ten years of his life were kept on a level of unruffled dignity on the
one side and on the other. It is evident that the Marquise was
predisposed to accept _la Doctrine_ which Malherbe, with so splendid a
force and pride, was about to impose upon his countrymen. No man of
letters has lived, in any country, who was more possessed than he by the
necessity of watching over the purity of language, of cultivating in
prose and verse a simple, lucid, and logical style, of removing from the
surface of literature, by an arrogant discipline, all traces of
obscurity, pomposity and looseness. He held the honour of the French
language above all other obligations, and the stories of his sacrificing
questions of personal interest, and even affection, to his passion for
correct diction, for a noble manner of writing and speaking, are
eloquent of the austere and dry genius of this masterful rather than
charming poet, who, nevertheless, had so profound and so lasting an
influence on French letters. Such a man as this, fanatically possessed
by an abstract ambition, needs the sympathy of a wise and beneficent
woman, and the old Malherbe, in the twilight of his days, found such an
Egeria in Catherine de Rambouillet. It was in the Hotel that the famous
discussions on the value, selection, and meaning of words, on nobility
in eloquence, on purity and force in versification, first took place,
and the heat from them radiated through France. The new era of style
found its cradle in the Chambre Bleue.
But what was this Blue Room, this mysterious and azure grot in which the
genius of French classic poetry went through its transformation? There
was not much mystery about it. It was a room, deep in the magnificence
of the Hotel, where the Marquise was in the habit of receiving the
familiar visits of her best friends. The novelty of it was its colour;
all other _salons_ in Paris being at that time painted red or drab. Out
of the Blue Room there opened a more secret retreat, her _cabinet_ or
_alcove_, where she could withdraw from all companionship, and spend her
time in reading or meditating. The furniture of the whole Hotel de
Rambouillet was on a scale of opulent splendour, but the rarity of the
objects brought together was concentrated in the _cabinet_, which was,
as M. Magne puts it, a sort of altar which the Marquise raised to
herself. Every object in it was fragile, brilliant, and precious. In the
days when Malherbe frequented the Hotel, it is probable that no inner
room existed. Tallemant gives us the very odd history of what led to its
formation. The Marquise in her youth was active and ready to expose
herself to the weather, but about 1623 she began to be threatened by an
_incommodite_, which made her unable to bear exposure to heat. She had
been in the habit of taking long walks in Paris, but one summer's day,
when the sun suddenly came out while she was strolling at La
Cour-la-Reine, on the Champs Elysees, she nearly fainted, and was
threatened with erysipelas. The following winter, the first time that
she drew up her chair to read by the fire, the same phenomenon came on.
She was now divided between perishing with cold or suffering miseries of
heat, and she therefore invented, taking the idea from the Spanish
"alcove," a little supplementary room, where she could sit close to her
friends, while they gathered round the hearth, and yet not be smitten by
the flames. In 1656, in the great winter, we hear of her, now an
elderly woman, lying on her bed, heaped over with furs, but not daring
to have a fire in sight.
Her energy did not leave her because of this disability. The
letter-writers of the period describe her extraordinary activity. She
had a great love of pretty and elaborate practical jokes which were in
the taste of the time. Hers, however, were distinguished by the fact
that they were never indecent and never ill-natured. But when an idea
occurred to Madame de Rambouillet, she rested not until the wild scheme
was accomplished. Voiture and Tallemant are full of instances of her
fertility. One instance out of many was the passion which she expended
in making a cascade in the park at Rambouillet, to startle a party of
guests. The water had to be brought up from the little tarn of
Montorgueil, and the Marquise superintended every spade and every pipe.
Carried on by her enthusiastic presence, a team of workmen laboured
night and day to complete the prodigious plaything, conducting their
ingenious hydraulics by the flare of torches. I could fill pages with
the proofs of her gaiety, her ingenuity, the amazing freshness and
vivacity of her mind, but the reader can turn to the original sources
for them. It may be suggested that, while the various independent
authorities really confirm the legend in its outline, when they tell the
same story, it will generally be found that Tallemant tells it more
naturally and more exactly than Segrais or Voiture. It is also to be
remembered that it was Tallemant who observed longest and most closely,
and brought least suspicion of vanity to bear on his relation. There is
a phrase buried somewhere in the vast tissue of the _Historiettes_ which
deserves to be better known. Speaking incidentally of the Marquise de
Rambouillet, Tallemant betrays that she was really the source of all his
inspiration: "c'est d'elle que je tiens la plus grande et la meilleure
partie de ce que j'ai escrit et que j'escriray dans ce livre." This
gives his statements their peculiar authority with regard to that Blue
Room, which he elsewhere calls "le rendez-vous de ce qu'il y avait de
plus galant a la Cour, et de plus joly parmy les beaux-esprits du
siecle." He quite frequently introduces an anecdote with the words "J'ay
ouy dire a Mme. de Rambouillet."
It would therefore be ungrateful to speak of the Hotel de Rambouillet
without paying a tribute to the strange quality of Tallemant des Reaux.
French criticism, in applauding his industry, has hardly done justice to
the talent, almost the genius, of this extraordinary man. With an
unrivalled gift of observation, he combined that clear objective sense
of the value of little things, which is so valuable in a memoir-writer,
and he is the very prince of those biographers to whom nothing regarding
the subjects of their art seems common or unclean. He has the keen eye
for detail of his English contemporary, John Aubrey, and his
_Historiettes_ are really, in the sense of Aubrey, _Minutes of Lives_.
But Tallemant has much more design in his work, and a broader sense of
the relation of moral and intellectual values. Saint-Simon, who was a
child when Tallemant died, has more passion, a more impetuous and
broader sweep of style, and a more intelligent appreciation of the scene
of life. It was not for Tallemant des Reaux to paint "des grands
fresques historiques." He is as trivial and as picturesque as Boswell,
as crude as Pepys, and, like them both, he is completely indifferent to
what other people may find scandalous. He moved in the best society, and
he was of it; but in his lifetime no one seems to have paid him much
attention. Voiture was often in the centre of the stage at the Hotel de
Rambouillet, and what answered in those days to limelight followed him
whenever he made one of his brilliant appearances; Tallemant was a
shadowy super, hanging about in the wings, but he was always there.
He had the best right in the world to be there. Gedeon Tallemant was a
close kinsman of the Marquis, whose sister, Marie de Rambouillet, had
married the biographer's father, a Huguenot banker of Bordeaux, head of
one of the best provincial families of the day. Gedeon was born at La
Rochelle in 1619, and was therefore thirty years younger than his
cousin's wife, the famous chatelaine of the Hotel de Rambouillet, whom
he adored.[2] When he came to Paris, about 1637, her coterie was already
at its height, but he was immediately admitted to it, and no doubt began
no less immediately to ask questions and to take notes. He had every
possible opportunity; his brother and a cousin were members of the new
French Academy: his father was a Maecenas to Corneille and others: he
himself married (in January, 1646) his cousin Elizabeth de Rambouillet,
a union which made him the familiar of La Fontaine and La Sabliere. In
1650 he bought the chateau and estate of Plessis-Rideau, in Touraine,
and by letters-patent changed the name to Les Reaux, which he then
adopted as a surname. Here he entertained his lifelong friends--the
associates of the Hotel, and other men of high professional rank, Patru,
Ablancourt, the Pere Rapin. He knew absolutely everybody; he was
adorably indiscreet; and those who associated with him perceived in him
only a wonderful talker (Maucroix says that he "racontait aussy bien
qu'homme de France"), and a lover of poetry who started writing an
_OEdipe_ before Corneille. What few of them knew was that this
obliging friend and graceful companion was putting down in an immense
MS. all the anecdotes, all the intrigues, all the tricks of manner, all
the traits of character, of the multitude of his polite acquaintances.
He has left more than 500 of his little highly finished portraits of
people he knew, and he knew everyone in that age and place worth
knowing.
It is doubtful at what particular time he wrote the _Historiettes_. He
was composing, or perhaps revising, part of them in 1657, but some must
be later, and many may be earlier in date than that; it is probable that
he ceased writing in 1665. He has been accused of being a spiteful
chronicler of the vices of the great, and he has been charged with a
love of looseness. But his own description is more just: "Je pretends
dire le bien et le mal, sans dissimuler la verite." He writes with an
air of humorous malice, pleased to draw the cloak off the limbs of
hypocrisy, but not moved by any strong moral indignation. Like Pepys, he
enjoyed giving a disinterested picture of the details of ordinary
private life, but was rather more cynically amused by them than
scandalized. He wrote, or at least intended to write, _Memoires de la
regence d'Anne d'Autriche,_ but this has totally disappeared, and we
need not regret it. Gedeon Tallemant is amply immortalized by the
_Historiettes_, which fill ten closely printed volumes in the excellent
edition of MM. Monmerque and Paulin of Paris. They are like the work of
some brilliant Dutch painter of sordid interiors. He is not always well
inspired. He says nothing more adequate about Pascal than that he was
"ce garcon qui inventa une machine admirable pour l'arithmetique," but
Pascal was hardly of his world. In 1685 Tallemant became a Catholic,
converted by the Pere Rapin, and, having outlived all his friends, he
died, probably in November, 1692, leaving a huge MS., the principal
subject of which is an analysis of the society that met within the Hotel
de Rambouillet.
At his death that MS. vanished, "as rare things will." It turned up
again in a library at Montigny-Lencoup in 1803. We may note, as a
curious coincidence, that while the publication of Evelyn's _Diary_
dates from 1818, and while the deciphering of Pepys began in 1819, it
was in 1820, that Chateaugiron set to work at copying out the
_Historiettes_, which were not published until 1835. Three of the most
important MS. memoirs of the seventeenth century were thus independently
examined for the first time at practically the same moment of the
nineteenth. Each publication was an event in literary history.
No such concealment, no such late discovery, has marked the course of
Voiture, whose letters and poems were published by his nephew Pinchesne
in 1650, only two years after the poet's death. In this remarkable
miscellany, which has been incessantly reprinted, and which forms one of
the recognized lesser classics of France, we find ourselves breathing
the very atmosphere of the Hotel de Rambouillet. It is, indeed, amusing
to reflect that, for fifteen years before her death, the Marquise and
all her circle possessed, and shared with a wide public, this elaborate
body of evidence as to their friendships, their tastes, and their
amusements. In the _OEuvres_ of Voiture, reprinted at least seventeen
times during the lifetime of the Marquise, the world at large was
admitted to the conversations of the Blue Room, and it eagerly responded
to the invitation. There was something about the supple genius of
Voiture, at once daring and discreet, apparently tearing every veil off
an intimacy, and yet in fact wrapping it in an impenetrable gauze of
mystery, which made him the ideal revealer to excite and baffle
curiosity, so that though he tells so much, as he stands at the top of
the stairs of the Hotel and takes the town into his confidence, yet he
leaves plenty of things untold, to be whispered into the ears of
posterity by Tallemant and Conrart.
The father of Voiture was a shopkeeper who sold wine at the sign of the
Chapeau de Roses at Amiens, and there his son Vincent was born in 1595.
The author of _Alcidalis et Zelide_, was therefore the contemporary of
Herrick and of George Herbert. If the last-mentioned had not rejected
"the painted pleasures of a Court-life" for the retirements of a saint,
he might have been the English Voiture, with his charming gifts and
ingenious graces. The year 1626, which saw Herbert adopt the solemn
vocation of a priest, is probably that in which Voiture, introduced by
Chardebonne, took up his station for the rest of his life, as principal
literary oracle and master of the gaieties in the Hotel de Rambouillet.
His father was honestly supplying wine to the Queen-Mother, Marie de
Medicis, and there was no question in his son's case, as in that of some
others, of doubtful or partial nobility. Vincent Voiture was frankly and
openly a _bourgeois_, admitted into that strictly guarded aristocracy
because of his abundant talents, his wit, his pleasantness, his
delicious social qualities, and also because it was part of the scheme
of the Marquise de Rambouillet to break down the boredom of the
exclusive privilege of rank for its own sake.
The main principle of the Hotel was a study of the art of how to
behave. The rules of _la bienseance_ were strictly laid down there,
after close discussion among persons of light and leading. There was a
strong resistance made to the roughness of the country noble, to the
awkwardness of the ordinary citizen, to the inky fingers of the pedant,
to the slovenly petticoat, the disordered wig, the bespattered boot. The
attention of both sexes was persistently called to these matters of
behaviour and _tenue_, which had an importance at that date which we may
easily, in our twentieth-century intolerance, ridicule and ignore. We
see the comic side of this extreme solicitude about dress and ceremony,
etiquette and behaviour, in such a book as Furetiere's amusing _Roman
Bourgeois_ (1666), but we may see the seriousness, the stately value of
it, in the tragedies of Corneille and the maxims of La Rochefoucauld.
The school of _la politesse_ became that in which every talent must
graduate, however grave its after-labours were to be. Even the solemn
Baillet, writing the life of no less dignified a person than Descartes,
mentions that the philosopher passed, like all other well-bred lads,
"aux promenades, au jeu et aux autres divertissements qui font
l'occupation des personnes de qualite et des honnetes gens du siecle."
In this school, the elegant and supple Voiture, impregnated with the
literature of _Amadis de Gaule_, and with the language of Spanish
chivalry, intimidated by no hyperbole of compliment, capable alike of
plunging into the deep waters and of swimming safe to shore, always on
the verge of absurdity, always gliding down the agreeable side of it,
persistent, subtle, entertaining, extravagant--in this school Voiture
was the triumphant, the unmastered master. His best letters, his best
sonnets, show him to have been able, at his most vibrating moments, to
rise out of this element of billets-doux to better things. He is of all
composers of society verse and prose the lightest and the swiftest, and
we may say to those who sneer at so unique a talent what Madame de
Sevigne said of them in her day: "Tant pis pour ceux qui ne l'entendent
pas!"
If one literary figure is more closely identified with the Hotel de
Rambouillet than Voiture, it must be Chapelain. It is therefore curious
that while M. Magne was preparing his picturesque volumes on the former,
M. Collas should be independently writing the earliest biography of the
latter. These coincidences are odd, but we are accustomed to them; they
show that a subject is "in the air." When Chapelain made his first
appearance at the Hotel, perhaps in 1635, Voiture had long been
installed there. They fell out at first sight, like dog and cat. When
the author of the _Preface de l'Adone_ stumbled over the precious floor,
dressed like a scarecrow, in hunting boots and dirty linen, and made his
clownish obeisance to the Marquise, she shrank a little from him, and
Voiture broke into a scream of elfish laughter. Madame de Rambouillet
never learned to care for Chapelain, and when he made clumsy love to
Mlle. Paulet, "the lioness," the Blue Room shook with mirth. But when
Mlle. Julie became a great personage, and especially as soon as the Duc
de Montausier introduced the pure cultivation of pedantry into the
Hotel, the strong character of Chapelain asserted itself, while the
death of Voiture left him unquestioned in authority. Grotesque as
Chapelain was, he had a wonderful talent for adapting himself to
circumstances, and his conversation, though massive and solemn, had
charm, which even his enemies admitted to be extraordinary. Chapelain
was never on those terms of petted intimacy with his host and hostess
which the insinuating Voiture enjoyed, but he conquered a position of
more genuine respect and esteem.
But to follow M. Collas and M. Magne into the later years of the Hotel,
when Mlle. de Rambouillet gave to the Blue Room a peculiar air of her
own, would be impossible for us, with the limited space at our command.
We must not go further than 1641, the year in which was produced the
celebrated _Guirlande de Julie_. After this point, not merely does the
character of the scene change, and its tone become less pleasing, or at
least less sympathetic, but for the reviewer the abundance of trees
makes the wood itself almost invisible. Here we may point to an example
of the superabundance of French material, which may almost console us
for the comparative dimness and bareness of the contemporary English
landscape. In dealing with this crowded age, M. Magne and M. Collas have
shown a learned adroitness and the happy logic to which scholars of
their race are trained. Of the two, M. Magne is the more vivacious, as
befits the biographer of Voiture. M. Collas has more difficulty in
reconciling us with the tedious and pedantic Chapelain, who,
nevertheless, as the founder of modern criticism and the mainstay of the
infant Academie Francaise, deserved to find a biographer at last. The
worst of it is that while Voiture, dancing-master to the Muses if you
will, and _petit-maitre_ in excelsis, is at least a brisk and highly
diverting personality, poor Chapelain, the typical academician, the
mediocre poet, the spider at the heart of the wide intellectual web of
his time, is not man enough to awaken our vivid sympathies. Moreover, to
conclude on a note of bathos, M. Collas has neglected to append an index
to his vast compendium of facts.
We must therefore refrain from entering the labyrinths of the later
_preciosite_, amusing as they are, and must continue to concentrate our
attention on the clearness, the sweetness, the purity with which the
founder of the Hotel, the great Madame de Rambouillet, throughout her
long life, created an atmosphere of sympathy and unity around her. As
long as she was paramount there, and until the influence of her daughter
and her daughter's husband, together with her own languor, pushed her a
little into the second line, gaiety was in the ascendant at the famous
Hotel. It is needful to assure ourselves of this, because in the later
days it became purely intellectual, and dry in its priggishness. M.
Magne, it is true, attributes this change not so much to the pedantic
Latinism of the Duc de Montausier, and the hair-splitting of the
academicians, as to the decay produced by gaiety itself. In an ingenious
passage he says:
The taste for badinage perverted in Voiture the taste for beauty.
His genius glittered, quivered, frisked and palpitated, and the
smile he wore was ever melting into irony. To depth he deliberately
preferred an elegant futility. He was impregnated with the quality
to which the age had given, in a noble sense, the name of
gallantry. But, in reacting everywhere against vulgar roughness,
the very excess of his effort landed him at last in preciosity.
It never had that deplorable effect upon Madame de Rambouillet herself,
on whose charming figure, swaying like a young pine-tree of the forest,
we must fix our attention, if we would see only what was best in that
remarkable and so vividly French revival of civilization which took
place under Louis XIII. Her purity of conduct was combined with no
uncouth prudery. She refrained from judging others hardly, but she
preserved, without a lapse, her own high standard of behaviour. She had
a lively horror of scandal, and desired that those about her, if they
could not contrive to be virtuous, should at least be discreet. It was
detestable to her to hear the gallants of the court boasting of their
conquests. She said, in her amusing way, that if she herself could ever
have been persuaded to leave the path of propriety, she must have chosen
for a paramour some unctuous and secret prelate, but that she had never
discovered one whom she could trust. It was her temperament, both of
heart and brain, which led her to rejoice in the new spirit of Malherbe,
whose simple, firm and lucid verses responded, after a revel of
romanticism, to her classic craving for harmony and dignity. In Racan's
pastoral poems, she welcomed a recovered love of country pleasures, and
the graceful convention of a shepherd. She liked private letters,
hitherto so pompous, to be composed in such terms that one seemed to
hear the writer's voice chatting at the chimney-corner. Richelieu,
although M. Magne denies the legend of his _Discours sur l'Amour_, used
to come to the Blue Room to have a good laugh with its delightful
occupant, and everyone unbent in her sweet and easy presence. Tallemant
has a story of no less dignified a personage than the Cardinal de La
Valette romping with the Rambouillet children, and discovered by the
Marquise hiding from them under a bed.
The close of the life of this marvellous woman was a sad one. She
outlived all her early friends, even outlived the prestige of her own
Blue Room. Six days after her death, Robinet composed a sort of funeral
ode to her memory, closing with an epitaph, which, as it is little
known, may be given here. It was written in January, 1666:
Ci gist la divine Arthenice,
Qui fut l'illustre protectrice
Des Arts que les neuf Soeurs inspirent aux humains.
Rome luy donna la naissance;
Elle vint retablir en France
La gloire des anciens Romains.
Sa maison, des vertus le temple,
Sert aux particuliers d'un merveilleux exemple,
Et pourrait bien instruire encor les souverains.
This is not very good poetry, but it would be difficult to sum up more
neatly the services of Madame de Rambouillet to France and to
civilization.
MALHERBE AND THE CLASSICAL REACTION[3]