La Grande Mademoiselle
TextThe high nobility had soon tired of order and obedience. Never was it more turbulent or more undisciplined than under Louis XIII. and in the minority of Louis XIV., but it must be noted as one of the signs of the times that it no longer carried its jaunty ease of conscience into its plots and its mutinies. Curious proofs of this fact are still in existence; the revolting princes and lords stoutly denied that they had taken arms against the King. If they had openly made war, and so palpably that they could not deny it, they invariably asserted with affirmations that they had done it "to render themselves useful to the King's service." Gaston d'Orléans gave the same reason for his conduct when he deserted France for a foreign country. All averred that they had been impelled to act by a determination to force the King to accept deliverance from humiliating tyranny, or from pernicious influences. During the Fronde, when men changed parties as freely as they changed their gloves, the rebels protested their fidelity to the King, and they did it because the idea of infidelity was abhorrent to them.
No one in France would have admitted that it could be possible to hold personal interests or personal caprice above the interests of the State, and in the opinion of the French cavalier this would have been reason enough for any action; but there was a more practical reason; the descendants of the great barons were beginning to doubt their power to maintain the assertion of their so-called rights. By suggesting subjects for the meditations of all the people of France who could read or write Astrée had contributed a novelty in scruples. In our day such a book as Astrée would excite no interest; the reiteration of the "torrents of tenderness" to which it owed its sentimental influence would make it a doubtful investment for any publisher, and even the thoughtful reader would find its best pages difficult reading; but when all is said and done, it remains, and it shall remain, the book which best divines our perpetually recurring and eternal necessities.
It treats of but one passion, love, and yet it gives the most subtle study in existence. In it all the ways of loving are minutely analysed in interminable conversations. All the reasons why man should love are given, with all the reasons why he should not love. All the joys found by the lover in his sufferings are set forth, with all the sufferings that his joys reserve for him. All the reasons for fidelity and all the reasons for inconstancy are openly dissected. A complete list is given of all the intellectual sensations of love (and of some sensations which are not intellectual). In short, Astrée is a diagnosis of the spiritual, mental, and moral condition of the love-sick. It contains all the "cases of conscience" which may or might arise, under the same or different circumstances, in the lives of people who live to love, and who, thus loving, see but one reason for existence – people who severally or individually, each in his own way and according to his own light, exercise this faculty to love, – still loving and loving even then, now, and always.
D'Urfé's conception was of the antique type. He regarded love as a fatality against which it were vain to struggle. Toward the middle of the book the sorrowful Celadon, crushed by the wrath of Astrée, is hidden in a cavern where he "sustains life by eating grasses." The druid Adamas knows that Celadon is perishing by inches, and he essays to bring the lover to reason. Celadon answers him:
"If, as you say, God gave me full possession of power over myself, why does He ask me to give an account of myself? – for just as He gave me into my own hands and just as He gave me to myself, so have I given myself to her to whom I am consigned for ever. First of all! If He would have account of Celadon, let Him apply to her of whom I am! Enough for me if I offend not her nor violate my sacred gift to her. God willed my life, for by my destiny I love; and God knows it, and has always known it, for since I first began to have a will I gave myself to her, and still am hers. In brief, I should not have been blest by love as I have been in all these years had God not willed it.32 If He has willed it would it be just to punish me because I still remain as He ordained that I should be? No! for I have not power to change my fate. So be it, if my parents and my friends condemn me! They all should be content and glad, when for my acts, I give my reason; that I love her."
"But," answered Adamas, "do you count on living long in such away?"
"Election," answered Celadon, "depends not on him who has neither will nor understanding."
La Grande Mademoiselle and most of her contemporaries escaped Astrée's influence in this respect; they did not admit that man has "neither will nor understanding" where his passions are concerned; or that his feelings depend on "destiny." Corneille, who had confronted the question, set forth the principle that the heart should defer to the will. "The love of an honest man," he wrote in 1634,33– "The love of an honest man should always be voluntary. One ought never to love to the point where he cannot help loving, and if he carries love so far, he is the slave of a tyranny whose yoke he should shake off."
In her youth Mademoiselle de Montpensier was one of the truest of the Cornéliennes of her generation; she practised what others were contented to restrict to preaching. Love's tyranny appeared to her a shameful thing, and she was so convinced that it rested with the lover whether he should be a slave or free himself "by shaking off the yoke," that even the most honest attacks of moral faintness were, in her eyes, occasions for judgment without mercy. One day – she tells it herself – she turned a young femme de chambre out of her service simply "because the girl had married for love." The shame then attendant upon love increased in proportion to the "condition" of the slaves of the questionable passion. The lower orders were insignificant, and their loves and their antipathies, like their sufferings, were beneath the consideration of reason, but when men were of a certain rank, sentiment was debarred from the conditions of marriage. Mademoiselle followed all the precepts of high quality, and throughout the first half of her life her line of action lay parallel with the noble principles introduced by Corneille. Jansenism, which, like Corneille, raised the veil of life for many of the humbler human hearts, made no impression upon "tall Mademoiselle." Lauzun was needed to break her pride.
Concerning moral questions, public sentiment was calm; the only serious difference raised by d'Urfé's work during a period of half a century was the conflict of opinions34 on human liberty; on all other subjects, notably the things of taste, d'Urfé was in harmony with public feeling; at times Astrée exceeded public feeling, but it seldom conflicted with it. The sentiments of the book were far in advance of the epoch.
But the nature with which d'Urfé communed and which he loved was the nature viewed by Louis XIII., and fashioned according to the royal taste, improved, repaired, decorated with artificial ornaments, and confined within circumscribed landscapes composed of complicated horticultural figures; a composite nature in which verdure was nothing but a feature. The fashion of landscape-gardening – an invention of the Renaissance – had arrived in France from Italy. In the land of its birth very amusing specimens of the picturesque were maintained by intelligent property-owners.
"There are fountains," [said M. Eugene Muntz,]35 "groves, verdant bowers, trellises, vine-wreathed arbours, flowers cherished for their beauty, and plants cultivated for their medicinal properties; and under ground there are caves and grottoes. There are bird-houses, hydraulic organs, single statues, groups of statues, obelisks, vases, pavilions, covered walks, and bathhouses; everything is brought together within a limited space to charm the eye and to favour the imagination."
The landscape-gardening of France offered the same spectacle, and the cultivated parks bore close resemblance to the shops of the venders of bric-à-brac. "In those rare gardens," said an enthusiastic historian, "he who promenades may pass from one surprise to another, losing himself at every step in all sorts of labyrinths." ("Dedalus" was the name in use, for in those days much was borrowed from mythology and from other ancient sources.) The labyrinths were complicated by ingenious devices intended to deceive the vision. Æstheticism of style demanded such delusions. The most renowned landscape-gardens were the royal parks, on which money had been freely lavished to perfect and to elaborate nature. Among the "rarities" in the gardens of the Gondis and at Saint Cloud, were fountains whose waters played invisible instruments. At the Duke de Bellegarde's (rue de Grenelle Saint Honoré) the most marvellous thing in the garden was an illuminated grotto of arcades, ornamented with grotesques and with marine columns, and covered with a vaulting encrusted with shells and with a quantity of rock-work; and more than that, so full of water-spouts, canals, water-jets, and invisible faucets36 that even the King had no greater number on his terraces at Saint Germain – nor had Cardinal de Richelieu a greater number in his gardens at Rueil, though the first artificial cascades ever seen in France[2] had been built in his garden.37 At the Château of Usson, the home of Queen Marguerite, who appears in Astrée under the name of Galatée, the garden was provided with all the rarities the place would hold. Nothing that artifice could add to it had been forgotten. The woods were embellished with divers grottoes so well counterfeiting nature that the eye often deceived the judgment.38 The most remarkable grotto was
the cave of old Mandragora, a place so full of witcheries that surprise followed surprise, and hour by hour, something continually occurred to delight the vision. The vaulting of the entrance was sustained by two sculptured figures very industriously arrayed with minute stones of divers colours; the hair, the eyebrows, and the beards of the statues, and the two sculptured horns of the god Pan were composed of sea shells so neatly and so properly set in that the cement could not be seen. The outer coping of the door was formed like a rustic arch, and garlands of shells, fastened at the four corners, ended close to the heads of the two statues. The inside of the arch tapered to a rocky point, which, in several places, seemed to drip saltpetre. The retaining walls of the arch were set back in niches to form fountains, and all of the fountains depicted some of the various effects of the power of love. In the grotto arose a tomb-like monument ornamented with images representing divers objects, all formed of coloured marble, and trimmed with pictures; wherever such an effect was possible, the trees were pruned to take the appearance of some other object or objects.
Thus the laborious and unrestrained intervention of man evoked a factitious type of nature as far from precious as the false Précieuses. By the unreserved admiration of its florid descriptions Astrée had consecrated the artificial mode. Nature demanded Lenôtre to strip her gardens of their ridiculous decorations, and to redeem them by simplicity, but when Lenôtre accomplished the work of regeneration the public taste was wounded; the people had become accustomed to the sight of parks decorated like the stage of the theatre, and the simplicity of nature shocked them. La Grande Mademoiselle considered Chenonceaux incomplete; she complained that it "looked unfinished"; her artificially nourished taste missed something, because the owners of Chenonceaux had respected the work of God, and left their park just as they had received it from the hand of its Creator; she wondered why Provence was called beautiful – to her it seemed "ugly enough." She lived at the gate of the Pyrenees thirty days and never entered the country, yet she delighted in the pretentious trinkets with which the landscape-gardeners of the Italian school decorated French woods and gardens. Honoré d'Urfé was responsible for her ignorance. Many of d'Urfé's tastes39 were noble, and Astrée was a work of excellent purpose – almost a great work; but it lacked the one thing demanded by true art, – love of nature in its simplicity.
D'Urfé's artificial taste was more regrettable because his successors, they who continued his work, accentuated his faults, as, generally speaking, the disciples of all innovators accentuate the faults of their masters. Few among the Précieuses knew how to sift the chaff from the wheat when the time came to take or to leave the varied gifts of their inheritance. The true Précieuses precipitated the revolution of which d'Urfé had been the prophet; they alone consummated the moral transformation which, according to his light, he had prepared.
During the changing years of half a century the Précieuses "kept the school" of manners and fine language, laying on the ferule whenever they found pupils as recalcitrant as the damsel whose story I am attempting to relate. They did not try – far from it! – to train the public taste, to correct it, or to guide it aright; they urged France into the tortuous by-paths of false ethics and superficial art; but, taken all in all, their influence was good. La Grande Mademoiselle, the abrupt cavalier-maiden, proved its virtue. To the Hôtel de Rambouillet she owed it that she did not end as she began – a dragoon in petticoats, and she recognised the fact, and was grateful for the benefits that she had received.
It has been asked: Was the Society of the Précieuses a result of the influence of Astrée? With the exception noted, it is probable that d'Urfé made no attempt to form new intellectual or sentimental currents; he confined himself to the observation of the thoughts and the feelings at work in the depths of human souls within his own view; he was a close student of character, his book was a study, and his influence reformed opinions and manners; but as the Society of the Précieuses was in process of incubation before Astrée appeared, it must have taken shape had d'Urfé never written his book. The world of fashion had long deemed it witty to ridicule the Précieuses; from too much handling, jests upon that subject had lost their effervescence, and in time it was considered more original to find virtue in the delicate mannerisms of the refined ladies than to adhere to the old fashion of mocking them. Their exaggerations were numerous and pronounced, but their civility was in pleasant contrast with the abrupt indelicacies of the Béarnais; and even now, looking back to them across the separating centuries, we can find few causes for reproach. They subjected their literature to the yoke of the Spanish and Italian schools, but they could hardly have done less at a time when the Court was Italian, and when Spanish influences were entering by all the frontiers. Aside from their submission to foreign influences, the Précieuses were sturdy champions of the right, and unless we are prepared to falsify more than thirty years of our history of morals, and of literature, we must admit that they rendered us services which cannot be forgotten or misunderstood.
They were women of the world, important after the fashion of their day, and by the power of their worldly influence they freed literature from the pedantry with which Ronsard – and Montaigne, also, to a certain extent – had entangled it. They forced the writers to brush the dust from their bookshelves; they imposed upon them some of the exigencies of their own sex, and by the bare fact of their influence literature which had been almost wholly erudite acquired a quality assimilating it to the usages of the world, and an air of decency and of civility which it had always lacked. The Précieuses compelled men to grant them the respect due to all women under civilisation, and to count them as members of the body politic; they exacted concessions to their modesty; they purified language; they obliged "all honest men" to select their topics of conversation; they habituated people to discern the delicate shades of thought and to dissect ideas and find the hidden meanings of words; they made demands for concessions to the rights of precocity, and, as a result, propriety of verbal expression and closely attentive analyses entered conversation hand in hand. Many and eminent were the services rendered unto France by the amiable band of worldly reformers; theirs was a mighty enterprise; we cannot measure the transformation wrought by the influence of women in the indecent manners of that day unless we make a minute examination of the subject. Before the advent of the Précieuses, exterior elegance and a graceful bearing had been a cloak covering the words and the conduct of barbarians. Proofs of this fact abound in the records of that day. La Grande Mademoiselle was of the second generation of the Précieuses; her wit, her love of wit, and her intellect, gave her rank in the Livré d'Or40; but the habits of youth are difficult to overcome, and when she first visited the Hôtel de Rambouillet she used the words and the gestures of a pandour, her squared shoulders and out-thrust chest bore evidences of the natural investiture of the Cossack. Speaking of that epoch, her most impartial critic tells us that she "voiced a thousand imprecations."41 In one of her attacks of indignation she threatened the Maréchal de l'Hôpital: "I will tear your beard out with my own hands!" she cried fiercely, and the marshal took fright and ran away. Several ladies of Mademoiselle's society were known to possess brisk and heavy hands, and feet of the same alert and virile character. Their people and their lovers knew something of their "manuals and pedals," and bore visible tokens of the efficacy of those phenomenal members on their own persons, – and in all the colours of the rainbow. Madame de Vervins, who assisted with La Grande Mademoiselle at the fêtes given in honour of Mademoiselle de Hautefort, "basted her lackeys and other servants at will," and she did it with no slack hand. One of the subjects on whom she plied her dexterity died under the operation, and the people of Paris avenged his death by sacking her palace.42 Following is the record:
On brisa vitré, on rompit porte, …
Bref: si fort s'accrut le tumulte
Que de peur de plus grande insulte,
Cette dame s'enfuit exprès,
Et se sauva par le marais.
But if the ladies were not lambs, the gentlemen were not sheep. They were no laggards in war. When they turned the flank of the enemy they did not mince matters, and upon occasion they drew the first blood. Once upon a time, at a dance, Comte de Brégis, having received a slap from his partner, turned upon her and pulled her hair down in the midst of the banquet. At a supper, in the presence of a great and joyous company, the Marquis de la Case snatched a leg of mutton from a trencher and buffeted his neighbour in her face, smearing her with gravy. As she was a lady of an even temper, she laughed heartily,43 and the incident was closed. Malherbe confessed to Madame de Rambouillet that he had "cuffed the ears of the Viscountess d'Auchy until she had cried for aid." As he was a jealous man, his action was not without cause, and in that day to flog a woman was a thing that any gentleman felt free to do.
The regenerating Précieuses had not arrived too soon. Ignoble jests and obscenities too foul to recount were accepted as conversation by both sexes. The father of the great Condé, who was president of a "social" club whose rules compelled members to imitate every movement made by their leader, ate, and forced his fellow members (including the ladies) to eat – I dare not say what; do not try to guess – you could never do it!
The modest and timid Louis XIII. could – when he set about it – give his Court very unappetising examples. In a book of Edification, bearing date 1658, we read that "the late King, seeing a young woman among the crowds admitted to his palace so that they might see the King eat, said nothing, and gave no immediate evidence that he had seen her; but, as he raised his glass for the last sup, before rising from the table, he filled his mouth with wine, and having held it thus sanctuaried for an instant, launched it forth into the uncovered chest of the watchful lady," who had been too eager to witness the mastications of royalty.
Aristocratic traditions exacted that the nobles should flog their inferiors, and the nobles conformed to the traditional exactions freely. Men and women were flogged for "failures" of the least importance, and knowing those antique customs as we do, we may be permitted to wonder that we have so few records of the music of that eventful day.
Richelieu "drubbed his people," he drubbed his officers, he drubbed (so it was said) his ministers. The celebrated Duke d'Épernon, the last of the great Seigniors after Saint Simon, was "as mild-mannered a man as ever cut a throat or scuttled a ship"; one day when he was discussing some official question with his Eminence, the Archbishop of Bordeaux, he gave the exalted prelate "three clips of his fist full in the archiepiscopal face and breast, supplementing them by several cuts of the end of his cane in the pit of the stomach." We are not told how the priest received his medicine, but history records that "this done, Monsieur the Duke bore witness to his Lordship (the Archbishop) that had it not been for the respect due to his character, he (the Duke) should have tipped him over on the pavement." One day when the feelings of the Maréchal de Mauny were outraged because a farmer had kept the de Mauny servitors waiting for their butter and eggs, he (the Maréchal) rushed from his palace like a madman, fell upon the first peasants who crossed his path, and with sword-thrusts and with pistol-shots wounded two of the "aggressors" mortally. This last event occurred in Burgundy; it was merely an incident. In Anjou, Comte de Montsoreau maintained a private money-coining establishment in the wood near, or on, his property, halted the travellers on the highways, obliged them to pay their ransom, and, at the head of a band of twenty men, all being brigands of his own species, swept over the country, pillaging in all directions. The daily occurring duels accustomed men to look lightly upon death, and contempt for human life prevailed. When the Chevalier d'Andrieux was thirty years old, he had killed seventy-two men. In such cases edicts were worthless; the national need demanded a radical change of morals. Nine years after the death of Louis XIII., Maréchal de Grammont said in one of his letters: "Since the beginning of the Regency, according to the estimate made, nine hundred and forty gentlemen have been killed in duels." That was an official estimate, and it did not include the deaths which, though they were attributed to other causes, were the direct and immediate results of honourable encounters; the dead thus enumerated having been killed on the spot.44
At that time the duel was not attended by ceremonies; it was a hand-to-hand encounter between barbarians. The contestants fought with any weapons that came to hand, and in the way most convenient to their needs. All means were considered proper for the killing of men, though it was generally conceded that for killing well the different means were, or might be made, more or less courteous. This being the case, the duel was in more or less good or bad taste, according to the means used in its execution, and according to the regularity, or the lack of regularity, employed in their use.
In 1612, Balagny and Puymorin alighted from their horses and drew swords in the rue des Petits Champs. While they were fighting, a valet took a pitchfork and planted it in Balagny from the back. Balagny died of the wound inflicted by the valet, and Puymorin also died; he had been wounded when the valet interfered. Still another lackey killed Villepreau in the duel between Beaupré and Villepreau. That duel also was fought in the street (rue Saint Honoré.) When young Louvigny45 fought with d'Hocquincourt, he said: "Let us take our swords!" As the other bent to comply with the suggestion, Louvigny gave a great sword-thrust, which, running his adversary through and through, put him to death. Tallemant des Reaux qualified the act as "appalling," but it bore no consequences for Louvigny.
Maréchal de Marillac (who was beheaded in 1632) killed his adversary before the latter had time to draw his sword. We should have called it an assassination, but our forefathers saw no harm in such duelling. They reserved their criticisms for the timidly peaceable who objected to a fight.
The salon, with its ultra-refinement and its delicacy, followed close upon the heels of these remnants of barbarity. The salon gave form to the civility which forbade a man to pierce the fleshy part of the back of an adversary with a pitchfork. Polite courtesy also restrained gentlemen from forcing ladies to swallow all uncleanness under the pretence of indulging in a merry jest. As good manners make for morality, let us thank the Précieuses for the reform they accomplished when they moulded men for courteous intercourse with their fellow-men; and to Madame de Rambouillet, among others, let thanks be given, for she made the achievement possible by opening the way and beginning at the beginning. Womanly tact, a decorous keeping of her house, love of order and of beauty inspired her with the thought that the arrangements made in the old hotels of Paris for the people of ancient days were not fitted for the use of the enlightened age of the Précieuses. There were no salons in the old hotels; the salon was unknown; therefore there was no room in which to frame the society then in formation. Tallemant tells us that the only houses known at that time were built with a hall upon one side, a room upon the other side, and a staircase in the middle. The salle was a parade-room, a place to pass through, a corridor where no one lingered. People received visitors in the room in which they happened to be when the visitors arrived; at different times they happened to be in different rooms. Very naturally at eating-time they were in rooms where they could sit at meat. There were no rooms devoted to the daily meals. The table on which viands were served was placed in any room large enough to contain the number of persons who were to be entertained. If there were few guests, the table was placed in a small room; when the guests were numerous, they were seated in a large room, or the table, ready served, was carried into any room large enough to hold the company. It was all a matter of chance. Banquets were given in the corridor, in the salle, in the ante-room, or in the sleeping-room,46 because literary intuition was undeveloped. Madame de Rambouillet was the first to realise that the spirit of conversation is too rare and too delicate a plant to thrive under unfavourable conditions, and that in order to establish conversational groups, a place must be provided in which they who favour conversation may talk at ease. Every one recognises that fact now, and every one ought to recognise it. No one – man or woman – is justified in ignoring the influences of the localities that he or she frequents. It should be generally known that sympathies will not group, that the current of thought will not flow freely when a table is unfavourably placed for the seating of society expected to converse.
Three hundred years ago the creator of the first French salon discovered this fact, and her discovery marked a date in the history of our social life.
Mme. de Rambouillet owned a dilapidated mansion standing between the Tuileries and the courtyard of the Louvre, near the site of the now existing Pavillon de Rohan.47 She had determined to rebuild the house, and no one could draw a plan suited to her ideas. Her mind was incessantly busy with her architectural scheme, and one evening when she had been sitting alone deep in meditation she cried out! "Quick! A pencil! paper! I have found a way to build my house."48 She drew her plan at once, and the arrangement was so superior to all known architectural designs that houses were built according to "the plans of Mme. de Rambouillet all over France." Tallemant says:
They learned from Mme. de Rambouillet how to place stairways at the sides of houses so that they might form great suites of rooms49 and they also learned from her how to raise floors and to make high and broad windows, placed one opposite another so that the air might circulate with freedom; this is all so true that when the Queen-mother ordered the rebuilding of the Luxembourg she sent the architects to glean ideas from the Hôtel de Rambouillet.
Until that time the interiors of houses had been painted red or tan colour. Mme. de Rambouillet was the first to adopt another colour and her innovation gave the "Blue Room" its name. The famous Blue Room in which the seventeenth century acquired the even and correct tone of conversation was disposed with a skilful and scientific tact which has survived the rack of three hundred years of changes, and to-day it stands as the perfect type of a temple fully adequate to the exigencies of intellectual intercourse.
In it all spaces were measured and the seats were systematically counted and distributed to the best advantage; there were eighteen seats; neither more nor less. Screens shut off certain portions of the room and facilitated the formation of intimately confidential groups; flowers perfumed the air; objects of art caressed the vision, and, taken all together, so perceptible a spirit of the sanctuary enshrining thought was present that the habitués of the Salon de Rambouillet always spoke of it as "the Temple." Even La Grande Mademoiselle, the irrepressible, felt the subtle influences of that calm retreat of the mind, and when she entered the Blue Room she repressed her Cossack gestures and choked back her imprecations. She knew that she could not evade the restraining influence of the hushed tranquillity which pervaded "the Temple," and she drooped her sparkling eyes, and accepted her discipline with the universally prevalent docility. In her own words, Mme. de Rambouillet was "adorable."