A distinguished Salon—The Duke’s Homage—Quietism—The disastrous
Edict—The writing on the Window-pane—The persecution of the
Huguenots—The Pamphleteers—The story of Jean Larcher and _The
Ghost of M. Scarron_—The two Policies.
“The house of Mademoiselle de L’Enclos,” writes a contemporary
author, “was then, 1694, the rendezvous of the persons of the Court
and of the city who were regarded as the most intellectually gifted
and estimable. The house of Ninon was, perhaps, in these latter
years of her life, the only one where talent and wit found fair
breathing-room, and where the time was passed without card-playing
and without ennui, and until the age of eighty-seven she was sought
by the best company of the time.”
“And,” writes another eminent chronicler—
“Ninon had illustrious friends of all sorts, and showed such wit
and tact that she never failed to keep them in good humour with
each other; or at all events free of petty differences. Her friends
were of the most refined and mentally gifted of the people of the
Court; so that it was esteemed very desirable to mingle with them
in her salon. There was never any gaming, nor loud laughter, nor
disputing, nor religious or political discussion, but much flow of
wit, and conversing on topics new and old, subjects of sentiment
or of gallantry, but these never transgressing the bounds of good
taste. All was delicate, graceful, well-balanced, and furnished
themes which she was well able to render full of interest from
her stores of memories of so many past years. The consideration
she had acquired, the number and distinction of her friends and
acquaintance, continued to be her attraction when the charm of her
beauty had faded. She knew all about the intrigues of the present
Court, as of the old, serious and otherwise. Her conversation was
charming, disinterested, frank, guarded, and accurate at every
point, and almost to a weakness blameless and pure. She frequently
assisted her friends with money, and would enter for them into
important negotiations, and ever faithfully guarded money and
secrets entrusted to her keeping. All these things won for her a
repute and respect of the most marvellous kind.”
Such, on the testimony of the Marquis de la Fare and of St Simon, was
the Ninon de L’Enclos of the closing years of her life and of the
century. She herself records, with pardonable pride, that “when the
great Condé used to meet her out driving, he would descend from his
carriage, and cause the window of hers to be let down, that he might
offer her his compliments.”
It has been said that Paris no longer had any salon except hers
where people of wit and breeding and celebrity forgathered. There
came Racine, her near neighbour, Boileau, Fontenelle, la Fontaine,
Huydens, Bussy Rabutin, Charleval, Montreuil, la Fare, Benserade,
Desmarets, Quinault, La Bruyère, and with them many of the prominent
men and women of the Court. Thither also came frequently Fénelon,
and it was in Ninon’s salon that his relative, Madame Guyon, first
expounded her doctrine of Quietism.
Now and again Madame de Maintenon would come to the rue des
Tournelles, and Ninon concedes that she had the good taste not to
unduly assert herself on these occasions; though the air of strict
and devout propriety seemed ever more and more to enfold her. At
that time she showed considerable favour to the theories of Madame
Guyon and of Fénelon; but the Jesuit Père la Chaise had small
appreciation of anything savouring of liberty of conscience, and the
Edict of Nantes was imminent, the evil thing engendered in the brain
of the trio ruling him whose proud mottoes, “_Nec pluribus impor_,”
“_Vires acquiret eundo_,” so belied the weak, superstitious shadow
into which the Grand Monarque had faded.
Louis’s liking for his Huguenot subjects had always been so entirely
of the smallest, that it verged on hatred. Thanks to Mazarin’s
plan of mental cultivation for him, his understanding of the
doctrinal questions at issue between Catholic and Calvinist was so
infinitesimal as to be of no account. It was his arrogant claim of
authority over the minds and bodies of his subjects, far more than
any spiritual convictions, which needed but the representations of
Madame de Maintenon, of the egotistical, vain and unsympathetic
minister Louvois, and of the Jesuit intolerance of Père la Chaise,
to fire the smouldering flame of extermination of the “reformed”
Christianity of France; and on the 22nd of October, 1685, was
re-enacted the new version of the tragedy of St Bartholomew, the
chief _rôle_ in it played by the descendant of the murdered Coligny’s
friend, who had been the progenitor of Françoise d’Aubigné, the
ambitious Madame Louis Quatorze. Gentle and patient in adversity,
as Scarron’s wife, admirable, and perhaps really lovable, in that
far-off day when she did not even then scruple, and successfully,
to win her friend Ninon’s lover away from her—a fact by no means
forgotten, nor likely to be, recorded as Monsieur de Villarceaux had
recorded it at the time on a window of “the Yellow Room” in the rue
des Tournelles. There, diamond-graven on the pane of glass, that
erotic quatrain proclaimed the charms of Françoise as unmistakably
as ever; and though Ninon had no part in it, somehow the lines found
their way into Monsieur Loret’s journal, and forthwith it created
other couplets, which commemorated more than one incident in the
life of Madame Louis Quatorze. The precious rhyming ran into several
verses, varied only by the several names of Madame’s former admirers,
starting gaily with Monsieur de Villarceaux:
“On est ravi que le roi notre sire,
Aime la d’Aubigné
Moi, Villarceaux, je mén créve de rire,
Hi! hé! hi! hi! hi! hé!
Puis je dirai, sans être plus lestes,
Tu n’as que mes restes,
Toi!
Tu n’as que nos restes,” etc. etc.
Briefly, the French nation looked with contempt on the left-handed
marriage contracted by the king. Madame de Maintenon, less a bigot
than an assumed one, hypocritical, ambitious, wrapped about in a
veil of piety, ruled Louis to the disaster of the country. She was
calmly, ruthlessly cruel in her methods of fostering the natural
passion of Louis for getting all under his own control. Not content
with the grasp of government which Richelieu had bequeathed to him,
and he had retained with iron hand, he only too readily allowed
himself to be urged to acquire the grip of the consciences of his
subjects. The Edict of Nantes, established by the other great king,
which had brought peace to the distracted land, and permitted the
Protestants freedom of worship after their own simple forms, was
revoked, religious intolerance was once more rampant, and to such
a degree, that a few months later, a second edict deprived the
Huguenots of keeping their children. The quick death of the night
of St Bartholomew only took on now the guise of slow torture,
prolonged into years, which witnessed the departure of an industrious
community, and sowed the dragon’s teeth of revolution, which in less
than another hundred years was to ripen into such fearful harvesting.
Discontent prevailed, deep hatred rankled against the despotism of
Versailles. The faults of Louis, glaring as they had ever been, had
hitherto been toned in the eyes of his people by the brilliancy
and glory of martial successes, and of great achievement in civil
government; but victory was no longer constant, and the Thirty Years’
War had exhausted the public funds.
The enormous prodigality of the king’s mode of life was beginning to
be more and more recognised for the evil it was. The Sun-King’s light
was fast dimming; the people no longer worshipped from afar, and the
death-stroke to his popularity and renown waned as the domination
of Madame de Maintenon waxed ever more powerful. The pamphleteers
fell to work. Many such productions found circulation in spite of the
efforts of the police to run them to earth. One of marked effect was
entitled, _The Sighs of Enslaved France for Liberty_, and was widely
read. The liberal sentiments of the pamphlets made deep impression.
When they were detected in any person’s possession, the unfortunate
students were forthwith conducted to the torture-chamber or the
Bastille; and while stricture on Louis was harshly enough dealt with,
it was mild compared with any attacks on Madame de Maintenon. The
king was so entirely conscious of the great political mistake he had
made in his marriage with her, that it enraged him to be reminded of
it. One of the tractates was called _The Ghost of M. Scarron_, and it
was adorned with a picture parodying the statue of Louis on the Place
des Victoires, whose four allegorical figures of its pedestal were
replaced in the pamphlet picture by the figures of la Vallière, de
Montespan, Fontanges, and de Maintenon. One morning the king found a
copy of this literary effort under his breakfast napkin, and Madame
Louis Quatorze also found one under hers. It was the princes of the
blood who were her most bitter enemies, and their powerful influence
fomented the enmity, and contrived to defeat, again and again, the
endeavours of Monsieur de la Reynie, the lieutenant of police, to
bring the pamphleteers to “justice.”
_The Ghost of M. Scarron_ was the crowning offence, and Monsieur de
la Reynie was summoned to Versailles, and commanded at any cost to
track down the authors of this pamphlet.
It was a fearful dilemma for Monsieur de la Reynie; that it would end
in his disgrace he could not doubt, and whenever the king chanced to
see the unhappy lieutenant, he flung reproaches at him on account of
the terrible “ghost.”
Curious chance came to the rescue of Monsieur de la Reynie; but
to the undoing and judicial murder of an innocent man, one Jean
Larcher, ending up with a horrible tragedy. This Jean Larcher, who
had sustained a loss of some 5000 livres, which had been stolen from
his house, came to the lieutenant of police to lodge his complaint,
in the hope that the thief might be traced. No sooner had he given
his name, than Monsieur de la Reynie summoned a police officer,
and whispering a few words in his ear, bade him accompany Larcher,
who was a bookbinder, to his house in the rue des Lions St Paul.
Larcher, delighted at the prompt and interested attention shown
him, grew communicative as he went along, and gave the officer much
information as to the exact position of the receptacles in which
he stored his money and stock in trade. On arriving, the officer,
changing his courteous demeanour, called to two of the small throng
of soldiers and police standing about in front of the bookbinder’s
door, and bidding them keep him well in their charge, and follow him
upstairs in company with another officer, went first to a room on the
first floor, where he told the man to climb to the top of a certain
cupboard, loaded with papers and pamphlets ready for the binder, and
bring them down. Selecting one of these, the officer placed it in
the hands of Larcher, who turned white as a sheet, for it was a copy
of _The Ghost of M. Scarron_. The unfortunate man, without more ado,
was hurried off under arrest to the Châtelet, and thence, before any
great loss of time, to the torture-chamber, three times suffering
there, and finally to the gibbet, where he died bravely, and firmly
asserting his innocence to the last.
There came a time when he was justified. The whole matter proved to
be an infamous plot, concocted by a scoundrel who had an intrigue
with Larcher’s wife. This man was Larcher’s assistant, and afterwards
married the widow. At a later time Larcher’s son discovered that
the wretched fellow had placed the pamphlets where they were come
upon in Larcher’s house, and then had written an anonymous letter to
Monsieur de la Reynie, informing him of where they were to be found.
On tracking the exact truth and circumstances of this abominable
treachery, the young man broke, in the dead of night, into the house
where the couple lived, and murdered both. He was arrested; but he
was saved from public death by brain-fever, which struck him down
while he was in prison.
At the time of the conviction of Larcher, it was more than believed
that he was innocent; but, in the first place, M. de la Reynie had
his own safety and position to consider, and somebody had to bear the
brunt; and secondly, riding very hard on the heels of it, Larcher was
a Protestant, and furthermore guilty of the enormity of remaining
in communication with his child, who had been sent for protection to
England.
The pope was far more tolerant in his desires for dealing with the
French Protestants, than was the quartette at Versailles. The liberal
spirit of the Gallican Church was ignored to feed the contemptible
ambition of the converted Françoise d’Aubigné, and to lull to rest
the conscience of the pusillanimous nonentity still called the
King of France. The persecution of the Huguenots was carried on
relentlessly for fifteen years; fire and sword, and rape and murder,
were the lot of those who remained to brave the booted emissaries of
M. Louvois, if they retaliated where they had the chance, and as they
did fiercely in the terrible struggles in the Cévennes. Justice is
even-handed: it was no time to turn the cheek to be smitten. Those
who emigrated, as in such thousands they did, carried with them the
commerce and the prosperity of France. Frugal and industrious for the
most part, and in these later days at least, peacefully disposed,
rarely seeking more than to be let alone, they were the mainstay of
the country. Richelieu had fully recognised their value, and followed
it in his policy with them. The “Old Woman of Versailles,” as she was
widely called, reversed the great cardinal’s provisions, and in time
the avengement fell.
The clergy generally carried out the orders issued from Versailles
for the extermination of the heretics. Monseigneur d’Orléans and the
Abbé de Fénelon alone resisted. The first afforded time for the
Huguenots to make their preparations for emigrating from France, by
lodging the soldiery, sent to disperse them by violence, in his own
palace, and maintaining them at his own expense, forbidding them
meanwhile to harm any one of the Huguenot families in his diocese.
For Monsieur de Fénelon, selected to superintend the raid of the
_booted missionaries_ in Poitou and Saintonge, he, like the Bishop
of Orléans, forbade them to use violence, and brought back more of
the errant ones into the Catholic fold by his sweet, persuasive
eloquence, than the rest of the priests did, with all their
_dragonnades_ and executioner assistants, notwithstanding the view
of Madame de Maintenon and of her spiritual director: that if only
the holy Apostles had employed such emissaries of fire and sword, the
Christian religion would not have been half so long in establishing.