Devereux — Complete

“Yes, under the auspices of the Bishop of Frejus.”

“You might have chosen a better guide: the King has been too much teased about him,” rejoined Hamilton; “and now that we are talking of him, I will show you a singular instance of what good manners can do at court in preference to good abilities. You observe yon quiet, modest-looking man, with a sensible countenance and a clerical garb; you observe how he edges away when any one approaches to accost him; and how, from his extreme disesteem of himself, he seems to inspire every one with the same sentiment. Well, that man is a namesake of Fleuri, the Prior of Argenteuil; he has come here, I suppose, for some particular and temporary purpose, since, in reality, he has left the court. Well, that worthy priest—do remark his bow; did you ever see anything so awkward?—is one of the most learned divines that the Church can boast of; he is as immeasurably superior to the smooth-faced Bishop of Frejus as Louis the Fourteenth is to my old friend Charles the Second. He has had equal opportunities with the said Bishop; been preceptor to the princes of Conti and the Count de Vermandois; and yet I will wager that he lives and dies a tutor, a bookworm—and a prior; while t’ other Fleuri, without a particle of merit but of the most superficial order, governs already kings through their mistresses, kingdoms through the kings, and may, for aught I know, expand into a prime minister and ripen into a cardinal.”

“Nay,” said I, smiling, “there is little chance of so exalted a lot for the worthy Bishop.”

“Pardon me,” interrupted Hamilton, “I am an old courtier, and look steadily on the game I no longer play. Suppleness, united with art, may do anything in a court like this; and the smooth and unelevated craft of a Fleuri may win even to the same height as the deep wiles of the glittering Mazarin, or the superb genius of the imperious Richelieu.”

“Hist!” said I, “the Bishop has reappeared. Who is that old priest with a fine countenance and an address that will, at least, please you better than that of the Prior of Argenteuil, who has just stopped our episcopal courtier?”

“What! do you not know? It is the most celebrated preacher of the day,—the great Massillon. It is said that that handsome person goes a great way towards winning converts among the court ladies; it is certain, at least, that when Massillon first entered the profession he was to the soul something like the spear of Achilles to the body; and, though very efficacious in healing the wounds of conscience, was equally ready in the first instance to inflict them.”

“Ah,” said I, “see the malice of wit; and see, above all, how much more ready one is to mention a man’s frailties than to enlarge upon his virtues.”

“To be sure,” answered Hamilton, coolly, and patting his snuff-box, “to be sure, we old people like history better than fiction; and frailty is certain, while virtue is always doubtful.”

“Don’t judge of all people,” said I, “by your experience among the courtiers of Charles the Second.”

“Right,” said Hamilton. “Providence never assembled so many rascals together before without hanging them. And he would indeed be a bad judge of human nature who estimated the characters of men in general by the heroes of Newgate and the victims of Tyburn. But your Bishop approaches. Adieu!”

“What!” said Fleuri, joining me and saluting Hamilton, who had just turned to depart, “what, Count Antoine! Does anything but whim bring you here to-day?”

“No,” answered Hamilton; “I am only here for the same purpose as the poor go to the temples of Caitan,—to inhale the steam of those good things which I see the priests devour.”

“Ha! ha! ha!” laughed the good-natured Bishop, not in the least disconcerted; and Count Hamilton, congratulating himself on his bon mot, turned away.

“I have spoken to his Most Christian Majesty,” said the Bishop; “he is willing, as he before ordained, to admit you to his presence. The Duc de Maine is with the King, as also some other members of the royal family; but you will consider this a private audience.”

I expressed my gratitude: we moved on; the doors of an apartment were thrown open; and I saw myself in the presence of Louis XIV.

The room was partially darkened. In the centre of it, on a large sofa, reclined the King; he was dressed (though this, if I may so speak, I rather remembered than noted) in a coat of black velvet, slightly embroidered; his vest was of white satin; he wore no jewels nor orders, for it was only on grand or gala days that he displayed personal pomp. At some little distance from him stood three members of the royal family; them I never regarded: all my attention was bent upon the King. My temperament is not that on which greatness, or indeed any external circumstances, make much impression; but as, following at a little distance the Bishop of Frejus, I approached the royal person, I must confess that Bolingbroke had scarcely need to have cautioned me not to appear too self-possessed. Perhaps, had I seen that great monarch in his beaux jours; in the plenitude of his power, his glory, the dazzling and meridian splendour of his person, his court, and his renown,—pride might have made me more on my guard against too deep, or at least too apparent, an impression; but the many reverses of that magnificent sovereign,—reverses in which he had shown himself more great than in all his previous triumphs and early successes; his age, his infirmities, the very clouds round the setting sun, the very howls of joy at the expiring lion,—all were calculated, in my mind, to deepen respect into reverence, and tincture reverence itself with awe. I saw before me not only the majesty of Louis le Grand, but that of misfortune, of weakness, of infirmity, and of age; and I forgot at once, in that reflection, what otherwise would have blunted my sentiments of deference, namely, the crimes of his ministers and the exactions of his reign. Endeavouring to collect my mind from an embarrassment which surprised myself, I lifted my eyes towards the King, and saw a countenance where the trace of the superb beauty for which his manhood had been celebrated still lingered, broken, not destroyed, and borrowing a dignity even more imposing from the marks of encroaching years and from the evident exhaustion of suffering and disease.

Fleuri said, in a low tone, something which my ear did not catch. There was a pause,—only a moment’s pause; and then, in a voice, the music of which I had hitherto deemed exaggerated, the King spoke; and in that voice there was something so kind and encouraging that I felt reassured at once. Perhaps its tone was not the less conciliating from the evident effect which the royal presence had produced upon me.

“You have given us, Count Devereux,” said the King, “a pleasure which we are glad, in person, to acknowledge to you. And it has seemed to us fitting that the country in which your brave father acquired his fame should also be the asylum of his son.”

“Sire,” answered I, “Sire, it shall not be my fault if that country is not henceforth my own; and in inheriting my father’s name, I inherit also his gratitude and his ambition.”

“It is well said, Sir,” said the King; and I once more raised my eyes, and perceived that his were bent upon me. “It is well said,” he repeated after a short pause; “and in granting to you this audience, we were not unwilling to hope that you were desirous to attach yourself to our court. The times do not require” (here I thought the old King’s voice was not so firm as before) “the manifestation of your zeal in the same career as that in which your father gained laurels to France and to himself. But we will not neglect to find employment for your abilities, if not for your sword.”

“That sword which was given to me, Sire,” said I, “by your Majesty, shall be ever drawn (against all nations but one) at your command; and, in being your Majesty’s petitioner for future favours, I only seek some channel through which to evince my gratitude for the past.”

“We do not doubt,” said Louis, “that whatever be the number of the ungrateful we may make by testifying our good pleasure on your behalf, you will not be among the number.” The King here made a slight but courteous inclination and turned round. The observant Bishop of Frejus, who had retired to a little distance and who knew that the King never liked talking more than he could help it, gave me a signal. I obeyed, and backed, with all due deference, out of the royal presence.

So closed my interview with Louis XIV. Although his Majesty did not indulge in prolixity, I spoke of him for a long time afterwards as the most eloquent of men. Believe me, there is no orator like a king; one word from a royal mouth stirs the heart more than Demosthenes could have done. There was a deep moral in that custom of the ancients, by which the Goddess of Persuasion was always represented with a diadem on her head.

CHAPTER VII

REFLECTIONS.—A SOIREE.—THE APPEARANCE OF ONE IMPORTANT IN THE HISTORY.—A CONVERSATION WITH MADAME DE BALZAC HIGHLY SATISFACTORY AND CHEERING.—A RENCONTRE WITH A CURIOUS OLD SOLDIER.—THE EXTINCTION OF A ONCE GREAT LUMINARY

I HAD now been several weeks at Paris; I had neither eagerly sought nor sedulously avoided its gayeties. It is not that one violent sorrow leaves us without power of enjoyment; it only lessens the power, and deadens the enjoyment: it does not take away from us the objects of life; it only forestalls the more indifferent calmness of age. The blood no longer flows in an irregular but delicious course of vivid and wild emotion; the step no longer spurns the earth; nor does the ambition wander, insatiable, yet undefined, over the million paths of existence: but we lose not our old capacities; they are quieted, not extinct. The heart can never utterly and long be dormant: trifles may not charm it any more, nor levities delight; but its pulse has not yet ceased to beat. We survey the scene that moves around, with a gaze no longer distracted by every hope that flutters by; and it is therefore that we find ourselves more calculated than before for the graver occupations of our race. The overflowing temperament is checked to its proper level, the ambition bounded to its prudent and lawful goal. The earth is no longer so green, nor the heaven so blue, nor the fancy that stirs within us so rich in its creations; but we look more narrowly on the living crowd, and more rationally on the aims of men. The misfortune which has changed us has only adapted us the better to a climate in which misfortune is a portion of the air. The grief that has thralled our spirit to a more narrow and dark cell has also been a change that has linked us to mankind with a strength of which we dreamed not in the day of a wilder freedom and more luxuriant aspirings. In later life, a new spirit, partaking of that which was our earliest, returns to us. The solitude which delighted us in youth, but which, when the thoughts that make solitude a fairy land are darkened by affliction, becomes a fearful and sombre void, resumes its old spell, as the more morbid and urgent memory of that affliction crumbles away by time. Content is a hermit; but so also is Apathy. Youth loves the solitary couch, which it surrounds with dreams. Age, or Experience (which is the mind’s age), loves the same couch for the rest which it affords; but the wide interval between is that of exertion, of labour, and of labour among men. The woe which makes our hearts less social, often makes our habits more so. The thoughts, which in calm would have shunned the world, are driven upon it by the tempest, even as the birds which forsake the habitable land can, so long as the wind sleeps and the thunder rests within its cloud, become the constant and solitary brooders over the waste sea: but the moment the storm awakes and the blast pursues them, they fly, by an overpowering instinct, to some wandering bark, some vestige of human and social life; and exchange, even for danger from the hands of men, the desert of an angry Heaven and the solitude of a storm.

I heard no more either of Madame de Maintenon or the King. Meanwhile, my flight and friendship with Lord Bolingbroke had given me a consequence in the eyes of the exiled Prince which I should not otherwise have enjoyed; and I was honoured by very flattering overtures to enter actively into his service. I have before said that I felt no enthusiasm in his cause, and I was far from feeling it for his person. My ambition rather directed its hope towards a career in the service of France. France was the country of my birth, and the country of my father’s fame. There no withering remembrances awaited me; no private regrets were associated with its scenes, and no public penalties with its political institutions. And although I had not yet received any token of Louis’s remembrance, in the ordinary routine of court favours expectation as yet would have been premature; besides, his royal fidelity to his word was proverbial; and, sooner or later, I indulged the hope to profit by the sort of promise he had insinuated to me. I declined, therefore, with all due respect, the offers of the Chevalier, and continued to live the life of idleness and expectation, until Lord Bolingbroke returned to Paris, and accepted the office of secretary of state in the service of the Chevalier. As he has publicly declared his reasons in this step, I do not mean to favour the world with his private conversations on the same subject.

A day or two after his return, I went with him to a party given by a member of the royal family. The first person by whom we were accosted—and I rejoiced at it, for we could not have been accosted by a more amusing one—was Count Anthony Hamilton.

“Ah! my Lord Bolingbroke,” said he, sauntering up to us; “how are you?—delighted to see you again. Do look at Madame la Duchesse d’Orleans! Saw you ever such a creature? Whither are you moving, my Lord? Ah! see him, Count, see him, gliding off to that pretty duchess, of course; well, he has a beautiful bow, it must be owned; why, you are not going too?—what would the world say if Count Anthony Hamilton were seen left to himself? No, no, come and sit down by Madame de Cornuel: she longs to be introduced to you, and is one of the wittiest women in Europe.”

“With all my heart! provided she employs her wit ill-naturedly, and uses it in ridiculing other people, not praising herself.”

“Oh! nobody can be more satirical; indeed, what difference is there between wit and satire? Come, Count!”

And Hamilton introduced me forthwith to Madame de Cornuel. She received me very politely; and, turning to two or three people who formed the circle round her, said, with the greatest composure, “Messieurs, oblige me by seeking some other object of attraction; I wish to have a private conference with my new friend.”

“I may stay?” said Hamilton.

“Ah! certainly; you are never in the way.”

“In that respect, Madame,” said Hamilton, taking snuff, and bowing very low, “in that respect, I must strongly remind you of your excellent husband.”

“Fie!” cried Madame de Cornuel; then, turning to me, she said, “Ah! Monsieur, if you could have come to Paris some years ago, you would have been enchanted with us: we are sadly changed. Imagine the fine old King thinking it wicked not to hear plays, but to hear players act them, and so making the royal family a company of comedians. Mon Dieu! how villanously they perform! but do you know why I wished to be introduced to you?”

“Yes! in order to have a new listener: old listeners must be almost as tedious as old news.”

“Very shrewdly said, and not far from the truth. The fact is, that I wanted to talk about all these fine people present to some one for whose ear my anecdotes would have the charm of novelty. Let us begin with Louis Armand, Prince of Conti; you see him.”

“What, that short-sighted, stout, and rather handsome man, with a cast of countenance somewhat like the pictures of Henri Quatre, who is laughing so merrily?”

“O Ciel! how droll! No! that handsome man is no less a person than the Duc d’Orleans. You see a little ugly thing like an anatomized ape,—there, see,—he has just thrown down a chair, and, in stooping to pick it up, has almost fallen over the Dutch ambassadress,—that is Louis Armand, Prince of Conti. Do you know what the Duc d’Orleans said to him the other day? ‘Mon bon ami,’ he said, pointing to the prince’s limbs (did you ever see such limbs out of a menagerie, by the by?) ‘mon bon ami, it is a fine thing for you that the Psalmist has assured us “that the Lord delighteth not in any man’s legs.”’ Nay, don’t laugh, it is quite true!”

It was now for Count Hamilton to take up the ball of satire; he was not a whit more merciful than the kind Madame de Cornuel. “The Prince,” said he, “has so exquisite an awkwardness that, whenever the King hears a noise, and inquires the cause, the invariable answer is that ‘the Prince of Conti has just tumbled down’! But, tell me, what do you think of Madame d’Aumont? She is in the English headdress, and looks triste a la mort.”

“She is rather pretty, to my taste.”

“Yes,” cried Madame de Cornuel, interrupting the gentle Antoine (it did one’s heart good to see how strenuously each of them tried to talk more scandal than the other), “yes, she is thought very pretty; but I think her very like a fricandeau,—white, soft, and insipid. She is always in tears,” added the good-natured Cornuel, “after her prayers, both at morning and evening. I asked why; and she answered, pretty simpleton, that she was always forced to pray to be made good, and she feared Heaven would take her at her word! However, she has many worshippers, and they call her the evening star.”

“They should rather call her the Hyades!” said Hamilton, “if it be true that she sheds tears every morning and night, and her rising and setting are thus always attended by rain.”

“Bravo, Count Antoine! she shall be so called in future,” said Madame de Cornuel. “But now, Monsieur Devereux, turn your eyes to that hideous old woman.”

“What! the Duchesse d’Orleans?”

“The same. She is in full dress to-night; but in the daytime you generally see her in a riding habit and a man’s wig; she is—”

“Hist!” interrupted Hamilton; “do you not tremble to think what she would do if she overheard you? she is such a terrible creature at fighting! You have no conception, Count, what an arm she has. She knows her ugliness, and laughs at it, as all the rest of the world does. The King took her hand one day, and said smiling, ‘What could Nature have meant when she gave this hand to a German princess instead of a Dutch peasant?’ ‘Sire,’ said the Duchesse, very gravely, ‘Nature gave this hand to a German princess for the purpose of boxing the ears of her ladies in waiting!’”

“Ha! ha! ha!” said Madame de Cornuel, laughing; “one is never at a loss for jokes upon a woman who eats salade au lard, and declares that, whenever she is unhappy, her only consolation is ham and sausages! Her son treats her with the greatest respect, and consults her in all his amours, for which she professes the greatest horror, and which she retails to her correspondents all over the world, in letters as long as her pedigree. But you are looking at her son, is he not of a good mien?”

“Yes, pretty well; but does not exhibit to advantage by the side of Lord Bolingbroke, with whom he is now talking. Pray, who is the third personage that has just joined them?”

“Oh, the wretch! it is the Abbe Dubois; a living proof of the folly of the French proverb, which says that Mercuries should not be made du bois. Never was there a Mercury equal to the Abbe,—but, do look at that old man to the left,—he is one of the most remarkable persons of the age.”

“What! he with the small features, and comely countenance, considering his years?”

“The same,” said Hamilton; “it is the notorious Choisi. You know that he is the modern Tiresias, and has been a woman as well as man.”

“How do you mean?”

“Ah, you may well ask!” cried Madame de Cornuel. “Why, he lived for many years in the disguise of a woman, and had all sorts of curious adventures.”

“Mort Diable!” cried Hamilton; “it was entering your ranks, Madame, as a spy. I hear he makes but a sorry report of what he saw there.”

“Come, Count Antoine,” cried the lively de Cornuel, “we must not turn our weapons against each other; and when you attack a woman’s sex you attack her individually. But what makes you look so intently, Count Devereux, at that ugly priest?”

The person thus flatteringly designated was Montreuil; he had just caught my eye, among a group of men who were conversing eagerly.

“Hush! Madame,” said I, “spare me for a moment;” and I rose, and mingled with the Abbe’s companions.

“So, you have only arrived to-day,” I heard one of them say to him.

“No, I could not despatch my business before.”

“And how are matters in England?”

“Ripe! if the life of his Majesty (of France) be spared a year longer, we will send the Elector of Hanover back to his principality.”

“Hist!” said the companion, and looked towards me. Montreuil ceased abruptly: our eyes met; his fell. I affected to look among the group as if I had expected to find there some one I knew, and then, turning away, I seated myself alone and apart. There, unobserved, I kept my looks on Montreuil. I remarked that, from time to time, his keen dark eye glanced towards me, with a look rather expressive of vigilance than anything else. Soon afterwards his little knot dispersed; I saw him converse for a few moments with Dubois, who received him I thought distantly; and then he was engaged in a long conference with the Bishop of Frejus, whom, till then, I had not perceived among the crowd.

As I was loitering on the staircase, where I saw Montreuil depart with the Bishop, in the carriage of the latter, Hamilton, accosting me, insisted on my accompanying him to Chaulieu’s, where a late supper awaited the sons of wine and wit. However, to the good Count’s great astonishment, I preferred solitude and reflection, for that night, to anything else.

Montreuil’s visit to the French capital boded me no good. He possessed great influence with Fleuri, and was in high esteem with Madame de Maintenon, and, in effect, very shortly after his return to Paris, the Bishop of Frejus looked upon me with a most cool sort of benignancy; and Madame de Maintenon told her friend, the Duchesse de St. Simon, that it was a great pity a young nobleman of my birth and prepossessing appearance (ay! my prepossessing appearance would never have occurred to the devotee, if I had not seemed so sensible of her own) should not only be addicted to the wildest dissipation, but, worse still, to Jansenistical tenets. After this there was no hope for me save in the King’s word, which his increasing infirmities, naturally engrossing his attention, prevented my hoping too sanguinely would dwell very acutely on his remembrance. I believe, however, so religiously scrupulous was Louis upon a point of honour that, had he lived, I should have had nothing to complain of. As it was—but I anticipate! Montreuil disappeared from Paris, almost as suddenly as he had appeared there. And, as drowning men catch at a straw, so, finding my affairs at a very low ebb, I thought I would take advice, even from Madame de Balzac.

I accordingly repaired to her hotel. She was at home, and, fortunately, alone.

“You are welcome, mon fils,” said she; “suffer me to give you that title: you are welcome; it is some days since I saw you.”

“I have numbered them, I assure you, Madame,” said I, “and they have crept with a dull pace; but you know that business has claims as well as pleasure!”