places whither its royalty came, ended appropriately in a marriage--a
marriage of "The Reform" in the person of Prince Henry of Navarre, to
Catholicism in the person of Margaret of Valois, Margaret of the
"Memoirs," Charles's sister, in tacit defiance of, or indifference
to, the Pope. With the great Huguenot leaders, with the princes of
the house of Guise, and the Court, like one united family, all in
gaudy evidence in its streets, Paris, ever with an eye for the chance
of amusement, always preoccupied with the visible side of things,
always Catholic--was bidden to be tolerant for a moment, to carry no
fire-arms under penalties, "to renew no past [121] quarrels," and
draw no sword in any new one. It was the perfect stroke of
Catherine's policy, the secret of her predominance over her sons,
thus, with a flight of purchaseable fair women ever at command, to
maintain perpetual holiday, perpetual idleness, with consequent
perpetual, most often idle, thoughts about marriage, amid which the
actual conduct of affairs would be left to herself. Yet for Paris
thus Catholic, there was certainly, even if the Pope were induced to
consent, and the Huguenot bride-groom to "conform," something illicit
and inauspicious about this marriage within the prohibited degrees of
kinship. In fact, the cunningly sought papal dispensation never
came; Charles, with apparent unconcern, fulfilled his threat, and did
without it; must needs however trick the old Cardinal de Bourbon into
performing his office, not indeed "in the face of the Church," but in
the open air outside the doors of the cathedral of Notre-Dame, the
Catholics quietly retiring into the interior, when that starveling
ceremony was over, to hear the nuptial mass. Still, the open air,
the August sunshine, had lent the occasion an irresistible physical
gaiety in this hymeneal Assumption weather. Paris, suppressing its
scruples, its conscientious and unconscientious hatreds, at least for
a season, had adorned herself as that fascinating city always has
been able to adorn herself, if with something of artifice, certainly
[121] with great completeness, almost to illusion. Whatever gloom
the Middle Age with its sins and sorrows might have left there, was
under gallant disguise to-day. In the train of the young married
people, jeunes premiers in an engagement which was to turn out almost
as transitory as a stage-play, a long month of masquerade meandered
night and day through the public places. His carnality and hers, so
startling in their later developments, showed now in fact but as the
engaging force of youth, since youth, however unpromising its
antecedents, can never have sinned irretrievably. Yet to curious
retrospective minds not long afterwards, these graceful follies would
seem tragic or allegoric, with an undercurrent of infernal irony
throughout. Charles and his two brothers, keeping the gates of a
mimic paradise in the court of the Louvre, while the fountains ran
wine--were they already thinking of a time when they would keep those
gates, with iron purpose, while the gutters ran blood?
If Huguenots were disgusted with the frivolities of the hour, passing
on the other side of the street in sad attire, plotting, as some have
thought, as their enemies will persuade the Pope, a yet more terrible
massacre of their own, only anticipated by the superior force and
shrewdness of the Catholics, on the very eve of its accomplishment--
they did but serve just now to relieve the predominant white and red,
[123] and thereby double the brilliancy, of a gay picture. Yet a
less than Machiavellian cunning might perhaps have detected, amid all
this sudden fraternity--as in some unseasonably fine weather signs of
coming distress--a risky element of exaggeration in those
precipitately patched-up amities, a certain hollow ring in those
improbable religious conversions, those unlikely reconciliations in
what was after all an age of treachery as a fine art. With Gaston,
however, the merely receptive and poetic sense of life was abundantly
occupied with the spectacular value of the puissant figures in motion
around him. If he went beyond the brilliancy of the present moment
in his wonted pitiful equitable after-thoughts, he was still
concerned only with the more general aspects of the human lot, and
did not reflect that every public movement, however generous in its
tendency, is really flushed to active force by identification with
some narrower personal or purely selfish one. Coligni, "the
Admiral," centre of Huguenot opposition, just, kind, grim, to the
height of inspired genius, the grandest character his faith had yet
produced--undeterred by those ominous voices (of aged women and the
like) which are apt to beset all great actions, yielded readily to
the womanish endearments of Charles, his filial words and fond
touching of the hands, the face, aged at fifty-five--just this
portion of his conduct let us hope being exclusive of his precise
share [124] in the "conspiracy." And the opportune death in Paris of
the Huguenot Queen of Navarre only stirred question for a moment:
autopsy revealed no traces of unfair play, though at a time credulous
as to impossible poisoned perfumes and such things, romantic in its
very suspicions.
Delirium was in the air already charged with thunder, and laid hold
on Gaston too. It was as if through some unsettlement in the
atmospheric medium the objects around no longer acted upon the senses
with the normal result. Looking back afterwards, this singularly
self-possessed person had to confess that under its influence he had
lost for a while the exacter view of certain outlines, certain real
differences and oppositions of things in that hotly coloured world of
Paris (like a shaken tapestry about him) awaiting the Eve of Saint
Bartholomew. Was the "undulant" philosophy of Monsieur de Montaigne,
in collusion with this dislocating time, at work upon him, that,
following with only too entire a mobility the experience of the hour,
he found himself more than he could have thought possible the toy of
external accident? Lodged in Abelard's quarter, he all but repeats
Abelard's typical experience. His new Heloise, with capacities
doubtless, as he reflected afterwards regretfully, for a refined and
serious happiness, although actually so far only a man's plaything,
sat daintily amid her posies and painted potteries in the [125]
window of a house itself as forbidding and stern as her kinsmen, busy
Huguenot printers, well-to-do at a time not only fertile in new books
and new editions, but profuse of tracts, sheets, satiric handbills
for posting all over France. Gaston's curiosity, a kind of
fascination he finds in their dark ways, takes him among them on
occasion, to feel all the more keenly the contrast of that picture-
like prettiness in this framing of their grim company, their grim
abode. Her frivolity is redeemed by a sensitive affection for these
people who protect her, by a self-accusing respect for their
religion, for the somewhat surly goodness, the hard and unattractive
pieties into which she cannot really enter; and she yearns after her
like, for those harmless forbidden graces towards which she has a
natural aptitude, loses her heart to Gaston as he goes to and fro,
wastes her days in reminiscence of that bright passage, notes the
very fineness of his linen. To him, in turn, she seems, as all
longing creatures ever have done, to have some claim upon him--a
right to consideration--to an effort on his part: he finds a sister
to encourage: she touches him, clings where she touches. The gloomy,
honest, uncompromising Huguenot brothers interfere just in time to
save her from the consequence of what to another than Gaston might
have counted as only a passing fondness to be soon forgotten; and the
marriage almost forced upon him seemed under its actual conditions no
binding sacrament. [126] A marriage really indissoluble in itself,
and for the heart of Colombe sacramental, as he came afterwards to
understand--for his own conscience at the moment, the transaction
seemed to have but the transitoriness, as also the guilt of a vagrant
love. A connexion so light of motive, so inexpressive of what seemed
the leading forces of his character, he might, but for the sorrow
which stained its actual issue, have regarded finally as a mere
mistake, or an unmeaning accident in his career.
Coligni lay suffering in the fiery August from the shot of the
ambiguous assassin which had missed his heart, amid the real or
feigned regrets of the Guises, of the royal family, of his true
friends, wondering as they watched whether the bullet had been a
poisoned one. The other Huguenot leaders had had their warnings to
go home, as the princes of the house of Navarre, Condé and Henry of
Bearn, would fain have done--the gallant world about them being come
just now to have certain suspicious resemblances to a prison or a
trap. Under order of the king the various quarters of Paris had been
distributed for some unrevealed purpose of offence or defence. To
the officers in immediate charge it was intimated that "those of the
new religion" designed "to rise against the king's authority, to the
trouble of his subjects and the city of Paris. For the prevention of
which conspiracy the king enjoined the Provost to possess himself
[127] of the keys of the various city gates, and seize all boats
plying on the river, to the end that none might enter or depart."
And just before the lists close around the doomed, Gaston has bounded
away on his road homeward to the bed of the dying grandfather, after
embracing his wife, anxious, if she might, to share his journey, with
some forecast of coming evil among those dark people.
The white badges of Catholicism had been distributed, not to every
Catholic (a large number of Catholics perished), to some Huguenots
such as La Rochefoucauld, brave guerrier et joyeux compagnon, dear to
Charles, hesitating still with some last word of conscience in his
ear at the very gate of the Louvre, when a random pistol-shot, in the
still undisturbed August night, rousing sudden fear for himself,
precipitates the event, and as if in delirium he is driven forth on
the scent of human blood. He had always hunted like a madman. It
was thus "the matins of Paris" began, in which not religious zealots
only assisted, but the thieves, the wanton, the unemployed, the
reckless children, les enfants massacreurs like those seen dragging
an insulted dead body to the Seine, greed or malice or the desire for
swift settlement of some long-pending law-suit finding here an
opportunity. A religious pretext had brought into sudden evidence
all the latent ferocities of a corrupt though dainty civilisation,
and while the stairways of the Louvre, the streets, [128] the vile
trap-doors of Paris, run blood, far away at Deux-manoirs Gaston
watches as the light creeps over the silent cornfields, the last
sense of it in those aged eyes now ebbing softly away. The village
priest, almost as aged, assists patiently with his immemorial
consolations at this long, leisurely, scarce perceptible ending to a
long, leisurely life, on the quiet double-holiday morning.*
The wild news of public disaster, penetrating along the country roads
now bristling afresh with signs of universal war, seemed of little
consequence in comparison with that closer grief at home, which made
just then the more effective demand on his sympathy, till the thought
came of the position of Colombe--his wife left behind there in Paris.
Immediate rumour, like subsequent history, gave variously the number-
-the number of thousands--who perished. The great Huguenot leader
was dead, one party at least, the royal party, safe for the moment
and in high spirits. As Charles himself put it, the ancient private
quarrel between the houses of Guise and Chatillon was ended by the
decease of the chief of the latter, Coligni de Châtillon--a death so
saintly after its new fashion that the long-delayed vengeance of
Henri de Guise on the presumed instigator of the murder of his father
seemed a martyrdom. And around that central barbarity the slaughter
had spread over Paris in widening [129] circles. With conflicting
thoughts, in wild terror and grief, Gaston seeks the footsteps of
Colombe, of her people, from their rifled and deserted house to the
abodes of their various acquaintance, like the traces of wrecked men
under deep water. Yet even amid his private distress, queries on
points of more general interest in the event would not be excluded.
With whom precisely, in whose interest had the first guilty motion
been?--Gaston on the morrow asked in vain as the historian asks
still. And more and more as he picked his way among the direful
records of the late massacre, not the cruelty only but the obscurity,
the accidental character, yet, alas! also the treachery, of the
public event seemed to identify themselves tragically with his own
personal action. Those queries, those surmises were blent with the
enigmatic sense of his own helplessness amid the obscure forces
around him, which would fain compromise the indifferent, and had made
him so far an accomplice in their unfriendly action that he felt
certainly not quite guiltless, thinking of his own irresponsible,
self-centered, passage along the ways, through the weeks that had
ended in the public crime and his own private sorrow. Pity for those
unknown or half-known neighbours whose faces he must often have
looked on--ces pauvres morts!--took an almost remorseful character
from his grief for the delicate creature whose vain longings had been
perhaps but a rudimentary aptitude for the [130] really high things
himself had represented to her fancy, the refined happiness to which
he might have helped her. The being whose one claim had lain in her
incorrigible lightness, came to seem representative of the suffering
of the whole world in its plenitude of piteous detail, in those
unvalued caresses, that desire towards himself, that patient half-
expressed claim not to be wholly despised, poignant now for ever.
For he failed to find her: and her brothers being presumably dead,
all he could discover of a certainty from the last survivor of her
more distant kinsmen was the fact of her flight into the country,
already in labour it was thought, and in the belief that she had been
treacherously deserted, like many another at that great crisis. In
the one place in the neighbourhood of Paris with which his knowledge
connected her he seeks further tidings, but hears only of her passing
through it, as of a passage into vague infinite space; a little
onward, dimly of her death, with the most damaging view of his own
conduct presented with all the condemnatory resources of Huguenot
tongues, but neither of the place nor the circumstances of that
event, nor whether, as seemed hardly probable, the child survived.
It was not till many years afterwards that he stood by her grave,
still with no softening of the cruel picture driven then as with fire
into his soul; her affection, her confidence in him still contending
with the suspicions, the ill-concealed [131] antipathy to him of her
hostile brothers, the distress of her flight, half in dread to find
the husband she was pursuing with the wildness of some lost child,
who seeking its parents begins to suspect treacherous abandonment.
That most mortifying view of his actions had doubtless been further
enforced on her by others, the worst possible reading, to her own
final discomfiture, of a not unfaithful heart.
NOTES
128. *Sunday, August 24, Feast of St. Bartholomew.
VII. THE LOWER PANTHEISM
Jetzo, da ich ausgewachsen,
Viel gelesen, viel gereist,
Schwillt mein Herz, und ganz von Herzen,
Glaub' ich an den Heilgen Geist.--HEINE.+
[132] Those who were curious to trace the symmetries of chance or
destiny felt now quite secure in observing that, of nine French kings
of the name, every third Charles had been a madman. Over the exotic,
nervous creature who had inherited so many delicacies of
organisation, the coarse rage or rabies of the wolf, part, doubtless,
of an inheritance older still, had asserted itself on that terrible
night of Saint Bartholomew, at the mere sight, the scent, of blood,
in the crime he had at least allowed others to commit; and it was not
an unfriendly witness who recorded that, the fever once upon him, for
an hour he had been less a man than a beast of prey. But,
exemplifying that exquisite fineness of cruelty proper to an ideal
tragedy, with the [133] work of his madness all around him, he awoke
sane next day, to remain so--aged at twenty-one--seeking for the few
months left him to forget himself in his old out-of-door amusements,
rending a consumptive bosom with the perpetual horn-blowing which
could never rouse again the gay morning of life.
"I have heard," says Brantome, of Elisabeth, Charles's queen, "that
on the Eve of Saint Bartholomew, she, having no knowledge of the
matter, went to rest at her accustomed hour, and, sleeping till the
morning, was told, as she arose, of the brave mystery then playing.
'Alas!' she cried; 'the king! my husband! does he know it?' 'Ay!
Madam,' they answered; 'the king himself has ordained it.' 'God!'
she cried; 'how is this? and what counsellors be they who have given
him this advice? O God, be pitiful! for unless Thou art pitiful I
fear this offence will never be pardoned unto him;' and asking for
her 'Hours,' suddenly betook herself to prayer, weeping."
Like the shrinking, childish Elisabeth, the Pope also wept at that
dubious service to his Church from one who was, after all, a Huguenot
in belief; and Huguenots themselves pitied his end.--"Ah! ces
pauvres morts! que j'ai eu un meschant conseil! Ah! ma nourrice! ma
mie, ma nourrice! que de sang, et que de meurtres!"
It was a peculiarity of the naturally devout [134] Gaston that,
habituated to yield himself to the poetic guidance of the Catholic
Church in her wonderful, year-long, dramatic version of the story of
redemption, he had ever found its greatest day least evocative of
proportionate sympathy. The sudden gaieties of Easter morning, the
congratulations to the Divine Mother, the sharpness of the recoil
from one extreme of feeling to the other, for him never cleared away
the Lenten pre-occupation with Christ's death and passion: the empty
tomb, with the white clothes lying, was still a tomb: there was no
human warmth in the "spiritual body": the white flowers, after all,
were those of a funeral, with a mortal coldness, amid the loud
Alleluias, which refused to melt at the startling summons, any more
than the earth will do in the March morning because we call it
Spring. It was altogether different with that other festival which
celebrates the Descent of the Spirit, the tongues, the nameless
impulses gone all abroad, to soften slowly, to penetrate, all things,
as with the winning subtlety of nature, or of human genius. The
gracious Pentecostal fire seemed to be in alliance with the sweet,
warm, relaxing winds of that later, securer, season, bringing their
spicy burden from unseen sources. Into the close world, like a
walled garden, about him, influences from remotest time and space
found their way, travelling unerringly on their long journeys, as
[135] if straight to him, with the assurance that things were not
wholly left to themselves; yet so unobtrusively that, a little later,
the transforming spiritual agency would be discernible at most in the
grateful cry of an innocent child, in some good deed of a bad man, or
unlooked-for gentleness of a rough one, in the occasional turning to
music of a rude voice. Through the course of years during which
Gaston was to remain in Paris, very close to other people's sins,
interested, all but entangled, in a world of corruption in flower
(pleasantly enough to the eye), those influences never failed him.
At times it was as if a legion of spirits besieged his door: "Open
unto me! Open unto me! My sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled!"
And one result, certainly, of this constant prepossession was, that
it kept him on the alert concerning theories of the divine assistance
to man, and the world,--theories of inspiration. On the Feast of
Pentecost, on the afternoon of the thirtieth of May, news of the
death of Charles the Ninth had gone abroad promptly, with large
rumours as to the manner of it. Those streams of blood blent
themselves fantastically in Gaston's memory of the event with the
gaudy colours of the season--the crazy red trees in blossom upon the
heated sky above the old grey walls; like a fiery sunset, it might
seem, as he looked back over the ashen intervening years. To
Charles's successor (he and [136] the Queen-mother now delightfully
secure from fears, however unreasonable, of Charles's jerking dagger)
the day became a sweet one, to be noted unmistakably by various pious
and other observances, which still further fixed the thought of that
Sunday on Gaston's mind, with continual surmise as to the tendencies
of so complex and perplexing a scene.
The last words of Charles had asserted his satisfaction in leaving no
male child to wear his crown. But the brother, whose obvious kingly
qualities, the chief facts really known of him so far, Charles was
thought to have envied--the gallant feats of his youth, de ses Jeunes
guerres, his stature, his high-bred beauty, his eloquence, his almost
pontifical refinement and grace,--had already promptly deserted the
half-barbarous kingdom, his acceptance of which had been but the mask
of banishment; though he delayed much on his way to the new one,
passing round through the cities of Venice and Lombardy, seductive
schools of the art of life as conceived by Italian epicures, of which
he became only too ready a student. On Whit-Monday afternoon, while
Charles "went in lead," amid very little private or public concern,
to join his kinsfolk at Saint-Denys, Paris was already looking out
for its new king, following, through doubtful rumour, his circuitous
journey to the throne, by Venice, Padua, Ferrara, Mantua, Turin, over
Mont Cenis, by Lyons, to French [137] soil, still building
confidently on the prestige of his early manhood. Seeing him at
last, all were conscious in a moment of the inversion of their hopes.
Had the old witchcrafts of Poland, the old devilries of his race,
laid visible hold on the hopeful young man, that he must now take
purely satiric estimate of so great an opportunity, with a programme
which looked like formal irony on the kingly position, a premeditated
mockery of those who yielded him, on demand, a servile reverence
never before paid to any French monarch? Well! the amusement, or
business, of Parisians, at all events, would still be that of
spectators, assisting at the last act of the Valois tragedy, in the
course of which fantastic traits and incidents would naturally be
multiplied. Fantastic humour seemed at its height in the institution
of a new order of knighthood, the enigmatic splendours of which were
to be a monument of Henry's superstitious care, or, as some said, of
his impious contempt, of the day which had made him master of his
destiny,--that great Church festival, towards the emphatic marking of
which he was ever afterwards ready to welcome any novel or striking
device for the spending of an hour.