Part 30 (2/2)
Lauzun went into deep mourning, and made, on the day of the funeral, an offer of marriage, to prove that he was really a widower. Having, on this occasion, been refused, he married (1695) the younger daughter of the Marechal de Lorges and became the brother-in-law of Saint-Simon.
Mme. de Lauzun was a child of fourteen,[314] to whom Lauzun, with his sixty-three years, appeared so old that she had accepted him in the expectation of being quickly a widow.
She flattered herself that at the end of ”two or three years at most”[315] she would find herself independent, rich, and, above all, a d.u.c.h.ess, and this idea captivated her. But Lauzun could never be counted upon. His wife was obliged to endure him for nearly thirty years, pa.s.sed in suffering torments from morning till night from the loving husband.
The King had said to the Marechal de Lorges, in learning of the marriage of his youngest daughter: ”You are bold to take Lauzun into your family; I trust that you may not repent it.” Repentance was prompt and bitter.
Mademoiselle was right, it was impossible to live with Lauzun. It was through miracles of patience that his new wife bore to the end, and miracles should never be exacted in wedded life. The mean little calculation at the beginning had been amply expiated by the time that Mme. de Lauzun finally became a widow. Even to the end, Lauzun had remained one of the ornaments and curiosities of the Court of France, noted for his grand manner, the eccentricities of his habits, the splendour of his habitation, and for the indescribable elegance and ease of conversation and bearing, which at that time was not to be acquired at Versailles.
At ninety he himself drove, and sometimes with fiery animals. One day, when he was training a fresh colt in the Bois de Boulogne, the King, Louis XIV., pa.s.sed. Lauzun executed before him a ”hundred capers” and filled the spectators with admiration, by his ”address, his strength, and his grace.”[316] He still often enjoyed ”pretty” moments. But there was a reverse side to the medal: the malignant dwarf ”frightened all who approached him with his wicked wit and his hateful tricks.” From afar, Lauzun is very amusing under this aspect; he excelled in buffoonery. In extreme age, he suffered from a malady which almost killed him. One day, when he was very ill, he perceived reflected in a mirror the forms of two of his heirs who entered the chamber on tiptoe, fancying themselves concealed behind the curtains, to ascertain with their own eyes how long they were to be forced to wait. Lauzun feigned to perceive nothing and began to pray in a loud voice as one who believes himself alone. He demanded pardon of G.o.d for his past life, and lamented that his time for repentance was so short. He exclaimed that there was only a single way to secure his safety, which was to devote the wealth which G.o.d had given him to paying for his sins, and this he engaged to do with all his heart. He promised to leave to the hospital all that he possessed, without abstracting a single penny. He made this declaration with so much fervour and with so penetrating an accent that his heirs fled away in despair, to relate the misfortune to Mme. de Lauzun. This scene properly terminates the career of this extraordinary personage, unscrupulous and malignant to the last. Lauzun died in 1723, at over ninety years of age.
Mademoiselle was the last to disappear of the grand figures belonging to the time of the Fronde. Retz, Conde, Turenne, La Rochefoucauld, Mme. de Chevreuse, Mme. de Longueville, had departed before her.
The only one of the ancient rebels which could not perish, the Hotel de Ville of Paris, had been suppressed from history by royal ordinance for the period corresponding to the Fronde. The accounts of the prosecutions of the Council recorded the revolutionary sentiments which prevailed at the capital during the civil war. The King ordered all the registers[317] to be destroyed, and the destruction included every record relating to public affairs for the years 1646-1653.
It may be said without too much calumniating the heart of Louis XIV.
that the death of his cousin afforded a certain relief. She was too lively a reminder of the execrable period which he did his best to banish from his own memory as well as from that of the public.
Saint-Simon, newly arrived at the Court at the date of the death of Mademoiselle, had time to convince himself that she was in the eyes of the King always the unpardoned and unpardonable heroine of the combat of the Porte Saint-Antoine. ”I heard him reproach his cousin once at supper, joking it is true, but a little roughly, for having turned the cannon of the Bastile upon his troops.”
The royal rancour extended to the city of Paris, eternal cradle of French revolutions. Not being able to suppress the capital, Louis XIV.
banished himself from its gates. On May 6, 1682, unfortunate date for the French monarchy, the Court installed itself definitely at Versailles, and henceforth left this place only for sojourns at the various country seats, as Fontainebleau and Marly. Paris was abandoned, left to do penance. Not only did Louis XIV. desert this city as a place of residence, but he visited it rarely. It was remarked that he often made long detours rather than to pa.s.s through Paris. The n.o.bility and ministers followed the King to Versailles. Royalty and the capital turned their backs on each other.
Another important event influenced the ideas of Court decorum and propriety. The Queen Marie-Therese dying in 1683 (July 30), Louis XIV.
in the course of the winter following formally married Mme. de Maintenon. The physiognomy of the Court, what Saint-Simon would have called the bark (_ecorce_), entirely changed its character. At the moment of ending this long study it is, then, a different world to which adieu must be said from the one which was found at the beginning, and the transformation did not end with the ”bark.” The princ.i.p.al cause of the change, the establishment of absolute monarchy, had acted violently upon France in shaking the nation to its depths, as do all changes not developing from national tradition.
Absolute monarchy was not a French tradition. It was an importation from Spain. Anne of Austria, who did not understand any other regime, had educated her son to accept her ideas and habits of thought, and the subst.i.tution of king for minister was, at the death of Mazarin, accomplished without shock. It was, however, a real _coup d'etat_.
Before Louis XIV. the royal power, without being submitted to precise limitations, from time to time hurled itself against certain rights, themselves often loosely defined. There existed privileges of the Parliament, others of the State, together with those of the n.o.bles, and others belonging to bodies and individuals, which when united left the King of France in a situation resembling that in which Gulliver found himself, when the Liliputians bound him with hundreds of minute threads.
Each single thread was of no consequence; through the compression of all together every movement was paralysed. Louis XIV. resolutely broke the numerous threads which had trammelled the power of his predecessors. He freed himself in suppressing the ancient liberties of France. No student of history can be ignorant of the material results, so splendid at first, so disastrous in the end; but certain moral consequences of his government have been perhaps less clearly remarked.
The French aristocracy ceased from the second generation to be a nursery for men of action. This was the result desired from the policy of keeping it chained to the steps of the throne. The end had been attained at the date of the King's death. Saint-Simon, who cannot be suspected of hostility towards the n.o.bility, certifies to this. When the Duke arrived at power under the Regent, his brain swarming with projects for replacing the aristocrats in positions of importance, and when he sought great names with which to fill great posts, he realised that he was too late. The ”nursery” was empty. The difficulty, say the _Memoires_
lay in the ignorance, the frivolity, and the lack of application of a n.o.bility which had been accustomed to lives of frivolity and uselessness; a n.o.bility that was good for nothing but to let itself be killed, and that reached the battle-field itself only through the force of heredity. For the remainder of the time, it was content to stagnate in an existence without a purpose. It had delivered itself over to idleness and felt keen disgust for all education, excepting that relating to military matters. The result was a general incapacity and unfitness for affairs.
It is proper to render to Caesar what belongs to Caesar. The effacement of the French aristocracy is not to be laid at the door of the great Revolution, which acted only upon an accomplished fact; it was the personal work of Louis XIV.
The higher cla.s.ses also, contrary to the generally received opinion, suffered from a serious moral abas.e.m.e.nt. This fact is the more striking, as at no other period has France possessed so many elements for giving to life decorum and dignity. Through a deplorable misfortune, social groups which ought, through their solid principles, to have served as the support of public morality had incurred, one after the other, the serious displeasure of royalty. Among the Catholics, the disciples of Berulle and of Vincent de Paul had compromised themselves in the affair of the _Compagnie du Saint Sacrement_. No government worthy of the name can suffer itself to be led by a secret society, whatever the purpose or character of such society may be. The Jansenists had shared with the reformers in the discontent that the least expression of a desire for independence, no matter in what domain, inspired in Louis XIV.
His distrust even reached the interior life of his subjects. Every one, under penalty of being considered a rebel, must feel and think like the King. This was with Louis a fixed idea, and during his reign gave a peculiar character to the religious persecutions. Jansenists and Protestants were pursued much oftener as enemies of the King than as enemies of G.o.d.
The hostility of the Prince to the three princ.i.p.al seats of the French conscience, and the destruction of two of these, left the field clear for the licentiousness which marked the end of the reign. Excessive dissipation is always supposed to belong particularly to the time of the Regency, but the abscess had existed for a long time before the death of Louis XIV. caused it to break. A letter as early as 1680 states, ”Our fathers were not more chaste than we are; but ... now the vices are decorated and refined.”[318] The evil had made rapid progress under the mantle of hypocrisy, which covered the Court of France from the time of the rule of Mme. de Maintenon. This last well perceived the danger and groaned over it to no purpose. Strangers were struck with the conditions. ”All is more concentrated,” wrote one of them in 1690, ”more reserved, more restrained, than the peculiar genius of the nation can bear.”[319]
The real misfortune was that Louis, who had been brought up and matured in an entirely formal religion, had permitted himself to be imposed upon by scoffers, who came disguised as believers, in order to make their court. The King, who had permitted the representation of _Tartuffe_, had not sufficiently meditated upon its import.
A final misdeed, and not the least for which the absolute regime is responsible, was the launching of the nation in pursuit of one of the most dangerous of political chimeras, that of the need of spiritual unity. Louis XIV. revoked the Edict of Nantes in the name of the fetich that a good Frenchman must be of his King's faith. A century later, the Terror cut off heads in the name of a unity of opinion, because a Frenchman ought to be virtuous in the fas.h.i.+on of Rousseau and of Robespierre. The reader may continue for himself the series, and count the acts of oppression committed in the nineteenth century, while even the twentieth century, young as it still is, presents examples of the attempt to enforce upon the nation a uniformity of thought which, if once attained, would signify intellectual death. For in politics, as in religion, as in art, in literature, in all, diversity is life.
It is through this capital error that the reign of Louis XIV., so glorious in many respects, was the precursor of the great Revolution and really made its coming inevitable. The Jacobins are in some measure the heirs of the great King. Fundamentally, the mania for spiritual and moral unity is simply, under a less odious name, the horror of liberty; a sentiment old as the world, but which in the earlier portion of the seventeenth century had been far from dominant. The word ”liberty”
occurs again and again in the writings of many people of that period, theorists, jurists, and great n.o.bles, at every point in which they touch politics. The expression contained for them nothing revolutionary. What they were demanding was rather a return to past methods, and, above all, it did not enter their thoughts to a.s.sociate with liberty the word ”equality.” It is the eighteenth century, more philosophical, if perhaps less reasonable, that first conceived the idea of uniting two really incompatible things, without perceiving that one of the two was destined to annihilate the other.
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