a question of principle. The Parlement of Paris took advantage of the
Regency to restore its old claim to be more than a Court of Record. It
claimed the right to examine edicts before registering them--in fact,
to be a Parliament. Atop of that came the grievance of the Masters
of Requests, who, having paid heavily for their offices, found their
value substantially reduced by the creation of twelve new ones. The
masters struck, and their offices were sequestrated. Then came the 26th
August 1648, when the Court, exalted by Condé’s victory at Lens, first
celebrated the occasion by _Te Deum_ in Notre Dame, and immediately
afterwards by causing Councillor Broussel, Father of the People, to be
arrested and carried off to Saint-Germain. Retz, the coadjutor, was in
both celebrations, as we can read in _Vingt Ans Après_. It was the day
before the Barricades. Directly the news of the arrest became known the
town, as he says, exploded like a bomb: “the people rose; they ran,
they shouted, they shut up their shops.” Retz went out in rochet and
hood--to watch, no doubt, over the harvest of his 36,000 sown _écus_.
“No sooner was I in the Marché-Neuf than I was encompassed by masses
of people who howled rather than shouted.” He extricated himself by
comfortable words, and made his way to the Pont-Neuf, where he found
the Maréchal de La Meilleraye, with the Guards, enduring as best he
could showers of stones, but far from happy at the look of things. He
urged Retz, who (though he had had an interchange of repartees with
the Queen overnight) did not need much urging, to accompany him to the
Palais-Royal and report. Off they went together, followed by a horde of
people crying, “Broussel! Broussel!”
“We found the Queen in the great Cabinet with the Duc d’Orléans,
Cardinal Mazarin, Duc de Longueville.... She received me neither
well nor ill, being too proud and too hot to be ashamed of what
she had said the night before. As for the Cardinal, he had
not the decency to feel anything of that kind. Yet he did seem
embarrassed, and pronounced to me a sort of rigmarole in which,
though he did not venture to say so, he would have been relieved
if I had found some new explanation of what had moved the Queen.
I pretended to take in all that he was pleased to tell me, and
answered him simply that I was come to report myself for duty, to
receive the Queen’s commands, and contribute everything that lay
in my power towards peace and order. The Queen turned her head
sharply as if to thank me; but I knew afterwards that she had
noticed and taken badly my last phrase, innocent as it was and
very much to the point from the lips of a Coadjutor of Paris.”
Then follows one of his famous Machiavellian aphorisms: “_But it is
very true that with princes it is as dangerous, almost as criminal, to
be able to do good as to wish to do harm._”
Retz might play the innocent, no one better, but neither Queen nor
minister were fools. It is not to be supposed that they had heard
nothing of his distribution of _écus_. Then the Maréchal grew angry,
finding that the rioting was taken lightly, and said what he had seen.
He called for Retz’s testimony, and had it.
“The Cardinal smiled sourly, the Queen flew into a rage.... ‘There
is a revolt even in the intention to revolt,’ she said. ‘These are
the stories of people who desire revolt.’ The Cardinal, who saw
in my face what I thought of such talk, put in a word, and in a
soft voice replied to the Queen: ‘Would to God, madame, that all
the world spoke with the same sincerity as M. le Coadjuteur. He
fears for his flock, for the city, for your Majesty’s authority. I
am persuaded that the danger is not so great as he believes; but
scruple in such a matter is worthy of his religion.’ The Queen,
understanding this jargon, immediately altered her tone, talked
civilly, and was answered by me with great respect, and a face so
smug that La Rivière whispered to Bautru, ... ‘See what it is not
to spend day and night in a place like this. The Coadjutor is a
man of the world. He knows what he is about, and takes what she
says for what it is worth.’”
The whole scene, he says, was comedy. “I played the innocent, which
I by no means was; the Cardinal the confident, though he had no
confidence at all. The Queen pretended to drop honey though she had
never been more choked with gall.” But what comedy there was was not
there very long. The Queen, who had declared that she would strangle
Broussel with her own hands sooner than release him, was to change her
mind. La Meilleraye and Retz were sent out again to report, and La
Meilleraye, losing his head, nearly lost his life. At the head of his
cavalry, he pushed out into the crowd, “sword in hand, crying with all
his might, ‘Vive le Roi! Broussel au large!’” More people, naturally,
saw him than could hear what he said. His sword had an offensive look;
there was a cry to arms, and other swords were out besides his. The
Maréchal killed a man with a pistol-shot, the crowd closed in upon him;
he was saved by Retz, who himself escaped by the use of his wits. An
apothecary’s apprentice, he says, put a musket at his head.
“Although I did not know him from Adam, I thought it better not
to let him know that. On the contrary, ‘Ah, my poor lad,’ I said,
‘if your father were to see this!’ He thought that I had been
his father’s best friend, though in fact I had never seen his
father, and asked me if I was the Coadjutor. When he understood
that I was, he cried out, ‘Vive le Coadjuteur!’ and they all came
crowding round me with the same cry.”
La Meilleraye knew very well what he had done. He said to Retz, “I am a
fool, a brute--I have nearly ruined the State, and it is you that have
saved it. Come, we will talk to the Queen like Frenchmen and men of
worth.” So they did, but to no purpose. She believed that Retz was at
the bottom of the whole _émeute_, and was not far wrong. But there was
no stopping it now. The barricades were up at dawn the next morning,
and it was clear that Broussel must be given back. He was. Then came
the flight of the Court, which Dumas tells so admirably.
After the evasion of the royalties, the Fronde became largely comic
opera. Certain of the princes--for reasons of their own--joined the
popular party: Beaufort, le roi des Halles, who wanted the Admiralty;
Bouillon, with claims upon his principality of Sedan; Conti, Elbeuf,
Longueville. Retz had the idea of bringing their, and his, ladies into
it. He himself fetched Mesdames de Longueville and de Bouillon with
their children to the Hôtel de Ville, “avec une espèce de triomphe.”
“The small-pox had spared Mme. de Longueville all her astounding
beauty; Mme. de Bouillon’s, though on the wane, was still
remarkable. Now imagine, I beg you, those two upon the steps of
the Hôtel de Ville, the handsomer in that they appeared to be in
undress, though they were not at all so. Each held one of her
children in her arms, as lovely as its mother. The Grève was full
of people over the roofs of the houses. The men shouted their joy,
the women wept for pity. I threw five hundred pistoles out of the
window of the Hôtel de Ville.”
After their debonair fashion these high people played at revolution.
“Then you might see the blue scarves of ladies mingling with steel
cuirasses, hear violins in the halls of the Hôtel de Ville, and drums
and trumpets in the Place--the sort of thing which you find more of in
romance than elsewhere.” Nothing came of it all; a peace was patched up
with the Parlement, and each of the grandees got something for himself,
which had been his only reason for levying civil war. Beaufort was
assured of his Admiralty, Longueville was made Viceroy of Normandy,
Bouillon compensated for Sedan--and so on. La Rochefoucauld, too, who
had taken up arms for the sake of Mme. de Longueville--
“Pour mériter son cœur, pour plaire à ses beaux yeux,
J’ai fait la guerre aux rois; je l’aurais fait aux dieux”--
we must suppose that he also was rewarded. There is an interesting
page in the Memoirs of André d’Ormesson, one of an upright family of
lawyers, which by stating the mere facts lets in the light upon the
Fronde. All he does is to draw up a list of the _grands seigneurs_ of
1648-55, with a statement of how often they changed sides in the seven
years. It should be studied by all who wish to know how not to make
civil war. But Retz too gives the spirit of the thing equally well.
When his quarrel with Condé was coming to a head, and he was preparing,
as he threatened, to push that prince off the pavement, he collected
his friends about him, and among them two light-hearted marquises,
Rouillac and Canillac. But when Canillac saw Rouillac he said to Retz,
“I came to you, sir, to assure you of my services; but it is not
reasonable that the two greatest asses in the kingdom should be on the
same side. So I am off to the Hôtel de Condé.” And, he adds, you are to
observe that he went there!
Retz alone, who, if he had been serious, might have been master of
Paris, had nothing--except, of course, his Cardinal’s hat, which he
would have had anyhow. The Court came back, Mazarin was forced out of
France for a couple of years. But the Queen had him in again; and then
it was _his_ turn. Retz was persuaded into the Louvre, immediately
arrested and carried off to Vincennes. It was a shock to his vanity
that the populace took it calmly. There were no barricades for him.
From Vincennes he was presently removed to Nantes, whence, with the
assistance of his friends--and I cannot but suspect the connivance
of the governor--he escaped to the coast, landed at San Sebastian,
was allowed to cross Spain and re-embark for Italy. He fetched up in
Rome, where he remained for a year or two, taking part in conclaves
and thoroughly enjoying himself. He spent large sums of money, which
he did not possess, but never failed to receive from his friends. The
French Ambassador and all the French clergy steadily cut him--but he
did not take any notice. The Pope did, though, and Retz was given to
understand that he had better remove himself. He went to Germany, to
Switzerland, Holland, England in turn. Mazarin was dead, and Charles II
restored by the time he came here. I don’t think that he did anything
to the purpose with our Court, though no doubt Charles was glad of
him. Neither Evelyn nor Pepys have anything to say about him; and I
fancy that he was only a passing guest. As soon as he could he crept
back to Court, to which he had already surrendered his coadjutorship.
Louis employed him once or twice; but his day was over. He lived mostly
at Commercy, where he tried economy, and made periodical retreats,
as La Rochefoucauld unkindly says, “withdrawing himself from the
Court which was withdrawing itself from him.” He was four million
_livres_ in debt, but managed to pay them off, and even to contemplate
a snug residuary estate which he intended for Mme. de Grignan, Mme.
de Sévigné’s high-stomached daughter. But Mme. de Grignan snubbed him
consistently and severely, and nothing came of it. He died in 1679,
drained of his fiery juices, making a “good end.” The stormy Coadjutor
had become “notre cher Cardinal.”
His Memoirs, taken on end, are wearisome, because endless intrigue,
diamond-cut-diamond and chicanery are wearisome, as well as intricate,
unless some discernible principle can be made out of them. It seems
that Retz did nothing except talk--but, as Michelet points out, that
was what France at large did when the Gascons were let into Paris with
Henri IV. Read desultorily, they are delightful, witty, worldly-wise,
untirably vivacious, thrilling and glittering like broken ice. His
Machiavellisms are worth hunting out:
“The great inconvenience of civil war is that you must be more
careful of what you ought not to tell your friends than of what
you ought to do to your enemies.
“The most common source of disaster among men is that they are too
much afraid of the present and not enough of the future.
“In dealing with princes it is as dangerous, if not as criminal,
to be able to do good as to wish to do harm.
“One of Cardinal Mazarin’s greatest faults was that he was never
able to believe that anyone spoke to him with honest intention.”
When the Queen-Regent was working her hardest for Mazarin’s return,
she tried to win Retz over to help her. He told her bluntly that such
a move would mean the ruin of the State. How so, she asked him, if
Monsieur and M. le Prince should agree to it? “Because, Madam,” said
Retz, “Monsieur would never agree to it until the State was already in
danger, and M. le Prince never, except to put it in danger.” Excellent,
and quite true.
After Retz’s death, the Président Hénault, writing about his Memoirs,
asked how one was to believe that a man would have the courage, or the
folly, to say worse things about himself than his greatest enemy could
have said. The answer, of course, is that Retz had no suspicion that
he was saying bad things about himself. He said a great deal that was
not true. Other chronicles of the Fronde give detailed accounts of
such days as that of the Barricades, with not a word of the Coadjutor
in them. But even if it had all been true, it would have seemed a
perfectly simple matter to him. If you have no moral sense, the words
“good” and “bad” have only a relative meaning. It is much harder to
understand why he did the things which he relates, or why, if he did
not do them, he said that he did. What was he trying to get done? Did
he hate Mazarin? There is no evidence that he did anything more than
despise him. La Rochefoucauld, whom he accuses, by the way, of having
tried to assassinate him, explains him and his Memoirs alike by vanity.
“Far from declaring himself Mazarin’s enemy in order to supplant him,
his only aim was to seem formidable, and to indulge the foolish vanity
of opposing him.” If Retz knew of that “portrait”--and he did, because
Mme. de Sévigné sent it him--his own more benevolent one of its author
must be reckoned in his favour. He had written it in his Memoirs, but
allowed it to stand there unaltered except for one little word. He
had originally said that La Rochefoucauld was the most accomplished
courtier and most honest man of his age. He scratched out the honesty.
Personally, I picture a happy _rencontre_ in the Elysian Fields in
or about 1679, when the Cardinal de Retz should have arrived and
greeted his brother in the purple. A lifting of red hats, a pressing
of hands--“Caro Signore, sta sempre bene?” and so on. There had been
bitter war on earth; each was a keen blade, each an Italian. Each
had had his triumphs. Retz had twice driven Mazarin out of Paris and
once out of France. But Mazarin had proved the better stayer. He had
returned, put Retz to flight, and died worth forty millions. Retz came
back, made a good end, and only just cleared his debts. And what had it
all been about? Some say, Anne of Austria, an elderly, ill-tempered,
fat woman; some say vanity, some ambition. I say, _Il Talento_ and the
joy of battle: the brain taut, the eye alert, the sword-hand flickering
like lightning on a summer night. Greek was meeting Greek. Inevitably
that must have been. There was not room for two Italians of that stamp
in France.
But let us always remember that he was mourned by Mme. de Sévigné, who
said that he had been her friend for thirty years. There is the best
thing to be known about him.
“L’ABBESSE UNIVERSELLE”: MADAME DE MAINTENON
Few of the outstanding names in history have received the hard measure
which has been meted out to Madame de Maintenon’s. She has had it, so
to speak, both ways; been blamed for what she did not, and for what
she did. First, she was to be held abominable because she was not the
King’s wife; next, and even more so, because she was. All that falls
to the ground if it can be shown that her life before the marriage
was as irreproachable, morally, as it was after it. Madame Saint-René
Taillandier, in a recent admirable study of the misjudged lady, has
no difficulty in proving that it was so. She proves it positively by
showing of what nature Madame de Maintenon really was, and negatively
by exploring all possible sources of contemporary evidence, and
finding nothing worth consideration. Dull, narrow, bigoted, obstinate,
over-busy about many things, more occupied with to-day than to-morrow,
falling in too readily with Louis’ view of himself and his place in the
universe (a view which she shared with the entire French nation)--these
things she may have been, and done. But she was a good woman, a pious
woman, one who was severely tried, one who did her immediate duty and
gave to the poor. She had a long and unhappy life, and died worn out.
There can be no doubt of all this. All sorts of reasons for hating and
slandering her can be urged: none of them good ones.
The reproaches of the historians are not so summarily to be dismissed.
It is not necessary to go so far as Michelet did when he said that
the price of her marriage with Louis was the revocation of the Edict
of Nantes. That’s absurd. Madame de Maintenon neither bargained nor
sold her hand. But it is hard to believe--impossible to believe--that
she was not in consultation with the King, and Louvois, and the
priests about the Revocation, or that, if consulted, she would not
have urged it. Saint-Simon, who is her first accuser here, is writing
after her death, and writing as an historian. I feel sure that he is
right. It is, of course, true that she was a Huguenot by descent, a
grand-daughter of that truculent, serio-comic old Agrippa d’Aubigné,
whose portrait, savagely grinning, is so extraordinarily like those
of his king, _le Béarnais;_ and it is true also that, though she was
converted before she was a grown woman, she never lost her fanatic hold
upon religion, but simply changed its direction. Throughout her life,
says Madame Taillandier, she showed Huguenot characteristics. She could
never take to the devotion of the rosary; she could never find any
enthusiasm for convents; she invoked neither the Virgin nor the Saints;
continued the reading of her Bible. No matter for that: she was hungry
for souls. As Saint-Simon puts it, with evident truth: “Elle eut la
maladie des directions ... elle se croyait l’abbesse universelle....
Elle se figurait être une mère d’église.” She converted whomsoever
she could touch, and as she grew in influence she could touch a many.
Concerned in the Revocation, besides Louis, there were Louvois,
Father le Tellier, Bossuet, her own spiritual director, the Bishop of
Chartres, and all the Jesuits. Everything that we know about her shows
to which side she would incline; and nothing that we know about her
makes it likely that she had any conception what statesmanship meant.
Louis called her “Sa Solidité.” Her solidity showed itself in her
care for detail: nothing was too small for her--she loved to order a
household, knew how many chickens you should get in for a small family,
how much wine for the servants, how many pounds of candles. She could
design the quasi-conventual robes for Saint-Cyr, costumes for ballets
and so on. But the economic or political outcome of the Revocation of
the Edict; the ruin of her country, the humiliation of the King, all
the immediate results of the “affreux complot” were entirely outside
her power of vision. “Four regiments of infantry,” Madame Taillandier
pleasantly says, “two of cavalry were ordered to follow the Duc de
Noailles into Languedoc, and _trample a little_ on the Huguenots.” My
italics! Well, Madame de Maintenon expected to save souls like that. I
don’t think that she can be let off her share in the _dragonnades_, or
in the Revocation.
Never mind. She was more of a saint than a sinner, though she lacked
the severity and suavity, the “sweet reasonableness” of the true
Saints. She was bleak, in herself and in her outlook; her life had
always been, and after her marriage was long to be, cheerless and
unutterably dull. What a life it was, throughout its eighty-three
years! Born in a prison in 1635, and living thereafter on charity,
with one relative or another; hounded from Huguenot pillar to Catholic
post; clinging to the faith in which she had been reared until she
was “converted” almost literally by force; still a pauper, often a
drudge; then at seventeen married to an elderly balladist, crippled by
disease, Paul Scarron, a scribbler of pasquinades and squibs, author
of a travesty of Virgil and what not; married to this incapacitated
rip; living with him in Grub Street on what he could pick up by the
hire of his pen--a libel here, a dedication there, a lampoon elsewhere,
a broadside for the street corner or bridge-end; living so from hand
to mouth, married but not a wife--what a life for a young girl gently
born, grand-daughter of King Henry’s old friend! Nothing is more
pathetic in Madame Taillandier’s account of her than the gallant fight
she put up in her little salon in the Rue Neuve Saint-Louis--polite
conversation in her bed-chamber with her friends, while Paul and his
tore the decencies to shreds below-stairs. And she succeeded, too, in
making good and herself respected. She had valuable friends. Madame
de Sévigné was one, Madame de Coulanges another, Madame de Lafayette
a third. Through them she became acquainted with yet higher persons,
among them with Madame de Montespan, then in league with the highest
of all. By those means she fell under the King’s eye. He did not like,
but he esteemed her, and chose her out of all the Court and all Paris
to govern Madame de Montespan’s children. She did it, by all accounts,
admirably. If she had no other qualities, she had two rare ones: she
did her duty, and held her tongue.
When, by public Act, the children were made Enfants de France, they
were removed from Paris to Saint-Germain; and there was Madame
Scarron in daily intercourse with Louis. That was the beginning of
her astounding ascent. Madame de Montespan was uneasy, and had reason
to be. The _gouvernante’s_ influence was steadily against her. Madame
Scarron disapproved of her and all her kind; and sure enough, from the
hour of her entry into the King’s family, the mistress’s star began
to wane. Finally, what the preachers--Bossuet, Bourdaloue--could not
do the ghastly business of “the Poisons” settled. La Montespan was in
that up to the neck, and Louis knew that she was, and held his peace,
not to save her neck, but to save his face. Montespan was exiled, and
took, as George Meredith said, “to religion and little dogs.” Madame
Scarron remained in charge of the children, and was ennobled with a
fief and a Marquisate. The Court called her “Madame de Maintenant”--but
she had not fully earned that. The Queen died--and Louis almost
immediately married the Marquise. There is not a ghost of a doubt of
it. Saint-Simon gives the date, the hour, and the names of celebrant,
assistants, and witnesses. Everybody knew it--but nothing was said.
From that hour Louis was hardly ever out of her company until the end,
when she was forced to leave him before the breath was out of his body.
What did she gain except unutterable weariness, suspicion, fear,
slander, and unending labour? Read Dangeau’s diary of the dreary,
splendid routine of Versailles, Marly and Fontainebleau; read in
Madame Taillandier a letter from the poor woman describing one of her
days. She had her Saint-Cyr in which she really delighted. She could
play universal Abbess there, and be interested and at peace for a time.
But even there chagrin and disappointment dogged her. She brought in
Madame Guyon, Quietism, and other things taboo. She became involved in
Fénélon’s disgrace; and presently she had to submit to Rome and turn
her beloved “Institution” of ladies into a convent of nuns.
No--she was bleak, and had a narrow mind; but, as she saw her duty, so
she did it. Her duty led her into thorny wastes and desert places; it
led her to be one of the thousand idle parasites yawning and stretching
at Versailles, slowly and endlessly revolving like dead moons round le
Roi Soleil. We may pity Madame de Maintenon for what life made of her,
but not blame her.
PIERRE DE L’ESTOILE