A Popular History of France from the Earliest Times Volume V Part 27

Even in Brittany and at the Rochers, Madame de Sevigne always has something to say. The weather is frightful; she is occupied a good deal in reading the romances of La Calprenede and the _Grand Cyrus,_ as well as the _Ethics_ of Nicole. "For four days it has been one continuous tempest; all our walks are drowned; there is no getting out any more.

Our masons, our carpenters keep their rooms; in short, I hate this country, and I yearn every moment for your sun; perhaps you yearn for my rain; we do well, both of us. I am going on with the _Ethics_ of Nicole, which I find delightful; it has not yet given me any lesson against the rain, but I am expecting it, for I find everything there, and conformity to the will of G.o.d might answer my purpose, if I did not want a specific remedy. In fact, I consider this an admirable book; n.o.body has written as these gentlemen have, for I put down to Pascal half of all that is beautiful. It is so nice to have one's self and one's feelings talked about, that, though it be in bad part, one is charmed by it. What is called searching the depths of the heart with a lantern is exactly what he does; he discloses to us that which we feel every day, but have not the wit to discern or the sincerity to avow. I have even forgiven the swelling in the heart (_l'enflure du coeur_) for the sake of the rest, and I maintain that there is no other word to express vanity and pride, which are really wind: try and find another word. I shall complete the reading of this with pleasure."

Here we have the real Madame de Sevigne, whom we love, on whom we rely, who is as earnest as she is amiable and gay, who goes to the very core of things, and who tells the truth of herself as well as of others. "You ask me, my dear child, whether I continue to be really fond of life. I confess to you that I find poignant sorrows in it, but I am even more disgusted with death; I feel so wretched at having to end all this thereby, that, if I could turn back again, I would ask for nothing better. I find myself under an obligation which perplexes me: I embarked upon life without my consent, and I must go out of it; that overwhelms me. And how shall I go? Which way? By what door? When will it be?

In what condition? Shall I suffer a thousand, thousand pains, which will make me die desperate? Shall I have brain-fever? Shall I die of an accident? How shall I be with G.o.d? What shall I have to show Him?

Shall fear, shall necessity bring me back to Him? Shall I have no sentiment but that of dread? What can I hope? Am I worthy of heaven?

Am I worthy of h.e.l.l? Nothing is such madness as to leave one's salvation in uncertainty, but nothing is so natural; and the stupid life I lead is the easiest thing in the world to understand. I bury myself in these thoughts, and I find death so terrible, that I hate life more because it leads me thereto than because of the thorns with which it is planted.

You will say that I want to live forever then: not at all; but, if my opinion had been asked, I should have preferred to die in my nurse's arms; that would have removed me from vexations of spirit, and would have given me Heaven full surely and easily."

Madame de Sevigne would have very much scandalized those gentlemen of Port-Royal, if she had let them see into the bottom of her heart as she showed it to her daughter. Pascal used to say, "There are but three sorts of persons: those who serve G.o.d, having found Him; those who employ themselves in seeking Him, not having found Him; and those who live without seeking Him or having found Him. The first are reasonable and happy; the last are mad and miserable; the intermediate are miserable and reasonable." Without ever having sought and found G.o.d, in the absolute sense intended by Pascal, Madame de Sevigne kept approaching Him by gentle degrees. "We are reading a treatise by M. Namon of Port-Royal on continuous prayer; though he is a hundred feet above my head, he nevertheless pleases and charms us. One is very glad to see that there have been and still are in the world people to whom G.o.d communicates His Holy Spirit in such abundance; but, O G.o.d! when shall we have some spark, some degree of it? How sad to find one's self so far from it, and so near to something else! O, fie! Let us not speak of such plight as that: it calls for sighs, and groans, and humiliations a hundred times a day."

After having suffered so much from separation, and so often traversed France to visit her daughter in Provence, Madame de Sevigne had the happiness to die in her house at Grignan. She was sixty-nine, and she had been ill for some time; she was subject to rheumatism; her son's wildness had for a long while r.e.t.a.r.ded the arrangement of her affairs; at last he had turned over a new leaf, he was married, he was a devotee.

Madame de Grignan had likewise found a wife for her son, whom the king had made a colonel at a very early age; and a husband for her daughter, little Pauline, now Madame de Simiane. "All this together is extremely nice, and too nice," wrote Madame de Sevigne to M. de Bussy, "for I find the days going so fast, and the months and the years, that, for my part, my dear cousin, I can no longer hold them. Time flies, and carries me along in spite of me; it is all very fine for me to wish to stay it, it bears me away with it, and the idea of this causes me great fear; you will make a pretty shrewd guess why." Death came at last, and Madame de Sevigne lost all her terrors. She was attacked by small-pox whilst her sick daughter was confined to her bed, and died on the 19th of April, 1696, thanking G.o.d that she was the first to go, after having so often trembled for her daughter's health. "What calls far more for our admiration than for our regrets," writes M. de Grignan to M. de Coulanges, "is the spectacle of a brave woman facing death, of which she had no doubt from the first days of her illness, with astounding firmness and submission. This person, so tender and so weak towards all that she loved, showed nothing but courage and piety when she believed that her hour was come; and we could not but remark of what utility and of what importance it is to have the mind stocked with good matter and holy reading, for the which Madame de Sevigne had a liking, not to say a wonderful hungering, from the use she managed to make of that good store in the last moments of her life." She had often taken her daughter to task for not being fond of books. "There is a certain person who undoubtedly has plenty of wits, but of so nice and so fastidious a sort, that she cannot read anything but five or six sublime works, which is a sign of distinguished taste. She cannot bear historical books; a great deprivation this, and of that which is a subsistence to everybody else.

She has another misfortune, which is, that she cannot read twice over those choice books which she esteems exclusively. This person says that she is insulted when she is told that she is not fond of reading: another bone to pick." Madame de Sevigne's liking for good books accompanied her to the last, and helped her to make a good end.

All the women who had been writers in her time died before Madame de Sevigne. Madame de Motteville, a judicious and sensible woman, more independent at the bottom of her heart than in externals, had died in 1689, exclusively occupied, from the time that she lost Queen Anne of Austria, in works of piety and in drawing up her _Memoires_. Mdlle. de Montpensier, "my great Mademoiselle," as Madame de Sevigne used to call her, had died at Paris on the 5th of April, 1693, after a violent illness, as feverish as her life. Impa.s.sioned and haughty, with her head so full of her greatness that she did not marry in her youth, thinking n.o.body worthy of her except the king and the emperor, who had no fancy for her, and ending by a private marriage with the Duke of Lauzun, "a cadet of Gascony," whom the king would not permit her to espouse publicly; clever, courageous, hare-brained, generous, she has herself sketched her own portrait. "I am tall, neither fat nor thin, of a very fine and easy figure. I have a good mien, arms and hands not beautiful, but a beautiful skin and throat too. I have a straight leg and a well-shaped foot; my hair is light, and of a beautiful auburn; my face is long, its contour is handsome, nose large and aquiline; mouth neither large nor small, but chiselled, and with a very pleasing expression; lips vermilion; teeth not fine, but not frightful either. My eyes are blue, neither large nor small, but sparkling, soft, and proud, like my mien. I talk a great deal, without saying silly things or using bad words. I am a very vicious enemy, being very choleric and pa.s.sionate, and that, added to my birth, may well make my enemies tremble; but I have also a n.o.ble and a kindly soul. I am incapable of any base and black deed; and so I am more disposed to mercy than to justice. I am melancholic; I like reading good and solid books; trifles bore me, except verses, and them I like, of whatever sort they may be, and undoubtedly I am as good a judge of such things as if I were a scholar."

A few days after Mademoiselle, died, likewise at Paris, Madelaine de la Vergne, Marchioness of La Fayette, the most intimate friend of Madame de Sevigne. "Never did we have the smallest cloud upon our friendship," the latter would say; "long habit had not made her merit stale to me, the flavor of it was always fresh and new; I paid her many attentions from the mere prompting of my heart, without the propriety to which we are bound by friendship having anything to do with it. I was a.s.sured, too, that I const.i.tuted her dearest consolation, and for forty years past it had always been the same thing." Sensible, clever, a sweet and safe acquaintance, Madame de La Fayette was as simple and as true in her relations with her confidantes as in her writings. La Princesse de Olives alone has outlived the times and the friends of Madame de La Fayette. Following upon the "great sword-thrusts" of La Calprenede or Mdlle. de Scudery, this delicate, elegant, and virtuous tale, with its pure and refined style, enchanted the court, which recognized itself at its best, and painted under its brightest aspect; it was farewell forever to the "Pays de Tendre." Madame de La Fayette had very bad health; she wrote to Madame de Sevigne on the 14th of July, 1693, "Here is what I have done since I wrote to you last. I have had two attacks of fever; for six months I had not been purged; I am purged once, I am purged twice; the day after the second time, I sit down to table. O, dear!

I feel a pain in my heart; I do not want any soup. Have a little meat then. No, I do not want any. Well, you will have some fruit. I think I will. Very well, then, have some. I don't know, I think I will have something by and by; let me have some soup and a chicken this evening.

Here is the evening, and there are the soup and the chicken: I don't want them. I am nauseated; I will go to bed; I prefer sleeping to eating. I go to bed, I turn round, I turn back, I have no pain, but I have no sleep either. I call, I take a book, I shut it up. Day comes, I get up, I go to the window. It strikes four, five, six; I go to bed again, I doze till seven, I get up at eight, I sit down to table at twelve, to no purpose, as yesterday. I lay myself down in my bed again in the evening, to no purpose, as the night before. Are you ill? Nay. I am in this state for three days and three nights. At present I am getting some sleep again, but I still eat merely mechanically, horse-wise, rubbing my mouth with vinegar otherwise I am very well, and I haven't even so much pain in the head." Fault was found with Madame de La Fayette for not going out. "She had a mortal melancholy. What absurdity again! Is she not the most fortunate woman in the world? That is what people said,"

writes Madame de Sevigne; "it needed that she should be dead to prove that she had good reason for not going out, and for being melancholy.

Her reins and her heart were all gone was not that enough to cause those fits of despondency of which she complained? And so, during her life, she showed reason, and after death she showed reason, and never was she without that divine reason which was her princ.i.p.al gift."

Madame de La Fayette had in her life one great sorrow, which had completed the ruin of her health. On the 16th of March, 1680, after the closest and longest of intimacies, she had lost her best friend, the Duke of La Rochefoucauld. Carried away in his youth by party strife and an ardent pa.s.sion for Madame de Longueville, he had at a later period sought refuge in the friendship of Madame de La Fayette. "When women have well-formed minds," he would say, "I like their conversation better than that of men; you find with them a certain gentleness which is not met with amongst us, and it seems to me, besides, that they express themselves with greater clearness, and that they give a more pleasant turn to the things they say." A meddler and intriguer during the Fronde, sceptical and bitter in his _Maximes,_ the Duke of La Rochefoucauld was amiable and kindly in his private life. Factions and the court had taught him a great deal about human nature; he had seen it and judged of it from its bad side. Witty, shrewd, and often profound, he was too severe to be just. The bitterness of his spirit breathed itself out completely in his writings; he kept for his friends that kindliness and that sensitiveness of which he made sport. "He gave me wit," Madame de La Fayette would say, "but I reformed his heart." He had lost his son at the pa.s.sage of the Rhine, in 1672. He was ill, suffering cruelly. "I was yesterday at M. de La Rochefoucauld's,"

writes Madame de Sevigne, in 1680. "I found him uttering loud shrieks; his pain was such that his endurance was quite overcome without a single sc.r.a.p remaining. The excessive pain upset him to such a degree that he was sitting out in the open air with a violent fever upon him. He begged me to send you word, and to a.s.sure you that the wheel-broken do not suffer during a single moment what he suffers one half of his life, and so he wishes for death as a happy release." He died with Bossuet at his pillow. "Very well prepared as regards his conscience," says Madame de Sevigne again; "that is all settled; but, in other respects, it might be the illness and death of his neighbor which is in question, he is not flurried about it, he is not troubled about it. Believe me, my daughter, it is not to no purpose that he has been making reflections all his life; he has approached his last moments in such wise that they have had nothing that was novel or strange for him." M. de La Rochefoucauld thought worse of men than of life. "I have scarcely any fear of things," he had said; "I am not at all afraid of death." With all his rare qualities and great opportunities he had done nothing but frequently embroil matters in which he had meddled, and had never been anything but a great lord with a good deal of wit. Actionless penetration and sceptical severity may sometimes clear the judgment and the thoughts, but they give no force or influence that has power over men. "There was always a something (_je ne sais quoi_) about M. de La Rochefoucauld," writes Cardinal de Retz, who did not like him; "he was for meddling in intrigues from his childhood, and at a time when he had no notion of petty interests, which were never his foible, and when he did not understand great ones, which, on the other hand, were never his strength. He was never capable of doing anything in public affairs, and I am sure I don't know why. His views were not sufficiently broad, and he did not even see comprehensively all that was within his range, but his good sense,--very good, speculatively,--added to his suavity, his insinuating style, and his easy manners, which are admirable, ought to have compensated more than it did for his lack of penetration. He always showed habitual irresolution, but I really do not know to what to attribute this irresolution; it could not, with him, have come from the fertility of his imagination, which is anything but lively. He was never a warrior, though he was very much the soldier. He was never a good partyman, though he was engaged in it all his life. That air of bashfulness and timidity which you see about him in private life was turned in public life into an air of apology. He always considered himself to need one, which fact, added to his maxims, which do not show sufficient belief in virtue, and to his practice, which was always to get out of affairs with as much impatience as he had shown to get into them, leads me to conclude that he would have done far better to know his own place, and reduce himself to pa.s.sing, as he might have pa.s.sed, for the most polite of courtiers and the worthiest (_le plus honnete_) man, as regards ordinary life, that ever appeared in his century."

[Ill.u.s.tration: La Rochefoucauld and his fair Friends----629]

Cardinal de Retz had more wits, more courage, and more resolution than the Duke of La Rochefoucauld; he was more ambitious and more bold; he was, like him, meddlesome, powerless, and dangerous to the state. He thought himself capable of superseding Cardinal Mazarin, and far more worthy than he of being premier minister; but every time he found himself opposed to the able Italian he was beaten. All that he displayed, during the Fronde, of address, combination, intrigue, and resolution, would barely have sufficed to preserve his name in history, if he had not devoted his leisure in his retirement to writing his _Memoires_.

Vigorous, animated, always striking, often amusing, sometimes showing rare n.o.bleness and high-mindedness, his stories and his portraits transport us to the very midst of the scenes he desires to describe and the personages he makes the actors in them. His rapid, nervous, picturesque style is the very image of that little dark, quick, agile man, more soldier than bishop, and more intriguer than soldier, faithfully and affectionately beloved by his friends, detested by his very numerous enemies, and dreaded by many people, for the causticity of his tongue, long after the troubles of the Fronde had ceased, and he was reduced to be a wanderer in foreign lands, still Archbishop of Paris without being able to set foot in it. Having retired to Commercy, he fell under Louis XIV.'s suspicion. Madame de Sevigne, who was one of his best friends, was anxious about him. "As to our cardinal, I have often thought as you," she wrote to her daughter; "but, whether it be that the enemies are not in a condition to cause fear, or that the friends are not subject to take alarm, it is certain that there is no commotion. You show a very proper spirit in being anxious about the welfare of a person who is so distinguished, and to whom you owe so much affection." "Can I forget him whom I see everywhere in the story of our misfortunes,"

exclaimed Bossuet, in his funeral oration over Michael Le Tellier, "that man so faithful to individuals, so formidable to the state, of a character so high that he could not be esteemed, or feared, or hated by halves, that steady genius whom, the while he shook the universe, we saw attracting to himself a dignity which in the end he determined to relinquish as having been too dearly bought, as he had the courage to recognize in the place that is the most eminent in Christendom, and as being, after all, quite incapable of satisfying his desires, so conscious was he of his mistake and of the emptiness of human greatness? But, so long as he was bent upon obtaining what he was one day to despise, he kept everything moving by means of powerful and secret springs, and, after that all parties were overthrown, he seemed still to uphold himself alone, and alone to still threaten the victorious favorite with his sad but fearless gaze." When Bossuet sketched this magnificent portrait of Mazarin's rival, Cardinal de Retz had been six years dead, in 1679.

Mesdames de Sevigne and de La Fayette were of the court, as were the Duke of La Rochefoucauld and Cardinal de Retz. La Bruyere lived all his life rubbing shoulders with the court; he knew it, he described it, but he was not of it, and could not be of it. Nothing is known of his family. He was born at Dourdan in 1639, and had just bought a post in the Treasury (_tresorier de France_) at Caen, when Bossuet, who knew him, induced him to remove to Paris as teacher of history to the duke, grandson of the great Conde. He remained forever attached to the person of the prince, who gave him a thousand crowns a year, and he lived to the day of his death at Conde's house. "He was a philosopher," says Abbe d'Olivet in his _Histoire de l'Academie Francaise;_ "all he dreamt of was a quiet life, with his friends and his books, making a good choice of both; not courting or avoiding pleasure; ever inclined for moderate fun, and with a talent for setting it going; polished in manners, and discreet in conversation; dreading every sort of ambition, even that of displaying wit." This was not quite the opinion formed by Boileau of La Bruyere.

"Maximilian came to see me at Auteuil," writes Boileau to Racine on the 19th of May, 1687, the very year in which the _Caracteres_ was published; "he read me some of his _Theophrastus_. He is a very worthy (_honnete_) man, and one who would lack nothing, if nature had created him as agreeable as he is anxious to be. However, he has wit, learning, and merit." Amidst his many and various portraits, La Bruyere has drawn his own with an amiable pride. "I go to your door, Ctesiphon; the need I have of you hurries me from my bed and from my room. Would to Heaven I were neither your client nor your bore. Your slaves tell me that you are engaged and cannot see me for a full hour yet; I return before the time they appointed, and they tell me that you have gone out. What can you be doing, Ctesiphon, in that remotest part of your rooms, of so laborious a kind as to prevent you from seeing me? You are filing some bills, you are comparing a register; you are signing your name, you are putting the flourish. I had but one thing to ask you, and you had but one word to reply: yes or no. Do you want to be singular? Render service to those who are dependent upon you, you will be more so by that behavior than by not letting yourself be seen. O man of importance and overwhelmed with business, who in your turn have need of my offices, come into the solitude of my closet; the philosopher is accessible; I shall not put you off to another day. You will find me over those works of Plato which treat of the immortality of the soul and its distinctness from the body; or with pen in hand, to calculate the distances of Saturn and Jupiter. I admire G.o.d in His works, and I seek by knowledge of the truth to regulate my mind and become better. Come in, all doors are open to you; my antechamber is not made to wear you out with waiting for me; come right in to me without giving me notice. You bring me something more precious than silver and gold, if it be an opportunity of obliging you. Tell me, what can I do for you? Must I leave my books, my study, my work, this line I have just begun? What a fortunate interruption for me is that which is of service to you!"

[Ill.u.s.tration: La Bruyere----633]

From the solitude of that closet went forth a book unique of its sort, full of sagacity, penetration, and severity, without bitterness; a picture of the manners of the court and of the world, traced by the hand of a spectator who had not essayed its temptations, but who guessed them and pa.s.sed judgment on them all,--"a book," as M. de Malezieux said to La Bruyere, "which was sure to bring its author many readers and many enemies." Its success was great from the first, and it excited lively curiosity. The courtiers liked the portraits; attempts were made to name them; the good sense, shrewdness, and truth of the observations struck everybody; people had met a hundred times those whom La Bruyere had described. The form appeared of a rarer order than even the matter; it was a brilliant, uncommon style, as varied as human nature, always elegant and pure, original and animated, rising sometimes to the height of the n.o.blest thoughts, gay and grave, pointed and serious. Avoiding, by richness in turns and expression, the uniformity native to the subject, La Bruyere riveted attention by a succession of touches making a masterly picture, a terrible one sometimes, as in his description of the peasants' misery:

To be seen are certain ferocious animals, male and female, scattered over the country, dark, livid, and all scorched by the sun, affixed to the soil which they rummage and throw up with indomitable pertinacity; they have a sort of articulate voice, and, when they rise to their feet, they show a human face; they are, in fact, men. At night they withdraw to the caves, where they live on black bread, water, and roots. They spare other men the trouble of sowing, tilling, and reaping for their livelihood, and deserve, therefore, not to go in want of the very bread they have sown." Few people at the court, and in La Bruyere's day, would have thought about the sufferings of the country folks, and conceived the idea of contrasting them with the sketch of a court-ninny. "Gold glitters," say you, "upon the clothes of Philemon; it glitters as well as the tradesman's. He is dressed in the finest stuffs; are they a whit the less so when displayed in the shops and by the piece? Nay; but the embroidery and the ornaments add magnificence thereto; then I give the workman credit for his work. If you ask him the time, he pulls out a watch which is a masterpiece; his sword-guard is an onyx; he has on his finger a large diamond which he flashes into all eyes, and which is perfection; he lacks none of those curious trifles which are worn about one as much for show as for use; and he does not stint himself either of all sorts of adornment befitting a young man who has married an old millionnaire. You really pique my curiosity: I positively must see such precious articles as those. Send me that coat and those jewels of Philemon's; you can keep the person. Thou'rt wrong, Philemon, if, with that splendid carriage, and that large number of rascals behind thee, and those six animals to draw thee, thou thiukest thou art thought more of.

We take off all those appendages which are extraneous to thee to get at thyself, who art but a ninny."

More earnest and less bitter than La Rochefoucauld, and as brilliant and as firm as Cardinal de Retz, La Bruyere was a more sincere believer than either. "I feel that there is a G.o.d, and I do not feel that there is none; that is enough for me; the reasoning of the world is useless to me.

I conclude that G.o.d exists. Are men good enough, faithful enough, equitable enough to deserve all our confidence, and not make us wish at least for the existence of G.o.d, to whom we may appeal from their judgments and have recourse when we are persecuted or betrayed?" A very strong reason and of potent logic, naturally imprinted upon an upright spirit and a sensible mind, irresistibly convinced, both of them, that justice alone can govern the world.

La Bruyere had just been admitted into the French Academy, in 1693. In his admission speech he spoke in praise of the living, Bossuet, Fenelon, Racine, La Fontaine; it was not as yet the practice. Those who were not praised felt angry, and the journals of the time bitterly attacked the new academician. He was hurt, and withdrew almost entirely from the world. Four days before his death, however, "he was in company. All at once he perceived that he was becoming deaf, yes, stone deaf. He returned to Versailles, where he had apartments at Conde's house.

Apoplexy carried him off in a quarter of an hour on the 11th of May, 1696," leaving behind him an incomparable book, wherein, according to his own maxim, the excellent writer shows himself to be an excellent painter; and four dialogues against Quietism, still unfinished, full of lively and good-humored hostility to the doctrines of Madame Guyon. They were published after his death.

We pa.s.s from prose to poetry, from La Bruyere to Corneille, who had died in 1684, too late for his fame, in spite of the vigorous returns of genius which still flash forth sometimes in his feeblest works.

Throughout the Regency and the Fronde, Corneille had continued to occupy almost alone the great French stage. Rotrou, his sometime rival with his piece of Venceslas, and ever tenderly attached to him, had died, in 1650, at Dreux, of which he was civil magistrate. An epidemic was ravaging the town, and he was urged to go away. "I am the only one who can maintain good order, and I shall remain," he replied. "At the moment of my writing to you the bells are tolling for the twenty-second person to-day; perhaps to-morrow it will be for me; but my conscience has marked out my duty. G.o.d's will be done!" Two days later he was dead.

Corneille had dedicated _Polyeucte_ to the regent Anne of Austria. He published in a single year _Rodogune_ and the _Mort de Pompee,_ dedicating this latter piece to Mazarin, in grat.i.tude, he said, for an act of generosity with which his Eminence had surprised him. At the same time he borrowed from the Spanish drama the canvas of the _Menteur,_ the first really French comedy which appeared on the boards, and which Moliere showed that he could appreciate at its proper value. After this attempt, due perhaps to the desire felt by Corneille to triumph over his rivals in the style in which he had walked abreast with them, he let tragedy resume its legitimate empire over a genius formed by it. He wrote _Heraclius_ and _Nicomede,_ which are equal in parts to his finest masterpieces. But by this time the great genius no longer soared with equal flight. _Theodore_ and _Pertharite_ had been failures. "I don't mention them," Corneille would say, "in order to avoid the vexation of remembering them." He was still living at Rouen, in a house adjoining that occupied by his brother, Thomas Corneille, younger than he, already known by some comedies which had met with success. The two brothers had married two sisters.

"Their houses twain were made in one; With keys and purse the same was done; Their wives can never have been two.

Their wishes tallied at all times; No games distinct their children' knew; The fathers lent each other rhymes; Same wine for both the drawers drew." --[Ducis.]

It is said, that when Peter Corneille was puizled to end a verse he would undo a trap that opened into his brother's room, shouting, "Sans-souci, a rhyme!"

Corneille had announced his renunciation of the stage; he was translating into verse the _Imitation of Christ_. "It were better," he had written in his preface to _Pertharite,_ "that I took leave myself instead of waiting till it is taken of me altogether; it is quite right that after twenty years' work I should begin to perceive that I am becoming too old to be still in the fashion. This resolution is not so strong but that it may be broken; there is every, appearance, however, of my abiding by it."

Fouquet was then in his glory, "no less superintendent of literature than of finance," and he undertook to recall to the stage the genius of Corneille. At his voice, the poet and the tragedian rose up at a single bound.

"I feel the selfsame fire, the selfsame nerve I feel, That roused th' indignant Cid, drove home Iloratius' steel; As cunning as of yore this hand of mine I find, That sketched great Pompey's soul, depicted Cinna's mind,"--

wrote Corneille in his thanks to Fouquet. He had some months before said to Mdlle. du Pare, who was an actress in Moliere's company, which had come to Rouen, and who was, from her grand airs, nicknamed by the others the Marchioness,

"Marchioness," if Age hath set On my brow his ugly die; At my years, pray don't forget, You will be as--old as I.

"Yet do I possess of charms One or two, so slow to fade, That I feel but scant alarms At the havoc Time hath made.

"You have such as men adore, But these that you scorn to-day May, perchance, be to the fore When your own are worn away.

"These can from decay reprieve Eyes I take a fancy to; Make a thousand, years believe Whatsoe'er I please of you.

"With that new, that coming race, Who will take my word for it, All the warrant for your face Will be what I may have writ."

Corneille reappeared upon the boards with a tragedy called _OEdipe,_ more admired by his contemporaries than by posterity. On the occasion of Louis XIV.'s marriage he wrote for the king's comedians the _Toison d'or,_ and put into the mouth of France those prophetic words:--

"My natural force abates, from long success alone; Triumphant blooms the state, the wretched people groan Their shrunken bodies bend beneath my high emprise; Whilst glory gilds the throne, the subject sinks and dies."

_Sertorius_ appeared at the commencement of the year 1662. "Pray where did Corneille learn politics and war?" asked Turenne when he saw this piece played. "You are the true and faithful interpreter of the mind and courage of Rome," Balzac wrote to him; "I say further, sir, you are often her teacher, and the reformer of olden times, if they have need of embellishment and support. In the spots where Rome is of brick, you rebuild it of marble; where you find a gap, you fill it with a masterpiece, and I take it that what you lend to history is always better than what you borrow from it. . . ." "They are grander and more Roman in his verses than in their history," said La Bruyere. "Once only, in the Cid, Corneille had abandoned himself unreservedly to the reality of pa.s.sion; scared at what he might find in the weaknesses of the heart, he would no longer see aught but its strength. He sought in man that which resists and not that which yields, thus giving his times the sublime pleasure of an enjoyment that can belong to nought but the human soul, a cherished proof of its n.o.ble origin and its glorious destiny, the pleasure of admiration, the appreciation of the beautiful and the great, the enthusiasm aroused by virtue. He moves us at sight of a masterpiece, thrills us at the sound of a n.o.ble deed, enchants us at the bare idea of a virtue which three thousand years have forever separated from us."

(_Corneille et son temps,_ by M. Guizot.) Every other thought, every other prepossession, are strangers to the poet; his personages represent heroic pa.s.sions which they follow out without swerving and without suffering themselves to be shackled by the notions of a morality which is still far from fixed and often in conflict with the interests and obligations of parties, thus remaining perfectly of his own time and his own country, all the while that he is describing Greeks, or Romans, or Spaniards.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Corneille reading to Louis XIV.----642]

There is no pleasure in tracing the decadence of a great genius.

Corneille wrote for a long while without success, attributing his repeated rebuffs to his old age, the influence of fashion, the capricious taste of the generation for young people; he thought himself neglected, appealing to the king himself, who had ordered _Cinna_ and _Pompee_ to be played at court:--

"Go on; the latest born have naught degenerate, Naught have they which would stamp them illegitimate They, miserable fate! were smothered at the birth, And one kind glance of yours would bring them back to earth; The people and the court, I grant you, cry them down; I have, or else they think I have, too feeble grown; I've written far too long to write so well again; The wrinkles on the brow reach even to the brain; But counter to this vote how many could I raise, If to my latest works you should vouchsafe your praise!

How soon so kind a grace, so potent to constrain, Would court and people both win back to me again!

'So Sophocles of yore at Athens was the rage, So boiled his ancient blood at five-score years of age,'

Would they to Envy cry, 'when OEdipus at bay Before his judges stood, and bore the votes away.'"

Posterity has done for Corneille more than Louis XIV. could have done: it has left in oblivion _Agesilas, Attila, t.i.tus,_ and _Pulcherie;_ it preserved the memory of the triumphs only. The poet was accustomed to say with a smile, when he was reproached with his slowness and emptiness in conversation, "I am Peter Corneille all the same." The world has pa.s.sed similar judgment on his works; in spite of the rebuffs of his latter years, he has remained "the great Corneille."

When he died, in 1684, Racine, elected by the Academy in 1673, found himself on the point of becoming its director; he claimed the honor of presiding at the obsequies of Corneille. The latter had not been admitted to the body until 1641, after having undergone two rebuffs.

Corneille had died in the night. The Academy decided in favor of Abbe de Lavau, the outgoing director. "n.o.body but you could pretend to bury Corneille," said Benserade to Racine, "yet you have not been able to obtain the chance." It was only when he received into the Academy Thomas Corneille, in his brother's place, that Racine could praise to his heart's content the master and rival who, in old age, had done him the honor to dread him. "My father had not been happy in his speech at his own admission," says Louis Racine ingenuously; "he was in this, because he spoke out of the abundance of his heart, being inwardly convinced that Corneille was worth much more than he." Louis XIV. had come in for as great a share as Corneille in Racine's praises. He, informed of the success of the speech, desired to hear it. The author had the honor of reading it to him, after which the king said to him, "I am very pleased; I would praise you more if you had praised me less." It was on this occasion that the great Arnauld, still in disgrace and carefully concealed, wrote to Racine: "I have to thank you, sir, for the speech which was sent me from you. There certainly was never anything so eloquent, and the hero whom you praise is so much the more worthy of your praises in that he considered them too great. I have many things that I would say to you about that, if I had the pleasure of seeing you, but it would need the dispersal of a cloud which I dare to say is a spot upon this sun. I a.s.sure you that the ideas I have thereupon are not interested, and that what may concern myself affects me very little. A chat with you and your companion would give me much pleasure, but I would not purchase that pleasure by the least poltroonery. You know what I mean by that; and so I abide in peace and wait patiently for G.o.d to make known to this perfect prince that he has not in his kingdom a subject more loyal, more zealous for his true glory, and, if I dare say so, loving him with a love more pure and more free from all interest. That is why I should not bring myself to take a single step to obtain liberty to see my friends, unless it were to my prince alone that I could be indebted for it." Fenelon and the great Arnauld held the same language, independent and submissive, proud and modest, at the same time. Only their conscience spoke louder than their respect for the king.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Racine----646]