Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France | Page 7

Edmund Gosse
I felt that nothing could be more startling or more extravagant than to snatch at the same time the Queen from the King her husband, and from the Cardinal de Richelieu who was jealous, and Mlle d'Hautefort from the King who was in love with her."
He tells the story with inimitable gusto. But he tells it just as an episode, and he hurries on to the death of Richelieu in 1642, as though he were conscious that up to his thirtieth year his own life had not been of much consequence.
Even in that age of turbulent extravagance, the Prince of Marcillac was known, where he was known at all, merely as a hare-brained youth who carried the intolerance and insolence of amatory youth past the confines of absurdity, and it is amusing to find Balzac, who was twenty years his senior, and who was buried in the country, describing him--surely by repute--as the type of--
"These gentlemen who chatter so much about the empire and about the sovereignty of ladies, and have their heads so stuffed with tales and strange adventures, that they grow to believe that they can do all that was done under the reign of Amadis, and that the least of their duties is to reply to a supplicating lady, I, who am only a man, how should I resist the prayer of her to whom the Gods themselves can refuse nothing?"
We seem far from the sombre and mordant author of the "Maximes," but a complete apprehension of the character of La Rochefoucauld requires the story of his adventures to be at least briefly indicated. A chasm divides his early from his late history, and this chasm is bridged over in a very shadowy way by such records as we possess of his retirement after the Fronde.
Between the death of Richelieu and this retirement there lies a period of ten years, during which the future author of the "Maximes" is swallowed up in the hurly-burly of the worst moment in the whole history of France. It is difficult from any point of view to form what it would be mere waste of time for us to attempt in this connection, a clear conception of the chaos into which that country was plunged by the weakness of Anne of Austria and the criminality of Mazarin. The senseless intrigues of the Fronde affect the bewildered student of those times as though
this frame Of Heav'n were falling and these elements In mutiny had from her axle torn The steadfast earth.
At first La Rochefoucauld seems to have meant to support the cause of the court, expecting to be rewarded for what he had done, or been prepared to do for the Queen. He says in his "M��moires" that after the death of Louis XIII. the Queen-Mother "gave me many marks of friendship and confidence; she assured me several times that her honour was involved in my being pleased with her, and that nothing in the kingdom was large enough to reward me for what I had done in her service." That sounds very well, but what it really illustrates is the extraordinary violence of aristocratic frivolity, the fierce levity and insatiable frenzied vanity of the noble families. The aims of La Rochefoucauld, in support of which he was ready to sacrifice his country, were of a class that must seem to us now petty in the extreme. He wanted the tabouret, the footstool, for his duchess, in other words the right to be seated in presence of the members of the royal family. He wanted the privilege of driving into the courtyard of the Louvre without having to descend from his coach outside and walk in. He demanded these honours because they were already possessed by the families of Rohan and of Bouillon. It is extraordinary to consider what powerful effects such trumpery causes could have, but it is a fact that the desolating and cruel wars of the Fronde largely depended upon jealousies of the carrosse and the tabouret. La Rochefoucauld's support of the rebellion frankly and openly was based upon it.
La Rochefoucauld brings the first part of his "M��moires" down to 1649. In the second part he begins again with 1642, being very anxious to show, to his own advantage of course, what the conditions were at court after the deaths of Richelieu and Louis XIII., and in particular to define the position of Mme de Chevreuse, the great intriguer and seductress of the French politics of the age. The charm of this lady, who was no longer young, faded before that of the Duchess of Longueville, one of the most ambitious and most unscrupulous women who ever lived. She was the sister of the Prince de Conti, and from the time when her celebrated relations with La Rochefoucauld began,
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