ENDINGS

“I cannot eate but lytle meate,my stomacke is not good;But sure I thinke that I can drynkewith him that weares a hood.Thoughe I go bare, take ye no care,I am nothinge acolde:“I stuffe my skyn so full withinof joly good Ale and olde.Back and syde go bare, go bare,both foote and hand go colde:But, belly, God send thee good ale inoughewhether it be new or olde”:—

“I cannot eate but lytle meate,my stomacke is not good;But sure I thinke that I can drynkewith him that weares a hood.Thoughe I go bare, take ye no care,I am nothinge acolde:

“I cannot eate but lytle meate,

my stomacke is not good;

But sure I thinke that I can drynke

with him that weares a hood.

Thoughe I go bare, take ye no care,

I am nothinge acolde:

“I stuffe my skyn so full withinof joly good Ale and olde.Back and syde go bare, go bare,both foote and hand go colde:But, belly, God send thee good ale inoughewhether it be new or olde”:—

“I stuffe my skyn so full within

of joly good Ale and olde.

Back and syde go bare, go bare,

both foote and hand go colde:

But, belly, God send thee good ale inoughe

whether it be new or olde”:—

and so on for four clinking verses. The thing is a triumph; it sings itself. Out of its rollicking rhythm a kind of haze of romance has piled up,which select spirits like Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton still see as a rosy cloud. I suppose it is all right.

But the language of those “merrie” people! There was only one injurious thing for woman to call woman: it was reflected in man’s accusation of man. If you named a woman the thing—and you always did—you named a man the thing’s son. The impact varied according to the temper of the accuser. It pricked you to madness if anger lay behind it; often it was a term of affection. Gammer Gurton so called Tib her maid, Dame Chat her girl Doll; but that was to coax them. When the beldams belaboured each other with the imputation they made the fur to fly. Exactly that impotence of expression, even in moods of malice, is observable to-day—but in towns, not in the country. I have lived twenty years in a village and never heard the taunt so much as whispered by one to another. But then nobody gets drunk out here now. Is there a holding link between ale and sterility of language? I suppose there must be.

Religion provides the only other expletives there are inGammer Gurton, and that makes the date of it an interesting matter. No earlier edition appears to be known than that of 1575; but a play calledDyccon of Bedlamwas licensed to be printed in 1562, and one by the presumed author ofGammer Gurtonwas acted at Christ’s College in 1553-4. However all that may fit in, there are internal evidences very much to the point. In the fifth act the bailiff is charged by the priest with Dick of Bedlam’s arrest. “In the King’sname, Master Bayly, I charge you set him fast,” he says. That might be Edward VI if the Prologue had not an allusion directly in conflict with it:

“Dame Chat her deare gossyp this needle had found;Yet knew shee no more of this matter (alas)Than knoeth Tom our Clarke what the Priest saith at masse.”

“Dame Chat her deare gossyp this needle had found;

Yet knew shee no more of this matter (alas)

Than knoeth Tom our Clarke what the Priest saith at masse.”

Is that reminiscence of old practice? Hardly that, for if the mass was then being said in English it would be quite pointless. Beyond that, the play is crammed with Catholic catchwords, all of them oaths. “Gog’s bread,” “Gog’s sydes,” “Gog’s malte”; numberless Our Ladys; “by gys” (by Jesus); finally this:

“There I will have you sweare by our dere Lady of Bullaine,S. Dunstone, and S. Donnyke, with the three Kings of Kullaine,That ye shall keepe it secret....”

“There I will have you sweare by our dere Lady of Bullaine,

S. Dunstone, and S. Donnyke, with the three Kings of Kullaine,

That ye shall keepe it secret....”

These things point to a familiarity with Catholic usage, whichever way you take them, exceedingly interesting. The chief thing which they point out to me is that there was no religious sense in the peasantry at all. The names and symbols of worship were augmentives of conversation, but no more. They meant nothing, and implied nothing but use and wont. Catholicism expired and Calvinism did not thrive, for the same reason.Neither of them touched the heart of the peasantry, which remained what it had been throughout, innately pagan, follower (as I put it) of Saint Use, but of no other divinity. That is as far as one has been able to go. CertainlyGammer Gurtonwill take us no further.

Dullness, bestiality, grossness: these stare you in the face. Between the lines of them you may discern the squalor and the penury of village life in Merrie England. Take this:

Gammer: “Come hether, Cocke; what, Cocke I say.Cocke: Howe, Gammer?Gammer: Goe hy thee soone, and grope behind the old brasse pan,Ther shalt thou fynd an old shooe, wherin if thou looke wellThou shalt fynd lyeng an inche of whyte tallow candell,Lyght it, and brynge it tite awaye.”

Gammer: “Come hether, Cocke; what, Cocke I say.

Cocke: Howe, Gammer?

Gammer: Goe hy thee soone, and grope behind the old brasse pan,Ther shalt thou fynd an old shooe, wherin if thou looke wellThou shalt fynd lyeng an inche of whyte tallow candell,Lyght it, and brynge it tite awaye.”

Gammer: Goe hy thee soone, and grope behind the old brasse pan,

Ther shalt thou fynd an old shooe, wherin if thou looke well

Thou shalt fynd lyeng an inche of whyte tallow candell,

Lyght it, and brynge it tite awaye.”

If that does not bring them home to us nothing will do it—except perhaps this:

“And home she went as brag, as it had ben a bodelouce.”

Not very long ago I took occasion to inquire into the beginnings of books. I found that the rules were simple, the formulæ few, and the practice seldom varied until near our own times. If you were an Epic poet, you invoked the Muse and stated the theme in which you desired her assistance; if you wrote prose narrative, you began with “Once upon a time,” or “There was a man,” and went on from there. You began, in fact, at the beginning; but if you were romantically inclined you contrived somehow to insinuate a hint of colour and what the artists call atmosphere. Whichever you were, poet or prosateur, like a musician, you had a prelude, and gave it as much work as it was capable of bearing, and sometimes rather more than it could bear. No matter for that: everything was in your favour: hope was high in your breast, and, no doubt, in your hearer’s or reader’s. The rules were simple; you laid out the theme, and off you went.

But theendingof your work is a very different thing. There are no formulæ for that. You are at the stretch of your tether, either thankfully or not; you are in your public’s discretion; however you take it, you are judged already. You may amend all by your ending, or you may make weariness more weary. In any case, you have somehow to “get off with it,” and will find thatyour shifts to make a good end to your adventure are not easily reduced to rule or comfortably suited by convention. We don’t hear so many sermons as we did; yet most of us know by experience that it is one thing for a clergyman to open upon his text, and quite another for him to turn to the East with credit. If he have prepared his peroration, and the way to it—what I may call hiscodaandfinale—well or ill, he will let it off. If he have not, then in addition to his anxious care for what he is to say, he will have another for what he must by no means say. Let him beware, for example, of using the hortatory words “And now”; for so surely as he pronounces them the congregation will rise as one man, and then nothing for it but the rest of the Ascription. I have known that happen more than once, and never faced the preacher with nerve enough to reseat the congregation for one more turn.

The writer and the orator may be compared, since literature, by origin a spoken word, has never lost the habits it then acquired—or has only just now lost them. As the ancient bard, Homer or Demodocus, as the wandering minstrel, trouvère or balladist, faced his assize, somehow or other he had to get off his platform. What was he to do? He desired a supper, perhaps a bed: one need not shirk the probability that he was to send round his hat. Could he be sure of them without some kind of a bang? Should it be a long or a short bang? Was he to sum up the whole argument of his poem in its last twenty lines, condense it all into one compendiousepigrammatic sentence? As we shall see, that was the means of one of our great prose-writers. Then, otherwise, should he perorate, and, in the musician’s way, recall the theme with which he began? As poet, perhaps he should—so indeed Tennyson more than once did; but as epic poet it was not always possible. No better poet than Homer ever lived, no better ending to an epic was ever made than that to the Iliad, whose last book shows Achilles, for once, generous, and Priam, in his simplicity, noble. But the Iliad does not end upon the matter of its beginning, nor with the hero of it. On the contrary, it ends with the hero’s chief enemy; and its very last line,

“So served they the last rites of Hector, tamer of horses,”

is remarkable, because it shows that the interest of poet and hearers alike had shifted during the progress of the poem. Homer, a Greek, singing to a Greek audience, finds it necessary to close his poem with Priam and Hector of Troy!

That shows you how difficult it is to end an epic. The Odyssey shows it you from another side. Everybody now agrees that what happens in that after the return of Ulysses, his revenge upon the suitors and recognition by Penelope, is anti-climax. We are not prepared, at the end of a long poem, to descend once more into Hades and listen to the ghosts of the wooers relate their griefs to the ghosts of Agamemnon and Achilles. We are not prepared for an outbreak of retaliatory war between the Ithacans and their recoveredprince.Nor were Homer’s auditors.Therefore Homer turned to the old stage device of the god from the machine; he brought an Athené to shut all down. No other means was open to him, and the knot was worthy.

I don’t intend to deal with the drama in this place. It has its own conventions, only occasionally of use to narrative writers. Most of them are impossible: the Chorus, for instance, which is an easy way of bringing down the curtain; or the attendants who carry off the dead bodies; or the curtain itself. The nearest approach to the curtain which a book can have is theExplicit, orColophon; but I only know one case of its use in a great poem, and in that case it is used in a hurry, and (as I believe) certainly not by the poet. The poem I mean is theSong of Roland, which, as we have it now, has neither beginning nor end. Of what may have once been either there is no trace to be found. As it stands now, the last stave of it shows Charlemagne reposing after justice done upon Roland’s betrayer, and the Archangel Gabriel announcing to him the call for new enterprise. Whereupon—

“‘God!’ said the King, ‘my life is hard indeed!’Tears filled his eyes, he tore his snowy beard”;

“‘God!’ said the King, ‘my life is hard indeed!’

Tears filled his eyes, he tore his snowy beard”;

and then the famous colophon which nobody can translate:

“Ci falt la Geste que Turoldus declinet.”

Clearly, if Turoldus made theSong of Roland, he did not put his colophon just there. Mr. Chesterton, in an introduction to the very accomplished version of the song made by Captain Scott-Moncrieff, devotes some eloquent lines to its defence; but he does it at the expense of criticism. It will not do. A poet is, after all, a man singing to, or writing for men. No man in the world would end a long story by beginning another. These things are not done.

The ending of theDivine Comedyis original and characteristic at once. There is deliberate art in it; there is a kind of artifice or trick in it. But the trick is justified because it is both beautiful and, philosophically, true. Each of the three canticas ends with the same word and the same thought. The aim of the pilgrim through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven is to reach the stars. From the darkness and lamentation of Hell he issues

“a riveder le stelle”;

after his painful climbing of the Mount of Purgation he finds himself

“Puro e disposto a salire alle stelle”;

the Paradise begins by describing the glory of the Prime Mover of things; and ends by discovering that this Prime Mover of the universe is Love, and that Love it is which

“muove il sole e l’altre stelle.”

As I say, there is artifice in that. After it we are not surprised to learn that the number of cantos in each cantica, the number of verses, the number of words in each was approximately planned out and very closely kept. It is much of a question what is gained by such joinery; but there is no question at all of the starry endings. Philosophically and poetically they are beautiful and right.

Dante belonged to the scholastic age, and to the Middle Age; but he stood alone both in his art and his artifice. Poets less serious than he, poets like Boccaccio and Chaucer, had other cares. As they drew near the end of their occasionally very light-hearted poems, they began to think about their own end as well as that of their poesy. Fears of the Archdeacon and his “Somonour,” fears of a summons still more dread beset them. The more they had written about pagan antiquity as if they believed in it, the more necessary it became to make their peace with Heaven before they had done.The Canterbury Taleswere never finished, so one cannot say whether Chaucer’s wholesale recantation of the “worldly vanitees” of them, ofTroilus, and of practically all that has made him immortal was really designed to fit on to the end of them or not. It certainly looks as if it was; and one can believe that The Wife of Bath, mine Host and others of the joyful company may have required some extenuation before the Recording Angel. So perhaps didTroilus and Cresseide, for which he provides a careful and solemn ending, following Boccaccio there as elsewhere. He shades off Troilus’ death very artfully by the translation ofhis “light gooste” to the eighth sphere of Heaven, from which elevation he was able to look down at the mourners bewailing his decease. And then the poet is elevated in his turn and, dropping all his debonair detachment, himself translated, becomes a pulpiteer of the best. “Such fyn,” he cries:

“Such fyn hath then this Troilus for love!Such fyn hath all his greté worthinesse!”

“Such fyn hath then this Troilus for love!

Such fyn hath all his greté worthinesse!”

It is fierce and powerful pulpit eloquence, mounting up and up until he reaches a height of scorning what he had previously loved, from which invective may be poured out like lava from Vesuvius:

“Lo here, of payen’s curséd oldé rights!Lo here, what all their Goddés may availe!”

“Lo here, of payen’s curséd oldé rights!

Lo here, what all their Goddés may availe!”

which, considering he began his poem by invoking the help of those same gods, seems ungrateful, not to say ungracious. The last stanza is quite simply a doxology:

“Thou one, and two, and three, eterne in life,That reignest aye in three, and two, and one,”

“Thou one, and two, and three, eterne in life,

That reignest aye in three, and two, and one,”

just such an accomplished and charming doxology as might be expected from Chaucer—but, all the same, a doxology. To such strange uses did poets lend their muse when they loved paynimry and were horribly afraid of it too.

Freed from the overshadowing of a wrath to come, Milton was able to concentrate upon poetic excellence, as indeed he did. You will look far before you find so serene and beautiful a close to a long poem as that ofParadise Lost.Pity and terror contend in the last paragraph. When the Archangel with his burning brand, and the attendant Cherubim, faces in the fire, descend and take possession of Eden, terror holds us; but then, pity:

“They, looking back, all th’ eastern side beheldOf Paradise so late their happy seat....”

“They, looking back, all th’ eastern side beheld

Of Paradise so late their happy seat....”

They were mortal, that pair. Mortals have short memories, but long hopes. So—

“Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;The world was all before them where to chooseTheir place of rest, and Providence their guide.They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,Through Eden took their solitary way.”

“Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;

The world was all before them where to choose

Their place of rest, and Providence their guide.

They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,

Through Eden took their solitary way.”

The dream was over. Life began its “search for rest.” Beautiful indeed, and exactly observed.

I must here leave the Muse with barely a glance at the Victorians, which suffices nevertheless to reveal that they adopted the rhetorical device of the peroration. Tennyson uses it inIn MemoriamandMaud, Browning inThe Ring and the Book, Swinburne, very finely, inTristram of Lyonesse, and very characteristically too with hisusual catchword. I don’t know how many considerable poems there may be of Swinburne’s which do not end with the word “sea,” but believe that the fingers of one hand would be too many for them. InSordelloBrowning chose the mediæval colophon, theCi falt la geste, when he shut down his long enigma with

“Who would has heard Sordello’s story told,”

and laid himself open to the easy retort that it was not at all true. But the grandest finale of our times remains to be told: Tennyson’s closing lines ofIdylls of the King. I do not refer to the Envoy, which is only a postscript to the Dedication. I mean rather the end of “The Passing of Arthur”: Sir Bedivere on the shore, “straining his eyes beneath an arch of hand” to see the barge out of sight, “down that long water opening on the deep”; to see it go,

“From less to less and vanish into light—”

Then one more line, one more picture:

“And the new sun rose bringing the new year.”

Superb! Nothing in theIdyllsbecame Tennyson like the leaving them. They do not form an epic; but the end is epical.

And now for prose.

You cannot end a book of prose as you can a poem, for the simple reason that prose does not appeal to the emotions directly, as poetry does, but by way of the reason. By emotion you can carry off anything that you may have had the passion to begin and continue; but the reason asks another satisfaction. You may win emotional assent to a proposition that two and two make three, or five. In the heat of the moment it will pass. Reason won’t take it in on the mere statement. If some such result is to be the outcome of your book—and it is that of many and many a novel—you must be careful how you conclude; and it will be seen, I think, that so the novelists have been.

The simplest way of ending a story, you might think, would be to say That’s all, and get off your tub. It was the way, we saw, of the rough-and-ready intelligence which carved theSong of Rolandout of some huge rhymed chronicle:Ci falt la geste que Turoldus declinet. It is the way of the colophon. But even the colophon must be meditated and prepared for; so it is not the real end but only part of it. Sir Thomas Malory had a long colophon to theMort d’Arthur, including a bidding prayer on his own account; and then Caxton his printer puts in a word for himself; but it is led up to by a page which sees Lancelot and Guinevere dead and buried, the realm of England disposed of, and the later fortunes of the few knights left alive. It is a deliberate, not a summary end to a great book—the end “in calm of mind, all passion spent,” which such a book should have.It is, again, the way chosen by Gibbon forThe Decline and Fall. You have a dignified and sufficient summary of the whole work in a sentence of twelve co-ordinate clauses, set stately apart by their semicolons. Then comes a brief reflection of the author’s—“It was among the ruins of the Capitol that I first conceived the idea of a work which....” And then, after that momentary tribute to his personal share in it, he makes a formal submission of it “to the curiosity and candour of the public.” Mannerly and contained to the last, the good Gibbon. Nobody ever came down from a tub with more self-respect; yet Boswell came down pretty well too:

“Such,” he concludes, “was Samuel Johnson, a man whose talents, acquirements and virtues were so extraordinary, that the more his character is considered, the more he will be regarded by the present age, and by posterity, with admiration and reverence.” He was, at least, sufficiently moved to forget himself altogether—which is very much to his credit. Yet he does not satisfy like Gibbon.

Carlyle was tired withFrederick, and, may be, out of conceit with it. His conclusion is short, and his colophon barbarous. “Adieu, good readers; bad also, adieu,” is rather bravado than bravery. More courteous, more inclusive, serener and braver is the conclusion ofThe French Revolution. One sniff there is, at the “Citizen King, frequently shot at, not yet shot,” recollection of a Teufelsdröckian prophecy, neither here nor there; and then a paragraph of valediction.“Toilsome was our journeying together; not without offence; but it is done.... Ill stands it with me if I have spoken falsely; thine also it was to hear truly. Farewell.” A beautiful colophon.

Carlyle was a scolding philosopher; Montaigne had been a shrugging one. His last essai,De l’Expérience, is very long, but appropriately the conclusion of a ripe and profitable book. The end of the matter deals with what, according to him, is the end of life itself, “de scavoir jouyr loyallement de son estre.” “So much art thou God,” he continues, “as thou knowest thyself for man.” His bidding prayer is on behalf of old age, addressed to the God of Health and Wisdom—“mais gaye et sociale.” It is very French to lay down in terms at once the nature of your God and your need of him. Compare with it old Burton’s “corollary and conclusion” of theAnatomy:

“Be not alone, be not idle”:

then, as he must always be quoting,

“Hope on, ye wretched,Beware, ye fortunate”—

“Hope on, ye wretched,

Beware, ye fortunate”—

encouragement and warning in one.

The novelist, whose aim has been your entertainment, and who has never lost the habit of the market-place in which he certainly began, had his own peculiar cares as the time approached for his last words. If he had earned applauseand assent to heights and moments of his tale, could he make sure of them by a quiet end? Or must he earn them by a final shock? Should he burst into a bouquet of stars in the upper air, like a rocket, or come down like its stick? Each way has been chosen.The Mill on the Flossends sublimely in the air, or, strictly, the water; so in its own way—not at all sublimely—doesTristram Shandy; but the majority of novelists have favoured the gentle decline of the narrative to the marriage or death-bed, and generally speaking, the longer the novel the quieter the end. Efforts to endear, however, can always be discerned. The earliest novel of all shows us an expedient in practice which has remained in use down to the Victorian age, and only been discarded by the ultra-moderns even now. Daphnis and Chloe in Longus’s old tale are married at the end of the book. The last picture in it shows the lovers in each other’s arms; and the last words of it are these:

“And Daphnis now profited by Lykainion’s lesson; and Chloe then first knew that those things that were done in the wood were only the sweet sports of children.”

The shift is very plain. It is to recall to the memory the most moving or provocative episodes in your tale, in the hope that the thrill they afforded him once will revive in the reader and lift you over the end. It is a sound rhetorical device by no means disdained by high practitioners in the art. Sir Walter used it inWaverley, when, on the last page, he recovered thepoculum potatoriumfor the Baron of Bradwardine. He had anaffection for the Baron, it is obvious; but he rightly felt him to have been his strongest card, and relied on him to win him the last trick. Often the novelist may be mistaken and table the wrong card, as Dickens certainly was when he endedNicholas Nicklebywith tears upon Smike’s grave, believing that shadow to have been a trump. He should have led Mrs. Nickleby. How wisely Jane Austen played out her hand inEmma, whose last paragraph is enjewelled with reflections of Mrs. Elton’s:

“Very little white satin, very few lace veils; a most pitiful business! Selina would stare when she heard of it!”

Jane Austen was incomparable alike in beginnings and endings.

Instead of recalling with insistence your strongest points, you may make a last effort to carry off what you doubt have been your weakest. There is much of that in both Dickens and Thackeray. InDombey and Son, for example, it is evident that Dickens desired to extenuate what he felt had been an excess of starch in Mr. Dombey. The last page and a half of the book deglutinates him with a vengeance. The man of buckram ends up as a weeping goose. Agnes Wickfield inCopperfieldhad never been convincing, nor had Estella inGreat Expectations. The last pages of those novels are devoted to the service of the pair of ladies; but the effort is too plain, and the reader withholds assent. So with Thackeray, who spends his last drop of ink inPendennison Laura, and inEsmondto pulling off the amazing marriage ofa man and his grandmother. In vain! The end ofVanity Fairis tame, because Dobbin is tame; the true end ofThe Newcomesis theAdsumof Colonel Newcome: very beautiful and not to be bettered. The epilogue, with its trite exhibition of strings and wires, had been better omitted. It is on all fours withDon Quixote, which really ends with the epitaph of Samson Carrasco upon the Ingenious Gentleman. The ensuing reflections of Cid Hamet Benengeli are not to the purpose, but, in fact, counter to it.

I have left almost to the last that conventional ending to novels best described as the Wedding Bells ending, or, in the consecrated fairy-tale phrase, “And they lived happily ever after.” I wonder what is the attitude of the ordinary novelist to that? Fielding, now. Did he write the end ofTom JonesandAmeliawith a shrug, or did he really believe that all was going to be for the best for the two charming women married to a couple of scamps? Moralist and satirist as he was to the roots, are those cynical endings? I cannot help suspecting it. No such doubt afflicts you with Anthony Trollope, who nearly always tied all his knots at the close. But Trollope worked in sober tones. His heroes and heroines had few rapturous moments, but loved temperately, hoped moderately, and if they longed, said little about it. His fondness for carrying over shows us some of his young people sedately and reasonably jogging along: Mr. and Mrs. Frank Gresham, Lord and Lady Lufton, Dr. Thorne and his Dunstable. We see them seated in the mean, contented if not happy. On the whole, I commend the cradlerather than the altar as a more hopeful ending. It is charmingly used by M. Anatole France in the most charming of all his books. M. France does not often incline to the idyll. The French do not. Consider the last words of Stendhal’sChartreuse de Parme:

“Les prisons de Parme étaient vides, le comte immensément riche, Ernest V. adoré de ses sujets, qui comparaient son gouvernement à celui des grands-ducs de Toscane.”

Well may he have added to that the final address, To the happy few! I should do him wrong if I did not remark that it is on the last page of the novel that Stendhal mentions, for the first and only time in it, the Chartreuse de Parme itself.

The French novelists favour irony at the close. It may be that they owe it to Voltaire:

“Pangloss used to say sometimes to Candide: All the things that happen to us are linked one to another in this best of all possible worlds; for indeed if you had not been driven out of a fine castle by kicks behind for Cunégonde’s sake, if you had not endured the Inquisition, traversed America on your two feet, driven your sword through the Baron’s body, lost all your fine sheep of Eldorado, you would not at this moment be eating lemon preserve and pistachio nuts. It is well said, replied Candide; but we must go on digging our garden.”

Flaubert adopted that sort of thing forl’Education Sentimentale, whose last is its best page. It is good to have arrived there, anyhow; and pleasant to depart on a happy thought.

How nearly the latter-day, strictly modern method allies the novel to the story of Cambuscan bold, I have no space left in which to tell the strictly modern reader—who also knows more about it than I do. Aposiopesis has its points, one of which certainly is that as anything you please has happened already, it can happen again, and may as well. But it presumes too much upon the immunity afforded by the printing-press. If the modern story-teller tried that game upon an auditorium, and proposed to take himself off with his characters left sitting, it is long odds that he himself would not have anything worth talking about left to sit upon. The only requital open to the reader, unfortunately, is to cease to be one; and that is very much what I understand him to be doing.

I have often wondered what were the feelings of the growing boy upon whom it slowly dawned that his sponsors had had him christened Hyacinth, or Achilles. Was he conscious of inspiration or the reverse? The discovery must have been frequent in France, where the reign of Louis XV in particular was a flowering time for names. There was an Anarcharsis Klootz, there was a Maximilien Robespierre. When to the unremarkable patronym of Caron there were prefixed the resounding syllables, Pierre-Augustin, to the wearer of them at least the things became a trumpet. He shrilled himself upon them into the far corners of Europe. The Empress Catherine chuckled over him in her Winter Palace; her august neighbour had him read to her, evenings, in Vienna. Horace Walpole, while declining his acquaintance, wrote of him with astonishment to Mme. du Deffand; Voltaire at Ferney thought that there must be something in him. And there was. First and always, impudence. He would look anyone in the face, and never be discountenanced himself. Next, good humour: in his worst hours he bore no grudges, and in his best so few as make no matter. When he had his enemy face to face, and was really at grips with him, he could always hold back from the fray to let off a joke or turn an attack by a compliment. There was a Madame Goëzman with whom he was badly embroiled in civil process. When they were before theregistrar, and she was asked, Did she know the plaintiff—“I neither know nor desire ever to know him,” said she. “Neither have I the honour of Madame’s acquaintance,” said Pierre-Augustin in his turn; “but having seen her, I am constrained to a desire exactly the opposite of hers.” A happy gallantry which ought to have touched the court, but did not.

Morally, he was like an india-rubber ball: the harder you hit him the higher he leapt. The Goëzman pair, husband and wife, in the legal broil just referred to, thought to crush him out of hand by scorn of his degree in the world. They more than hinted that his father had been a watchmaker, that they themselves were “noble.” Pierre-Augustin saw his chance and took it. He held up the Mémoire in which those injudicious nods and winks had appeared. “You open yourchef d’œuvreby reproaching me with the fortunes of my ancestry. It is too true, Madame, that the latest of them added to other branches of industry some celebrity in the art of watchmaking. Forced as I am to suffer judgment upon that point, I confess with sorrow that nothing can cleanse me from your just reproach that I am the son of my father.... But there I pause, for I feel that he is behind me at this moment, looking at what I write, and laughing while he pats my shoulder.”

“You,” he goes on, “who think to shame me through my father, have little conception of the generosity of his heart. Truly, apart altogether from watchmaking, I have never found another for which I would exchange it.But I know too well the worth of time, which he taught me how to measure, to waste it in picking up such trifles. It is not everyone who can say with M. Goëzman:‘Je suis le fils d’un Bailli; oui:Je ne suis pas Caron; non.’”

‘Je suis le fils d’un Bailli; oui:Je ne suis pas Caron; non.’”

‘Je suis le fils d’un Bailli; oui:

Je ne suis pas Caron; non.’”

And so he left it.

However high he leapt, his aims were not high. I don’t think he ever failed of his heart’s desire. He wanted a title of nobility, and obtained one, or indeed, some. He was “Ecuyer, Conseiller-Secrétaire du Roi, Lieutenant Général des Chasses, Baillage et Capitainerie de la Varenne du Louvre, Grande Vénerie et Fauconnerie de France,” which can hardly mean more, and may mean considerably less than it sounds; and all that, when he had earned a territorial name by marriage, enabled him to become Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais. Next, he wanted money, and had it, and lost it, many times over. Then he wanted to be talked about; and for a long time Paris, and for some time Europe, talked of little else. That was when he was conducting two interminable lawsuits, one growing out of the other, and not only conducting them with a vivacity and geniality which nothing could tire, but issuing from the press bulletins of progress of the kind I have attempted to sample above. It was those Mémoires which entertained equally Petersburg and Strawberry Hill. Delightful as they must have been to read when all the actors were aliveand buzzing in the courts or on the quays, they are difficult to follow now. The original suit, which was to recover a debt on an estate from an executor, was made complex by French legal process, but the second (in which the Goëzmans were involved) was complex in itself. The exceedingly delicate point in it was that Beaumarchais had attempted to bribe a member of the Court, and actually got the money as far as his wife, where some of it remained, though the bulk was restored. To recover by law what was still held it was necessary for Beaumarchais to reject with vehemence the suggestion that he had tried to suborn justice, while bringing home the fact that Madame Goëzman had undoubtedly taken his money. He did not, naturally, succeed; but he incriminated the Goëzman pair, and with them was condemned in “infamy and civil degradation.” But in reporting his daily engagements with them, and his verbal victories, he became simply the hero of the hour, and ultimately carried his main action against the Comte de la Blache with damages and costs.

That must be a parenthesis, to show how Beaumarchais climbed to his point of desire, whatever it was at the moment, serving himself alike of disaster and success. Many were his affairs of the kind, all pursued with unflaggingenjouement—as, a breach of promise in Madrid on behalf of his sister, a row with the mad Duc de Chaulnes about an “unfortunate female,” a more than dubious, a not at all dubious, plant upon Maria-Teresa, underground transactions with the Chevalier d’Eon, gun-running for theUnited States of America; and finally that upon which his present fame rests—two comedies which broke all the records of the theatre for anticipation and realisation. I would not go so far as to say that he engineered the repeated delays in their performance which brought expectation up to hysteria if not delirium, but have no doubt that he courted them, and deserved, if not earned, the proud result that more people were crushed to death crowding in to theBarbier de Sevillethan had ever been so crushed before, and that it and its sequel,Le Mariage de Figaro, ran longer on end than any such things had ever done. When they threatened to flag their author was the man to revive them. He knew as much about advertising as Mr. Selfridge, and had as little use for modesty as Mr. Bernard Shaw. Like that salient dramatist, he published his plays, and wrote prefaces to them which are better reading than the text. The pair still hold the stage, as they were written, and as opera; and I should not be surprised to hear that they and their author were as generally known as most of Molière’s and theirs. After all, the same could be said of Sheridan, with his pair, at the expense of Shakespeare.

Mr. John Rivers,[1]Beaumarchais’ first English biographer, I believe, has evidently enjoyed his work, and will be read with enjoyment. He is right in claiming the Life of his hero as a challengeto fiction. It is first-rate picaresque, nearly as good as Gil Blas, and much better than Casanova. But I think he rates him too highly as a dramatist. He considers that Figaro ranks with “Falstaff or Tartufe.” If he does, it is thanks to Rossini and Mozart: without their help the claim is surely preposterous. Luckily, he has taken the trouble to translate large portions of both plays, and so furnished the best corrective to exaggerated pretensions that we could wish to have. Taken in such liberal doses, they don’t march. In their original they are not easy reading, for Beaumarchais, though a brisk, was not a good writer. One does not ask for fine writing necessarily of a dramatist, but that he shall attend to his business. Beaumarchais conceives his to be the making of points. He is apt to be diffuse in reaching them, and to clinch them tightly when he has them. In French he is often difficult; in English he is both dull and difficult. It is like reading bad handwriting on foreign letter-paper. You never seem to get on with the thing.

TheBarbieris not much more than a Commedia dell’ Arte. It is a play of manœuvring, intrigue the whole affair. Stock characters will do for that, and you can manage without humour, if you have a sufficiency of wit. There is perhaps more effervescence than wit, and what wit there is not of the best kind. It is not concerned with ludicrous appositions; rather it is paradox, verbal antithesis, the Gratiano vein. Here is an example. Figaro is reporting to Rosine that Lindor is her lover, and asks leave to tell her so:

“Rosine: Vous me faites trembler, monsieur Figaro.“Figaro: Fi donc, trembler! mauvais calcul, madame. Quand on cède à la peur du mal, on ressent déjà le mal de la peur....“Rosine: S’il m’aime, il doit me le prouver en restant absolument tranquille.“Figaro: Eh! madame! amour et repos peuvent-ils habiter en meme cœur? La pauvre jeunesse est si malheureux aujourd’hui, qu’elle n’a que ce terrible choix: amour sans repos, ou repos sans amour.”

“Rosine: Vous me faites trembler, monsieur Figaro.

“Figaro: Fi donc, trembler! mauvais calcul, madame. Quand on cède à la peur du mal, on ressent déjà le mal de la peur....

“Rosine: S’il m’aime, il doit me le prouver en restant absolument tranquille.

“Figaro: Eh! madame! amour et repos peuvent-ils habiter en meme cœur? La pauvre jeunesse est si malheureux aujourd’hui, qu’elle n’a que ce terrible choix: amour sans repos, ou repos sans amour.”

Beaumarchais can better that, though it is a fair sample of his handling. In the second Act, where Bartholo (Pantaloon) has patched up a reconciliation with Rosine (Columbine), whom he intends to marry, he closes the scene like this:

“Bartholo: Puisque la paix est faite, mignonne, donne-moi ta main. Si tu pouvais m’aimer, ah! comme tu serais heureuse!“Rosine(baissant les yeux): Si vous pouviez me plaire, ah! comme je vous aimerais!“Bartholo: Je te plairai, je te plairai; quand je te dis que je te plairai! (Il sort.)”

“Bartholo: Puisque la paix est faite, mignonne, donne-moi ta main. Si tu pouvais m’aimer, ah! comme tu serais heureuse!

“Rosine(baissant les yeux): Si vous pouviez me plaire, ah! comme je vous aimerais!

“Bartholo: Je te plairai, je te plairai; quand je te dis que je te plairai! (Il sort.)”

That is very happy, because it has humour as well as wit. Pantaloon and Columbine have become human beings.

It is not all so good as that, and some of it is not good at all. It was written originally for an opera libretto, for which it is well suited. It would do equally well for marionettes. To such thingsthe spectator can lend himself, because in the former the music, and in the latter the puppets, take the responsibility off him; nothing of his own is involved. But in a play the action and the dialogue perform the resolution of life into art, with the audience as accomplice. Human nature is implicated; if we allow the cheap, we must cheat ourselves. If there is any resolution in theBarbier, it is into a jig, and condescension is difficult. Life is only there in so far as some of the personages wear breeches, and some petticoats. It is a mere trifle that the scene is laid in Spain, while all the characters are Italian.

TheMariage de Figarois a more considerable work, if only because it is much longer and more complicated. Everybody is older, including Beaumarchais. Since the end of theBarbier, Count Almaviva has pursued hundreds of ladies, Rosina has almost left off being jealous, Figaro has become a cynic, and is inclined to give lectures. The romance would seem to have been rubbed off seduction, as you might expect when you consider that the Count has been at it all his life, and is now a middle-aged man, old enough to be Ambassador. It has been said—and Mr. Rivers says it—that Beaumarchais was deliberate in contriving the effect of satiety, which he certainly obtains—as if an author would set himself to work to be wearisome! Subversion, Mr. Rivers thinks, was his aim, moral revolt. He wrote, and it was played, on the eve of the Revolution. Was theMariagenot, therefore, a contributory cause?

“Figaro, soliloquising: Parceque vous êtes un grand seigneur, vous vous croyez un grand génie!... Noblesse, fortune, un rang, des places, tout cela rend si fier! Qu’avez-vous fait pour tant de biens? Vous vous êtes donné la peine de naître, et rien de plus. Du reste, homme assez ordinaire; tandis que moi, morbleu! perdu dans la foule obscure, il m’a fallu déployer plus de science et de calculs pour subsister seulement, qu’on n’en a mis depuis cent ans à gouverner toutes les Espagnes: et vous voulez jouter ...!”

Is that contributory to revolution—or revolution contributory to it? It was surely current coin in 1784. Voltaire and Rousseau had encouraged cats to look at kings; everybody had made fun of the nobility. Titles of honour can have held little intimidation since Louis XIV had had the handling of them, and turned out dukes where his grandfather made marquises. What little there might be left to do had been done handsomely by his grandson. It is far more likely that Beaumarchais was easing grudges of his own, or that in the famous flight of paradoxes aimed at “la politique” he was recalling recent experiences in London and Vienna, where he came into collision with the real thing. Much out of character as it is, it is a good example of what both Figaro and Beaumarchais had become by 1784:

“Feindre ignorer ce qu’on sait, de savoir tout ce qu’on ignore; d’entendre ce qu’on ne comprend pas, de ne point ouïr ce qu’on entend; surtout de pouvoir au delà de sesforces; avoir souvent pour grand secret de cachet qu’il n’y en a point; s’enfermer pour tailler des plumes, et paraître profond quand on n’est, comme on dit, que vide et creux; jouer bien ou mal un personnage; répandre des espions et pensionner des traîtres; amollir des cachets, intercepter des lettres, et tacher d’ennoblir la pauvreté des moyens par l’importance des objets: voilà toute la politique, ou je meure!”

Very brisk. But when Count Almaviva shortly comments, “Ah! c’est l’intrigue que tu définis!” the criticism is final, because it is completely just. Curious that a playwright should light up his Roman candle, and damp it down the next moment. Such speeches imperil the character of Figaro by making him so dominant a personality that there can be no fun in seeing him dupe his betters. Beaumarchais, I think, may have felt that objection, and attempted to restore the balance by having Figaro duped himself in the last act.

The balance is really adjusted in quite another way. Two new characters are brought in, one of whom, Marceline, avieille fille, designs to marry Figaro, but presently finds out that she is his long-lost mother! The other is Chérubin, who saves the play, to my thinking, just as surely as Polly Peachum savesThe Beggar’s Opera. Chérubin—“création exquise et enchanteresse,” says Sainte-Beuve—is the making of theMariage, partly because he keys it down to its proper pitch, which is that of children playing grown-ups, and partlybecause he is truly observed and poetically presented. I don’t see how the adage, “Si jeunesse savait,” could be more tenderly exploited. All his scenes are good—the first with Suzanne, in which the young scamp, after betraying his occupation with three love affairs at once, snatches his mistress’s hair-ribbon and dodges behind tables and chairs while the maid pursues him; the second, with the Countess, where she is dressing him as a girl, and discovers her ribbon staunching a cut in his arm: in each of these scenes the delicious distress of his complaint is painted with a subtlety and sensibility combined which are first-rate art. Delicate provocation can go no further, or had better not. Beaumarchais’ triumph is that he knows that, and does not add a touch in excess. The final touch is that the Countess, instead of feigning a desire for the restoration of the ribbon (which she did very badly), now really does desire, and obtains it. Enough said: there is no more. “Tu sais trop bien, méchante, que je n’ose pas oser,” says the youth to Suzanne. That is his trouble, and a real one it is.

The imbroglio in this play is a thing of nightmare. “Que diable est-ce qu’on trompe ici?” The answer is the audience. Everybody deceives everybody, twice over and all the time. It surprises, if you like, by “a fine excess.” It is not surprising, anyhow, that the last act was too much for Sainte-Beuve, has been too much for Mr. Rivers, and is too much for me. I do not, simply, know what is happening, but I do know that none of it is very funny. Compare it withSganarelle, and you will see. In that little masterpiece youhave four characters: Lélie and Clélie, the lovers, Sganarelle the jealous husband, and Sganarelle’s wife. Clélie lets drop Lélie’s portrait in the street, Sganarelle’s wife picks it up, and is caught by Sganarelle admiring it. Presently, when Clélie faints, and is picked up by Sganarelle, it is his wife’s turn to be jealous. Then Lélie, overcome by his feelings, is pitied by Madame Sganarelle and helped into her house. The fat is in the fire. Madame Sganarelle flies at Clélie for carrying on with her husband; Lélie believes that Sganarelle has married Clélie. Sganarelle pursues Lélie with a sword, and when he is confronted, pretends that he brought it out because the weather looked threatening. It is a complete cat’s cradle of a play, and as easily untied. The action is swift, the intrigue is easy to follow, the appositions are really comic. But who believes that Almaviva seriously wants Suzanne, or that Figaro has really promised Marceline, or that the Countess really loves Chérubin? The lack of plausibility causes theMariageto turn unwillingly, like a mangle. It took four hours and a half to play: I can hardly believe that Figaro’s inordinate soliloquy in the last act survived the first night. Figaro himself is overweight; Marceline is a very bad shot. She has at first a good Polly-and-Lucy slanging match with Suzanne; but in the discovery scene she grows serious—very serious, and rightly serious, no doubt, in any other play but this. But to suspend all the gallantries in progress for the sake of her diatribes upon gallantry, to shake the head over them, to say “True,” and “Too true”—and then immediately to resume gallantries, hasthe effect of exhibiting neither gallantry nor the reprobation of it as serious; and as something in a play must be taken seriously, the Comédie Française, rightly deciding in favour of gallantry, cut out the whole scene; and it is so marked in my edition of Beaumarchais. It would have been a pleasant toil for Edward FitzGerald, who loved such work, to hew and shape this comedy. It has fine moments, but wants both the speed and the gaiety of theBarbier. Mozart gave it them—we owe to Beaumarchais the most delightful opera in the world.

Mr. Rivers translates the two plays freely, but I don’t think very successfully. I have said already that Beaumarchais is not a good writer—too diffuse at one time, too terse at others—but no doubt he is very difficult. Literal translation is useless. “Miss” is not a translation of “Mademoiselle.” “Mistress,” or “Young Lady” would be better—and so on. You cannot get the points sharply enough unless you translate ideas as well as idiom; and to do that you must take a wide cast. Rhetoric is rhetoric in whatever language you cast it. It has its own rules. Dialogue is another matter. There come in the familiarities, secrets of the toilette, secrets of the bower. How are these things to be done? I don’t know; but if Andrew Lang could not be natural with the 15th Idyll of Theocritus, it is no shame to Mr. Rivers to have failed with Beaumarchais.

If he desired to try his hand I wonder why he omitted one of his liveliest and wittiest sallies—the letter which he addressed toThe Morning Chroniclein 1776, on one of his confidential visitsto London. It is too long to give entire, but I must have a shot at pieces of it:

“Mr. Editor,” he says, “I am a stranger, a Frenchman and the soul of honour. If this will not completely inform you who I am, it will at least tell you, in more senses than one, who I am not; and in times likes these, that is not without its importance in London.“The day before yesterday at the Pantheon, after the concert and during the dancing which ensued, I found at my feet a lady’s cloak of black taffetas, turned back with the same and edged with lace. I do not know to whom it belongs; I have never seen, even at the Pantheon, the person who wore it; all my inquiries since the discovery have taught me nothing about her. I beg of you then, Mr. Editor, to announce in your journal the discovery of the cloak, in order that I may punctually return it to her who may lay claim to it.“That there may be no possible mistake in the matter, I have the honour to give you notice that the loser, upon the day in question, had a head-dress of rose-coloured feathers. She had, I believe, diamond ear-rings; but of that I am not so positive as of the remainder of my description. She is tall and of elegant appearance; her hair is a flaxen blonde, her skin dazzlingly white. She has a fine and graceful neck, a striking shape, and the prettiest foot in the world. I observe that she is very young, very lively and inattentive, that she carries herself easily, and has a marked taste for dancing.”

“The day before yesterday at the Pantheon, after the concert and during the dancing which ensued, I found at my feet a lady’s cloak of black taffetas, turned back with the same and edged with lace. I do not know to whom it belongs; I have never seen, even at the Pantheon, the person who wore it; all my inquiries since the discovery have taught me nothing about her. I beg of you then, Mr. Editor, to announce in your journal the discovery of the cloak, in order that I may punctually return it to her who may lay claim to it.

“That there may be no possible mistake in the matter, I have the honour to give you notice that the loser, upon the day in question, had a head-dress of rose-coloured feathers. She had, I believe, diamond ear-rings; but of that I am not so positive as of the remainder of my description. She is tall and of elegant appearance; her hair is a flaxen blonde, her skin dazzlingly white. She has a fine and graceful neck, a striking shape, and the prettiest foot in the world. I observe that she is very young, very lively and inattentive, that she carries herself easily, and has a marked taste for dancing.”

He then proceeds to deduce all these charming properties from the taffetas cloak—some from a single hair which he finds in the hood, some from minute particles of fluff and fur; others, more carefully, from measurements; others, again, from the position in which the cloak was lying—all of which led him to conclude infallibly that “the young lady was the most alert beauty of England, Scotland and Ireland, and if I do not add, of America, it is because of late they have become uncommonly alert in that particular country.” Sherlock Holmes!

“If I had pushed my inquiries,” he concludes, “it is possible that I might have learned from her cloak what was her quality and rank. But when one has concluded that a woman is young and handsome, has one not in fact learned all that one needs to learn? That at any rate was the opinion held in my time in many good towns in France, and even in certain villages, such as Marly, Versailles, etc.“Do not then be surprised, Mr. Editor, if a Frenchman who all his life long has made a philosophical and particular study of the fair sex, has discovered in the mere appearance of a lady’s cloak, without ever having seen her, that the fair one with the rosy plumes who let it fall unites in her person the radiance of Venus, the free carriage of the nymphs, the shape of the Graces, the youth of Hebe; that she is quick and preoccupied, and that she loves the dance, to the extent of forgetting everything else in order to run to it, on a foot as small as Cinderella’s, and as light as Atalanta’s own.”

“Do not then be surprised, Mr. Editor, if a Frenchman who all his life long has made a philosophical and particular study of the fair sex, has discovered in the mere appearance of a lady’s cloak, without ever having seen her, that the fair one with the rosy plumes who let it fall unites in her person the radiance of Venus, the free carriage of the nymphs, the shape of the Graces, the youth of Hebe; that she is quick and preoccupied, and that she loves the dance, to the extent of forgetting everything else in order to run to it, on a foot as small as Cinderella’s, and as light as Atalanta’s own.”

He has done it with the unfailing humour and neatness which carried him in and out of the lawcourts, took him to prison and enlarged him again. And he was then only forty-four, and had another twenty years before him. Impudence and good humour. The first was his shield and buckler—triple brass. The other enabled him to support it in all companies without offence. When at long last his suit with La Blache was ended, and in his favour, the Comte not only restored the estate without a murmur, but gave him a fine portrait of the testator. Beaumarchais may have been a bad lot; but he was evidently a good sort.

[1]“Figaro: the Life of Beaumarchais,” by John Rivers. Hutchinson. 18s.

No student of France and literature can afford to neglect this gay and hardy little sinner, though the use of that very word might show that I was not fitted to expound him. It has here, however, an æsthetic significance and not an ethical. Poets and moralists have this in common that, owing their power to the strength of their prejudice, they make bad historians. Carlyle, very much of a poet, illuminating his heroes with his own fire, did no harm to Cromwell, whose wart was a part of his glory; but Frederick the Great showed up oddly. The higher the light rayed upon him the more ghastly stared his gashes under the paint. Michelet was a good deal of a poet too, and rootedly a moralist. Naturally he came to blows with the history of his country. The Fronde made him angry, thegrand siècleshocked him. Edification may be served that way, not truth. It is, I grant, difficult to read the History of France as that of a sane, hard-working, penurious people; difficult to decide why the Revolution, instead of coming in 1789, did not come in 1689; or why, having begun in 1649, it did no more, as Bossuet said, than “enfanter le siècle de Louis.” To understand that would be to understand the Fronde, but not how the state of things which evoked the Fronde and made possible the Memoirs of de Retz, could have come about. A royal minority, a foreign regent, a foreign minister, and a feudal aristocracy will account for a good deal—not for all.The Italianisation of manners which began with the last Valois kings, and was renewed by Henry’s Florentine wife, has to be reckoned up. To a nobility convinced of privilege it opened the ways ofIl Talento.

Il Talentois the Italian description of the state of mind induced by desire and the means to gratify it on the spot. Iago is the standing type; but Cæsar Borgia is a better. For him and his likes,The Princeof Machiavelli was the golden book. In France the princely families—those of Lorraine, Bouillon, Condé and Savoie—found it a kindly soil; and one of its best products was naturally the Cardinal de Retz, whose memoirs are as good as Dumas, very much like him, and the source of the best chapters ofVingt Ans Après. Here wasIl Talentoin fine flower, existing for its own sake; whereas Mazarin hid it in avarice, and Richelieu had lost it in statecraft. You cannot read Retz with pleasure, to say nothing of profit, if you do not allow for the point of view—which you will have no difficulty in doing if you remember that, less than a hundred years before the Cardinal’s day, his ancestor, Alberto Gondi, had been as familiar with the Ponte Vecchio as he himself was with the Pont-Neuf.

In his “portrait” of Mazarin, Retz accused his brother-cardinal of common origin, but if you went back to his own family’s beginnings I do not know that the Gondis were more than respectable according to French standards. But the future Cardinal, Jean-Francois-Paul, was born the son of a Duc de Retz, a great man of Brittany, was a Knight of Malta in the cradle,and when, later, it was thought well to make a churchman of him, tumbled into abbacies as became a young prince, and had a bishopric as soon as he cared. He says of Mazarin’s youth that it was shameful, that he was by bent and disposition a cardsharper. He might have said worse and not been wrong; yet the account he gives of himself is so frank, shameless and extremely flagrant that the reproof has an odd sound.

“I did not affect devotion,” he says of himself as Abbé, “because I could never be sure that I should be able to keep up the cheat. But I had great consideration for the devout, and from their point of view that is in itself a mark of piety. I suited my pleasures to the rest of my habits. I could hardly get on without gallantry, but I continued it with Madame de Pommereux, young and a coquette, whose ways suited me because, as she had all the young people not only about her but in her confidence, her apparent affairs with them were a mask for mine with her.”

This equivocal conduct so far succeeded that the pious agreed with St. Vincent de Paul that, though the Abbé de Retz was not truly religious, he was “not far from the Kingdom of Heaven”—quite as near, in fact, as the young gentleman desired to be. And then he tells a story which he thinks is to his credit:

“A short time after I left college, my governor’s valet, who was my humble servant,found living with a wretched pin-maker a niece of hers, fourteen years old and of remarkable beauty. After he had shown her to me, he bought her for one hundred and fifty pistoles, took a little house for her at Issy, and put his sister in to look after her. I went there the day after she was installed, and found her extremely cast down, but attributing it to her modesty, was not at all surprised. She was still more so the next day, a fact about her even more remarkable than her good looks, which is saying a great deal. She talked with me straightforwardly, piously, without extravagance, and cried no more than she could possibly help. I saw that she was so much afraid of her aunt that I felt truly sorry for her, admired her disposition, and presently her virtue. I tested that so far as it could be done, and took shame to myself. I waited till it was dark, then put her into my coach and took her to my aunt de Meignelais. She put the child into a convent of religious, where eight or ten years later she died in the odour of sanctity.”

One must not expect too much from agrand seigneurin a cassock. The story has more implication than he was able to perceive; but at least it shows that he had pity in him, if not piety.

In time he was appointed coadjutor to his uncle, the Archbishop of Paris, with a promise of survivorship, and a fancy title of Archbishop of Corinth. He tells us that he took six days to consider how he should regulate his conduct, how restore the credit of the archiepiscopate (whichwas very necessary) without losing any of his pleasures. “I decided to do evil with deliberation—no doubt the most criminal course in the eyes of God, but no doubt also the most discreet in those of the world.” In his opinion that was the only way open to him of avoiding “the most dangerousabsurditywhich can be met with in the clerical profession, that of mixing sin and devotion.” “Absurdity” is remarkable.

His first duty as coadjutor was a severe trial to his fortitude. It was necessary to make a Visitation of the Nuns of the Conception; and as the convent held eighty young ladies, “of whom several were handsome and some adventurous,” he had many qualms about exposing his virtue to such a test. “It had to be done, though; and I preserved it to the edification of my neighbour. I did not see the face of a single one, and never spoke to one unless her veil was down. This behaviour, which lasted six weeks, gave a wonderful lustre to my chastity. I believe, however, that the lessons which I received every evening from Madame de Pommereux strengthened it materially against the morrow.”

Such was the Coadjutor-Archbishop of Paris, and such his efforts to restore the credit of that see. He did not continue them long. Other things engrossed him, one being to obtain from Mazarin a recommendation to the Cardinalate, another by all, or any, means to obtain his benefactor’s disgrace. Before the first could take effect, or the second be effected, the parliamentary Frondebegan, and Retz was in it to the neck. What he wanted, except to enjoy himself, is not at all clear. He despised rather than hated Mazarin; he forsook the only man—Condé—for whom he seems to have had any real regard; he invited his country’s enemies to Paris; and he got nothing out of it. But I am sure he enjoyed himself.

His strong card was his popularity with the Parisians. He earned that partly by hard money—the Barricades, he says, cost him some thirty-six thousandécus—and somewhat on his own account too. After he had been enthroned as Coadjutor, he gave himself no airs. On the contrary, “Je donnai la main chez moi à tout le monde; j’accompagnai tout le monde jusqu’au carrosse.” Then, when he was firmly established as the most affable seigneur in the city, suddenly he jumped in a claim for precedence before M. de Guise, and had it adjudged him. It enhanced his prestige incalculably. “To condescend to the humble is the surest way of measuring yourself against the great,” is the moral he draws, but another is that if you aim at popularity, you should stand up to a great man, and beat him. Retz had courage, and the Parisians loved him for it. So did the Parisiennes, according to his own account, though many things were against him. He was an ugly little man, a little deformed, black man, Tallemant reports him, very nearsighted, badly made, clumsy with his hands, unable to fasten his clothes or put on his spurs. No matter. Whatever he could or could not do, there is no doubt he could give a good account of himself in the world, upstairs and downstairs andin my lady’s chamber. Not only does he say so in Memoirs, written, as he is careful to say, for the instruction of Madame de Caumartin’s children, but his enemies allowed it. It may even be that Mazarin paid him the compliment of being jealous of his midnight conferences with Anne of Austria; at any rate, Retz seriously thought of cutting him out. Then he was a good preacher, a ready debater, and a born lobbyist to whom intrigue was daily bread. Those were his cards for beggar-my-neighbour with Mazarin, and not bad ones. The weakness of the hand resided in the player. He had as little heart as conscience. He cared nothing for his country, for his friends or for his mistresses when their interests conflicted with what for the moment were his. If he had an affection for anyone it was for Condé. Yet he was against him all through, and chose rather to back the poor creature, Monsieur—to his own undoing, as he must have foreseen if he had given it a moment’s thought. Gaston simply let in Mazarin again, through mere poltroonery; and Mazarin once in, Retz must be out. And so he was.

The Fronde, the first Fronde, began seriously, like our Civil War, on a question of principle. The Parlement of Paris took advantage of the Regency to restore its old claim to be more than a Court of Record. It claimed the right to examine edicts before registering them—in fact, to be a Parliament. Atop of that came the grievance of the Masters of Requests, who, having paid heavily for their offices, found their value substantially reduced by the creation of twelvenew ones. The masters struck, and their offices were sequestrated. Then came the 26th August 1648, when the Court, exalted by Condé’s victory at Lens, first celebrated the occasion byTe Deumin Notre Dame, and immediately afterwards by causing Councillor Broussel, Father of the People, to be arrested and carried off to Saint-Germain. Retz, the coadjutor, was in both celebrations, as we can read inVingt Ans Après. It was the day before the Barricades. Directly the news of the arrest became known the town, as he says, exploded like a bomb: “the people rose; they ran, they shouted, they shut up their shops.” Retz went out in rochet and hood—to watch, no doubt, over the harvest of his 36,000 sownécus. “No sooner was I in the Marché-Neuf than I was encompassed by masses of people who howled rather than shouted.” He extricated himself by comfortable words, and made his way to the Pont-Neuf, where he found the Maréchal de La Meilleraye, with the Guards, enduring as best he could showers of stones, but far from happy at the look of things. He urged Retz, who (though he had had an interchange of repartees with the Queen overnight) did not need much urging, to accompany him to the Palais-Royal and report. Off they went together, followed by a horde of people crying, “Broussel! Broussel!”

“We found the Queen in the great Cabinet with the Duc d’Orléans, Cardinal Mazarin, Duc de Longueville.... She received me neither well nor ill, being too proud and too hot to be ashamed of what she had said thenight before. As for the Cardinal, he had not the decency to feel anything of that kind. Yet he did seem embarrassed, and pronounced to me a sort of rigmarole in which, though he did not venture to say so, he would have been relieved if I had found some new explanation of what had moved the Queen. I pretended to take in all that he was pleased to tell me, and answered him simply that I was come to report myself for duty, to receive the Queen’s commands, and contribute everything that lay in my power towards peace and order. The Queen turned her head sharply as if to thank me; but I knew afterwards that she had noticed and taken badly my last phrase, innocent as it was and very much to the point from the lips of a Coadjutor of Paris.”

Then follows one of his famous Machiavellian aphorisms: “But it is very true that with princes it is as dangerous, almost as criminal, to be able to do good as to wish to do harm.”

Retz might play the innocent, no one better, but neither Queen nor minister were fools. It is not to be supposed that they had heard nothing of his distribution ofécus. Then the Maréchal grew angry, finding that the rioting was taken lightly, and said what he had seen. He called for Retz’s testimony, and had it.

“The Cardinal smiled sourly, the Queen flew into a rage.... ‘There is a revolt even in the intention to revolt,’ she said. ‘These are the stories of people who desire revolt.’ The Cardinal, who saw in my face what Ithought of such talk, put in a word, and in a soft voice replied to the Queen: ‘Would to God, madame, that all the world spoke with the same sincerity as M. le Coadjuteur. He fears for his flock, for the city, for your Majesty’s authority. I am persuaded that the danger is not so great as he believes; but scruple in such a matter is worthy of his religion.’ The Queen, understanding this jargon, immediately altered her tone, talked civilly, and was answered by me with great respect, and a face so smug that La Rivière whispered to Bautru, ... ‘See what it is not to spend day and night in a place like this. The Coadjutor is a man of the world. He knows what he is about, and takes what she says for what it is worth.’”

The whole scene, he says, was comedy. “I played the innocent, which I by no means was; the Cardinal the confident, though he had no confidence at all. The Queen pretended to drop honey though she had never been more choked with gall.” But what comedy there was was not there very long. The Queen, who had declared that she would strangle Broussel with her own hands sooner than release him, was to change her mind. La Meilleraye and Retz were sent out again to report, and La Meilleraye, losing his head, nearly lost his life. At the head of his cavalry, he pushed out into the crowd, “sword in hand, crying with all his might, ‘Vive le Roi! Broussel au large!’” More people, naturally, saw him than could hear what he said. His sword had an offensive look; there was a cry to arms, and other swords wereout besides his. The Maréchal killed a man with a pistol-shot, the crowd closed in upon him; he was saved by Retz, who himself escaped by the use of his wits. An apothecary’s apprentice, he says, put a musket at his head.

“Although I did not know him from Adam, I thought it better not to let him know that. On the contrary, ‘Ah, my poor lad,’ I said, ‘if your father were to see this!’ He thought that I had been his father’s best friend, though in fact I had never seen his father, and asked me if I was the Coadjutor. When he understood that I was, he cried out, ‘Vive le Coadjuteur!’ and they all came crowding round me with the same cry.”

Back to Index Next