beyond his reach, and in 1662 there appeared

a book purporting to be the Memoirs of M. L. R. F. This book excited

much indignation in the persons commented upon, and La Rochefoucauld

hastened to deny its authenticity, alleging that but a fraction was his,

and that garbled. His denial was very partially credited, and has

remained the subject of suspicion almost to the present day. Probably,

however, he was warned by the incident of the danger of this sort of

contemporary criticism, and no authentic edition was issued. After his

death a new turn of ill-luck befell him. A fresh recension of the

Memoirs was published, not indeed quite so incorrect as the first, but

still largely adulterated, nor was the injustice repaired until 1817,

and then not entirely. It is only within the last few years that the

publication of the Memoirs from a manuscript in the possession of his

representatives has finally established the text, and that laborious

enquiries have demonstrated the conglomerate character of the early

editions (which were made up of the work of La Rochefoucauld, of La

Chatre, of Vineuil, and of several other people, even such well-known

writers as Saint Evremond being laid under contribution), and the

justice of the author's repudiation. The genuine Memoirs are, however,

extremely interesting; they are less full, and perhaps less absolutely

frank than those of Retz, but they yield to these alone of the Fronde

chronicles in piquancy and interest, while their purely literary merit

is superior. The strange bird's-eye view of conduct and motives which

characterises the Maxims is already visible in them, as well as the

profundity of insight which accompanies width of range. The form is less

finished, but its capacities are seen.

Jean Herault de Gourville stood to La Rochefoucauld in something like

the relation which Guy Joly bore to Retz, but was far more fortunate.

Born at La Rochefoucauld, without any advantages of family or fortune,

he began as a domestic of its seigneur. He passed from this service to

that of Conde and Mazarin, held public employments which enriched him,

became the friend of Fouquet, and escaped the general ruin which fell on

the superintendent's friends at his fall, married, it is said, secretly

a daughter of the house where he had served in a menial capacity, was

recalled honourably to his country, discharged important political and

diplomatic offices, lived on equal terms with the greatest nobles of the

court, and died full of years, riches, and honours, in 1703. His

Memoirs, which were written but a short time before his death, were

dictated to a secretary. They are of a somewhat gossiping character, but

full of curious information. The so-called memoirs of Omer Talon are

really accounts, written in a stilted and professional style, of the

proceedings of the Parliament of Paris. Henri de Guise, the last, the

least fortunate, but not the least remarkable of his famous family, has

left an account of the wild expedition which he made to Naples at the

time of the revolt of Masaniello, which is somewhat too long for the

subject. The Memoirs of the Marechal de Grammont were composed from his

papers by his second son, Louvigny, afterwards Duke de Grammont. The

eldest son, Count de Guiche, the most accomplished cavalier of the

earlier court of Louis XIV., died before his father. Guiche left a

brilliant relation (written some say on the spot and at once) of the

passage of the Rhine, an exploit much exaggerated by the king's

flatterers, but which was really a brilliant feat of arms, and was

mainly due to Guiche himself. Like those of Grammont, the Memoirs of the

Marechal du Plessis are not the work of the hero, but in this case a

professional man of letters--it is thought Segrais--seems to have been

called in. Their somewhat stilted regularity contrasts with the

irregular vigour of most of the work mentioned in this chapter. Some

anonymous _Memoires pour servir a l'Histoire du XVII'eme Siecle_,

though evidently a compilation, are not destitute of literary merit.

They seem to be extracted for the most part from works already

mentioned. The Memoirs of La Porte, the valet de chambre of Anne of

Austria and the youthful Louis XIV., are rather important to history

than to literature. Madame de la Fayette wrote Memoirs of Henrietta, the

daughter of Charles I., and the first wife of the Duke of Orleans, but

they are not equal to her novels in merit. The poet-Marquis La Fare

began memoirs on an extensive plan, but only completed a small part of

them. Those of the Duke of Berwick are justly considered models of

simple straightforward writing, of clear judgment, and of accurate

statement. The _Souvenirs_ of Madame de Caylus had the honour of having

Voltaire for their first editor, and deserved it. They are purely

personal, and might even be called frivolous, were it not for the

interest and historical importance of the society whose manners they

depict. The memoirs of Torcy give a clear and lucid account of the

negotiations in which that diplomatist was engaged. Last of this long

list come three works of value, the memoirs of Villars, Forbin, and

Duguay Trouin. The last two are among the somewhat rare records of

French prowess on sea. Both are somewhat boastful, and the memoirs of

Forbin, which are the longer and the more amusing of the two, are

suspected of some inaccuracy. They were not, it appears, the unaided

work of their nominal authors. The memoirs of Villars are of greater

historical importance, and of much literary interest.

[Sidenote: Saint Simon.]

A few authors, not included in the collection the order of which has

been followed, have now to be mentioned. Bussy Rabutin, cousin of Madame

de Sevigne, and one of the boldest, most unscrupulous, and most unlucky

of aspirants after fortune, has left a considerable number of letters

and memoirs in which he exposes his own projects and wrongs, and, above

all, a kind of scandalous chronicle called the _Histoire Amoureuse des

Gaules_, in which gossip against all the ladies of the court, not

excepting his own relations and friends, is pitilessly recorded. Bussy

had many of the family qualities which show themselves more amiably in

the cousin whom he libelled. His literary faculty was considerable, his

brain fertile in invention, and his tongue witty in expression; but he

made no very good use of his powers. The Marquis de Dangeau[258] has

left an immense collection of memoirs, describing in the minutest detail

the etiquette of the court of Louis XIV. and all that happened there for

years; but he had hardly any faculty of writing, and his work, except

for its matter, is chiefly remarkable because of the contrast which it

presents to a book which deals with much the same subject, and which has

yet to be noticed. This book, with grave defects and inequalities,

exhibits in the highest degree the merits of the class and period of

literature which is now under review. These are the skill shown by

writers in no respect professional, but trained to expression only by

literary amusements and the conversation of the salons; the keen insight

into motive and character; the intense interest and power of reflection

with which contemporary events are taken in and represented.

Louis de Rouvroy, Duke de Saint Simon[259], was born at La Ferte

Vidame, the family seat, in 1675. The family was of very great antiquity

and unblemished _noblesse_, claiming descent from Charlemagne; the

dukedom and the peerage--it is to be remembered that peerage in France

has, or rather had under the old regime, an entirely different sense

from the modern English sense, referring not in the least to the

ennobling of the persons enjoying it, but to their admission into a kind

of great council of the kingdom which had indeed long lost its active

functions, but retained its dignity--were conferred only on Saint

Simon's father, a favourite and a faithful servant of Louis XIII. His

mother was Charlotte de l'Aubespine, of a family which had much

distinguished itself for several generations since the days of Francis

the First. Saint Simon was brought up by the Jesuits, went to the wars

in Flanders at the age of seventeen, and a year later succeeded to the

title and estates by the death of his father. Thus at the age of

eighteen he found himself in a position theoretically superior to every

man in France except the princes of the blood, and his few brother

peers--theoretically, for the rule of Louis did not admit of any real

exercise of the privileges of the peerage. Saint Simon, however, began

at once to show his devotion to the idol of his whole life--the status

of his order--by going to law with Luxembourg, the famous Marshal, on a

question of precedence and title of the most intricate kind. At the

Peace of Ryswick he left the army, to the displeasure of the king; but

he was none the less constant at court, though he could hardly be called

a courtier, and though his inveterate stickling for precedence

frequently brought down the king's wrath on his head. In 1705 he was

made ambassador to Rome, but the appointment was almost immediately

cancelled. Many years later, however, a similar, but greater, honour

fell to his lot. The death of Louis put power into the hands of Philippe

d'Orleans, who was a friend of Saint Simon's, and the latter enjoyed the

greatest triumph of his life by bringing about the degradation of the

'Bastards' (the illegitimate sons of Louis), on whom, to the indignation

of the peers, the king had bestowed the rank and precedence of princes

of the blood. In 1721 Saint Simon went on a special embassy to Spain to

arrange the double marriage of Louis XV. to the Infanta, and of the

Prince of the Asturias to the Regent's granddaughter. There he was made

a grandee of the first class. Soon after his return he gave up

interference in public affairs, but he lived for thirty years longer,

writing incessantly, and died in 1755.

The history of his enormous literary productions is curious enough.

Nothing was published, and, from the personal nature of most of his

work, nothing could well be published, during his lifetime. He died

intestate, and with no immediate heirs, and opportunity was taken to

impound the whole of his manuscripts, amounting to hundreds of volumes.

Extracts from the memoirs were surreptitiously published from time to

time during the eighteenth century, but it was not till 1839 that the

whole was fully and faithfully given to the world. These memoirs,

however, form relatively but a small part of the vast mass of Saint

Simon's manuscripts, though they fill twenty printed volumes. Until very

recently obstacles of a not very intelligible character have been thrown

in the way of publication by the French Foreign Office, to which the

MSS. belong; but at length these seem to have been overcome, and three

different workers, M. de Boislisle, M. Drumont, and M. Faugere, have

been engaged in editing or re-editing different parts of the total. The

minor works, however, from the specimens already published, would seem

to be of less interest than the memoirs; most of them bearing on the, to

Saint Simon, inexhaustible subject of the privileges of the peerage, and

its place in the hierarchy of government. To discuss these subjects

would lead us out of our way. It is sufficient to say that it is a great

mistake to regard Saint Simon as a mere selfish aristocrat in the cant

sense. He would have had the kingdom justly and wisely governed for the

benefit of the whole nation, but he regarded the nobility, and, above

all, the peers, as the pre-destined instruments of government. 'Much for

the people, but nothing by the people,' was his political motto.

The importance of Saint Simon in literature is, however, entirely

independent of his standpoint as a politician, though that standpoint

was not without influence on his literary characteristics. He is

valuable to us as, without exception, the most vivid and graphic painter

of contemporary history of the anecdotic kind in French or any other

language. His style is incorrect, and sometimes barely grammatical, and

all his work bears the character of notes, hurriedly dashed off, rather

than of a finished and regularly arranged history. Opinions differ as to

his trustworthiness in matters of fact, but it is certain, from his

positive manner of recounting the incidents and the actual words of

interviews at which he could not have been present, and as to which he

is not likely to have had more than hearsay information, that his

testimony is to be received with caution. His prejudices, too, were

extraordinarily strong, and he is in the habit of representing

everything and everybody that he does not like in the blackest possible

colours. His furious denunciation thus makes a curious contrast to the

good-humoured malice of the author with whom he is most likely to be

compared--Madame de Sevigne. But all these drawbacks affect only the

matter, not the manner of his work. The picture which he has given of

the inner life of the court of Versailles during the later years of

Louis XIV. is unrivalled in history. Still more extraordinary is the

power of single passages, such especially as the famous one describing

the Dauphin's death. Saint Simon has often been compared to Tacitus, but

his torrent of words very little resembles the laconic incisiveness of

the Roman. A much nearer parallel, though with remarkable differences,

might be found in the late Mr. Carlyle.

Some memoirs of great extent and interest, valuable as checking Saint

Simon and Dangeau (whom Saint Simon annotated), have recently appeared

for the first time, at least in a form that is to be complete. They are

the work of the Marquis de Sourches[260], a great court officer, and

they cover the last thirty years of Louis's reign. Their chief literary

peculiarity is the formal and almost official character of the text

contrasted with the greater freedom of the numerous notes.

[Sidenote: Madame de Sevigne.]

The most famous and remarkable of all the letter-writers of the

time--perhaps the most famous and remarkable of all letter-writers in

literature--was Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de Sevigne[261]. She

was born at Paris on the 6th of February, 1626, and died at Grignan, of

small-pox, on the 10th of August, 1696. Her family was a distinguished

one both in war and other ways. Her grandmother was the well-known

Sainte Chantal, the pupil of St. Francois de Sales, and her first

cousin, as has been mentioned, was Bussy Rabutin. Her father and mother

both died when she was very young, and an uncle, not more than twenty

years older than herself, the Abbe de Coulanges, took charge of her,

remaining, for the greater part of her life, her chief friend and

counsellor. She soon became a great beauty, and something of a scholar,

though not of a blue-stocking. Menage and Chapelain had, among others,

much to do with her education, and she was a member of the celebrated

_coterie_ of the Hotel Rambouillet, though her satirical humour saved

her from being a _precieuse_. At the age of eighteen she married the

Marquis de Sevigne, of a good and wealthy Breton family. Her husband

was, however, a selfish profligate, who wasted her substance with Ninon

de l'Enclos, and such-like persons,--though Ninon herself, to do her

justice, never plundered her lovers,--and did not pretend the slightest

return for the affection she gave him. He was killed in a duel in 1651,

leaving her with two children, a daughter, Francoise Marguerite, and a

son Charles. After a few years of seclusion she returned to the world,

being then in the full possession of her beauty, and only twenty-eight

years old. She continued for more than forty years to form part of the

best society of the capital, without suffering the least stain on her

reputation. The selfish vanity of the superintendent Fouquet made him

keep certain of her letters; but though they were discovered in a casket

which was fatal to many of his friends of both sexes, Madame de Sevigne

came scathless out of the ordeal. In 1669 her daughter, then twenty-two

years old, married the Count de Grignan, a Provencal gentleman of the

noblest birth, of great estate, rank, and fortune, but already twice a

widower, past middle age, plain, and of somewhat embarrassed means,

considering the great expenses which, as Governor of Provence, he had to

meet. He was, however, a man of good sense and probity, and his wife

seems to have been sincerely attached to him. The great bulk of Madame

de Sevigne's voluminous correspondence was addressed to her daughter,

for whom she had an almost frantic fondness; Charles de Sevigne, though

apparently far the more lovable of the two, having but an inferior share

of his mother's affection. The letters to Madame de Grignan are for the

most part dated either from Paris (in which case they are full of court

news and gossip), or from Les Rochers, the country seat of the Sevignes,

near Vitre, in which case they are full of social satire and curious

details of the provincial life of that time. One very interesting series

describes the habits and regimen of Vichy, which Madame de Sevigne

visited in consequence of a severe attack of rheumatism. The

correspondence thus serves as a minute and detailed history of the

author for the last thirty years of her life, except during her rare

visits to Grignan, in one of which, as has been mentioned, she caught

the illness which proved fatal to her.

It has been said that Madame de Sevigne's letters are very numerous.

Those to her daughter especially were garbled in the earlier editions by

omissions, and by the substitution of phrases which seemed to the 18th

century more suitable than the fresh nature of the originals. The

edition cited gives the extant MSS. faithfully. The enthusiastic

affection lavished by the mother on the daughter naturally commends

itself differently to different persons. It is certain that if it is not

tedious, it is only due to the extraordinary literary art of the writer,

an art which is at once the most artful and the most artless to be

anywhere found. The only other faults of the letters are an occasional

crudity of diction (which, however, is, when rightly taken, perfectly

innocent and even valuable as exemplifying the manners of the time,) and

a decided heartlessness in relating the misfortunes of all those in whom

the writer is not personally interested. Madame de Sevigne has been

blamed for not sympathising more with the oppression of the French

people during her time. This, however, is an unfair charge. In the first

place she simply expresses the current political ideas of her day, and,

in the second place, she goes decidedly beyond those ideas in the

direction of sympathy. Her treatment of some of her own equals leaves

much more to desire. The account of Madame de Brinvilliers'

sufferings--unworthy of much pity as the victim was--is callous to

brutality, and it seems to be sufficient for any one to have ever

offended Madame de Grignan, or to have spoken slightingly of her, to put

him, or her, out of the pale of even ordinary human sympathy. But no

other fault can be found. For vivid social portraiture the book equals

Saint Simon at his best, while it is far more uniformly good. The

letters describing the engagement of La Grande Mademoiselle to Lauzun,

the death of Vatel, the trial of Fouquet, the Vichy sojourn, the meeting

of the states of Britanny, and many others, are not to be surpassed in

this respect. Unlike Saint Simon, too, Madame de Sevigne has no fixed

idea--except that of Madame de Grignan's perfections, which rarely

interferes--to prevent her from taking fresh, original, and acute views

of things in general as distinguished from mere court intrigues. Her

literary criticism is excellent, and if she somewhat overvalues

moralists like Nicole and novelists like Mademoiselle de Scudery, who

ministered to her peculiar tastes, her remarks on the great preachers,

on La Fontaine, on Corneille and Racine, display a singular insight as

well as a singular power of expression. She is, indeed, except in

politics, on which few persons of her class had at the time any clear or

distinct ideas, never superficial; and this union of just thought with

accurate observation and exceptional power of expression makes her

position in literature.

[Sidenote: Tallemant des Reaux.]

Madame de Sevigne, so to speak, dwarfs all other letter-writers of her

time. Yet many of those already mentioned under the head of memoirs left

letters which have been preserved, and which are of merit. It is,

however, not necessary to specify any except Madame de Maintenon, whose

correspondence is voluminous and important both as history and as

literature. It has not the charm of Madame de Sevigne, but it displays

the great intellectual powers of the writer[262]. Of a very different

kind, but not less worthy of notice are the letters of Guy Patin, which

are for the most part violent _Mazarinades_, and full of scandalous

anecdotes, but full also of lively wit. Scandal, indeed, was very much

the order of the day, as appears from the large and curious collection

of broadsheets and pamphlets republished by the late M. Fournier in his

_Varietes Historiques et Litteraires_[263]. These, most of which refer

to the present period, form a kind of appendix to historical and

biographical writing of the more serious kind. There is, however, one

remarkable work which remains to be noticed, and which, for want of a

better place for it, must be noticed here, the _Historiettes_ of

Tallemant des Reaux[264]. The author of this singular book, Gedeon

Tallemant des Reaux, was born at La Rochelle about 1619, and died in

1692. He was of a family not noble but wealthy and well connected, and

he himself was able, by marriage with a cousin who was an heiress, to

live without any profession, and to purchase an estate and seignory of

some importance. Little, however, is known of his life except that he

was much at the Hotel de Rambouillet in his youth, and that in his old

age he underwent some not clearly defined misfortune or disgrace. The

_Historiettes_ were written in the years immediately preceding 1660, and

form an almost complete commentary on the persons most celebrated in

society and literature for three quarters of a century before that date.

There is no other book to which they can be exactly compared, though

they have, with much less literary excellence, a certain resemblance in

form to the work of Brantome. They are, as published by Monmerque, 376

in number, filling five (nominally ten) stout volumes. Each is as a rule

headed with the name of a single person, though there are a few general

or subject headings. The articles themselves are not regular

biographies, but collections of anecdotes, not unfrequently of the most

scandalous kind. Tallemant, though by no means of small ability, appears

to have been a somewhat malicious person, and not too careful to examine

the value of the stories he tells, especially when they bear heavily on

the old nobility, of whom, as a new man, he was very jealous. Yet his

sources of information were in many cases good, and his statements are

confirmed by independent evidence sufficiently often to show that, if

they are in other cases to be accepted with caution, they are not the

work of a mere libeller. No one, even in that century of unstinted

personal revelations, has taken us so much behind the scenes, and

certainly no one has left a more amusing book of its kind or (with the

proper precautions) a more valuable one.

[Sidenote: Historical Antiquaries.]

[Sidenote: Du Cange.]

The class of learned investigators into the sources of history cannot be

omitted in any account of French literature; though their work was

chiefly in Latin, and though even when it was not it was rather of value

as material for future literature than as literature itself. This

century and the earlier part of the succeeding one were the palmy time

of really laborious erudition--the work of the Benedictines and

Bollandists, and of many isolated writers worthy of being ranked with

the members of these famous communities. The individuals composing this

class are, however, too numerous, and, from the purely literary view,

too unimportant to detain us. Exceptions may be made in favour of Andre

Duchesne, whose collections of French and Norman Chronicles, and his

genealogical histories of the houses of Laval and Vergi, are valuable

examples of their kind; of Mabillon, famous for his labours in

hagiology, in the history of France, and above all in that of Italy; and

lastly, of Du Cange. The last-named has a special right to a place here

because, both directly and indirectly, he did much towards the

rediscovery of old French literature. Du Cange was his seignorial style,

his personal name being Charles Dufresne. He devoted himself to the

study of the middle ages generally, and particularly of the Byzantine

Empire. He edited Joinville, wrote a history of the Latin Empire, and in

his most famous work, the _Glossarium Mediae et Infimae Latinitatis_,

contributed not a little to the study of the oldest form of French.

FOOTNOTES:

[253] The following paragraph contains, except as far as Mezeray is

concerned, chiefly second-hand information. I have hitherto been unable

to devote the time necessary to enable me to speak at first hand of

these books, which are very bulky, not as a rule interesting or

important in manner, and for the most part long obsolete in matter.

[254] The legend, familiar probably to most readers, is that Vertot

required documents for his account of a certain military operation.

Tired with waiting for them, he constructed the history out of his own

head, and when they arrived made the ejaculation in the text.

[255] This, with some other of the pieces here mentioned, will be found

in two volumes of the _Collection Didot_, entitled _Petits Chefs

d'oeuvre Historiques_.

[256] Ed. Feillet, Gourdault and Chantelauze. Paris (in progress).

[257] Ed. Gilbert et Gourdault. Paris, 1868-81.

[258] Ed. Feuillet de Conches. 19 vols. Paris, 1854-61.

[259] Memoirs, ed. Cheruel. 20 vols. Paris, 1873. Now being re-edited by

M. de Boislisle. Miscellaneous works are also appearing.

[260] Ed. Bertrand et de Cosnac. Vol. i. Paris, 1882.

[261] Ed. Monmerque. 14 vols. Paris, 1861-66, to which must be added 2

vols. of _Lettres Inedites_ discovered and published by M. Capmas.

[262] A full and excellently edited selection has been given by A.

Geffroy. 2 vols. Paris, 1887.

[263] 10 vols. Paris, 1855-63.

[264] 10 vols. in 5. Ed. Monmerque. Third edition. Paris, n. d.

CHAPTER V.

ESSAYISTS, MINOR MORALISTS, CRITICS.

The enormous popularity which the Essays of Montaigne enjoyed could not

fail to raise up imitators and followers in the century succeeding their

publication. But Montaigne's influence on the production of short

pieces, complete in themselves and having for the most part an ethical

bearing, was supplemented by the feature of the time so often referred

to, the fancy for literary _coteries_, and for wit combats between the

members of those _coteries_. For this latter purpose pieces of moderate

length in prose, corresponding to the sonnets, the madrigals, and

such-like things in verse, were well suited. The Academy, too, with its

competitions and its ordinary critical occupations, stimulated literary

production in the same direction. The essay was therefore much

cultivated in the seventeenth century, and not a few minor styles of

composition descended from it. Such were the _Pensee_, a short essay on

some definite and briefly handled point; the _Conversation_, an essay or

sketch in dialogue; the _Portrait_, a sketch of personal character; the

_Maxime_, a condensed _Pensee_, just as the _Pensee_ was a condensed

essay. In these various styles some of the most excellent work existing

in French literature was composed during the time which we are at

present handling; and four names of the first, or almost the first rank

in literary history, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyere, and Saint

Evremond, belong to this division, besides not a few others of less

importance. Pascal, indeed, might be almost as well treated in either of

the two following chapters as in the present; but if the substance of

his work is for the most part philosophical or theological, the form of

it seems to fall more suitably under the present head. He does not,

however, open the series of Essayists.

[Sidenote: Balzac.]

Something of Montaigne's manner, as well as of his peculiar sceptical

doubt, which nevertheless does not transcend the limits of orthodoxy,

was continued far into the century by La Mothe le Vayer, a man of

talent, but of some deliberate eccentricity and archaism in costume and

manners as in style. But the most important name in the history of

French prose next after that of Montaigne is that of Jean Guez de

Balzac, who occupies nearly the same place in it as Malherbe does in

that of French poetry. Balzac was a gentleman of rank and fortune in the

province of Angoumois, where he was born towards the end of the

sixteenth century, and where he died in 1655. In his younger days he

served in some diplomatic employments, then for a long time resided in

Paris, and finally retired to his country seat. Balzac's works are

almost entirely of the essay character, though they are sufficiently

diverse, and for the most part rather artificial in form. The most

considerable part of them is composed of letters--not such letters as

have been discussed in the preceding chapter, but elaborate epistles

written deliberately for the sake of writing, and with a definite

attempt at style. Besides these, which are very numerous, Balzac was

also the author of discourses on various subjects and of certain

nondescript works of an ethico-political character, the principal and

best known of which is the _Socrate Chretien_. In all, his work was

sufficient to fill two folio volumes when it was collected[265]. Balzac

is a really remarkable figure in literary history, because he is, in his

own tongue and nation, almost the first person who deliberately wrote

for the sake of writing, and not because he had anything particular to

say. The practice is perhaps not one to be commended to the general run

of men at any time, or even to exceptional men, except at a peculiar

time. But done as it was, and when it was, Balzac's work was really of

importance and advantage to his countrymen. The prose literature of the

sixteenth century had been admirable, but it had not resulted in the

elaboration of any general style of all work. Each writer had followed

his instincts, and when those instincts were under the guidance of

genius, as they frequently were, many writers had produced admirable

results. But the general use of the printing press, and the adaptation

of literature to all sorts of journey-work, made it imperatively

necessary that the tools should be put ready fashioned into the hands of

ordinary workmen instead of each man having to manufacture them for

himself. Various steps had been taken in this direction. Guillaume du

Vair had already written a _Traite de l'Eloquence Francaise_; Vaugelas,

a Savoyard by birth, was shortly to undertake some valuable _Remarques_

on French grammar and style, which long remained a standard book. But

not many examples of deliberate composition had been given. It was these

examples of deliberate composition which Balzac furnished, and which, in

a lighter and more graceful fashion, and to a more limited circle, were

also given by the letters of the poet Voiture. Balzac, as is natural in

the first attempts at a polished prose style, has the drawback of being

somewhat rhetorical and occasionally ponderous. But the important point

is that the mechanism of the clause, the sentence, and the paragraph has

evidently been considered by him, and that he has succeeded in getting

it into very tolerable condition. His sentences no longer run on to the

interminable length of earlier writers, or finish in the haphazard

manner, neglectful of rhythm, balance, and proportion, also noticeable

in his predecessors. The substitution of the full stop for the

conjunction, which, speaking generally, may be said to be the initiating

secret of style (though of course it must not be applied too

indiscriminately), is at once apparent in Balzac's best passages, and he

rarely falls into the error which waits on this substitution, the error

of scrappiness. His style is perhaps better suited to oratory than to

writing; a not unlikely result, since his models were pretty obviously

the classical orators. But there can be no doubt that to him in no small

part is due the extraordinary outburst of rhetorical power which

distinguished the preachers of the latter half of the century. Nor was

it long before what was faulty in Balzac's style was corrected by the

example of very different writers.

[Sidenote: Pascal.]

Blaise Pascal[266] was born at Clermont, in Auvergne, on the 19th of

June, 1623. His father was President of the Court of Aids, but when the

boy was eight years old the family moved to Paris. Pascal was one of the

small number of extraordinarily precocious children who have justified

their precocity by genius equally extraordinary in after-life; but it

does not appear that he was forced by his father (who took the whole

charge of his education), and it is said that he did not begin Latin

until he was twelve years old--a very late age for the time.

Mathematics, however, were his chief study and delight, and he early

excelled in them, showing also an extraordinary faculty in applying them

to physics. At nineteen he invented a calculating machine. But his

application to study did not improve his health. He was but

five-and-twenty at the time of his famous experiment with the barometer

on the Puy de Dome in his native province. He was soon exposed to the

philosophical influence of Descartes on the one hand, and the

theological influence of the Jansenists on the other, and he felt both

deeply. His greatest work, the _Provinciales_, appeared in 1656. He died

on the 19th of August, 1662, having long lived in retirement and

asceticism, giving much of his substance to the poor, and abandoning

himself almost entirely to religious, mathematical, and philosophical

meditation.

We have nothing to do here with his purely mathematical works or those

in natural science. The two books by which he belongs to literature, and

which have placed him among the foremost writers of his country, are the

_Provinciales_ and the so-called _Pensees_. The former were regularly

published by himself in his lifetime, though they were ostensibly

anonymous, or rather pseudonymous. The _Pensees_ consist of scattered

reflections, which were found in his papers after his death. They were

published, but, as has been discovered of late years, with much omission

and garbling, and the restoration of them to their authentic form has

been effected in comparatively recent times.

The famous title of _Les Provinciales_ is only a convenient abbreviation

of the original, which is _Lettres Ecrites par Louis de Montalte a un

Provincial de ses Amis et aux Reverends Peres Jesuites sur le Sujet de

la Morale et de la Politique de ces Peres_. This somewhat cumbrous

appellation has at any rate the merit of exactly describing the

contents of the book, except that Louis de Montalte is of course a

pseudonym. The letters were written at the height of the early struggle

(which had not yet been interfered with by the secular arm) of

Jansenists and Jesuits, and they inflicted on the famous society a blow

from which it has never wholly recovered, and from which it can never

wholly recover. The method and style of Pascal are entirely original,

except in so far as a slight trace of indebtedness to Descartes may be

observed in the first respect, and a slight debt to Montaigne and the

_Satire Menippee_ in the second. His great weapon is polite irony, which

he first brought to perfection, and in the use of which he has hardly

been equalled and has certainly not been surpassed since. The intricate

casuistries of the Jesuits are unfolded in the gravest fashion and

without the least exaggeration or burlesque, but with a running comment

or rather insinuation of sarcasm which is irresistible. The author never

breaks out into a laugh, never allows himself to be declamatory and

indignant. There is always a smile on his countenance, but never

anything more pronounced than a smile. Yet the contempt of this is more

crushing than that of the bitterest invective. In the later letters

indeed the mask of irony is to a certain extent dropped, and a more

serious tone is taken. But effective as these are they are not the most

effective part of the _Provinciales_. That part is the earlier one, in

which, without dry scholastic argument, without the coarse abuse which

the sixteenth century had regarded as inseparable from theological

controversy, and at the same time with almost absolute accuracy of

statement--for the misrepresentations which two centuries of eager and

able apologists for the Order have been able to detect are

insignificant--the author carried the discussion out of the schools into

the drawing-room, made every man of fair education and breeding a judge

of it, and triumphantly brought the judgment of the vast majority of

such men on his side. To this day Pascal, with Swift and Courier, is the

greatest example in modern literature of irony, excelling Swift as much

in elegance and good-breeding as he falls short of him in sombre force,

and having the advantage over his brilliant follower at the beginning of

this century in depth and nobility of thought.

The _Pensees_ supply the reverse side of Pascal's character, and the

supplement to any proper estimate of his literary genius. But from the

circumstances already referred to, they are evidence of a less complete

though an even more genuine kind than the _Provinciales_. The scepticism

which ate so deeply into the heart of the seventeenth century affected

Pascal, though he rarely wavered in point of abstract faith. To few men,

however, was doubt more painful, and as no clearer or more piercing

intellect has ever existed, so to none was doubt more constantly

present. The _Pensees_ in their genuine form exhibit the thoughts to

which this conflict of opinion gave rise in him, and are in remarkable

contrast with the polished and sedate badinage of the letters. But few

if any of them are finally worked up into the form in which the author

would have been likely to present them to the public, and therefore,

from the point of view of pure literary criticism, they require less

notice here than the sister volume.

The revolution, as far as style is concerned, which in point of time is

already noticeable in Descartes, has entirely accomplished itself in

Pascal. The last vestige of archaism, of quaintness of phrase, of

clumsiness in the architecture of the sentence or the paragraph, has

passed away. Indeed, it can hardly be said that two centuries have added

much to the language except in point of richness and adaptation to the

more multifarious needs of the describer in modern times. The style is

extremely simple, but it has none of the monotony, the lack of colour,

and the stereotyped form which are the great drawbacks of French after

Boileau as contrasted with French before him. It is extraordinarily

graphic, sparkling with epigram at every point, and yet never

sacrificing sense to the play of words. The _Pensees_ (which it must

always be remembered were never finally worked up) yield matter which

will compare with the carefully concocted Maxims of La Rochefoucauld or

of Joubert, while the _Provinciales_ are, as has been said,

unsurpassable in their own line. It is probable that most good judges

would allot to Pascal in French the place which Dryden occupies in

English, that is to say, the place of the writer who combines most of

the advantages of the elder and younger manners. But Pascal, who wrote

merely to please himself, had this great advantage over Dryden, that his

work contains no mere journey-work, and especially nothing unworthy of

him. Admirable as it is in style, it is equally admirable in meaning and

in adaptation to that meaning, and it has thus both the sources of

lasting popularity at command. Dealing, moreover, as it does with

subjects of perennial importance and interest, it is almost entirely

exempt from the necessity of comment and explanation which weighs down

much admirable work of past ages. No man, however indisposed to serious

reading, can put down the _Provinciales_ as dull; no man, however

unwilling to read anything that is not serious, can complain of levity

in the _Pensees_. There are few authors in any language who unite as

Pascal does the claims of importance of subject, charm of style, and

bulk, without too great voluminousness of production. He has, moreover,

the additional merit of being in a high degree representative of his

age. That age had grown too complex for one man to reflect the whole of

it, but Pascal and Moliere (with perhaps Saint Evremond or La

Rochefoucauld as thirdsman) supply an almost complete reflection.

Saint Evremond[267], who was thirteen years Pascal's senior, and who

outlived him by more than forty years, was, in almost every respect

except intellectual vigour and literary faculty, his opposite. He was a

Norman by birth (Charles de Marguetel de Saint Denis was his proper

name), and was born in 1610. He was educated by the Jesuits, entered the

army early, served through the later campaigns of the Thirty Years' War

and in the Fronde, was a favourite of Conde's but fell into disgrace

with him, and after the fall of Fouquet, which led to the discovery of

his very able and very uncourtly letter on the Peace of the Pyrenees,

also incurred the king's displeasure. This displeasure is said to have

been aggravated by his notorious membership of the freethinking and

materialist school which Gassendi, if he had not founded it, had helped

to spread. Saint Evremond was practically if not formally banished, and

the time of his misfortune coinciding pretty nearly with the

Restoration in England, he made his way thither, was well received by

the king and his courtiers, many of whom he had known in their exile,

and dwelt in London for almost the whole remainder of his long life. He

died in 1703, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. His works are almost

entirely occasional, consisting of 'conversations,' letters,

'portraits,' short literary disquisitions and tractates on subjects of

historical and ethical interest. They display a placid epicurean

philosophy which in its indifference to the assaults of fortune is not

destitute of nobility, an extraordinary catholicity and acuteness of

literary judgment, and remarkable wit and _finesse_. The _Conversation

du Pere Canaye_, which is of the same date as the _Provinciales_, is

worthy of Pascal for its irony, and possesses a certain air of being

written by a 'person of quality,' which Saint Evremond could throw over

his writings better almost than any one else. His Portraits, not always

flattering, are full of nervous vigour. But his literary remarks are

perhaps the most surprising of his works. At a time when English

literature was almost unknown in France, and when Boileau ostentatiously

pretended never to have heard of Dryden, Saint Evremond, perhaps with

some assistance from his friend Waller, drew up some masterly remarks on

the humour-comedy of the Jonson school. His criticisms of French plays,

as compared with classical tragedy and comedy, are also full of pregnant

thought; and some comparative studies of his on Corneille and Racine

show a power of detachment and independence which may be due in some

part to the cosmopolitanism given by residence abroad, but which is

certainly due also to native power. From the point of view of literary

history, however, Saint Evremond is perhaps most remarkable as having

formed, in conjunction with Pascal and Bayle, a singular trio, which

supplied Voltaire with the models[268] whence he drew his peculiar style

of persiflage. As far as form is concerned, it may be fairly said that

Saint Evremond was the most influential of the three. Like many other

men of his time he rarely published anything in the ordinary way, and it

was not till very late in life that he empowered Desmaizeaux to issue

an authorised edition of work that had either circulated in manuscript

or been piratically printed.

[Sidenote: La Rochefoucauld.]

Francois de Marcillac[269], Duke de la Rochefoucauld, was born in 1613

of one of the noblest families of France. His father had just been

created duke and peer, the highest honour possible to a French subject,

and for many years the son was known under the title of Prince de

Marcillac. He was very imperfectly educated, but was early sent to serve

in the army and introduced to the court. Young as he was, he was deeply

engaged in the various intrigues against Richelieu, chiefly in

consequence of his affection for the celebrated Madame de Chevreuse.

After Richelieu's death and the comparative effacement of Madame de

Chevreuse, he transferred his affections to Madame de Longueville and

his aversion to Mazarin. He was one of the chiefs of the Princes' party,

and fought all through the Fronde, winning a reputation, not so much for

military skill as for the most reckless bravery. The establishment of

the royal authority first sent him into retirement, and then reduced him

to the position of an ordinary courtier. This last period of his life

was distinguished by a third attachment to a lady hardly less celebrated

than either of his former loves, Madame de la Fayette, the author of _La

Princesse de Cleves_, in which novel he is said to figure under another

name. He was also an intimate friend of Madame de Sevigne. In the latter

part of his life he suffered terribly from gout, and died of that

disease in 1680.

His Memoirs have been already noticed. The more famous and far more

remarkable Maxims were published shortly afterwards, and at once

attained a wide popularity. The first edition appeared in 1665, and four

others were published, with considerable alterations and additions,

during the author's lifetime, in 1666, 1671, 1675, and 1678. After his

death a sixth edition was published by Claude Barbin, containing fifty

new maxims, the authenticity of which is uncertain but probable.

The fullest authoritative edition of La Rochefoucauld's Maxims contains

504 separate paragraphs, to which, besides the fifty just noticed, about

another fifty can be added by restoring those which the author

suppressed during his lifetime. The last, which is avowedly a kind of

appendix, and on a different plan from the others, extends to a couple

of pages. But the average length of the remainder is not more than three

or four lines, and many do not contain more than a dozen words. The art

of compressing thought and then pointedly expressing it has never been

pushed so far except by Joubert, and hardly even by him. All La

Rochefoucauld's maxims, without exception, are on ethical subjects, and

with a certain allowance they may be said to be generally concerned with

the reduction of the motives and conduct of men to the single principle

of self-love. In consequence, accusations of misanthropy, of unfairness,

of short-sightedness, have been showered upon the author by those who do

not like a spade to be called a spade. We have nothing to do with the

moral side of the matter here, and it is sufficient to say that La

Rochefoucauld is not an advocate of the selfish or any other school of

moralists. He is simply an observer, setting down with the utmost

literary skill the results of a long life of unusual experience in

business and pleasure of every kind. He is a man of science who has got

together a large collection of facts, and who expounds and arranges them

on a certain coherent and sufficient hypothesis. As a work of literary

art the result of his exposition is unrivalled. The whole of the Maxims,

even with the doubtful or rejected ones, need not occupy more than a

hundred pages, and they contain matter which in the hands of an ordinary

writer would have filled a dozen volumes. Yet there is no undue

compression. It is impossible ever to mistake the meaning, though the

comprehension of the full application of that meaning depends, of

course, on the intellectual equipment and social experience of the

reader. The clearness with which Descartes had first endowed French is

here displayed in its very highest degree. The style, as was unavoidable

in work of the kind, is entirely devoid of ornament. Imagery is wholly

absent, and though metaphorical expressions abound, they are of the

plainest and simplest kind of metaphor. The philosophical language of

the day is present, but in no very prominent measure. The motto of the

book (at least in the fourth and fifth editions), 'Nos vertus ne sont le

plus souvent que des vices deguises,' is a very fair example of the

simple straightforward fashion of La Rochefoucauld's style. Sometimes,

but rarely, the author explains his meaning, and slightly lengthens his

phrase by repeating the sentiment in a somewhat different form, as thus,

'Le plaisir de l'amour est d'aimer, et l'on est plus heureux par la

passion qu'on a que par celle que l'on donne.' But even here it is to be

observed that the explanation is in a manner necessary to take off the

air of sententious enigma, which the words 'le plaisir de l'amour est

d'aimer' might have had by themselves. La Rochefoucauld is never

enigmatical, rarely sententious merely, and is almost indifferent to the

production of _mots_. How continually the study of brevity, combined

with precision, occupied the author, and how severe he was on any

exuberance, can be seen very instructively in the successive alterations

of his work. Thus, in the first edition Maxim 295 ran, 'La jeunesse est

une ivresse continuelle, c'est la fievre de la sante, c'est la folie de

la raison;' but La Rochefoucauld seems to have thought this unduly

pleonastic, and it appears later as 'La jeunesse est une ivresse

continuelle, c'est la fievre de la raison,' the improvement of which in

point and freshness is sufficiently obvious. The result of this process

is that the best of these Maxims are absolutely unrivalled in their own

peculiar style, and that all subsequent writers in the same style have

taken their form as a model. French critics have, as a rule, rather

under-than over-estimated the purely literary talent of La

Rochefoucauld. But this is due to two causes: first, to the supposed

antagonism of his spirit to conventional morality; secondly, to the fact

that he somewhat anticipated the writers of the particular period which

for a century and a half was the idol of academic criticism. His

language is rather that of Louis XIII. than of Louis XIV., and in his

words and phrases there is a certain archaism, not to say an occasional

irregularity, which critics who look only at the stop-watch apparently

find it hard to forgive.

[Sidenote: La Bruyere.]

These critics generally give the palm of style, as concerns writing of

this kind, to Jean de la Bruyere[270]. Less is known of the personal

history of this author than of that of any contemporary writer of great

eminence. He was born at Paris, in August 1645, and his family appears

to have been anciently connected with the law. He must have been a man

of some means and of good education, for he had just bought himself an

important financial post at Caen, when, on the recommendation of

Bossuet, he was appointed Historical Preceptor to Duke Louis of Bourbon,

the grandson of Conde, in whose household he continued till his death in

1696. He had published his _Caracteres_ in 1687, and was elected to the

Academy in 1693.

The works of La Bruyere consist of the _Caracteres_ just mentioned, of a

translation of Theophrastus, of a few literary discourses, and

(probably) of some chapters on Quietism, written on the side of his

patron Bossuet during the great controversy with Fenelon, but not

published till after the author's death. The _Caracteres_ alone are of

much importance or interest.

The design of this curious and celebrated book is taken, like its title,

from Theophrastus, but the plan is very much altered as well as

extended. Instead of copying directly the abstract qualities of

Theophrastus and his brief, pregnant, but somewhat artificial and jejune

description of them, La Bruyere adopted a scheme much better suited to

his own age. He took for the most part actual living people, well known

to all his readers, and, disguising them thinly under names of the kind

which the romances of the middle of the century had rendered

fashionable, made them body forth the characters he wished to define and

satirise. These portraits he inserted in a framework not altogether

unlike that of the Montaigne essay, preserving no very consecutive plan,

but passing from moral reflection to literary criticism, and from

literary criticism to one of the half-personal, half-moralising

portraits just mentioned, with remarkable ease and skill. The titles of

his chapters are rather more indicative of their actual contents than

those of Montaigne's essays, but they represent, for the most part,

merely very elastic frames, in which the author's various observations

and reflections are mounted. The result of this variety, not to say

desultoriness, combined as it is with the display of very great literary

art, is that La Bruyere's is a book of almost unparalleled interest to

take up and lay down at odd moments. Its apparently continuous form and

its intermixture of narrative save it from the appearance of severity

which the avowed Maxim or Pensee has; while the bond between the

different chapters, and even the different paragraphs, is so slight that

interruption is not felt to be annoying. Even now, when the zest of

personal malice, which, as Malezieux remarked to the author, made him

sure beforehand of 'plenty of readers and plenty of enemies,' is past,

it is a most interesting book to read; and it is especially interesting

to Englishmen, because there is no doubt that the English essayists of

the Queen Anne school directly modelled themselves upon it.

It has been objected to La Bruyere that he is less of a thinker than of

a clever writer, and there is truth in the objection. He was possessed

of a remarkable shrewdness, common sense, and soundness of taste; thus,

for instance, he protests energetically against the foolish pedantry

which rejected as obsolete many of the most useful and most picturesque

words in French, and so sets himself directly against the dominant and

very unfortunate literary influence of his time, that of Boileau. Yet he

himself wrote in the fashionable style, and in the language rather of

Racine than of Corneille. A further objection, also a just one, is that

his characters are too much of their age and not of all time. This

objection, indeed, applies to almost all writers after 1660, except

Moliere, and La Fontaine, and La Rochefoucauld. But La Bruyere (though

there are some sarcastic insinuations which seem to hint that his range

was wider than he chose to show) is as unwilling to disentangle himself

from Versailles and Paris as his English followers are to extend their

gaze to something beyond 'the town.' Nor is there the force and vigour

about La Bruyere's moral reflections that there is about La

Rochefoucauld's. They are frequently commonplace, sometimes even

platitudinous, and the author occasionally falls into what is perhaps

the most dangerous pitfall for a moralist and social satirist, the

adoption of stock butts and types. It is indeed most probable that La

Bruyere was one of those who, according to a famous phrase of his enemy

and successor, Fontenelle, 'may have their hands full of truth, but may

not care to open more than their little finger.' He was not, like La

Rochefoucauld, a great noble with the liberty of the Fronde in his mind,

but a man of no exalted rank, living in the most absolute period of

Louis the Fourteenth's rule. His remark that 'les grands sujets sont

defendus' is a pregnant one, especially when it is remembered how near

to the 'grands sujets' (as, for instance, in his oblique denunciation of

the misery of the French peasantry) he sometimes goes. But his style,

though looser than that of his forerunner, and destitute of the

character of sharp and enduring sculpture which is impressed on the

_Maxims_, is a model of ease, grace, and fluency without weakness[271].

FOOTNOTES:

[265] He has not recently been re-edited, but a selection was published

in 1822.

[266] Editions of Pascal are numerous, but a complete and definite one

is still wanting. Of the _Pensees_, etc., the editions of Faugere,

Havet, and Rocher may be mentioned; of the _Provinciales_, the edition

of 1867.

[267] Ed. Giraud. 3 vols. Paris, 1866. (A selection only, but containing

almost everything of importance.)

[268] Perhaps Anthony Hamilton should be added, as a channel of

communication with Saint Evremond and some of the seventeenth century

coterie-writers.

[269] Ed. as before noticed. The _Maxims_ have been constantly reprinted

by themselves.

[270] Ed. Servois. Paris, 1865-1882.

[271] Under the head of this chapter, in an exhaustive history, not a

few classes of writers might be ranged. Such are, besides great numbers

of miscellaneous writers of criticism from Corneille in his _Examens_

downwards, the classical commentators, editors, and translators. Few of

these have left a very enduring reputation. In the earlier part of the

century Perrot d'Ablancourt, a fertile translator, may be mentioned. His

work was so free that his versions were called 'les belles infideles,'

but Boileau himself admitted that he was a master of French style. In

the latter part the best-known and perhaps the most remarkable name is

that of the still famous Madame Dacier. Many of the early members of the

Academy, and some who never attained to its ranks, have left a

reputation more anecdotic than strictly literary, such as Menage (a

representative of the class), Cotin, Costar, Bautru, etc. But they can

only be alluded to here. Law also contributed in the person of Patru, a

writer for the most part on professional topics, but occasionally on

literature, who is ranked by Boileau with Perrot d'Ablancourt in respect

of style.

CHAPTER VI.

PHILOSOPHERS.

The history of literature and the history of philosophy touch each other

only at certain points of their course. There are periods (the

nineteenth century itself is perhaps an example) when the study of

philosophy is almost divorced from style. There are others when the two

are intimately wedded. Nowhere is this latter more the case than in the

seventeenth century, and in France. Much of the most excellent writing

of the time was directed to philosophic subjects. But it so happened

that the great reformer of philosophy in France was also the greatest

reformer of her prose style, and that his greatest disciple carried

philosophical writing, as far as style is concerned, to very nearly, if

not quite, the highest pitch which it has yet attained in French. We

shall not have to concern ourselves in more than the very slightest

degree with the subject of the writings of Descartes and Malebranche,

but they have as legitimate a place in the history of French literature

as they have in that of European philosophy.

[Sidenote: Descartes.]

Rene Descartes[272] was born at La Haye in Touraine on the 31st of

March, 1596. His family belonged by descent to the province in which he

was born, but by occupation and official position (as well it would seem

as by possessions) to Britanny. It was of noble rank, though only of

_noblesse de robe_, and possessed enough landed property to leave

estates and territorial designations to two sons. Thus Rene was Seigneur

du Perron, though, quite contrary to the wont of the day, he never made

use of the title. He was of weak health both at this time and

afterwards, and, unlike most of his contemporaries, did not begin his

studies very early. In 1604 he was sent to the Jesuit College of La

Fleche, and remained there nearly eight years. After a short stay at

home he was sent to Paris, where he divided his time between ordinary

pursuits and amusements on the one hand, and hard study on the other. In

1617, when he had just attained his majority, he joined the army as a

volunteer, and the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War soon gave him

plenty of employment. He visited various parts of Europe, partly on

duty, partly as an ordinary traveller. First he served for two years at

Breda under Prince Maurice of Nassau, pursuing the same mixture of study

and routine employments. Then he went to Germany, where in his winter

quarters his great philosophical idea, as he has told in memorable

words, flashed across him. He served in various parts of the empire, and

in Hungary and Bohemia, but left the army in 1621 and went to Holland,

experiencing on the way a curious and dangerous adventure. After a year

at the Hague he went home, and was put in possession of his share of his

mother's property. He visited Italy, where he made a pilgrimage to

Loretto, then returned to France, and dwelt in Paris for some time;

resuming however his military character for a while, and serving at the

siege of La Rochelle. At last, in 1628, being then thirty-two years old,

he left the service finally, and gave himself up wholly to the study of

philosophy. For this purpose he retired to Holland, where he was still

somewhat restless[273]. But his chief centres were successively

Amsterdam, Egmond, not far from Alkmaar, and Endegeest, within easy

distance of the Hague. He returned to France more than once, and was

asked to settle at court, receiving from Mazarin a pension of 3000

livres. But the troubles of the Fronde made Paris a distasteful and

unsuitable residence for him. He then accepted, at the end of 1649, an

invitation from Queen Christina of Sweden and went to Stockholm, where

the severe weather and the gracious habit which the queen had of

summoning him for discussion at five o'clock in the morning (he had all

his life when not on active service made a point of not rising till

eleven), put an end to his life, by inflammation of the lungs, on Feb.

11, 1650.

The works of Descartes are numerous, though few of them are of very

great extent. He wrote a treatise (not now extant) on the art of fencing

when he was but sixteen; and during the succeeding years small treatises

on different points, chiefly of mathematics and natural theology,

constantly issued from his pen, though he was not a ready writer. The

works which alone concern us here are his famous _Discours de la

Methode_, 1637, and his letters. The _Meditations_, of equal importance

philosophically with the _Discours_, and the _Principia Philosophiae_, a

rehandling of the two, were originally published in Latin. No attempt

can here be made to give any account of Descartes' mathematical,

physical, and metaphysical speculations, or of the means by which he

endeavoured to work out his great principle, that all knowledge springs

from certain ideas clearly and distinctly conceived, and is deducible

mathematically, or rather logically, from these principles.

Until and including Victor Cousin, who, though his own style has some

drawbacks, was a keen judge and a fervent admirer of the best classical

French, French writers have always regarded the style of Descartes as

one of the most remarkable, and above all the most original in the

language. There cannot be the slightest doubt in the mind of any one

historically acquainted with that language, and accustomed to judge

style critically, that the opinion is a thoroughly sound one. Of late,

however, there have been dissidents, and their opinion has been

strangely adopted by the latest English biographer of Descartes[274].

Controversy as a rule is out of place in these pages, but on this

particular point, involving as it does one of the most important

questions in French literary history--the proper distribution of the

epochs of style--an exception must be made. According to Mr. Mahaffy's

view it is Descartes' few letters to Balzac which have gained him a

reputation for style, but he is 'seldom more than clear and correct;' he

is 'seldom grand, not often amusing.' The temptation to enlarge on this

singular definition of style as that which is grand or amusing must be

resisted. Those who have followed the foregoing pages will perceive

that the refusal to recognise in a writer who is 'seldom more than clear

and correct' (Descartes is a great deal more than this, but no matter)

the characteristics of a master of style arises from ignorance of what

the characteristics and drawbacks of French style had hitherto been.