CHAPTER XLVIII.----LOUIS XIV., LITERATURE AND ART.

It has been said in this History that Louis XIV. had the fortune to find

himself at the culminating point of absolute monarchy, and to profit by

the labors of his predecessors, reaping a portion of their glory; he had

likewise the honor of enriching himself with the labors of his

contemporaries, and attracting to himself a share of their lustre; the

honor, be it said, not the fortune, for he managed to remain the centre

of intellectual movement as well as of the court, of literature and art

as well as affairs of state. Only the abrupt and solitary genius of

Pascal or the prankish and ingenuous geniality of La Fontaine held aloof

from king and court; Racine and Moliere, Bossuet and Fenelon, La Bruyere

and Boileau lived frequently in the circle of Louis XIV., and enjoyed in

different degrees his favor; M. de la Rochefoucauld and Madame de Sevigne

were of the court; Lebrun, Rigaud, Mignard, painted for the king;

Perrault and Mansard constructed the Louvre and Versailles; the learned

of all countries considered it an honor to correspond with the new

academies founded in France. Louis XIV. was even less a man of letters

or an artist than an administrator or a soldier; but literature and art,

as well as the superintendents and the generals, found in him the King.

The puissant unity of the reign is everywhere the same. The king and the

nation are in harmony.

Pascal, had he been born later, would have remained independent and

proud, from the nature of his mind and of his character as well as from

the connection he had full early with Port-Royal, where they did not rear

courtiers; he died, however, at thirty-nine, in 1661, the very year in

which Louis XIV. began to govern. Born at Clermont, in Auvergne,

educated at his father’s and by his father, though it was not thought

desirable to let him study mathematics, he had already discovered by

himself the first thirty-two propositions of Euclid, when Cardinal

Richelieu, holding on his knee little Jacqueline Pascal, and looking at

her brother, said to M. Pascal, the two children’s father, who had come

to thank him for a favor, “Take care of them; I mean to make something

great of them.” This was the native and powerful instinct of genius

divining genius; Richelieu, however, died three years later, without

having done anything for the children who had impressed him beyond giving

their father a share in the superintendence of Rouen; he thus put them in

the way of the great Corneille, who was affectionately kind to

Jacqueline, but took no particular notice of Blaise Pascal. The latter

was seventeen; he had already written his _Traite des Coniques_ (Treatise

on Conics) and begun to occupy himself with “his arithmetical machine,”

as his sister, Madame Perier calls it. At twenty-three he had ceased to

apply his mind to human sciences; “when he afterwards discovered the

roulette (cycloid), it was without thinking,” says Madame Perier, “and to

distract his attention from a severe tooth-ache he had.” He was not

twenty-four when anxiety for his salvation and for the glory of God had

taken complete possession of his soul. It was to the same end that he

composed the _Lettres Provinciales,_ the first of which was written in

six days, and the style of which, clear, lively, precise, far removed

from the somewhat solemn gravity of Port-Royal, formed French prose as

Malherbe and Boileau formed the poetry. This was the impression of his

contemporaries, the most hard of them to please in the art of writing.

“That is excellent; that will be relished,” said the recluses of Port-

Royal, in spite of the misgivings of M. Singlin. More than thirty years

after Pascal’s ddath, Madame de Sevigne, in 1689, wrote to Madame de

Grignan, “Sometimes, to divert ourselves, we read the little Letters (to

a provincial). Good heavens, how charming! And how my son reads them!

I always think of my daughter, and how that excess of correctness of

reasoning would suit her; but your brother says that you consider that it

is always the same thing over again. Ah! My goodness, so much the

better! Could any one have a more perfect style, a raillery more

refined, more natural, more delicate, worthier offspring of those

dialogues of Plato, which are so fine? And when, after the first ten

letters, he addresses himself to the reverend Jesuit fathers, what

earnestness, what solidity, what force! What eloquence! What love for

God and for the truth! What a way of maintaining it and making it

understood! I am sure that you have never read them but in a hurry,

pitching on the pleasant places; but it is not so when they are read at

leisure.” Lord Macaulay once said to M. Guizot, “Amongst modern works I

know only two perfect ones, to which there is no exception to be taken,

and they are _Pascal’s Provincials_ and the _Letters of Madame de

Sevigne_.”

[Illustration: Blaise Pascal----597]

Boileau was of Lord Macaulay’s opinion; at least as regarded Pascal.

“Corbinelli wrote to me the other day,” says Madame de Sevigne, on the

15th of January, 1690: “he gave me an account of a conversation and a

dinner at M. de Lamoignon’s: the persons were the master and mistress of

the house, M. de Troyes, M. de Toulon, Father Bourdaloue, a comrade of

his, Desprdaux, and Corbinelli. The talk was of ancient and modern

works. Despreaux supported the ancient, with the exception of one single

modern, which surpassed, in his opinion, both old and new. Bourdaloue’s

comrade, who assumed the well-read air, and who had fastened on to

Despreaux and Corbinelli, asked him what in the world this book could be

that was so remarkably clever. Despreaux would not give the name.

Corbinelli said to him, ‘Sir, I conjure you to tell me, that I may read

it all night.’ Despreaux answered, laughing, ‘Ah! sir, you have read it

more than once, I am sure.’ The Jesuit joins in, with a disdainful air,

and presses Despreaux to name this marvellous writer. ‘Do not press me,

father,’ says Despreaux. The father persists. At last Despreaux takes

hold of his arm, and squeezing it very hard, says, ‘You will have it,

father; well, then, egad! it is Pascal.’ ‘Pascal,’ says the father, all

blushes and astonishment; ‘Pascal is as beautiful as the false can be.’

‘False,’ replied Despreaux: ‘false! Let me tell you that he is as true as

he is inimitable; he has just been translated into three languages.’ The

father rejoined, ‘He is none the more true for that.’ Despreaux grew

warm, and shouted like a madman: ‘Well, father, will you say that one of

yours did not have it printed in one of his books that a Christian was

not obliged to love God? Dare you say that that is false?’ ‘Sir,’ said

the father, in a fury, ‘we must distinguish.’ ‘Distinguish!’ cried

Despreaux; ‘distinguish, egad! distinguish! Distinguish whether we are

obliged to love God!’ And, taking Corbinelli by the arm, he flew off to

the other end of the room, coming back again, and rushing about like a

lunatic; but he would not go near the father any more, and went off to

join the rest of the company. Here endeth the story; the curtain falls.”

Literary taste and religious sympathies combined, in the case of Boileau,

to exalt Pascal.

The provincials could not satisfy for long the pious ardor of Pascal’s

soul; he took in hand his great work on the _Verite de la Religion_.

He had taken a vigorous part in the discussions of Port-Royal as to

subscription of the formulary: his opinion was decidedly in favor of

resistance. It was the moment when MM. Arnauld and Nicole had discovered

a restriction, as it was then called, which allowed of subscribing with a

safe conscience. “M. Pascal, who loved truth above all things,” writes

his niece, Marguerite Perier; “who, moreover, was pulled down by a pain

in the head, which never left him; who had exerted himself to make them

feel as he himself felt; and who had expressed himself very vigorously in

spite of his weakness, was so grief-stricken that he had a fit, and lost

speech and consciousness. Everybody was alarmed. Exertions were made to

bring him round, and then those gentlemen withdrew. When he was quite

recovered, Madame Perier asked him what had caused this incident. He

answered, ‘When I saw all those persons that I looked upon as being those

whom God had made to know the truth, and who ought to be its defenders,

wavering and falling. I declare to you that I was so overcome with grief

that I was unable to support it, and could not help breaking down.’”

Blaise Pascal was the worthy brother of Jacqueline; in the former, as

well as the latter, the soul was too ardent and too strong for its

covering of body. Nearly all his relatives died young. “I alone am

left,” wrote Mdlle. Perier, when she had become, exceptionally, very

aged. “I might say, like Simon Maccabeus, the last of all his brethren,

All my relatives and all my brethren are dead in the service of God and

in the love of truth. I alone am left; please God I may never have a

thought of backsliding!”

Pascal was unable to finish his work. “God, who had inspired my brother

with this design and with all his thoughts,” writes his sister, “did not

permit him to bring it to its completion, for reasons to us unknown.”

The last years of Pascal’s life, invalid as he had been from the age of

eighteen, were one long and continual torture, accepted and supported

with an austere disdain of suffering. Incapable of any application, he

gave his attention solely to his salvation and the care of the poor.

“I have taken it into my head,” says he, “to have in the house a sick

pauper, to whom the same service shall be rendered as to myself;

particular attention to be paid to him, and, in fact, no difference to be

made between him and me, in order that I may have the consolation of

knowing that there is one pauper as well treated as myself, in the

perplexity I suffer from finding myself in the great affluence of every

sort in which I do find myself.” The spirit of M. de St. Cyran is there,

and also the spirit of the gospel, which caused Pascal, when he was

dying, to say, “I love poverty, because Jesus Christ loved it. I love

wealth, because it gives the means of assisting the needy.” A genius

unique in the extent and variety of his faculties, which were applied

with the same splendid results to mathematics and physics, to philosophy

and polemics, disdaining all preconceived ideas, going unerringly and

straightforwardly to the bottom of things with admirable force and

profundity, independent and free even in his voluntary submission to the

Christian faith, which he accepts with his eyes open, after having

weighed it, measured it, and sounded it to its uttermost depths, too

steadfast and too simple not to bow his head before mysteries, all the

while acknowledging his ignorance. “If there were no darkness,” says he,

“man would not feel his corruption; if there were no light, man would

have no hope of remedy. Thus it is not only quite right, but useful, for

us that God should be concealed in part, and revealed in part, since it

is equally dangerous for man to know God without knowing his own misery,

and to know his own misery without knowing God.” The lights of this

great intellect had led him to acquiesce in his own fogs. “One can be

quite sure that there is a God, without knowing what He is,” says he.

In 1627, four years after Pascal, and, like him, in a family of the long

robe, was born, at Dijon, his only rival in that great art of writing

prose which established the superiority of the French language. At

sixteen, Bossuet preached his first sermon in the drawing-room of Madame

de Rambouillet, and the great Conde was pleased to attend his theological

examinations. He was already famous at court as a preacher and a

polemist when the king gave him the title of Bishop of Condom, almost

immediately inviting him to become preceptor to the dauphin. A difficult

and an irksome task for him who had already written for Turenne an

exposition of the Catholic faith, and had delivered the funeral orations

over Madame Henriette and the Queen of England. “The king has greatly at

heart the dauphin’s education,” wrote Father Lacoue to Colbert; “he

regards it as one of his grand state-strokes in respect of the future.”

The dauphin was not devoid of intelligence. “Monseigneur has plenty of

wits,” said Councillor Le Gout de Saint-Seine in his private journal,

“but his wits are under a bushel.” The boy was indolent, with little

inclination for work, roughly treated by his governor, the Duke of

Montausier, who was endowed with more virtue than ability in the

superintendence of a prince’s education. “O,” cried Monseigneur, when

official announcement was made to him of the project of marriage which

the king was conducting for him with the Princess Christine of Bavaria,

“we shall see whether M. Huet (afterwards bishop of Avranches) will want

to make me learn ancient geography any more!” Bossuet had better

understood what ought to be the aim of a king’s education. “Remember,

Monseigneur,” he constantly repeated to him, “that destined as you are to

reign some day over this great kingdom, you are bound to make it happy.”

He was in despair at his pupil’s inattention. “There is a great deal to

endure with a mind so destitute of application,” he wrote to Marshal

Bellefonds; “there is no perceptible relief, and we go on, as St. Paul

says, hoping against hope.” He had written a little treatise on

inattention, _De Incogitantia,_--in the vain hope of thus rousing his

pupil to work. “I dread nothing in the world so much,” Louis XIV would

say, “as to have a sluggard (_faineant_) dauphin; I would much prefer to

have no son at all!” Bossuet foresaw the innumerable obstacles in the

way of his labors. “I perceive, as I think,” he wrote to his friends,

“in the dauphin the beginnings of great graces, a simplicity, a

straightforwardness, a principle of goodness, an attention, amidst all

his flightiness, to the mysteries, a something or other which comes with

a flash, in the middle of his distractions, to call him back to God. You

would be charmed if I were to tell you the questions he puts to me, and

the desire he shows to be a good servant of God. But the world! the

world! the world! pleasures, evil counsels, evil examples! Save us,

Lord! save us! Thou didst verily preserve the children from the furnace,

but Thou didst send Thine angel; and, as for me, alas! what am I?

Humility, trepidation, absorption into one’s own nothingness!”

It was not for Bossuet that the honor was reserved of succeeding in the

difficult task of a royal education. Fenelon encountered in the Duke of

Burgundy a more undisciplined nature, a more violent character, and more

dangerous tendencies than Bossuet had to fight against in the

grand-dauphin; but there was a richer mind and a warmer heart; the

preceptor, too, was more proper for the work. Bossuet, nevertheless,

labored conscientiously to instruct his little prince, studying for him

and with him the classical authors, preparing grammatical expositions,

and, lastly, writing for his edification the _Traite de la Connaissance

de Dieu et de soi-mime_ (Treatise on the Knowledge of God and of Self),

the _Discours sur l’Histoire Universelle_ (Discourse on Universal

History), and the _Politique tiree de l’Ecriture Sainte_ (Polity derived

from Holy Writ). The labor was in vain; the very loftiness of his

genius, the extent and profundity of his views, rendered Bossuet unfit to

get at the heart and mind of a boy who was timid, idle, and kept in fear

by the king as well as by his governor. The dauphin was nineteen when

his marriage restored Bossuet to the church and to the world; the king

appointed him almoner to the dauphiness, and, before long, Bishop of

Meaux.

Neither the assembly of the clergy and the part he played therein, nor

his frequent preachings at court, diverted Bossuet from his duties as

bishop; he habitually resided at Meaux, in the midst of his priests. The

greater number of his sermons, written at first in fragments, collected

from memory in their aggregate, and repeated frequently with divergences

in wording and development, were preached in the cathedral of Meaux. The

dauphin sometimes went thither to see him. “Pray, sir,” he had said to

him, in his childhood, “take great care of me whilst I am little; I will

of you when I am big.” Assured of his righteousness as a priest and his

fine tact as a man, the king appealed to Bossuet in the delicate

conjunctures of his life. It is related that it was the Bishop of Meaux

who dissuaded him from making public his marriage with Madame de

Maintenon. She, more anxious for power than splendor, did not bear him

any ill-will for it; amidst the various leanings of the court, divided as

it was between Jansenism and Quietism, it was to the simple teaching of

the Catholic church, represented by Bossuet, that she remained

practically attached. Right-minded and strong-minded, but a little

cold-hearted, Madame de Maintenon could not suffer herself to be led away

by the sublime excesses of the Jansenists or the pious reveries of Madame

Guyon; the Jesuits had influence over her, without her being a slave to

them; and that influence increased after the death of Bossuet. The

guidance of the Bishop of Meaux, in fact, answered the requirements of

spirits that were pious and earnest without enthusiasm: less ardent in

faith and less absolute in religious practice than M. de St. Cyran and

Port-Royal, less exacting in his demands than Father Bourdaloue,

susceptible now and then of mystic ideas, as is proved by his letters to

Sister Cornuau, he did not let himself be won by the vague ecstasies of

absolute (pure) love; he had a mind large enough to say, like Mother

Angelica Arnauld, “I am of all saints’ order, and all saints are of my

order; “but his preferences always inclined towards those saints and

learned doctors who had not carried any religious tendency to excess, and

who had known how to rest content with the spirit of a rule and a faith

that were practical. A wonderful genius, discovering by flashes, and as

if by instinct, the most profound truths of human nature, and giving them

expression in an incomparable style, forcing, straining the language to

make it render his idea, darting at one bound to the sublimest height by

use of the simplest terms, which he, so to speak, bore away with him,

wresting them from their natural and proper signification. “There, in

spite of that great heart of hers, is that princess so admired and so

beloved; there, such as Death has made her for us!” Bossuet alone could

speak like that.

He was writing incessantly, all the while that he was preaching at Meaux

and at Paris, making funeral orations over the queen, Maria Theresa, over

the Princess Palatine, Michael Le Tellier, and the Prince of Conde. The

Edict of Nantes had just been revoked; controversy with the Protestant

ministers, headed by Claude and Jurieu, occupied a great space in the

life of the Bishop of Meaux. He at that time wrote his _Histoire des

Variations,_ often unjust and violent, always able in its attacks upon

the Reformation; he did not import any zeal into persecution, though all

the while admitting unreservedly the doctrines universally propagated

amongst Catholics. “I declare,” he wrote to M. de Baville, “that I am

and have always been of opinion, first, that princes may by penal laws

constrain all heretics to conform to the profession and practices of the

Catholic church; secondly, that this doctrine ought to be held invariable

in the church, which has not only conformed to, but has even demanded,

similar ordinances from princes.” He at the same time opposed the

constraint put upon the new converts to oblige them to go to mass,

without requiring from them any other act of religion.

“When the emperors imposed a like obligation on the Donatists,” he wrote

to the Bishop of Mirepoix, “it was on the supposition that they were

converted, or would be; but the heretics at the present time, who declare

themselves by not fulfilling their Easter (communicating), ought to be

rather hindered from assisting at the mysteries than constrained thereto,

and the more so in that it appears to be a consequence thereof to

constrain them likewise to fulfil their Easter, which is expressly to

give occasion for frightful sacrilege. They might be constrained to

undergo instruction; but, so far as I can learn, that would hardly

advance matters, and I think that we must be reduced to three things; one

is, to oblige them to send their children to the schools, or, in default,

to find means of taking them out of their hands; another is, to be firm

as regards marriages; and the last is, to take great pains to become

privately acquainted with those of whom there are good hopes, and to

procure for them solid instruction and veritable enlightenment; the rest

must be left to time and to the grace of God. I know of nothing else.”

About the same time Fenelon, engaged upon the missions in Poitou, being

as much convinced as the Bishop of Meaux of a sovereign’s rights over the

conscience of the faithful, as well as of the terrible danger of

hypocrisy, wrote to Bossuet, telling him that he had demanded the

withdrawal of the troops in all the districts he was visiting: “It is no

light matter to change the sentiments of a whole people. What difficulty

must the apostles have found in changing the face of the universe,

overcoming all passions, and establishing a doctrine till then unheard

of, seeing that we cannot persuade the ignorant by clear and express

passages which they read every day in favor of the religion of their

ancestors, and that the king’s own authority stirs up every passion to

render persuasion more easy for us! The remnants of this sect go on

sinking little by little, as regards all exterior observance, into a

religious indifference which cannot but cause fear and trembling. If one

wanted to make them abjure Christianity and follow the Koran, there would

be nothing required but to show them the dragoons; provided that they

assemble by night, and withstand all instruction, they consider that they

have done enough.” Cardinal Noailles was of the same mind as Bossuet and

FEnelon. “The king will be pained to decide against your opinion as

regards the new converts,” says a letter to him from Madame de Maintenon;

“meanwhile the most general is to force them to attend at mass. Your

opinion seems to be a condemnation of all that has been hitherto done

against these poor creatures. It is not pleasant to hark back so far,

and it has always been supposed that, in any case, they must have a

religion.” In vain were liberty of conscience and its inviolable rights

still misunderstood by the noblest spirits, the sincerity and

high-mindedness of the great bishops instinctively revolted against

the hypocrisy engendered of persecution. The tacit assuagement of the

severities against the Reformers, between 1688 and 1700, was the fruit of

the representations of Bossuet, Fenelon, and Cardinal Noailles. Madame

de Maintenon wrote at that date to one of her relatives, “You are

converted; do not meddle in the conversion of others. I confess to you

that I do not like the idea of answering before God and the king for all

those conversions.”

At the same time with the controversial treatises, the _Elevations sur

les Mysteres_ and the _Meditations sur l’Evangile_ were written at Meaux,

drawing the bishop away to the serener regions of supreme faith. There

might he have chanced to meet those Reformers, as determined as he in the

strife, as attached, at bottom, as he, for life and death, to the

mysteries and to the lights of a common hope. “When God shall give us

grace to enter Paradise,” St. Bernard used to say, “we shall be above all

astonished at not finding some of those whom we had thought to meet

there, and at finding others whom we did not expect.” Bossuet had a

moments glimpse of this higher truth; in concert with Leibnitz, a great

intellect of more range in knowledge and less steadfastness than he in

religious faith, he tried to reconcile the Catholic and Protestant

communions in one and the same creed. There were insurmountable

difficulties on both sides; the attempt remained unsuccessful.

The Bishop of Meaux had lately triumphed in the matter of Quietism,

breaking the ties of old friendship with Fenelon, and more concerned

about defending sound doctrine in the church than fearful of hurting his

friend, who was sincere and modest in his relations with him, and humbly

submissive to the decrees of the court of Rome. The Archbishop of

Cambrai was in exile at his own diocese; Bossuet was ill at Meaux, still,

however, at work, going deeper every day into that profound study of Holy

Writ and of the fathers of the church which shines forth in all his

writings. He had stone, and suffered agonies, but would not permit an

operation. On his death-bed, surrounded by his nephews and his vicars,

he rejected with disdain all eulogies on his episcopal life. “Speak to

me of necessary truths,” said he, preserving to the last the simplicity

of a great and strong mind, accustomed to turn from appearances and

secondary doctrines to embrace the mighty realities of time and of

eternity. He died at Paris on the 12th of April, 1704, just when the

troubles of the church were springing up again. Great was the

consternation amongst the bishops of France, wont as they were to shape

themselves by his counsels. “Men were astounded at this mortal’s

mortality.” Bossuet was seventy-three.

A month later, on the 13th of May, Father Bourdaloue in his turn died.

A model of close logic and moral austerity, with a stiff and manly

eloquence, so impressed with the miserable insufficiency of human

efforts, that he said as he was dying, “My God, I have wasted life; it is

just that Thou recall it.” There remained only Fenelon in the first

rank, which Massillon did not as yet dispute with him. Malebranche was

living retired in his cell at the Oratory, seldom speaking, writing his

_Recherches sur la Verite_ (Researches into Truth), and his _Entretiens

sur la Metaphysique_ (Discourses on Metaphysics), bolder in thought than

he was aware of or wished, sincere and natural in his meditations as well

as in his style. In spite of Flechier’s eloquence in certain funeral

orations, posterity has decided against the modesty of the Archbishop of

Cambrai, who said at the death of the Bishop of Nimes, in 1710, “We have

lost our master.” In his retirement or his exile, after Bossuet’s death,

it was around Fenelon that was concentrated all the lustre of the French

episcopate, long since restored to the respect and admiration it

deserved.

Fenelon was born in Perigord, at the castle of Fenelon, on the 6th of

August, 1651. Like Cardinal Retz he belonged to an ancient and noble

house, and was destined from his youth for the church. Brought up at the

seminary of St. Sulpice, lately founded by M. Olier, he for a short time

conceived the idea of devoting himself to foreign missions; his weak

health and his family’s opposition turned him ere long from his purpose,

but the preaching of the gospel amongst the heathen continued to have for

him an attractionn which is perfectly depicted in one of the rare sermons

of his which have been preserved. He had held himself modestly aloof,

occupied with confirming new Catholics in their conversion or with

preaching to the Protestants of Poitou; he had written nothing but his

_Traite de l’Education des Filles,_ intended for the family of the Duke

of Beauvilliers, and a book on the _ministere du pasteur_. He was in bad

odor with Harlay, Archbishop of Paris, who had said to him curtly one

day, “You want to escape notice, M. Abbe, and you will;” nevertheless,

when Louis XIV. chose the Duke of Beauvilliers as governor to his

grandson, the Duke of Burgundy, the duke at once called Fenelon, then

thirty-eight years of age, to the important post of preceptor.

Whereas the grand-dauphin, endowed with ordinary intelligence, was

indolent and feeble, his son was, in the same proportion, violent, fiery,

indomitable. “The Duke of Burgundy,” says St. Simon, “was a born demon

(_naquit terrible_), and in his early youth caused fear and trembling.

Harsh, passionate, even to the last degree of rage against inanimate

things, madly impetuous, unable to bear the least opposition, even from

the hours and the elements, without flying into furies enough to make you

fear that everything inside him would burst; obstinate to excess,

passionately fond of all pleasures, of good living, of the chase madly,

of music with a sort of transport, and of play too, in which he could not

bear to lose; often ferocious, naturally inclined to cruelty, savage in

raillery, taking off absurdities with a patness which was killing; from

the height of the clouds he regarded men as but atoms to whom he bore no

resemblance, whoever they might be. Barely did the princes his brothers

appear to him intermediary between himself and the human race, although

there had always been an affectation of bringing them all three up in

perfect equality; wits, penetration, flashed from every part of him, even

in his transports; his repartees were astounding, his replies always went

to the point and deep down, even in his mad fits; he made child’s play of

the most abstract sciences; the extent and vivacity of his wits were

prodigious, and hindered him from applying himself to one thing at a

time, so far as to render him incapable of it.”

As a sincere Christian and a priest, Fenelon saw from the first that

religion alone could triumph over this terrible nature; the Duke of

Beauvilliers, as sincere and as christianly as he, without much wits,

modestly allowed himself to be led; all the motives that act most

powerfully on a generous spirit, honor, confidence, fear and love of

God, were employed one after the other to bring the prince into

self-subjection. He was but eight years old, and Fenelon had been only

a few months with him, when the child put into his hands one day the

following engagement:--

“I promise M. l’Abbe de Fenelon, on the honor of a prince, to do at once

whatever he bids me, and to obey him the instant he orders me anything,

and, if I fail to, I will submit to any kind of punishment and disgrace.”

“Done at Versailles the 29th of November, 1689.

“Signed: Louis.”

[Illustration: Fenelon and the Duke of Burgundy----610]

The child, however, would forget himself, and relapse into his mad fits.

When his preceptor was chiding him one day for a grave fault, he went so

far as to say, “No, no, sir; I know who I am and what you are.” Fenelon

made no reply; coldly and gravely he allowed the day to close and the

night to pass without showing his pupil any sign of either resentment or

affection. Next day the Duke of Burgundy was scarcely awake when his

preceptor entered the room. “I do not know, sir,” said he, “whether you

remember what you said to me yesterday, that you know what you are and

what I am. It is my duty to teach you that you do not know either one or

the other. You fancy yourself, sir, to be more than I; some lackeys, no

doubt, have told you so, but I am not afraid to tell you, since you force

me to it, that I am more than you. You have sense enough to understand

that there is no question here of birth. You would consider anybody out

of his wits who pretended to make a merit of it that the rain of heaven

had fertilized his crops without moistening his neighbors. You would be

no wiser if you were disposed to be vain of your birth, which adds

nothing to your personal merit. You cannot doubt that I am above you in

lights and knowledge. You know nothing but what I have taught you; and

what I have taught you is nothing compared with what I might still teach

you. As for authority, you have none over me; and I, on the contrary,

have it fully and entirely over you; the king and Monseigneur have told

you so often enough. You fancy, perhaps, that I think myself very

fortunate to hold the office I discharge towards you; disabuse yourself

once more, sir; I only took it in order to obey the king and give

pleasure to Monseigneur, and not at all for the painful privilege of

being your preceptor; and, that you may have no doubt about it, I am

going to take you to his Majesty, and beg him to get you another one,

whose pains I hope may be more successful than mine.” The Duke of

Burgundy’s passion was past, and he burst into sobs. “Ah! sir,” he

cried, “I am in despair at what took place yesterday; if you speak to

the king, you will lose me his affection; if you leave me, what will be

thought of me? I promise you. I promise you . . . that you shall be

satisfied with me; but promise me . . .”

Fenelon promised nothing; he remained, and the foundation of his

authority was laid forever in the soul of his pupil. The young prince

did not forget what he was, but he had felt the superiority of his

master. “I leave the Duke of Burgundy behind the door,” he was

accustomed to say, “and with you I am only little Louis.”

God, at the same time with Fenelon, had taken possession of the Duke of

Burgundy’s soul. “After his first communion, we saw disappearing little

by little all the faults which, in his infancy, caused us great

misgivings as to the future,” writes Madame de Maintenon. “His piety has

caused such a metamorphosis that, from the passionate thing he was, he

has become self-restrained, gentle, complaisant; one would say that that

was his character, and that virtue was natural to him.” “All his mad

fits and spites yielded at the bare name of God,” Fenelon used to say;

“one day when he was in a very bad temper, and wanted to hide in his

passion what he had done in his disobedience, I pressed him to tell me

the truth before God; then he put himself into a great rage and bawled,

‘Why ask me before God? Very well, then, as you ask me in that way, I

cannot deny that I committed that fault.’ He was as it were beside

himself with excess of rage, and yet religion had such dominion over him

that it wrung from him so painful an avowal.” “From this abyss,” writes

the Duke of St. Simon, “came forth a prince affable, gentle, humane,

self-restrained, patient, modest, humble, and austere towards himself,

wholly devoted to his obligations and feeling them to be immense; he

thought of nothing but combining the duties of a son and a subject with

those to which he saw himself destined.”

“From this abyss “ came forth also a prince singularly well informed,

fond of study, with a refined taste in literature, with a passion for

science; for his instruction Fenelon made use of the great works composed

for his father’s education by Bossuet, adding thereto writings more

suitable for his age; for him he composed the _Fables_ and the _Dialogues

des Morts,_ and a _Histoire de Charlemagne_ which has perished. In his

stories, even those that were imaginary, he paid attention before

everything to truth. “Better leave a history in all its dryness than

enliven it at the expense of truth,” he would say. The suppleness and

richness of his mind sufficed to save him from wearisomeness; the

liveliness of his literary impressions communicated itself to his pupil.

“I have seen,” says Fenelon in his letter to the French Academy, “I have

seen a young prince, but eight years old, overcome with grief at sight of

the peril of little Joash; I have seen him lose patience with the chief

priest for concealing from Joash his name and his birth; I have seen him

weeping bitterly as he listened to these verses:--

‘O! miseram Euridicen anima fugiente vocabat;

Euridicen toto referebant flumine ripx.’”

The soul and mind of Fenelon were sympathetic; Bossuet, in writing for

the grand-dauphin, was responsive to the requirements of his own mind,

never to those of the boy’s with whose education he had been intrusted.

Fenelon also wrote _Telemaque_. “It is a fabulous narrative,” he himself

says, “in the form of an heroic poem, like Homer’s or Virgil’s, wherein I

have set forth the principal actions that are meet for a prince whose

birth points him out as destined to reign. I did it at a time when I was

charmed with the marks of confidence and kindness showered upon me by the

king; I must have been not only the most ungrateful but the most

insensate of men to have intended to put into it satirical and insolent

portraits; I shrink from the bare idea of such a design. It is true that

I have inserted in these adventures all the verities necessary for

government and all the defects that one can show in the exercise of

sovereign power; but I have not stamped any of them with a peculiarity

which would point to any portrait or caricature. The more the work is

read, the more it will be seen that I wished to express everything

without depicting anybody consecutively; it is, in fact, a narrative done

in haste, in detached pieces and at different intervals; all I thought of

was to amuse the Duke of Burgundy, and, whilst amusing, to instruct him,

without ever meaning to give the work to the public.”

_Telemaque_ was published, without any author’s name and by an

indiscretion of the copyist’s, on the 6th of April, 1699. Fenelon was in

exile at his diocese; public rumor before long attributed the work to

him; the _Maximes des Saints_ had just been condemned, _Telemaque_ was

seized, the printers were punished; some copies had escaped the police;

the book was reprinted in Holland; all Europe read it, finding therein

the allusions and undermeanings against which Fenelon defended himself.

Louis XIV. was more than ever angry with the archbishop. “I cannot

forgive M. de Cambrai for having composed the Telemaque,” Madame de

Maintenon would say. Fenelon’s disgrace, begun by the _Maximes des

Saints_ touching absolute (pure) love, was confirmed by his ideal picture

of kingly power. Chimerical in his theories of government, high-flown in

his pious doctrines, Fenelon, in the conduct of his life as well as in

his practical directions to his friends, showed a wisdom, a prudence, a

tact which singularly belied the free speculations of his mind or his

heart. He preserved silence amid the commendations and criticisms of the

_Telemaque_. “I have no need and no desire to change my position,” he

would say; “I am beginning to be old, and I am infirm; there is no

occasion for my friends to ever commit themselves or to take any doubtful

step on my account. I never sought out the court; I was sent for

thither. I staid there nearly ten years without obtruding myself,

without taking a single step on my own behalf, without asking the

smallest favor, without meddling in any matter, and confining myself to

answering conscientiously in all matters about which I was spoken to.

I was dismissed; all I have to do is to remain at peace in my own place.

I doubt not that, besides the matter of my condemned work, the policy of

_Telemaque_ was employed against me upon the king’s mind; but I must

suffer and hold my tongue.”

Every tongue was held within range of King Louis XIV. It was only on the

22d of December, 1701, four years after Fenelon’s departure, that the

Duke of Burgundy thought he might write to him in the greatest secrecy:

“At last, my dear archbishop, I find a favorable opportunity of breaking

the silence I have kept for four years. I have suffered many troubles

since, but one of the greatest has been that of being unable to show you

what my feelings towards you were during that time, and that my affection

increased with your misfortunes, instead of being chilled by them. I

think with real pleasure on the time when I shall be able to see you

again, but I fear that this time is still a long way off. It must be

left to the will of God, from whose mercy I am always receiving new

graces. I have been many times unfaithful to Him since I saw you, but He

has always done me the grace of recalling me to Him, and I have not,

thank God, been deaf to His voice. I continue to study all alone,

although I have not been doing so in the regular way for the last two

years, and I like it more than ever. But nothing gives me more pleasure

than metaphysics and ethics, and I am never tired of working at them. I

have done some little pieces myself, which I should very much like to be

in a position to send you, that you might correct them as you used to do

my themes in old times. I shall not tell you here how my feelings

revolted against all that has been done in your case, but we must submit

to the will of God and believe that all has happened for our good.

Farewell, my dear archbishop. I embrace you with all my heart; I ask

your prayers and your blessing. --Louis.”

“I speak to you of God and yourself only,” answered Fenelon in a letter

full of wise and tender counsels; it is no question of me. Thank God, I

have a heart at ease; my heaviest cross is that I do not see you, but I

constantly present you before God in closer presence than that of the

senses. I would give a thousand lives like a drop of water to see you

such as God would have you.”

Next year, in 1702, the king gave the Duke of Burgundy the command of the

army in Flanders. He wrote to Fenelon, “I cannot feel myself so near you

without testifying my joy thereat, and, at the same time, that which is

caused by the king’s permission to call upon you on my way; he has,

however, imposed the condition that I must not see you in private. I

shall obey this order, and yet I shall be able to talk to you as much as

I please, for I shall have with me Saumery, who will make the third at

our first interview after five years’ separation.” The archbishop was

preparing to leave Cambrai so as not to be in the prince’s way; he now

remained, only seeing the Duke of Burgundy, however, in the presence of

several witnesses; when he presented him with his table-napkin at supper,

the prince raised his voice, and, turning to his old master, said, with a

touching reminiscence of his childhood’s passions, “I know what I owe

you; you know what I am to you.”

The correspondence continued, with confidence and deference on the part

of the prince, with tender, sympathetic, far-sighted, paternal interest

on the part of the archbishop, more and more concerned for the perils and

temptations to which the prince was exposed in proportion as he saw him

nearer to the throne and more exposed to the incense of the world. “The

right thing is to become the counsel of his Majesty,” he wrote to him on

the death of the grand dauphin, “the father of the people, the comfort of

the afflicted, the defender of the church; the right thing is to keep

flatterers aloof and distrust them, to distinguish merit, seek it out and

anticipate it, to listen to everything, believe nothing without proof,

and, being placed above all, to rise superior to every one. The right

thing is to desire to be father and not master. The right thing is not

that all should be for one, but that one should be for all, to secure

their happiness.” A solemn and touching picture of an absolute monarch,

submitting to God and seeking His will alone. Fenelon had early imbued

his pupil with the spirit of it; and the pupil appeared on the point of

realizing it; but God at a single blow destroyed all these fair hopes.

“All my ties are broken,” said Fenelon; “I live but on affection, and of

affection I shall die; we shall recover ere long that which we have not

lost; we approach it every day with rapid strides; yet a little while,

and there will be no more cause for tears.” A week later he was dead,

leaving amongst his friends, so diminished already by death, an

immeasurable gap, and amongst his adversaries themselves the feeling of a

great loss. “I am sorry for the death of M. de Cambrai,” wrote Madame de

Maintenon on the 10th of January, 1715; “he was a friend I lost through

Quietism, but it is asserted that he might have done good service in the

council, if things should be pushed so far.” Fenelon had not been

mistaken, when he wrote once upon a time to Madame de Maintenon, who

consulted him about her defects, “You are good towards those for whom you

have liking and esteem, but you are cold so soon as the liking leaves

you; when you are frigid your frigidity is carried rather far, and, when

you begin to feel mistrust, your heart is withdrawn too brusquely from

those to whom you had shown confidence.”

Fenelon had never shown any literary prepossessions. He wrote for his

friends or for the Duke of Burgundy, lavishing the treasures of his mind

and spirit upon his letters of spiritual guidance, composing, in order to

convince the Duke of Orleans, his _Traite de l’Existence de Dieu,_

indifferent as to the preservation of the sermons he preached every

Sunday, paying more attention to the plans of government he addressed to

the young dauphin than to the publication of his works. Several were not

collected until after his death. In delivering their eulogy of him at

the French Academy, neither M. de Boze, who succeeded him, nor M. Dacier,

director of the Academy, dared to mention the name of _Telemaque_.

Clever (_spirituel_) “to an alarming extent” (_faire peur_) in the

minutest detail of his writings, rich, copious, harmonious, but not

without tendencies to lengthiness, the style of Fenelon is the reflex of

his character; sometimes, a little subtle and covert, like the prelate’s

mind, it hits and penetrates without any flash (_eclat_) and without

dealing heavy blows. “Graces flowed from his lips,” said Chancellor

d’Aguesseau, “and he seemed to treat the greatest subjects as if, so to

speak, they were child’s play to him; the smallest grew to nobleness

beneath his pen, and he would have made flowers grow in the midst of

thorns. A noble singularity, pervading his whole person, and a something

sublime in his very simplicity, added to his characteristics a certain

prophet-like air. Always original, always creative, he imitated nobody,

and himself appeared inimitable.” His last act was to write a letter to

Father Le Tellier to be communicated to the king. “I have just received

extreme unction; that is, the state, reverend father, when I am preparing

to appear before God, in which I pray you with instance to represent to

the king my true sentiments. I have never felt anything but docility

towards the church and horror at the innovations which have been imputed

to me. I accepted the condemnation of my book in the most absolute

simplicity. I have never been a single moment in my life without feeling

towards the king personally the most lively gratitude, the most genuine

zeal, the most profound respect, and the most inviolable attachment. I

take the liberty of asking of his Majesty two favors, which do not

concern either my own person or anybody belonging to me. The first is,

that he will have the goodness to give me a pious and methodical

successor, sound and firm against Jansenism, which is in prodigious

credit on this frontier. The other favor is, that he will have the

goodness to complete with my successor that which could not be completed

with me on behalf of the gentlemen of St. Sulpice. I wish his Majesty a

long life, of which the church as well as the state has infinite need.

If peradventure I go into the presence of God, I shall often ask these

favors of Him.”

How dread is the power of sovereign majesty, operative even at the

death-bed of the greatest and noblest spirits, causing Fenelon in his

dying hour to be anxious about the good graces of a monarch ere long,

like him, a-dying !

Our thoughts may well linger over those three great minds, Pascal,

Bossuet, and Fenelon,--one layman and two bishops; all equally absorbed

by the great problems of human life and immortality. With different

degrees of greatness and fruitfulness, they all serve the same cause.

Whether as defenders or assailants of Jansenism and Quietism, the

solitary philosopher or the prelates engaged in the court or in the

guidance of men, all three of them serving God on behalf of the soul’s

highest interests, remained unique in their generation, and without

successors as they had been without predecessors.

Leaving the desert and the church, and once more entering the world, we

immediately encounter, amongst women, one, and one only, in the first

rank--Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marchioness of Sevigne, born at Paris on

the 5th of February, 1627, five months before Bossuet. Like a

considerable number of women in Italy in the sixteenth century, and in

France in the seventeenth, she had received a careful education. She

knew Italian, Latin, and Spanish; she had for masters Menage and

Chapelain; and she early imbibed a real taste for solid reading, which

she owed to her leaning towards the Jansenists and Port-Royal. She was

left a widow at five and twenty by the death of a very indifferent

husband, and she was not disposed to make a second venture. Before

getting killed in a duel, M. de Sevigne had made a considerable gap in

the property of his wife, who, however, had brought him more than five

hundred thousand livres. Madame de Sevigne had two children: she made up

her mind to devote herself to their education, to restore their fortune,

and to keep her love for them and for her friends. Of them she had many,

often very deeply smitten with her; all remained faithful to her, and,

she deserted none of them, though they might be put on trial and

condemned like Fouquet, or perfidious and cruel like her cousin M. de

Bussy-Rabutin. The safest and most agreeable of acquaintances, ever

ready to take part in the joys as well as the anxieties of those whom she

honored with her friendship, without permitting this somewhat superficial

sympathy to agitate the depths of her heart, she had during her life but

one veritable passion, which she admitted nobody to share with her. Her

daughter, Madame de Grignan, the prettiest girl in France, clever,

virtuous, business-like, appears in her mother’s letters fitful,

cross-grained, and sometimes rather cold. Madame de Sevigne is a friend

whom we read over and over again, whose emotions we share, to whom we go

for an hour’s distraction and delightful chat. We have no desire to chat

with Madame de Grignan; we gladly leave her to her mother’s exclusive

affection, feeling infinitely obliged to her, however, for having

existed, inasmuch as her mother wrote letters to her. Madame de

Sevigne’s letters to her daughter are superior to all her other letters,

charming as they are. When she writes to M. de Pomponne, to M. de

Coulanges, to M. de Bussy, the style is less familiar, the heart less

open, the soul less stirred. She writes to her daughter as she would

speak to her; it is not letters, it is an animated and charming

conversation, touching upon everything, embellishing everything with an

inimitable grace. She gave her daughter in marriage to Count de Grignan

in January, 1669; next year her son-in-law was appointed lieutenant-

general of the king in Provence; he was to fill the place there of the

Duke of Vendome, too young to discharge his functions as governor. In

the month of January, 1671, M. de Grignan removed his wife to Aix: he was

a Provencal, he was fond of his province, his castle of Grignan, and his

wife. Madame de Sevigne found herself condemned to separation from the

daughter whom she loved exclusively. “In vain I seek my darling

daughter; I can no longer find her, and every step she takes removes her

farther from me. I went to St. Mary’s, still weeping and still dying of

grief; it seemed as if my heart and my soul were being wrenched from me;

and, in truth, what a cruel separation! I asked leave to be alone: I was

taken into Madame du Housset’s room, and they made me up a fire. Agnes

sat looking at me without speaking: that was our bargain. I staid there

till five o’clock, without ceasing to sob: all my thoughts were mortal,

wounds to me. I wrote to M. de Grignan, you can imagine in what key.

Then I went to Madame de La Fayette’s, who redoubled my griefs by the

interest she took in them. She was alone, ill and distressed at the

death of one of the nuns; she was just as I could have desired. I

returned hither at eight; but when I came in, O! can you conceive what I

felt as I mounted these stairs? That room into which I used always to

go, alas! I found the doors of it open, but I saw everything

disfurnished, everything disarranged, and your little daughter, who

reminded me of mine. The wakenings of the night were dreadful; I think

of you continuously: it is what devotees call an habitual thought, such

as one should have of God, if one did one’s duty. Nothing gives me any

distraction. I see that carriage, which is forever going on and will

never come near me. I am forever on the highways; it seems as if I were

afraid sometimes that the carriage will upset with me. The rains there

have been for the last three days reduce me to despair; the Rhone causes

me strange alarm. I have a map before my eyes, I know all the places

where you sleep. This evening you are at Nevers; on Sunday you will be

at Lyons, where you will receive this letter. I have received only two

of yours; perhaps the third will come; that is the only comfort I desire:

as for others, I seek for none.” During five and twenty years Madame de

Sevign~ could never become accustomed to her daughter’s absence. She set

out for the Rochers, near Vitry, a family estate of M. de Sevigne’s. Her

friend the Duke of Chaulnes was governor of Brittany. “You shall now

have news of our states as your penalty for being a Breton. M. de

Chaulnes arrived on Sunday evening, to the sound of everything that can

make any in Vitry. On Monday morning he sent me a letter; I wrote back

to say that I would go and dine with him. There are two dining-tables in

the same room; fourteen covers at each table. Monsieur presides at one,

Madame at the other. The good cheer is prodigious; joints are carried

away quite untouched, and as for the pyramids of fruit, the doors require

to be heightened. Our fathers did not foresee this sort of machine,

indeed they did not even foresee that a door required to be higher than

themselves. Well, a pyramid wants to come in, one of those pyramids

which make everybody exclaim from one end of the table to the other; but

so far from that boding damage, people are often, on the contrary, very

glad not to see any more of what they contain. This pyramid, then, with

twenty or thirty porcelain dishes, was so completely upset at the door,

that the noise it made put to silence the violins, hautbois, and

trumpets. After dinner, M. de Locmaria and M. de Coetlogon danced with

two fair Bretons some marvellous jigs (passe pipds) and some minuets in a

style that the court-people cannot approach; wherein they do the Bohemian

and Breton step with a neatness and correctness which are charming. I

was thinking all the while of you, and I had such tender recollections of

your dancing and of what I had seen you dance, that this pleasure became

a pain to me. The States are sure not to be long; there is nothing to do

but to ask for what the king wants; nobody says a word, and it is all

done. As for the governor, he finds, somehow or other, more than forty

thousand crowns coming in to him. An infinity of presents, pensions,

repairs of roads and towns, fifteen or twenty grand dinner-parties,

incessant play, eternal balls, comedies three times a week, a great show

of dress, that is the States. I am forgetting three or four hundred

pipes of wine which are drunk; but, if I did not reckon this little item,

the others do not forget it, and put it first. This is what is called

the sort of twaddle to make one go to sleep on one’s feet; but it is what

comes to the tip of your pen when you are in Brittany and have nothing

else to say.”

Even in Brittany and at the Rochers, Madame de Sevigne always has

something to say. The weather is frightful; she is occupied a good deal

in reading the romances of La Calprenede and the _Grand Cyrus,_ as well

as the _Ethics_ of Nicole. “For four days it has been one continuous

tempest; all our walks are drowned; there is no getting out any more.

Our masons, our carpenters keep their rooms; in short, I hate this

country, and I yearn every moment for your sun; perhaps you yearn for my

rain; we do well, both of us. I am going on with the _Ethics_ of Nicole,

which I find delightful; it has not yet given me any lesson against the

rain, but I am expecting it, for I find everything there, and conformity

to the will of God might answer my purpose, if I did not want a specific

remedy. In fact, I consider this an admirable book; nobody has written

as these gentlemen have, for I put down to Pascal half of all that is

beautiful. It is so nice to have one’s self and one’s feelings talked

about, that, though it be in bad part, one is charmed by it. What is

called searching the depths of the heart with a lantern is exactly what

he does; he discloses to us that which we feel every day, but have not

the wit to discern or the sincerity to avow. I have even forgiven the

swelling in the heart (_l’enflure du coeur_) for the sake of the rest,

and I maintain that there is no other word to express vanity and pride,

which are really wind: try and find another word. I shall complete the

reading of this with pleasure.”

Here we have the real Madame de Sevigne, whom we love, on whom we rely,

who is as earnest as she is amiable and gay, who goes to the very core of

things, and who tells the truth of herself as well as of others. “You

ask me, my dear child, whether I continue to be really fond of life. I

confess to you that I find poignant sorrows in it, but I am even more

disgusted with death; I feel so wretched at having to end all this

thereby, that, if I could turn back again, I would ask for nothing

better. I find myself under an obligation which perplexes me: I embarked

upon life without my consent, and I must go out of it; that overwhelms

me. And how shall I go? Which way? By what door? When will it be?

In what condition? Shall I suffer a thousand, thousand pains, which will

make me die desperate? Shall I have brain-fever? Shall I die of an

accident? How shall I be with God? What shall I have to show Him?

Shall fear, shall necessity bring me back to Him? Shall I have no

sentiment but that of dread? What can I hope? Am I worthy of heaven?

Am I worthy of hell? Nothing is such madness as to leave one’s salvation

in uncertainty, but nothing is so natural; and the stupid life I lead is

the easiest thing in the world to understand. I bury myself in these

thoughts, and I find death so terrible, that I hate life more because it

leads me thereto than because of the thorns with which it is planted.

You will say that I want to live forever then: not at all; but, if my

opinion had been asked, I should have preferred to die in my nurse’s

arms; that would have removed me from vexations of spirit, and would have

given me Heaven full surely and easily.”

Madame de Sevigne would have very much scandalized those gentlemen of

Port-Royal, if she had let them see into the bottom of her heart as she

showed it to her daughter. Pascal used to say, “There are but three

sorts of persons: those who serve God, having found Him; those who employ

themselves in seeking Him, not having found Him; and those who live

without seeking Him or having found Him. The first are reasonable and

happy; the last are mad and miserable; the intermediate are miserable and

reasonable.” Without ever having sought and found God, in the absolute

sense intended by Pascal, Madame de Sevigne kept approaching Him by

gentle degrees. “We are reading a treatise by M. Namon of Port-Royal on

continuous prayer; though he is a hundred feet above my head, he

nevertheless pleases and charms us. One is very glad to see that there

have been and still are in the world people to whom God communicates His

Holy Spirit in such abundance; but, O God! when shall we have some

spark, some degree of it? How sad to find one’s self so far from it, and

so near to something else! O, fie! Let us not speak of such plight as

that: it calls for sighs, and groans, and humiliations a hundred times a

day.”

After having suffered so much from separation, and so often traversed

France to visit her daughter in Provence, Madame de Sevigne had the

happiness to die in her house at Grignan. She was sixty-nine, and she

had been ill for some time; she was subject to rheumatism; her son’s

wildness had for a long while retarded the arrangement of her affairs;

at last he had turned over a new leaf, he was married, he was a devotee.

Madame de Grignan had likewise found a wife for her son, whom the king

had made a colonel at a very early age; and a husband for her daughter,

little Pauline, now Madame de Simiane. “All this together is extremely

nice, and too nice,” wrote Madame de Sevigne to M. de Bussy, “for I find

the days going so fast, and the months and the years, that, for my part,

my dear cousin, I can no longer hold them. Time flies, and carries me

along in spite of me; it is all very fine for me to wish to stay it, it

bears me away with it, and the idea of this causes me great fear; you

will make a pretty shrewd guess why.” Death came at last, and Madame de

Sevigne lost all her terrors. She was attacked by small-pox whilst her

sick daughter was confined to her bed, and died on the 19th of April,

1696, thanking God that she was the first to go, after having so often

trembled for her daughter’s health. “What calls far more for our

admiration than for our regrets,” writes M. de Grignan to M. de

Coulanges, “is the spectacle of a brave woman facing death, of which she

had no doubt from the first days of her illness, with astounding firmness

and submission. This person, so tender and so weak towards all that she

loved, showed nothing but courage and piety when she believed that her

hour was come; and we could not but remark of what utility and of what

importance it is to have the mind stocked with good matter and holy

reading, for the which Madame de Sevigne had a liking, not to say a

wonderful hungering, from the use she managed to make of that good store

in the last moments of her life.” She had often taken her daughter to

task for not being fond of books. “There is a certain person who

undoubtedly has plenty of wits, but of so nice and so fastidious a sort,

that she cannot read anything but five or six sublime works, which is a

sign of distinguished taste. She cannot bear historical books; a great

deprivation this, and of that which is a subsistence to everybody else.

She has another misfortune, which is, that she cannot read twice over

those choice books which she esteems exclusively. This person says that

she is insulted when she is told that she is not fond of reading: another

bone to pick.” Madame de Sevigne’s liking for good books accompanied her

to the last, and helped her to make a good end.

All the women who had been writers in her time died before Madame de

Sevigne. Madame de Motteville, a judicious and sensible woman, more

independent at the bottom of her heart than in externals, had died in

1689, exclusively occupied, from the time that she lost Queen Anne of

Austria, in works of piety and in drawing up her _Memoires_. Mdlle. de

Montpensier, “my great Mademoiselle,” as Madame de Sevigne used to call

her, had died at Paris on the 5th of April, 1693, after a violent

illness, as feverish as her life. Impassioned and haughty, with her head

so full of her greatness that she did not marry in her youth, thinking

nobody worthy of her except the king and the emperor, who had no fancy

for her, and ending by a private marriage with the Duke of Lauzun, “a

cadet of Gascony,” whom the king would not permit her to espouse

publicly; clever, courageous, hare-brained, generous, she has herself

sketched her own portrait. “I am tall, neither fat nor thin, of a very

fine and easy figure. I have a good mien, arms and hands not beautiful,

but a beautiful skin and throat too. I have a straight leg and a

well-shaped foot; my hair is light, and of a beautiful auburn; my face is

long, its contour is handsome, nose large and aquiline; mouth neither

large nor small, but chiselled, and with a very pleasing expression; lips

vermilion; teeth not fine, but not frightful either. My eyes are blue,

neither large nor small, but sparkling, soft, and proud, like my mien. I

talk a great deal, without saying silly things or using bad words. I am

a very vicious enemy, being very choleric and passionate, and that, added

to my birth, may well make my enemies tremble; but I have also a noble

and a kindly soul. I am incapable of any base and black deed; and so I

am more disposed to mercy than to justice. I am melancholic; I like

reading good and solid books; trifles bore me, except verses, and them I

like, of whatever sort they may be, and undoubtedly I am as good a judge

of such things as if I were a scholar.”

A few days after Mademoiselle, died, likewise at Paris, Madelaine de la

Vergne, Marchioness of La Fayette, the most intimate friend of Madame de

Sevigne. “Never did we have the smallest cloud upon our friendship,” the

latter would say; “long habit had not made her merit stale to me, the

flavor of it was always fresh and new; I paid her many attentions from

the mere prompting of my heart, without the propriety to which we are

bound by friendship having anything to do with it. I was assured, too,

that I constituted her dearest consolation, and for forty years past it

had always been the same thing.” Sensible, clever, a sweet and safe

acquaintance, Madame de La Fayette was as simple and as true in her

relations with her confidantes as in her writings. La Princesse de

Olives alone has outlived the times and the friends of Madame de La

Fayette. Following upon the “great sword-thrusts” of La Calprenede or

Mdlle. de Scudery, this delicate, elegant, and virtuous tale, with its

pure and refined style, enchanted the court, which recognized itself at

its best, and painted under its brightest aspect; it was farewell forever

to the “Pays de Tendre.” Madame de La Fayette had very bad health; she

wrote to Madame de Sevigne on the 14th of July, 1693, “Here is what I

have done since I wrote to you last. I have had two attacks of fever;

for six months I had not been purged; I am purged once, I am purged

twice; the day after the second time, I sit down to table. O, dear!

I feel a pain in my heart; I do not want any soup. Have a little meat

then. No, I do not want any. Well, you will have some fruit. I think I

will. Very well, then, have some. I don’t know, I think I will have

something by and by; let me have some soup and a chicken this evening.

Here is the evening, and there are the soup and the chicken: I don’t want

them. I am nauseated; I will go to bed; I prefer sleeping to eating. I

go to bed, I turn round, I turn back, I have no pain, but I have no sleep

either. I call, I take a book, I shut it up. Day comes, I get up, I go

to the window. It strikes four, five, six; I go to bed again, I doze

till seven, I get up at eight, I sit down to table at twelve, to no

purpose, as yesterday. I lay myself down in my bed again in the evening,

to no purpose, as the night before. Are you ill? Nay. I am in this

state for three days and three nights. At present I am getting some

sleep again, but I still eat merely mechanically, horse-wise, rubbing my

mouth with vinegar otherwise I am very well, and I haven’t even so much

pain in the head.” Fault was found with Madame de La Fayette for not

going out. “She had a mortal melancholy. What absurdity again! Is she

not the most fortunate woman in the world? That is what people said,”

writes Madame de Sevigne; “it needed that she should be dead to prove

that she had good reason for not going out, and for being melancholy.

Her reins and her heart were all gone was not that enough to cause those

fits of despondency of which she complained? And so, during her life,

she showed reason, and after death she showed reason, and never was she

without that divine reason which was her principal gift.”

Madame de La Fayette had in her life one great sorrow, which had

completed the ruin of her health. On the 16th of March, 1680, after the

closest and longest of intimacies, she had lost her best friend, the Duke

of La Rochefoucauld. Carried away in his youth by party strife and an

ardent passion for Madame de Longueville, he had at a later period sought

refuge in the friendship of Madame de La Fayette. “When women have

well-formed minds,” he would say, “I like their conversation better than

that of men; you find with them a certain gentleness which is not met

with amongst us, and it seems to me, besides, that they express

themselves with greater clearness, and that they give a more pleasant

turn to the things they say.” A meddler and intriguer during the

Fronde, sceptical and bitter in his _Maximes,_ the Duke of La

Rochefoucauld was amiable and kindly in his private life. Factions and

the court had taught him a great deal about human nature; he had seen it

and judged of it from its bad side. Witty, shrewd, and often profound,

he was too severe to be just. The bitterness of his spirit breathed

itself out completely in his writings; he kept for his friends that

kindliness and that sensitiveness of which he made sport. “He gave me

wit,” Madame de La Fayette would say, “but I reformed his heart.” He

had lost his son at the passage of the Rhine, in 1672. He was ill,

suffering cruelly. “I was yesterday at M. de La Rochefoucauld’s,”

writes Madame de Sevigne, in 1680. “I found him uttering loud shrieks;

his pain was such that his endurance was quite overcome without a single

scrap remaining. The excessive pain upset him to such a degree that he

was sitting out in the open air with a violent fever upon him. He

begged me to send you word, and to assure you that the wheel-broken do

not suffer during a single moment what he suffers one half of his life,

and so he wishes for death as a happy release.” He died with Bossuet at

his pillow. “Very well prepared as regards his conscience,” says Madame

de Sevigne again; “that is all settled; but, in other respects, it might

be the illness and death of his neighbor which is in question, he is not

flurried about it, he is not troubled about it. Believe me, my daughter,

it is not to no purpose that he has been making reflections all his

life; he has approached his last moments in such wise that they have had

nothing that was novel or strange for him.” M. de La Rochefoucauld

thought worse of men than of life. “I have scarcely any fear of

things,” he had said; “I am not at all afraid of death.” With all his

rare qualities and great opportunities he had done nothing but

frequently embroil matters in which he had meddled, and had never been

anything but a great lord with a good deal of wit. Actionless

penetration and sceptical severity may sometimes clear the judgment and

the thoughts, but they give no force or influence that has power over

men. “There was always a something (_je ne sais quoi_) about M. de La

Rochefoucauld,” writes Cardinal de Retz, who did not like him; “he was

for meddling in intrigues from his childhood, and at a time when he had

no notion of petty interests, which were never his foible, and when he

did not understand great ones, which, on the other hand, were never his

strength. He was never capable of doing anything in public affairs, and

I am sure I don’t know why. His views were not sufficiently broad, and

he did not even see comprehensively all that was within his range, but

his good sense,--very good, speculatively,--added to his suavity, his

insinuating style, and his easy manners, which are admirable, ought to

have compensated more than it did for his lack of penetration. He

always showed habitual irresolution, but I really do not know to what to

attribute this irresolution; it could not, with him, have come from the

fertility of his imagination, which is anything but lively. He was

never a warrior, though he was very much the soldier. He was never a

good partyman, though he was engaged in it all his life. That air of

bashfulness and timidity which you see about him in private life was

turned in public life into an air of apology. He always considered

himself to need one, which fact, added to his maxims, which do not show

sufficient belief in virtue, and to his practice, which was always to

get out of affairs with as much impatience as he had shown to get into

them, leads me to conclude that he would have done far better to know

his own place, and reduce himself to passing, as he might have passed,

for the most polite of courtiers and the worthiest (_le plus honnete_)

man, as regards ordinary life, that ever appeared in his century.”

[Illustration: La Rochefoucauld and his fair Friends----629]

Cardinal de Retz had more wits, more courage, and more resolution than

the Duke of La Rochefoucauld; he was more ambitious and more bold; he

was, like him, meddlesome, powerless, and dangerous to the state. He

thought himself capable of superseding Cardinal Mazarin, and far more

worthy than he of being premier minister; but every time he found himself

opposed to the able Italian he was beaten. All that he displayed, during

the Fronde, of address, combination, intrigue, and resolution, would

barely have sufficed to preserve his name in history, if he had not

devoted his leisure in his retirement to writing his _Memoires_.

Vigorous, animated, always striking, often amusing, sometimes showing

rare nobleness and high-mindedness, his stories and his portraits

transport us to the very midst of the scenes he desires to describe and

the personages he makes the actors in them. His rapid, nervous,

picturesque style is the very image of that little dark, quick, agile

man, more soldier than bishop, and more intriguer than soldier,

faithfully and affectionately beloved by his friends, detested by his

very numerous enemies, and dreaded by many people, for the causticity of

his tongue, long after the troubles of the Fronde had ceased, and he was

reduced to be a wanderer in foreign lands, still Archbishop of Paris

without being able to set foot in it. Having retired to Commercy, he

fell under Louis XIV.’s suspicion. Madame de Sevigne, who was one of his

best friends, was anxious about him. “As to our cardinal, I have often

thought as you,” she wrote to her daughter; “but, whether it be that the

enemies are not in a condition to cause fear, or that the friends are not

subject to take alarm, it is certain that there is no commotion. You

show a very proper spirit in being anxious about the welfare of a person

who is so distinguished, and to whom you owe so much affection.” “Can I

forget him whom I see everywhere in the story of our misfortunes,”

exclaimed Bossuet, in his funeral oration over Michael Le Tellier,

“that man so faithful to individuals, so formidable to the state, of a

character so high that he could not be esteemed, or feared, or hated by

halves, that steady genius whom, the while he shook the universe, we saw

attracting to himself a dignity which in the end he determined to

relinquish as having been too dearly bought, as he had the courage to

recognize in the place that is the most eminent in Christendom, and as

being, after all, quite incapable of satisfying his desires, so conscious

was he of his mistake and of the emptiness of human greatness? But, so

long as he was bent upon obtaining what he was one day to despise, he

kept everything moving by means of powerful and secret springs, and,

after that all parties were overthrown, he seemed still to uphold himself

alone, and alone to still threaten the victorious favorite with his sad

but fearless gaze.” When Bossuet sketched this magnificent portrait of

Mazarin’s rival, Cardinal de Retz had been six years dead, in 1679.

Mesdames de Sevigne and de La Fayette were of the court, as were the Duke

of La Rochefoucauld and Cardinal de Retz. La Bruyere lived all his life

rubbing shoulders with the court; he knew it, he described it, but he was

not of it, and could not be of it. Nothing is known of his family. He

was born at Dourdan in 1639, and had just bought a post in the Treasury

(_tresorier de France_) at Caen, when Bossuet, who knew him, induced him

to remove to Paris as teacher of history to the duke, grandson of the

great Conde. He remained forever attached to the person of the prince,

who gave him a thousand crowns a year, and he lived to the day of his

death at Conde’s house. “He was a philosopher,” says Abbe d’Olivet in

his _Histoire de l’Academie Francaise;_ “all he dreamt of was a quiet

life, with his friends and his books, making a good choice of both; not

courting or avoiding pleasure; ever inclined for moderate fun, and with

a talent for setting it going; polished in manners, and discreet in

conversation; dreading every sort of ambition, even that of displaying

wit.” This was not quite the opinion formed by Boileau of La Bruyere.

“Maximilian came to see me at Auteuil,” writes Boileau to Racine on the

19th of May, 1687, the very year in which the _Caracteres_ was published;

“he read me some of his _Theophrastus_. He is a very worthy (_honnete_)

man, and one who would lack nothing, if nature had created him as

agreeable as he is anxious to be. However, he has wit, learning, and

merit.” Amidst his many and various portraits, La Bruyere has drawn his

own with an amiable pride. “I go to your door, Ctesiphon; the need I

have of you hurries me from my bed and from my room. Would to Heaven I

were neither your client nor your bore. Your slaves tell me that you are

engaged and cannot see me for a full hour yet; I return before the time

they appointed, and they tell me that you have gone out. What can you be

doing, Ctesiphon, in that remotest part of your rooms, of so laborious a

kind as to prevent you from seeing me? You are filing some bills, you

are comparing a register; you are signing your name, you are putting the

flourish. I had but one thing to ask you, and you had but one word to

reply: yes or no. Do you want to be singular? Render service to those

who are dependent upon you, you will be more so by that behavior than by

not letting yourself be seen. O man of importance and overwhelmed with

business, who in your turn have need of my offices, come into the

solitude of my closet; the philosopher is accessible; I shall not put you

off to another day. You will find me over those works of Plato which

treat of the immortality of the soul and its distinctness from the body;

or with pen in hand, to calculate the distances of Saturn and Jupiter. I

admire God in His works, and I seek by knowledge of the truth to regulate

my mind and become better. Come in, all doors are open to you; my

antechamber is not made to wear you out with waiting for me; come right

in to me without giving me notice. You bring me something more precious

than silver and gold, if it be an opportunity of obliging you. Tell me,

what can I do for you? Must I leave my books, my study, my work, this

line I have just begun? What a fortunate interruption for me is that

which is of service to you!”

[Illustration: La Bruyere----633]

From the solitude of that closet went forth a book unique of its sort,

full of sagacity, penetration, and severity, without bitterness; a

picture of the manners of the court and of the world, traced by the hand

of a spectator who had not essayed its temptations, but who guessed them

and passed judgment on them all,--“a book,” as M. de Malezieux said to La

Bruyere, “which was sure to bring its author many readers and many

enemies.” Its success was great from the first, and it excited lively

curiosity. The courtiers liked the portraits; attempts were made to name

them; the good sense, shrewdness, and truth of the observations struck

everybody; people had met a hundred times those whom La Bruyere had

described. The form appeared of a rarer order than even the matter; it

was a brilliant, uncommon style, as varied as human nature, always

elegant and pure, original and animated, rising sometimes to the height

of the noblest thoughts, gay and grave, pointed and serious. Avoiding,

by richness in turns and expression, the uniformity native to the

subject, La Bruyere riveted attention by a succession of touches making a

masterly picture, a terrible one sometimes, as in his description of the

peasants’ misery:

To be seen are certain ferocious animals, male and female, scattered over

the country, dark, livid, and all scorched by the sun, affixed to the

soil which they rummage and throw up with indomitable pertinacity; they

have a sort of articulate voice, and, when they rise to their feet, they

show a human face; they are, in fact, men. At night they withdraw to the

caves, where they live on black bread, water, and roots. They spare

other men the trouble of sowing, tilling, and reaping for their

livelihood, and deserve, therefore, not to go in want of the very bread

they have sown.” Few people at the court, and in La Bruyere’s day, would

have thought about the sufferings of the country folks, and conceived the

idea of contrasting them with the sketch of a court-ninny. “Gold

glitters,” say you, “upon the clothes of Philemon; it glitters as well as

the tradesman’s. He is dressed in the finest stuffs; are they a whit the

less so when displayed in the shops and by the piece? Nay; but the

embroidery and the ornaments add magnificence thereto; then I give the

workman credit for his work. If you ask him the time, he pulls out a

watch which is a masterpiece; his sword-guard is an onyx; he has on his

finger a large diamond which he flashes into all eyes, and which is

perfection; he lacks none of those curious trifles which are worn about

one as much for show as for use; and he does not stint himself either of

all sorts of adornment befitting a young man who has married an old

millionnaire. You really pique my curiosity: I positively must see such

precious articles as those. Send me that coat and those jewels of

Philemon’s; you can keep the person. Thou’rt wrong, Philemon, if, with

that splendid carriage, and that large number of rascals behind thee, and

those six animals to draw thee, thou thiukest thou art thought more of.

We take off all those appendages which are extraneous to thee to get at

thyself, who art but a ninny.”

More earnest and less bitter than La Rochefoucauld, and as brilliant and

as firm as Cardinal de Retz, La Bruyere was a more sincere believer than

either. “I feel that there is a God, and I do not feel that there is

none; that is enough for me; the reasoning of the world is useless to me.

I conclude that God exists. Are men good enough, faithful enough,

equitable enough to deserve all our confidence, and not make us wish

at least for the existence of God, to whom we may appeal from their

judgments and have recourse when we are persecuted or betrayed?” A very

strong reason and of potent logic, naturally imprinted upon an upright

spirit and a sensible mind, irresistibly convinced, both of them, that

justice alone can govern the world.

La Bruyere had just been admitted into the French Academy, in 1693. In

his admission speech he spoke in praise of the living, Bossuet, Fenelon,

Racine, La Fontaine; it was not as yet the practice. Those who were not

praised felt angry, and the journals of the time bitterly attacked the

new academician. He was hurt, and withdrew almost entirely from the

world. Four days before his death, however, “he was in company. All at

once he perceived that he was becoming deaf, yes, stone deaf. He

returned to Versailles, where he had apartments at Conde’s house.

Apoplexy carried him off in a quarter of an hour on the 11th of May,

1696,” leaving behind him an incomparable book, wherein, according to his

own maxim, the excellent writer shows himself to be an excellent painter;

and four dialogues against Quietism, still unfinished, full of lively and

good-humored hostility to the doctrines of Madame Guyon. They were

published after his death.

We pass from prose to poetry, from La Bruyere to Corneille, who had died

in 1684, too late for his fame, in spite of the vigorous returns of

genius which still flash forth sometimes in his feeblest works.

Throughout the Regency and the Fronde, Corneille had continued to occupy

almost alone the great French stage. Rotrou, his sometime rival with his

piece of Venceslas, and ever tenderly attached to him, had died, in 1650,

at Dreux, of which he was civil magistrate. An epidemic was ravaging the

town, and he was urged to go away. “I am the only one who can maintain

good order, and I shall remain,” he replied. “At the moment of my

writing to you the bells are tolling for the twenty-second person to-day;

perhaps to-morrow it will be for me; but my conscience has marked out my

duty. God’s will be done!” Two days later he was dead.

Corneille had dedicated _Polyeucte_ to the regent Anne of Austria. He

published in a single year _Rodogune_ and the _Mort de Pompee,_

dedicating this latter piece to Mazarin, in gratitude, he said, for an

act of generosity with which his Eminence had surprised him. At the same

time he borrowed from the Spanish drama the canvas of the _Menteur,_ the

first really French comedy which appeared on the boards, and which

Moliere showed that he could appreciate at its proper value. After this

attempt, due perhaps to the desire felt by Corneille to triumph over his

rivals in the style in which he had walked abreast with them, he let

tragedy resume its legitimate empire over a genius formed by it. He

wrote _Heraclius_ and _Nicomede,_ which are equal in parts to his finest

masterpieces. But by this time the great genius no longer soared with

equal flight. _Theodore_ and _Pertharite_ had been failures. “I don’t

mention them,” Corneille would say, “in order to avoid the vexation of

remembering them.” He was still living at Rouen, in a house adjoining

that occupied by his brother, Thomas Corneille, younger than he, already

known by some comedies which had met with success. The two brothers had

married two sisters.

“Their houses twain were made in one;

With keys and purse the same was done;

Their wives can never have been two.

Their wishes tallied at all times;

No games distinct their children’ knew;

The fathers lent each other rhymes;

Same wine for both the drawers drew.” --[Ducis.]

It is said, that when Peter Corneille was puizled to end a verse he would

undo a trap that opened into his brother’s room, shouting, “Sans-souci, a

rhyme!”