Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France | Page 8

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, 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 "Mémoires" 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