seventeenth century, was towards the polishing of society, left
roughened and rusty by the long wars of religion. But the court of Henri
IV was too coarse, and too little in sympathy with the mental
aspirations of the age, to carry out this design, which needed other
influences than those which could emanate from Marie de Medicis.
Meanwhile, the great importance of the provincial centres had rapidly
declined, and it was Paris that gave the tone to France. This then was
the moment when a peculiarly Parisian centre was needed, independent of
the court, yet in political sympathy with it, a centre of imagination
and intelligence not too austere in its morals, not too pedantic in its
judgments, to include the characteristic minds of the age, whatever
their limitation or peculiarity; and yet definitely, unflinchingly and
for a sufficient length of time, radiating politeness and authority.
Such a Parisian centre must be aristocratic, yet liberal and
intelligent; it must lay down rules of conduct, and contrive to get them
obeyed; it must be recognized and haunted by the first men and women of
the century; it must be actuated in equal proportions by the genius of
discipline, and by that of easy grace and accomplished gallantry. In
short, it must be what Providence astonishingly provided for French
society at that moment of its sorest need, the unparalleled Hotel de
Rambouillet, with, as its prophetess and chatelaine, one of the most
charming women who have ever occupied the pen of the memoir-maker.
In observing the history of the famous Chambre Bleue, it cannot but
strike an English critic how far more articulate French opinion was than
English in the seventeenth century. Although, as we shall presently see,
documents have been slow in forthcoming, they existed, and still exist,
in profusion. But while we can now study, almost from day to day, the
intrigues, the amusements and the enthusiasms of the group in the Rue
Saint-Thomas, the record of a similar _salon_ open in England at the
same epoch is still shrouded in a darkness which is likely never to be
penetrated. So far as we can venture to judge there must have been many
points of likeness between the Marquise de Rambouillet and Lucy Countess
of Bedford. The circle of the friends of each was illustrious. Donne was
a greater poet-divine than Cospeau or Godeau; our national vanity may
fairly set Daniel and Drayton against Voiture and Chapelain, while even
Corneille is not shamed by being balanced by Ben Jonson. The coterie of
the Countess of Bedford may probably have been less wealthy, less
sparkling, more provincial than that of Madame de Rambouillet, but the
melancholy thing is that we lack the opportunity of comparing them. Save
for vague allusions in the poets, and for a dim tradition of politeness,
we form no detailed impression of the feasts of wit at Twickenham,
whereas about those in the Rue Saint-Thomas we know almost as much as
heart can wish. In the communication of social impressions England stood
much farther behind France in the seventeenth century than the
individual genius of her writers accounts for. We have, however, one
possible recompense: the field of irresponsible conjecture is infinitely
wider in our island chronicle. In France, even the craziest of faddists
could not hope for a hearing if he suggested that the tragedies of
Pierre Corneille were secretly written by Richelieu in his lighter
moments.
On the history of the Hotel de Rambouillet the documents which survive
are very numerous, and probably have not yet been exhaustively examined.
The seventeenth century in France was awake to the importance of its own
immortality, and set down the records of its social and literary glory
with complacency. The memorials of the Hotel de Rambouillet to be found
scattered over the works of such contemporaries as Segrais, Pellisson
and Conrart have long been known. The poems and correspondence of
Voiture, of course, form a mine of treasure, which was first competently
worked by Ubicini in his edition of Voiture's works. It is now sifted
to its last crumb of gold by M. Emile Magne in the eloquent and learned
volumes which he has just published. There is also, and most important
of all, Tallemant des Reaux, of whom I shall presently speak at greater
length. M. Magne and M. Collas, with Voiture and Chapelain respectively
in their particular thoughts, have turned over the priceless wealth of
MSS. in the _Archives nationales_. It is probable that we now possess,
thanks to the researches of these scholars, as full an account of the
Hotel de Rambouillet as we are likely to obtain. It may be pointed out
that these exact records, founded upon positive documents, show the
danger of such hypotheses as not a few previous historians have rashly
taken up. In the light of present knowledge, it is necessary to use not
merely Roederer (1835), but even the more accurate Livet (1870), with
caution.
The Hotel existed, as a centre of light and civility, for nearly seventy
years, and involved the whole careers of two generations. Its history,
which was developed by circumstances, and somewhat modified in its
course by changes of taste, found no chronicler until it had existed
some twenty years. That preliminary period, from the death of Henri IV
to the arrival of Tallemant and Voiture, is precisely the time about
which we should like to know most, and about which we are doomed to know
least. The violent close of the reign, in a last wild crime, had, as we
see from every species of evidence, brought with it a longing for
serenity and repose. The keynote of the best society became a
cultivation of simplicity, refinement, and delicacy. This growth of a
new spirit was identified with the Marquis and Marquise of Rambouillet,
but exactly how at first we are at a loss to tell, and even M. Magne is
silent. A careful setting side by side of scattered impressions may
enable us, however, while avoiding these hypotheses of which we have
given warning, to form some idea of the foundation of the Hotel and its
prestige.
Charles d'Angennes, Marquis of Rambouillet and Pisani, who has given
its title to the celebrated union of hearts, must not long detain us,
for the excellent reason that not much is recorded about him. He was
probably born about 1577, and he died in Paris in 1652, having become
blind about twelve years earlier. His eyesight was very peculiar;
perhaps he was colour-blind. On this subject he was sensitive, and tried
to conceal his condition. On one occasion, when the Duc de Montausier,
who was known to have recently ordered a gorgeous scarlet costume,
appeared at the Hotel de Rambouillet, his host called out "Ah! Monsieur,
la belle escarlate!"--which was unlucky, because the Duc had happened to
call in a black suit. Tallemant says that the Marquis "avait
terriblement d'esprit, mais un peu frondeur." In this he doubtless
resembled most of the wits of that age, who liked to let their
antagonists feel that there were claws under the fur. In wit his wife,
with her sweet consideration and delicate humorous tact, was
immeasurably his superior; it was she, and not he, who gave the Hotel
its famous amenity. We must not measure this in all things by our
standards. About 1625 there was quite an inundation of spiteful, and
sometimes obscene, verse in France, and this has to be taken into
consideration in dealing with the _salons_. The Hotel de Rambouillet
kept this in some check, but was amply aware of the entertainment to be
got by clothing satire--what Agrippa d'Aubigne called _la malplaisante
verite_--in smooth and well-turned verse. The Marquis was himself a
versifier, and he shared to the full his wife's respect for letters.
There is nothing, however, to show that this agreeable man would have
been able, by his unaided talents, to make a mark upon the age he lived
in. He was the satellite of an infinitely more refulgent luminary, his
extraordinary wife. If there is such a thing as social genius, on the
same lines as literary or artistic genius, this was undoubtedly
possessed, in a very high degree, by Catherine de Vivonne, Marquise de
Rambouillet. She was born at Rome in 1588; half an Italian, her mother
was a Roman princess, Julia Savella; and when, long afterwards, the
Marquise had become not merely French, but almost the culture of France
incarnate, she loved to dwell on her Italian parentage. Tallemant tells
us that she always thought the Savelli the best family in the world; it
was her faith. At the age of six, she became a naturalized French
citizen, and in January, 1600, being in her twelfth year, she was
married to Charles d'Angennes, who, his father being still alive, was
then Vidame du Mans. Her own sober and stately father, the Marquis de
Pisani, was just dead. He had left Catherine a conspicuous heiress. In
later years, she spoke with characteristic humour of the way in which
she was intimidated, poor child of twelve, by her husband's years, since
he was twenty-three, and she said that she had never become quite used
to feeling grown-up in his presence. But this was her whimsical way of
talking, for there really existed between them the closest and most
intimate affection. The Marquis and the Marquise were always in love
with one another, throughout their extended married life of more than
half a century; and in that age of light loves and cynical
relationships, even baseless ill-nature never found any serious charge
of frivolity to bring against this gracious lady.
It is true that it could not be difficult to show complaisance to
Catherine de Rambouillet. She was never dull, never inattentive, never
indiscreet. We hear that she had an extraordinary native gift for being
present when she was wanted, and occupied elsewhere when her company
would have been inconvenient. As years grew upon her, it seems as though
this instinct for pleasing became a little too emphatic. Almost the only
fault which any chronicler brings against her is that, towards the end,
she was not critical enough, that she liked too many people, that her
individuality melted into a general indulgence. But she was surrounded
by petulant poets and snarling courtiers, and that this mild censure of
her should be insinuated is, probably, but another tribute to her tact.
She was like Milton's Lady; not indeed "chained up in alabaster," but
serene, open-eyed and gay in the midst of a monstrous rout of ambitions
and vanities which often resembled "stabled wolves or tigers at their
prey." One of her most striking characteristics obviously was her power
of ruling a society from its centre without making her rule oppressive.
All the anecdotes of her discipline in her _salon_ show the coolness of
her judgment and the velvet strength of her hand. She was capable of
strong dislike, yet with an Italian faculty for concealing it. She hated
Louis XIII to the inmost fibre of her being, for what seemed to her his
despicable qualities, yet he never discovered it.
Those who regard Catherine de Rambouillet as one of the most engaging
figures of Europe in the seventeenth century, must regret that, from an
age where portrait-painting was so largely cultivated, no picture of her
has come down to us. All we know is that she was beautiful and tall; the
poets compared her to a pine tree. It was supposed that she never
consented to sit to a painter, but M. Magne has discovered that there
were portraits. Scudery, he believes, possessed engravings from
paintings by Van Mol and by du Cayer. The earlier of these, painted in
1645, represented her gazing at the dead body of her father. These works
of art appear to be hopelessly lost. We are thrown back on the written
"portraits," in the alembicated style of the middle of the century,
which adorn a host of novels and poems. Of these the fullest is that
introduced by Madeleine de Scudery into the seventh volume of her huge
romance, _Le Grand Cyrus_. M. Emile Magne, confronted with the
"precious" terms of this description, and the vagueness of it, loses his
temper with poor Mlle. de Scudery, whom he calls _cette pecore_. It is
true that the physical details which would interest us are omitted, but
it is hardly true to say, that "il est impossible de rien demeler au
griffonage [de Mlle. de Scudery], sinon que Mme. de Rambouillet etait
belle." This is not quite just, and to avenge the great Madeleine for
being called a _pecore_, I will quote, what M. Magne surprisingly omits,
part of the character of Cleomire, the pseudonym of Mme. de Rambouillet
in _Cyrus_:
She is tall and graceful. The delicacy of her complexion is beyond
expression. The eyes of Cleomire are so admirably beautiful that no
painter has ever been able to do justice to them. All her passions
are in subjection to her good sense.
This might be more precise, but the touch about the eyes is helpful.
Chapelain celebrated (in 1666, just after her death)
Cet air, cette douceur, cette grace, ce port,
Ce chef d'oeuvre admire du Midi jusqu'au Nord;
And Tallemant, always the best reporter, speaks of the permanent beauty
of her complexion, which she would never consent to touch artificially.
The only concession to fashion which she made in old age was to rouge
her lips, which had turned blue. Tallemant wished she would not do even
this. When she was very old, her head shook with a sort of palsy; this
was attributed to her having indulged too much in the eating of pounded
ambergris, but perhaps a more obvious reason could be found for so
natural an infirmity.
In an age so troubled and so turbulent as that of Henri IV, public
attention was concentrated in wonderment on the serene beatitude of the
Rambouillets. "So rest, for ever rest, O princely pair!" the admiring
court might be conceived as saying to a couple so dignified, so calm and
so unaffected in their attachment. "Tout le monde admire la magnifique
entente, a travers leur vie limpide, du Marquis et de la Marquise."
Their limpid life--that was the just description of a mode of conduct so
rare in that age, and at that social elevation, as to be relatively
unique. What existences the reverse of limpid, lives tortured and turbid
and mud-stained, do memoir-writers of that time, the Segrais and the
Tallemants, reveal on all sides of them! Both were gifted, and each was
persuaded of the excellence of learning and literature, although in
talents the wife considerably surpassed the husband. Madame de
Rambouillet was versed in several literatures. She spoke Italian and
Spanish, the two fashionable languages of the time, to perfection. She
loved all beautiful objects, and not one of the fine arts failed to find
eager appreciation from her. In order to enjoy the sources of poetic
distinction, she taught herself Latin, that she might read Virgil in the
original. But she soon relaxed these studies, which might easily have
landed her in pedantry. She became the mother of seven children, to
whose bringing-up she gave strict attention. She found that her health,
although her constitution was good, needed care. Perhaps she gave way, a
little, to an amiable Italian indolence; at all events, the
strenuousness which her early years had threatened subsided into a
watchful, hospitable, humorous and memorable hospitality. If there could
be rank maintained in such matters, Madame de Rambouillet would probably
take place as the most admirable hostess in history.
But, to entertain, a house was needed. The old Marquis de Pisani had
bought, in 1599, a ramshackle dwelling, close to the Louvre, in the Rue
Saint-Thomas, which became, at his death, the property of his daughter.
In 1604 when, it is to be noted, she was only sixteen years of age, she
pulled it down and built the famous Hotel on the site.
Young as she was, it is certain that the Marquise was herself the
architect of the Hotel de Rambouillet. A professional architect had been
called in to rebuild the house, but when he submitted his designs to her
they dissatisfied her by their conventionality. Tallemant describes
them--a saloon on one side, a bedroom on the other, a staircase in the
middle, nothing could be more poor. Moreover, the courtyard was pinched
in extent and irregular in shape. One evening, after she had been
dreaming over the drawings, the young Marquise called out "Quick! some
paper! I have thought of what I want!" She had been trained to use a
pencil, and she immediately drew out an elevation, which the builders
followed point by point. Her design was so bold, so original, and so
handsome, that the house made a sensation in Paris. The Queen-Mother,
when she built the Luxembourg, sent her architects to study the Hotel
de Rambouillet before they started their plans.
In all this matter of the foundation of the Hotel and the opening of the
famous _salon_, M. Magne has made considerable discoveries, which should
be distinguished from much in his charming books in which he has had no
choice but to follow earlier published authorities. He has made
excellent use of the _Inventaires_ of 1652, 1666 and 1671, to which
attention had, however, already been drawn by M. Charles Sauze. But a
ground plan of the Hotel de Rambouillet, from a contemporary map of
Paris by Gomboust, is less known, and a reproduction of this is a
singular aid to the reader of M. Magne's _Voiture_. We see that it stood
actually next door to the famous Hotel de Chevreuse, in comparison with
which, in its sparkling newness, in its slated turrets and its charming
combinations of pale stone and salmon-coloured brick, it seemed an
expression of the new age in a triumphant defiance of the old. From both
houses could be seen, just across the quiet Rue Saint-Thomas, and over a
strip of waste ground, the massive contour of the Louvre; a great
garden, on the west side, stretched away behind the house, down to the
corner of the Rue de Richelieu.
M. Magne has discovered that M. and Mme. de Rambouillet took up their
abode in their new house early in 1607; this fixes what has hitherto
been quite vague, the commencement of the Hotel de Rambouillet. But the
Marquise was still only nineteen years of age, and it would be a mistake
to suppose that, precocious as people were in those days, she began at
once to exercise her celebrated hospitality, or to fill the rooms with
tapestry, statues and men of wit. This came on gradually and naturally,
without any violence of forethought. It has been suggested that the
Marquise founded her _salon_, or, less pompously, began to gather
congenial friends about her, in 1613. It is difficult to say on what
documents this exact date is based. Her known aversion from Louis XIII,
and her growing preference for receiving her friends at home over
appearing in a crowd at court--both of them, doubtless, symptoms of her
personal delicacy, which shrank from the suspicion of roughness--were
probably emphasized after the murder of Concini in 1617, when the great
nobles, who had defied the weak regency of Marie de Medicis, boldly
swept back into Paris. Doubtless this was the time when Madame de
Rambouillet began to practise a more cloistered virtue among the
splendour and fragility of her treasures, and first intimated to noble
and elegant friends, who were scandalized by the rowdiness of the
Louvre, that here was an asylum where they might discuss poetry for
hours on the velvet of her incrusted couches, or walk, in solemn ranks,
among the parterres of her exquisite walled garden.
The character of pedantry and preciosity which the Hotel afterwards
incurred, is not to be traced in any of its original features. In its
early years there was no atmosphere of "intellectual beatitude" about
it. But that a certain intellectual standard was set up from the very
first it is impossible to question. From the compliments of the earliest
inmates of the Hotel to the eulogistic epitaphs which were scattered on
the hearse of the Marquise, all her devotees agree in celebrating her
passionate love of literature. Clumsy phrases, rude expressions, the
coarseness of a language still in process of purification, were a
positive distress to her; and Tallemant has a droll anecdote about the
agitation into which she was thrown by the use of so vulgar a word as
"scurvy," _teigneux_, in an epigram which was being read to her. With
these tendencies, she was peculiarly fitted to welcome to her intimacy
the man who of all others was at that time most occupied with the task
of correcting and clarifying the French language. An inevitable
attraction must have drawn Malherbe to the doors of the Hotel de
Rambouillet.
It would be of interest, and even of some importance, if we could
discover the date at which Malherbe began to frequent the Hotel de
Rambouillet, since there can be little doubt that it was to him that it
owed its intellectual direction. Unfortunately, this is not easy to do.
The poet Racan, whose invaluable notes and anecdotes were adopted by
Tallemant to form the body of the _historiette_ on Malherbe, did not
anticipate how grateful posterity would be for a few dates sprinkled
here and there over his narrative. But the fact that Tallemant here took
the line, so very unusual with him, of adopting somebody else's life of
one of his heroes, can only be accounted for by the double supposition
that Malherbe could not be omitted from his gallery, and yet had quitted
the scene too early for Tallemant to know much about him at first hand.
He must indeed have arrived at the Hotel very soon after its formation,
since he was sixty-two years of age when we suppose it to have begun,
and in 1628 he died. The Duc de Broglie was probably right when he
conjectured that Malherbe was practically the first, and as long as he
lived the foremost, of the literary clan which met in the Chambre Bleue.
Racan, who accompanied and may have introduced the elder poet to the
Hotel de Rambouillet, says that it was "sur les vieux jours de Malherbe"
that the latter had the curious conversation about the proper heroic
name, or poetic pseudonym, which ought to fix all future references to
the Marquise, a conversation which led to his writing an eclogue in
which he calls himself Melibee and his disciple Arcan. I quote
Tallemant, who is quoting Racan:
"The very day that he sketched out this eclogue, fearing that the
name Arthenice [Catherine] if it were used of two persons [for
Racan had addressed Catherine Chabot as Arthenice, in a pastoral]
would make a confusion between those two persons, Malherbe passed
the whole afternoon with Racan turning the name about. All they
could make of it was Arthenice, Eracinte and Carintee. The first of
those they considered the prettiest, but as Racan was using this
also in a pastoral, Malherbe concluded by choosing Rodante."
Unfortunately Madame de Rambouillet, who had plenty of humour, declined
the name of Rodante, which would better have adorned a mouse than a
great lady, and Malherbe threw his consideration for Racan to the
winds. Madame de Rambouillet became for him and remained
Celle pour qui je fis le beau nom d'Arthenice,
and he called her
Cette jeune bergere a qui les destinees
Sembloient avoir donne mes dernieres annees.
We gather that the sound judgment and the exquisite charm of Madame de
Rambouillet attracted Malherbe away from the other _salons_ which he
affected, particularly from those of the Vicomtesse d'Aulchy and of
Madame des Loges. It was the latter lady whose ears the grim poet
soundly boxed in her own house on a celebrated occasion. He was a
formidable guest as well as a tyrant in literature.