Nemesis—Ninon’s Theories—Wits and Beaux of the Salons—Found
at Last—“The Smart Set”—A Domestic Ménage—Scarron—The Fatal
Carnival—The Bond of Ninon—Corneille and _The Cid_—The
Cardinal’s Jealousy—Enlarging the Borders—Monsieur l’Abbé and the
Capon Leg—The Grey Cardinal—A Faithful Servant.
Ninon’s intrigue with the young Marquis de Rambouillet gave great
offence to Madame de Rambouillet. It sheds a curious light on
the manner of the great world of the time, that the doors of the
marquise’s house remained still open to her, yet so they did remain.
The justly incensed lady contented herself with soliciting an order
from the Court for the young man to rejoin his regiment in Auvergne
without delay; and Ninon was left to console herself elsewhere, and
to avenge as she might her annoyance at the epigrams showered upon
her, not to speak of the severe blame cast upon women of society who
were undeterred by any sense of propriety and the _convenable_—which
she was well aware was mainly levelled at herself. All moral
considerations aside, the breach of good taste is inconceivable
in one who so prided herself, and generally with justice, on the
observation of the general laws governing the people of her class.
The hospitality of the famous mansion in the rue St Thomas du Louvre,
however, was still accorded her, and if it was more chilly than
formerly, Ninon consoled herself by enlisting many who frequented
the brilliant gatherings, on the side of her easy-going philosophy,
and discussing its tenets with amazing frankness.
The women were not many who upheld her arguments; but the men vastly
applauded and seconded her sallies against the theory of Platonic
love. In her opinion, it was an impossible doctrine, and on such
themes she was Madame Oracle, and her beautiful mouth opened to
expound, what dog dare bark? Unless indeed it might be the cardinal.
“Mademoiselle,” he said, one evening when he was present, as he
frequently was, in the Rambouillet salon, and Ninon ventured an
observation not quite to his taste, “I never accept lessons, even
when they issue from such pretty lips as yours.”
The stately mansion of Rambouillet, with its magnificent grand
salon, and blue chamber, the special haunt of the poets, its
daintily furnished smaller chambers, and richly-draped alcoves
and cosy corners, was only one among many houses entertaining the
society of the world which was devoted, or assumed devotion, to art
and literature. There were the Saturdays of Madame de Sablé, and
notably also the receptions of Mademoiselle Scudéri. Mademoiselle de
L’Enclos’ own apartments were thronged on her reception nights with
the company of talented and famous men and women, though that genial
admirer of hers, St Evrémond, once had the temerity to criticise
the beauty, or the lack of it, in the ladies of the _côtérie_. It
might, of course, as he said, arise from mere chance; but otherwise
it was a mistake; since it suggested the idea that Ninon could not
sufficiently prize her own beauty; and on the score of the hidden
compliment the audacity was condoned. After the coolness that
followed upon Ninon’s _liaison_ with the Marquis de Rambouillet, the
society of the salon of the marquise somewhat thinned for awhile;
while the salon of the rue des Tournelles was more thronged than
ever. The _cachet_ that admitted to all these various assemblies
would appear to have been that only of fair breeding and connexions,
and some intellectual pretension, though the supply of that was not
necessarily very great, since the leaven of would-be wits and of
absolute stupidity—the “mostly fools” Carlyle says the world is
peopled with—would seem to have been even curiously large. One and
all, however, were full of ambition to air the rhymes, and often
senseless epigrams and dreary sonnets and conceits, generated in
their miserable brains.
Perhaps the only one of this crowd of triflers who is worth recording
is the Baron de Miranges. In addition to the fact that he was never
known to sit still two consecutive minutes, he was supremely ugly;
marked with the smallpox, he squinted, his chin was awry, his nose
twisted to one side. He was the first to jest at all these defects.
One day he met a man on the Pont Neuf, an entire stranger to him, and
halting before him, Miranges, in a sort of transport of satisfaction,
gave a joyous cry and threw himself upon the individual’s neck,
saying: “Oh, sir! how charmed I am at this meeting, and for what a
number of years I have been looking for you!”
“Indeed?” said the other, in a tone of astonishment. “I do not think
I have the honour of knowing you.”
“No. Unluckily I have met you much too late; but I look at you, I
contemplate you, and I am happy.”
“But why?”
“Yes, yes, indeed,” replied Monsieur de Miranges; “let us embrace
each other again. I have always despaired of ever finding a man
uglier than myself, but now—yes, you are that man.”
Not without justice, Ninon, who about this time had in more ways than
one drawn unfavourable public criticism upon herself, complains that
she was really less culpable, infinitely more decorously behaved
in society, than many of the titled and fashionable dames, whose
behaviour, scandalous as it was, passed unchallenged. They were
constantly promenading in the Place Royale, chattering at the top of
their voices, ogling, smoking, taking snuff, adorning their mantles
and hats with knots of ribbon of various colours, each conveying a
different significance, and generally comporting themselves after
the manner of the lowest of their sex. Ninon de L’Enclos had made a
law unto herself, a law of liberty, and she made no pretence of not
abiding by it; but she rarely sinned in outward decorum, or forgot
the good breeding of her station.
In the matter of de Rambouillet, if she did not acknowledge the
false step, it was probable she was made to feel conscious of it, and
decided soon after to divert public attention to some other topics of
scandal, by absenting herself from Paris for a while and rusticating
at Loches, the estate which her aunt had left her. On reaching le
Mans, she was met by the Marquis de la Châtre—an amiable man for
whom Ninon had sufficient attachment and constancy to allow the good
provincials to imagine they were man and wife, and the two were
widely welcomed and courted.
One evening, at a supper party to which they were invited, she met
Scarron. He arrived in company with some canons from the cathedral,
and to her great surprise she learned from him that he now held a
canonry in le Mans cathedral, bestowed upon him for the assistance
of his pen, than which few were more able than his in Lorraine, in
drawing up a history of the duchy of Lorraine.
To Paul Scarron, the brilliant wit, comic poet, rhymester—so
admired of another erratic genius, Oliver Goldsmith, who translated
his _Roman Comique_—the sunny-natured, in earlier years
scandalously debauched, and always _bon vivant_—brimming with the
overflow of humour that wells from the depths of a sympathetic
temperament—generous, kind-hearted—to:
“Nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice,”
are words hardly to be more aptly applied. The sufferings of his
childhood, due to the avarice of his artful stepmother, who contrived
to separate him from his father and get possession of his fortune,
cast him nearly penniless upon the world, when scarcely more than
a child. It was one more instance of the game, ever new, which
relatives intellectually inferior, incited by envy and greed, love
to play upon the unfortunate talented one, and render life one long
misery and struggle at the best, provided sufficient bread is somehow
come upon to retain breath. So much the brave heart and exercise
of his gifts enabled the lad to acquire, and he managed to enter
ecclesiastical ranks; but only to the outermost degree—not, it may
be, aspiring to the priesthood, which hardly could have lost anything
from one whose character and mode of life were so glaringly ill
adapted for the calling. Scarron’s vocation that way was worse than
nil; nevertheless, in that lax time of ecclesiastical law and order,
he obtained the canonry of le Mans cathedral, and thus dignified,
Monsieur l’Abbé Scarron met Ninon again at the supper-table of the
local receiver-general of taxes, and was more ready than ever for
any lengths of wild uproariousness the chance brought him. It came
just then with the Carnival, and Scarron, with one or two companions,
conceived the notion of spreading a big mattress all over with
goose’s feathers and down; then, smearing themselves from head to
foot in honey, they rolled upon the mattress until they were encased
in the feathers so thickly, that the disguise was impenetrable, and
they looked like some hideous monstrosities of the bird-tribe, face
and all covered in the plumage. Passing up the street, followed
by a huge concourse, they made their way to Ninon’s château, and
forced entrance, greatly to the anger of Monsieur de la Châtre, who
quickly discovered who they were, and at once denounced them. The
mob, furious at the thought of a churchman of their own cathedral
indulging in such wild licence, set upon the feathered monsters, and
flinging them down, pommelled and beat the unprotected bodies of the
unfortunate masqueraders, and plucked off every feather, pursuing
them without mercy, until they were compelled to jump into the rushes
of the river for protection. There they were forced to remain for
hours, and two of Scarron’s three companions died from the effects
of the cold immersion, and the violence dealt them. Scarron himself
escaped with breath, but little more. The chill and exposure brought
on an illness from which he never recovered. It crippled him in every
limb, and rendered him, as he himself says, an abridgment of human
suffering—tied to his chair by the contraction of every muscle, in
never-ending pain for all the years to come; yet never losing his
gaiety, and for all the misery he had created for himself, winning
the pity and the money gifts from the Court and from wealthy friends
which enabled him to live in fair affluence.
A short time later the domestic felicity being enjoyed at the Loches
château by Ninon and Monsieur de la Châtre was rudely broken up by a
summons from Monsieur de la Châtre’s family, at Besançon, to repair
to the deathbed of his father. The two parted with real regret, and
so much devotion on the Marquis de la Châtre’s side, that nothing
would content him short of a written and signed promise from Ninon
of eternal fidelity to him. She accordingly wrote on a leaf of his
tablets these words—
“I swear to love you always.—NINON.”
Carefully bestowing this precious bond in black and white in an
innermost pocket of his vest, de la Châtre conducted Ninon back to
Paris. He would have preferred to leave her in Touraine, to pass the
time of his absence in the rural tranquillity of her beautiful little
domain; but if Ninon desired to ruralise, was there not her charming
country residence at Picpus?—and Picpus is much nearer Paris than
Loches; and just then the Maréchal de Sévigné had arrived in Paris,
a man of noble presence, distinguished for his recent successes in
the king’s service, and the young Vicomte de Turenne, already entered
upon the paths of his renown, by his splendid service in Lorraine and
Italy, and both, eagerly seeking introduction to Ninon, came, saw,
and were conquered by her charm.
De Sévigné’s rendered homage was, however, on somewhat unconventional
lines, the honeyed words of his admiration being tempered with
just enough fault-finding as to render it unusually piquant;
but Ninon’s favours, and just now especially, were in no wise
exclusively bestowed on the heroes of the battlefield. She was no
more _précieuse_ than she was _Platonicienne_; but she was genuinely
gifted with a love of letters, which had been fostered by the
excellent education her father had given her, and she entered
ardently into the great intellectual movement of the time, in which
the drama figured so prominently. Richelieu himself was so warm a
devotee, that his ambition to excel as a dramatist equalled, if it
did not surpass, his political ambition; and while jealous to the
mean extent envy can reach, he did not withhold his patronage from
the great genius of him who has been styled the father of the French
dramatists, Pierre Corneille. Even had Richelieu not desired as he
did, to make use of the brilliant talent of Corneille for his own
ends, it would not have been possible for him to hold aloof amid the
enthusiasm of the world of letters, and of society generally, which
hailed in 1636 the production of _The Cid_.
As every time “doth boast itself above better gone,” so must
Corneille’s name yield place in a degree to what has since been seen.
Still, ever remembering his fathering of it—for his predecessors
in dramatic work worthy of any name were dull and lacked artistic
knowledge of their craft, and Godelet, Gamier, and others are but
names now and no more—Corneille’s masterpiece would challenge
criticism in plenty now, placed before the delicate discrimination
of the daily press of this time, or the judgment of the gallery,
alike in his native country or elsewhere. It is but recently that the
tragedy of a great French poet, not yet two generations passed away,
revived at the Comédie Française, though reverently and finely acted,
was derided and mocked at without mercy behind the scenes by those
taking part in it. Exactly what will be the opinions of critics of
future generations on the dramatic productions of the early years of
the twentieth century, fortunately the means will probably be lacking
to know; the fact remains that the fame of Pierre Corneille is a
living force and a memory for all time.
It was the fashion of that day to model plays and novels on Spanish
and Italian patterns; and advised to follow this ruling, Corneille
selected the subject of _The Cid_—Rodriguez—on which to base
a drama, not his first by several; but while the preceding ones
were held in great esteem, _The Cid_ was regarded as attaining
to the highest excellence, and its fame as his crowning work has
ever remained by it. Some of his dramas of a later date were
unsuccessful; one of his comedies, _Le Menteur_—the only one which
had popularity—is best known in this country by Steele’s translation
of it, _The Lying Lover_.
Richelieu, stirred to dramatic ambition—finding probably that it
was an art less easy than it seemed—sought the assistance of five
dramatists to write up and give more effect to his tragedies; at
least any other reason for such collaboration is not easy to be
imagined. One of the five chosen was Corneille, who, naturally
somewhat curt and abrupt in speech, did not spare to find fault with
some of the details of the cardinal’s work, and the concatenation
of _The Cid’s_ success and of Corneille’s frankness over _Euterpe_
and _Mirame_, stirred such offence in the cardinal’s jealous mind,
that he endeavoured to drive a spoke in the wheel of Corneille’s
car of triumph; and one of the earliest achievements of the recently
constituted Académie Française was a critique on _The Cid_ commanded
of its members by its founder. It had no effect at all in lessening
the enthusiasm of the world of letters, or of the general public for
the drama. The poison did not act, in spite of the endeavours of
several of the poetasters to second the pronouncements. One defect,
that it was not original in plot and construction, but based on a
Spanish dramatic model, was to be conceded; if defect that was which
at the time was held to be almost indispensable in a play. There
is nothing new under the sun. Shakespeare’s comedies and tragedies
alike—the English historical plays excepted—are one and all based
on old legends and classic stories which he drew from Italian, and
Spanish and French, and other sources that had, in their turn,
sprung from tradition no longer traceable, hidden in origins lost
in the lapse of centuries. Richelieu’s own dramatic effusions were
reproductions of classical themes. It was the grandeur of the verse
of Corneille, its lofty thought, its dignity and moral conception,
its depicting of conflicting passions—this it was that won the
admiration, and struck home to heartfelt sympathies, in its power of
presenting character, under other names, of living men and women, the
contemporaries of Ninon’s time, contending, suffering, striving in
the stormy political atmosphere, darkening in now with the shadows of
the Thirty Years’ War.
In the delight of Corneille’s presence in Paris, Ninon sacrificed
all the ordinary routine of her life. It was in her salon, if the
chronicling of the fact is to be trusted, that Corneille read to the
assembled company his manuscript of _The Cid_, all the principal
members being present of the Hôtel Bourgogne, and the few other
talented “rogues and vagabonds” proscribed of the Church, though ill
to be spared by it, if the cardinal’s plays were to have any sort of
success. The Comédie Française was yet an institution of the future;
and the stage of the Hôtel Bourgogne, with the two or three other
theatres were not much more than glorified fair platforms, while
the theatre in the rue Guénégaud ordinarily confined itself to the
presentment of Chinese shadows. The drawing-room of the Louvre and
of the Palais Cardinal were utilised for masques and such plays as
there were, called in request for the Court and the more exalted
circles of society. Richelieu’s own pieces were thus performed. The
drama was in transition. It was a far cry now from Clement Marot and
the antics of the clerks of the Basoche upon the huge marble table
of the Hall of Lost Footsteps, to the Académie Française and the
Hôtel de Rambouillet; and the language of the country was undergoing
changes, even as the aspect of the city itself was no longer that of
a few years earlier, when Ninon first came to Paris. Then Notre-Dame
was nearly surrounded by green spaces of meadowland and field and
hedgerow, stretching between the streets and the grassy banks of the
Isle de la Cité. Now here, and away to the Palais de Justice; and
northwards of the Louvre, streets were gathering, and houses began to
crowd about the old towers of the Conciérgerie; while on the banks of
the Seine, right and left, the old walls of Philip Augustus were laid
low or broken up to afford room for new buildings. Behind the Louvre,
far extending to the gardens and palace of the Tuileries, Richelieu’s
magnificent residence dominated the rue de Rivoli—the Palais
Cardinal, so soon to pass as a gift to the king and take the name
of the Palais Royal, till the Revolution of 1793 changed it to the
Palais Égalité, and the lordly “pleasure-house” of the great upholder
of kingly power was cut up into gaudy shops and gaming-houses.
After the performance of _The Cid_, which took place before the king
and queen, and Court, and a vast company of illustrious persons,
Corneille returned home to Rouen, to pursue the great career he was
now launched upon. The fulminations of the cardinal through the
Académie Française far from proving destructive to his fame, had
probably cast a brighter lustre on it. “I never undertake anything
without well first considering, but once I have resolved, I go
straight to my aim; I throw all down that is in my path; I mow down
all, and I cover all with my red robes,” he once said, and it was
no empty boast. Yet the ruling found its exception; his rancour and
jealousy did its worst, but it could not crush Corneille. It did not
at all events do so. Even for Richelieu it might have been dangerous
and impolitic. Gaston d’Orléans, the king’s brother, who belonged to
the party of the queen, threw in his influence to support anything
he dared in opposition to the cardinal—and at this time Gaston was
a frequent visitor at Ninon’s house. He invited himself one evening
to dinner with her, attended by several gentlemen, and Ninon, who was
kept in countenance by her friend, Marion Delorme, and another lady,
entertained her royal guest with an elegant repast of fish, flesh and
fowl, although she had ventured to remind “Monseigneur” that, being
the season of Lent, it was a questionable proceeding to have anything
but dishes of the first served up. Gaston, however, had insisted,
especially in the matter of roast capon, and good wine—_cela va
sans dire_. Whether the wine was partly answerable, or it was merely
the manners of the time that prompted one of the guests—Monsieur
de Boisrobert, my lord cardinal’s secretary—who was fingering the
leg-bone of a fowl, to fling it out of window at the head of Monsieur
l’Abbé Dufaure, the venerable dean of St Sulpice, that was what he
did. The abbé was a Jesuit priest, and the scandal of insult to
him was doubled by the sin of eating meat in Lent. Monseigneur and
his companions finished the evening by adjourning to the house of
Monsieur la Navarre, a neighbour of Ninon’s, and breaking up the
furniture. Then the prince himself sent for the magistrate, and the
functionary arriving, demanded to be informed which was the culprit.
The unfortunate neighbour, who did not know who Gaston was, pointed
him out, and forthwith six archers were sent for, who laid hands
on the prince, and he was threatened with handcuffing if he did
not immediately go quietly to prison. Upon this the gentlemen in
attendance, hearing the uproar, entered, and with profoundest respect
proceeded to inquire what had happened, addressing Monseigneur by
name. Terrified out of his senses at what he had done, the magistrate
besought pardon, which the prince gravely granted, not without
commanding him to make _amende honorable_ by holding a lighted wax
taper in his hand, and, on bended knees, confessing his crime before
all and individually of the women of the household, who were summoned
to attend for the purpose.
So much for Monseigneur’s little amusement: it was Ninon who was
the sufferer. The insulted abbé complained to his Superior, who
complained to the magistrate of the district, and from mouth to mouth
the story flew. Not one man in black, but constant contingents of the
black-soutaned fraternity haunted the rue des Tournelles, and invaded
Ninon’s apartments, subjecting her to such severe inquisition about
her affairs generally, that it became unendurable, and she wrote to
the prince in severe reproach for allowing the blame of his folly
to burden and annoy her. Whereupon Gaston sent two of his friends
to mollify the wrath of the magistrate, who tore up the Jesuit
Superior’s letter of complaint. But the scandal only aggravated the
soreness and complications of the opposing parties of the Court, and
it made an additional grievance for Richelieu against Gaston; though,
on the other hand, it was Boisrobert, his own secretary, who was also
his own jester-in-chief, who had been at the bottom of the offence,
so that the affair cut both ways, and the cardinal may have preferred
to see it hushed up.
It was about this time that Richelieu lost by death the man he called
his right hand—Père Joseph, the Capucin friar—in other words, “The
Grey Cardinal,” as he was nicknamed; but in fact and deed the poor
man never even received the bishopric long promised, never bestowed.
Richelieu himself was already in failing health, worn by stress and
anxiety for the care of the vast structure of kingly power he had
built up and sustained, as it were, by his own hand, that was against
so many, and Louis himself was almost as much a nonentity as any of
the _rois fainéants_ of old days. It is almost impossible to realise
that he and his false-hearted, selfish brother should have been the
sons of the dauntless Henry of Navarre.
Louis was not vicious; it was his valetudinarian melancholy
temperament which appears to have rendered him indifferent to
ordinary human interests. He made less than no pretence of affection
for his Spanish wife, for whose bright glances other men would have
staked existence. For her, Buckingham forgot honour and duty to
his own royal master, and did not spare compromising her repute.
That is a page of history that remains sealed. How far it affected
Louis’s feelings towards her through the rest of his life, remains
an open question, or whether from the beginning, love and mutual
inclination were at fault. “The wind bloweth where it listeth,”
and the beauty and attractions of Anne of Austria may never have
struck a responsive chord in the king’s heart. He was not destitute
of sentiment. More than once he strove to fill the dreary void with
the sympathy of other women of repute about the Court, and, in one
instance at all events, not unsuccessfully; but he was not one to
win love and friendship generally; and the consciousness of this
chilled his manner still more, and threw him back upon himself.
Gaston d’Orléans, with all his grave faults, had at least quicker
outward intelligence and sufficient animation to win some extensive
suffrages of the gentler sex, notably of Anne herself, who tolerated
his attentions and coquetted with him up to a certain point; though
how far this was policy, or from real sentiment, Court intrigues
veil too entirely to attempt to determine, and the jealousy of
Richelieu, himself enamoured of the queen, had soon put an end to all
the aspirations of the two dukes. “There is no such word as fail,”
Richelieu was often heard to say, and he did not fail to put his
foot down very decisively when a league was formed, which the queen
herself was said to favour, whose end and aim was to depose Louis the
Just, crown Gaston, and give him Anne of Austria to wife.
“I should not have sufficiently gained by the change,” was, however,
Anne’s reply, when the accusation of her desire for this was made
against her in the course of the rigorous inquiry and treatment to
which she and her friends were subjected. If on account alone of
that time, years back now, when Gaston, to save himself, permitted
one of his noblest adherents, Chalais, to perish on the scaffold at
Richelieu’s command, Monsieur was not likely to be very favourably
regarded by her. Nearly half a score of years had passed since the
brave man had died in the flower of his life, tortured and hacked by
countless bungling strokes of a creature found at last, among the
dregs of the prison, to do the hideous task which the professional
headsman managed to evade by absenting himself and remaining _perdu_.
In the interval, the queen’s mother had been effectually, and for
ever, banished from France. “The Day of Dupes” had come and gone,
leaving Richelieu all-triumphant; but still the contest raged, and
the virulence of the minister against the queen broke furiously on
the pretext he found at last, of discovering that she was keeping up
a private correspondence with the King of Spain, and the cardinal
infant, her two brothers, and also with persons in Madrid and
Brussels, whose friendship she valued—the more, doubtless, for the
isolation and lack of affection and harshness surrounding her. It was
a boast of Richelieu’s, that with only two lines of an innocent man’s
writing he could ruin him. Naturally, therefore, however innocent the
correspondence, Anne was anxious to hold her letters uninspected by
the cardinal, and she kept them in her own private oratory chamber in
the Benedictine convent of the Val de Grâce, in the rue St Jacques,
which she had founded. The letters, on their arrival, were received
by one of the nuns, who placed them away in a closet to await the
queen’s coming, and her replies to them were forwarded from thence.
But Richelieu’s spies were at work; they swarmed of course in Paris;
and before long they scented out the secret correspondence, and
Richelieu informed the king of it, holding up before His Majesty’s
dreary imagination all the terrors of national peril it signified.
The alarmed king hurried the queen out of Paris to the Château of
Chantilly, where she was confined to her own rooms and compelled
to listen to a string of rigid interrogation from the chancellor.
She was in a cruelly forlorn situation; for, in fear of Richelieu’s
anger and the activity of his spies, the courtiers and following of
the royal pair did not venture so much as to lift their eyes to her
window as they passed. For her own servants, they had been at once
disposed of in various prisons; while the chancellor proceeded to
ransack the convent of Val de Grâce for more papers and letters. But
it was labour lost, which possibly was no more than he expected;
since it is believed that the queen had warning from him of his
intended visit, and the documents, for all they might be worth,
were safe in the care of Madame de Sourdis. The alarm and suspicion
intensified, when there was found upon the person of la Porte, the
queen’s confidential servant, a letter from her to the Duchess of
Chevreuse, long exiled. La Porte was thereupon, as a man of strict
honesty and fidelity to his royal mistress, locked away in one of the
towers of the Bastille, and all the efforts to draw from him anything
incriminating the queen, were absolutely abortive; though Richelieu
employed every art to shake him, from promises and emoluments, to
threats of torture, which were rendered more real to his imagination,
by his being taken to the torture-chamber for a sight of its
equipments.
Fortunately for him, a great event was at hand, which marvellously
changed the aspect of political affairs. The queen, after twenty-two
years of childlessness, was in a situation of promise to give an
heir to the throne. Then Richelieu relaxed la Porte’s durance so
far as to permit his retiring to Saumur, where he remained till the
queen recalled him, on the death of the cardinal, now shadowing in,
bringing with it the terrible tragedy which was the last act and deed
of his hand.