A distinguished Salon—The Duke’s Homage—Quietism—The disastrous Edict—The writing on the Window-pane—The persecution of the Huguenots—The Pamphleteers—The story of Jean Larcher andThe Ghost of M. Scarron—The two Policies.
“The house of Mademoiselle de L’Enclos,” writes a contemporary author, “was then, 1694, the rendezvous of the persons of the Court and of the city who were regarded as the most intellectually gifted and estimable. The house of Ninon was, perhaps, in these latter years of her life, the only one where talent and wit found fair breathing-room, and where the time was passed without card-playing and without ennui, and until the age of eighty-seven she was sought by the best company of the time.”
“The house of Mademoiselle de L’Enclos,” writes a contemporary author, “was then, 1694, the rendezvous of the persons of the Court and of the city who were regarded as the most intellectually gifted and estimable. The house of Ninon was, perhaps, in these latter years of her life, the only one where talent and wit found fair breathing-room, and where the time was passed without card-playing and without ennui, and until the age of eighty-seven she was sought by the best company of the time.”
“And,” writes another eminent chronicler—
“Ninon had illustrious friends of all sorts, and showed such wit and tact that she never failed to keep them in good humour with each other; or at all events free of petty differences. Her friends were of the most refined and mentally gifted of the people of the Court; so that it was esteemed very desirable to mingle with them in her salon. There was never any gaming, nor loud laughter, nor disputing, nor religious or political discussion, but much flow of wit, and conversing on topics new and old, subjects of sentiment or of gallantry, but these never transgressing the bounds of good taste. All was delicate, graceful, well-balanced, and furnished themes which she was well able to render full of interest from her stores of memories of so many past years. The consideration she had acquired, the number and distinction of her friends and acquaintance, continued to be her attraction when the charm ofher beauty had faded. She knew all about the intrigues of the present Court, as of the old, serious and otherwise. Her conversation was charming, disinterested, frank, guarded, and accurate at every point, and almost to a weakness blameless and pure. She frequently assisted her friends with money, and would enter for them into important negotiations, and ever faithfully guarded money and secrets entrusted to her keeping. All these things won for her a repute and respect of the most marvellous kind.”
“Ninon had illustrious friends of all sorts, and showed such wit and tact that she never failed to keep them in good humour with each other; or at all events free of petty differences. Her friends were of the most refined and mentally gifted of the people of the Court; so that it was esteemed very desirable to mingle with them in her salon. There was never any gaming, nor loud laughter, nor disputing, nor religious or political discussion, but much flow of wit, and conversing on topics new and old, subjects of sentiment or of gallantry, but these never transgressing the bounds of good taste. All was delicate, graceful, well-balanced, and furnished themes which she was well able to render full of interest from her stores of memories of so many past years. The consideration she had acquired, the number and distinction of her friends and acquaintance, continued to be her attraction when the charm ofher beauty had faded. She knew all about the intrigues of the present Court, as of the old, serious and otherwise. Her conversation was charming, disinterested, frank, guarded, and accurate at every point, and almost to a weakness blameless and pure. She frequently assisted her friends with money, and would enter for them into important negotiations, and ever faithfully guarded money and secrets entrusted to her keeping. All these things won for her a repute and respect of the most marvellous kind.”
Such, on the testimony of the Marquis de la Fare and of St Simon, was the Ninon de L’Enclos of the closing years of her life and of the century. She herself records, with pardonable pride, that “when the great Condé used to meet her out driving, he would descend from his carriage, and cause the window of hers to be let down, that he might offer her his compliments.”
It has been said that Paris no longer had any salon except hers where people of wit and breeding and celebrity forgathered. There came Racine, her near neighbour, Boileau, Fontenelle, la Fontaine, Huydens, Bussy Rabutin, Charleval, Montreuil, la Fare, Benserade, Desmarets, Quinault, La Bruyère, and with them many of the prominent men and women of the Court. Thither also came frequently Fénelon, and it was in Ninon’s salon that his relative, Madame Guyon, first expounded her doctrine of Quietism.
Now and again Madame de Maintenon would come to the rue des Tournelles, and Ninon concedes that she had the good taste not to unduly assert herself on these occasions; though the air of strict and devout propriety seemed ever more and moreto enfold her. At that time she showed considerable favour to the theories of Madame Guyon and of Fénelon; but the Jesuit Père la Chaise had small appreciation of anything savouring of liberty of conscience, and the Edict of Nantes was imminent, the evil thing engendered in the brain of the trio ruling him whose proud mottoes, “Nec pluribus impor,” “Vires acquiret eundo,” so belied the weak, superstitious shadow into which the Grand Monarque had faded.
Louis’s liking for his Huguenot subjects had always been so entirely of the smallest, that it verged on hatred. Thanks to Mazarin’s plan of mental cultivation for him, his understanding of the doctrinal questions at issue between Catholic and Calvinist was so infinitesimal as to be of no account. It was his arrogant claim of authority over the minds and bodies of his subjects, far more than any spiritual convictions, which needed but the representations of Madame de Maintenon, of the egotistical, vain and unsympathetic minister Louvois, and of the Jesuit intolerance of Père la Chaise, to fire the smouldering flame of extermination of the “reformed” Christianity of France; and on the 22nd of October, 1685, was re-enacted the new version of the tragedy of St Bartholomew, the chiefrôlein it played by the descendant of the murdered Coligny’s friend, who had been the progenitor of Françoise d’Aubigné, the ambitious Madame Louis Quatorze. Gentle and patient in adversity, as Scarron’s wife, admirable, and perhaps really lovable, in that far-off daywhen she did not even then scruple, and successfully, to win her friend Ninon’s lover away from her—a fact by no means forgotten, nor likely to be, recorded as Monsieur de Villarceaux had recorded it at the time on a window of “the Yellow Room” in the rue des Tournelles. There, diamond-graven on the pane of glass, that erotic quatrain proclaimed the charms of Françoise as unmistakably as ever; and though Ninon had no part in it, somehow the lines found their way into Monsieur Loret’s journal, and forthwith it created other couplets, which commemorated more than one incident in the life of Madame Louis Quatorze. The precious rhyming ran into several verses, varied only by the several names of Madame’s former admirers, starting gaily with Monsieur de Villarceaux:
“On est ravi que le roi notre sire,Aime la d’AubignéMoi, Villarceaux, je mén créve de rire,Hi! hé! hi! hi! hi! hé!Puis je dirai, sans être plus lestes,Tu n’as que mes restes,Toi!Tu n’as que nos restes,” etc. etc.
“On est ravi que le roi notre sire,Aime la d’AubignéMoi, Villarceaux, je mén créve de rire,Hi! hé! hi! hi! hi! hé!Puis je dirai, sans être plus lestes,Tu n’as que mes restes,Toi!Tu n’as que nos restes,” etc. etc.
“On est ravi que le roi notre sire,
Aime la d’Aubigné
Moi, Villarceaux, je mén créve de rire,
Hi! hé! hi! hi! hi! hé!
Puis je dirai, sans être plus lestes,
Tu n’as que mes restes,
Toi!
Tu n’as que nos restes,” etc. etc.
Briefly, the French nation looked with contempt on the left-handed marriage contracted by the king. Madame de Maintenon, less a bigot than an assumed one, hypocritical, ambitious, wrapped about in a veil of piety, ruled Louis to the disaster of the country. She was calmly, ruthlessly cruel in her methods of fostering the natural passion of Louis for getting all under his own control. Not contentwith the grasp of government which Richelieu had bequeathed to him, and he had retained with iron hand, he only too readily allowed himself to be urged to acquire the grip of the consciences of his subjects. The Edict of Nantes, established by the other great king, which had brought peace to the distracted land, and permitted the Protestants freedom of worship after their own simple forms, was revoked, religious intolerance was once more rampant, and to such a degree, that a few months later, a second edict deprived the Huguenots of keeping their children. The quick death of the night of St Bartholomew only took on now the guise of slow torture, prolonged into years, which witnessed the departure of an industrious community, and sowed the dragon’s teeth of revolution, which in less than another hundred years was to ripen into such fearful harvesting. Discontent prevailed, deep hatred rankled against the despotism of Versailles. The faults of Louis, glaring as they had ever been, had hitherto been toned in the eyes of his people by the brilliancy and glory of martial successes, and of great achievement in civil government; but victory was no longer constant, and the Thirty Years’ War had exhausted the public funds.
The enormous prodigality of the king’s mode of life was beginning to be more and more recognised for the evil it was. The Sun-King’s light was fast dimming; the people no longer worshipped from afar, and the death-stroke to his popularity and renown waned as the domination of Madame de Maintenon waxed ever more powerful. Thepamphleteers fell to work. Many such productions found circulation in spite of the efforts of the police to run them to earth. One of marked effect was entitled,The Sighs of Enslaved France for Liberty, and was widely read. The liberal sentiments of the pamphlets made deep impression. When they were detected in any person’s possession, the unfortunate students were forthwith conducted to the torture-chamber or the Bastille; and while stricture on Louis was harshly enough dealt with, it was mild compared with any attacks on Madame de Maintenon. The king was so entirely conscious of the great political mistake he had made in his marriage with her, that it enraged him to be reminded of it. One of the tractates was calledThe Ghost of M. Scarron, and it was adorned with a picture parodying the statue of Louis on the Place des Victoires, whose four allegorical figures of its pedestal were replaced in the pamphlet picture by the figures of la Vallière, de Montespan, Fontanges, and de Maintenon. One morning the king found a copy of this literary effort under his breakfast napkin, and Madame Louis Quatorze also found one under hers. It was the princes of the blood who were her most bitter enemies, and their powerful influence fomented the enmity, and contrived to defeat, again and again, the endeavours of Monsieur de la Reynie, the lieutenant of police, to bring the pamphleteers to “justice.”
The Ghost of M. Scarronwas the crowning offence, and Monsieur de la Reynie was summonedto Versailles, and commanded at any cost to track down the authors of this pamphlet.
It was a fearful dilemma for Monsieur de la Reynie; that it would end in his disgrace he could not doubt, and whenever the king chanced to see the unhappy lieutenant, he flung reproaches at him on account of the terrible “ghost.”
Curious chance came to the rescue of Monsieur de la Reynie; but to the undoing and judicial murder of an innocent man, one Jean Larcher, ending up with a horrible tragedy. This Jean Larcher, who had sustained a loss of some 5000 livres, which had been stolen from his house, came to the lieutenant of police to lodge his complaint, in the hope that the thief might be traced. No sooner had he given his name, than Monsieur de la Reynie summoned a police officer, and whispering a few words in his ear, bade him accompany Larcher, who was a bookbinder, to his house in the rue des Lions St Paul. Larcher, delighted at the prompt and interested attention shown him, grew communicative as he went along, and gave the officer much information as to the exact position of the receptacles in which he stored his money and stock in trade. On arriving, the officer, changing his courteous demeanour, called to two of the small throng of soldiers and police standing about in front of the bookbinder’s door, and bidding them keep him well in their charge, and follow him upstairs in company with another officer, went first to a room on the first floor, where he told the man to climb to the top of a certain cupboard, loaded with papersand pamphlets ready for the binder, and bring them down. Selecting one of these, the officer placed it in the hands of Larcher, who turned white as a sheet, for it was a copy ofThe Ghost of M. Scarron. The unfortunate man, without more ado, was hurried off under arrest to the Châtelet, and thence, before any great loss of time, to the torture-chamber, three times suffering there, and finally to the gibbet, where he died bravely, and firmly asserting his innocence to the last.
There came a time when he was justified. The whole matter proved to be an infamous plot, concocted by a scoundrel who had an intrigue with Larcher’s wife. This man was Larcher’s assistant, and afterwards married the widow. At a later time Larcher’s son discovered that the wretched fellow had placed the pamphlets where they were come upon in Larcher’s house, and then had written an anonymous letter to Monsieur de la Reynie, informing him of where they were to be found. On tracking the exact truth and circumstances of this abominable treachery, the young man broke, in the dead of night, into the house where the couple lived, and murdered both. He was arrested; but he was saved from public death by brain-fever, which struck him down while he was in prison.
At the time of the conviction of Larcher, it was more than believed that he was innocent; but, in the first place, M. de la Reynie had his own safety and position to consider, and somebody had to bear the brunt; and secondly, riding very hard on the heels of it, Larcher was aProtestant, and furthermore guilty of the enormity of remaining in communication with his child, who had been sent for protection to England.
The pope was far more tolerant in his desires for dealing with the French Protestants, than was the quartette at Versailles. The liberal spirit of the Gallican Church was ignored to feed the contemptible ambition of the converted Françoise d’Aubigné, and to lull to rest the conscience of the pusillanimous nonentity still called the King of France. The persecution of the Huguenots was carried on relentlessly for fifteen years; fire and sword, and rape and murder, were the lot of those who remained to brave the booted emissaries of M. Louvois, if they retaliated where they had the chance, and as they did fiercely in the terrible struggles in the Cévennes. Justice is even-handed: it was no time to turn the cheek to be smitten. Those who emigrated, as in such thousands they did, carried with them the commerce and the prosperity of France. Frugal and industrious for the most part, and in these later days at least, peacefully disposed, rarely seeking more than to be let alone, they were the mainstay of the country. Richelieu had fully recognised their value, and followed it in his policy with them. The “Old Woman of Versailles,” as she was widely called, reversed the great cardinal’s provisions, and in time the avengement fell.
The clergy generally carried out the orders issued from Versailles for the extermination of the heretics. Monseigneur d’Orléans and the Abbé de Fénelon alone resisted. The first affordedtime for the Huguenots to make their preparations for emigrating from France, by lodging the soldiery, sent to disperse them by violence, in his own palace, and maintaining them at his own expense, forbidding them meanwhile to harm any one of the Huguenot families in his diocese. For Monsieur de Fénelon, selected to superintend the raid of thebooted missionariesin Poitou and Saintonge, he, like the Bishop of Orléans, forbade them to use violence, and brought back more of the errant ones into the Catholic fold by his sweet, persuasive eloquence, than the rest of the priests did, with all theirdragonnadesand executioner assistants, notwithstanding the view of Madame de Maintenon and of her spiritual director: that if only the holy Apostles had employed such emissaries of fire and sword, the Christian religion would not have been half so long in establishing.