La Grande Mademoiselle. Barine Arvède
of a spoil-sport than he had ever been. He considered her childish talk very indecorous. Mademoiselle pursues:
Cardinal de Richelieu, who does not like me to accustom myself to being there, nor to have them accustomed to seeing me there, had me given orders to return to Paris. The Queen and Mme. de Hautefort did all that was possible to keep me. They could not obtain their wish, – which I regretted. It was all tears and cries when I left there. Their Majesties gave many proofs of friendship, especially the Queen, who made me aware of a particular tenderness on that occasion. After this displeasure I had still another to endure. They made me pass through Rueil to see the Cardinal, who usually lived there when the King was at Saint Germain. He took it so to heart that I had called the little Dauphin my little husband that he gave me a great reprimand: he said that I was too large to use such terms; that I had been ill-behaved to do so. He spoke so seriously – just as if I had been a person of judgment – that, without answering him, I began to weep. To pacify me he gave me collation, but I did not pass it over. I came away from there very angry at all he had said to me.
Richelieu meant that his orders should be obeyed. Mademoiselle adds: "When I was in Paris I only went to Court once in two months; and when I did go there I only dined with the Queen and then returned to Paris to sleep." It must be said that if the Cardinal had submitted to it for a night or two, she might have found it difficult to sleep at the château. At that time our kings had strange and very inconvenient arrangements for receiving guests; their household appointments had brought them to such a pass that they had suppressed their guest-chamber. When the royal family went to Saint Germain there was a regular house-moving; they carried all their furniture with them, and nothing was left in the Louvre, – not even enough for the King to sleep on when business called him to the capital. Henry IV., a monarch who did not stand on ceremony, invited himself to the house of some lord or of some rich bourgeois, where he put himself at his ease, receiving the Parliament, and also his fair friends, and bidding adieu to his hosts only when he was ready to go home. He took leave of them in his own time and at his own hour.
The timid Louis XIII. had never dared to do such things; he had never thought of having two beds: one in the city, the other in the country.
When the Court came back to Paris they brought all their furniture; not a mattress was left in the palace at Saint Germain. This singular custom had evolved another, which appears to us to have lacked hospitality. When the King of France invited distinguished guests, he never furnished their rooms. He offered them the four walls, and let them arrange themselves as best they could. From as far back as people could remember, they had seen the great arrive at the château closely followed by their beds, their curtains, and even their cooks and their stew-pans. This was the case with Monsieur and his daughter; and so it was with Mazarin, in the following reign. Mademoiselle was not ignorant of the peculiar methods of the royal housekeeping. She knew that the King's friends could not be made comfortable for the night, on the spur of the moment, and she rested very well in Versailles, and thought of nothing but her amusements.
The people saw a gratuitous malevolence in her exile from Court; but the Fronde proved the justice of the Cardinal's action. La Grande Mademoiselle made civil war to constrain Mazarin to marry her to Louis XIV., who was eleven years her junior. Her godfather had guessed well: the idea of being Queen had germinated rapidly in the little head in which the influence of Astrée– still active despite its age – was busily forming romantic visions far in advance of its generation. D'Urfé died in 1620; to his glory be it said that we are obliged to go back to him and to his work when we would explain the moral state of the later days.
Few books in any country or in any time have equalled the fortune of Astrée,28 a pastoral romance in ten volumes, in which the different effects of honest friendship are deduced from the lives of shepherds and others, under a long title in the style of the century. Honoré d'Urfé's work immediately became the "code of polite society" and of all who aspired to appear polite. Everything was à l'Astrée– fashions, sentiments, language, the games of society, and the conversation of love. The infatuation extended to classes of society who read but little. In a comedy familiar to the lesser bourgeoisie,29 some one reproached marriageable girls for permitting themselves to be captured by the insipid flattery of the first coxcomb who addresses them thus:
– Bien poli, bien frisé
Pourvu qu' il sache un mot des livres d'Astrée.
Success had crossed the frontiers of France. People in foreign lands found material for their instruction in Astrée. The work was a novel with a key; a story with a meaning. "Celadon" was the author; "Astrée" was his wife (the beautiful Diane de Chateaumorand, with whom he had not been happy). The Court of le grand Enric was the Court of Henry IV. "Galatée" was the Queen (Marguerite) and so on. "All the stories in Astrée were founded on truth," wrote Patru, who had gathered his information from the lips of d'Urfé. But "the author has romanced everything – if I dare use the word." The charm found in the scandalous reality of the scenes and in the truth of the characters crowned the work's success; the book was translated in most languages, and devoured with the same avidity by all countries. In Germany there was an Académie des Vrais Amants copied from the "Academy" of Lignon. In Poland, in the last half of the century, John Sobieski, who was not by any means one of the be-musked knights of the carpet, played at Astrée and Celadon, with Marie d'Arquien. "To grass with the matrimonial love which turns to friendship at the end of three months! … Celadon am I, now as in the past; the ardent lover of those first glad days!"30 he wrote after marriage.
When the people's infatuation had passed, the book still remained the standard of all delicate minds, and it continued to wield its literary influence.
Through two centuries [said Montégut] Astrée lost nothing of its renown. The most diverse and the most opposite minds alike loved the book; Pellisson and Huet the Bishop of Avranches were enthusiastic admirers of its qualities. La Fontaine and Mme. de Sévigné delighted in it. Racine, in his own silent and discreet way, read it with fond pleasure and profit, but did not say so.
Marivaux had read it and drawn even more benefit from it than Racine… Last of all, Jean Jacques Rousseau admired it so much that he avowed that he had re-read it once a year the greater part of his life. Now as Jean Jacques exerted a dominant influence upon the destinies of our modern imaginative literature, it follows that the success of Astrée has been indirectly prolonged even to our own day. Madame George Sand, for example, derived some little benefit from d'Urfé, though she was not too well aware of it.
Montégut had forgotten the Abbé Prévost; but M. Brunetière repairs the omission, and adds: "One may say that Astrée's success shaped the channel for the chief current of our modern literature."
Its social influence was equal to its influence upon literature. And yet, to-day, not one of all the books that had their time of glory and of popularity is more neglected. No one reads Astrée now, and no one can read it; with the best will in the world, the most indulgent must throw the book down, bored by its dulness. It has become impossible to endure the five thousand pages of the amorous dissertations of the shepherds of Lignon. At the best such a debauch of subtlety would be only tolerable, even had it emanated from a writer of genius. And d'Urfé had no genius; he had nothing but talent.
D'Urfé was a little gentleman of Forez, whom his epoch (he was born in 1568) had permitted to examine the society of the Valois. We know that no social body was ever more corrupt; nevertheless those who saw it were dazzled by it; and because they had looked upon it they were considered – in the time of Louis XIII. – exquisitely elegant and polite; they were regarded as the survivors of a superior civilisation.
The ladies of the Court of Anne of Austria were proud of their power to attract the notice of the elderly noblemen "thanks to whom," in the words of a contemporary writer, "remnants of the polite manners brought by Catherine de Médicis from Italy were still seen in France." The homage of the antique gentlemen was insistent, of a kind which refuses to be repelled. Even the Queen accepted it. Anne of Austria, whose habitually correct attitude was notable,
The first part appeared in 1610, or perhaps [says M. Brunetière], in 1618. The rest followed at long intervals. The four last volumes bear date 1627 and consequently are posthumous. The part written by d'Urfé cannot be distinguished from the part written by Baro, who continued the work begun by d'Urfé.
Waliszeffski: