“Loving like a Madman”—A Great Transformation—The Unjust Tax—Parted Lovers—A Gay Court, and A School for Scandal and Mazarin’s Policy—The Regent’s Caprices—The King’s Upholsterer’s Young Son—The Théâtre Illustre—The Company of Monsieur and Molière.
“A man of sense may love like a madman, but never like a fool.” It is the dictum of François de la Rochefoucauld, and must have been framed from his deep attachment to Condé’s sister, Madame de Longueville, one of the most charming of the women of the great world at that time, and bound by ties of close friendship with Ninon.
It was no one-sided love, no case of the one who loves, and the one who merely consents to it; but mutual, and as passionate, as certainly for a time the flame was pure, shining with a clear, unflecked radiance.
Madame de Longueville, who was wedded to an old man, was singularly fascinating, from her gentle manners and amiability. Her face was not strictly beautiful, and bore traces of the smallpox, the cruel scourge then of so many beautiful faces; her eyes were full of a softened light, and she had the gift of a most sweet voice, while her smile was gentle and irresistibly winning. The dreamy, romantic, somewhat melancholy-natured de la Rochefoucauld’s heart was laid at her feet in whole and undivided adoration. For their conscious love, eachstrove against the temptation, she so earnestly, that she shut herself away from all chance of so much as seeing him for a little while. But Ninon slipped in with her philosophy. It was quite true, she argued to Madame de Longueville, that there were grave considerations to be respected—the indissoluble tie of marriage,convenancesto be observed—all these; but to hide herself away, to refuse the unhappy prince the alleviation of gazing at her, of exchanging a few fleeting words—no, it was monstrously absurd. The veryPlatoniciensdid not go such lengths. No, if complete happiness could not be theirs, at least a smile, a glance, was permitted; and Ninon’s counsel wound up with a suggestion to the disconsolate prince, that he should try what a little note to the woman he adored would effect, and he wrote—“Show yourself—be beautiful, and at least let me admire you.”
And Ninon delivered the billet, and its effect was marvellous. It conquered the young duchess’s natural timidity and retiring disposition. She took courage; she assumed her rightful place in the world; she appeared at the Louvre; she kept open house and gave brilliant receptions; she took her seat on thetabouretof the duchesses; her toilettes were magnificent; she shone brilliantly in conversation, and began to take part in Court intrigues; ere long very actively.
“With two lines of a man’s writing,” had said Mazarin’s great predecessor, “I could condemn him”; and with two lines of that magical pen of the Count de la Rochefoucauld, Madame de Longuevillebecame another woman. As in the matter of her warm attachment to her lover, she was constant in her politics; while Louis de Condé, all-conquering at Rocroi, yielded himself captive to the charms of Ninon de L’Enclos—a veritable lion in love; not so blindly, however, that he was insensible to the wrongs of the people, upon whom a tax had been levied of a specially hateful kind. It was called the Toisé, and was a revival of an old edict long fallen into desuetude. To the Italian, d’Eméri, to whom Mazarin had entrusted the control of public finances, was due its discovery and resuscitation. This edict forbade the enlargement of the borders of Paris, and as recently new buildings had been, and were being, in course of construction far and wide, the owners of these were threatened with confiscation of their materials, unless they consented to pay for their newly-erected houses and other buildings, a rate regulated by measurement of the size of them. This pressed cruelly on the people. Loud murmurs were excited. The Parliament expostulated, and the Toisé was withdrawn. It was the first stone slung by the Fronde. Condé’s indignation was great; and one day, in the rue St Antoine, he laid flat with his sword the body of some wretched collector who had snatched away a child’s cradle from a poor woman. His act gave great offence to the queen, who saw in it defiance of Mazarin. Both at home and abroad, there was plenty stirring to keep existence from stagnating; but for a few brief delightful weeks the Duc d’Enghien sought retirement and tranquillityin his château of Petit Chantilly, in company with Ninon, who left the rue des Tournelles dwelling to take care of itself. It was the iniquitous Toisé which broke in upon their content; for the queen sent for the duke, to consult him in the emergency created by the cardinal favourite.
After the Toisé prologue, however, the opening scenes of the inglorious turmoil of the Fronde did not see Condé; for Austria once more took up arms, and he lost not a moment in hastening to the frontier. If it is indeed a fact that Ninon accompanied him thither in the guise of a young aide-de-camp, mounted on a fiery charger, it was but to re-enact her former exploits; and Ninon was nothing if not daring. That her presence on the field of Nordlingen could have been really anything but exceedingly encumbering, is more than imaginable. At all events Condé soon begged her to return to Paris, in order to go and console his sister, Madame de Longueville, who had been summoned to attend his father, the Duc de Condé, in an illness threatening to be fatal. Arrived at Paris, she found the sufferer very much better, and writing to inform the Duc d’Enghien of this pleasant intelligence, she begged to be allowed to return to him. The duke, however, replied that it was hardly worth while; as he should soon be back. To pass the tedium of his absence, Ninon resumed herréunions, finding pleasant distraction in the society of her friends, among which were two ladies distinguished for their birth and undoubted talents, scarcely less than notorious, even in thosedays, for their openly lax mode of life. One of these was Madame de la Sablière, a notable member of the Hôtel de Rambouilletcôtérie. A really brilliant mathematician, she was at least equally skilful in the science of love—so ardent a student, that one day her uncle, a grave magistrate, scandalised out of all endurance at her ways, remonstrated severely, reminding her that the beasts of the field observed more order and seasonable regulation in their love-affairs.
“Ah, dear uncle,” said the gifted lady, “that is because theyarebeasts.”
Madame de Chevreuse was the other specially chosen spirit of her own sex Ninon now consorted with. After the death of Richelieu, who had exiled her at the time of the Val de Grâce affair, she was allowed to return to France, attended by the Abbé de Retz, Paul de Gondi, whom Louis XIII., on his deathbed, had appointed coadjutor to the new archbishopric of Paris. De Retz had himself aspired to the archbishopric, and swore that he would obtain a cardinalate.
The Court was now brilliantly gay. The gloomy and sombre atmosphere of Louis XIII. and of Richelieu’s day faded all in a succession of balls and fêtes and every sort of festivity. Anne of Austria enlarged the south side of the Louvre, and Grimaldi and Romanelli adorned the chambers and galleries with their exquisite skill. Poussin, whose friezes terminated the ends of the great gallery, had had apartments assigned him in the Louvre, in order to carry on his work with greaterfacility; but he had retired in displeasure at the criticisms of his brother-artists, and went to Rome, where he spent the rest of his life, leaving in Paris immortal memories of his genius, among them the altarpiece for the chapel of St Germain en Laye, and the mournful Arcadian Shepherd, “Et in Arcadia Ego.”
So the never-ending round of gaiety was set in motion by Mazarin, and Anne of Austria was the regent. Anne, still handsome, and by nature frivolous under her somewhat cold Spanish demeanour—surely a born coquette, delighting in show and magnificence, none the less that she had so long lived under repression. The queen, apparently, was the reigning power; but it was the crafty prime-minister who pulled the strings, and set the puppets dancing and fiddling, and amorously intriguing, so that they should leave him to carry on his politics, and mount to the heights of his ambition and power in his own unhindered way. Unlike his great predecessor, he was handsome, and good-natured in manner, and therefore an ornament in those brilliant assemblies. Wrote St Evrémond—
“J’ai vu le temps de la bonne régence,Temps où régnait une heureuse abondance,Temps où la ville aussi bien que la courNe respirait que les jeux et l’amour.Une politique indulgenteDe notre nature innocenteFavorisait tous les désirsTout dégoût semblait légitime;La douce erreur ne s’appélait point crime,Les vices délicats se nommait des plaisirs.”
“J’ai vu le temps de la bonne régence,Temps où régnait une heureuse abondance,Temps où la ville aussi bien que la courNe respirait que les jeux et l’amour.Une politique indulgenteDe notre nature innocenteFavorisait tous les désirsTout dégoût semblait légitime;La douce erreur ne s’appélait point crime,Les vices délicats se nommait des plaisirs.”
“J’ai vu le temps de la bonne régence,
Temps où régnait une heureuse abondance,
Temps où la ville aussi bien que la cour
Ne respirait que les jeux et l’amour.
Une politique indulgente
De notre nature innocente
Favorisait tous les désirs
Tout dégoût semblait légitime;
La douce erreur ne s’appélait point crime,
Les vices délicats se nommait des plaisirs.”
Very pleasant and entertaining the world of society was then; and seasoned as it was with even unusual spice of malice and spite, scandal was rife. Among others, the stepmother of Madame de Chevreuse, Madame de Montbazon, who was married to the old Duc de Rohan, was a past-mistress in the gentle art of making mischief; and where the material was insufficient, she manufactured it without scruple. In this way she nearly succeeded in bringing a rift into the love-harmonies of Henri de la Rochefoucauld and his adored Madame de Longueville, by means of sheer, brazen lying, alleging that certain letters of Madame de Longueville, which had been found, had dropped from the pocket of Coligny. It was a pitiful fabrication, and Madame de Montbazon—of whom de Retz, in his Memoirs, says “I never saw any person showing in her vices less respect for virtue”—did not come out of it with very flying colours, for all her best efforts at effrontery, and she received an order from Mazarin to retire to Tours. The letters, in effect, proved to be not those of Madame de Longueville at all; and the pocket they dropped out of, was not Coligny’s. It was altogether an affair of another pair of lovers.
The embellishments of the Louvre were still not completed, before the queen decided not to reside in it. She began to recall, rather tardily it would seem, all the lugubrious memories of her past life connected with the palace; and she established herself in the magnificent Palais Royal—originally the Palais Cardinal.
In all those festivities, Ninon took prominent part. Ever philosophical, she thus consoled herself for the prolonged absence of the Duc d’Enghien, an absence which had, moreover, not intensified the sentiments of adoration she at first conceived for him. It was but Ninon’s way. She had begun to see small defects in the case-armour of the perfection of her Mars. Her acquaintance with the dead languages supplied her with the Latin proverb, “vir pilosus, aut libidinum aut fortis.” “Now Esau was a hairy man,” and the Duc d’Enghien was alsovir pilosus, and Ninon taxed him with being a greater warrior than an ardent wooer, and the passion cooled rapidly; but the friendship and mutual liking ever remained.
Ninon employed Poquelin, upholsterer to the king, in the furnishing of her elegant suite of apartments. His shop was in the rue St Honoré, and there was born his son, Jean Baptiste, an intelligent, rather delicate-looking little boy, whom he duly educated and trained for his own trade. Young Jean Baptiste, however, fairly submissive and obedient, was also very fond of reading and writing, the only two acquirements his father thought necessary for assisting the chair and table-making the boy’s future was destined for. Fortunately he had a very kind grandfather who loved the drama, and sometimes he would take little Jean Baptiste with him to see the performances at The Hôtel Bourgogne. Poquelin père looked with distrust on these excursions, thinking that he saw in the lad, as undoubtedly he did, growing aversion to the upholstery vocation, and afast developing passion for tragedy and comedy—comedy very markedly—and the boy’s delight in study and books generally, created a disturbance in the good upholsterer’s mind, which culminated in distress, when it became certain beyond all question, that young Jean’s liking was as small for cabinet-making as it was unconquerable for literature. He was at that time about fourteen years old, and he carried about with him a small comedy he had composed calledl’Amour Médecin, which Ninon one day, when he came to assist his father at her house, detected, rolled up under his arm. Won by her kind smiles, young Poquelin was induced to allow her to look at it, and she, no mean critic, saw such promise in it, that she showed it to Corneille—who was then staying with her, pending the representation ofThe Cid. Corneille warmly seconded her estimate of the boy’s promise of unusual dramatic gifts; and after great demur, Poquelin yielded to the good grandfather’s persuasions to send him to college. Several helping hands, Ninon among them, contributed to the necessary funds for this new career, and Jean Baptiste became a pupil of the Jesuits at Clermont. There he studied for five years, in the same class with Armand de Bourbon, Prince de Conti, the youngest brother of Madame de Longueville, who promised Ninon the special protection and friendship of Armand, and of the college preceptors, a promise that was ever faithfully held by; and the celebrated teacher Gassendi took him under his special care, with two other gifted lads confided to him.
At the end of the five years, Jean Baptiste was forced to resume his old occupation, on account of his father’s increasing infirmities. But it was not for long. Richelieu’s love of letters, and of the drama especially, brought him knowledge of young Poquelin’s talent, and made the difficult way of literature easier for him; for the theatre was beginning to flourish. There was no regular company of actors in Paris until the coming of Corneille. Only a few of the “rogue and vagabond” wearers of the sock and buskin came and went, selling their plays, when they could find buyers, for some ten crowns apiece. The comedies of Corneille caused the establishment of a dramatic troupe in the city, and then it was that young Poquelin, leaving the upholstery to the dogs, established a small company of young men—“stage-struck” as the mockers were pleased to say, in this instance guided however by the sterling judgment of Jean Baptiste, truly dramatically gifted, in the Faubourg St Germain. They called it the Illustrious Theatre—(l’Illustre Théâtre). So through the years of the ignoble strife of the Fronde, when times were arid for real literary talent, Poquelin acted and composed little comedies, mainly for the provinces. Travelling with his company to Languedoc, where the Prince de Conti happened to be staying on his estates, Poquelin produced before him several of his pieces, afterwards finding their world-wide renown,l’Étourdi,le Dépit Amoureux, and others. The Prince de Conti introduced him to Monsieur, the only brother of Louis XIV.; and in ashort time there came a day of days when the command of their Majesties reached the actor-manager, to give a representation in the chamber of the Guards in the old Louvre. After the performance of this long five-act piece, Poquelin—who had followed the custom of the actors of his time, had taken another name, and selected Molière—stepped to the front, and begged His Majesty’s permission to play a short one-act piece. It wasle Docteur Amoureux. This is possibly the origin of the custom, still so frequently observed, of the “Curtain-raiser.”