Rank and Good Breeding.--The Hôtel de Rochefoucault.--Racine and
his Plays.--La Rochefoucault's Wit and Sensibility.--Saint
Simon's Youth.--Looking out for a Wife.--Saint-Simon's Court
Life.--The History of Louise de la Vallière.--A mean Act of
Louis Quatorze.--All has passed away.--Saint-Simon's Memoirs of
His Own Time.
The precursor of Saint-Simon, the model of Lord Chesterfield, this
ornament of his age, belonged, as well as Saint-Simon, to that state of
society in France which was characterised--as Lord John Russell, in his
'Memoirs of the Duchess of Orleans,' tells us--by an idolatry of power
and station. 'God would not condemn a person of that rank,' was the
exclamation of a lady of the old _régime_, on hearing, that a notorious
sinner, 'Pair de France,' and one knows not what else, had gone to his
account impenitent and unabsolved; and though the sentiment may strike
us as profane, it was, doubtless, genuine.
Rank, however was often adorned by accomplishments which, like an
exemption from rules of conduct, it almost claimed as a privilege.
Good-breeding was a science in France; natural to a peasant, even, it
was studied as an epitome of all the social virtues. '_N'étre pas poli_'
was the sum total of all dispraise: a man could only recover from it by
splendid valour or rare gifts; a woman could not hope to rise out of
that Slough of Despond to which good-breeding never came. We were behind
all the arts of civilization in England, as François de Rochefoucault
(we give the orthography of the present day) was in his cradle. This
brilliant personage, who combined the wit and the moralist, the courtier
and the soldier, the man of literary tastes and the sentimentalist _par
excellence_, was born in 1613. In addition to his hereditary title of
duc, he had the empty honour, as Saint-Simon calls it, of being Prince
de Marsillac, a designation which was lost in that of _De la
Rochefoucault_--so famous even to the present day. As he presented
himself at the court of the regency, over which Anne of Austria
nominally presided, no youth there was more distinguished for his
elegance or for the fame of his exploits during the wars of the Fronde
than this youthful scion of an illustrious house. Endowed by nature with
a pleasing countenance, and, what was far more important in that
fastidious region, an air of dignity, he displayed wonderful
contradictions in his character and bearing. He had, says Madame de
Maintenon, '_beaucoup d'esprit, et peu de savoir_;' an expressive
phrase. 'He was,' she adds, 'pliant in nature, intriguing, and
cautious;' nevertheless she never, she declares, possessed a more steady
friend, nor one more confiding and better adapted to advise. Brave as he
was, he held personal valour, or affected to do so, in light estimation.
His ambition was to rule others. Lively in conversation, though
naturally pensive, he assembled around him all that Paris or Versailles
could present of wit and intellect.
The old Hôtel de Rochefoucault, in the Rue de Seine, in the Faubourg St.
Germain, in Paris, still grandly recalls the assemblies in which Racine,
Boileau, Madame de Sévigné, the La Fayettes, and the famous Duchesse de
Longueville, used to assemble. The time honoured family of De la
Rochefoucault still preside there; though one of its fairest ornaments,
the young, lovely, and pious Duchesse de la Rochefoucault of our time,
died in 1852--one of the first known victims to diphtheria in France, in
that unchanged old locality. There, when the De Longuevilles, the
Mazarins, and those who had formed the famous council of state of Anne
of Austria had disappeared, the poets and wits who gave to the age of
Louis XIV. its true brilliancy, collected around the Duc de la
Rochefoucault. What a scene it must have been in those days, as Buffon
said of the earth in spring '_tout four-mille de vie!_' Let us people
the salon of the Hôtel de Rochefoucault with visions of the past; see
the host there, in his chair, a martyr to the gout, which he bore with
all the cheerfulness of a Frenchman, and picture to ourselves the great
men who were handing him his cushion, or standing near his _fauteuil_.
Racine's joyous face may be imagined as he comes in fresh from the
College of Harcourt. Since he was born in 1639, he had not arrived at
his zenith till La Rochefoucault was almost past his prime. For a man at
thirty-six in France can no longer talk prospectively of the departure
of youth; it is gone. A single man of thirty, even in Paris, is '_un
vieux garçon_:' life begins too soon and ends too soon with those
pleasant sinners, the French. And Racine, when he was first routed out
of Port Royal, where he was educated, and presented to the whole
Faubourg St. Germain, beheld his patron, La Rochefoucault, in the
position of a disappointed man. An early adventure of his youth had
humbled, perhaps, the host of the Hôtel de Rochefoucault. At the battle
of St. Antoine, where he had distinguished himself, 'a musket-ball had
nearly deprived him of sight. On this occasion he had quoted these
lines, taken from the tragedy of '_Alcyonnée_.' It must, however, be
premised that the famous Duchess de Longueville had urged him to engage
in the wars of the Fronde. To her these lines were addressed:--
'Pour mériter son coeur, pour plaire à ses beaux yeux,
J'ai fait la guerre aux Rois, je l'aurais faite aux dieux.'
But now he had broken off his intimacy with the duchesse, and he
therefore parodied these lines:--
'Pour ce coeur inconstant, qu'enfin je connais mieux,
J'ai fait la guerre aux Rois, j'en ai perdue les yeux.'
Nevertheless, La Rochefoucault was still the gay, charming, witty host
and courtier. Racine composed, in 1660, his '_Nymphe de Seine_,' in
honour of the marriage of Louis XIV., and was then brought into notice
of those whose notice was no empty compliment, such as, in our day,
illustrious dukes pay to more illustrious authors, by asking them to be
jumbled in a crowd at a time when the rooks are beginning to caw. We
catch, as they may, the shadow of a dissolving water-ice, or see the
exit of an unattainable tray of negus. No; in the days of Racine, as in
those of Halifax and Swift in England, solid fruits grew out of fulsome
praise; and Colbert, then minister, settled a pension of six hundred
livres, as francs were called in those days (twenty-four pounds), on the
poet. And with this the former pupil of Port Royal was fain to be
content. Still he was so poor that he _almost_ went into the church, an
uncle offering to resign him a priory of his order if he would become a
regular. He was a candidate for orders, and wore a sacerdotal dress when
he wrote the tragedy of 'Theagenes,' and that of the 'Frères Ennemis,'
the subject of which was given him by Molière.
He continued, in spite of a quarrel with the saints of Port Royal, to
produce noble dramas from time to time, but quitted theatrical pursuits
after bringing out (in 1677) 'Phèdre,' that _chef-d'oeuvre_ not only
of its author, but, as a performance, of the unhappy but gifted Rachel.
Corneille was old, and Paris looked to Racine to supply his place, yet
he left the theatrical world for ever. Racine had been brought up with
deep religious convictions; they could not, however, preserve him from a
mad, unlawful attachment. He loved the actress Champmesle: but
repentance came. He resolved not only to write no more plays, but to do
penance for those already given to the world. He was on the eve of
becoming, in his penitence, a Carthusian friar, when his religious
director advised marriage instead. He humbly did as he was told, and
united himself to the daughter of a treasurer for France, of Amiens, by
whom he had seven children. It was only at the request of Madame de
Maintenon that he wrote 'Esther' for the convent of St. Cyr, where it
was first acted.
His death was the result of his benevolent, sensitive nature. Having
drawn up an excellent paper on the miseries of the people, he gave it to
Madame de Maintenon to read it to the king. Louis, in a transport of
ill-humour, said, 'What! does he suppose because he is a poet that he
ought to be minister of state?' Racine is said to have been so wounded
by this speech that he was attacked by a fever and died. His decease
took place in 1699, nineteen years after that of La Rochefoucault, who
died in 1680.
Amongst the circle whom La Rochefoucault loved to assemble were
Boileau--Despréaux, and Madame de Sévigné--the one whose wit and the
other whose grace completed the delights of that salon. A life so
prosperous as La Rochefoucault's had but one cloud--the death of his son
who was killed during the passage of the French troops over the Rhine.
We attach to the character of this accomplished man the charms of wit;
we may also add the higher attractions of sensibility. Notwithstanding
the worldly and selfish character which is breathed forth in his 'Maxims
and Reflections,' there lay at the bottom of his heart true piety.
Struck by the death of a neighbour, this sentiment seems even on the
point of being expressed; but, adds Madame de Sévigné, and her phrase is
untranslatable, '_il n'est pas effleuré_.'
All has passed away! the _Fronde_ has become a memory, not a realized
idea. Old people shake their heads, and talk of Richelieu; of his
gorgeous palace at Rueil, with its lake and its prison thereon, and its
mysterious dungeons, and its avenues of chestnuts, and its fine statues;
and of its cardinal, smiling, whilst the worm that never dieth is eating
into his very heart; a seared conscience, and playing the fine gentleman
to fine ladies in a rich stole, and with much garniture of costly lace:
whilst beneath all is the hair shirt, that type of penitence and
sanctity which he ever wore as a salvo against all that passion and
ambition that almost burst the beating heart beneath that hair shirt.
Richelieu has gone to his fathers. Mazarin comes on the scene; the wily,
grasping Italian. He too vanishes; and forth, radiant in youth, and
strong in power, comes Louis, and the reign of politeness and periwigs
begins.
The Duc de Saint-Simon, perhaps the greatest portrait-painter of any
time, has familiarized us with the greatness, the littleness, the
graces, the defects of that royal actor on the stage of Europe, whom his
own age entitled Louis the Great. A wit, in his writings, of the first
order--if we comprise under the head of wit the deepest discernment, the
most penetrating satire--Saint-Simon was also a soldier, philosopher, a
reformer, a Trappist, and, eventually, a devotee. Like all young men who
wished for court favour, he began by fighting: Louis cared little for
carpet knights. He entered, however, into a scene which he has
chronicled with as much fidelity as our journalists do a police report,
and sat quietly down to gather observations--not for his own fame, not
even for the amusement of his children or grandchildren--but for the
edification of posterity yet a century afar off his own time. The
treasures were buried until 1829.
A word or two about Saint-Simon and his youth. At nineteen he was
destined by his mother to be married. Now every one knows how marriages
are managed in France, not only in the time of Saint-Simon, but even to
the present day. A mother or an aunt, or a grandmother, or an
experienced friend, looks out; be it for son, be it for daughter, it is
the business of her life. She looks and she finds: family, suitable;
fortune, convenient; person, _pas mal_; principles, Catholic, with a due
abhorrence of heretics, especially English ones. After a time, the lady
is to be looked at by the unhappy _prétendû_; a church, a mass, or
vespers, being very often the opportunity agreed. The victim thinks she
will do. The proposal is discussed by the two mammas; relatives are
called in; all goes well; the contract is signed; then, a measured
acquaintance is allowed: but no _tête-à-têtes;_ no idea of love. 'What!
so indelicate a sentiment before marriage! Let me not hear of it,' cries
mamma, in a sanctimonious panic. 'Love! _Quelle bêtise!_' adds _mon
pére_.
But Saint-Simon, it seems, had the folly to wish to make a marriage of
inclination. Rich, _pair de France_, his father--an old _roué_, who had
been page to Louis XIII.--dead, he felt extremely alone in the world. He
cast about to see whom he could select. The Duc de Beauvilliers had
eight daughters; a misfortune, it may be thought, in France or anywhere
else. Not at all: three of the young ladies were kept at home, to be
married; the other five were at once disposed of, as they passed the
unconscious age of infancy, in convents. Saint-Simon was, however,
disappointed. He offered, indeed; first for the eldest, who was not then
fifteen years old; and finding that she had a vocation for a conventual
life, went on to the third, and was going through the whole family, when
he was convinced that his suit was impossible. The eldest daughter
happened to be a disciple of Fénélon's, and was on the very eve of being
vowed to heaven.
Saint-Simon went off to La Trappe, to console himself for his
disappointment. There had been an old intimacy between Monsieur La
Trappe and the father of Saint-Simon; and this friendship had induced
him to buy an estate close to the ancient abbey where La Trappe still
existed. The friendship became hereditary; and Saint-Simon, though still
a youth, revered and loved the penitent recluse of _Ferté au Vidame_, of
which Lamartine has written so grand and so poetical a description.
Let us hasten over his marriage with Mademoiselle de Lorges, who proved
a good wife. It was this time a grandmother, the Maréchale de Lorges,
who managed the treaty; and Saint-Simon became the happy husband of an
innocent blonde, with a majestic air, though only fifteen years of age.
Let us hasten on, passing over his presents; his six hundred louis,
given in a corbeille full of what he styles 'gallantries;' his mother's
donation of jewellery; the midnight mass, by which he was linked to the
child who scarcely knew him; let us lay all that aside, and turn to his
court life.
At this juncture Louis XIV., who had hitherto dressed with great
simplicity, indicated that he desired his court should appear in all
possible magnificence. Instantly the shops were emptied. Even gold and
silver appeared scarcely rich enough. Louis himself planned many of the
dresses for any public occasion. Afterwards he repented of the extent to
which he had permitted magnificence to go, but it was then impossible to
check the excess.
Versailles, henceforth in all its grandeur, contains an apartment which
is called, from its situation, and the opportunities it presents of
looking down upon the actors of the scene around, _L'OEil de Boeuf_.
The revelations of the OEil de Boeuf, during the reign of Louis XV.,
form one of the most amazing pictures of wickedness, venality, power
misapplied, genius polluted, that was ever drawn. No one that reads that
infamous book can wonder at the revolution of 1789. Let us conceive
Saint-Simon to have taken his stand here, in this region, pure in the
time of Louis XIV., comparatively, and note we down his comments on men
and women.
He has journeyed up to court from La Trappe, which has fallen into
confusion and quarrels, to which the most saintly precincts are
peculiarly liable.
The history of Mademoiselle de la Vallière was not, as he tells us, of
his time. He hears of her death, and so indeed does the king, with
emotion. She expired in 1710, in the Rue St. Jacques, at the Carmelite
convent, where, though she was in the heart of Paris, her seclusion from
the world had long been complete. Amongst the nuns of the convent none
was so humble, so penitent, so chastened as this once lovely Louise de
la Vallière, now, during a weary term of thirty-five years, 'Marie de la
Miséricorde.' She had fled from the scene of her fall at one-and-thirty
years of age. Twice had she taken refuge among the 'blameless vestals,'
whom she envied as the broken-spirited envy the passive. First, she
escaped from the torture of witnessing the king's passion for Madame de
Montespan, by hiding herself among the Benedictine sisters at St. Cloud.
Thence the king fetched her in person, threatening to order the cloister
to be burnt. Next, Lauzun, by the command of Louis, sought her, and
brought her _avec main forte_. The next time she fled no more; but took
a public farewell of all she had too fondly loved, and throwing herself
at the feet of the queen, humbly entreated her pardon. Never since that
voluntary sepulture had she ceased, during those long and weary years,
to lament--as the heart-stricken can alone lament--her sins. In deep
contrition she learned the death of her son by the king, and bent her
head meekly beneath the chastisement.
Three years before her death the triumphant Athénée de Montespan had
breathed her last at Bourbon. If Louis XIV. had nothing else to repent
of, the remorse of these two women ought to have wrung his heart.
Athénée de Montespan was a youthful, innocent beauty, fresh from the
seclusion of provincial life, when she attracted the blighting regards
of royalty. A _fête_ was to be given; she saw, she heard that she was
its object. She entreated her husband to take her back to his estate in
Guyenne, and to leave her there till the king had forgotten her. Her
husband, in fatal confidence, trusted her resistance, and refused her
petition. It was a life-long sorrow; and he soon found his mistake. He
lived and died passionately attached to his wife, but never saw her
after her fall.
When she retired from court, to make room for the empire of the subtle
De Maintenon, it was her son, the Duc de Maine, who induced her, not
from love, but from ambition, to withdraw. She preserved, even in her
seclusion in the country, the style of a queen, which she had assumed.
Even her natural children by the king were never allowed to sit in her
presence, on a _fauteuil_, but were only permitted to have small chairs.
Every one went to pay her court, and she spoke to them as if doing them
an honour; neither did she ever return a visit, even from the royal
family. Her fatal beauty endured to the last: nothing could exceed her
grace, her tact, her good sense in conversation, her kindness to every
one.
But it was long before her restless spirit could find real peace. She
threw herself on the guidance of the Abbé de la Tour; for the dread of
death was ever upon her. He suggested a terrible test of her penitence.
It was, that she should entreat her husband's pardon, and return to him.
It was a fearful struggle with herself, for she was naturally haughty
and high spirited; but she consented. After long agonies of hesitation,
she wrote to the injured man. Her letter was couched in the most humble
language; but it received no reply. The Marquis de Montespan, through a
third person, intimated to her that he would neither receive her, nor
see her, nor hear her name pronounced. At his death she wore widow's
weeds; but never assumed his arms, nor adopted his liveries.
Henceforth, all she had was given to the poor. When Louis meanly cut
down her pension, she sent word that she was sorry for the poor, not for
herself; they would be the losers. She then humbled herself to the very
dust: wore the hardest cloth next her fair skin; had iron bracelets; and
an iron girdle, which made wounds on her body. Moreover, she punished
the most unruly members of her frame: she kept her tongue in bounds;
she ceased to slander; she learned to bless. The fear of death still
haunted her; she lay in bed with every curtain drawn, the room lighted
up with wax candles; whilst she hired watchers to sit up all night, and
insisted that they should never cease talking or laughing, lest, when
she woke, the fear of _death_ might come over her affrighted spirit.
She died at last after a few hours' illness, having just time to order
all her household to be summoned, and before them to make a public
confession of her sins. As she lay expiring, blessing God that she died
far away from the children of her adulterous connection, the Comte
d'Antin, her only child by the Marquis de Montespan, arrived. Peace and
trust had then come at last to the agonized woman. She spoke to him
about her state of mind, and expired.
To Madame de Maintenon the event would, it was thought, be a relief: yet
she wept bitterly on hearing of it. The king showed, on the contrary,
the utmost indifference, on learning that one whom he had once loved so
much was gone for ever.
All has passed away! The _OEil de Boeuf_ is now important only as
being pointed out to strangers; Versailles is a show-place, not a
habitation. Saint-Simon, who lived until 1775, was truly said to have
turned his back on the new age, and to live in the memories of a former
world of wit and fashion. He survived until the era of the
'Encyclopédie' of Voltaire, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He lived, indeed,
to hear that Montesquieu was no more. How the spirit of Louis XIV. spoke
in his contemptuous remarks on Voltaire, whom he would only call Arouet;
'The son of my father's and my own notary.'
At length, after attaining his eightieth year, the chronicler, who knew
the weaknesses, the vices, the peculiarities of mankind, even to a
hair's breadth, expired; having long given up the court and occupied
himself, whilst secluded in his country seat, solely with the revising
and amplification of his wonderful Memoirs.
No works, it has been remarked, since those of Sir Walter Scott, have
excited so much sensation as the Memoirs of his own time, by the
soldier, ambassador, and _Trappist_, Duc de Saint-Simon.
Transcriber's Notes.
1. The following typos were corrected:
narative//narrative
Rochoucault's//Rochefoucault's
Ormonde's//Ormond's
Gramont//Grammont
Warmistre//Warmestre
Frederic//Frederick
2. The various spellings of Shakespeare//Shakespere//Shakspeare
and Dutchess//Duchess in the original text were retained.
3. The year Mary Fairfax and George Villiers, the
2nd Duke of Buckingham, were married is transposed
from 1657 to 1675 in the original text. The day also
appears to be in error (6th->15th).