the master’s house, with ten rooms on the ground-floor, eight others on
the first floor, three granaries above, with a dovecote, and three
cellars below; a farmer’s house, a shepherd’s, hay-barns and stables, a
courtyard and fountain, a garden and orchard with over a hundred
fruit-trees, a fish-pond, fifty bee-hives, and two hundred sheep. He
had rebuilt much of this himself, and spent ten thousand francs on the
work; and in laying some new foundations he had put his wife’s and
children’s names below the corner-stone. As to farm management, he
emphatically preferred and advised self-work with hired help, instead
of renting the place on shares or otherwise to a farmer with a useless
family. He gave very judicious rules for sowing, hoeing, harvesting,
etc., and impressed upon his son the profit to be derived from bees,
and the increased value of land of a certain kind, if planted with
young oaks. Work he considered the only condition of happiness, as well
as the road to comfort, and he said he would sooner see his sons
shoemakers than idlers. The family profession was the law, though he
himself in his youth studied medicine, successfully enough in theory,
but not in practice, since, after losing his first patient, his
scruples and disgust ended by forcing him to leave his calling. The
business of a notary public was the one he recommended to his son in
the choice of a profession; his family tradition led him in this
groove, where, indeed, he had been preceded by some of the greatest men
in France.
This choice of a state is so much a matter of custom or of personal
inclination that we must carefully discern between things in the
Courtois family which were models and things of indifference. Their
moral qualities alone are universal types; their local customs, worthy
in their own circumstances, would probably be utterly unfit for a
country and race so different as ours. But Courtois’ native town, of
which he was mayor for nearly twenty years, gives an example less rare
in foreign countries than in either England or the United States—that
of supporting an institution containing an archæological museum, a
botanical collection, and a collection of local zoölogy and mineralogy,
besides a library which occupies a separate building, the whole under
the care of a member of the French Archæological Society, M. Henri
Chrestian—an example which it would be well if our own towns of three
thousand inhabitants (Sault has no more) would be public-spirited
enough to follow. It is not the lack of money that debars small rural
towns of such advantages; they generally contrive to keep three or four
barrooms going, a dancing-hall, a Masonic hall, an annual ball and
supper, half a dozen discreditable places for summer picnics, and other
things either useless and showy or downright disreputable. Instead of
paying money year by year for the gratification of folly and temptation
to vice, and putting money in the pockets of men who deliberately trade
on their fellow-men’s weakness or wickedness, why not pay a
subscription the full benefits of which they reap themselves not for
one day or night only in a year, but every day? Where there _is_ a
library in a small town, what books are most numerous? Trashy novels
vilely illustrated, and Saturday newspapers with their ignoble,
misleading, immoral tales and cuts. What a contrast to many a French,
Italian, German village of three to five thousand inhabitants, or even
to some of the island-villages of North Holland, remote and unvisited
as they are!
Antoine de Courtois was the natural outcome of the secluded domestic
atmosphere in which his family had grown up. The doctrines that led to
the excesses of the Reign of Terror—for we must not confound the legal
and rightful reforms of 1789 with the bloody fury of 1793—and the
abuses that hurried on the great dislocation of society, had not
reached his valley. In all lands where the local land-owners had
remained at home and identified themselves with their neighbors,
keeping only as a badge of their superiority a higher standard of honor
and bravery, there was no revolt against the gentlemen. If any village
followed the example of the large cities, it was sure to be owing to
some scapegrace who had left home and learnt a more successful
rascality among the tavern politicians of some seething city, and then
come back to play Robespierre on his own small stage. Courtois married
in the midst of the Revolution, in 1798, and quietly took up the task
of his brother Philip, who had died suddenly without leaving any
children, and whose wife, though only a bride of a few months, devoted
herself all her life to the family interests. Antoine, always humane
and charitable, had given shelter to two of the revolutionary
commissioners, pursued by enemies of an opposite faction then
uppermost, for which he was speedily denounced by an informer and
imprisoned. His widowed sister-in-law travelled to Nice and besought
the interference of the man he had formerly saved—the young
Robespierre. A respite, then a pardon, was granted, and Antoine retired
for a short time to Nice, sheltering himself behind his nominal
profession of medicine, until one night the informer who had betrayed
him came trembling to his door, begging him to save his life. He fed
and clothed him, and gave him money to set him on his way, as well as a
promise to turn his pursuers from his track should he be examined.
Such a man acted as he believed, and might say the Lord’s Prayer with a
clear conscience. His equable temperament, and his firm reliance on
reason as the corner-stone of morality, are very unlike what we
attribute to the typical Frenchman—emotional, unreliable, fantastic, or
affected; the Parisian has blotted out all worthier types from our
sight. His advice to his children on their duty of consulting reason
and moderation in all things, and sternly repressing mere inclination
or passion, goes so far as to seem exaggerated and to banish from life
even its most legitimate pleasures. But he knew the corruption pressing
upon his retreat, besieging it and luring it, and to extreme evils he
opposed extreme remedies. Besides, ancient custom sanctioned, or at
least colored, his advice as to marriage, in which matter not only his
daughters but also his son were not to choose for themselves, but let
their mother choose and decide for them. He required his children to be
wise beyond their years, and would fain have put “old heads on young
shoulders”; but the frightful license he saw around him made the recoil
only natural. Men had need to be Solomons in early youth, when hoary
heads degraded themselves to play at Satyrs. Among other precepts—and
there is not one that could not be matched out of Proverbs and
Ecclesiastes—he insisted on the duty of neither borrowing nor lending;
his teaching was inflexible on this point. “Better go shirtless than
borrow money” was his maxim. In these days of lax and indiscriminate
pity for all misfortune such advice sounds selfish and harsh; it
belongs to the conscience of each man to interpret it and make
exceptions. As to the borrowing we might be inclined to say, “Never
under any circumstances”; but as to the lending there may be
exceptions. In the first you fetter yourself, than which nothing is
less wise; in the second you incur no obligation, and, if you can
afford to lose the sum lent, there is an additional excuse. Courtois’
objection was founded on the principle he set forth elsewhere, that
your property is not your own but your posterity’s, and that you have
no right to diminish it. If he had had any other and absolutely
personal property, the objection would have been no doubt qualified. In
many cases he showed by his own example that he had no objection to
_give_, and to be helpful to his neighbor according to his ability. He
was rigidly opposed to the reading of novels, to games of chance, to
balls and theatre-going; one could almost fancy one’s self listening to
an old Puritan on this subject. But in this respect who is more of a
Puritan than St. Jerome in his instructions to Paula for the education
of her daughter? Reading consisted, with Antoine de Courtois, chiefly
of the Scriptures and of the _Following of Christ_, that universal book
of devotion, with Châteaubriand’s then recently-published _Génie du
Christianisme_. The later development of Christian literature, less
florid than Châteaubriand, might have added other books in his own
language to his restricted library, but they hardly existed in his day.
For instance, he would have sympathized with Joubert, who wrote:
“Whenever the words altars, graves, inheritance, native country, old
customs, nurse, masters, piety, are heard or said with indifference,
all is lost.”
The practical and physical advantages of virtue were always before his
eyes, and he never ceased showing his children how sensible and
rational are the laws of God. They preserved health and gave success;
they ensured happiness and kept peace. Honesty is not only the first
duty of man to his fellow, but is the safest road for one’s self, and
brings with it the confidence, the respect, and the love of one’s
neighbors. On the subject of drunkenness it is worth while to note what
a Frenchman, one of a nation of wine-drinkers—who, it is said, are so
sober as opposed to a nation of ale and spirit drinkers—and of a
generation long preceding any agitation on the temperance question,
says in his solemn advice to his children:
“Nothing is more contemptible than drunkenness, and, in order
that it may be impossible for you to fall into this sin, I
advise you never to drink wine. Water-drinkers live longer and
are stronger and healthier. Be sure of this: it is easy to
accustom yourself to drink no wine, but, once the habit of
drinking wine is formed, it costs a good deal to satisfy it,
and often painful efforts to restrain it within the bounds of
moderation. I never drank wine till I was five-and-thirty, and
I should have done better never to drink any. Wine strengthens
nothing but our passions; it wears out the body and disturbs
the mind.”
He recommended work, not only as a duty but as the essential condition
of happiness, and no one knows how true this is but those who have
tried to do without regular employment. One often hears people wonder
why so-and-so, being so rich, continues in business, and slaves at the
desk instead of enjoying the fruits of his wealth. Nothing is more
natural, unless a man has a taste strong enough to form an occupation,
such as Schliemann had from his boyhood, and was able to indulge after
he earned money enough by business to prosecute researches in the East.
The leisure that some people recommend is only idleness under a veil of
refinement, and no man or woman can be rationally happy unless through
some special occupation which towers above all others. Doing a score of
things, and giving an hour or so to each, never brings any result worth
mentioning; devoting all your spare time to one pursuit strengthens the
mind even where it is not needed to support the body. “If you have no
profession,” says Antoine de Courtois, “you will never be anything but
useless men, a burden to yourselves and a weariness to others.”
Domestic economy is another cardinal virtue of this thrifty French
farmer, and the rule he prescribes—that of laying by one-sixth of one’s
income to form a reserve fund, so as not to encroach on one’s capital
for repairs or other unexpected expenses—is worthy of notice. Going to
law, especially among relations, he utterly abhors, and advises his
son, in cases of dispute, to have recourse to the arbitration of some
mutual friend. On one occasion, when he was compelled to go to law
against a neighbor, he mentions the suit as that of “our mill against
——’s meadow,” and takes the first opportunity to do his adversary a
personal favor, carefully distinguishing between the individual and the
cause. In a word, all the elements of discord and dissolution most
familiar to ourselves, and too unhappily common to cause any surprise,
or even to elicit more than languid blame, are, in this family
register, studiously held up to execration.
Family affection, again, was not restricted to the brothers and
sisters; it included all relations, and was supposed, whenever
necessary, to show itself in practical help. Uncles and aunts were
second fathers and mothers; god-parents were more than nominal
connections; cousins were only another set of brothers and sisters. A
maiden aunt, Mlle. Girard, called in the affectionate _patois_ of
Provence “our good _tata_,” helped to bring up Antoine’s children, and
her brothers, far from wishing her to follow her first impulse, and, on
account of her feeble health, take the veil in some neighboring
convent, argued with her in favor of home life and duties. She died at
the age of fifty-two, a holy death, as her life had been useful,
humble, and charitable. Courtois himself considered marriage the
natural state of man, and said that, for his part, he thought “there
was no true happiness, and perhaps no salvation, outside of the married
state.” But he looked upon it as so much a means to an end that he
deprecated the interference of personal inclination against such
practical considerations as health, virtue, becoming circumstances of
fortune and station. He wisely said that one was only the steward of
one’s own property, and was bound to hand it on unimpaired to one’s
posterity; yet it is possible that he had too little confidence in the
probably wise choice his children would make for themselves. It is true
that the choice of mates by the parents provides in each generation a
balance to the inability of the parents to choose for themselves in
their own case—a sort of poetic retribution; and it is true also that
men and women at the age of parents with marriageable children have
just come to that maturity and perfection of judgment which enables
them to be good guides to their sons and daughters while the latter are
still in that chrysalis state when obedience is the wisest course. But
such an education as he had given them should have made them more
capable of discernment than others, and in his precepts there is
perhaps as much of old tradition as of reaction against the subversive
theories which were rending French society in pieces. How else
interpret such a sweeping assertion as this: “A father is the only man
a young girl need not fear”?—a withering comment, indeed, on the
general state of society. On the important subject of marriage and its
duties Mme. de Lamartine, the mother of the poet, has a beautiful
passage in her journal, written at Milly, near Mâcon, at a small
country house, whose orchards, meadows, and vineyards brought in the
small income of six hundred dollars a year. On this she had a large
family of sons to bring up and workmen to pay, yet the family life was
as dignified and as calm as Abraham’s with his vast possessions. Her
husband she calls a peerless man, “a man after God’s own heart,” and,
as is often the case with the fathers of brilliant men, his character
stands contrasted with that of the poet, as the oak by the side of the
willow. The father of Macaulay was infinitely superior in his moral
character to his amiable, genial, and gifted son—a man of iron,
austerely upright, and a rock on which to depend, “through thick and
thin,” but not what the world calls charming. Here is Mme. de
Lamartine’s judgment, worthy to be graven in the heart of every bride
as she leaves the altar:
“I was present to-day, 5th Feb., 1805, at a taking of the veil
of a Sister of Mercy in the hospital at Mâcon. There was a
sermon, in which the candidate was told that she had chosen a
state of penance and mortification, and, as an emblem of this,
a crown of thorns was put upon her head. I admired her
self-sacrifice, but could not help remembering also that the
state of the mother of a family, if she fulfils her duties, can
match the cloistered state. Women do not think enough of it
when they marry, but they really make a vow of poverty, since
they entrust their fortune to their husbands, and can no longer
use any of it except what he allows them to spend. We also take
a vow of chastity and obedience to our husbands, since we are
hereafter forbidden to seek to please or lure any other man.
Over and above this we take a vow of charity towards our
husbands, our children, our servants, including the duty of
nursing them in sickness, of teaching them as far as we are
able, and of giving them sound and Christian advice. I need
not, therefore, envy the Sisters of Mercy; I have only
faithfully to fulfil my duties, which are fully as arduous as
theirs, and perhaps more so, since we are not surrounded by
good examples, as they are, but rather by everything which
would tend to distract us. These thoughts did my soul much
good; I renewed my vows before God, and I trust to him to keep
me always faithful to them.”[179]
Her life was serious and busy:
“I go to Mass every morning with my children at seven. Then we
breakfast, and I attend to some housekeeping cares; then study,
first the Bible, then grammar and French history—I sewing all
the while.... My chief object is to make my children very pious
and keep them constantly in full occupation.”
They had family prayer, too, and she says in her journal:
“It is a beautiful custom and most useful, if one would have
one’s house, as Scripture recommends, a house of brethren.
Nothing is so good for the mind of servants as this daily
partaking with their masters in prayer and humiliation before
God, who recognizes neither superiors nor inferiors. It is good
for the masters to be thus reminded of Christian equality with
those who are their inferiors in the world’s eyes, and the
children are thus early taught to think of their true and
invisible Father, whom they see their elders beseech with awe
and confidence.”
The Courtois family were cousins of the Girards, one of whom, Philip de
Girard, invented a flax-spinning machine in 1810, and many other
mechanical improvements. In 1823 his father’s property was in danger of
being sold at auction, and, having no capital but his genius, he made a
contract with the Russian government, binding himself to become
chief-engineer of the Polish mines for ten years. He thus saved his
patrimony. A new town grew up around one of the factories established
in Poland on his system, and took his name, Girardow; the present
emperor has given the town a block of porphyry as a pedestal for the
founder’s statue. He, too, was of the old French stock, a dutiful son
and sincere Christian, schooled in tribulation in his own country, but,
notwithstanding his many disappointments as an inventor, happy enough
to have been buried in his own old home.
A better-known name is that of the D’Aguesseau family, a remarkable
house, both for inherited piety and genius. The great chancellor of
this name was a model son to a model father, and all his own children
were worthy of him. Perhaps the La Ferronnays are equally fortunate; as
far as their family life is revealed in _A Sister’s Story_, it seems
cast in the same mould. Few, however, so prominent, and therefore so
open to temptation, as the D’Aguesseaus have given such a sustained
example of high virtue. The chancellor, whose family, always connected
with the law, dated authentically from the end of the fifteenth
century, was dangerously fortunate in his public career. At twenty-two
he was advocate-general to the Parliament of Paris, and
procurator-general at thirty-two, an orator famous all over France, a
historian, a judge, a philosopher, and a writer. His name was
synonymous with several important laws. He held the seals of the
chancellorship for thirty-two years, and died in 1751, over eighty. His
linguistic studies embraced Hebrew and Arabic—rare acquirements at that
time—and he was also a good mathematician. His own saying, which he
applied to his father, is no less true of himself: “The way of the
righteous is at first but an imperceptible spot of light, which grows
steadily by degrees till it becomes a perfect day.” Another of his
maxims was that “public reform begins in home and self-reform.” His
children’s education was his greatest solicitude, even among his public
duties, and one gets an interesting glimpse of him in Mme.
d’Aguesseau’s letters describing the business journeys of inspection on
which he had to go, and which he made with his family in a big coach.
The mother would open the day by prayer, and the sons then studied the
classics and philosophy with their father, while even the hours of
leisure were mostly filled up by reading; for the chancellor wisely
taught his boys to choose subjects of interest out of school-hours,
that they might not identify reading with compulsory tasks. School
teaching he considered only as a basis for continued education by one’s
self, and his ideal of his daughter’s education was the union of
domestic deftness with scientific study. This daughter, in her turn,
left to her sons advice such as truly proved her to be a mother in
Israel. His wife he enthroned as a queen in his heart and his home, and
would smile when others rallied him on his domestic obedience. He
trusted to her for all home matters and expenses; and such women as she
and those she represented were fit to be trusted.
The seventeenth century was essentially the age of great women in
France, and the early part of the eighteenth still kept the tradition.
Mme. de Chantal had a manly soul in a woman’s body, and yet proved
herself as good a housekeeper as an administrator of her son’s estate
while a minor. Prayer, work, and study went hand in hand in these
women, and the D’Aguesseaus were only shining representatives of whole
families and classes of noble wives and mothers. They remind one of
some Scotch mothers and homes, in districts where old customs still
abide; where servants are part of the family, yet never, in all their
loving and rude familiarity, approach to a thought of disrespect or
disobedience; where there is intense love but no demonstration; where
honor and truth are loved better than life, and simplicity becomes in
reality the most delicate and grave courtesy. D’Aguesseau loved farming
as his chosen recreation, and vehemently denounced the rising prejudice
of the young who were ashamed of their father’s simple homestead and
refused to live such rustic lives. The Hebrew ideal—than which no finer
has ever been invented—was his absolute standard of home-life, and how
his father’s character answered to it we shall presently see. The
publication of this manuscript biography and other domestic writings of
the chancellor was due only to long-continued pressure, and his sons
consented only with the hope of doing good to a perverse generation. In
these days, when people are rather flattered than otherwise to see
their names in print, even if it be only in a local sheet, many may
wonder at this reticence which denoted the delicacy of this exceptional
family. Whether the publication did good we can hardly judge; it must
have helped to stop some on a downward career, or at least strengthened
the weak resolves of some few struggling against the current.
The elder D’Aguesseau had singular natural advantages such as the
majority lack, but much of this happy temperament was probably the
result of generations of clean, temperate, and orderly living, such as
his forefathers had been famous for. His son traces a portrait of him
which seems to unite the primitive Christian with the ancient Roman: