Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France | Page 7

write more than twenty years afterwards--
"However difficult and perilous this adventure might seem to me, I may
say that never in all my life have I enjoyed anything so much. I was at
an age (24) at which one loves to do extravagant and startling things,
and 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 "Mémoires" 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 "Mémoires" 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