Louis XIV and La Grande Mademoiselle, 1652-1693. Arvede Barine
lenient. She understood, however, all the difference between this morality and Christian principles.
The Provinciales (1656) had made it clear to the blindest that it was necessary to choose between the two. Mademoiselle had under this influence made a visit to Port Royal des Champs63 and had been entirely won by these "admirable people" who lived like saints and who spoke and wrote "the finest eloquence," while the Jesuits would have done better to remain silent, "having nothing good to say and saying it very badly," "for assuredly there were never fewer preachers amongst them than at present nor fewer good writers, as appears by their letters. This is why for all sorts of reasons they would have done better not to write."
Seeing Mademoiselle so favourably impressed, one of the Monsieurs of Port Royal, Arnauld d'Andilly, said upon her departure, "You are going to the Court; you can give to the Queen account of what you have seen." – "I assure you that I will willingly do this."
Knowing her disposition, there is but little doubt that she kept her word; but this was all. The worthy Mademoiselle, incapable of anything low or base, did not dream for a second of allowing the austere morality, ill fitted for the needs of a court, to intervene in influencing her judgments upon others, or in the choice of her friends. She blamed the Duchesse de Châtillon for reasons with which virtue, properly named, had nothing to do. We see her soon after meeting Mme. de Montespan, because common morality has nothing to blame in a King's mistress.
Mme. de Sévigné agreed with Mademoiselle and they were not alone. This attitude gave a kind of revenge to the Jesuits.
Tastes became as common as sentiments; those of the King were not yet formed, and the pleasure taken in the ballet in the theatre of the Louvre injured the taste for what was, in fact, no longer tragedy. Corneille had given up writing for the first time in 1652, after the failure of his Pertharite. The following year, Quinault made his debut and pleased. He taught in his tragi-comedies, flowery and tender, that "Love makes everything permissible," which had been said by Honoré d'Urfé in l'Astrée, a half-century previous, and he retied, without difficulty, after the Corneillian parenthesis, the thread of a doctrine which has been transmitted without interruption to our own days.
Love justifies everything, for the right of passion is sacred, nothing subsists before it.
Dans l'empire amoureux,
Le devoir n'a point de puissance.
L'éclat de beaux yeux adoucit bien un crime;
Au regard des amants tout parait légitime.64
The idea which this verse expresses can be found throughout the works of Quinault. He has said it again and again, with the same langourous, insinuating sweetness, for a period which lasted more than thirty years, and in the beginning no one very seriously divided with him the attention of the public.
At the appearance of his first piece in 1653, Racine was fourteen; Molière did not return to Paris until 1658. Corneille, in truth, was preparing his return to the theatre; but he found when his last tragedies were played, that he had done well to study Quinault, and in doing this he had not wasted his time; – a decisive proof of the echo to which souls responded,65 and of the increasing immorality of the new era.
Thus the Court of France lost its prestige. The éclat cast by the Fronde upon the men and women seeking great adventures had been replaced by no new enthusiasms. The pleasures to which entire lives were devoted had not always been refining, as we have seen above, and people had not grown in intelligence. The bold crowd of the Mazarins gave the tone to the Louvre, and this tone lacked delicacy. The Queen, Anne of Austria, groaned internally, but she had loosed the reins; except in the affair of her son's marriage she had nothing to refuse to the nieces of Cardinal Mazarin.
Because the Court was in general lazy and frivolous, a hasty opinion of the remainder of France should not be formed. The Court did not fairly represent the entire nation; outside of it there was room for other opinions and sentiments. It was during the years of 1650 to 1656, which appear to us at first sight almost a moral desert, that private charity made in the midst of France one of its greatest efforts, an effort very much to the honour of all concerned in it.
I have noticed elsewhere66 the frightful poverty of the country during the Fronde. This distress which was changing into desert places one strip after another of French territory, must be relieved, and amongst those in authority no one was found capable of doing it.
It is hardly possible to represent to one's self to-day the condition left by the simple passage of an army belonging to a civilised people, through a French or German land, two or three hundred years ago.
The idea of restricting the sufferings caused by war to those which are inevitable is a novel one. In the seventeenth century, on the contrary, the effort was to increase them. The chiefs for the most part showed a savage desire to excite the mania for destruction which is so easily aroused with soldiers during a campaign. Towards the end of the Fronde, some troops belonging to Condé, then in the service of the King of Spain, occupied his old province of Bourgogne. If any district of France could have hoped to be respected by the Prince, it was this one; his father had possessed it before him and it was full of their friends. Ties of this kind, however, were of no advantage. March 23, 1652, the States of Bourgogne wrote to M. de Bielle, their deputy at Court:
The enemies having already burned fourteen villages [the names follow], besides others since burned, these fire-fiends are still in campaign and continuing these horrible ravages, all which has been under the express order of M. le Prince, which the commandant [de la ville] de Seurre has received, to burn the entire Province if it be possible. The same Sieur de Bielle can judge by the account of these fires, to which there has so far been no impediment presented, in what state the Province will be in a short time.
The common soldier troubled himself little whether the sacked region was on the one or the other side of the frontier. He made hardly any difference.
Some weeks after the fires in Bourgogne, two armies tortured the Brie. The one belonged to the King, the other to the Duc de Lorraine, and there was only a shade less of cruelty with the French forces than with the others. When all the troops had passed, the country was filled with charnel houses, and there are charnel houses and charnel houses.
That of Rampillon,67 particularly atrocious, must be placed to the account of the Lorraines: "at each step one met mutilated people, with scattered limbs; women cut in four quarters after violation; men expiring under the ruins of burning houses, others spitted."68 No trouble was taken to suppress these hells of infection.
It would be difficult to find any fashion of carrying on a war both more ferocious and more stupid. Some chiefs of divisions, precursers of humanitarian ideas, timidly protested, in the name of interest only, against a system which always gave to campaigning armies the plague, famine, and universal hatred. A letter addressed to Mazarin, and signed by four of these, Fabert at the head, supplicates him to arrest the ravages of a foreigner in the services of France, M. de Rosen. Mazarin took care to pay no attention to this protest: it would have been necessary first to pay Rosen and his soldiers. If it is expected to find any sense of responsibility in the State, in the opinion of contemporaries, for saving the survivors, left without bread, animals, nor harvests, without roof and without working tools, there is disappointment; the State held itself no more responsible for public disasters than for the poor, always with it.
The conception of social duty was not yet born. Public assistance was in its infancy, and the little which existed had been completely disorganised by the general disorders; like everything else. Each city took care of its beggars or neglected them according to its own resources and circumstances. On the other hand, the idea of Christian charity had taken a strong hold upon some circles, under the combined influence of the Jansenism which exacted from its devotees a living faith; of a secret Catholic society whose existence is one of the most curious historical discoveries of these last years69;
In the summer of 1657.
The phrase is M. Jules Lemâitre's.
See
Village of the arrondissement of Provins.
Feillet,
See the volume of Raoul Allier,