The International Weekly Miscellany - Volume I, No. 4 | Page 2

and recognized in Versailles only when it was too late. How
easy it would have been then, as Marmontel had shown very clearly in
his memoirs, to fetter Voltaire, who was offensive to the people, and
how important this would have been for the state, will appear in the
following paragraphs, in which we shall show that even the Parisian
theatre, whose boards were regarded as a model by all Europe, freed
itself from the influence of the court, became dependent on the
tone-giving circles of Paris, and assumed a decidedly democratic
direction.
As early as the time of Louis XIV., the court had separated itself from
the learned men of the age; and at the end of the seventeenth century
the houses and societies could be historically pointed out, in which
judgments were pronounced upon questions of literature in the same
manner as the pit became the tribunal to which plays and play-actors
must appeal; we shall not, however, go back so far, but keep the later
times always in our view. In those associations in which the Abbé de
Chaulieu and other friends of Vendome and Conti led the conversation,
literature was brought wholly under the dominion of audacious
pretension and immorality, in the time of the Regency and during the
minority of Louis XV. In reference to the leaders there needs no proof.
What could a Philip of Orleans or his Dubois take under his protection,
except what corresponded with his ideas and mode of life?
The time of the minority of Louis XV. and that of the administration of
Cardinal Fleury was for several reasons highly favorable to the
formation of private societies, which entertained themselves with wit
and satire, and carried on a quiet but continual contest with the persons
and systems which were protected by the government and the clergy.
Fleury regarded everything as sinful which had the appearance of
worldly knowledge, or partook of the character of jests, novels, or plays;
Louis, as he grew up, showed himself quite indifferent to everything
which had no connection with religious ceremonies, hunting, or
handsome women. Fleury spoke and wrote in that ecclesiastical
phraseology which was laughed at in the world: he favored the clergy,
school learning, the tone of the times of Louis XIV.; but the spirit of

the age demanded something different from this. All that was regarded
with disfavor by Fleury assembled around those celebrated men, who
held their reunions in Paris, and this court soon became more important
to the vain than the royal one itself, and it was proved by experience
that reputation and glory might be gained without the aid or protection
of the court at Versailles. This no one could have previously believed,
but the public soon learnt to do homage to the tone-giving scholars, to
the ladies and gentlemen who fostered them, as it had formerly paid its
homage to the ministers of the court. This gave to the ladies, who
collected around them the celebrated men of the time (for reputation
was much more the question than merit,) and who protected and
entertained them, a degree of weight in the political and literary world,
which made them as important in the eighteenth century as Richelieu
and Colbert had been in the seventeenth.
The queen, on her part, might have been able to exercise a beneficial
influence, however little power she had in other respects, when
compared with the mistresses of the king; but the daughter of
Stanislaus Leckzinski was a gentle, admirable woman, although
somewhat narrow-minded, and wholly given up to irrational devotional
exercises and bigotry. Like her father, she was altogether in the hands
of the Jesuits, blindly and unconditionally their servant; such an
attachment to a religious order, and such blind devotedness as hers
would be quite incredible, if we did not possess her own and her
father's autograph letters, as proofs of the fact. We shall present our
readers with some extracts from these letters, which are preserved in
the archives of the French empire, when we come to speak of the
abolition of the order of Jesuits.
As to the enlightened mistresses who had much more power and
influence than the queen, Pompadour seemed, as we learn from
Marmontel, desirous of participating in the literature of the age and of
doing something for its promotion, when she saw how important
writers and the influence of the press had become; but partly because
both she and the king were altogether destitute of any sense for the
beautiful in literature or art, and partly because the better portion of the
learned men at the time neither could nor would be pleased with what a

Bernis, Düclos and Marmontel were disposed to be, who undoubtedly
received some marks of favor from her. Voltaire is therefore quite right
when