Full text of "The life and times of Marie Madeleine countess of La Fayette"

MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

MARIE MADKLKINE PIOCHE DE LA VF.RGNE, COMTKSSE DE LA FAYETTE

AFTER A PORTRAIT BY FERDINAND

THE LIFE
AND TIMES OF

MARIE MADELEINE

COUNTESS OF LA FAYETTE

LILIAN REA

WITH TWENTY ILLUSTRATIONS

METHUEN AND CO.

36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON

First Published in 1908

TO MY FRIEND

FEILDING ROSELLE

THIS BOOK IS GRATEFULLY DEDICATED

" Pour juger les hommes, il faut leur passer les pre'juge's de leur temps."

Montesquieu.

PREFACE

WITHOUT depreciating the value and interest
of our own age, distinguished as it is for
freedom of thought and feeling, it is surely
permissible to look with absorbing pleasure backward
through the centuries to that period considered in all the
history of the world as one of the richest and most
picturesque. And for the refreshment and encourage-
ment of our spirits we may also be allowed to analyse
the actions and motives of those in that remote day
who lived richly; to probe reverently into the deepest
corners of their souls for the hidden fundamental
fountains of human sensation and sentiment For,
in spite of our level of twentieth century morality and
intellect, we may if we can but succeed in turning
their soul faces towards us and understanding them
still learn many lessons from these women of the
seventeenth century : from her who said :

" One is unhappy, because one is ignorant ! "

or from that other, who, in the midst of physical suffer-
ing and mental anguish, looked out at the world with
eyes that saw nevertheless all its beauty and wonder
and mystery as she exclaimed :

" It is enough just to have lived ! "

In attempting to write the life of Marie Madeleine,
Countess of La Fayette, I do not pretend to bring forth
any newly discovered facts, but merely to present the

vii

viii MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

incidents of her life as they appear through the mirror
of my own personality whether the attempt will be
interesting to the general reader or not is again a
matter of temperament.

I have also seen the features of her age as they
touched upon and influenced her life and character.
Yet, when all is said, to reconstruct the life of this
grande dame of the seventeenth century is, I am aware,
a difficult task, one which requires, first of all, as
Matthew Arnold says, a personal attraction towards
one's subject. This personal attraction is indeed my
excuse for undertaking the task; and, like Tristram
Shandy, I throw myself on my reader's indulgence.
Like him I say :

" I would go fifty miles on foot to kiss the hand of
that man whose generous heart will give up
the reins of his imagination into his author's
hands be pleased he knows not why, and
cares not wherefore ! "

L. R.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

PREFACE - - vii

I. THE BAPTISM AT ST. SULPICE CHILDHOOD OF

MARIE MADELEINE - i

II. PARIS IN THE REIGN OF Louis XIII. RICHELIEU

MARIE DE MEDECIS - 16

III. THE LOVE OF CARDINAL RICHELIEU DEATH OF

MARIE DE MEDECIS DEATH OF RICHELIEU - 26

IV. DEATH OF Louis THE JUST MAZARIN ANNE OF

AUSTRIA - 40

V. GASTON D'ORLE"ANS - 51

VI. THE FRONDE THE DESECRATION OF ST. SULPICE

THE HUMOUR OF THE FRONDE ITS GENIUS 62

VII. LA GRANDE MADEMOISELLE - 76

VIII. MADEMOISELLE DE LA VERGNE'S INTRODUCTION INTO

PARISIAN SOCIETY - - 88

IX. THE GALLANTRY OF THE FRONDE - - 106

X. H6TEL DE RAMBOUILLET, RUE ST. THOMAS DU

LOUVRE - - 121

XI. MADEMOISELLE DE LA VERGNE'S MARRIAGE AT ST.

SULPICE FOUR YEARS IN OLD AUVERGNE - 134

XII. LA MARQUISE DE SE"VIGN - - 149

XIII. LIFE IN PARIS AFTER MARRIAGE MUTUAL FRIENDS

OF MADAME DE LA FAYETTE AND MADAME DE
SEVIGNE" - 168

XIV. NINE YEARS OF COURT LIFE FRIENDSHIP WITH

HENRIETTE D'ANGLETERRE - - 181

b ix

x MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

CHAPTER PAGE

XV. MADAME DE LA FAYETTE AND THE Due DE LA

ROCHEFOUCAULD - - 197

XVI. FRIENDSHIP WITH SEGRAIS, HUET AND LA FONTAINE 218

XVII. POLITICAL EXPERIENCES LA DUCHESSE DE SAVOIE 234

XVIII. CHILDREN AND LATER LIFE - - 250

XIX. BOOKS- 263

XX. LAST DAYS AT THE FAUBOURG - - 290

XXI. MADAME DE LA FAYETTE AND PORT ROYAL - - 300

LIST OF AUTHORITIES - - 323

INDEX - - 331

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

MARIE MADELEINE PIOCHE DE LA VERGNE, COMTESSE DE LA

FAYETTE - Frontispiece

After a Portrait by FERDINAND

TO FACE PAGE

THE PONT NEUF, SHOWING STATUE OF HENRI IV. - - 17

From an old Print

MADAME DE COMBALET, DUCHESSE D'AJGUILLON - - 26

From two Miniatures by PETITOT in the Louvre

MARGUERITE DE LORRAINE, DUCHESSE D'ORL^ANS - - 51

After a Miniature by PETITOT

PAUL SCARRON - - 7

From an Engraving by BOIZOT

THE BASTILLE AND PORTE ST. ANTOINE - -76

From an old Print

MADEMOISELLE DE MONTPENSIER (LA GRANDE MADE-
MOISELLE) IN 1657 - - 79
From a Lithograph by LEMERCIER

GILLES MENAGE- - ... 88

After a Portrait by NANTEUIL

NINON DE LENCLOS - - - 108

From a Miniature by PETITOT

THE OLD LOUVRE - -121

From an old Print

MARIE DE RABUTIN-CHANTAL, MARQUISE DE SE"VIGNE- - 149

From a Contemporary Engraving

AN EARLY PORTRAIT OF MADAME DE LA FAYETTE - - 168

After a Drawing by BOUTERWEK

HENRIETTE D'ANGLETERRE, DUCHESSE D'ORLEANS - 188

After a Portrait by WANDER WERFF

xii MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

TO FACE PAGE

THE CHATEAU OF ST. CLOUD - -192

From an old Print

FRANCOIS DE MARSILLAC, Due DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD - 197

After a Miniature by PETITOT

JEAN REGNAULD DE SEGRAIS - - 218

After a Portrait by FLAMEN
JEAN DE LA FONTAINE - 229

After a Portrait by INGRES

THE CHATEAU OF VERSAILLES - - 251

From an old Print

PIERRE CORNEILLE - - 266

After a Portrait by C. LEBRUN

JACQUES JOSEPH Du GUET- - 310

From an old Engraving

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF

MARIE MADELEINE
COUNTESS OF LA FAYETTE

CHAPTER I

THE BAPTISM AT ST. SULPICE CHILDHOOD OF
MARIE MADELEINE

"What a large volume of adventures may be grasped within
this little span of life by him who interests his heart in everything."
The Sentimental Journey

EARLY in March of the year 1634 a passer-by
might have noticed an unusual procession issue
from the Hotel of the Petit Luxembourg in
the Rue Vaugirard of Paris, turn into a short and narrow
street leading directly west, and stop in front of a little
old church in the middle of the immense square of St.
Sulpice.

At this time in its history, St. Sulpice, the parish
Church of St. Germain, was deep in the throes of a
transition state ; the St. Germain quarter still one of
the wickedest and most unregenerate in all Paris. Into
the very sanctuary of the church itself, which was small,
dirty and ill-lighted, bare of all beauty of architecture
and adornment, the general corruption outside had found
its way, Bacchus and his crew holding sway in one of
its vaults, its priests joining in the wine-drinking and
attendant disorder. In fact the God of Riot ruled over
mind, manners and morals, and reigned in all corners of
the huge circuit dominated by the Abbey of St. Germain

2 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

des Pres then as now the student quarter of Paris,
and only recently at that time boasting of royal palaces.
What else, under the circumstances, could this temple
of religion founded by pious souls centuries before, be
but the haunt of Free-thinkers and Atheists, its church-
yard the resort of drunkards and roisterers ? So great
was its degradation that, at no very remote epoch, books
on the diabolic art had been sold at its very doors ;
in one of its chapels an altar found on which were in-
scribed the horrible words :

" Thanks to thee, Lucifer ; thanks to thee, Beel-
zebub ; thanks to thee, Azrael."

And in 1634, although an effort towards reform was
being made, no architectural changes had taken place,
and the appearance of wealth and importance which
emanated from the party halting before its doors on
that March day thus only accentuated the squalor and
dirt which marked the old church. That these were
persons of distinction was easily guessed, as was also
the object of their expedition, for a very small infant,
carried in its nurse's arms, and wrapped in many layers
of clothes against the sharp wind, was quite evidently
the central and most conspicuous personage among
them.

Simultaneously with the arrival of the small proces-
sion in front of the church, the officiating priest, dressed
in baptismal robe of violet, accompanied by satellites
swinging incense, and bearing the salt and oils used in
the ceremony, appeared in the porch ; for however
neglectful of their ordinary duties the priests of St.
Sulpice might be, they could not on this occasion afford
to offend such influential parishioners by the least delay
or neglect of ceremonial. With one accord, the other
members of the party stood aside to allow the godfather
and godmother to advance into the church and lead the
way to the font, rising in majestic simplicity from the
darkness of one of the neglected chapels.

When at last, after many genuflections and mystic
motions, the priest had finished arranging the oils and
accessories at the font, the question which began the

THE BAPTISM AT ST. SULPICE 3

solemn initiation of the new-born into the Church of
God penetrated through the hollow recesses of the little
church with reverberating echoes.

"What do you seek from the Church of God?"
he asked, turning towards the sponsors.

" Faith ! " answered the great lady, looking earnestly
at the priest, nor waiting for her companion to join her
in the response both had to make on behalf of the child.

" What will faith bestow upon you ? "

"Eternal life!" rang out proudly and clearly the
answer, and though the priest mumbled the words of
spiritual uplifting and promise which followed through
the long form of the baptismal ritual, the attention of
the godmother at least .never wavered.

" Receive the light now kindled," concluded the
priest, handing a lighted candle to each of the sponsors,
and perfunctorily continuing his solemn adjuration to
the new member of the Church :

" And guard without reproach thy baptism. Keep
the commandments of God : that when the
Lord shall come to His nuptials, thou mayest
meet Him, together with all His saints, in the
heavenly courts, possess life eternal, and live
for ever and ever ! "

And thus from the hands of the Church the child called
Marie Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne received a name,
and began, with its sanction, her long journey of life.
Thus father, mother, godfather and godmother signed
the baptismal register put carefully away in the
archives of the old Church of St. Sulpice. Mean-
time the central figure of the whole, the infant thus
solemnly vouched for, was as unconscious of this most
important introduction upon the scene of life, as she
was of the joy and pride with which her parents re-
garded the condescension of their noble patrons acting
as sponsors, registered simply as " Urbain de Maille,
Marquis de Br6ze," and " Marie Madeleine, Dame de
Combalet," but in reality no less than brother-in-law to
the great Cardinal Richelieu, and the future Duchesse
d'Aiguillon, his favourite niece.

4 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

These were times when the patronage of the rich
and powerful, always important from a worldly point of
view, meant exceeding much ; and, on this day of her
baptism, the fortune of the small Marie Madeleine de la
Vergne, afterwards to become famous as the Countess of
La Fayette, seemed assured to her parents, themselves
of noble birth, but much inferior in social standing and
wealth to the two sponsors.

The godmother, Madame de Combalet, Mistress of
the Petit Luxembourg, was overwhelmed at the moment
with responsibilities of no common nature. Never was
she too busy to pause for religious communion, never too
absorbed in her own affairs to put a soul under the pro-
tection of the Church. Therefore the baptism of this
daughter of her Lady of the Bedchamber, Madame de
la Vergne, nde Demoiselle Elizabeth Pena, was to her
of quite enough importance to warrant the time ex-
pended on the baptism ceremony. Doubtless it was
she, too, who had induced the godfather called the
maddest huntsman in France, a brave fighter, but a
poor husband to assist at the baptism ; the father of
the infant, " Marc Pioche, dcuyer, Sieur de la Vergne,"
being his Equerry.

Both the Marquis and his Equerry belonged to
Poitou, the Marquis de Breze to a very ancient family,
more rich in history than in fortune, his own father
having dissipated the last remnant of their patrimony.
And ties of vassalage had connected the De la Vergnes
to the De Brezes from very ancient times if, as I
believe, a certain Pierre de la Vergne from Poitou
was the ancestor of Marc Pioche.

The story runs that in the year 1476 a celebrated
member of the De Breze family, called the Seneschal
de Breze, living at the family chateau in Anjou, had as
huntsman a gentleman from Poitou called Pierre de la
Vergne. The Poitevine being so unwise as to lift his
eyes towards his patron's wife, was suspected by the
husband, discovered in her presence, dragged out in
the manner of those days, and murdered by the indig-

THE BAPTISM AT ST. SULPICE 5

nant Seneschal, who, after killing his huntsman, did not
hesitate to wreak his vengeance on his faithless wife as
well. In confirmation of this story and the ancient
connection, we hear of a chateau of the De la Vergnes in
Anjou not far from Segre, close to the two ancestral
estates of the De Brez^s.

These hereditary habitations of the Marquis's family
were called Brze and Mailly or Milly, and both were
of ancient origin, Br^ze", with its wonderful moat, cele-
brated in all the country round, having been rebuilt in
the beginning of the sixteenth century by the Grand
Seneschal, Louis de Breze\ who added a new half to
the chateau, and whose great claim on our memory to-
day is the fact of his having been the husband of the
famous Diane de Poitiers.

The chateau of Mailly, or Milly, near Saumur, of
which the Marquis de Breze was governor, and which
was supposed to contain hidden treasure, was in 1634
the guardian of the hunting equipage of the Marquis
de Breze\ Being only four leagues away from the
larger estate, it was used by the family, in conjunction
with Breze, as their most constant residence.

The chateau of Mailly was especially connected
with a very happy period in the life of Madame de
Combalet. On becoming Lady of the Bedchamber
to Marie de Medecis, she had once accompanied her
royal mistress on a visit to Breze", where she had for-
merly lived under the charge of her aunt the Marquise.
Young, beautiful, gay, and just entering the world
again after her widowhood, basking as the niece of
Cardinal Richelieu in the favour of the Queen-Mother
who lingered on at Breze", Madame de Combalet spent
many days, even weeks, at Mailly, hunting in the woods
with her uncle the Marquis, or riding gaily through the
glades of the wonderful forest. Perhaps it was there
that the Marechal de la Vergne, then simple ecuyer,
first met in her train Demoiselle Elizabeth Pna. This
is not impossible, and certainly the very meagre details
to be had of the origin and history of the Marechal
de la Vergne necessitate some piecing together of fact

6 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

and fancy. And whether this story of Pierre de la
Vergne is true or not, the various offices which the
Marechal held under the Marquis de Breze and Ma-
dame de Combalet all point to an ancient family and
feudal connection a connection continued on the part
of Madame de Combalet towards her little namesake
and goddaughter throughout her entire life.

Much younger than his wife, Richelieu's sister
Nicole, the Marquis de Br6ze was a brusque, bluff,
indifferent man, noted for his pride, eccentricities and
gallantries, who never took the slightest trouble to pay
court to any one. So well known was his carelessness
as to his own advantage especially with regard to his
powerful brother-in-law that the following couplet went
the rounds of Paris :

Come, drink to the illustrious Breze
Who has thrown all care away
Of that chimera importune
Called Fortune.

Yet Cardinal Richelieu, at the zenith of his power
in 1634, and disliked and feared by all who came in
contact with his iron will and inflexible determination,
had always been kind and good, even tender, in his own
family. Instead of resenting either the independent
attitude of the brusque Marquis, or avenging other
much more serious failings, Richelieu first got De
Br6ze an appointment as Captain of the Queen's
Guards ; and then, when the many attempts upon his
own life rendered a military household necessary, trans-
ferred his brother-in-law to its command, afterwards
making him governor of all his various possessions.

In 1634, seventeen years after his marriage, the
Marquis de Brez6 was still a young man of only thirty-
seven, full of honours and importance, living a life of
gallantry, and rumoured to be in love with his associate
in the baptismal ceremony at St. Sulpice, his wife's
beautiful niece, Madame de Combalet. The latter,
however, did not encourage him, having a greater pre-
occupation at heart. In revenge, he is responsible, says

THE BAPTISM AT ST. SULPICE 7

Tallemant des R^aux, for all the malicious gossip that
afterwards circulated against Madame de Combalet.

Nicole de Richelieu having always been of a melan-
choly and fantastic nature, there was little sympathy
between her and her husband. Thus on account of her
mental disorder and his continual absence, the two
children born of the union were brought up by their
uncle the Cardinal, who established both in important
positions in life. The son, Armand, became an Admiral
in the Navy, and was killed at the early age of twenty-
seven at the battle of Orbitello. The daughter, Claire,
Clemence de Maille-Breze, was in 1641 sacrificed to the
ambition of Cardinal Richelieu by a marriage with the
then Due d'Enghien, afterwards the Grand Conde, by
whom she was woefully neglected. She was painfully
young, awkward and ugly at the time of her grand mar-
riage, and her father, while proud of the alliance with
Conde, rather pitied his daughter, looking at her quite
impartially as if she were the child of some one else.

On her part Nicole de Richelieu did not live to see
either the ambitious marriage of her daughter or the early
death of her son, but dying in 1635, left the Marquis at
that early period free to follow his own inclinations.
Surviving his wife fifteen years, he had time to review
his rather wandering career, to long in his last days for
peace and quiet. And, so much did the noise and tur-
moil of the world disturb him at the end, that, shutting
himself into his chateau of Mailly near Saumur, he had
an inscription placed over his door to the effect that no
guest, bidden or unbidden, would be allowed to enter
to disturb him.

The Equerry of the eccentric Marquis, Marc
Pioche de la Vergne, Marie Madeleine's father, filled,
until his death, positions of trust under the overlordship
of Richelieu, the Marquis de Breze, or the Duchesse
d'Aiguillon, finally becoming " Marechal des Camps
et Armees du Roy " an office which before Louvois'
reconstruction of the army, twenty-five years later,
must have corresponded to that of Commissary-General.
He was continually being sent to take command of

8 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

various places ; and, as his wife and daughter accom-
panied him to all his military posts, the youth of Marie
Madeleine was necessarily nomadic. But for a short
time after her birth the De la Vergnes lived at the
Petit Luxembourg in the immediate household of
Madame de Combalet, just then particularly gay and
brilliant. And though absent from Paris most of his
time, the Marechal de la Vergne was greatly imbued
with the feudal idea of devotion to his patrons the
desire to have his permanent home near them.

With this in view, he bought at a bargain from the
nuns of Calvaire quite a large plot of land just opposite
the Petit Luxembourg, the ground of which part of a
large garden formed, according to the deed of sale, the
western corner of the Rue Ferou the same short street
that runs through from the Palace of the Luxembourg
to the Church of St. Sulpice. This land had been the
site of the old mediaeval Hotel des Trois Rois, and the
part bought by the Marechal de la Vergne must have
retained its ancient character, for although we hear
little of the house he built, the great charm of the place
seems to have centred in the garden. It was large and
shady ; and in it grew many fragrant flowers, so that from
the arbour the eye and senses were both charmed and
refreshed. Next it on the right, the conventual build-
ings of the Filles du Calvaire gave dignity and solidity
to the whole picture, the lovely garden thus reminding
one of the contrasts of everyday life, in which the
heavenly flowers of spirituality and piety grow side by
side with the worldly blossoms of ambition and cir-
cumstance. Plentifully, indeed, did these latter blossoms
grow in the old garden for the child Marie Madeleine
to gather, and it was no wonder that their brilliant
colours blinded her eyes for a time to those paler
spiritual flowers, which, nevertheless, took root in a
deeper part of her nature to bless and sanctify at
last.

Her father little thought, when he erected on this
historic spot a house designed to be used as a sort of
pied-fr-terre when he was in Paris, how important his

CHILDHOOD OF MARIE MADELEINE 9

particular corner of ground in the Rue Vaugirard would
one day become, but by so doing he linked the life of his
daughter, then six years of age, yet more closely to
that of her godmother and the inhabitants of the Petit
and Grand Luxembourg, and it was in this very house
left her by her father that the Countess of La Fayette
lived and died-

At the time of her birth, in the last days of
Louis XIII., Marie Madeleine's father was a man
already well on in years and of parts and ambition
that anomaly a military man by profession, interested
in all sorts of intellectual pursuits. One of his delights,
according to Tallemant des Reaux, was the study of
architecture ; and from this famous caricaturist we get
a graphic picture of his humour, at the same time
learning that he was associated with the son of Sebas-
tien Zamet, the notorious Valet of the Wardrobe to
Henri IV. during the siege of Montaubon, where
Zamet was Marechal in command of the King's forces.
Zamet, it seems, was a grave, pompous man, in the
habit of making ridiculously low, stiff bows. La
Vergne, evidently a wag, standing behind him on one
occasion when he was making a very low reverence to
Louis XIII., had in the seeing of the King feigned to
measure the length of the inclination of his body, there-
by exciting the King's sense of humour to the extent
that he said he could never see Zamet afterwards with-
out thinking of La Vergne and his rule !

We are ignorant of the date of the Marechal's own
birth, but from the fact, vouched to by a literary man
of standing, that Marie Madeleine's mother was his
second wife ; that his first wife, Claude Brard, was
mentioned as such in a notarial document dated 1619,
and that he was active in the siege of Montaubon in
162 1, we surmise him to have been about forty-five years
of age when Marie Madeleine was born. Elsewhere
we learn that the second wife, Elizabeth Pena, was
young and rather frivolous, and that the Marechal
dominated the household, which confirms us in our
belief that he was much older than his second wife.

io MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

Un homme de bien he undoubtedly was in the sig-
nificance of those days : that is, a man with mental and
moral qualities, with heart, mind and talent.

When Marie Madeleine was only four years of age,
and a most merry little body, the De la Vergne family
was living at Pontoise, a town over which the Marechal
de la Vergne had been given temporary command.
The "little Menie," as they called her in this Pont-
oise period, comes out in most charming colours under
the pen of the poet Le Pailleur, an old friend of her
father's. One of the rare poems of this poet of few
words, describes the young mother, so fair and good,
keeping house with care for her husband, and enter-
taining their guests with the little Menie, playing at
wolf with her apron over her head.

Differing so from later visualisations, this madonna-
like picture of mother and child is interesting as unique
of this childish period, and as denoting that harmony
and love surrounded Marie Madeleine in her early
years, a fact of immense advantage in her development.

Soon after 1638 the Marechal de la Vergne was
transferred from Pontoise to Havre, where he remained
as Lieutenant of the Government, third in command,
for ten years or more ; thus it was in Havre that
his daughter grew up from childhood into young woman-
hood.

Yet it was not in Havre proper that the De la
Vergnes lived, but in a charming retreat found for
his family by the Marechal in the,fashionable settlement
on the coast called Ingouville, not a suburb of Havre,
but itself claiming Havre as its faubourg. In those
days, separated from the port only by the fortifications
in ours forming an inseparable part of the town
Ingouville was on the Seine close to Graville, which
had an ancient chateau of its own, belonging at this
time first to Richelieu, then to the Duchesse d' Aiguillon,
the son of the Marquis de Breze", afterwards bearing the
title of the Seigneur de Graville.

How often as a child must Marie Madeleine have
climbed the old Tower of Francis I., from which one

CHILDHOOD OF MARIE MADELEINE 11

could catch the first glimpse of a sail on the distant
horizon, and which commanded one of the most beauti-
ful panoramas of the world ! To the east, the Seine
glistened in and out between its hills ; to the south,
the towers and spires of the towns of Honfleur and
Orcher were visible. The country of Calvados stretched
out to the west ; while on the north-west was the
prolongation of the coast, forming a blue line which
ended in the Promontory of Cotentin. Straight in
front of her were Havre's two broad roadsteads, always
studded with white-sailed ships, and to the north lay
the Channel, in whose waters were reflected the Cape
of La Heve and the coast, including Ingouville. The
slopes of Ingouville itself were not in those days, as
now, covered with graceful pavilions, green terraces
and wooded groves, but the sea having slowly receded
from possession of the coast, its shores consisted in
grass-grown lagunes on which grazed quantities of
sheep.

Next to the Tower of Francis I., the building of
greatest importance was the Church of Notre Dame
de Grace, whose steeple, at that time in the history of
the world when lighthouses were still unknown in
France as elsewhere, was used as custodian of the
warning beacon. Curfew, too, since the days of William
the Conqueror, had been rung from the tower of Notre
Dame de Grace at ten o'clock every night in summer,
every winter night at nine. And when Marie Made-
leine listened to the music of the curfew, it came across
the quiet country from two magnificent bells called the
" Cardinals," presented to the Church of Notre Dame
by Cardinal Richelieu.

Yet Havre was not beautiful in itself; it was es-
sentially a fortress, a stronghold ; to others the art and
the beauty, hers the office of the ugly, threatening
vault which concealed and guarded the rich gem of
Normandy. She was the Norman Carthage, and, like
the Carthage of old, her motto was : " That which
stands in the way of our greatness must be removed ".

Thus Havre's greatest glory and adornment was

12 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

the sea ; and, used as she was to all the sights of the
town and its surroundings, Marie Madeleine loved
best to wander on its cliffs. It had early made so
deep an impression on her, that instead of joining in
the gaiety natural to her youth, she was in the habit
of taking long walks along the sea-coast, or climbing
the rocks of La Heve. For hours, tired with walking
and climbing, she would sit on some rock, letting her
eyes wander far off across the ocean to the land of
her heart's desire. May she not then have learned
the lesson of the sea : that of unswerving purpose-
But one the sea is evermore :
And one be still, 'twixt shore and shore,
As the sea's life, thy soul in thee.

The seed of her intellectual life was not, however,
sown in the soil of Havre or Paris, but inherited ; and,
strange to say, not from her father, to whom she owed
her mental training, and who since her earliest years
had been occupied in giving his little daughter a more
thorough and extensive education than was vouchsafed
to many women of the day, when even Anne of Austria
scarcely knew how to read or write, and when women
of fashion were already beginning to be ashamed to
be thought pedantic. A historian of Havre, who makes
the common mistake of claiming Havre as her birth-
place, tells us that at fourteen she spoke Latin like a
doctor of the Sorbonne, although it was only in the
intimate circle of some old friends of her father's that
she dared avow such a thing.

The germ of her literary talent came to her through
her ancestors the De Penas, for Demoiselle Elizabeth
Pna, her mother, belonged to an ancient Provengal
family, which boasted several scholarly men in its
ranks. Among these there stood out the figure of
one Hughes de Pna, a poet, secretary to Charles I.
of Naples, on whose brow the poet's laurel had been
placed in the thirteenth century by Queen Beatrice
herself. We know unfortunately much too little of
the youth of this true descendant of Hughes de Pna,

CHILDHOOD OF MARIE MADELEINE 13

whose inherited poetical tendency was fostered and
developed in those early years by the sea ; but it is
significant of her character that even then, while glory-
ing in study, her modesty was so great that she pre-
ferred to hide her superior attainments from the women
about her, rather than excite their jealousy and ill-will
a fact which demonstrates the early balance of her
good sense and judgment a judgment which Segrais
was later on to extol as greater even than her intellect.

Another instinct than the poetical one was also un-
doubtedly expanded and developed in Havre : that of
pride of station and breeding, for here in the old town
of Havre de Grace her mother told her wonderful
stories of the beauty and virtue of her godmother ; her
father filled her ears with tales of Richelieu's greatness,
the high positions of trust and command filled by the
Marquis de Brez6, a name of magic in their -household.
Here, too, she heard of all the stirring events which
had occurred in France during the memories of both
father and mother, whereupon her youthful imagination,
increased by solitude, could not help brooding over
them with all the absorption of the poet. Yet she was
no morbid dreamer ; her mind, if poetic, was also alert
and philosophic, her pondering only a preparation of
material for her future literary work a work which
was to portray life in the true psychological form, and
show its creator not only as a thinker, but a keen
observer of the motives of people, the significance of
situations and things.

Thus are Environment and Chance sometimes
powerful controllers of Fate, and though the birth of
this future authoress was not among the highest, all
the circumstances of her early life tended to make a
naturally proud and ambitious spirit firm in the desire
to rise both socially and mentally.

And it was in this atmosphere of quiet study and
domesticity that she remained until the age of fourteen
or fifteen, learning more than the lessons of her age,
dreaming much, thinking much, and conforming
characteristically to the life about her, which in its turn

I 4 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

hinged upon events happening elsewhere, especially
upon the doings of its King, its Queen, its ministers
and governors in its principal city of Paris.

Nor was history silent in those days. Events
were succeeding each other in quick rotation ; all was
making ready for the great age that was to come ; one
of those climaxes in history of which Carlyle spoke,
when, confronted with the problem of the Revolution,
he moralised on the "realised ideals" of the ages gone
before. Marie Madeleine de la Vergne was born on the
cusp of the age of Louis XIV., as it were, at a time when
the age of Louis XIII. was in transition, when the
dominant influences, partaking of the nature of the pre-
ceding and the following period, had as yet no distinct
characteristic of their own.

By reason of all these things, the Marechal de la
Vergne, consequently his family also, was deeply con-
cerned in what went on, not only in the Kingdom of
Normandy, not only in Paris, the centre of France, not
only at the Petit Luxembourg, his patron's home, but
at the Luxembourg itself. Indirectly, he had part in
the affairs of Marie de Medecis, Anne of Austria, as
well as those of Richelieu and Louis XIII., especially
in so far as they affected him through his two patrons,
the Marquis de Brez6 and the Duchesse d'Aiguillon.

Thus the character and after life of the Countess
of La Fayette can only be understood through an exact
knowledge of the intangible, as well as of the tangible,
influences which went to form her personality. The
last days of Louis XIII., as well as thirty -two years of
the Fourteenth Louis, were incorporated in her history ;
and to know her in her maturity it is not enough to know
her in her beginnings, we must also understand the
lives of those whose destinies even indirectly touched
hers. Thus, in painting her portrait, it is necessary to go
far afield into conditions and things which at first sight
may appear irrelevant to the subject, and a wide digres-
sion from the history of Marie Madeleine de la Vergne.
Yet underneath the irrelevancy and the aloofness, the
synthetic thread is running surely and strongly ; for,

CHILDHOOD OF MARIE MADELEINE 15

even as to the traveller in Italy all roads lead eventu-
ally to Rome, so from our wanderings and excursions
into the rich field of contemporary life in the two ages,
we may all the more infallibly find our way back at last
to the individual life which is our present Rome on
the map of history.

CHAPTER II

PARIS IN THE REIGN OF LOUIS XIIL RICHELIEU-
MARIE DE MEDECIS

" What is our life but a sudden flight of winged facts or events !
In splendid variety these changes come, all putting questions to the
human spirit."

A setting for our picture, we must imagine the
Paris, the quarter of St. Germain, and the
Palaces of the Grand and Petit Luxembourg in
the last days of Louis XIIL and Richelieu that Paris
of ill-paved, ill-lighted streets, of narrow boundaries, of
licence and uproar, of bravado and brawls. A city of
mud, a city of dirt, a city of mire ! Yet in the midst
of the mud and the dirt, the gloom and the confusion,
rose a few stately buildings ; and out of the squalor,
from behind the menacing face of ugly towers and
battlements, there peeped forth many lovely gardens :
the Tuileries, the Cours la Reine, the Jardin des Plantes
and the Palais Royal. And thus Paris appeared, says
Dulaure, like a poor proud man wearing gilded gar-
ments on top of dirty linen peopled by vermin !

The Louvre dominated all ; as in the days of
Charles VII. it was still the stronghold of royalty;
still its name the oak round which were entwined the
thick parasites of royal authority and power. And it
is as difficult to picture the Louvre of the early seven-
teenth century as to imagine anything but a modern
Paris. Yet how different from the city of broad boule-
vards, of asphalted, shaded streets, of order and clean-
liness, known to the traveller of our day, was the still
mediaeval town upon which Louis XIIL looked down
on that memorable day in 1617 when he declared his

PARIS IN THE REIGN OF LOUIS XIII. 17

kingship and saw his mother, the Queen Regent, de-
part into exile ! From where he stood, on the terrace
of his moated chateau at once a fortress, a treasury, a
palace and a prison, as it is described in the old books
he saw a less beautiful, it is true, but also a more
picturesque Paris. The long perspective of the Seine
lay before him ; on its left bank was the great Tour de
Nesle ; on the other rose the immense Tour de Bois,
higher than the Grande Galerie of the Louvre ; each of
these flanked by its auxiliary round tower, in some
points higher even than itself.

Circumscribed was the extent of the Louvre itself
in comparison with the huge dimensions brought by
the centuries ; but even then its crowning beauty, the
facade of Henri IV., faced the fine old Church of St.
Germain 1'Auxerrois, while the majesty of its appear-
ance was enhanced by the deep moats which sur-
rounded it on every side, and the impressive drawbridge
of stone-vaulted arches, which led over the moat to the
principal entrance into the castle, was gallantly sur-
mounted by two round towers with conically shaped
roofs.

Not far away was the gay Pont Neuf, where the life
of the city was going on. Here walked all Paris ; here
throughout the long hours of the day and far into the
night, charlatans were selling balsams and playing farces,
vendors of songs were singing their wares, merchants
of toys, iron-ware and books were crying out to pur-
chasers, marionettes were pirouetting with appropriate
jest and gesture.

" Papa sells ink," cried a little child of one of the
merchants, addressing a prospective purchaser strolling
along the bridge.

' The child says true," gravely assented the father
in a tremendously profound and sonorous voice.

" Buy my wine," sang the wine-crier ; " my lovely
white, my claret wine ! "

" Bread ! Bread ! Bread ! " called the beggars.
"Give us bread, gentle sirs!"

When darkness had descended upon the river and

18 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

the muddy streets, the wares most in demand on the
Pont Neuf were lanterns, and the cry that rose most
surely above the din and the uproar seemed incon-
gruous enough in the midst of the licence and dis-
order.

" Light yourselves, good people let there be
light ! " was heard on all sides, while in fitful brilliancy
the torches of yellow wax flared up all over the road-
way to illuminate as if by magic the bronze figure of
Henri IV., sitting there immovable on his horse of
bronze, an enigmatical smile and dare-devil look on his
set features a fitting accompaniment to the scene !

This same bronze horse, from whose back Henri IV.
overlooked the gaiety of the Pont Neuf, had had a
strange history of its own. It had been ordered from
the great Italian sculptor, Giovanni da Bologna, by
Duke Ferdinand of Tuscany, who intended to put
his own statue upon it. Death having interfered with
his plans, however, his successor, Cosimo II., offered it
as a present to Marie de Medecis. On her acceptance,
the vessel bearing it across the seas to France was
wrecked off the coast of Normandy, and the beautiful
bronze horse forced to rest a whole year at the bottom
of the sea, from whence in 1614 it was finally rescued
and taken to France. For a long time the horse with-
out a rider was the ornament of the Pont Neuf, but
eventually a fine figure of Henri IV. was put upon it,
and the horse itself set up on a pedestal commemorat-
ing all the glorious victories of that King.

Since its foundation by Philippe Auguste in 1204,
the Louvre had from time to time been the residence
of the Kings of France ; but royal fancy is ever fickle,
and intermittently other palaces had been used, that of
the Tournelles in the quarter of the Marais being a fa-
vourite dwelling-place of royalty up to the time of Henri
II. The demolition of this magnificent old palace, so
called on account of the quantity of small towers which
distinguished its architecture, was due to Catherine
de Medecis, wife of Henri II., and not the least of her
crimes was its destruction. A stony sorrow that which

PARIS IN THE REIGN OF LOUIS XIII. 19

could be assuaged by the throwing down of innocent
brick and mortar ; and this stately palace had done
naught to Catherine de Medecis but witness the fatal

tournament which cost her royal husband his life ! Still,
she pleased her whim by its demolition, even though
she herself did not therefore return to her proper queenly
residence, the Louvre, which now belonged, in truth, to
the new king, her son. A new palace she decided to
have, and, taking the proceeds from the sale of the
Tournelles, forthwith began to build on the site of an
old factory of tiles that famous place named after the
former use, Les Tuileries.

The Gardens were from the first the greatest at-
traction of Catherine de Medecis' palace. Henri IV.,
further beautifying these, also erected the wing called
the Pavilion de Flore and the lovely fountain. By his
time the Louvre had been rebuilt and was new and
magnificent, so that on her husband's death it was
conceivable that Marie de Medecis might have been
satisfied with either it or the palace of Catherine de
Medecis ; not at all ; the traditional royal desire to
build palaces and commemorate the queenly grandeur
in stone was strong in her heart also. So in the days
directly after the murder of Henri IV., when the great
minister Sully was in disgrace, when the low-born
Concini was enforcing his short-lived power over France
and its Queen by gibbets placed in all the streets and
squares of Paris for the convenient hanging of malcon-
tents, Queen Marie de Medecis began to think of a
palace which should be her very own.

Strange to say, it was the quarter of the Faubourg
St. Germain which attracted her fancy ; that district of
vice and disorder ruled over by the great Fair of St.
Germain. Into this quarter, said to be not only the
most populous parish of Paris but of the whole world
at the time, the Fair of St. Germain, first held on the
site of the Palais Royal, afterwards near the Abbey
of St. Germain des Pres, had, since before the time
of Henri IV., brought for two months of the year all
the miscreants of Paris, attracted thither by the fact

20 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

that no tolls were exacted, and that crime could go
unchallenged. Thieves, mountebanks, strollers, jugglers
all crowded there to satisfy their needs or their plea-
sures ; and not only during the fair, but throughout
most of the year, the scene was one wild Bacchanal,
where brawls resulted in assassinations and duels the
latter being at one time so numerous that in one week
seventeen persons were mortally wounded. Here, in
1612, Marie de Medecis bought an immense tract of
land bordering on the Rue Vaugirard, the very next
year beginning to build there the palace now known
as the Palais du Luxembourg.

Jacques Desbrosses, the great architect, carried out
her plans, fashioning the building after the Pitti Palace
in Florence, so that the new palace, perfect in its sym-
metry, majestic in its force and solidity, really expressed
the homesickness of the Italian Queen for her native
country as well as her pride in herself as a Queen of
France. To Jacques Desbrosses is also due the famous
fountain, which with the palace and gardens still continue
to be the ornament and delight of the left bank of the
Seine to-day.

And thus, although she lived in it so few years her-
self, the Palace of the Luxembourg is associated most
closely with the memory of Marie de Medecis, especially
as its Grand Gallery originally contained that series of
paintings which in the Museum of the Louvre to-day
testifies to her grandeur as well as to the immortal genius
of Peter Paul Rubens. These many immense canvases
were in reality an idealised history of her life, and they
delighted the Queen, who during the sittings, at which
Richelieu was often present, would ask him naive ques-
tions questions which he with all his diplomacy some-
times found most difficult to answer.

The adjoining hotel, called the Petit Luxembourg,
had been given to Cardinal Richelieu by Marie de
Medecis at the period of his greatest favour, when she
herself lived at the Luxembourg, and in 1626 Richelieu
had left his own hotel in the Place Royale to take up
his residence in his new home.

PARIS IN THE REIGN OF LOUIS XIII. 21

Though not so splendid in size and conception as
the Luxembourg proper, the Petit Luxembourg was
a most magnificent, in fact, according to Sauval, an
altogether delicious, mansion, with a terraced garden,
the trees and flowers of which were portable and re-
newed unceasingly, with gates through whose portals
alluring perspectives of the adjoining Luxembourg could
be caught, whose apartments all opened out on to the
blossoming terraces and communicated with a superb
salon, sumptuously decorated by Lemaireand Manchole.
Large cabinets full of rare and precious objects, tables
in mosaic and ebony tables supported by silver carya-
tides, gold and silver vases decorated with precious
stones, and many antiquities, were tastefully distributed
about the immense salon ; and in it Richelieu had also
placed all the rare paintings and priceless objects of
art that he had brought from Italy, the whole being
fitly dominated by a life-like bust of the Cardinal him-
self done by Bernini, that famous architect and sculptor
of the Louvre.

Marie de Medecis had, however, but small respite
in which to enjoy either her new palace or her novel
authority as Regent of France, for people's minds were
still throbbing with the horror of the murder of Henri
IV. when Louis XIII., suddenly roused out of his con-
stitutional weakness and his adolescence to a man's
power, rudely asserted his kingly authority. The
motive force behind this sudden development from boy-
hood into maturity for he was not seventeen at the
time was not love, although he had been married two
years before to the young and attractive Anne of Austria,
but indignation against his mother's unworthy favour-
ites and the murderers of his father, whom he saw
honoured in the kingdom. A sudden coup was necessary
to destroy this unholy state of things, so encouraged
and aided by his own favourite, Albert de Luynes, the
young King secretly ordered the assassination of the
Marechal d'Ancre. On seeing the deed done by the
Captain of the Guard, on the very drawbridge of his
castle, Louis XIII. cried out joyously to the assassin :

22 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

" Thanks to you, I am now King ! " and thereupon
he promptly made the Captain Marechal de France !

Not content with this summary act of vengeance,
the murdered man's wife another favourite of Marie
de Medecis called Leonore Galagai, whom she had
brought from Florence was seized, tried as a witch,
and condemned to be burned and beheaded. The
judges of the Court at her trial, on questioning this
daughter of a washerwoman as to the witchery used
to gain such control over Marie de Medecis, received
the reply that hers was only the power which strong
souls have over weak ones an answer which but
accelerated her death.

Naturally the glory of Marie de Medecis was greatly
dimmed by these tragic events, and her rule as Regent
at an end. Queen- Mother still, but no longer mistress
of France, she was at the mercy of the young King,
who now decreed her exile from Paris. She therefore
departed one fine sunny day to the castle of Blois
in Touraine, say the old memoirs, accompanied by all
her servants, while from the top of the terrace of the
Louvre the King watched her as she drove away.

Only a boy of sixteen after all, with his kingly
power so fresh a toy in his hands, Louis XIII. did not
stand long looking after his mother on that afternoon
in 1617. One cannot wonder at this, for he was of a
cruel, unloving nature, his pleasures more to him than
anything in the world, and he had never been taught
the duties of a King. Fauchet's long and uninteresting
History of France, which he was made to read in his
youth, had so disgusted him with all learning that he
had early formed a distaste for study ; thus he never
read a book, and knew, it was said, neither the past
nor the present, profiting by the lessons of neither one
time nor another.

After the chase, which was his greatest pastime,
Louis XII I. 's ruling passion was music ; Guedron was
his instructor in the art, and with him Louis was in
the habit of spending many hours in the composition
of some piece of melody of his own, or in quietly lis-

RICHELIEU AND MARIE DE MEDECIS 23

tening to those composed by his master. In strong
contrast with this influence was that of his favourite,
Albert de Luynes, the same who had incited him to
the murder of the Marechal d'Ancre. This young man
had been allowed near the person of the King, as he
was thought to be perfectly harmless and unimportant.
Quite otherwise did he prove, however, and soon his
influence and that of his two brothers, Brantes and
Cadenet, was recognised of such a nature that together
they were called " The Three-headed Dog of the
Inferno"!

Involved in the disgrace of the Marechal d'Ancre
was a young man who was soon to dominate Marie de
Medecis, rise superior to De Luynes, and completely
subjugate Louis XIII. himself. In 1617 Richelieu's
star was already on the horizon, and practically only an
outsider, watching keenly the trend of events, he had,
in speaking of the fate of Leonore Galagai, philosophi-
cally commiserated the poor butterfly (to use his own
words) who knew not that the fire which was to con-
sume her was inseparably united to the blaze of that
other life which, transported by ease and contentment,
she had delighted to serve. Yet he himself was not
afraid to come within the blaze of that same fire ; and
already he stood within the radius of its influence. In
fact at the time of Louis XIII.'s declaration, Jean
Armand du Plessis de Richelieu had already attracted
the notice of the King and Marie de Medecis by an
address he had delivered as Bishop of Lugon three
years before when Deputy to the States-General. The
Queen-Mother had at once made him her Secretary at
command, and so deep was the impression he made
then that by the following year he had so gained her
confidence as to form part of the wedding cortege of
Anne of Austria and Louis XIII., Philip of Austria
and Elizabeth of France a double political contract.
Shortly afterwards he was appointed Grand Almoner
to the new Queen, Anne of Austria, and entered the
King's Cabinet.

Dismissed from the latter office as a friend of the

24 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

Marshal d'Ancre, after the grand coup detat in 1617,
and ordered to retire to his bishopric, Richelieu was
now loyal or politic enough to follow his patron Marie
de Medecis into exile, preferring, as he said, the honour
of following her in her affliction to all hopes of prefer-
ment held out to him should he remain behind. It was
not long before the fickle Queen- Mother forgot the
death of her two Italian friends in the mastery which
this new French one, distinguished at that time for his
exquisite politeness, and not yet become the " sphinx
of the red robe, the phantom of the grey beard, the
dull eye, the fine thin hands," had acquired over her.

As time went on, the favourite, De Luynes, pro-
moted from the position of Master of Falconry in the
Cabinet of the King to that of Prime Minister, be-
came extremely unpopular by reason of his arrogant,
domineering rule. Even the King was growing weary
of him, when, perceiving all at once that the ground
was growing warm under his feet, De Luynes suddenly
bethought him that a reconciliation between the King
and his mother might restore his own prestige. The
first step in bringing this about was to conciliate the
man highest in her favour and though Richelieu soon
after the exile to Blois had been obliged by the King's
jealousy to leave the Queen-Mother and retire into
his bishopric, he had lost no jot of his influence. Ap-
proached by De Luynes on the subject, the Bishop of
Lu9on quickly saw the advantage not only to the
favourite but to himself in such a reconciliation, where-
fore he did not hesitate to recommend it to the Queen.

Before signing the treaty of peace, however, mother
and son for their credit's sake had to try the respective
merits of their troops, and here again Richelieu's diplo-
macy came into play, for the King's troops coming to
issue with those of the Queen-Mother at a place called
Ponts-de-Ce, and the latter having at first the advantage,
the great diplomatist cautioned Marie de Medecis that
it would be wisest to give way. Thus the King carried
off the victory, after which his dignity allowed him to
celebrate a formal reconciliation with his mother.

RICHELIEU AND MARIE DE MEDECIS 25

In the exuberance of their joy at this reunion, both
mother and son were desirous of bringing about an
alliance of some kind between their two advisers ; De
Luynes had a nephew, Richelieu a niece : what so
proper as to unite the two houses in marriage ? And
what mattered it that the nephew was uninteresting,
the niece already promised to a man she loved ? The
matter was settled in the twinkling of an eye ; indeed a
wag has said that at the battle of Ponts-de-Ce the King's
cannon roared out the name of Combalet, while that of
the Queen responded Pontcourlay ! At any rate the
lamb of sacrifice offered up on the altar of policy was
Mademoiselle de Pontcourlay.

This niece of the Bishop of Lucon was the daughter
of his older sister, much beloved by him. Dying when
Marie Madeleine de Wignerot was but twelve years of
age, the mother had left her and her only brother, younger
than herself, to the care of Grandmother Richelieu, a
woman of tremendous character and wide experience,
as well as of strong religious tendencies. The two
orphans could not have been placed under better influ-
ences, but, unfortunately, they were destined soon to be
deprived of them by the death of the Marquise de
Richelieu, who, only a few months afterwards, feeling
her own end approaching, and with implicit confidence
in her favourite son, Armand, Bishop of Lu^on, re-
commended her two charges to his care. He, loving
both mother and sister tenderly, did not hesitate to
piously accept the charge as a duty to both. Probably
his conscience in the matter of this marriage of con-
venience was stilled by the thought of the high position
to which he was raising his niece. At any rate, he
seems to have had no compunction in tearing her from
her quiet life in the country, and bringing her to Court,
where, in 1620, she was married to the awkward
Vicomte de Combalet, to whom, as wedding dower, the
King promised 150,000 livres, the Queen on her side
endowing Mademoiselle de Pontcourlay with 12,000
cus worth of jewels !

CHAPTER III

THE LOVE OF CARDINAL RICHELIEU DEATH OF
MARIE DE MEDECIS DEATH OF RICHELIEU

" Des qu'un 8tre a un passe, il a des secrets que lui seul peut se
pardonner a soi-mSme."

THE portraits of Cardinal Richelieu show him
to have been a very handsome man, in spite
of his cold grey eyes and sinister expression.
His eyes, if cold, were large and brilliant, his nose
aquiline, his well-made mouth ornamented by mous-
tachios and an elegantly appointed beard, his eyebrows
strongly marked, his hair long and black a most im-
posing ensemble. His was not the soul of the church-
man, but naturally that of the soldier, the man of action,
of courage, resource and diplomacy. His astuteness,
even, did not resemble the subtle sagacity of a church-
man, but was essentially that of a statesman. He had
in fact early distinguished himself in literary pursuits
when at the College of Navarre, where he was known
by his younger son appellation of the Marquis de
Chillou, and a brilliant secular career seemed open to
him. But the benefice and episcopal mitre having been
refused by his elder brother for a monk's habit, Armand
at his mother's request quietly dropped all his military
inclinations, subdued the instinct for war, the command
of men and armies, strong within him, and weighted
his young shoulders with the title and duties of the
Bishop of Lu^on.

Thirty-five years of age in 1620, when the recon-
ciliation of the King and Queen-Mother took place,
Richelieu must have had some great compelling charm
of personality to have so powerfully attracted the love

MADAME DE COM BA LET,
DUCHESSE D'AGUILLON

KROM A MINIATURE BY PETITOT
IN THE LOUVRE

MADAME DE COMBALET,
DUCHESSE D'AIGUILLON

FROM A MINIATURE BY I'ETITOT
IN THE l.OUVRE

THE LOVE OF CARDINAL RICHELIEU 27

of Marie de Medecis. To her he owed his quick rise
into power, and although upon receiving his Cardinal's
hat he is said to have cast it at her feet, exclaiming :
" Madame, this purple which I owe to your
Majesty, will make me remember the vow
I have made to shed my blood in your ser-
vice,"

it was not long before he was strong enough in his own
might to shake off the hand that had taught him to
rise.

" When once I have taken a resolution, I carry it
through to the bitter end : I overthrow every-
thing, I mow everything down ; and then I
cover all with my red robe,"

said this man of indomitable will, who at times could
also be cruel and revengeful. And in connection with
a nature like this love would seem a very foreign ele-
ment. Yet in the gracious plan of the universe love
comes unfailingly to every one who seeks it and is will-
ing to give in return. Thus to Richelieu, the indomit-
able, was also vouchsafed the inestimable boon of a real
and lasting passion, and the woman who loved him
truly all her life was no other than his niece, Marie
Madeleine Wignerot de Pontcourlay, Dame de Com-
balet, the godmother and lifelong patron of Marie
Madeleine de la Vergne.

His own predilection for his niece had awakened
suddenly as love is apt to do. Needing her to further
his ambitious schemes, he, her guardian, had drawn her
at sixteen from her studies and her prie-dieu in the
country at the chateau of Richelieu, and commanded
her to appear at Court. Not then, however, did he
become enamoured of her ; his eyes in those days were
blind to aught but his own advancement ; his mind
recked not of love save as an accompaniment of ambi-
tion.

And indeed at that moment men had little time for
love, all France being in a chaotic state, its history a
history of favourites and favouritism, as was Richelieu's
own. In this atmosphere real love was crowded out by

28 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

intrigue ; each of these great rulers of kingdoms, each
grand dignitary of the Crown whom the young Made-
moiselle de Pontcourlay saw in 1620 on her introduction
at Court, had his favourite, his mignon, each of these in
his turn was ruled over by his own particular darling of
the hour. And favouritism is too unequal a match to
be love.

Still, when the young girl first appeared at Court,
love was lurking beside ambition at the door of the
great minister's heart, although he knew it not ! Like
the rest of the Court, Richelieu could not help being
startled by the vision of loveliness his beautiful niece
made, as, dressed in clothes fashioned in the rich mode
of those days, and laden down with the jewels of
her wedding dower, she was presented in triumph to
the two Queens, to the King, to all the great dignitaries
of the Crown. De Luynes himself was so impressed by
her appearance and the success of the marriage with his
nephew, that he impulsively promised Richelieu to ask
for him a cardinalate of the Pope, while the waning
affection of Louis XIII. for his favourite returning
under the warmth of these courtesies, he in his turn
promised De Luynes his commission as Connetable of
France.

Thus was Marie Madeleine Wignerot de Pontcour-
lay sacrificed to a red hat and a connetable's baton-
thus she learned her lesson of the power of ambition.
She had so profited by this lesson, this insight into her
uncle's character, that when, a few years later, her unin-
teresting young husband the Vicomte de Combalet was
killed in war against the Huguenots, she was wise
enough to flee to the refuge of her convent from the
possibility of a second sacrifice of the kind.

The great foundation of the young widow's character
was the religious instinct, and this natural pious impulse
was ever destined to war against the secular and carnal
desires. All her life she balanced, it was said, between
the love of this world and the fear of losing the next, and
the convent of her girlhood that of the Carmelites in
Paris was constantly her refuge in times of crisis.

THE LOVE OF CARDINAL RICHELIEU 29

There she was always sure of finding an asylum not only
from the enticements of human affairs, but from the
temptations of her own heart as well. Even in early
youth, at her mother's knee or by her grandmother's
side, she had preferred study and prayer to the pleasures
of her age ; and, as she grew older, this religious fervour
seemed to deepen ; no earthly allurements could ever
really obscure for a moment her intense desire to devote
herself to the devotional life. So imbued was she with
reverence for even the image of holiness, that it was
her habit, whenever she met a godly procession in the
street, to follow it wherever it went, prostrating herself
in the mud and mire before the Host. Impressed with
her own sinful nature, she would spend whole nights
through stretched prostrate on the pavement of the
Church of St. Sulpice. And many were the tales told
of her great piety, of the religious orders she instituted,
the colony she was instrumental in sending out to New
France. It was she also who founded the famous hos-
pital of the Salpetriere for the 40,000 poor beggars of
Paris, and to her generous initiative was due Louis
XIV.'s putting an end to begging in Paris.

But we are anticipating. In 1621, when news came
of her husband's death, her first impulse was to flee from
the ways of men for ever, and with a joyful heart she
hurried back to the quiet and calm of those walls which
shut out the noise of the struggle and ambition of the
world. Although the Order of the Carmelites was one of
the most austere in France, she endured without a murmur
the hardships of their rigid discipline with such sweet-
ness and humility that it was undoubtedly she who in-
spired the holy priest, Fra^ois de Sales, to write the
eulogy to widows found at the beginning of his great
book called " LTntroduction a la Vie DeVote". Un-
consciously, on some visit to the Carmelites, he must
have raised his eyes long enough from his breviary to
see the attractive piety of this young widow, to have
noted her youth and charm.

"In the garden of the Church," he says, "widows
are comparable to violets, little flowers of

30 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

hardly noticeable colour, of an odour that is
not piquant, but wonderfully fragrant. O,
what a beautiful flower is the Christian widow,
little and insignificant through humility !
There is nothing brilliant about her in the
eyes of the world, for she flees it, and no
longer decks herself out to attract its notice.

And why should she desire the eyes of those
whose heart she no longer covets ? "

But Cardinal Richelieu had no intention of allowing
his beautiful niece to languish in a convent all her days,
for having become Prime Minister of Louis XIII. at
the death of De Luynes in 1621, again he needed her
to do the honours of his various establishments. Ac-
cordingly, one day, just after she had finished her novi-
tiate and was about to take the veil, the quiet and
peace of Madame de Combalet's idyll at the Carmelites
was rudely disturbed by the messenger of the Cardinal
uncle requesting the young widow to return to Court.
For a long time she refused, and it was only when her
tender heart had been moved by the plea ingeniously
set forth by Richelieu of his numerous enemies and
failing health that in 1624 she unwillingly left her con-
vent with its silence, its quiet life, its monotonous duties,
and went back to the storm and stress of the Court.

Only twenty years of age at the time, Madame de
Combalet already had an intense loyal love for her
uncle which, after all, was the only tie that bound her
to the world. And on his part, as the secret memoirs
chronicle, Richelieu, linked as he was to Marie de
Medecis by ties which gratitude should have made un-
severable, forgot the sense of obligation, difference in
years, statecraft and interest, in the passion which this
modest little violet of St. Frangois de Sales, now close
to the person of Marie de Medecis as her Lady of the
Bedchamber (Dame cPAtours], suddenly aroused in his
heart. A weakness this for the great Cardinal, and yet,
learning of Madame de Combalet's beauty and charm
at this time, who could blame him ? She herself was
at first the mould of discretion and humility, not only

THE LOVE OF CARDINAL RICHELIEU 31

in her dress, which was a plain robe of serge appro-
priate to a devote of fifty, but in her timid demeanour ;
her eyes she never raised, but kept fixed steadfastly on
the ground. As, however, the claims of youth began
to clamour in her breast, drowning the echo of the
convent's chimes at first insistent in her ears as the
influence of her uncle's power over the brilliant Court,
penetrating through the crust of humility acquired in the
convent, reached her youthful love of the world, woman-
like she began to think of the charms of her personal
appearance, to add first a bow here, a buckle there, until
all at once the modest violet had blossomed out into a
full-blown rose. And behold the Cardinal's niece be-
come one of the three beauties of the day ! Poets raved
over her beauty as like unto that of antique statuary,
and exhausted themselves in Latin and Greek analogies,
according to the fair custom of the time. And yet one
forgot her perfect figure, her shoulders, her very beauti-
ful hands, in looking at her face. Lovely in its form
and outline, it was framed by a wealth of chestnut hair,
dark eyebrows and eyelashes, her greatest charm being
the contrast which these made with her clear blue eyes.

At first no one suspected the grave minister of being
a victim to these charms ; but continually brought into
contact in the Queen's chamber with such radiant
freshness, it was no wonder he quickly preferred it to
the maturity of the Italian Queen with her rich, stout
figure, fine eyes and complexion, on which she used no
softening powder and paint, or that the music of these
young lips soon became more melodious to him than
Marie de Medecis' uncouth pronunciation of the French
tongue.

As the days went on, like a heavenly spark, the
secret flame of his love burned more and more hotly in
Richelieu's breast, until the enthusiasm of the poet was
fired within him, and he was compelled to discover his
passion to its object at all costs ; so in original verse
he declared his subjugation, throwing the blame for his
ingratitude on Heaven who had given his niece the
fatal charm which had conquered his heart and reason.

32 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

Glory, wealth, dignities, interest, fortune,
Since I knew you, alas ! all, all have I despised !

confessed the enamoured priest of thirty-nine.

" You attack a very tender heart at more than one
point," discreetly replied the young widow, also in
verse, gracefully hinting at the entire capitulation of
her heart ; and the memoirs go on to tell a long story
of the lovers' meetings, the arousing of Marie de
Medecis' jealousy all the fascinating intrigue of a
secret love.

Perhaps the story is true that those first verses of
Richelieu's to Madame de Combalet five long impas-
sioned stanzas really did fall into the hands of the
Queen-Mother ; at any rate, the fact remains that from
the time of the siege of La Rochelle, in 1628, Marie de
Medecis' love for Richelieu seemed to turn into hatred.

Richelieu by this time had grown much too grand
for the Petit Luxembourg, and in 1630, having built
the tremendous Palais Cardinal, popularly known as
the Palais Royal, for himself, he did not scruple to
transfer his own residence to his new palace, and to
make over Marie de Medecis' gift to his niece, it from
that time forth becoming the personal property of
Madame de Combalet, and identified with her name.
Of all Richelieu's crimes towards her, Marie de Medecis
was most incensed by this donation to her rival of the
palace nestling up against her own, and only less dear
to her than it. From this time on, she began to try to
undermine the influence of the great minister with the
King, combining with her younger son, Gaston, to
drive him out of the kingdom.

But she was not strong enough to cope with this
man of indomitable will, and on the so-called Day of
Dupes, when, after promising his mother and brother to
get rid of Richelieu, Louis XIII. betrayed them both
by changing his mind and begging his minister to
remain, she was for ever defeated in her dreams of
revenge, both she and her son being obliged to flee the
kingdom. And Marie de Medecis never again re-
turned to France, her hatred of Richelieu thus being

THE LOVE OF CARDINAL RICHELIEU 33

the cause not only of her long exile, but of her lonely
death in a foreign land. For in far-away Cologne, alone
and unhonoured, this Queen of France, consort of Henri
IV., passed away, and her last breath was drawn not
in a palace, but in the house of the man whom she had
befriended, a simple artist, who had immortalised the
history of her life on canvas, and to whom she had
appealed in her last extremity. Extreme as had been
everything with this woman of impulse her passions,
her whole life her death was most extreme of all,
and it, rather than her deeds, has made the name of
Marie de Medecis remarkable in history.

After the Day of Dupes, Richelieu's power was
greater than ever, his influence paramount in the king-
dom, while at his side Madame de Combalet shared in
his triumphs and watched over his interests with lov-
ing care, doing the honours of the various houses in
which he entertained with a magnificence more than
royal. Yet, in the midst of his overwhelming power,
Richelieu was not blinded to the fact that jealousy and
envy were there hidden behind the smiling faces of the
courtiers, and that at his death the smiles would be
turned into frowns, the flattering words into harmful
calumny against his " Princess Niece," as she was called.

Fruitlessly he had tried to protect her from these
possibilities by a marriage with one of the numerous
suitors, who, anxious for alliance with one of his kin,
had pressed even princely rank and fortune upon her.
But being denied a marriage with heaven in deference
to her uncle's need of her, Madame de Combalet would
hear of no earthly union. Richelieu, therefore, began
to devise some other means of protecting her this
niece, who it was rumoured was more to him than a
niece from the enemies who would surely rise against
her some day. And his fertile mind was not long in
coming upon a powerful weapon with which he could
provide her :

"A Duchess," he reasoned, "can better fight the
world than an untitled gentlewoman my
niece shall be a peeress of France ! "

34 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

And the propitious moment for asking a favour
of Louis XIII. had arrived. For at last the un-
expected, the marvellous, had happened, and after
twenty-two years of hopeless longing for an heir, a
child had been born to King Louis and his much-
abused, much-neglected and suspected wife, Anne of
Austria.

The Duchy of Aiguillon, for sale at that moment,
was costly, but what was that to a man of Richelieu's
determination? Thus in 1638, when the bells were
ringing to announce the birth of the future Louis XIV.,
the King himself handed the deed of the Duchy of
Aiguillon and her brevet as Duchess to Madame de
Combalet, congratulating her warmly on her new
honours. Richelieu's overwhelming ascendancy was
further demonstrated by a clause contained in the
brevet of the new Duchesse d'Aiguillon, which pro-
vided not only that the title should be continuable,
but that it should descend upon any heir the Duchess
might select, whether male or female.

The whole nation was en fete in those early days
of 1638. To pious minds, the birth of the Dauphin
had come as answer to prayer, Louis XIII. having
gone early in the year in procession with great pomp
to Notre Dame and solemnly placed his kingdom
under the protection of the Virgin. To others, the
stars were responsible, for long had the astrologers pre-
dicted it. However, it was in September of the same
year that the bells announced an heir to the throne of
France.

The rejoicings over the advent of the little Dauphin
took the usual form of bonfires, illuminations, carrousels ;
before each palace, each hotel, burned the sovereign em-
blem of rejoicing, a tribute at once to the god of light
and the god of fire an unconscious augury of the
future Roi Soleill Enormous flambeaux of white wax
set up before the hotels of the grand seigneurs, great
torches set in sockets on the walls of their palaces,
coats of arms in transparencies all bore testimony to
the genuine delight and feudal allegiance of the nobles,

THE LOVE OF CARDINAL RICHELIEU 35

while in humbler circles, gay-coloured lanterns were
hung out of windows along the streets, wherein were
spread groaning tables laden down with every kind
of viand for the refreshment of the people, who ate
and drank to the health of the King and the
Dauphin. The enormous convent of the Jesuits
flared with thousands of torches set in the walls, a
dolphin of fire contrived by their ingenuity was the
wonder and delight of all Paris, and their young
pupils acted a comedy in further praise of the little
prince.

Like the rest, Richelieu did not fail to do his part
to celebrate the event, and gave a grand ballet called
" La Felicite* " at the Palais Cardinal in its glorification,
at which Louis XIII. honoured his minister by his pre-
sence.

Notwithstanding all this worldly prosperity, the
homage and adulation of time-servers and sycophants,
the new Duchess had a skeleton in her closet, a secret
anxiety, a source of grief and pain. And this was her
only brother, a weakling from an accident in early
childhood, between whom and the stern justice of her
uncle she had always stood. After having tried his
nephew in many important positions, and finding that
not even the responsibility of a wife and child could re-
strain him in his extravagance and dissipation, Richelieu
seemed at last to have lost all patience. The Duchesse
d'Aiguillon was in despair, but for the hundredth time
she again appealed to her uncle's clemency, and once
more, moved by her entreaties, the Cardinal consented
to give his nephew another chance. Made General of
the King's Galleys at Marseilles, at last by one brave,
decisive action the Marquis de Pontcourlay justified his
sister's belief in him by distinguishing himself signally in
a splendid tour de force. H earing of the approach of fif-
teen Spanish galleys soon after his arrival at Marseilles,
he did not wait to communicate with the superior
authorities, but at once ordered out fifteen of his own
galleys, set sail towards the Spaniards, met and routed
them with great slaughter. Imagine the rejoicing at

36 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

the Petit Luxembourg, the talk in the Court, the con-
gratulations flowing in to the Duchesse d'Aiguillon !

The Cardinal had the matter of succession very
near at heart, and, in spite of his little faith in his nephew,
he characteristically did not visit the sins of the father
upon the sons, for his love of family was so strong that
he never thought of leaving his name and fortune else-
where than to one of his blood. It was therefore the
eldest son of this same Marquis de Pontcourlay whom,
having no family of his own, he selected to be the heir
to his vast estates.

Though still young in years, Cardinal Richelieu had
long been infirm in health, and foreseen the coming of
his earthly end. More and more his physical strength
became as the breath of a candle which any passing
wind might extinguish. But, indomitable as ever in
will, he ignored the infirmities of a body which had
never equalled his mind in vigour, and persisted in
carrying the burdens of the State on his shoulders to
the last.

His eye was on every part of France, his mind con-
trolled the slightest detail. With the pangs of death
upon him, still he defied the Great Change, still he in-
sisted upon the state and magnificence of his position.
Journeying from Lyons in the South of France in 1642,
where he had gone hoping to derive benefit from the
waters, not being able to stand the jarring of a carriage,
he had himself carried by eighteen of his guards in a
litter covered with red damask and consisting of a room
fitted up with the appointments of his own bedchamber,
with his bed of state upon it. This was his last journey
as his faithful niece, meeting him halfway back to
Paris, realised. Even then, though long familiar with
his weakness, though prepared for the Inevitable, still
she could not reconcile herself to the loss of this man
dearest to her on earth. His passing away was the
great sorrow of her life, for whatever the secret relation-
ship between uncle and niece, whether filial or carnal
love united them, in these last hours all the world could
see the strength of the bond to both. At the last, con-

THE LOVE OF CARDINAL RICHELIEU 37

fessing that it was she whom throughout his life he had
most loved, Richelieu's tenderness rebelled at the sight
of her sorrow, and he had the fortitude, the unselfishness,
to send her away in order that she might be spared the
sight of his last agony : proof of love indeed !

" Go away, I beg of you," said the dying man, see-
ing her weeping at his bedside. " Your sorrow
moves me too much. Do not subject yourself
to the grief of seeing me render up my soul ! "
Thus in 1642, at fifty-two years of age, six months
after Marie de Medecis, the greatest man in France was
no more.

" Voila un grand politique mort ! " behold a great
politician gone! was Louis XIII.'s only comment on
the death of his minister and master. Not until his death
could the true perspective of Richelieu's character be
had. Even then, many were the eulogies paid by the
outside world to this wonderful man, many the masses
said for his soul, if many also the criticisms now flung
rabidly forth against him. His magnificent tomb still
stands to-day in the Church of the Sorbonne, his crea-
tion, but on it were never engraven those words designed
for it and written shortly afterwards by an unknown
E nglish enemy. A copy of this curious document, called
" A Synopsis or Contract View of the Life of John
Armand, Cardinal of Richelieu, Great Favour-
ite and Minister of State to Lewis the Thir-
teenth, King of France, to be engraved on his
tomb,"

has been preserved by the Harleian Society, and one
sentence of it alone seems to sum up the enormity of
the crimes imputed to him by a critical, unsympathetic
world :

" By the conferrings of the Queen-Mother he was
made rich ; by her plottings preferred ; and
by her power made more potent. Yet her
did he deprive of the king's power, of her
liberty, of her estate, of France, and at last
of her life ; she being an exile at Cologne.
And lest he should spare her, when she was

38 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

dead, he nulled her last will and caused her
corpse to lie five months (at the end of which
he himself followed her) in her chamber un-
buried."

Like other and lesser men, like the poets and artists
of all time, this man of many sides had an ambition
which lay far away from his profession, an ambition
dearer to him than any project of State, any military
glory or renown. Turning one day to the poet Des-
marets, he suddenly asked :

"In what, do you think, do I take most pleasure ? "

" Why, in advancing the fortunes of France," an-
swered the astonished poet.

" Not at all," said Richelieu. " I take greatest
pleasure in making verses."

By himself thus confessed, we can picture Richelieu
the Great riding to the siege of La Rochelle at the
head of the King's troops, a coat of mail on the
outside, this time, of his Cardinal's robe ; writing love-
letters to his niece ; dancing in baldaquin costume be-
fore Anne of Austria and the Duchesse de Chevreuse ;
exchanging bon-mots with the four greatest story-tellers
of the time : the Prince de Guemne, Bautru, the
Comte du Lude and the Marquis de Jarze ; colla-
borating with five different poets in the writing of plays
which he loved to think were his own ; and finally,
when his comedy of " Mirame " was being performed at
the Palais Cardinal, in his pride and excitement lean-
ing far out of his box to applaud vigorously with hands
and feet, and himself impose silence in the sublime
moments !

To him the stage in France, then in its youth,
owed much, and though he tried to annihilate Corneille
by inducing the Academic Franchise to damn " The Cid,"
he himself really prepared the great poet's most signal
triumphs by encouraging the art of the drama, and thus
educating the people to appreciate him. In the Palais
Cardinal he built two theatres, the one small, the other
large, where he gave his own and other plays, while
the three troupes of comedians then in Paris, those of

THE LOVE OF CARDINAL RICHELIEU 39

the Hotel de Bourgogne, the Marais and the Faubourg
St. Germain, were supported in great measure through
his patronage.

What memories the Palais Royal holds to-day !
On the walls and over the doors of nearly every room,
every arcade, every corner of the old Hotel de
Richelieu, as it was also called, and which since the days
of the Cardinal has had so varied a history, the arms
of the Richelieus the three chevrons with the Cardinal's
hat are to be seen still in all their pristine distinctness.
In the grand theatre, where formerly the first attempts
of the greatest dramatists of the age were made,
bourgeois plays of very risqut tendency now delight a
certain class of Parisians. And to-day as one strolls
through the arcades and galleries of the Palais Royal,
involuntarily one stands still before those three chevrons
and the Cardinal's hat, remembering with awe the ac-
tivities of Louis XIII.'s great minister. No wonder
that Voiture said of him :

" He is neither flesh nor blood, but all spirit."
To his niece, Richelieu left a great fortune and
many memories. To her also the guardianship of his
heir a trust entailing, together with its responsibilities,
a long series of jealousies, a continual plague of petty
annoyances. Not for her the peace and quiet of
convent walls, but tumult and action still. For her,
from now on, life would be shorn of beauty, and filled
with anxieties over which no romance threw its
glamour, no strong mind watched. Verily, when Love
dies, Life is ended !

CHAPTER IV

DEATH OF LOUIS THE JUST MAZARIN ANNE OF
AUSTRIA

"The head is ever the Dupe of the Heart." La Rochefoucauld

WHEN Louis XIII. took the loss of his minis-
ter so calmly he was filled with no dreams
of awakening energy, no desire to assume
the reins of State. Perhaps he had the intuition to
foresee in the Italian prelate, who had been recom-
mended to him by Richelieu on his deathbed, a worthy
successor to that strong man who had been his brains
and conscience for twenty years. Richelieu's great
mind had with amazing certainty foreshadowed the
contingencies that his own death would bring to
France, had prepared for all ; thus still saving Louis the
trouble of thinking for himself. Avowing that he knew
but one man who could succeed himself, and that man a
foreigner, the dying minister had made Giulio Mazarrini,
the Italian priest, a Cardinal, recommended him to the
King, and then presented him to Anne of Austria, re-
marking :

" Madame, you should love him well, he has the air

of Buckingham ! "

Mazarin he also took as his pupil in Statecraft ; and one
evening as his niece returned from the first performance
of her uncle's own play of " Europa," to which he himself
was too weak to go, he said, pointing to the new
Cardinal :

" My niece, while you were at the Comedy, I have

been instructing a minister of State ! "
In making these arrangements, Richelieu, knowing

DEATH OF LOUIS THE JUST 41

Louis XIII. had not long to live, was actuated greatly
by his hatred of Gaston d'Orleans. To prevent the
King's brother from ever coming into power, Mazarin
was to insinuate himself not onlv into the good graces
of the King, but into those of the Queen. This, then,
was how matters stood when Richelieu died.

The health of King Louis had for years been far
from robust, and, soon after Richelieu's death, it was
seen that his days were numbered. In April of the year
1643, himself convinced that the end was near, Louis
moved out to the new palace at St. Germain, where the
air was much purer and better than in Paris, and pro-
ceeded piously to prepare for the next world. Yet it
was more the fear of the Devil and of Hell than the love
of God which actuated his religious zeal, although he
died with calm and dignity. After having looked out
from his windows at St. Germain towards the tower of
the Cathedral of St. Denis, the last resting-place of the
Kings and Queens of France, he said thoughtfully :
' There is where I soon shall be ! "
Thus died Louis the Just, born, as the astrologers
said, under the sign of the Balance, but characterised
even before his death by a contemporary anonymous
weigher of character as one who

"does not say all he thinks ; does not do all he

wants to do ; does not wish all he might wish ".

Read with the light of history upon it, the inscription

placed by Richelieu on the equestrian statue of Louis

XIII. in the once famous old Place Royale, now the

Place des Vosges, in Paris, seems sarcastic indeed :

' To the glorious and immortal memory of the

most great, the most invincible Louis the Just !

Thirteenth of the name, King of France and

of Navarre. Armand, Cardinal and Duke of

Richelieu, his principal minister in all his

illustrious and generous designs, overwhelmed

with honours and benefits by so good a master

and so generous a monarch, has had this statue

raised to him as an eternal mark of his zeal,

his fidelity and his gratitude."

42 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

For even so tremendous an eulogy from such a source
could not immortalise the memory of a roi faineant.
Like the statue in the Place des Vosges to-day,
where his small insignificant head is hidden behind the
shade of friendly chestnut trees, where, perched upon
a marble horse, he sits forever forgotten and unnoticed,
Louis the Just is remembered at best but as the link
between two great Kings, Henri IV. and Louis XIV.

Symbolic, too, of the life of King Louis, Thirteenth
of his name, are the vicissitudes through which the horse
and rider have gone in the centuries. While the horse,
originally of bronze, made by a pupil of Michael Angelo,
was very artistic, the statue itself, executed by another
hand, was, like its prototype, out of proportion and of
weak construction. Glorious and pompous, with noise
of drum and artillery, was its unveiling in the year 1639,
magnificent the hopes of the King, the prediction of
whose future greatness and invincibility had thus been
sarcastically engraven on the statue, sitting upon his
bronze horse raised high upon a pedestal of marble,
and surveying with indifferent eye the new and mag-
nificent Place Royale ! In his hand he then held
a sceptre of command. But, long before the bronze
horse and rider were melted down into cannon for the
Sans Culottes of the Revolution, this sceptre had in some
mysterious way slipped from the King's fingers an
emblem of the weak hold he had upon kingly power in
his lifetime.

For nearly twenty-five years Richelieu had guided
that commander's baton in his master's nerveless fingers ;
and when death finally removed his grasp, " Voila un
grand politique mort ! " said Louis, little thinking, in
thus pronouncing the epitaph of one far greater than
himself, how in the years to come he himself would be
best remembered by the careless words of an unknown
writer of burlesques :

Here lies the King our master,

Louis, Thirteenth of his name,
Who for twenty years valet of a priest

Still acquired great renown.

DEATH OF LOUIS THE JUST 43

Thus, when death had relieved both the great
Cardinal and his valet of their high offices, what was
the position of the Queen ?

In those last days at St. Germain, Louis had ar-
ranged the affairs of the kingdom wisely, as he supposed,
in giving the Queen the honorary title of Regent,
Gaston d'Orlans the equally harmless one of Lieutenant-
General of the Kingdom, and in vesting all real power
in the hands of a Council of Regency, of which Mazarin
was to form part. This, Mazarin said, was an insult to
the Queen, and four days after the King's death the
Parlement of Paris overthrew all Louis' well-laid plans
by abolishing the Council of Regency, and giving the
whole power to Anne of Austria.

Her position thus assured, the question in the minds
of the Tiers Etat next was : Will the Queen find a
successor to Richelieu, or will she rule by herself?

"Surely she will rule by herself," said the citizens
of Paris ; " she is weary of being ruled over ; "
so they received her with rejoicings and acclamations
on that morning after Louis XI 1 1. 's death, when, hardly
waiting for him to draw his last breath, the whole Court,
with bed and furniture, hurried back to Paris from St.
Germain, their new King of five years of age at their
head.

For days Anne of Austria kept her own counsel,
and it was easy to divert the minds of the people for
a little while just then from thoughts of their future.
They were absorbed in their rejoicings over the glory
of France, the news of the victory of Cond (still Due
d'Enghien) over the Spaniards at Rocroy having come
only about five days after the King's death.

Not long, however, could the truth be concealed ; in
fact, four days after the King's death, and on the very
morning when the young King held his first Lit de
Justice, appearing before the Parlement in a beautiful
violet dress, and betraying even then the majesty which
always distinguished him, it became known that the
Italian, whom, to the general surprise, Louis XIII. had
taken into his Council the day after Richelieu's death,

44 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

had again scored a secret victory, and was become the
chosen minister of Anne of Austria.

Indignation now broke out everywhere, but the noise
of it was repressed into a dull rumble which did not
penetrate the thick walls of the Louvre, where first the
Queen was lodged. Nor did it later on reach as far as
the Palais Cardinal, Richelieu's legacy to Louis XIII.
To this palace Anne of Austria, at the end of 1643,
removed with her two young sons, King Louis and
Philippe, Due d'Anjou, changing its name, in spite of
the Duchesse d'Aiguillon's wounded feeling, into that
of the Palais Royal. Here, in an apartment connected
by a secret passage with that of the Queen Regent,
Mazarin was also lodged, in order, it was announced,
that he might the more conveniently confer with her
at any moment on affairs of State.

And at last, after over twenty-five years of misunder-
standings, neglect and slights from a husband whom she
could not love, of bullying from a minister whom she
hated and feared, Anne of Austria was happy. At last
she had come into her kingdom in more ways than
one : not only was she now arbiter of her own destiny,
but mistress of France as well. In the exuberance
of her joy and freedom she distributed favours over
the land with a lavish hand until the whole of France
resounded with the words : " How good the Queen is ! "
And if she had in reality but exchanged one rule for
that of another, her subjection this time was at least
that sweet one which every woman seeks, for Anne of
Austria loved Richelieu's successor.

Still handsome at forty-five, she was tall, well-made,
her mien benign and majestic, her eyes beautiful, their
expression fine ; still she prided herself on her figure,
on those famous hands of which her chronicler,
Madame de Motteville, says so much ; and, freed
from continual espionage and suspicion, she, like a real
Spaniard, dreamed that she could combine gallantry
with piety. Exceedingly devout, she was yet exceed-
ingly gallant at the same time, having, especially in those
early days of her infatuation for the handsome Italian,

DEATH OF LOUIS THE JUST 45

all the airs and graces peculiar to the most coquettish of
her sex. From the first her devotion to Mazarin was
not hidden not only was it whispered in Court circles,
but loudly proclaimed in the streets, as were also the
criticisms on her conduct. Rumours of her secret
marriage met these latter, and were a plausible explana-
tion, such marriages being extremely in vogue at the time,
and often indulged in for the mere pleasure of the mys-
tery. Writing only a short time afterwards, the Duchesse
d'Orlans in her Memoirs asserted positively that the
Queen Regent and Mazarin were really bound to each
other by the marriage tie. The greatest doubt of this
marriage through the centuries has hung on the much-
discussed point of Mazarin's priesthood a still un-
decided point and recently it has been generally
believed that the ceremony actually took place ; yet, as
no proof is forthcoming, the question must still remain,
as it has for nearly two hundred and fifty years, one of
the numerous enigmas of history.

Louis XIII. had not been dead three months,
however, before Mazarin had acquired so tremend-
ous an influence over the Queen that already he
was almost as much master of the kingdom as Riche-
lieu had been. Of Anne of Austria Madame de la
Fayette wrote :

" Her mind had seemed restless and preoccupied
during the life of her husband ; but from the
time she became mistress of herself and of
the kingdom, she thought only of leading a
sweet life, of occupying herself with her de-
votional exercises, betraying a great enough
indifference to everything".

So great was Mazarin's supremacy that it seemed as
if Richelieu were not dead at all :

" He is not dead," said the poets, "he has only

changed in age ! "

Some have called Richelieu's successor a knave,
some a foreign adventurer, some even a thief, but all
should agree in recognising his qualities as a minister,
a statesman and a lover. Forty-one years of age in

46 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

1643 therefore four years younger than Anne of
Austria oily, sleek and handsome, speaking the French
language rather worse than even Marie de Medecis,
it was said that his heart was more French than his
tongue.

Bussy de Rabutin in his Memoirs gives an inter-
esting account of the rise of this Roman gentleman
from his birth up to the time when Richelieu took a
hand in his advancement. Like Richelieu, Mazarin,
too, had the heart of a soldier, moreover he had even
served as such in war, after which under Cardinal
Barberini he had distinguished himself in diplomatic
missions, the Italian Cardinal thereafter attaching him
to his person and making, if not a priest, at least a
churchman and a prelate of him. On coming to France
and employed in negotiations in the Treaty of Casal,
which he terminated to the advantage of France,
Richelieu, seeing his clever qualities and thinking to
make use of him, had him made Cardinal and placed
near himself.

From the beginning people were suspicious of the
Foreigner, and many were the contemptuous remarks
made. One of his contemporaries, Guy Patin, was
courageous enough to say :

" Mazarin is the Queen's misfortune ; a demon,

and consequently ours. I love him no better

than the devil, and I hold him for what he is

a mere scoundrel a Pantalon in a red

bonnet, and a buffoon in a long robe ! "

The two famous Cardinals were certainly very

unlike : of the two, Richelieu being the greater. A

comparison has been drawn between them to the effect

that Mazarin's mind was the broader of the two, while

Richelieu was more honourable, and had a more

beautiful soul. But, if broader, Mazarin's mind was

also more cunning, and his methods quite the opposite

of those of his predecessor. His were pre-eminently

the enigmatical procedures of the Jesuit, Richelieu's

power that of the domineering autocrat and statesman ;

in a word, it was Craft opposed to Strength ; and,

DEATH OF LOUIS THE JUST 47

though Strength be outwitted by Craft, there is no
question as to which is the nobler passion.

Yet if inferior to Richelieu in nature and honesty
it must be admitted, at least, that Mazarin excelled
him as a royal lover. And, whatever had recom-
mended him to Anne of Austria, whether his air of
Buckingham, his wily manners, his handsome face,
fine presence, or his insinuating and caressing ways,
no man was ever more shielded or protected by the
love of a weak woman. Mazarin gave the Queen
moments of the only real happiness she had ever
known, apparently courting her love for its own sake ;
Richelieu's love-making to Marie de Medecis, on the
contrary, though it brought him his first step towards
fame, proved fatal to his royal mistress.

In spite of his faith in the Queen's constancy and
there seems never to have been the least doubt of that
Mazarin had to walk slowly and carefully in the first
days of his ascendancy. This he was an adept in
doing, having no difficulty in allowing " Dame Anne "
as the people called her in their contempt of her
love for the foreigner to protect and cover his every
movement, he himself meanwhile strenuously essay-
ing to carry out the foreign policy of Richelieu, and
thus lay solid ground for his feet to tread upon in the
future.

In 1644, not long before the outbreak of the First
Fronde, Anne of Austria, thinking to do Madame
d'Aiguillon, her great friend .at the time, an honour,
had invited herself and her court to Ruel, the place of
all others that Richelieu had most loved. There,
in the first blush of her youth and beauty, when
Richelieu was mad about her, his niece would retire
for weeks together so the memoirs report. There the
great minister himself worked each day with his sub-
ordinates ; there he received the poets and men of
letters in whom he was so much interested. Ruel, too,
it was whispered, was the fearful place of many sum-
mary acts of justice, of terrible dungeons and secret
torture chambers, as well as the repository of the

48 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

great minister's taste and wealth, the witness to his
love for magnificence and his adoration of beauty in
art. Full as it was of precious pictures and curios,
evidences of his undying influence were everywhere.
To Anne of Austria and her court, its vast gardens
were marvels of beauty, and they never tired of ad-
miring the freshness and novelty of the artificial cas-
cades introduced into this lovely spot by the Cardinal
before such a thing was known elsewhere in France.
No king of France had ever yet had such a domain as
this ; and seeing it, feeling the influence of the man
who in life had been naught but a menace and a
humiliation to her, Anne of Austria could not help
realising his power. Standing before his portrait at
Ruel one day, she paid him in death the compliment
she could never have made him in his lifetime :

" If the Cardinal were alive to-day," she said

thoughtfully, "he would be more powerful

than ever ! "

These six weeks the Court spent at Ruel in 1644
were a round of pleasure ; to the Queen, whose free-
dom and love were new and absorbing, this visit was a
dream of delight. In truth, all was gaiety and light-
heartedness : from morning to night divertissement ;
conversation over the embroidery frame, games of for-
feit, promenades through the beautiful park, where a
quantity of surprises planned by the attentive hostess
would meet the guests ; wonderful collations three times
a day fitting tributes to Epicurus. The co-operation
of the Nine Muses was demanded in the theatre, fitted
up by Richelieu with the most marvellous mechanical
contrivances and where the Duchesse d'Aiguillon exer-
cised the utmost limit of her own ingenuity in preparing
the comedy, of which Anne of Austria was passionately
fond, or in arranging one of those ballets so fascinating
to the gay gallants of the time. In these divertisse-
ments Imagination and Grace would vie with each
other to make the hours fly by, and when, in a ballet
of the seasons, the Muses, the Night or the Arts, the
ingenuity of even these indefatigable seekers after

DEATH OF LOUIS THE JUST 49

pleasure had been exhausted, the round of the pro-
gramme would but begin over again.

At night, too, the Queen loved to walk in the park,
sometimes illuminated by the moonlight, sometimes
dark in the starlight, but where always a surprise, as
they called it, in the shape of a serenade, a spectacle, or
a pantomime would greet her ; most often it was the
sweet voice of the Italian singer, Signora L^onore an
artist brought from Italy by Richelieu which, in the
old Italian of the South, accompanied by several in-
struments, would sound sensuously from behind one of
the bosquets, to delight the ear and move the heart of
the newly awakened and sentimental Queen.

One day as she was driving through the park in
her calecke, accompanied by the Duchess, she noticed
Voiture, that poet so noted at the Rambouillet for his
skill in story-telling, walking along in a profound re-
verie. Stopping him, the Queen, anxious to test his
powers, demanded of what he was thinking so intently.
Without any hesitation, Voiture thereupon improvised
an answer in verse, boldly recalling to the Queen's
mind her old friend the Duke of Buckingham, whose
ghost, indeed, must often have been walking by her
side through the allees and by-paths of Ruel.

For both the Queen and her hostess, singularly
enough, the gardens of Ruel were full of ghosts. Here
Richelieu, twenty years before, had entertained the
whole Court at the time of the wedding of Henriette
of France to Charles I. of England. Here Anne of
Austria a very young wife at the time was dazzled
by the attentions of the dashing Duke of Buckingham,
come in all his magnificence to escort the daughter of
Henri IV. over to his royal master in England ; here
she listened to his declaration of love and eternal
fidelity. Here, too, Madame de Combalet had lived
through her own love romance with Richelieu.

So, as they drove together through those lovely
allies the thoughts of each woman must have been
occupied with the past. Less fortunate than the Queen
Regent, however, the Duchesse d'Aiguiilon had no

50 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

present heart-interest to dissipate sad thoughts from
her mind. Thus the sight of Mazarin and Anne of
Austria walking through those scenes so connected
with the happiest period of her own life was painful to
her in the extreme. Nor did their love, secret as hers"
had been, seem to make her very sympathetic, for not
long afterwards she incurred the displeasure of the
Queen Regent by daring to admonish her with regard
to Mazarin, while later on we hear of her endeavour to
put obstacles in the way of Mazarin's return from exile.
The old place of Ruel, famous first of all for its
association with the intimate history of Richelieu and
Madame d'Aiguillon, afterwards became identified with
the Fronde and with Louis XIV. himself. The story is
told that when in 1666 Louis Quatorze conceived the
idea of purchasing the beautiful estate for the Crown
and his own purposes, the Duchess betrayed the hold
this home of hers had upon her affections. Richelieu
had left it to her unconditionally in his will, and
although, when approached by Colbert, she went so
far as to return an estimate of the improvements made
by Richelieu and the price at which she valued it, she
acknowledged that to sell it was very far from her
desire :

" To no one but the King or the Queen," she

added diplomatically, " has Ruel a price for

me!"

The King, seeing her reluctance, did not persist ; so the
estate remained in the Duchess's possession during her
lifetime, and at her death descended through her heirs
to the Due de Richelieu of revolutionary fame, who sold
it in his turn to a business man of Paris for use as a
factory. Thus, like those of Madame d'Aiguillon her-
self, the grand days of Ruel had practically ended with
Richelieu's death. In 1793, becoming national pro-
perty, it was again sold, and in modern times the
ancient chateau has quite disappeared, giving place in
the old park to the modern edifice belonging to the
Princess of Essling. Such are the vicissitudes of
palaces built upon earth !

MARGUERITE DE LORRAINE, DUCHESSE D ORLEANS

AFTER A MINIATURE BV PETITOT

CHAPTER V

GASTON D'ORLEANS

" Le pire des caracteres, c'est de n'en avoir pas." La Bruyire

NO history of the period could be complete
without a picture of the third son of Henri
IV. and Marie de Medecis, Gaston, the
younger brother of Louis XIII., known in the early
years of his life as the Due d'Anjou, later on as the
Ducd'Orlans ; and, more generally still, as " Monsieur,"
the latter appellation since the beginning of the six-
teenth century having been taken as a sort of proper
name to designate the King's eldest brother.

As there was seven years' difference in the ages of
Louis and Gaston the second son of Henri IV. having
died at four and a half years of age the two brothers
were unconnected by any of those strong souvenirs of
childhood so powerful in later years to forge mature
acquaintance. To Louis, therefore, Gaston was a
stranger, merely one of his subjects, albeit the highest
vassal in his realm ; and for the handsome robust boy,
who excelled him in mind and body, he felt no love :
rather did he look at him askance.

For his part, Gaston had from his birth suffered
irretrievably under the fate of a King's younger brother
no enviable destiny ; the whole horizon of such an
one being obscured by the latent possibility of suc-
cession to the Crown, which, by eternally hanging over
his head, causes him to concentrate every faculty into
the two preoccupations of Waiting and Watching. No
wonder that the higher emotions of this younger brother
should finally be attacked by atrophy, and become al-

52 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

together extinct. Or that, being assured by the eleva-
tion of his rank from the consequences of almost any
crime, he should, on the other hand, yield to the dictates
of his lower nature.

Yet this younger brother of King Louis the Just
had been richly endowed by fortune : even the day of
his birth, falling as it did on the 25th of April, the
anniversary of the birth of St. Louis, had been con-
sidered most auspicious ; besides which his father had
named him in honour of one of the bravest and best
knights that ever lived, Gaston de Foix, while his
mother, thinking thus to secure for him the protection
of the patron saint of her native city of Florence, John
the Baptist, had added the name of Jean Baptiste.
But when, according to the custom of the time, the
young Prince's horoscope was taken, it was predicted
that he should have misfortune and disgrace during
the greater part of his life, and that by his own fault !

Contrary to his brother again, the personality of
Gaston was a most charming one, while that of Louis
was timid and unattractive, rendered the less seductive
by a bad habit of stuttering, which had caused Richelieu,
fearful that the King be nicknamed Louis the Stutterer,
to hail with joy the more dignified title of Louis the
Just. With blue eyes, black curling hair, alert, wide-
awake air, Gaston was noted for his fine looks, added
to which he possessed the charm of gentle manners,
and a mind of no mediocre quality, his imagination was
keen, and he had the talent of expressing himself not
only well, but with grace. With him Art was a pas-
sion, and he was so learned in herbs and simples,
knowing the names and virtues of each one, that when
exiled to Blois, after the Fronde, he there instituted a
botanical garden which became noted throughout
France.

It is, therefore, but the sadder, considering such
talents, to think that had Gaston d'Orleans but had
the proper influences in his early life, he would have
realised the highest hopes of his future. " He is
mobile," ^said his governess, Madame de Montglat,

GASTON D'ORLANS 53

who had charge of Henri IV.'s children in their early
youth ; and mobility is the key to his whole character :
never was a man more easily swayed, never did any
one change his plans and ideas with greater facility :
therefore never did any one more require the proper
influences.

At first these surrounded him. His governor, the
Sieur de Breves, sixty-five years of age when he
undertook the charge of Gaston, was universally re-
spected, and a man of wide experience and knowledge,
having lived twenty-two years in the East and served
as Counsellor of State and Ambassador to Rome. His
" Turk " Gaston used to call his governor, in allusion
to his residence in the East. In addition to his valu-
able experience of life and manners, the Sieur de Breves
was also possessed of wisdom, goodness and judgment,
and, as he was ably seconded by two sub-governors
and a preceptor of unusual ability, for three short years
Gaston received the best of instruction and training.
That he yielded extraordinarily well to discipline, is
proven by the fact that in those three years ''the
Turk " had but once been obliged to have recourse to
the rod he kept ever at his belt.

On every side instruction pursued the young Due
d'Anjou : on his walls hung geographical charts ;
portraits of illustrious men and historical paintings ;
his very recreations were made useful ; he was taught
to pray, and for an hour each night after his coucher
books on instructive subjects were read aloud to him.
It was a wonder that the boy did not react from all
this virtue, which seems abnormal for a descendant of
kings ; but perhaps three years of it was not long
enough to admit of reaction. Anyhow at the Court,
where jealousy, questions of policy or ambition are
always to be reckoned with, this ideal state of things
was soon broken in upon ; the Sieur de Breves had
the misfortune to be not only a friend of the Marechal
d'Ancre, but of Marie de Medecis as well ; De Luynes,
favourite of Louis XIII., therefore, had his watchful
eye upon the King's brother and his creatures, and

54 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

finding Gaston being too well trained to suit his schemes,
he affected for his own ends the dismissal of De Breves,
and the appointment of a man to whom he was under
obligation.

Of utterly different character from De Breves was
the Comte du Lude, the new governor. Debauched
and dissipated, he loved pleasure too much to pay the
proper attention to his charge, and thus Gaston was
left entirely to the under-governor, a man of low birth
and of gross, uncouth manners. Fortunately, Du Lude
lived only seventeen months after his appointment.
His successor, the Comte d'Ornano, was again a man
of character whose influence was quite strong enough
to offset the effects of the short rule of Du Lude, had
he so chosen. The new governor, too, had the ad-
vantage of being greatly aided in his task by his wife
a woman of culture and distinction named Maria de
Raymond, Marquise de Montlaur who acquired a hold
over the mind and imagination of the gifted boy.

But suddenly all was changed by a metamorphosis
which occurred in Ornano and his wife. After surround-
ing him with good influences up to the age of seventeen,
with the result that Gaston was a favourite with all the
Court on account of his gentleness, kindness and lack
of haughtiness, and that admission into his household
was considered the greatest of honours, they ceased to
be respectively his mentor and inspiration, and became
his fawners and flatterers ; ambition was the element
which had compassed this sudden change. Why, they
asked themselves, as Louis has no children and his
health is bad, should not Gaston become King of France ?
Straightway Ornano, before whom loomed the vision of
the baton of Marechal of France, introduced this new
idea into his pupil's head, beginning to remind him, not
of his duties, but of his rights.

And of a furtive secret nature, Louis XI 1 1. 's jealousy
of his brother's physical superiority was now increased
by whispered insinuations that, should Gaston marry
and have children, the allegiance of the people would turn
from him, the childless King. He recoiled from the

GASTON D'ORLEANS 55

idea with that strength of a weak mind which can be-
come obsessed, and endeavoured pertinaciously to pre-
vent the marriage he dreaded.

In the meantime others were plotting for the very
thing that Louis feared ; Marie de Medecis determined
not only that her favourite son should marry, but that
he should win the richest heiress in France, Mademoi-
selle de Montpensier. Richelieu seconded her, while
Ornano, for his own ends, headed a plot to marry his
pupil to the Princess of Mantua. Then, as Richelieu
stood in the way of the success of any plot but his own,
Gaston was taken into the secret of Ornano's schemes.

" I will not marry Richelieu's choice," said Gaston,
so a variation was made in the original plan by which
Louis XIII. was to be relegated to a convent for the
rest of his days, and Gaston to become King in his
stead with the young Queen Anne of Austria as his
consort. Gaston also promised to give the signal for
Richelieu's assassination. When the critical moment
for striking the blow came, however, with characteristic
indecision he let it pass his courage failed him, as it
always did whereupon Richelieu, quickly suspecting the
plot within a plot, seized upon the would-be murderer,
and intimidated him into confessing all. Obliged to
find a scapegoat, Gaston named one of the conspirators
called Chalais, who was immediately arrested and held
for trial at Nantes.

It is significant of the opinion generally held of Gas-
ton that, accused of complicity in the plot, Anne of
Austria had no difficulty in making her judges believe
in her innocence simply by the contempt with which
she said that she would not have gained enough by the
exchange.

This experience was the first of Gaston's encounters
with Richelieu, and it is the type of all that followed.
Found out in his plans, he had no compunction in be-
traying Chalais before the Court of Justice, meekly
promising to be good, and to marry Mademoiselle de
Montpensier if only his rights and income be restored.
In this very town of Nantes, therefore, he was quickly

56 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

married to the rich heiress ; and mingled with Chalais'
dying groans was the sound of his wedding-bells ! And
these bells sounded like funeral knells in the ears of
Louis XIII., to whom, in 1624, after eight years of
marriage, no heir had been vouchsafed.

Once married, Gaston forgot everything, even the
death of Ornano, killed, it was said, by wounded ambi-
tion. He loved his new wife ; he caressed her ; he
could not live without her. And it was not long before
another and more palpitating excitement, wherein there
gleamed the hope of ambition realised, filled his
thoughts ; only a few months after their marriage his
wife announced her happy expectations of motherhood,
and Gaston began to proclaim on all sides the coming
of a son a Crown Prince !

What agonies must Louis XIII.'s Queen have
suffered on this announcement how revenged when,
after months of anticipation and rejoicing, of boasting
and crowing on Gaston's part, the heir turned out to be
no Crown Prince, but a daughter, none other than that
queer masculine little creature, so strange a mixture all
her life of virile force and feminine weakness and caprice,
who was to go down to history as the Grande Made-
moiselle !

But Gaston's constancy to his new wife was not long
put to the proof, for the very next year she died leaving
him with the little daughter known as Mademoiselle de
Montpensier. Gaston's chequered career dates from
this period. Always a thorn in the flesh of Richelieu,
he now began to prick him in earnest, and also to incite
Marie de Medecis to take her revenge on the man who
had spurned her love. These two, combining together
in their hatred of their foe, determined to turn Louis
XIII. against him ; the Day of Dupes was the result,
after which a hasty flight abroad seemed wisest for both
mother and son.

Fleeing to Lorraine, Gaston asked asylum of Duke
Charles IV., and was received by him into the midst
of his household. Here he met the Duke's sister,
Margaret of Lorraine, and whether he really fell in

GASTON D'ORL#ANS 57

love with her, or whether it was to avoid a marriage
with Madame de Combalet, Richelieu's niece, that he
married her, it is difficult to tell. At any rate, news
soon came to France that in the Palace of Nancy, with
the sanction of the Duke of Lorraine, Gaston, the King's
brother, had dispensed with royal permission, and on
his own responsibility secretly wedded Margaret of
Lorraine.

" This will never do ! " said Richelieu, and with his
usual decision he set about thwarting the rebellious
dreams of the Due d'Orl^ans. First of all marching
towards Nancy, he defeated the Duke of Lorraine and
Gaston, and forced the former to sign a treaty wherein
he acknowledged the overlordship of France, and
agreed to refuse asylum to Gaston d'Orleans. Then
the Duke having quickly broken both stipulations, again
Richelieu raised his hand, and Gaston fled precipitately
to Brussels, where his new wife, with blackened face,
and in man's attire, crossing the enemy's line, soon
followed him.

But how could Gaston be content to remain quietly
in Brussels without the usual appurtenances of his rank
without his enjoyments, his excitements? Undoubt-
edly he sighed for those eighty magnificent French
Guards dressed in his livery with cassocks of velvet,
embroidered both in front and behind with numbers,
and wearing bandoleers of velvet. Or for those twenty-
four footmen who on Sundays and/te days were allowed
to walk before him beating the drum wherever he went,
providing he did not go where the King was.

Worst of all, he had no money for his favourite pas-
time of gambling, and he was tired of the abortive plots
made at that distance with his mother against the life
of Richelieu, or with Spain against France. Without
saying a word to either his mother or his wife, he began
negotiating a secret treaty whereby he might get back
again to France, and one fine morning, going out on
the pretence of a day of hunting, he escaped over the
border, and reappeared at Paris.

Sheepily he came back ; sheepily he resigned him-

58 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

self to circumstances, changing with the wind, betraying
his friends at every turn as usual. Shaking his brother's
hand at St. Germain, he completed his humiliation by
going to Ruel :

" With three sweetmeats and two Genoa plums,"

Richelieu had said, " I will engage to drive

away all bitterness from his heart,"

and immediately on Gaston's return he instituted a grand

fete at Ruel to celebrate the reconciliation. Here, after

eating his sweetmeats and plums in the shape of the

comedy administered by the Cardinal, in conjunction

with a little judicious flattery, Gaston gave the usual

list of his followers and friends, the fete being followed

by the sound of wailing and gnashing of teeth.

But while apparently subdued and reconciled to the
annulment of his marriage, in reality Gaston was only
biding his time ; for, whatever his faults, he loved this
second wife, who, of little importance personally, had in
marrying Gaston, and thus interfering with Richelieu's
political plans, been the unwitting means of ruining her
own family in Lorraine. Gaston was determined to
bring her to France as his acknowledged wife, and
pretending obedience to Richelieu, he waited with as
good a grace as possible until that time when, the great
minister being gone, he could induce his brother to let
him carry out this sincere desire of his ordinarily shallow
heart.

But for eight long years the proper opportunity
never came ; it did not arrive, in fact, until after Riche-
lieu's death, only eight days before Louis XIII. himself
followed his great minister, when, weakened by illness
and the approach of the end, the King gave his per-
mission for " Madame," as Gaston's wife was now to be
called, to come to France, and this on condition that a
new ceremony of marriage be gone through with. Poor
Madame, Tallemant des Reaux reports, when the
marriage was repeated at Meudon, cried bitterly, believ-
ing that until then she had been living in mortal sia

Naturally the rumour of the arrival of Madame at
the Court caused much excitement. Her romantic

GASTON D'ORLfiANS 59

flight all the way from Nancy to Brussels had sur-
rounded her with interest in the eyes of a gallant
nation, and Gaston's fidelity to her was matter for
constant wonder. Thus all were on the qui vive to see
this woman known as the " dashing robber " of their
fickle unstable Orleans ; and first and foremost among
the curious ones was Mademoiselle de Montpensier,
Gaston's daughter, grown up from the little masculine
creature of her earliest years into a curious young
person of sixteen.

In her memoirs, the Grande Mademoiselle gives an
interesting account of the first meeting between Gaston
and his wife after the nine years' separation ; she tells
of the embarrassment on both sides, of her own dis-
appointment in this stepmother who had excited her
romantic interest. The Court was likewise bitterly dis-
appointed, finding it quite impossible to recognise in
the devote, the imaginary invalid, and the spiritless
woman, too indolent to move out of her bed for days
together, whom they now saw presiding at the Palais
du Luxembourg or rather the Palais d'Orleans, as it
had been called in deference to Gaston, the brilliant
creature which their imagination had painted Margaret
of Lorraine.

And a strange compound was the Duchesse d'Or-
lans even in an age of anomalies !

" Her person, her humour, her manners are odious
to me," said Anne of Austria, and some years after-
wards Louis XIV. expressed his opinion that she was a
woman who spoiled everything she was connected with.
On the other hand, at St. Sulpice they considered her
a lily among thorns, her swearing husband being the
most unregenerate of all her surroundings.

Yet while the Duchess was very pious, and pos-
sessed the fine and rare qualities of sense and bravery,
the good in her seemed completely neutralised by her
indolence, her lack of education and her false piety.
When young, her beauty was extolled later on, in
speaking of her, it was her love for the pleasures of the
table which people remembered. All the ills and troubles

60 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

of life she tried to forget, not in wine or opium, but in
satisfying her palate. She ate, she said, to cure her of
the vapours !

Such a character could have nothing in common
with Mademoiselle de Montpensier, who from a first
romantic admiration for her stepmother had finally
grown to heartily disliking and despising her. So
great was her dislike that when in 1672 Madame, then
Dowager-Duchess of Orleans, had herself carried out
into the Garden of the Luxembourg to die, Mademoi-
selle, allowing herself to be seen from an upper window
of the palace, had the cruelty not to go near her ;
leaving the house without a word, the cold and heart-
less Princess hurried away to St. Germain. Even
when Madame was no more, Mademoiselle did not
relent, but begging Louis XIV. to absolve her from
the task of following her father's widow to the grave,
the only respect she paid the memory of Margaret of
Lorraine, once so beautiful and so renowned, was her
empty carriage in the funeral cortege.

Gaston of the blue ribbon had never had a very
enviable reputation in France. In fact he has been
estimated by one of his own countrymen as the perfect
type of the conspirator and traitor, consequently one of
the saddest figures in all French history. During the
Fronde, Cardinal Retz, who had occasion to know him
well, said of him :

"He enters into everything because he has not
the force to resist those who carry him along,
and he always comes out of his schemes with
shame because he has not the force to hold
on".

Hesitating and temporising in every crisis of his
life, Gaston succeeded, as the years went on, less and
less well in his projects. During the Fronde he had
the further disadvantage of being harried and tor-
mented not only by his wife, but by his daughter as well,
the Palais d'Orleans being converted into a hotbed of
secret conferences and underhand plots. Throughout,
the habit of the Due d'Orleans was to bring his friends

GASTON D'ORL^ANS 61

into his study, hear what they had to propose, and then,
with a " Let us ask Madame," call in his wife. And, too
indolent to entertain or to receive visits, Madame often
surprised the conspirators, when her advice was asked,
by her common-sense and judgment qualities in which
she always excelled her husband. Like many other
weak men, devoid of force and character, Gaston
d'Orleans was remarkable for his power of language ;
he was in truth a born orator.

Both his powers of oratory and his lack of courage
were no secret to his contemporaries, as is testified by
a couplet which went the rounds during the Fronde to
the effect that Beaufort shone by his prowess, Gaston
by his tongue. Oh, could Beaufort have but Gaston's
tongue, could Gaston but have Beaufort's arm !

CHAPTER VI

THE FRONDE THE DESECRATION OF ST. SULPICE
THE HUMOUR OF THE FRONDE ITS GENIUS

Un vent de Fronde
S'est lev ce matin ;

Je crois qu'il gronde
Centre le Mazarin.

MEANWHILE the dull rumble of discontent
which had broken out when Anne of Austria
appointed Mazarin her adviser and minister
had not died down ; at moments it threatened to break
through the best-built walls and penetrate to kingly
ears, and its growling undertone rose and fell with
every wind of circumstance. A victory to French arms
brought about by either Turenne or Cond6 had power
to still it momentarily, a breath of injustice to swell its
menacing sound to a chord of insistent vehemence.

No wonder that, after it was all over, looking back
on those days of struggle, Mazarin proudly took as his
device a rock beaten by the waves, with the motto :
" With what noise and how vainly ! "

The prologue to the trouble had been precipitated
by no other than an old friend of Anne of Austria's,
the celebrated Duchesse de Chevreuse, who, exiled
for many years from France during the lifetime of
Richelieu and Louis XIII., had on their removal re-
turned to Court with the vain expectation of being
received by Anne of Austria with the same affection
and enthusiasm. Finding the Regent absolutely ab-
sorbed in Mazarin and utterly careless of old ties, the
intriguing Duchess formed an alliance with the Due
de Beaufort, natural son of Henri IV., and Gabrielle

THE FRONDE 63

d'Estrees, and joined the party of the Importants.
This party of malcontents, foiled in their attempt to
assassinate Mazarin, their leader the Due de Beaufort
imprisoned, and they themselves soon completely sub-
dued, may be said to have foreshadowed, and given
warning of, the Fronde. Still the Foreigner rankled
in the minds of the people ; and when, to pay the ever-
increasing expenses of the still-existing and costly war
with Spain, as well as Anne of Austria's generosities,
new taxes were imposed, the dull rumble of discontent
became a loud and menacing cry no longer to be
ignored, even a victory to France not being able to
quiet its threatenings.

" We will not pay the taxes levied on our dearest

consolations ! " cried the Sans Culottes.
" Indeed you shall not !" replied the Parlement of

Paris.
" Down with the Italians !" roared the good citizens

of Paris.
'The King and Parlement for ever!" responded

the Parlement.

And thus France broke out into that wonderful
farce called the Fronde verily " the Travail of France
ready to bring forth the Reign of Louis XIV. ! "
Its name alone betrayed its farcical character, its
careless purpose. Originating in a joke d propos of
an affair of school-boys, Barillon, a witty councillor
of Paris, stamped its character in the verse impro-
vised in Court for the amusement of his fellow Par-
lementarians, the couplet at the beginning of this
chapter. A poor old woman walking along the street
had been unwittingly hit by a stray stone from a school-
boy's slingshot. On her complaining against the boys,
their cause had been brought into Court, and before
night the whole of Paris was singing M. Barillon's
couplet : " Un vent de Fronde ! " And what but a
child's play a game where, regardless of aim, of right
or reason, stones were thrown about for the mere pleas-
ure of it was this war between the Parlement and the
Crown ? From a military point of view, at least, it

64 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

was but a fronde a slingshot war, and in the streets
of Paris its pleasantries most appropriately began.
The Parlement, in fact, suppressed in Richelieu's time,
was become, since its interference in breaking the
Council of Regency appointed by Louis XIII., a very
arrogant and domineering body, which, though it itself
had given the supreme power to the Queen Regent,
insisted on poking its curious nose into the smallest
affairs of the nation. Five years after the inauguration
of this rule in 1648 it grew so unbearable that Anne
of Austria and Mazarin decided that this curious nose
must be tweaked. So, taking advantage of the popular
rejoicing over the victory of Lens, by way of tweaking
the Parlement's nose, they had three of the most pro-
minent Parlementarians arrested and thrown into the
prison at Vincennes.

" What does this mean ? " cried the people. " Are
not the Parlement our representatives our-
selves ? Give us back those men ! "
And forthwith, raising barricades in the streets, the
indignant mob demanded from behind their shelter
the release of the three Parlementarians.

Unprepared for such an uprising, the Court could
not stem such a tide as this, and for the moment
reluctantly gave way setting the men at liberty and
sullenly looking on while the mob escorted them in
triumph to Notre Dame. The city of Paris thereupon
resumed once more its ordinary appearance ; the bar-
ricades came down, and quiet once more reigned above
the seething discontent

This day was called the Day of Barricades,
and was the real inauguration of the Fronde, though
next day another disturbance of quite a different
nature arose, all Paris being thrown into a fresh excite-
ment by news of a sacrilege that had been committed
in the quarter of St. Germain. On this occasion, as in
later melees, the god of Pathos and Sorrow walked side
by side with the demi-god of the Ludicrous and
Extravagant; with Polichinelle paraded the Melancholy
Jacques, while Laverna, goddess of Thieves, hovered

THE FRONDE 65

in close proximity. And as incongruous as the rest of
this slingshot war, on this occasion, too, Thanksgiving
walked side by side with Lamentation, Sorrow followed
after Joy. Hardly had the Te Deunts chanted for the
great victory of Lens gained by Condd in Flanders
against tremendous odds ceased resounding within the
walls of St. Sulpice, when their joyous notes suddenly
changed into terrified wonder and sorrow. For, in
the dead of night, robbers had entered through the
windows of the church and carried off the sacred
vessels, leaving their contents scattered on the ground.

" Woe unto us! " cried out the guilty parishioners,
made conscious by this sign of anger from a just God
of the wickedness and unregeneracy which, in spite of
the leaven of righteousness brought them by the holy
Pere Olier and the Duchesse d'Aiguillon, was still
strong within them.

" Surely it is I who have offended Divine Justice,"
each began to say in his own soul, and for a moment,
dropping the pressing excitements of the days, people
paused to think of their sins. It was enough that they
stopped, for the pointing finger wrote Mene, mene, tekel
upharsin before each secret conscience-mirror, until in
terror they tore off their purple and fine linen, donned
robes of sombre black, and trooped to the old church
to seek absolution and consolation.

Not only were the inhabitants of the wicked St.
Germain quarter thus aroused, the whole Court, in-
cluding the Queen Regent and the princes, hastened
to listen to the words of admonition and consolation
preached from the pulpit of St. Sulpice by the greatest
preachers of the day Vincent de Paul himself among
the number ; spending hours of devotion before the
sumptuous altar, where for three days the Holy
Sacrament was exposed, and giving of their choicest
possessions to help in its adornment. So great was the
awakening of conscience that the greatest ladies of the
Court, headed by the Duchesse d'Aiguillon and the
Duchesse d'Orleans, joined in along procession of peni-
tents to the Abbey Church of St. Germain des Pres,

66 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

that old abbey from whose tower Henri IV., then plain
Henry of Navarre, had looked down fifty years before
upon the city of Paris which he was so soon to
dominate and rule.

And on their way thither, though the rain fell in
torrents, duchesses and countesses of illustrious names
were not too proud to walk side by side with the Dames
des Halles with such modesty and religion, it was said,
that naught save the chanting of psalms was heard.

And the old Church of St. Sulpice, or rather the
new and reformed church, made larger and finer since
that day of Marie Madeleine's baptism in 1634, was
gorgeous in its adornment. The nave was resplendent
in cloth of gold, the choir in red velvet embroidery
lavish on every side, while in the midst of golden vases
and candlesticks, blazing with light, raised high upon a
pyramidal throne surmounted by a crown glittering with
jewels, gleamed out in mysterious symbolic warmth
the Holy Sacrament.

As a contrast to this solemnity and unreal agitation
for Bathos is never very far from Pathos at its high-
est moment even while the St. Sulpiciens were
ecstatic in their expiatory services a certain Baronne
de Neufvillette, a leader of society in the district, took
her sins yet more to heart, and impulsively vowed never
to eat anything but the coarsest bread, to drink nothing
but water the rest of her life a picturesque resolve,
which her poor human body vetoed by refusing to
carry out the extravagance which her mind had conceived.
Her father confessor having forbidden her to con-
tinue with the bread and water, and not content to be
without sensation even in her religious life, the
Baronne determined to publicly break with the world,
so, putting on a gown of patchwork, she began the
process of humiliation by visiting in this garb one of
her worldly friends at the Luxembourg.

" The Queen ! the Queen ! " cried the children,
crowding around her. " Hail, Queen of Tatters ! " where-
upon, no doubt, the pious lady felt herself a martyr and
a saint.

THE FRONDE 67

The First, or Parlementary Fronde, was of short
duration, lasting only the seven months from 26th
August, 1648, to ist April, 1649, and ending in the
Treaty of Ruel, in reality only a truce, even as the Parle-
mentary Fronde itself may be called the prelude or
signal of the Fronde proper. Its principal character
was the Parlement, its motive power the greed of the
Mattres de Requetes^ whose perquisites had been re-
duced by the creation of new offices which diminished
the value of the old. As its war-cry the virtuous Par-
lement adopted the King, on whose side they arrayed
themselves as against the Prime Minister. In those
three months the Court had the worst of the joke ; it
was a time of flights from Paris by night, of lack of
funds, of cold palaces, of inconveniences of every de-
scription. So, great was the rejoicing when, as it was
supposed, it all was over, the gladness as usual taking
the form of Te Deums in the churches.

But the flame had only died down, it had not been
extinguished, and its smouldering embers were fanned
into a blaze again by the Mazarinades of prominent
satirical poets ; by the dissatisfaction of Conde and
other nobles ; and suddenly out flared the Second, or
Nobiliare Fronde, aptly called by M. Victor Cousin " the
Pastime of Gentlemen, Wits and Beautiful Women ! "
Indeed Woman was the power of the day ; while men
reigned women governed, and soon the joke became a
broad farce a contest of ambition for money and power
a pell-mell of military chiefs, hereditary noblemen and
petticoats. Parlement, it is true, still continued its agi-
tations, but its bourgeois element was swallowed up in
the gallantries and eccentricities of the nobles, who kept
changing from one side to another, making light of their
holiest duties, of patriotism and religion, and parodying
even their own greeds and ambitions. In their vacilla-
tion, their reckless bravado, these nobles of France gave
to this war in spite of the misery and evil underly-
ing the five years of its continuance the tragic comic
character which still clings to its memory.

" The lion, the monkey and the fox," as the Due

68 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

d'Orleans called the three princes most prominent in
the struggle Conde, his brother the Prince of Conti,
his brother-in-law the Duke de Longueville were ar-
rested in 1650 and imprisoned, first at Vincennes, after-
wards at Havre, a coup (tttat due to Mazarin, who,
according to the justice of the day, was obliged himself
to go to release them in 1651 ; but from the time of
their imprisonment the changing of sides and factions
began. From one day to another, it was never sure
whether Conde would be with the Queen and Mazarin
against the Frondeurs, whether Retz was plotting in-
side the Palais Royal against Gaston d'Orleans at the
Luxembourg, or inside the Luxembourg inciting the
same Gaston to strike a blow at the Queen and her
minister.

A favourite cake in Paris in the old days had been
a certain kind baked between two irons and called an
"oubliette". Vendors of these cakes would appear
every night at eight o'clock on the Pont Neuf and call
out their wares. During the Fronde those men who
went secretly back and forth at night between the
Palais Royal and the Luxembourg were called Oub-
lieurs ; they, too, were baked between two irons !

Great was the confusion, great the licence, great the
show and parade ; throughout the five years the pen-
nons of the different parties fluttered madly down every
street in the city, the straw-colour of the Frondeurs con-
sorting first with the red of the Lorraines, then with the
yellow of the Spaniards, then the dove-colour of Conde,
while the royal blue of Gaston d'Orleans hovered near
them, uncertain where to float. And from day to day
the colours would be picturesquely associated ; some-
times the straw-colour would be side by side with the
dove ; sometimes these two would be opposed in deadly
combat ; sometimes the three the red, the yellow and
the straw would be arrayed against the blue, or again
the four would give battle to the white of the King.

Yet whichever way the wind blew, all sides had
united against the Queen in demanding the exile of
Mazarin, and to obtain this boon so ardently desired the

THE FRONDE 69

superstitious people of Paris had even taken out the
shrine of their beloved patron saint Ste. Genevieve
and promenaded it through the streets, thinking through
her to obtain the expulsion of the Cardinal. But no
matter what was going on, what misery the people were
suffering, what injustice was being committed, what
struggles, what anxieties, everywhere there was gaiety,
everywhere debauch and bloodshed !

In 1651 Mazarin finally was obliged to leave Paris,
and the next year, at the express command of the King,
joining him at Poitiers, he was again forced by the re-
habilitated Parlement to retire to Bouillon. At last,
wearied out with their own excitement, pacified by
Mazarin's exile and the liberation of the princes, having
exhausted their last shred of enthusiasm in the battle
of Porte St. Antoine, the people desisted, the nobles
turned once more, Gaston capitulated. And no sooner
had Mazarin been turned out of the country, than all
were clamouring to have him back again.

The story is told that on the day of Mazarin's re-
turn from his second exile, Anne of Austria stood for
an hour at one of her windows in the Palais Royal
watching and waiting for him. When he came, it was
in triumph this " rat of the Court," as he had been
called. He was received, says Voltaire, like a father
by Louis XIV. who went a long way to meet him ; and
by the people as a master a sudden change of affairs
possible, it would seem, only to the French.

Thus no criticism, no Mazarinade, written by the
keenest satirists of France, could ever drive either Anne
of Austria or her son from their loyalty to the foreigner,
and not until death had dismissed his minister for him,
did Louis XIV. assert his own kingly power and allow
the regal crown to rest securely upon his own head.

Thus the white ribbon of the Monarchy fluttered
over Paris, alone in its glory ! What a change from
those five sadly merry years just passed, those days
when the colours of the rainbow had completely ob-
scured the pure and modest white ! And now Lorraine
of the red pennon had disappeared ; gone were the

70 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

Spaniards of the flaunting yellow ; Gaston had carried
his blue standard to Blois, never to return, with him all
his friends and adherents, who for the moment thought
it wisest to retire into the country. Conde of the soft
dove-colour had gone over the border to the Spaniards
with the Parlement's condemnation on his head. Gone,
too, was Cardinal Retz, betrayed by Gaston, and a
prisoner of the Crown first at Vincennes, then at Nantes.

The joke, therefore, had reacted on those who per-
petrated it. Mazarin, made the scapegoat of it all, the
ridiculed, the hated, the twice-exiled, carried off the
final victory at last. The Parisians, who had sought it
in their own interests, gained only the hatred of their
King Louis XIV., who in after years made them bitterly
regret the hardships and exile entailed upon him by the
rebellion a hatred which in the day of his greatness
caused him to avoid their city and transplant his whole
court to Versailles. On their side the nobles and heroes
of the Second Fronde lost their freedom, and were held
fast in the grip of an absolute Monarchy. To remind
them of the power which had subdued and ruled them,
Louis XIV. afterwards symbolised the god of Monarchy
in the statue erected before the Hotel de Ville. Armed
with a thunderbolt, one of the feet of this demi-god rests
upon a slave, from whose hand drops an extinguished
torch : the Parlement, the other foot steps upon an
overturned ship : Paris. Thus men reigned, but
women governed ; thus misery and suffering lay groan-
ing beneath the carelessness, the mirth and the discord.

To one who looks at the Fronde through the magni-
fying glass of the centuries, two men particularly seem
to stand out against its background, and to typify, the
one the irony and grotesque humour of it, the other its
genius. These men were Cardinal Retz and Paul
Scarron.

Famous for his satires, Little Scarron, as he was
called, personified in himself the humour of the Fronde.
He was full of a kind of Satanic gaiety a gaiety born
of pain and suffering, the irony of a great mind set in a
tiny body, which, after having been jaunty and gallant,

PAUL SCARRON

FKOM AN ENGRAVING BV BOIZOT

THE FRONDE 71

active in ballet and rout, was at twenty -seven paralysed
by the drug of a charlatan. Small cause had he for
laughing, and yet laugh he did. Never an hour did he
pass without acute pain his whole life from twenty-
seven to fifty was spent tied to his chair. Yet to pain
he said : " Thou art a pleasure," and of life he made a
continual jest.

Such, indeed, was the humour of the Fronde, upon
which this jester expended his wit, letting fly his barbed
arrows in the Gazettes Burlesques against things in
general, and hitting Mazarin whom he hated, and who
never forgave him his pleasantry, in his famous Mazarin-
ades. Even in his marriage the poet displayed his
Satanic humour : it was primarily a jest that the helpless
cripple should marry at all : a jest for him a man of
forty to marry a girl of thirteen a jest that, with hardly
enough money on which to keep himself alive, he should
undertake to nourish another. Yet he married her, he
said, to keep her out of the convent.

This girl, Frangoise d'Aubigne, afterward to be-
come the famous Madame de Maintenon, was an
orphan, reduced to extreme poverty, whose avaricious
relatives begrudged her even the scanty clothes upon
her back. For twelve years she lived with this poor
cripple, acting as his friend, counsellor and secretary,
effacing herself, making the most of his poverty, gracing
his household by her mind and spirit. Little Scarron
appreciated this power of hers for effacing herself :

" Other women," he said one day, " pride them-
selves on their minds, this one loves to hide
hers."

But fire cannot long be hid, and soon Madame Scar-
ron's influence was felt in the little house in the Marais,
where a brilliant assembly gathered to do honour to
the man whom Balzac compared to Prometheus, and
who was dubbed the Prince of Stoicism. To Heinrich
Heine he has also been likened, but the resemblance
was perhaps more that of fate than of genius, more of
spirit than of mind. And his laugh seems more genuine
man that of Heine, his fun less bitter ; from the Abyss

72 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

of Pain he could always laugh at himself and the
world, without the sob which seems to underlie Heine's
most humorous verse. Yet could Scarron never sleep
without opium nor move without screaming. All the
world admired his mind and wit ; all pitied his condi-
tion. As pathetic as Scarron's own epitaph of himself,
wherein he adjured the passer-by to step lightly in
order not to awaken one who for the first night in his
life was sleeping, is La Fontaine's " Epigram on a
Witticism of Scarron who was Dying" :

Scarron, feeling the approach of his end,
Said to the Angel of Fate : " Attend

Till all of my satire is done the while ! "
" Ah ! " Clotho said, " Down below, my friend,

Come on, come along, there's no time to smile ! "

And if Scarron personified the humour of the
Fronde, it was Cardinal Retz who was the incarnation
of its genius. Three years younger than Little Scarron,
he was only thirty-five at the beginning of the Fronde,
and five years before, in 1643, had been made Coadjutor
to his uncle the Archbishop of Paris, himself holding
the honorary title of Archbishop of Corinth. His
avowed object in taking part in the Fronde was to
restore to Paris a worthy form of monarchy, to find the
model of which he went back to the days of St. Louis.
Yet like the other actors in this curious war, his real
object was naught but his own advancement, his motive
power an innate love of scheming and intriguing.

From the description of him in the memoirs of the
Duchesse de Nemours we do not gather that his per-
sonality was a very attractive one : small, black and
ugly she calls him, and if he had any charm, it must
have lain in his sparkling eyes and his alert spirit.
" Mind without heart," said he, " is worth nothing even
in business affairs," and so firm was his predilection for
the predominance of heart, that his own memoirs are
filled with accounts of his affairs of gallantry. So
scandalous, indeed, were his descriptions of the esca-
pades of his earlier years, that no less than 250 pages
of his manuscript were actually torn out by some un-

THE FRONDE 73

known hand, a few pages only being left to show the
character of the rest. To say the least, his heart seems
always to have been in undue proportion to his mind.

And his was a curiously unecclesiastical character
in an age of unecclesiastical priests. As Coadjutor of
Paris, it was really his duty to throw oil on the troubled
waters of the angry sea, and at first he honestly tried to
do this. Misunderstood and suspected by the Court
notably by Anne of Austria, who said he had caused
most of the trouble, goaded on by some biting and mis-
placed pleasantries which she allowed herself to make
at his expense the young and fiery prelate threw him-
self into the party of the insurgents and became their
leader.

A warlike prelate, one would have thought, had he
been seen that day he went to a meeting of Parlement
with a poignard sticking out of his pocket. Struck
with this incongruity, the Duke de Beaufort, the famous
Roi des Halles, said, laughingly :

" Look at the breviary of our Archbishop ! "

Naturally a reputation like this could not fail to cling
to him, and even in his old age Madame de Sevign
could still flatter him by calling him the " hero of the
Breviary".

Of all the Oublieurs who circulated between the
Palais Royal and the Luxembourg, Retz was the most
constant. Ostensibly on the side of the Frondists, he
was all the time in secret collusion with the Court, and
received his cardinalate in 1652 as a price of his services.
At the last moment, however, he could not resist
plotting against Mazarin whom he hated, and Mazarin
having gained the upper hand did not scruple to have
the gallant Cardinal arrested and imprisoned. Taken
first to Vincennes, while in the prison there his uncle
the Archbishop of Paris died, and his right to the
succession was recognised by the chapter and clergy of
Paris. He was not released, but transferred to Nantes,
where he proved too cunning for his gaolers, escaping
from their midst by a clever stratagem.

From that time on, exiled from his own country,

74 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

his history is one of foreign lands, for he roamed about
first in England, then in Spain, then in Italy, until in
1662 Louis XIV. allowed him to return to Paris on
condition of resigning his See. This he did, and with
it he seemed to have lost his intriguing and adventurous
spirit, for the rest of his days were passed in strict se-
clusion at the Abbey of St Denis, of which he had been
made Abbot. From the time of his return, Madame
de Sevigne seems his best chronicler. She admired and
loved this man of adventurous history, over whose later
life the lurid reflection of his early escapades threw a
mysterious and fascinating glamour. It especially caught
her fancy that, having through a long life of gallantry
contracted debts to more than three millions a typical
prelate of the century he was in this also and suddenly
determining to retrieve his fortunes, he should start in
to pay all he owed by economising, and in a few years
succeed in clearing off every penny ! With humour and
worldly wisdom, Madame de Sevigne commented on the
uniqueness of this effort of will power :

"He has never had an example in anybody, nor

has any one ever followed his example ! "
she exclaimed.

As unique and full of surprises as his character was,
it is not strange that opinion differed greatly as to his
merits, nor that his enemies utterly denied him to possess
those qualities of generosity, unselfishness, etc., attri-
buted to him by his friends. Indeed it was said that
De Retz had a hundred different reputations according
to the quarter of the city from which they emanated.
No one, in any case, seems to have been lukewarm
about him ; either one was his warm friend or his im-
placable enemy.

One of his great virtues, in Madame de Sevigne^s
eyes, was his attachment to her daughter, and in her
letters she always spoke of him as " Notre cher Co-
adjuteur" or " Notre cher Cardinal".

Writing to her daughter in 1679, just after his death,
she said :

" You know how amiable he was, and how worthy

THE FRONDE 75

of the esteem of all who knew him. His
friendship was equally honourable and deli-
cious to me. Eight days of continued fever
have taken this illustrious friend from me. I
am touched to the bottom of my heart."

CHAPTER VII
LA GRANDE MADEMOISELLE

" Vous savez de quel litre elle se glorifie,

Et qu'elle a dans la tete une philosophic
Qui declare la guerre au conjugal lien,
Et vous traite 1'amour de deite de rien."

" Prenez garde, Madame : 1' Amour sail se venger des mepris que
Ton fait de lui."

" La Princesse <? Elide" Moliere

UNLIKE her father, Mademoiselle de Montpen-
sier played a great and heroic role during the
Fronde. The soul of a warrior and the talent
of a demagogue were united in this daughter of Gaston
d'Orleans : for, inheriting her father's enterprising spirit,
she greatly excelled him in decision and courage.

Her own interest in the Fronde had been intense
from the first, and when she and her father left the Court
and joined the party of the Frondists, the latter's inaction
and indecision had goaded her on to many rash acts
the maddest of which was that of turning the cannon of
the Bastille on the King's troops to help Conde and his
party.

" Here is your little husband ! "

Anne of Austria had laughingly remarked fourteen years
before to the then twelve-year-old Princess, as she
showed her the new-born infant, Louis XI V. ; and inter-
ested even at that early age in the question of a suitable
husband and establishment for herself, Mademoiselle had
guarded her aunt's careless remark in her mind, from that
time forth regarding the young King as her fiance.

At the battle of Porte St. Antoine, she had yielded
for a moment to the intoxication of power, forgotten

O ~

LA GRANDE MADEMOISELLE 77

consequences, disregarded her matrimonial chances,
and thus paid a kingdom for her joke, Louis XIV.,
though only a boy of fourteen, never forgiving her
her pleasantry. Looking on at it from the heights of
Charonne, and seeing her Amazonian action, Mazarin
in exile remarked cynically that with the firing of that
cannon-ball she had killed her husband !

So, when the other Frondists were dispersed after
this last battle, Mademoiselle hardly had time to brush
the straw-colour out of her hair, or take it from the
ribbon on her fan, before she was quietly told by her
cousin that her apartments at the Tuileries would be
needed for his brother a message only too easy to
understand, and which under the circumstances made
her flee in haste to her chateau of St. Fargeau.

This old chateau, whose possession had been of
little moment to her up to this time, looked so neglected
and was of so uninviting an appearance generally that
on seeing it she sat down and cried. However, there
was no other refuge at the moment, and as her Mare-
chales de camp and Secretary, together with other
officials and domestics, had followed her into exile, the
old chateau was not only converted into a place of en-
chantment, but soon a gay court having assembled there,
the surroundings were completely changed and metamor-
phosed. This was not difficult as there was sufficient
means with which to effect transformations ; also, not
being debarred from approaching the environs of Paris,
nor the members of the Court forbidden to visit St.
Fargeau, the exile was diversified from time to time by
visits from old friends and associates, or by expeditions
to Fontainebleau, and the neighbouring resorts of the
Court. The greater part of the time, however, Made-
moiselle was engaged with her own circle, into which
were introduced all the platonic pleasures and divertisse-
ments described in that delightful book, UAstrde.

And soon the days slipped by in most agreeable
fashion : what so piquant, for instance, after the reading
of a poem or a romance, as the conversation half-literary,
half-gallant suggested by what had just been listened

78 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

to ! What greater charm than that of discussing person-
alities, of analysing the passions of one's friends, the
delicacy or wickedness of their sentiments, as the case
might be ! Furthermore, this little coterie had the ad-
vantage of being under the influence of a poet, Regnauld
de Segrais a real poet at once spirituel and gay, tender
and delicate. Mademoiselle's secretary was, in fact,
the life and spirit of the whole.

This enforced retirement amidst the beauties of
Nature, where she was obliged to turn to the recreations
of the mind for amusement, was to Mademoiselle a bless-
ing in disguise. Hers was a singular character, quite as
much a product of surroundings as was her father's. As
her childhood had been passed wholly in the atmos-
phere of the Court, under the rule for some time owing
to the vagaries of her father and his frequent absences
induced by the eternal conflict with Richelieu of Marie
de Medecis, whose government was vacillating and
weak, the education of the young Princess had been
most imperfect ; consequently when she went to St.
Fargeau she was an ignoramus, not caring for study,
and learned only in the intrigues of the Court. Since
the early age of seven she had been allowed to assist
at all sorts of functions, to listen to the comedy, witness
the ballet, and herself to give balls and parties. Steeped
therefore in the atmosphere of intrigue and disturbance
which characterised the court of Louis XIII., it was no
wonder that from a curious precocious child of twelve,
with a nervous taste for continual excitement, she
should have grown up into an Amazonian young woman
who, after having believed herself in love with every
eligible person in the Court register from Louis XIV.
and his younger brother to the Grand Conde and his
son, at twenty-six was fast becoming a disappointed
old maid.

It was M. de Segrais, her Secretary to command,
who gave her a new interest in life during this exile at
St. Fargeau, by directing her attention for the first
time to literature and intellectual pleasures ; she began
to read, and soon herself became an author, writing her

MLLE. DE MONTPENSIER (LA GKAXDE MLLE.) IX Ki57

LA GRANDE MADEMOISELLE 79

memoirs, a number of short tales, as well as pen por-
traits of various people among others that of Louis
XIV., Christine of Sweden, and herself.

She had adopted the fashion of painting portraits
in 1657, the idea having been suggested by two friends
who had seen some pen portraits during a visit to
Holland. These two friends, the Princesse deTarente
and Mademoiselle de la Tremouille, calling upon her at
Champigny, a town through which, her exile over, she
was passing on her way back to Paris, had much ex-
cited her curiosity for this new fad by showing her
those they themselves had written. Immediately she
had a great desire to try her own portrait, at once and
on the spot. People in those days, as in our time,
were not like the gods " incurious of themselves," but
engrossed far more than with anything else on earth
with the analysis of their personal qualities.

This portrait of herself Mademoiselle wrote in about
fifteen minutes. To judge from it, she seems on the
whole very well satisfied with the physical outfit given
her by Nature, and she prefaces a very complacent
description of herself by excusing the frankness of her
analysis of her merits and demerits on the ground that
a princess has no one to tell her the truth. Her tall
figure, she says, is neither stout nor thin, but fine and
supple ; her appearance healthy, her throat well-made,
her limbs straight, her feet shapely, red-blonde her hair,
her blue eyes brilliant, sweet and proud, while her de-
meanour is haughty without being glorious; she is
civil and familiar ! With naivete she adds :

" I am neat ; and whether ne*glige or in order,
everything that I put on looks well : I do
not mean to say that I do not look incom-
parably better when in order, but simply
that negligence suits me better than others,
for without flattering myself, I disfigure less
what I put on, than what I put on sets me
off!"

M. de Segrais' portrait of his patron is poetically flat-
tering, giving "this illustrious heroine," as he calls her,

80 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

such qualities of mind and heart as only an angel from
Heaven could possess, and

"all these qualities," he continued, "lodged in a
physique which was worthy. Her figure
alone made one adore her ! "
In fact, he concluded :

" the Princess is more amiable than Venus, and

like Pallas invincible to love ! *'

One most excellent quality Mademoiselle attributed to
herself :

" I do not speak at all of things which I do not

understand," she said, " as do ordinarily those

people who love to talk, and who, having too

good an opinion of themselves, despise others ".

Although the art of portrait painting in words was

not invented by Mademoiselle de Montpensier that

had been done by Mademoiselle de Scudery some years

before she made it so popular that for two years there

existed a great rage for it. In 1660 Tallemant des

Reaux spoke of it as that

" foolish fashion of making portraits, which is be-
ginning to bore people furiously ".

The year before, Segrais and Huet had assembled
fifty-nine of the portraits collected by Mademoiselle,
sixteen of which were written by herself, others by
her friends, the acknowledged and undoubted gem of
the whole being that of Madame de SeVigne at thirty-
three years of age, written by Madame de la Fayette.

Meantime, weary of her efforts to find a suit-
able husband for herself, Mademoiselle professed to
have grown so tired of the word love that she could not
even bear to have it mentioned. Yet, as her own chances
of experiencing the passion seemed to lessen, the subject
itself was ever in her mind, although outwardly, her
contempt for it was extreme, and, in 1660, she found
relief in tracing for Madame de Motteville the plan
of a republic where marriage should be forbidden alto-
gether.

To this idea, Madame de Motteville replied as mildly
as she could, intimating that though Mademoiselle's

LA GRANDE MADEMOISELLE 81

idea was Utopian, it was hardly practicable. " Mar-
riage," she said, " is an error which an old custom has
legitimised ; therefore," she concluded, " I fear that in
your colony you will be obliged to permit it."

The Utopian colony of which Mademoiselle dreamed
was a settlement of the two sexes in some delicious spot
on the Seine. Here the pleasures were to be conversa-
tion, reading, music, the cultivation of the gardens on
the river, the care of flocks, reigned over by the silence
of Amor, where marriage and love were to be strictly
proscribed. " Marriage," said Mademoiselle, "means for
women either servitude or a departure from virtue, and
is only a torment either way."

" Ah," said she, " if youth but knew the worth of
friendship and the bitterness of love, the latter
passion would be banished from all reasoning
society."

Bravely she tried to banish from her own circle this
"infirmity of Nature," as she called it ; at St. Fargeau
her court might indulge in all the pastoral platonic joys
described by UAstrte, but beware of love-making !
" No marriage ! " she cried, finally and autocrati-
cally, " for such is my pleasure, and so much
the worse for those who do not find it theirs."
It was in 1657 that, even then professing to despise
love in all its forms, and regretting leaving the place of
her exile because she had just planned to begin the
study of Italian, the Princess had returned to Paris and,
in the absence of her father and his family at Blois, be-
came the mistress of the Luxembourg. It amused her
to think with what regret she left St. Fargeau, and all
for the pleasure of reading Italian. With pride she
exclaimed :

" There are few people who would have been sorry
to go to Paris because they couldn't read
Tasso " ;

but to recompense herself for this great loss, she now
recommenced her social gatherings, discontinued at the
Tuileries in 1652 on her sudden departure for St.
Fargeau, drawing around her in the rooms delighted in

82 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

by Marie de Medecis, a society which was necessarily
prdcieuse, but which, being frequented by all the literary
celebrities of the day, was highly brilliant and interest-
ing. Here Segrais composed his madrigals, his sonnets
and other light works calculated to make a great suc-
cess among those nobles and literati who honoured the
evenings of the love-eschewing Princess.

In 1 66 1 Mademoiselle was again forced to leave
Paris and seek the seclusion of St. Fargeau. Again
she was exiled from the delights of Paris to the chateau
in the country, whose solitudes, no longer unknown to
her, were no longer feared. This time the royal cousin
had displeased the King by refusing to consider a mar-
riage which he for political reasons sought to force
upon her. Yet this marriage was repulsive indeed, for
Alexander VI., King of Portugal, was not only half-
witted, but brutal and savage. That Mademoiselle
had dared to have a will of her own, apart from that of
her King, was enough to damn her in the eyes of the
despotic Louis XIV., still unforgetful of the Fronde.
So to St. Fargeau she departed.

By this time, fortunately, she had grown more diplo-
matic ; the birth of the Dauphin in 1664 gave her
an opportunity to conciliate the King, and, opening the
way to a reconciliation by a letter of congratulation on
this event, she was allowed to return and resume her
former occupations. Once more, as ever, she began to
busy herself with projects of marriage and establish-
ment. She was become, in fact, extremely learned in
genealogy : love had made her erudite. Y'et, never
losing her taste for social amusements, she finally
added a new interest to her excitable existence in de-
voting herself with ardour to Madame de Montespan,
the new favourite, then intriguing to oust La Valliere
from the King's fancy. Madame de Montespan, unlike
the simple La Valliere, was an intellectual, brilliant
woman, and her mind and wit ravished the susceptible
Mademoiselle. Under this new fancy her love for the
Court was revived, and she spent much time in its
circles. Suddenly, in 1669, after all her invectives

LA GRANDE MADEMOISELLE 83

against love and marriage, she was herself stricken
down with the dread malady, nor could she avoid
her destiny that fate which waits behind the veil for
princess of the blood or simple gentlewoman.

Her memoirs describe the rise and culmination
of this malady, for malady it was, to fall in love at
the age of forty-three with a nobleman no higher in
the social scale than a Marquis, and at the same
time six years her junior. The gentleman whom she
thus honoured with her mature regard was a cer-
tain Antonin Nompar de Caumont, Marquis de Puy-
guilhem, afterwards Comte de Lauzun, who from very
indifferent circumstances had become through impu-
dence the favourite of the King. Bussy de Rabutin de-
scribed him as the smallest man that God ever made,
nor did the Grande Mademoiselle herself paint him in
very seductive colours, in spite of her infatuation. Her
"little man " she called him affectionately.

It seems that Lauzun was well known to Madame
de Montespan indeed it was said that he had been
a lover of hers in the old days. She had promised to
aid him in some ambitious design or other, but instead
of speaking for him to the King, Lauzun discovered
that she had endeavoured to prejudice the King against
him. Naturally of violent temper, he went to the
King and complained, using some very opprobrious
terms with regard to her. Instead of replying, the
King, who was standing near a window at the time,
suddenly opened it, and, throwing out the cane he held
in his hand, said that he would have been sorry to
strike a gentleman.

Mademoiselle, however, madly in love with this
proud little man, determined to marry him at all costs.
In her memoirs she naively recounts her long courting
of him, he responding only lukewarmly, and with no
enthusiasm. For a year these private negotiations be-
tween the two dragged out, being complicated and
finally brought to a head in Lauzun's case by the
sudden death of the wife of Louis XIV.'s brother
Philippe (Henriette d'Angleterre), one of the husbands

84 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

Mademoiselle had formerly coveted, and who was now
left free to marry the great heiress. But by this time,
Mademoiselle's former taste for Monsieur had evaporated
in the heat of this first real passion of her life, nor would
she listen to the proposal of the Duchesse de Longue-
ville, seconded by many of her own friends, among
whom were the Comtesse de la Fayette and the Mar-
quise de Sevigne, that she marry the young Comte de
Saint Paul. Though only twenty years of age, Madame
de Longueville was perfectly willing to sacrifice the
youth of her son to the millions of Mademoiselle. For
the first time in her life, the proud Princess knew what
love meant, and nothing could dissuade her not even
the pleading of the Archbishop of Paris, who came
and begged her to give up Lauzun from her project
to marry this simple gentleman.

So all Paris was in excitement over the marriage ;
" the most astonishing, the most triumphant, the most
overwhelming, the most unheard-of, the greatest, the
smallest, the most rare, the most common thing the
world had ever experienced," as Madame de Sevigne
exclaimed. The King himself, who was secretly de-
lighted to see his proud cousin compromise herself
with Lauzun, was approached by a deputation of nobles,
headed by the Duke de Montausier, who came to
demand the hand of Mademoiselle for Lauzun. In the
excitement of the moment the King acquiesced, and
Mademoiselle in her joy had already bestowed four
duchies on the little man, as well as other property,
amounting to twenty-two millions, when two women
and Lauzun himself upset all her hopes : first Lauzun,
whose foolish wish for the 6clat of a grand marriage
gave the Queen and Madame de Montespan time to
put obstacles in the way of any marriage at all. The
signing of the wedding contract being postponed day
by day, the King finally sent for Mademoiselle and
calmly told her that the marriage could never be.
Wild was the despair of the bride in the very act of
pledging her vows at the altar to the man she loved ;
but the King's will was unalterable, so after a paltry

LA GRANDE MADEMOISELLE 85

allowance of five days, in which to master her sorrow,
Mademoiselle was obliged to again take up her duties
at Court with a smiling face.

Thus life went on as before at the Luxembourg,
except that Lauzun was practically master there, and
everything was done to please him. From that time
forth he was Mademoiselle's master, if not her husband,
and it was thought that a secret marriage really took
place then. No one knew positively, however, whether
she ever married the Comte de Lauzun or not, and her
subsequent history is the most unhappy, the most un-
fortunate, the most deplorable that can be imagined.

Shortly after the refusal of Louis XIV. to counten-
ance the marriage, and Lauzun again reproaching
Madame de Montespan, this time for having opposed
his marriage, Louis XIV. becoming alarmed as well
lest Mademoiselle should will away everything to her
lover, he was suddenly arrested and taken to the strong
and distant fortress of Pignerol, where without a trial
he was kept in solitary confinement for ten years. Dur-
ing that time Mademoiselle knew almost nothing of him ;
for ten years she had to hide her sorrow and longing
behind the artificial countenance of a courtier, and to
flatter and cajole the King and Madame de Montespan
in the vain hope of getting her beloved back again.
Finally she bought his release by making the Due du
Maine, eldest son of Louis XIV. and Madame de
Montespan, her heir ; taking back the properties she
had made over to Lauzun, these also she had to
transfer to the King's son. But what did it matter ?
Should she not have back that inestimable boon, the
man she loved ?

So at last Lauzun appeared in Paris, allowed to
return on condition that he never show himself again at
the Court. And now is the time when by most authori-
ties he is believed to have really married the Grande
Mademoiselle, but what a disappointment to the poor
Princess was this return for which during ten interminable
years she had longed with the greatest strength of her
being. For it was an indifferent, contemptuous master

86 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

who came back to lord it over her, not a lover full of
caresses and reverence for the woman who had saved
him from a terrible captivity. It was not many months
after his return before the two ill-matched lovers were
quarrelling so outrageously that finally the Grande
Mademoiselle was forced to order Lauzun from her
presence for ever.

The anecdote is told that her final resolution was
taken one day when, coming home from the hunt, the
insolent little man had sat down before her and com-
manded peremptorily :

" Henriette de Bourbon, take off my boots ! \

A princess of the blood royal can hardly pardon such
a remark as that, no matter how much in love she may
be, and now even the patience of Mademoiselle was at
an end : she had done with him for ever. She was
ashamed, she said, to have loved so small a thing, and
never again could he regain her favour, in spite of in-
numerable efforts even to the dragging of himself on
his knees across a whole long gallery in spite of the
fame he won by rescuing the Queen of James II. of
England from her pursuers at the time of the usurpation
of William and Mary in spite of his again being taken
into favour by Louis XIV. When the King sent to
Mademoiselle to apologise for seeing Lauzun again, on
the plea that after the services rendered him by the
latter he could do no less, Mademoiselle flew into a rage,
and exclaimed :

" This then is the gratitude for what I have done

for the King's children ! "

and in the presence of the messenger, she threw the
letter sent her by Lauzun into the fire.

Nor did the fact that Lauzun had been made duke
and peer of France move her wounded heart, any more
than had his other honours and distinctions ; once
released from the spell of his fascination, never again
would she receive her retrograde lover or husband-
never again would she consent to look upon his face.

On his part, when, in 1693, news came to the Due
de Lauzun that the obdurate Princess had passed away,

LA GRANDE MADEMOISELLE 87

he promptly put on the mourning of a widower, and
mourned the Grande Mademoiselle as if she had been
his wife. Then, when the time of mourning was over,
the world was surprised to learn of his marriage with a
young girl of fourteen. She, poor thing, had consented
to this sacrifice of her youth under the supposition that
a man of nearly sixty would not long survive his marriage
day. Vain hope ! For thirty long years she was con-
demned to bear his peculiarities and idiosyncrasies, and
he lived not only to be ninety years of age, but to survive
his royal master, whom he had bullied and flattered, pre-
serving to the last his fabulous impudence and originality.
And Mademoiselle de Montpensier, called, when
the daughter of Henriette d'Angleterre and Monsieur
grew up and disputed with her the title of " Made-
moiselle," the Great Mademoiselle, is a pathetic figure of
the grand cycle a graphic proof of the saying that it is
not always the great who are happiest in this world.
In her old age, indeed, Mademoiselle is said to have
envied the fate of the meanest peasant woman in her
own vast possessions; gladly would she have relinquished
the whole of her fortune for one year of real happiness !
Her day of brilliancy she had had ; to the full she had
enjoyed the eclat which her great wealth and position
gave her ; she had even remedied the defect that
Segrais in her portrait in the Nouvelles Francaises
had deplored when he said that it was not enough to in-
spire so much love, to embellish history it was necessary
to love a little oneself. " The history of your charms,"
said he, " is long and fine, but the romance is only too
short." There lay the secret ; the romance of Made-
moiselle's life was a mistake, therefore she herself could
be nothing more than an eccentricity, whose adventures,
vagaries and sorrows amused the Court, whose every-
day actions filled it with a never-failing source of gossip
and conjecture. The Grande Mademoiselle she may
have been to herself and to her age ; but, in spite of her
grandeur, her greatness of the old regime, at best she
was but the connecting link between the old and the new
Court, otherwise the target for the arrows of all the world.

CHAPTER VIII

MADEMOISELLE DE LA VERGNE'S INTRODUCTION
INTO PARISIAN SOCIETY

" Digne objet de mes vers, jeune et sage Aramante

Dont 1'amitie sincere et fiddle et constante
De 1'infidelite de tant d'amis divers
Console mes ennuis dans ce siecle pervers."

Manage

HAVING tried to give a general idea of the per-
sonalities which touched the early life of the
child Marie Madeleine de la Vergne, as well
as the conditions and traditions of the age and genera-
tion preceding hers, we are at liberty to come back
again into her immediate atmosphere, and we find her
at fifteen still living in the old town of Havre de Grace,
absorbed in study, leading an objective life apart from
events and happenings in France except as food for
thought and conjecture. As Carlyle would have said,
these eleven years had been her seed-time : that slow
formative period of her life which is the preliminary to
real existence.

Ever since the death of Richelieu, Havre itself had
been restless and disturbed by the struggles which its
governor the Duchesse d'Aiguillon had had to endure
to preserve it for her nephew, Richelieu's heir, from
jealous noblemen greedy for the possession of so im-
portant a seaport. And when in 1648 the Fronde be-
gan, this was even a more burning matter to them, so
that of all provincial towns, Havre was most affected
by the peculiar characteristics of the struggle, most
filled with the echo of its incongruity and misery. The
De la Vergnes would have doubtless remained indefi-

GILLES MENAGE

AKTER A PORTRAIT 1!Y NANTEUIL

MADEMOISELLE DE LA VERGNE 89

nitely in Normandy, had not death decreed otherwise ;
the year after the Fronde began, it interfered in their
quiet life, and carried away the father who had been
so strong an influence for good in the life of the young
daughter, leaving her to the care of a mother of seem-
ingly frivolous and intriguing character. To the young
girl, the loss of her father was doubly disturbing ; it not
only took away the steadying hand that for fifteen years
had guided her, it also transported her away from Havre
and back to Paris ; out of quiet and peace into the
midst of turmoil and disturbance. Thus, for her, child-
hood was over suddenly ; the prologue finished, the
life drama begun. And the next six years were des-
tined to prove quite as important in her individual
development as they were in the history of her country.

Leaving Havre de Grace immediately after her
husband's death, and returning to Paris, Madame de la
Vergne found the house in the Rue Vaugirard, built ten
years before, in the very midst of the disturbances of
the Fronde, just broken out again with redoubled fury.
With the Palace of the Luxembourg, where lodged the
Lieutenant-General of the Kingdom, as centre of the
confusion, the noise of firearms and the clang of swords
filled the air of the Rue Vaugirard. But, as Madame de
la Vergne was herself an avowed Frondist, this ex-
change from the quiet by the sea to such an atmosphere
was not disagreeable in the least ; on the contrary, it
delighted her.

With her daughter it was different, but having been
away from her birthplace since her baptism in the old
Church of St. Sulpice, everything was new and strange
to the young Mademoiselle de la Vergne, and naturally
her first and greatest interest was concentrated in the
Duchesse d'Aiguillon and her household. Stories of
this fairy godmother's beauty and romantic history had
so fed her childish soul with dreams of the rank and
distinction to which she herself might one day attain, that
she had grown to idealise this fairy godmother as one
who could influence her whole life. Nor did the hurried
glimpses she now caught of the Duchess, busy as she

90 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

was with a thousand things connected with a large
household, her interests at Court, and the immense
estates left in her keeping for the young Duke of
Richelieu, dissipate any of her ideals ; they seemed to
excite still more strongly her inborn taste for rank, re-
finement and beauty tastes absolutely opposed to the
noise, brutality and garishness of the Fronde. Thus
her sympathies from the beginning were far more with
her brilliant godmother than with the Frondist friends
of her mother.

* Although belonging to opposite political parties in
the beginning of the war, old ties united the Duchess
and the De la Vergnes, and Madame de la Yergne
was on terms of intimate friendship in the Petit Luxem-
bourg. Of kind and religious nature, in spite of her
worries and anxieties, Madame d'Aiguillon felt a warm
interest in her young goddaughter, who was now intro-
duced to the treasures of the Petit Luxembourg and to
an intimacy in the household. She was also allowed
to join in the social life going on there, for, like the other
leaders of Parisian society at that epoch, the Duchess,
too, turned easily from political thoughts and Court pre-
occupations to gallant distractions and the enjoyment
of literature and art. The very war-cry of the Fron-
dists was Gallantry; from bloodshed these noble
farceurs turned to love-making ; from political intrigue
to gallant adventure. Men reigned, but women
governed and they governed, these clever women,
not by the power of their minds alone, but by then-
bright eyes, their feminine seductive charm.

Just at this juncture, the salon of the Petit Lux-
embourg seems to have been more celebrated than ever
before; the shadow of Richelieu, which once had
obscured the horizon, was no longer there, and Made-
moiselle de la Vergne was fortunate in seeing this
charming hostess before she had entirely given way to
the endeavour to reconcile herself with Heaven. Once
these nephews and nieces were old enough to leave
the nest, without compunction she had the beautiful
palace, prepared for her with so much care by Richelieu,

MADEMOISELLE DE LA VERGNE 91

dismantled of its rich appointments and art treasures,
and turned into a mere distributing bureau for works
of charity. But during the Fronde she entertained in
her tasteful elegant surroundings the greatest beaux-
esprits and artists of the day.

In 1651, Loret, the Gazetteer, tells of one of these
assemblies when young Blaise Pascal explained to the
great company of dukes, marquises, Cordons Bleus,
wits, and beautiful women, the newest mathematical
inventions, the latest experiments in physics.

Therefore the debut of Mademoiselle de la Vergne
was made in the salon of the Duchess ; and, taken to
these assemblies by her mother, the wit, the brilliancy,
the humour the peculiar features of the Parisian
society of all ages and the renown of the habitues of
the Petit Luxembourg at this time made a tremendous
impression on her.

To the young girl, fresh from a provincial town
where she had led a life of study and contemplation,
where her greatest enjoyment had been found in
roaming about the coast, climbing the rocks, and
dreaming by the sea, this brilliant society was a revela-
tion. With awe she looked at the Grand Corneille, in
1651 a man of forty-five and in the height of his
popularity and renown ; with astonishment at Jean de
Balzac, whose Lettres were already so celebrated, and
whom the Queen Regent and Mazarin had just
honoured by a visit to his chateau at Bordeaux ; with
curiosity at Godeau, Bishop of Vence, so genial in his
poetry as to write with equal facility love verses,'
psalms or prayers ; at Gombauld, the poet who had
especially idolised the Duchesse d'Aiguillon, and written
a poor panegyric of Richelieu ; La Calprenede, too,
that Gascon of queer tongue and fantastic mind,
quite the lion of the hour by reason of his romantic
novels all written on the same plan all these must
have filled her with amazement. And Little Scarron,
the poor cripple who had had himself carried to the
Petit Luxembourg on many of these occasions, was
always the centre of a group fascinating to the young

9 2 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

girl, who listened with awakening discrimination to the
bon-mots of this most delightful of farceurs. With ad-
miration and amusement intermingled, she saw the poet
Chapelain, now quite advanced in years, and who
thirty years before had cut such a figure at the Ram-
bouillet in his strange attire, his coat of black silk,
mended with pieces of his sister's clothes, a mixture
which it was said resembled his verse. Sarrazin,
Secretary of the Prince de Conti, who had just written
the funeral eulogy of Voiture, Scudery and his sister,
Menage and Segrais, were also there, each in his turn,
clothed with his own peculiar attribute or peculiarity,
becoming known to the observant looker-on. Here,
too, she saw the popular artists of the day who came to
pay homage to one who had always had an appreciation
and love for art.

Three of these latter especially aroused her interest.
Three whose names stand out with brilliancy yet to-day :
Claude Gelee, dit le Lorrain, the king of landscape
painters ; Nicolas Poussin, called the painter of mind
and reason ; and Le Sueur, distinguished by the quali-
ties of love and faith.

That discourse on "The Immortality of the Soul,"
held by the celebrated philosopher, L'Eclache :

In that palace so charming

Of the Niece of the Great Armand,

as Loret chronicles, undoubtedly filled her mind with
thoughts far beyond the everyday topics of gallantry
and pleasure indulged in by the world at large.

And Madame de la Vergne herself, according to the
testimony of Scarron, was in the habit of giving great
assemblies at her own house, where she received many
of the beaxx-espritSi Frondeurs and gallants of the day,
joining eagerly in the social functions of the gay world of
aristocratic Paris. Only sixteen, Madame de la Vergne's
daughter, however modest and retiring, could not there-
fore avoid entering into this new life with youthful
enthusiasm, and for her quiet study was no longer pos-
sible ; even to the lovely garden with its high walls and

MADEMOISELLE DE LA VERGNE 93

vine-covered arbour, not only this social atmosphere, but
the general unrest of the Fronde had penetrated, and a
last hope of aloofness from the latter excitement was
dissipated in 1650, when Madame de la Vergne had
allied herself in marriage with one of the principal
Frondeurs, a Knight of Malta, who had had himself
absolved from his vows in order to marry the fascinating
widow of the Marechal de la Vergne. This was the
Chevalier de Sevigne, intimate friend and relative to
the Coadjutor of Paris.

We have no record of this marriage except through
the poet-chronicler of the period, Jean Loret. In his
Muse Historiqne, a gazette written in the form of poeti-
cal letters to Mademoiselle de Longueville, Loret in-
sinuated that Mademoiselle de la Vergne was not only
opposed to the marriage, but that she herself was in
love with this Knight of Malta, dreaming that it was
she whom he wanted to marry, not her mother. She
showed anger, asserted the gazetteer, on discovering
that the Chevalier's attentions were not for her, believ-
ing as she did that she was more beautiful than her
mother, and that on this occasion love could never have
tempered his darts but in her amiable glances. Should
not fresh young girls, he asked, be preferred to widows,
and was not one of her tender looks worth fifty mamas ?

Madame de la Vergne certainly did not stop to con-
sult her daughter's wishes in the matter, being so madly
in love with this knight pledged to celibacy that at her
marriage in 1650 she settled on him the usufruct of her
whole property and fortune during his lifetime a fact
which undoubtedly excited the pleasant humour of the
poet-chronicler to assert that Mademoiselle de la Vergne
did not like the marriage. If dislike it she did, it was
more probably on account of her stepfather's political
principles than for mercenary or jealous reasons. And
at the time of this marriage into Frondist circles, instead
of envying her mother the love of the Chevalier, Made-
moiselle de la Vergne was thinking of anything but love
and marriage. Besides which, being naturally fond of
study, especially of^ the classics, her character, tastes

94 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

and instincts were distinctly opposed to war and in-
trigue. Even at the early age of fifteen, when in the
midst of her intellectual training and development, she
had been much more interested in the savants and
beaux-esprits famous just then in the world of letters,
than in the ultra- revolutionary spirits about her, and
these tastes had been strengthened by her intercourse
with the Duchesse d'Aiguillon and the brilliant company
she had met at those evenings at the Petit Luxembourg.
Then, too, she was absorbed in reading Latin and study-
ing Italian, as well as in her new friendships. Already
she was much sought after for her beauty and her mind,
as was attested among others by Little Scarron, who,
writing to ask the influence of her mother, Madame
Renaud de Sevign6, in some affair connected with the
Government of Havre, " with her good Duchess,"
meaning the Duchess d'Aiguillon, with whom he evi-
dently thought Madame de SeVign6 to have great
credit, begged to be remembered to Mademoiselle de
la Vergne, " toute lumineuse, toute precieuse ".

Toute lumineuse this, in a nutshell, was the attrac-
tion of Marie Madeleine de la Vergne ; this was the
quality which secured to her all those friends in high
circles, that kept them faithful to her through ill-health,
seclusion and sadness. No cold beauty of regularity of
features and classical outline can be comparable to that
luminosity of visage which is the light from within and
a product of mind and spirit, and this charm Made-
moiselle de la Vergne possessed to a high degree.

" I am glad to see you again, si belle, si spirituelle,
si pleine de raison," wrote the Abb6 de Costar, one of
her earliest admirers. Beautiful, spiritual, full of under-
standing not beautiful in the gallant sense of the word,
but lumineuse. As to a magnet, this luminosity at-
tracted men of mind and learning to her.

Distasteful as this second marriage of her mother's
may have been to the daughter, it at least brought her
the greatest gain of her whole life. Through it she made
the acquaintance of the woman destined to become her
best and lifelong friend. When Marie Madeleine de la

MADEMOISELLE DE LA VERGNE 95

Vergne first met her, the wife of the Marquis de Sevign
nephew of the Chevalier was a creature radiant with
mind, beauty and sunny grace, surrounded by admirers
vicing with each other in their attentions to her, and hold-
ing in her arms two adorable children. The enthusiastic
sympathy of the girl of sixteen went out to this charming
woman instantly, and as she gradually came to know
that the mother of these two children was neglected
and insulted by her debonnair, cavalier husband, that
underneath the gaiety of the careless, laughing wife the
heart-break was continually lingering, her own delicacy,
imagination, her poetical mind, was touched with an un-
forgettable impress, and from that time forth she vowed
to her new friend a devotion that should never swerve.

From 1650, then, dates this intimacy, and despite
the disproportion of seven years in their ages to the
advantage of Madame de Sevigne", the minds of these
two women were so well adapted to understand each
other that, meeting as they did nearly every day for
forty-three years, nothing could ever break their devoted
friendship.

The Sevignes were Frondists, being allied to the
Coadjutor De Retz by ties of blood, all taking part in
the troubles of the Regency. It is true that the only
active service of the young Marquis de Sevigne con-
sisted in making the Due de Longueville, Governor of
Normandy, whose lieutenant he was, laugh at his puns
and bantering humour ; but his uncle, Mademoiselle
de la Vergne's stepfather, was most ardent, and De
Retz's principal aid in the war.

Early in the Fronde, the Coadjutor having raised
at his own expense a regiment of Cavalry, the command
was given to the Chevalier de Sdvigne". In derision of
DeRetz, whose honorary title was Archbishop of Corinth,
the regiment was named The Regiment of Corinthians,
so when it was defeated in its first engagement, the Wits
took occasion to call the battle The First of Corinthians !
Thus the Chevalier assisted at the first huge joke of the
war. How gaily, with the Chevalier at its head, had
the Corinthians gone out to give battle to the King's

96 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

troops ! But hardly were they safely outside the walls
of Paris, before they had to march ignobly back again,
leaving the Chevalier, who was slightly wounded, for
dead in a ditch. This probably cooled the ardour of
the ci-devant Knight of Malta, as we never hear of his
taking active service again, the First of Corinthians
being the Last. De Retz, however, did not forget his
brave aide-de-camp ; a reward for him was included in
his treaty of 1649 with Anne of Austria and Mazarin,
and according to the Cardinal's own memoirs, it was
bargained that the Chevalier should receive 22,000
livres, or 44,000 francs in the money of that time.

While evidently attached to the Chevalier de Se-
vigne", De Retz does not seem to have had a very good
opinion of his wife. It is possible that he had known
her before her second marriage, and in some way had
discovered her manoeuvring spirit, for in his memoirs
he quite candidly pronounces her not only mercenary, but
the very vainest woman in matters of intrigue he had
ever known. And in view of his experience of women
conspirators, this casts a rather unpleasant light on the
character of Mademoiselle de la Vergne's mother.
Brought into an intimate footing in the household of
the Rue Vaugirard in Paris by his connection with the
Chevalier, De Retz had an opportunity of observing
Madame Renaud de Sevigne in her own home, and he
also describes a visit paid him by her and her daughter
at Nantes during his imprisonment there in 1653. At
this time the Chevalier de S6 vigne had, like the other
Frondists, found it expedient to retire from Paris for
a time, and he and his wife and stepdaughter were
spending the summer at their chateau of Champir6near
Segr6 and not far from Nantes, in Anjou. Following
the example of all the other ladies of Nantes, Madame
Renaud de Se"vigne went to the prison, taking her
daughter with her. The Cardinal, ever ready for
gallantry, was disposed to make love to Mademoiselle
de la Vergne, who must have repulsed him, for with
singular generosity, confessing that he did not please
her and with no rancour at an unwonted repulse he

MADEMOISELLE DE LA VERGNE 97

pays his tribute to her good looks and general charm,
absolving her from any imputation of coquetry.

" Madame de la Vergne," he writes in his memoirs,
" who had married for her second husband,
the Chevalier de Sevigne, and who lived in
Anjou with her husband, came to see me there
and brought Mademoiselle de la Vergne, her
daughter, now Madame de la Fayette. She
was very pretty and very amiable, and more-
over very much like Madame de Lesdiguieres.
She pleased me much, but to tell the truth, I
did not please her at all, whether because she
had no inclination for me, or that her mother
and stepfather had since Paris times sedu-
lously tried to give her a mistrust of my incon-
stancies, and my different love affairs, which
put her on her guard against me. I consoled
myself for her cruelty with the facility natural
to me."

Mademoiselle de la Vergne may very well have heard
of the Cardinal's peculiarities from her mother and step-
father, but in no cage would Cardinal Retz have attracted
her ; her gallantry, such as it was, was peculiar to herself
and ever combined with intellectual profit. Instead of
culling the flowers of love among the butterflies of
fashion, her habit throughout life was to seek those Im-
mortelles which grow on the high places of Classicalism
and Learning, and her friends of those early days were
all pedants, her intercourse with them an interchange
of intellectual compliments and ideas, rather than the
empty badinage of flirtation.

In Anjou, where after the Fronde the Renaud de
Sevignes spent some time, Mademoiselle de la Vergne
soon found an atmosphere that suited her tastes. The
little circle in the old town of Angers was most genial,
and although neither the Duke and Duchess of ^ Rohan,
nor M. de Fourilles may have been kindred spirits in an
intellectual sense, the Duke being Governor of Anjou,
M. de Fourilles Governor of Angers, these three were
leaders of society in the neighbourhood, and gathered

98 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

around them others who supplied their deficiencies in
point of brilliancy as, for instance, M. de Lavardin,
Archbishop of Mans, that jovial prelate who, like
Costar, his Archdeacon, was more noted for the deli-
cacy and joyousness of his banquets, his entertaining
mood, than for the saintliness of his life.

It was in just such an intimate circle as this that
Mademoiselle de la Vergne was most at home, not
only in those early days, but afterwards when she had
become prominent at Court It was at Angers, too,
during those years just after the Fronde, that she ac-
quired that social experience which later in her history
was to make her own house so attractive to her par-
ticular friends and the world at large. It was her good
fortune during this period at Angers to make the ac-
quaintance of the Abbe Costar, the above-named worthy
associate of the Archbishop of Mans in his predilection
for the good things of this world as a preparation for
the next. He is said to have been the son of a hatter
of Paris, who sent him out of the paternal shop on
account of the disgraceful form he gave to the hats !
Leaving his father's roof, he took to the Church and
to learning, in the pomposity of which he soon out-
rivalled his friends, Menage, Voiture and Balzac. A
certain galante femme of the period, Madame de la
Suze, a Coligny, designated Costar cleverly as the
most gallant of pedants and the most pedantic of
gallants.

In 1652 or 1653, when Mademoiselle de la Vergne
knew the Abbe, he was already fifty years of age, and
his gallant phrases, great learning and grandiloquence
aroused the interest of a mind seeking to extend its
own knowledge not only of books but of people. So
much did the Abbe Costar on his part admire her
young mind and strong intellect that, after she left
Angers, he sent her his books with a request for her
valued criticism, and carried on a regular correspond-
ence with her for some time. None of her letters to
him have been preserved, but his are full of the pre-
vailing exaggeration of style and his own individual

MADEMOISELLE DE LA VERGNE 99

stilted manner. Yet he could be very amusing on
occasion, and Mazarin found his letters so humorous
that, when he was ill and wished to be diverted, he
ordered his secretary to read aloud to him some of
Costar's letters.

In one of his letters to Mademoiselle de la Vergne,
Costar speaks of her as " incomparable," and, in inflated
language, alludes to her dreamy poetic nature by asking
her if she is enjoying the company of Monsieur and
Madame de Sevigne her mother and stepfather as
well as that of her own dear thoughts.

Costar was but a fleeting episode in the life of
Mademoiselle de la Vergne, although he had a part in
forming her taste, if only by disgusting her with ver-
bosity and bombast. But another pedant, whom she
also met in Angers, a native of the place, was destined
to have a very lasting and powerful influence in her
life. This was Gilles Menage, the original of Vadius,
the pedantic fraud, in Moliere's comedy of " Les Femmes
Savantes ". Seeing him standing one evening among
the "small poets" at the Rambouillet, Ninon de Len-
clos is said to have remarked :

" Nothing equalled his pretensions, unless it were
his ugliness ".

Segrais is the author of the statement that the
Marechal de la Vergne procured the two scholars,
Pere Rapin and Menage, as Latin masters for his
daughter, but evidence showing that Pere Rapin
never had any part in her education, and other facts
pointing to her not having met Menage until after
her father's death, there is much ground for the con-
clusion that she first made Menage's acquaintance
through her stepfather when the poet was living in
the household of Cardinal Retz before the Fronde.
Ever since the renaissance of letters in the reign of
Louis XII., it had been the custom in France for the
great nobles to have men of letters attached to their
households. Accordingly, Benserade was the poet of
Gaston d'Orleans, who lodged him in the Palais Royal,
and Gilles Menage was attached in like manner to the

ioo MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

Coadjutor, who endured all the vain poet's idiosyncrasies
with supreme good-humour for some years. At last,
however, growing tired of the flagrant abuse of his
hospitality he found Menage was making, of his wound-
ing epigrams, he finally indicated to the poet that he
must find a home elsewhere.

Menage had known the young Marquise de Sevign6
before her marriage in 1644, and given her Latin
lessons. Being very gallant, he was somewhat piqued
at her marriage, and began to make epigrams on their
defunct friendship defunct love, he called it later on.
The Marquise considered him and his pretensions in the
light of a huge joke, fortunately, nor was she afraid of
his sentimental gallantry.

"It is you," she said, " who have taught me to

speak of our friendship as a poor defunct ;

loving you as I do, I could never have thought

of it."

But her touchy master would not be cajoled, and sud-
denly the flame of his gallantry was turned aside into
another channel. This was when he met Mademoiselle
de la Vergne. Saying nothing to the Marquise, he
soon took advantage of an unusually heated quarrel
with his elder pupil to transfer his allegiance to the
younger and unmarried one. M. de Segrais tells a
wonderful story of this younger pupil's proficiency in
Latin, sufficient, he relates, at the end of three months
to put her two masters right upon the translation of a
passage in Virgil. This was to M. de Segrais easily
explainable by the fact that she had (esprit pottique ;
that she loved poetry and hated Latin prose, her poetic
mind easily jumping to the solution of a question which
the more scholarly intellects of her masters failed to
grasp.

Later on, looking back at these two friendships, and
the difference in his manner of loving these two charming
women, Manage said :

" I have loved Madame de la Fayette in verse and

Madame de Sevigne in prose ! "
Mademoiselle de la Vergne seems to have served as

MADEMOISELLE DE LA VERGNE roi

muse for almost all of his poetic meanderings in French,
Latin, Greek and even Italian a language which he
acquired for her sake. She was his goddess Laverna,
goddess of Thieves " bellissima Laverna, dolce ladra
d'amore" his Filli, his Sylvie, Enone, and many were
the idylls, madrigals, epigrams and disains addressed to
her by this paragon of learning, accused alas! by
envious detractors of the heinous sin of plagiarism in
his Greek and Latin sources.

" I defy thee in verse, prose, Greek and Latin ! "
was the threat which in " Les Femmes Savantes " Vadius
hurls at his rival author, and Manage, whose encounter
with a rival poet in the presence of the Grande Made-
moiselle was supposed to have suggested this scene to
Moliere, was as great a menace in the French society of
his day as was Vadius to his rival. Quarrelling with
every one he knew, his irritability and pomposity contin-
ually incurred the enmity of those who were too afraid
of these well-known powers of his to risk resenting his
impudence. Only one or two satirists dared to expend
their wit upon him : Moliere was big enough to do so
with impunity, but Menage flew into a terrible rage on
learning that a copy of a satire written against him by
young Boileau had been given to Mademoiselle de la
Vergne by Le Pailleur.

His self-esteem was so abnormally developed that
few satires could destroy his equanimity, and yet joined
with his overpowering belief in himself was a sincere
and profound admiration for his clever pupil. In one
poem, he sentimentally exclaims :

Yes, I am dying, amiable Sylvia,

And 'tis you who take my life away,

Your attractions inevitably dear,

Wound from afar even as they do more near.

That she, like Madame de Svign, was all too insens-
ible to his devotion, he hints very often : one of his
Italian poems is dedicated to "La donna troppa cru-
dele," while one of the verses found among his poems
was marked to be placed under her portrait :

102 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

This portrait resembles the lovely lady,
It is as insensible as she.

Very much less sentimental than her master, Made-
moiselle de la Vergne was obliged sometimes to inter-
sperse a lesson like the following among the charming
letters filled with sweet words and protestations of real
affection which she did not hesitate to send him. One
day in Holy Week, forgetting his priestly profession, it
seems that Menage had written in rather a gallant
mood, urging in quite an empresse way the pleasure of
an interview with her, upon which she replied :

" Nothing could be more gallant than your letter.
If the thought of making an examination of
your conscience inspired such things in you,
I doubt that your contrition is very strong.
I assure you that I make as much of your
friendship as it warrants I should make, and I
think I say everything in saying that. Adieu
for the present. I promise you but one hour's
conversation, for one must limit one's diver-
tissements these days."

The following, written to the same gentleman also at
this period, shows the protestations which, according to
the fashion of the day, even a reserved person like
Mademoiselle de la Vergne was in the habit of making :
" Please give a thousand compliments from me to
Mademoiselle de Scude>y," wrote Made-
moiselle de la Vergne, " and assure her that for
her I have all imaginable tenderness, I who
ordinarily have none ! You will voluntarily
vouch for that in the thought you harbour that
I am not tender because I do not fly at the
neck of all the world. I beg you to ask Sappho
who is so skilled in tenderness, if it is a mark
of tenderness to make caresses simply because
one is accustomed to making them to every-
body, and whether a sweet word from a
ritrosa beltd (stubborn beauty) should not
touch more and persuade better of friend-
ship than a thousand obliging discourses from

MADEMOISELLE DE LA VERGNE 103

a person who makes them to every one. I
hold that when I say to you that I have a
great friendship for you, and that I am more
glad to have you for a friend than any whom-
soever in the world, you should be satisfied
with me."

This letter also shows her to have been intimate
with Mademoiselle de ScudeVy Sappho, as she called
herself for whom all the beau monde of the time had
respect and admiration in spite of the liberties she
allowed herself in her capacity of authoress such, for
instance, as attending the very free assemblies at the
house of Little Scarron in the Marais before his marriage,
when his apartment was the rendezvous of the Fron-
deurs, and when the only women who dared go there
were such free spirits as Marion Delorme, Ninon de
Lenclos, Madame de la Suze and herself.

At this period the authoress of the Grand Cyrus,
the Carte de Tendre, Madelaine de Scudery, had passed
the period of youth, and was over forty-five years of
age. In this letter to Menage, Mademoiselle de la
Vergne makes allusion to the Carte de Tendre, Made-
moiselle de Scudery 's novel called Clelie in which it
appeared having come out about that time. When
the younger woman wrote the above letter she little
dreamed that one day such a critic as M. Victor Cousin
would place her above Sappho. Yet in his Introduc-
tion to La Socitte Fran$aise au XVIII. Siecle, saying
that the genius of Mademoiselle de Scudery was for Les
Conversations, he praised hers as coming immediately
after those of Madame de Sevigne and Madame de la
Fayette.

Madame de la Fayette does not appear among the
portraits in Le Grand Cyrus, the first and second
volumes of which there were ten in all appeared the
year of her introduction into French society, and when
she was still unknown to Mademoiselle de Scude"ry.
But as Mademoiselle de Scudery outlived Madame de
la Fayette by eight years, she must have seen her own
novels superseded by those of the new school, of which

104 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

Madame de la Fayette was the creator. Menage tried
to excuse the length of the novels of Mademoiselle de
Scudery by saying that they were really epic poems,
full, as were the poems of Virgil and Homer, of episodes
and incidents which necessarily retarded the dtfnoue-
ment, but in vain ; it was destined that his young and
sage Aramante should sound the note of the new age
and show Mademoiselle de Scude>y the value of brevity
and succinctness.

In one of his poems, Menage gives a sure recipe for
winning the affections of his attractive pupil, Made-
moiselle de la Vergne, and the secret of his own place
in her affections. This was to have grey hair, but it
is hard to conceive him with grey hair at forty.

His further history is interesting as being perfectly
consistent with his whole life, and having had much to
do with this same beloved pupil. In 1652 or 1653,
when he left Cardinal Retz, Menage, if not over forty
years of age, was still old enough to find it pleasant to
be his own master ; and he was glad, he said, to be
freed from the restraint of an overlord. So, from this
time forth he made the most of his independence.
Taking a little apartment in the cloister of Notre Dame,
he began to draw about him men of letters, savants and
even the fairer sex, his two former pupils, whom he had
loved in verse and prose, among the number.

For some inexplicable reason his worth had never
been acknowledged by the Academic ; and, when it
became evident that he would never be admitted to the
ranks of the Immortals, the evenings at his house, called
" Mercuriales," as they were held on Wednesdays, grew
to be known as his "Academy". In presiding over
these assemblies he no doubt had great exercise for his
grandeur and pomposity, as well as for his quarrelsome
spirit. Always a great clumsy man, who could never
learn either to dance or to sing, in spite of his disposi-
tion to gallantry, he was looked upon by the ladies as
nothing but a bel-esprit, so that they must have laughed
much among themselves when on the day of his fiftieth
anniversary he made the rounds of all his fair acquaint-

MADEMOISELLE DE LA VERGNE 105

ance, and, formally taking leave of each one, announced
that he was now renouncing gallantry for ever. Soon
after this sad event, one day, when attempting to rise
from his knees in Notre Dame, he put his thigh out of
joint. This left him in quite a helpless condition, which
was made wholly so when a severe fall soon after dis-
located his shoulder and confined him to the house.
Shutting himself into his little apartment (overlooking
the great cathedral), like a mouse in his hole, he never
came out again. Yet was life not extinct, and, to con-
sole himself for his infirmities, he thereafter held his
beloved Academy every day in the week instead of on
Wednesdays only.

With all his faults, this the most celebrated pedant
of his kind was ever sincere and faithful in his love for
letters ; up to the last day of his life he wrote unceas-
ingly, and finally, at the age of seventy-nine, died pen in
hand.

But however flattered the young and sage Aramante
was in those early days by the homage of a man with
Menage's reputation for learning, to a woman who dis-
liked as she did affectation and bombast and to one
who like the Marquise de Sevigne had a keen sense of
the ridiculous the erudite and amorous Menage must
often have been tiresome enough, and there is every
probability that the story told by Tallemant des Reaux
of Mademoiselle de la Vergne's being heard to exclaim
on one occasion as she saw him coming :

" Here comes that tiresome M. Manage,"
is absolutely true and natural.

CHAPTER IX

THE GALLANTRY OF THE FRONDE

" Who lives without folly is not so wise as he thinks."

La Rochefoucauld

WHILE at St. Germain, in the beginning of
the Fronde, Mademoiselle, young and gay,
was laughing at the inconveniences and
discomforts of her beautifully painted and decorated
apartment, with no glass in the window-panes, no fire
with which to meet the January wind, M. de Segrais,
her secretary, left behind in Paris, amused himself by
writing verses to rhyme with amours and tambours,
complaining in his quality of poet that the noise of the
drums (tambours] had frightened love (amours] away.
Yet never was the beautiful art of gallantry more skilfully
or constantly practised than at this tempestuous time.
Love ran riot still and the word gallantry was, in fact,
ever the open sesame of the century an exquisite
gallantry which proclaimed the reign of woman there-
fore of finesse and delicacy. So potent was it withal
that by its magic the doors of Kings and Queens were
opened to Beauty frankly divorced from Virtue, and all
France recognised and celebrated not only virtuous
women of gallant temperament, but also those who in
our own day would be considered outcasts from polite
society.

Galantes andflrudes alike were, after and during the
Fronde, as in the early years of 1600, only a part of
their century, a product of their surroundings ; they
looked with lenient eyes upon the sins against the Holy
Ghost, provided these were cloaked under the name of

106

THE GALLANTRY OF THE FRONDE 107

gallantry ; and the most virtuous among them did not
disdain to practise the thousand little coquetries in
vogue. Going to the Afternoon Drive or Promenade,
in the early days of Louis XIII., it was their caprice to
wear various coloured ribbons on heart or bosom, to sus-
pend their fans or prayer-books by knots of the same to
their waists. Even the fashion of their coiffure would be
significant to their admirers, who were struck to the
heart or transported with joy according as curls decked
the temples, or locks fell over the beautiful oval faces
of their lady-loves. Naturally all these ribbons and
locks had names in the book of gallantry ; one was
called a mignon, another a galant ; the knot on the fan
a badin, that on the prayer-book a bijou ; the curl on the
temple was a cavalier, the lock falling over the face a
gar$on, etc.

Thus gallant imagination concerned itself with even
the most trivial details, adding interest and excitement
to every chance encounter, to the most commonplace
affairs of life. And later on these same^a/antes/emmes
revelled in the Fronde, openly wearing the colours of
their knights, and encouraging them to fight first for
one side then for another, as their caprice dictated.

Disciplined by the cleansing flame of Puritanism, we,
of the enlightened twentieth century, are sometimes led
into strange extravagances of temperament ; these
women, we must remember, were still in the full shadow
of the Renaissance, with its voluptuousness, its joy in
living, its delight in beauty in whatever form, its pas-
sionate desire above all things for full life, and its
utter carelessness as to the means by which it acquired
sensation and excitement therefore its arrogant selfish-
ness. And in judging the morals of this picturesque
age, we must discount upon it as a whole and individually
the effect of tradition and custom, looking with as much
sympathy and understanding as we possess for the great
human qualities, whether of goodness or frailty, which
lie deep down in character uninfluenced by outside con-
vention and prejudice.

We must remember that in those days it was con-

io8 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

sidered a crime to be insensible to love, and that the
man or woman who was devoid of gallantry was looked
at askance. Later on in the century even the devout
Duchesse d'Aiguillon, herself past the period of coquetry,
was so infected by the tradition of the day that she
could not rest until her young nephew betrayed signs
of falling in love, for until he appreciated the power of
beauty and capitulated to it, even she considered him
but a milksop, not yet honnete komme.

To understand quite what gallantry meant in the
seventeenth century, it is essential to consider the
phenomenon of Ninon de Lenclos.

When Mademoiselle de la Vergne entered Parisian
society in 1649, this celebrated courtesan was already
nearly forty years old, but with an eternal youth such
as hers, the years did not age, and she was as much of
a feature of the day then as she had been nineteen
years before when she first appeared at the Rambouillet
and Rubens had painted her portrait. Queen Precieuse
of Love she was called, but strange to say she had never
been strictly beautiful, even at twenty, in spite of the
fact that her hair of dark chestnut fell over an oval
countenance, that her eyes were beautiful and shaded
by dark eyebrows ; and that her open, fine, tender and
animated face was calculated to awaken admiration,
love and friendship. It was only when really aroused
that Ninon's power was felt ; otherwise she was languid
and indolent.

Charming spirit, beautiful Ninon,
The mistress of Agamemnon
Had no charm comparable
To that which renders you amiable,

sang the poet Scarron ; and with lute and song, with
all the lighter joys of life, Ninon kept the great men
of the century, as well as lesser ones, at her feet. Yet,
writing on one occasion to her old friend Saint Evre-
mont, she said that every evening she rendered grace
unto God for her mind, that every morning she thanked
Him for having preserved her from the foolishness of

NINON DE LENCLOS

AFTEK A MINIATURE BY I'ETITOT

THE GALLANTRY OF THE FRONDE 109

her heart ! That she should render grace unto God
for her mind is quite comprehensible, for she was akin
and most legitimate successor to that Aspasia of old,
who, in the midst of her devotion to the god of love,
could yet discuss with her admirers the highest prob-
lems of philosophy, and appreciate their deepest
thoughts.

With characteristic humour, Ninon divided her
admirers into three classes : her martyrs, her caprices
and her favoris, and into one or other of these classes
fell nearly every gallant in Paris. The greatest literary
geniuses succumbed to her fascination, and every great
work of the century had its dress rehearsal in her
modest house in the Rue Tournon. Here not only
so august a man as Corneille, but Moliere, too, waited
for her applause before venturing out into the world ;
here such heroes as the Grand Conde and Turenne
made her adventurous spirit kindle with tales of danger
and bravery ; here La Rochefoucauld himself got from
the Queen Pre"cieuse of Love his first taste of that
feeling which afterwards turned to the bitter gall and
wormwood of his Maxims.

In studying Ninon's history, it is not difficult to
understand how she came so early to decide the usual
conflict between the two natures warring in every breast,
and to decide unconditionally for the worldly one, when
we learn that fascinating tales of camp adventure told
her by a soldier father, who tried to instil into her
childish mind his own philosophy of pleasure, were
contrasted with the teaching of a too devout mother,
who tore her away from her father's knee to hear mass
three times a day, or to listen to the reading of the
Introduction d la Vie Devote. The wonder is that she
never wavered in her choice, but that her whole life was
a history of unconventionality and unrestraint a de-
fiance of all the laws governing the rest of the world.
And beyond the pale of conventionality she had her
own acknowledged place, one which no one else of her
kind could ever win. Not only was " Ninon " tolerated,
she was adored in the highest circles of the Court. The

no MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

gods had endowed her with an uncanny charm ; and,
as she had as well the human qualities of generosity,
tenderness, nobility of soul, what mattered it to these
apostles of the Renaissance that her life long she con-
tinued to commit the fifth of the seven deadly sins ?

The young Marquise de Sevigne's first heart-throbs
had been occasioned by Ninon, who soon after his
marriage had enrolled the gay Marquis de Sevigne in
the list of her favoris. Bussy de Rabutin had the
cruelty to tell the Marquise of this conquest, but, never
faithful long to one person, three months of one gallant
being an eternity to her, the Marquis de Sevigne was
quickly replaced in the capricious affection of Ninon.
History relates, however, that not only the husband of
the Marquise, but her son and grandson were succes-
sively in the toils of this wonderful courtesan.

In later years both the Marquise de Sevigne and
Mademoiselle de la Vergne visited Ninon in the Rue
Tournon, and knew her intimately. M. de Mirecourt,
who has imagined the memoirs of the great courtesan,
tells a great deal of the friendship of Ninon and Madame
de la Fayette, even describing a journey to Italy they
took together. It was not through Ninon that in
those early days Mademoiselle de la Vergne was en-
lightened as to the meaning of the gallantry in vogue,
but through another love of the Marquis de Sevigne, a
certain Madame de Gondran, for whom, and on account
of the very incident connected with Mademoiselle de la
Vergne, he fought the fatal duel which cost him his life.

It was dastardly of the Marquis to put Mademoiselle
de la Vergne to such a test, but it seemed that his con-
fidence in her loyalty was not misplaced, for finding that
he had used her name to cover one of his gallant
escapades, she did not betray him, but even tried to
shield this husband of her friend. Tallemant relates
that, as the abject slave of Madame de Gondran, the
Marquis could not refuse to try to procure for her some
beautiful jewels belonging to Mademoiselle de Chev-
reuse, stepdaughter of the Duchess of Frondist renown,
which, out of caprice, his inamorata determined she

THE GALLANTRY OF THE FRONDE in

must have. So, knowing full well that Mademoiselle
de Chevreuse would never lend the jewels to Madame
de Gondran, he boldly went to her and asked the loan
of them for Mademoiselle de la Vergne. The ear-
rings were so famous throughout Paris, by reason of
their value and beauty, that their owner was not long
in hearing that they had been worn at some assembly
by Madame de Gondran, and at once taxed the Marquis
with the fact. Appealed to by Sevigne" to save the
situation, the only thing for Mademoiselle de la Vergne
to do was to say she had lent them to Madame de
Gondran which she generously did. Unfortunately,
some other gallant, hearing the story, related the truth
to Mademoiselle de Chevreuse, whereupon SeVign
challenged the impudent informant, and was himself
shot down in the ensuing duel.

Mademoiselle de la Vergne's next experience of
gallantry, shortly after this event, came through Cardi-
nal Retz, and gave her rather a clear idea, one would
think, of those "inconstancies" and "love affairs" of
which her mother and stepfather warned her before
she visited the Cardinal in prison after the Fronde.

It was while the Marquise de Sevign6 was away
from Paris at her estate of Les Rochers, in Brittany,
weeping the loss of her faithless husband, that Mademoi-
selle de la Vergne made the acquaintance of Ang&ique
de la Loupe, the eldest daughter of Baron de la Loupe,
and related to the Marquise de Rambouillet. The Baron
and his family lived next the De la Vergnes in the Rue
Vaugirard, and for some reason Madame de la Vergne
approved so much of the intimacy between the two
girls that she fostered it by every means in her power,
even to the cutting of a door between the two houses
in order that they might the more easily have access to
each other. And at first the friendship progressed fast
and furiously. Cardinal Retz, as he tells in his memoirs,
happened to have seen the pretty face of Mademoiselle
de la Loupe at the Luxembourg at a little assembly
given one day in the Study of Madame, and it had so
struck his gallant fancy that, going to the Luxembourg

112 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

a few days afterwards, on finishing his errand there he
quite naturally strolled across the street, and into the
De la Vergnes, taking advantage of his privilege as the
Chevalier's friend. He confessed quite frankly that he
did not go there to see either Madame de la Vergne or
her daughter, but solely for Mademoiselle de la Loupe,
in seeking whose acquaintance the gallant Cardinal
assured Madame de la Vergne he simply wished to
enter into a "good, chaste and holy friendship".

" This could be nothing but entirely spiritual and
angelic" he remarks, " being with Mademoi-
selle Angelique de la Loupe, so pretty and so
prtcieuse, both in manner and in modesty."
On this assurance, Madame de la Vergne evidently gave
him the entree to her house and the society of both her
daughter and Mademoiselle de la Loupe, while on the
occasions of his visits the Cardinal was wily enough to
take with him his friend the Due de Brissac, whose
duty it was to engage Mademoiselle de la Vergne in a
close tte-d-tete while he endeavoured to win over
Mademoiselle de la Loupe. Obliged to give up the
attempt to make this friendship a little more human, the
Cardinal at last acknowledged with pique that he never
found his fair lady anything but spiritual and angelic.
This failure he did not attribute either to lack of
coquetry on the part of Mademoiselle de la Loupe, or
of attraction on his, but solely to the atmosphere of the
De la Vergne household, which, to his chagrin, had
such an air of severity and modesty that even his daring
tongue was tied.

In describing his failure to subdue Mademoiselle de la
Vergne's friend, he could not refrain from ending his
account of this episode, " so little to the honour of his
gallantry," by the remark that his failure was surprising
to those who knew the Comtesse d'Olonne, and did not
know Mademoiselle de la Loupe a remark justified in
a measure by the notorious conduct of the latter after
her marriage to the Comte d'Olonne.

In later life both the Comtesse d'Olonne and her
sister, the Duchesse de Ferte, carried their gallantry so

THE GALLANTRY OF THE FRONDE 113

far that even the most gallant women of the day could
not risk being seen with them. An unusually severe
sermon on Good Friday once frightened them into an
approach to contrition, but, instead of fasting themselves,
they contented their consciences by making all the
servants in their house fast !

Yet in her youth Mademoiselle Angelique had come
honestly by the title of prdcieuse given her by De Retz
her mind and manners both being marked by that
grace and dignity united to culture and talent, that per-
fect accord between good taste and good tone, which
distinguished the Precieuse a name which in those
days was the highest compliment that could be paid
any woman. Later on, when exaggeration and imita-
tion changed the meaning of the word into one of
ridicule, the term itself went into disuse, and has never
been replaced in the French language.

Fortunately, it was not many months after the young
girls met before Angelique married the Comted'Olonne,
and with her marriage this friend of accident disappears
from the horizon of both Mademoiselle de la Vergne
and Madame de Sevigne, and indeed a typical gallant
woman of the time like this one, with no special qualities
of either mind or personality to make her remarkable,
seems an incongruous companion for Marie Madeleine
de la Vergne, who remained untouched by the reckless-
ness and licence of the Fronde.

Yet one cannot touch pitch and not be defiled, as
Mademoiselle de la Vergne was to discover, for the
short-lived friendship of the two girls with Cardinal
Retz and the Due de Brissac gave the Marquise de
Sevigne's wicked cousin, Comte Bussy de Rabutin, an
opportunity to include them both in his so-called
"Geographical Map of the Court," an extravagance
imagined by himself and the Prince de Conti in
moments of idleness. This map was supposed to be
of the Country of Bragues Love in Idleness a large
and beautiful country containing many streams, of which
the principal were the Jade, the Flirt and the Precieuse,
on which certain towns were situated.

II 4 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

" La Vergne," it says, " is a large and very pretty
town, and so devout that the Archbishop has
resided there, and the prelate having quitted
it, the Duke de Brissac remains its principal
Governor."

Insinuating as this is, it is really very faint calumny
coming from a man like Bussy de Rabutin, whose
scurrilous tongue spared no one, but his description of
the Comtesse d'Olonne will not bear quotation here ;
enough that Bussy de Rabutin was, even in that day
and generation, a little too broad for the general taste,
and that for indulging his taste for Rabelaisian analysis,
he had to pay the penalty of a sojourn in the Bastille
and an exile of many years from France.

Thus, disappearing into the slough of wanton
gallantry and dissipation, to die in obscurity in 1707,
Angelique de la Loupe goes down to fame solely in
the pages of Les Gaules Amoureuses. That neither
Madame de la Fayette nor Madame de Sevigne could
follow their former friend in the licence of her later life,
is explained by a remark made some years after the
Fronde by the Marquise de Sevigne. Writing to her
daughter, she simply commented :

" It is difficult to purify the name of Olonne ! "
This tells the story of the efforts of herself and Madame
de la Fayette to keep up this friendship, and one can
hear the sigh which escaped the lips of the charitable
Marquise as in these words she acknowledged the further
impossibility of continuing even the semblance of it.

An incident of rather a different nature, and told by
Tallemant des Reaux, illustrates another phase of the
gallantry of Mademoiselle de la Vergne, as also her
keen sense of humour.

It seems that many people were struck with Made-
moiselle de la Vergne's resemblance among others,
Cardinal de Retz himself to the Duchesse de Lesdi-
guieres, Retz's niece, a woman older than herself a
femme galante, and very good-looking, associated in the
Fronde with Madame de Chevreuse, with whom she
was responsible for the treaty made at Ruel in 1649.

THE GALLANTRY OF THE FRONDE 115

The friendship of the Duchesse de Lesdiguieres with
the Due de Roquelaure was well known in Court circles,
in fact more than whispered in the ruelles, those ren-
dezvous of the gossips, and Tallemant recounts that at
an assembly one day, Roquelaure, coming to sit down
beside

" The little La Vergne, daughter of La Vergne,
Governor of M. de Breze, who as they say
resembles Madame de Lesdiguieres, she said
to him :

" ' Monsieur, take care of the resemblance ! '
" * Mademoiselle,' he responded, ' take care your-
self!'

This Due de Roquelaure, a redoubtable antagonist
in the art of word-fencing, and, in fact, one of the
cleverest men of the day, was renowned in Paris and
the provinces for his sallies, which, always spirituelles
and often very piquant, also never failed to be amusing.
His personal appearance, on the contrary, was most
unprepossessing. Not five feet in height, he had very
small, bright black eyes, wide thick eyebrows, puffed-
out cheeks, a swarthy skin, a flat nose, and wide nostrils,
always filled with snuff! Not an engaging picture for
a gallant ; and we are not surprised that in seeing him
sit down beside her Mademoiselle de la Vergne tried to
frighten him away, especially as a gallant of this sort
never appealed to her in the least.

Besides these two types of the galante femmes, as
personified by Ninon de Lenclos and Angelique de la
Loupe, there was yet another which aimed at political
power and influence, and seems to have especially
enraged and baffled Mazarin both before and after the
Fronde. When, in 1660, he was ending up his political
life with its greatest triumph, the treaty of peace termi-
nating the long war with Spain, he frankly expressed
his views on the subject to the Spanish Ambassador
drawing up the treaty with him. Beginning by con-
gratulating Don Haro on the fact that in Spain they
had so few femmes de bien, or virtuous women wishing
to meddle in public affairs, he said :

u6 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

" Our women, on the contrary, whether prude or

galante, old or young, foolish or clever, all

want to be concerned in everything that goes

on. They want to see everything, and what

is worse, muddle everything. We have three

in particular who every day bring us into more

confusion than ever was in Babylon ! "

Had the three women of France, alluded to by

Mazarin, disclosed the secret of their power during the

Fronde, they must have defined it to be Love. All

three were gallant, all three form a curious contrast.

They were the Duchesse de Chevreuse, the Princesse

Palatine and the Duchesse de Longueville.

The history of Madame de Chevreuse is a long and
chequered one. Said to be pretty, mischievous and
gay in her youth, her intriguing career began at an
early age when she married that one-time favourite
of Louis XIII., the Connetable de Luynes. On his
death, in 1621, she became the wife of the Due de
Chevreuse, who as a Guise and a very handsome man
was selected to be the proxy of Charles I. in his mar-
riage with Henriette de France. At this grand wedding,
Madame de Chevreuse shone in the wonderful jewels
of the murdered Marechale d'Ancre, confiscated at the
time of her death and given to De Luynes as successor
to the Marechal. After the royal marriage, the Duke
and Duchess of Chevreuse accompanied Queen Henri-
ette to England, and it was on this occasion that the
Duchess took Buckingham the celebrated necklace
sent him as a gage d' amour by Anne of Austria an
errand which cost her dear, for Louis XIII. though an
unloving was a very jealous husband. So France be-
came too uncertain a place for this ancient friend and
lady-in-waiting to Anne of Austria. Not the least
among her indiscretions had been her jocular encourage-
ment of Richelieu to dance in baldaquin costume before
the Queen, and her prominence in the Chalais con-
spiracy. But the greatest of her crimes, even in the
eyes of Richelieu, was the furthering of the loves of
Buckingham and Anne of Austria. Richelieu gave

THE GALLANTRY OF THE FRONDE 117

orders to have her imprisoned in the Bastille, whereupon
she managed to escape in man's attire first to Spain,
then to Lorraine, wandering for some years about the
earth like a veritable Don Quixote.

On returning to France, only a Dumas could ade-
quately describe the Duchess's strife with Mazarin, the
betrayal of Fouquet to Colbert, the third marriage to a
gentleman of little name or fortune, or make one feel
the misery of a death like hers the unhappy passing
away of a conscience-stricken old woman worn out with
a long life of excitement and intrigue.

Anne of Gonzague, Princesse Palatine, called the
" Statesman of the Fronde," was given her distinguish-
ing mark by Cardinal Retz, when he said that he did
not believe Queen Elizabeth herself had more capacity
for governing a kingdom than she. Perhaps of all
three women she had the finest mind, and was most
patriotic. She, too, had had a romantic history, and
indulged her love for gallantry and adventure to the
full, only when youth was past to repent sincerely and
turn to religious devotion as a preparation for the life to
come.

Daughter of the Due de Mantua, and raised in a
monastery, on her father's wishing her to take the veil
she fled from the monastery to one of her sisters ; but,
soon falling in love with the Due de Guise, who
promised to marry her, she compromised herself by
following him as his page to Holland. He refused to
marry her after all. This slight notwithstanding, Prince
Edward, Count Palatine of the Rhine, a sovereign
without a kingdom living in Paris, fell violently in love
with her, and, offering her his hand and heart, she
accepted him.

On becoming a widow shortly afterwards, the Prin-
cesse Palatine joined in the Fronde, finding in it an
exercise for that adventurous spirit which all her
experiences had not stilled, for her ardent imagination
and her tremendous desire to live fully. All these
qualities she found full vent for as Diplomate of the
Fronde. She it was who acted as go-between in the

n8 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

various situations, and, unlike the other two women, hers
was a conciliatory spirit ; she knew how to smooth out
rough places and bring peace into the different opposing
minds of the parties. As a reward for her efforts,
Mazarin made her at the end of the Fronde superin-
tendent of the household of the young Queen Marie
Therese, but on condition that in two months she hand
it over to the Comtesse de Soissons.

Wearying of the world, having tasted the dregs of
pleasure, it was not long after the Fronde that this
clever woman gave up everything and devoted herself
entirely to religion. Her last words on her deathbed
show how far she had found peace and resignation :
" I am going," she said, " to see how God will treat
me, but I hope in His mercy ".

Had Madame de Longueville not been of princely
blood, she might have been called both an intrigueuse
and adventuress. But Anne Genevieve de Bourbon,
Princesse de Cond6, sister of the Grand Conde and the
Prince de Conti, was at any rate a Circe whom one
could not see without loving. Her life, says Lemontey,
was the model of that of the usual pretty woman, and
had three periods : first, the agitation of the heart and
the senses ; secondly, the consoling diversions of the
mind ; thirdly, the ardour of faith and the emotions of
piety ; in other words, she was successively a coquette,
z.pre'cieuse and a devote.

Not long after her marriage in 1642 to the Due de
Longueville, a man very much older than herself, she
was attacked by small -pox, and it was thought that her
beauty would be impaired by the terrible disease ; on
the contrary, it seemed to have been enhanced, and her
whole personality imbued with a subtle something which
drew men to her. Only twenty-nine years of age at the
beginning of the Fronde, and still in the coquette period,
she had made the dramatic sensation of the war by
giving herself up to the citizens of Paris as hostage of
the good faith of her husband and brother, who had
just joined the Frondist party.

In triumph, she and the Duchesse de Bouillon, with

THE GALLANTRY OF THE FRONDE 119

their households, were transferred to the Hotel de Ville
as hostages to the city, who treated them like queens.
It was a life of continual excitement, most unusual to
the staid and heavy Aldermen of the City of Paris. So
infected were they by the prevailing tone of gaiety and
face'.iousness which distinguished all parties and en-
livened every situation during this merry time, that
wher one day, soon after the occupation of their
munhipal stronghold by these ladies and their families,
they learned that in one of their oak-panelled council
rooms a son had been born to the Duchesse de Longue-
ville, they crowded round to ask the honour of acting
as godfathers to the child.

It .must have been a curious sight this procession of
the Aldermen of Paris as they escorted the Duchesse
to the old Church of St. Jean en Greve, there to join in
the baptismal ceremony of the child called, in memory
of his birth, Charles de Paris, and afterwards known as
the Comte de Saint Paul, who was thus taken into
solemn alliance with the City of Paris as its godchild.

" Beautiful as an angel," Anne Genevieve de Bour-
bon had been called at her marriage, and her beauty
worked such havoc among the susceptible warriors of
the Fronde that they would have risked anything for
her dear sake :

To merit her heart, to please her lovely eyes,
I have made war on kings ; 'gainst gods I'd have sought the
prize,

sang the Due de la Rochefoucauld, as he threw himself
headlong into the Fronde ; but, led out from the battle
of the Porte St. Antoine, his sight almost gone, his
heart bitter with the knowledge of the falsity of the
heart he had coveted, and for which he had risked so
much, he changed his cry into the words : %

For this inconstant heart, I know now to my cost,
I have made war on kings, for it my eyes I've lost !

Madame de Longueville was false to her old husband

120 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

as well as to her lover, and the last years of the Fronde,
says Lemontey, might be described as a tournament
between two women : Genevieve de Conde" and Anie
of Austria, the one trying to flee from her husband, the
other to recall her Cardinal.

V r"
^ 2

o "

^ o

CHAPTER X

HOTEL DE RAMBOUILLET, RUE ST. THOMAS DU
LOUVRE

" A des plus hauts objets e"levez vos de"sirs
Songez a prendre un gout des plus nobles plaisirs,
Et, traitant de mepris les sens et la matiere,
A 1'esprit, comme nous, donnez-vous tout enti^re."

" Les Femmes Savantes," Moliere

CATHERINE DE VIVONNE was born at
Rome during the ambassadorship there in 1 588
of her father, the Marquis de Pisani, her mother
being a Roman lady of ancient lineage and clever mind,
who instructed this only daughter in the culture of her
native country of Italy, from whence, along with cor-
ruption and depravity of morals, came at that period all
the refinements of belles lettres and the arts. At the
early age of twelve, this young daughter was married to
a gentleman twice her age and weighted even then with
honours and distinctions, Charles d'Angennes, Marquis
de Rambouillet, whom she, a mere infant, regarded as
a mature man of the world and respected accordingly.
Nor were distinctions lacking in her own family, for the
very year of her marriage we learn of Henri I V.'s send-
ing her mother, the Marquise de Pisani, to Marseilles to
receive his new wife, Marie de Medecis.

Yet, in spite of her unusual distinction at Court, both
as a Pisani and Savelli, relative of the three last Valois
and Marie de Medecis herself, and on account of her
husband's merits, after a brilliant experience of ten years
in the forefront of its pleasures and excitements, the
young Marquise de Rambouillet, confessing her weari-
ness of noise, confusion and immorality, retired at the

121

122 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

early age of twenty -two from its circle for ever. In so
doing she unconsciously headed a great reactionary
movement, which since 1600 had been seething under-
neath the strata of corruption. With the Italian culture
which the infamous Concini, Marechal d' Ancre, " Enfant
de Florence, la magninque," had introduced into the
Court of Marie de Medecis, he also brought a Floren-
tine and pagan love of pleasure. And this, joining with
the dissolution of morals taught by Henri IV. himself,
soon brought forth in the soil of the French Court an
overwhelming harvest of wickedness and corruption.

Clever in all things, the first employment of the
Marquise de Rambouillet, on giving up the loud and
blatant assemblies of the Louvre, was to beautify her
own home and thus to prepare a social atmosphere in
which to bring up her two sons and five daughters.

The Hotel de Rambouillet, formerly called the
Hotel de Pisani, had been given the Marquise in her
wedding dower by her father, the Marquis de Pisani.
Among the accomplishments of the Marquise was not-
ably that of painting and design ; and, not content with
plans submitted to her for the rebuilding of the old
Hotel Pisani, she took her pencil in hand and became
her own architect. Until her time, the prevailing mode
of architecture was the Italian custom of a large room on
each side of the house with a staircase in the middle ;
she introduced the plan of rooms en suite, with wonder-
ful originality as it seemed, putting the staircase out of
the way at the side. So practical, so convenient, and
so artistic were her architectural innovations, that the
new house became noted throughout Paris for its com-
fort and elegance, and when Marie de Medecis in 1612
began to build her palace of the Luxembourg, the fame
of the Rambouillet having already reached her ears,
she sent her architect to inspect it before beginning his
operations.

A feature which especially struck the visitor to the
Rambouillet was, on the garden side, the long windows
on the ground floor. Reaching from floor to ceiling,
these could be thrown open on to those beautiful gar-

H6TEL DE RAMBOUILLET 123

dens, which extended in those days from the Rue St.
Thomas du Louvre to the Carrousel and the Tuileries.
To-day this is swallowed up in the immense circum-
ference of the modern palace of the Louvre ; no trace
of house, garden or street remains ; nor do the walks
and courtyards of the Louvre betray any sign of those
shady paths and delicious distances, where bel-amour
had superseded the old-time galanterie ; and where, in
its turn, according to the inexorable law of growth,
development and decay, bel-amour degenerated into
affectation and exaggeration.

In this garden in the old days there was a beautiful
fountain on which were inscribed the words of the poet
Malherbe :

Passer-by, seest them this stream at play

Then vanish in a moment ?
Thus the world's glory fades away

And naught but God is permanent.

Three of the spacious drawing-rooms of the Hotel
Rambouillet were used for the reunions of the Mar-
quise, and one of these, whose walls were hung with
blue velvet and panelled in gold, filled with blue velvet
furniture fringed with gold and lace, became so charac-
teristic a setting to the drama of literary ambition and
art creation played within its confines for fifty years
(1615-65) that the very name of the Salon Bleu made
one hold one's breath and speak in awed whispers.
Nothing that a refined and delicate sense could con-
ceive to make a room artistic was lacking in the Salon
Bfat, : the air was perfumed, the eye ravished by rare
and lovely flowers ; on the walls were paintings perfect
in taste and skill ; cabinets full of rarest specimens of
delicate sculpture, enamels, gems and other articles of
vertu stood in the niches and embrasures, while the light-
ing of the salon by lamps of beautiful Venetian glass
a thing new to Paris at the time was matter for
wonder and delight.

Within herself the Marquise had many resources
with which to vary the monotony of her retirement ;

124 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

she loved above all to paint and design, also to read ;
but next to the comedy, the amusement which most
pleased her, but in which she seldom indulged, she
delighted in conversation. For this latter diversion
she needed a coterie, so having made the frame for her
picture, she began drawing about her in it those spirits
most congenial to her own ; and, instead of copying
the dull evenings she had known at the Louvre and
elsewhere, she was wise enough to bring together in
her salon people of widely differing personalities and
culture. The only title of admission to her tasteful
house and refined society was not birth, but mind.
In the artistic corners of that famous Salon Bleu
those alcoves, recesses and studies, arranged and
planned by herself she gathered not only the highest
in the land, but men of letters and savants of all kinds
and conditions. Here distinguished men of the Court
came face to face with simple townsmen ; polite men of
the world affiliated with men of letters ; up against the
ribbon of the Saint Esprit there even rubbed the
doublet of the son of a hatter, a merchant or a notary.
And these different elements were all ruled by the
hand of a delicate woman who longed for a purer, freer
social atmosphere than that found in the circle round
the throne where the ignoble passions of ambition,
greed and vainglory stifled the nobler emotions of the
soul.

Tht precieitx movement, as this revolt came to be
called, has been explained both as a natural revolt
against the dissolution of the epoch, and as the out-
come of a great need for conversation arising after
many years of the silence of war and struggle :
" Licence is brusque, cynicism laconic ; but when men
are good, they long to talk ! " Women, too, elevated
in France at an early period by Louis XII. and Anne
of Brittany out of the state of inferiority which still
existed in England and Germany, had, after the
struggles of the League were over and the Monarchy
had settled down under Henri IV. at the beginning of
the seventeenth century, begun to associate with men

HOTEL DE RAMBOUILLET 125

on the plane of the intellect, and the nation was thirsty
for the intercommunication of conversation. It has
been said that the Italian sings, the German discusses,
the Englishman perorates, but that the French alone
know how to talk. At the Rambouillet la belle
conversation first had full play, and the sexes ap-
proached each other, not with the old-time priere
muette, but on the equal level of mind to mind ; on that
high plateau of platonic love described by D'Urfe in his
epoch-making novel of L'Astrde, the first volume
of which, published in 1610, is said to have introduced
an altogether new kind of gallantry. At the Ram-
bouillet, from the first, they unconsciously lived the life
of the Astre"e ; that is a life of aspiration and honnete
amitie', and set themselves the task of reforming and
purifying their surroundings : thoughts, language,
morals and manners. How did they attempt to do
this, one asks ? First of all by cultivating the taste for
the Beautiful.

We have seen the cult of the Beautiful in the Mar-
quise de Rambouillet's adornment of her house, the
resort of the society. It was also exemplified in her
encouragement of the production of fine works of the
mind by contemporary writers. These were read
aloud, or performed there to an audience of mixed
tastes, but of similar aspirations ; and within those
walls, under that genial encouragement, the trammels
of the Antique were gradually thrown off to allow native
genius and inspiration to find its way back into French
literature.

After the cultivation of the Beautiful, the next duty
of the Marquise and her guests was that of the True.
In her search for the True in Art and Manners, the
Marquise often ran headlong against diplomacy and
cunning, but her uprightness never suffered, and in its
best years the Rambouillet was the Touchstone of
Truth in the deceitful world of the Court and of Paris.
She herself had the courage to repulse the great Car-
dinal Richelieu, when, on one occasion, he sent his
henchman, Pere Joseph, to sound her as to how far she

126 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

would divulge the careless remarks on himself dropped
by her guests in the intimacy of her salon.

" Tell the Cardinal," was her reply, " that I ap-
preciate too well the consideration due his
Eminence to allow evil to be said of him in
my presence."

Very early in the history of the Rambouillet, Riche-
lieu, then the young Armand du Plessis, had read a
paper on la belle galanterie, and in the year 1635
Chapelain, one of the most noted of the prdcieux, gave
a grand discourse at the Academy Centre I' Amour.
Although Gallantry d la mode was tabooed at the Ram-
bouillet, the precieux were none the less interested in
the subject oif Love, and this discourse of Chapelain's
aroused there the greatest discussions.

" Though Love is the natural exercise of the Will,"
said Corneille, "yet Will is the higher force.
And although all passions and affections ori-
ginate in Love, being good or evil according
as the love from which they spring is good
or evil, it is still the Will which must rule
over all emotions. So ephemeral a thing as
Passion should never reign, especially over
the sacred sacrament of marriage, true
marriages being based upon more lasting
things than attraction or passion. Passion,
therefore, must be eliminated by the Will."
With such a standard as this, imagine the indigna-
tion at the Rambouillet when, a short time after
Chapelain had made his discourse against Love, a
certain M. Boissat, who belonged to the party of the
aesthetics of those days, rose in the Academic to
answer his arguments by a long diatribe in favour
of r Amour des corps, in which he attempted to prove
that physical love is not less divine than that of the
soul.

" Scandalous ! " cried the pre"cieux, whose sensibili-
ties were so exquisite that anything so gross as even
the common words used in ordinary conversation of-
fended their ears, while to speak of the body was a

HOTEL DE RAMBOUILLET 127

crime not lightly to be forgiven, physical love being
outside the pale of their reason altogether.

Singularly enough, in that age of coarse gallantry
outside the prtcieux circle, when Calumny walked
openly everywhere, the Marquise de Rambouillet her-
self was the most respected woman in all Paris ; no breath
of scandal ever attached to her name, even the unspar-
ing caricaturist Tallemant des R^aux, always ready to
search into the secrets of his neighbours, singing her
praises without an arriere pense'e. No gallantry, says
M. Cousin, troubled either her life or her salon. Of
course those polite attentions which spring from sudden
attraction and magnetism could not be entirely banished
from a society made up of the two sexes and these
were cultivated with care and enthusiasm within the
limits of decorum and reserve ; the gallantry of the
Rambouillet being thus devoid of that spontaneity and
excitement which is the delirium of its less heavy and
confined expression.

The Marquise's eldest daughter, Julie d'Angennes,
had many admirers, among whom was notably Voiture,
one of the most constant habitues of the Rambouillet.
But of all those who contended for the honour of her
hand, none was so persistent as M. de Montausier,
a gallant distinguished for his bravery as an officer
as well as for his learning. The fair Julie, brought up
in this atmosphere of honn$te amitit, did not long for
marriage, and was quite content with friendship. Thus
for thirteen years she persistently refused the pleading
of her lover. Finally Montausier, who had made no
secret of his attentions from the first, assailed her heart
with a gallantry described by Tallemant as "the most
illustrious ever made," and one which may be said to
adequately represent the gallantry of the Rambouillet

The Guirlande de Julie, as this fantasy was called,
was conceived by M. Montausier, and composed of
eighteen madrigals, written by eighteen different poets
of the Rambouillet M. de Montausier being among
the number underneath certain flowers selected by
the fond lover to symbolise the virtues of his lady-love.

128 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

The whole was bound in a wonderful cover made of red
morocco leather and lined with the same, bearing inside
and out the enlaced letters of Mademoiselle de Ram-
bouillet's name. The frontispiece was a garland, with
the title and dedication delicately inscribed by one of
the most famous caligraphists of the day, who also did
all the writing inside, each flower having a page to
itself with its appropriate poem underneath. The ori-
ginal copy of the Guirlande de Julie sold in the last
century for 14,510 francs, and is now in possession of
a descendant of the Due de la Valliere only two other
copies being made.

This unique love fantasy made a slight impression
on the heart of Julie d'Angennes, and the lover followed
up his advantage by inducing three of her best friends
to plead his cause with her. Accordingly, each one
tried to break down her armour : Mademoiselle Paulet,
Madame de Sable, and last but not least, the Duchesse
d'Aiguillon.

In the early days of her Court life, the Duchesse
d'Aiguillon, then Madame de Combalet, had been a very
prominent member of the Rambouillet circle, and she
had selected Mademoiselle de Rambouillet as her dearest
friend, her attachment to Julie becoming at last the most
serious, the most tender of her existence. The Ram-
bouillet was her asylum in those early days whenever she
could get away from the heavy evenings at the Louvre,
where Marie de Medecis, Anne of Austria and Louis
XIII. did not make a particularly brilliant trio. Escap-
ing to the Rue St. Thomas du Louvre, she luxuriated in
the congenial society of the men of letters and brilliant
women who in the best days of the Hotel Rambouillet
congregated round the Marquise and her daughters.
And so the Duchess had been a witness to the whole
course of the Montausier wooing, and had helped it
along as well as she could by advancing the fortunes
of the Marquis. Therefore it was with alacrity that
she took upon herself the task of pleading- in his
behalf.

" I esteem M. de Montausier. but I have an aver-

H6TEL DE RAMBOUILLET 129

sion for matrimony," Julie d'Angennes said
in reply to Madame d'Aiguillon's eloquent
arguments.

" My child, my child," responded the devout
Madame d'Aiguillori, horrified at such a sen-
timent with regard to one of the holy sacra-
ments of the Church, " there is no such
thing possible before God as aversion to
marriage ; that gives devotion."
The fair Julie, now arrived at the mature age of
thirty-eight, could neither withstand the flattery of the
Guirlande, nor the pleading of her devoted friends, so
with triumph Madame d'Aiguillon persuaded her to
celebrate the wedding at Ruel, and there, just before
the Fronde (in 1645), tne ceremony took place with great
magnificence and rejoicing, the delighted bridegroom
carrying his bride away from the circle she had adorned
for so many years down into the obscurity of one of the
provinces over which he had been, through Madame
d'Aiguillon's efforts, appointed governor.

Fortunately the Marquise had another daughter,
called Angelique, who by some people was more ad-
mired than Madame de Montausier, so that the real
decline of the Rambouillet did not begin until 1652,
when the Marquis de Rambouillet died. This was the
blow which was the beginning of the end, for the love
between the two heads of this household in the Rue St.
Thomas du Louvre was a most unusual one for that
day and generation : perfect sympathy and love seem
always to have united them. The Marquise herself
then began to decline physically, and to feel still more
that strange malady to which no name was given,
as it did not come under either of the two favourite
maladies called the Vapeurs and the Migraine which
since the age of thirty had debarred her from enjoying
any kind of heat.

In 1651-52, therefore, when Mademoiselle de la
Vergne visited the Rambouillet for the first time, its
most glorious days were over the Marquis de Ram-
bouillet had just passed away ; Julie d'Angennes was
9

130 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

married and still away in the provinces ; the Marquise
herself over sixty years of age, and yielding more and
more to the infirmity which prevented her not only
from basking in the rays of the sun, but from enjoying
the delight of the dreamer and poet : the open fire.

Nevertheless, the four ensuing years from 1651-
55, the date of Mademoiselle de la Vergne's marriage
the period not only of her intimacy at the Ram-
bouillet, but of her joyous, merry girlhood happened
to be rather a brilliant aftermath if we may call it so
at the Rambouillet. Although the well-known and
characteristic figures of Mademoiselle Paulet, Voiture,
and Malherbe were missing, there was still a goodly
number of the old school left Mademoiselle de Scudery,
Chapelain and Menage while in the galaxy of rising
stars were such names as La Fontaine, Moliere, Ben-
serade, Boileau. That great prdcieuse belonging to
both the old and the new Madame de Longueville,
" belle comme un ange " still was in the full swing of
the prdcieuse period of her life, and making great stir
in literary circles just then by the celebrated quarrel
in which she was engaged, and in which the whole
Rambouillet joined.

Taking sides against her brother the Prince de
Conti, she sustained Voiture's sonnet of Uranie as finer
than the sonnet of Job written by Benserade, and her
criticism of poor Benserade was so heated that every
one began to pity the unfortunate Job, who in life was
persecuted by a demon, after his death by an angel !
Those who took sides for Uranie were called the Urani-
ans, the partisans of the Prince de Conti and Benserade
the Jobelins. Usually the contests at the Rambouillet
were not more serious than the emulation caused by
making verses on given rhymes, or sonnets and mad-
rigals suggested by such trivial subjects as a lady's losing
her parrot, etc., so that this controversy aroused great
excitement, everybody taking one side or another. One
lady, on being asked to declare her side, and not wishing
to offend either party, said laughingly :
" Oh, I'm for Tobie,"

H6TEL DE RAMBOUILLET 13 [

whereupon a third party called Tobie was immediately
formed.

Two men in particular have made Madame de
Rambouillet and her circle famous and renowned :
Vincent Voiture, who was its contemporary poet-laureate,
and M. Roederer, its eighteenth-century historian. An-
other contemporary, the Sieur de Somaize, observing
the movement most sympathetically, compiled a so-called
Dictionary of the Pre"cieuses. In that day of Imagination
Madame de Rambouillet naturally was given many
names. The Grande Mademoiselle speaks of her as
the Goddess of Athens Dtesse d'Athenes Somaize
named her Rozelinde, Mademoiselle de ScudeVy in
the Grand Cyrus called her Cleomire. But her great
admirer, Malherbe, who in the practice of bel-amour
had selected her as his muse, gave her the name by
which she is best known, and which is an anagram on
her own name of Catherine : Artenice.

Strange to say, the person who introduced Made-
moiselle de la Vergne to the celebrated Artenice, and
to the charmed circle which still gave tone to refined
Paris, was that spurious pre'cieuse, her intimate friend
of the moment, Mademoiselle Angelique de la Loupe,
at that time much esteemed among the pre"cieux.
Very young, and very gay were these two demoiselles
at that period. Marie Madeleine de la Vergne only
just seventeen, was full of life and spirits, with no trace
of ill-health or sadness to detract from the joyousness
of her youth and vitality. Among the other prtcieuses
in his celebrated dictionary, the Sieur de Somaize gives
a picture of her at this time, and his very name for her
indicates joy and happiness, as well as a felicitous dis-
position. Fdliciane, he called her, and of her he said :
" Feliciane is a young, amiable and spirituelle pre-
cieuse of a lively spirit, of agreeable presence.
She is civil, obliging, and a little bantering ;
but she rallies with so good a grace, that she
makes herself beloved by those whom she
treats the worst or at least she does not
make herself hated."

I 3 2 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

The Marquise de Sevigne, the Sieur de Somaize called
Sopkronie, but her name does not appear prominently
at the Rambouillet until the year 1654, when she un-
doubtedly joined the party of the Jobelins, Benserade
having been one of the poets most assiduous in singing
her praises. And a delightful third she must have
made in this trio of youth and gladness formed by
Ftliciane and Mademoiselle de la Loupe. Writing
long afterwards to her daughter, she asked her, speak-
ing of the grave Madame de la Fayette :

" Do you remember that with all her wisdom, we

used to laugh much and commit many follies

together ? "

These follies, whatever they were, must have been
committed during this period of gaiety and joy, before
sadness and ill-health dissipated the spontaneous fresh-
ness from the youth of F^liciane.

Segrais had the audacity to compare Fdliciane to
both Mademoiselle de Scudery and the Marquise de
Rambouillet. Of the former, he said :

" Mademoiselle de Scudery has much mind, but

Madame de la Fayette more judgment ! "
Again, comparing her to the mistress of the Ram-
bouillet :

" Madame de la Fayette learned much of Madame

de Rambouillet, but Madame de la Fayette

had the more solid mind".

These two qualities of judgment and solidity of mind
must have kept her from the exaggerations and ex-
travagances of the Rambouillet, which in 1654-55 were
beginning to be very apparent. The new element
introduced there was not always so discriminating as
the old, and the effort to purify and refine language,
taste and manners, had come to its inevitable reaction :
refinement had become affectation : purity, prudery.
The awakening of these euphuists came in 1658 when
Moliere had the courage to read his famous play of
" Les Precieuses Ridicules " in full session of the Ram-
bouillet. It was at first doubtful as to how they would
take this exposure of their most cherished weaknesses,

H6TEL DE RAMBOUILLET 133

the caricature of their own peculiarities, but as the play
went on, the satire of this master-hand overcame their
vanity, and they gave way without reserve to the enjoy-
ment of their irrepressible mirth.

To this day, one can feel for the two old pedants
Menage and Chapelain after that first representation of
the masterpiece, when, taking Chapelain by the arm as
they went out, Menage said quietly :

" Old fellow, we approve you and I, of all those
foolishnesses which have just been criticised
so finely and with such good sense ; but
believe me, to use the words of St Remi
to Clovis, we must burn what we have adored,
and adore what we have burned ! "
With the decline of the Rambouillet, the Montausiers,
while advancing from a worldly point of view, seemed
to decline morally and intellectually. They were away
from Paris in the provinces of Saintonge and Angou-
mois until 1 66 1 , when the birth of the Dauphin brought
them back, Madame de Montausier having been ap-
pointed Governess of the children of the King. On
returning, both she and her husband became inseparably
identified with the Court, and the old prtcieux instincts
were swallowed up in those of the courtier. In a few
years, the Marquis was made Duke and Peer of France,
and became Governor of the Dauphin, with Bossuet
and Huet as his assistants ; but in 1665, the Marquise
de Rambouillet died, and although the Montausiers
endeavoured to hold together the old salon, it was
already a thing of the past.

Thus life goes on from climax to climax, and happy
the person who in the midst of exaggeration and affec-
tation, can remain in the middle of the road. That
both Mademoiselle de la Vergne and Madame de
Sevigne were able to do this with regard to the Ram-
bouillet and the prdcieuses, was due in the case of the
former to those two invaluable qualities acquired in her
early training : judgment and solidity of mind. In the
case of the latter, it was her sense of humour which
carried her above and beyond to that region where all
is simplicity and freedom.

CHAPTER XI

MADEMOISELLE DE LA VERGNE'S MARRIAGE AT ST.
SULPICE FOUR YEARS IN OLD AUVERGNE

"L'Amour se nourrit de larmes."

ONE of the greatest of life's climaxes was now
swiftly approaching for Mademoiselle de la
Vergne ; and, with the unconsciousness of
those who move towards Fate, she was unaware of
the crisis upon whose brink she stood. Contentment
with her lot in life was uppermost in her mind, for her
friends were devoted to her. Moreover, she was a
welcome guest in the most brilliant gatherings in Paris,
while there yet remained time for her own particular
and intimate coterie, over which hovered always the
bright spirit of her dearly-loved friend, the Marquise
de Sevigne, in whose house she was likewise honoured
above all others. With delight, she sought out the
Sevigne household in the Rue Vieille du Temple every
Friday evening, each week returning home from that
atmosphere where wit, and fun and literary appreciation
warmed the heart and gave wings of inspiration to the
brain, quite prepared to echo the prayer of another
habitue of the Marquise's evenings M. de Saint Pavin.
Praying to God to forgive him his weaknesses,

" Dear Lord," he cried, " I vow to renounce all
the sins of this wicked world, if only Thou
wilt multiply the Friday evenings at the Mar-
quise de Sevigne's ! "

No thought of love or marriage entered the mind
of Marie Madeleine de la Vergne, nor did the question
of age disturb her. Fancy-free, and heart-whole, she

134

MLLE. DE LA VERGNE'S MARRIAGE 135

replied with kind raillery to the heavy gallantry of her
pedant friends, Menage and Costar, laughing at their
absurdities, their amorous poems, their letters, their
quarrels, and their vanities.

Early in the year 1655, however, she began to per-
ceive her friends whispering among themselves, and
looking furtively at her : conspiracy was in the air ; but,
try as she would, she could not unravel the mystery.
Demanding an explanation of the Duchesse d'Aiguillon,
one of the most active of the conspirators, the latter at
last confessed :

"Are you not nearly twenty-two, my child, and not
yet married ? "

"Why should I marry, Madame?" replied Marie
Madeleine earnestly. " I am very happy as I am."

" Ah, but you must marry, child : cela donne devo-
tion ! " said the Duchess, thinking of her friend, Julie
d'Angennes, who for so many years had defied Fate
only to succumb at last.

The Marquise when approached, said the same
thing :

" But you must marry some time, ma belle, so why
not now ? "

" But whom shall I marry ? " asked the perplexed
Marie Madeleine : " il n'y en a pas moyen ! "

" Attendez" said the Marquise "we will find the
most gallant man in all France for you ! '

So, there was presented to Mademoiselle de la
Vergne, as an aspirant for her hand and heart, a gentle-
man of fine fortune and ancient lineage a gallant from
Auvergne, who if not celebrated through his own merits,
had acquired a reflection of fame at any rate through
illustrious members of his family. More especially did
he shine by the lustre from his sister, Angelique de la
Fayette, ci-devant maid of honour to Anne of Austria,
that chastely beloved of Louis XIII., who to escape
the temptations of the Court and her royal lover, had
some twenty years before immolated herself in a con-
vent.

With nervous apprehension, these good friends

136 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

presented the awkward and speechless Comte de la
Fayette to the fastidious Mademoiselle de la Vergne.
Loret describes their meeting in his own humorous
fashion. Brought up before the clever young woman
of whose brilliance and vogue in the Paris salons he
had heard so much, this lord of high degree and
lieutenant of one of the most fashionable regiments
in Paris, lost his tongue completely. Standing there
speechless, he looked, said Loret, like a sot and
benet a fool and booby of a husband. "What
a stupid lout ! " thought the friends, turning away in
despair.

But to their amaze, the delicate and refined Made-
moiselle de la Vergne, consulted as to the impression
the Comte had made upon her at that first interview,
said quietly :

"He seems rather stupid but he has so gentle
and honest an air, I daresay he will do very
well."

Fearful that other interviews might dissipate this
favourable opinion, the solicitous friends hastened to
have the marriage banns published in Auvergne at
the home of the Comte de la Fayette ; and, procur-
ing a special dispensation for the wedding in Paris,
it took place on the I5th day of February, 1655,
at the same old Church of St. Sulpice by this time,
a reformed and beautified old Church of St Sulpice
in the square of St. Sulpice, where twenty-two
years before the child Marie Madeleine de la Vergne
had been made a child of God and promised eternal
life.

Prominent among those who signed the wedding
lines, were the Duchesse d'Aiguillon and the Marquise
de Sevigne, the former again triumphant to have ac-
celerated this climax in the life of her godchild, the
latter half-unselfishly joyful over the happiness of her
friend, and half-tearful over the personal loss which she
herself might have to suffer in the possible absence from
Paris of her inseparable companion.

Loret 's comment on the marriage, was as follows :

MLLE. DE LA VERGNE'S MARRIAGE 137

La Vergne, that lady rare
To whom the term of fair
Belongs most rightfully,
Joining herself in holy sacrament
To her dear lover La Fayette
Has finished the austere diet
Which, though it rend asunder,
Every maiden must be under.

For a short time after the marriage, the newly
wedded pair remained in Paris, where fetes in their
honour increased the usual gaiety. In 1655 tne whole
land was in a state of comparative peace politically,
Mazarin, in spite of the presence in France of the un-
fortunate Queen of Charles I., to whom as daughter of
Henri IV. the kingdom owed allegiance, being em-
ployed in flattering Oliver Cromwell, the Protector of
England.

But the Comte de la Fayette soon grew tired of the
excitements of the capital, and the very summer after
his marriage, the fears of the Marquise de S vigne were
realised, her friend being taken away from the delights
of Paris and from her, down into the country where
once the ancient Celts had had their habitation, into
the antique province of Auvergne, lying far to the south
of Paris. Deep in the solitude of this Auvergnat country
was situated the La Fayette ancestral chateau of Es-
pinasse ; and it was to the seclusion of such a home
that Frangois Motier, Comte de la Fayette, Seigneur
of Nade, Espinasse and Beauregard, Lieutenant of the
Gardes Frangaises, had the courage to take his bride,
Marie Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne, Comtesse de la
Fayette.

Stretching out between the Alps and the Pyrenees,
Auvergne seems to share the characteristics of each
mountain system ; but, melancholy as it is in places,
ravaged by volcanoes in others, there is no more
beautiful district in all the lovely smiling country of
France. For its picturesque landscape, sublime in gran-
deur and nobility, is superior to any disadvantages of
internal or external ravage. And to this day, while

138 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

Auvergne remains less well known than the other
counties of France, some writers, acknowledging it to
be the least known province, still claim it as the most
beautiful. Speaking of the Valley of the Limagne,
Apollinaris Sidonius a Roman priest and writer, who,
going to Auvergne in the middle of the fifth century,
stayed on and as Bishop of Clermont became identified
with the country, said :

" Once visiting it, strangers like myself will find
it so entrancing that never again will they be
able to leave ; but, remaining there, soon
lose in its beauty all remembrance of their
native lands ! "

And here, in old Auvergne, amid such entrancing
surroundings of Nature, the new Comtesse de la Fayette
was suddenly obliged to exchange the sights and sounds
of the Paris she loved so well, where she was herself
appreciated and beloved by an ever-growing circle of
friends, for the outlook upon field and dell, upon river-
side, mountain and stream. Instead of the cries and
calls of the merchants and vendors of the Pont Neuf
and the Vaugirard, her ears distinguished but the lowing
of cattle, the dropping of water on the rocks, the strange
sound of the bagpipe Auvergne's national instrument.
And, in place of the well-known noise and bustle of the
greatest city in France, the deep solitude of an isolated
chateau closed in upon her.

What mattered it to her at first that the antique
chateau of Espinasse was rich in historical memories
that it had belonged to the De la Fayettes since 1543,
when it had been brought in dower to one of her hus-
band's ancestors by a Montmorin bride, and that after
sacking towns and driving nuns out of their convents
in a civil war, this ancestor had himself been killed in
the defence of the chateau of Espinasse, which had then
been taken and partly burned by the rebels in revenge ?
What consolation could she, interested in history as
she was, find for her first loneliness in reading the
chronicles of the glory of the La Fayettes, or in the
knowledge that the lands owned by her husband were

FOUR YEARS IN OLD AUVERGNE 139

among the most ancient in the county : that that member
of which the family was proudest, Gilbert Motier,
Marechal de la Fayette, had in the early fourteen
hundreds, been one of the men of greatest force in
France to drive from his native heath the English
usurpers, and to set the fleur-de-lis firmly upon the
head of Charles VII., his liege lord? And yet she
could not have avoided looking with pride upon the
famous set of ancestral silver decorating her table, when
her husband, for once becoming eloquent, told the story
of how Charles VII. in gratitude to Gilbert Motier,
Marechal de la Fayette, had ordered two hundred livres
taken out of a none so well-filled treasury, and appro-
priated to the purchase of a set of silver, to be given
the Marechal as a New Year's gift.

For the first few weeks, to her homesick ears, the
melodies of interminable bagpipes must have sounded
like funeral dirges, which not even the graceful influence
of the patron saint Amable the gentle, conciliating
saint of the cathedral near at hand could have made
less insistent, until, the adjusting period growing a little
less blatant in tone, she had settled down into harmony
with her surroundings : to a liking for solitude never
a difficult thing for one of her temperament an in-
terest in her housekeeping and for all her esprit
pottique she was eminently practical contentment in
a stupid but very devoted husband, and even into an
interest in the uninteresting provincials about her in
the county magnates, who astonished her by the amount
of brains they manifested, considering they were gens
de province. Also to an interest in the wives of the
latter, who, she allowed herself to say, were not by a
long way si raisonnables as their husbands, but who
fortunately were not in the habit of paying visits, and
therefore did not incommode her. And then the black-
browed, dark-featured Auvergnats, with their coarse,
stupid manners, their patois smacking still of Latin
and Celtic influence, their lack of imagination, and
their unideal poverty of legend and story !

But, in becoming more used to her surroundings,

140 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

and absorbed in her small interior, her fidelity to her
beloved pedants left behind in Paris and Anjou was
not lessened. Writing to M. Menage in these early
days of her marriage, she gives her old friend a graphic
little picture of her surroundings. Congratulating him
on the fact that he has not the pleasure of an acquaint-
ance with these neighbours of hers, she confesses to
the shame of her delicacy that she herself, strangely
enough, is not bored by them although she owns
they do not divert her. The secret of her free-
dom from boredom, she attributes to the golden rule
she has adopted : that is, the determination in her inter-
course with her neighbours to forget herself and her
own interests, and to talk, not of the things of her
world, of which they know nothing, but exclusively of
things in which they are interested ! Fresh from the
Rambouillet as she was at this time, this lack of annoy-
ance in people who must have seemed banal and in-
delicate to a degree, proves most conclusively that she
was not tainted by the defects of the prtcieuses. She
did not even try to debrutalise her provincial neighbours
to use an expression coined by Madame de Ram-
bouillet, and refused by the Academic for its dictionary
but quietly tried to make the most of her surround-
ings by interesting herself in the pursuits and occupa-
tions of others. As she could have had no material
interest in conciliating people of no worldly influence,
this early period of her life should convince carping
critics, anxious to find interested motives in all her
later actions, that with her it was always an instinct to
live in harmony with whomever she was thrown in con-
tact, a peaceful atmosphere being essential to mind and
spirit.

From the time when as a young girl studying Latin
and Italian, she was careful to avoid arousing jealousy,
her feeling vifitting-in had been delicate and instinctive,
and her letter to Manage would be pathetic, if, endowed
with second-sight and reading between the lines, one
could foresee her future with her husband, who at first
according to her own testimony adored her, and was

FOUR YEARS IN OLD AUVERGNE i 4I

loved much by her in return, but who later on sud-
denly passed apparently completely out of her everyday
life.

The letter to Menage ends by an effort to reassure
herself of her happiness :

" I assure you," she says, "that the life I lead is a
very happy one, and that I desire only its
continuance. When one believes oneself
happy, you know that suffices to be so ; and,
as I am persuaded that I am happy, I live
more contentedly than do, perhaps, all the
Queens of Europe."

Few of Europe's Queens had, however, so rough a
soldier for a husband as Madame de la Fayette. For-
merly serving in the Dutch wars, then made Ensign
in the company of the Marshal d'Albret, the Count
had finally become Lieutenant of the Gardes Fran-
9aises, the fashionable regiment of the day, retiring
from which he had apparently sunk into the apathetic
state of an utterly uninteresting country squire. Such
a man could hardly have filled for long the heart and
mind of a woman like Marie Madeleine de la Vergne.
She had gone into marriage, not from conviction, but
because her friends wished it. "Cela donne devotion,"
she was assured by her godmother, and all her friends
had united in urging her to link her fate with that of
this provincial noble. But on the face of it, such doubt-
ful happiness as she describes in her letter to Menage
could not be of long duration.

To judge from the facts, its continuance was short
indeed, for as early as 1659, we find Madame de la
Fayette again in Paris, having left as the sequel
shows both her husband and Auvergne behind for
ever ! The reason that took her back is still a mystery
to all her biographers, as well as to the writers of the
time. And her contemporaries are singularly silent on
the subject, while her friends with one accord, seem to
have tacitly agreed to ignore the separation between
husband and wife, and to keep to themselves any con-
jectures or knowledge they may have had with regard

142 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

to the cause of such separation. Even Loret, whose
business it was to know everything, dismissed the
matter by saying :

To his estate he went away
Like his father in his day,

while she made

Novels at Paris

With the Beaux-esprits.

Some writers have not only attributed to Madame
de la Fayette a book published in Holland and called
Mdmoires de Hollande, but asserted it to be a history
of her own life. The authorship of this book has been
much contested, and is hardly possible, but should it be
true, one might conclude the crime of the Comte de la
Fayette to have been that of unfaithfulness. No proof
has been found to sustain such a theory, however, and
one can conjecture that the only offence of the husband
was that irreparable one of dulness and incompatibility.
Had Madame de la Fayette but left some of those
betraying documents, letters, the cause of the obscurity
and mystery in which so many things are still wrapped
would doubtless have been satisfactorily explained. Of
this period, alas ! there is only the one to Menage above
quoted.

We know that two children were born to her during
the first four years in Auvergne, both of them boys,
the youngest in September, 1659, shortly after which
she returned to Paris, and to the house in the Rue
Vaugirard.

Whatever the reason for the early return, she does
not seem actually to have burned her lares and penates
at once, although the cremating process must un-
doubtedly have begun on leaving Auvergne, and even
if she herself never again visited that melancholy but
delightful province, M. de la Fayette to judge from
the mention made of him in letters of hers to Menage,
and to Madame de Sevigne as late as 1673 often
visited Paris and the separation was an amiable one.

FOUR YEARS IN OLD AUVERGNE 143

When at the Eaux de Vichy in 1676, Madame de
Sevigne writing to her daughter, mentions having re-
ceived a visit from " M. de la Fayette," and Walckanaer
puts in a note to say that she means the Comte de la
Fayette, the son of her intimate friend ! Walckanaer,
however, like all the rest of the world at that time (he
wrote in 1839), believed M. de la Fayette, the hus-
band, to have died shortly after marriage which is not
the case. It seems quite possible, in view of the fact
that the Comte was alive in 1676 and living near Vichy,
that the M. de la Fayette who visited Madame de
Sevigne in 1676 was no other than the husband of
Madame de la Fayette himself, come over from Espi-
nasse to pay his respects to his wife's old friend, espe-
cially as she visited his cousin M. de Bayard, one
of the witnesses of the marriage in 1655, who lived
very delightfully in Auvergne also, at a place called
L'Onglar.

In 1669, when Madame de la Fayette was one
of the witnesses to the marriage of Mademoiselle de
Sevigne", her name is signed : Marie Madeleine de la
Vergne, wife, not widow, of the Comte de la Fayette !

During the four years in Auvergne, Madame de la
Fayette had also had the great sorrow of losing her
mother, Madame Renaud de Sevigne\ We do not
know the exact date of this loss, but according to M.
Walckanaer, Madame de SeVign^'s learned biographer,
it was shortly after her marriage, and in 1656 we find
the Chevalier de Sevigne already established at Port
Royal de Paris, from whence he that year wrote a long
letter to the Monastery of St. Maur.

Always of religious tendencies, the Chevalier had,
until he became head of the Corinthians, formerly
inhabited a little house in the outer corner of the con-
vent of Port Royal de Paris, and before his marriage in
1650, his niece the Marquise had laid the first stone of
a building added on to Port Royal at his expense. We
are not surprised therefore to hear of his retiring to
Port Royal immediately after his wife's death nor that
he lived there in the exercise of the most austere piety

144 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

until his death in 1676 at the age of sixty-six. There
is no direct evidence that he and his stepdaughter
were not in accord, but it was his niece the Marquise,
not Madame de la Fayette, who seems to have visited
him in Port Royal des Champs and with whom he had
most intercourse ; and Madame de la Fayette could not
have felt very kindly toward the man who, having in-
herited all of her mother's fortune, used it during the
twenty years after her mother's death in making addi-
tions to Port Royal, and for other pious charities, so
that when he himself passed away, very little remained
for her or her children. That her mother's death afflicted
her greatly, we may conclude from an undated letter of
condolence to her from Archdeacon Costar :

" I honoured Madame de Sevigny to such a point,
and had received so many marks of her favour
and her goodness, that my own interest would
oblige me to mourn the loss which we have
just had. But I beg you to believe, Madame,
that a consideration of your sorrow has ex-
ceeded that of my own, and that I have felt to
the bottom of my heart the rebound of your
pain," etc.

Beyond this letter, there is elsewhere no hint of how
her mother's death affected Madame de la Fayette : it
is as profound a secret as that of her estrangement with
her husband. Should we endeavour, as is so customary
a practice in the case of distinguished people of whose
lives little is known Shakespeare being the most
illustrious example to gain information of Madame
de la Fayette's life through her books, her novel La
Princesse de C/eves, supposed to be autobiographical,
contains a most touching description of the death of
the heroine's mother, as well as of the intense grief and
pain of the daughter. Searching for an explanation of
the same kind with regard to the trouble with her hus-
band, left without either wife or children down in the
solitude of his old estate of Espinasse, we find one of
the characters in her novel of Zaide crying out in an
agony of self-reproach ;

MDLLE. DE LA VERGNE'S MARRIAGE 145

" The very acme of misfortune is to have to blame
oneself, to have dug the abyss into which one
falls, to have been unjust and unreasonable ;
in fact, to have been the cause of the misfor-
tune with which one is overwhelmed ".
And later on :

" Believe by the cruel experience which I have
made that to lose by one's own fault what one
loves is a kind of affliction which makes itself
felt far more deeply than any other ".
In three of her novels, Madame de la Fayette was
exclusively preoccupied with the subject of conjugal
duty : its claims were very strong in her heart, and
in each case her heroine yielded her own happiness
to that claim. What was then, we ask, the thing
that absolved her in her own life from her marriage
vows ? Had she herself alienated the love of her
husband, had he by some action, some infirmity, ab-
solved both her and his children from their allegiance
to him ?

History is silent on all these points, and the Comte
de la Fayette is altogether a hero of mystery, whose
shadowy, uncorporeal figure is brought but for a fleeting
instant before our eyes by Loret at the moment of his
presentation to his future wife, and again in a perusal
of some of Madame de la Fayette's own letters to M.
Menage wherein it is always with gratitude and affec-
tion that she speaks of him, but from which no details
of his life are to be gleaned.

Tallemant des Reaux in his Historiette on Scarron
tells a little story d propos of the Comte de la Fayette
and the marriage in 1655. At that time, it seems that
Scarron was bringing out a certain Gazette Burlesque ;
and hearing, evidently, the circumstances of the pre-
sentation of the Comte de la Fayette to Mademoiselle
de la Vergne, his Sardonic humour was so aroused that
forgetting, in his love for the humorous and extravagant,
his respect and admiration for the woman whom he
had called toute lumineuse, he made a most amusing

I 4 6 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

story out of it ! A gentleman from Auvergne, ran his
account, came up to Paris one fine Saturday to find
himself a wife, and lo and behold, before the following
Friday, he had not only found one to his liking, but
had already married her a true case, said he, of veni,
vidi, vici. This gentleman was no other than the
Comte de la Fayette, the lady, Marie Madeleine Pioche
de la Vergne.

That Scarron quickly repented him of his unkind
insinuations, and in a following number of the Gazette
tried to excuse himself for writing so of la belle dame
toute lumineuse, Tallemant further chronicles, also that
he wrote a letter to Manage on the subject, knowing
him to be Mademoiselle de la Vergne's good friend.
Menage, well meaning, but awkward and tactless, was
foolish enough to take the story to Mademoiselle de la
Vergne herself, who, however, had neither heard of the
libel nor of the apology, and wisely enough took no
further notice of either.

The mysterious Comte de la Fayette was so in-
explicable to historians, that they conveniently disposed
of him by saying that he died a few years after the
marriage. Family documents in the possession of the
Due de la Tremouille, direct descendant of Madame de
la Fayette's granddaughter, and examined some time
in 1880 by the Comte d'Haussonville, Madame de la
Fayette's delightful biographer, have brought to light
the fact that the Comte de la Fayette did not die until
the year 1683, twenty-eight long years after their mar-
riage ; and that he lived most of that time, at least, in
Auvergne on his estates of Naddes or Espinasse, the
one near Gannat, the other close to the beautiful and
sunny town of Riom. Here he got into all sorts of
quarrels and litigations with the same neighbours with
whom his wife had managed to live so peaceably and
amicably during the four years of her early married life.
And it seems to have been Madame de la Fayette's
duty, both before and after his death, to have straight-
ened out these complications which he had made, for she

MLLE. DE LA VERGNE'S MARRIAGE 147

was constantly engaged with men of the law. In this
connection, she was astonished at the aptitudes she
suddenly discovered in herself, and on one occasion
wrote to Menage, who seems to have helped her in
her legal difficulties, even as she in return gave him
all sorts of practical advice and help in his business
affairs.

"It is an admirable thing to observe what the
interest with which one meets one's business
affairs can do. If these did not concern my-
self, I should understand them no more than
High German, whereas I have them in my
head like my Pater. Every day I dispute
with business-men things of which I know
nothing, and in which my interest alone gives
me knowledge."

Thus, in spite of her protestations of desiring only
the continuance of the first happy days of her marriage,
and the quiet of old Auvergne, her content there was
of short duration. In spite of the birth of her two
children, her vaunted interest in her house, her adoring
husband : in spite, too, of her love for solitude which
had seemed so keen and unchangeable the fact remains
that she left it all before four years were over to return
to Paris !

The only knowledge we have of Madame de la
Fayette's communication with her friends left behind
in Paris after her marriage, is the letter to Manage,
and some verses in Italian written by the latter and
set to music. These verses are called " The Heart's
Anguish," and are headed by the following explana-
tion :

" Marie de Rabutin, later Madame de S6vigne\
separated from her young friend Madame
de la Fayette, who has just married and
left for Auvergne, augments ^ instead of
lessens her sorrow by the song."
One of the verses thus describing the sorrow of the
Marquise, runs as follows :

148 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

Now that no longer my soul is enthralled
By the sound of my angel's song,

Now that naught on my waiting ear falls
Save the sighs that in my bosom throng,

Alas ! cruel fate that thou dost thwart

My soul from exhaling in sighs from my heart !

MARIE DE RAIJUTIN-CHANTAT., MARQUISE DE SEVIGNE

FROM A CONTEMPORARY ENGRAVING

CHAPTER XII
LA MARQUISE DE sviGN

" Who is it that says most? Which can say more
Than this rich praise, that you are you?"

Shakespeare

CONSIDERING the fact that in this day and
generation few ancient documents have es-
caped the scientific examination of the count-
less archaeological and antiquarian societies of modern
times, the secrets of Madame de la Fayette's inmost
emotional life have been extraordinarily well kept
through the centuries. In reality, there were but
two heart influences in her life worthy of the name :
the one entered it in extreme youth, and continued till
the end : the other, coming into it when mind and nature
were mature, remained to bless it during twenty-five
years of closest companionship, only to leave it desolate
and comfortless for ten lonely years thereafter.

At sixteen, Marie Madeleine de la Vergne gave her
young girl's love and confidence to the brilliant Marquise
de Sevigne of twenty-four, and for forty years there
was not on either side one shadow upon that first en-
thusiasm, no iota of diminution in the strength of the
initial soul's outgoing.

And yet these two friends were totally unlike in
character, in circumstances and in tastes. The bond
that united them, therefore, was that strongest one, after
all, of likeness in unlikeness. Two souls with but a
single thought, two hearts that beat as one, find each
other rather tiresome at times, but two brains that
stimulate each other, and ever find something new and
startling to awaken interest, may with safety begin a

149

150 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

friendship. Rare is it, however, for even such a bond
to last forty years. To analyse the possibility of such
a relationship, many things must be presupposed for
instance, entire lack of jealousy on both sides ; an extra-
ordinary belief in each other ; mutual admiration and
respect. Above all things how beautiful and how neces-
sary is that quality of Faith : how many friendships
are wrecked for the lack of it ! That both women pos-
sessed this quality to an extraordinary degree, is shown
in all their relationships, but in none more clearly than
in their commerce with each other tested through forty
long years of companionship.

Seven years older than her friend, Marie de
Rabutin-Chantal was born in Paris in the year 1626,
of a great family of Bourgogne. Becoming an orphan
at seven years of age, she lived a short time with her
grandmother, after the latter's death being brought up
by her uncle, the Abbe de Coulanges, whom she adored,
and whom she affectionately called " Le Bien-Bon ".
Her very extensive education was conducted by Manage
and Chapelain, who taught her Latin, Italian and
Spanish. At eighteen years of age, she married a
gentleman of Brittany, the Marquis de SeVigne^ by name,
by whom she had two children, a daughter whom she
worshipped with a passionate, almost violent, adoration,
and a son Charles, afterwards the Marquis de Sevigne.
The Marquise had been married six years when
the young Mademoiselle de la Vergne made her ac-
quaintance, her youngest child, Charles, being two
years of age ; but already she was noted for her wit and
repartee, her gaiety and charm. The whole world still
feeds on her sayings :

" She is brusque," said Tallemant, "and never can
she refrain from saying anything bright that
comes into her head, no matter whether it is
a little broad or not ; indeed, she rather affects
these things, and always finds a way of making
them fit the occasion."

With all her gaiety and natural light-heartedness, the
Marquise, like her friend, was full of trust and faith in

LA MARQUISE DE SfiVIGNl* I5I

those whom she loved ; and this quality was put to
the severest tests by her husband, himself not only of
most unfaithful nature, but moody, taciturn and difficult
on every side. Yet the Marquise could never forget
the fleeting happiness of the first years of her marriage,
or the love which in those moments of girlish abandon
she had given so generously, so to the end she loved
her debonnair husband, unworthy of her as he was in
every way. But he, even in admitting that others
might find his wife attractive, confessed that he himself
was absolutely insensible to her charms. Conrart,
founder of the Academic Franchise, summed up the
difference in their feelings toward each other by saying
that the Marquis de Sevigne respected his wife without
loving her, while she loved him without respecting him !
Debarred from allowing her greatest tenderness to
find legitimate exercise towards her husband, the
Marquise concentrated all the warmth of her nature
on her children and friends, especially on her daughter.
The Marquis had been drawn into the Fronde by
his uncle the Chevalier, Mademoiselle de la Vergne's
stepfather, and, as Cardinal Retz, also a relative of
theirs, was likewise so much involved, the Marquise
though keeping aloof from active participation in the
war, could not avoid a certain passive connection with
the Frondist friends of her uncle and husband. Thus
in 1650, before she met Mademoiselle de la Vergne,
Loret chronicles a grand supper given by the Sevignes,
after the stereotyped evening drive of the elite, to no
other than the Duchesse de Chevreuse ! One can well
imagine the Marquise's lukewarm enthusiasm for the
Fronde and its extravagances being quickly extin-
guished on seeing her quiet house invaded by^a
roistering crowd of Frondists, and knowing that a fete
given by her would make its way to posterity in the
following :

We must here make mention

Of a grand collation,

Which to the Duchesse de Chevreuse

SeVigne of race frondeuse

152 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

Gave four days ago or five

On returning from the Drive.

There were seen by candle-blaze,

Throats most fair unto the gaze ;

There did many a gallant man

Eat his full of Ortolan.

Praise of wine was chanted free,

A hundred times they said, no, yes, no see !

The Fronde, 'twas said, it smacked of there,

And stolen was a plate most rare.

Some soup was spilled upon the floor

And really I know nothing more I

Soon after this affair, the Marquise went down into
Brittany with her children ; and while there, news came
to her that her husband had been killed in a duel.
Though most people considered this a happy riddance
for her, she herself felt otherwise, and mourned the
Marquis sincerely. Even before her husband's death,
she had been surrounded by admirers, but now more
than ever she absorbed her warmer feelings in her
children and her friends, the nearest of the latter being
Mademoiselle de la Vergne. Her sentimentality, such as
it was, for others than her daughter, was jocose, rounded
out by a laugh or a witticism, as on that occasion when
she must greatly have astonished her old teacher and
" martyr," Menage, one day in the presence of many
gay gallants, by suddenly throwing her arms around his
neck and kissing him on both cheeks : " Ah," said she
archly, when they laughed and rallied her about it,
" 'twas so they kissed in the primitive church ! "

Still, indifferent as she was to gallantry, the Mar-
quise enjoyed masculine society. She was clever
enough to prevent her lovers from going too far, but
when she perceived that her coldness was driving a
gallant from her side, she was also adroit enough to
bring him back again by a brilliant smile or a kind word.

To maintain friendliness between herself and her
would-be lovers was easier, however, than to keep the
peace among the swains themselves. Unavoidable
was an occasional outbreak, like that at the end of the
Fronde in 1652, when her uncle the Chevalier de Se"-
vignd as head of her house, felt it incumbent upon him

LA MARQUISE DE SEVIGNE 153

to challenge a gentleman who had insulted another in
her house an admirer of the Marquise's whose rank was
no less than that of a duke. Fortunately the intention
of the combatants was discovered by the authorities ;
and as duelling, so prevalent during the reigns of
Henri IV. and Louis XIII., was by this time strongly
interdicted, when the parties assembled for the combat,
they were surprised to see two guards of the Due
d'Orleans there before them. Moreover, these guards,
each taking one of the principals under his charge,
marched off with him, thus averting bloodshed, and
relieving the fears of the Marquise and Mademoiselle
de la Vergne for the safety of the Chevalier. Yet, as
the Due de Rohan, the Chevalier's opponent, was
suspected of himself having warned the authorities,
rather a lurid light was shed upon his courage, and the
affair was hotly discussed in Court and Frondist circles.

Though so virtuous, so absorbed in her maternal
duties and compensations, like beautiful women In
general, Madame de SeAagne was not without her own
romance a romance centred round one of the most
dangerous and celebrated gallants at the Court of the
young Louis Quatorze : no other, in fact, than Nicolas
Fouquet, Minister of Finance. Though placed in so
important a position, Fouquet was noted for his extra-
vagance and prodigality. He was a patron of the arts,
of literature, and of beauty : his establishments outdid
the royal residences in magnificence ; his/tes at Vaux
and St. Mand6 surpassed any given at Versailles, St.
Germain or Fontainebleau.

So supreme was the confidence of this Minister of
Finance in his own grandeur and security, that when
in 1 66 1 Mazarin was ill with his last illness, and all the
Court, persuaded that Fouquet would be Prime Minister
in his stead, awaited him in the ante-chamber of his hotel,
Fouquet, pretending to be in his study working alone,
in reality had descended by a private staircase into his
garden, and was there carelessly whiling away the
precious hours in the company of his nymphs and
dancers !

154 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

Was Louis envious of all this magnificence? It
was rumoured indeed that he was jealous of his minister,
but not of his magnificence : at that time the young
King was most interested in affairs of the heart, and it
was here that Fouquet stood in his way : it was this
that occasioned his downfall. From the ranks of a very
good but not particularly elevated family of Bretagne,
Fouquet had mounted to the post of Minister of
Finance, nay he had even dreamed of becoming Maza-
rin's successor, and Prime Minister of France. But a
too great confidence in himself and his friends arrested
his ambitious flight.

One day, roaming through the gardens of Vaux,
Fouquet's magnificent estate, the King had come upon
a lovely portrait of La Valliere. His infatuation for
the beautiful Louise was at that time new and strong,
nor was it ever his habit to forget or forgive ; from
that moment, Fouquet's fate was sealed, especially as
there was also a Colbert to reckon with a Colbert also
in love with the inamorata of the King. Not even the
intercessions of Fouquet's former love and friend,
Mademoiselle de la Valliere herself induced to inter-
cede for him by the Marquise de SeVigne availed to
save this lover of luxury and magnificence and beauty,
him whose motto, "Where can I not mount?" be-
trayed his proud and confident spirit. Louis XIV. did
not at first allow Fouquet to realise his disgrace, but
conducted his investigations secretly, to the last choos-
ing to blind the eyes of his minister. And it was during
the pleasures and magnificence of a. fete at Vaux planned
by Fouquet for the King himself that the coup defoudre
suddenly descended on the head of the generous host !
There, on his own ground, Fouquet was arrested by
the celebrated d'Artagnan, Captain of the King's Mous-
quetaires, and taken to Paris to await his trial.

Some people affirm that Fouquet came nearer the
heart of the Marquise de Sevign6 than any one else ; but,
even in the height of his success and greatness, he too
was successfully kept at a distance ; and it was only in
his disgrace that he fully realised the value of the friend-

LA MARQUISE DE SEVIGNE 155

ship which she gave him instead of love a friendship
which survived his disgrace, the malice of gossiping
tongues and the shock of finding that he had been so
unwise as to put her most innocent and inoffensive
letters in the famous casket containing the secrets of his
gallant successes elsewhere. At the time of his dis-
grace, when his cabinets were searched by the King
and Le Tellier for incriminating papers and found to
bulge not with State papers, but with love-letters from
the highest dames in the land, the letters of the Marquise
de Sevigne were also found. Naturally this fact caused
tremendous consternation to Madame de Sevigne and
her friends.

"I am most angry," she wrote to Menage, "that
Fouquet should have put my letters in the
casket of his poulets (hens) ! "

Bussy de Rabutin, one of the most active of her
defenders, had taken the precaution before taking up
her cause, to go to Le Tellier and ask him in confidence
how the Marquise was implicated. Le Tellier at once
relieved his mind by saying that he and the King had
found the letters of the Marquise merely those of a
friend those of a friend so full of wit that they gave
the King far more pleasure than any of the insipid
sweetness of real love-letters such as the others in the
casket. But, added Le Tellier, most unseasonably did
the Surintendant mix love and friendship !

Bussy himself, the first to lay siege to the Marquise's

heart after her husband's death, as he had been the

foremost of her lovers before, declared all her warmth

to be that of the mind. But, said he, philosophically :

" Tis better to wish what you wish, provided one

cannot get what one wishes oneself ! "
Wherefore, he continued ;

" One is only too glad to remain among your friends.
And there is no one in this kingdom but you
who can reduce her lovers to contenting them-
selves with friendship."

Of the intimacy between the Marquise de Sevigne
and Madame de la Fayette, we know most through the

156 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

immortal letters of the former to her daughter. These
contain so many details of the most intimate and homely
kind regarding Madame de la Fayette, that from them
the outline of her whole life history might be sketched
in in broad strokes. Alas ! that this can be but an outline
after all. Even as circumstances had emphasised the
place of letter-writing in the life of Madame de Svign,
even so this art, so great a diversion and comfort to the
Marquise, was almost completely crowded out of Madame
de la Fayette's life not only by disinclination, but by
other preoccupations. Never in her intercourse with
her most intimate friends, could Madame de la Fayette
give free rein to her pen as was the Marquise's habit
laisser trotter la plume, le bride sur le COM. A few of
her letters to her friend still exist, but for most of our
information about her, we must turn to these letters of
Madame de Sevigne an inexhaustible mine of interest
and delight as they are. They do not begin, however,
until 1670 the year after the marriage of Mademoiselle
de Sevign6 and the date of her departure for Provence
as the wife of the Marquis de Grignan. It is, in fact, to
the greatest sorrow of the Marquise de Sevigne's life
that we owe the most faithful, entertaining and piquant
picture that exists of the world of Paris in the reign of
Louis Quatorze. Loving her daughter above all things
in the world, it was cruel that she herself should have
brought about that which she most dreaded a separa-
tion from this daughter. This she did by marrying her
daughter extremely well, as she thought, to the Comte
de Grignan, a man much older, who it is true had been
twice married before, who changed his wives as he
would his coach, said Bussy de Rabutin, but who was
a fine husband from Madame de SeVigne's point of view.
And at the time there was no reason to fear a separa-
tion, the Comte de Grignan being engaged at Paris in
a diplomatic position : Madame de Sevigne therefore
counted upon always having her daughter near her :
instead of which, the marriage had only taken place a
few months when the Comte de Grignan was appointed
Governor of Provence, and removing to that far-away

LA MARQUISE DE SEVIGNE 157

province, continued there throughout the lifetime of his
mother-in-law, whom he thoroughly admired and appre-
ciated.

To understand these letters, one must know some-
thing first of all of the daughter to whom they were
addressed, and who was the constant recipient of the
" flower of the Marquise's spirit, mind and sight ". After
which, we must become acquainted with the son, who
formed a great part of the life of both mother and
daughter.

As a girl, Franchise, Marguerite de SeVigne", was un-
doubtedly beautiful. Her mother called her the pretti-
est girl in France : Menage speaks of her as the miracle
of our days : but, owing to her lack of what distinguished
her mother and, although like her mother she too was
most graceful and a beautiful dancer her success in
society does not seem to have been very great. She
is said to have had a taste for misfortune and sadness,
even as her mother was inclined toward pleasure and
joy. Madame de la Fayette's famous portrait of the
Marquise de Sevigne" at the age of thirty-three, written
anonymously in 1659, at the time when the rage for
portrait painting had been instigated by the Grande
Mademoiselle, testifies to this joyousness of spirit natural
to the mother.

"Joy," she said, "is the veritable state of your
soul, and sorrow more contrary to you than
to any one whomsoever."

To Madame de Se"vigne's charm of manner she also
pays tribute :

" You are the most civil and obliging person that
ever lived ; and by the free and sweet air in
all your actions, the simplest compliments
of courtesy appear in your mouth protestations
of friendship." . . .

"In short," sums up the Inconnue, with ^ the
enthusiasm of twenty-five, " you have received
graces from Heaven which have been given
to you alone, and the world is indebted to
you for having come into it to show it a

158 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

thousand agreeable qualities heretofore un-
known to it."

Of the daughter, on the contrary, Bussy de Rabutin
said :

"That woman has mind, but a bitter mind, and
an insufferable conceit. She will make for
herself as many enemies as her mother makes
friends and adorers."

Mademoiselle de SeVign6 confessed of herself that she
was of a nature but little communicative a mild way
of stating her pride, reserve and timidity qualities
which showed themselves, strange to say, most con-
spicuously in her mother's presence, before whom she
could hardly speak for timidity. Indeed, she always
appeared so embarrassed and indifferent that at times
the poor mother imagined she must have a real aversion
for her.

Her pride was that of the timid person who depre-
ciates his own abilities, all the time desiring an assurance
of their superiority. Thus while Madame de Grignan
was one of the first to appreciate the worth and import-
ance of her mother's letters, carefully preserving them
for posterity, her own replies, when they finally came back
into her hands, she must just as carefully have burned
a proof of pride indeed, for she was fearful lest her
own epistolary inferiority which as we learn from her
mother's letters, she was continually deprecating should
be discovered. Consequently, the fact that very few of
her letters now exist has perhaps led to wrong estimates
of her character.

" Eh ! Mon Dieu, my daughter," wrote Madame
de SeVignd in 1672, "what do you say to
me ? What pleasure you take in speaking ill
of your person, your mind ; in depreciating
your good conduct ; in finding that one must
be very kind to have thought of you ? Al-
though you surely do not think all that, it
wounds me, you annoy me ; and although I
should not reply to things said in joking, I
cannot prevent myself from scolding you."

LA MARQUISE DE SEVIGNE 159

"Your thoughts and tirades are incomparable," the
mother would reply on other occasions to these depre-
ciatory remarks, in her doting fondness hoarding up for
her daughter every flattery of her style paid by those
friends to whom she was in the habit of reading the
letters she received from this child of her adoration
flattery paid by these friends, who even while not
understanding the violence of the mother's devotion,
humoured her in her great weakness. However little,
on the other hand, Madame de Grignan may have
deserved her mother's affection, whatever reproach
may have been brought against her for her coldness,
she was at any rate the most faithful of correspondents,
and in all the twenty-five years of separation, never lost
a single post, writing twice every week-

Strangely enough Madame de Grignan had no love
for any of her mother's friends. The Due de Chaulnes,
Governor of Brittany, closely allied to Madame de
Sevigne at the Rochers, her Breton home, she found
dull : Emmanuel de Coulanges, so noted for his bon-
mots and genial society, bored her ; she teased Corbin-
elli ; she rudely refused a present from Cardinal Retz,
who called her his dear niece, and wished to make her
his heiress ; nor would she give the Cardinal her
friendship, even in the face of her mother's statement
that she herself would be inconsolable if she refused it
him. But of them all, she seemed most to dislike
Madame de la Fayette, to whose mind and qualities
her jealousy blinded her. In 1675, Madame de SeVigne"
complained of this persistent enmity towards her best
friend.

" You are always very naughty," she wrote, " when

you speak of Madame de la Fayette,"
and one of the rare existing letters of Madame de
Grignan casts a slur on Madame de la Fayette, which
coming as it does from the daughter of one who knew
her best if one does not take the injustice of jealousy
into account has an unpleasant influence on those judg-
ing of Madame de la Fayette's character. A propos of
Madame de la Fayette's infrequent letters, she wrote :

160 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

"See there! see there! Does your Madame de
la Fayette love you so extraordinarily ? She
does not write you two lines in ten years !
She knows how to do what suits her ; she
keeps her ease and her quiet, and in the midst
of this indolence has an eye to her own
advantage."

Goaded on by this letter, Madame de Sevigne during
an absence in Provence evidently complained to her
friend of the rarity of her letters, for soon afterwards
she received the following reply from Madame de la
Fayette :

"Eh bien, eh bien ! ma belle, what reason have
you to cry like an eagle ? I ask you to wait
to judge me until you are here. What is
there so terrible in those words : My days are
full? It is true that Bayard is here, and
that he does my business for me ; but when
he has run about the whole day for my service
can I write ? I still must talk to him. When
I myself have been out doing errands, and
return, I find M. de la Rochefoucauld, whom
I have not seen all day ; can I write ? Gour-
ville and M. de la Rochefoucauld are here ;
can I write ? But when they are gone ? Ah !
when they are gone ! It is eleven o'clock,
and I am sleepy. I am staying with our
neighbours because they are building in front
of my windows. But after dinner ? I have
the headache. In the morning ? Still I do
not feel well, and am taking some herb
bouillons, which intoxicate me. You are in
Provence, ma belle, your time is free, and
your head even more so ; the taste for writing
lasts for you for all the world ; with me it has
passed for all the world. Do not measure
our friendship by writing. I shall love you as
much not writing you more than one page in a
month, as you do me writing ten in eight days."
If Madame de Sevign's complaint against her friend

LA MARQUISE DE SEVIGNE 161

was that she wrote so seldom, Madame de la Fayette's
counter-complaint might have been that born as she
was for friendship, Madame de Sevigne" revelled in it
sometimes at the expense of concentration : she had so
many friends, that her best friend, who was more dis-
criminating in her affections, thought herself justified in
making the assertion that she was the one who loved
most. Thus the i4th of July, 1673, Madame de la
Fayette wrote to the Marquise :

11 Be resolved, ma belle, to see me sustain all my

life at the point of my eloquence, that I love

you more than you love me."

In Madame de Sevigne's defence, it must be said that
while Madame de la Fayette enjoyed perfect freedom
in her friendships : no jealous person questioned her
right to love as she pleased : no one criticised her
friends to her : no one made devotion difficult, Madame
de SeVigne had to encounter and surmount the enmity
of the person she loved best against this friend who
came next in her affections. Madame de la Fayette
tried very hard to conciliate the daughter of her friend :
nearly every letter of Madame de Sevigne to Madame
de Grignan contains some message from the Faubourg,
such as :

" I have given your compliments to Madame de

la Fayette, and to M. de la Rochefoucauld,

and Langlade ; all these love you, esteem

you, and would serve you on every occasion."
" Madame de la Fayette tells me she is going to

write you."
" Madame de la Fayette returns your good wishes :

her health is not good."
" Madame de la Fayette is very grateful for your

letter. She finds you very honest and very

obliging."
" Madame de la Fayette embraces you, and begs

you to keep for her the new friendship you

promised her."
Etc., etc.
But in vain did the mother try to turn aside her

162 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

daughter's dislike : no flattery could ever avail to
dissipate it, not even the fact that Madame de la
Fayette had her portrait in her room where she could
look at it every day. Not even the following assurance
from her mother availed to move her :

" Madame de la Fayette cedes the first place near
me to you without difficulty : this justice
renders her worthy of the second, and she has
it too ".

In their letters, mother and daughter had the fantasy
of speaking of their friends and acquaintances under
the sobriquets of the powers of the Elements. Thus
they named Louis XIV. Passionate Fire ; the neglected
Queen Marie Therese, White Cold Snow ; Made-
moiselle de la Valliere, Weeping Dew ; Madame Scarron,
the Thaw, or the Royal Ice which melts. Of Madame
de la Fayette they always spoke as le Brouillard, the
Fog. M. de Sainte Beuve takes away the gloominess
which this name suggests by telling us that the fog
lifted sometimes and disclosed charming vistas where-
upon there immediately rises before our eyes the vision
of a lake enveloped in fog : suddenly as we gaze, one
end of the vapour rises, and behold ! there is the
gorgeous sunlight, suffused and intensified by the very
fog through which it has passed.

No fogs obscured the clear atmosphere of the life
of the Marquise de Sevigne : storms and tempests there
were of course, many dark days, like that, for instance,
on which her jealous cousin Bussy de Rabutin told her
of her husband's devotion to Ninon de Lenclos : or that
early one in her married life on which news of her faith-
less but beloved husband's duel for another woman was
brought her in Brittany days later on in life of rheu-
matism and suffering days when the post from her
daughter did not arrive, when her letters were colder
than usual but her nature had no trace of melancholy
in it.

Most akin to her in this respect, was her son Charles

who in fact resembled her in mind and nature far

more than Madame de Grignan. Of light and careless

LA MARQUISE DE SEVIGNE 163

character, Charles de Sevigne" was au fond goodness
and honour itself, and best of all he adored his mother,
having no trace of jealousy towards his sister in his dis-
position. Whenever the Marquise attempted to chide
him for his dissipations or extravagance, he responded
so gaily, that she could not help laughing in return, and
the whole affair would end in the best understanding
in the world between mother and son, their whole inter-
course throughout life being that of two jolly comrades.
Yet the mother fully realised her son's weaknesses and
did not always do him justice.

" Your petit frere is here," she would write the

sister ; or :

" Let us talk a little of your brother, my daughter.
He is everything that pleases others ; he is
weak to the point that he makes me ill. . . .
His sentiments are all true, are all false, are
all cold, are all burning, are all frivolous, are
all sincere ; in a word, his heart is mad ! "
" Oft behind his little words, I see his little senti-
ments," she said on one occasion, but after all, when the
years had toned down his peculiarities, she ended by
saying, in spite of everything :

" He is worth his weight in gold ! "
At one time the news she sent his sister of her petit
frere was most alarming :

" Your brother is entering under the laws of Ninon.
I doubt whether they are good for him there
are some minds to which they are of no value
she spoiled his father we must recommend
him to God. When one is a Christian or
at least when one wants to be one, one cannot
see excesses without sadness."

Ninon held sway over the son of the Marquise for
some time, and Madame de Se"vigne had reason to call
her dangerous : this Ninon, who acknowledged that
she found the young Marquis de SeVigne" to have the
simplicity of a dove, and to resemble his mother : but
that Madame de Grignan had all the salt of the family.
The Marquise, observing the course of his relation-

164 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

ship with the siren, soon acknowledged that she was
becoming anxious as to the evil Ninon was doing
her son, and feeling called upon to extricate him in
some way from toils closing tighter round him, she called
upon Madame de la Fayette to help her. This the latter
did with such success, that Ninon finally sent back all
the Marquis's letters, etc., and gave him his definite congt.
In the meantime, both mother and daughter could not
help enjoying the humour of Ninon's names for this
lover, who imagined himself the most passionate of
gallants, but who in truth was in love with Passion
itself, never with its object, having acknowledged his
fickleness of character to the Due de la Rochefoucauld.
It was his ambition, he confessed, to die of a love that
he did not feel ! For this indifference, to real passion,
he had the ingratitude to reproach his mother ;

"Why," he complained, "did you give me some
of your ice, when you might have given it all
to my sister ? "

Realising his peculiarities, Ninon the Straightforward
had called him " Milksop " ; " Soul of Pap " ; " Body of
Wet Paper " ; " Heart of a Pumpkin fried in Snow " !
Not very complimentary terms, these, surely, but very
indicative.

Madame de la Fayette, however, was fond of the
Marquis, and made far better progress with him than
with his sister. There existed, in fact, a real friendship
between them : when in monetary difficulties, it was to
his mother's friend that he turned for assistance, and
to plead his cause, while she did not hesitate to remind
the Marquise that the son had as many claims on her
as the daughter, and that she must not lavish everything
on the one object. In 1673, she even wrote to Madame
de Sevign6 to intercede for the Marquis after an un-
usual bout of extravagance occasioned by the expenses
of one of his military campaigns, he being Guidon in
the regiment of the Gendarmes Dauphin, and engaged
in the long campaign of the Palatinate :

" Your son is leaving here, and came to say good-
bye to me, and to ask me to write you his

LA MARQUISE DE SEVIGNE 165

reasons about the money. They are so good
that there is no need for me to explain them
to you at length, for even at the distance at
which you are you will see the expenses of a
campaign that never finishes. Every one is
in despair, every one is being ruined. It is
impossible that your son should not do as the
others do, and besides the great love you have
for Madame de Grignan necessitates your
showing a little to her brother."

Charles de SeVigne, in spite of being a very conscien-
tious young officer, was never able to acquire promotion
in the army : he detested his position, so after engaging
in several important campaigns, he finally sold out at
an early age, married the daughter of a member of
Parliament in Brittany and settled down into a very
good and pious country squire.

Both before and after his marriage, his mother lived
with him a great deal, also spending as much time as
she could in Provence ; but the greater part of her
later years were spent alone or with her " Bien-Bon "-
either in the Rue Vieille du Temple and its neighbour-
hood, the historic Quarter of the Marais, that recovered
marsh centred round the Place Royale, or at the ad-
jacent Hotel de Carnavalet, to which she removed
in 1677, and where she lived until her death in 1696,
nineteen years later. Although the Hotel Carnavalet
is now the authorised shrine of the SeVign family,
even to-day the memory of the Marquise clings most
ineradicably to two other places : first of all to Les
Rochers, those poor rocks, as she called the old chateau
and park situated in a melancholy, ill-cultivated part of
Brittany, whose only beauty lay in the grand old woods
filled with silence, where the gay Marquise in her later
life loved to stay for days together in absolute solitude,
dreaming, it was supposed, of the early days of her
married life spent there, when for a short space she
had held the love of her volatile husband, and dru
her only cup of happiness in the flower of her twenty
years.

166 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

No wonder that her memories connected with Les

Rochers were not all agreeable. Even those of her

daughter, were, as she told her, in a letter from there,

so keen and tender that they could hardly be endured.

"You can well understand," she said, "the effect

they have on a heart like mine."
So cherished is the souvenir of the brilliant Marquise
at the Rochers to-day that the fine old allies, where the
trees form an arch overhead excluding the hot rays of
the sun, still bear the names she gave them : one is
called " L'Infini," another " La Solitaire," another " Le
Cloitre " all breathe still of her. Near Les Rochers,
in the town of Vitre, the ancient Tour de Sevigne,
where Madame de Sevigne often entertained her
friends, is still standing. In 1671 she wrote:

" Yesterday I received all Brittany in my Tour de

Sevigne ". '

The other place so identified with her name, Livry,
an estate not far from Paris, was the home of the Abbe
de Coulanges, the " Bien-Bon ". And even after the
death of the Abbe, her uncle, Livry was still a favourite
resort of the Marquise. How she loved its " sweet and
gracious air," its flowers, which betrayed the "triumph
of the month of May" its peace, its quiet! Horace
Walpole, visiting Livry in 1766, wrote as follows to
his friend George Montague :

"There does not exist a single tree which remem-
bers that charming woman, because in this
country every old tree is a traitor who has
merited the death penalty ; but the plantations
are not too new, and may very well have been
such as they were at that time ".

He goes on to tell that the Abbe occupied a very
decent and commodious house, but our interest is
centred in what he says of \hepavillon given Madame
de Sevigne by her uncle for her own special apartment :
it consisted on the ground floor of -a little dining-room,
and an arcade, the niches of which formerly open are
now closed up, and on them are painted in fresco the
medallions of Madame de Sevigne, Madame de Grig-

LA MARQUISE DE SEVIGNE 167

nan, Madame de la Fayette and M. de la Rochefou-
cauld. Next to these frescoes the most interesting
thing in the place is the monogram of the Abb6 de
Coulanges, and a little bridge in the garden the same
on which the Marquise used to stand and await the
coming of the courier who brought her her daughter's
letters.

It was neither at Les Rochers, nor at Livry, nor in
the historic old Carnavalet, however, that Madame de
Sevigne finally experienced that change which all her
life she had so dreaded, but at the Chateau de Grignan
in Provence, where she had been nursing her daughter
through a severe illness, and where she herself suc-
cumbed to the disease of small-pox. Of this change,
she once wrote as follows to that beloved daughter :
" I was embarked upon life without my consent I
must leave it a thought which overwhelms
me. But how shall I leave it? Where?
In what frame of mind ? How shall I stand
with God ? I engulf myself in these thoughts,
and I find Death so terrible that I hate Life
more because it leads me to it than because
of the thorns with which it is sown."
The whole world has united to do honour to the
Marquise de Sevign her of whom Horace Walpole
said :

" Madame de Sevigne" shines both in grief and

gaiety,"

and whose genius Sainte Beuve likened to that of
Moliere and La Fontaine. But no epitaph could be
greater or more touching than the words of Madame
de la Fayette herself at the very end of her own life,
when ignoring any more romantic or exciting attach-
ment, she made the tremendous statement :

" Croyez, ma tres chere, que vous etes la personne

du monde que j'ai le plus veVitablement aime ".

In answer to this eulogy, Madame de Sevigne

responds gallantly to posterity, by averring that in all

the forty years of their friendship, never was there the

slightest cloud on the horizon of their intercourse.

CHAPTER XIII

LIFE IN PARIS AFTER MARRIAGE MUTUAL FRIENDS
OF MADAME DE LA FAYETTE AND MADAME DE
SfiVIGNE

" L' Amour, quelque delicat qu'il soit, pardonne plus de fautes
qu6 1'amitie." La Bruylre

K;TURNING to Paris after the four years
spent in Auvergne, amid surroundings which,
though beautiful in themselves, gave no
exercise to the tastes ingrained by education, training
and circumstances in her character, to Madame de la
Fayette the joy and excitement of life seemed eternal.

And what wonder, when we consider the change
which had taken place in Paris since the Fronde and
since the marriage in 1655. Then, Misery and Want
still lay concealed at every street corner ; now, Prosperity
had driven Need and Destitution into the farthest re-
cesses of the city, and all France was in a state of re-
joicing. Even as Pere Olier, the saviour of St. Sulpice,
dying with the corruption of the St. Germain Quarter
still uneradicated, had cried, " Love ! Love ! Love ! "
even so the people of France now shouted, " Peace !
Give us Peace ! "

On the 7th of November, 1659, Mazarin had
brought to a successful conclusion the greatest political
effort of his life : the treaty with Spain, which ended
the long war of twenty years' duration, and gave to the
young King, Louis XIV., his Spanish Queen, Marie
Therese.

Never was there a more picturesque or gorgeous
spectacle than that of the signing of the Peace of St.
Jean de Luz between the two Kings, Louis Quatorze

1 68

AN EARLY

PORTRAIT OF MADAMK IK LA KAYKTTE

AFTER A DRAWING IIV I1OUTKRWF.K

LIFE IN PARIS 169

a stripling of twenty-two and Philippe IV. of
Spain, his uncle. The whole world was curious to see
the meeting, and for a time at least Paris was entirely
deserted, every one of any importance in the kingdom
trooping off with the Court to the borders of Spain,
there to see the Spanish uncle and the French nephew
come face to face. On the approach of the Spanish
cortege, Anne of Austria, rejoicing to see her own
brother again after so many years ; and forgetting in
her long absence from Spain the rigorous etiquette
there enforced, started forward and threw her arms
round his neck, to the great astonishment and dis-
pleasure of the ten or twelve Grands d'Espagne, who,
dressed in the greatest simplicity, yet covered with
jewels, were gathered round their King. Philippe him-
self rebuked this exuberance, turning from his sister to
his nephew and the great event of the moment an
affair which required all his attention, as neither
monarch was allowed to put more than one foot on the
other's territory, the meeting-place being partly in one
kingdom partly in the other. The little spot on which
uncle and nephew stood, called the Island of Pheasants,
was thereafter re-named the Island of the Conference,
and this incident furnished La Fontaine with the sub-
ject of one of his fables.

Two nanny-goats met on a bridge too narrow for
both to pass over at once : neither would go back :
La Fontaine imagined he saw

With Louis the Great
Philip the IV. advance
In the Island of Conference.

And on the Island of Conference, each falling on his
knees, the two sovereigns made their peace, after which,
according to custom, on Louis' returning back farther
into France, he was married by proxy in Spain to
Marie Therese, the new Queen being then brought over
the border, and the ceremony repeated on French
ground with Louis himself, after which the feasting
and rejoicing began.

i;o MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

On the 26th of August, 1660, all Paris was en fete
for the return of the King with his new Queen. A
whole August day the royal entry lasted : starting from
Vincennes at five o'clock in the morning, the procession
never reached the Louvre until seven in the evening !
It was witnessed from the balcony of the Hotel
d'Aumont by Anne of Austria, Queen Henriette of
England, her daughter the Princess Henriette, and
picturesquely enough by Madame Scarron, the future
Madame de Maintenon, together with many of the
great ladies of the Court, among whom were Madame
de Sevigne and Madame de la Fayette.

Writing to his patron M. Fouquet on the occasion,
La Fontaine gave a description in verse of the proces-
sion. In witnessing it, two things struck him most :
the magnificence of Mazarin, and the beauty of the
spectators. With defiance of Mazarin, who had grown
so proud that he would allow praise of no one, not even
of his royal master, La Fontaine had the courage to end
this poetical letter with a tribute to Louis.

" Do you think," he said, " that the world has
many kings of figure so beautiful, of appear-
ance so fine? I do not think so, and when
I see him, I imagine I see Grandeur herself
in person."

On ending the Treaty of St. Jean de Luz, and cele-
brating this marriage, there were no bounds to Mazarin's
pride, no limit to his vainglory and pomp. Madame
de la Fayette, in her Histoire d? Henriette cCAngleterre,
thus commented on it :

"Cardinal Mazarin, glorified to have given peace
to France, seemed to have nothing more to do
than to enjoy this great fortune to which his
good luck had elevated him. Never did
minister govern with so absolute a power, and
never did a minister make such good use of
his sway to the establishment of his own
grandeur."

But in spite of his riches, his magnificence, his in-
solence to the Queen who had raised him to this high

LIFE IN PARIS 171

estate, Mazarin was not long to have a chance to enjoy
his importance. "All that was lacking to his happi-
ness," said Madame de la Fayette, " was its duration
but," she continued, "this was exactly what failed him."
Only a few months after the triumphal entry into Paris,
more to the glory of Mazarin than to that of the King,
the proud Cardinal died at Vincennes, "more philo-
sophically than Christianly," remarked Madame de la
Fayette.

And with Mazarin's death, a new era dawned for
France, the true reign of Louis XIV. began. Under
the mourning which the whole Court put on for the
great Cardinal, there seethed the tumultuous excitement
and ambition of the Unknown : each courtier hugging
to himself the secret hope of advancement and power
under the rule of an ignorant King. But when the
ministers of State came to Louis Quatorze to demand
the name of the man to whom they must turn for com-
mand, the bubble of the Unknown burst and each grand
noble started in disappointed amaze to hear the proudly
spoken answer of the young King :

"Tome!"

And so the reign of favourites was over ; thus was
founded an absolute monarchy which was to bring order,
elegance, culture and outward decorum into France.
At last the Golden Age was come!

To no woman of twenty-six, though she be saddened
by the awakening to the incongruities of life inevitably
brought by a marriage such as Madame de la Fayette's,
can life under such surroundings be anything but an in-
terrogation, a continual wonder of development. In
Madame de la Fayette's case, to be sure, the light-hearted
young girl had disappeared for ever, but in her place
was now the woman whose soul had been opened by
suffering and the everlastingly solemn experience of
motherhood. Mind and soul were alive, heart and
brain active, and before her was still the greatest climax
of her life. For marriage had not been able to show
her the depths of love, and these next few years were
to be all the more momentous for the very thing that

172 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

was lurking behind the grave form of the future. Her
eyes, open to what was going on around her in the
present, both in the world of the Court and of Paris in
general, were blind to what the future was concealing.
Her world of the present was that of the friend who
had sighed for her companionship during those four
years of her absence : the friend of her girlhood with
whom she had studied and read and ridiculed their
teachers' idiosyncrasies : with whom she had laughed
and rallied, and enjoyed her eternal youth that youth
which, even as the pessimist of the Fronde defined it,
is a continual intoxication, a fever of reason.

And now in their more serious years, the intimate
friends of the Marquise de Sevigne became the guests
of Madame de la Fayette, and formed the milieu in
which she moved. Living in the Quarter of the Marais,
the Marquise's name for Madame de la Fayette's house
and circle in the Faubourg St. Germain was " The Fau-
bourg," and from the Marais, where merriment and
gaiety reigned, these friends would often turn with relief
to the Faubourg, finding in its more serious tone a
grateful change. There pedants like Menage, Segrais
and Huet gave the directing tone and over it hung the
ponderous wand of learning. Whenever the versatile
Marquise was unduly oppressed by so much erudition,
she could always find relief and reaction in dining b
PUT bavardin with her friend the Marquise de Lavar-
din at the house of the latter's brother-in-law, the Abbe^
de Lavardin, whose epicurean tastes and gallant dis-
position were proverbial, or by indulging in Rabutinage
her name for the lively discussion of their family in
which she and that wicked and fascinating cousin of
hers, Bussy de Rabutin, whose philosophy of life was
to make light of serious things delighted

To Comte Bussy, love, for instance, was always a
recommencer that is, he could always begin over again.
Many and various were his gallant adventures, from the
abduction of Madame de Miramion, to flirtation with
his cousin herself all of which Madame de SeVign^
loved to hear him tell about in his delightful way, al-

LIFE IN PARIS

173

though she neither responded to his amorous advances
nor emulated his example. To her friendship, not love,
was the real recommencer : she had ardours in her
friendships, as M. Gaston Boissier puts it, and each of
her friends brought her a real gain in life. Comte
Bussy was the fagot de son esprit the lash of her spirit
which kept her wit bright and sparkling ; Corbinelli,
whose mind, she said, was made to please hers, was the
joy and sweetness of her life ; Philippe de Coulanges
the inspiration of her wit, and she loved him, she said,
as her life !

Though Madame de la Fayette may not have had
ardours in her friendships, she delighted none the less
in real companionship and enjoyed to the full the quali-
ties and peculiarities of these friends. With Comte
Bussy, she had little commerce a fact doubtless ac-
counted for first by his long absence from Court in the
wars, and then after the writing of the Gaules Amou-
reuses, by his exile from Paris in 1666, not to speak of
his many gallant preoccupations in which a woman like
herself could have had little part.

With Corbinelli, Madame de Sevigne's whilom sec-
retary and constant friend, however, she was closely
allied. She and the Marquise must indeed often have
deprecated the lack of ambition of this man of great
talents, son of the secretary of Marie de Medecis
and Attache of the Marechal d'Ancre, who coming to
France in 1644 absolutely without fortune, but with
the rare gift of making friends wherever he went, yet
spent his whole life which lengthened out into over a
hundred years in trying without success to get away
from the mediocre condition in which fate had placed
him. Hesitation was evidently the rock on which he
stranded, and a bore he must have been at times a
dryasdust with a fury for reciting Latin, and looking up
the definition of things. His letters abound in Latin
quotations and analysis of details.

How Corbinelli must have been rallied in this circle
where Madame de la Fayette herself was made the
scapegoat of many a jest and good-natured badinage,

174 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

as she complains humorously in a letter to M. de Pom-
ponne, another intimate of the circle, to whom she in
1666 wrote a joint letter in company with La Roche-
foucauld, Madame de SeVign6 and Madame du Plessis
Guenegaud, while staymg at the latter's estate of
Fresnes near Paris. A propos of the marriage of
Mademoiselle de Sevigne, which was being agitated
at the time, and the topic of general conversation
among Madame de Sevigne's friends, Madame de la
Fayette writes :

" Apparently, since Mademoiselle de Sevignd is in
question, you may well judge that no one
speaks any longer of me at least in this
matter ; for not to speak of me is an im-
possible thing at Fresnes and the Hotel de
Nevers. There I am the butt ; they make
fun of me incessantly. If the sweetness of
Madame de Coulanges and Madame de
Sevigne did not console me a little, I believe
I should fly to the North."

The "North" alluded to Sweden where M. de Pom-
ponne was ambassador at this time. He himself was a
man greatly honoured and respected at Court, in spite
of his having been Fouquet's friend. He belonged to
that well-known family of Arnaulds, most of whom had
embraced the religious life and become celebrated by
their piety or their literary ability. His father, M.
Arnauld d'Andilly, whom Madame de Rambouillet had
called her " Professor of Friendship," was one of the
finest men of his time, both literarily and piously, and
his country estate called Pomponne, was very near
that of Fresnes belonging to the Du Plessis-Gu6n-
gauds, also friends of Fouquet, also celebrated in Jan-
senist circles, and intimate both in the Marais and the
Faubourg.

In the winter, the Guenegauds entertained the beaux-
esprits and their aristocratic friends at their Paris resi-
dence, the Hotel de Nevers, now the Monnaie, the
gardens of which extended for a great distance along
the quay near the Hotel de Ville. In the summer,

LIFE IN PARIS I75

they entertained their same world at Fresnes, where in
the magnificent chateau, amid the most beautiful scenes
of nature, these prurituses and prdcieux, these seekers
after the True and the Beautiful, posed as Tritons and
Nereids of the Beuvronne, the river flowing through
the grounds, and gave themselves up with generous
abandon to the light- heartedness of the moment. Here
in the Grande Galerie ornamented by Poussin's fa-
mous Bacchante, these Quiquoix, as they called them-
selves, used to walk and talk ; and here the comedies
and ballets were often diversified, to the delight of
Madame de la Fayette, by such literary feasts as some
of Boileau's satires read aloud by the author, or even by
three acts of the " Alexandre" of Racine, whose rising
glory was just then beginning to threaten Corneille's
star with total eclipse.

Madame du Plessis, as Madame de Sevign6 calls
the hostess of Fresnes in her letters, was most closely
in touch with the two friends and very worthy of their
friendship, to judge from the very high estimate of her
expressed by M. Arnauld d'Andilly :

" I have found in Madame du Plessis," he says in
his MtmoireS) " all that one could wish to
render a friendship perfect."
"Her application to great things," he further ex-
plains, "did not prevent her from attending
to the smallest details, she was endowed with
good sense and a complete indifference to the
changes of fortune."

Strangely enough, it was Madame de Coulanges,
not with the brilliant Philippe, the Marquise's cousin,
with whom Madame de la Fayette had most sym-
pathy. Even while admitting that the mind of
Madame de Coulanges was "a dignity," Madame de
Sevign betrayed her real opinion of her cousin's wife
by calling her "La Feuille," the leaf. Philippe was
little and ugly, but he was intensely amusing, his whole
life a joke which wonderfully illustrated the truth of the
old saying that it is better to laugh than to be sighing.
After living exclusively for idleness and pleasure, giving

1 76 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

up his post as Conseiller au Parlement de Paris simply
in order to be able to travel, make verses and eat good
dinners, Philippe de Coulanges lived to be eighty-two
years of age in perfect health of mind and body ! No
wonder that this Grand Epicurean, as Saint Simon called
him, stimulated the mind and fancy of a woman like the
Marquise, nor that it was to him she wrote some of her
most amusing and brilliant letters. Two of these, called
La Lettre du Cheval and La Lettre de la Prairie, cir-
culated among her friends, and became so celebrated
that one day being ill and dull, Madame de Thianges
sent her valet to ask the loan of them from Madame de
Coulanges. The companionship of such a man was
certainly not of the kind to make " furrows on the
spirit," but he was not particularly akin to Madame de
la Fayette. She found his wife, in her way no less
amusing, far more congenial. So in the habit of saying
piquant things was Madame de Coulanges, that the " epi-
grams of Madame de Coulanges " became celebrated
throughout Parisian society, her father confessor going
so far as to say that her every sin was an epigram !

Thus, with the spiritual vivacity of the one and the
wit of the other, the De Coulanges were a rarely pic-
turesque couple, flitting in and out of the world of
Paris " like two butterflies on a beautiful day of spring ! "
Unlike her husband, Madame de Coulanges was not
true to the God of Carelessness all her life : in her
later years, she repented of her follies, and became very
devout, reproaching the brilliant Philippe his vaga-
bondage and incorrigible youth, adjuring him to think of
more solid things than the eternal round of social life.
Yet as butterflies these two flitted in and out of the
atmosphere of both the Marais and the Faubourg,
bringing light and joy to the Marquise, and making a
bit of colour in the more sombre world of her friend at
the Faubourg.

In his essay on Madame de la Fayette, M. Auger
of the Academic has drawn an interesting comparison
between her and three of her friends :

" She brought into conversation neither the caustic

LIFE IN PARIS I77

and brilliant sallies of Madame de Cornuel,
nor the spiritual vivacity of Madame de
Coulanges, nor the amiable abandon of Ma-
dame de Sevigne", but her discourse was of
an elegant and ingenious precision,"
and to substantiate his statement, he at the same time
cites three of her original expressions :

"Silly translators," she said, " resemble those ig-
norant lackeys who change into foolishness
the compliments with which they are en-
trusted."
"A sentence cut out of a book is worth a louis

d'or ; a word, twenty sous."
Of Montaigne she said : "It would be a pleasure

to have a neighbour like him ".
A special friend of Madame de Coulanges was
Madame de Maintenon, who had also been a most im-
portant member of the Sdvigne-La Fayette circle, not
only in the early days of her marriage to the poet
Scarron, but later on in 1 669 when she had undertaken
the charge of the King's illegitimate children. She
then lived in the St. Germain Quarter in the same
street with Madame de la Fayette. Madame de Se-
vigne tells of taking her all the way home one evening
after she had been supping with the friends at Madame
de Coulanges, to the very bottom of the Faubourg St.
Germain almost as far as the town of Vaugirard in
the country, she said. There she had a fine large
house, great garden, and extensive apartments a car-
riage, servants, and horses. She dresses modestly
and magnificently, continued the Marquise, like a woman
who has passed her life with persons of quality : she is
amiable, handsome, good and negligee: one can talk
well with her. In spite of these qualities, and a certain
intimacy which ensued between Madame Scarron,
Madame de la Fayette and the Marquise, the nature of
the former was too subtle and crafty to be really akin
to either of the latter. Madame de la Fayette's well-
known frankness and sincerity weighed upon Madame
Scarron still more than that of Madame de S^vigne",

i;8 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

for although even more outspoken Madame de la
Fayette on more than one occasion having to remind
her friend that she must not let that in her heart be
seen which prudence should oblige her to hide Madame
de Sevigne was not so silent a reproach as her frank
friend.

At first Madame de Maintenon endeavoured to
emulate this famous frankness of Madame de la Fayette's.
Writing to Madame de Chantelou in 1666 of her pre-
sentation to Madame de Montespan, she at that time
being a very needy young widow, she said :

" Madame de Thianges presented me to her sister.
I painted my misery without degrading myself.
Finally, Madame de la Fayette would have
been content with the truth of my expressions
and the brevity of my tale."

Later on, however, a rupture between the two, incident
to Madame de la Fayette's detection of a certain Jesu-
itical leaning on the part of Madame Scarron, began to
show its ugly face. Indignantly did the latter deny
this tendency to Jesuitism, and in 1678 she herself
began to criticise Madame de la Fayette, writing :
" If I had fifty thousand livres of income, I would
not have the suite of a great lady nor the bed
trimmed with gold lace like Madame de la
Fayette, nor a valet de chambre like Madame
de Coulanges. Does the pleasure which
these things bring outweigh the raillery which
they excite ? "

Surely a woman who spent a great part of her life on
a bed of suffering, might be excused for concealing with
lace and gold the ugliness of her couch while there is
no pride equal to that self-love which fears criticism
and raillery and affects a simplicity which in itself is
the greatest pride. Therefore, while Madame de la
Fayette adorned her bed with gold lace, Madame de
Maintenon, dressing with the demureness of a nun in
grey or stone-colour, was casting her longing eyes
towards the throne of France, willing to renounce the
state of any title, if only its power and dignity were hers.

LIFE IN PARIS I79

Aware of her own ambitions, she could not help
resenting the openness of Madame de la Fayette's life,
and finally all pretence of friendship between the two
women was abandoned. In 1684 in a letter to Madame
de Saint Geran, Madame de Maintenon thus excused
herself for having broken an old tie :

"I have not been able," she said, "to preserve
the friendship of Madame de la Fayette : she
puts its continuation at too high a price. But
at least I have shown her that I am as sincere
as she."

Madame de la Fayette, on her part, did not neglect an
occasion which came to her when writing her Mtmoires
de la Cour some years later to express her contempt
of Madame de Maintenon's hypocrisy. Commenting
upon Racine's tragedy of " Esther " written at Madame
de Maintenon's request for the pupils of St. Cyr, she
says :

" She ordered the poet to write a comedy, the

subject of which must be pious : for at the

present time outside of piety there can be no

salvation at the Court any more than in the

other world. The comedy represented, so to

speak, the downfall of Madame de Montespan

and the elevation of Madame de Maintenon :

the whole difference being that Esther was a

little younger, and less finically pious."

Whether pious or not, this French Esther's power

over Louis XIV. remains one of the wonders of history.

Too awkward for love, she had been pronounced by

her friend Ninon de Lenclos, in the poverty-stricken

days of her early widowhood, when the future wife of

Louis le Grand had actually shared Ninon's bed and

board. What more damning thing could a woman like

Ninon have said ? Madame de Maintenon's power was

never acquired by methods such as were pursued by the

other women who had captivated the King in his youth.

She ruled indeed not by. beauty or physical charm, but

by mind and tact. And her own predominant passions

were pride and ambition neither of which, in spite of

1 8o MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

all that she accomplished, did she succeed in wholly
satisfying for the end of both meant public recognition
as Queen of France, an honour never hers. The secret
of her power over Louis may thus be analysed as that
of Craft over a maturity tired of youthful dissipation and
awakening in advancing age to the whispers of Con-
science.

CHAPTER XIV

NINE YEARS OF COURT LIFE FRIENDSHIP WITH
HENRIETTE D'ANGLETERRE

" Born in the storms of War, this Royal Fair,
(Produc'd like Lightning in tempestuous Air)
Tho' now she flees her native Isle, less kind,
Less safe for her, than either Sea or Wind,
Shall when the blossom of her Beauty's blown
See her great Brother on the British Throne
Where Peace shall smile and no dispute arise
But which Rules most, his Sceptre or her Eyes."

Edmund Walltr

THE alliance of Mademoiselle de la Vergne with
the Comte de la Fayette, whether happy or
unhappy, important or unimportant, brought
about a train of collateral circumstances which proved
of signal consequence in her life the chain of experi-
ence beginning with her husband's family. These were
all kindly disposed towards her, especially the Comte's
uncle, Francois de la Fayette, Bishop of Limoges,
whose friendship was not only delightful and beneficial
to the young Countess, but of material advantage to
her sons later on.

Jean de la Fontaine, visiting Limoges in 1663, wrote
to his wife in most enthusiastic terms of its Bishop,
Frangois de la Fayette :

" He is a prelate who has all the fine qualities which
you can possibly imagine ; above all things,
splendide, and keeping the best table in Lim-
ousin. He lives like a Grand Seigneur, and
certainly is one in reality."

This description of La Fontaine's undoubtedly ap-
plied to the Bishop of Limoges at the time his nephew's

181

1 82 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

wife first made his acquaintance, and his earlier history
explains the quality of nobility and breeding noticed by
the poet. He was the son of the second son of the
Montmorin heiress who brought into the La Fayette
family the lands of Nade and Espinasse, the brother
of Jean de la Fayette, father of Marie Madeleine de
la Vergne's husband. Embracing the career of the
Church, he had held the title of Abbe of Dalon and
Prior of St. Ange when Pope Urban VIII. appointed
him to the Bishopric of Limoges in 1627, and on his con-
secration at Paris in 1629, the Pope sent his Nuncio to
witness the ceremony. Great must have been his reputa-
tion for brilliancy and piety to have attracted on this
occasion, not only Gaston d'Orleans, but Anne of
Austria, who during the ceremony was so affected by
admiration for the new Bishop that at the very moment
of his ordination, taking a priceless ring from her own
finger, she sent it to him.

It was through the influence of Madame de Senecy,
governess of Louis XIV. and a relative of the La
Fayettes, that he was made Chief Almoner to Anne of
Austria ; and, according to Madame de la Fayette's own
testimony, he afterwards enjoyed great favour with her.
But, added to his manners and habits of Grand Seigneur,
were the instincts of a scholar, and soon, in spite of
these honours and distinctions, he became known as
one of the most learned prelates of France. Acting as
Bishop of Limoges for forty-seven years, he refused all
the more important positions offered him, and no
adulation, no flattery, could move him from the duties
of his episcopate, his whole life being devoted to visit-
ing his diocese, forming charitable associations, and
keeping up ecclesiastical discipline among his clergy.
To this learned Bishop, Madame de la Fayette owed
many a word of advice, many a friendly act ; and when
in 1676 he grew ill with his last illness, she was as
afflicted as if he had been allied to her by birth. On
his deathbed, he made over to her eldest son the
Abbey of Dalon, soon after which he passed away
calmly and peacefully, universally beloved and regretted

NINE YEARS OF COURT LIFE 183

by rich and poor, alike, no one mourning him more
sincerely than the wife of his nephew Fran9ois.

But of all the members of the Comte de la Fayette's
family two brothers soldiers like himself, two sisters
nuns our imagination and interest are most vividly
arrested by the personality of the second sister, the
famous Louise de la Fayette.

The memoirs of the time picture Louise de la
Fayette at the age of seventeen, when she became
Maid of Honour to Anne of Austria, as one of the most
beautiful women at Court, who soon attracted the
attention of the timid and unamorous, but friendship-
loving Louis XI 1 1. Of kind nature, the young Maid
of Honour responded with interest to the King's con-
versation, feeling sorry for the awkward, stuttering,
friendless young King. But, on Richelieu's perceiving
the influence she was rapidly gaining over Louis, the
little idyll of friendship was soon over : suddenly, doubts
being cunningly presented to her mind of the faith of
her royal friend, Louise de la Fayette fled from the
Court to the sure refuge of a convent, from whence
no entreaties of the King could ever again induce her
to come forth.

In 1655, when her brother Francois Motier married
Marie Madeleine de la Vergne, this romance had long
been over. After giving her royal friend, whom she
loved chastely and unselfishly, good advice through
convent gratings, Louise de la Fayette, now a woman
of thirty-seven, had survived both the love of the King
and the hatred of Richelieu, and, throwing off worldly
thoughts and cares, grown more and more identified
with the religious life, having become at last through
a chain of circumstances, Abbesse of the Convent of
Chaillot.

This celebrated convent, located in Paris at the
extremity of the Cours la Reine, and on the top of the
hill called Chaillot (from which it took its name), was in
1655 a comparatively new institution, having been
founded a few years before the Fronde by Queen
Henriette of England under letters patent granted by
Anne of Austria and the Archbishop of Paris.

184 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

Chaillot was a lovely place : its terraced gardens
extended from the very top of the hill down to the
river, and the summit commanded a full panorama of
the Seine, along the sides of which rose the picturesque
old towers of Paris. The house itself, built originally
by Catherine de Medecis for her country-place, had
been made after her death by Henri IV. as a present
to the Marechal de Bassompierre, his Prime Minister.

After many vicissitudes of change and decay, the
memory of Catherine de Medecis, the Marechal de
Bassompierre, and the nuns of Chaillot has to-day been
lost in the majesty of that landmark of modern Paris
known as the Trocadero, and only a name on one of
the omnibuses now reminds the visitor that Chaillot
ever existed. Nevertheless, it is a spot which should
be interesting to the English as well as to the French,
for this charming retreat was selected just before the
Fronde by the exiled Queen Henriette Marie, wife of
Charles I. of England, as an asylum for herself and her
little daughter Henriette d'Angleterre, far away from
the noisy life of the Court. To the old pleasure house
of Catherine de Medecis, she brought as a nucleus ten
or twelve nuns from the Convent of the Visitation near
the Bastille in the Rue St. Antoine, strangely enough,
the convent into whose walls Louise de la Fayette had
fled some fifteen or twenty years before.

Having known Louise de la Fayette before her own
marriage, when Louis XIII.'s friend was in the brilliant
period of her Court life, Queen Henriette renewed her
old friendship with Mere Angelique, as Louise de la Fay-
ette was then called, at the Convent of the Visitation.
Thus on the foundation of the Convent of Chaillot, Mere
Angelique had accompanied the other nuns there, and
when in a short time the first superior died, the former
friend of Louis XIII. was unanimously elected Abbesse
in her stead, to the great satisfaction of Anne of
Austria, who owed Louise de la Fayette a debt of
gratitude in reconciling her to Louis XIII.

Little did Mademoiselle de la Vergne think in
marrying the brother of Mere Angelique all that this

NINE YEARS OF COURT LIFE 185

connection was to bring her ; but, naturally going often
to Chaillot to see her sister-in-law, it happened that she
made there the acquaintance of the Queen of England,
and became strongly attached to her young daughter,
the Princess Henriette.

At this period, the Queen and her daughter were
enjoying the peace and quiet of the convent, Queen
Henriette overseeing the education of the twelve-year-
old Henriette. But both already knew the depths of
sorrow : the life of the unfortunate Queen of Charles I.,
Henriette Marie de France, being one of the most
tragic in all history.

" In this one life," said Bossuet, in her funeral

oration, " may be seen all the extremities of

human things ! "

livery one knows the calamitous history of the Stuarts
the Civil War in England, which indirectly encouraged
the outbreak of the Fronde in France the flight of
Queen Henriette back to her native land to escape
the vengeance of the " Roundheads," as she herself had
named the closely cropped Puritans, who looked so
ugly and unattractive to her eyes used to the French-
men of Louis XIII.'s Court, and the ringleted Cavaliers
of her English husband. Henriette Anne, the youngest
of her five children, was born in 1644 at Exeter, whither
the mother had fled in the last extremity. A true child
of fear and sorrow, the first years of her life were one
long history of sadness.

As soon as she was old enough to travel, her
governess, the Countess of Morton, left behind at
Exeter on the flight of the Queen to Holland, escaped
to France with the Princess, disguising her as a little
peasant lad named Henry.

" I am not Henry," the little Princess persisted in

saying during this voyage, " I am the Princess

of England,"

a naivet^ which nearly cost her a prison. In 1646, how-
ever, she was safely given over into her mother's hands,
who during the minority of Louis XIV. had been put
in possession of the royal apartments of the Louvre.

1 86 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

On the outbreak of the Fronde, returning to the
Louvre from St. Germain, the Queen of England and
the little Henriette were in the general excitement ab-
solutely forgotten by the Court, their pension, for lack
of funds in the royal exchequer, not paid. The Louvre
was cold and big and magnificent, but fine surroundings
do not warm or nourish, so these two royal women ex-
perienced the pangs of hunger and cold. Their attend-
ants, for lack of sustenance, were obliged to leave them,
and Queen Henriette, having already sold all her own
jewels, even to the sacred vessels of her chapel to aid
Charles I., they were reduced to a pitiable plight. From
this situation, strangely enough, it was Cardinal Retz
who rescued them.

Visiting the Louvre one day in the dead of winter,
he discovered the mother and daughter alone in those
cold rooms of state, the daughter in bed, the mother
shivering beside her.

"You see," said the Queen, as he came in, "that
I am keeping Henriette company ; the poor
child could not get up to-day because there is
no fire."

The daughter of Henri IV. without a fire was a spectacle
which even the brusque cavalier Cardinal could not look
upon quietly : with little ceremony, he hastened away to
the Parlement, where he told the story so eloquently that
at once they sent the Queen 40,000 livres. Although
their physical misery was thus relieved, the mental
and emotional anguish of the Queen and her daughter
could not be so easily alleviated. It was brought to a
climax in February, 1649, when several days after it
happened, news came of the execution of Charles I. at
Whitehall. Stunned by this blow, the Queen could
not at first rouse herself from her overwhelming grief.
Soon, however, her religion came to her aid, and she
began to Five for her children, putting her own personal
feelings as much as possible out of sight, especially in
her care for the little Henriette, whom she brought up
in the strictest principles of the Roman Church. After
the Fronde, refusing Anne of Austria's invitation to

NINE YEARS OF COURT LIFE 187

live with her at the Palais Royal, she retired to Chaillot,
there endeavouring to instil into the young Henriette
humility and modesty together with all the accomplish-
ments of mind and spirit.

The terrible circumstances of the Princess's birth
at Exeter had affected her physically : she was unusu-
ally delicately and nervously strung : her lungs were
weak, and she had the consumptive's craving for excite-
ment. To use an expression of Anatole France's, she
was in her youth " une terrible e"tourdie," but one of
those madcaps who have the whole world at their feet !
Many were the portraits drawn of her. Her religious
preceptor, Pere Cyprien, praised her noble mind, her
rare beauty, her facility and skill in all sorts of exercises
in vogue at the time, such as the dance, the playing of
musical instruments, and other things to which the
agility of her body, the beauty of her figure, and her
majestic deportment lent grace and charm.

But the best description of her after all has been
given by Madame de la Fayette herself in the beginning
of the Histoire cf Henriette dAngleterre :

" As soon as the princess began to come out of
childhood, one perceived in her un agrement
extraordinaire an extraordinary charm. . . .
The Princess of England possessed to a sove-
reign degree the gift of pleasing, and that
which one calls grace. Charm pervaded her
whole person, her actions as well as her mind,
and never was a princess so capable of mak-
ing herself beloved by men and adored by
women."

In 1658, when she was just fourteen, the young
Princess already answered to this description : she was
full of charm, singing like a bird, and playing ravish-
ingly on the clavecin.

Some time before, Queen Henriette had tried to
retrieve the fortunes of the Stuarts by marrying her
son Charles to the rich heiress, Mademoiselle de Mont-
pensier. The Grande Mademoiselle, however, very
much absorbed in the Grand Conde", and disgusted with

1 88 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

the awkward Englishman who could speak no word
of French, and was silent even in his own tongue,
had disdained the black-browed Prince of Wales !
This hope failing, it then occurred to the solicitous
mother that she might marry Henriette to the
young Louis XIV. But Louis XIV., just twenty
years of age, did not like "little girls," being very
interested in the fascinating nieces of Cardinal Maza-
rin, especially in the one at whose wedding the little
girl in question first made her appearance at Court.
And even the following April when Henriette, crowned
with lilies and roses, danced as Erato in the ballet
called " Les Noces de Thetis et Pel^e," and was
celebrated by Benserade, Louis XIV. still had no eye
for his young cousin. He saw only her thin figure,
never looking long enough at her face to perceive that,
without being beautiful, there was something there far
more attractive than mere comeliness. Nor was he
then arrested by her noble and aristocratic bearing, so
significant of her high birth : in fact, he utterly failed
to discover that infinite charm which surrounded her,
throwing a glamour even then over her carelessly
arranged hair of light chestnut, her long face, and her
sparkling complexion.

An unknown writer of the seventeenth century has
defined this peculiar charm as a very personal one.

" She has a certain languishing air," said he,
" and when she speaks to any one, for she is
absolutely amiable, be it about the most indif-
ferent thing in the world, she seems to demand
one's heart."

This fascination she exerted for the first time at sixteen
when Charles II. having just been reinstated on his
father's throne, Queen Henriette went over to England
to arrange about the Princess's marriage portion.

As royal matchmakers may never grow weary in
their search for proper alliances for their successors,
Queen Henriette, having failed of Louis XIV. for her
daughter, had finally succeeded in arranging a match
with the prince next highest in the land. This was no

HENRIETTE D'ANGLETKRRE, DUCHESSE DOR1.EANS

AFTER A PORTRAIT BV XVANUKR WKKKK

NINE YEARS OF COURT LIFE 189

other than the King's brother Philippe, become Due
d'Orteans in February, 1660, on the death of his uncle
Gaston, inheriting the right to the appanage and state
of the King's brother as well as the ancient appellation
of Monsieur.

In England both mother and daughter were/t'W
and celebrated, while Henriette's demand for the heart
evoked a storm of gallantry from all the young nobles
of the English Court, foremost among whom was the
Duke of Buckingham, son of the former lover of Anne
of Austria. Charles II. was not rich, and the dowry
Henriette brought back to France was laughable com-
pared to that given by Mazarin with each one of his
nieces. But Monsieur wrote most pressingly, urging
their instant return ! So they finally tore themselves
reluctantly away, upon which Monsieur, to do his part,
going forward with a grand suite towards Havre, met
the Princess and her mother, and escorted them back to
Paris, overwhelming Henriette until her marriage with
every mark of attention. Nothing was lacking but
love ; and, said Madame de la Fayette, " the miracle of
inflaming the heart of this prince was reserved to no
woman in the world ".

Monsieur was to prove anything but an ideal
husband for Henriette d'Angleterre. Handsome and
well-made, his beauty and his figure were effeminate,
his nature cold, his disposition withal an extremely
jealous and suspicious one, his self-love seeming to
render him incapable of affection for any one but him-
self. Some said that his nature had been spoiled in
his early youth when, being so like a girl in face and
figure, he would often dress in women's clothes, and
ape the manners and occupations of the gentler sex
to the detriment of his own manly virtues. However
that may have been, in 1661 the marriage took place
quietly at the Tuileries, when after a short sojourn at
Paris, Monsieur and Madame followed the Court to
Fontainebleau. " To Fontainebleau," says Madame de
la Fayette, " Madame took joy and pleasure with her."

And to Fontainebleau in Madame Henriette's train

190 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

went her friend of Chaillot, Madame de la Fayette,
now twenty-seven years of age and ten years older
than the Princess. In spite of this disparity in their
ages, in spite of the more serious and reflective nature
of the older woman, the confidence and trust of
Henriette had been won for all time. Her first
thought on her marriage, therefore, had been to
appoint Madame de la Fayette a member of her Court.
Madame de la Fayette tells- as follows the history of
their relationship. Speaking of Mere Angelique, she
says :

" As I often went to her cloister, I saw there the
young princess of England, whose mind and
merit charmed me. This acquaintance gave
me thereafter the honour of her familiarity, to
the extent that when she married I had all the
special entries to her house, and although I
was ten years older than she, she showed me
up to her death much kindness and had much
regard for me."

The next demand of Henriette's heart was made to
Louis XIV. himself, and at Fontainebleau the very
summer of her marriage. Attracted by the gentleness
and devotion of his Queen Marie Therese, the King
up to this time had been her slave. She on her part
was passionately in love with him, but was so unwise as
to show her love too plainly to one whose nature would
not allow him to worship long at one shrine. So by
the time his brother was married, Louis had begun to
weary of the devotion of Marie Therese rather heavy
and stupid as she was, and so furiously jealous that his
life was made unbearable and in 1661 he was quite
ready to find his new sister-in-law all that was fairest and
most charming. "The little girl," once disdained, he
at last confessed to be the most beautiful person in the
world, doubtless realising the mistake he himself had
made in refusing an alliance with her. With all the
abandon of his nature, he now threw himself into this
admiration for Madame : she was the life and joy of
every pleasure, every ballet, every divertissement :

NINE YEARS OF COURT LIFE 191

his devotion to her was extreme : he took pleasure only
in what gave her enjoyment. Seeing this, Monsieur
began to grow furiously jealous, and complained to his
mother. The latter, by this time rather bigoted on the
subject of morality and virtue, took Madame away for
a few days, and expostulated with Louis XIV. all in
vain ! Although he loved his mother tenderly, Louis
loved his pleasures better. Suddenly, however, his
youthful imagination was fired by the sight of a beauti-
ful face looking out at him from among the bevy of
ladies in the suite of Madame herself. From behind
the grave, poetical countenance of Madame de la Fay-
ette, gleamed the modest, flower-like face of Louise de
la Valliere.

" I will heed my mother! " said Louis XIV. " It

would be a sin to love my brother's wife."
So, turning his back on Madame, he looked all the
more earnestly at her young maid of honour, yet never
in all the course of his long history of gallantry that fol-
lowed, forgetting that first enthusiasm for the charming
Henriette.

The King's defection at first caused Madame many
pangs more those of ennui, perhaps, than of real feeling
it is so exciting to be loved ! And Madame was of
gallant spirit naturally. Madame de la Fayette, the
strong, the intellectual, the grave, loved Henriette
tenderly, but now and then even she allowed herself to
express a slight disapproval of the young Princess's
frivolity :

"Madame," she said, "who showed timidity in

speaking seriously, had none for affairs of

gallantry : where they were concerned she did

not foresee consequences, but found therein

all the pleasurable excitement of a romance."

As Madame's lady-in-waiting, the companion of her

early life, her most trusted friend and confidante,

Madame de la Fayette was an eye-witness to all that

happened at the Court during the nine years from 1661

to 1670 ; she was an onlooker at Madame's love-affairs,

the sympathiser in her illnesses, and the sharer in her

192 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

vexation at the jealousy and neglect of Monsieur, a
guest at all the great Court functions, as Henriette's
friend, basking in the special favour of the King. Thus
when in 1668, Louis XIV. gave a grand fete at Ver-
sailles, Felibien chronicles that Madame de la Fayette
was one of the ladies who sat at his table.

With the usual gallant diversions, and such pleasures
and fetes as those at Versailles, the life of the Court was
filled. It would never have seemed so wonderful to
Madame, had she not had her own perturbations of heart
to which the element of secrecy was an added charm.
But when the Comte de Guiche, Monsieur's former
favourite, was exiled on her account, she suddenly be-
came impressed with the picturesqueness of her ex-
periences, and in her Preface to the Memoir of the
Princess of England, Madame de la Fayette thus tells
the origin of Madame's desire to record the history of
her own life :

" In 1665," said she, "the Comte de Guiche was
exiled. One day, telling me the story of
some rather extraordinary circumstances of
his passion for her, she (Madame) said: ' Do
you not find that all that has happened to me,
and the things pertaining thereto would make
a pretty story ? You write well : write, and I
will furnish you with good memoirs."
Madame de la Fayette agreed with pleasure to this
proposal undoubtedly her skill in writing had been
whispered about the Court ever since the publication
three years before of a certain anonymous little novel
full of delicacy and charm ; and she recounts that, full
of enthusiasm for this new fad, Madame took the trouble
to prepare her for the writing of her story by telling
her many personal details of which she had hitherto been
ignorant. Soon, however, the royal caprice passed,
and the Histoire lay for some four or five years for-
gotten. It was not until a year before her death, that
Henriette, in the leisure of a long convalescence at
St. Cloud, remembered.

"Then," said Madame de la Fayette, "she told

NINE YEARS OF COURT LIFE 193

me the sequel of those things she had begun
to tell me before. I began again to write
them ; I showed her every morning what I
had made out of what she had told me the
evening before. She was very pleased. It
was a difficult enough task to turn the truth
in certain places in such a manner as to make
it known, and still not to be offensive or dis-
agreeable to the Princess. She made fun with
me over the places which gave me most trouble ;
and took so much pleasure in what I wrote
that during a journey of two days of mine to
Paris, she wrote in with her own hand what
I had marked, and which I still have.
" The King returned : she left St. Cloud, and our
work was abandoned. The following year
she was in England, and a few days after her
return, this princess, being at St. Cloud,
lost her life in a manner which will always
astonish those who read this history. I had
the honour to be near her when this fatal
accident occurred ; I felt all that one could feel
of the most sorrowful kind in seeing the most
amiable princess that ever was expire, one who
had honoured me with her good graces. This
loss is one of those for which one is never
consoled, and which leaves a bitterness ex-
tended through the rest of one's life.
" The death of this princess left me neither the de-
sign nor the taste to continue this history,
and I wrote only the circumstances of her
death, of which I was a witness."
Thus originated one of the most charming memoirs
ever written the so-called Histoire cCHcnriette cCAn-
gleterre, also the best picture extant of that "dazzling
Henriette," as a modern critic very aptly calls her,
" who has left inextinguishable in history the blaze of
her life and of her death ". And the book itself shows
that the writing of it was a labour of love to Madame
de la Fayette. It is palpably the outcome of many

I 9 4 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

hours of intimacy, hours when the Princess forgot the
rigorous etiquette of Court life, the artificiality of form
and ceremonial, and laid bare to her companion some
of the most hidden feelings of her young heart. Such
times of expansion draw two natures together, and no
wonder that going to the Palais Royal two years after
Madame's death, Madame de la Fayette wept again the
loss of one who had been so near her heart, nor that
years afterwards, on reading over the letters of the
Princess, she should have been as deeply moved as if
the Princess had but just passed away !

We are told elsewhere that in her later years, a
change was noticeable in the gay, frivolous Henriette
who had so shocked the stolid Marie Therese in those
early times by her finery and her coquettish manners ;
she had gained in self-poise : her mind was keen and
cultured, and she delighted in the reading of poetry,
and even of historical works. One of her last pranks
was to induce the two poets Corneille and Racine to
consent to write a tragedy on a subject to be chosen by
her, her jest being to give the same subject to each
that of representing Louis XIV. as Titus, Marie Man-
cini as Berenice thus making the two poets unknow-
ingly compete. Corneille at that time was old and past
his best work, so Racine easily bore away all the hon-
ours, to the great chagrin of poor old Corneille.

Thus the years went on in the usual round of love,
intrigue, and pleasure Monsieur and Madame be-
coming more and more estranged as time passed until
in 1670, Henriette accomplished the last act of her
picturesque life ; that of bringing about the treaty be-
tween Louis XIV. and her brother Charles II. a
treaty intended to lead to the re-establishment of the
Roman Catholic religion in England.

Secretly in the summer of 1670, Madame Henriette
crossed the Channel, met Charles II. as if by chance at
Dover, and there caused him to sign the famous treaty !
This covenant, in breaking up the Triple Alliance be-
tween England, Holland and Sweden against Louis
XIV., and binding Charles II. to declare his conversion

NINE YEARS OF COURT LIFE 195

to the Roman Catholic religion, as well as to join in a war
with France against Holland, was a great triumph for
Henriette's diplomacy. On her return, she seemed to
be at the zenith of her life : her brother Charles, whom
she loved tenderly, had treated her with extraordinary
affection and consideration ; after having bade her adieu
at the port of embarkation, he returned three times to
again embrace her, making her beautiful presents of
money and jewels. She felt herself to be the connect-
ing link, as it were, between " the two greatest Kings of
the century," to use Madame de la Fayette's expression ;
her star was on high, she was on the top of the wave.
Alas, that that wave should have been the ninth, that
wave of Destiny, which was to carry her out of the sea of
life into the vast ocean of the Unknown !

Ten days after her triumphant return, after an illness
of only nine hours, Henriette d'Angleterre died in the
arms of her faithful friend and companion. So sudden,
so acute, so mysterious was her illness, that Madame
herself, and all those about her, suspected poison. It
was afterwards conclusively proved to the satisfaction
of the English Ambassador and his King, that this was
not possible, but that the fell disease was peritonitis.

When taken ill, she happened to be at St. Cloud,
at that beautiful chateau built for Monsieur by his
brother Louis XIV., and decorated by some of the
greatest artists of the day, the house itself vicing with
the gardens in beauty. It was especially dear to both
women as the place where Henriette gave to Madame
de la Fayette her intimate confidences. In all the sur-
roundings of Paris too, St. Cloud was the palace most
connected with the Princess of England. Alas! that
the Vandals of the Revolution in their rage against kings
and kingly power should not have respected this abode
of Henriette d'Angleterre. I n their ruthless wantonness,
they destroyed it utterly, and of the lovely palace where
she breathed her last there now remains not one trace
only the gardens and fountains tell the story of her
gentle presence, her tragic, ill-timed end !

On the very day of her death, hearing, as Olivier

196 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

d'Ormesson recounts in his Journal, that Madame de
la Fayette had had quite a serious accident, a brick
from her chimney having fallen upon her head " heart-
less bricks, not to spare so illustrious a head ! " the
Princess had amused herself in taking down Madame
de la Fayette's coiffure and examining her bruises.
During this process, she asked her favourite if she
feared death. " For my part," Madame said, " I do
not believe I should." Little did the brave Princess
think at that moment how soon she would have a chance
of proving her assertion no vain boast.

Hearing of her severe attack, the King hastened out
to St. Cloud, full of sorrow and distress, the whole Court
being shocked and disturbed by such news of one whom
all loved. From the first, and to the last, Henriette
betrayed the full force of her proud and loving spirit :
" Alas, Monsieur," she said to her husband, as he

stood by her bedside, " you have long ceased

to love me, but that is unjust, I have never

failed you."

And, looking at the King, also standing there beside
her bed, she seemed in these last moments to see
France itself :

"Sire," whispered the low but firm voice, "in

losing me, you will lose the truest servant you

will ever have ! "

Then when the King, moved to the depths by her
firmness and courage a firmness which he found almost
too great expressed his surprise that she should speak
thus in the midst of her great agony, she replied that
she had never feared death, although she had feared
to lose his good graces.

Thus did the granddaughter of Henri IV. meet the
Unknown as became one of her race ! Seeing the
fortitude and courage of her end, her friend and cousin,
her brother-in-law, Louis XIV., was not ashamed to
show his own heart, nor to let his tears mingle with the
tears of the faithful companion of her whom of all others
he had really loved with all the enthusiasm and strength
of his young manhood.

FRANCOIS DE MARSILLAC,
DUG DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD

CHAPTER XV

MADAME DE LA FAYETTE AND THE DUG DE LA
ROCHEFOUCAULD

" II y a un plaisir plus touchant et plus durable que la liaison
des sens c'est 1'union des cceurs."

IT was in the very heyday of the age of Louis
Quatorze, that, keen observer of life and manners
as she was, Madame de S6vign6 complained of
there being no time at the Court for love ; and yet, in
spite of the fact that the King would have liked to
ignore any other circle than the one he dominated
" L'Etat c'est moi ! "the vortex of Court life did not
engulf all Paris any more than all France. A few
coteries there were, where in the midst of the choking
nettles of Gallantry, still the open sesame everywhere,
not only the sentiment of real Love, but also that of
Friendship flourished. Only in these, where leisure was
found for the cultivation of the True and the Beautiful,
was leisure also for the development of those qualities of
the soul which conduce to the noble passions of love
and friendship. Love can never be crowded out ; it had
persisted through the ages ; while Friendship, silent
during war and struggle, came into its own again
simultaneously with the rise of Woman to equality with
Man simultaneously with la belle conversation. For, in
spite of the famous exceptions we might mention,
Friendship is essentially a feminine attribute, meaning
that fine separation of feeling into the thousand tints,
half-tones, and delicate nuances of tenderness, admira-
tion, mutual confidence and esteem, which require the
finesse and delicacy supposed to be possessed in greatest
degree by the gentler sex. Men lead in love ; women

197

198 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

in friendship ; and in that movement called the Precieux,
which women dominated and wherein Love was refined
to the point of Jansenism, Friendship itself may be
said to have been the Calvinism of Love : its purified,
ennobled essence !

While at the Court with Madame, following her
about from the Palais Royal to St. Cloud, from St.
Cloud to Fontainebleau, from Fontainebleau to Ver-
sailles, Madame de la Fayette still had much time at
home, where with relief she turned to the society of her
friends. Her. whole life shows her to have had a deep
appreciation of the real meaning of friendship, of that
relationship which " maketh a fair day in the affections
from storms and tempests," which bringeth "daylight
in the understanding out of darkness and confusion of
thoughts ". And, consequent upon this intimate delight
in the society of sympathetic friends, the artificiality of
the Court could not have failed to be abhorrent to her.
That it was so, is shown by a letter written during her
experience of nine years at Court, to an old friend at
Havre or rather at St. Adresse, a little place near
Ingouville her childhood's home an unpublished, but
authentic letter, in which she says :

" Far from envying me my fortune, you should
pity me. To that sweet liberty which I
enjoyed among you, has succeeded constraint
and discomfort, eternal visits have replaced
our promenades. Believe me, dear friend,
you have been deceived if you have been told
that Fontainebleau and its gardens are worth
more than your house, your terraces of St.
Denis, and the ravishing view of the sea.
Much evil is said of the Court, but enough has
not yet been said."

When after having seen her young, beautiful and
illustrious friend die in her arms, with her heart full of
memories and torn with the sadness and pity of all she
had gone through, she came back again to her own
quiet home in the Rue Vaugirard, it was still to Friend-
ship that she turned for consolation for renewal. For

FRIENDSHIP WITH LA ROCHEFOUCAULD 199

her ideal of Friendship was that of an eternally growing,
re-creating force a force which made Life reach out into
the Infinite. And, as she looked about among those
whom she could call her consolers, there was first of all
the faithful Marquise de S^vigne, standing ready with
her tried and proved affection ; and beside her was
now another, who in a few years had become almost
equally important perhaps more important in her
life. Was this new experience love or friendship ? It
is hard to tell, nor have the centuries disclosed the secret
left unsolved by contemporaries. Yet whatever the
analytical basis of the relationship, at least it was true
and real.

Most sympathetic and congenial the masculine mind
had always been to Madame de la Fayette ; stimulat-
ing her intellectual faculties, it satisfied the need of her
virile nature for communion on subjects with which
neither her best friend, nor the galante women of the
day were in touch. No wonder, therefore, that the
second emotional influence in her life was masculine,
the first and most important formative factor of the four
men whose friendship graced her life, and gave it
colour. While that of the other three was purely a
mind attraction, the sway of the fourth was as much
and infinitely more. At twenty-five, the Love which
had been waiting for her through the years of girlhood,
young womanhood, and unsatisfactory married life,
came in the person of Fra^ois, Prince de Marsillac,
Due de la Rochefoucauld, ancient Frondeur, and former
impetuous lover of the Duchesse de Longueville, be-
come the bitter and pessimistic author of the Maxims !

M. de Segrais states the companionship between
La Rochefoucauld and Madame de la Fayette to have
lasted twenty-five years, which, as the Duke died in
1680, would date the beginning of their acquaintance
in the year 1655, the very year of her marriage when
she was twenty-two, he forty-two. Other authorities
date it ten years later. But while it is hardly likely
that they could have avoided meeting long before the
latter period, the earlier date does not seem altogether

200 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

probable, and their real companionship evidently did
not become assured until as late as 1665.

Each phase of the life of La Rochefoucauld, this
man of romantic history, says Sainte Beuve, had been
dominated by a woman : first by Madame de Chevreuse,
secondly by Madame de Longueville, then by Madame
de Sable, and lastly by Madame de la Fayette.

" The first two," he continues, " were the heroines
of intrigue and romance ; the third a moralist
and Causeuse ; the fourth returned through
a tenderness tempered with reason to the
character of heroine, re-colouring and varying
the hues, throwing a glamour over them as if
from the last rays of the sun."

The biographers of the Due de la Rochefoucauld
vary very much as to his merit and qualities. Segrais,
who admired him, while admitting that he had not studied
much, considered him to have a perfect knowledge of
men and of the world a knowledge productive of the
Maxims, and as proof of his admiration for La Roche-
foucauld, we may mention that Segrais knew nearly all
these by heart. On the other hand, there is the portrait
by Cardinal Retz. In many minds Retz's description has
caused La Rochefoucauld to stand for that enigmatical
but useful French phrase, which was here first used in
connection with him a certain " Je ne sais quoi " ! All
his life a something seems to have prevented him
from attaining to the perfection of what he aimed at
it stepped in between him and his early life of intrigue ;
it prevented him from gaining the reward for his
services to Anne of Austria ; from becoming an accom-
plished warrior, a fine statesman, or a good courtier : it
left him at the age of fifty-two, when, as Madame de la
Fayette's friend, he was fast becoming a success at last,
a man of misanthropy and bitterness, one who had tried
Life in the balances and found it wanting in everything
noble, durable and beautiful.

His first disgrace at Court had come through an
unsuccessful attempt, in conjunction with Madame de
Chevreuse, to aid Anne of Austria in an effort to flee

FRIENDSHIP WITH LA ROCHEFOUCAULD 201

to Brussels to escape her unhappy existence between
Richelieu and Louis XIII. an attempt which occa-
sioned his exile from Paris.

This exile brought him a season of domestic happi-
ness : during it, he married and settled down in the
country. Soon, however, the death of Richelieu and
Louis XIII. took him back to Paris, where he expected
much from his old friend Anne of Austria. But she
in the meantime had become absorbed in Mazarin, and
had no remembrance of the friends of her youth and
misery. Seeing this, La Rochefoucauld, disgusted with
such ingratitude from one whom he had served so faith-
fully, on the outbreak of the Fronde was only too glad
to throw himself headlong into the party of the Frond-
ists, fighting not only for the beautiful eyes of the
woman he loved, but also for revenge !

We have seen what little satisfaction he got out of
the Fronde ; its mercenary motives and general selfish-
ness, the ingratitude of one whom he adored, only
strengthened his growing opinion of the corruption of
his fellow-men : with a natural reaction, therefore, on
issuing from the Fronde, he became its judge and
moralist.

It was in the salon of the friend of his third period
the moralist and conversationalist, Madame de Sable"
that the Maximes of La Rochefoucauld came into
being. Without her, it is said, he would never have
made them.

Madame de Sable was an old-fashioned precieuse,
and in addition to her favourite occupation of maxim-
making, her preciosit'e showed itself in all her habits,
but especially in her mastery of the art of cooking !
She was noted for the delicacy of her cuisine, not
opulent or abundant, but exquisite and dainty to a
degree so much so that the Due de la Rochefc
cauld, also an enthusiastic epicure, asked her to give \
lessons, and was in the habit of sending his chef\.Q\
kitchen to learn in the process how to make all
soups, marmalades, etc. And after once getting n
way of transcribing his experiences of life in Maxims

202 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

and these were after all but a record of his own bitter
disappointments he was in the habit of sending her his
pessimistic reflections in exchange for a good dish, or a
coveted recipe.

" Here are all the maxims I have," he wrote her on
one occasion, "but as no one does anything
for nothing, I ask of you in return a carrot
soup, or a ragout of mutton ! "

Thus Madame de Sable gave a carrot soup for a criti-
cism of Woman as personified by Madame de Longue-
ville ; for a sarcastic reflection on the genius of Intrigue
Madame de Chevreuse ; for a scathing epigram on
Vanity, when the inflated figure of the Due de Beaufort,
Roi des Halles, loomed before his vision ; or for a sigh
over Duplicity, when Mazarin impersonated the whole
race^of Deceivers to him.

Madame de Sable's own great claim to distinction
was her politeness. Belonging to the early Court of
Louis XIII., she had, says M. Victor Cousin her bio-
grapher, neither the beauty of Madame de Mont-
bazon, the audacity of Madame de Chevreuse, the
capacity of the Princess Palatine, the charm of Madame
de Longueville, nor the genius of Madame de Sevigne,
but she possessed in the highest degree the gift of
politeness, that product of the union of reason and mind,
of charm and goodness. This she had acquired in the
early years of the century, for Madeleine de Souvre,
daughter of the Marquis de Courtenaux, was born as
early as 1599. Married at the age of fifteen to the
Marquis de SabM a man of no importance in the world,
but with whom she lived twenty-six years, and by whom
she had four children in 1663, when she was Marie
Madeleine de la Fayette's friend, she was already sixty-
four years of age, and her life romance, which had been
centred round one of Gaston d'Orleans' victims, the
brilliant and unfortunate Henri de Montmorency, was
already long past. With it, at thirty-three, the period
of coquetry was also over, her emotional life thereafter
being confined to the calmer satisfaction of friendship,
ending finally in the comfort and peace of religion.

FRIENDSHIP WITH LA ROCHEFOUCAULD 203

Earlier, when living the life of the Astree, and an idol
of the Rambouillet, she had been one of the most sought
after women of the salon of the Grande Mademoiselle,
and her own salon was in one sense on a higher plane
than any of the others. Even as the Rambouillet had
introduced the epistolary style, brought to perfection by
Madame de SeVigne ; Mademoiselle de Scudery and
her school, that of light literature in imitation of Voiture ;
the Grande Mademoiselle, pen portraits ; so Madame
de Sable had introduced the elevated taste for Maxims,
sentences and moral reflections.

During her married life, Madame de Sable" lived in
the Place Royale, where her salon was much visited by
the fashionables and beaux-esprits of the day ; but as
early as 1659, overcome with the loss of her grown son,
she left the Place Royale, and building for herself a
house within the precincts of Port Royal de Paris, she
had retired there. It was therefore in the shadow of
this monastery, where the noblesse and literati of Paris
assembled round her hearthstone, that

" Maximes et pense"es were handed about, turned
and returned, a trait of wit added, or a drop
of acid poured in ".

History is full of strange coincidences, and by one
of these Madame de Sable when living at Port Royal
was associated in closest friendship with the former
friend of the pessimist that friend for whom he would
have fought with gods the Duchesse de Longueville !
At first in no sense a devotee, Madame de Sable", under
the influence of her spiritual surroundings at Port Royal,
had become more and more pious, until in her last
years she joined the Solitaires at Port Royal des
Champs, and became altogether identified with the
Jansenists. Stranger still than the friendship of
Madame de Sable and the Duchesse de Longueville,
was it that the fourth and last interest of the Due de la
Rochefoucauld should have allied herself to the other
two; but so it was. For Madame de la Fayette,
thrown in contact with Madame de Sable, doubtless in
the salon of the Grande Mademoiselle, and having

204 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

known Madame de Longueville at the Rambouillet,
became very friendly with them both when they were
living at Port Royal. She seemed anxious to under-
stand them, and to be loved by them in return, having
especially a great admiration for Madame de Sable,
her senior by thirty-five years.

To a certain Dr. Valant, Madame de Sable's phy-
sician for many years, at last her secretary, we owe the
record of the latter friendship. As her confidential agent,
it should have been his duty at her death to have de-
stroyed the private letters and papers left in his charge,
instead of which he collected them carefully, and de-
posited them in the Abbey of St. Germain des Pres,
from whence in the course of the centuries they were
sent to the Bibliotheque Nationale at Paris. I am
ignorant of the exact number of letters from Madame
de la Fayette in the Valant Collection, but eight of
them published in Delort's Voyages autour de Paris are
charming. Most of them are solicitous of the friendship
of Madame de Sable, and reproachful of the latter's too
great seclusion, the writer complaining of being denied
admittance to the little house contiguous to the convent.

In 1659, coming back to Paris from Auvergne, and
taking up a certain habitual life among her friends, and
the world at large, it is most probable that Madame de
la Fayette often met the Due de la Rochefoucauld, al-
ways so prominent and so remarkable even in that re-
markable day and society. And certainly if she had
not done so Before 1661, she must at least have made
his acquaintance when she became a member of the
Court of Madame, when she was also an intimate friend
of Madame de Sable. According to M. Gaston Boissier,
that delightful modern critic, it was in the salon of the
Marquise de Sabl6 that the Due and Madame de la
Fayette first met ; but in 1663, when Madame de Sable"
sent manuscript copies of the Maximes round to her
and La Rochefoucauld's friends on the condition that
they give their frank opinion, and refrain from copying
the precious sayings, none was sent to Madame de la
Fayette. She heard the Maxims read for the first time

FRIENDSHIP WITH LA ROCHEFOUCAULD 205

at Fresnes by Madame du Plessis Gue"n6gaud, and they
seem to have affected her disagreeably. On coming
back to Paris, she wrote as follows to Madame de
Sable :

" I have just returned from Fresnes, where I have
been two days in solitude with Madame du
Plessis. In those two days we have spoken
of you two or three thousand times it is use-
less to tell you how ! You will easily guess it.
There we read the Maxims of M. de la Roche-
foucauld. Ah ! Madame, what corruption
must one have in heart and mind to be cap-
able of imagining all that ! I was so horrified by
it that I assure you if all the pleasantries had
been serious, such maxims would injure his
affairs more than all the soup which he ate the
other day at your house."

In her next letter to Madame de Sable", she says that
she is anxious to see some of the former's own maxims
as Madame du Plessis assures her that all persons of
good sense are not so persuaded of corruption as M . de
la Rochefoucauld.

In general men approved the Maxims, and women
condemned. Madame de Sable", while sympathising
with her friend La Rochefoucauld in a great many
intellectual points, combated some of his moral opinions
strongly, even to the point of herself writing a treatise
on Friendship in refutation of his maxim that the most
disinterested of Friendships is naught but a traffic where-
in our self-love always shows us something to gain. A
great variety of opinions were sent her in answer to her
request for the candid expression of sentiment with re-
gard to the Maxims, and she did not hesitate to com-
municate these to their author, as also an article which
she herself wrote for the Journal des Savants, and
in which she on the whole praised the mind and pene-
tration of one who " discovered to men the false idea
they had of themselves " always a healthy knowledge.
On the other hand, the story is told that some years
later Madame de la Fayette, knowing the honesty and

206 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

unbiassed judgment of her learned friend, Daniel
Huet, Bishop of Avranches, took the Maxims to him
with a request that he give her his opinion. With
wonderful frankness, Huet replied that in the first place
he not only considered the greater part of the Maxims
to be entirely false in their philosophy, but that even
the title given them was erroneous, maxims being only
those incontrovertible truths universally recognised as
such by all the world, whereas the propositions con-
tained in La Rochefoucauld's work were new, little
known, and clear even to a penetrating and clairvoyant
spirit only through meditation and reflection. Instead
of qualifying them as Maxims, said he, it would have
been more proper to have called them Moral Reflections.
This criticism seemed so just both to La Rochefoucauld
and to Madame de la Fayette, that the new edition of
the book bore the title of Moral Reflections. But
beyond criticising the title, M. Huet analysed the
subject-matter, and especially La Rochefoucauld's pes-
simisms as to the nature of man. Himself believing
optimistically the nature of man to be upright, just and
virtuous, inclined naturally towards good and not evil,
corruptible only by vice, he contended that the defects
observed by La Rochefoucauld were noticeable not in
natural but in corrupted man, vice dehumanising man
from his real humanity. Further, he considered the
author of the Maxims to display a lack of equity in
putting, as he did in many cases, an evil construction
on actions and inclinations innocent in themselves.
But, worst of all, he suspected La Rochefoucauld of
often imputing a vice to man simply for the opportunity
of using an elegant expression the vice being in-
vented for the expression, not the expression for the
vice.

There is no record of how the Duke received Huet's
criticisms. Perhaps his very tactful friend, Madame
de la Fayette, had softened them down before re-
counting them as Madame de Sable had done when
placed in a similar position, for in spite of his cynicism
as to other people, La Rochefoucauld was not without a

FRIENDSHIP WITH LA ROCHEFOUCAULD 207

share of that same vanity ! At any rate the two men
must have remained friends, to argue from a letter which
Huet wrote Madame de la Fayette afterwards, urging
her to induce the Due de la Rochefoucauld to enter
the French Academy. This Madame de la Fayette
would have had him do, but strange to say, the Duke
himself was too timid ever to think of pronouncing the
necessary discourse : although he could talk brilliantly
to a circle of five or six people, a larger audience terri-
fied him to a degree.

La Fontaine was a much kinder critic than Huet.
When the Maxims appeared, he at once wrote a fable
which he addressed to their author. With the usual
beautiful imagery of the poet, this fable was called
" Man and his Image," and in it the Maxims were com-
pared to the crystal of a transparent stream in which
the vain man who fears all mirrors, never having found
one flattering enough, perceives in spite of himself his
features as they really are. From this mirror he wishes
to flee in vain, for whichever way he turns forever he
returns towards the accusing reflector.

One of the letters in the Valant Collection is said to
have betrayed not only the secret of Madame de la
Fayette's budding relationship with La Rochefoucauld,
but to fix its date. This letter is evidently the one in
which she tells of reading the Maxims for the first time,
and which she ends by the remark that if the plea-
santries had been serious they would " injure his affairs "
more than all the soup he had eaten at Madame de
Sable's. It is difficult to guess what she meant by
"his affairs," and M. d'Haussonville thinks she must
have meant his attentions to her about which Madame
de Sable" had rallied her : therefore at the time this
letter was written that is in the year 1663, or shortly
afterwards the relationship was already becoming
close. More indicative still, however, is a letter
written by her to Manage in 1663, and preserved in
the Tarbe Collection of seventy-six of her letters to
Menage a rare treasure. It betrays even more clearly
the fact that at about that date there already existed a

208 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

great attraction between them, and was written in
reply to some flattering message or other sent Madame
de la Fayette through Menage by the Due de la
Rochefoucauld perhaps on the occasion of the publica-
tion of her first novel, the Princesse de Montpensier :
" I am very much obliged to M. de la Roche-
foucauld," she writes, " for his sentiment. It
is an effect of the fine sympathy between us."
This sympathy was evidently the beginning of the end,
for in 1666, when she wrote to Madame de Sable a
letter which M. de Sainte Beuve has made famous and
which is curious in that it shows her innate shrinking
from an imputation of gallantry, and also her dislike of
being considered beyond the age when women are
admired by the opposite sex the relationship was fully
established. It seems that the Comte de Saint Paul,
generally known to be the son of La Rochefoucauld and
Madame de Longueville, had paid her a visit, and she
had spoken to him of the rumours which were beginning
to circulate regarding her connection with the Due de la
Rochefoucauld. Fearing that he had not quite believed
her protestations as to the untruth of these reports, she
wrote to Madame de Sable to ask her to try to persuade
the young Comte of their falsity. Approaching the
subject as if she thought Madame de Sable herself not
quite credulous of her denial, she used very little pro-
testation to her, but begged her to persuade the Comte
of its truth chiefly on the plea that she hated to have
people of his age think she had gallantries, and because
young persons were so apt to consider those older than
themselves as at least a hundred !

The Comte de Saint Paul was very young indeed,
little more than seventeen, and not yet launched on his
later career of gallantry and bravery so soon to end in
a soldier's grave. Madame de la Fayette, tremendously
interested in this young man so dear to her friend La
Rochefoucauld, confesses in a postscript of this same
letter to Madame de Sabl6 that she finds him to have
" terriblement de 1'esprit ".

In 1668, La Rochefoucauld's much-neglected wife,

FRIENDSHIP WITH LA ROCHEFOUCAULD 209

who had borne him eight children, died, and it has been
a matter of surprise to historians that he did not at once
marry Madame de la Fayette, a fact very explicable
nowadays in the light of the discovery that the Comte
de la Fayette was still alive, not only in 1668, but until
1683, and that he outlived La Rochefoucauld by three
years ! Yet if one ignores the inevitable struggle be-
tween the Material and the Spiritual under which these
two friends as mortals doubtless had to suffer, the re-
lationship between them seems to have been a perfect
one. The secret of that struggle can only be divined,
never probed into, as neither of them ever divulged it.
But that it was certainly there, burning underneath that
daily companionship, can be guessed from the fact that
a woman like Madame de la Fayette, very little past
the age of twenty-five, to whom marriage had not re-
vealed real love, yet who seemed born for its tenderest,
most passionate depths, could not have remained in-
sensible to the peculiar charm of a man like La Roche-
foucauld.

At the time of their first meeting if this took place
about the year 1659 he was still handsome, of a most
interesting type of countenance, having, according to
his portrait of himself, very black and naturally curling
hair, thick, well-pencilled eyebrows, a fine and well-
proportioned figure, a manner with women that was
peculiarly captivating. In 1659 he had not even "gout
in miniature " no suspicion of the terrible disease which
afterwards, according to the testimony of Madame de
Sevigne, attacked him in such strength as to bring
forth groans and cries in her presence exactly the
type of man, in fact, calculated to win the admiration
and fancy of a woman like Madame de la Fayette, all
of whose attachments were, as we know, strong and
lasting. However strong, it was not his personality
which most attracted her : undoubtedly the magnet
which drew her was this very corruption of heart that
she had remarked on first reading his Maxims she was
fascinated by the idea of counteracting his view of life,
of taking away the bitterness from his heart

210 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

Did she succeed in her purpose of ridding him of
his bitterness and cynicism ? Her influence is not
perceptible in later editions of the Maxims, but Sainte
Beuve says there was a change in his practice if not in
his profession. And we can imagine her real success
from the proud and triumphant remark imputed to her
by Segrais, the authenticity of which has been called in
question by modern writers.

" M. de la Rochefoucauld," she said, " gave me

mind, but I reformed his heart."

If indeed she succeeded in reforming the heart of this
pessimist, her reward was that of all unselfish persons :
the good reacted on herself. For, in reforming his
heart, she at the same time found the great happiness
of her own life, and experienced that compensation
which pursues each mortal round the earth to bless at
last

La Rochefoucauld has left no testimony to corrobo-
rate the assertion as to his heart having been reformed
by her. Nor is there any evidence in his writings of
her influence. He admits, however, in the portrait of
1659 that he still approves " les belles passions " : they
mark grandeur of soul, and though contrary to extreme
wisdom, go so well with the most austere virtue as not
to be condemnable. Confessing that he has once been
gallant, though no longer so, he says he has renounced
fleurettes for ever. " And if ever I should love," he
continues, " it would be assuredly in this fashion " (that
is, with a grand passion). Thus he was prepared in
1659 for the great passion of his life, and it was not
long before he entirely possessed himself of the mind
and heart of one of the most sensitive souls of the age,
whom he Madame de Sevigne to the contrary or not
undoubtedly loved deeply in return.

The secret of Madame de la Fayette's power to
hold this man who believed neither theoretically nor
practically in constancy in any relation, was revealed
by a scrap of paper in the writing of La Rochefoucauld,
found among the papers of Madame de Sable collected
by ValanL At first it was believed that the fragment

FRIENDSHIP WITH LA ROCHEFOUCAULD 211

was part of a letter from La Rochefoucauld to Madame
de la Fayette, whom he addressed as Zaide, but later
on it was discovered that the very words written on the
paper were incorporated in Madame de la Fayette's
novel of Zaide. That these words belong to the book,
and are not a letter, however, in nowise lessen the
value of the discovery. La Rochefoucauld must have
composed them out of his own experience, giving them
to the author of the book, who on her part accepted
them. The secret of Zaide's power over Alamir who
speaks in the book, is namely, that of Madame de la
Fayette :

" I have ceased," it runs, "to love those who have
loved me, and I adore Zahyde, who disdains
me. Is it her beauty which produces so
extraordinary an effect, or is it her sternness
which causes my attachment ? Would it be
possible that I should have so strange a
sentiment in my heart, and that the only
means of holding me would be not to love me ?
Ah, Zahyde, shall I never be happy enough to
be in a position to know whether it is your
charms or your reserves which attach me to
you ? ".

As in studying life and character, proof in delicate
matters is at best a matter of conviction, one cannot in
this case but feel convinced that in the romance called
Life, our Zaide remained obdurate ever to the persuasions
of her lover, and that wisely enough she never allowed
him to resolve that fatal question as to the superiority
of her charms over her reserves. Perhaps she knew
the nature of La Rochefoucauld too well to give way
perhaps as Mademoiselle de Scudery said to Bussy de
Rabutin when he asked her as to the nature of the
relationship existing between the two :

"The fear of God on both sides, perhaps also

policy, had cut the wings of love ! !
To the last, added Mademoiselle de Scude'ry, "she
remained his favourite and foremost friend ".

Madame de la Fayette was evidently a pricicuse of
the type who did not hesitate to demand everything of

212 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

a lover : entire devotion, love, respect, even unto death,
all for the knowledge that her heart was irrevocably his.
All the world believed at least that M. de la Rochefou-
cauld lived " honestly " with Madame de la Fayette, for
not a breath of scandal attaches to her name, and she
was honoured and acclaimed by her contemporaries as
the most delicate, the most virtuous of her sex.

To resist the gallant side of Friendship was un-
doubtedly easier in the days of the seventeenth century
than it would be now : people then had been educated
by D'Urfe to see the picturesque side of purely platonic
friendship ; by La Calprenede to find delight in romance
for its own sake ; by Mademoiselle de Scudery to satisfy
their souls with phrases and protestations of undying
devotion ; and finally by Corneille to believe in the
strength of the Will over the Passions and Emotions.

That the Due de la Rochefoucauld rebelled against
the platonic side of the friendship in this case, some
critics conclude from the change they discovered in one
of his maxims. Before he knew Madame de la Fayette
the maxim in question ran thus :

" What we take for virtues are often but an
assembly of different actions and interests
which fortune or our interest often arrange,
and it is not always by valour that men are
brave."

In an edition a year or so later, the author made this
maxim apply to both men and women, as :

"Vanity, shame, and above all disposition, often

make men brave and women chaste,"
a sarcastic reflection on the fear of the gentler sex to
allow their natural inclinations to have full play.

Their love was a thing that grew, and not a
sudden flame that flickered up brilliantly only to
gradually die down. To judge from her many re-
velations in her books, Madame de la Fayette be-
lieved most strongly in love at first sight : with all
her wisdom, all her virtue, she had found as did her
own creation the Princesse de Cleves, that this
spontaneous movement of the heart, this unwished-for,

FRIENDSHIP WITH LA ROCHEFOUCAULD 213

but unavoidable outgoing, cannot be controlled. " Does
one pretend to be perfect?" she asked in her self-
revelation. And yet as the years went on, time had
certainly softened down and made veritable the love
of the Due de la Rochefoucauld and his friend, until
the sight of their companionship drew forth from
Madame de SeVigne the thoughtful, almost envious
reflection :

" I believe that nothing can surpass the force of

such a relationship ".

Still, though their love brought them into perfect
sympathy, that Madame de la Fayette never changed
her opinion of the Maxims, the following shows.

In the early part of the nineteenth century, a very
precious book had found its way into the hands of
greedy collectors ; and, after suffering the wanderings
and vicissitudes common to rare and precious things of
the kind, had, after two centuries, actually been seen
and handled by the Comte d'Haussonville, Madame de
la Fayette's tender and sympathetic biographer. This
little book was no less than a copy of the Maximes of
La Rochefoucauld annotated by Madame de la Fayette
herself as the Comte d'Haussonville, in spite of opin-
ions of connoisseurs to the contrary, believes.
On its margin was written :

" A short time before her death, Madame de la
Fayette in re-reading the Maxims of the Due
de la Rochefoucauld, with whom she had been
intimately connected in friendship, wrote in
the margin her observations. This copy was
found on the death of M. l'Abb6 de la Fayette
among the books of his library."

This precious volume, found twenty-nine years after the
death of Madame de la Fayette, betrays her most
mature opinion of the Maxims, her notes being written
indeed in that hour of illumination which should precede
the translation of the spirit into a world where it
no longer sees " through a glass darkly," but with the
clear vision of a realm into which death and corrup-
tion cannot enter. They were made on the proof-

214 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

sheets, evidently, of Barbin's edition of 1693, and as
Madame de la Fayette died in 1693, she was already
at a point when the true state of things is made suddenly
clear :

" That long view of death," she says in her novel
of La Princes se de Cleves, " now so imminent,
made Madame de Cleves look at the things
of this life with a far different eye from that
with which she saw them in health."
Thus these notes betray her last human opinion of her
friend's thoughts, and show that she never radically
changed her first dictum expressed twenty-seven years
before as to the corruption of heart that could conceive
them. It would be interesting to follow these annota-
tions one by one, which though we have not the precious
copy touched by her delicate fingers, we might do
through an edition of the Maxims published in 1853 by
M. Duplessis, who attributed the notes to "a con-
temporary". In 1822, M. Aime Martin, in his edition
of the Maxims, but only in thirty-three copies thereof,
gave thirty-eight of these notes, which he said were
"attributed to Madame de la Fayette". M. Victor
Cousin denied their authenticity altogether, but as the
Comte d'Haussonville believes in them, it will be worth
while to consider at least a few here.

Madame de la Fayette's only comment a propos of
many of La Rochefoucauld's most cherished aphorisms
such as :

" The smallest fault of women who give themselves

up to love, is to love," or
" We should only be astonished at still being able

to be astonished,"

is either " Rubbish ! " or " Nonsense ! " But, when he
discusses the more personal aspects of Love and Friend-
ship, sneering at either the passions themselves or the
possibility of their being felt veritably she becomes more
expansive. Thus when he asserts :

" What men term friendship is merely a partnership
with a collection of reciprocal interests, and an
exchange of favours in fact, it is but a trade

FRIENDSHIP WITH LA ROCHEFOUCAULD 215

in which self-love always expects to gain some-
thing,"
she replies :

"Very good as regards ordinary friendship, but

not for true friendship".

And when, thinking of the loves and friends who have
played him false, the pessimist remarks :

" Rare as true love is, true friendship is rarer,"
he is silenced by the simple answer of our apostle of
the True and Sincere in all relationships :

" I believe both to be equal in rarity, for the verit-
able in friendship has in it a little of love, and
the reality of love contains friendship also ".
This belief of hers in the union of the veritable in love
and friendship is further enlarged by her note to the
following maxim :

" The reason why the majority of women are so
little given to Friendship is that it is insipid
after having felt love ! "
"This," she said, "is because there is everything

in love : mind, heart and body."
" If one judges of love by the greater part of its
effects," he goes on, " it more resembles hate
than friendship."

"I do not understand that," she unhesitatingly
replies. " Good as far as it applies to violent
or jealous love, which according to many
people is the true love."
And she meets his pessimistic reflection that

" Most friends sicken us of friendship, most de-
votees of devotion,"

with her calmer, saner view of life, at once more modern
and more feminine than his :

" Because the greater number take both the one
and the other wrongly. This is perhaps also
the reason that no one understands either
Devotion or Friendship."

Even his pessimism as regards marriage, notwithstand-
ing her own unhappy experience, cannot take away her
faith in the reality of the ideal. He asserted :

216 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

" There may be good, but there are no delicious

marriages ".

" I do not know that there are no delicious mar-
riages," she said, " but I believe there might
be!"

And what supreme faith in the possibilities of life, she
shows in answering his statement that

" In the old age of love, as in life, we still survive
for the evils, though no longer for the plea-
sures ".

Ah, she says dreamily, from her bed of illness, looking
back without bitterness at a life filled with the evils, not
the pleasures of love :

" There are sometimes aftermaths in both which

make one live again for the pleasures ! "
But of all these notes, written it must have been in
a spirit of loneliness and retrospection of a whole life
when, as she said, things were made clear in the illum-
ination of that near approach of death, none betrays
Madame de la Fayette so unfailingly as the following
written as commentary to his assertion that

" Of all violent passions, the one that becomes a

woman best is love ".

"True," she answers, "because it shows least, and
is easy to hide : the character of a woman is
to have nothing which can make her re-
marked "

and this is her principle through life, that which made
her loth to boast of her knowledge, of her Latin, that
which made her publish her books anonymously, that
which kept her in the background of an age where
women lead. And this principle is that of the well-bred
woman through all the ages :

" To have nothing which can make her remarked ! "
La Rochefoucauld then had reason to call this woman
" true," for undoubtedly writing thus after his death, she
did not hesitate to discuss these questions with him as
together they sat in that lovely garden, through hours
of sunshine and spring, through melancholy autumn,
and breathless summer. And, thrice-honoured must

FRIENDSHIP WITH LA ROCHEFOUCAULD 217

the present owner of the little volume feel, who opening
it at some moment when the hypocrisy of the world
weighs most heavily upon him, and reading those trans-
lations of the spirit of a man as weary of the world as
himself, can in the delicate almost unreadable handwrit-
ing of Madame de la Fayette, get back again through
the spirit of this woman who "reformed the heart" of
the author, his belief in Humanity, in Love, in Friend-
ship in all the nobler emotions of the soul !

CHAPTER XVI

FRIENDSHIP WITH SEGRAIS, HUET AND
LA FONTAINE

" The soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a
grander self-acquaintance or solitude." Emerson

THE three other special men friends of Madame
de la Fayette, forming a rare triad of brilliancy
in the literary hemisphere, had no such per-
sonal place in her life as the Due de la Rochefoucauld,
and yet they too were important factors in the develop-
ment of her intellectual nature.

The first was M. Regnauld de Segrais, a native of
Caen in Normandy who after having had in his early
youth an attack of one of those great religious fervours,
which he himself called "the small-pox of the mind,"
had early succumbed to the devouring passion of his
country : that of making poetry. " To be an excellent
poet," went the saying in those days, "one must be
born in Normandy ; " and at the time Segrais began to
invoke the muse, the frenzy for making verses had
extended even to the shops of the old town of Caen !
Pastoral poetry happened to be his particular forte,
but he also wrote galante verses, and it was this latter
talent of his which recommended him to a proud noble
of the time called the Comte de Fiesque, exiled to Caen
for his adherence to the head of the party of Les Im-
portants, who in 1647 took the young poet back to
Court with him, and proposed him to the Grande Made-
moiselle for entrance into her household. She, not
averse to the eclat of acquiring a poet, in 1648 promptly
appointed him her "Gentleman" and "Secretary to
her Command ".

218

JEAN RKGNAUI.n IE SKGRAIS

AFTER A rOKTKAIT K\ FI.AMK.V

FRIENDSHIP WITH SEGRAIS 219

The mother of the Comte de Fiesque, Segrais' earliest
patron, had been for many years the governess of the
Grande Mademoiselle, his wife a prominent member
of her Court, and remarkable for her literary tastes and
gallant imagination. Like most of thega/anfe femmes
of the day, the young Comtesse de Fiesque craved ex-
citement and diversity : she drew a circle of gay men
and women about her, entertaining in a large salon
decorated all in plush. Going from excitement to
excitement, these habitue's of the "Salon Moquette"
composed burlesque plays, poems and madrigals, using
the poetical forms and superannuated language of a
bygone day, and dedicating them all to their Queen,
ensconced within her walls of plush, sitting upon the
plush of her couch, dressed in the smooth yielding
material. I n this atmosphere, the sound of their laughter
and grotesque verse even, was muffled and deadened
until its echo was like that of water rippling over the
rocks. So intoxicated did these knights become with
this sensuous environment, the luxury, the satisfaction
of it, that the yielding substance became a very fetish
to them, and naming her who was the deity of the place,
their Queen, they dubbed themselves Knights of the
Plush ! Soft as plush were their glances ; pliant as
velvet their mood when within the walls and under
the sway of their Queen.

For a short time, Segrais was himself enrolled among
the Knights surrounding Queen Gilette, as they called
her, and under her inspiration he doubtless composed
some of his more gallant verses. Only a great love for
Nature saved him, indeed, from emulating the deterior-
ating fads of his fellow-worshippers at the shrine of
luxury and voluptuousness.

Of rather different calibre from her was Queen
Gilette's husband, and yet he shared her love of excite-
ment. In the Fronde, both found a congenial atmo-
sphere : the Comtesse de Fiesque became one of the
Grande Mademoiselle's Mardchales de Cavip, the Comte
figured prominently under the banner of the Due de
Beaufort and Les Importants. He was said to be vain

220 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

and quarrelsome to the point of searching out disorder
for its own sake ; but he had a distinctly good side, and
it was to his better nature that Segrais appealed. A
great patron of the arts, to which his intellectual modicum
attached him, he delighted in music, literature, and
strange to say, in athletic sports. And, as the splendour
of a great name and the eclat of a considerable fortune
were also his, his unworthier actions, his dissipation and
extravagance alike, were veiled by a dazzling brilliancy.

Regnauld de Segrais had quite a mixture of the
gallant in his disposition, as every poet even a pastoral
one should have, and yet after his first experience
among the Knights of the Plush, this gallant side was
almost wholly submerged in the more serious and
pedantic interests into which he was plunged in his
relationship with the Grande Mademoiselle. Her
exiles at St. Fargeau emphasised his bucolic tastes he
delighted at all times to be in the country, and of all
her Court got most pleasure out of St. Fargeau. All
his softer feelings found balance in watching the flocks
on the hillside in the glow of a rich sunset, at noonday,
or in the early morning, or in trying to reproduce the
language of the shepherds ; in listening to the noises of
the fields, and in seeking out the mountain solitudes.
On the other hand, his pedantic tastes were brought
out at St. Fargeau by his social intercourse with the
Grande Mademoiselle and her Court : his was the
directing tone ; his self-appointed task in his leisure
hour that of transcribing novels and stories for their
amusement novels in which the conversations were
idealised versions of those really carried on by the
Princess and her brilliant society.

To all these people, Segrais the poet a model of
temperance in every respect except that of his pastoral
raptures was the life and spirit. Temperate he was in
truth, for living practically on one meal in the middle
of the day, eating at night only a little bread and fruit,
he loved rule, moderation and good sense, all his desires
being those of the poet. Although he never ran after
fortune, it seems to have sought him out, early bringing

FRIENDSHIP WITH SEGRAIS 221

him literary distinction, not only in his own intellectual
town of Caen, whose Palinods, or poetical contests, were
celebrated throughout France, but in Paris as well, he
being called up from Caen in 1662 to take rank as a
member of the Academic.

When the Fronde began, he was quite young only
twenty-four or five and at first he saw only its humor-
ous side. Afterwards, becoming intimate with Little
Scarron and Jean de Balzac, he grew to ponder over
the misery and sadness of it all, even contemplating like
them emigration to America. It was not until he had
found a medium view of life reconciling him somewhat
through the pleasures of the intellect to the sadness and
incongruities, that he first met the future Madame de
la Fayette, then only about seventeen years of age, and
in 1651 frequenting the Grande Mademoiselle's salon
at the Luxembourg twice a week, in 1652 her delight-
ful evenings at the Tuileries. On these occasions,
Mademoiselle's Gentleman Secretary was master of
ceremonies ; and in the intervals of music, the dance
and the play, he would entertain the company with one
of Scarron's burlesques, or perhaps a few pages from
Don Quixote. Poor Segrais, although a passionate
lover of music, was not blessed with any musical talent :
his voice was unpliable, nor with the best will in the
world could he learn to sing, having, perforce, to con-
tent his craving for the art with the strains of the
celebrated violins of Mademoiselle, with the concerts
given at the Luxembourg by his former patron the
Comte de Fiesque, or those in which the celebrated
musician Lambert and his sister took part.

Becoming friends during those evenings at the
Luxembourg and the Tuileries, Madame de la Fayette
and Segrais renewed their intercourse in 1659 on the
return of Mademoiselle and her Court after the first
exile. This was also the year of the portrait craze, as
well as of Madame de la Fayette's re-introduction into
Parisian society after her four years in Auvergne. She
must in some way have become aware of Segrais'
gallant side, for during the second exile at St.

222 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

Fargeau, she wrote in very sarcastic vein to their
mutual friend M. Huet on the rigour of the Grande
Mademoiselle as regarded the warmer emotions, pity-
ing poor Segrais for the lack of gallant material to be
had under the circumstances at St. Fargeau. All the
more pitiable did this seem to her because she believed
rustic hearts to burn with so much greater fire than
those of the Court, while in the fields and meadows
even Court hearts were apt to burn better than at
Paris. With the best will in the world, however, and
with all the necessary leisure, Segrais would not be able
at St. Fargeau to find the necessary fire with which
to illumine his gallantry.

" I do not believe," said she, "that he will be able
to find enough there to light a match with ! "
During the St. Fargeau period, in addition to his
pastoral inspiration, his novels of society, his occupations
as secretary, Segrais was occupied with more serious
literary work : such as the translation of Virgil's SEneid.
Having a very exalted opinion of Madame de la
Fayette's learning and literary taste, he sent parts of this
work from there to her for her criticism, thereby causing
her much embarrassment, as she found the work not
carefully enough corrected and finished. In 1664, she
wrote thus to M. Huet on the subject :

" M. de Segrais, who believes that I have profited
in Latinity always in proportion to my begin-
ning, and that besides I am a good judge in
matters of poetry, sent me his Virgil in order
that I should read it and give him my opinion
of it, while awaiting that of Menage. I fear
that this opinion of mine will be a pleasant
one indeed ! "

Doubtless in her love for the truth, she did not hesitate
to give Segrais her frank opinion : at any rate, she
wrote Manage to impress upon him the necessity of
advising Segrais to go over his work more carefully,
while hers and other friends' criticism evidently bore
good fruit, the final edition of Segrais' translation being
universally praised as a most scholarly work.

FRIENDSHIP WITH SEGRAIS 223

It was when Segrais had known Madame de la
Fayette some nineteen years, and had served Mademoi-
selle faithfully for twenty-two years that he suddenly
learned the fickleness of princely favour ! Deepest
gratitude and esteem give way, in fact, before the
vanquishing power of love, and Segrais for all his
philosophy, was indiscreet enough to arrogate every-
thing to friendship and throw down the gauntlet to Love !
In their zeal for the welfare of their mistress, he and
another member of Mademoiselle's household had been
unwise enough to go to the Archbishop of Paris and
ask him to use his influence to stop her marriage to
Lauzun. This expedition coming to the knowledge of
the Princess in the first days of her grief at the frustra-
tion of her marriage, Lauzun's will being more than
ever law to her, both men were summarily dismissed
from her household. And no intercession availed to
save Segrais. Fortunately for him, however, he had a
very firm and generous friend near at hand one who at
once offered him the hospitality of her house and home,
whereby the immediate consequence of his misfortune
was simply a transfer from the Luxembourg to the
more modest household opposite in the Rue Vaugirard.
This generous friend was indeed no other than Madame
de la Fayette ; and, noted as she was for her exquisite
politeness, for a delicacy so sensitive as to instinctively
avoid anything that could wound or shock it, in offering
her hospitality to Segrais she had paid him the greatest
possible compliment and eulogy. Although by so
doing, she incurred the eternal enmity of Mademoiselle
de Montpensier, always a good hater, her independent
spirit was not disturbed, and on his part, Segrais only
gained by this exchange of a palace for the hotel of a
simple gentlewoman. In the society of Madame de la
Fayette, too, he found a milieu infinitely more congenial
to his tastes than that surrounding the Princess, while
from his gracious, gentle hostess, called v rate by one
who knew her best, he learned to esteem the true, to
love only it in all things.

From the time Segrais entered the household of

224 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

Madame de la Fayette in 1670 until 1676 when he
married and removed to Caen, he is most closely identi-
fied with both Madame de la Fayette and the Due
de la Rochefoucauld ; and in return for her generous
hospitality, he was of the greatest service to her in the
writing of her books. Not only did he allow her to
publish under his name when she at first feared the
ridicule of the Court as an authoress, but, taking the
authorship of several of her books upon himself, actually
made authors out of both her and the Due de la Roche-
foucauld, lending them that practical assistance in the
technique of writing which is as necessary as the inspira-
tion itself.

" It is a trade to make a book, quite as much as
to make a watch," said La Bruyere, "and
more than intellect is required to become an
author."

Segrais, therefore, was the means of both these authors
becoming adepts in their trade, La Rochefoucauld
having submitted his Maxims for Segrais' correction
before they were published in 1665, and it being
thought for a long time that Madame de la Fayette's
first books were altogether his work.

Segrais had the greatest and most sincere admira-
tion for his hostess of those six years, and his Mdmoires
Anecdotes, a collection of amusing bits of gossip
about all the famous people of the day, now included
in the Segraisiana, are full of admiring details of
Madame de la Fayette's character and life. He tells
of her poetical spirit, cleverness in affairs, judgment,
the solidity of her mind.

" Where," he asks in one place, " does one find

poets like M. Manage, who makes good verses

in Latin, in Greek and Italian? He was

a great personage, although those envious

of him would not admit it. He did not,

however, understand all the. finesse of poetry :

but Madame de la Fayette understood it well."

He especially admired a certain quality of frankness

she had, and seemed struck with the fact that she did

FRIENDSHIP WITH HUET 225

not hide her age like other women, but told freely in
what year and what place she was born. His testi-
mony as guest to her practical management not only of
her domestic affairs, but of private matters as well,
was also frankly given. She not only knew how to
govern her own house, he comments, but understood
the science of litigation, being clever in understanding
all things without ostentation.

With his marriage and removal to Caen, Segrais
seems to have passed out of the life of Parisian society
in general and of the Faubourg in particular, but early
in his friendship with Madame de la Fayette, he had
introduced to her a friend, also a native of Caen and
six years younger than himself: M. Daniel Huet, not
a poet, no Knight of the Plush, but another erudite
scholar, philosopher and scientist. The relationship
between M. Huet and Madame de la Fayette was
purely an intellectual one : she respected and admired
this man so esteemed both for his character and writings
by the greatest men of his time, including Bossuet
and Flechier. When Segrais brought him to the
Faubourg in about 1660, Huet was still a layman : he
did not take holy orders until he was forty-three years
old, about thirteen years later, but at thirty his reputa-
tion as an erudite scholar was already established, and
he was noted for the politeness of his language and the
force of his reasoning.

Segrais and Huet used to visit the Faubourg to-
gether, Huet calling for Segrais at the Luxembourg,
and escorting him across the street for an evening in
the brilliant company gathered round Madame de la
Fayette, or for a little dinner en tite-h-ttte, as the case
might be. On one occasion, Madame de la Fayette
sent them a joint invitation to dinner, excusing herself
for not writing separate letters by saying that her in-
dolence did not wish in any way to disunite that which
friendship had joined together.

" Wherefore," she says, " it puts you two together."
Her animated correspondence with Huet was a mark
of admiration and friendship indeed, in conquering as

226 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

it did her aversion to letter-writing, which was partly
ingrained, partly the result of ill-health. To all her
correspondents, she had to make excuses for the irregu-
larity of her letters ; and she did not at first acknowledge
to Huet the real cause of her delinquencies in this
respect with him, but rather attributed it to natural
indolence.

" I bask in idleness," she wrote, " and it but grows

and increases from day to day."

Then again : one letter, she reminded him, deserved at
least three from Caen !

Yet even in these first letters, reading between the
lines, it is easy to divine that her vaunted laziness was
but a chosen veil for ill-health. As early as 1 663 when
only twenty-nine years of age she confessed to Huet
that honours cannot change health, even if they do alter
manners, nor can they give it, alas ! to those who have
it not. At this time though honours were not lacking
to the friend and confidante of Henriette d'Angleterre,
health was already denied her.

" Instead of working for Heaven," she complained
about this time to Huet, in the same humor-
ous vein, " I begin to find there is nothing
better to do than to do nothing."
Her physical being did force her into a certain degree
of inactivity, but when she wrote she had all the vivacity
and interest one could desire. The restless activity of
Huet seemed to amuse her vastly, and to awaken her
keen sense of humour.

"Seigneur Dieu, Monsieur," she wrote him on

hearing of his frequent journeyings to and fro,

and conjecturing that he made many visits to

the Abbesse of Malnoue, "you come and go

like peas in the pot. What in the world

makes you trot so ? To see you go so fast,

it would seem that it must be love : it can

only be in its service that one goes so far ! "

Only to her friend Madame de S6vign6 did Madame

de la Fayette acknowledge the extent of the extreme

lassitude which possessed her : only to her did she try

FRIENDSHIP WITH HUET 227

to excuse that disinclination to letter-writing. Begin-
ning a letter on the subject by saying she had had two
attacks of fever since last she had written, and after
giving some very Rabelaisian details as to her health,
she paints her persistent insomnia and capricious
appetite.

" I would rather sleep than eat I go to bed : I
turn and turn again. I have no pain, neither
have I any sleep. I call some one : I take a
book : I shut it again. Day comes : I rise, I
go to the window : four o'clock strikes five
six : I go to bed again, and fall asleep until
seven. I rise at eight, sit down to the table at
twelve uselessly as on the evening before. I
go to bed again uselessly in the evening as
on the night before. Are you ill ? Not in
the least. Are you weaker ? Not in the least.
11 1 remain in this state three days and three nights.
I am sleeping again now, but still I do not eat
except by machine and without rubbing my
mouth with vinegar like the horses. For the
rest, I am well, and I have not even a
headache."

Of course the ill -health of Madame de la Fayette
eventually became known to her friends, and her various
maladies, her uncomplaining sufferings were sources of
much concern to them, doubtless for the very reason of
her patience and unselfishness. Manage, especially, in
his numerous letters to Daniel Huet, mentions constantly
Madame de la Fayette's "migraines," her "vapeurs,"
her colds and her heart attacks all seem solicitous and
tender toward her to a degree.

M. Huet, though not gallant in the general sense
of the word, seems to have been greatly admired by
women. One well-known dame of the time, Madame
de Choisy, renowned for the sharpness of her tongue,
as well as for her wit and shrewdness, was frank enough
to criticise him in a portrait included among the forty-
nine in the collection of Mademoiselle de Montpensier,
edited by Segrais and Huet himself. She characterises

228 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

the erudite and attractive prelate in enigmatical fashion
as taller and of better figure than healthy in appearance ;
better made than agreeable ; with a skin too white and
delicate for a man ; blue eyes, rather large than small ;
light chestnut hair, well-made nose, large mouth, the
whole redeemed by red lips, and teeth of a striking
whiteness.

" As for your mind," she said, " you certainly have
as much as one can have, and it resembles
your face : it has more beauty than charm ! "
Altogether, her portrait paints the man of learning
engrossed in his studies, rather heedless of the science
of the world. On reading his short essays on various
abstract subjects, however, one forms a different opinion.
An underlying humanity and warmth attract most
sensibly to this friend of Madame de la Fayette, whose
most famous treatise, was on the ''Weakness of the
Human Spirit".

He discriminates most interestingly between the
terms bon-e sprit and be I- esprit. To be bel-esprit, he
says, one must be bon-esprit, but to be bon-esprit it is
not at all necessary to bel-esprit ! In other words, to
be good one must have a beautiful mind, but to be good
it is not necessary to be brilliant. " However lively,
however dazzling, however fecund the mind, if it is not
solid and regulated, it will be tinged with folly." It is
his dictum, too, that "the beauty of the spirit consists in
a vivacity, a fertility, an elevation purely gifts of nature,
and not attained by study or art. Goodness of mind,
however, depends on justice, regulation, and moderation
originating in nature, but capable of being cultivated
and augmented by art."

The learned Huet, while condemning the Moral
Reflections of La Rochefoucauld, admired the books of
Madame de la Fayette extremely, to her great surprise
and delight showing his appreciation by writing an
endorsement of them in the shape of a very profound
essay on the origin of novels, which was published as a
preface to her novel of Zaide in 1670. In this, he
speaks of novels as the " agreeable pastime of honest

JEAN DE LA FONTAINE

AFTER A PORTRAIT BY INGRES

FRIENDSHIP WITH LA FONTAINE 229

idlers," and announces their principal object or at least
what should be their object as primarily the instruction
of readers, to whom they should always show Virtue
crowned and Vice punished ! Much pleased by this
preface to her book, Madame de la Fayette said d
propos of it laughingly to Huet : " We have married
our children to each other ".

The third figure of this group of friends of Madame
de la Fayette, Jean de la Fontaine, was of quite dif-
ferent calibre, neither a philosopher and savant like
Huet, nor a poet of the quality of Segrais, rather a
genius, one of those figures which appears but once in
an age, and whose gifts are evident only in his works,
not in his everyday life or conversation.

Born at Chateau-Thierry in Champagne, where his
father was Commissioner of Forests, in 1621, the youth
of Jean de la Fontaine was not much disturbed by
educational tasks : he was free to roam about at will ;
and Nature, seeing the boy neglected, interposed and
taught him her own most exquisite secrets. Like the
Anointed Man described by the modern Scottish poet,
Fiona Macleod, the Fairies had whispered to him as
he lay in the fields, and books added naught to the
genius that was in him. For twenty-two years, his
poetical instinct lay dormant suddenly it was aroused
by an ode of Malherbe's beginning :

What will ye say, races of the future,
If now and then a discourse sage

Relate to you the wild adventure
Of our most abominable age ?

These lines seemed to arouse the sleeping poet within
him, and he began himself to make a discourse which
was to teach the coming races some of the adventures
of his age, so full of romance and variety. His de*but
in the world of letters was made, however, not by
original work, but by a free translation of one of
Terence's poems. He was then thirty- three years of
age, and the Duchesse de Bouillon, exiled to Chateau-
Thierry after the Fronde, had taken him up to Paris,

230 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

where that great patron of literature, M. Fouquet,
made him Poet-Laureate of his magnificences at Vaux
and St. Mande. In 1659, La Fontaine wrote the
epitaph of a lazy person supposed to be himself, in
which he said his time was divided into two parts, the
one in sleeping, the other in doing nothing. This was
a pleasantry, and yet had a grain of truth in it : to such
a person, the office of making poems to order could
not but be irksome, and the Fouquet poet-laureateship
weighed heavily upon his spirit. He felt, he said, as if
the writing of every poem was the mechanical pulling
of a string which had a loaf of bread at the other
end of it !

Fouquet's disgrace in 1661 ended the earning of
these loaves of bread, and La Fontaine then became
" Gentleman " to Margaret of Lorraine, Dowager-
Duchess of Orleans, remaining at the Luxembourg in
this pleasant capacity until the death of the Duchess in
1672. Although so gauche and silent in society, La
Fontaine had many warm friends, among them, the
Due de la Rochefoucauld. It is not known where or
how he and Madame de la Fayette first met, but they
must have done so very early in his Parisian career,
either at the Rambouillet, or later on at the Luxem-
bourg, where Madame de la Fayette visited the
Duchess of Orleans as well as the Grande Mademoiselle.
These friends, Menage, Segrais, Huet and La Roche-
foucauld, were all closely connected with La Fontaine,
all met at the house of Madame de la Fayette all de-
lighted in La Fontaine's genius, which first became
fully apparent in 1664, when the first part of his
Contes appeared. His name is associated most eter-
nally with those wonderful fables (1668), at times
shockingly free and indecent, which since his day have
never ceased to instruct Youth and amuse Old Age-
They shocked Louis XIV. to the extent that he would
do nothing for La Fontaine, and they excluded him
for many years from the Academic. Finally, in order
to gain admittance to the Academic and to secure the
favour of the King, the poet was forced to vow never

FRIENDSHIP WITH LA FONTAINE 231

more to write fables. Yet he himself, while unhappily
married and sarcastic of the marriage tie, which he ad-
mitted was good for some people, if not for himself,
was most reserved and circumspect in his relationship
with those women whom he loved and respected, be-
traying no trace of coarseness even in the most familiar
and freest conversations a fact which explains his very
good friendship with so delicate a woman as Madame
de la Fayette.

To her he seems to have been tenderly attached
unless one can put down to the exaggeration of the time
such an expression as " I love you, love me always!"
This poet, from whom, like Little Scarron, the laugh
and the tear were never far away, to whom the Dream
was the greatest reality who like De Musset thought

A tear has its price, it is the sister of a laugh !

indulged sometimes in the distractions of the gay
society about him, and it is to some wager or plea-
santry of society during one of those social evenings at
Madame de la Fayette's that we owe the tangible
memorial of his friendship for her. This is a poem
accompanying a little set of billiards he sent her.
Though quaint in its metaphor and sentiment, it is
not remarkable as poetry pure and simple.

Comparing the game of billiards to " the pretty
game of love," the object to be won, says the
poet, is a proud heart : the ball, the poor
lover ; the cue and the play itself, the means
which the lover takes soonest to touch the
object of his affections; the pockets, the by-
paths into which the player may precipitate
himself, or by the address and stratagem of
others, himself be precipitated.
"But this is a poor piece of wit, and quite un-
worthy your genius," La Fontaine concludes.
:< My billiards are succinct, not so my letter.
I shall add nothing to this long discourse
but this alone, which comes from a sincere
heart : I love you, love me always ! '

232 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

On the death of the Duchess of Orleans, at fifty-one
years of age, the wanderings and loneliness of this
necessarily solitary genius were at last relieved by a
friend who not only understood and appreciated him,
but who realised that the poet was not capable of
taking care of himself. With wonderful insight and
kindness, this friend took him into her own household,
and for twenty years provided for all his wants.

This Madame de Sabliere, wife of the Secretary
to Louis XIV., was herself one of the most charming
and intellectual women at the Court, one who though
she never wrote herself, had all the necessary lumieres
being learned in mathematics, physics, astronomy,
natural history, anatomy, and philosophy her unusual
knowledge depriving her in no way of the charm of
her sex, her house being called the sojourn of Joy,
Pleasure and the Graces.

Under the warm attachment which benefactors feel
towards their proteges, La Fontaine soon became such
an inseparable part of Madame de Sabliere's family,
that on one occasion she herself wrote that she had sent
away her entire household, keeping only her dog, her
cat and La Fontaine ! This devotion seems the more
remarkable when we think of La Fontaine's well-known
absent-mindedness, his stupidity, his gaucherie, his
inability to talk well, to recount what he had seen, or
even to recite his own fables a phenomenon which La
Bruyere relegates among the incomprehensible things
of this world, for, said he, if he sits down to write, he
makes the very animals, the stars, the stones everything
that cannot speak to talk ; in his works there is naught
but lightness, elegance, natural beauty and delicacy.

" La Fontaine," said La Harpe, " invented nothing
but his style, and the secret of that died with him."
This may be true, but the world is more grateful to the
man who makes it laugh than to him who forces out its
tears ; and the whole world was grateful to La Fontaine,
not only the world of his own day, when such people as
Madame de Sevigne, Madame de la Fayette and the
Due de la Rochefoucauld learned his fables by heart,

FRIENDSHIP WITH LA FONTAINE 233

but the world of to-day, which still rejoices in and is
taught the lessons of life by his donkeys, his monkeys,
his foxes and his crows, while the sage and bitter
reflections of a cynical philosophy live but as dead
evidences of the folly of all earthly pride and ambition.
Thus each of these three friends, Segrais, Huet and
La Fontaine, entering for a brief space into Madame de
la Fayette's life, after serving their purpose, after doing
their share to teach her soul its " grander self-acquaint-
ance," went his own way again ; and, moving into other
spaces, carried out apart from her his further destiny.
Each, however, left the mark of his influence unmis-
takably in her character to the shaping of her after
career. Those persons are few indeed who accompany
us throughout the entire course of our existence, but
each personality with which we come in contact leaves
its own particular mark. In moving away from these
three remarkable men, whose minds had stimulated
hers, whose characters had helped smooth out her
angles, whom she herself had swayed powerfully for
good, Madame de la Fayette must have been grateful
for and cognisant of the salutary power of such contact.
She must have realised its sharpening effect upon her
intellect, even though at the time she was unaware that
all her experiences, and especially this impersonal
masculine agency, had been busy preparing her for yet
another, and greater, call of Friendship !

CHAPTER XVII

POLITICAL EXPERIENCES LA DUCHESSE DE
SAVOIE

" Luck and Temper rule the World ! " La Rochefoucauld

WHILE Love with its pleasures and compensa-
tions brings its own peculiar responsibilities,
nothing requires a quicker response to its
calls' than Friendship. Sometimes it demands quiescence
and calm sometimes action ; but, whatever its claims,
woe to the person who refuses instantly to obey. If
Friendship's reward is sweet, so is its revenge relentless
and stern !

At the very time she was welding the bond of
friendship which held her to the young Princess of
England, Madame de la Fayette was making yet
another alliance which in its turn was to demand great
things of her. During her frequent visits to Chaillot,
she had become acquainted with two young girls, both
under the care of Mere Ang&ique. The eldest was
just the age of Henriette d'Angleterre, therefore ten
years younger than Madame de la Fayette, and both,
though not of royal blood, were destined like the
Princess of England, to fill important positions in the
world.

Their father had been a personage of renown in the
time of the Regency, when he was celebrated for his
handsome face, his gallant tastes, and his fiery temper.
Married to Elizabeth de Vendome, sister of the famous
Due de Beaufort, whose escutcheon bore the bar sinister
of Henri IV. himself, Charles Ame"dee de Savoie, Due
de Nemours, joined with the Frondists in the struggle

234

POLITICAL EXPERIENCES 235

really begun by his brother-in-law, as head of the party
of Les Importants, at the same time carrying on with
that brother-in-law his own particular quarrel a feud
engendered either by his own serious shortcomings
towards his wife, or by innate antagonism, it is difficult
to judge which. At any rate, the Due de Nemours was
the aggressive party ; and, full of the pride of life, the
bravado of death, reckless dare-devil as he was, he
could not even wait for his wounds to heal after the
battle of Porte St. Antoine : in fact the guns had
hardly stopped roaring, before again taking up the
sword in his weak ringers, he forced his wife's brother
to satisfy his hitherto unappeased anger in a duel to the
death. For this, he paid the last price, and death in
cooling his hot temper for ever, also saved him exile
with the rest of the party of the Princes.

Accounts unite in describing the Due de Nemours
as of charming personality, and his life might be said
to be peculiarly appropriate as the history of a cavalier
of the Fronde. Like the Marquis de S6vigne, this
typical gallant had had the misfortune to see beauty in
every one but in his own wife, the happiness of being
rewarded for his infidelities by her faithful devotion and
loyalty. On his death, therefore, according to the
singular justice of fate, instead of being execrated on all
sides for his faithlessness, he was mourned sincerely by
the two women whom he had injured most. His wife,
overcome with grief, although she certainly had not had
much reason to regret his loss, at once retired with her
two young daughters to the convent of the Filles de
Ste. Marie in the Rue St. Antoine, from which she
afterwards removed to Chaillot. The other woman,
forgetting his perfidy, and remembering only his charms
and her own passionate devotion, wept for him as if he
had died adoring her. This latter was the Duchesse
de Longueville ; the Due de Nemours being the rival
of La Rochefoucauld !

By the time the sorrow of the widow of the Due de
Nemours had become somewhat less poignant, the two
fatherless daughters had grown into beautiful marriage-

236 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

able creatures ; and, disappointed in her own wedded
life, Madame de Nemours then became ambitious to
make for her children alliances far above those which
their rank as princesses of the younger House of Savoy
would warrant an ambition early strengthened by the
prediction of a soothsayer that one would be a Queen,
the other a Sovereign! According to Mademoiselle
de Montpensier, prejudiced by jealousy and dislike
against the Duchesse and the two girls, the mother
neglected nothing to make this prediction come true.
Visiting all the Courts of Europe with them, she
endeavoured to press upon all eligible parties their
superior charms and attractions.

" As for me," said the Grande Mademoiselle, telling
this with a spice of malice, " I never could see
that they had any ! Their heads were of
a terrible size, the one red, the other blonde,"
she continues, " their features very mediocre,
. . . but, though anything but beautiful, they
were well dressed, and danced well, "she admits
grudgingly. "Their manners, however, do
not please me," she concluded, "why, I
cannot tell."

Yet for all her trouble and concern over the future
of her offspring, Madame de Nemours did not live long
enough to see the prediction regarding their great
futures fulfilled : she died in 1664, just about as the
elder, whom she had previously destined for the Due
de Savoie, was again to have the opportunity of
wedding him a possibility which the year before had
seemed closed for ever when he married Frangoise de
France, half-sister of the Grande Mademoiselle. In
1664, however, this Princess had suddenly died, leaving
the enviable position of Duchess of Savoy again free,
whereupon Duke Emmanuel selected the elder Made-
moiselle de Nemours to fill the vacant place, and in
1665 the wedding was celebrated. The next year the
younger sister espoused that very Alexander VI. of
Portugal whom in 1662 Louis XIV. for political
reasons had endeavoured to unite to the Grande

POLITICAL EXPERIENCES 237

Mademoiselle, and for refusing whom the Princess had
been sent into her second exile at St. Fargeau.
Thus was the old prediction fulfilled : one sister had
become a Queen, the other a Sovereign.

There is a portrait of Marie Jeanne Baptiste de
Nemours, the elder sister, among the portraits in the
gallery of Mademoiselle de Montpensier, which de-
scribes her as both gay and serious when occasion
required, of gallant manners and amiable temper : as
not only singing well, playing the Mute gracefully and
dancing admirably, but with a mind capable of finesse,
a just speech, every movement and action instinct with
a grace and charm inseparably connected with the
memory of that hot-headed gallant, her father. Thus,
in spite of the jealous depreciation of her cousin across
the bar sinister, the Grande Mademoiselle, the Duchess
of Savoy was considered extremely beautiful ; and this
beauty and charm, this seduction of personality, she
never lost. Many years later, a French envoy visiting
the Court of Savoy, enthusiastically described her at
the age of forty-five, to surpass all the ladies of her
Court in nobility and charm.

She was just twenty-one when she married the
Due de Savoie, and although he had selected this
gallant and charming Princess after refusing an alliance
with no less a personage than the Grande Mademoiselle
herself on the plea that he wanted a younger and more
beautiful wife, it had not been a love-match : Made-
moiselle de Nemours' real love-affair had brought her
only sorrow and chagrin, to escape which she had
willingly left her native country for far-away Savoy.

The greatest ambition of the Due de Savoie was
to become a second Louis Quatorze ! He adopted him
as his model not only in great but in small matters in
politics, war, art, works of peace, endeavouring to
ameliorate the condition of his people, to give an im-
pulse to commerce, and to leave behind him architec-
tural monuments to his own grandeur. His palace of
the Venerie near Turin reminded of Fontainebleau, his
Court was a faint echo of the Court of France, a miniature

238 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

Louvre. But if in his weaknesses the Due de Savoie
succeeded admirably in emulating his model, the
dignity and delicacy of Louis in concealing his vices,
he could not imitate, nor did his character show many
of the best qualities of the Roi Soleil. Amiable and
soft-hearted, he was essentially careless and selfish-
faults due in great part to early education under the
leading strings of his mother, Christine of France,
sister of Louis XIII.

Under these conditions, the role which the new
Duchesse de Savoie had to play at this imitation Court
of Louis XIV. was a very difficult one, both before
and after her husband's death. Neglect, insult, and
humiliation were the portion of the wife of a reigning
sovereign not a princess of the blood. Voluntarily
would the Duchess have relinquished real power for
the semblance of it : during the Duke's lifetime, both
were denied her. She could have no real power under
his open neglect and flagrant gallantry, yet her pride
was so great that during even the shortest absences of
her husband, she endeavoured to simulate authority by
summoning the Ministers of State to the palace to
consult with her. To humour her, these dignitaries
allowed themselves to be seen entering and leaving
the palace no more ! The Duchess having endured
the enigmatical position of a sovereign in name for
ten years, in 1675 Due Charles Emmanuel suddenly
died at the early age of forty, leaving the full power to
Madame Royale, as in the custom of Savoy the
Duchess was then called.

What a change was this ! From the position of a
nonentity, Madame Royale suddenly loomed into the
greatest personage in the kingdom. Only a short
time, however, was she allowed to exult in perfect
liberty : she had reckoned without France. During
the lifetime of Mazarin, the policy of Savoy's overlord
had been that of conciliation, but after his death, a new
factor came into the control of foreign affairs. This
was a young man of only twenty-one, son of the famous
Secretary of State Le Tellier, who at the early age of

POLITICAL EXPERIENCES 239

fifteen had been appointed Secretary in Reversion, that
is heir to his father's office, and in 1662 was made
Minister of War by Louis XIV. This was the re-
doubtable Louvois, the same who afterwards proved
the insurmountable stumbling-block in the way of
Madame de Maintenon's ambition of becoming the
crowned and recognised Queen of France.

No weak character was Louvois. According to the
Abbe" Vittorio, he was at once the greatest clerk and the
greatest brute that ever lived. His whole mind was bent
on business, and especially on reforming the army and
bringing in a strict system of discipline into all the de-
partments under his care, and he carried out his ambi-
tions and plans with that rough force which tramples on
all objects in its way. It irritated him exceedingly that
the young King cared more for women and gallantry
than for soldiers and discipline, and from the first he
had had his eye on Savoy as a magnificent centre for
his ambitious designs for the extension of his military
operations in Italy and Spain. Thus, as Louis XIV. at
that period was the slave of his ministers, a new political
policy based on military lines, began in Savoy as well
as in France itself. Louvois' plans, however, were
blocked momentarily by his own antagonism to Charles
Emmanuel, which the politic measures of Louis XIV.,
who managed to win back the loyalty and devotion of
the Duke, redeemed. It was not until the latter's death
that Louvois began his real efforts to secure Savoy as
a field of operations for his designs against Italy.

His first step was to dismiss the French ambassador
appointed under the Mazarin regime, and in his stead
to put a man who had instructions to at once break up
the prevailing desire for repose and peace, neutrality
and inaction at the Court of Savoy, and to infuse a war-
like spirit into the country. He was also deputed to
find out whether Madame Royale was capable of active
alliance with France, whether she was disposed to take
advantage of the weakness of the Spaniards in order
to make conquests in the Milanese district

Thus beset with difficulties and perplexities from

240 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

the very first moment, and realising that she was in the
hands of a domineering master, the King of France re-
presented by his implacable ministers, Madame Royale,
longing to retain her neutrality, her repose, turned for
help in her hour of need to an old friend in France.

It is singularly indicative of the character of Madame
de la Fayette, that she should have inspired deep con-
fidence in two women of high position such as Henriette
d'Angleterre and the Duchesse de Savoie. Yet she
had scarce ceased her first weeping for the one, before
an appeal for advice in growing political perplexities
came to her from the other ! Doubtless Madame de la
Fayette's experience at the Court of France among
courtiers and ministers had prepared her for this new-
field. Doubtless also her connection with the most
remarkable men of letters in France, as well as her
close friendship with the Due de la Rochefoucauld, had
sharpened her mind, and developed her diplomatic
ability. And at forty-one years of age, in the prime
of life and of intellect, the political faculty that last
development of all in man or woman was ripe in
Madame de la Fayette : whatever her reason for accept-
ing this mission, she did not hesitate to answer the
second call of Friendship promptly and generously.

Her exact relationship to the Regent of Savoy has
only recently been estimated by means of the discovery
in 1880 of a number of very important letters which
had lain hid away in the Archives of Turin for two
centuries. These letters most of which are from her
to Madame Royale's secretary and man of business,
Lescheraine, not only prove her tremendous influence
in the affairs of Savoy, but establish as well her patriot-
ism, and the value of her services to France in preserving
to it the allegiance of both Madame Royale and her
son Victor Amedee II.

Madame de la Fayette's friendship for Madame
Royale had many tests put upon it during these years
after the death of the Due de Savoie, and the very fact
that it was preserved, attests her loyalty, good faith,
toleration and magnificent qualities. Looking with

POLITICAL EXPERIENCES 241

leniency on the faults of her friend, she tried only to
help and sustain a woman who was not equal to the
situation into which fate had thrust her. It is very
evident that the grave and self-contained Madame de
la Fayette had an unusual strain of tenderness and
sympathy for young and beautiful creatures of her own
sex, like Henriette d'Angleterre ; and, as she never
saw the Duchesse de Savoie after her loveless marriage,
her ideal of her antedated the unpleasant characteristics
which this union had developed in the charming and
seductive Jeanne Baptiste de Nemours. And, having
given her her allegiance at the early period of her
girlhood, knowing the later character of the Duchess
only through letters no inconsistencies, no mistakes
on the part of her friend could for a moment alienate
the fidelity of a nature like hers.

During all the years of the Duchess's absence from
France, Madame de la Fayette had corresponded with
her having also kept in touch with the younger sister,
the Queen of Portugal and it is probable that she
began to keep her informed of what was going on in
the circles she had left, as early as the first years of her
marriage, becoming, in fact, even then her unofficial
agent at the French Court. A certain M. Foucher, a
subaltern, wrote to the Duchess in October, 1665, that
Madame de la Fayette was extremely anxious to please
her Highness by very exact accounts of all that was
happening at the Court and elsewhere. It was not
until 1675, however, that she became practically am-
bassadress if an unofficial one still at the Court of
France in the interests of Madame Royale, who at thirty-
one years of age on the death of her husband, was young,
beautiful, and moreover determined to essay the power
of her charms on others in order to prove his mistake
in neglecting her. She became therefore very galante,
at the same time very jealous of her reputation, so that
her love-affairs were carried on with the greatest dis-
cretion and secrecy, she being especially desirous of
concealing her emotional expansions from the Court of
France. It is doubtful whether Madame Royale's

242 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

ambassadress ever fully understood her weaknesses, and
if she did have rumours of them, remembering only the
charming young girl, she must have believed such re-
ports calumnies.

That she had a suspicion that her friend was not
without some of the foibles of her age as regards
gallantry, is proved by one or two of these recently
discovered letters. In 1678, mentioning the Duchess's
relationship to a certain Comte de Saint Maurice, known
to be her favourite of the moment, Madame de la Fay-
ette admitted to Lescheraine that she was " afraid lest
our friend commit many follies " ; but, upon Lescher-
aine's asking her to use her influence with Madame
Royale, she wrote :

" One may give counsel, my dear sir, but one does
not dictate as to conduct. This is a maxim
which I have begged M. de la Rochefoucauld
to include among his. Nevertheless, I am
writing, you will see."

Afterwards, when this favourite had been sent
away, she expressed a fear that he might be replaced
by another (as indeed he quickly was), and on Lescher-
aine's trying to reassure her, she wrote in a most human
and personally betraying way :

" I have found you so reassured from one post to
another on a chapter on which it needs whole
years in which to reassure oneself, that I do
not know whether you have spoken sincerely
or not. Also, when I say whole years, it is
centuries I should say, for at what age and in
what time is one exempt from love, especially
when one has felt the charm of being occupied
with it ? One forgets the evils which follow
it ; one thinks only of the pleasures and
resolutions fly away."

Unfortunately none of Madame de la Fayette's letters
to the Duchess herself have been found, so that one
can judge neither of her accounts of the Court, nor of
her sage and guarded counsels. She often complains
to Lescheraine in these Turin letters that she on her

POLITICAL EXPERIENCES 243

part is not being kept sufficiently well informed as to
what is going on in Savoy :

" For her service," she said, " one must know here
what is about to become public, in order that
one may give it the proper colours and
reasons ".
Again, she complained :

"You may believe that I am far from thinking
that I have a head for giving counsel, and I
do not concern myself at all with things which
do not come here even to mention them
but I confess that I have trouble in not
speaking of things which are known, because
people are continually being inflamed by the
talk of those who know how devoted I am to
Madame Royale, and as soon as there is any-
thing new, they address themselves to me.
By the good maxim you have of writing
nothing, there is also nothing to reply to
them."

The conduct of Madame Royale was rather difficult
to report diplomatically, for it was not long after her hus-
band's death, that she became involved in a variety of
difficulties. In the first place, her favouritism cost her
dear, aiding as it did to bring about her unpopularity in
the kingdom : and the greed of her favourites and
sycophants, combined with a series of bad harvests,
brought matters to a climax four years after the begin-
ning of the Regency, when it was found that the
financial affairs of the kingdom, then in a most flourish-
ing condition, were now in a deplorable state.

Notwithstanding her excesses in favouritism and
gallantry, the greatest mistake of the Duchess's life was
after all her neglect of her son Victor Am&le'e, who
from his earliest childhood had received nothing but
frowns and neglect from his mother, and who, learning
later on of the scandals attaching to her name, grew to
despise her. The Duchess's love of power made her
dread the coming of age of her son, and for years she
did everything in her ability to keep him in the back-

244 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

ground. At last, however, at fourteen the boy attained
his majority, and the Duchess was obliged to celebrate
the occasion. This she was determined to do to her
own credit at least, so the day before the ceremony, a
solemn meeting was held at the Academy of Turin
an institution founded by the Duchess herself on the
lines of the French Academy, and which in emulation
of the mother institution at the Louvre, held its seances
at the Ducal Palace. In true old prtcieuse fashion -a
tradition which had lived in her since her youthful days
at the Court of Anne of Austria the Duchess, with her
son, attended incognito to hear a discourse which she
herself had inspired, and which was an extended eulogy
of her Regency. For this discourse, afterwards
printed as

The Panegyric of the Regency of Madame Roy ale,

Marie Jeanne Baptiste de Savoie,
the panegyrist received a ring costing 1 20 pistoles, and
a pension of 2,000 louis !

Notwithstanding her traditions, this was most dis-
tasteful to Madame de la Fayette, as is proved by a
letter she wrote to Lescheraine d propos of a panegyric
of Madame Royale (probably the same one) which he
had inserted in the Gazette de France :

"Your relation is too beautiful," said she, "there
is no need of flowers, nor of a sportive air in
things of this kind, but it is necessary that all
should be noble and simple. At least this is
the present taste in this country. I doubt if
it is that of the place where you are, thus I
do not condemn you. Nor are long periods
of the style which is liked. I have seen a
letter in the Mercure Galant which must be
by you. In reading it, I might well have
thought that I could not let you take it with
you into the other world on account of the
length of the periods ! "

Mother and son were continually quarrelling about
one matter or another, and all their disputes seem to
have been arbitrated at the Court of France, where the

POLITICAL EXPERIENCES 245

son had his own ambassador. Two disputes were being
agitated between them on one occasion : one on the
question of her Guards having been taken away from
Madame Royale, and a journey which Victor Ame"dee
was to take, and to which she had not been invited. It
was important, says M. Camille Rousset, the historian
of Louvois, to know Madame de la Fayette's opinion,
because at the same time one would get that of Louis
XIV. and Louvois ! She was the go-between in every
negotiation with Madame Royale, even to the packets
sent by the latter regularly every week to Louvois,
these always reaching him through her medium.

It is probable that Madame de la Fayette knew
nothing of the political secrets which underlay these
family quarrels of Madame Royale and her son : she
was particularly bent on defending the Duchess from
the accusations of her son a difficult task, and one
which required the services of a ferret, such as the
Marquis de la Pierre described her !

" Madame de la Fayette is a ferret unfuret" he
said, " who goes about watching and adjuring
all France to sustain Madame Royale in
everything she does."

This judgment coincides with the estimate of Madame
Arvede Barine as to Madame de la Fayette's activities
in the Duchess's affairs :

" She watched everything, thought of everything,
combined, made visits, spoke, wrote, sent
counsels, procured advice, baffled plots, was
ceaselessly in the breach, and in her own
person rendered more services to the Duchess
than all the envoys avowed or secret which
the latter kept in France".

The only diplomatic check of this watchful ambas-
sadress in the affairs of Savoy, was brought about
singularly enough by the Grande Mademoisell
seems that when in 1681 Louis XIV. was sending a
French army into Savoy on its way to Italy, Madam*
Royale was anxious that her childhood's friend, M. c
Lauzun, should command it. Madame de la Fayette

246 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

was therefore entrusted with the management of the
affair in France, and tried to bring about the nomina-
tion of Lauzun through Madame de Montespan, with
whom she had great credit.

Madame de Montespan was unwise enough to tell
Mademoiselle de Montpensier of the Duchess of Savoy's
wish to secure Lauzun, and of Madame de la Fayette's
efforts towards that end, added to which the Grande
Mademoiselle had already suspected that Madame de
la Fayette and Lauzun were secretly conspiring, her
people having seen the coach of the latter standing
before the door of the house in the Rue Vaugirard.
Thus forewarned, Mademoiselle took steps to keep
Lauzun in Paris : having by so great sacrifice as the
donation of the half of her property to the Due du
Maine, obtained the boon of his return from prison, she
was determined to chain her lover at her side : and thus
Madame de la Fayette did not succeed in her mission.

But soon our diplomatist Jiad a chance to redeem
her credit ! This was on the occasion of the wedding
of Victor Amedee de Savoie to " Mademoiselle," the
eldest daughter of Monsieur and Henriette d'Angleterre.
Madame Royale had been secretly manoeuvring to
marry her son to his cousin the daughter of the Queen
of Portugal, while Louis XIV. and his ministers had
early conceived the idea of uniting the heir to the
kingdom of Savoy to a French Princess. The King
of France, notably also through the craft of Victor
Amedee himself who would have done anything to
cross his mother in her purposes, triumphed in his
design, and the date of the Savoy marriage by proxy
was fixed for a certain day in 1684. But, as the day
approached, it was found that the dispensation expected
from the Pope and necessary for the celebration of the
wedding had failed to arrive. There was great fear
in France that the ceremony would have to be post-
poned : now was Madame de la Fayette's opportunity !
In his perplexity the Ambassador of Savoy turned to
her as to his natural aid in difficult situations ; quite
equal to the demand made upon her, Madame de la

POLITICAL EXPERIENCES 247

Fayette without hesitancy appealed to the Cardinal de
Bouillon, who was to perform the ceremony and a
special friend of hers. In answer to her appeal, Car-
dinal Bouillon wrote her the following letter :

"You may count upon it, dear Madame, that in

view of doing anything that you have shown

me must be agreeable, I will perform the

marriage of Mademoiselle d'Orleans to the

Due de Savoie, although no ambassador

presenting the dispensation accorded by the

Pope without which I could not perform the

ceremony should come to ask me to do so.

Do me the justice to believe that no one in

the world is more absolutely yours sincerely

than THE CARDINAL BOUILLON "

The receipt of this letter and the knowledge that she

had been instrumental in making this marriage possible,

was one of the proudest moments of Madame de la

Fayette's life ; and although in this case she aided

Victor Amedee against his mother for the sake of

France, in all else she was indefatigable in forwarding

the cause of Madame Royale.

Before the end of 1685, Victor Amedee sent the
Marquis de la Pierre to Paris to announce the birth of
a princess, and to undermine the influence of Madame
de la Fayette ! The ambassador found on arriving
that the latter had won over the Savoyard Ambassador
at the Court of France and that she had in her hands the
threads of a great plot against Victor Ame'de'e. Many
persons of Pi^mont concerned in this plot, and others
acting as agents, spent whole days with Madame de la
Fayette. Sounding Louvois, the Marquis found him
informed as to the slightest detail concerning his
master :

" M. de Louvois," concluded La Pierre, " seemed
to me to be in the interests of Madame
Royale; he must be undeceived about a
hundred foolishnesses that La Fayette has
put into his head."
But when after a six or eight months' stay in Pans, the

248 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

Marquis de la Pierre went back to Savoy, he had made
no difference in the situation : Louis XIV. continued to
interfere in favour of Madame Royale, and indeed in
all the affairs of Savoy, until in 1696, Victor Amedee
exclaimed in complaint of the officiousness of the French
Ambassador :

" If he would but leave us in repose with our sheep
and our wives, our mothers, our mistresses
and our domestics ! "

M. Perrero's publication stops with the departure of
the Marquis de la Pierre from Paris, but Madame de
la Fayette undoubtedly continued her connection with
Madame Royale until her own death. Since the publi-
cation of these Turin letters, a new light is supposed
to be thrown on the character of Madame de la Fayette.
In an article published in the Revue des Deux Mondes
for September, 1880, Arvede Barine, that interesting
author of the two books on the Grande Mademoiselle
and other similar works, discussed at length the change
in the popular idea of Madame de la Fayette which the
reading of them entailed. The tradition of the author
of La Princesse de Cleves had been that, she says, of
" a sickly nervous creature, almost always confined
to her bed, having no other occupation in the
midst of her closed chamber, than to slacken
and enfeeble her sensations in order to live as
little as possible within the compass of a day :
of one occupied in trying to reduce herself in
every way, in thought, in sentiments and in
movement. Upright and frank, reasonable
and good, estimable in spite of everything,
and perfectly esteemed, only a little too
languishing to the taste of her friends, who
would have wished her more bustling, and
more given to writing letters."

The letters in the Perrero Collection, twenty-eight in
all, certainly do dissipate a little of the melancholy and
poetry attaching to her memory, and show her to have
been a woman full of energy, determination and action
when occasion required. A woman of the world, of

POLITICAL EXPERIENCES 249

affairs, but in demonstrating this they prove yet more
conclusively her characteristics of faithfulness and un-
selfish friendship qualities which could strengthen her
weak back, fortify her poor nerves, steady her hand for
writing and even throw a momentary veil over a heart
wounded unto death by the loss of that which it loved
best on earth. Her vaunted idleness, the result of ill-
health, took wings and waited for her leisure when a
friend needed her vigour and strength, only to return
upon her as soon as an important visit was made, a
difficult letter written. Most of her business, moreover,
was done quietly without much coming and going, with-
out derogating from her social position.

" Never," wrote Madame de Sevigne, " did a

woman without leaving her place do such

good business."

Nor did her friends scruple to take advantage of the
credit which she had always enjoyed at the Court and
with Louis XIV. personally, to advance their own
interests. To be her friend was wealth indeed !

And in the case of Savoy, these invaluable services
were given for the mere bagatelle of an Indian shawl,
occasional little boxes of japanned wood and chiselled
lacquer sent her by Madame Royale from the boxes of
presents to Turin from the Queen of Portugal, some
beautiful copies of old paintings in the Museum of
Turin which the Duchess had made for her ; and at
one time thirty ells of Turin damask which Madame de
la Fayette had asked Lescheraine to order for her, and
which Madame Royale had insisted on paying for.
She was nevertheless, on the testimony of these letter
the matter viewed through the cool perspective of the
centuries, supposed to be altogether mercenary and
cold-hearted. As this harsh criticism is, however,
offset by the careful and scholarly admiration of such
men as Sainte Beuve, and the Comte d'Haussonvil
we can venture to sustain our opinion that the Savoy
episode but serves to put Madame de la Fayette
higher on that pinnacle of friendship based upon the
solid foundation of a true and just mind.

CHAPTER XVIII
CHILDREN AND LATER LIFE

" Batons -nous, le temps fuit, et nous traine avec soi ;
Le moment ou je parle est deja loin de moi." Boileau

HOWEVER disappointed and disillusioned
Madame de la Fayette might have been in
her married life, she at least had a source of
great joy and pride in the two sons born to her from the
union with the Comte de la Fayette. Always delicate
in mind and body, the pain of childbirth and the stulti-
fication of her emotional nature in a marriage such as
hers, would seem to account for the fact that it was in
Auvergne that she sowed the germs of many maladies
that were to take stronger and stronger possession of
her. Some say she brought from there not only a
heartache, but a real disease of the organ. She was,
however, a most devoted, painstaking and clever mother,
and upon her devolved entire care of the education and
establishment in life of the two sons. This she success-
fully accomplished through her own efforts, political
credit and personal charm, the father, although alive,
being practically buried in his far-away Auvergne, and
apparently concerning himself little about his wife and
children.

Louis de la Fayette, contrary to custom as the elder
son, chose the career of the Church and took holy orders.
According to Saint Simon, the Abbe" de la Fayette was
" A man of mind, of letters, of social tastes, cynical

and singular, honoured by his friends ".
For him, Madame de la Fayette worked indefatigably ;
for him she succeeded in obtaining various fat benefices :
not only a pension on the Abbey of St. Germain, but

250

O s
^ z

CHILDREN AND LATER LIFE 251

the Abbeys of the Grenetiere, Valmon and Dalon, the
latter formerly held by his uncle the Bishop of Limoges.
The King, who never forgot Madame de la Fayette's
connection with Henriette d'Angleterre, was very
gracious with regard to both sons. In 1673, Madame
de Sevigne wrote thus to her daughter :

" Madame la Comtesse went this morning to St.

Germain to thank the King for a pension

of five hundred ecus on an abbey which has

been given her : in time this will be worth a

thousand, because it is on a man who has the

same pension on the Abbe de la Fayette,

therefore they are now quits, and when the

first dies, the pension will always remain on

his abbey. The King even accompanied this

present with so many agreeable words that

there is reason to expect greater favours."

The granting of this abbey was only the suite to the

special favours the King had shown Madame de la

Fayette two years before, and of which Madame de

Sevigne also gives an account :

" Madame de la Fayette was at Versailles yester-
day. Madame de Thianges had sent her
word to come. She was received there very
well very well indeed : that is to say, the
King had her put in his c alec he with the ladies,
and took pleasure in showing her all the
beauties of Versailles quite like a private in-
dividual, whom one goes to see in his country-
house. He spoke only to her, and received
with much pleasure and politeness all the
praise she gave of the marvellous beauties
she was shown."
"You may believe," added the Marquise, "that

one is content with that journey ! '
This elder son was the long-lived one of the family,
living to be seventy-nine years of age, but in return for
his mother's tender interest, we find^ him lending her
manuscripts indiscriminately and losing them those
precious testimonies to her mind and character.

252 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

The younger son, Ren-Armand Motier de la
Fayette, on the contrary, chose a military career, and in
him were centred all hopes for the continuance of the
historic old family of La Fayette, so that after having
established the elder son in holy orders, it was on the
future of this younger one that the mother's thoughts
were fixed. According to Madame de Sevign, this
son was/0/z, exempt of any bad quality. In his career
of war the influential friends of his mother came to
good account. These were legion, Madame de Sevigne
tells us, not without a suspicion of envy, although in
the next breath she adds : " The merit of that mother
is very distinguished ". Madame de Sevigne had cause
for envy, for unlike Charles de SeVign, who could
not, in spite of faithful service, procure any advance-
ment in his profession, the Marquis or Comte de la
Fayette (some writers call him Marquis, some Comte)
rose rapidly into favour, his final rank being that of
Brigadier-General. In the memoirs of the Marquis de
Sourches, we read of his taking part in a grand car-
rousel given by the King for the Dauphin on the 5th
and 6th of June, 1686 an affair which for the furnishing
of the saddle-cloths and harness of the horses alone cost
the King more than one hundred thousand livres.

A brilliant spectacle this carrousel must have been
even in these days of gorgeous pageants and spectacles,
behind which the glory of the Roi Soleil was slowly
setting. Intended to represent scenes from the civil
wars in Granada, the uniforms and adornments were
Spanish, each brigade of each quadrille displaying
different colours, designs, devices and banners.

" Paresca como lusca" : "Though it disappear,

may it still shine ! "

was the device underneath the emblem of a flash of
lightning which appeared on the banner borne by the
Comte de la Fayette, a handsome officer of twenty-
seven. Belonging to the division of the Abencerrages
he was dressed in African armour of fire-colour : a
medusa head of gold embroidered in the centre of his
coat of mail. Fire-colour was the whole tone, diversified

CHILDREN AND LATER LIFE 253

by black and gold, and set off with diamonds and
emeralds. The head-dress was black velvet, embroi-
dered with gold and decorated with rubies and diamonds,
fire-colour the plumes, fire-colour the lance, and again
on the saddle-cloth the medusa head, each knight being
followed by pages and footmen dressed in the same
rich costume.

To the eyes of the mother, the young officer with
his proud device and gorgeous uniform undoubtedly
appeared the handsomest and most gallant of the brilliant
cavalcade which assembled in the grand court before
the Palace of Versailles that June morning, and passed
in all their glory underneath the windows of the Duke
de Bourgogne. Her pride too is excusable when one
thinks that to form one of the Quadrille of the Dauphin,
among men of honour and distinction, seemed in those
days to a man envious of military distinction the acme
of earthly glory.

And, to his mother, the Comte de la Fayette owed
all his career. Even the editor of the memoirs of the
Marquis de Sourches, in describing this carrousel, has
put in a note to say that the Comte de la Fayette was
celebrated rather through the distinction of his mother,
than that of the gentleman of Auvergne who was his
father. This mother not only had " much mind," but
it was she who procured this son a regiment of infantry,
his brother, three abbeys.

To his mother, the young Comte de la Fayette was
indebted, then, not only for advancement in his military
position, but even for the manning of his regiment-
that of La Fare. Going about to procure men at low
rates, a Maltre des Comptes among her friends actually
presented her, as she herself told Gourville, with twelve
good men ! Louvois was her friend at Court, his
interest having been acquired for her by La Rochefou-
cauld, whose grandson had married the daughter of the
Minister of War. And to Louvois was due the granting
of this regiment. Speaking of the nomination of the
Comte de la Fayette to its command, the old journal
the Mercure takes occasion to eulogise the mother :

254 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

" Every one is agreed," it says, " as to the delicacy
of her mind, and nothing was ever more
general than the esteem in which she is
held".

That she had her enemies goes without saying, for who
was ever big enough for a target who was not shot at !
Such shots can, however, usually be traced back to
jealousy, wounded pride and self-love, sensitive dignity,
etc. In the case of calumny concerning Madame de la
Fayette, although the unpleasant insinuations against
her character are few compared to those heaped up
against most of her contemporaries, there were those
even in her own circle who could not see her quiet
rise into social power and political influence without
jealousy, nor refrain from spitefully registering depre-
ciatory remarks as to her mercenary instincts.

Prominent among those who put a slur on her
memory, was a certain remarkable personage whose rise
in the social ladder was one of the most astonishing
phenomena of the century. At eighteen years of age,
valet de chambre to the Abbe de la Rochefoucauld,
Jean Herault de Gourville gradually raised himself by
his cleverness, good sense and effrontery to immense
wealth, to social commerce with the great of the land,
to sitting at the table of princes, to playing at cards
with the King himself ! Sainte Beuve has called
Gourville the Gil Bias or Figaro of the century, a
sufficiently descriptive touch.

Brought up in the La Rochefoucauld household,
Gourville was made by the Due de la Rochefoucauld
at one time his maitre d' hotel, but it was in the trenches
and the long nights before the camp fire during the
Fronde that the former master had learned to accept
the ancient valet de chambre for companion and friend,
and Gourville had won his way to La Rochefoucauld's
heart, not merely by his adventurous spirit, his wonderful
address, usefulness, and ability, but by his skill in
describing his experiences. Nor was the Duke later on
too proud to present this man whose merit he recognised
to his own circle in Paris, who in their turn were glad

CHILDREN AND LATER LIFE 255

to enroll among their number as an intimate and equal
any one so clever and amusing.

Among other famous personages who took Gourville
into their intimacy, was Fouquet, to whom he remained
true in his disgrace : the Prince de Conti, who delighted
in his ability and humour and clamoured for his pre-
sence ; the Prince de Conde, who made him his man
of affairs, and placed the utmost confidence in him.
And throughout all his adventurous life when he flitted
through the Fronde, travelled in Holland and gave the
Prince of Orange advice ; acted as agent of war to
Conti, as man of affairs to Conde", he was always at
home in the La Rochefoucauld household, therefore
among the rest of the Duke's friends, he also visited
Madame de la Fayette. But, while admitting him to
her house and intimacy, the latter could never forget
Gourville's former position, nor could she avoid treating
him more or less like a servant bound to do her pleasure.
For this, Gourville never forgave her for this, he took
his revenge later on in his memoirs, which were written,
fortunately, after her death.

The crowning glory of his eventful life, as well as
the last act of it, were these memoirs. Dictated in
1702, when he was seventy years of age, they were
finished in four months and a half, and soon after their
publication, without having had the time to correct
them in any way, Gourville died. So amusing and
descriptive were these chronicles of his experiences,
that they enchanted our old friend, Madame de Cou-
langes. But on reading his remarks about Madame de
la Fayette, she became very indignant, and writing to
Madame de Grignan in 1703, while praising the
memoirs highly, she admitted that Gourville's remarks
on Madame de la Fayette were very offensive. Meeting
the author himself four days before his death at the
Comtesse de Grammont's, she did not hesitate to repeat
this opinion to him, adding that in reading his memoirs
she always passed over the portion relating to her old
friend.

Gourville's slur on Madame de la Fayette was in

256 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

connection with St. Maur, a beautiful place near Chan-
tilly, which the Prince de Conde had given to Gour-
ville as the man to whom he was under obligation
for having drawn him out of the most serious pecuni-
ary difficulties and completely straightened out his
affairs.

St. Maur was a place of great beauty, whose origin,
says the traveller Delort, is lost in the night of time !
The wonderful woods in whose cool shade and quiet
beauty Marie de Medecis herself had taken pleasure,
were its greatest attraction even in the old days, but it
was after the time of Marie de Medecis that Le Nostre
took the gardens in hand and transformed their wild
beauty into the artistic state in which they were given
to Gourville. According to Sainte Beuve, Gourville
spent much money on the embellishment of the gardens
and Capitainerie, or old Toll-house of the Estate.

" This kind of folly," he confessed in his memoirs,

" was one of the maladies of the times."
Naturally proud of his acquisition of St. Maur, and the
part he had taken to make the place more attractive,
soon after it came into his possession Gourville invited
Madame de la Fayette to come down and enjoy the
beautiful walks and drives which its park afforded. She
found the place so delightful, that she asked to be allowed
to spend a few days there in the enjoyment of the fine
air. This was the beginning of her invasion of St.
Maur, and with pique, Gourville thus describes it in his
memoirs :

" She lodged herself in the only apartment which
there was at that time, and found herself so
much at her ease that she proposed to make
it her country-house. On the other side of
the house were two or three other rooms which
I afterwards had torn down. She pretended
that I had enough with them when I came
down to stay, and designated, as if by right,
the best one for M. de la Rochefoucauld, whom
she asked to come often. Having asked the
Concierge to let her see the few bits of furni-

CHILDREN AND LATER LIFE 257

ture kept in a high room which served as a
furniture store-house, she found a large
armoire in the form of a cabinet, which had
formerly been in fashion and worth a great
deal, with some other old things which might
be of use. Having gone to Paris for a little
time, she begged the Due d'Enghien to permit
her to have these things brought down to her
apartment a thing which it was not trouble
for him to accord. And having discovered a
fine walk on the shores of the water, on the
other side of which was a wood, she was so
charmed with this that she took everybody
who came to see her there. There were also
some fine walks in the Park, so that she was
very content with the house she had made
herself. . . .

" I said to some one that I found her sojourn at

St. Maur very long, and she reproached me

for this, pretending that it could only be very

convenient because whenever I went there

I would be assured of finding company.

Finally, in order to be able to enjoy St.

Maur, I was obliged to make a written treaty

with M. le Prince whereby he gave me the

enjoyment of it during my lifetime, with twelve

thousand livres of income," etc.

One feels the spite underlying this account of

Madame de la Fayette's invasion of St. Maur, and

even if the facts were true, there were probably reasons

why Madame de la Fayette felt justified in thus making

use of the Capitainerie : she certainly went there very

often and the place, like Fleury near Meudon in the

Forest of Fontainebleau, where she had a little house,

is intimately associated with her name. That she loved

it, one feels in her letter to Madame de Sevigne, written

from there on the 4th September, 1673 :

" I am at St. Maur ; I have left all my affairs,
and all my friends ; I have my children and
the fine weather, that suffices me.
17

258 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

taking the water at Forges, I am thinking
of my health. I see nobody, I bother about
no one ; everybody seems to me to be so
attached to his pleasures, and to pleasures
that depend entirely upon others, that I find
myself to have a gift of the fairies to be in the
humour in which I am.

" I do not know whether Madame de Coulanges
has told you about a conversation which took
place one afternoon at Gourville's, where
Madame Scarron and the Abbe Testu were,
on the persons whose taste is above or below
their minds : we threw ourselves into the
subtleties until we no longer understood any-
thing : if the air of Provence, which still
subtilises all things, augments for you our
visions on this subject, you will be in the
clouds. Your taste is above your mind, and
M. de la Rochefoucauld's also, mine too but
not as much as yours and his ! "
Both Madame de la Fayette and Madame de Sevigne
were friends not only of the Grand Conde, Gourville's
patron, but also of the hero's son, the Due d'Enghien,
at whose assemblies, as Madame de Sevigne reports,
Madame de la Fayette was always present. He was
indeed the son of the daughter of her father's old
patron the Marquis de Breze, and this relationship was
doubtless at the root of the intimacy. She often visited
Chantilly, where the Prince de Conde lived, as well as
St. Maur, and on the 26th of May, 1673, sne wrote thus
enthusiastically of Chantilly to Madame de Sevign :
" If I had not the headache, I would give you an
account of my journey to Chantilly, and I
would say to you that of all the places the
sun shines on, there is none like it. We
did not have very good weather, but the
beauty of the chase in carriages with glass
windows supplied all that we lacked. We
were there five or six days ; we wished
very much for you, not only on account of

CHILDREN AND LATER LIFE 259

friendship, but because you are the person of
all the world most worthy to admire those
beauties."

But to return to the young Comte de la Fayette,
another and earliest care of his solicitous mother was to
have him well married. And a propos of this, history
has preserved a story similar to that of St. Maur,
but one even more difficult to believe. It seems that
Madame de la Fayette had as friend a certain M. de
Lassay, a gentleman in the suite of the Prince de
Conde\ Being obliged on one occasion to accompany
the Prince to Hungary, M. de Lassay left not only his
business papers, but his young daughter in the charge
of Madame de la Fayette. During his absence, she
conceived the project of marrying this young girl, who
would eventually inherit great wealth, to her son. In
order to persuade Lassay to agree to this project, she
wrote secretly to Louvois, and asked for a warrant
which should interdict the Abbesse of Cherche-Midi,
in whose convent the young girl was, from allowing
her to leave there. She then wrote to the father offer-
ing her services to have this warrant raised, while
Segrais at the same time wrote also to M. de Lassay to
mention Madame de la Fayette's great influence, and
to suggest to him the idea of a marriage between his
daughter and the Marquis de la Fayette. This latter,
Lassay refused to consider, writing on his part to
Madame de Maintenon to have the warrant raised.

This story can probably be traced to the door of
Madame de Maintenon, who as we know, had by this
time broken her ancient friendship with Madame de la
Fayette, and was quite ready to cast discredit on her re-
putation. M. de Lassay, too, was noted as a great fool
and visionary, while in greatest disproof of it all, the
girl herself was at the time only eleven years of age,
and even in the opinion of those days a little too young
for marriage.

Whatever her designs with regard to Mademoiselle
de Lassay, Madame de la Fayette had no trouble in
finding a suitable match for so attractive a young officer

260 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

as her son, for in 1689 sne arranged a union between
him and the great-granddaughter of Marillac, Keeper
of the Seals in the days of Louis XIII.

Madeleine de Marillac had everything to recom-
mend her : youth, beauty, mind and wealth : a dot of
two hundred thousand livres, as well as " nourritures a
1'infini ! " Yet in spite of these advantages Madame
de Sevigne"'s opinion was that M. de Marillac on his
part was not doing ill in securing the Comte de la
Fayette for his son-in-law : for Madame de la Fayette
was so delighted that she agreed to settle all her
property on the young couple : the head of the family,
the Abbe, did the same, and to the Comte was thus
assured at their deaths, an income of thirty thousand
livres. Nor did the estimable young man owe a single
pistole, said Madame de Sevigne, again with a suspicion
of envy, thinking of her own son who was always in debt.

So with the most joyful anticipations of a long life
to both husband and wife, with many children to bless
them, the wedding took place with great rejoicing and
splendour.

But alas! for the vanity of human wishes. Instead
of a long life, Armand de la Fayette survived his
mother by only one year, dying in 1694 at the siege
of Landau at the early age of thirty-five, his only
progeny being one little child, the granddaughter of
Madame de la Fayette. Thus were the great anticipa-
tions of the renewal of the family frustrated, and with
this daughter the elder branch died out. Its pride was
augmented, however, by the marriage which she made:
at an early age she became the wife of Charles Louis
de Bretagne de la Tre'moille, Prince de Tarente, Due
de Thouars, seventh Due de la Tre'moille, but not
long did she survive this grand union, dying herself at
the early age of twenty-six.

The present Due de la Tre'moille is therefore the
direct descendant of the Comtesse de la Fayette : the
celebrated General and Marquis de la Fayette of
American and Revolutionary fame, belonging to a
collateral branch of the family, which recently became

CHILDREN AND LATER LIFE 261

extinct, says the Comte d'Haussonville, in the person
of Edmond de la Fayette, Senator for the District of
the Upper Loire.

The Due de la Tremoille is the possessor of such
De la Fayette papers as have been handed down, but
as Madame de la Fayette herself left none, these be-
longed exclusively to the Abbe" de la Fayette. These
papers, reports the Comte d'Haussonville, who had the
opportunity of seeing them some time in the nineties,
are not very interesting in themselves, but consist of
business papers, contracts, inventories, transactions-
all of which were drawn up by Levasseur, Notary at
the Chatelet of Paris. The most important fact dis-
covered through their perusal by the Comte d'Haus-
sonville, was the date of the death of Francois de la
Fayette, Madame de la Fayette's husband. It was also
clear from them that the major part of his life was spent
in the country, whether at his chateau of Naddes or that
of Espinasse where he died, it is not known. From
them it transpired that his life was passed in many law-
suits, some of which were settled before his death, but
most of which were left to annoy his widow, who, how-
ever, in order to preserve as much as possible of their
patrimony to her children, put to the settlement of these
disputes what legal skill she possessed, being very suc-
cessful in her object.

Of the whole collection the most interesting docu-
ment must be the marriage contract of Madame de
la Fayette : it states that she brought to the community
ten thousand livres, while her husband doubled that
sum, settling on his wife besides a reversionary right
of four thousand livres. Another interesting paper is
a settlement of affairs between Madame de la Fayette
and Madame de Sevigne" for the sum of eight thousand
and seven pounds due Madame de la Fayette on the
succession of her stepfather, Renauld de Sevigne, who
was also the uncle of Madame de Sevigne, that part of
his fortune which came from Madame de la Vergne
reverting to Madame de la Fayette, the other part to
the Sevign&s.

262 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

Finally, there is the inventory drawn up at the death
of the Abbe de la Fayette himself, of the books in his
library, a document which should contain mention of
the annotated copy of La Rochefoucauld's Maxims.
On going carefully through it, however, the Comte
d'Haussonville could find absolutely no mention of the
precious volume.

CHAPTER XIX
BOOKS

" Un bon pote n'est pas plus utile a 1'etat qu'un bon joueur de

quilles." Malherbe

A MODERN French poet has put into words
a perception which vaguely underlies the
thought of the whole world : that the little
things a perfume the breath of spring a flower-
are, after all, the most important facts of life.

With this feeling strong in our minds, having de-
scribed in the history of Madame de la Fayette its
so-called great matters : love, friendship, political activ-
ity, social intercourse, we come at last to that exclu-
sively inner existence represented by her books an
essence relegated, perhaps, in her case, among the
small factors, but which is become to us the vital point,
the force which represents to posterity the weighty
part of her personality. It i& her claim to considera-
tion, and the real climax of her life-story : through it,
she had an enduring influence on her contemporaries
as on the ages to come : through it she has become a
part of history itself.

And yet so great a critic as M. de Sainte Beuve,
while characterising her as the friend of Madame de
SeVign^ and as the woman said by Boileau to have
more mind than any woman in France and to write
the best, commented :

"This person wrote nevertheless very little, at
her leisure, through amusement, and with a
sort of negligence which had nothing pro-
fessional about it".
363

264 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

In view of the numerous other preoccupations which
a necessarily busy existence thrust before them, the
writings of Madame de la Fayette may have seemed
to a superficial observer only a secondary part of her
everyday life, but the proof that literary work meant
more to her than anything else in the world is that her
every experience found expression in her books. To
them she told the secrets of her soul : reserved and
contained even to friends and intimates, her books
were her confidantes, her chosen confessors ; and to
them we must look for real knowledge of her char-
acter and nature.

It is safe to conjecture that the intellectual forces
which had been fomenting in her ever since early
girlhood, were brought to a focus by an unsatisfied
marriage, and that denied the usual expression of
emotion, she found vent for the most sacred part of
herself in the freedom of discreet fiction and under the
protecting mantle of anonymity. Her ancient modesty
had persisted through the early excitements of the
Rambouillet, the rampant gallantry of the" society about
her : her muse was always "tender and discreet," even
in its inspiration and fountain-head, for it was Nature,
and Nature enjoyed in solitude, which taught her first
of all to listen to that small, low-sounding voice within
which cried out continually against exaggeration and
affectation. And whatever her written confidences,
undoubtedly those rocks and bays of La Heve, which
she had haunted in the early days at Havre, could
better have told the secret of her soul, than all the books
in the world. To them she must have breathed out its
inmost depths on many a day in spring, when Nature,
never more close or compelling, summons the soul to
unfold its wings and soar into the highest realms.

" Paint things as they are, and be not afraid ! " it
said to her then. " How fair is the world. How simple
and unadorned Human Nature shorn of the veils which
Man in his ignorance throws over it to hide his own
iniquities."

In this feeling she approached La Rochefoucauld,

BOOKS 265

for while she differed from him in the essential point of
seeing the real existence of the True and the Beautiful
underneath all deformities, warping conditions, dis-
figuring changes and chances from birth to death, she
also admitted that the human mind did in the wicked-
ness of its corruption veil the True and the Beautiful.
With the prophet, he said :

" Vanity, vanity, all is vanity."

" No," said she. " All seems to be vanity, but I

believe there might be something better."
And it was this something better that she sought
constantly through every appearance and deception-
looking into the depths with her serious eyes, and
making her own deductions, uninfluenced by the
exuberances of others, yet herself willing to learn from
those to whom the secrets of beauty and knowledge
had been revealed in greater degree. Thus she was
content to take the best from La Rochefoucauld, and
to give him in return her soul :

"He gave me understanding, but I reformed his

heart,"

she said a triumphant affirmation which reveals the
secret of her love and her ambition.

Next to Nature, it is always the personal influence
which most aids in the development of a poetical whole.
Madame de la Fayette was singularly fortunate in this
second element also, for she had the power of attracting
the real friendship and comradeship of men of letters
without arousing their more gallant instincts. In her
early life, it was Menage who directed her studies, who
gave her the culture of the classic humanities, a balance
to preserve her from the exaggeration of the Ram-
bouillet ; and later on the friendship of other men of
learning, taste and culture completed the tendencies of
mind which Nature had begun. For, like Saint Simon,
Madame de la Fayette may be said to have

" frequented those charming societies where were

united people of such rare intelligence, where

the knowledge of man and the science of life

made so much progress ".

266 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

Like him too, she lived

"At an epoch where the custom of life in common

induced the habit of observation " ;
and yet she belonged, it must be remembered, absolutely
to the early period of Louis Quatorze, not to the later :
the earlier, represented by Pascal and La Rochefoucauld,
being distinguished by simplicity and sincerity of style ;
the latter, like La Bruyere, more ornate and elegant.
Her literary gods were thus primarily the Latin poets
and Corneille.

In 1659, Corneille, fifty-three years of age, was still
although his first drama " M elite " had been produced
thirty years previously the greatest factor in the eru-
dite and polite world of the day, Racine being as yet
merely a threatening cloud on the horizon. Although
the Prtcieux had seen their inconsistencies and peculi-
arities through the eyes of Moliere, it was not easy for
them to follow Menage's advice and " burn what they
had adored, or adore what they had burned " : so in 1659
Corneille was still adored at the Rambouillet with a
fealty born of a Wotan-like reluctance to see the old
gods go, even though new ones should immediately
arise.

And it was only in 1665 with the appearance of
Racine's " Alexandre," a year after his first tragedy,
" Les Freres Ennemis," written when he was twenty-
five, that the controversy with regard to the respective
merits of the two poets began to take form. When it
broke out, although Madame de SeVignd was most
heated of all Cornelians, and Madame de la Fayette also
very faithful to the old poet menaced by the growing
ascendancy of a younger rival, the latter's acumen did
not permit her to follow her friend in some of her ex-
travagant predictions. She could not echo her opinion
that " The fashion of Racine would pass like coffee-
drinking," the new habit just introduced into France
nor could she endorse her statement that the younger
poet wrote not for future centuries but for the celebrated
actress, Champmesle'.

" Vive our old friend Corneille," wrote Madame de

PIERRK CORNKILLE

AFTER A PORTRAIT HY C. I.EHKUN

BOOKS 267

SeVigne" ; " forgive him his bad verses in
favour of the divine and sublime beauties
which transport us. I am mad about Cor-
neille everything must give place to his
genius. Believe that nothing will ever
approach I do mot say surpass, I say that
nothing will ever approach, his divine
genius."

This championship of Madame de SeVign6, which
blinded her to Racine's genius, has been criticised in
her as a great lack of taste and scholarly judgment, and
it resulted from an obstinate allegiance which prevented
her from reading anything of Racine's. When finally
she did hear " Bajazet," she had to admit that it was
beautiful and had much passion in it, while " Esther,"
given with so much eclat and pomp at St. Cyr in 1689
by the pupils of Madame de Maintenon before the
whole Court, charmed her. One suspects, however,
that some of her enthusiasm might have been due to
the fact that it was an honour to have been invited to
the sixth representation of " Esther " at Versailles, and
particularly to the King's condescension in asking her
opinion of the play.

But Madame de la Fayette was made of different
intellectual mould, her mind altogether less impulsive.
And if Corneille was the object of her youthful admira-
tion, and had had a part in forming the deportment of
her younger years, Racine must have been a tremen-
dous influence in her later life, for he was after all much
more akin to her mind than Corneille. Even in her
most prejudiced period, she called him " the best poet
and inimitable". His inspiration was from the grand
Greek and Latin writers of antiquity : Cprneille's the
Spanish romantic poets and romancists ; his, the analy-
tical consideration of the True which he made into the
Ideal Corneille's, the portrayal of the Ideal, which his
genius vitalised.

Although all her life she had abhorred anything
bordering on the exaggerated or affected, Madame (
la Fayette had, like any other grande dame of her time,

268 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

delighted in L'Astrte, that novel of wide-reaching
influence which since the days of Henri IV., who
himself watched anxiously for its appearance, had so
moulded the life and deportment of her countrymen.
What was it, we of the twentieth century cannot help
asking, that so attracted those discriminating littera-
teurs of the seventeenth century to this book ? Was
it a certain local colour now faded and gone ? Was it
that valuable personal note, which, like the gentle
Angelus, once coming across the meadows to the ears
of the shepherds of the Forez, but now silenced by the
five thousand and forty changes rung by the cathedral's
chimes, has given place to the substitute imagined by
the modern mind ?

Like colour and sound, taste changes, and the
world hurries to move on, growing richer and richer
with each change, each absorption of individuality ;
while in the world of literature, no note of colour, no
single creation, has more enriched and fertilised the
soil than this very novel of UAstrde. It cer-
tainly had its proper and proportionate effect upon
Madame de la Fayette, for living in the midst of all
these poets and romancists, she took from each one
what she needed at the moment : sipping honey from
each store, her muse, like the butterfly, was thus
strengthened and sustained for its flight into the em-
pyrean. Nor would she have denied her indebtedness
to either Mademoiselle de Scudery or D'Urfe\ any more
than to Corneille, Racine, Descartes, Pascal, La Fon-
taine or Boileau. From Mademoiselle de Scudery
and D'Urfe she seized the honey of colour and of the
imagination ; from the heroic poets and philosophers,
strength and solidity of mind ; from La Fontaine and
Boileau, delight and fancy. They worked upon her
spirit as upon a lyre whose strings respond to the wind
from heaven, yet never could the deeper vibrations
swing out until life itself had touched the chords.
Emotion did not lead her in her intellectual life as
it did her friend the impulsive Marquise, who, even
while seeing and ridiculing the defects of a style like

BOOKS

269

La Calpre"nede's, was carried away by its wonderful

passion and extravagance entrained like any younggirl.

" I find it detestable, and yet I do not cease to

cling to it as to glue,"
complained the Marquise.

Calmer and better-balanced literarily than her friend,
it was nevertheless without a direct consciousness of a
desire to reform the art of novel-writing that Madame
de la Fayette has the distinction of being the first
writer of the more modern style of fiction, the philoso-
phical and psychological, yet this is her special claim to
a place in the world of literature to-day, for when she
brought out the book which has made her name as the
creator of the modern novel, Le Sage had not yet given
Gil Bias to the world, and it was forty years before
Robinson Crusoe was lost on his desert island.

Although born in the best period of the Grand
Cycle and educated by all the greatest writers of
the century, one of Madame de la Fayette's nearest
inspirations was but a minor light in the literary firma-
ment, one whose heroic and pastoral novels, still on
the romance order, and not, properly speaking, either
modern or psychological, were yet the real links be-
tween hers and those of the school preceding her. This
was Regnauld de Segrais, the poet of St. Fargeau.

The romance, as distinguished from its antithesis
the modern novel, is itself a sort of poem, describing
events solely as the imagination bodies them forth ; and
thus it differs essentially from the novel, whose form,
absolving it from the use of illusion and glamour for the
glossing over of the ordinary events of life, deals with
things as they are in reality. The development of the
novel had been from the Rabelaisian to the Heroic, from
the Heroic and the Mock-Heroic to the Pastoral.
Segrais, whose novels, according to Hal lam were mere
pieces of light satire designed to amuse by transient
allusions his patroness, Mademoiselle de Montpensier,
was the link between the Mock-Heroic and the Fan-
tastic, and by his fidelity to nature, the connecting tie
between Mademoiselle de Scudery and Madame de la

2/0 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

Fayette. Love and the vicissitudes through which it
passes before it can settle down into the prescribed
happy ending, was his subject, as it was the subject of
earlier and later novels, but the accessories he used were
those of the earlier school : disguises, unexpected re-
cognitions, horoscopes, the meeting of lovers at church,
the play, etc., etc. With him, too, adventures on
sea and land were intermixed with gallantry of the
pricieux sort, and adorned with pieces of poetry in
high relief.

The influence of Segrais was perceptible in the books
of Madame de la Fayette only as an inspiration and
suggestion, which she derived after all, not from his
novels, but from his poetry, in which he was " elegant,
romantic, full of complaining love, instinct with nature,
sweetness and sentiment," his inspiration being found
in the Spanish and French romances, notably D'Urfe.

From this high strain of imaginative unreality, a
gradual descent had to be effected, and before a style
dealing more closely with nature could be reached, the
thrilling adventures of chivalry had, to avoid an anti-
climax, to be resolved gradually into less coloured in-
cidents : the expressions of love and devotion to pass
from the hyperbolical into the less flowery exuberances
of a more reserved rhetoric. Madame de la Fayette
turning from the heroes of D'Urfe and the country which
Mademoiselle de Scudery described with such sure
imagery, and wherein even lovers of the Natural and
Unaffected are still unafraid to walk at times the
Country of Tenderness was happy enough to bring
about this evolution from the Heroic and Pastoral to
the Psychological most successfully and in a perfectly
natural way in her few works only six in all : two
romances, two" novelettes, and two historical memoirs.

Concentrating her thought and expression within the
bounds of terseness and strength, she is credited by no
less a personage than the learned M. Walckenaer, with
having composed the " first novels written with taste "
in the French language. Thus she became remarkable
for her mind and the surety of her judgment : thus her

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271

society was sought and celebrated, as he says, by the
beaux-e 'sprits of the time.

The first flight of her literary imagination was her
portrait of the Marquise de Sevigne, written anony-
mously, with all the modesty of the tyro, and her own
peculiar aversion to notoriety, on the inspiration of the
portrait-painting craze brought into fashion by Made-
moiselle de Montpensier, and to which nearly every one
of the fashionable world of the day succumbed. The
date of this portrait is 1659, the very year when we
suppose her to have returned from Auvergne, and when
she was twenty-five years old. Neither this portrait,
nor her first novel, written in 1662, show traces of
Segrais' influence. At this time Segrais was enjoying
Mademoiselle's second exile at St. Fargeau, and
amusing the ladies of her Court with his " Nouvelles
Fran9aises," and his " Illustres Fra^ais," while Madame
de la Fayette's only literary adviser seems to have been
Menage. The latter was her intermediary with Bar-
bin the publisher, and to him alone was the secret of
her authorship known. And to him, says M. d'Haus-
sonville, she wrote shortly afterwards for " ten fine copies
well-bound " of her own book.

This novelette, La Princesse de Montpensier, seems
more in the style of her later writings, and not at all
like the next novel Zaide, which appearing under the
name of Segrais, is the only one which palpably betrays
his influence. The first-named is romantic, yet re-
strained and terse, treating the subject of Love in the
favourite style of its author.

To Madame de la Fayette, Love was always a
serious affair, its counterfeit, gallantry, interesting her
solely in a psychological sense. With herself, whenever
in real life as in her books a conflict between Love and
Duty presented itself, the wings of Love were invariably
cut by Duty, that "stern daughter of the Voice of God,"
yet she was a most impassioned believer in love at first
sight, in the impotence of the will to resist the insinua-
tion of a sudden outgoing of the heart.

The Princesse de Montpensier is put in a his-

272 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

torical setting, as are all her books, except Zdide, and
it is the first of three novels written with a moral
purpose, each one, though by different means, illustrating
the conflict between Duty and Love, and the inevitable
triumph of Duty. The story deals with the court of
Charles IX., and the scene is laid for the most part in
Poitou, her father's native country, with which she was
doubtless well acquainted. Although it follows the
tradition of the old romances in the impediments which
crowd the path of Love, the ending, contrary to that
tradition, is an unhappy one.

Mademoiselle de Mezieres, a great heiress of nas-
cent beauty and extreme youth, after being affianced
to the Due d'Anjou, conceives an attachment for his
brother the Due de Guise ; and, fearing the proximity
of the Due de Guise in case she marry his brother,
accedes to her father's desire that she marry a third
suitor, the Prince de Montpensier. Although her hus-
band takes her away from Paris, down into Poitou,
directly after the marriage, Chance soon throws the
Due de Guise in her path, and after a brave secret
resistance, she is finally conquered by the strength of
her passion, and consents to a rendezvous with her
lover. In the meantime her husband's best friend, left
her guardian during the Prince's absence in war, com-
plicates matters by forming a mad passion for her
himself. This friend, the Comte de Chabannes, proves
to be the strongest character in the book : a model of
unselfishness and faithfulness, who, made a confidant
by the wife of her feeling for the Due de Guise,
actually becomes the bearer of her letters to his rival,
arranges the secret rendezvous, and when the husband's
suspicions are aroused, immolates himself on the altar
of his devotion by allowing the lover to escape, and
suspicion to rest upon him :

" I am unhappier and more in despair than you ;

I can say no more,"

is his reply, when the Prince rushing in and finding
him sitting in his wife's chamber in an attitude of the
deepest dejection, his head in his hands, reproaches

BOOKS 273

him for his treachery. With no further reply to the
Prince's upbraiding, the Comte leaves the house, and
rides hastily away to hide his own sorrow in the farthest
corner of Paris, where he is discovered by the per-
secutors of the Huguenots and enveloped in the mas-
sacre of St. Bartholomew. When too late, the Princess
recognises the worth of this friend and the falsity of
her lover, who debarred from seeing the Princess
again, easily consoles himself at the side of another.
Overcome with his infidelity, her own faults against a
noble husband, and the loss of this, the most perfect
friend that ever lived, the Princess herself dies, as
Madame de la Fayette expresses it, "in the flower of
her age ". To draw the moral of this tale, the author
adds :

" She was one of the most beautiful princesses in
the world, and without doubt would have
been one of the happiest, if virtue and modesty
had guided all her actions ".

Though very slight, this novel has a great many of
the traits of Madame de la Fayette's later manner : her
almost fanatical belief in the terrible effects of a de-
parture from virtue, her modern theory of punishment
on this earth for sins committed here. The book,
however, seems to have made little stir in the world,
but the secret of her anonymity was evidently revealed
to Madame among others, for it was on the strength
of this novelette that the Princess of England con-
ceived the idea of having its author write the history
of her life.

In none of Madame de la Fayette's books is that
quality of grace, which seemed to Horace Walpole so
essential a thing in writing, as noticeable as in this
Histoire d'Henriette dAngleterre, the next literary
work on which Madame de la Fayette was engaged,
but which like her later work, M'emoires de la Cour, was
not published until long after her death not until 1720,
in fact, the Mdmoires de la Cour appearing as late as
1731.

A modern French critic, M. Barbey d'Aurevilly, in

274 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

a short article on a revised edition of the memoir of
Henriette, draws attention to the sweetness of the
author's point of view, the purity of her style, her
pearl-like brilliancy, and adds :

"The simple charm of her manner communicates
unknown graces to history, as well as a
certain pathos at once naif, repressed, and
incomparably noble ".

One may say that these memoirs are simply an idealised
history of Henriette d'Angleterre's period of heart-
interests, for they completely ignore the seriousness of
her literary tastes, and the importance of her political
role. But, as the early years of the young Princess's
life were constantly unhappy, her predisposition to
coquetry so strong that she seemed, says M. Anatole
France, never to have been born until that day when
she was loved for the first time, Madame de la Fayette's
account begins most appropriately with her birth into
gallantry, or the meeting with Buckingham.

Many brilliant pictures pass before our eyes in read-
ing the history of r^enriette. First of all the English
Court of the Restoration : where the young Charles
II. and his nobles are placed in strong contrast to
the youth of the French Court riding out towards
Havre with Monsieur as he goes to meet his bride
and conduct her back to Paris. Then a picture of
the Forest of Fontainebleau in the height of summer.
How gaily each morning does Madame start out for
her bath. How happy and charming she looks in
her open caleche on her way thither ; how young and
fascinating, as on horseback she returns, when the sun
is a little less burning, through the green glades, fol-
lowed by the ladies of her Court, as young and
fascinating as she, " gallantly dressed, with a thousand
plumes on their heads " ; how like a Queen does she
receive the homage of the King, who rides beside her,
jealous of her every glance, her smile, her slightest
word !

And under the skill of the Memoirist, we share
in that famous ballet danced on the banks of the old

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275

palace pond that ballet led by the young Louis XIV.
and Madame, quaintly described by Madame de la
Fayette as " the most agreeable that ever was ".
With Madame, too, we feel the awakening excitement
as, passing her in the dance, the Comte de Guiche,
Monsieur's favourite, suddenly claps his hand to his
heart in theatrical dismay, pretending that she has
robbed him of his heart and exclaiming, like Mascarille
in the Prtcieuses Ridicules : " Oh, Robber ! Robber ! "
Yet another picture of charm within the palace
itself is of a circle of beautiful Court dames surrounding
Henriette in the afternoons with their embroidery and
chatter a circle in which Madame de la Fayette
who describes herself as having pleased Madame by
her bonheur stands out accompanying her on the
Promenade, returning to sup with Monsieur, and
then, with all the gallants of the Court gathered round
them, spending the evening "amidst the pleasures of
the comedy, the card-tables and the violins". Or,
after supper, we behold them mounting gaily into
calashes and driving along the banks of the canal to
the music of the violins far into the night.

With the recital of Henriette's death, the memoir
ends, as also ended Madame de la Fayette's nine years
at Court. But, says M. Barbey d'Aurevilly :

"The tragedy of this death which Bossuet relates
with crash of thunder, Madame de la Fayette
tells with the constrained emotion of \htgrandt
dame of her time, whereby the heart does not
break its bounds, and wherein Conventionality,
Opinion's sister, and like her a queen, prevents
the tears from falling, though she cannot pre-
vent them from rising ".

There has been a great deal of controversy about
the next book, Zahyde, or Zdide, published the year
of Madame's death, the only novel Madame de la
Fayette wrote which had no moral purpose. Appearing
under the name of Segrais, it was at first universally
supposed, even by Bussy de Rabutin, who liked every-
thing Segrais wrote, to have been his. One of Segrais'

276 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

biographers, Bredif, says that both he and La Roche-
foucauld had a hand in Zaide :

" Segrais furnished the gallant or ingenious inven-
tions, La Rochefoucauld the maxims, of which
there are many ".
" But," he adds,

" A feminine hand alone could have written pages
so delicate and touching. If in spite of the
exchange of thoughts and sentiments of the
three friends the Thinker and Academician
had taken the pen, the work would not have
had the same beauty, the same charm. Each
of them has left his impress in different ways,
but that of Madame de la Fayette dominates.
They put into it their mind and knowledge,
she put there all her heart."

One of Segrais' own statements with regard to
Zaide is distinctly misleading :

"After my Zahyde was published," he wrote,
" Madame de la Fayette had a copy bound
with a blank page between each printed page,
in order to review it anew and make correc-
tions, particularly in the language : but she
found nothing to correct, even after several
years, and I believe that even to-day nothing
could be changed ".

This statement is counteracted elsewhere, however, by
another and very positive statement to the effect :

" Zahyde, which appeared under my name, is by
Madame de la Fayette. It is true that I had
some part in it, but only in the disposition of
the novel, where the rules of art are observed
with a great exactitude."

An imaginative Spanish romance, Za'ide seems to be a
step backward in point of literary inspiration, as after
having written a book as succinct and graphic as the
Princesse de Montpensier, the author here reverted
quite to the methods and romantic quality of Made-
moiselle de Scudery and her school : it abounds in
sentimental incidents such as the shipwreck of two

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277

beautiful women, who are found extended on the sea-
shore after a terrible storm, bereft of consciousness, but
dressed magnificently and covered with jewels. And
there are countless troubles before, at the end of two
hundred and thirty-seven closely written pages, the
obstacles to the marriage of the two lovers, whose union
has been prophesied by an astrologer on the strength
of a miniature, are finally removed.

A German critic, speaking of Zctide, says that
humour is quite unknown to the author : that she
hardly knows how to put in any local colour, and that
there are no descriptions of nature, human feelings and
actions being to her apparently the only things worth
the telling.

And yet it is this work which was inspired by her
early experiences at Havre her sea-book. For, if she
does not actually describe the sea, the whole action of
her story is centred round it, and her familiarity with
all its aspects is convincingly displayed. It is the
volume, too, to which the author has most generously
and unreservedly confided the remembrance of her
youthful thoughts on love, and those girlhood dreams
which she experienced before the age of fifteen, when,
wandering along the shores of Normandy, her whole
life seemed mirrored in those clear blue waters, or
obscured by the angry waves of the tempest, which
dashed so tumultuously on therocks at her feet : dreams
of the sweetness of a first affection they were, of that
early passion whose secret charm is never found again
in the attachments of later life, and to which she so
often refers in this and other novels :

" Love," said one of the characters in Zatde, " had
for us all the attraction of novelty ; and we
found therein a secret charm which one finds
only in first inclinations ".

Three characters in the same story discuss the
compelling power of love at first sight, which to her
fancy is the only real passion. Reproached by his two
comrades for his insensibility to amour, the hero, 1
Gonsalve, reproaches them in his turn for never having

278 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

experienced veritable devotion : the thing they called
by its name was simply the heartless gallantry of the
day :

"You can never persuade me," said he, "that you
are in love with a person whose face you
hardly know, and whom you would not
recognise if you should see her at any other
place than the accustomed window ".
To this attack, Don Garcie, Prince of Le"on, replied
that for his part he could never be drawn to a person
with whom he was familiarised. Beauty, said he, is the
first requisite ; from the faces and letters of our sweet-
hearts we judge of their knowledge : as we approach
nearer, then, there is always the joy of discovering
unknown charms.

" I leave you the liberty of adoring that of which
you know nothing, Seigneur," replied Gon-
salve, " provided you permit me to love only
a person whom I know sufficiently to esteem,
and to be assured that if I am loved by her, I
shall find enough to make me happy."
" For my part," said Don Ramire, the third friend,
" I confess that I should find more pleasure in
making myself master of a heart prohibited by
a passion, than to touch one which had never
been touched before : it would be a double
victory to me."

" Gonsalve is astonished at your opinion," replied
the Prince. ' '/ believe that natural inclinations
make themselves felt from the first moment,
and that those passions which come only with
time cannot be veritable ones"

Later on, when Gonsalve himself has at last experienced
this " natural inclination " at first sight, he exclaims :
" Ah, Don Garcie, you were right : there are no
passions but those which strike us at first and
surprise us ; the others are only relationships
to which we voluntarily give our hearts. The
veritable inclinations tear it from us in spite of
ourselves ! "

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279

Notwithstanding the Segrais and Scudery influence so
perceivable in this book the traditional stops, quavers
and semiquavers of emotion there are original touches
which betray Madame de la Fayette infallibly as for
instance that clever one of making her hero and heroine,
who when they first meet cannot speak each other's
language, discover after being separated for a long
period, that though no words of love have passed
between them, each has in the meantime learned the
other's tongue.

" Each advanced towards the other, and both began
to speak. Gonsalve used the Greek language
to ask her pardon for appearing before her
like an enemy in the same moment that Zaide
said to him in Spanish that she no longer
feared the misfortunes she had apprehended,
and that this was not the first peril from which
he had saved her.

" So astonished were they each to hear his native
tongue spoken by the other, so strongly did
they feel the reasons which had compelled
them to learn it, that they blushed and re-
mained in silence."

Zaide was written between the years 1665 and 1670,
in the stormy years, says M. d'Haussonville, of Madame
de la Fayette's relationship with La Rochefoucauld ; and
he traces a resemblance to La Rochefoucauld in the
character of Prince Alamir an " Arabian Lovelace,"
who, having the power to make all women love him, as
he succeeds in winning their devotion, abandons his
conquest to begin another pursuit. Zai'de is the only
one who can hold him, simply because she remains
insensible to his passion : " Is it her rigours which cause
my attachment ? " he cries.

But hinting as this story does at a solution of the
nature of the attachment between the author and La
Rochefoucauld, it, like history itself, leaves the ques-
tion an interrogation still, for although Alamir says to
Zaide :

" Shall I never be happy enough to be in a position

280 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

to know whether it is your charms or your
rigours which attach me to you ? "
he dies with the question unanswered ; and, accordingly,
adoring her still.

The next novel Madame de la Fayette's master-
piece is also supposed to be autobiographical ; and, if
we interpret the Princesse de Cleves to be Madame de
la Fayette, the Due de Nemours, La Rochefoucauld, it
is certainly most illuminating with regard to her early
struggles against this inclination which from the first
moment of meeting she had so feared.

The Princesse de Cleves is again the history of a
marriage entered into as the author's own must have
been, without any special predisposition on the part of
the wife, although at their first meeting in a jeweller's
shop the husband conceives a tremendous passion for
her. Here, too, real love comes too late.

The scene this time is laid in the Court of Henri II.,
where the famous Diane de Poitiers, Duchesse de Valen-
tinois, by this time an old woman, reigns over the King
as she has done over his father before him. Here lives
and moves the enigmatical Catherine de Medecis,
Henri II.'s Queen, who, says Madame de la Fayette,
" Had so profound a dissimulation that it was diffi-
cult to judge of her feelings " ;

and here we make acquaintance with the unfortunate
Mary, Queen of Scots, who has just married the
Dauphin of France.

"The Reine Dauphine was," says Madame de la
Fayette, "a person perfect in mind and body.
Educated at the Court of France, she had
taken on all its politeness, and she was born
with so much taste for all beautiful things that
in spite of her great youth, she loved them
more and was more skilful in them than any
one else."

One of the interesting bits of historical writing in the
book is the description of the tournament in which
Henri II. lost his life, and which resulted in the destruc-
tion of the beautiful old palace of the Tournelles, on the

BOOKS 281

site of which was afterwards built the Place Royale.
The Court of Henri II. was an extremely gallant one :
the love of letters and poetry taught by Francis I. still
lingered there ; and, among all the belles dames, none
was lovelier or more sought after than the Princesse de
Cleves, no man so gallant or so handsome as the Due
de Nemours.

A gay Lothario, singled out by Elizabeth of England
as a possible consort for herself, and indeed on the eve
of setting out for England to woo the English Queen in
royal fashion, the Due de Nemours is completely van-
quished by the loveliness and charm of the new beauty
whom he sees for the first time on the very evening of
her marriage to the Prince de Cleves. From that
moment, the tangled web of their lives intertwines, for
she too, coming within the influence of this paragon of
nobility and charm, feels a certain " trouble " permeating
all her mind.

More experienced than her daughter, the mother of
the Princess is at once aware of this agitation caused
by the Due de Nemours, whom she also knows to be
the most dangerous man at Court ; and, not wishing to
allow her daughter to see her fears, she endeavours
to warn her in general terms. The "trouble" of the
Princess, Madame de la Fayette defines to be

" That joy which first youth joined to beauty gives,

that kind of trouble and embarrassment which

love in the innocence of first youth causes " ;

Unfortunately for the Princesse de Cleves, this wise

mother is suddenly taken ill, and soon finding that

her end is approaching, she causes herself to be left

alone with her daughter ; and, throwing off all disguise,

warns her seriously and solemnly of the attraction

which the Due de Nemours is beginning to exercise

over her :

" You are on the brink of a precipice : great effort
and great violence will be necessary to keep
you back. Have force and courage, my
daughter, retire from the Court ; oblige your
husband to take you. Do not hesitate to

282 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

adopt the most strenuous and difficult mea-
sures : however terrible they may appear to
you at first, they will be easier in the end
than the unhappiness of a gallantry."
This solemn adjuration is the last the sorrowing
daughter hears her mother speak, for sending her from
her bedside, and refusing to see her again, Madame de
Chartres spends the last two days of her life in preparing
for death.

In Madame de la Fayette's own history, we do not
get the idea that she and her mother, Madame Renaud
de SeVigne, were ever very congenial ; but the Prin-
cesse de Cleves certainly loved her mother very deeply,
and was overwhelmed with affliction at her death.
Nor does the Prince de Cleves at all resemble the
Comte de la Fayette, as one's imagination paints him,
while the denouement of the story does not follow the
facts of real life.

The whole is a picture of the struggle of Madame
de Cleves against this " natural inclination " inspired in
her breast after her marriage an inclination which in
desperation she reveals to her husband in a conversa-
tion overheard, strangely enough, by the Due de
Nemours, her unavowed lover. In her confession to
her husband of some one whose influence she so much
fears that she wishes to keep away from the Court she
mentions no names ; but, incited by jealousy the Prince
de Cleves does not rest until he discovers the identity
of the man whose attraction she so fears.

Under such conditions, a catastrophe is inevitable,
and soon it comes in the shape of the death of the Prince
de Cleves from the effect of the sorrow which a belief
in his wife's faithlessness induced by a train of circum-
stantial evidence entails. Fever seizes him, and he
expires, leaving his wife crushed by the feeling that
she has killed him a fantastic idea which keeps her
obdurate to the entreaties of the Due de Nemours
ever after. In vain does he adjure her to at last fulfil
her destiny in a marriage with him, the man she
confesses to love :

BOOKS 283

" No," says she, in the first and last interview they
ever have, looking at him with eyes full of
sweetness and charm : " I know that it is not
the same in the eyes of the world, but in mine
there is no difference, because I know that it
is through you he died, and on my account ! "
" Ah, Madame ! " cries the Due de Nemours.
" What phantom of duty do you oppose to
my happiness ? "

In the long explanation which follows of her reasons
for not marrying M. de Nemours, the Princesse de
Cleves now betrays the secret of Madame de la
Fayette's power to resist the Due de la Rochefoucauld :
again the knowledge that his nature is a fickle one,
which cools in proportion as it finds itself becoming
possessed of the affections it covets. Before the pos-
sibility of a changed allegiance, Madame de la Fayette
in the person of the Princesse de Cleves recoils :

" I cannot confess to you without shame," she
says, " that the certainty of no longer being
loved by you as I now am, seems so horrible
a misfortune to me, that even though I had
no insurmountable reasons of duty, I doubt
if I could persuade myself to risk that un-
happiness ".

Thus, after many sage reflections on the impossi-
bility of a man of his disposition for gallantry remaining
faithful to a regard of which he has become absolute
master, she sends him away for ever. Giving up
worldly love, she devotes herself to that heavenly love
which is called Charity, the greatest of all, and which
finally transports her into the company of the saints
above.

" Her life, which was quite short, left," concludes
Madame de la Fayette, "an example of in-
imitable virtue."

Marmontel said that the Princesse de Cleves was
the most adroit and the most delicate piece of work
that ever the mind of woman could produce, while the
great M. Taine called it the finest novel of the century.

284 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

Drawing a comparison between it and the famous
Saint Simon Mdmoires, Taine further speaks of it as
a " shrine of gold, wherein shine the pure diamonds
with which the polished aristocracy adorns itself".
The Mdmoires of Saint Simon, on the contrary, seemed
to him "a large secret cabinet where, huddled together
in an avenging light, lie the soiled and deceitful cast-
off garments of the priesthood by which a servile
aristocracy is enfeebled".

"After having opened the cabinet," Taine con-
cludes, "it is proper to open the shrine."
The authorship of this masterpiece, like that of Madame
de la Fayette's two first literary essays, was also
doubted ; and, although finished in 1672, it was not
published until 1678, coming out anonymously but
popularly thought to be the joint work of La Roche-
foucauld and Madame de la Fayette. The preface to
the first edition mentions many private readings before
its publication when it received the approbation of
many judges. The moment it was finally published,
therefore, it had been so heralded that the whole Court
was agog to read it. According to Sainte Beuve,
people even stopped each other in the Grande Allee
of the Tuileries to ask news of it : on its appearance,
Fontenelle read it over four times and Boursault made
a tragedy of it, even as out of the plot of Zatde, two
comedies and an opera had been evolved.

The joint authorship of the Princesse de Cleves was
asserted by Mademoiselle de Scudery in a letter to
Bussy de Rabutin dated 1677 :

" M. de la Rochefoucauld and Madame de la

Fayette," she wrote, " have written a novel

of the gallantries of the Court of Henri II.,

which I am told is admirably done ".

It is impossible to determine at this late day exactly

what part the Due de la Rochefoucauld had in the

composition of the Princesse de Cleves ; and to us the

most interesting question now would seem to be in how

far it is autobiographical of Madame de la Fayette.

The most probable supposition is that portions of each

BOOKS 285

book that she wrote is, like the work of other writers,
autobiographical, but that no one story can be abso-
lutely descriptive of her real experiences.

Each writer of fiction is obliged to draw not only
on his imagination, but on his own experience as well,
each mixes fact and fancy in the way that suits his
individual taste. This is what Madame de la Fayette
undoubtedly did, and it therefore rests with each reader
of her books to divine for himself those portions which
reveal the secrets of the writer's innermost being. But
whatever light may be cast upon that vital part of her,
it cannot fail to remain delicate and sensitive and
virtuous in the true sense of the word.

Most curious of all the soul evidence in the case of
Madame de la Fayette is her denial of the authorship
of the Princesse de Cleves to Lescheraine contained in
one of the Turin letters discovered by M. Perrero a
denial which the latter believed, and upon which he has
based a positive affirmation that she cannot have been
its author.

The 1 3th of April, 1678, one month after the pub-
lication of the Princesse de Cleves, Lescheraine received
from Madame de la Fayette the following interesting
letter :

" A little book which circulated here fifteen years
ago, and in which it has pleased the public to
ascribe me a part, is responsible for my being
credited also with the Princesse de Cltves.
But I assure you that I had no part in it, and
that M. de la Rochefoucauld, to whom it is
also ascribed, has had as little as myself : he
has made so many vows to this effect that it
is impossible not to believe him, especially
in the case of a thing that may be avowed
without shame. For myself, I am flattered
that I am suspected of it, and I believe 1
should avow the book if I were assured that
the author would never come to demand it
back from me. I find it very agreeable, well
written without being extremely polished, full

286 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

of things of an admirable delicacy and which
should even be read more than once ; and
above all, I find in it a perfect imitation of
the Court and the manner in which one lives
there. There is nothing romantic or forced
in it, nor is it a novel : properly speaking it
is memoirs, and this was, I am told, the title
of the book, but it has been changed.
" This is, Sir, my opinion of Madame de Cleves :
I ask you for yours, for opinion on this book
is divided to the devouring point : some con-
demn what others admire. No matter what
you say, do not fear being alone in your
party."

The authenticity of this letter is questioned by Madame
Arvede Barine, and she suggests that, as Madame
Royale was a Princess of Nemours, one of Madame
de la Fayette's motives for denying the authorship to
Lescheraine may have been that she had called her
hero the Due de Nemours.

The most plausible explanation is that it had been
concerted between her and La Rochefoucauld that the
authorship should be steadfastly denied, and this letter
was therefore written under those conditions.

" The Princesse de Cleves is a poor orphan," said
humorously Mademoiselle de ScudeYy, " dis-
avowed by father and mother."

It is not the habit of Madame de Sevignd to speak
much of Madame de la Fayette's books, but just after
the publication of the Princesse de Cleves, writing to
her daughter an account of the death of the daughter-
in-law of Colbert, a young woman of only eighteen, she
said :

" La Princesse de Cleves did not live longer, but
she will not be forgotten so soon. It is a
little book which Harbin gave us two days
ago, and which seems to me one of the most
charming things I ever read."

The Princesse de Cleves was the second of the tril-
ogy of stories written by Madame de la Fayette with the

BOOKS

287

conflict between Duty and Love as the underlying note
on which she rang the changes of her imagination : the
third and last was a much shorter story, of few pages
indeed, but those few instinct with the author's
individual point of view, her characteristically simple
style, and called La Comtesse de Tende.

This latter story, like the Princesse de Montpensur,
and the Princesse de Cleves, has also an unhappy ending,
and contains another confession of an original nature.
Written during the latter years of Madame de la
Fayette's life, the Comtesse de Tende was probably
brought forth by impatience of the criticisms on the
picturesque garden scene in the Princesse de Cteves,
these animadversions on her novel being headed by
Bussy de Rabutin, who considered the said incident
extravagant, and the resistance of the Princess to the
Due de Nemours after her husband's death, even
more so.

" Very well," said Madame de la Fayette to her-
self, " I will give them something to talk
about ! "

So she set to work to write a more singular avowal still
in the story of a woman who, again disappointed in a
husband's love, is carried away by an illegitimate affec-
tion into at once a betrayal of her dearest friend and her
own husband. The Comtesse de Tende has scruples
of conscience all the way through, and finally over-
whelmed by the death of her lover, her friend's
husband, she declares her fault to her own husband in a
touching letter in which, confessing that she had intended
to take her own life, she says she has decided " to offer
it to him and to God in expiation of her crime ". The
husband, tenacious of his own vanity, refuses on account
of what the world will think, to take advantage of this
permission for revenge ; but of course the unfortunate
lady dies and in the conviction that Shame is one of
the most violent of passions.

Besides these few novels and the Histoire dHen-
riette dAngleterre, there exists a fragmentary series
of Mtmoires de la Cour, supposed to have been written
during the last years of the author's life, but details of

288 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

which are lacking owing to the carelessness of her son
the Abbe de la Fayette, who is accused of having lost
some of these as well as the MS. of Caraccio. The
fragments which remain are of the years 1688 and 1689
only ; but, although merely a simple recital of events,
their charm equals that of the History of Henriette,
picturing as they do the interesting happenings of those
years : the expedition of the Dauphin into the Palati-
nate, the seizing of the English crown by the Prince of
Orange, the flight of James 1 1. to France, his personality,
etc. At every turn, great independence of judgment
and courage of opinion break forth ; and it was owing
to this fact, perhaps, that they were not published until
so late as 1731.

Madame de la Fayette's own peculiarly simple and
direct style is noticeable from the beginning of these
memoirs, when describing France as being momentarily
n a state of perfect tranquillity.

" No other arms were used," she remarks, " than
those instruments necessary for digging up the
ground and for building. The troops were
employed for these purposes, not only with
the intention of the ancient Romans, which
was to keep them from an indolence as bad
for them as excess of toil would be, but with
the object also of turning back the river Eure
from its course in order to render the fountains
of Versailles continual."

She then goes on to say that these labours of the troops
simply resulted in advancing the King's pleasures by
some years, and the consequences, which did not
appear worthy of attention,

"In the bosom of the tranquillity enjoyed at the

time,"

were, as she sarcastically puts it, only that these same
troops, made terribly ill by the unwonted stirring up of
the earth, were thus rendered incapable of any service
whatsoever.

But to sum up the phase of Madame de la Fayette's
existence represented by her books and literary activi-

BOOKS 289

ties for in her case they are an inseparable part of her
life the words of the poet and critic, Casimir Delavigne,
seem best to resume both, and to appropriately close
the picture :

Tis thee whom I acclaim, lovely La Fayette,

Of Cleves and of Nemours, muse tender, circumspect,

Who screened thy life and fate from fame,

In illustrating and adorning Segrais' name.

CHAPTER XX
LAST DAYS AT THE FAUBOURG

" Le soleil ni la mort ne se peuvent regarder fixement."

La Rochefoucauld

IT is to the Marquise de SeVign that we owe an ac-
count of the last years at the Faubourg. The two
houses which in her eyes composed it, were her
favourite resorts at all times. Whole days she spent in
Madame de la Fayette's bedchamber, writing at her desk,
or in the ruelle of her bed decorated with fringe of gold
lace, discussing questions of literature and life. Many
hours too she spent at the Hotel de Liancourt in the
Rue de Seine where the Due de la Rochefoucauld was
confined to his chair with gout.

Now and then the gay Marquise was overwhelmed
by the serious and melancholy tone emanating from the
two invalids as they sat together in Madame de la
Fayette's garden a seriousness which seemed to put a
shade on even the brightness of the flowers and sun-
shine. At times their conversation even was too heavy,
and she acknowledged that although she enjoyed La
Rochefoucauld's maxims, there were some of them
which, frankly, she could not in the least understand.
Yet she admired and loved their author : his character,
his mind and his firmness in meeting sorrow. On
that day in which La Rochefoucauld learned of the
wounding of his eldest son, the death of his second son,
as well as that of the Comte de Saint Paul, the Mar-
quise happened to be at the Faubourg.

"This hail-storm," she said, " fell upon him in my
presence. It affected him strongly ; tears
welled up from the depths of his heart, and
290

LAST DAYS AT THE FAUBOURG 291

his firmness prevented them from breaking-
out."

Thus, though she always found sympathy at her cher
Faubourg, at times the melancholy weighed upon her
bright spirits; and it was no wonder that in 1672,
staying in Paris to nurse her beloved aunt Madame de
la Trousse, ill unto death, instead of going to Provence,
and dividing her time between the dying woman and
her friend in the Rue Vaugirard, just then recovering
from a worse attack of illness than usual, she should
have expressed the sadness of it all to her usual cor-
respondent :

" Madame de la Fayette is always languid, M. de
la Rochefoucauld always lame ; sometimes we
have conversation of such a sadness that it
seems there is nothing further to do but to
bury ourselves. Madame de la Fayette's
garden is the prettiest thing in the world :
everything is in bloom, everything is per-
fumed. We spend many evenings there, for
the poor woman does not dare drive out in a
coach. We often wish you were behind some
palisade in order that you might hear certain
discourse of some unknown lands which we
believe we have discovered.
" I pass from the Faubourg to my aunt's chimney
corner, and from my aunt's chimney corner to
that poor Faubourg."

In the same year, she again describes the two people to
Madame de Grignan :

" To-morrow Madame de la Fayette is going to a
little house near Meudon where she has been
before. She is to spend a fortnight there in
order to be suspended between Heaven and
earth. She does not want to think, nor to
talk, nor to reply, nor to listen ! She is weary
of saying good-morning and good-night-
every day she has fever, and repose cures her,
therefore she must have repose. I shall go to
see her from time to time.

292 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

" M. de la Rochefoucauld is in the chair that you
know. He is in incredible sadness, and one
very well understands what is the matter with
him."

The sadness of the Due de la Rochefoucauld, to which
Madame de Sevign alludes in this letter, was occa-
sioned by the death of the Comte de Saint Paul, whom
of all his sons he seems to have loved most tenderly.

Still, the Faubourg was not always sad and mourn-
ful. There were days when the gout retired into the
background and the vapeurs were dissipated by the
sunshine, the perfume and the flowers, when one of
those " aftermaths of life " that Madame de la Fayette
remembered so well, intervened, when the two invalids
met their dear friend Madame de Sevign6 as she came
in with smiling faces, ready to reply to her badinage,
and to enjoy the piquancy she brought from the outside
world even to add their own part towards merriment
and jollity.

The greatest butt of this select circle of three at the
Faubourg, was a certain Madame de Marans, an old
lady noted not for the virtue but for the irregularity
of her life, she having been at one time gallantly
associated with the Due de Bourbon. For many
years, however, the Due de la Rochefoucauld had
known her intimately, and in fun he had fallen into the
habit of calling her " mother ". This old lady was
always doing something to make herself ridiculous
dressing like a young girl, adopting the affectations in
vogue, and showing herself as vain as a peacock. Not
long after Madame de Grignan's marriage, Madame
de Marans incurred the anger of Madame de Sevigne
and her friends by circulating a bit of gossip about
Madame de Grignan for which the sensitive mother,
and each one of the friends, separately took her to
task. Madame de Sevigne was in the habit of mali-
ciously repeating to her daughter each escapade of the
Marans, as they called her, and it was with real delight
that on one occasion she recounted a little incident which
happened to La Marans on one of the intermezzo days

LAST DAYS AT THE FAUBOURG 293

at the Faubourg, a piquant translation of which is given
by a curious English book of the early eighteenth cen-
tury called Court Secrets taken from Madame de St-
vignfs Letters. The story itself illustrates not only the
foolishness of La Rochefoucauld's "mother," but Madame
de la Fayette's inherent love of simplicity and truth.
" La Marans," runs the letter as given in the above-
mentioned translation, " said a day or two ago :
' Lord ! I must get my hair cut after the new
mode.' Madame de la Fayette, with a great
deal of goodness, replied : ' Do not attempt
it, Madame, it suits none but young people.'"
Then, continued Madame de Sevigne :

"After La Marans had had her hair cropped, she
came to Madame de la Fayette's where I
was together with M. de la Rochefoucauld.
In she comes bareheaded. She had just then
been having her hair cropped, for all the world
like any young girl, with her locks proudly
powdered and buckled up in prim order. In
less than a quarter of an hour, the preparatory
introduction to her running the gauntlet was
all over, and finding herself likely to be finely
roasted, she was horridly out of countenance.
" ' In reality,' says Madame de la Fayette to her,
' you must needs be turned a downright fool !
Do you know, Madame, that you have made
yourself completely ridiculous ? '
" ' Ha, Mother! ' exclaimed M. de la Rochefoucauld.
' Faith, Mother ! we must not have done with
you so soon. Pray come nearer that we may
see you closely. If you do not look like

your Sister, whom I saw just now. Indeed,
* i t~ i >

Mother, you are monstrously tine

On other good days, the three friends would pass hours
reading together : they delighted in Boileau's satires, ir
the fables of La Fontaine ; and one of their greatest
delights was to study the Carte de Tendre, to speculate
on excursions into that wonderful country of Tenderness,
described for them by Mademoiselle de Scudery in her

294 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

Grand Cyrus. Stopping at the first town in this country,
the City of New Friendship, they discussed the three
different ways of acquiring tenderness, as laid down in
the Map of Tenderness : by the means of Great Esteem,
of Gratitude, and of Inclination. Knowing the three
friends, one can understand how La Rochefoucauld, the
moralist, would debate the possibility of there being such
a thing as true tenderness, while Madame de Sevigne
would argue for tenderness through Esteem, passing by
the town of Great Mind. Madame de la Fayette in
her delicate, imaginative sentiment supported that of In-
clination whose route to the City of New Friendship
needed no bridge of any kind, although the River of
Inclination throws itself into the sea called Dangerous,
and beyond that sea are those Unknown Lands, of
which Madame de Sevign makes so much mention in
her letters.

Even if these conversations were of Unknown
Lands, they were what the Marquise de Sevigne loved
best, and in this she was very congenial to La Roche-
foucauld. He himself dearly loved to talk to a few
people, and thoroughly appreciated the conversational
powers of Madame de Sevigne.

Once when Madame de Sevign was away, Madame

de la Fayette wrote her in the same strain, as follows :

" M. de la Rochefoucauld is very well, and sends

you a thousand and a thousand compliments,

as also to Corbinelli. Here is a question

between two maxims :
" One pardons infidelities, but one does not forget

them.
" One forgets infidelities, but one does not pardon

them.
" Would you rather commit an infidelity towards

your lover, whom you, however, would always

love ; or that he should commit one towards

you, and love you always ? "

This was a difficult question for the Marquise to answer,
and the solution was finally left to La Rochefoucauld,
who out of the discussion made the following maxim :

LAST DAYS AT THE FAUBOURG 295

" One pardons in proportion as one loves ".
The flavour of all these conversations and discussions
is distinctly perceptible in Madame de Sevigne's lett*
to her daughter. " Agreeable," she called them, even
when they were saddest ; and when particularly desirous
of discussing serious things, it was to the Faubourg she
turned on all occasions : there she was always sure of
mental food of a very different calibre from her beloved
bavardinage (gossip) on those celebrated evenings at
the Marquise de Lavardin's, or even in the exchange
of Rabutinage with her brilliant cousin.

Thus when Madame du Plessis-Guenegaud, the
mutual friend of Madame de la Fayette and the Marquise,
passed away, and going to the house of affliction as
she said to sprinkle some holy water, and to meditate on
life and death Madame de Sevigne was denied the
pleasure of talking over the sudden event with the
Guenegaud family, she turned to Madame de la Fayette,
and at the Faubourg they discussed it to her heart's
content. One can feel the Faubourg when, after giving
her daughter the different opinions as to the causes of
the death of \h\sfriend, by reverberation, as she called
her, she continued :

"But, my dear, we others who read Providence,
we see that her hour had been marked from
all eternity : all these little events had been
linked together and carried along to reach
that point ".

For the Due de la Rochefoucauld, the Marquise de
Sevigne had the liveliest admiration and respect, and
when in 1680, it came time for him to show the temper
of his mettle in sustaining the last agonies of the life
for which he theoretically had such contempt, it was her
pen that drew the immortal picture of his fortitude and
courage. His last maxim of all runs :

" After having spoken of the falsity of so many
apparent virtues, it is reasonable to say some-
thing in regard to the falsity of a scorn of
Death.
" There is a difference," he said, " between meeting

296 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

Death with courage and despising it. The
first is common enough, the last, I think,
always feigned."

Yet if it was not scorn which he himself showed at the
last, it was something approaching indifference, for he
looked down from the height of his sufferings at him-
self as at a person distinct and apart. His mind was
clear, his brain untroubled. Seeing this, Madame de
SeVigne could not help exclaiming :

" Believe me, my daughter, it was not uselessly
that he made reflections all his life ; he has
approached his last moments in such fashion
that for him they have naught of novelty or of
strangeness ".

The end came on the i6th of March, 1680, as he sat in
his accustomed chair, with the arms of his son about
him, with the great Bossuet at his side a death which
was a calm passing over the quiet River into the Un-
known a country which having so often peered into,
he did not dread.

Not so calmly could those dear to him look on and
see this passing, however, and when the end came the
one who loved him best had to leave his bedside be-
cause of her tears and agony.

" The day before he died he could not see Madame
de la Fayette because she was weeping,"
chronicles Madame de Sevigne,

and the next day the same pen, depicting his son as in
deep affliction, added :

" But he will find the King and the Court again,
all his family will make up his loss to him ;
but where will Madame de la Fayette find
such a friend, such society, a like sweetness, a
charm, a confidence, a consideration for her-
self and her son ? She is infirm, always in
her room, she does not walk the streets. M.
de la Rochefoucauld was sedentary also this
rendered them necessary to each other-
nothing could be compared to the confidence
and charm of their friendship. Think of it,

LAST DAYS AT THE FAUBOURG 297

my daughter, and you will find that it would
be impossible to have a greater loss, or one
which Time can less console."
A few days afterwards, she wrote again :

" Madame de la Fayette's poor health ill sus-
tains such a sorrow : she has a fever from
it, and it will not be in the power of Time
to take away from her the tedium of this
privation ".

On the 29th of March, she wrote of a scene between
Madame de la Fayette and the Due d'Enghien the
night La Rochefoucauld died, and remarks that never
had she seen so many tears, never a sorrow more tender
or more true :

" It was impossible," she continued, " not to be like
them they said things to break the heart-
never shall I forget that evening ! "
To her friend the Comte de Guitaut, she put the posi-
tion of Madame de la Fayette even more pathetically
than to her daughter in a letter beginning :

" I have a friend who can never be consoled "...
Then, dilating upon the sweetness and charm of La
Rochefoucauld's society, and the confidence and friend-
ship existing between her two friends, both of whom
were of uncommon merit, she said :

" Add to this, the circumstance of their ill-health,
which rendered them necessary to each other,
and which gave them leisure not possible in
other relationships to enjoy their good quali-
ties. It seems to me that at the Court one
has not the leisure for love ; the whirl so
violent for all, was peaceful for them, and
gave great scope for the pleasure of so
delicious a commerce. I think no passion
can surpass the force of such a relationship :
it was impossible to have been with him
without loving him much, so that have
regretted him on my own account, and
account of that poor Madame de la Fayette,
who would be false to Friendship and to

298 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

Gratitude were she less afflicted than she
is."

Strange to say, although the death of the Due de la
Rochefoucauld had been preceded the year before by
that of the woman most intimately connected with his
Frondist days, it was closely followed by her funeral
oration, and on the 1 2th of April, Madame de Se" vign6
tells her daughter of going to the Grandes Carmelites
to hear a eulogy of the Duchesse de Longueville. At
the end of the ceremony, she saw Madame de la Fayette
bathed in tears. These tears were occasioned by the
sight of the handwriting of La Rochefoucauld among
the papers of the Duchesse de Longueville. Calm
and contained as Madame de la Fayette usually was,
this sight surprised and afflicted her.

The unwonted sight of Madame de la Fayette in
tears, drew forth from Madame de S^vigne another
great well of pity, for which she had to find outlet to
her usual confidante :

"I do not believe in truth that Madame de la
Fayette is consoling herself. I am less good
for her than any one else for we cannot prevent
ourselves from speaking of this poor man, and
that is killing ; all those who were fond of
him, lose their price with her. She is to be
pitied . . . her health is completely over-
turned ; she is changed to the last degree. . . .
" She avows quite frankly," Madame de Svigne
further admitted, " that she tries to make
herself stupid, by taking from her mind
all those thoughts which ordinarily one tries
to put into it."

And this was the woman who had been accused of
being secke, devoted to her own interests, selfish,
cold ! Who could have known her better than that
friend of forty years' standing, who declared that the
more one knew her, the better one appreciated her
character and worth ? This same friend who saw her
in tears over the death of one exceptionally dear to her,
also recounts her susceptibility to the power of music,

LAST DAYS AT THE FAUBOURG 299

and tells of their hearing an opera of Lulli's together,
when she herself was in tears at certain places.

" But," said she, " I was not the only one who
could not stand them : the soul of Madame
de la Fayette was all alarmed ! "

The Comte d'Haussonville mentions a letter now
lost unfortunately from Madame de la Fayette to
Madame de Sevigne, in which she thus sums up the
sorrows which have come to her :

" Nothing can repair the treasures which I have

lost ".

No wonder, then, that towards the end of a life which
had been so full of action, and incident, when the motive
power of twenty-five long years was removed, as in
Madame de la Fayette's case, all the ordinary means of
consolation should have failed to bring her solace. As
Sainte Beuve said in speaking of Madame de la
Fayette :

" After Love, after absolute friendship, without a
reserve, nor return elsewhere, wholly occupied
and penetrated, and the same as ourselves,
there is only Death or God ! "

CHAPTER XXI

MADAME DE LA FAYETTE AND PORT ROYAL
" La felicit^ est dans le gout et non pas dans les choses."

IT was apparently not until after La Rochefoucauld's
death, when oppressed by the greatest loneliness
and suffering, that Madame de la Fayette began
to turn to religion for comfort and consolation. Up
to this time, it was said she had not only neglected the
practice of religion and sinned against its precepts,
but that she had blinded the eyes of her soul to it, and
actually dared not only to analyse its teachings, but to
question their truth : in fact, " the friend of La Roche-
foucauld had reasoned on faith ! "

Seeing her friend so utterly afflicted and inconsol-
able the Marquise de Sevign6 with all her soul wished
for her that only remedy for a spirit in distress
the consolation of religion. But the two friends,
who had experienced most things together, had not
made their acquaintance with the facts of the
spiritual life simultaneously. Some ten years before,
Madame de S6vigne had taken Madame de la Fayette
to hear her favourite preacher, Bourdaloue, and on that
occasion chronicled that Madame de la Fayette, hear-
ing him for the first time, had been " transported by
admiration ". His sermon, on the death of Lazarus,
taken as an image of the death of a soul by sin, drew
forth from the Marquise the exclamation :

" Ah ! Bourdaloue, what divine truths have you

said to us to-day on death ! "

but one cannot help feeling that she too, was trans-

300

MADAME DE LA FAYETTE AND PORT ROYAL 301

ported not by any real feeling of conviction of sin, but,
like Madame de la Fayette, simply by admiration of
the preacher. And, apparently, her missionary work
with regard to Madame de la Fayette did not continue,
for although in 1673 tne latter wrote of visiting the
Superior of the Convent of Calvaire, and added : " I
hope she will make me good ! " there is no record of
a second visit of the two friends together to Bourdaloue,
nor does Madame de S&vigne who herself often went
tell of Madame de la Fayette's visiting any other
of the great preachers of the day.

The mind of Madame de la Fayette was very
differently constituted from that of her best friend, and
religion naturally appealed to each in different ways.
Madame de Se"vigne\ although belonging, as she
humorously said, neither to God nor to the Devil
which annoyed her had a strong sense of right and
wrong, and even if she were, as some people asserted,
cold in matters of the heart, she too had to endure many
interior conflicts. A propos of her romance with Fou-
quet, for instance, she had described the force of old
passions as like the life-tenacity of those vipers whose
bodies cut off to make bouillons for Madame de la
Fayette, would not die, but still continued to move
and move and move ! Perhaps for Madame de la
Fayette, the passions were vipers too, but her method
of exterminating them was not that of Madame de
Se"vign6 rather that of the Spartan boy who let the
wolf eat into his very heart without a sign or cry of
anguish. The one method was picturesque, like every
act of an impulsive nature : the other, heroic and
stoical both were characteristic, both effective !

In the early days of Madame de la Fayette's
married life, there already breathed, in the very air of
the Court itself, a persistent undercurrent of religious
reform, and isms were becoming rife in all circles.
Out of Molinism, had sprung Jansenism ; opposing
Jansenism, was Jesuitism; while later on Jesuitism
was to fall upon Jansenism and strangle it !

The promulgator of the teachings of the interesting

302 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

sect called by his name, and ironically said to be the
"aristocrats of Catholicism," whose purpose was to

" repair and maintain in the Catholic Church,

Science, Intelligence and Grace,"
was a certain Jansenius, Bishop of Ypres in France.
The rise of the Jansenists, whose influence finally
centred in the Society of Port Royal, is one of the in-
teresting developments in the history of religion one
which so took hold on the imagination of the great
critic Sainte Beuve that he devoted six large volumes
of more than five hundred pages each to its description,
and expended upon it the greatest study and enthusiasm
of his life. In this work, his task, he says, was to show
how the reformation of one convent of nuns, and the
society of a few pious recluses, came to have the im-
portance and ascendancy with which the name of Port
Royal is associated in French history.

Founded in the early thirteenth century by Cis-
tercian nuns, the ancient Abbey of Port Royal des
Champs, not far from Paris, was reformed in the year
1609 by a young girl seventeen years of age called
Jacqueline Marie Angelique Arnauld, a member of
the celebrated Arnauld family, and who at that early
age was made abbesse of the institution she had
reformed. Soon afterwards the unhealthfulness of the
old abbey necessitated the removal of most of the
nuns to Paris, where they established themselves in
a convent called, to distinguish it from the sister
institution, Port Royal de Paris. Later on, when the
abbey in the country had been put in a more sanitary
condition, most of the nuns preferred to return there,
still keeping up the Paris foundation. But in the
meantime (in 1637) a celebrated lawyer of Paris named
Le Maistre, also a connection of the Arnauld family,
and whose mother and aunts were all nuns at Port
Royal des Champs, wishing to consecrate himself to
religion, and giving up a brilliant career to that desire,
had obtained permission to come down to the almost
deserted Port Royal des Champs, and there occupy a
room in one of the inner courts. Here he lived a life

MADAME DE LA FAYETTE AND PORT ROYAL 303

of complete solitude and meditation, working in his
own little garden, and performing the necessary menial
offices for himself.

Such was the contagion of his example, that later
on two friends, also desirous of giving up the world,
joined him, and by degrees other illustrious persons
were added to the number until together they formed
the so-called Society of Port Royal, which acknow-
ledged Jansenius as its model. These men soon
exercised a powerful and widespread influence through
their teachings and writings, becoming the spiritual
directors of many of the great of the day, among whom
were prominently Madame de Sable and Madame de
Longueville.

Literarily, the movement culminated in Racine,
whose early life was spent at Port Royal, and whose
" Athalie " was an outcome of his later sympathy with
the Jansenists, and their crowning glory! Also, by
Blaise Pascal, who, becoming converted to the teachings
of the order which his young sister Jacqueline had
joined, carried on a fierce controversy in their behalf
against the Jesuits, the product of which appeared in
the celebrated Lettres Provinciates.

" Ces Messieurs," as Madame de Svigne called the
Port Royal recluses, exercised a tremendous power
over the whole of Parisian society a secret one to a
great degree, but a no less important and far-reaching
one which finally became so dangerous that the Jesuits
determined upon the entire extermination of the order ;
and Louis XIV., persuaded through Madame de
Maintenon, in 1 709 had the ancient abbey demolished,
and the poor nuns dispersed those nuns said by M.
Pe>efixe, the Archbishop of Paris, to be "as pure as
angels and as proud as demons !

Although never a professed Jansenist herself, the
Marquise de S^vigne enjoyed the teachings of Ces
Messieurs, especially that of Nicole, author of the
Essays on Morality, who taught her to "submit
herself to Providence, to take everything disagreeable
as if it came from the divine hand ; to bore herself

304 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

gladly with people who displeased her ; not to murmur
against the Rain : in a word, to see God in the small and
great events of existence ". Her mind was not adapted
to the subtleties of religious doctrine, and she herself
avowed the fact in hearing learned disputes over the
abstract subject of Grace the basic dogma of the
Jansenists thereby unconsciously striking at the root
of the weakness of these Messieurs of Port Royal a
weakness which Sainte Beuve puts plainly and sadly in
his great work. She said simply :

" For me you must thicken religion a little it

evaporates in the process of subtilisation ".
Sainte Beuve, letting the pen fall on the last sentence
in his book wherein he says he has endeavoured to give
the essence of the spirit of Port Royal, to inquire into
the very depths of its purpose to depict with vivid
brush its human prototypes, its visible works, and to
follow it from its foundation through all its phases to
its decadence, takes it up again the next moment in a
spirit of sadness and depression, to ask the melancholy
question : " What have I wished ? What have I
accomplished ? What have I gained ? "

Seeking the origin of this phenomenon of the
religious instinct of men of the seventeenth century,
and wishing to extract the mystery underlying the
tendency of those pious souls, the intimate and profound
poetry, which, as he says, exhaled therefrom, Sainte
Beuve acknowledged that he found at the root only a
superficial doctrine after all. Always talking of Truth,
and sacrificing everything to its image as they saw it,
their outlook had been but narrow and confined. It is
easy to picture the depression of a man like Sainte
Beuve, who going into the study of a movement, not
only with enthusiasm, but with absolute conviction and
faith, gradually discovers the human weakness of its
great teachers not only in the practice and carrying out
of their high ideals, but in the narrowness of their vision
as they gaze towards the limitless perspective of the
Infinite. No wonder that the whole movement seemed
to him in this moment of clairvoyance but as a " pale

MADAME DE LA FAYETTE AND PORT ROYAL 305

torch illumined but for an instant in the midst of a great
night " ! No wonder that his own efforts to understand
and fathom what had seemed to him a never-ending
journey towards the Illimitable and the Boundless,
should resolve themselves into a futile following of a
fata morgana or as he says, "the most fugitive of
illusions at the core of the Infinite Illusion".

And yet the teachings and reasonings of these
hermits of Port Royal were undoubtedly of a nature to
appeal strongly to an intellect like that of Madame de
la Fayette, who as opposed to Madame de Se"vigne",
who was influenced solely through her emotions-
enjoyed subtilisation, her feelings passing first through
the intellect before even knocking at the door of her
heart. After the death of the Due de la Rochefoucauld,
Madame de la Fayette did not at first admit that life
held nothing more for her but inaction. She could not
realise immediately how necessary the daily presence of
this companion had become, nor with what insidious
strength such a communion had taken hold of the
very springs of her being. She rebelled at first against
yielding to the softer feelings, against resigning herself
to a calm waiting for her own translation into that
unknown country where she might one day regain his
companionship. She still doubted the facts of religion
and among them now stood out the certainty of the
actual existence of that Unknown Country to which he
had gone !

Like all strong natures struggling against fate and
young enough at forty-six still to be able to struggle-
she endeavoured in action to deceive her own heart
So, emulating the example of the Spartan boy and
ignoring the pain gnawing at her vitals, she threw her-
self headlong into the distractions of work, and into her
interest in her son's advancement in life. It was exactly
at this epoch also that she became the furet in the
path of the ambassadors of Victor Amedde of Savoy.
Only in action could she forget her loneliness and sorrow.
She has, of course, been greatly criticised for resuming
her active life so soon after the Due de la Rochefou-

306 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

cauld's death. That in that very year she should have
been able to write letters filled with a lively interest in
small details and affairs of trivial moment, such as those
to Lescheraine, the Secretary of Madame Roy ale of
Savoy, found in the Archives of Turin, was matter for
astonishment to many. But this criticism is a superficial
one to those who look deeper than the surface into the
well-springs of motive and character, for to such her
activity seems but the restlessness of a great despair.
Only when ill-health gained greater and greater
possession of her, when her will-power became more
and more weakened by suffering, did this woman of
determined intellect give herself up to the need for out-
side comfort. Long before this, Madame de la Fayette
undoubtedly had sought refuge in religion and ethics,
for to have conquered and subdued so tremendous
a moral temptation to have remained consistently
through all storm and stress true to herself and in the
straight and narrow path at a time when others of her
own station were constantly and successfully deviating
therefrom she must have had a very strong element of
faith, an enormous belief in goodness and honour, and
carefully discriminated the difference between right and
wrong.

And it does not seem quite proven that she ever
became a real Jansenist, although she is supposed to
have early formed a sympathy for the sect in the
salon of an avowed and zealous member of the society,
Madame du Plessis-Gue"negaud.

No less a person than Racine, in a letter to M.
Bonrepas, just after her death in 1693, speaks with
authority of her connection with Port Royal.

In telling of a dinner he took in company with
Madame de Caylus, Madame de Maintenon's niece, at
the Countess of Grammont's, Racine wrote :

" Your friend, Madame de la Fayette, was a sad
topic of conversation for us. I unfortunately
had not the pleasure of seeing her in the last
years of her life. God had thrown a salutary
bitterness over her worldly occupations, and

MADAME DE LA FAYETTE AND PORT ROYAL 307

she died after having suffered in solitude with
an admirable piety the rigours of her infirmi-
ties, having been in this very much helped by
the Abbe du Guet, and by several of the
Messieurs of Port Royal, whom she held in
great veneration."

In 1688, Madame de la Fayette's hold on the world
was not yet relaxed, however, for in a letter dated
November of that year, Madame de Sevigne speaks
of going to the Faubourg on Madame de Lavardin's
invitation, to be congratulated by both friends on
the recovery of her grandson, the young Marquis de
Grignan, from a small wound received in his first battle.
This circumstance in calling the attention of the King
to him was considered as a very lucky accident for a
young officer of seventeen at the outset of his career ;
yet, knowing the disposition of Madame de Grignan,
the two old friends in bantering fashion exclaim :

" Eh, bien ! What do you suppose Madame de
Grignan will find to epilogue about in this ?
It would be something to buy if it were for
sale! She should be too happy."
It seems too that as an older and more experi-
enced warrior, the Comte de la Fayette had taken a
great interest in the Marquis de Grignan, and so
solicitously did he watch over him during this very
campaign in the Palatinate, that the Marquise de
Sevigne humorously called him " the spy of her little
Tomcat ! " the latter being her pet name for her grand-
son.

" Politer people," said she, " would say Puss !
This amusing incident connected with the Marquis
de Grignan seems to have roused Madame de la Fayette
out of her sad thoughts and physical depression, and
the next year she again was apparently full of energy
and enthusiasm, the object which this time wakened
her out of the lethargy of ill-health being the Marquise
de Sevigne, whose condition of health and pecuniary
affairs were giving her friends concern. It seems
that the Marquise had had an unusually bad attack
of rheumatism the year before at Paris, and that

3 o8 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

her " doctors," as she called Madame de la Fayette and
Madame de Lavardin, were anxious that she should not
spend the coming winter at Les Rochers the home at
this epoch of her son Charles, and where she had
announced her intention of remaining. Knowing the
financial difficulties into which the extravagance of this
son, and that of the Grignans had brought her, several
of her associates plotted together to bring the Marquise
back to Paris, provide horses and a coach, as well as
other necessary luxuries for her, and to have a purse con-
taining a thousand ecus waiting for the settlement of
her most pressing debts. It fell to Madame de la
Fayette's part to write the letter urging the Marquise
to accept these things, and to return to Paris ; and,
with her usual frankness and directness, Madame de la
Fayette writing a for her extraordinarily long letter
put the case before her friend rather brusquely and
almost dictatorially :

" The question, ma belle," she wrote, " is that you
must not pass the winter in Brittany, no mat-
ter at what cost. You are old, Les Rochers
are full of woods ; fluxions and catarrhs will
overwhelm you you will be bored, and your
mind will be sad and depressed : the things
of the world are nothing in comparison with
what I say," etc., etc.,

finally ending this long epistle with the menace that
none of them will want as friend, one who by her own
fault allows herself to grow old and die !

This letter, while flattering as an assurance of the
real affection of these near and dear intimates, and of
Madame de la Fayette in particular, rather piqued its
recipient on the score of its insinuations that she was
growing old ; and she wrote back refusing the offer,
but promising that she would neither be ill, nor grow
old and garrulous, also conjuring Madame de la Fayette
to love her always, in spite of the menace at the end of
her letter.

Madame de la Fayette did not herself like the idea
of growing old any better than Madame de Sevigne.

MADAME DE LA FAYETTE AND PORT ROYAL 309

Some years earlier, she had written Manage to reproach
him for neglecting her for a new attraction of the
moment, and reminded him that she was neither uglier
nor more foolish than she had been two years before :
" I am older," she said, "it is true, but I am still
so rich in youth that those two years do not
impoverish me, and should not injure me in
your eyes ".

Evidently this letter brought Manage to his allegiance,
for after making one or two gallant little detours to
other people, he was more devoted to his former pupil
towards the end than ever, and in the last years threat-
ened to write her poetical portrait. Upon which, no
longer so rich in youth and health as when she had
boasted to him of her wealth in this respect, she wrote
to dissuade him from his purpose :

" You call me ' my divine Madame '. My dear
Sir, I am a meagre divinity. You make me
tremble when you speak of writing my por-
trait. Your self-love and mine would suffer
much, it seems to me. You could not paint
me other than I was, for there is no means of
thinking of me as I am, and there is no one still
alive who saw me when I was young ! No
one would believe what you say of me, still
less in seeing me. I beg you to drop the
work. Time has too much destroyed the
materials. I still have a figure, teeth and
hair, but I assure you I am a very old
woman. ... I am in truth very sensible of
the friendship you show me. This revival
has the air of novelty."
In another letter, she exclaims:

" How foolish one is when one is young ! One
has no obligations, and one does not know the
price of a friend like you. It costs one dear
to become reasonable it costs one one's
youth ! "

Then, in conclusion, she complained that time and old
age had taken away all her friends. Already she her-

310 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

self felt the coming of the end, but before it came, she
had still to suffer the loss of this same good comrade
and master whose loyalty and affection she had learned
to appreciate at the expense of her youth : the loss of
Menage himself, for he died in July, 1692, just a year
before her death. Prior to this time, even, she had fore-
seen the end of her own life : indeed for years she had
anticipated it :

" I do not think I can live long in this state," she
wrote to Menage, shortly before his death,
" my life is too disagreeable. I submit myself
without difficulty to the will of God. He is
the All- Powerful, and from all sides one must
come back to Him. I am told you are
thinking seriously of your salvation, and I
am glad."

And this last letter shows that by that time she had
become reconciled to religion as the Great Consoler
a state to which she had undoubtedly been helped by
the Abbe du Guet, even if not by the other Messieurs
of Port Royal.

Du Guet himself was not a true " Solitaire," but
connected in a very collateral way with Port Royal.
His was a peculiar and most individual character, full
evidently of human frailties, but helpful to others chiefly
on that very account, his warmth and charm of personal-
ity going far towards infusing comfort and strength into
his words, in themselves most eloquent and flowery.
It is therefore significant that Madame de la Fayette
should have chosen this man from among the celebrated
directors of the day as her spiritual guide, for it was
again her mind which had to be satisfied, her sense of
proportion which had to be balanced, before her heart
could bow down to that last test of complete surrender
to the emotions. Then and not until then could she
allow the clouds to dissipate from her mind, the doubts
to flee away ; then only could the friend of La
Rochefoucauld, she who had with him probed the
depths of the corruption and inconsistencies of human
nature, drive away reasoning from her mind, and accept

FROM AN OLD ENGRAVING

MADAME DE LA FAYETTE AND PORT ROYAL 311

the facts of life and death in their naked simplicity and
ruggedness.

Du Guet was all the more fitted to understand a
nature like that of Madame de la Fayette from the very
facts of his own history.

Born in the country of L'Astree in 1649, he was
only about forty years of age at the time Madame de la
Fayette was under his charge, she his senior by fifteen
years. A dreamy, poetical boy, at twelve already
destined for the Church, the reading of the great novel
of his country had aroused in him a certain literary
ambition, and the story is told that at that early age he
had half finished a similar romance in which the
characters round about his home of Montbrizon in the
Forez figured as principals. However, on reading this
romance aloud to his mother a very saintlike woman
she said to him :

"You would be very unhappy, my son, if you
should make so bad a use of the talents which
God has given you ! "

whereupon the young Du Guet threw his half-finished
romance into the fire. He could not so easily destroy
his nature, and this romantic and imaginative tendency
of his, instead of going into the writing of works of
profane art, was concentrated on the moulding of a
personal influence full of unanalysed seduction and
charm a force which was exercised exclusively in the
practice and teaching of religion and philosophy.

After taking his degree at the Oratory in Paris, Du
Guet was sent from one provincial town to another,
finally to the village of St. Re"my, where his eloquence
in teaching the poor their catechism so attracted the
rich of the neighbourhood that the poor were crowded
out of the lecture room a circumstance which so dis-
pleased Du Guet that he asked to be recalled. Finally,
at the age of thirty-two, he was ordained priest, and
began to give public conferences at the Convent of St.
Magliore, in the Faubourg St. Jacques. It was probably
at this time that Madame de la Fayette first became
interested in him, for the whole of Paris seems to have

312 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

flocked to the Faubourg, and she in the neighbouring
St. Germain could not have avoided the contagion.
But she did not then put herself under his directorship :
for the year of La Rochefoucauld's death the weak
health of Du Guet obliged him to break off his brilliant
career of popular preacher, and the next five years of
his life were somewhat migratory, spent mostly away
from Paris at various institutions of his order. Finally,
failing to agree with the methods of his colleagues, he
decided to leave Paris secretly and go into religious
retirement, no one, not even his family, knowing the
name of his retreat.

Sainte Beuve tells us that Brussels was his place of
refuge, the Arnauld family residing there his hosts, and
that his motive for secrecy was a budding sympathy
with the Jansenists. But in Brussels his poor health
would not allow him to remain more than seven months,
so for some years he went about from place to place,
not returning definitely to Paris until 1 690 three years
before the death of Madame de la Fayette, when it is
safe to conjecture he became her directeur.

Failing the more prominent position of popular
preacher denied him by reason of a weak chest and
generally delicate health, Du Guet's individual person-
ality made him an ideal religious director. In this
capacity, many were the penitents who claimed his
attention, and who overwhelmed him with benefits and
attentions of all kinds, many the letters he wrote to
women so anxious for that soul consolation which only
a priest can give ; into these letters he always managed
to put just that grain of personal interest for which their
souls were hungering. Thus, one lady he delicately
chides for adjuring him to be careful of his health when
she herself is suffering :

"If you abandon yourself to pain, is it in my
power," he asks, "not to be penetrated by it?
I can only follow your example."
To another he writes :

" I had almost as much joy, Madame, in learning
that you had taken some remedies, as if you

MADAME DE LA FAYETTE AND PORT ROYAL 313

had assured me of your health. This is not
so much the effect of my confidence in
remedies as that the smallest care you take
of your health gives me pleasure."
" But," says M. de Sainte Beuve, "the finest, the best-
known and the most classic of his letters of directorship,
is without contradiction that addressed to Madame de la
Fayette."

With the torment of those melancholy thoughts which
ill-health brings to the healthiest minds which made
even Madame de SeVigne of sunny disposition, sad
in her despair, probably, at the doubts still assailing
her, and having been confronted for so long and so per-
sistently by the idea of the closing in of the Waters of
Death, Madame de la Fayette finally turned to Du Guet
in the hope of finding peace and courage for her last
journey.

In responding to this appeal, Du Guet on his part
evidently recognised the nature of the character with
which he had to deal, and realised that his task required
more judgment and delicacy than even that of consol-
ing the Duchesse de Longueville, who it was said, had
also been under his spiritual direction. He undoubt-
edly felt it necessary to satisfy primarily that all-inquir-
ing mind of hers : therefore his letter begins with
remarks designed to conciliate her intellectual pride :
" I should have liked your thoughts rather than
mine, Madame," he prologues diplomatically,
" and this in no refinement of humility. It
simply means that it would be more useful for
you to find out the sentiments of your own
heart than to accept those of others, and that
there are always two dangers in getting a
written lesson, the one that of amusing one-
self by a method which changes nothing :
the other soon to be disgusted with that
method."

Having thus prepared the ground, he proceeds with the
lesson, and confesses that in thinking her case over,
it has seemed to him she should employ the first

314 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

moments of her day more usefully "those moments
when you cease to sleep only to begin to dream ".

With these words, it is easy to imagine the awaken-
ing astonishment of the reader of the letter :

" How can he know so well the utter listlessness
of those moments the effort one makes to
keep from thinking but surely this is not
sinful ! "

Not sinful in themselves are these thoughts, con-
tinues the wise director of souls, but the best thing
one can say of them is that they are useless. It is
not enough to be quiescent the mind must be nourished
on solid food. Why not employ this time, he asks
almost brutally, " in demanding an account of yourself
of a life already very long, and of which nothing re-
mains to you but a reputation, the vanity of which you
comprehend better than any one else ! "

" Nothing remains but a reputation " so much
then, for her vanity of woman of the world to whom
fame has come unsought, perhaps, but at the same
time, with insidious power. This, the first error to
tear from her heart for her long journey.

And from the vanity of earthly glory, the doctor of
her soul then passes on to disabuse her mind of the
vanity of arrogating to herself the right of doubting
and judging :

"You are in this world not to judge Truth, but to
follow it," he cries. "If you are desirous of leading a
new life, look at yourself as your Judge sees you ;
throw off the habits of a lifetime, reverse your instincts
and feelings, and be born again into Righteousness ! "
" Ah," he goes on, coming at last to the core of his
lesson : " into what an abyss of salutary con-
fusion does one sink in recalling in bitterness
of heart all those years whose remembrance
can scarcely be borne, and yet which have
not yet been sincerely repented of because
one is unjust enough to excuse his weakness,
and to love the cause of it ! "
Touching finally at the root of Madame de la Fayette's

MADAME DE LA FAYETTE AND PORT ROYAL 315

malady, the astute director thus betrayed his belief that
she was still hugging to herself the love of the sin in
adoration of its cause. And, following this last blow
at her past life quickly, with an exhortation for the
present, he eloquently attacks another of her cherished
weaknesses :

" Thus ye who have dreamed, cease your dream-
ing ! Ye who esteem yourselves ' true ' above
everything, and whom the world flatters as
such, ye are but half and falsely so. Your
wisdom without God was not wisdom at all
it was but good taste."

Strong medicine for a sick spirit is this letter of
Du Guet's a Calvinistic lash of the soul ! Rudely
striking at Madame de la Fayette's last chimera, her
idea fostered for years that she was "true," bravely
he broke down her pride and love of the world, and
prepared her for coping with that final illusion "at the
core of the Infinite Illusion ! "

Thus the patient found God the Ail-Powerful, and
knew that from every side one must come to Him.
But in the process, she was conscious of the integral
part of herself that was being torn away. To Menage,
she said in this knowledge :

" Every one loses the half of himself before being

recalled,"

the half of herself being not only La Rochefoucauld,
but her cherished dreams, her pride, her youth, her
strength !

For years she had been fighting that enigmatical
disease, which for want of a better name, she called
the " vapours " a designation under which she classed
her sufferings in general. The " vapours " was a very
prevalent disease of the seventeenth century, and one
often wonders exactly what was meant by the term.
It is interesting, therefore, to read in a letter to Menage,
Madame de la Fayette's explanation of the malady she
so often is affected with :

" C'est un chien d'avoir les vapeurs," she wrote-
" it is a puzzle to have the vapours : where

316 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

do they come from, where do they go, and
what shall one do with them ! Not only do
they take away the health, but they steal away
the spirit and the reason one no longer
sleeps, one cannot eat : one is always sad,
sullen, restless, knowing full well that one
has no cause for sadness, for sullenness, for
disquiet. One disapproves continually of one-
self a bad state indeecf ! "

Three years before her death, Madame de la Fayette
wrote to Madame de Svigne :

" I am in the saddest and cruellest vapours that
one can possibly be in there is nothing to
do but suffer, if such is the Will of God".
Unfortunately, during the last years when her friend
most needed her, Madame de Sevigne" was with her
daughter in Provence and away from Paris altogether,
so that alone Madame de la Fayette had to suffer and
be strong, nursed only by a very devoted secretary
called Mademoiselle Perrier, cheered only by an occa-
sional sight of her sons, her daughter-in-law, and her
one little granddaughter.

Yet the vapours, though persistent, were not con-
tinual. Sometimes the Fog lifted, and the sunshine
poured into her room and flooded the garden with its
cheering radiance. And the invalid was never too ill
to be interested in the details of Madame de Sevigne's
life in Provence, in her hopes and fears for that beloved
daughter and her affairs. Ever with unselfish firmness
did she refuse to allow Madame de Se"vign6 to come
back to Paris to see her, quieting the solicitous appre-
hensions on her account, writing cheerily and looking
with calm eyes upon the world. But in 1691, Madame
de Sevigne returned to Paris, bringing her daughter
with her. Again absent in 1692 for a short time, and
making inquiries as to her dear companion's health, no
longer could the true state of affairs be disguised.
Madame de la Fayette therefore wrote a few words
pathetically depicting her great suffering, at the same
time revealing the sincere resignation which time and
religion had taught her :

MADAME DE LA FAYETTE AND PORT ROYAL 317

" Alas ! ma belle, all that I can say to you is that
my health is very bad : in a word, I have re-
pose neither night nor day, neither of body
nor of mind, I am no longer a person as re-
gards the one or the other ; I am failing visibly ;
it must be finished when God wills, and I am
resigned. . . . Believe me, my very dear one,
that you are of all the world the one I have
most truly loved ! "

Written in January, 1692, this was her last letter to
Madame de Sevigne\ and in May of the next year her
pain and suffering, her disquiet of mind and body were
lost in the long repose and quiet of death !

And to this friend, whom she had most truly loved
of all those who had crossed her life's path, we owe her
epitaph that which will last, that which strikes deeper
than any outside tribute, whether from the Mercure
Galant, laudatory as its notice was, or from the literary
world as represented by the writer who thus summed up
her charm :

Here lies what true taste regrets,
The tender, the noble La Fayette.

In one of those immortal letters, one of the last Madame
de Sevigne herself was to write, and addressed to a
mutual friend of long standing, Madame Guitaut, is this
epitaph incorporated. Evidently Madame Guitaut had
written to condole with Madame de Sevigne^ on her
loss, for, on the 3rd of June, 1693, Madame de Sevigne
replied :

"You could not have broken silence, Madame, in
an occasion more affecting to me. You knew
all the merit of Madame de la Fayette, either
through your own experience or through me,
or through your friends : of it you could not
believe too much. She was worthy to be
your friend; and I was only too happy in
being loved by her during a very considerable
length of time ; never had we the slightest
cloud on our friendship. Long habit had not

3 i8 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

accustomed me to her merit : the taste for it
was always lively and new ; I took great care
of her, following the movement of my heart
without regard or friendship having any part
in obliging me to it : I was assured too that
I was her tenderest consolation, and for forty
years it was the same thing : this date is a
violent one, but it also well founds the truth
of our relationship. For two years her in-
firmities had been extreme. I defended her
always, for it was said that she was mad not
to want to go out. She had a mortal sad-
ness : what a foolishness again ! 'Is she not
the happiest woman in the world ? * She
acknowledged it, but I said to those persons
so precipitate in their judgments : ' Madame
de la Fayette is not mad,' and I held to it.
Alas ! Madame, the poor woman is now but
too well justified : it was necessary that she
should die in order to show that she was right
not only in not going out, but in being sad."
Whereupon, justifying Madame de la Fayette's sadness
and indolence by details as to her condition of health,
she continues :

" Such was the state of this poor woman who said :

' One will find one day all that one has

found ! ' Thus, Madame, she was right during

her life, she was right after her death, and

never was she without that divine reason,

which was her principal quality."

So holy was the dying woman's confession of her

sins, so exact and sensitive her acceptance of the last

Sacrament, that Madame de Sevigne looking on and

knowing her friend's former difficulty in accepting the

facts of religion, could not help feeling that God had

shown her a very peculiar grace, and that she was

after all predestined to righteousness. Madame de la

Fayette's final perfect submission to the Divine will

can, however, be explained again by her character.

Strong as had been her resistance, having once thrown

MADAME DE LA FAYETTE AND PORT ROYAL 319

away doubt and indecision and analysis her surrender
and self-abnegation were correspondingly complete, her
end absolutely in keeping with her nature and disposi-
tion.

Thus in resignation and hope in that life eternal
promised her at her baptism, passed away a woman
whose mortal existence would seem to have been rounded
in a worldly sense as few lives of women often are.
And, reviewing its course from birth to that transition
which for want of a true understanding we call death
a word defined by the great etymologist Skeat to mean
the loss of life, instead of a re-birth she seems more
than ever to deserve the distinctive title given her by
the friend who knew her best, and who said, " she is
true " ! For whatever her faults and we do not claim
that she was without them " Who would boast of being
perfect?" she herself had asked she was singularly
true and consistent throughout. She had none of those
little coquetries and infidelities of which other women
in an age of gallantry were not ashamed ; and, though
her married life may have been a mistake, she un-
doubtedly remained true to her marriage vows, true to
her motherhood, true to friendship. And all her re-
lationships were elevated by that dignity and grace
peculiar to a century in which a courtly King set the
example to courtier knight and peasant alike, and
when the term noblesse oblige was not always an empty
phrase.

In the year 58 after Christ, St. Paul preaching to
the Corinthians reminded them of the shortness of life,
and that it remained to them

" To use this world as not abusing it, for the fashion

of this world passeth away 1

Preaching the funeral oration of the Duchesse d'Aiguil-
lon, sixteen hundred and seventeen years later, Fleshier,
Bishop of Nimes, repeated the warning to his listeners ;
and how justly might it be recalled at this day in
summing up the life of the Duchess's godchild, Marie
Madeleine, Countess of La Fayette.

The fashion of this world does pass away, but its

320 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

semblance and shadow remain ; and to-day as one
descends from the old-fashioned Paris omnibus at the
Theatre of the Odeon, once the Palace of the Grand
Conde, looking across at the Palace of the Luxembourg,
the change is startling. In the beautiful Renaissance
Gardens of Marie de Medecis one's eye is still caught
by the colossal fountain, on which time has set only a
softening mark. Strolling along, there is the garden
terrace still the statues of the Queens of France :
the brilliant beds of flowers along the parterres are,
perhaps, more gorgeous than in the old days.

Inside the palace itself, the Grand Staircase,
surmounted by the busts of Marie de Medecis and
Henri IV., the princely rooms once graced by the
Grande Mademoiselle and her guests all are there.
In the Petit Luxembourg, once connected intimately
with its larger neighbour, now separated, the grand
salon is untouched in its form and structure. And even
opposite in the Rue Vaugirard, the old hotel of Madame
de la Fayette, in whose rooms gathered all that was
greatest in the literary and polite world of the Paris of
Louis Quatorze, to whose refuge Madame de Sevigne
turned in her hours of greatest joy as in her greatest
sorrow, stands unchanged in its bare semblance, while
the old garden, once ornamented by the statues of
Etienne le Hongre, that great sculptor of Versailles
in whose glass-covered arbour the two invalids sat for
so many years in happy companionship is there still,
overlooked now as of old by the conventual buildings
of the Filles de Sainte Marie.

What then is gone ? Only the fashion of this
world. Yet all is changed !

The beautiful fountain, though it now jets out water
to thirsty travellers as it never did in the old days, is
no longer kept for the gaze of royal eyes, but criticised
and glanced at indifferently by the unknowing multitude
that flocks to those gardens every afternoon in summer
and winter alike. Though the statues of the Queens
of France are there on the terrace to delight the
scrutiny of the careless passer-by, in his blindness he

MADAME DE LA FAYETTE AND PORT ROYAL 321

sees only the disfigurements which Time has brought.
Inside, the Grand Staircase is trodden by Republican
politicians, who in their political preoccupations think
not of the past or future, only of the garish present.
Madame de la Fayette's bare dwelling is occupied by
a new Cur of St. Sulpice, the garden mutilated and
shorn of its statues and its flowers !

Naught, however, prevents one from forgetting the
present and losing oneself in a dream of what is gone.
For the subtle aroma of the past can ever be enjoyed
by those whose senses are sharpened to perceive it ;
and in the midst of these changes, the spirit of Marie
de Medecis, of Gaston, of Marguerite de Lorraine, of
the Grande Mademoiselle and her three step-sisters of
Orleans, who used to escape from their mother's dull
apartments to her neighbouring salon where there was
always gaiety and brilliant society, seems to the thought-
ful mind still to pervade the Palace of the Luxem-
bourg.

And to those who love the study of character, whose
sympathies are wide enough to follow the experiences
of their fellow-creatures through the changes of time
and place with love and understanding, the history of
Madame de la Fayette will not fail to appeal. To
these, therefore, we leave the unsolved mysteries, the
unexplained faults, the undeveloped tendencies of her
life and character, trusting in them to fill in the blanks
out of the depths of their own imaginations and experi-
ences ; and, reviewing her life as they know it, to ex-
claim with her :

" C'est assez que d'etre"- " it is enough just to
have lived ! "

LIST OF AUTHORITIES

Aubigne", Fran^oise d'. Memoires.

Avalon, Cousin d'. Fontainiana.

Aigueperse, P. G. Les divers Genres de Celebrites de 1'Auvergne.

Biographie ou Dictionnaire Historique des Personnages

d'Auvergne.

Aubery, A. Memoires pour 1'Histoire du Cardinal Due de Richelieu.
Avenant, Alfred Bonneau-. La Duchesse d'Aiguillon.
Aubenas, G. A. Madame de Sevigne.
Albert, Paul. La LitteVature Fran9aise.
Anselm de la Vierge Marie. Le Palais de la Gloire.

Histoire Ge"nealogique, etc.

Anonymous

La Vie de Henriette Marie de France.

L'Origine de la Maison de Lorraine.

Nouveaux Choix de pieces tire'es des Anciens Mercures, etc.

Recueil de diverses pieces comiques gaillardes, etc.

Recueil de diverses Oraisons funebres.

Recueil de diverses pieces curieuses a 1'histoire.

Amours des dames illustres de France, etc.

Amours secrettes du Cardinal de Richelieu.

Histoire des Amours de Gre"goire VII.

Les Amis de la Marquise de Sable".

Lettres patentes de declaration du Roy.

Socie"t pour la publication des Documens originaux.

II masco storico della casa di Savoia.

Memorie due lette nelle Societa".

Me"moires de Hollande.

Histoire du ministere du Cardinal de Richelieu.

A synopsis or Contract View of the Life of J. A. Cardinal

Richelieu.
Alembert, M. d'. FJoges.

Blois, Theodore de. Histoire de Rochefort.

Brune"tiere, Ferdinand. Manuel de la Litte*rature francaise.

Bruyere, Jean de la. Les Caracteres.

Berville, . Me"moires du Marquis d'Argenson.

Baillon, Charles de. Henriette Anne d'Angleterre.

Henriette Marie de France.

Bossuet, J. B. Oraison funebre de Henriette Marie de France.

323

324 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

Boissier, Gaston. Madame de Se"vigne".

Saint Simon.

Barral, P. Sevigniana.

Barthe"lemy, E. M. de. La Marquise d'Huxelles et ses amis.

Bre"dif. Segrais, sa vie, et ses oeuvres.

Boislisle, A. M. de. Paul Scarron et Franfoise d'Aubigny d'apres

des documents nouveaux.
Barine, Arvede. Princesse et grandes Dames.

La Jeunesse de la Grande Mademoiselle.

Louis XIV. et la Grande Mademoiselle.

Bassompierre, Francois de. Journal de ma Vie.
Bourdigne, Jean de. Chroniques d'Anjou.
Bodin, Jean. Recherches historiques sur 1'Anjou.

Briquet, A. Nouveaux Eclaircissements sur les M e" moires de

Hollande.

Briquet, M. U. F. Dictionnaire historique.
Beauchet, F. H. Dictionnaire historique et ge'ne'alogique des families

du Poitou.

Pieces ine"dites, rares ou curieuses concernant le Poitou.

Conches, Feuillet de. Les Salons de Conversation au dixhuitieme
siecle.

Causeries d'un Curieux.

Che"ruel, P. A. De 1'Administration de Louis XIV.

Dictionnaire historique des Institutions.

Memoires sur la vie publique et privee de Fouquet.

Cimber, M. L. Extraits du Mercure Francais.

Archives curieuses de 1'histoire de France.

Cayon, Jean. Les Dues de Lorraine.

Cousin, Victor. La Socie"t fran9aise au XVII. Siecle.

Madame de Sable.

Madame de Longueville.

Courtaux, T. P. D. Huet.
Costar, Pierre. Lettres.

Capmas, Charles. Lettres ine"dites a Madame de Grignan de Madame

de Sevigne.
Curll, E. Court Secrets as taken from Madame de Sevigne's

Letters.

Capefigue. Richelieu, Mazarin.
Correspondant, Le. Vols. CV., CVI.
Cagny, Perceval de. Chroniques de.
Costa de Beauregard, Marquis de. Memoires historiques sur la

maison royale de Savoie.
Chardon, Charles. Histoire des Sacremens ou de la maniere dont

ils ont te celebres.

Carette, Madame (nle Bouvet). Madame de la Fayette.
Cosnac, Daniel de. Me'moires.

Chabrol, G. M. Coutumes generates et locales d'Auvergne.
Chatfield-Taylor, H. C. Moliere.

LIST OF AUTHORITIES 325

Dupont. Histoire de la Rochelle.

Dufour, Marie Armand Jean. Memoires anecdotes secretes et

inedites sur Mesdames de la Valliere, etc.
Dufour, J. M. De 1'ancien Poitou.

Histoire geneVale de Poitou.

Dubouchet, Louis F. Memoires du Marquis de Sourches sur la

Regne de Louis XIV.

Druon, Henri. Education et Jeunesse de Gaston d'Orldans.
Daelli, G. Biblioteca rara.
Du Radier, Dreux. Memoires historiques, critiques, et anecdotiques

de France.

Histoire litteraire du Poitou.

Bibliotheque historique et critique de Poitou.

Du Guet, J. J. Lettres sur divers sujets de morale et de pie'te'.
Delort, Joseph. Mes Voyages aux environs de Paris.
Dreyfus-Brissac, E. La Clef des Maximes de la Rochefoucauld.
De Sales, Francois. Introduction a la Vie DeVote.
Dulaure, J. A. Histoire de Paris.

Histoire des Environs de Paris.

D'Aurevilly, J. Barbey. Femmes et Moralistes.
Dreyss, . Mdmoires de Louis XIV.

France, Anatole. La Vie de Madame.
Fruges, G. M. de. J. J. Olier.
Faillon, Abbe". Life of M. Olier.
Fournel, Victor. De Malherbe a Bossuet.

La Litterature Inde"pendante.

Vieux Paris.

Flottes, J. B. M. Etude sur Daniel Huet.

FeUibien, Andre. Relation de la feste de Versailles du 18 Juillet,
1668.

Description de divers Ouvrages de Peinture faits pour le roy.

Fleury, A. H. de. Description historique et ge"ographique de la

France.
Farmer, Eugene. Versailles and the Court under Louis XIV.

Gourville, Jean Herault de. Memoires.

Grimoard. Louis XIV., King of France.

Gaston, Due d'Orleans. Memoires.

Girault, C. X. Details historiques sur les ancetres de Madame de

Se*vigne\
Guibert, Adrien. Tableau geographique et statistique de la France.

Haussonville, Comte d'. Madame de la Fayette.

Madame de la Fayette et Menage d'apres des Lettres inedites

(Revue des deux Mondes).

La Rochefoucauld et les Maximes (Revue des deux Mondes).

Hassall, Arthur. Louis XIV. and the Zenith of the French

Monarchy.
Hallam, Henry. Introduction to the Literature of Europe.

326 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

Huet, P. D. A Travers les papiers de Huet.

Huetiana, ou pensees diverses.

Lettres inedites.

Henry, Caraille. Un erudit, homme du monde, etc. Lettres

inedites de Madame de la Fayette a Huet.
Hemon, Felix. Madame de la Fayette (Extract from La Revue Bleue).

Imberdis, Andre. Histoire generate de 1'Auvergne.

L' Auvergne depuis 1'^re gallique jusqu'au XVIII. siecle.

Journal des Debats politiques et litteraires. Nov., 1846.

Koerting, Heinrich. Geschichte des Fransbsischen Romans im
XVII. Jahrhundert.

La Fayette, Marie M. Motier de. CEuvres. Editor, L. S. Auger.

Notice sur la vie.
- CEuvres. Editor, P. D. Huet. Essai sur 1'origine des Romans.

Memoires. Editor, Eugene Asse. Notice.

Princesse de Cleves. Editor, H. Taine.

Lettres. Editor, L. S. Auger.

La Harpe, J. F. Cours de Litterature.

Ledain, Belisaire. Parthenay et les chateaux de Meilleraye.

Le Gatine historique et monumentale.

Histoire de la ville de Parthenay.

Laine", P. Louis. Archives Genealogiques de la Noblesse de France.

Le Grand d'Anissy. Voyage d'Auvergne fait en 1787 et 1788.

Lesson, R. P. Pastes historiques.

Lenet, Pierre. Memoires.

Lescure, M. F. A. de. Memoires de Choisy.

Souvenirs de Madame de Caylus.

La Mothe. Histoire de la Vie de Louis XIV.
Loiseleur, Jules. Problemes historiques.
Levasseur, Gustave. La Rochefoucauld.

La Rochefoucauld. Reflexions, sentences, et Maximes. Editor,
Duplessis.

The same. Editor, Aime* Martin.

Livet, Charles Louis. Precieux et Precieuses.

Portraits du Grand Siecle.

Loret, Jean. La Muse Historique.

Poesies naturelles.

Lemontey, P. E. CEuvres.

Lotheisen, F. Geschichte der Franzosischen Literatur.

Le Petit, Claude. La Chronique Scandaleuse, ou Paris ridicule.

L'Intermediare des Chercheurs et Curiex.

Montpensier, Mademoiselle de. Memoires. Editor, Cheruel.
Michel, Adolphe. L'A'ncienne Auvergne.

Mourguye, F. Essai historique sur les anciens habitans de
1' Auvergne.

LIST OF AUTHORITIES 327

Maichin, A. Histoire de Saintonge, Poitou.
Morlent, J. Le Havre et son arrondissement.

Le Havre Ancien et Moderne.

Voyage historique et pittoresque du Havre a Rouen.

Mirecourt, E. Memoires de Ninon de Lenclos.
Motteville, Francoise Langlois de. Memoires.

Lettres.

Malherbe, E. La Jeunesse de Madame de Sevigne.
Menage, Gilles. Egidii Menagii Poemata.

Selected Poems.

Menagiana.

Magne, E. Scarron et son milieu.

Marais. Histoire de la Vie et des ouvrages de M. de la Fontaine.

Morin, E. Le Cardinal de Retz.

Mery, C. de. Histoire gene*rale des proverbes.

Histoire anecdote de la Monarchic.

Mercure Galant ; Extraordinaire du Mercure Galant.
Moliere, J. Poquelin de. CEuvres. Firmin Didot Edition.
Mesnard, Paul. Madame de Sevigne".

Neukomm, Edmond. Fetes, et Spectacles du vieux Paris.
Nodier, J. E. C. Voyages pittoresques et romantiques en France.

Les Environs de Paris.

Nemours, Duchesse de. Memoires.
Noisy, C. B. Les Dues de Lorraine.

Ormesson, Olivier Orfevre d'. Journal. Editor, Cheruel.
Olier, J. J. Abrege de la vie de.

Olivet, Thoulier d'. Traite philosophique de la Faiblesse de 1'esprit
humain.

Percel, Gordon de. De 1'Usage des Romans,

Prat, Lamartine de. Madame de Sevigne.

Petit de Julleville, L. Histoire d& la Langue et de la Litterature

francaise.

Pascal, Blaise. Lettres Provinciales.
Pellison-Fontanier, Paul. Recueil de pieces galantes.

L'Apogee de la Monarchic fran9aise.

Histoire de Louis XIV. depuis la mort de Cardinal Richelieu.

Relation contenant 1'histoire de 1'Acad^mie franchise.

Epigrammes.

Histoire de 1' Academic Franchise avec un Abrege des vies.

Pericaud, Marc Antoine. Notice sur Charles Emmanuel de Savoie.
Puliga, . Madame de SeVigne.

Petitot, Jean. Les Emaux de Petitot.

Rabutin, Comte Bussy de. Histoire Amoureuse des Gaules.

Amours des Dames illustres de France.

Cartes Geographiques de la Cour.

Mdmoires.

328 MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

Rabutin, Comte Bussy de. Histoire en abreg de Louis le Grand.
Retz, Cardinal de. Memoires. Editors, Guy de Joli et la Duchesse

de Nemours.

Renaudot, Theophraste. La Gazette de France.
Roederer, Pierre Louis. Memoire pour servir a 1'histoire de la

Societe polie en France.
Rabany, Beauregard, A. Tableau de la ci-devant Province d'Au-

vergne.

Rousset, Camille. Histoire de Louvois.
Rahstede, G. H. Wanderungen durch die Franzosische Literatur.

Studien zu La Rochefoucauld's Leben und Werken.

Richard. La Vie du veritable Pere Joseph.

Richelet, P. Les plus belles Lettres des meilleurs Auteurs Francais.

Rassegna Settimanale. Vol. for 1879.

Revue Bleue. Vols. for May, 1879, an< ^ October, 1880.

Revue des Deux Mondes. 1880, 1890, etc.

Revue Poitevine.

Revue d'Arche"ologie poitevine.

Revue d'Aquitaine scientifique.

Revue de Rouen et de la Normandie. 1852.

Sainte Beuve, C. A. Portraits de Femmes.

Causeries du Lundi.

Port Royal.

Sauval. Les Antiquite"s de la Ville de Paris.

Saint Simon, Louis de Rocroi. Memoires.

Sorel, Charles Sieur de Souvigny. La vraye histoire comique de

Francion.

Saint Fargeau, Girault de. Les Beautes de la France.
Somaize, Antoine Badeau de. Le Grand Dictionnaire des Precieuses.

Le secret d'estre toujours belle.

Sillery, Brulart de. Mademoiselle de la Fayette.

Scheuer, E. Frau von La Fayette.

Strowski, Fortunat. Saint Fra^ois de Sales.

Sabry, J. F. Le Mode Fran9ois.

Sichel, E. The Household of the La Fayettes.

Sirmond, J. Le Genie Demasque'.

Sauquet, P. Madame.

SeVerien, Alexandre. Histoire des Philosophes modernes.

Saporta, Marquis G. de. La famille de Madame de Sevigne en

Provence.
S6vigne, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal. Lettres. Editor, Monmerque.

Lettres. Editor, Regnier.

Notice par Saint Surin.

Lettres. Editor, Fousse de Sacy. Notice.

Lettres. Editors, Abbe de Vauxcelles et M. Grouvelle.

Notices.

Eloge de Madame de Sevigne, par Madame Brisson.

Lettres. Editor, Nodier.

Madame de Sevigne et Contemporains.

LIST OF AUTHORITIES 329

Sevigne", Marie de Rabutin-Chantal. Sevigniana.
Segrais, Regnauld de. Segraisiana.

Traduction de 1'Eneide de Virgile.

Les Nouvelles Francaises.

La Gallerie des Portraits de Mademoiselle de Montpensier.

CEuvres diverses.

Scarron, Paul. CEuvres.

Tallemant des Reaux, Gedeon. Les Historiettes.
Thibaudeau, A. R. H. Histoire de Poitou.
Taillefer, Antoine. Tableau historique.
Taine, H. Essais de critique et d' Histoire.

Voltaire, Franfois Marie Arouet de. Siecle de Louis XIV.

Walpole, Horace. Letters.
Waller, Edmund. Poems.

Walckanaer, C. A. Memoires touchant la vie de Marie de Rabutin
Chantal.

Abrege chronologique de 1'histoire de France.

Histoire de la vie et des ouvrages de Jean de la Fontaine.

INDEX

Academic Fran?aise, 38.

Aiguillon, Duchesse d' (Madame de Com-
balet), 3, 10, 35, 47, 48, 49, 50, 65,
88, 89, 90, 94, 108, 128, 129, 135,

Duchy of, 34.

Alphonse VI., King of Portugal, 82, 236.
Ancre, Marshal d' (Concino Concini),

21, 23, 122.

Andilly, Arnauld d', 174, 175.

Angennes, Julie d' (Duchesse de Mon-
tausier), 127, 128, 129.

Anne of Austria, Queen of France, 12,
34, 38, 40, 43-50, 55, 56, 59, 62, 64,
68, 69, 76, 91, 96, 116, 120, 169,
170, 182, 183, 186, 189, 200, 201,
244.

Artenice, 131.

Astree, L', 77, 81, 125, 203, 268, 311.

Auger, L. S., 176.

Aurevilly, J. Barbey d', 273, 275.

Auvergne, 137-139, 221, 250, 253, 271.

Balzac, Jean de, 71, 91, 221.

Barillon, Le President, 63. .

Barine, Madame Arvede, 215, 248, 286.

Barricades, Day of, 64.

Bastille, La, 76.

Bautru, 38.

Bayard, L'Abb^ de, 143.

Beaufort, Due de, 61, 62, 63, 73, 202,

219, 234.

Benserade, 99, 130.
Bernini, 21.

Blois, Castle of, 22, 52, 70.
Boileau, Nicolas Despreaux, 101, 175,

263, 268, 293.
Bois, Tour de, 17.
Boissat, Pierre de, 126.
Bossuet, 225, 275, 296.
Bouillon, Cardinal de, 247.

' Duchesse de, 118, 229.

Bourdalouc, 300, 301.
Bourgogne, Due de, 252.
H6tel de, 39,

Breves, Sieur de, 53.
Brezg, Marquis de (Urbain de Maille-),
3-6, 10, 13, 258.

Marquise de (Nicole de Richelieu),

6, 7-

Armand de, 7.

Claire Clgmence de Mailld-, 7.
Louis de, 5.

Brissac, Due de, 112, 113, 114.
Buckingham (George Villiers), ist Duke
of, 49, 116.
(George Villiers), 2nd Duke of,

189, 274.

Caen, 218, 21, 224, 225, 226.

Calvaire, Nuns of, 8, 301.

Caraccio, MS. novel of Madame de la

Fayette, 288.
Carmelites, Les, 29.
Carnavalet, Hdtel de, 165.
Chaillot, 183, 184, 187, 190, 234, 235.
Chalais, 55, 56.
Champigny, 79.
Champir6, 96.

Chapelain, 92, 126, 130, 133, 150.
Charles I., King of England, 49, 186.
II., King of England, 188, 189,

194, 195, 274.
IV., Due de Lorraine, 56.

Charonne, 77.

Chateau-Thierry, 229.

Chaulnes, Due de, 159.

Chevreuse, Due de, 116.

Duchesse de, 38, 61, 114, 116,

117, 151, 200, 202.
Mademoiselle de, no, in.

Chillon, Marquis de, 26.
Choisy, Madame de, 227.
Christine, Queen of Sweden, 79.
Clcves, La Princesse de, Madame dc

la Fayette's masterpiece, 212, 214,

248, 280, 281, 283, 284, 285, 286,

287.

Colbert, 50, 117, 154, 286.
Combalet, Madame de (see d' Aiguillon),

3. 4- 5. 6, 27, 30-33, 49.
Vicomte de, 25, 28.

331

332

MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

Concini (see d'Ancre), 19.

Conde", Prince de (Le Grand Conde"), 7,

43, 61, 65, 68, 70, 78, 187, 255, 256,

258, 259, 320.

Princesse de (see Bre"ze", Claire

Cle"mence de MaiHe"-).

Conrart, 151.

Conti, Prince de, 68, 255.

Corbinelli, 159, 173, 294.

Corinthians, First of, 95.

Corneille, Pierre, gi, 126, 175, 194, 212,

266, 267, 268.

Costar, L'Abbe', 94, 98, 99, 135, 144.
Coulanges, L'Abbe" de, 150, 166, 167.

Philippe Emmanuel de, 159, 173,

175.

Madame de, 175, 176, 177, 178,
255. 258.

Cousin, Victor, 67, 103, 127, 202, 214.
Cromwell, Oliver, 137.
Cyprien, Pere, 187.

Dauphin, Le (Louis XIV.), 34, 35.

Delavigne, Casimir, 289.

Delort, 256.

De Musset, 231.

Desbrosses, Jacques, 20.

Descartes, 268.

Desmarets, 38.

Du Guet, L'Abbe", 307, 310-314.

Dupes, Day of, 32, 56.

Duplessis, 214.

Eclache, L', 92.

Elizabeth, Queen of England, 281.
Enghien, Due d', 257, 297.
Espinasse, 137, 138, 261.

" Faubourg, Le," 161, 172, 225, 290,

291, 292, 294, 295, 308.
Fauchet, 22.
Fglibien, 192.
Fe"liciane, 131, 132.
Femmes Savantes, Les, 99, 101.
Peris', Duchesse de, 112.
Fiesque, Comte de, 218, 219, 220, 221.

Comtesse de, 219.

Fle"chier, 225, 319.

Fontainebleau, 77, 189, 190, 198, 237,

257, 274.
Foucher, 241.
Fouquet, Nicolas, 117, 153-155, 170,

174, 230, 255, 301.
Fourilles, M. de, 97.
France, Anatole, 187, 274.
Francis I., Tower of, 10, n, 281.
Fresnes, 174, 175, 205.

Fronde, 47, 62-75, 7 6 . 88 . 89, 235.
Gallantry of, 106-120, 183, 186,

201, 219, 221, 229, 255.

Galagai, Le"onore (Mare"chale d'Ancre),
22, 23.

Gaules Amoureuses, Les, 114, 173.

Godeau, Bishop of Vence, 91.

Gombauld, 91.

Gondran, Madame de, no, in.

Gourville, Jean He"rault de, 253, 254,
255, 256, 258.

Grammont, Comtesse de, 255, 366.

Grande Mademoiselle, La (see Made-
moiselle de Montpensier).

Graville, Seigneur de, 10.

Grignan, Marquis de, 156, 307.

Marquise de, 255, 291, 292, 307.

Marquis de (son of above), 307.

Chateau de, 167.

Guedron, 22.

Gue"me"ne", Prince de, 38.

Gudndgaud, Madame du Plessis, 174,

175, 205, 295.

Guiche, Comte de, 192, 275.
Guirlande de Julie, 127, 128.
Guise, Due de, 117.

Hallam, 269.

Haussonville, Comte d', 146, 207, 213,

214, 249, 261, 262, 271, 279, 299.
Havre, 10, n, 12, 13, 88, 89, 189, 198,

264.
Henri II., King of France, 18, 280, 281,

284.
IV., King of France, 18, 19, 51,

53, 186, 196, 234, 268, 320.
Henriette Marie, Queen of England, 49,

116, 170, 183-186.
Henriette d'Angleterre (Duchesse d'Or-

le"ans), 170, 184, 185, 186-196, 226,

234, 240, 241, 246, 251, 274, 275.
Henriette d'Angleterre, L'Histoire de,

Memoir by Madame de la Fayette,

273, 287.
Huet, Daniel (Bishop of Avranches), 80,

172, 206, 222, 225-230, 233.

Importants, Les, 63.
Ingouville, 10, n, 198.

James II., King of England, 86, 288.
Jansenism, 198, 301, 302, 303, 304, 306,

312.
Joseph, Pere, 125.

INDEX

333

La Bruyere, 224, 266.

La Calprnede, 91, 212, 268.

La Fayette, Marie Madeleine Motier,
Comtesse de (see La Vergne), her
estimate of Anne of Austria, 45 ;
portrait of Madame de Se'vigne, 80 ;
advocates Mademoiselle's marriage
to Comte de Saint Paul, 84 ; ending
of friendship with Comtesse d'Ol-
onne, 114; four years in Auvergne,
137-148 ; a witness to marriage of
Mademoiselle de SeVigne', 143 ;
relation with stepfather, 143 ;
death of mother, 144 ; Madame
de SeVign^'s grief at her departure
for Auvergne, 147, 148 ; her eulogy
of Madame de Svign6, 157 ; jeal-
ousy of her by Madame de Grignan,
159 ; her answer to Madame de
SeVigng's reproach on her infre-
quent letters, 160 ; protestation of
affection for Madame de Se'vigne',
161 ; compliments to Madame de
Grignan, 161 ; given sobriquet of
" The Fog," 162 ; relation with
Charles de Se'vigne', 167 ; her esti-
mate of Mazarin's power and pride,
170, 171 ; life in Paris after mar-
riage, 168-180 ; compared with
Madame de Cornuel, Madame de
Coulangesand Madame de Se'vigne',
176, 177 ; friendship with Madame
de Maintenon, 177-180 ; nine years
of Court life and friendship with
Henriette d'Angleterre, 181-196 ;
friendship with the Due de la
Rochefoucauld, 197-217 ; friendship
with Madame de Sabl6, 203, 204,
205 ; friendship with Segrais, Huet
and La Fontaine, 218-233 I ner
lassitude and ill-health, 226, 227;
political experiences and friendship
with Duchesse de Savoie, 234-249 ;
her children and later life, 250-262 ;
Gourville's slur on her memory,
254-258 ; her books and literary
life, 263-289 ; last days with La
Rochefoucauld, 289-296 ; her in-
consolable sorrow, 296-299 ; suscep-
tibility to music, 299 ; religious life,
300-317 ; connection with Port
Royal, 306, 307 ; revival of interest
in life, 307, 308; she does not wish
to grow old, 309 ; her definition of
" Les Vapeurs," 315, 316; death
and epitaph, 317.

Francois Motier, Comte de, 136,

137, 138, 141-146, 181, 183, 209,
250, 261, 282.

La Fayette, Francois de, Bishop of
Limoges, 181, 182, 251.

Louise de (Mere Angelique), 153,

183, 184, 234.

Gilbert Motier, Mare"chal de, 139.

L'Abbede, 213, 250, 251, 260, 261,

262, 288.

Ren Armand Motier, Comte de,

252, 253, 259, 260, 307.

Gilbert Motier, Marquis de, 260.

La Fontaine, Jean de, 72, 167, 169, 170,

181, 207, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233,
268, 293.

Contes de, 230.

La Harpe, 232.

La Heve, n, 12, 264.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois Ducde, 109,
119, 160, 161, 164, 167, 199-217,
224, 228, 230, 232, 235, 240, 242,
253. 254, 255, 256, 258, 262, 264,
265, 266, 276, 279, 280, 283, 284,
285, 286, 290-300, 305, 306, 312,

315.

Lassay, M. de, 259.
Lauzun, Comte de, 83, 84, 85, 86, 223,

245, 246.

La Valliere, Louise de, 82, 153, 191.
Lavardin (Archbishop of Mans), 98, 172.
Marquise de, 172, 295, 307, 308.

Lemaire, 21.

Lemontey, 118, 120.

Lenclos, Ninon de, 99, 108-110, 162,

163, 164.
Le Nostre, 256.
Le Pailleur, 10, 101.
Le Sage, 269.
Lescheraine, 240, 242, 244, 249, 285,

286, 306.

Lesdiguieres, Duchesse de, 114.
Le Sueur, 92.
Le Tellier, 155, 238.
Levasseur, 261.
Livry, 166, 167.
Longueville, Due de, 68, 118.
Duchesse de, 84, 116, 118-120,

130, 199, 200, 202, 235, 298, 303,

3*3-
Mademoiselle de, 93.

Loret, Jean, 91, 93, 136, 142, 151.

Lorrain, Claude, 92.

Louis XIII., King of France (Louis the
Just), 9, 14, 16, 21, 22, 32, 34, 37,
4-43. 45, 5*. 52. 54-59, i3, 184,
185, 201, 202, 238, 259.

XIV., King of France, 4, 43, 50,

60, 69, 70, 74, 76, 77, 78, 79, 82,
83, 84, 85, 86, 154, 155, 168-171,
179, 180, 185, 188, 190, 191, 192,
193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 230, 232,
236, 238, 239, 245, 246, 248, 249,
266, 275, 303, 320.

Louvois, 7, 239, 245, 247, 253, 259.

334

MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

Louvre, 16, 17, 122, 123, 185, 186, 238,

244.
Lu9on, Bishop of (see Richelieu), 23, 24,

25, 26, 30.
Lude, Comte de, 54.
Luxembourg, Palais du, 8, 20, 59, 60,

66, 68, 81, 84, 89, in, 122, 221,

223, 225, 230, 320, 321.
Luynes, Albert de, 21, 23, 24, 25.

Madame Royale (see Duchesse de

Savoie).
Mailly, 5-7.

Maine, Due du, 85, 246.
Maintenon, Madame de (see Madame

Scarron), 71, 177-180, 239, 259,

267, 33. 306.

Malherbe, 123, 130, 131, 229.
Manchole, 21.
Mantua, Due de, 117.
Marais, Quarter of the, 18, 165, 172,

174, 176.

Marans, Madame de, 292, 293.
Marie The"rese, Queen of France, 116,

168, 169, 170, 190, 194.
Marillac, M. de, 260.
Madeleine de (afterwards Com-

tesse de la Fayette), 260.
Marmontel, 283.
Martin, Aime', 214.
Mary, Queen of Scots, Dauphine de

France, 280.
Mazarin, Cardinal, 40, 43-47, 50, 62,

63, 64, 68, 69, 70, 71, 73, 77, 91,

96, 99, 115, 118, 137, 153, 168, 170,

171, 172, 189, 202, 238, 239.
Mazarinades, Les, 67.
Medecis, Catherine de, Queen of France,

18, 19, 184, 280.

Marie de, Queen of France, 5,

19, 20-22, 24, 27, 31, 32, 33, 47, 51,
55. 56, 57, 78, 82, 122, 256, 320,
321.

Memoires de la Cour (Memoirs by
Madame de la Fayette), 273, 276,
287.

Manage, Gilles, 92, 99, 100-102, 104,
105, 130, 133, 135, 140-142, 146,
147, 150, 152, 155, 156, 172, 207,

208, 222, 224, 227, 230, 265, 266,
271, 309, 310, 315.

Mirame', 38.

Molire, 101, 132, 167, 266.

Montausier, Due de, 84, 127, 128, 129,

133-

Duchesse de (see Julie d'An-

gennes).

Montespan, Marquise de, 82, 83, 84, 85,
178, 246.

Montglat, Madame de, 52.

Montmorency, Henri de, 202.

Montpensier, Mademoiselle de (La
Grande Mademoiselle), 56, 59, 60,
76-87, 106, 187, 218, 219, 220, 221,
222, 223, 227, 230, 236, 237, 245,
246, 248, 269, 271, 320, 321.

Montpensier, La Princesse de (Madame
de la Fayette's first novel), 208,
271, 287.

Motteville, Madame de, 44, 80.

Nantes, 70, 73, 96.
Nemours, Due de, 234, 235.

Duchesse de (Elizabeth de Ven-

dome), 234, 236.
Duchesse de (Memoirist), 72.

Nesle, Tour de, 17.
Neufvillette, Baronne de, 66.
Notre Dame de Grace, Church of, ti,
64.

Olier, Pere, 65, 168.

Olonne, Comtesse d' (Anglique de la

Loupe), 111-114, 131.
Orleans, Gaston, Due d', 32, 41, 51-55,

57> 58, 60, 61, 68, 69, 70, 76, 99,

182, 189, 202, 321.

Philippe, Due d', 44, 83, 84, 189,

246, 274, 275.

Duchesse d' (Marguerite de Lor-
raine), 56, 58, 59, 60, 61, 65, 230,
321.

Duchesse d' (see Henriette

d'Angleterre).
Mademoiselle d', 247.

Ormesson, Olivier d', 196.
Ornano, Comte d', 54, 56.
Oubliettes, 68.
Oublieurs, 68, 73.

Palais Cardinal (Palais Royal), 16, 32,

35, 38, 39, 44, 68, 187, 194, 198.
Palatine, Prince Edward, 117.

Princesse (Anne of Gonzague),

116, 117, 202.
Palinods de Caen, 221.
Paris, Archbishop of, 72, 73.
Parlement de Paris, 63, 64, 67.
Pascal, Blaise, 91, 266, 268, 303.
Patin, Guy, 46.
Paul, Vincent de, 65.
Paulet, Mademoiselle, 128, 130.
Pe"na, Hughes de, 12.

Elizabeth (see Madame de la

Vergne).

INDEX

335

Perrero, M., 248, 285.

Perrier, Mademoiselle, 315.

Petit Luxembourg, i, 4, 8, 14, 20, 21,

32, 90, 91, 94, 320.
Philippe IV., King of Spain, 169.
Pierre, Marquis de la, 245, 247, 248.
Pignerol, Fortress of, 85.
Pisani, Hotel de (see Rambouillet).
Place Royale (Place des Vosges), 20,

41, 42, 203, 281.
Poitiers, Diane de (Duchesse de Valen-

tinois), 5, 280.
Pomponne, M. de, 174.
Pontcourlay, Marquis de, 35, 36.
Marie Madeleine Wignerot de

(see Madame de Combalet), 25,

28.

Pont Neuf, 17, 18.
Pontoise, 10.
Ponts-de-Ce', 24, 25.
Portraits, Painting of, 79.
Port Royal, 143, 144, 203, 204, 302-305,

307, 310.

Poussin, Nicolas, 92.
Pr6cieuses Ridicules, Les, 132.

Rabutin, Comte Bussy de, 46, 83, 113,

114, 155, 156, 158, 172, 173, 211,

275, 284, 287.
Racine, 175, 179, 194, 266, 267, 268,

303, 306.

Rambouillet, Marquis de, 121, 129.
Marquise de (Catherine de Vi-

vonne), in, 121-129, 131, 132, 174.
Hotel de, 92, 121-133, 230, 265,

266.

Rapin, Pere, 99.
Re'aux, Tallemant des, 79, 80, 105, 114,

115, 127, 145, 146, 150.
Retz, Cardinal de, 68, 70, 72, 73, 74,

95, 96, in, 113, 117, 151, 159, 186,

200.
Richelieu, Jean Armand du Plessis,

Cardinal de, 3, 5, 6, 7, 10, n, 13,

20, 23, 24, 26, 27, 28, 30-33, 35-40,

42, 45, 46, 47, 48, 55, 57, 5, 78, 88,

125, 126, 183, 201.

Due de, 50.

Marquise de, 25.

Richelieu, Arms of, 39,

Rochers, Les, in, 159, 165, 166, 167,

308.

Roederer, M., 131.
Rohan, Due de, 97.

Duchesse de, 97.

Roquelaure, Due de, 115.
Rousset, Camille, 245.
Rubens, Peter Paul, 20.
Ruel, 47-50, 58, 67, 129.

Treaty of, 114.

Sabl, Madame de, 128, 200, aoi, 202-

205, 210, 303.

Sabliere, Madame de, 232.

Sainte Beuve, 162, 167, 200, 208, 210,

249, 254, 256, 263, 284, 302, 304,

312, 313.

Saint Evremont, 108.
Saint Maurice, Comte de, 242.
Saint Paul, Comte de, 84, 119, 208, 290,

292.

Saint Pavin, 134.
Saint Simon, 175, 250, 265, 284.
Sales, St. Fran9ois de, 29.
Salpe'triere, La, 29.
Sarrazin, 92.
Sauval, 21.
Savoie, Charles Emmanuel, Due de, 236,

238, 239, 240.
Duchesse de (Marie Jeanne Bap-

tiste de Nemours), called Madame
Royale, 237-249, 286, 306.
Scarron, Paul, 70, 71, 72, 91, 92, 94,
103, 108, 145, 146, 221, 231.
Madame (see Madame de Main-

tenon), 71, 170, 177, 258.

Scude'ry, Mademoiselle de, 80, 92, 102,

103, 104, 130, 131, 132, 203, ail,

268, 269, 270, 276, 279, 284, 286,

293.

Segrais, Regnauld de, 13, 78, 79, 80, 82,
89, 92, 99, 100, 106, 132, 172, 199,
200, 210, 218-224, 225, 227, 229,
230, 233, 259, 269, 270, 271, 275,
276, 279.

Senecy, Madame de, 182.

Se'vigne', Marquis de, 94, 95, no, in,
150, 151, 152, 235.

Marquise de, 73, 74, 80, 84, 95,

ioo, no, in, 113, 114, 132, 133.
134, '35, 136, 137, 142, 143. M7,

,149-167, 172, 174, 175, 197, 199,
203, 209, 210, 213, 226, 232, 249,
251, 252, 257, 258, 260, 261, 263,
266, 267, 270, 271, 286, 290, 292,
293, 294, 295, 296, 298, 299, 300,
301, 303, 305, 307, 308, 313, 3 lfi .
317, 3i8, 320.

Charles de, 150, 162-165, 252,

308.

Francoise de (see Marquise de

Grignan), 156, 157, 158, 159, 160,
163.

Renaud de (Chevalier), 93, 95,

96, 143, 144, I5L IS*, 53, *<>

Madame Renaud de (see Madame

de la Vergne), 94, 96, 143, 144, 282.
Soissons, Comtesse de, 118.
Somaize, Sieur de, 131.
Sophronie (Madame de Se'vignl), 132.
Sorbonne, Church of the, 39.

336

MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

Sourches, Marquis de, 252, 253.

St. Antoine, Porte, 69, 76, ng, 235.

St. Cloud, 192, 193, 195, 196, 198.

St. Cyr, 179, 267.

St. Fargeau, 77, 78, 81, 82, 220, 222,

237, 269, 271.
Ste. Genevieve, 69.
St. Germain 1'Auxerrois, 17.

Fair of, 19.

Faubourg of, 19, 177.

en Laye, 41, 43, 60, 186, 251.

des Pres, i, 65, 204.

Quarter of, i, 16, 64, 65, 168, 177,

312.

St. Jean de Luz, Treaty of, 168, 170.
St. Maur, 256, 257, 258, 259.
St. Sulpice, 1-3, 29, 59, 65, 66, 136.
Suze, Madame de la, 98.

Taine, 283, 284.
Tarente, Princesse de, 79.
Thianges, Madame de, 176, 178, 251.
Tournelles, Palace of the, 18, 19, 280.
Trmoille, Due de la, 260, 261.

Mademoiselle de la, 79.

Tuileries, 16, 19, 77, 81, 189, 221, 284.
Turenne, 61.

Turin, 237, 240, 242, 244, 248, 249, 285,
306.

Urf<, Honor6 d', 212, 268, 270.
V

Valant, Dr., 204, 210.

Vaugirard, Rue, i, 9, 20, 89, 96, 198.

Vaux, 154, 230.

Vendome, Elizabeth de (see Duchesse de

Nemours).

Venerie, Palace of the, 237.
Vergne, Marc, Pioche de la (Mare'chal),

4. 5. 7, 8, 9, 10, 14.

Madame de la (Elizabeth Pe"na),

4, 5, 9, ", 89, 90, 92, 93, 97, 112,

261 (see Madame Renaud de S6-
vigne').

Vergne, Marie Madeleine Pioche de la
(see Comtesse de la Fayette), bap-
tism of, 2-4 ; parentage and home
of, 7-10 ; removal to Pontoise,
thence to Havre, 10 ; life in Havre,
10-15; origin of literary talent, 12;
introduction into Parisian society,
88-105 ; experience of gallantry-,
no; friendship with Mademoiselle
de la Loupe, in, 112; Bussy de
Rabutin's slander, 113 ; incident
with Due de Roquelaure, 114, 115 ;
introduction at Rambouillet, 129 ;
Somaize gives her name of Fe'lici-
ane, 131 ; compared to Madame
de Rambouillet and Mademoiselle
de Scude"ry, 132 ; marriage agitated
by friends, 134, 135 ; marriage at
St. Sulpice, 136 ; beginning of
friendship with Marquise de Se'-
vign6, 149.
Pierre de la, 4.

Versailles, 70, 192, 198, 251, 253, 267,

288, 320.
Victor Am6de"e II., Due de Savoie, 240,

243, 246, 247, 248, 305.
Ville, Hotel de, 70, 119, 174.
Vincennes, 70, 73, 171.
Vittorio, L'Abbe', 239.
Voiture, Vincent, 39, 49, 92, 130, 131,

203.

Voltaire, 69.
Vosges, Place des (see Place Royale),

41, 42.

Walckenaer, 270.
Walpole, Horace, 166, 173.

Zaide, novel by Madame de la Fay-
ette, 211, 228, 271, 272, 275, 276,
277, 284.

Zamet, Sbastien, 9.

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Auden (T.), M.A., F.S.A. See Ancient Cities.

Aurelius (Marcus) and Epictetus.
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Austen (Jane). See Little Library and
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A YEAR IN RUSSIA. Second Edition.
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Barker ( .), M.A. (Late) Fellow of Merton
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Beruete (A. de). See Classics of Art.

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Bethune-Baker (J. P.), M.A. See Hand-
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Bidez (M.). See Byzantine Texts.

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Binns (H. B.). THE LIFE OF WALT
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Blair (Robert). See I. P. L.

Blake (William). THE LETTERS OF
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Bloom (J. Harvey), M.A. SHAKE-

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Blouet (Henri). See Beginner's Books.
Boardman (T. H.), M.A. See Textbooks

of Science.
Bodley (J. E. C.), Author of France.' THE

CORONATION OF EDWARD VII.

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Bona (Cardinal). See Library of Devotion.

Boon (P. C.). See Commercial Series.

Borrow (George). See Little Library.

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Boyle (W.). CHRISTMAS AT THE ZOO.
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Bradley (A. Q.) ROUND ABOUT WILT-
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Brailsford (H. N.). MACEDONIA:
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Brooks (E. W.). See Byzantine Texts.

Brown (P. H.), LL.D., Frasr Professor of
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Brown (S. E.), M.A., Camb., B.A., B.Sc.,
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Brownell (C. L.). THE HEART OF
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Browning (Robert). See Little Library.

Buckland (Francis T.). CURIOSITIES
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Buckton (A. M.) THE BURDEN OF
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Buist(H. Massac). THE MOTOR YEAR
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Bull (Paul), Army Chaplain. GOD AND
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Bulley (Miss). See Lady Dilke.

Bunyan (Jobn). THE PILGRIM'S PRO-
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Burch (Q. J.I. M.A., F.R.S. A MANUAL
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Buries* (Qelett). GOOPS AND HOW TO
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Burke (Edmund). See Standard Library.

Burn (A. E.), D.D., Rector of Handsworth
and Prebendary of Licbfield.
See Handbooks of Theology.

Burn (J. H.), B.D. THE CHURCH-
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Burnand (Sir F. C.). RECORDS AND
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Burrulde (W. P.\ M.A. OLD TESTA-
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Burton (Alfred). See I.P.L.
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Butler (Joseph). See Standard Library.
Caldecott (Alfred), D.D. See Handbooks

of Theology.

Calderwood (D. S.), Headmaster of the Nor-
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Cambridge (Ada) [Mrs. Cross). THIRTY
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Canning (George). See Little Library.
Capey (E. F. H.). See Oxford Biographies.
Careless (John). See I.P.L.
Carlyle (Thomas). THE FRENCH
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Chapman (S. J.). See Books on Busineu.
Chattel-ton (Thomas). See Standard

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Christian (F. W.). THE CAROLINE
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Cicero. See Classical Translations.

Clarke(F. A.), M.A. See Leaders of Religion.

Clausen (George), A.R.A., R.W.S. AIMS
AND IDEALS IN ART :Eight Lectures
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SIX LECTURES ON PAINTING. First
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Cleather (A. L.). See Wagner.

Clinch (Q . ). See Little Guides.

dough (W. T.). See Junior School Books
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Clouston (T. S.), M.D., C.C.D., F.R.S.E.,
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Coast (W. Q.), B.A. EXAMINATION
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Cobb (W. F.), M.A. THE BOOK OF
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Collins (W. E.)i M.A. See Churchman's
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Colonna. HYPNEROTOMACHIA POLL
PHILI UBI HUMANA OMNIA NON
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ATQUE OBITER PLURIMA SCITU
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Combe (William). See I. P. L.

Conrad (Joseph). THE MIRROR OF
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LATIN PASSAGES FOR UNSEEN
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Corelli (Marie). THE PASSING OF THE
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Cotes (Everard). SIGNS AND POR-
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js. (>d. net.

Cotes (Rosemary). DANTE'S GARDEN.
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BIBLE FLOWERS. With a Frontispiece
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Cowley (Abraham). See Little Library.

Cowper (William), THE POEMS OF.
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J. C. BAILEY, M.A. Illustrated, including
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Cox(J. Charles), LL.D., F.S.A. See Little
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Cox' '(Harold), B.A., M.P. LAND
NATIONALISATION AND LAND
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Crabbe (George). See Little Library.

Craigie(W. A.). A PRIMER OF BURNS.
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Craik (Mrs.). See Little Library.

Crane (Capt. C. P.). See Little Guides.

Crane (Walter). AN ARTIST'S RE-
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Crashaw (Richard). See Little Library.

Crawford (F. G.). See Mary C. Danson.

Crofts (T. R. N.), M.A. See Simplified
French Texts.

Cross (J. A.), M.A. THE FAITH OF
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Cruikshank (G.). THE LOVING BAL-
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Crump (B.). See Wagner.

Cunliffe (Sir F. H. E.), Fellow of All Souls'
College, Oxford. THE HISTORY OF
THE BOER WAR. With many Illus-
trations, Plans, and Portraits. / 2 vols.
Quarto. 15.5. each.

Cunynghame (H. H.), C.B. See Connois-
seur's Library.

Cutts (E. L.), D.D. See Leaders of Religion.

Daniell (G. W.), M.A. See Leaders of
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Danson (Mary C.) and Crawford (F. G.).
FATHERS IN THE FAITH. Fcaf.
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Dante. LA COMMEDIA DI DANTE.
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Darley (George). See Little Library.

D'Arcy (R. F.), M.A. A NEW TRIGON-
OMETRY FOR BEGINNERS. With
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Davenport (Cyril). See Connoisseur's
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Davey (Richard). THE PAGEANT OF
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Davis (H. W. C.), M.A., Fellow and Tutor
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ENGLAND UNDER THE NORMANS
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Dawson (Nelson). See Connoisseur's Library.

GENERAL LITERATURE

Dawson (Mrs. N.). See Little Books on

Art.

Deane (A. C.). See Little Library.
Dearmer (Mabel). A CHILD'S LIFE OF

CHRIST. With 8 Illustrations in Colour

by E. FORTESCUE-BRICKDALK. Larre Cr.

Sro. 6s.
Delbos (Leon). THE METRIC SYSTEM.

Cr. Svo. as.
Demosthenes. AGAINST CONON AND

CALLICLES. Edited by F. DARWIN

SWIFT, M.A. Second Edition. J-'caf.

Sno. as.
Dickens (Charles). See Little Library,

I.P.L., and Chesterton.
Dickinson (Emily). POEMS. Cr. Svo.

4s. 6d. net.
Dickinson (O. L.), M.A., Fellow of Kind's

College, Cambridge. THE GREKK

VIEW OF LIFE. SixtA Edition. Cr.

Dilke(Lady).' Bulley (Miss), and Whltley

(Miss). WOMEN'S WORK. Cr. Svo.

is. 6d.
Dillon (Edward). See Connoisseur's Library

and Little Books on Art.
Ditchfield (P. H.), M.A., F.S.A. THE

STORY OF OUR ENGLISH TOWNS.

With an Introduction by AUGUSTUS

JESSOPP, D.D. Second Edition. Cr.Svo. 6s.
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