--, I mm t. BT. HCHEMBACH- THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES FROM THE LIBRARY OF FRANK J. KLINGBERG ' A/i Love I could you and I with Him conspire To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire, Would we not sJiatter it to bits and (Jien Remould it nearer to the Hearfs Desire!" OMAR KHAYYAM THE BY JUSTIN H. MCCARTHY, M.P. AUTHOR OF "AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY" 14 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE " ETC. IN TWO VOLUMES VOL. L NEW YORK HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE 1890 TO MY FATHER I DEDICATE THIS BOOK CONTENTS OF YOL. I. I. WHENCE ? 1 II. SEEDS OP REVOLUTION 14 III. Louis THE WELL-BELOVED 26 IV. THE PHILOSOPHES 39 V. THE APOSTLE OP AFFLICTION 67 VI. THE POMPADOUR 92 VII. "How WILL BERRY PULL THROUGH?" .... 104 VIII. A QUEER WORLD 116 IX. MARIE ANTOINETTE 132 X. TRIANON 141 XI. TURGOT 166 XII. THE DIAMOND NECKLACE 186 "illl. COUNT CAGLIOSTRO 197 XIV. KNAVES AND FOOLS 214 XV. SOWING THE WIND 226 XVI. THE NOTABLES 239 XVII. THE BRIENNE ILIAD 251 XVIII. EQUALITY ORLEANS 262 XIX. BRIENNE is BLOWN OUT 274 XX. WHAT ARTHUR YOUNG SAW . 293 XXI. WHAT ARTHUK YOUNG SAID 319 XXII. PARIS 332 XXIII. THE PEOPLE OF PARIS 364 XXIV. THE ELECTIONS . ... .387 viii CONTENTS. OUAPTKR PAGE XXV. THE SPRING OP '89 . . 398 XXVI. THE Row AT REVEILLON'S 404 XXVII. STATES-GENERAL AT LAST 414 XXVIII. THE PLAY BEGINS 419 XXIX. THE WILD GABRIEL HONORE 425 XXX. THE MAN FROM ARRAS 464 XXXI. SOME MINOR CHARACTERS 482 XXXII. PEOPLE IN THE STREETS ........ 494 XXXIII. THE OVERTURE ENDS , . 50? XXXIV. THE EIGHT WEEKS , . 510 XXXV. SLOW AND SURE , . 531 XXXVI. ON AND ON 539 XXXVII. DRIFTING . 549 XXXVIII. THE TENTH OP JUNE 557 XXXIX. THE SEVENTEENTH OP JUNE 563 XL. TENNIS 571 XLI. PARIS AND VERSAILLES 592 XL1I. CAMILLE DESMOULINS 605 XLIII. TWELFTH AND THIRTEENTH OF JULY. . . . 612 XLIV. THE BASTILLE 623 XLV. AFTERMATH G52 XLVI. THE STONES OF THE BASTILLE . . 660 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CHAPTER I. WHENCE ? LORD BEACONSFIELD, to whom life was all paradox, was never more delightfully paradoxical than when he declared that there were only two events in history the Siege of Troy and the French Revolution. Like most of Lord Beaconsfield's brilliant firework phrases, the shining fantasy was more than half a truth. In the antique world that antique world which, in spite of Mr. Freeman, does seem to be set apart from us by so definite and so insuperable a barrier no event is more conspicuous than the story of the armament of Hellenic chieftains and Princes Orgulous against a little town in Asia Minor. In comparison with that mythical or semi-mythical event the conquests of Alexander, the career of Caesar, the very fall of Rome herself, appear to dwindle into insignificance. In much the same way the French Revolution seems to dwarf all modern his- tory ; its heroes good or bad, its shining St. Michaels and Lucifers, Stars of the Morning, dwarf other heroes of other times to the proportions of pigmies. The French Revolution shares with the Siege of Troy its legendary attributes ; shares with it, too, the perennial charm which makes men turn like lovers to its story again and again with unabated interest and unflagging I. 1 2 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. I. zeal. Even the Homeric Scholiasts are not more enam- oured of their theme than the historians who once em- bark on the perilous seas of French revolutionary history. The heroic muse, suddenly called upon, in the Homeric formula, to sing of the French Revolution, might very well be puzzled where to make a beginning. It is really hard to decide exactly how far back we must hark to get to its legitimate starting-point. Are we to seek the initial impetus in the reign of Louis XV., or in the de- baucheries of the Regency, or in the spacious despotism of Louis XIV., or yet farther back in the feuds of the Fronde and Mazarin, when a queen and a dauphin fled from Paris and a Paris mob ? It is difficult to draw the hard-and-fast line, and the conscientious historian reaching backwards into history might find himself well among the early Capets, among the Merovingians, among the enemies of Caesar, and still come on traces of the causes of the French Revolution. To be plain, the history of the French Revolution is scarcely com- prehensible without a knowledge of the history of France; the history of France in its turn is scarcely comprehensible without that of Rome, of Greece, and so backwards to the dawn of deeds. But a history of the world would be a lengthy preface for a chronicle of the French Revolution, and each chronicler must choose his own starting-point, and toe his own line. Still, the great difficulty in approaching the study of the French Revolution is to choose this starting-point. In one sense, in what may be called a dramatic sense, it may be conveniently assumed that the revolutionary egg was hatching while Louis the Well -beloved was cynically speculating on deluges; the shell chipped, and the cock began to crow when Louis XVI. began to try to reign. Yet again, the Revolution may be said to 1789. SEEKING THE SOURCE. 3 have begun with the self-creation of the National As- sembly ; in another regard, the origin of the Revolution must be placed much farther back. Indeed, it is curious to find how far back we shall have to travel when once we leave the arbitrary line which divides the Old Order from the New. The Revolution began, one authority may argue, with the struggle of the Parliaments against Louis XV. It began, according to another, with the great movement of literature and thought which evolved the Encyclopaedia and the Social Contract. Another will anticipate the scepticism of the eighteenth century by the scepticism of Montaigne, of Bayle, and of Fon- tenelle, will see in the Encyclopaedia and the Social Con- tract not causes, but effects, and will leap back lightly to Althusen, and Hobbes, and Locke, and Genevese deism, not without an eye, it may be, to the thoughts and theo- ries of far Hellenic philosophies. Another dates its im- mediate conception from the moment when Benjamin Franklin amazed the ladies of Versailles with the sombre habit of the Pennsylvanian Quaker, and when Lafayette lent his bright sword to the service of Washington and the young Republic. Another may insist upon a sum- mary of the various forces, accidents, deliberate lines of policy, which, from the breaking up of the great fiefs down to the death of Louis XIV., had prepared the dis- tractions of the monarchy under Louis's descendants, or may ask, more moderately, for a chronicle of the strife of ecclesiastical factions and the battles between the judiciary and the crown. It is the old philosophic business of causation over again. Trace any single event back step by step, and you will find the event of yes- terday intimately and indissolubly connected with the creation of the world. Any starting-point for any his- torical event whatever must be more or less arbitrary. 4 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. I. It may be convenient to take the year 1789 as the initial Year of Revolution ; that is the year in which the Rev- olution, however distant its remote causes, actually did begin to be. But it is surely necessary to give such a sketch of the preceding history and condition of France as may be essential to the true understanding of the story. For it seems impossible to appreciate the events of the French Revolution without a clear understanding of many of the events which immediately preceded it, and most of the social conditions which made revolution not only possible or probable, but imperative and inev- itable. The volcanic character of the French Revolution is made the more impressive by contrast with the tra- ditional conservatism of the Old Order which preceded it; just as the ruin caused by a landslip, an earthquake, or a tidal wave is most impressive to one whose eyes have long been familiar with the smiling fields, the state- ly town, the teeming coast which have been suddenly laid desolate. Moreover, the genius of Revolution did not leap, fully armed, out of the Jupiter brain of the National Assembly. As the meteorologist can detect the warnings of the coming storm, so the student of his- tory can note, for much more than a generation before the summons to the States- General, the slow, steady growth of the Revolutionary Idea. That the Revolution should have taken France by surprise is in itself surpris- ing. Revolution was in the air for long enough, had been thought of, talked of, written about, breathed abroad in a hundred ways. It was very much as if the dwellers on the slopes of Vesuvius, noting the sullen smoke-cap on the peak, noting the trouble of earth and air and sea and sky, and talking daily of the eruption that threatened, should be taken completely by surprise, 1788. A PIECE OF FICTION. 5 when at last the lava did begin to brim the lips of the crater. There is, indeed, no better preface from a purely lit- erary, or, shall we say, from a purely dramatic point of view, to the French Revolution than that wonderful posthumous piece of fiction which La Harpe wrote under the guise of fact, and on which Sainte-Beuve rightly bases La Harpe's claim to remembrance. Taine places it at the end of his study of the Old Order; it might more appropriately begin a record of the French Revolution. Let "the first lieutenant of Voltaire" speak for himself. " It seems to me," he says, " as if it were but yester- day, and yet it was at the beginning of the year 1788. We were dining with one of our brethren of the Acad- emy, a grand seignior and a man of intelligence. The company was numerous and of every profession cour- tiers, men of the robe, men of letters, and academicians; all had feasted luxuriously, according to custom. At the dessert the wines of Malvoisie and of Constance con- tributed to the social gayety a sort of freedom not al- ways kept within decorous limits. At that time society had reached the point at which everything is permitted that excites laughter. Champfort had read to us his impious and libertine stories, and great ladies had lis- tened to these without recourse to their fans. Hence a deluge of witticisms against religion, one quoting a tirade from 'La Pucelle,' another bringing forward cer- tain philosophical stanzas by Diderot. There was un- bounded applause. The conversation becomes more serious; admiration is expressed at the revolution ac- complished by Voltaire, and all agree in its being the first title to his fame. ' He gave the tone to his century, finding readers in the antechambers as well as in the 6 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. I. drawing-room.' One of the guests narrated, bursting with laughter, what a hairdresser said to him while powdering his hair : ' You see, sir, although I am but a poor devil, I have no more religion than any one else.' They concluded that the Revolution would soon be con- summated, that superstition and fanaticism must wholly give way to philosophy, and they thus calculated the probabilities of the epoch and those of the future society which should see the reign of reason. The most aged lamented not being able to flatter themselves that they could see it ; the young rejoiced in a reasonable prospect of seeing it, and every one especially congratulated the Academy on having paved the way for the great work, and on having been the headquarters, the centre, the inspirer of freedom of thought. " One of the guests had taken no part in this gay con- versation. This was Gazette, an amiable and original man, but, unfortunately, infatuated with the reveries of the Illuminati. In the most serious tone he now began: 'Gentlemen,' said he, 'be content; you will witness this great revolution that you so much desire. You know that I am something of a prophet, and I repeat it, you will witness it. Do you know what will be the result of this revolution, for all of you, so long as you remain here?' 'Ah!' exclaimed Condorcet, with his shrewd, simple air and smile, 'let us see, a philosopher is not sorry to encounter a prophet.' ' You, Monsieur de Con- dorcet, will expire stretched on the floor of a dungeon ; you will die of the poison you take to escape the execu- tioner, of the poison which the felicity of that era will compel you always to carry about your person !' At first, great astonishment was manifested, and then came an outburst of laughter. ' What has all this in common with philosophy and the reign of reason?' 'Precisely 1788. CAZOTTE'S PROPHECY. 7 what I have just remarked to you ; in the name of phi- losophy, of humanity, of freedom, under the reign of reason, you will thus reach your end ; and, truly, it will be the reign of reason, for there will be temples of reason, and, in those days, in all France, the temples will be those alone of reason. You, Monsieur de Champfort, you will sever your veins with twenty-two strokes of a razor, and yet you will not die for months afterwards. You, Monsieur Vicq-d'Azir, you will not open your own veins, but you will have them opened six times in one day, in the agonies of gout, so as to be more certain of success, and you will die that night. You, Monsieur de Nicolai, on the scaffold ; you, Monsieur Bailly, on the scaffold ; you, Monsieur de Malesherbes, on the scaffold; you, Monsieur Roucher, also on the scaffold.' 'But then we shall have been overcome by Turks and Tar- tars ?' ' By no means ; you will be governed, as I have already told you, solely by philosophy and reason. Those who are to treat you in this manner will all be philosophers, will all, at every moment, have on their lips the phrases you have uttered within the hour, will repeat your maxims, will quote like yourselves the verses of Diderot and of "La Pucelle."' 'And when will all this happen ?' ' Six years will not pass before what I tell you will be accomplished.' ' Well, these are miracles,' exclaims La Harpe, 'and you leave me out?' ' You will be no less a miracle, for you will then be a Christian.' 'Ah,' interposed Champfort, 'I breathe again ; if we are to die only when La Harpe becomes a Christian, we are immortals.' ' Come, at least we women,' said the Duchesse de Gramont, ' are extremely fortunate in being of no consequence in revolutions. It is understood that we are not to blame, and our sex ' 'Your sex, ladies, will not protect you this time. You 8 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. I. will be treated precisely as men, with no difference whatever. You, Madame la Duchesse, will be led to the scaffold, you and many ladies besides yourself, in a cart with your hands tied behind your back.' 'Ah, in that event, I hope to have at least a carriage covered with black.' ' No, madame, greater ladies than yourself will go, like yourself, in a cart, and with their hands tied like yours.' 'Greater ladies ! What, princesses of the blood !' ' Still greater ladies than those !' They began to think the jest was carried too far. Madame de Gramont, to dispel the gloom, did not insist on a reply to her last exclamation, and contented herself by saying, in the lightest tone, 'Now, he will not even leave me a confessor!' 'No, madame, neither you nor any other person will be allowed a confessor ; the last of the condemned that will have one, as an act of grace, will be ' He stopped a moment. ' Tell me, now, who is the fortunate mortal enjoying this prerogative ?' ' It is the last that will remain to him, and it will be the King of France.' " How much would one not give that that grim fancy were very fact ? Can we not see the brilliant room, shining with waxen lights, the assembly of wits and poets and philosophers and fair pedantic women, hear the ripple of light conversation suddenly shattered and startled by the astonishing suggestions of Cazotte? We can picture to ourselves Cazotte himself surveying his amazed audience with that curious face of his, the face that recalls in something our own Oliver Goldsmith, the face in which a superhuman mysticism reigns in the high forehead and the wide eyes, and a human sensuali- ty of a sweet and simple type asserts itself in the large heavy jaw, and the large uncertain lips. If La Harpe's wild dream were true, if the author of the " Impassioned 1788. THE STARRY SALONS. 9 Devil " and the disciple of the Illuminati had made his astonishing prediction, we may well believe that it would have been received with incredulity and amusement. Well might the scholars and statesmen who listened smile confident in the coming triumph of advanced ideas, in the Reign of Reason, in the regeneration of the Age of Saturn. How could they possibly credit a prophet who spoke of such unlikely horrors to the children of the Encyclopedia, to the pupils of Rousseau, to the economists who invested the name of Turgot with a kind of sanctity? There is really nothing in literature more directly tragic than this queer tale of La Harpe's, and it may well be accepted by the lovers of the pict- uresque in history and history is far more picturesque than some historians would allow as a fitting prelude to the story of the French Revolution. The picturesque fancy may be pardoned or excused when we remember that the French Revolution, accord- ing to the semi-satiric suggestion of that curious dual historic entity, the brothers Goncourt, began in the sa- lons of Paris. The saying, like all such epigrammatic condensations of history, is neither accurate nor com- plete, but it contains a large measure of truth. Those brilliant assemblies, little local heavens starred with bright names grouped in constellations of thought, of theory, that drifted slowly, steadily, from the suppers of the Regency to the " principles of eighty-nine." As the salons grew in influence, they grew in gravity ; as the pebble of speculation or dogma cast into the waters of public opinion caused a wider and ever-widening cir- cle, those who stood upon the brink began to regard their pastime with an austerer earnestness. A Galiani bewailing Paris in his Italian exile more bitterly than Ovid in Pontus bewailed Augustan Rome, would hardly 10 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. OH. I. have recognized, could he have revisited it, the Paris of his light triumphs, in the serious salons of the years just before the Revolution declared itself. The reign of mere wit had withered, the audacities of a new philoso- phy, eager to test with a crude science all the things of earth or heaven, no longer afforded a unique delight ; the dreams of Rousseau, the doctrines of the Encyclo- paedists, had borne their fruit, and the dainty world was dipped in a delirium of political reform, of speculations as to the rights of man and the manufacture of consti- tutions in the Sieyes manner. But if there is a difficulty in choosing a starting-point, there is scarcely less difficulty in deciding the treatment. There are two distinct and independent schools of his- torians of the French Revolution. One of these schools, of which M. Charles d'Hericault is perhaps the most characteristic exponent, regards the Revolution as the sheer outpouring of the Pit, and always accords it the honor of capital lettering, as a kind of tribute to its Sa- tanic grandeur. The leaders, in its eyes, are as so many fiends in human shape, specially sent into the world for the purpose of harassing a noble king and yet more noble queen, and a nobility whose resplendent merits make them only a little lower than the archangels. "The Revolution," says M. Charles d'Hericault with all gravity, "is the reign of Satan. God has given the evil angels, for a period which we cannot predict, power over the kingdom of France ;" and he goes on in this vein in a kind of breathless way, dealing largely in "demons," "monsters," and "madmen," as the only epithets proper to apply to any and every Revolution- ist. On the other hand, however, the very elect among the angels would hardly, to his loyal mind, seem quite the peers of a half-divine royal family. If, however, 1789. ANGELS OR DEVILS. 11 anything could excuse his maudlin sentimentalism, if anything could seem worse than his unscientific rhap- sody, it would be the extravagance of certain of the writers who argue, or, we should say, who write on the other side. There is a M. Jean Bernard, for example, who is too clever a writer to be fitly employed in the sheer partisanship to which he has devoted himself, and who is as trying in his way as M. Charles d'Hericault is in his. To him the Revolutionists are all angels of light, to him the Royalists are all devils of more or less degrees of darkness. Every malign rumor, every foul whisper which strikes at the name and fame of any ad- herent of the throne, is so much gospel truth to this impassioned advocate. Both these writers might well make a serious student of the French Revolu- tion despair. Yet both these writers are popular writers, and act as guides and teachers to large num- bers of people easily impressed and with little oppor- tunity of analysis. Small wonder if, under such con- ditions, Marie Antoinette is regarded as a Saint Do- rothea or as a Messalina by those who think of Saint- Just only as the murderous author of an obscene poem, or as the exalted prophet of the noblest of political creeds. A kind of impassioned prejudice seems to govern most writers upon the French Revolution. Lacretelle, Louis Blanc, Thiers, Mignet, Michelet, Lamartine, Mar- tin, Taine, and all the cluster of the lesser writers, are brilliant special pleaders, resolute defenders of the side they have espoused. De Tocqueville and Sorel are more impartial and more judicial ; so are writers like Von Sy- bel in Germany, and Mr. H. Morse Stephens in England. Mill would have been impartial, and we might lament that Mill never wrote his dreamed-of history, were it 12 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. I not that in losing Mill we gained Carlyle. Carlyle was not impartial, but he made a great book. It is curious to remember that his magnificent prose epic is actually nearer in years to the events it treats of than it is to us who read it to-day. It is, no doubt, very hard to be either impartial or judicial about the French Revolu- tion. The whole affair is so dramatic, the darling creeds appeal so directly to the emotions, the central figures are so fascinating and so fatal, that it is difficult to keep cool in such a conflict, and to hold one's reason from running to seed in hatred in one direction, or blossoming into the rank luxuriance of an exaggerated hero-worship on the other. The great secret lies in remembering that all the figures of the French Revolution were men and women like ourselves, animated by like passions, pur- poses, virtues, failings, hopes, and fears ; that a mob re- mains a mob, whether it raves, bristling with pikes and capped with crimson, around an iron lantern, or over- throws the railings of a park; that we all can turn to contemporaries of our own who, under slightly differing conditions, might very well have played the parts of a Danton or Lafayette, a Vergniaud or a La Rochejaque- lein. It may be well for the wisest of us, in expatiating upon the faults of a Robespierre or the follies of a Marie Antoinette, to ask ourselves how we, under like condi- tions, could have withstood on the one hand the temp- tations of absolute power, on the other the traditions of a monarchical past. Of course this is no justification ; yet, if the reflection do but serve to give us pause and to temper our invective, it will have served its turn ex- cellently. Let us always, always remember that we are dealing with men and women some of them even com- monplace men and women, that no fresh race of beings, either fiends or angels, were invented for the Revolu- 1789 MEN AND WOMEX. 13 tionary period, and we shall do fairly well, and come out in the end with a more human as well as a more humane appreciation of perhaps the greatest pages of history. 14 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. II. CHAPTER II. SEEDS OF REVOLUTION. WE begin well if we start off with the heroic deter- mination to be as impartial as we can in our attitude towards the actors in the great drama, to bear in mind and earnestly apply the excellent maxim " Put yourself in his place," and to regard each and all of them not as men and women strangely habited and removed from us by the gap of a century, bnt as friends with whom we may have come into contact in the chances of public, of social, of civil life. Once in this even and exemplary temper, we may with free minds turn our attention to the preliminaries of the great piece. Perhaps we may catch the first clattering discordant note of the Revolutionary Carillon on the day when the bells of Paris were tolling for the illustrious dead. Alas for the poor Sun-King, the luckless Roi-Soleil ! What a dismal epilogue to all his long and lustrous reign, filled with wars and the rumors of wars and pom- pous enunciations of "L'lStat, c'est Moi," and stately high-heeled passions for innumerable mistresses, from giddy Montespans and their like to grave De Mainte- nons, coifed and clerical. The dingy funeral, scantily, even scurvily, escorted, the scornful populace varying indifference with actual pelting of stones ; such were the sorry obsequies of the Great King. While he lived the world was ringing with his name ; dead, it did not matter where they huddled him, or how. There never 1715. - JESUITS AND JANSENISTS. 15 was a more impressive sermon on the glory and the nothing of a name. The king, whose word was law, could not bind his successors even by the solemn state- ments of the royal testament. His will was set aside, treated like so much waste paper. The eighteenth cent- ury, practically beginning with the death of Louis XIV. as the eighteenth century begins in England with the death of Anne, marks its iconoclastic career from the onset by its derision of the last of the despots. Abso- lute monarchy was never more completely exemplified than in Louis XIV., but the century which was to end in the culbute generate and upheaval of the kingly principle began by treating the final wishes of a great king as of no more moment than the catch of an old song. The Revolution could not be far off when the Parisians pelted the unsepulchred coffin of the great monarch, and his last august wishes were lightly daffed aside. The seeds of religious controversy, which Louis XIV. sowed, proved fertile in revolutionary ideas. France was by no means Ultramontane ; Louis XIV. endeav- ored to make it so. The early part of the eighteenth century is the theatre of a pitched battle between the Jesuits and the Jansenists, in which the weight of the royal influence was given to the Jesuit camp. Jansenius, bishop of Ypres, after passing his life largely in the study of the writings of St. Augustine, died on May 6, 1638. Two years after his death, in 1640, Frommond published at Louvain a posthumous work of Jansen's, " Augustinus S. : Doctrina S. Aug. de Hum. Naturae Sanitate, Aegritudine, Medicina, adversus Pelagianos et Massilienses." In his will he referred his book to the judgment of the Holy See, while express- ing his belief that it contained no doctrinal error. But 16 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. II. this declaration of Jansen's was suppressed by the pub- lisher of the book. The book created the greatest ex- citement in the theological world. It rallied around it the most impassioned advocates, and against it the most impassioned antagonists. Its second edition was condemned at Rome in 1641 and again in 1642 by Ur- ban VIII. for repeating the errors of Baius in his exag- gerations of the Augustinian doctrines of grace. Baius had bowed meekly to the censure of the Holy See, but the "Disciples of St. Augustine," as the Jansenists called themselves, were not so meek. They rallied their forces ; contested the papal decree. In 1653, In- nocent X. launched a fresh bull condemning the five propositions in which the hostile French bishops found the pith of Jansenian doctrine. These five propositions were : Firstly : That there are divine precepts which good men are unable to obey for want of God's grace, although desirous to do so. Secondly : That no person can resist the influence of divine grace when bestowed. Thirdly : That, for human actions to be meritorious, it is not necessary that they should be exempt from necessity, but only from constraint. Fourthly : That the Semi-Pelagians err grievously in maintaining that the human will is endowed with power of either receiv- ing or resisting the aids and influences of preventive grace. Fifthly : That whoever maintains that Jesus Christ made expiation by his sufferings and death for the sins of all mankind is a Semi-Pelagian. The Jansenists did not accept defeat. While they wished to remain in external communication with the Church, they cast about for means of checkmating the papal bull. Ingenious Jansenist divines argued that while they accepted the papal censure of the five points, they refused to recognize that those five points were to 1640-1713. JANSENISM. 17 be found in Jansen's writings. In this way they carried on the fight against their opponents in Rome and the powerful Jesuit party in France until the appearance of their great champion, Pascal. Never did any cause find a more brilliant defender. Jansenism has passed away; that great fight is over, dead and buried, but still men of all creeds and of all opinions read and de- light in the immortal " Provincial Letters." It has been truly said by the most uncompromising opponents of Jansenism that Pascal's letters touch every chord of the human heart, and that their sudden transitions from logic and wit to sublime and pathetic eloquence pro- duce an effect which can be neither resisted nor effaced. But Pascal died young, in 1662, and the glory of the Jansenist cause was gone. Censure after censure thun- dered from Rome; in France, the face of royalty was set very sternly against the sect. Louis had come to regard the Jansenists as Republi- cans in the Church and Republicans in the State. His destruction of Port Royal in 1710 was a heavy blow ; a heavier was that dealt in 1713 at the "Reflexions Mo- rales sur le Nouveau Testament" of Father Quesnel in the papal document so famous throughout the eigh- teenth century as the bull " Unigenitus." Into the merits or demerits of the "Reflexions Mo- rales " it is not necessary to enter here ; nor is it neces- sary to offer criticism upon the conception or the enun- ciation of the bull " Uniorenitus." But the bull aroused O the greatest excitement and the strongest opposition. At an assemblage of bishops in Paris, a minority of fourteen prelates, headed by Cardinal de Noailles, op- posed the majority of forty who supported the Jesuit Le Tellier and the Bull. The division spread through- out the whole of the Church. The Ultramontane party I. 2 18 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. II. stood to their guns, and took strong measures to en- force the acceptance of the Constitution. The rebel- lious bishops were dismissed to their dioceses ; the prel- ates who had not been present at the Assembly were called upon by the king to renew their adhesion to the propositions of the bull; the Sorbonne, which had re- jected it by a majority of votes, was peremptorily ordered to register it, and the same duty was sternly laid upon a protesting Parliament. Louis soon found that he had raised a whirlwind about his ears. His suppression, not merely of Father Quesnel's book, but of all writings issued in its defence; his forbidding, under heavy pains and penalties, the publication in the future of any other defence, had not the desired result. Dying, he left France distracted by the desperate fierceness of a religious feud which had affected all classes in the State, and which was in itself no small cause of the almost indecent satisfaction with which the country at large heard of the setting of the Sun-King. In the dawn of the regency of the Duke of Orleans it seemed for a moment as if the existing conditions of things were to undergo a vital change. A cool demo- cratic wind began to blow through the heated mo- narchical atmosphere. Strange democratic words were made use of by the regent himself in his very edicts. He spoke of the " rights of the nation ;" he declared that, in the event of the absence of legitimate successors to the throne, the gift of the crown belonged to France alone. Not in words alone, but in deeds, the regent showed himself opposed to the policy of the late king. He gave back to the Parliament its right of remon- strance, of which it had been deprived ; he set aside the late king's will; he came very near to summoning the 1618-93. A NEW PHASE OF FRENCH HISTORY. 19 States-General. The lettres de cachet in force were carefully scrutinized, and a large number of persons im- prisoned in the Bastille were set free. In the religious controversy that was raging he took a different attitude from that of the late king. He set at liberty all the many persons who were in prison for their Jansenist opinions. The Cardinal de Noailles, who had been in disgrace, and against whom a lettre de cachet was said to be actually pending, was named President of the Council of Ecclesiastical Affairs. Le Tellier conceived it prudent to withdraw from popular dislike into volun- tary exile. So far had the reaction gone that complete suppression of the Jesuits was mooted ; but the pro- posal in the end resolved itself merely into an order forbidding them the pulpit and the confessional. With the Regency we enter upon a new phase of French history ; the gavotte begins which is destined to end in the Carmagnole. To the gravity, the pom- posity, the heroics of the Great King succeed the wan- tonness, the license, the devil- may-careness of the Re- gency. Louis XIV. was profligate enough, but he environed his profligacy with a certain decorum which was wholly wanting in Philippe of Orleans. We move at once in a more buffoon world, a world of light comedy, brilliant with painted mistresses, with opera- girls, with dancers and dainty abbes, with adventurers of the sword and adventurers of the robe a world of intrigue and shady finance, of bright persistent de- bauchery, a mad, bad business, ruinous for France. There were evil deeds, enough and to spare, in Louis XIV. 's reign. Long before its evening, a kind of crap- ulosity seems to have set in, which in itself was fertile stuff for the quickening of Revolution. The memoirs of the time, the writings of Bussy Rabutin, reveal to 20 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. II. us a grave degree of corruption among the rising nobil- ity which- disagreeably affected Louis, and which was significant in its warnings. When we read of the way in which some of the young nobles, some of the bearers of famous names, such as the bearer of the name of Col- bert, were banded together for debaucheries, atrocities, and excesses of the most degrading type, we can only wonder that the Revolution did not break out long be- fore its time. The satyr-like lust and fiend-like cruelty of some of the acts recorded of these young nobles must be borne in mind when we think upon the horrors which disfigured the time of the Terror. When we read of two cases in particular in which these wearers of great names inflicted horrible torture for the mere sake of torture upon a woman who was their plaything, and upon an unfortunate man who died of his sufferings, we wonder if any descendant of either of those unhappy victims took part in the September massacres, and sated in those wild days a revenge that was none the less wel- come because it had been long delayed. The record of the Regency could only be considered an exhilarating study by a new Timon. Presided over nominally by a debauched prince, who was suspected of being a murderer, and who was known to be a profli- gate and a sot, swayed by a ribald, intriguing Church- man, France was undoubtedly come to a pretty pass. The high dignity, the spacious splendor of Louis XIV., were rapidly resolving themselves into ruin. The eigh- teenth century can scarcely boast a darker, an abler, or more degraded spirit than Dubois. It produced no more perversely immoral ruler than the Regent Philip. But both were men of extraordinary ability ; both were, in their strange way, statesmen. They had original ideas of foreign policy with its English leanings, stimulated, 1719. THE RUE QUIXCAMPOIX. 21 it shall be said, by English gold, with its Triple Alli- ance growing into its Quadruple Alliance, with its swift unmasking of Cellamare's conspiracy, to which memoir- writing Jean Buvat contributed, its humiliation of Spain, its Brittany executions, its upheaval of Alberoni, its fan- tastic shuffling of the court cards in the European pack. They had original ideas, too, of finance, with their cham- bre ardente for inquiry into the claims of farmers-gen- eral and other public creditors, its tortures, its impris- onments, its victims, its collapse ; with their John Law lunacy of an endless paper currency as grotesque as that which captivates the German emperor in the second part of " Faust," its other John Law lunacy of the Missis- sippi scheme, with its mushroom fortunes and final ca- tastrophe. The most amazing thing in all that Regency is the Rue Quincampoix, with its feverish crowds, a Vanity Fair of the maddest kind, in which lords and lackeys, prelates and shopkeepers, prostitutes and prin- esses jostled and elbowed in the common race for wealth, and which ends with the prudent Prince de Conti ex- changing his paper money for three cart-loads of solid silver one seems to see those three argentiferous carts lumbering through the narrow Parisian streets in the universal crash, and in John Law dying in squalid pov- erty in Venice, without much i-eason to be thankful that he escaped alive from the wild hands of the Paris mob. Seldom has it been given to any single individual to ac- complish such widespread desolation, such national ruin and despair, as John Law accomplished. The advent- urous Scottish gentleman who was to make everybody rich with pieces of paper had promised infatuated Philip that he would wipe out the national debt of France, and leave it as if it had never been. He left it increased to a grand total of six hundred and twenty-five 22 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. II. millions of francs. Statesman after statesman, finan- cier after financier, will strive to patch that business together again, to caulk the leaky places ; good and bad, wise and foolish, all will make their effort to mend Law's colossal madness, all will try down to Necker ; but by the time it comes to Necker's turn the work which John Law was really sent into the world to do will have ripened to its due fruition. A little later, in 1725, a momentous thing happened, which at first scarcely seemed momentous. An English nobleman, Lord Derwentwater, is said to have founded in Paris in this year the " Loge Anglaise," the first Free- masons' lodge in France ; another English nobleman, the Duke of Richmond, set up another in his Aubigny castle a little later. It would be vain, and worse than vain, to attempt to penetrate back into the past for the early history of Freemasonry. We may, if we please, accept, with Masonic writers, the statement that it ex- isted "ever since symmetry began and harmony dis- played her charms." We may agree, with Charles Kings- ley, that the uninitiate have little right to any opinion on the mediaeval lodge of Kilwinning and its Scotch degrees, on the seven Templars who, after Jacques de Molay was burned in Paris, revived the order on the Scottish isle of Mull, on the Masons who built Magde- burg Cathedral, in 876, on Magnus Grecus, on Hiram of Tyre, and many another name and date important in the annals of Freemasonry. It is perhaps audacious for any one not a Mason to speak of its history and its myster- ies ; on the other hand, Masons are not, we understand, permitted to speak of the tenets or the traditions of their order. Such accounts as exist of Freemasonry differ in the most extraordinary degree according as the writers are animated by an enthusiasm for or an 1725. MASONRY. 23 aversion to the sect. Thus we shall find one set of writers leaping lovingly back to the sacerdotalism of ancient Egypt, progressing to the Dionysia of old Greece, and dwelling affectionately upon the legend of the building of Solomon's temple and the fate of the architect Hiram Abi, murdered for the sake of the se- cret word which he refused to reveal to his three ap- prentices with the queer names of Jubelas, Jubelos, and Jubelum. From the grave of the murdered Hiram comes the acacia plant, whose name is said to play so large a part in Masonic symbolism. According to this legend the Masonic mystery is to find out the lost pass- word of the temple. Other scarcely less fanciful author- ities talk wild words about Manes, founder of Mani- chaeanism, and the purpose of avenging his death at the hands of a Persian king by a regicide league striking at all Icings. Others pretended that the Freemasons were simply the proscribed and ruined Templars under a new name, and that their cherished purpose was ven- geance of the death of Jacques de Molay. More hos- tile critics, however, go no further back than the medi- aeval migratory Mason guilds, with their ceremonials aped from Benedictine ritual ; we hear much of the disputed Cologne charter of 1535, signed at the open- ing of the cathedral by Melanchthon, Coligny, and oth- ers; and Elias Ashmole, the Englishman who founded, in 1646, the order of the Rosicrucians, comes in for his share of denunciation for his strange blend of Masonry and occultism. All these various legends and various opinions offer interesting enough matter for the studies and the speculations of the scholarly occult. But the serious importance of the part which Freemasonry was destined to play in the history of the French Revolu- tion depends in no degree upon the truth or the untruth 24 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. II. of the legends about Hiram, about Manes, or anybody else before the days of Lord Derwentwater. For our purpose it is enough to accept the fact that, in 1717, the Grand Lodge of England was established by certain English noblemen and gentlemen in London, who met together in lodges at the Goose and Gridiron, in St. Paul's, at the Crown near Drury Lane, at the Apple Tree near Covent Garden, and at the Rummer and Grapes in Channel Row, Westminster. These English noblemen and gentlemen bad little thought, at the time when they met together under the hospitable rafters of these pleasantly named London taverns, of the part the work they had in hand would yet play in the destinies of nations and the fates of kings. But when Lord Der- wentwater and the Duke of Richmond pitched their Freemasons' tent in France they began a business which resulted most amazingly. For the thing spread and spread all over the continent of Europe. Introduced by Englishmen into Germany, Austria, Russia, Swit- zerland, Italy, Spain, Portugal ; introduced into Swe- den and Poland from France, which itself owed its Ma- sonic inspiration to England, we find the English or the Scottish lodges weaving all Europe together into the complicated web of a great organization. Kings and princes were among its earliest initiate ; Crown Prince Frederick, afterwards to be famous as Frederick the Great, Francis I. of Austria, and many a noble name be- sides, are inscribed upon its earliest rolls. There is a name yet to be inscribed upon its rolls, the name of a prince not yet born to the House of Orleans, which will be most instrumental in aiding the work which Freemasonry was destined to do in France. In the meantime Freemasonry, waiting for the birth of Equal- ity Orleans, grew and throve in Europe, undismayed 1788. CHARLES EDWARD IN ARRAS. 25 by the papal excommunication levelled against it in 1738. At this particular time, however, Continental Free- masonry had not dreamed of the phases through which it was yet to pass. Lord Derwentwater did not antici- pate Adam Weishaupt and the mysterious Illuminati, with their strange cipher L.P.D., which, being inter- preted, means "Lilia Pedibus Destrue," and signifies the doom of kings. He did not dream of that strangest of strange Illuminated, Balsamo-Cagliostro, and all that was to come through him. We shall meet with Cagli- ostro in his season, and with the Illuminati and their terrible L.P.D. In the meantime it is curious to re- member that a legend, which seems to be something more than a legend, declares that Prince Charles Ed- ward himself founded, in the town of Arras, a Scottish Freemason lodge, of which the first president was Robes- pierre's father. If the story were true, it would only be one further proof of the dramatic completeness of the revolutionary story which so early associates with a body destined to play so great a part in the Revolu- tion the name which, of all others, stands out most conspicuously in association with it. When we meet with the Freemasons again we shall find that they have greatly changed in power and influence from their little groups of exiled Jacobites and their small beginnings in the days of the Regency. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. I1JL CHAPTER III. LOUIS THE WELL-BELOVED. IT is not necessary to linger longer over the mud and swine idyl of the Regency. While growing Freemason- ry was striking its tap-roots in all directions, while the financial fantasies of law had given a further impetus to national financial ruin, Regent Philip contented him- self with reeling from desire to satiety, and from satie- ty to desire, like a more vulgar Faust, and left every- thing in the hands of Dubois. In the battle of the bull "Unigenitus" Dubois had espoused the bull and the papal court, and had obtained the archbishopric of Cam- brai. It is one of the eternal ironies of history that among the names supporting Dubois in his claim to the archbishopric is that of the good, the just, the noble Massillon. In spite of all the opposition that the des- perate and despairing Jansenists could make, Dubois forced the Jansenistic Parliament of Paris to register the combated edict, and the constitution embodied in the bull became established law. In the February of 1723 Louis XV. attained his legal majority, Orleans re- signed his regency and became President of the Coun- cil of State, which included among its members Dubois. But just in this crowning moment Dubois died in the August of 1723, and in the December of the same year the regent followed him, and there were two scoundrels the less in France. Philip of Orleans dead and out of the way, the Duke 1726. LOUIS XV. 27 of Bourbon obtained from the young king the position of first minister. Ignorant of everything except the chase, a humble servant of the Marquise de Prie, a tool in the hands of financier Paris Duvernay, the duke was eminently calculated to carry on all that was worst in the government of Philip of Orleans. The religious war still raged. The Jesuits grew more and more pow- erful, the Jansenists more and more feeble. The young king's bride, Maria Leszczynska, daughter of the King of Poland, then resting in pensioned exile in Alsace, re- ceived the surname of Unigenita in graceful allusion to the famous and triumphant bull. In the very earliest years of the young king's reign the spirit of sedition asserted itself ; the spirit of constitutional resistance to aggravated authority made itself felt. The scarcity of bread, that unfailing source of popular disaffection, caused several serious riots in 1725. Caen, Rouen, Rennes were the scenes of desperate conflicts. In Paris itself some two thousand rioters straggled through the streets, shouting and pillaging. They were dispersed at the point of the sword ; two of them were hanged on high gallows in the chief street of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine ; but the spirit of hungry discontent still muttered ominously underground and was only silenced, only staved off, by measures which lowered the price of bread. But a more serious sign was shown in the con- duct of the Paris Parliament when it protested in the very presence of the king himself holding his bed of justice against certain taxes, including one of a fiftieth upon all the revenues of the kingdom, which had not been previously submitted to the magistrates. " Do not be late for supper, duke," said Louis XV. graciously to Bourbon on June 11, 1726, as he left Ver- sailles for Rambouillet, whither he bade the duke follow 28 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. III. him speedily. The duke did not appreciate the fine point of irony in the king's civility till the king had gone. Then an order arrived, signed with the royal hand, dismissing Bourbon to his domain at Chantilly. And so, like the Eastman in the Gunnlaug Saga, he is out of the tale. Madame de Prie was whistled down the wind to Normandy ; Duvernay was clapped into the Bastille ; Fleury was raised to the rank of first minister, and the Cardinal's red hat soon reached him from Rome. For seventeen years Fleury, who was seventy years old at the time of his triumph, held well- nigh royal sway in France. Astute, subtle, of gentle and simple bearing, Fleury united the sagacity of a fifth-rate statesman with the decorum of a fifth-rate Churchman, and between his sagacity and his decorum he held his own. Those wild popular commotions which characterized the administrations of the regent and of Bourbon died away ; the manners of the court and of the great nobles were modified to something dimly approaching to decency ; financial economy re- stored public credit ; foreign policy was guided in the direction of peace ; a pinchbeck Saturnian age seemed to be established. But the retrospective observer can discern that revolution is still afoot. The desperate battle of Jesuits and Jansenists still raged, and the Jesuits found in Fleury, who had been an ardent Jan- senist, a devoted champion. The miracles reported from the grave of the Jansenist Paris at St. Medard Ceme- tery led to the closing of the cemetery in 1732 by order of the government, and to the promulgation of the fa- mous epigram : "De par le Roi, defense & Dieu D'operer miracles en ce lieu." Condemnation after condemnation fell upon the heads 1730. "LA BELLE GENITUS." 29 of those who still protested against the bull " Unigeni- tus." Yet its opponents multiplied. The majority of the Parisians were opposed to it ; and the ranks of op- position were swelled by all Adullamites, by all who were discontented and in danger and in debt, by all who disliked the government or who liked disturbance, by all those floating forces of agitation if not of disaf- fection which are rendered for the moment homogene- ous by a great opposition movement. The battle over the bull " Unigenitus " was one of the training-schools of the Revolution. Not that very many of its fiercest opponents knew or cared to know what the bull really was or what it really meant. It may be fairly said that in general nobody understood anything about those questions of doctrine with which the bull was con- cerned. There were people who called it "la belle Genitus." But it served as a rallying-cry, as a common banner ; it set people thinking, talking, acting ; the Parliament of Paris was in the forefront of the fight. The proposal of Benoit XIII. to amplify the Breviary by a lesson in which Gregory VII. was lauded for hav- ing excommunicated an emperor and released his sub- jects from their oath of allegiance was combated by the Parliament, and a printed sheet set in circulation and containing the new lesson and prayer was suppressed by the Parliament. The fight raged and was to rage yet for generations. On the one side the puppet king and the dexterous septuagenarian man of schemes, his minister, and all Ultramontanism ; on the other, the Parliaments and all the waning strength of Jansenism, swollen and sup- ported by all possible elements of disorder that could be attracted to a struggle against a government. We may note a fiery Abbe Pucelle, at white heat of impas- 30 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. III. sioned Jansenism, sneering at Fleury quantum mutatus ab illofand informing an astounded king that duty to the sovereign sometimes compelled disobedience to his orders. We may note contumacious parliaments defying royal authority to a certain point, and yielding when the royal screw is put on heavily, always under the guidance of the grave, imperturbable Fleury. No wild writings on the wall invoking destruction on the Constitution and its supporters could alarm that deter- mined old man ; could alarm, indeed, his determined colleagues. The dwarfish, humpbacked Bishop of Laon, half an Aramis and half a De Retz, of whom it was said that he would have been the devil of a fellow if he had only been a musketeer, declared that the only way out of the whole difficulty was to hand the greater part of the public power back into the hands of the bishops in order to save a hereticized France from destruction. The Parliament ordered the suppression of these utter- ances. The bishop retorted by threatening excommu- nication to any one who should venture .to read the parliamentary order, and recited the prayers against the enemies of the Church. At Rome the Holy See solemnly burned the famous " Consultation," in which forty advocates pleaded the cause of as many cures who appealed to the Parliament against the censures of their bishops. This document, among other things, advanced such significant theories of statecraft as that the Parliaments were the senate of the nation, and the king was to be regarded only as the chief of a sovereign nation, while phrases like " pub- lic authority " and " public power " were used with ominous iterance. The forty advocates, pushed into a corner, declared in a later document that they recog- nized that France was a monarchical state, and that the 1730. A PERTINACIOUS PARLIAMENT. 31 * sovereign authority rested in the person of the monarch and of the monarch alone. As a reward for this sub- mission an Order of Council cleared them of the crime of rebellion ; but the Archbishop of Paris, dissatisfied, issued an ordinance in which he declared that the whole of the forty advocates were heretics, and asserted that the bishops had, in virtue of their divine origin, a co- active power independent of the secular authority. The Parliament of Paris suppressed this ordinance, where- upon an Order of Council ordered both the high dis- puting parties to keep an absolute silence upon the whole question of the rights of the two powers. A little later, however, the government allowed the Arch- bishop of Paris to promulgate his ordinance, where- upon the forty advocates declared that the minister associated himself with the charge of heresy brought against them, and refused to plead. The legal order as a body followed their example. Ten advocates were promptly punished by exile. Their departure was con- verted by popular enthusiasm into a triumph, and there was considerable danger of riot. Laon's wild bishop attacked the Parliament bitterly ; the Parliament re- torted by summoning him before the Assembly of Peers for trial, and the peers were summoned for that pur- pose to attend the Parliament. Fleury, to avoid the scandal, suppressed the Bishop of Laon's mandate, and the Parliament issued its order of September 7, in which it set forth "that the temporal power was independent of all other power, that to it alone belonged the right to 'control' the king's subjects, and that the ministers of the Church were accountable to Parliament, under the authority of the king, for the exercise of their ju- risdiction." Immediately an Order of Council, launched by Fleury, 32 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. III. suppressed this parliamentary mandate, and an usher of the Council was despatched to strike with his own hand the mandate from the parliamentary register. At this juncture the Parliament rose for its habitual vacation of two months from September 7 to November 12. When it met again it was faced by a direct order from Fleury forbidding it to deliberate upon the action of the government with regard to the mandate of Sep- tember 7. The Parliament sent a deputation to the king, which the king declined to receive, whereupon it decided to make a protest "at some more opportune occasion." Fleury took these words to mean when he should be no more, and was indignant. The Parlia- ment was summoned to Versailles and roundly repri- manded, and nothing more was heard of the mandate of September 7. The battle, lulled for a while, began all over again when the Archbishop of Paris condemned the " Nou- velles Ecelesiastiques." The Parliament proceeded to discuss this condemnation ; the king ordered them to keep silence till they learned his good pleasure ; the Parliament protested ; the king retorted by exiling the Abbe Pucelle and clapping another councillor into Vin- cennes. Then the Parliament defiantly forbade the distribution of the Archbishop's mandate, and for fear that this order should be erased, as was the order of September 7, they had it printed at once and issued broadcast. The government cancelled the order and exiled four more councillors. Thereupon the majority of the magistrates, to the number of one hundred and fifty, signed their resignations and solemnly marched out of the palace two by two amidst the applause of an enormous crowd, who hailed them as Romans and fathers of their country. This was on June 20, 1732. 1732. MUTINOUS MAGISTRATES. 33 Fleury, amazed and perturbed, by a policy of blended menace and cajolement, induced the Parliament to re- sume its functions. But it was a truce, not a peace. Fleury would have liked to abolish the Parliament alto- gether, but, as this was too comprehensive a step, he began by endeavoring to reduce its powers. On August 18, 1732, he addressed a declaration to the magistrates which changed all the order and usage of the Parlia- ment, and limited much of its authority. The Parlia- ment protested. The king held firm, and the decla- ration of Fleury was solemnly registered at a bed of justice held in the Guards' Hall at Versailles. The magistrates who had to attend the bed of justice seized upon the law which prohibited the changing of the seat of Parliament to declare the bed of justice null and void. The government immediately sent one hundred and thirty-nine of the mutinous magistrates into exile, and then, in November, as if fearful of its own bold- ness, revoked the exile, recalled the banished magis- trates, and practically withdrew the Fleury declaration. This comparative triumph for the Parliament stirred up the Jansenists to fresh activity. Montpellier's bish- op, in a pastoral letter, spoke with ominous prophecy of " a coming revolution which will substitute a new Church for the existing Church." On the other hand, the Jesuits waged fiercer war than ever. Fleury was denounced for his yielding to the Parliament. The faithful were called upon to rally in defence of a threat- ened faith. In the midst of all this welter a young king of four-and-twenty hunted and supped most tran- quilly, and an aged minister oscillated in irritated de- spair between the two factions. In the very white heat of the Jesuit-Jansenist wrangle France found herself at war again, much against Fleury's L 3 34 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. III. will. But France could hardly in those days stand idly by and see Stanislas Leszczynska, the French king's father-in-law, beaten rudely out of Warsaw by Augus- tus III. and the Russians. The war, which, like all wars at that time, raged in ever so many places at the same time, came to an end honorably and advantageously for France with the treaty of Vienna in 1738, and landed Stanislas Leszczynska, not again on the throne of Po- land, but comfortably enough in the duchies of Lorraine and Bar. To the despair of a peaceful minister, how- ever, war blazed out again in 1740; the European pow- ers were all wrangling together like boys at a muss, and France got very much the worst of it. A picturesque young Archduchess of Austria, hardly pressed, set Hun- gary aflame with enthusiasm at Presburg. " Moriamur pro Rege nostr'a !" became an historical phrase, and a crippled French army found itself in hot retreat from Prague to the French frontier in the January of 1743. This retreat was as fatal to Fleury as Austerlitz was yet to be to Pitt. Old, broken, despairing, he died at Issy on January 29, 1743. He was ninety years old ; he had done his best for himself, and after himself for France ; a better, stronger, wiser man than he could scarcely have saved her under the conditions of the game ; he left her in the hands of a young king of whom the country and the world as yet knew little, of whom the country and the world was soon to know a great deal. From this point onwards the state drifts steadily from shame to shame towards its doom ; we stand upon the threshold of the most disastrous, the most degraded period in the history of France. The little that was known about the young king was not much to his credit. He had already disgraced him- self as a husband by his brutal indifference to his wife 1743. MADAME DE CHlTEAUROUX. 35 and by his more than Oriental extravagance of desires. Already he was remarkable for his mistresses. He had honored one stately family, the family of Nesle, by choosing in succession no less than four daughters of its house to be his mistresses. Of these four mistresses, the latest was Madame de Chateauroux, youngest and fairest of the four sisters, who was in the full noon- tide of her effulgence when battered old Fleury gave up his cunning and died. She was the real influence in the state. Chancellor D'Aguesseau, Marine Min- ister Maurepas, War Minister D'Argenson, and Car- dinal Tencin recognized and submitted to her authority over the young, indolent, sensual king. Madame de Chateauroux, to do her justice, does seem to have tried her best to make something more like a man and less like a hog out of her Louis. She urged him to play a bold part in facing the foes who were now combining against France. England was now actively helping Maria Theresa; Prussia was sated in neutrality by the confirmation of stolen Silesia; Naples and Sardinia, under English influence, withdrew from coalition with France, who thus found herself alone. The desperate defeat of Dettingen in 1743 occasioned more enthusiasm than it deserved in the capitals of London and Vienna. The next year an event of much greater moment nearly came to pass. Louis XV., travelling with his army like an opera king of cooks and lackeys, was suddenly struck down by malignant fever at Metz, and nearly given over. But he did recover ; the influence of his evil star was not yet exhausted. Louis, always easily in- fluenced by theories of religious or ethical decorum while he was in bad health, consented to become recon- ciled with his unhappy wife, and to whistle his beau- tiful, ambitious mistress down the wind. Perhaps the 36 THE FRENCH KEVOLUTION. CH. III. indolent voluptuary was getting a little tired of a mis- tress so proud, so impetuous, so eager to make something manly out of her languid monarch as Madame de Cha- teauroux. Anyhow, she was banished, and Louis saw her no more. Louis's rescue from the jaws of death seems to have aroused a good deal of misplaced enthu- siasm among his subjects. The title of " Well-beloved " was conferred upon him by popular sentiment, a good deal, it would seem, to the monarch's own surprise. " What have I done that my people should love me so much?" he is reported to have said perhaps in good faith, more likely with the queer cynical irony which was a characteristic of his fatal nature. Though the death of the emperor Charles VII. in the January of 1745, and the terms to which the new elector of Bavaria came with Maria Theresa, removed all reason for continuing it, the war still raged until Fontenoy gave, in the May of 1745, the signal for a series of French victories which ended in the treaty of Aix-la- Chapelle. It might be very reasonably maintained that the first serious impetus in that downward movement which cul- minated in the culbute generate was given by the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. If the reign of Louis XV. had ended before 1748, it would have been, as kings and reigns went in those days, a not inglorious reign. Un- der the ministership of Fleury the prestige of France was kept to something like the standard of the spacious days of the Sun-king, and Louis XV. himself, with his fine new title of the Well-beloved hot upon him, had not yet, by his private debaucheries, eclipsed the degra- dation of the Regency. In 1748 France was a great and powerful kingdom, victorious in arms all over Eu- rope, with a growing empire in India, a growing empire 1748. TREATY OF AIX-LA-CHAPELLE. 37 in America, with a roll-call of victories as brilliant as any that followed the fortunes of the marshals of Louis XIV. Before the genius of Saxe, the armies of England had been driven in defeat at Fontenoy and at Lauffeld; before the genius of Dupleix the navy of England had retreated in despair from Pondicherry ; the siege of Maestricht was the last word of a long and glorious catalogue of triumphs. But the treaty of Aix-la-Cha- pelle afforded France no reward for her long and suc- cessful struggle. " I wish," said Louis the Well-beloved, " to negotiate like a prince and not like a merchant," and he made practically no terms for France in the treaty. Glory was enough for Saxe and his generals, the reflected glory was enough for the Well-beloved and the lords and ladies of the Bull's Eye ; but to that vast France of which nobody took any heed, and which was composed of quite others than lords and ladies, marshals and generals, and well -beloved kings, glory was but a barren business. The national debt was enor- mously increased ; the fighting strength of the country had been reduced by victories only less fatal than de- feats, commerce shattered, the navy weakened; and for all these there was nothing to show except the gilded record of some bloody and triumphant battles. Hungry France, thirsty France, trouserless France, might have felt a more appreciable affection for a king who had a touch more of the merchant in his composition, might have felt a keener sympathy for the kingly institution if it had known a little better how to combine the dig- nity of its high office with something of that business- like common-sense which, in the opinion of Louis, set merchants apart from and beneath princes. France got nothing by the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, and from the moment of the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, France, or 38 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. III. rather the French monarchy, began to go down the hill. The twenty - six years in which, by the ordinance of Providence, Louis XV. was still permitted to reign over France, were years of deepening degradation for the monarchy, of deepening misfortune for the country and its people. 1781. THE L1TERAKY MOVEMENT. 39 CHAPTER IV. THE PHILOSOPHES. WHILE France was slipping faster and faster on its glacier descent to destruction, while a young king was growing older without growing wiser or better, or at all more serviceable to the state, a movement was tak- ing place in literature which was destined to have the most momentous results. While Jansenist and Jesuit plucked at each other's throats, while the king occupied his ignoble life by selecting mistresses with the gravity of a grand signior and the sensuality of a satyr, new forces were coming into play, whose influence in fer- menting the revolutionary impulse is not to be over- estimated. " The authority of the king has dwindled, and is obeyed in no particular." So D'Argenson could write in 1731 in the face of the Jansenist and Jesuit Iliad which was raging, and which had for the moment eccen- trically erected the Paris Parliament into the champion of popular rights against the oppressions of a despotic ministry. The fantastic and extraordinary case of Father Girard and Miss Cadiere was promptly made use of as a weapon against the Jesuits. New and strange allies were found swelling the Jansenist ranks. A cer- tain number of men were gradually drifting together into a kind of unconscious alliance, guided by a common sympathy and a common scepticism. Certain men of letters, certain philosophers, certain thinkers, were slow- 40 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION*. CH. IV. ly forming themselves into a body destined to be bitterly abused, to be accused of all manner of crimes, to be mis- understood alike by their enemies and their blind ad- mirers, and to effect the most comprehensive changes in thought. In the early part of 1 732 a blow was struck at this loosely adherent, scarcely formed party which had considerable effect in causing it to cohere more closely. A book appeared, which the Parliament con- demned to be burned as dangerous alike for religion and for the order of civil society. The book was the " Let- ters on the English." The author was one of the most popular men of letters, Voltaire. Fran 9013 Marie Arouet was born at Chatenay on Feb- ruary 20, 1694. So puny was the child, so poorly fitted for the struggle for life, that it was feared at first that he could not live at all, and neither the excellent and well-to-do notary, his father, nor the keen-witted mother, who died when the child was seven years old, could have ventured to dream of the long life that lay before the frail creature. In 1704 he went to the college of Louis- le-Grand to learn under the Jesuits, according to his own statement, nothing worth the learning. From col- lege his godfather, the Abbe Chateauneuf, took the lad into the dazzling society which was soon to revolve around the sinful splendor of Regent Philip. Under the guidance of Chateauneuf, under the influence of another abbe, Chaulieu, the young Voltaire saw a great deal of life of a brilliant evil kind, and met a great many brilliant evil people, and a good many who were simply evil without being brilliant. Chaulieu was a very typical abbe of the Regency. A dainty rhymer of the lightest and loosest verses, a champion of all the obscene reaction against the severity of the Sun-King's setting days, the intimate of an aristocracy whose chief 1694-1715. AROUET. 41 ambition it was to excel in corruption and to be fanci- fully original in sin, Chaulieu was the most amazing Mentor that young Telemachus Arouet could have found in his voyage through Paris. It is scarcely matter for surprise that Arouet the father, that eminently respect- able notary, did not rejoice in the course of his son's conduct or the choice of his friends. They were an ill- assorted sire and son. They had nothing in common ; to Voltaire the narrow respectability of his father was at once galling and ridiculous ; Arouet the elder was not sufficiently keen-sighted to see that the flippant boy who consorted with a lewd nobility was a man of genius. By way of mending matters and forcing the blood-horse into the mule's mill walk, Arouet the elder induced Chateauneuf's diplomatist brother to take young Arouet with him on a mission to the Hague. At the Hague, Voltaire fell desperately in love with a young country- woman, a Mademoiselle du Noyer. Mademoiselle du Noyer was the amiable daughter of a most unamiable mother who drove a queer traffic in libels. Pity as well as love urged the young Arouet to hope to withdraw the girl from such an influence. The intrigue was dis- covered, and the amorist was sent back in disgrace to Paris. Years after, Mademoiselle du Noyer married a Baron de Winterfeld, and always cherished an affec- tionate admiration for the great man who had been her boyish lover. Destiny did not draw closer the relation- ships of father and son. To please the father, the son studied law under Attorney Alain in Paris, but he hated the legal trade and sought happiness in Caumartin's library at St. Ange. The advent of the regent in 1715 was hailed by the appearance of a bitter and clever poem, "Les j'ai vu," satirizing the condition of France and assailing the Jesuits. Voltaire did not write the 42 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. IV. poem, but the authorities thought that he did, and sent him to the Bastille to reflect for nearly a year upon the dangers of dissatisfaction with things as they were in France. In the Bastille he worked hard mentally, for it seems he was not allowed ink and paper finishing his " Oedipus," which was played with success shortly after his release, and in planning the " Henriade," in which he hoped to succeed where Ronsard had failed, and give epicless France her epopee. The "Henriade" was to be all that the " Franciade " was not. For the next six years the young Arouet worked hard and played hard, flitting hither and thither in a passion for wander- ings, falling in and out of love, writing much, reading more in printed books and the bigger book of the world, welcome in the bravest society, rejoicing in his own youth, wit, and ambition, hating Paris and loving the country with a passion that seems exotic and old world in eighteenth-century France. Arouet the elder died in 1722, as bitter against his shining, stubborn son as ever, and with his death Arouet the younger also fades from knowledge, and in his place the world has to accept a young Voltaire. Where the name Voltaire came from, why he chose it, and what it signified to him or to oth- ers, is and must remain a mystery. It has been puzzled over, guessed at, reasoned upon ; it is really not of the slightest importance. It may be, as has been ingeniously suggested, compounded of an anagram upon his name of Arouet with the "U" converted to a "V" and the initial letters of the words " Le Jeune " pressed into the service to make up the sum. The new name was soon to be better known than the old. Its owner got into the famous quarrel with an insolent bearer of the name of Rohan. Voltaire was wittier than Rohan ; Rohan revenged himself through the cudgels of his lackeys. 1726. VOLTAIRE IX ENGLAND. 43 Voltaire, as bitter as creatures physically slight and weak may well be under brutality, applied himself with passion to the art of fencing, and challenged Rohan. Rohan refused to fight, but through the influence of his family he got Voltaire sent for the second time to the Bastille. There he suffered for six months ; when he was at length released he was immediately ordered to leave Paris. In the May of 1726 Voltaire arrived in England. England was at that time and for long after a kind of Mecca to Continental lovers of liberty of thought and action. Frederick the Great paid, in his "Memoirs," his tribute to the great men, such as Hobbes, Collins, Shaftesbury, and Bolingbroke, who, in his eyes, had done so much to widen thought. "The freedom of opinion," he wrote, "prevalent in England contributed greatly to the progress of philosophy." All manner of Frenchmen, from Raynal to Roland, from Montesquieu to Marat, visited it during the golden prime of the eigh- teenth century ; Voltaire was not the pioneer. He had formed a friendship with Lord and Lady Bolingbroke in France, and, when the world was all before him where to choose, he very naturally turned towards the country of which he had heard so much from the illustrious St. John. " Before Voltaire became acquainted with Eng- land through his travels and his friendships," says Cousin in his " History of Philosophy," " he was not Voltaire, and the eighteenth century was still undeveloped." In England he passed three years, which were years full of admiration for the country, for the freedom which he admired when he did not always understand it, for its men of genius who were beginning to revolutionize thought its Newton, its Locke, its Swift, its Addison, its Pope. He studied English literature with something 44 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. IV. like appreciation, though he thought too highly of Ad- dison's "Cato;" he studied English science, then just dawning into something like scientific methods ; he studied English philosophy, and he studied English the- ology. Seldom were three years of exile more indus- triously, more laboriously employed. While in England he published his " Henriade," which Lord Chesterfield, who did not admire Homer, admired, and which we may be allowed to consider perhaps the dullest epic in the world. It was well subscribed for ; it laid the foundation of his fortune. After three years he came back to France and his most famous love-affair with Madame du Chatelet. He was happy in a literary life, producing successful plays, writing and planning histories, when the " Lettres sur les Anglais " saw the light. They do not seem very terrible to-day, they did not seem terrible in a little while even to his enemies, but the Parliament had them burned, and the Parliament prepared to level a lettre de cachet at the head of their author. Voltaire dreaded the Bastille ; he would prob- ably have returned to P^ngland if it had not been for 'Madame du Chatelet's existence. In consequence of Madame du Chatelet's existence he retired to Cirey, in Champagne, the chateau of the Marquis du Chatelet there, with the learned lady and her lord, livted six se- cluded years while it was given out that he was in Eng- land. Seldom has the service of literature been obeyed un- der more curious conditions. The urbane marquis, the scientific marquise, the philosophic poet and poetic phi- losopher lived a life that might not unfairly be called eccentric at Cirey. The gifted man and the gifted woman were devoured by a positive passion for work. Madame du Chatelet passed the major part of the 1734. MADAME DU CHlTELET. 45 twenty-four hours shut up in her own room, translating Newton, competing with Euler, devoting all the energy of her fine intellect to the cause of science. Voltaire was no less strenuous, but more catholic, -condemning waste of time as the most unpardonable of offences, studying science with desperate eagerness, writing his- tories, writing plays, consumed by a very demon of work, and yet always ready to play too for the amuse- ment of stray guests. It cannot be said that his life lacked fulness. At one moment he was great at magic- lanterns and puppet-plays, convulsing wandering gen- tlewomen by Puncinella singing " fagnana, fagnana ;" at another he was flying to Holland to avoid lettres de cachet. The influence of Madame du Chatelet would have been unfortunate if she had succeeded in leading him entirely into the service of a sternly rationalistic science. But Voltaire had the good sense to feel doubts of his capacity to shine as a man of science, the good sense to submit those doubts to a famous man of sci- ence, and the good sense on finding those doubts con- firmed to accept the situation. When Madame du Chatelet died, Voltaire declared himself inconsolable. " I have lost the half of my life," he said, consciously or unconsciously imitating the ex- quisite tribute of Horace to Virgil. He knew well enough that the gifted lady was no more faithful to him than she was to her husband; the episode of Vol- taire and Chatelet opening a locket of hers after her death and finding that it contained the portrait of neither of them, but of her lover, St. Lambert, has been worked upon in many literatures. Voltaire was not in- consolable, however. It is in one of his own exquisite short stories that he speaks of the despairing pair who, in the end, ceased to despair and raised together a tern- 46 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. IV. pie to Time the consoler. Time was always Voltaire's great consoler. He lived so long and lived so thorough- ly that his keenest personal griefs did inevitably fade into a far perspective. Then came the storm and stress of the melancholy Prussian period, when a great king and a great writer behaved with the absurd incivility of angry schoolboys and converted a famous friendship into a yet more famous enmity. Neither Frederick the Great nor Voltaire comes well out of the quarrel. The whole thing was pitiable, mean, and ridiculous, not to be willingly lingered over. Then Voltaire settled down at Ferney, and made for a long time the little village on the Swiss lake the Mecca of the philosophic thought of Europe. It was from Ferney that Voltaire fulminated all those thunders against the "Infamous" which have earned for him an exaggerated censure and an exaggerated praise. It was while at Ferney that he gave most strenuous expression to that "fierce indignation," that saeva indignatio, which harassed his spirit all his life very much as it harassed the spirit of Jonathan Swift. To Ferney came men from all parts of the world to visit the great writer the great James Boswell, of Auchin- leck, for one; Dr. Burney, for another. It was at Fer- ney that that most amazing" scoundrel and liar, Jacques Casanova, had those interviews with Voltaire which he records in those astonishing volumes in which a kind of grotesque satyriasis alternates with shrewd and en- tertaining judgments upon men and things. If it were ever possible to take Casanova's statements at the foot of the letter, it would be amusing to accept as in some degree truthful his account of his arguments with Vol- taire over the respective merits of "Merlin Coccaie" and the "Pucelle." But especially it was to Ferney 1762. VOLTAIRE'S SATIRICAL TRIUMPHS. 47 that the minds and thoughts turned of that body of men who were destined to make the epoch of the Pom- padour illustrious and the French Revolution possible the Encyclopaedists Diderot, D'Alembert, D'Holbach, Helvetius, and Grimm. In his own mind Voltaire looked for fame to his longer works. To me, however, Voltaire's happiest style is to be seen in his short stories. His capacity for pro- ducing effective and precious trifles was, as has been said in words which I may adopt and adapt, some- thing wonderful not mere curiosities, but condensed triumphs of genuine satire, whose meaning grows and deepens as they are studied. What, for instance, can surpass the concise humor of " Scarmentado's Travels " ? Or "The Blind Judges of Colors," with its whimsical conclusion, in which, after the recital of all the quar- rels and battles which took place among the blind dis- putants, each of whom claimed to be an infallible judge of colors, we are gravely told that a deaf man who had read the tale admitted the folly of the sightless men in presuming to decide questions of color, but stoutly maintained that deaf men were the only qualified musi- cal critics ? Or " Bababec and the P"akirs " ? A Mussul- man, who is the supposed narrator of the tale, and a good Brahmin, Omri, visit the fakir groups by the banks of the Ganges, at Benares. Some of these holy men are dancing on their heads; some inserting nails in their flesh; some staring fixedly at the tips of their noses, in the belief that they thus will see the celestial light. One, named Bababec, is revered for special sanc- tity because he went naked, wore a huge chain round his neck, and sat upon pointed nails, which pierced his flesh. Omri consults this saintly sage as to his own chances of reaching Brahma's abode after death. The 48 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. IV. fakir asks him how he regulates his life. " I endeavor," says Omri, " to be a good citizen, a good husband, a good father, and a good friend. I lend money without interest to those who have need; I give to the poor, and I maintain peace among my neighbors." "I am sorry for you," interrupts the pious fakir; "your case is hopeless; you never put nails dans votre cul." Such specimens, however, are only like the brick which the dullard in the old story brought away for the purpose of giving his friend an idea of the beauty of the temple. The seeds of the Revolution were nowhere more surely sown than in these short stories. Voltaire developed the satirical capability of the French language to a de- gree equalled by no other man. So much sarcastic force was, probably, never compressed into so few and such simple words as in many of these little fictions. The reader is positively amazed at the easy dexterity with which subjects are placed in the most ludicrous light possible. Sometimes Voltaire's ideas become extrava- gant, but his style never does. Sydney Smith frequent- ly lacks simplicity, but Voltaire is always simple and never strains. What an admirable pamphleteer Vol- taire would have made had he but been an Englishman ! What inextinguishable ridicule he would have scattered over a ministry or over an opposition ! How irresisti- bly people would have been forced to think anything he laughed at deserving of laughter! How he would have written up some measure of emancipation and made a reluctant government afraid to refuse it ! That Voltaire appreciated English freedom of speech we have already seen. Had he but understood the genius and the worth of our best literature as well, it would have been better for his critical, and perhaps for his dramatic fame. Voltaire, of course, made fun of English ways 1694-1778. VOLTAIRE'S USE OF SATIRE. 49 now and then. My Lord Qu'importe, or What -then, who said nothing but " How d'ye do " at quarter-hour intervals, is the prototype of many a caricature drawn by succeeding hands. But in the very chapter which contained this good-humored hit at our proverbial in- sular taciturnity, he calls the English the most perfect government in the world, and adds, with a truth which prevails at this day as much as ever, " There are, indeed, always two parties in England who fight with the pen and with intrigue, but they invariably unite when there is need to take up arms to defend their country and their liberty." Well might Goldsmith, in his " Citizen of the World," well might Disraeli, in " Contarini Flem- ing," pay their tributes in turn as Englishmen to the genius of Voltaire. A noble weapon was that Voltaire owned, for one who used it rightly who understood, as Sydney Smith said, how to value and how to despise it. It would be idle to deny that Voltaire sometimes used it unfairly. Fantastic, hot - tempered, sensitive, spiteful by nature, how could such a man have such a stiletto always un- sheathed, and not sometimes give a jealous stab, and sometimes thrust too deeply, and sometimes wound those who were not worth piercing at all ? He often imported petty personal spleens into his satires, and used his giant's strength upon some poor ephemeral pigmy, some Freron or some Boyer. But so did Horace, and Pope, and Swift, and so did Thackeray even in later and milder days. Voltaire has got a worse name for meanness of this kind than almost any other man of kindred genius, and yet seems, after all, to deserve it less than most of the great satirists of the world. Indeed, posterity has, upon the whole, dealt very harshly with Voltaire's errors, and made scant allowance of the praise which his pur- I. 4 50 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. IV. poses and efforts so often deserved. Few of the lead- ing satirists of literature ever so consistently and, all things considered, so boldly turned their points against that which deserved to be wounded. Religious intol- erance and religious hypocrisy, the crying sins of France in Voltaire's day, were the steady objects of his satire. Where, in these stories, at least, does he attempt to sat- irize religion? Where does he make a gibe of genuine human affection? Where does he sneer at an honest effort to serve humanity ? Where does he wilfully turn his face from the truth ? Calmly surveying these mar- vellous satirical novels, the unprejudiced reader will search in vain for the blasphemy and impiety with which so many well - meaning people have charged the fictions of Voltaire. Where is the blasphemy in "Zadig"? It is brimful of satire against fickle wives and false friends, intriguing courtiers, weak beings, in- tolerant ecclesiastics, and many other personages toler- ably well known in France at that day. They might naturally complain of blasphemy who believed them- selves included in the description of the learned Magi who doomed Zadig to be impaled for his heretical doc- trines concerning the existence of griffins. "No one was impaled after all, whereupon many wise doctors murmured and presaged the speedy downfall of Baby- lon," was a sentence which probably many in Paris thought exceedingly offensive and impious. Possibly yet greater offence was conveyed to many minds by Zadig's famous candle argument. Zadig, having been sold into slavery, fell into the hands of a very humane and rational merchant, named Setoc. " He discovered in his master a natural tendency to good, and much clear sense. He was sorry to observe, however, that Setoc adored the sun, moon, and stars, according to the J 6 94-1778. OBJECTS OF VOLTAIRE'S SATIRE. 51 ancient usage of Araby. . . . One evening Zadig lit a great number of flambeaux in the tent, and, when his' patron appeared, flung himself on his knees before the illuminated wax, exclaiming, 'Eternal and brilliant lights, be always propitious to me !' ' What are' you doing?' asked Setoc, in amazement. 'I am doing as you do,' replied Zadig. ' I adore the lamps and I neg- lect their maker and mine.' Setoc comprehended the profound sense of this illustration. The wisdom of his slave entered his soul; he lavished his incense no more upon created things, but adored the Eternal Being who made them all." Is it impious to satirize the glory of war, the levity of French society, the practice of bury- ing the dead in close churchyards in the midst of cities, the venal disposal of legal and military offices? All these are subjects on which the author pours out his gall in the " Vision of Babouc." The travels of Scar- mentado simply expose religious intolerance in France, Spain, England, Italy, Holland, China. The letters of Amabed denounce fanaticism coupled with profligacy. Anything said against the manner in which the vices of Fa Tutto are exposed must apply equally to Aristoph- anes and Juvenal, to Rabelais and Swift, to Marlowe and Massinger. The " Histoiy of Jenni " is a very humdrum argumentation against atheism; inefficacious, we fear, to convert very hardened infidels, and serving only to demonstrate the author's good intentions and his incapacity for theological controversy. " The White Bull," if it have any meaning whatever beyond that of any of Anthony Hamilton's fairy tales, means to satirize the literal interpretations of certain portions of the Old Testament in which very stupid theologians delighted. To accuse of blasphemy every man who refused to ac- cept the interpretations which Voltaire in this extrava- 52 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. IV. gant parable appears to reject, would be to affix the charge upon some of the profoundest of our own theo- logians, some of the best and wisest of our thinkers. It is unquestionable that Voltaire was deficient in that quality which we call veneration. He had no respect even for what Carlyle terms the "majesty of custom." With all his hatred of intolerance, he was himself sin- gularly intolerant of error. He did not care to concil- iate the feelings of those whose logical inaccuracy he ridiculed. Frequently and grievously he sinned against good taste, against that kindly, manly feeling which prompts a gentle mode of pointing out a fellow-man's errors and follies. But there is nothing in these stories, at least, which affords any real foundation for a charge of blasphemy or wilful impiety ; and these volumes, more truly and faithfully than anything else which re- mains of him, reflect to posterity the real character and spirit, the head and heart of Voltaire. In these we learn what Voltaire thought deserving of ridicule; and with that knowledge, on the great German's principle, we come to know the man himself. What is the moral of all these satires ? Voltaire gave them to the world with a moral purpose, and, indeed, marred the artistic effect of many of them by the reso- lute adherence with which he clung to it. Do they teach anything but that truth, unselfishness, genuine religious feeling, freedom, and love, are the good an- gels of humanity ; and falsehood, selfishness, hypocrisy, intolerance, and lawless passion, its enemies and its curses? Why accept Juvenal as a moral teacher and reject Voltaire? Why affix to the name of Voltaire a stigma no one now applies to that of Rabelais ? Voltaire mocked at certain religious teaching, unquestionably ; and it is not, under ordinary circumstances, amiable or 1694-1778. VOLTAIRE'S SATIRE JUSTIFIED. . 53 creditable to find food for satire in the religious cere- monials or professions of any man. To do so now would be inexcusable, because it would be wholly unnecessary. Where each man has full and equal freedom to preach, pray, and profess what he pleases, nothing but malig- nity or vulgarity can prompt any one to make a public gibe of his neighbor's ceremonials of worship, even al- though his neighbor's moral practices may appear some- what inconsistent with true worship of any kind. To satirize the practices or doctrines of the established church of any civilized country now argues not cour- age, but sheer impertinence and vulgarity. But things were very different when Voltaire wrote. Where it might entail banishment, worldly ruin, or even death, to speak a free word of criticism upon the doings of the hierophants of a dominant authority, it was a very excusable and praiseworthy act to expose the folly of some of the deeds, the inconsistency and immorality of some of the teachers. It is more easy to pardon this than to pardon the "Pucelle," that brilliant, indecent burlesque of Chapelain's solemn muse which Richelieu suggested, which Malesherbes adored, which its author affectionately called " Ma Jeanne," which the yet to be famous'author of "Organt" desperately imitated. The "Pucelle" is as unjustifiable to-day as when Voltaire wrote it ; the stories no longer need to be justified. Gessler may wear his hat any fashion he chooses, and only ill-breeding would laugh at him as long as he does not insist upon any one performing any act of homage to his humor. But when he sets his beaver upon a pole in the centre of the market-place, and orders imprison- ment or exile for every subject who will not fall down and worship it, that man does a brave and wise act who Bets the world laughing at the tyrant and his prepos- 54 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. IV. terous aiTOgance. The personages who used to sing comic songs and dance the clog-dance during certain performances of divine service several years ago were vulgar and culpable boors. Whatever they might have thought of the service, they were not compelled to at- tend it, and in our days theological differences are not decided by mobs and hob-nailed shoes. But if the in- cumbent of the church had the power to bring down penal disqualification, or exile, or worldly ruin upon the heads of all those who declined to acknowledge his cere- monials as their worship, the first man who raised a bold laugh at the whole performance might be very justly regarded as a hero. Something, at least, of this quali- fied character is to be said in palliation of the irrever- ence of Voltaire. Much that was stigmatized as blas- phemy a century ago, most people regard as plain truth now. Much even of the most objectionable of Voltaire's writings may be excused by the circumstances of the time, by the feelings with which he wrote, by the dis- torted and hideous form in which Christianity was pre- sented in the dogmas of so many of its professional exponents. Much, it is true, may be admitted to be wholly inexcusable, for did he not produce the "Pu- celle"? But no one claims for Voltaire an immunity from some severe censure. All that is sought for him is a more general and generous recognition of the praise he merited and the motives which impelled him, a miti- gation of the sentence which so many have pronounced upon him. No other man from Voltaire's birth down- wards, not even excepting Rousseau, has borne such extravagance of praise followed by such a load of ob- loquy. He was not a profound thinker ; he was not a hero ; he was not a martyr for truth ; he was not a blameless man. But he had, at least, half-glimpses of 1694-1778. VOLTAIRE'S GREAT INFLUENCE. 55 many truths, not of his own time, which the world has recognized and acknowledged since. He had probably as much of the heroic in him as a man constitutionally nervous and timid could well be expected to have. No one would ever have relished less the endurance of the martyr's sufferings in his own person, but he made odious and despicable those who had caused or con- nived at their infliction upon others, and he did some- thing to render future martyrdoms impossible. For his time and his temptations, his personal offences were not very many or very great. If people would but cease to think of him as a philosopher either of free- thought or of infidelity, and would merely regard him as a political and social satirist, they would recognize in bis satirical works, not only the memorials of a ge- nius unrivalled in its own path, but the evidences of a generous nature, an enlightened perception, and an earn- est desire for the happiness and the progress of human beings. With these words we must take our farewell of Vol- taire. Never was there a greater force in literature ; never has a man been more wildly worshipped or more wildly execrated. His bitterest enemies can afford to think well of the champion of Rochette, of Galas and Sirven, of La Barre and Lally. His greatest admirers may regret the squabble with Frederick. But the whole life of Voltaire was one gallant fight for freedom. The influence he obtained in his own time was simply enor- mous, only rivalled by the enormous influences which his name and work have exercised since his time. It is impossible to read, without being deeply touched, of that return to Paris in 1778, after an absence of well- nigh a generation, of the enthusiastic triumph accorded to him by the whole city, and of his death, whether 56 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. IV. from over-excitement, or an overdose of laudanum, on May 30 in that same year. He had waged a life-long war against tyranny, oppression, and injustice of all kinds ; if he was the great general of the war, he had the good-fortune to rally round him the brilliantest of lieutenants most brilliant of all, the greatest of his dis- ciples, Diderot. Denis Diderot was born at Langres in 1713, the son of a studious, intelligent sword cutler and a worthy woman ; he had a " divine Diogenes in petticoats " for a sister and a devout Jesuit for a brother. In his early youth he went to school with the Jesuits, and became so enamoured of them that he sought to escape from Rome in order to join the order in Paris. His father intercepted the escape, but, with wise indulgence, took him himself to Paris to the College d'Harcourt. There the young Diderot had two years of excellent training ; then the father announced that it was time he should begin the world, and offered him his choice of law or medicine. Denis Diderot disliked both. Medicine seemed to him as murderous as it seemed to Faust ; law, the intolerable doing of other folks' business. Diderot senior thereupon promptly and decisively cut off the supplies and Denis found himself thrown on his own resources. To be thrown upon one's own resources in a great capital with much ambition for success chiefly of the literary kind, and no money wherewith to insure bed and board, is not a very agreeable experience in the present day, but it was very much more disagreeable in the last century. The life of a man of letters who wished to live by his pen was desperate, uphill work. He was often hungry, he was often homeless, his raiment often scanty, bis linen often ragged. He was worse off than the gypsy, because he would not steal ; he was worse 1713-1784. DENIS DIDEROT. 57 off than the tramp, because he would not beg ; he was worse off than the laborer, because he was troubled by the thoughts, the hopes, the dreams which lifted him from the possibility of content in almost animal occu- pation and almost animal gratification of the imperious desires. Diderot was destined to see the man of letters a man of power in France ; but when he first launched his bark upon the perilous sea, the man of letters was hardly recognized as better than an adventurer or a drudge. Diderot for the first hard decade of his working life was both adventurer and drudge. He did some teach- ing, got a tutorship in the house of a wealthy man, and deliberately gave it up because it interfered with his scheme of existence. He did as much borrowing as he could. The needy Bohemians of Murger's immortal story did not live a more desperate life than he. Paris is the true Prague of Bohemia, and Diderot was free of the city. He knew what it was to starve. A kind land- lady once forced a supper upon him when he was almost dying of hunger. He swore that if ever brighter hours dawned for him he would never refuse aid to any living creature or help to condemn him to such misery. It is pleasant to record that Diderot kept his oath. But the time for keeping the oath was far off. In the meantime he tramped Paris, wrote and read and hungered and thirsted ; studied rather the book of life than books about life ; married in the reckless Bohemian way a seamstress named Antoinette Champion, and made a dismal match of it. Men of genius are not always the pleasantest companions for the hearth and home, even where the sordid claims of daily life do not intrude and disturb. But Diderot was wretchedly poor, and the seamstress naturally brought no portion with her. She 58 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. IV. was full of the domestic virtues, pious, -prudent, careful. But she was rather older than Diderot, she could not possibly understand him; in the end his wild humors, his infidelities, wore out her patience and the bond galled. Poor little Lenette in Jean Paul Richter's masterpiece was much to be pitied for marrying Sieben- kaes, though Siebenkaes was as moral as an apostle. But, on the other hand, Siebenkaes was to be pitied in that he was a man of genius and a poet who had mar- ried a mere Haus-Frau. We must pity Antoinette Champion ; we may also pity Diderot. He should not have married, he was not meant for marriage ; he could not keep the compact he had entered into ; he could not do without intellectual companionship. Unlucky Antoinette Champion could give him her devoted affec- tion, her untiring work, her poor hoarded pence for his cups of coffee, but she could not talk about the things nearest and dearest to his heart, and he inevitably drift- ed off to those who could. Who can help pitying her or blaming him ? To have lived the life due to his mar- riage would have been suicide to Diderot, but not to live it was little short of murder murder of the domes- tic hopes, the domestic yearnings, all that made life sweet to the poor seamstress. Philosophers are often bad house-fellows. After all, we have never heard Xan- tippe's side of the story. For many bitter years Diderot toiled and drudged in Paris, doing all manner of hack work, befriending all who sought his friendship, readily cheated and deceived by all who strove to cheat or to deceive him, translating Shaftesbury, penning pamphlets, enduring domiciliary visits from the police, even going to prison. A lampoon upon a courtly minion caused him to be arrested and sent to Vincennes, where he might have rotted to death 1713-84. A REVOLUTIONARY PRELUDE. 69 but for the efforts of Voltaire. In the woods of Vincen- nes Diderot was allowed to wander, while he was still nominally a prisoner, in the company of Rousseau ; it was while he was in Vincennes that he learned his first sharp lesson in the infidelity of woman. He imag- ined that his new Egeria, Madame de Puisieux, would at least be true to him. He strangely fancied that ge- nius, wit, scholarship, could bind a lewd woman to his side. She betrayed him, while her professions of love and devotion were still warm upon her lips ; he was convinced of her treason and he gave her up. It is one of the most whimsical curses which Nature inflicts upon such men, that while they are themselves untrue they expect to find truth in others. Full of his friendship for Rousseau, whose flagging purposes he had animated with his own philosophical fire, full of bitter reflections upon the treachery of woman's love, Diderot left Vin- cennes a free man after three months of captivity, and set himself with all swiftness to giving the final touches to the first volume of the " Encyclopaedia." Much is expected of those who have the fortune or the misfortune to be called upon to play their part in an epoch of transition. Diderot's part was played in such a time ; he was almost unconsciously, but not quite unconsciously, preparing the way for the Revolution. The whole social order around him was wheeling swiftly into a new orbit, and Diderot put his shoulder to the wheel with a will. It is not easy even for the greatest of men to be absolutely certain that they live and move in a time of radical change, a kind of grand climacteric of life and order and law. But Diderot worked in a time when the grand climacteric of the political and social life of France was fast approaching, and he was distinctly conscious of the approaching change. What 60 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. IV. shape the change was to take, how great, how convulsive the change was to be, he can have hardly guessed, but he worked like a hero in the cause of change; any change from the condition of life, mental, social, political, in which the France of his youth was set. How far Dide- rot was prepared to go, at least in theory, we may learn from the passages which he interpolated into the Abbe Raynal's history of the two Indies. Take, for example, this sentence : " Until a king is dragged to Tyburn with no more pomp than the meanest criminal, the people will have no conception of liberty. The law is nothing unless it be a sword suspended over all heads without distinction, and levelling all which elevate themselves above the horizontal plane in which it circles." No wonder that Mallet du Pan declared that such sentences "serve as a prelude to the revolutionary code." To an age like ours, so rich in the means it affords to all of knowledge, so fertile in the systematization and the spread of information, it is difficult at first to realize the literary revolution which was effected by the appearance of -the "Encyclopaedia." It was really the first of its kind, the " Hero Eponymus " of encyclope- dias. There had been encyclopaedias before, but hardly in the sense which is now, since the days of Diderot, attached to the word. If Albertus Magnus made a kind of compilation, if Vincent de Beauvais wrote a "Specu- lum," if Roger Bacon in an Opus Majus set up the vestibule to an unfinished temple of knowledge, the " Compendium Philosophic," if a Ringelberg of Basle in the sixteenth century, and an Alsted in the seventeenth century, and a Chambers in the eighteenth century pub- lished cyclopedias, none of these ventures could at all compare with the "vast operation" which Diderot and his friend so gallantly undertook and so gallantly car- 1746. THE "ENCYCLOPAEDIA." 61 ried through. Englishmen may well feel, however, a sense of gratification in thinking that the inspiration of the " Encyclopaedia," nay, more, its pattern and model, came from England. " Our principal debt," Diderot himself wrote, " will be to the Chancellor Bacon, who sketched the plan of a universal dictionary of sciences and arts at a time when there were not, so to say, either arts or sciences." The impassioned admirers of Bacon who seek to adorn his great memory with the author- ship of the plays of Shakespeare and the essays of Mon- taigne might do better in remembering the tribute that Diderot in the prospectus and D'Alembert in the pre- liminary discourse paid to the memory of Francis Bacon. The very plan of the " Encyclopaedia " was modelled upon an English example, upon the cyclopaedia of Eph- raim Chambers, which was published in London in 1727, and which was translated into French half a century later with a view to its publication in Paris. Le Breton, the Paris publisher, wanted a man of letters to help him in bringing out the book. He turned to Diderot, who had some reputation among booksellers as a needy, hard- working author. Diderot examined the work, saw with the swift inspiration of genius what a great deed was to be done, and suggested to Le Breton that it should be done. Diderot's eloquence inspired Le Breton, in- spired even D'Aguesseau ; in the January of 1746, a privilege was procured, and a kind of syndicate of pub- lishers formed to run the concern. Even Diderot, with his wide knowledge and desperate capacity for work, felt that he could not accomplish an encyclopaedia, a " book that should be all books," single-handed. He wanted a friend, a colleague, an ally; he found that ally, that colleague, that friend, in D'Alembert. One wintry November night in the year 1717, a newly 02 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. IV. born child was discovered, well-nigh dead from expo- sure, on the steps of the church of St. Jean le Rond. A kindly hearted woman of the people, a glazier's wife, whose name, curiously enough, seems to have been Rous- seau, adopted the deserted child. The child was the son of the natural son of Madame de Tencin, an authoress of some small reputation and a courtesan of no reputation, who had been the mistress of a large variety of illustri- ous persons, including English Bolingbroke and French D'Argenson. No very illustrious person, however, par- ented the young D'Alembert ; his sire was artillery- officer Destouches-Canon, the brother of Destouches the dramatist. Mr. John Morley, who is rather fond of sweeping criticisms, and who is little in sympathy with the lighter literature of the eighteenth century, is pleased to describe D'Alembert's uncle as " the author of some poor comedies." The criticism is neither just nor happy. The comedies of Destouches are scarcely so delightful as the comedies of Regnard, but Destouches is nearer to Regnard than Regnard is to Moliere, and some of Des- touches' comedies are both excellent and entertaining. When Destouches, the artillery-officer, discovered that his son had been adopted by the poor glass-worker, he allowed himself to feel some natural promptings of duty, if not of affection, and paid from time to time certain small sums for the child's education. It is one of the many curious and ironic facts attendant upon the gene- sis of the French Revolution that one of the master minds of the age, one of the dominant forces of the " Encyclopedia," should owe to the fostering care of the people the right to breathe, which was well-nigh denied to him by the soldier his sire and the harlot his mother. The eighteenth century in France, so largely swayed by harlots and by soldiers, was fated to fall be- 1717. D'ALEMBERT. 63 fore the strange alliance of the philosophe and the prole- taire, and never did philosophe owe more to the proletaire than D'Alembert, or more keenly remember the debt. Years after, when he had become famous, and Madame de Tencin was eager to claim her kinship with him, he repelled her proudly with the words, " I am the son of the glazier's wife." Yet if he was the son of the glazier's wife if he abided with her for no less than forty years, he was not entirely a source of satisfaction to his foster-mother. His passion for learning, which distinguished him from the moment when, in 1730, he entered the Mazarin Col- lege, was the life-long despair of Mistress Rousseau. " You will never be anything but a philosopher, and a philosopher is only a madman, who makes his life mis- erable in order that people may talk about him after he is dead." Such was the poor opinion held by the gla- zier's wife of philosophers. Nevertheless, D'Alembert remained obstinate, remained a philosopher. His career resembles that of Balzac's Daniel d'Arthez in its single- minded devotion to study. He was happily constituted with a perfect genius for work. How many men of let- ters there are, harassed by constitutional infirmity, who begin each morning of their waking life with the mel- ancholy reflection, " What can I avoid doing to-day ?" D'Alembert belonged to that happier class who salute the day with the cheerily courageous question, " "What can I do to-day ?" Yet this exquisite temperament was not due to physical health. His physique was as feeble as Voltaire's, as feeble as Rousseau's ; all his life his health was bad, and his health reacted naturally enough upon his temper and made him fretful and impatient. D'Alembert was the only one of the great sceptics who was fostered by the sheltering wings of Jansenism. 64 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. IV. Most of the other Encyclopaedists had been brought up under Jesuit influences ; D'Alembert alone was nur- tured on Jansenism. When the " Encyclopaedia " was started, Diderot's thoughts turned at once to D'Alem- bert. D'Alembert was a great mathematician, one of the greatest in France ; geometry was to him the pas- sion that poetry or that pleasure is to men of different mould. In many ways, indeed, in most ways, D'Alem- bert was strangely dissimilar to Diderot. All that was wild, reckless, wanton in Diderot's nature was entirely wanting to D'Alembert's character. Diderot, as we have said, was a Bohemian of Bohemia. D'Alembert was precise, even austere, scholastic. Some of his utter- ances on the scholastic life remind us of the later lone- liness and reserve of Arthur Schopenhauer. Even the alliance which D'Alembert formed in later years with Mdlle. de 1'Espinasse had nothing in common with Dide- rot's wild amours. His affection for that greatly gifted and amazingly sensitive lady was not a cause of great happiness to D'Alembert, but it was an affection of a high type, and if Mdlle. de 1'Espinasse could only have included among her gifts the art of being faithful, she might have sweetened instead of embittering the career of the great philosopher. Around these two men the little army of writers for the great work grew up and held together. High stood Holbach the wealthy, the aggressively atheistic, who came from a childhood in the Palatinate to live out his life in Paris, and whose "System of Nature," written under the pseudonym of Mirabaud, was attacked by both Voltaire and Frederick the Great ; born in 1723, he was to live till the dawn of Revolution and die in the great year 1787. High, too, stood Grimm Frederich Mel- chior Grimm who, born in the same year, was to out- 1715-1 807. GRIMM AND HELVETIFS. 65 live the century and die in 1807 at Gotha with a mind stocked with marvellous memories memories of the war against Rameau on behalf of the Italian music and his headship of the " coin de la Reine," memories of the great "Encyclopaedia," memories of the great Revolu- tion. He was given by the fates nearly a century of life, and he was lucky in his century and the lines his life was cast in. High stood Claude Adrien Helvetius, who was born in Paris in 1715, the year of the Sun- King's death, of a race of quacks and physicians ; who was in turns farmer-general, versifier, man of letters. He wrote a book " On the Mind," which came near to teaching Utilitarianism, but only succeeded in laying down the doctrine that the love of pleasure and the dis- like of pain were the sole motives for our actions. The book shocked tne youth of Madame Roland, roused the critical wrath of Turgot, and was publicly burned. Hel- vetius was otherwise remarkable for marrying a very pretty wife, whom we shall meet again, and for being the friend of the Great Frederick. If he made a hard and unpopular landlord, he did at least shelter the Young Pretender generously in his hour of need, and pension Marivaux. He died in 1771. These were the generals of the Encyclopaedic army. It was a strange and mis- cellaneous army. The greatest thinkers of the time wrote on the topics to which they had devoted their profoundest thoughts ; ladies of fashion sent dainty fragments of information about clothes and coquettish minutiae about the dressing of the hair. The " Book that was to be all Books" was to be as catholic as the world itself and to contain all things. Nothing in the history of literature is more remarkable than the way in which all these people, philosophers and fair ladies, economists, scholars, soldiers, and wits, worked together I. 5 66 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. IV. at the great work in loyal and even loving unison. There was no writer for the "Encyclopaedia" who did not take a personal pride in the " Encyclopaedia." The influence of the " Encyclopaedia " upon the thought that tended to Revolution is incalculable. It was only not as great an influence at that of Voltaire, and the influ- ence of Voltaire himself was not so distinctly instru- mental in bringing the Revolution about as was the in- fluence of the self -torturing sophist, wild Rousseau. 1712. JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU. 67 CHAPTER V. THE APOSTLE OF AFFLICTION. THE first spot which the stranger seeks in visiting Geneva is the little island which bears the name of Geneva's greatest citizen. It is but a little handful of earth, carefully banked against the wear of the waters, carefully railed and kept scrupulously trim. It presents the usual medley of the sublime and the ridiculous essen- tial, or at least inevitable, to all show-places. One of the most conspicuous objects on the little island is a refreshment kiosk, where a placard infoi'ms the thirsty that American drinks are compounded. The other is a statue of the greatest thinker and teacher of the eighteenth century, Jean Jacques Rousseau. Here he loved to come in the days of his youth, when the con- fines of the island in their natural shape met the waves and ripples of the lake, and when what is now called the Old Town was the only Geneva extant, rising tier upon tier of dull brown roofs along its hill, clustering about the antique towers of its church, with the eternal lines of the twin Saleve hills for a background. The new Geneva, the Geneva of the traveller and the tourist, had not come into existence then ; but the Geneva of to- day, which offers its shelter to the Nihilist and to the cosmopolitan revolutionary, is practically in spirit the same Geneva which sheltered the Protestant family of Rousseau from the wrath of a persecuting king. Rousseau was born in Geneva on June 28, 1712. Early 68 THE FKENCH REVOLUTION. CH. V. in the sixteenth century, Didier Rousseau, a bookseller of Paris, carried his Protestantism from Paris to Geneva, and there set up his staff. A son Jean begat a son David, and a son David begat a son Isaac, and the son Isaac begat Jean Jacques, and with him, all unwitting- ly, the "Contrat Social" and the French Revolution. Rousseau's birth cost his mother her life. To use Mr. Morley's fine phrase, Rousseau " was born dying." " My birth," he writes himself, in the " Confessions," with that note of almost intolerable pessimism which he always loved to strike, "was the first of my misfortunes." The motherless child had the strangest imaginable education. Isaac Rousseau was an imaginative dreamer, and he com- municated the grave malady to his son. There is noth- ing in the last century at once more pleasing and more poignant than the picture Rousseau draws of the long evenings he and his father spent together, the man and the child of seven, reading to one another in turn the novels and romances that the mother had collected together. Through the long hours of the night, the strangely assorted pair would sit and follow with fever- ish delight the long-winded evolutions of last century fiction until the music of the morning birds would arouse them from their paradise to the consciousness of a workaday world outside which was waking up and busy. When the undiluted fiction was exhausted, then came the service of the scarcely less fanciful muse of history. Before the eyes of Isaac and Jean Jacques the glittering brocaded panorama of Venetian history unfolded itself, and the mind of the child gave itself up in wondering homage to the worship of Plutnrch and the Plutarchian heroes. "Every healthy child is a Greek or a Roman." Such is the axiom of a very dif- ferent philosopher from Jean Jacques, of transatlantic, 1712-24. ROUSSEAU, A PUPIL OF PLUTARCH. 69 transcendental, Bostonian Emerson, himself the hearti- est lover of Plutarch of modern times. Rousseau was not a healthy child, but he shared the common lot of all intelligent children in becoming an antique hero. The heart of any child in which the least seed of the heroic is by good-fortune sown always swells over the splen- did pages of Greek courage and Roman fortitude ; it is possible that the heart of a sickly, sensitive, and high- ly imaginative child beats all the quicker for the very difference which chymic destiny has made between him and the breed of heroes. However that may be, the heroes ot'Plutarch came out of the dead past, and walked abroad with the child Rousseau, welcomed him to their fellowship, hailed him -as a peer. It is a proof of the amazing, delicious, self -deceptive affectation of child- hood that we find the young Rousseau on one occasion startling his hearers, in recounting the myth of Mutius Scaevola, by stretching his little arm over a hot chafing- dish, and so quickening the spirit of the ancient legend. A like tale is to be told in later days of another disciple of Plutarch, a disciple of Jean Jacques, the young St. Just. Rousseau was left at an early age practically an only child. There was an elder, most unruly brother, who took to himself the key of the fields and vanished from the knowledge of his kinsfolk and from the knowledge of history forever. Imagination, which always stands on tiptoe by the side of her stern sister, History, would dearly like to speculate on the fate of that lost child of the Rousseau race. He was seven years older than Jean Jacques, who does not even tell us his name ; he was brought up to the father's trade of watch-making; he was a libertine and a rascal ; he was tenderly loved by Jean Jacques. Once Jean Jacques flung himself be- 70 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. V. tween the brother and a beating which the father was bestowing on him, and received the blows until the father O ' stayed his hand. Let us hope the brother was not un- grateful. " He loved me," says Rousseau, " as much as a scapegrace can love anything." At last the scapegrace took himself off altogether ; a vague rumor reached his relatives that he had gone to Germany ; he never wrote them a line ; that was the end of him. For all that they knew, for all that we know, he may have been dead and buried within a year of his flight ; or he may have changed his name and his mode of life, and ended not dishonorably. Who knows? There may have been in some German town a Rousseau who followed with wonder and delight the rising fame of Jean Jacques, and said to himself, " Behold my brother." But if he did he kept his admiration to himself, and Jean Jacques never heard of him again. His early education was with an aunt, a singer of sweet old songs, the memory of which clung to Jean Jacques and brought tears into his eyes in days long later. Then his father quarrelled with the operations of the law in Geneva, broke up his home, and sent Jean Jacques, then ten years old, to M. Lambercier's school at Bossey village. Here he first learned his passion for the country ; here too he gained that other extraordinary passion which he has set forth so crudely in the " Con- fessions," and which may well be left there. True to that strange principle with which he set out in writing his life, the principle of leaving " nothing to tell to God," he regards the sensual dawnings in the feeble body of an imaginative child with a direct simplicity which would make one loathe virility if it were not that the absence of virility was the quickening cause of Rousseau's dis- eased, unhappy imaginings. Let us pity and pass on. 1722-48. THE "CONFESSIONS." 71 While at Bossey a rigorous punishment for an offence which he had not committed roused in the childish mind that first sense of the Swift-like "fierce indignation" against injustice which became the key.-note of his life. To the hysterical temperament of Jean Jacques the sense of wrong was like the travail of a new birth, sharp- ly dividing the old childish life from the new. From Bossey, Rousseau came back to Geneva to live with his uncle and to prepare for the vocation of a minister. But he was sent first to a notary's office, and when he was promptly dismissed thence for incapacity he was ap- prenticed to an engraver. The engraver was a rough, brutal man ; his brutality converted Rousseau into a liar, a coward, and a thief. At last, in sheer terror of his savage taskmaster and of a promised chastisement, Rousseau followed the example of the ne'er-do-weel elder brother and in his turn ran away. He was then sixteen years old. Without a penny in his pockets, without a trade, without an object, without any friends save those he was leaving behind him, he faced the world and step- ped boldly forth into the unknown. It is a curious ex- ample of the strangely contrasted nature of Rousseau that the spirit which shrank in despair from a physical punishment confronted with an almost heroic indiffer- ence the perilous possibilities of the vagabond life. But the old note of romance was once more set a-stirring. Rousseau saw himself on his fool's errand as the hero of all manner of wonderful and delightful adventures ; he noted no darkness on his dubious course, but only a nursery world of festivals, of treasures, of adventures, of loving friends and complaisant mistresses, and he stepped ont with a high heart like a child in a fairy tale. He drifted for a day or two among the villages adjacent to Geneva, tasting the ready hospitality of the peasant. 72 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. V. Then he made his way to Confignon village, in Savoy, where a zealous priest dwelt, M. de Pontverre. Rous- seau visited the priest, listened to his arguments, ac- cepted his dinner and his Frangi wine, found his argu- ments excellent, and intimated his readiness to enter the Catholic Church. To hasten that end M. de Pontverre sent his young disciple post-haste to Annecy, to Madame de Warens and his fate. After three lazy lounging days, singing under every chateau window in the hope of evoking the adventures which never came, Rousseau found himself at Annecy, and entered upon the epoch of his life which, as he says himself, decided his character. He expected to meet a wrinkled devotee ; he found the fairest face, the bluest eyes, the most dazzling complexion, the most enchanting throat, all the charms that a young and pretty woman possesses in the eyes of an imaginative, sentimental lad. Here, on the threshold of the long-looked-for adventure, Rousseau pauses to give a portrait of himself, and \ve may well pause with him to look on the picture. A slight, well-proportioned figure, a neat foot, a fine leg, a dainty mouth, black hair and brows, eyes deeply sunk and small, but full of passionate fire, a manner unusually awkward and timid, such were the characteristics of the young convert who presented himself to Madame de Warens. A pretty fellow enough, indeed ; but he says that he was quite unconscious of his physical advan- tages, which perhaps we may slightly doubt. His eyes were evidently the feature of his face. In the memoirs of Madame d'Epinay two independent tributes are to be found, written in later years, to the attractions of his eyes : " eyes that overflow with fire," says one wit- ness ; "eyes that tell that love plays a great part in his romance," says the other. But those eyes did not just 1728-32. MADAME DE WAKENS. 73 then overlook Madame de Warens. She received the youth courteously, kindly ; despatched him to a monas- tery in Turin to complete his conversion. Once again Rousseau tramped along, cheered by a bright enjoy- ment of the changing scenes of each day's journey. At Turin the curious process of Rousseau's conversion was completed ; at Turin he faced for the first time in a foul adventure some of the most horrible facts of life. Soon he found himself alone in Turin without money, with dreams of adventures still buzzing in his head, but never taking tangible shape. He became a lackey in a lady's house ; he stole a piece of ribbon, and charged the crime upon an honest, comely girl, a fellow-servant, and was haunted by regret for his baseness all his life ; he starved in garrets and became again a lackey, and was dismissed this time, and, having no better thing to do, thought of Madame de Warens, and turned again his adventurous footsteps towards Annecy. In the au- tumn of 1729 he appeared for the second time before Madame de Warens. With her for nearly ten years his life became identified. Much of these years were still what the Germans would call Wander- Years, years spent in drifting here and there, now to Lyons, now to Paris, now to Freiburg, seeking an occupation, seeking employment, seeking an aim in life, with no great assi- duity, with no consistency a vagrant, drifting creature. He was declared too ignorant to be a priest ; he had not sufficient application to become a fine musician, and the story of his audacity in attempting to conduct a concert at Lausanne without knowing anything about music is rich in solemn caricature. In 1732 he settled down at Chambery with Madame de Warens and with her friend Claude Anet in the most extraordinary fam- ily union ever recorded. 74 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. V. But this household, like all other households, had its terra. Anet died, and Rousseau wept for him and wore his black coat. Then he and Madame de Warens re- tired to that most famous farmhouse, Les Charmettes, and Rousseau dallied with nature and vexed himself over theology, and tried unsuccessfully to learn Latin and fencing, dancing and chess. Then in process of time the Charmettes idyl broke up. Rousseau, unfaith- ful to Madame de Warens, was much surprised and pained to find that she was unfaithful to him. They parted, and the happiest hours of Rousseau's unhappy life came to an end. Dismally poor, he drifted to Paris and tried to convince the Academy of Sciences of the merits of a system of musical notation which he con- sidered that he had discovered. Poverty held him for her own till, in 1743, he was made secretary to the French ambassador to Venice, M. de Montaigu, whom Rousseau soon cordially hated. Eighteen not unhappy months in Venice came to an end in 1V45, which found him in Paris again, in a squalid Sorbonne hostelry, which it had been better for him never to have seen. For here he met Therese Le Vasseur, pitied her, loved her, and most madly made her the companion of his life. She was as ignorant as a Digger Indian, yet Rousseau was fond of her, remained fond of her when she had ceased to be fond of him. We need not dwell upon the mel- ancholy story of the children of this strange union, de- posited, each in its turn, in the foundling hospital, and untraceable forever even to the kind-hearted Marechale de Luxembourg. The speculative mind, the mind of the romancist, might employ itself not unprofitably in wondering what became of those five children, the name- less bearers of the blood of Rousseau. But if Therese did take to drinking brandy and to running after stable 1760. "NOUVELLE HELOISE" AND "EMILE." -76 boys, we must admit that she had some excuse in the conduct of a husband who forced her against her will to be so unnatural a mother. Rousseau's life is not a pleasant life to dwell upon. Stern poverty did not ennoble him, though it made him utter noble words. His friendships with Diderot and with Grimm ended only in miserable squabbles ; his love affairs were too often ludicrous; fame, which never brought him wealth, never brought him dignity in his attitude to life. He seems to have thought that every woman should fall in love with him ; he seems to have thought that every other man of genius was one in a plot to conspire against and to injure him. His visit to England was but an acrid Odyssey, and added his friend and host, Hume, to the list of his fancied enemies. His grim end by his own hand, at that Ermenonville where he loved to botanize, is the stern conclusion of one of the saddest lives ever wasted on our wasting planet. It is pleasanter to think of the books than of the man. His first great success was the " Nouvelle Helo'ise," one of the most exquisite romances ever written. The hap- piest judgment is expressed by Lord Beaconsfield in his last novel, and in some of the most graceful words he ever penned, when he speaks of " those feelings which still echo in the heights of Meilleraie, and compared to which all the glittering accidents of fortune sink into insignificance." Then came the " Social Contract," with the Revolution in its womb, and " Emile," for which the imbecile Paris Parliament ordered his arrest. The social success of "Emile" was something surprising; it rivalled the fame of the sorrows of the divine Julie. Taine draws a skilful picture of the woman of the court, to whom love is mere gallantry of which the ^6 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. V. exquisite polish poorly conceals the shallowness, cold- ness, and, occasionally, wickedness ; to whom life means only the adventures and personages of Crebillon the younger. One evening, however, this idle creature finds the " Nouvelle Helo'ise " on her toilet-table ; she reads, and keeps her horses and footmen waiting from hour to hour ; at last, at four o'clock in the morning, she orders the horses to be unharnessed, and then she passes the rest of the night in reading and in tears ; for the first time in her life she finds a man who knows what love really means. In like manner, those who would com- prehend the success of " Emile " must call to mind the children of the age ; the embroidered, gilded, dressed- up, powdered little gentlemen, decked with sword and sash, carrying the hat under the arm, bowing, presenting the hand, rehearsing fine attitudes before a mirror, re- peating prepared compliments, pretty little puppets, in whom everything is the work of the tailor, the hair- dresser, the preceptor, and the dancing-master ; the pre- cocious little ladies of six years, still more artificial, bound up in whalebone, harnessed in a heavy skirt com- posed of hair and a girdle of iron, supporting a head- dress two feet in height, so many veritable dolls to which rouge is applied, and with whom a mother amuses herself each morning for an hour and then consigns them to her maids for the rest of the day. But when this mother reads "Emile" she immediately makes senti- mentally sensible resolutions to dress her offspring bet- ter and to nurse her next child herself. Seldom have men been more misappreciated during and since their lifetime than was Rousseau. We think with despair of that letter of the Comtesse de Boufflers to Gustavus III., published by Geffroy. "I intrust," says this rash critic, "to Baron de Lederheim, though 1760. THE "NOUVELLE H^LOISE." V7 with reluctance, a book for you which has just' been published, the infamous memoirs of Rousseau entitled ' Confessions.' They seem to me those of a common scullion and even lower than that, being dull through- out, whimsical and vicious in the most offensive manner. I do not recur to my worship of him, for such it was ; I shall never console myself for its having caused the death of that eminent man David Hume, who, to grat- ify me, undertook to entertain that filthy animal in England." We think with despair, too, of M. Taine writing that " an effort of the will is required to read the ' Nouvelle Helo'ise,' " and of Mr. John Morley's slighting remarks upon that marvellous book remarks which make it clear that he has never read it with the care it deserved, and has unconsciously misunderstood and misrepresent- ed some of its most essential features. Yet Mr. Morley can in general appreciate Rousseau, although there is a coldness in his great biography which Mr. Morley seems to feel towards every man but Burke. Yet M. Taine can appreciate Rousseau, as he shows when he describes Rousseau as the artisan, the man of the people, ill-adapt- ed to elegant and refined society, out of his element in a drawing-room ; the man of low birth, badly brought up, sullied by a vile and precocious experience, highly and offensively sensual ; the man of morbid mind and body, fretted by superior and discordant faculties, pos- sessing no tact, and carrying the contamination of his imagination, temperament, and past life into his austere morality and into his purest idyls ; the man who has no fervor ; the man who is the opposite of Diderot, avow- ing himself that his ideas arrange themselves in his head with the utmost difficulty, that certain sentences are turned over and over again in his brain for five or 78 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. V. six nights before he puts them on paper, and that a letter on the most trifling subject costs him hours of fatigue ; the man who cannot fall into an easy and asrreeable tone, nor succeed otherwise than in works O * which demand application. "As an offset to this, style, in this ardent brain, under the influence of intense, pro- longed meditation, incessantly hammered and re-ham- mered, becomes more concise and of higher temper than is elsewhere found. Since La Bruyere we have seen no more ample, virile phrases, in which anger, admiration, indignation, studied and concentrated passion, appear with more rigorous precision and more powerful relief. He is almost the equal of La Bruyere in the arrange- ment of skilful effects, in the aptness and ingenuity of developments, in the terseness of impressive summaries, in the overpowering directness of unexpected arguments, in the multiplicity of literary achievements, in the exe- cution of those passages of bravura, portraits, descrip- tions, comparisons, creations, wherein, as in a musical crescendo, the same idea, varied by a series of yet more animated expressions, attains to or surpasses, at the last note, all that is possible of energy and of brilliancy." This is skilful criticism, keen as a knife, clean-cutting, dexterous ; but there is even keener to be found in a great English writer. Hazlitt has never been happier than in his study of Rousseau. Rousseau, he says in an essay informed with fine sympathy, " had the most intense consciousness of his own existence. No object that had once made an impression on him was ever after effaced. Every feeling in his mind became a passion. His craving after excitement was an appetite and a dis- ease. His interest in his own thoughts and feelings was always wound up to the highest pitch, and hence the enthusiasm which he excited in others. He owed the 1712-78. HAZLITT AXD ROUSSEAU. 79 power which he exercised over the opinions of all Eu- rope, by which he created numberless disciples and overturned established systems, to the tyranny which his feelings in the first instance exercised over himself. The dazzling blaze of his reputation was kindled by the same fii'e that fed upon his vitals. His ideas differed from those of other men only in their force and inten- sity. His genius was the effect of his temperament. He created nothing, he demonstrated nothing, by a pure effort of the understanding. His fictitious characters are modifications of his own being, reflections and shad- ows of himself. His speculations are the obvious exag- gerations of a mind giving loose to its habitual im- pulses, and moulding all nature to its own purposes. Hence his enthusiasm and his eloquence, bearing down all opposition. Hence the warmth and the luxuriance as well as the sameness of his descriptions. Hence the frequent verboseness of his style, for passion lends force and reality to language and makes words supply the place of imagination. Hence the tenaciousness of his logic, the acuteness of his observations, the refinement and the inconsistency of his reasoning. Hence his keen penetration and his strange want of comprehension of mind; for the same intense feeling which enabled him to discern the first principles of things, and seize some one view of a subject in all its ramifications, prevented him from admitting the operation of other causes which interfered with his favorite purpose and involved him in endless wilful contradictions. Hence his excessive egotism, which filled all objects with himself and would have occupied the universe with his smallest interest. Hence his jealousy and suspicion of others; for no at- tention, no respect or sympathy, could come up to the extravagant claims of his self-love. Hence his dissatis- 80 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. V. faction with himself and with all around him; for noth- ing could satisfy his ardent longings after good, his restless appetite of being. Hence his feelings, over- strained and exhausted, recoiled upon themselves, and produced his love of silence and repose, his feverish aspi- rations after the quiet and solitude of nature. Hence, in part also, his quarrel with the artificial institutions and distinctions of society, which opposed so many bar- riers to the restrained indulgence of his will, and allured his imagination to scenes of pastoral simplicity or of savage life, where the passions were either not excited or left to follow their own impulse where the petty vexations and irritating disappointments of common life had no place and where the tormenting pursuits of arts and sciences were lost in pure animal enjoyment or indolent repose. Thus he describes the first savage wandering forever under the shade of magnificent for- ests, or by the side of mighty rivers, smit with the un- quenchable love of nature." Never has the master mind of the last century been more admirably appreciated. It is gratifying, too, to find that Hazlitt shares with Lord Beaconsfield that fine enthusiasm for the "Nouvelle Helo'ise " which helps to console us for Mr. John Mor- ley's somewhat ungenerous treatment of that enchant- ing book. The writings of Rousseau which had the most direct influence in bringing about the Deluge, so composedly anticipated by the fifteenth Louis, were the " Discourse on the Influence of Learning and Art," whose appear- ance in 1750 effected, according to Grimm, a kind of revolution in Paris; the "Discourse on Inequality," published in 1754; and, above and beyond all, the "So- cial Contract," which came upon the world like a thun- derclap in 1762. The essay on the " Causes of Inequal- 1754. "CAUSES OF INEQUALITY AMONG MEN." 81 ity among Men " contained, as has been happily said, "the germs of the whole radical democratic system which he developed in his numerous subsequent writ- ings." In the second essay Rousseau declares civiliza- tion to be a disease, and civilized men a degenerate race. All the customs and institutions of a developed society are, in his opinion, unnatural and artificial. To abolish society, therefore, and return to what he chooses to call the " state of nature," is the one thing necessary to happiness. Inequality among men is the result of their degeneration; and this degeneration is caused by society; which, he admits, may develop the capacities and perfect the understandings of men, but makes them morally bad. This assertion he attempts to justify by saj'ing that the existing social order had been produced by an unnatural measure of power on the one hand, and an unnatural weakness on the other. Rousseau soon leaves the solid ground of reality, and deduces from the ideals of his own brain, as premises, all manner of conclusions. The first man, he cries, who, after enclosing a piece of land, dared to say, This is mine, and found other men simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civilization. What crimes, what wars, what murders, what misery and horror would have been spared the human race, if some one, then, had torn down the enclosure, and had cried to his fellows: "Beware of listening to this impostor; you are lost, if you ever forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all in common, and the earth itself to no one." Not unnaturally the plebeian Rousseau, "living from hand to mouth, by turns valet, clerk, tramp, tutor, copy- ist, author, fugitive," was filled with fitful hatred of the rich and powerful. This fitful hatred, together with an abiding love of humanity, made him burn with the de- L 6 82 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. V. sire to overthrow society and carry men back to that state of "nature" which he conjured up in his imagina- tion. Are not all the advantages of society, he indig- nantly asks, for the benefit of the powerful and the rich? Are not all lucrative employments filled by them alone? And is not public authority entirely in their favor? When one of them robs his creditors or com- mits other rascalities, is he not sure of impunity ? Are not the clubbings that he administers, the acts of vio- lence that he commits, the murders and assassinations of which he is guilty, mere matters that are hushed up, and after six months no longer mentioned ? But let this same man be robbed, and the entire police force is immediately on the alert; and woe to the innocent man whom he chances to suspect. A rich man has to pass a dangerous place? See how many escorts he has. The axle of his carriage breaks? Every one flies to his as- sistance. There is a noise at his door? He speaks a word, and silence reigns. The crowd incommodes him ? He makes a sign, and the road is clear. A wagoner gets in the way of his carriage ? His flunkeys are ready to beat the wagoner to death, and fifty honest pedestrians would be crushed under the wheels rather than that the gorgeous equipage of one puppy should be retarded. How different is the picture of him who is poor! The more humanity owes him, the more society refuses him. All doors are closed to him, even when he has the right to have them opened; and if he sometimes obtains jus- tice, he does so with more difficulty than another would have in obtaining pardon for a crime. If there is a forced labor to be undertaken, or militia to be levied, he is selected to do it. In addition to his own burden, he bears that which is shifted upon him by his richer neighbor. At the least accident that befalls him, every 1750-62. THE TYRANNY OF POWER. 83 one deserts him. Let his poor cart upset, and I hold him lucky if he escapes the outrages of the brisk lackeys of some young duke. In a word, all free assistance flies him in time of need, for the very reason that he has nothing with which to pay for it. But I regard him as a ruined man if he is so unfortunate as to have an honorable spirit, an attractive daughter, and a powerful neighbor. Let us sum up briefly the relations between the rich man and the poor man: You have need of me, for I am rich and you are poor. Let us then make a bar- gain. I will vouchsafe you the honor of being my servant, on condition that you give me what little you have left, to repay me for the trouble I take in lording it over you. This utterance is but one example of the bitterness with which Rousseau attacked the existing order of things. Nor can it be denied that much of what he said of civilization in general was but too true of the rotten fabric of Old France. It may be said, it has been said, that at the first glance it might seem that Rousseau's imprecations upon intellectual education, science, and art were diametrically opposed to that spir- it which produced the feverish thirst for knowledge characteristic of the time. But both movements were revolutionary, both were products of the profound dis- content and longing for some radical change which per- vaded men's minds before the Revolution. It is ob- vious that the deep hatred of the existing social sys- tem was common to all the various Utopias that were dreamed of by different men. It is quite true that all kinds of enemies were using their various weapons in the attack on the tottering fortress of the Old Order; that infantry, cavalry, artillery, regulars, guerillas, free lances, high-souled heroes, and stealthy assassins made each his own species of attack, but all attacked. 84 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. V. The living words with which Rousseau, with all the fierce conviction of a genius that neared to madness, painted the ideal and idyllic bliss and innocence of men in a "state of nature," freed from the curses and cor- ruptions of civilization, had an absorbing attraction for men who were vexed at every hour by the privileges, the pomp, and the insolence of a nobility and priest- hood that had ceased to perform their proper functions, and lived by draining the heart's blood of the people. If Rousseau did not spare them, he did not spare the monarchy in its turn. Society was due, he said, to an iniquitous compact between oppressors and oppressed, which permitted a child to govern old men, an idiot to rule wise men, a handful of men to gorge themselves with dainties, while the famished multitude lacked the necessaries of life. For him the whole occupation of kings and their ministers had but two aims, to extend their domination without, and to make it more absolute within. When they pretended to have other aims they deceived. The expressions, public good, welfare of our subjects, glory of the nation, so stupidly employed in public edicts, were ever the harbingers of disastrous measures; and the people groan in advance when their masters allude to their paternal solicitude. But Rous- seau has a remedy against tyranny, for the compact be- tween the governors and the governed may be dissolved; the despot is master only so long as he is stronger than the people, and as soon as they are able to expel him, he can make no complaint of their violence. It will always be absurd for a man to say to a man, or for a man to say to a people, " I make a contract with you according to which you bear all the expenses and I reap all the profits a contract which I will observe only so long as I choose, but which you shall observe so long as I 1750-62. THE SUN OF FREEMEN. 85 see fit." If madmen sign such a treaty, their signatures are not valid. If men who are prostrate upon the ground with a sword at their throats accept these con- ditions, their acceptance is null and void. The idea that men under compulsion, or madmen, could have con- tracted a thousand years ago for all subsequent gen- erations is absurd. A contract for a minor is not bind- ing when he becomes an adult ; and when the infant has arrived at years of discretion he is his own master. At last we are adults, and we have only to act like rational men in order to reduce to their true value the preten- sions of that authority which calls itself legitimate. It possesses power, nothing more. But a pistol in the hands of a highwayman is also a power ; will you, he asks, therefore say that I am in duty bound to give him my purse? I yield only to force, and will recapture my purse as soon as I can seize his pistol. When Rousseau declared war upon the government, France and Europe rang with applause. The day will come, says Condorcet, when the sun will shine upon none but freemen who acknowledge no master save their rea- son ; when tyrants and slaves, priests and their stupid or hypocritical tools, will no longer, exist, except in history and upon the stage ; when men will no longer speak of them except to pity their victims and their dupes, to maintain a useful vigilance by recalling the horror of their excesses, and to be able to recognize and to crush beneath the weight of reason the first germs of superstition and of tyranny, if they should ever reappear. This was the Utopia of a philanthropist who was des- tined to take poison in prison to escape from men more extreme than himself, eager to bring that gracious reader of Horace to the guillotine ! This is, indeed, one of the most tragic aspects of the Revolution the aspect which 86 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. V. gives it at once its fascination and its terror. If men need shed few tears over the fate of insolent nobles, who thought no more of driving over a peasant than of killing a mouse, nor of lihertine bishops, whose episcopal palaces were little like Christian places, they mast needs mourn the fate of those great-hearted men who, imbued with a world-wide philanthropy, burned with a desire to usher in a millennium of bliss for oppressed hu- manity, but awoke from their dreams to the bitter re- ality that the populace were not always the idyllic and amiable beings that Rousseau had painted them, but occasionally too ferocious and too ignorant to distinguish friend from foe. It is urged that the men of whom Rousseau speaks in his famous book on the " Social Contract " are not con- crete, tangible individuals, but pure abstractions, math- ematical units of equal magnitude. Every man, accord- ing to him, is by nature innocent, affectionate, grateful, good. He is still more. He is also an entirely rational being capable of assenting to a clear abstract prin- ciple, and of moving in the straight line of logical syllogism from the premises to the ultimate conclusions. In the dramas, dialogues, and other writings of the time, says Mr. Dabney and this is true of other countries as well as of France appear gardeners, jugglers, peas- ants, country parsons, philosophers, tattooed barbarians, and naked savages, all discoursing, reasoning, marching in the rectilinear path of syllogistic deduction from ab- stract ideas. Rational, good, perfectly equal and per- fectly free such are the abstract entities which Rous- seau calls men, and who, he says, came together at some unknown epoch to make a social contract. Their aim. in making this contract was to discover a form of as- sociation which should defend with the whole power of 1750-62. ROUSSEAU'S "SOCIAL CONTRACT." 87 the community the person and the property of each as- sociate, and by which each man, though uniting himself with all, obeyed in reality only himself, and remained as free as before. This united assembly of abstract individuals is called simply the State, when it obeys its own will or remains passive ; the Sovereign, when it acts upon itself ; a Power, when compared with other similar assemblages. In the same way the individuals united in a state are called, when regarded collectively, the People ; regarded as participants in the sovereign power, they are called Citizens ; regarded as under the necessity of obeying their own laws, that is, the laws of the state, they are called Subjects. All this abstract juggling with words is employed by Rousseau in the specious but vain attempt to reconcile the absolute free- dom of the individual with his absolute obedience to the will of the majority. Sovereignty, he says, is inalienable and indivisible. The general will can never err. All error arises from party spirit ; wherefore societies and corporations within the state should be either prohibited or so multiplied that no single one can have an appre- ciable influence. "The sovereign, consisting merely of the sum of the individuals who compose it, has and can have no interest opposed to theirs ; and conseqxiently the sovereign power has no need of guaranteeing the subjects against tyranny, because it is impossible that a body should desire to injure all its members." In all this it is said everything is abstract. In the real world we live in we see concrete individual men, women, and children, with different desires, different passions, different intellectual capacities, and different moral characteristics. Not so in the ideal world which issued from the brain of Rousseau. All his men of the social contract are equal, all free, all good, all eager to 88 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH, V. obey cheerfully the general will. The people, not the king, are the sovereign. The king is but the people's clerk nay, less than their clerk their lackey. The contract between them is not of indefinite duration, and not one " which can be annulled only by mutual consent, or by bad faith on the part of one of the contracting parties." By no means. For " it is contrary," says Rousseau, " to the nature of the body politic for the sovereign to impose a law upon itself which it can never infringe." No sacred and inviolable constitution to bind the people forever ! " The right to change the constitution is the prime guarantee of all other rights." " There is, there can be, no fundamental law obligatory for all time upon the whole people, not even the social contract." For a prince, or an assembly, or magistrates to call themselves the representatives of the people is usurpation and falsehood. Sovereignty cannot be rep- resented, for the same reason that it is inalienable. The moment a people elects representatives, it is no longer free, it no longer exists. The English, he argued, imagined themselves free, but they were vastly mis- taken ; they were free only during the election of mem- bers of Parliament ; so soon as the election had taken place, they were slaves, they were nothing. The deputies of a people, thus, neither are nor can be its representa- tives ; they are only its commissioners, and can make no final conclusions. Every law that has not been ratified by the people directly is null and void ; it is not a law. " It is not sufficient that the assembled people should have fixed the constitution of the state once by giving its sanction to a body of laws ; they must hold, in ad- dition, fixed and periodical assemblies which nothing can abolish or prorogue, so that on fixed days the people may legally assemble without the necessity of any for- 1750-62. THE NEW SOCIETY. 89 raal convocation. At the moment when the people has thus assembled, all jurisdiction of the government ceases, the executive power is suspended." Society starts again, and the citizens, restored to their original independence, renew, for so long as they please, the provisional con- tract which they had made only for a term of years. " The opening of these assemblies, the object of which is the maintenance of the social contract, should always begin with the decision of two questions which should be separately put to the vote. The first question is this : Is it the pleasure of the sovereign people to maintain the present form of government ? And the second : Do the sovereign people wish to leave the administration in the hands of the present incumbents? In submitting, therefore, to leaders, the sovereign people merely dele- gate to them a power which they exercise in the name of the sovereign people whom they serve, but which can be modified, limited, or reassuraed by the sovereign at will." Thus the people possess not merely the legislative power, which belongs to them, and can only belong to them, but they delegate and take back again at will the executive function as well. So runs much of the gos- pel according to Rousseau. The influence of Rousseau in bringing about the Rev- olution can hardly be overrated. In the midst of a thoroughly artificial life, social and political, he suddenly uplifted a voice of passion and pathos which made itself heard everywhere and called the men of his time to come back to nature. It was the cry of a prophet half crazed by the fury of his emotion. Rousseau was in- tensely earnest. He seemed like a man who had never laughed. He was like one who looks over life from some Stylites' pillar, but whose whole soul is with the writhing, struggling, suffering mortals he sees below 90 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. OH. V. him. " Man is man's brother," he cried out ; " in this world there are no masters and no slaves ; or at least there should be none. Where now there is nothing but guilty luxury on one side, and hopeless misery on the other, there ought to be equality, love, brotherhood, and happiness." He appealed to all that was noblest in human nature. He appealed to the high as well as the lowly. Most of his arguments were absurdities if they were to be treated as philosophic or economic reasonings ; but he had got tirm hold of his half of the whole truth the fact that society was rotting because of its artificiality; that artificial and not natural distinctions stood as bar- riers between one set of men and another, between all men and true happiness. " Pull down the artificial barriers" was one part of his appeal, the part which told with most tremendous effect. That was what people cared about ; they did not much mind the appeal to return to nature, to the condition of the natural man. Rousseau, in fact, like a great many other philosophers of the more poetic order, created a natural man ; in- vented a being who never had existence, a creature of absolute truthfulness, courage, honesty, purity, health, and happiness. All the eloquence in the world would have failed to induce any considerable number of people to return to the condition of the natural man. They could not do it if they would; and they would not find themselves any better off even if they could. All that part of Rousseau's appeal might as well have been called out to solitude. But the other part of the appeal sank deep into every ear which it reached. It thrilled con- viction into hearts and minds. The rich and privileged themselves admitted its justice and its sincerity. The broad principles of Rousseau became positively fash- ionable among the aristocracy of France. Great ladies 1712-76. "THE APOSTLE OF AFFLICTION." 91 in the splendid salons of Paris raved about the new proph- et "the apostle of affliction," as Byron so happily styled him. Among the oppressed all over France his eloquence brought into flame a resentment that before had been only smouldering in vagueness and the dark. To them it told of the wrongs heaped for so many generations on them and on theirs; it put before them a picture of what they actually were, and side by side with that a picture of what they might be and what they ought to be. It dinned into their ears the too terrible truth that not natural laws of any kind, but purely artificial reg- ulations were answerable for all that misery with which a whole nation was accursed. " Down with the artificial barriers !" was the refrain of every appeal. Rousseau did not mean revolution by force. He was not thinking of that. He wanted the whole people princes, peers, peasants, and paupers alike to reform themselves by a common effort. Nor is it by any means impossible that his genius, his energy, his passion might have done much to bring about such a great moral and social revolution if only events could wait. But events could not wait. The growth of the moral revolution would have been too slow. Things had gone too far. So when the other revolution began to show itself the people remembered what Rousseau had taught about the artificial barriers, and they levelled them with a crash which is echoing even still through Europe. Rousseau had many faults both as a writer and as a man. But as a writer he was endowed with a power of eloquence and of pity such as has rarely in the history of the world poured forth from platform or from pulpit. As a man he was filled by what a great English statesman of our own day, speaking of another reformer, not Rousseau, called " a passion of phi- lanthropy." That one merit almost empties him of faults. 92 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. VI. CHAPTER VI. THE POMPADOUR. A NEW influence had already ta'ken its place in social and political life. The middle classes, the high bour- geoisie, financiers, farmer -generals, commercial giants, had taken their prominent place in the state, rivalling and overgrowing the nobility in the influence of their wealth and enterprise. The great names of France are no longer the names of old and illustrious families alone ; they are the names of a Bergeret, of a Brissart, of a Bouret, of a Bragousse, of a Camuzet, of a Gaze, of a Chevalier, of a Gaillard, of a Delahaye, of a Delaporte, of a Dupin, of a D'Arnoncourt, of a De Villemur, of a Grimod, of an Helvetius, of a L'Allement de Nantouille, of a Le Riche de la Popeliniere, of a Lenormant de Tournehem, of a Rolland, of a Savalette, of a Thiboux. These are the men of the enormous fortunes who are forcing their way to the front, who are building them- selves palaces, whose luxury eclipses the pride of princes, who are getting the offices of the state within their in- fluence, who are marrying their daughters to the bluest blood and the noblest names of France. They are the patrons of the arts ; the painter, the poet, the man of letters, the wit, the philosopher, the sculptor, the archi- tect, throng tlVeir antechambers, compete for their fa- vors, and laud their names. The part of Maecenas is played by some wealthy man of business who began life in a counting-house or a wine-shop, and whom poets 1721. MONSIEUR AND MADAME POISSON. 93 will gladly hail as "dulce decus meum," heedless of the absence of kingly ancestors. The Pompadour offers to the world a further proof of the triumphs of the bourgeoisie. She was the daugh- ter of a gentleman of the unpoetic name of Poisson, who had been sentenced, not undeservedly, to be hanged for malversation, but had saved his neck by a self- imposed exile. Honest or dishonest, rogue Poisson did get back to France after a time, did succeed by desper- ate pushes of court favor in preserving his neck un- twisted. It would have been a worse thing for Sieur Poisson, but an infinitely better thing for France, if the hanging had been duly and decorously effected, and effected before Madame Poisson had borne him a fair daughter ; though, indeed, upon due reflection we must admit that the hangman's fingers would have saved France no whit. Madame Poisson was a lady of the lightest possible character ; she was involved at the time of the Pompadour's birth in an intrigue with Le- normant de Tournebem, who, no mean authority on the matter, considered himself to be the girl's sire. He manifested for her all the affection of a father, provided for her education in the most liberal way ; if he had set himself the task of preparing a morsel for a king he could hardly have better set about it. All that the art, the culture, the polite muses of the age could do for Mademoiselle Poisson they were called upon by Le- normant de Tournehem to do. No expense was spared in procuring her the best masters in all departments of social art. Guibaudet had taught her how to dance Guibaudet the illustrious ; Jeliotte had taught her to sing ; she danced, we are told, as well any dancing-girl of the Opera ; she sang as well as any professional sing- er, and Georges Leroy quoted against her the saying of 94 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. VI. Sallust concerning Fulvia, that "she danced and sang better than was becoming to a decent woman." The instruction that money could not buy, friendship gave. Crebillon deigned to teach her elocution, to instruct her in the acquirement of a perfect diction. She learned to draw, to paint, to back a horse with more than com- mon skill, to touch the harpsichord with distinction, to engrave. She ran the gamut of all the accomplishments betitting a great lady in an age that liked its great ladies to be, or to seem to be, cultured. She refined and tem- pered her quick intelligence in the society of men of let- ters, men of wit ; she spared no pains, and no pains were spared for her, to make herself as attractive as possible, to heighten the effect of her physical beauty by the ornament of a many-sided culture. Whatever she did, she did well ; her singing and playing were the rage in the little social court of which she was the acknowl- edged queen. Thanks to Lenormant de Tournehem, she was fairly launched upon the glittering sea of wealthy Parisian society ; thanks again to his fostering care, she solidified her position by a wealthy marriage with his nephew, Lenormant d'tioles. Her husband was not a comely man, and she does not seem to have professed to care much about him. Her marriage with him was to her but one step in the career which was to bring her so near the throne. For the curious thing about the woman is that she seems to have been early inspired with the laudable ambition to become the king's mistress. It would al- most seem as if she took all the labor and pains to make herself so brilliantly accomplished solely that she might become in fulness of time the mistress of the Well- beloved King. While she was yet a little girl Madame Lebon prophesied that she would become the mistress of 1741. MADAME LEXORMANT D'ETIOLES. 95 Louis XV., and the prophecy seems to have exercised its guiding influence upon all her life. There is some- thing melancholy to the moral, something entertaining to the cynical, in this picture of a girl slowly growing up into beauty and culture, and informed during all the years of her young maidenhood and all the years of her young married life with the one desire, the one hope, the one purpose of becoming the mistress of a satyr king. Soon after her marriage she said with a smile to some talk of love and lovers that the king alone in all the world could shake her fidelity to her husband. The hearer thought, no doubt, that the fair D'^iioles was jesting ; but the fair D'fitioles was perfectly se- rious. She would not be unfaithful to her husband with any save the king, not because she thought the king so hopelessly out of her star that the saying in itself implied eternal fidelity, but because she meant to be unfaithful to him with the king. It was a daring ambition even for the spoiled child of the wealthy bour- geoisie. From the moment of her marriage in 1741 Madame Lenormant d'lStioles set herself to captivate the king. She crossed his path whenever she could, she sought to fire his voluptuous imagination with the vision of a rare and radiant .creature, always beautifully attired, always smiling, always dazzling the world with her beauty and her wit. In the royal hunts at Senart Wood she flitted before the kingly eyes a Boucheresque Diana very much to the indignation of Juno (Jhateauroux, who, discern- ing a rival, and a dangerous rival, sternly banished the beautiful Diana from the royal hunt. The banished Diana bided her time. She could not afford to fight against Madame de Chateauroux, but she could very well afford to wait. There came a moment when it 96 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. VI. seemed as if she had waited in vain, as if the prophecy of her youth had cheated her. When Louis lay nigh unto death with that malignant fever at Metz, no heart in all the kingdom, not even Chateauroux's, can have mourned for the ailing king more than Madame Lenor- mant d'JStioles. But the very fever helped her. Under its influence Louis was persuaded to banish Madame de Chateauroux from his presence, and Madame de Cba- teauroux did not long survive the banishment. Louis recovered, earned his title of Well-beloved, and the way was clear for the ambition of the younger Poisson. She had underground influence at court, and she plied it hard ; a faithful Binet, a faithful Bridge, an industrious Madame de Tencin pushed her cause. She appeared at a masked ball before the king, teasing and tempting him with her wit and her beauty. She dropped her handkerchief, Louis picked it up, and every one said that the Sultan had thrown the handkerchief. Yet still Louis hung fire, even after a supper-party where the royal delight in Madame's physical beauty was counter- balanced by a vague alarm at certain ambitious notes in her intellect. A bishop, too, made his appearance in the game, Boyer, Bishop of Mirepoix, doing his best to prevent the threatened conjunction. But the stars were on the woman's side; there was another intimate sup- per; Madame d'lStioles was divinely charming, discreet- ly unambitious. But even while she welcomed the king's affection she painted such a terrible picture of the murderous fury of her deceived husband that she persuaded Louis to allow her to hide herself in a corner of Versailles palace in the rooms that had belonged to' Madame de Mailly. .Once fairly installed in Versailles, Madame d'^tioles was not the woman lightly to leave it. The unlucky husband was in despair, talked of 1745-64. MADAME DE POMPADOUR. 97 killing himself, talked of tearing his false wife from the king's arms. Then passing from the tragic mood to the pathetic, he wrote a letter to the mistress implor- ing her to return to him. Luckless, diminutive, un- comely D'Etioles, what words of his, though he spoke with the speech of angels, would have brought her back to him now ! She read the letter composedly, and handed it to Louis to laugh at. Louis, who had some of the instincts of a gentleman, said, after reading it, " Your husband, madame, is a very worthy man." But, worthy or no, he was sent away from Paris into a kind of exile, and Madame d'lCtioles had won the first trick in her great game. The other tricks she took rapidly. She was soon made Madame de Pompadour. She was presented at court and received with a strange melancholy civility by the queen, and with cold indifference by the dauphin. In a moment, as it were, she became the central figure in the state. A party was formed against her, fierce, virulent, and persistent. A party was formed for her, a party of all those who live by the favor of favorites, of all who thought to influence the king through the mistress, a party as virulent and unscrupulous as its opponent. Roughly speaking, outraged virtue counted for little or nothing in the attacks upon and the in- trigues against the new favorite. Indignation was chiefly aroused by the facts of her birth and station. Hitherto the recognized mistresses of the king had been ladies of the noble order, ladies of name and race. In one case the king did a stately family the honor of raising all its daughters in turn to the purple. But to take a recognized mistress from the middle classes, from the third estate, from the bourgeoisie, to elevate a lady whose maiden name was Poisson, and whose married I. 1 its THE FKENCII REVOLUTION. Cu. VI. name was Lenormant, this was indeed an outrage upon decency and upon civilization. As a matter of policy it certainly was imprudent. It broke down one of the barriers of prestige with which the Old Order fenced itself from attack. Whatever else the reign of Pompadour may have been, it was undoubtedly an Augustan epoch for the arts. It is usually in a period of decadence that the fine arts are most passionately cultivated, that the most eager attention is given to all the fair details of life to exquisite architecture, to highly wrought literature, to decorative painting and sculpture, to delicate handi- craft of all kinds, to engraving, to verse-making, to the binding of books. The courtly poets clustered round Madame de Pompadour like bees around a comb; they sang her praises with the sickly classicism of the time. A court poet is usually an odious creature, but he seems nowhere more pitiful than when he is cutting his apish capers to win the smile of some royal mistress. The brazen Abbe de Bernis, leering over his triple chin, clung to the Pompadour's skirts and saved himself from shipwreck. Naturally he was grateful to his patroness, and he reeled off a world of insipid verses in her honor. Bernis is the stage abbe of the eighteenth century, witty, mean, voluptuous, neat at epigram, quick in turning a madrigal, great at a lady's toilet-table, great at a rich man's banquet, suave, supple, smiling, servile, Epicurean in a sense which would have made Epicurus despair, pagan only in the baser way, a miserable creature. There was nothing better for such a fellow to do than to sing of Madame de Pompadour's dimples, and he sang of them with nauseating, wearisome iterance which might have disgusted even the woman to whom they were offered. 1745-64. "POMPADOUR FECIT." 99 The luxurious, the decorative ai'ts flourished under her sway. All the costly elegancies of life were dear to her, the potteries of China and Japan, the porcelain of Dresden, the glass work of Venice. Under her pat- ronage the porcelain of Sevres rose into triumphant rivalry with the skill of Saxony and the genius of the East. The condescension of Madame de Pompadour, gave to the master workers of Sevres a palace wherein to live and labor, a domain in which to rest and recreate. The artists of Sevres, like the glass- workers, were graced with the right to hunt, and they could avail themselves of the privilege in the Sevres woods after their long hours in the work-rooms long hours sometimes shared by Madame de Pompadour, who loved to come to Sevres to assist in the choice of tints, and to supply her colo- ny with designs of her own composition. Madame de Pompadour loved to play at art, loved to be thought an artist. The lovers of the art of the last century delight in the slender folio which bears the title " L'CEuvre de la Marquise de Pompadour," in which her own designs, signed " Pompadour fecit," mingle with her reproduc- tions of the designs of others, inscribed " Pompadour sculpsit," and with examples of her love for gems graven after the fashion of the antique. The nymphs and satyrs, the vines and children-cupids of the last-century antique, have a peculiar charm of association when they are designed by Madame de Pompadour. She had a great affection, too, for binding, for that ex- quisite art which reached perhaps in the last century its highest point. Under her patronage flourished Pade- loup, the great Antoine Michel Padeloup, binder for kings and king among binders. Louis Douceur, Pade- loup's contemporary, Padeloup's rival in the affections of the great, designed for Madame de Pompadour a 100 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. On. VI. blotting-book which is held by the learned to be the mas- terpiece of his art. M. Leon Gruel, the bookbinder and historian of bookbinders, sighs quaintly for the secrets that have lain beneath the covers of that book of citron morocco, wrought with Douceur's favorite lace design, "A petits fers," and emblazoned with the arms of Ma- dame de Pompadour, the three castles on the escutcheon. Who, he asks, will tell us the secrets that this blotting- book has held ? Think that she for whom it was fash- ioned lived for twenty years the uncontested mistress of the destinies of France ! Why cannot things of this nature speak and tell us of all that they have seen ? So the master binder bemoans, and yet that blotting- book has its voice too, and bears its testimony to the innate love for beauty, for luxury, for exquisite refine- ment of all artistic workmanship, which is the especial characteristic of the Pompadour epoch. Literature as well as art received her patronage. Her library was large, not from affectation. She sought cult- ure in all directions; she was as eager to enrich her mind as to adorn her body, and the range of her reading was wide and varied. In history, in theology, in philosophy, her shelves were richly stored, for she felt an interest in all the creeds and all the scepticisms. Her love for the stage displayed itself in her splendid collection of theatrical works from the earliest dawn of the drama in France to the lightest court ballet that was footed before the eyes of Louis XV. Nor was romance forgotten. It is a curious proof of the many-sided nature of the woman that in an age so gracefully artificial, so daintily gallant, she delighted in the rough old Carlovingian epics and the frank vigor of the legends of the Round Table. It must be remembered to Madame de Pompadour's honor that the patroness of Marmontel was the means of giv- 1762. THE FALL OF THE JESUITS. 101 ing the concluding part of Galland's " Mille et une Nuits " to the world, and that the goddess of Crebillon the elder could take pleasure in the deeds of Roland and the loves of Lancelot of the Lake. Yet the long period of Madame de Pompadour's sway over France is an unexhilarating study of public inde- cency, incapacity, and injustice. To her and to her creature, Controller-General Machault, France owed the ruinous invention of those " acquits au comptant," those bills at sight upon the king's signature which had always to be met and never to be explained or justified. Dur- ing her reign the religious war raged with a new ferocity. Madame de Pompadour declared war upon the Jesuits, who, triumphing in the blows they had dealt to a reeling Jansenism, thought they could successfully defy the new influence at the foot of the throne. They were mistaken. The brilliant minister Choiseul was their enemy; Madame de Pompadour was their enemy; the philosophers, the Encyclopaedists were their enemies. An alliance stronger than Jansenism ever could rally to its standards was formed against the Jesuits; blow after blow fell upon them with significant success : in 1762 the order was formally abolished by the Paris Parlia- ment, its vast property confiscated to the crown, and its members secularized. Madame de Pompadour's tri- umph was great; she had done to the Jesuits as they had done to the Jansenists. But if their defeat was a triumph for Madame de Pompadour, the years of her sway record few triumphs for France. The loss of the French colonies in Canada to the English, the fatal alli- ance with Austria, with its sequel of calamities, the crush- ing naval defeats at Lagos and Belleisle, the disastrous Carrickfergus expedition, the pitiful Peace of Paris these are the jewels in the crown of the Pompadour 102 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. VI. glory. She died in the April of 1764, being only forty- four years of age. During all the years in which she had lived with the king she had kept her influence over him unimpaired, and had used that influence most evilly for France. Madame de Pompadour was not a great woman; she was the mistress of a very worthless king. But bad and base as the reign of Louis XV. was, when the king was reigned over by Madame de Pompadour it was a reign fruitful in new and great influences in art and letters and thought. If Pompadour patronized Padeloup, she also patronized Voltaire, and under the shadow, as it were, of the genius of Voltaire the set of men grew into public attention who were the very imme- diate precursors of the Revolution; while a thinker of a very different school was calling upon civilization at large to shake off its superstitions and return to the sylvan savagery of the early man. Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists on the one side, Rousseau and the fol- lowers of Rousseau on the other, represent two irrecon- cilable influences, which had, however, the same effect of making directly for Revolution. No two publica- tions have ever influenced their own times more directly than the famous "Encyclopaedia" and the no less fam- ous "Social Contract." No two publications had more direct effect in undermining the whole existing condi- tions of social order, and in advancing that new con- dition of things which -was to begin with the National Assembly, and to end where ? The Encyclopedists sprang into existence under the fostering influence of Voltaire. Voltaire, who was a sceptic but not an atheist, though he has often and absurdly 'been called so, was the leader of a school of thinkers many of whom were, so far as the term is ever applicable to philosophic think- ers, atheists. Rousseau was horrified by any suggestion 1764-68. MISTRESS AND QUEEN. 103 of atheism; he was an impassioned Deist, and Deism was the creed of his consistent followers, was the creed of that consistent, most curious follower, Maximilien Robespierre. Bad too as was the epoch of Madame de Pompadour, it had at least the merit of being better than the epoch that followed it. Four years later, two years after the death of Stanislas had united Lorraine to France, un- happy Maria Leszczynska died, and afforded Louis XV. the opportunity for a famous display of false sentimen- tality. He bewailed ludicrously enough the woman he had outraged and insulted all her life, and for a brief period he played a sickening comedy of repentance and reform. It did not last long. Maria Leszczynska was not a year in her grave when Louis, reeling along the familiar road of royal debaucheries, found in his path his fate aud the fate of France in the person of the Du Barry. 10 4 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION- CH. VII. CHAPTER VII. "HOW WILL BEERY PULL THROUGH?" His Well-beloved Majesty Louis XV. had a certain sardonic humor of his own. His phrase about the Del- uge was the epigrammatic summary of his own policy of pleasure and despair. Scarcely less epigrammatic, scarcely less significant, is another of the royal sayings. " When I am gone," he asks, and the words are under- lined with a sneer, " I should like very much to know how Berry will pull through with it." The Berry of this bitter saying was the Dauphin of France, for whom destiny was reserving the crown and title of Louis XVI. The second son of Louis the Dauphin, son of Louis XV., death had steadily removed all obstacles to his succession. In 1765, when he was only e.leven years old, his father died with the strange Roman words upon his lips, " How astoundingly easy it is to die !" The little newly made dauphin was immediately brought to Louis XV. and announced as " M. le Dauphin," and Louis is reported to have uttered some sentimental expressions of pity for poor France with a king of fifty-five and a dauphin of eleven. The time was yet to come when the poor little dauphin of eleven might envy that elder brother of his who died in 1761, leaving it to his brother Berry to become the heir of France. Louis XV. did not love the new dauphin, and always persisted in calling him "Berry," as if, with that kingly impression that words are as good as things, if not better, the calling the child 176?. PLOT AND POISON. 105 by another than his rightful title would in some way relieve Louis from the dislike of regarding in him the future sovereign. When little Louis was thirteen years old his mother died, poisoned, as she declared and as many believed. The dread of poison was common in the court of France for many reigns, and any death at all suspicious or not easily explicable was sure to be set down to plot and to poison. Popular clamor inside the court, popular rumor outside the court, not merely asserted that the dauphiness died poisoned, but named the instigator of the crime, the arch-poisoner, and even named his tool. Choiseul, so rumor said and all the tongues with which its garment is traditionally painted talked this thing loudly Choiseul was the arch-poisoner; Lieutaud, the court physician, was the no less criminal tool. Lieu- taud, the court physician, took a curious method of reply- ing to the rumors. He published his "Medecine Pra- tique," with a picture representing his version of a classic story, according to which the physician of Alexander, accused of planning to poison his royal master, drank off himself the draught he had prepared. As for Choi- seul, he held his head high and defied rumor. But rumor, and such rumor, was very advantageous for political purposes. It strengthened tremendously the hands of Choiseul's malignant, strenuous rival, the Duke d'Aguillon, and his faction ; very possibly it was through this rumor that such influence as the young dauphin possessed passed into the hands of the D'Aguillon party. It seems certain that Louis XVI. 's repugnance to Choi- seul was largely inspired by the impression made upon his childish mind that in Choiseul he beheld the mur- derer of his father and mother. Louis XV. had the least possible affection for his 10 g THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. VII grandson. He saw in him the most inappropriate suc- cessor, the most unkingly person, according to his ideas of kingliness, that could wait for a dead king's crown. A young gentleman who was ambitious to be remembered in history as " Louis le Severe " had obviously little in common with the man of many mistresses. Perhaps the king, who was so fond of cooking and wood-turning, might have felt some sympathy with the grandson whose most pronounced tastes were in favor of amateur lock- making and hunting. But the cold respectability of grandson Louis's mind, the unattractive awkwardness of grandson Louis's body, the blundering shyness of grand- son Louis's bearing, were all so many insurmountable barriers to sympathy between Louis XV. and the Dau- phin of France. Everything about the young prince betokened a bour- geois mind, a nature inspired by all the bourgeois virtues and marred by not a few of the bourgeois vices. He was well-educated in a commonplace way; he could read English well and hate England well; he had a pretty taste in geography; he loved making locks, and practised it later, to his cost, with a scoundrelly locksmith named Gamain ; he liked looking through telescopes with his shortsighted eyes ; he liked orderliness, formality, regu- larity; he was great at commonplace-books, classified extracts, compilations; he was grotesquely economical where economy was of no importance; he had a certain affection for the character of Richard III. of England, whom he considered to be a most ill - used man. To this commonplace, dull, respectable bourgeois prince the destiny that watches over princes gave as a wife the most unsuitable woman in the world, the beautiful Marie Antoinette of Austria. Maria Theresa, ambitious daughter of the Pragmatic 1754-70. MARIE ANTOINETTE. 107 Sanction, ambitious mistress of the partition of Poland, dreamed of an alliance with France. The dream was fostered by Kaunitz, it pleased the mind of Louis XV.; it was decided that the grandson of the French king should marry the youngest daughter of the Austrian empress. Marie Antoinette, who was born on No- vember 2, 1755, was the last of the sixteen children that Maria Theresa bore to her husband, Francis I. It is re- corded that on the day of the birth of Marie Antoi- nette a great earthquake convulsed a large part of the world ; this earthquake, which ruined Lisbon, and im- pressed so differently Voltaire and Goethe, seemed to certain superstitious courtiers an omen of significance concerning the young princess. The education of the royal children was careful and domestic. Francis I. and Maria Theresa were much attached, were devoted to their family. Hunter Francis died in the August of 1765, when the little Marie Antoinette was barely ten years old, and the increasing cares of the state in- terrupted the close intercourse between the mother and daughter. Her son Joseph, who was born in 1741, was formally crowned Emperor of Germany, but the power remained in the hands of Maria Theresa, and to better wield that power Maria Theresa was obliged to leave the education of Marie Antoinette to other hands than her own. Royal princes and princesses are always said by the chroniclers of their childish days to have been prodigies of learning and of virtue ; but it is not difficult in piercing through the courtly eulogies of the young archduchess to learn that she, capricious, self-willed, charming, was quick to learn whatever pleased her, but not too eager or too willing to apply herself to unattrac- tive studies. An amiable Madame de Brandis, a strong- minded Countess de Lercheufeld, in turn guided the 108 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. Vil. mind of Marie Antoinette until the time came when her hand was formally sought for a son of France. Her education then was imperfect. She spoke French fairly fluently, but wrote it very badly. Italian she had learned, and learned well, from that amazing Abbe de Metastasio, whose strange fortune it was all through his life to be loved and admired above his merits. She danced exquisitely, and she adored music. Music won her the adoration of the young Mozart, who, when he was younger, yet dreamed with nursery audacity of mak- ing a bride of his royal playmate ; music won her the adoration of Gluck, the great master of eighteenth-cen- tury music. When the time was at last ripening for the royal marriage which was to ally the two reigning houses of France and Austria, it was decided by Choiseul that some one should be sent to instruct the future dauphiness in all the knowledge that was necessary to make her shine in the court circles of Versailles. He found this some one in the Abbe de Vermond, suggested to him by Lomenie de Brienne, archbishop of Toulouse. Over the choice many bitter words have been spoken. There are writers who see in the Abbe de Vermond a very cor- rupter of youth, the evil genius of Marie Antoinette. We may assume that Vermond was a well-meaning man of a narrow knowledge, able to attract the mind of the young archduchess, but wholly unfitted for the grave task of guiding her safely through the difficulties that were likely to lie in her way. He did not capti- vate Mercy, the wise and faithful Mercy, whose lengthy residence at Versailles and whose clear intelligence ena- bled him to appreciate very keenly the difficulties, the perils even, to which the young dauphiness was likely to be exposed. Mercy came to Vienna himself to give the finishing touches to the veneer of French modes 1770. AUGUR GOETHE. 109 and French thoughts which Vermond was applying to his charge; he dwelt long, earnestly, and unsuccessfully upon the absolute importance of appreciating the for- malities of etiquette which swayed the court of France. Mercy knew well enough the difference between the ways, the well-nigh domestic ways, of the Austrian court and the elaborate, glittering ceremonialism which prevailed in France. One thing at least the young arch- duchess could and did learn to dance. She danced di- vinely, winning the heart of her dancing-master, who declared that she would be his glory. Such as she was, a somewhat spoiled, ill-educated, graceful child of fifteen, trying desperately to play at being a French princess at a time when she had better have been play- ing in the nursery, she was sent out into the new, strange world of Versailles. When Maria Theresa trembled, thinking of that vicious court, Kaunitz reassured her diplomatically. " We must give a lily to gain a lily," he urged sententiously, and so the lily was given. On April 19, 1770, the Archduke Leopold solemnly wedded his sister, Marie Antoinette, in the Augustine convent in the name of the Dauphin of France, and the young dauphiness set out upon her memorable journey from her old to her new home. Let the young Goethe speak. He was at Strasburg playing at law, and learning card-playing and dancing, and winning the hearts of his dancing-master's daughters. If these and other things disturbed his studies, "yet this dissipation and dismemberment of my studies was not enough, for a remarkable political event set every- thing in motion, and procured us a tolerable succession of holidays. Marie Antoinette, Archduchess of Austria and Queen of France, was to pass through Strasburg on her road to Paris. The solemnities by which the people 110 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Cii. VIJ. are made to take notice that there is greatness in the world were busily and abundantly prepared, and es- pecially remarkable to me was the building which stood on an island in the Rhine between the two bridges, erected for her reception, and for surrendering her into the hands of her husband's ambassadors." The em- broidered tapestry with which this pleasure-house was lined greatly attracted the young poet, and he paid many a silver coin to its porter for the privilege of going in and looking at it. Two of the rooms had tapestry worked after Raphael's Cartoons, which filled Goethe with indefinable delight; the hangings of the third and chief saloon greatly shocked and startled him. The pict- ure presented the legend of Jason and his two brides, the dark witch woman of Colchis, and the fair girl Creusa of lolchos. At the left of the throne, poor Creusa strug- gled with the merciless flames in the midst of despairing sympathizers; at the right the distraught Jason beheld his murdered children; above, the sorceress drove in her dragon-car along the clouds. Small wonder if the impet- uous young Goethe called upon his companions to wit- ness such a crime against good taste and feeling. " Is it permitted," he asked, " so thoughtlessly to place before the eyes of a young queen, at her first setting foot in her dominions, the representation of the most horrible marriage that ever was consummated ? Is there, then, among the French architects, decorators, upholsterers, not a single man who understands that pictures represent something, that pictures work upon the mind and feel- ings, that they make impressions, that they excite fore- bodings? It is just the same as if they had sent the most ghastly spectre to meet this beauteous and pleas- ure-loving lady at the very frontiers." The something sibyllic in these utterances of the youthful, indignaut 1770. HOW TO MAKE A ROYAL PROGRESS. m Goethe strikes us with all the inspiration of prophecy, but they did not delight the companions to whom they were addressed. They hurried him away as best they could, assuring him soothingly that the people of Stras- btirg would be too busy to seek omens in the hangings of a wall. Yet the young Goethe was right, and an omen more portentous and more menacing is not record- ed in the annals of the curious. A little later Goethe saw the young queen, and his description forms a parallel picture to Burke's immortal eloquence : " I yet remember well the beauteous and lofty mien, as cheerful as it was imposing, of this youth- ful lady. Perfectly visible to us all in her glass car- riage, she seemed to be jesting with her female attend- ants, in familiar conversation, about the throng that poured forth to meet her train." So, for the first time, the fair Marie Antoinette swims within the ken of great eyes, so, for the first time, she appears before us, limned in immortal language, with her foot upon the threshold of France. If she could only have known what the greatest man of that time, one of the greatest men of all time, was thinking of as he gazed upon that fair, gracious advent, perhaps the imperial Austrian heart might have been touched to some purpose, and the his- tory of France written quite otherwise. For there was one circumstance in connection with this day which struck the vivid fancy of 'Goethe, and which is, as it were, the key to all that followed. A formal regulation had been issued that no deformed persons, no cripples, nor disgusting invalids should presume to show them- selves upon the road of the royal progress. It is one of the most horrible characteristics of the dying century and the dying monarchy, this insane attempt to hide, to suppress, to avoid, and so to forget the stern facts of H2 TIIE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. VII. humanity. Goethe, though he calls it a " very rational regulation," appreciated the grim popular humor which joked about it, and he interpreted the humor in a little French poem which compared the advent of Christ, who came into the world especially to seek the sick and the lame, with the coming of the queen who scared the unfortunates away. Goethe's friends seem to have been pleased with this little satire; a French friend, however, fell foul mercilessly of the language and the metre, and Goethe wrote no more French poems. But the fact that it was written, that it could be written, is the most significant preface to the story that ended in the Con- ciergerie and on the scaffold. The ghastly pretence that a royal road must be all smiles and roses and fair favor, which no touch of human sorrow and human shame or pain was to approach, could only end in an hour in which squalor and suffering and despair should force their way into the sham enchanted palace, and trample on the purple. The lesson is still significant. The grim presages which Goethe drew from the Jason pictures were soon responded to. In that part of the pavilion reserved for the Austrian court, Marie Antoi- nette had her first experience of the etiquette of her new country. A Dauphin of France, animated by the same principles which dictated the wedding conditions of John Antony Riqueti of Mirabeau, insisted that noth- ing should remain with his royal consort of a land which was no longer hers. So the young Austrian princess was solemnly undressed, even to her very chemise and stockings, and reclad from head to foot in the garments provided for her by France. Courtly etiquette always assumes, and perhaps wisely, that to change in ap- pearance is to change in fact. But, unhappily, no chang- ing of chemise and stockings could make poor Marie 1770. MARIE ANTOINETTE'S ROYAL ROAD. H3 Antoinette other than the "Austrian," in the eyes of her court enemies and, at last, in the eyes of France at large. By slow and ceremonial stages the young dauphiness proceeded from Strasburg to Saverne, from Saverne to Nancy, from Nancy to Bar, from Bar to Chalons, from Chalons to Soissons, from Soissons to Compiegne. The route was one long triumph flowers, balls, Te Deiims, public banquets. It was roses, roses, all the way, as Browning's luckless hero says in the poem. A little way beyond Compiegne, the Duke de Choiseul met the dauphiness and her escort and guided her to a space in the forest by the Berne Bridge, where she found a royal party who had travelled from Versailles to meet her. The young Austrian fell at the king's feet. He lifted her up, embraced her and presented her to the dauphin, who, in his turn, in what, we may imagine, was a some- what perfunctory and awkward fashion, kissed his bride. At the chateau, the king presented to the stranger a number of princes and peers, the Duke de Chartres among the number an ominous presentation. Here, too, for the first time she met the Princess de Lamballe. From so far these two fair young women had met, and for what a parting ! More festivities, more journeyings by slow stages, more gifts, more banquets, more meetings with persons of importance, including Madame du Barry, who ob- tained the privilege of supping at the dauphiness's ta- ble at La Muette. The dauphiness was simple enough or skilful enough to find the Du Barry charming. The Du Barry did not take long to find the young dauphin- ess dangerous and to hate her with all her heart. At last, on a stormy Wednesday, May 16, 1770, in the chap- el at Versailles, the dauphin, in the eyes of all that was noblest and fairest in France, placed the ring of gold L 8 ] 14 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. VII. upon the girl's finger, gave her the thirteen traditional pieces of gold. More presentations, chiefly of foreign ambassadors, suppers, music, blessing of the nuptial bed by the Archbishop of Rheims; Marie Antoinette of Austria slept that night as Dauphiness of France. The great ambition of Maria Theresa was fulfilled. No dream slipped through the gates of horn to stand by mother or child and warn them of fate. But the su- perstitious shuddered over the savage storm which beat upon Versailles on the wedding-day, and drew ominous prognostications from the thunder-strokes that beat upon the palace on the day when the dauphiness first set foot therein. A more evil omen was yet to come: the fort- night of successive festivals in honor of the wedding ended on May 30; there was a great display of fire- works in the Place Louis XV.; the crowd was great the precautions few the police arrangements insuffi- cient; two great waves of the crowd met in a narrow space the crush became murderous. When, at last, it was ended and the crowd dissolved, the scene was like a field of battle; hundreds of the dead strewed the ground poor luckless merrymakers who came to a fete and found a massacre. It was never decisively known how many were killed on that terrible night. On the good old courtly principle of sparing at all hazards the feelings of the royal people, as little as possible was said about it, and ruined families mourned their losses in such stoical silence as they could muster lest the sound of their sorrow should vex the ears of the young princess. One hundred and thirty -two corpses were hurriedly interred in the cemetery of the Madeleine, there to wait awhile for more august companionship. Away in far Frankfort-on-the-Main the news of the catastrophe caused aching hearts for a season in the 1770. GOETHE'S FOREBODINGS. 115 house with the lyre above its portal ; in the house of Dr. Goethe the inmates trembled for the young Johann Wolfgang, then believed to be in Paris, whose silence led them to fear the worst. They were undeceived the young Johann Wolfgang had been fooling them. Wanting a holiday from Strasburg for some whim of his own, he had pretended to go to Paris, and had even written a letter dated Paris, which he had got a friend to post. Fate had not ordained that the young Goethe's life was to be so untimely ended. But young Goethe, reflecting on the awful news, remembered again the Strasburg tapestries with their hideous tale of Jason's marriage and felt his odd melancholy forebodings deepen. 116 THE i'KEKCH HE VOLUTION. CH. VIII. CHAPTER VIII. A QTJEEB WORLD. IT was a queer world upon which the little Austrian archduchess now shone for the first time. The beauti- ful, imperious, wilful girl, who was scarcely more than a child, found herself suddenly in very different sur- roundings from those that had been familiar to her girlhood in Vienna and in Schonbrunn. The old king himself, the central sun of the celestial court system, was not an over-attractive figure. He was then sixty years old, worn with vices, cynical, weary, sensual, with a taste for turning, a taste for cooking, and a stronger taste for mistresses, a great devotion to the reigning favorite and a great indifference to the government of the country. He was as immoral as an ape ; he was about as useful to the country he was supposed to gov- ern as an elderly ape would have been, if that creature of the greenwoods had been taught to wear the royal purple and the trappings of the Saint-Esprit. But he was King of France, and Maria Theresa appreciated the fact thoroughly, and her daughter, through her, appre- ciated it as thoroughly. Marie Antoinette knew well that it was part of her business to captivate the old king, and she set to work very steadily to win what- ever feelings of kindlier affection might be left in his wicked, withered old heart. It is scarcely surprising to find that she succeeded. With all his baseness, Louis was still in the curious courtly sense of the word a 1770. THE DU BARRY. 117 gentleman, and could hardly fail to be touched by the youth, the beauty, and the pretty ways of his gracious Austrian grandchild. But there was a figure at the court even more important than the king's. We have seen how at La Muette the dauphiness noted the bold, beautiful face of Madame du Barry at her table, and asked, perhaps in childish ignorance and all simplicity, what part Madame du Barry played in the great pag- eant of the courtly life. We are told that the per* plexed and vague answer given by the person she asked was to the effect that Madame du Barry's business at the court was to amuse the king. "Then let her be- ware," is said to have been Marie Antoinette's jesting answer, " for I warn her that she will find a serious ri- val in me." Madame du Barry was hardly likely to welcome the rising of the Austrian star. She was the real sovereign of the court, the real sovereign of France, the living cynical proof of the degradation of the monarchy and the monarch. The reign of the Du Barry made decent men regret the reign of the Pompadour. At least the Pompadour was a woman of education, of ability, who, if not of gentle blood, bore herself like a lady of gentle blood, and was always exquisitely careful never to allow her influence to be ostentatiously or offensively obtruded. But Madame du Barry was a very different sort of woman from Madame de Pompadour, and her triumph over the king was the most eloquent possible proof of the royal declension in ignominy. The De Goncourts, in their life of Madame du Barry, quote from the " Jour- nal" of Hardy preserved in the National Library of Paris a curious episode which forms a most appropriate preface to a record of a strange and shameful career. A certain ecclesiastic strange to Paris and its ways was U8 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. VIII. dining at a house where after dinner a Parisian priest bade his brethren present drink to " The Presentation." The ingenuous stranger asked if it was the ceremony of the Presentation of our Lord to the Temple which was to take place the next day, whereupon the priest who had proposed the toast answered that he was thinking of the presentation of the new Esther who was to de- throne Haman. The new Esther was Madame du Barry; the new Haman was the minister Choiseul. In the year 1743, in the month of August, the natural child of Anne Bequs was born at Vaucouleurs, was bap- tized and named Jeanne. A protector and patron of the mother, a wealthy financier named Dumonceau, caused the little girl to be taught to read and write and began her amazing education by placing her with her mother in the house of his mistress, a Mdlle. Frederique, famous in the courtesanship of the day for her red hair and her extreme looseness of morals. This excellent be- ginning was presently modified by Mdlle. Frederique herself, who began to grow jealous of the growing charms of little Jeanne. Little Jeanne was packed off to the Convent of Saint -Aure, a gloomy institution where poor girls were kept respectable under a regimen of appalling austerity. Little Jeanne revolted against the regimen, was sent back to Mdlle. Frederique, who would have none of her, and who succeeded in inducing Dunaonceau to turn Jeanne and her mother into the streets. Jeanne was then fifteen. She drifted about the streets for a while hawking cheap jewellery and plying a sordid prostitution. Then a mysterious uncle, a Father Picpus, turned up and got her a place as com- panion at Cour-Neuve, in the environs of Paris, where old Madame Lagarde cheered her declining years with theatrical entertainments. But Madame Lagarde had 1743. THE HARLOT'S PROGRESS. 119 sons who could appreciate the beauty of Jeanne, and Jeanne was soon sent about her business. Then she got a place in a modiste's shop and began the life of little gallantry which led her from lover to lover into the arms of the rascally Count du Barry, and opened the way to the higher gallantry which was to niche her for a season on the steps of a throne. Count du Barry was a swaggering, profligate rogue, who claimed descent from the English Barrymores, and who sustained in Paris a kind of commerce of beautiful women whom it was his business and profit to discover, and train for the benefit of wealthy patrons. Every man has an ideal, even a man in so despicable a business as this of Count du Barry's. Du Barry's ambition was to be the purveyor of a mistress to the king himself. He had already tried and failed when he found in Jeanne, the adventuress whom he had formed into an accomplished and brilliant courtesan, the woman he wanted. Louis XV. saw Jeanne, how and when histo- rians differ, and was completely conquered, to the great grief of Lebel, his valet, who seems to have died of something like grief at discovering that what he had regarded as a passing fancy was likely to prove a per- manence in the royal affections. But as Madame du Barry was neither noble nor wedded, it was decided by the king that she must be the one and the other. Count du Barry could not marry her himself, as he had already a wife living. But there was his brother, Guillaume, needy officer of marines at Toulouse the very man ! A sort of sham husband being thus found, a sort of sham father was found in a certain almoner of the king, Gomard de Vaubernier, who consented to regard him- self as the parent of the fair Jeanne, and so spare Guillaume du Barry the pain of wedding and King 120 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. VIII. Louis the pain of loving a young lady who was only a natural child ! The ludicrous farce was played out and the new Madame du Barry found herself comfortably quartered at Versailles as the mistress-in-chief of the king. From that moment the name of Madame du Barry was carried by the winds of rumor to all the corners of the earth. Quite unconsciously she played a mighty part in the great game of politics. Every one who hated Choiseul, all the discontented courtiers, all the allies of the Jesuits against whom he had waged so merciless a war, found in the new favoiite a weapon to their hand. Choiseul had laughed at favorites before; had he not overthrown Madame d'Esparbes simply by taking her by the chin in public and asking her, " Well, little one, how are your affairs getting on ?" But the Du Barry was a more serious foe. She had an able prompter al- ways in the background in rascally, clever Count John ; she had a watchful adviser and confidante always by her in rascally, clever Count John's rascally, clever, slightly humpbacked sister, the famous Chon. The world that began to talk of Madame du Barry began to recognize in her a rival and a serious rival to Choiseul, and around her flowing petticoats gathered all the op- ponents of the powerful minister. Madame du Barry, in her dainty nest at Versailles, with her black page and her parrot, and her ape and her poodle, and her dainty, flowing simplicity of attire, her unpowdered hair and unpainted face, her lisping voice that always blun- dered s into z, was preparing the way for the fall of the great Choiseul. Madame du Barry had a certain rough-and-ready way of revenging herself upon those who were unlucky enough to offend her. There is one story told in this 1768-70. WHIPPING A COUNTESS. 121 connection which is curiously characteristic of the wom- an and her ways, and her innate vulgarity. Her friend the Countess de Rosen in a rash moment quarrelled with the favorite, and sought in more ways than one to cause her annoyance. The favorite complained to the king. Louis shrugged his shoulders. " Madame de Rosen is only a schoolgirl, and shoiild be treated like a schoolgirl." Madame du Barry took the royal sugges- tion perfectly seriously. She invited Madame de Rosen to come and see her. Madame de Rosen came. Once inside the Du Barry's rooms, she was seized upon by a sufficiency of stout serving-girls, and in the Du Barry's laughing presence was soundly birched in the most schoolgirl fashion. Poor Madame de Rosen, hurt and hysterical, complained to the king. Louis, who had for- gotten his suggestion, mildly reproved the favorite, who immediately reminded the monarch that she was only obe)nng his own advice. The king laughed, and suc- ceeded in pacifying Madame de Rosen, who afterwards became very good friends again with her chastiser. In spite of the Du Barry, however, and all her wiles, the most important figure in the court still was the fig- ure in the eyes of young Louis, the sinister figure of the Duke de Choiseul. At this time he was just fifty- one years of age, and, though he knew it not, his great career lay already behind him. Behind him lay all those great achievements, all those greater plans, his military youth, the envoyship to Rome, secret treaties with Maria Theresa, long alliance with the Pompadour, mad schemes for invasion of England, blunderings in America, blunderings in the West Indies, blunderings in India, blunderings in Poland, "Family Compact" triumph and failure, anti- Jesuit failure and triumph. So many showy successes, so many scarcely less showy 12 2 TiJE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. VIII. failures, were crowded into that restless, busy, brilliant half-century of life. One very fateful meeting led the young dauphiness to a very fateful friendship. Perhaps no figure in all the courtly world is more attractive, more perplexing, than that of Marie Therese Louise de Savoie-Carignan, Prin- cesse de Lamballe, whose beautiful face looks out upon us and upon all time with such an air of exquisite can- dor in Hickel's portrait as engraved by Fleischraann. That fair, unfortunate creature, whose marriage was so desperately miserable and pitiable, who came so near to marrying Louis XV. in his old age, has had many assail- ants, chief among them the acridly unvirtuous Madame de Genlis, and many impassioned champions, of whom M. de Lescure and M. Georges Berlin are the latest and the most impassioned. Perhaps Carlyle rather over- shoots his mark when he says of Madame de Lamballe that " she was beautiful, she was good, she had known no happiness." The beautiful friend of Marie Antoi- nette must have known some happy hours in that bright court which danced so daintily over the volcanic earth, in spite of her ghastly marriage, in spite of all that was to be. Even Madame de Genlis, who declares that her hands were "terribly ugly," has little to say against her nature ; even the profligate and pitiful Lauzun has to admit that she was " as good as she was pretty." Madame de Lamballe's beauty still seems to live far acroes the generations. Hickel's portrait, with its air of childish grace, can thrill us across the wilderness of years with its delicate, haunting loveliness. That hair of fair Italian gold which has been likened to the tresses which crown, nimbus -like, the heads of Raphael's Madonnas, those sweetly smiling lips, those frank, kindly, loyal eyes can still captivate, can still in- 1749-92. LADIES OF THE COURT. 123 spire. "She is a model of all the virtues," said the Baroness d'Oberkirch ; and the praise does not seem to have been exaggerated. If it was her misfortune to be married to the unlucky Lamballe, it was her good- fortune to have in her father-in-law, the Duke de Pen- thievre, the brightest and best example of the old no- bility of France. The recently published memoirs of Dom Courdemanche, edited by Etienne Allaire, add one more to the many delightful pictures we possess of the good old peer. If France could have boasted more nobles like the Duke de Penthievre and less like the Duke de Lauzun towards the close of the last century, the story of the French Revolution might have been very different. There were certain other ladies at that court, ladies very unlike the Du Barry on the one hand, or Madame de Lamballe on the other, three soured and faded ladies who had the misfortune to be the daughters of the king. They were known to the court, they are known to the world, by the endearing nicknames bestowed upon them by their royal father, Loque, Coche, Graille nicknames that Carlyle allots inaccurately. These were Madame Adelaide, Madame Victoire, and Madame So- phie. Another sister, Madame Louise, known to the paternal slang as Chiffe, had left the court for the se- clusion of a convent before the arrival of Marie Antoi- nette. The three were all old maids, and very old- maidish old maids, much given to piety, to scandal, and the like. Two of them were exceedingly plain Ma- dame Adelaide and Madame Sophie which did not serve to increase the little affection that lingered in the heart of Louis. Poor desolate ladies, they seemed very insig- nificant all through their lives, and yet two of them had their mischievous importance, and did more harm than ]24 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. VIII. a legion of old maids could set right again. M. Edouard de Barthelemy has devoted a biggish book entirely to Mesdames de France, in which the curious will find a vast amount of interesting particulars concerning these old ladies and tneir varying fortunes. M. de Barthe- lemy has worked hard with all the available material. The neglected, melancholy old ladies live again in his pages, curious shadows flitting across that sinful court, curious shadows flitting before the terrors of the new order of things which knocked a less sinful court into fragments. With their early lives we have nothing to do ; their interest only begins for us with the advent of Marie Antoinette. Madame Victoire, the sad sister who had once been something of a beauty, played but a small part in the grim game that ended for her in exile and Trieste. Madame Adelaide and Madame Sophie were more im- portant. It was permitted to them to have a share, and no inconsiderable share, in accelerating the progress of the inevitable Revolution. They seem to have hated Marie Antoinette almost from the first. Ill-favored themselves, they resented the beauty of the new dau- phiness. Slighted by their father, they resented the attentions which Louis XV. offered to Marie Antoi- nette and the admiration with which he spoke of her. Formal, precise, old-fashioned, and austere, they were shocked and scandalized by the lightness of Marie An- toinette's nature. Their rigid respect for etiquette and strict decorum was daily, hourly outraged by the free- and-easy fashions which Marie Antoinette brought with her from the virtuous but free-and-easy court of Vi- enna. Marie Antoinette was not to be long in France without calling into existence an anti-Dauphiness party, in which party the two Mesdames Adelaide and Sophie 1732-53. A WATCHMAKER'S SON. 125 were leaders. The anti-Dauphiness party was yet to grow into an anti-Queen party, fostering all the acrid, malignant, envenomed support that Madame Adelaide and Madame Sophie could lend to it. Let us take note as we pass on that Mesdames de France have been the precious patronesses of an obscure watchmaker who desires many things, especially riches and fame. We shall meet with him again. His name is Beaumar- chais. If Cervantes smiled Spain's chivalry away, so certainly Beaumarchais helped to smile away the old nobility of France. In late January of 1732 a reputable Parisian watchmaker named Caron begot a son, whom he named Pierre Augustin, and brought up in the good old Egyp- tian way to his own trade. The young Caron had a soul above clock-cobbling. He was smart, good-look- ing, ambitious, esurient of success and the things suc- cess brings with it popular applause, pretty women, the favor of the great, money in poke, fine clothes, and all the fun of the world's fair. But he owed his first rise in life to his watches. He invented a new escape- ment ; some rogue pirated ; Caron, who was always pugnacious and litigious, rushed into print to claim his own, and the Academy of Sciences, to which the watch feud was referred, decided in his favor. This brought him into court notice : he was graciously permitted to try his skill upon Madame de Pompadour's watch, gra- ciously permitted to call himself Watchmaker to the King. Once in touch of the court, Caron resolved to keep so. Luck favored him. A well-to-do woman fell in love with the handsome, pushing young watchmaker; the woman was married ; she cajoled her husband, Con- troller Francquet, into making over his post to Caron. When Francquet died his widow straightway married 126 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. VIII. Caron, who henceforth assumed the title of De Beau- marcbais, which he was yet to make famous. Later on, the judicious purchase of a secretaryship to the king flattered his vanity by bringing with it a title of nobility. The daughters of the king, Loque, Coche, Graille, and Chiffe, took him up, patronized him, allowed him to teach them the harp, and gave him a recognized place in the society of the court. Not that the court al- ways liked him ; but the cool impudence of Beaumar- chais enabled him always to meet, and meet success- fully, the insolence of any contemptuous courtier. The story is well known of the young nobleman who on one occasion asked Beaumarchais to look at his, the young nobleman's, watch, as he feared there was something wrong with it. Beaumarchais calmly observed that he was so long out of practice that he feared he would be scarcely equal to the task ; then, taking the watch from the courtier's hand, he let it fall from his own carefully careless fingers to the floor, where it dashed to pieces. With a grave smile Beaumarchais said, " You see, I am out of practice," and so walked leisurely away, leaving the courtier gazing sufficiently ruefully at his shattered treasure. If Beaumarchais was never afraid of making ene- mies, he had the art also of making serviceable friends. Paris-Duverney, the great banker, was one of these ; Puris-Duveruey, who helped Beaumarchais to make his fortune. After Paris-Duverney's death a document was found in which the banker acknowledged himself Beau- marchais's debtor for 16,000 francs. The Count la Blache, who hated Beaumarchais, contested the validity of the document, and thereupon arose one of the most fiercely fought lawsuits, or rather succession of law- 1732-76. BEADMARCIIAIS. 127 suits, whereof the world holds witness. Beaumarchais gained, lost on appeal, got into trouble through an at- tempt to gain by a money payment to Goezman's wife the favorable vote of Goezman the Parliamentarian on whose report the vote of the Parliament depended. Goezman brought bis action against Beaumarchais for attempted corruption of a judge. Beaumarchais de- fended himself in the most brilliant, the bitterest m&- moires, and, though he lost his case for the time, his attacks upon the detested Parliament made him as pop- ular with the people as he had been unpopular. In the common phrase, Beaumarchais was bad to beat. His defeat by Goezman cost him his civil rights, as his de- feat by La Blache had cost him his little fortune ; but in his indefatigable way he declined to be defeated, and in the end not only got his civil rights restored to him, but actually defeated La Blache himself. Beaumarchais had a kind of genius for getting into queer affairs. It is not over-agreeable to find a man of genius drifting about Europe in the hunt after pam- phlets lampooning Madame du Barry, even with the purpose of buying them up and destroying them for the king ; still less so if he could believe, as has been hinted, that the pamphlets in question only existed in Beaumarchais's ingenious mind. The enthusiasm with which he flung himself into the cause of American inde- pendence was an enthusiasm of that kind which knows how to make a good thing out of its sympathies. But we can forget and forgive all the shifts and dodges, all the seamy side of Beaumarchais's life, when we come to his two immortal plays. Commerce and the Clavijo affair had taken him to Spain in his younger days, in 1764, and from Spain he drew the inspiration and the at- mosphere of exquisite intrigue of his two great comedies. 128 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. VIII. Those comedies ; those comedies ! They made Beau- marchais immortal. They set him up by the side of Moliere. They helped to laugh the Old Order out of existence. Caron had always a certain fierce eagerness for dramatic success ; had written and produced in his salad days two plays, which had been uncompromis- ingly condemned. Uncompromisingly condemned the " Barber of Seville " was very near being too. Beau- marchais had his head full of his law affair, though all Paris had its head full of it also, and crowded his text with the most tedious allusions to his litigation. The result was a dead, dismal failure on the first night. But if Beauraarchais loved his law, he loved his play more. With a ruthless hand he carved out all the tedious per- sonal stuff, wrote and rewrote, and on the second night the play was a great success. But there was a greater success to come. It was the " Mariage de Figaro," which was destined to be the " Don Quixote " of the Old Order. Louis XVI., with some glimmerings of intelligence sud- denly aroused in him, saw what the piece meant saw even dimly what it might mean, and refused his sanc- tion to its performance. The " Barber of Seville " saw the footlights in 1775 ; it was not till 1784 that the "Marriage of Figaro" was brought out, and aroused the laughter which helped to upset the Bastille, and with it the monarchy five years later. The success was astonishing, well-nigh unprecedented. Aristophanes deriding democracy to an Athenian audience did not win half the enthusiasm that came to Beaumarchais when, masked as Figaro, he laughed at everything which a Parisian audience was supposed to regard as sacrosanct. It is fatally easy to overrate the influence of a particular book, a particular speech, a particular play upon a popular movement. But if ever a move- 1721-89. LOUIS XV. AND LOUIS XVI. 129 ment was helped to its triumph by the two hours' traffic of the stage, the French Revolution was helped by the bitter buffoonery of Gil Bias Beaumarchais in the " Ma- riage de Figaro." It was not given to Louis XV. to escape the lot com- mon to all those princes and monarchs for whom Fran- 9ois Villon inquires in his famous ballades. There came an end to his caperings, to his neat cynical sayings, to his merry-makings with his mistresses Pompadour yesterday and Du Barry to-day to Pare aux Cerfs pleasures, if Pare aux Cerfs ever existed, which is by no means certain ; to all the infamies and fooleries which make his name a byword and his reign a sham. The years during which he reigned were fertile of good to France ; they produced great thinkers, great teachers, Encyclopaedists, economists, wits, statesmen ; but, as far as Louis XV. was concerned, he did nothing to make his reign other than a plague spot. " After me the del- uge," indeed. The waters were rising, rising all through the weak, worthless, wicked reign ; now small-pox has seized upon the sin-weakened body. Louis XV. lies as dead and despicable as a poisoned rat ; his last maitresse en titre has vanished into obscurity, to emerge again, unhappily, later on, under terrible conditions. Louis XVI. is King of France, and the history of the French Revolution may be said to seriously begin. There are a new king and queen on the throne of France ; they are both young ; they are aid to have prayed Heaven to guide them in the difficulties of their new life. Never were such prayers more needed, could they but have known it. Poor king, poor queen : let us look at them a little closely and try to understand them, children about to be visited by the punishment for the sins of their fathers. L 9 13 o THE FRENCH KEVOLUTIOX. CH. VIII. For fifteen years Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette reigned over France with no thought of the fate that was in store for them. There had been kings of France for hundreds of years past ; there seemed no reason to doubt that there would be kings of France for hundreds of years to come. These fifteen years were full and eventful years. Certain events especially stand out, events of very different kinds, but all tending in their effect to the same result. The comedies of Beaumar- chais, the American Revolution, the Diamond Neck- lace, and the Assembly of Notables are the cardinal points by which to steer through the stormy course of that fifteen years. A queer, perplexing fifteen years they were, with their light-hearted Trianonism, their desperate financial flounderings, their Turgots and Nec- kers and Calonnes and Lomenie Briennes, each trying after his own wise or wild way to accomplish the impos- sible. Fifteen years for the king of much hunting and lock-making ; fifteen years for the queen of Trianon light life, of growing disfavor, unpopularity, enmities ; fifteen years for the people of growing discontent, in- creasing poverty and pain ; fifteen years of freer speech, of conflicting ambitions, of fervid dreams, of desperate hopes. The momentum of the monarchy on its roll down hill to destruction has increased beyond the power of man's hand to hold, increased probably beyond the power of any man's hand to retard. A sufficiently eventful fifteen years they were. Poor, scheming, malignant, strenuous d'Aguillon was puffed out of favor by the same breath that blew the Du Barry down the wind into seclusion. Septuagenarian De Mau- repas found the old Pompadour disfavor which had kept him in the cold for a quarter of a century no longer a barrier ; he was called to the post of principal minis- 1774-89. DE MAUREPAS. 131 ter, and was thenceforward to play a pretty active part for his time of life in helping to ruin France. He was not a very estimable old man, he was not a very intelli- gent old man ; he had been in his queer way a large- handed patron of learnings he could not well appreciate; he had helped to send Maupertuis to Lapland, that Mau- pertuis whose wild ideas Voltaire made so merry over ; he had helped to send Jussieu to South America, that Jussieu who was not the most eminent of the " Botan- ical Dynasty." He was to play his part now in helping on the French Revolution. 13 2 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. IX. CHAPTER IX. MARIE ANTOINETTE. MARIE ANTOINETTE is one of the most perplexing, fascinating, tragic figures in history. Her empire and her influence, like the influence and empire of Mary Stuart, have not ceased with her existence, but extend- ed almost unaltered and unimpaired to the present day. The admiration which Montaigne, which Bran tome, which Konsard express for Mary Stuart is rivalled in its warmth by the language of her adherents to-day ; the praise of Burke, of Goethe, of Mirabeau, and of Arthur Young finds echo in the passionate homage which is still paid to the name of Marie Antoinette. Historians fight over her as fiercely as the factions wrangled in the days of the Diamond Necklace, in the days of the Versailles Banquet, in the days of the Con- ciergerie. Though she belongs, as it were, to the day before yesterday, though the very traditions of her time still linger in certain ancient stately Parisian circles, though many live and look upon the earth whose grand- sires and grandams were familiar with the court of which she was the most unhappy head, it is most diffi- cult to form anything like a precise judgment upon her character, her nature, and her acts. Two schools of what can hardly be called criticism chiefly assert themselves. To the one school Marie Antoinette is only an uncanonized saint and martyr, noblest, purest, highest of women, more than human in 1774-89. CONTRASTING PICTURES. 133 her beauty and her goodness a kind of angel whose very virtues left her the more easily the prey to the enmities of an evil world The disciples of the other school hold her up to all execration as a mere she fiend. They paint her proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at her back than they have thoughts to put them in. They endow her with monstrous vices stolen from the stews of imperial Rome; they accuse her of name- less, shameless sins ; they conjure up an image of a de- pravity utter and complete, sickening even to think upon, and they assure us that such is her true likeness. They load her life with innumerable love affairs ; they treat her as the furious creature of illimitable and abom- inable passions ; they see in her nearest and most natural friendships the degradation of Baudelaire's " Femmes Damnees;" they drink in with a greedy ear and a base credulity the loathsome charges of the tribunal which condemned her. Her wanton blood, her unnatural appe- tites, her tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide, they make responsible for all the miseries of France, and they exult over the day of her death as over the day which liberated a groaning world from some monster. Accu- sations which we might hesitate to believe of Messalina, cruelty which would seem exaggerated if attributed to Nero, they accept and repeat and circulate as the cur- rent coin of history. The obscenities of revolutionary caricature, the depravities of De Sade, the corrupt im- aginings of a corrupt age, all these are to them as rev- elation, and they fish in the literature of the cesspool for every possible and impossible horror wherewith to smirch her name. Only the imaginings of a madhouse could compete with some of the pictures of Marie An- toinette presented to us as serious history. It may be simply and safely assumed that neither of 134 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Cn. IX. these pictures is the real woman or at all like the real woman. Probably no woman since the world began was quite so angelic as the devotees of the Old Order, the historians of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, would have us believe Marie Antoinette was. No woman, it is to be hoped for the sake of humanity, was ever quite so bad as the kind of female Satan which the ragings of a blood-red school of writers offer as the true Marie Antoinette. The courtly idolatry of the one is more pleasant, more chivalrous reading than the other; but the gutter ravings and the rhapsodies are equally for- eign to the serious seeker after truth. He would be but a sorry student of human nature who gauged the civilization of mankind only by the preciosity of a Eu- phuist or the foul word scrawled on a wall. The rapt- ures for and the ragings against Marie Antoinette are of as little service in aiding us to obtain any true appre- ciation of her character and of her reign. It must be admitted, moreover, that more impartial historians are sometimes scarcely more satisfactory. Every one who has studied the history of the Revolution knows the sketch which Mr. John Morley gives of Marie Antoi- nette in his essay on Robespierre. Its frigid judicial ferocity is scarcely more serviceable than the eulogies and the lampoons. Mr. Morley criticises the child queen of the corruptest court and the corruptest capital in Europe as he might criticise a Girton girl crammed with Comtism and the newest theory of historical evolution placed in the same exalted position. In endeavoring to understand Marie Antoinette it is impossible not to feel a profound regret that the collec- tion of letters attributed to her by the Count Paul Vogt d'Hunolstein should be of no avail. Unfortunately, to put the case mildly, their authenticity seems more than 1774-89. THE HUNOLSTEIX LETTERS. 135 dubious. It would be as reasonable to base a case in favor of Marie Antoinette upon an elaborate study of Dumas's " Chevalier de Maisonrouge " as upon the let- ters of the D'Hunolstein collection. The one is fiction pure and simple, the other is fiction of a graver kind masquerading in the guise of history. Who that has read these letters would not like to be able to make use of them? For it may be admitted that they are exceedingly attractive, exceedingly ingeniously linked together. They have all that charm of fiction which is sometimes the property of veritable fact, but they seem to have no value save their charm. The curious in lit- erary puzzles may add these letters to the letters of Phalaris, to the pseudo-Petronius, to the book of Dio- nysius the Areopagite, and the like. The student of history will read them, if he reads them at all, with a sigh as he follows the unfolding picture of this imagi- nary Marie Antoinette. In the first letter she daintily addresses the future husband as " Monsieur le Dauphin et Cher Frere." She confides fears to her mother of her inexperience " in that new country which has adopt- ed me in your name." She describes herself as "La Jeune Frar^oise." She makes quaint allusions to Rob- inson Crusoe and to Lilliput. She jests about " la Dau- phine en Biscuit de Pate Tendre." She depicts her new life as a perpetual performance where one has never the time to hear one's self live. She makes affectionate al- lusions to Metastasio. She pictures the Count d'Artois as " flippant as a page and heedless of grammar." She gives accounts of her "petits bals." She requests her sister to assure Maria Theresa that she has become " as French as she told me it was my duty to become." She makes solemn announcement of the little lady's wisdom teeth. She is enthusiastic about Gluck's " Iph- 13 6 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. IX. igenia." She hits at D'Aguillon as the " Ame Damnee de la Comtesse du Barry." She is alarmed at her new royalty: "Mon Dien, moy Reine si jeune, j'en suis tout effrayee." She is surprised to find " the determination of certain folk to picture me as a stranger, always pre- occupied with her own country and only French against the grain." She is annoyed at the report that she had rebaptized her Petit Trianon " mon petit Vienne." She is grieved at her childishness: "Je suis dans la main O de Dieu et je m'etourdis le plus que je peux; j'en ai besoin, car ce n'est pas etre reine de France que de ne pas avoir les honneurs d'un Dauphin." She declares, "I feel myself French to the finger-tips," "jusqu'aux ongles." She feels mingled joy and disappointment- over the birth of " la pauvre petite " instead of the ex- pected dauphin. She naturally thinks " the cruel custom of filling the bedroom of the queen at such a moment should be abolished." She has the pretty conviction that her daughter is " la plus belle enfant du royaume." She gossips about the Freemasons, and the reception of the Princess de Lamballe as grand mistress of a lodge. She is indignant at the audacity of the Cardinal de Ro- han in making love to her : " You know my aversion for him." She is in despair at the progress of the " af- f reuse affaire," the "abominable affaire," as she calls the case of the Diamond Necklace. She blends maternal solicitude for the cold of " mon gros Normandie " with allusions to "ce charlatan de Cagliostro" and to Dame la Motte " Je n'ai jamais vu cette femme de Lamotte." She is angered at the light punishment inflicted upon Rohan, who dared " to lend himself to that mad and infamous scene of the bosquet, and to believe that he had an appointment with the Queen of France. She is scornful of the clumsy forgeries which were absurdly 0. THE PIT? OF IT. 137 signed "Marie Antoinette de France." She is alarmed at the assembling of the Notables. The gloom of the letters grows as events succeed swiftly. We witness the conversion of the graceful queen and mother into an eager politician, fighting for her throne, and even for her life, and the lives of those dear to her. We have allusions to Lafayette, to Orleans, to Mirabeau; despair- ing appeals for help to the emperor. We have a sig- nificant commentary on the changed state of public feeling: "A la mort de nion pauvre cher Dauphin, la nation n'a pas seulement eu i'air de s'en apercevoir." We have the touching request to the Count de Mercy to keep the letter she writes to him, as she would be "bien aise de la ravoir un jour;" the earnest request to the Princess de Larnballe not to come back to danger; the melancholy plaint towards the end: " Je souffre nuit et jour, je change a vue d'oeil ; mes beaux jours sont passes, et sans mes pauvres enfants, je voudrais etre en paix dans ma tombe. Us me tueront, ma chere Chris- tine. Apres ma mort, defendez-moi de tout votre coeur." How gladly would we accept all these as genuine, not so much for any fresh light they afford, but for the ad- ditional touches they give to a great historical picture ! Yet the Hunolstein letters deserve some recognition. The very fact that such documents do exist is, in itself, portion and parcel of the history; and if they are not genuine, their unknown constructor deserves at least the credit of a skilful and well-ordered composition. There is, at least in the excerpts here strung together, nothing that Marie Antoinette might not have written, much that she must have said and written in such words or words akin to them. Even if it were absolutely cer- tain that the Hunolstein collection were not genuine, the letters would still not be absolutely valueless to the !38 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. OH. IX. student, not merely of the life of Marie Antoinette, but of the strange cult of Marie Antoinette that has been steadily growing since her death. A brilliant historical novel may sometimes afford a side-light to the student of history, and in at least a kindred sense something may be gleaned from an acquaintance with the Hunol- stein collection. It is hardly fair to say, as has been said, that Marie Antoinette was only an Austrian spy in a high position. She was far too self-willed, too human, too intensely feminine to have any real capability for the part of conscious or unconscious spy. It is the old mistake of regarding all the actors in the French Revolution as being incarnations of logical purposes. They were all, first and foremost, men and women, like other men and women puppets, even as ourselves. Never since the world began was any woman more characteristically womanly than Marie Antoinette. Her womanhood is as characteristic as her beauty. The beauty of Marie Antoinette shines like a star through all that age. Eng- lish Burke, English Arthur Young shall pay their trib- ute of enthusiasm; chroniclers have left descriptions of her at all ages. Bachaumont makes her live for us as she was when she arrived in France, a dauphiness of scarce fifteen, with the slight, unfinished, girlish figure, her fair hair that promises to become light chestnut, her fine forehead, her oval, almost too oval, face, her eyebrows " as thick as a blonde's can ever be," her blue eyes, her aquiline nose, her small mouth and full lips, the lower the famous Austrian lip, her astonishingly white skin and natural beauty of complexion which might well neglect the use of rouge. Nine years later Madame Vigee le Brun, whose portraits of the queen are among the most precious legacies of the eighteenth 1774-89. THE MOST FAIR PRINCESS. 139 century, painted her portrait also in words, telling of the well-developed form, the noble arms, the little hands, the charming feet, and the brilliant, matchless complex- ion of the sovereign she adored. A Tilly and a Segur vie in their praises. If in Madame Campan's raptures over "all that enchanting being" we fear to find the rhapsodies of the waiting- women, we can remember Burke and Arthur Young and feel reassured. It is dif- ficult in reading all these impassioned praises to think of a certain sketch, which a certain painter named Da- vid, now a young man, shall yet make a sketch of a haggard, prematurely old, almost witch-like figure of a woman with a cap of liberty on her head, going to her dismal death. But that sketch is yet unmade, those fingers are only training for it in Paris and Rome, with little thought in their owner's mind of what they yet shall trace. Let us not draw that curtain. It is harder to judge of the character of the queen than of her appearance. Perhaps some words of De Tilly's may help. " A like or a dislike," he says, " was disclosed in her regard more curiously than I have ever seen elsewhere." Impetuous, frivolous, self-willed, affec- tionate, imperious, obstinate, she was very femininely at the mercy of feminine moods. A little less capacity for uncompromising dislike might have saved the mon- archy for a while through Mirabeau; a little less im- perious self -consciousness of royal state might have saved at least the monarchs at the Varennes flight. But this is of the future; we shall be able to judge bet- ter of the queen's character as we trace her tragic story step by step. Those who love the intimacies of great names, the domestic minutiae of great dramas, the little familiar details which bring home past times and the lords and 14 o THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. IX. ladies of old time so much more vividly than the most pompous panegyric or the most chiselled slander, will feel grateful to the Count de Reiset for his two rare, curious, sumptuous, and instructive volumes, " Modes et Usages au Temps de Marie Antoinette." Count de Reiset republishes an account-book of a certain court dressmaker, in which the dresses of the queen and many court-ladies for several years are recorded. This odd document Count de Reiset has raised almost to the dig- nity of a state paper by the magnificent series of illus- trations with which he has embellished it and by his valuable and exhaustive annotations and elucidations. The Count de Reiset adores his queen, and the book is so far one-sided and prejudiced; but there is no book in existence which gives a better idea of what the Old Order was like in France, in its habit as it lived, just before the Revolution. Luckily indeed for those who love the revolutionary period, there is no lack of pre- cious documents. The engravings of the time stand, of course, in the first place. Then, more readily accessible, come the many and magnificent publications of more recent years; the precious and minute series of illustra- tions which the Count de Viel-Castel devoted to the Revolution and Empire; the set of contemporary revo- lutionary costume plates from 1790 to 1793 which has been edited by M. Jules Claretie from the collection of M.Victorien Sardou; the sumptuous illustrated editions of the De Goncourts' books, which cover the whole pe- riod from the Pompadour to the Terror; the labors of the Bibliophile Jacob. These are the most important among many important works which help the curious student of the time to see its men and women, its he- roes and its martyrs, its saints and sinners, in their habit as they lived. 1774-89. THE NEW KING'S GARDEN. 141 CHAPTER X. TRIANON. THERE are certain words which have the power to move all hearers with a profound degree of emotion, and to call up very vivid pictures in the minds of the imaginative. Perhaps of all such spell-words, no one is better to conjure with than the word " Trianon." For the sight or the hearing of that word at once sets fancy working; the mental stage is at once cleared for the daintiest, most pathetic set scene imaginable. That fairy palace, those gracious gardens, the chosen toy, the dearest trinket of the most beautiful and the most ill- starred of queens, arises more or less vaguely, like the shadow-palace of a dream, before the mental vision of the historically sentimental. A little world of rococo decorations, of clipped avenues, of loveliness all ranged and patched and powdered, of noble gentlemen, a little dissolute but very devoted, of piquant abbes and des- perately wicked cardinals and brave Besenvals, and criminal queen-resembling adventuresses, and the cen- tre of all this the enchanting queen herself such is the phantasmagoric image which the word Trianon calls up to the large proportion of persons to whom history is always half romance. Trianon itself was actually the fruit of a queer whim for domesticity which at one pe- riod seized upon that weariest of weary kings, Louis XV. Madame de Pompadour, ever at her wit's end to keep the monarch amused, hit upon the device of pleas- 142 THE FRENCH RE VOLUTION. CH. X. ing her royal lover with bourgeois pleasures and the pursuits of little folk. Louis had always, even as a little child, loved Trianon; he loved it more than ever when the fancy of Madame de Pompadour converted it into a kind of model farm, all pigeons, and cows, and chickens, and kitchen-garden. Here the king and his mistress, with a picked court of gentlemen and pretty women, played a kind of ghostly pastoral; here Louis posed grotesquely enough as a sort of demi-god gentle- man farmer, an eighteenth - century Admetus. It is given to no one now to behold the entire Trianon of Louis XV. Time has buffeted it as mercilessly as it has buffeted Antioch, and much of it has vanished ir- remediably from the face of creation. But "though much is taken, much remains ;" the curious can still please their eyes with the dainty pavilion, with its fan- ciful farmyard decorations of cocks and hens, and its central absurdity of the eagle, supposed to be allegorical of the august Jovism of Louis XV. At first the title " Little Trianon" was not used. The new pleasure-place was called by many names, but not that name. " New Menagerie of Trianon," " Garden of the Menagerie," "New King's Garden" even "Her- mitage " were among its titles. It was not, according to M. Gustave Desjardins, until 1759 that the term "Little Trianon" was habitually used. Louis XV. might very well have called it the garden of experiments. He had an inclination for botany, which he gratified at Trianon by attempting the acclimatization of all manner of exotics. In this he was aided by the most wonderful gardener of the age, Claude Richard, son of an Irishman, and as devoted to horticulture as ever Palissy was to pottery. Claude Richard, who took his orders only from the royal mouth, who took his wages only from the royal 1774-89. A ROYAL GIFT. 143 hand, became the joy of Louis's heart. Under him the gardens throve and extended ; under him the straw- berries, which the king loved best of all fruits, flourished; and through him it came to pass that Bernard, de Jussieu set up his staff at Trianon, and made the botanic garden there the admiration of all Europe. With the advent of Madame du Barry came the ex- ecution of the chateau which had been planned for and by Madame de Pompadour ; the chateau, with all its wealth of gracious pagan pictures, with its wonder- ful Lariot flying-tables, which enabled a king and his company to feast in discreet isolation flying-tables at whose mechanism a certain locksmith named Gamain labored. A chapel too for was not Louis the "most Christian King"? lifted its bell- tower and Mansard roof among the trees. It was at Trianon, within sound of this chapel bell, within sight of this pretty paganism, that Louis XV. was struck by the sudden illness that was to prove mortal. Scandal was flagrantly busy as to the cause of the malady. Enough the fact that on the Tuesday, April 26, 1774, the king came to Little Trianon, that on the following day he complained of ill- ness, that he was removed to Versailles, and died there on May 10, 1774. When the history of Louis the Well- beloved had come to its grisly end, the history of Little Trianon was just about to begin. Louis XV. was not long dead when Louis XVI. made a formal present of Little Trianon to Marie Antoinette. Courtly chroniclers of the event put into Louis's mouth varying extravagant phrases of the petit-maitre type which we may well believe he did not utter. The gift, with or without phrases, was exceedingly welcome to Marie Antoinette. She accepted it, but accepted it on one odd condition. The condition was that the king, her 14 4 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. X. husband, was never to come to Little Trianon except upon her express invitation. Little Trianon was to be her own, her very own, as the children say, and no one, not even her husband, was to set foot therein save with her gra- cious permission. Louis might be King of France ; she was determined to be queen in her little dominion. Louis accepted the terms, and Little Trianon became Marie An- toinette's kingdom in little. The condition was perhaps not a very unnatural one for a frivolous young queen to make. She was anxious above all things to be amused ; she wished to make Little Trianon a very palace of amusement, and Louis, as an inevitable figure, was cer- tainly not likely to be amusing. The queen, it would seem, had no notion of allowing Little Trianon to remain a place for learned experiments. In the insipid allegory of the hour, Minerva was to give place to Venus and the Graces. Poor Bernard de Jus- sieu's Botanical Garden, which had been the joy of the wise, was hardly entreated. The queen wanted to have a garden in that manner which has been called the English manner, which has been called the Chinese manner, and which sought to substitute for Dutch formality French frigidity and a tepid and tedious sham classicism ; the picturesque freedom of an English park or a Chinese pleasure-ground. Nature, as cham- pioned by Horace Walpole and Rousseau, was to triumph over trim alleys of quincunxes ended by the walls painted with landscapes which delighted last-century France as much as it had delighted Pliny and Pompeii. So Bernard de Jussieu's Botanical Garden was abolished -" culbutee," Mercier says turned upside down, and its treasures were rescued from destruction by pious hands, and carted off to not inglorious exile in the Jardin des Plantes. 1774-89. "LITTLE VIENNA." 145 Luckless queen ! Trianon was destined to prove fatal to her fortunes. In almost every point where its history and hers coincide, it was destined to be of evil influence upon her. Through her love for the place arose the rumor the unfounded rumor that she had baptized it anew as the "petit Vienne," or the "petit Schonbrunn," in order to recall to her mind the beloved homes of her girlhood. Nothing could be better qualified to make the queen of evil repute to sensitive French patriotism than the impression that her heart and her sympathies were still all Austrian. The term " Little Vienna " was certainly in the air for a while, even if the queen did not herself directly sanction it, for it even figures, accord- ing to M. Desjardins, in financial accounts for the year 1776. But if. the imprudence of Marie Antoinette had been confined merely to giving rise to an unfortunate nickname for her pleasure-place, there would not have been much harm done. Unfortunately thus bad begins, but worse remains behind. Marie Antoinette's mania for an Anglo-Chinese garden was the opening note in the long gamut of reckless extravagance through which she ran during the early Trianon days. She was soon at odds with Turgot on the question of expense, and it is hard to say how much of Turgot's fall was due to his judicious hostility to the absurd and costly Anglo- Chinese plaything. The indifference, the frivolity, of Marie Antoinette would seem recklessly culpable if we did not duly recol- lect extenuating circumstances. The air of personal authority she cast over Trianon was of itself calculated to irritate the irritable public opinion of Parisian society. At Trianon only the red-and-silver liveries of the queen were to be seen ; the red, white, and blue of the king's servants were nowhere visible. At Trianon too, as after- I, 10 14 6 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. X. wards, and yet more unwisely at St. Cloud, Marie Antoi- nette issued orders and notices signed " de par la Reine " " by the Queen's command " instead of the habitual and authoritative " de par le Roi." An act of this kind in a country where the Salic law was so scrupulously observed and so jealously regarded was light-hearted to a culpable degree. No less foolish was her petulant, if very natural, dislike to the restrictions of courtly custom and convention which led her to practically banish from her little court the solemn and formal Madame de Noailles, whom the queen nicknamed " Madame 1'Eti- quette," whom the palace-ladies called "Madame Ho- nesta," and to establish in her stead the Princess de Chimay. Nor did the queen do much to win the good opinion of the world at large, and the circle of friends in whom she most delighted, by the way in which she allowed herself to be seen rushing from pleasure to pleas- ure, unaccompanied by the king, and escorted only by a young, heedless company, among whom the king's broth- ers, D'Artois and Monsieur, made themselves needlessly conspicuous. In those early Trianon years, Marie An- toinette seemed to think that the life of a great queen had no other, no higher duties than gambling, dancing, extravagant dressing, festals of all kinds, and high-flown, too gallant friendships, which at the best were dangerous flirtations, and which scandal, ever eying for the worst, persisted in regarding as culpable intrigues. Maria The- resa, Mercy, Joseph IT., regarded Marie Antoinette's recklessness with the gravest alarm. Joseph visited his sister in the May of 1777, and no doubt reasoned and reasoned in vain with the sister to whom he was so de- voted that it was with the utmost reluctance that he left Trianon to return to his empire. Mercy declared that the only object of the young queen's life was pleas- 1779. THE QUEEN'S ATTENDANTS. 147 ure. Maria Theresa wrote in 1775 that her daughter was rushing to her ruin, and would be fortunate if she succeeded in preserving the virtues of her rank. The maddest of all the mad deeds of her Trianon reign was done when, in 1779, she fell ill of the measles. Here, for the first time, she took up her abode at Trianon. It was judged best that she should separate herself from the king during the course of the malady, lest Louis, who had never had the measles, should, by taking it, be prevented from attending to affairs of state. The queen, accordingly, left Versailles and settled down at Trianon. What happened then would seem well-nigh impossible to believe if we did not have it on the grave and reluc- tant testimony of Mercy. It is certain that, when the queen went to Trianon, she chose for the attendants on her sick-chamber not, as might be expected, four court ladies, but four gentlemen, and these four gentlemen perhaps the very last that, given such astonishing conditions at all, the queen should have chosen. These four strange attendants were the Duke de Coigny, the Duke de Guines, Count Esterhazy, and Baron de Besenval. The Duke de Coigny was a soldier, forty years of age, neither strikingly good-looking nor conspicuously witty, popular with most persons on account of his good man- ners and his good-nature ; disliked by Mercy on account of the undue influence he seemed to exercise over the queen ; detested by Madame de Polignac for the same reason, and for the efforts he made to overthrow her in- fluence. The Duke de Guines owed his duchy to the queen, who manifested for him the most violent partisanship. He chiefly deserves recollection of an ignoble kind as having been the principal cause of Turgot's overthrow. He had been ambassador in London, where he had earned 148 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. X. the epithet of "magnificent." He had a dubious dis- tinction for coarse conversation, accompanied by a per- fect gravity of countenance. He was fat with a rapidly increasing corpulence, and struggled against this by wear- ing garments so tight that he had to get on a chair and drop into them while they were held out to him by his servant. This, however, was only on days when he had decided to martyrize himself by standing all day ; on days when he condescended to sit down he wore attire of sufficiently loose construction to permit of the process. He was fond of playing on the flute, and had fluted his way into the favor of Frederick the Great and now of Marie Antoinette. Valentin Esterhazy was a young Hungarian gentleman and soldier high in the favor of the queen, to Maria Theresa's annoyance and regret. He seems to have been a comparatively harmless, commonplace, well-mean- ing, feather-headed young man, but the queen delighted to honor him, to correspond with him, to pay his debts. His was perhaps the least amazing, where all were amaz- ing, of the four presences. Undoubtedly the most amaz- ing, where all were amazing, was the Baron de Besenval. Swiss and soldier of nearly sixty years of age, white- haired, courtly, with a bitter wit, cynical, cheaply senti- mental, gallant with a kind of full-flavored barrack-room gallantry, a writer of light tales, a singer of ranz des vaches, he had gained a great influence over the queen, and was said to employ it in the perversion of her mind. Mercy found him pushing, foolish, flippant. In 1775, presuming on his friendship for Marie Antoinette, he went so far as to make her a violent declaration of love, which cost him for some time her favor and intimacy. That she, however, still regarded him as her very close friend, she showed now by choosing him for one of the four astounding guardians of her sick-chamber. 1722-79. BESENVAL. 149 Pierre Victor, Baron of Besenval, is one of the most carious figures of the age. His race sprang from Swiss Savoy; his name was sometimes spelled Beuzenwald and sometimes Besenwald; and we know on the author- rity of an inscription written in a copy of his memoirs belonging to M. Octave Uzanne that his name was right- ly pronounced Bessval. " A la cour et dans 1'ancien monde, nous prononcions Bessval." His mother was a Polish Countess Belinska, of kin with the Leszczynski house; his father was the diplomatist to whom, and not to Goertz or Alberoni, the honor of the idea which pleased Charles XII. of dethroning the King of England was due. Our De Besenval began early in the career of arms; distinguished himself for his gallantry as a soldier, dis- tinguished himself for his gallantry as a lover. Born in 1722, he was campaigning with the Swiss Guards when he was thirteen years old, and he flashes later on through the Seven Years' War, brilliant, foolhardy, a figure as captivating as one of Duraas's musketeers. In the piping times of peace he ruffled it with the wild spirits who surrounded the Duke of Orleans. He ruffled it most especially with 'that young German Count de Frise, the fine flower of the gallantry of the age, whose famous letter to his friend, half prose and half verse like the old chantefable of Aucassin and Nicolete, is one of the daintiest productions of that age of literary dainti- ness. The nephew of the Marshal de Saxe died young, De Besenval lived on, growing more popular, more witty, more audacious as time whitened his locks. Fair, insolent, and lovable, the Prince de Ligne calls him in his de- lightful memoirs, which contain no more delightful pages than those which paint the portrait of Besenval. De Ligne pictures him the hero of a kind of eternal summer, shining at sixty years of age like a young man on the 150 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. X. threshold of his career, conspicuous alike in the brilliant circle of the queen's adorers and among the intrepid hunters whose society pleased the king. He liked to be mixed up in many things; he gained certain courtly privileges by winning certain patents of nobility "of which he had no need, having so much nobility in his soul," and, as for the hunting, surely " a grizzled Swiss lieutenant-general who was present at the death of the Duke of Berwick might very well dispense with being present at the death of the stag forty years later." But that was the character of the man well-preserved, eu- peptic, enjoying himself much and in many ways, car- rying into courtly places something of the coarse salt humors of the barrack-room and the camp. A graceful amateur in the arts of painting and the arts of letters, a lover of'graceful gardens, of graceful women, above all of one most graceful woman, he stands out in vigorous relief from the rest of the courtly rout. He could be faithful to his friends, he had early devoted himself to De Choiseul, and he followed De Choiseul in his disgrace to Chanteloup; he had in him the makings of an excel- lent administrative soldier, as the reforms he effected in his Swiss forces show ; that he could write with a dexterous grace his memoirs and the little pieces that he wrote at Drevenich. during the campaign of 1757 prove. He was a man of too many tastes to do anything really great, but he succeeded at least in being remark- able. There is nothing in the whole history of the Old Order more, strange than this story of the royal illness. The young queen acted like the girl in the Poitau folk-song, who audaciously rejoices in the fact that she has her three lovers to wait upon her: one to brush her clothes, and one to dress her hair, and one to make her bed. She 1749-79. LA POLIGNAC. 151 chose to be attended in her bedchamber by four gentle- men, all alike renowned chiefly for their profligacy, all alike regarded by public scandal as the lovers of Marie Antoinette, all alike able to boast of very special proofs of her favor. Guines could say that for him she had overthrown Turgot ; Esterhazy that she had paid his debts and written him innumerable letters ; Coigny that he owed her many honors ; Besenval that he had ad- dressed her in the words of love and still retained her friendship. What can we think of the queen who was nursed by these four libertines and dandies ; still more, what can we think of the king who knew of this and yet permitted it? Fantastic gallantry never aped more madly since the world began. The four courtiers actu- ally proposed to pass all the night and every night in Marie Antoinette's bedroom. This outrage* at least Mercy managed to prevent. With infinite difficulty he succeeded in arranging that the gentlemen should leave the queen's bedside at eleven at night and return again at seven in the morning. If the queen's name suffered through her men friends, it suffered also through the women she was devoted to. Her friendship for Madame de Lamballe might have passed ; but there was another and even more famous friend of Marie Antoinette, the mention of whose name even now has the power of goading the opponents of the queen to fury. Gabrielle-Yolande-Claude-Martine de Polastron, born in 1749 the same year as the Prin- cess de Lamballe married in 1767 the Count Jules de Polignac. She was not wealthy, neither was her husband; she lived generally away from the court, until she chanced to win the affections of Marie Antoinette and to become one *f the brightest of the fixed stars in the Versailles firmament. The name of Madame 152 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Cn. X. de Polignac is a name to conjure up hatred with. The animosity which assails the queen deepens in acridity when it is addressed to her dearest friend. So intem- perate is some of the language that has been used about her that it would almost seem as if in the eyes of certain writers Madame de Polignac, and Madame de Polignac alone, was responsible for all the evils of the Old Order and all the sorrows of the Revolution. On the other hand, certain other writers have made the inevitable attempt to rehabilitate her character, and, stealing the pigments of the courtly limners of the queen, have paint- ed us a Duchess de Polignac of the most angelic type, modest, retiring, unambitious a sort of eighteenth-cen- tury Una. We may very readily decline to accept either picture. The Duchess de Polignac, as she afterwards became, was a rarely beautiful woman, a rarely charming woman. We can judge in some degree of her beauty still, from her portraits; her charm we must take on trust from the unanimous enthusiasms of aLevis, a Segur, a Tilly, a Besenval, a De la Marck, a Madame Campan, who all agree in their tributes to the singular grace of her character and bearing. Her beauty and her charm completely conquered Marie Antoinette. Her royal friendship for the Princess de Lamballe waned and paled before the hot enthusiasm of her regard for the beautiful wife of Jules de Polignac. Madame de Polignac became one of the most important figures at the court. Whether she was ambitious her- self or not, she naturally became the knot of a little group of ambitious people who hoped to play upon the stops of Madame de Polignac's popularity, to govern the queen through the favorite and the king through the queen. Undoubtedly the influence of Madame de Polignac was not a fortunate influence upon the queen. 1775-79. THE POLIG.VAC PARTY. 153 However innocent Madame de Polignac may have been of any deliberate schemes, she became the centre of a set of schemers ; she belonged by tradition, by interest, by affection, to that worst kind of court party which sees the salvation of a nation only in the comfort of the court, and considers those institutions only possible which mean the maintenance of that court in all possible luxury and all possible authority. The gang who thronged the Poli- gnac salon, who clung around the Polignac skirts, and who hoped to guide the course of the queen's action through the Polignac fingers, were not a gang who were likely to be good advisers for a young and feather-headed queen. A Duke de Guines, who was to help to overthrow Turgot; a Duke de Coigny, who was to come nigh to strik- ing his king ; a Prince de Ligne, writer of incomparable memoirs, but saturated with the ideas of the Old Order ; a Baron de Besenval ; a Count Valentin Esterhazy ; a Count d'Adhemar ; a light Madame de Chalons ; a plain, pleasing, ambitious Diane de Polignac, sister of Jules such were the members of the Polignac cenacle ; such were the advisers, the influencers of the queen. But in condemning the fatal frivolities of Marie An- toinette's early days let us not be blind to the many excuses that can be made for her. She was young, she was beautiful ; she belonged to an age which believed in the divine right of kings and kindred superstitions ; she was flung at an age that had scarcely passed out of childhood into the corruptest court in Europe ; she was surrounded by dangerous enemies and more dan- gerous friends ; she was in daily contact with men whose one idea was to become the favored lover of the queen in the most practical sense, and who were sure to be converted into foes by any rebuff ; worst of all, she was married to Louis XVI. Even under ordinary j54 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. X. conditions Louis XVI. would have been a trying, un- attractive husband for a woman like Marie Antoinette. The monarch who would come to greet his beautiful and dainty consort with hands all grimy from his stithy welt deserved to be called "My god Vulcan" by the Venus of Versailles. But there were graver reasons why Louis XVI. was an unfortunate husband for Marie Antoinette. It seems perfectly certain that Louis XVI., for certain physical reasons, was not the man to make a good husband of ; it seems perfectly certain that for a very long time after the formal marriage Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette were husband and wife only in name. The subject is a delicate one ; it is treated of again and again most indelicately in the gossip, the lampoons, the verses of the day ; it suggests itself often in the early letters of Marie Antoinette to her mother. An operation upon the king's person was essential ; it was long postponed ; it was at last performed and proved successful. The Queen of France became a mother. We need pay no heed to the slanders of Or- leans, who, lusting for the crown himself, declared that "the son of Coigny shall never be my king." We need pay no heed to the sneers of the Count of Prov- ence. There is not the slightest reason to assume for a moment that the children of Marie Antoinette were not the children of Louis XVI. as well. But in nudging the character of Marie Antoinette, in deploring the frivolity, the flightiness which characterized so much of her early court life, we must bear in mind the cu- rious physical conditions which accompanied her mar- ried life, and, remembering how much the happiness of all men and all women depends upon such physical con- ditions, we must be prepared to make much allowance for the beautiful, wayward, unhappy Queen of France. 1770-79. RUMOR'S TONGUES. 155 A great number of names have been from time to time brought forward in good faith and in bad faith as the names of Marie Antoinette's lovers. That she had many lovers in the sense that many men were in love with her, it would be impossible, as it would be absurd, to deny. A young and beautiful woman, a young and beautiful queen, was sure to have any number of adorers. But it is alleged again and again that many of these adorers were lovers in the completest sense of the term. It is impossible to say for certain that Marie Antoinette was as pure as admirers of the type of Burke would fain have her to be. But really the evidence against her is of the weakest kind. Perhaps the gravest is to be found in the memoirs of Lauzun, and we shall see that there is, after all, but little gravity in them. Lauzun was a brilliant blackguard, an incarnation of all the graceful and disgraceful vices of his age. He is the ornament and rose of a foul state, the typical courtier and soldier of a decadent epoch. Educated, as he says, well-nigh upon the lap of Madame de Pom- padour, he soon approved himself a worthy pupil of her philosophy. He lived the life of his time and of his class to the extreme, reeled like a vulgar Faustus from desire to satiety, and from satiety to desire. Life to him was one long round of women, cards, horse-racing, tempered only by occasional facile diplomacy and by a perfect Avillingness to play a soldier's part whenever called upon. His intrigues have made him famous or infamous in an age of intrigue ; his name has become a proverb among the profligate ; he rivals, but he does not surpass, Richelieu. There could hardly be a more perfect proof of the inevitable Revolution than the life of such a man, and yet the life is interesting and emi- nently picturesque. In the evil panorama of his me- 156 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. X. raoirs there is one pretty picture to be gleaned when the lad Lauzun, as yet a child, and standing eagerly upon the threshold of experience, falls in love with the girl act- ress of the theatre. We are reminded of the Daphnis and Chloe of Longus, in their stolen meeting, with its in- nocent, ignorant caresses, a meeting suddenly interrupted by the apparition of a large spider, which neither of them was courageous enough to kill, and which frightened the babyish lovers away, as the spider in our nursery legend frightened away the memorable Miss Muffet. In estimating the character of Marie Antoinette, some importance has been attached by her enemies to the statements of Lauzun. In Lauzun's memoirs he dis- tinctly states that the queen was in love with him, that she practically flung herself at his head, that it was her delight to display her passion for him in the most pro- nounced manner before the whole court, and that if her attachment for him was not actually guilty, it was only because of his superior prudence and reserve. I do not think it is in the least necessary to question the gen- uineness of the memoirs of Lauzun. Talleyrand did indeed vehemently deny, in 1818, their genuineness. But the word of Talleyrand in such a matter need not count for much. A man of Talleyrand's diplomatic mind and unscrupulous spirit would very well be will- ing to clear the memory of his friend by denying the authenticity of his memoirs. To my mind, they are perfectly genuine ; to my mind, they prove nothing whatever against the queen. On Lauzun's own show- ing the queen was never his mistress. He affirms, in- deed, that she was tortured by a guilty passion for him; but Lauzun was one of those men who are vexed by a semi-feminine belief in their own unfailing powers of attraction. The fine flower of a corrupt court and a 1749-94. LAUZUX AND HIS MEMOIRS. 157 corrupt age, he had made so many conquests, enjoyed so many intrigues, played at love with so many pretty women of all kinds, actresses and aristocrats, that he had come to believe himself irresistible. The victim of a semi-sentimentalized erotomania, he saw every- where the victims of his charms, and it is not sur- prising that he imagined the queen herself to be his slave. That he was a despicable rascal, a disgrace to the name of gentleman, an unchivalrous rogue, his me- moirs make sufficiently clear. With his morality, with the morality of the women who loved him or lusted after him, we have nothing to do. It is the baseness of heart which led him to set his love-secrets down on paper, to betray with incredible meanness the long suc- cession of his mistresses, which makes him loathsome in all eyes. It is, indeed, a striking tribute to the vir- tue of Marie Antoinette that this slanderous cur did not dare to describe her as his mistress. It is hard to know what held his unscrupulous hand, and we can only conceive that some glimmering tradition of truth- fulness, while allowing him to warp a few signs of royal favor into the declarations of a guilty passion, did not permit him directly to state in defiance of the facts that he had been, actually and physically, the queen's lover. The very interview which he describes with the queen, in which he pictures Marie Antoinette as falling into his arms and well-nigh soliciting his em- braces, is to be very differently understood when in- terpreted by the light of Madame Campan's statements. She mentions the interview, declares that the door of the queen's room was opened, that Marie Antoinette indig- nantly ordered Lauzun to leave her, that Lauzun depart- ed in silence, and that the queen, turning to Madame Cam- pan, said, " That man shall never come near me again," 158 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. X. Lauzun's later actions are much more characteristic of the impertinent lover, repulsed and revengeful, than of the triumphant favorite of the queen. He became one of her bitterest enemies, and went his unworthy wav to his doom. It is fortunate for history that this ungentle gentleman was not as unprincipled a liar as he was a profligate. While we shudder over the treach- ery with which be revenged his mortified vanity by writing down his calumny of. the queen, we cannot but rejoice that he did no more. It would have been so easy for him just then to lie harder, to pull a longer bow. As it is, his memoirs are not much of a weapon against the character of Marie Antoinette. There is, of course, nothing inherently impossible in the sugges- tion that Marie Antoinette may have been attracted by such a handsome court butterfly as Lauzun. We must remember the conditions of the courtly life ; we must remember the profound corruption of manners, of mo- rality, of literature, of the time ; we must remember the extraordinary blending of scepticism and sentimen- tality which characterized the refined depravity of the century, in estimating the character of the queen and of any other woman of that age. The court of France was not an atmosphere in which virtue flourished. The conditions of Marie Antoinette's life were exception- ally unfavorable to virtue. Married in her early youth to a passionless man of sluggish blood, denied the wifely rights for long enough, troubled in body and soul by such physical indifference, surrounded by homage, com- pliment, adoration ; what an ordeal for such a woman in such an age ! Unhappily Louis XVI. was not the kind of monarch to mellow with time ; he was not, in the words of Du- roas's Planchet, a "bonne pate d'homme/' and time 1774-89. A COMIC KING. 159 only intensified his defects. If he was weak and fool- ish when he came to the throne, he was weak and fool- ish still after many years of reign. Physically he so- lidified, mentally he stultified into a monarch more and more ridiculous, more and more unsuited to the critical conditions of the time. It is a little ironical that his very virtues were in some respects his greatest failings. We may wonder when we find a Count de Tilly declaring that "a king steeped in vices and im- moralities might possibly have saved us, but we were fated to perish through a king whose weakness neutral- ized all his virtues." Yet it is just possible that a king like Henri Quatre, if such a king could have sprung from the weakened Bourbon blood, a king like Louis Quatorze, might have for the time being saved "us" saved, that is, the nobility that did not in the least de- serve saving. But Louis XVI. was not the man to save anything except his pocket money. His bour- geois virtues looked ridiculous to a court that lusted after the recollections of the late reign and the tradi- tions of the Regency, and outside the circle of the court they either were not believed in or failed to make the least impression. The poor man who might have been happy enough as a small shopkeeper, or better still as a small gamekeeper, was ludicrously out of place in his unwelcome trade of king. To the world at large, Louis XVI. in 1789 was a feeble, vacillating, comic individ- ual, at once shy and brutal, with a weakness for mean economies, and a weakness for too much wine the de- graded and unlovely Gambrinus of a comic opera. A king may be many things and hold his crown fast ; but there is one thing he must never be, and that is, comic. Good-bye to the king who is the laughing-stock of his people. It is all very well to be the King Yvetot of a 160 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. X. broad ballad ; but the nightcap of Beranger's monarch contrasts too oddly with the imperial purple of the throne. It is by no means clear that the accusations made against Louis of an overfondness for the flagon were based on very substantial facts. He is defended against the accusation, not too skilfully, by the Count d'Hezecques. But it was enough for him to be re- garded by the people at large as the " drunkard king," and, were he as abstemious as Pythagoras, it would be of no avail. Caricaturing Paris stuck a bottle into the pocket of the monarch it derided ; Louis had the same unhappy sort of reputation which in after-days fell upon that Prussian king who was so unjustly baptized as " King Clicquot." If Louis did drink, we may be sure it was with no such poetic pleasure in red wine as that which animates the Persian of Hafiz, the Greek of the pseudo-Anacreon, or the Vaux de Vire of Olivier Basselin. His drinking must have been a stolid sort of business. The picture we have of him coming back from the chase at Rambouillet, half asleep, heavy, daz- zled by the lights, helped up-stairs by obsequious, sneer- ing valets, who assume their weary king to be dead drunk, is not a kingly picture. Louis always had a kind of gross interest in his food, which we shall find yet coming out, comically and yet pathetically crude, at a time when other thoughts than the thoughts of wine and chicken would better have become him. If he was derided by the public, Louis was little loved in the circles of the court. He was shy, and his shyness made him hate new faces ; he was rough and rude, and his rudeness made him incessant enemies, whom he could ill afford to have as enemies. His only serious passion and preoccupation was the chase, and his famous diary is one of the most dismal monuments 1774-89. AN UNKINGLY KING. 161 of human folly that fantastic chance has preserved to us. His queer habit of putting down the word "rien," "nothing," on every day when he did not hunt some- thing has caused some of the most ironic juxtaposi- tions in this journal. As, for example, where we find such entries as these : " To-day nothing ; remonstrances of the Parliament." "Nothing ; death of M. de Mau- repas." "Nothing; retirement of M. Necker." Other entries yet more significant will be made in that diary before the~ poor king is done with it. He was only happy when he was hunting, killing all manner of game, from the wild boar and the stag to the simple swallow ; he was unhappy when a cold in his head or some ab- surd matter in connection with the government of the country interfered with his pastime. It was a great priv- ilege to be permitted to join in the royal hunting-par- ties, and yet by no means always a pleasant privilege- Tremendous proofs of nobility going back to the fif- teenth century had to be furnished, and when they were furnished the bearer of some illustrious or ancient name often found the glory of- sharing in the royal pleasure sorely discounted by the ignominy of having to endure the running fire of the somewhat brutal royal pleasantries at the expense of the bearer of an unfamil- iar face. The ordinary enjoyments of the court were detest- able to Louis. He hated late hours ; he hated come- dies and parties ; he hated all play save loto and whist for small stakes ; he hated, indeed, everything courtly except the solemnities of courtly ceremonial which al- lowed him to mask his native timidity under the frigid mask of etiquette. His native timidity needed some such mask. The king's bearing was not kingly ; the royal face was not royal. From the loyal portraits of I. 11 162 THE FKENCH REVOLUTION. CH. X. the time that flatter the lineaments of a failing race, from the savage caricatures that accentuate malignly all its defects, from servility and from satire alike, we can gather a fairly clear impression of that weak, com- monplace face, with its high, slanting forehead, its full nose, its protruding lips, weak chin, swollen, flabby jowl and thick neck. It was a foolish face, with its whimsi- cal, vacant expression of rustic good-humor spreading over its heavy cheeks and prominent lack-lustre eyes, its heavy, drooping eyelids and thick ej^ebrows. Ma- dame Campan, who would no doubt willingly flatter, tries to infuse a tinge of melancholy into the vapid beatitude of the face, but has to admit, what every one else from De Besenval to D'Allonville admits, that Louis lacked all nobility of carriage. The less courtly criti- cism of Barere depicts the unwholesomely pale face, the expressionless bluish eyes, the loud laugh that had some- thing imbecile in its mirth, the ignoble massiveness of the bulk, the hopeless awkwardness of the bearing. That he was slovenly to a degree, even Campan admits, and her waiting-maid mind despairs over his ill-adjusted clothes and the persistent untidiness of his hair. There never was a king less calculated to dominate a brilliant, audacious, and corrupt court, to impress a sceptical and critical people, and to captivate a beautiful and ambi- tious wife. Destiny did the house of Capet the worst turn in the world when it adorned its line with a prince endowed with many virtues, and no capacity for using those virtues for the benefit of his people, his party, or himself. But if the king was bad from the kingly standpoint, perhaps his two royal brothers of Provence and Artois were worse. If Louis XVI. was a stupid king, Prov- ence and Artois would not have done any better in his 1774-89. BROTHER OF PROVENCE. 163 place ; the time was yet to come when they did for a season sit on the royal throne, each in his turn, and not distinguish themselves. That is far ahead. When Ma- rie Antoinette first saw them they were still very young, with the graces and the possibilities of youth. In 1789 they had given their measure, and a very bad measure too. But they were very different from the king, and very different from each other. It was said of them that they only resembled each other in one thing their mar- riages. They had married two sisters, princesses of the house of Piedmont princesses whom nobody much liked, and who were conspicuous for no great merits or defects. In all other things Provence and Artois were wide as the poles asunder. Provence was plethoric, pompous, priggish, a huge eater and drinker, with un- wieldy body swollen by overfeeding and lack of exer- cise. On his ungainly existence an affectation of liter- ature and learning sat most ungracefully. It pleased him to pose as a man of taste, to linger long hours in his library, to write little mean paragraphs for the press, and little mean pamphlets, to ape a philosophic calm. When the expected birth of a dauphin dispelled his im- mediate and fondly cherished hopes for a swift succes- sion hopes that were flattered and fostered by a little army of adulators he wrote about his disappointment with a pedantic assumption of serenity which seems sufficiently ridiculous to us, and seemed, let us hope, sufficiently ridiculous to the King of Sweden, to whom it was addressed. He liked to get about him men of letters, wits, and scholars, to quote verses with an as- sumption of intelligence, and to parade fragments of Latin. In appearance he was like the king, his brother, but with a difference. The forehead was lower, the nose smaller, the chin less feeble, the throat less full, 164 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. X. the general expression less benign. There was some- thing irritable, something sourly aggressive, something rat-like about his countenance which was curiously dis- agreeable. Artois was strikingly unlike his royal brother or his brother Provence in character. He seems to have start- ed in life with the determination to be, like Young Mar- low, an Agreeable Rattle, and to have succeeded in mak- ing himself a Disagreeable Rattle. In his youth he strove to play that kind of page part which was not then typified and immortalized by Beaumarchais's Cher- ubin, and he continued to play the same part long after it had ceased in the least degree to become him. He was as frivolous and empty-headed as a man well could be, and seemed to take a kind of pitiable pride in his frivol- ity and his empty head. He loved to gamble, to revel in a kind of skittish, skipping, grotesquely boyish kind of way, which had in it nothing so dignified as the dog- gedness of the vices of Orleans, nor so unconscious and innate as the vices of Lauzun. Where his brother Provence played at pedant, he played at profligate ; the queen liked him as much as she disliked Provence ; he did his best gravely to compromise the queen by the intolerable license of his manners and speech to her manners and speech which aroused time and again the indignation and the protests of Mercy. He was better- looking than Provence, brisker in expression, of a fairer favor, alerter in his bearing, a sufficiently dashing, sol- dierly prince. He it is of whom Mercier tells the tale of his skin-tight breeches into which he had to be dropped by four tall lackeys the most interesting tale about him. Such were the prominent persons in the great court drama, such the meddlers and muddlers who were finally 1774-89. NEGLECTED OPPORTUNITIES. 165 to laud France in full revolution and send the fine flower of the French nobility skipping basely over the frontier. The courtly party had their chance time and again ; sal- vation lay in their way more than once, and they daffed it lightly aside. Salvation was never nearer to them than now, when a Minister of Marine was called to the Controllership of the Finances, and what looked like a fair field lay open to Turgot. 166 TilE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XI. CHAPTER XI. TURGOT. IP the god Thor, oblivious for the moment of his hammer and his goats and the tests of Utgarda Loke, could have looked down from his cloudy Scandinavian heaven upon France in the middle of the eighteenth century, he might have seen a sight in which he might naturally be expected to take an interest. A youthful abbe in his clerical cassock playing at battledore and shuttlecock with an exceedingly pretty young lady whom he called Minette such was the idyllic sight which might be supposed to deserve the attention of the war- god of the North. For that alert young abbe, with the wise, boyish face, who seemed so devoted to the dainty Minette, was actually the war-god's namesake, and his ancestors, it would seem, claimed to be sprung from the war-god's loins. The young abbe's name was Turgot, and Turgot means Thor God, and it might have sur- prised and perplexed the Thor God of the hammer to know that the Thor God of the battledore was going to accomplish things more amazing than any recorded of his illustrious ancestor, and was to help to shake the foundations of the established world. The great Turgot was born in Paris on May 10, 1727. He came of an excellent Normandy breed, rich in suc- cessful names. Somewhere in the sixteenth century the family branched into two, the Turgots of Tourailles and the Turgots of Saint-Glair. Our Turgot came of the 1727-81. TURGOT. 167 Saint-Glairs. It is curious to find that in the early sev- enteenth century a Turgot of Tourailles knocked on the head in a scuffle by an inn a certain Protestant soldier of fortune named Montchretien. This Montchretien had written some tragedies of no importance and a prose work of very considerable importance, because it brought for the first time a very famous term into literature. Montchretien's book was called " Traite d'Econoinie Po- litique." It is a curious example of the " supreme ironic procession" part of existence that the inventor of the term "political economy" should meet his death at the hands of a namesake of one of the most famous teachers of political economy who ever lived. Our Turgot was the youngest son of Michel Etienne Turgot, an excellent prevot des marchands in Paris and builder of a dram as famous as that of Tarquinius Pris- ons. Michel Etienne had one daughter, who married the Duke de Saint- Aignan, and three sons, of whom the eldest became a sufficiently eminent magistrate and the second a sufficiently eminent soldier. The third son was a curious blend of precocity and timidity. All his life he was awkward, bashful, nervous ; all his life, too, he preserved the extraordinary capacity for study, the ex- traordinary power of work, which characterized his early youth. He was educated at that College Louis-le-Grand upon whose roll such strange names were yet to be in- scribed ; while he was only sixteen years old he attended the theological lectures at the Sorbonne, and, after ob- taining special permission, on account of his youth, to be examined, passed his examination with conspicuous success. The young Abbe de Laulne he bore this name from a paternal estate rose from success to success, passed examination after examination brilliantly, was elected a prior of Sorbonne, made some admirable Latin 1(58 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Cu. XI. speeches in fulfilment of the duties of the office, and wrote his first work on political economy in attack upon Law's system. His friends were enthusiastic, pressed him to enter the Church, predicted speedy bishoprics ; but to their surprise and disappointment Turgot an- nounced his intention of giving up the Church, and in the December of 1750 he definitely left the Sorbonne, and turned his thoughts to other things. Even in that age of astonishing young men Turgot was astonishing. He was only twenty-three years old when he left the Sorbonne, but he was already an ac- complished economist, a profound thinker, a theoretic statesman. Leon Say says of him that while he was yet at the Sorbonne he had already in his mind everything which came out of it afterwards, and that the work of the last thirty years of his life was merely the produc- tion in broad daylight of the mental stores acquired in the Sorbonne. From the moment of his leaving the Sorbonne to the moment in which the controllei'-gener- alship came into his hands, life was for Turgot a series of repeated triumphs. His final fall was, could he but have known it, but his greatest triumph. Deputy So- licitor-General, Councillor in the Parliament, Maitre des Requetes, Limoges Intendant, these are the stepping- stones of his progress from 1752 to 1761. During all that period he moved and shone in the most cultured Parisian society. He was a friend of Madame Geoff rin, of Mademoiselle de 1'Espinasse, of Madame de Graffigny, of Condorcet, of Helvetius, of D'Alembert and the brill- iant Encyclopaedic stars, of the excellent Morellet, of Quesnay and Quesnay's devoted servant, old Mirabeau the "friend of man," of Gournay. He was the corre- spondent of Adam Smith, whom he met later at Ques- nay's house ; he was the friend and correspondent of 1W1-61. TURGOT AX ENCYCLOPEDIST 169 Voltaire though correspondence came near once to severing the friendship. He was for a little while the acquaintance of Madame du Deffand and of her great friend the Duke de Choiseul, but the acquaintance soon faded out of existence and merged on the part of Ma- dame du Deffand and De Choiseul into active dislike. He was the friend and something more than the friend of the beautiful Mademoiselle de Ligneville, whom her aunt Madame de Graftigny always called Minette. It is one of the minor mysteries of history why Turgot did not marry Minette. They seem to have been tenderly attached ; excellent Morellet is in despair because the attachment did not end in marriage. Some solve the problem by suggesting, without decisively proving, that Turgot was actually in holy orders at the time. Others consider that he was too busy, too practical a man to hamper his career with the cares of a wife and a possible family. Others, again, suggest that Turgot, threatened with hereditary gout and convinced that it was the des- tiny of his race to be short-lived, was unwilling to link a woman's fate with his. Whatever the reasons, the certain fact remains that Turgot did not marry Minette or any one else, that Minette married the wise Helvetius, and that Turgot and Madame Helvetius remained f riend-s all their lives. la 1751 the first volume of the famous "Encyclopae- dia " made its appearance. Turgot was soon drawn into the magic circle of its contributors, and wrote five ar- ticles for it, on Etymology, Existence, Expansibility, Fairs and Markets, and Endowments. The article on "Existence" made its mark upon thinkers then, has made its mark upon thinkers since. But though Tur- got's connection with the "Encyclopaedia" was brilliant, it was not of long duration. An imbecile government 1/70 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XI. suppressed the "Encyclopaedia," and Turgot, as an offi- cial servant of that government, did not think it be- coming or compatible with his duties to leave his name upon the Encyclopaedic list. It is to be regretted that the fine genius of Turgot could not continue to be asso- ciated to the end with the monumental work of the "Encyclopaedia," more indeed for the sake of the "En- cyclopaedia" than for the sake of Turgot. His own written works are not voluminous, but they are abun- dant, inasmuch as they set forth sufficiently the eco- nomic doctrines of his life, that life which was in itself the best and the most convincing of all his works. On August 8, 1761, Turgot was appointed to the in- tendance of Limoges, and for thirteen years, until 1774, he devoted himself to his task and tempered his theo- retic soul in the practical work of statesmanship. The duties of an iutendant were many and varied, the power of an intendant very considerable. At that time France was divided into forty military divisions called Prov- inces, under the command of a governor, and thirty-five administrative circumscriptions called "generalites," un- der the direction of an intendant. Like most of the other administrative arrangements of the Old Order, these divisions were very muddled and confusing. The provinces and generalities were not uniform in extent or identical in limit. They overlapped each other so much that there were generally several intendants for one governor and several governors for one intendant. The functions of governor and intendant were entirely independent. The intendants looked after the police, the militia, and public charities ; they had the power of deciding on litigious cases connected with taxes ; they were maitres des requetes, and had the right to sit with the other maitres des requetes when in Paris ; they 1761-74. TtRGOTS REFORMS. 171 were in the first place financial agents. Turgot now entered upon all these various and complex duties and proceeded to amaze his peers. Never before, unhappily for the Old Order, had such an intendant been known. Unhappily, too, for most of the adherents of the Old Order, they never wanted to see such an intendant again. Still more unhappily for them, they did not get the chance. Turgot found himself in the midst of a network of corrupt and degrading traditions, which he proceeded to break through with the ease and the determination of the strong man. He found the people suffering griev- ously under the oppressions and exactions of the greater and the lesser nobility, and he set to work with uncom- promising courage to reform it altogether. Naturally enough, he won the affection of the peasantry, not much given as a rule to entertaining affectionate feelings tow- ards their intendants. Naturally, too, he won the de- testation of the astounded and indignant nobility and gentry. That an intendant, one of a class that had always thought with them and acted with them, should take it upon himself to interfere with their privileges and to write and talk preposterously about ameliorat- ing the lot of the peasantry was an innovation of a kind not to be endured. For thirteen years they had to en- dure it, however, while Turgot toiled at improvement of taxation, at making a survey of the province, and strove with Angouleme crisis, with dearth of cereals, with opposition to free circulation of corn, with an im- possible Abbe Terray. The irritated and offended no- bility held Turgot up to execration as a "man of sys- tem." "The name of a man of system," Turgot himself has written, " has become a kind of weapon on the lips of all persons either prejudiced or interested in retain- 172 TQE FRENCH REVoLtmoN. CH. XI. ing certain abuses ; and it is levelled against all those who propose changes in any order of ideas whatever." Never did Turgot give greater proof of the extraor- dinary vitality and varied powers of his mind than during this period of his Limoges intendance. While he was grappling so heroically with the difficulties in the way of a reforming intendant, while he was trav- elling all over his province in the wildest winter sea- sons heedless of the gout and rheumatism that racked him, while he was pouring out those letters and pam- phlets which are so many precious state papers of po- litical economy, he still found time to keep up a large correspondence with many familiar friends Caillard, Hume, Condorcet, and others and to practise some of those graceful literary exercises which are usually the decorous occupation of a learned leisure. He seemed certainly to justify the saying that the great things are only done by those who have no time to do them in. Among Turgot's literary enterprises about this time was an ambitious attempt to revive the laws which gov- ern the prosody of the ancient Greeks and Romans for the benefit of French versification. The dream of hap- pily adapting the hexameter to the tongues of modern Europe has been dreamed by more than one scholar in every scholastic generation. Turgot followed the dream so far as to render into French hexameters the fourth book of Virgil's " ^Eneid." The result is not exhilarat- ing to students of French verse. If the exquisitely melo- dious genius of Ronsard and his brilliant stars suffered slightly from a too enthusiastic classicism, such metri- cal talents as Turgot possessed suffered heavily in the majestic Olympian measure. But, unluckily, Turgot was as proud of his verses as Richelieu had been of his tragedy, as most men of genius are of some enterprise 1761-74. VOLTAIRE'S CRITICISM. 173 curiously out of the scope of their genius. He ad- mired his hexameters immensely, but he was not con- tent with his own admiration. He wanted the admira- tion of Voltaire himself, the aged autocrat of belles- lettres, and to win that admiration unbiassed he caused Caillard to send them to Voltaire as the production of an unknown Abbe de Laage. Alas for Turgot's ambi- tion ! Voltaire at first gave no opinion ; at last, and upon pressure, he wrote a pathetic little letter, in which he pleaded old age and waning sight as his excuse for delay in expressing his satisfaction at what he consid- ered to be a very excellent translation in prose. That " in prose " was a bitter sting to Turgot's vanity. Vol- taire was doubtless innocent of the slightest sarcasm, but the very innocence of the criticism only made the matter worse, and Turgot said some very bitter things about Voltaire's lack of reasoning faculty. Nobody now, we should imagine, pastures his classic instincts upon Turgot's travesty, more gravely intended than Scarron's, of the "^Eneid." But one effort of his has made its mark upon what Turgot's English contempora- ries would have called polite literature, the line he wrote under a portrait of Benjamin Franklin: "Eripuit caelo fulmen, sceptrumque tyrannis " a line which might well have prophetically referred to other sceptres and other tyrants than those Turgot had in his mind. Happily, however, it is not upon his neat- ly turned Latin epigrams any more than upon his labo- rious Gneco-Gallic hexameters that Turgot's claim to the admiration of the world depends. The world will remember the "Lettres sur la Liberte du Commerce des Grains," and the " Reflexions sur la Formation et la Dis- tribution des Richesses," when it has forgotten that the !74 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XI. great economist was also expert in Latinity and ambi- tious of a translator's fame. When Turgot had been thirteen years intendant at Limoges he had made his mark pretty plainly upon such public opinion as then existed ; he was recognized by a large party in France as the champion of reform : the one thing needful for the due carrying out of his plans was that he should become a cabinet minister. The same fair fortune that had served him hitherto at every step of his career stood him in good stead now. He be- came a cabinet minister. A new order of things had come about. Louis XV., Louis the Well-beloved, had been hurried to his dishon- ored grave. Louis XVI. was King of France, and the grim question, "How would Berry pull through with it?" was about to be answered in all earnest. Berry had begun, as we have seen, by making De Maurepas his prime-minister, by sending D'Aiguillon to the right- about, and by making it pretty plain to the two other sides of that ingenious political triangle, Maupeou and Terray, that they were not likely to adorn their own offices much longer. Who was to take Terray's place ? Who was to be the new Controller-General ? The Abbe de Very, Turgot's intimate friend and the intimate friend of Maurepas, said, emphatically, Turgot. The enthusiastic and intelligent Duchess D'Enville, of the antique La Rochefoucauld line, with which Maurepas was so proud to be linked, said, emphatically, Turgot. The Countess de Maurepas also said, Turgot. Under these conditions Maurepas was very willing ; and thus it came to pass that Turgot was brought into the cabi- net, appointed first of all to the Navy, and then one month later, in August, 1774, to the coveted Controller- Generalship. 1774. TURGOT CONTROLLER-GENERAL. 175 It seemed at first that Turgot would have to encoun- ter no very great difficulties in his new office. It seemed so at least to the indifferent lookers-on, who do not al- ways see most of the, game. Turgot himself appreci- ated more keenly the dangers in his way. The young, beautiful, imperious queen, with her love for entertain- ment, for all that makes life amusing, and that costs a great deal of money, was not likely to be much of an aid to a reforming minister bent specially on inculcating economy upon an exceptionally weak king. Marie An- toinette did indeed write to her mother that Turgot en- joyed "the reputation of being a very honest man," using, in so doing, almost exactly the words employed by Mercy in his letter to Maria Theresa upon Turgot. But when Marie Antoinette wrote those words she had not yet found the " very honest man " running counter to any of her wishes. As for the king, be appeared to be as pleased with his new controller-general as if he were a new and ingenious lock. The meeting between them at Compiegne, when Turgot came to thank him for the appointment, seems to have been most royal, most effective. Turgot was all gratitude, but he was also all determination ; Louis was every inch a king of the nobly benevolent type. With an excess of gener- ous enthusiasm which was doubtless genuine enough at the time, he pledged himself to Turgot beforehand by his word of honor "to share all your views, and always support you in the courageous steps you will have to take." Poor Louis ! If Turgot had known him better he would have known how little those high-sounding words represented the real workings of that well-mean- ing, most unstable mind. But Turgot was not unnatu- rally hopeful. He entered upon office in the character of a reforming minister, and he proceeded at once to i-76 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XI. play his part. The programme he presented to the king had the merits of brevity and simplicity. It was ex- pressed in three terse points " no bankruptcy, no in- crease in the loans, no taxation." This was the nega- tive policy ; the positive policy, the policy that was to make all this possible, was simpler and shorter still. It was summed up in one phrase " Reduce the expendi- ture." Only reduce the expenditure and all will be well. It was simple enough ; but under the condi- tions, as Turgot had yet to find, it had the sovereign defect of being impossible. It would be, perhaps, too rash to say although the statement might be defended that if Turgot had been able to carry out thoroughly his programme, with all that it involved, the Revolution would never have taken place. But it is certain that if Turgot had been allowed a free hand, the Revolution would have been very dif- ferent from what it was. Suppose that Turgot had been able to realize all his hopes ; suppose that he had re- organized the financial condition of France, had crushed the old evil privileges out of existence, h#d lopped away the bulk of the abuses, had established the freedom of industry and commerce, then the majority of the causes which created the Revolution of 1789 would have ceased to exist. But unhappily for Turgot, and still more unhappily for his enemies, Turgot was not given a free hand. He was not a revolutionist at all in any sane sense of the word, but he was regarded by his ad- versaries as if he had been the wildest of revolutionary fanatics. The farmers-general were terribly fluttered in their dovecots, the Terrays and their kind were hot against him ; privilege was up in arms everywhere. Turgot soon began to show that he was in earnest in his notions of reform. He began by dismissing Brochet 1774-76. REFORM. 177 de Saint- Prest, the director of the Corn Agency, the dme