Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France | Page 8

her influence engaged him in all the unplumbed chaos which led to civil war. When this finally broke out, however, in 1648, the Duke is found once more on the side of the young king and his government, that is to say, of Cardinal Mazarin.
Through the "universal hubbub wide of stunning sounds and noises all confused," we can catch with difficulty the accents of literature, at first indeed vocal in the midst of the riot, and even stimulated by it, as birds are by a heavy shower of rain, but soon stunned and silenced by horrors incompatible with the labour of the Muses. The wars of the Fronde made a sharp cut between the heroic age of imaginative literature and the classical age which presently succeeded it, and offer in this respect a tolerable parallel to the civil wars raging in England about the same time. It is specious, but convenient, to discover a date at which a change of this kind may be said to occur. In England we have such a date marked large for us in 1660; French letters less obviously but more certainly can be said to start afresh in 1652. It is tolerably certain that in that year Pascal, Retz and the subject of our inquiry simultaneously and independently began to write. Up to that time there is no reason to believe that La Rochefoucauld had given himself at all to study, and we possess no evidence that up to the age of forty he was more interested in the existence of the literature of his country than was the idlest of the cut-throat nobility who swaggered in and out of the courtyard of the Louvre.
His "M��moires" end with an account of the war in Guienne in 1651 which is more solemn and more detached than all the rest. No one would suspect that the historian, who affects the gravity of a Tacitus, was acting all through the events he describes with the levity of a full-blooded and unscrupulous schoolboy. The most amazing instance of this is his grotesque attempt to have Cardinal de Retz murdered at the Palais de Justice. In the course of a sort of romping fray he caught Retz's head between the flaps of a folding door, and shouted to Coligny to come and stab him from behind. But he himself was shoved away, and the Cardinal released. La Rochefoucauld admits the escapade, without any sign of embarrassment, merely observing that Retz would have done as much by him if he had only had the chance. But now comes the incident which, better than anything else could, illustrates the feverish and incongruous atmosphere of the Fronde, and the difficulty of following the caprices of its leading figures. The very next day after this attempt to assassinate Retz in a peculiarly disgraceful way, La Rochefoucauld met the Cardinal driving through the streets of Paris in his coach. Kneeling in the street, he demanded and received the episcopal benediction of the man whom he had tried to murder in an undignified scuffle a few hours before. No animosity seems to have persisted between these two princes of the realm of France, and this may be the moment to introduce the picture which Cardinal de Retz, whose head was held in the folding door, painted very soon after of the volatile duke who had held him there to be stabbed from behind. Both writers began their memoirs in 1652, and no one has ever decided which is the more elegant of the two unique conpositions. The conjunction between two of the greatest prose-writers of France is piquant, and we cannot trace in Retz's sketch of his antagonist the smallest sign of resentment. It was not published until 1717, but it has all the appearance of having been written sixty years earlier, at least, when Mademoiselle was seized with the fortunate inspiration of having "portraits" written of, and often by, the celebrated personages of the day. This, then, is how Retz saw La Rochefoucauld--
"There has always been a certain je ne sais quoi in M. de La Rochefoucauld. He has always ever since his childhood wanted to be taking part in some plot, and that at a time when he was indifferent to small interests, which have never been his weakness, and when he had no experience of great ones, which, in another sense, have never been his strong point. He has never had any skill in conducting business, and I don't know why; for he possessed qualities which in any other man would have made up for those which he lacked. He was not longsighted enough, and he did not see as a whole even what was within his range of vision. But his good sense--which in the field of speculation was very good--joined