A Short History of French Literature
Paris and thence, in 1679, to his native town, where the Duke of Savoy
made him his historiographer and a member of the Academy of Turin. Not
long before his death he was employed in political work. Saint Real's
chief characteristics as a historian are the preference before
everything else of a dramatic conception and treatment, and the
employment of a singularly vivid and idiomatic style, simple in its
vocabulary and phrase and yet in the highest degree picturesque. He has
been accused of following his master, Varillas, in want of strict
accuracy, but in truth strict accuracy was not aimed at by any of these
essayists. Their object was to produce a creditable literary
composition, to set forth their subject strikingly and dramatically, and
to point a moral of some kind. In all three respects their success was
not contemptible.
[Sidenote: Memoir-writers.]
[Sidenote: Rohan]
[Sidenote: Bassompierre.]
The memoir-writers proper, who confine themselves to what they in their
own persons have done, heard, or thought, are, as has been said, of far
more importance. Their number is very great, and investigations into the
vast record treasures which, after revolutionary devastation, France
still possesses, is yearly increasing the knowledge of them. Only a
brief account can here be attempted of most of them; and where the
historical importance of the writer exceeds or equals his importance as
a literary figure, biographical details will be but sparingly given, as
they are easily and more suitably to be found elsewhere. The earliest
writer who properly comes within our century (the order of the
collection of Michaud and Poujoulat is followed for convenience sake) is
Francois Duval, Marquis de Fontenay Mareuil. Fontenay was a soldier, a
courtier, and a diplomatist, in which last character he visited England.
He has left us connected memoirs from 1609 to 1624, and some short
accounts of later transactions, such as the siege of La Rochelle, and
his own mission to Rome. Fontenay is a simple and straightforward
writer, full of good sense, and not destitute of narrative power. To
Paul Phelypeaux de Pontchartrain (1566-1621) we owe a somewhat jejune
but careful and apparently faithful account of the minority of Louis
XIII. A short and striking relation of the downfall of Concini is
supposed to be the work of Michel de Marillac, keeper of the seals
(1573-1632), afterwards one of the victims of Richelieu. Henri de Rohan
(1579-1638) is very far superior to the writers just named. Of the
greatest house, save one or two, in France, he travelled much,
distinguished himself in battle, both in foreign and civil war; was once
condemned to death, made head for a time against all the strength of
Richelieu; was near purchasing the principality of Cyprus from the
Venetians, and establishing himself in the east; was recalled, commanded
the French forces with brilliant success in the Valtelline, and met his
death under Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar at Rheinfeld. Besides his memoirs he
wrote a book called the _Parfait Capitaine_, and some others. The
memoirs extend from the death of Henri IV. to the year 1629, and have
all the vigour and brilliancy of the best sixteenth-century work of the
kind. A further account of the Valtelline campaign is also most probably
Rohan's, though it is not written in the first person, and has been
attributed to others. Of still greater personal interest are the memoirs
of Francois, Marechal de Bassompierre, another of the adversaries of
Richelieu, and who, less fortunate than Rohan, languished twelve years
in the Bastille. Few persons played a more active part in the first
years of the reign of Louis XIII. than Bassompierre, and no one has left
a livelier description, not merely of his own personal fortunes, but of
the personality of his contemporaries, the habits and customs of the
time, the wars, the loves, the intrigues of himself, his friends and his
enemies. He has not the credit of being very accurate, but he is
infinitely amusing. His memoirs were written during his sojourn in the
Bastille. This was terminated by the death of Richelieu, but
Bassompierre followed his enemy before very long in consequence of an
attack of apoplexy.
In singular contrast to Bassompierre's work are the memoirs of another
chronicler of the same time, Francois Annibal, Marechal d'Estrees,
brother of the mistress of Henri IV. D'Estrees excludes all gossip,
confines himself strictly to matters of public business, and recounts
them apparently with scrupulous accuracy, and in a plain but clear and
sufficient style. Among the most curious and not the least interesting
of the works of this class are the memoirs of Pontis--one of the famous
solitaries of Port Royal in his old age. Pontis died at the age of
eighty-seven, and had been for fifty-six years in the army. His memoirs,
which are strictly confined to his personal experiences, obtained the
approbation of two such undeniably competent judges as Conde and Madame
de Sevigne, and are by no means unworthy of the honour. The actual
composition of the memoirs is said to be the work of Thomas du Fosse.
The memoirs called Richelieu's are different from all these, and,
notwithstanding their great extent and the illustrious name they bear,
of very inferior interest, at least from the literary point of view.
Richelieu's talents, it is sufficiently notorious, were not literary;
and even if they had been, but little of these memoirs comes from his
own hand. They are the work of secretaries, confidants, and
under-strappers of all sorts, writing at most from the cardinal's
dictation, and probably in many cases merely constructing _precis_ of
documents. There is, therefore, no need to dwell on them.
In the memoirs of Arnauld d'Andilly and of his son, the Abbe Arnauld,
the personal interest and the abundance of anecdote and
character-drawing which characterise the memoir work of the time
reappear; the latter are, indeed, particularly full of them. Those of
the father are chiefly interesting, as exhibiting the curious mixture of
worldly and spiritual motives which played so large a part in the
history of the time. For Arnauld who was the fervent friend and disciple
of Saint Cyran, the practical founder of Jansenism in France, was also
an assiduous courtier of Gaston d'Orleans, and not too well satisfied
with the results of his courtiership. There are memoirs attributed to
Gaston himself, but they are almost certainly the work of another hand;
their historical value is not inconsiderable, but they have little
literary interest. Those of Marie, Duchess de Nemours, and daughter of
the Duke de Longueville, are short, but among the most interesting of
all those dealing with the Fronde, from the vividness and decision of
their personal traits.
[Sidenote: Madame de Motteville.]
More important still among the memoirs of this time are those of
Francoise Bertaut, Madame de Motteville, a member of the family of the
poet Bertaut. She was introduced by her mother, when very young, to Anne
of Austria, and soon became her most intimate confidante. The jealousy
of Richelieu banished her for a time from the court, and she married M.
de Motteville, a man of wealth and position in the civil service of the
province of Normandy. Shortly before Richelieu's death she lost her
husband; and as soon as Anne of Austria succeeded to the regency she was
recalled to court, and spent her time there during the queen's life. She
survived her mistress many years, and was a member of the society of
Madame de Sevigne. She died in 1689. Her memoirs, which were not
published till many years after her death, contain many curious
revelations of the court history of the time, for she was not only
intimate with Anne of Austria, but also with the unfortunate Henrietta
Maria of England, and with La Grande Mademoiselle. With the latter she
interchanged some curious and characteristic letters on a fantastic
project of Mademoiselle's for founding a new abbey of Thelema. The
general style of her memoirs is sober and intelligent, but it is injured
by the abundance of moral reflections, in matter according to the
taste, but in manner lacking much of the piquancy, of the time. These
memoirs are somewhat voluminous, and extend to the death of Anne of
Austria. Madame de Motteville, notwithstanding her affection for her
mistress, is one of the best authorities for the period of the Fronde,
because, unlike Retz and La Rochefoucauld, she was only secondarily
interested in the events she relates. Some curious details of the later
Fronde are found in the short memoirs of Pere Berthod, of whom nothing
is known. Of the Comte de Brienne, who was a favourite and minister of
Anne of Austria, and whose book contains much information on foreign,
and especially English affairs; of Montresor and Fontrailles, both
followers of Gaston of Orleans, and the latter the author of a relation
of the Cinq Mars conspiracy, short, but minute and striking; of La
Chatre, an industrious courtier and intriguer, and a vivid and
picturesque writer, whose work, as will presently be mentioned, became
entangled in a strange fashion with that of La Rochefoucauld; of the
great Turenne, a worthy follower of Montluc and Rohan in the art of
military writing, little more than mention can be made. There are some
military memoirs of interest, which go under the name of the Duke of
York (James II).
[Sidenote: Cardinal de Retz.]
The works and personages of some other writers demand a fuller notice.
Paul de Gondi[256], Cardinal de Retz, who occupies with Saint Simon, and
perhaps La Rochefoucauld, the first place among French memoir-writers of
the seventeenth century, was born in 1614, and died in 1679. He was a
younger son of an ancient and noble house, uniting French and Italian
honours, and was early destined for the church, for which probably no
churchman ever had less vocation. He intrigued in society and politics,
was a practised duellist, and though he was not more than seven-or
eight-and-twenty at Richelieu's death, had already caballed against him.
His appointment by Louis XIII., almost on his deathbed, to the
coadjutorship (involving the reversion) of the archbishopric of Paris,
which was then held by his uncle, a very old man of no personal capacity
or influence, put into his hands a formidable political weapon, and he
was not long in making use of it. He was more than any other man the
instigator of the Fronde, that singular alliance of the privileged
bourgeoisie of the great towns with the still more privileged nobility
against the royal authority as exercised through ministers. The history
of this confused and turbulent period is in great part the biography of
Retz. It is not easy to see that he had any definite political views
except the jealousy of Mazarin, which he shared with almost all his
order, an inveterate habit of insubordination, and a still more
inveterate habit of conspiracy. The Fronde was and could have been but a
failure, and Retz was a failure with it. He was for some time in exile,
but at last reconciled himself to the inevitable, and even enjoyed some
public employments under Louis XIV. His principal occupation, however,
was the payment of his enormous debts, which he effected with an honesty
not common at the time among his class by rigorously reducing his
expenditure, selling and mortgaging his numerous benefices, and, as
Madame de Sevigne put it, 'living for his creditors.' He is said thus to
have paid off four millions of francs, a vast sum for the time.
Meanwhile he was writing the Memoirs which, like the Maxims of his rival
and half-enemy, La Rochefoucauld, unexpectedly gained for him a higher
reputation in literature than he could have hoped for in politics. When
a mere boy he had shown in the _Conjuration de Fiesque_ no small