“Loving like a Madman”—A Great Transformation—The Unjust
Tax—Parted Lovers—A Gay Court, and A School for Scandal and
Mazarin’s Policy—The Regent’s Caprices—The King’s Upholsterer’s
Young Son—The Théâtre Illustre—The Company of Monsieur and
Molière.
“A man of sense may love like a madman, but never like a fool.” It is
the dictum of François de la Rochefoucauld, and must have been framed
from his deep attachment to Condé’s sister, Madame de Longueville,
one of the most charming of the women of the great world at that
time, and bound by ties of close friendship with Ninon.
It was no one-sided love, no case of the one who loves, and the
one who merely consents to it; but mutual, and as passionate, as
certainly for a time the flame was pure, shining with a clear,
unflecked radiance.
Madame de Longueville, who was wedded to an old man, was singularly
fascinating, from her gentle manners and amiability. Her face was
not strictly beautiful, and bore traces of the smallpox, the cruel
scourge then of so many beautiful faces; her eyes were full of a
softened light, and she had the gift of a most sweet voice, while
her smile was gentle and irresistibly winning. The dreamy, romantic,
somewhat melancholy-natured de la Rochefoucauld’s heart was laid
at her feet in whole and undivided adoration. For their conscious
love, each strove against the temptation, she so earnestly, that
she shut herself away from all chance of so much as seeing him
for a little while. But Ninon slipped in with her philosophy. It
was quite true, she argued to Madame de Longueville, that there
were grave considerations to be respected—the indissoluble tie
of marriage, _convenances_ to be observed—all these; but to hide
herself away, to refuse the unhappy prince the alleviation of gazing
at her, of exchanging a few fleeting words—no, it was monstrously
absurd. The very _Platoniciens_ did not go such lengths. No, if
complete happiness could not be theirs, at least a smile, a glance,
was permitted; and Ninon’s counsel wound up with a suggestion to
the disconsolate prince, that he should try what a little note to
the woman he adored would effect, and he wrote—“Show yourself—be
beautiful, and at least let me admire you.”
And Ninon delivered the billet, and its effect was marvellous.
It conquered the young duchess’s natural timidity and retiring
disposition. She took courage; she assumed her rightful place in
the world; she appeared at the Louvre; she kept open house and gave
brilliant receptions; she took her seat on the _tabouret_ of the
duchesses; her toilettes were magnificent; she shone brilliantly in
conversation, and began to take part in Court intrigues; ere long
very actively.
“With two lines of a man’s writing,” had said Mazarin’s great
predecessor, “I could condemn him”; and with two lines of that
magical pen of the Count de la Rochefoucauld, Madame de Longueville
became another woman. As in the matter of her warm attachment to
her lover, she was constant in her politics; while Louis de Condé,
all-conquering at Rocroi, yielded himself captive to the charms of
Ninon de L’Enclos—a veritable lion in love; not so blindly, however,
that he was insensible to the wrongs of the people, upon whom a tax
had been levied of a specially hateful kind. It was called the Toisé,
and was a revival of an old edict long fallen into desuetude. To
the Italian, d’Eméri, to whom Mazarin had entrusted the control of
public finances, was due its discovery and resuscitation. This edict
forbade the enlargement of the borders of Paris, and as recently new
buildings had been, and were being, in course of construction far
and wide, the owners of these were threatened with confiscation of
their materials, unless they consented to pay for their newly-erected
houses and other buildings, a rate regulated by measurement of the
size of them. This pressed cruelly on the people. Loud murmurs were
excited. The Parliament expostulated, and the Toisé was withdrawn.
It was the first stone slung by the Fronde. Condé’s indignation was
great; and one day, in the rue St Antoine, he laid flat with his
sword the body of some wretched collector who had snatched away a
child’s cradle from a poor woman. His act gave great offence to the
queen, who saw in it defiance of Mazarin. Both at home and abroad,
there was plenty stirring to keep existence from stagnating; but for
a few brief delightful weeks the Duc d’Enghien sought retirement
and tranquillity in his château of Petit Chantilly, in company
with Ninon, who left the rue des Tournelles dwelling to take care
of itself. It was the iniquitous Toisé which broke in upon their
content; for the queen sent for the duke, to consult him in the
emergency created by the cardinal favourite.
After the Toisé prologue, however, the opening scenes of the
inglorious turmoil of the Fronde did not see Condé; for Austria once
more took up arms, and he lost not a moment in hastening to the
frontier. If it is indeed a fact that Ninon accompanied him thither
in the guise of a young aide-de-camp, mounted on a fiery charger,
it was but to re-enact her former exploits; and Ninon was nothing
if not daring. That her presence on the field of Nordlingen could
have been really anything but exceedingly encumbering, is more than
imaginable. At all events Condé soon begged her to return to Paris,
in order to go and console his sister, Madame de Longueville, who had
been summoned to attend his father, the Duc de Condé, in an illness
threatening to be fatal. Arrived at Paris, she found the sufferer
very much better, and writing to inform the Duc d’Enghien of this
pleasant intelligence, she begged to be allowed to return to him.
The duke, however, replied that it was hardly worth while; as he
should soon be back. To pass the tedium of his absence, Ninon resumed
her _réunions_, finding pleasant distraction in the society of her
friends, among which were two ladies distinguished for their birth
and undoubted talents, scarcely less than notorious, even in those
days, for their openly lax mode of life. One of these was Madame de
la Sablière, a notable member of the Hôtel de Rambouillet _côtérie_.
A really brilliant mathematician, she was at least equally skilful
in the science of love—so ardent a student, that one day her uncle,
a grave magistrate, scandalised out of all endurance at her ways,
remonstrated severely, reminding her that the beasts of the field
observed more order and seasonable regulation in their love-affairs.
“Ah, dear uncle,” said the gifted lady, “that is because they _are_
beasts.”
Madame de Chevreuse was the other specially chosen spirit of her
own sex Ninon now consorted with. After the death of Richelieu,
who had exiled her at the time of the Val de Grâce affair, she was
allowed to return to France, attended by the Abbé de Retz, Paul de
Gondi, whom Louis XIII., on his deathbed, had appointed coadjutor to
the new archbishopric of Paris. De Retz had himself aspired to the
archbishopric, and swore that he would obtain a cardinalate.
The Court was now brilliantly gay. The gloomy and sombre atmosphere
of Louis XIII. and of Richelieu’s day faded all in a succession of
balls and fêtes and every sort of festivity. Anne of Austria enlarged
the south side of the Louvre, and Grimaldi and Romanelli adorned
the chambers and galleries with their exquisite skill. Poussin,
whose friezes terminated the ends of the great gallery, had had
apartments assigned him in the Louvre, in order to carry on his work
with greater facility; but he had retired in displeasure at the
criticisms of his brother-artists, and went to Rome, where he spent
the rest of his life, leaving in Paris immortal memories of his
genius, among them the altarpiece for the chapel of St Germain en
Laye, and the mournful Arcadian Shepherd, “_Et in Arcadia Ego_.”
So the never-ending round of gaiety was set in motion by Mazarin, and
Anne of Austria was the regent. Anne, still handsome, and by nature
frivolous under her somewhat cold Spanish demeanour—surely a born
coquette, delighting in show and magnificence, none the less that
she had so long lived under repression. The queen, apparently, was
the reigning power; but it was the crafty prime-minister who pulled
the strings, and set the puppets dancing and fiddling, and amorously
intriguing, so that they should leave him to carry on his politics,
and mount to the heights of his ambition and power in his own
unhindered way. Unlike his great predecessor, he was handsome, and
good-natured in manner, and therefore an ornament in those brilliant
assemblies. Wrote St Evrémond—
“J’ai vu le temps de la bonne régence,
Temps où régnait une heureuse abondance,
Temps où la ville aussi bien que la cour
Ne respirait que les jeux et l’amour.
Une politique indulgente
De notre nature innocente
Favorisait tous les désirs
Tout dégoût semblait légitime;
La douce erreur ne s’appélait point crime,
Les vices délicats se nommait des plaisirs.”
Very pleasant and entertaining the world of society was then; and
seasoned as it was with even unusual spice of malice and spite,
scandal was rife. Among others, the stepmother of Madame de
Chevreuse, Madame de Montbazon, who was married to the old Duc de
Rohan, was a past-mistress in the gentle art of making mischief; and
where the material was insufficient, she manufactured it without
scruple. In this way she nearly succeeded in bringing a rift into the
love-harmonies of Henri de la Rochefoucauld and his adored Madame de
Longueville, by means of sheer, brazen lying, alleging that certain
letters of Madame de Longueville, which had been found, had dropped
from the pocket of Coligny. It was a pitiful fabrication, and Madame
de Montbazon—of whom de Retz, in his Memoirs, says “I never saw
any person showing in her vices less respect for virtue”—did not
come out of it with very flying colours, for all her best efforts
at effrontery, and she received an order from Mazarin to retire to
Tours. The letters, in effect, proved to be not those of Madame de
Longueville at all; and the pocket they dropped out of, was not
Coligny’s. It was altogether an affair of another pair of lovers.
The embellishments of the Louvre were still not completed, before
the queen decided not to reside in it. She began to recall, rather
tardily it would seem, all the lugubrious memories of her past
life connected with the palace; and she established herself in the
magnificent Palais Royal—originally the Palais Cardinal.
In all those festivities, Ninon took prominent part. Ever
philosophical, she thus consoled herself for the prolonged absence of
the Duc d’Enghien, an absence which had, moreover, not intensified
the sentiments of adoration she at first conceived for him. It
was but Ninon’s way. She had begun to see small defects in the
case-armour of the perfection of her Mars. Her acquaintance with the
dead languages supplied her with the Latin proverb, “_vir pilosus,
aut libidinum aut fortis_.” “Now Esau was a hairy man,” and the Duc
d’Enghien was also _vir pilosus_, and Ninon taxed him with being a
greater warrior than an ardent wooer, and the passion cooled rapidly;
but the friendship and mutual liking ever remained.
Ninon employed Poquelin, upholsterer to the king, in the furnishing
of her elegant suite of apartments. His shop was in the rue St
Honoré, and there was born his son, Jean Baptiste, an intelligent,
rather delicate-looking little boy, whom he duly educated and trained
for his own trade. Young Jean Baptiste, however, fairly submissive
and obedient, was also very fond of reading and writing, the only two
acquirements his father thought necessary for assisting the chair
and table-making the boy’s future was destined for. Fortunately he
had a very kind grandfather who loved the drama, and sometimes he
would take little Jean Baptiste with him to see the performances at
The Hôtel Bourgogne. Poquelin père looked with distrust on these
excursions, thinking that he saw in the lad, as undoubtedly he did,
growing aversion to the upholstery vocation, and a fast developing
passion for tragedy and comedy—comedy very markedly—and the boy’s
delight in study and books generally, created a disturbance in the
good upholsterer’s mind, which culminated in distress, when it became
certain beyond all question, that young Jean’s liking was as small
for cabinet-making as it was unconquerable for literature. He was at
that time about fourteen years old, and he carried about with him a
small comedy he had composed called _l’Amour Médecin_, which Ninon
one day, when he came to assist his father at her house, detected,
rolled up under his arm. Won by her kind smiles, young Poquelin was
induced to allow her to look at it, and she, no mean critic, saw such
promise in it, that she showed it to Corneille—who was then staying
with her, pending the representation of _The Cid_. Corneille warmly
seconded her estimate of the boy’s promise of unusual dramatic gifts;
and after great demur, Poquelin yielded to the good grandfather’s
persuasions to send him to college. Several helping hands, Ninon
among them, contributed to the necessary funds for this new career,
and Jean Baptiste became a pupil of the Jesuits at Clermont. There
he studied for five years, in the same class with Armand de Bourbon,
Prince de Conti, the youngest brother of Madame de Longueville, who
promised Ninon the special protection and friendship of Armand, and
of the college preceptors, a promise that was ever faithfully held
by; and the celebrated teacher Gassendi took him under his special
care, with two other gifted lads confided to him.
At the end of the five years, Jean Baptiste was forced to resume his
old occupation, on account of his father’s increasing infirmities.
But it was not for long. Richelieu’s love of letters, and of the
drama especially, brought him knowledge of young Poquelin’s talent,
and made the difficult way of literature easier for him; for the
theatre was beginning to flourish. There was no regular company of
actors in Paris until the coming of Corneille. Only a few of the
“rogue and vagabond” wearers of the sock and buskin came and went,
selling their plays, when they could find buyers, for some ten crowns
apiece. The comedies of Corneille caused the establishment of a
dramatic troupe in the city, and then it was that young Poquelin,
leaving the upholstery to the dogs, established a small company of
young men—“stage-struck” as the mockers were pleased to say, in this
instance guided however by the sterling judgment of Jean Baptiste,
truly dramatically gifted, in the Faubourg St Germain. They called it
the Illustrious Theatre—(l’Illustre Théâtre). So through the years
of the ignoble strife of the Fronde, when times were arid for real
literary talent, Poquelin acted and composed little comedies, mainly
for the provinces. Travelling with his company to Languedoc, where
the Prince de Conti happened to be staying on his estates, Poquelin
produced before him several of his pieces, afterwards finding their
world-wide renown, _l’Étourdi_, _le Dépit Amoureux_, and others.
The Prince de Conti introduced him to Monsieur, the only brother of
Louis XIV.; and in a short time there came a day of days when
the command of their Majesties reached the actor-manager, to give
a representation in the chamber of the Guards in the old Louvre.
After the performance of this long five-act piece, Poquelin—who had
followed the custom of the actors of his time, had taken another
name, and selected Molière—stepped to the front, and begged His
Majesty’s permission to play a short one-act piece. It was _le
Docteur Amoureux_. This is possibly the origin of the custom, still
so frequently observed, of the “Curtain-raiser.”
[Illustration: POQUELIN DE MOLIERE
_Coypel pinc._ _Ficquet Sculp._
_To face page 100._]
Now established at Paris, Molière’s company, which he styled the
_Troupe de Monsieur_, his patron, was accorded the Salle of the
Palais Royal, for the representation of his piece. It had been
originally constructed for the cardinal’s tragedy of _Mirame_, and
“The chamber,” says Voltaire, “for dramatic purposes, is as bad as
the piece for which it was built.”
Molière had a very agreeable personality. He was a little above
medium height, well-built and of noble presence. His gait was
dignified, his nose and mouth were large, and his lips full; his
complexion was dark with black, thick eyebrows, and these he could
control to giving his face all sorts of comic expressions. His manner
was gentle, pleasing and kindly. He loved to speak, and when he read
his plays to his company, he liked them to bring their children, so
that he might study their ways and actions.
Molière, having the good or the ill fortune, as it may be, to become
such a distinguished public favourite, had his fair number of enemies
among his many friends. His chief detractors were, of course, to be
found among the bad authors and the great unacted; also the “unco’
guid” tried to sting him hard, and in a measure succeeded—as when do
they not when their poison is dropped upon sensitive natures? But the
warmth of the Sun-King’s admiration and patronage greatly shielded
him. His Majesty bestowed a canonry on his son.
Molière had a physician, Mauvilain. It was rather an unfortunate
name, and one day when he was dining with the king, Louis asked him
about him. “You have a doctor,” he said; “what does he do for you?”
“Sire,” replied Molière, “we gossip together; he prescribes me
remedies; I do not take them—and I am cured.”
That Ninon was proud of the brilliant man she had so signally helped
to befriend as a lad, may well be conceived, and whenever a new piece
was produced, she was always there to witness it, in one of the most
honoured places reserved for her.