Part 19 (1/2)
[287] _Memoires pour l'histoire des Sciences et des Beaux-Arts_ (1707), ii.
pp. 934-945.
[288] Letter dated 30th October 1708.
[289] Letter dated 7th January 1735.
[290] Clarke and Foxcroft, _Life of Burnet_, p. 429.
[291] Letter of 29th July 1743.
[292] The MSS. letters are preserved in the library of the _Societe pour l'histoire du Protestantisme Francais_.
[293] Married women, unless of n.o.ble birth, were styled before 1789 _Mademoiselle_.
[294] Written September 1697. In this, as in the following letters, the pa.s.sages left out are merely of a complimentary nature.
[295] The touch of nature is wholly unexpected at this date.
[296] She was a contemporary writer of insipid pastorals.
[297] _i.e._ Locke and Mrs. Masham.
[298] Mrs. Blomer, then Rebecca Collier the quakeress.
[299] Mrs. Wharton.
CHAPTER XI
THE STRANGE ADVENTURES OF THE TRANSLATOR OF ROBINSON CRUSOE, THE CHEVALIER DE THeMISEUL
If, in December 1715, a Frenchman had been asked what important events had happened in the year, he would certainly have replied the death of Louis the Great and the publication of the _Chef d'oeuvre d'un inconnu_. In a few weeks that amusing lampoon on the scholars and commentators of the time had run through four editions. People who knew whispered the name of the man who sought to hide under the pseudonym of Doctor Matanasius; he was a cavalry officer, of mysterious birth, the Chevalier de Themiseul. Hitherto the life of the author had been an extraordinary web of adventures diversified by scandals, _lettres de cachet_, imprisonment and exile. After wandering through Holland, Sweden, and Germany, the young officer had come back, adorned with a halo of bravery, learning, daring speculation, and bitter humour. He flaunted notions that the Regency was about to popularise: deism, the cult of experimental science, contempt of authority, a lack of reverence for the cla.s.sics. A man of culture, moreover, he knew just enough of Latin and Greek to impose upon an average reader. By an extraordinary stroke of good luck, his success, which was rapid, lasted long enough for Abbe Sabatier de Castres to exclaim fifty years later, under the impression of the witty fireworks of the _Chef d'oeuvre_: ”Irony reigns therein from beginning to end; pleasantry is handled with as much spirit as judgment, and produces effects which eloquence aiming straight at the point would have been unable to produce.”
To say the truth, we know hardly more about the Chevalier de Themiseul than the men who lived under Louis XIV. He apparently never contradicted the idle story that gave him Bossuet for father and Mademoiselle de Mauleon for mother. As fond of blague as a Paris _gamin_, he must have enjoyed the idea of mystifying his friends while throwing dirt on a respected prelate's character. Abbe Sabatier de Castres, wis.h.i.+ng to unravel the mystery, went to Orleans, searched the registers of the Parish of Saint-Victor and found therein recorded, on 27th September 1684, the christening of the Chevalier, son to Hyacinthe de Saint-Gelais, master bootmaker, and Anne Mathe, his wife. Others have read the record in a different manner; _Cordonnier_, they say, is not the father's trade, but his name, the Chevalier is not even ent.i.tled to a _de_, his name is plebeian Hyacinthe Cordonnier; Paul Cordonnier, a.s.sert the brothers Haag in their _Dictionary_, born on 24th September, the son not of a master-bootmaker, but of an officer in the army.
Now this is what one finds to-day in the register, if one takes the trouble to read it:
”To-day, Tuesday, September 26th, 1684, Hyacinthe, born on Sunday last, 24th said month, son of Jean Jacques Cordonnier, lord of Belleair, and demoiselle Anne Mathe, his wife, was christened by me Pierre Fraisy; and had for G.o.dfather Anthoine de Rouet, son to the late Antoine de Rouet and demoiselle Anthoinette Cordonnier and for G.o.dmother Marie Cordonnier, spinster.”
And Saint-Hyacinthe's father signed ”De Belair.” The t.i.tle thus added to his father's name must have given rise to the Chevalier's dreams of a n.o.ble birth.
The mystery of the birth extends to the life. In 1701, the Chevalier's mother resided at Troyes in Champagne, giving her son, thanks to the bishop's patronage, a gentleman's education that qualified him for an officer's commission in the _regiment-royal_. Among the n.o.blemen living on their estates in Chalons and Reims he numbered acquaintances, and they treated him with due respect. Letters are extant which prove that he was on terms of friends.h.i.+p with the Pouillys and the Burignys, no mean men in their province. There is nothing to object to his conduct as a soldier. He fought bravely in Germany, and, if taken prisoner at Blenheim, it was together with Marshal de Tallart and many others whose courage no one dared to question.
His captivity in Holland acted somewhat in the same manner as exile in England did later on upon Voltaire. The ideas upon which his youth had been nursed were shattered to pieces. Eventually he got free and came back to Troyes. In 1709, he turned up in Stockholm, with the intention of fighting the Moscovites under the Swedish flag, but it was too late: Charles XII.
had just suffered a crus.h.i.+ng reverse at Pultava.
Back the Chevalier went to Holland, learning meantime English, Spanish, and Italian, reading Bayle, Le Clerc, and Locke, and many other books forbidden in France. At the Utrecht congress he caused a scandal by courting the d.u.c.h.ess of Ossuna, wife to the Spanish plenipotentiary. The jealous husband promptly obtained an order of expulsion, and poor Themiseul needs must take refuge once more at his mother's in Troyes.
A new scandal soon drove him thence. Being entrusted by an austere abbess with the task of teaching her young niece Italian, he fell in love with his fair pupil while they read Dante together, trying maybe to live up to the story of Francesca da Rimini. To avoid the _lettre de cachet_, he fled to Holland, and for prudence' sake, exchanged his name of Chevalier de Themiseul for the less warlike one of Saint-Hyacinthe.
Under that name his literary career began. Together with the mathematician S'Gravesande, De Sallengre, and Prosper Marchand the bookseller, he wrote for the Hague _Journal litteraire_ (1713). Two years later, the sudden success of the _Chef d'oeuvre d'un inconnu_ acted upon his brain like a potent liquor, and caused all his subsequent misfortunes.