character of our marechal-de-camp. Bungener, in his “Voltaire et son
Temps,” illustrates the confusion into which men’s ideas had got upon
the subject of things spiritual and things temporal, by noticing the
affair of the Chevalier de la Barre, in 1766. Amid the accusations
brought against him was one, according to which it was laid to his
charge that he had recited in public a certain filthy ode. He was
condemned to be broken on the wheel, on charges of irreligion, of which
this was one. But the part of the question that must have made Astræa
weep through the bandage with which poets have bound her eyes, was
this, namely, that the author of the obscene ode objected to, Piron,
was then in the reception of a pension from the court; and this pension
had been procured for him by Montesquieu, by way of compensation
for his having lost his seat at the Academy, in consequence of his
having been the author of this very ode. This confusion of rewards
and penalties was enough to make Justice dash her brains out with
her own scales. Piron would have been in no wise troubled by such a
catastrophe; the pension from the court enabled him to keep a joyous
table, and that was enough for him.
Duclos was a contemporary and a co-disciple with Piron, in the temple
of philosophy. In 1766, he was at Rome, where he gave such charming
little suppers, that the Sacred College gratefully extended to him the
privileged permission of reading improper books! The philosophers were
then in possession of considerable influence. Marmontel, who was one
of them, was sent to the Bastille, on a certain Friday, in the year
1760. Soon after his arrival, he was supplied with an excellent dinner
_maigre_, the which he ate without thinking of complaining. His servant
was just on the point of addressing himself to the scanty remains, when
lo! an admirable but somewhat irreligious repast, of meat and other
things which come under the denomination of _gras_, and are therefore
forbidden on fast-days, was brought in. The unorthodox banquet was
intended for Marmontel; the more lenten fare was intended for his
servant. For in those days, although philosophers were sent to prison,
their appetites were left to their heretical freedom.
This liberty was allowed by the state, but it was neither sanctioned
nor practised by the Church. The authority of the latter was great
previous to the Revolution. There was then a clerical police, which
looked into the dishes as well as the consciences of the people--of
all degrees. I have somewhere read of a body of this police coming
in collision, during Lent, with the officers of the household of
the Prince of Conti, who were conveying through the streets, from a
neighbouring _rotisseur’s_ to the ducal palace, a supper, through the
covers of which there penetrated an odour which savoured strongly of
something succulent and sinful, of gravy and gravity. Thereupon the
archbishop’s alguazils bade the prince’s men stand and deliver. The
followers of the house of Conti drew their swords in defence of their
rights and sauces. Much of the latter on the side of Conti, and a
little malapert blood on both sides, was spilt, to the edification of
the standers by. Finally, the transgressors of the Church law were
dragged to prison. The damaged repast remained on the pavé, for the
benefit of poor souls who assumed ecclesiastical licence to devour it
without fear of damnation; and the servants of Conti were left in damp
cells to meditate at their leisure upon the argument which Dean Swift
at another period had thus cast into verse:--
“Who can declare, with common sense,
That bacon fried gives God offence?
Or that a herring hath the charm
Almighty vengeance to disarm?
Wrapt up in Majesty divine,
Doth He regard on what we dine?”
To pass from cooks and church to courtesy and coachmen, I may here
speak of a certain Girard who was known in Paris, during the Terror,
for his love of what he called liberty and good living. In his early
days he was a very independent coachman, and was just on the point of
concluding an engagement with an aristocratic old countess, when he
remarked--“Before I finally close with madame, I should like to be
informed for whom madame’s horses are to make way in the streets.”
“For every one,” said the countess. “On questions of precedence, I am
not difficult; if it is yielded to me, I take it; if not, I wait.” “In
that case,” said the aristocratic John, “I shall not suit, madame, as
I myself never draw aside except for the princes of the blood!” Now
this great personage in livery was no other than the Girard who became,
in 1793, the “public accuser,” and who sent to the scaffold those same
nobles who had not been sufficiently noble for him in 1780.
Upon the matter of what became nobility, however, there was always
much confusion in the “aristocratic idea” of the highest continental
families. Thus who, in contemplating the famous Princess des Ursins,
seated among the most honoured at the table of the King of Spain, would
dream of her writing the following sentence in one of her letters to
Madame de Maintenon? “It is I who have the honour of taking from his
majesty his _robe de chambre_, when he gets into bed; and I am there to
give it to him again, with his slippers, when he rises in the morning.”
The flattery paid to royalty in France was never more prodigally
offered than at the period when “wit and philosophy” were beginning to
undermine the throne. We have an instance of this in what happened when
the queen of Louis XV. arrived, in 1765, at Ferté-sous-Jouarre, where
she intended to sup and sleep. She was met beneath an avenue of trees,
outside the town, by the authorities, who offered to her, according to
custom, bread and wine. The queen took a portion of the bread, broke
it in two, and ate thereof, as well as of some grapes, sipping also the
wine; to the delight and edification of the admiring multitude. The
authorities were so struck by the act of condescension on the part of
the royal personage, that they made record of the fact in the register
of the town council. And this they did in such terms as to cause a
commentator to remark, that they could hardly have said more, had her
majesty been a genuine goddess.
After all, this sort of homage had fallen off, in 1765, from what it
had been two centuries before. When Louis XII. encountered his bride,
Mary of England, outside Abbeville, he clapped his feeble hands, and
wished the devil might seize him (and he _did_ die soon after) if she
were not more beautiful than report had painted her! At the gates of
Abbeville, the ill-assorted pair were met by the Bishop of Amiens and
the municipal magistrates, to welcome them to the evening banquet ere
they betook themselves to repose. The bishop presented the new Queen of
France with a piece of the Real Cross. “The _mayeurs_ offered a gift,
the nature of which brings it within my subject.” The gift was usual
whenever king and queen appeared at the portals of the old monkish
city. It consisted of three tuns of wine, three fat oxen, and fifteen
quarters of oats, three pecks of which were presented to the astonished
lady on bended knee, and in a measure painted light blue, and covered
with golden fleurs-de-lys. A complimentary address to the king crowned
all. “Sire,” said the chief local magistrate, “you may now conclude
your marriage in this our good city, without any fear of committing sin
thereby; for, in the year 1409 were reformed, as abuses, those synodal
statutes by which men in our city were forbidden to live with their
wives, during three whole mortal days after the wedding!” The monarch
entered and sat down with his consort to a repast which rendered
both ill for more than double the period just mentioned. Louis had
well-nigh died, like La Matrie, the infidel philosopher at Berlin, of
an indigestion. Had he done so, it might have been said of him, as the
infidel Prussian king said of La Matrie: “He was a _gourmand_, but he
died like a philosopher; let us have no more anxiety about him.”
Frederic himself loved philosophy more than faith, and philosophical
though profligate kings, more than he did “Most Christian” or “Most
Catholic” monarchs. He was wont, therefore, to laugh at the story
of the famished beggar who, standing near the statue of Henri IV.
on the Pont Neuf, solicited charity of a friend of Voltaire who was
passing by. “In the name of God,” said the mendicant. The student of
philosophy was deaf. “In the name of the Holy Virgin!”--“In the name
of the saints!” The appeal was unheeded. “In the name of Henri IV!”
exclaimed the petitioned; and forthwith the Voltairean put his hand
in his pocket, giving a crown-piece, in the name of a philosophical
profligate, while he refused a sou when asked for in the name of God.
But, as Frederic used to say, “How divine is philosophy!” In his mouth
the exclamation was like the well-known cry of Marcel, the ecstatic
dancing-master: “Que de choses dans un minuit!”
There is a story told in connexion with this same great Frederic
which is a good table trait in its way. Joachim von Ziethen was one
of the bravest of the generals who stood by Frederic the Great in
victory or defeat. He was the son of a poor gentleman, and had little
education save what he could pick up in barracks, camps, and battle
fields, in all of which he figured in early youth. If his head was
not over-ballasted with learning, his heart was well freighted with
that love for God, of which some portion, as the dismissed lecturer
on Ecclesiastical History in King’s College tells us, is in almost
every individual without exception, and forms the sheet-anchor which
shall enable him to ride through the storms which keep him from his
desired haven of rest. He became the terror of the foes of Prussia;
but among his comrades, he was known only as “good father Ziethen.”
He was remarkable for his swiftness at once of resolve and execution,
and in remembrance as well as illustration thereof, a sudden surprise
is spoken of by an astonished Prussian as “falling on one like Ziethen
from an ambush.”
Now, old Ziethen, after the triumph achieved in the Seven Years’ War,
was always a welcome guest at the table of Frederic the Second. His
place was ever by the side of the royal master whose cause he had more
than once saved from ruin; and he only sat lower at table when there
happened to be present some foreign royal mediocrity, illustriously
obscure. On one occasion, he received a command to dine with the king
on Good Friday. Ziethen sent a messenger to his sovereign, stating that
it was impossible for him to wait on his majesty, inasmuch as that
he made a point of never omitting to take the sacrament on that day,
and of always spending the subsequent portion of the day in private
meditation.
A week elapsed before the scrupulous old soldier was again invited
to the royal dinner-table. At length he appeared in his old place,
and merry were the guests, the king himself setting an example of
uproarious hilarity. The fun was running fast and furious,--it was
at its very loudest, when Frederic, turning to Ziethen, smacked him
familiarly on the back, and exclaimed, “Well, grave old Ziethen! how
did the supper of Good Friday agree with your sanctimonious stomach?
Have you properly digested the veritable body and blood?” At this
blasphemy, and amid the thunders of pealing laughter, the saluting
artillery of the delighted guests, Ziethen leaped to his feet, and
after shaking his grey hairs with indignation, and silencing the
revellers with a cry, as though they had been dogs, he turned to the
godless master of the realm, and said--words, if not precisely these,
certainly and exactly to this effect:--
“I shun no danger;--your majesty knows it. My life has been always
ready for sacrifice, when my country and the throne required it. What
I was, _that_ I am; and my head I would place on the block at this
moment, if the striking of it off could purchase happiness for my
king. But there is One who is greater than I, or any one here; and
He is a greater sovereign than you who mock Him here from the throne
in Berlin. He it is whose precious blood was shed for the salvation
of all mankind. On Him, that Holy One, my faith reposes: He is my
consoler in life, my hope in presence of death; and I _will not_ suffer
His name to be derided and attacked where I am by, and have voice to
protest against it. Sir, if your soldiers had not been firm in this
faith, they would not have gained victories for you. If you mock this
faith, and jeer at those who cling to it, you only lend a hand to bury
yourself and the state in ruin.” After a pause he added, looking the
while on the mute king:--“What I have spoken is God’s truth; receive it
graciously.”
Frederic was the patron of Voltaire, who had dared to say at his own
table that what it had taken God and twelve Apostles to build up, one
man (Voltaire) would destroy. But Frederic was now, for the moment,
more deeply moved by what had been uttered by the unphilosophical
Ziethen than by anything that had ever fallen from the brilliant but
irreligious Voltaire. He rose, flung his left arm over Ziethen’s
shoulder, offered his right hand to the brave old Christian general,
and exclaimed:--“Ziethen, you are a happy man! Would that I could be
like you! Hold fast by your faith; and I will respect even where I
cannot believe. What has occurred shall never happen again.”
A deep and solemn silence followed, and the dinner was spoiled,
according to the guests, to whom the king gave the signal to disperse
long before their appetites had been satisfied. Ziethen was preparing
to withdraw with the rest, but Frederic, taking him by the hand,
whispered:--“You, my friend, come with me to my cabinet.”
This anecdote was told by Bishop von Eylert to Frederic William III.
That king, who had never heard of the incident, pronounced on it a
three-piled eulogium of “excellent, pleasing, and instructive,” adding
thereto a natural desire to know what passed between the king and
Ziethen in the cabinet. It were doubtless well worth knowing, but I
have sought for any notice of it, and all in vain. The good bishop, as
he deserved, was invited to remain at Sans Souci, to supper. “I excused
myself,” says the prelate, in his memoir of the king, “as having only a
common upper coat on.” The king replied, smilingly, “I know very well
that you have got a dollar and a dress-coat; you are the same person in
either. I want _you_, not your coat; so, go in.”
The Prussian soldiers, in the days of the great Frederic, used to be
allowed unlimited liberty in providing themselves with food in an
enemy’s country. The like permission, but somewhat enlarged, was given
to the Croat soldiers, under the name of foraging for “supper;” but
in that permission they included every meal. They are as ready at it
as Abyssinians; they cut a slice out of the first beast they fall in
with, salt it, put it between the saddle and the horse’s back, gallop
till it gets warm, and then eat it with Croat appetite. The sportsmen
of Dauphiny eat beccaficoes after much the same fashion; they pluck
the bird, sprinkle it with pepper and salt, carry it on their hat to
dry in the air, and eat it with relish for supper, without any further
cooking. They declare it is far better so than when roasted.
Celebrated as the “petits soupers” of the French were during the last
century, they were equalled in brilliancy, and perhaps surpassed in
popularity, by those given in Paris by the Duchess of Kingston. The
adventures of that very adventurous lady rendered her a favourite with
our lively neighbours. When a rustic Devonshire beauty,--wayward,
capricious, ignorant, and seductive, Elizabeth Chudleigh was suddenly
transplanted to the court of the Princess of Wales, as maid of honour.
She there captivated the youthful Duke of Hamilton, returned his
affection, and accepted the offer of his hand. They loved intensely,
quarrelled furiously, and were reconciled warmly; the enemies of both
toiled incessantly to prevent the marriage, and each was daily told of
the alleged infidelities of the other. One of these stories excited
the ardent beauty to such rage that she dismissed her ducal lover,
and in the whirlwind of her wrath gave her hand to Captain Hervey,
brother of the Earl of Bristol. She married in haste, and repented
quite as hastily. She hated her husband before they left the church
together; and after six months of the most active domestic warfare,
the ill-assorted pair separated by mutual consent. She went abroad to
find solace for her disappointment, and was heartily welcomed at the
courts of St. Petersburg, Prussia, and Saxony; she was the favoured
guest of Catherine II., and of the great Frederic, at Berlin; and
no electoral banquet took place at Dresden without being enlivened
by her presence and her wit. When she accepted the invitation to
resume her place at the English court, the reception she met with was
enthusiastic: she played whist with the men, and she drove four-in-hand
as if she had been the born daughter of a charioteer, brought up to her
father’s business. Her accomplishments won the heart of the simplest
of dukes and the gentlest of men, his grace of Kingston, and as an
ecclesiastical court, in 1769, pronounced her marriage with Captain
Hervey (now Earl of Bristol) null and void, she speedily espoused her
ducal admirer, while her former husband bestowed an earl’s coronet
on a second wife. The duke’s property was not entailed, and the
duchess spent it with such reckless prodigality, that his grace was
fairly frightened into consumption and death; and in 1773 she was a
beautiful widow, with the large remnant of the duke’s fortune in her
possession--as long as she did not marry again. Away she went to Rome,
sailed up the Tiber in her own yacht, entertained the pope (Ganganelli)
Clement XIV. at breakfast, dinner, and supper, and kept up such a state
that the world had never beheld such extravagant splendour since the
days of the most profuse and profligate of queens: the heirs of the
duke, seeing their inheritance fast melting away, instituted against
her the famous suit for bigamy, on the ground that the ecclesiastical
court which broke her first marriage had no power to do so. To meet her
accusers she hurried to England, where she considerably startled the
modest among our grandmothers by her Sunday amusements, and the daily
display afforded by the very lowest of dresses. But as she gave most
splendid dinners she had no lack of friends, and few men could find it
in their hearts to abandon a woman in distress, whose kitchen fires
were never extinguished, who gave her guests green peas at Christmas,
and whose commonest beverage was imperial tokay. The House of Lords
judged her case, heard her defence, and pronounced her second marriage
bigamy by overthrowing the decree of the ecclesiastical court with
regard to her first union. To avoid the vulgar penalty she immediately
fled, crossed the Channel in a storm, and proceeded to Munich, where
she was royally entertained, especially as the law could not touch the
property bequeathed her by the Duke of Kingston. The courtesy title of
duchess was still allowed her, and the Elector of Bavaria added to it
that of Countess of Warth. Great nobles gave entertainments in her
honour, which lasted, for days, and ended with a ball, a banquet, and,
instead of common-place fireworks, the storming of a town at midnight.
Poor nobles vied with each other for her smiles and the life-interest
of her possessions; but as she had once been nearly entrapped by a
Greek Prince Warta, who turned out to be the son of an ass-driver in
Trebizond, and who committed suicide in prison, she made and kept her
resolution to be her own mistress for the future, and not that of
either count or kaiser.
In France, where she ultimately resided, she purchased the estate
of St. Assize au Port, which had formerly belonged to the Duke of
Orleans, the father of “Egalité.” She paid down a million and a half
of francs for it, and sold seven thousand francs’ worth of rabbits
from it, during the first week of her residence there. A fricasee of
the duchess’s rabbits was, for a long time, the chief dish at all
the _guinguettes_ round Paris. Her own great suppers were famous for
their refinement and luxury. She was a lover of good living, a GOURMET
rather than a GOURMANDE; an epicure of taste, but not a glutton; and
the gastronomic art never could boast of a more liberal patronage than
that she bestowed upon it, especially in her Paris residence; where her
table, her wit, her dinners, and her diamonds, made of her, for a time,
the most remarkable personage in the capital. She died suddenly, of the
rupture of a blood-vessel, in 1788, and was completely forgotten before
that year had also expired.
I have mentioned that our eccentric countrywoman had purchased the
property of the Duke of Orleans; and that reminds me how fatal the
table, and particularly the supper-table, has been to the dukes of
that house. Thus Philippe, the brother of Louis XIV., quarrelled with
the latter touching the marriage which the king wished to conclude
between one of his own natural daughters and the duke’s son. Orleans,
fevered and flushed, went to sup “with the ladies of St. Cloud.” He
had not long before eaten heavily and drunk deeply at dinner; and at
this second meal he was fatally stricken with apoplexy. The king said
he was sorry, and having thus far given way to his grief, he sat down
with Madame de Maintenon to rehearse the overture of an opera. This
duke’s son and successor gave suppers, at which his infamous daughter,
the Duchess de Berri, presided, and admission to which was purchased
by the candidate making simple denial of his belief in a God! The fate
of both had something retributive in it. The Duchess de Berri, who had
privately married a profligate and ugly officer of her guards, named De
Riou, sought to overcome her father’s wrathful refusal to acknowledge
the union, by giving him a splendid supper _al-fresco_ on the terrace
of Meudon, on the 13th May, 1709. The evening proved cold and damp, and
the duchess caught there a fever brought on by a chill, over-feeding,
and deep drinking, of which she died. Fourteen years afterwards, the
sire who, at sixteen, had all the experience in vice of a man of sixty,
was dining with the Duchess of Phalaria, his last mistress, when he
was taken ill. The physician who was summoned enjoined abstinence
immediate and complete. “Wait till to-morrow,” said the duke, “I will
enjoy myself to-night.” And accordingly, the exemplary pair supped
together, and the lady was in the act of telling the duke one of her
lively stories. As she went on, the glass slid from his hand, and his
head sank upon her shoulder. She thought he was asleep, and went on
with her story; but he to whom she was telling it was stone-dead. The
son of the regent duke was in every respect unlike his father. He ate
_his_ last supper with the Jansenist fathers of the Geneviève,--symbol
of his general habits and the society he kept. _His_ son was the father
of _Egalité_, and at the time of his death (1785) was popular with the
lower classes at Paris for the nightly suppers which he distributed
to them, and which consisted of bread and wine, with medicine for
those who needed it. It was a distribution made not charitably, but
politically. Of the last meal of Egalité, before he went to execution,
I only know that it was a breakfast, and not a supper, and that he
both ate and drank heartily. Misfortune quite as little disturbed the
appetite of the Louis Philippe of our own days. During his flight from
Paris he never forgot the hour of supper or dinner; and when “William
Smith” landed at Newhaven, the first thing he asked for was--something
to eat. I notice these table traits, simply because the Orleanist
historians always speak contemptuously of Louis XVI. eating, with
appetite, in open court during his trial. The stomach of Orleans was
ever as ready as that of Bourbon.