by Will Durant
The King survived him by five months. Louis’ brief rule was gratefully remembered, for he released political prisoners, suffered exiles to return, and allowed France to breathe. He complained that the Cardinal had not permitted him to act as he wished. His mother had died a few months before Richelieu; he had her remains brought from Cologne and gave them stately burial, and in his last moments he repeatedly prayed that God and man would pardon the harshness he had shown to her.
He saw himself failing, but rejoiced in the vigor and beauty of his four-year-old son. “What is your name?” he asked playfully. “Louis the Fourteenth,” answered the boy. “Not yet, my son, not yet,” said the King, smiling. He bade the court accept the regency of the Queen until his son should come of age. When he was told that death was near, he said, “Then, my God, I consent, with all my heart.”49 He died on May 14, 1643, aged forty-one. “People went to his funeral as to a wedding,” Tallemant reported, “and appeared before the Queen as at a tourney.”50 The terrible Cardinal had made everything ready for le grand monarque and le grand siècle.
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I A like development weakened “states’ rights” in the United States in the twentieth century.
CHAPTER XVI
France Beneath the Wars
1559–1643
I. MORALS
THE religion whose varieties gave specious excuses for so many wars was beginning to suffer from its political employment; there was a growing number of men who questioned the divinity of doctrines that argued by the competitive shedding of blood; and in the upper classes doubts of the Christian ethic began to mingle with skepticism of the creed. It was a sign of the times when a good priest, Pierre Charron, explained the respectability of sex and its absurd apparatus.1
The peasants retained their faith, and honored the Christian code even when violating it; they might kill one another in passing ecstasy, they might diverge from monogamy when opportunity called and surveillance slept, but otherwise they led a tolerably decent life, heard Mass regularly, and, at least once a year, consumed the body and the blood of the Lord. The middle classes—Catholic or Huguenot—gave the best example of Christian morality: they dressed modestly, married once, attended to their business and their children, went to church, and gave the state its priests, physicians, lawyers, magistrates, and stability. Even in the aristocracy there were exemplary women; Charles IX called his wife, Elizabeth of Austria, the most virtuous woman in the world. But generally, in the leisure classes of the capital and in the artisans of the towns, erotic matters were getting out of hand. It was an age of frankly physical drive. Something of the platonic love that had amused Bembo and Castiglione in Italy and Marguerite of Navarre in France survived in the circle of Mme. de Rambouillet (herself an Italian), but it was mostly a feminine device, a resistance in depth to glorify the citadel.
So far as we know, Catherine de Médicis was a faithful wife and solicitous mother, but gossip accused her of training pretty women to seduce her enemies into obedience,2 and Jeanne d’Albret (something of a prude) described Catherine’s court as “the most corrupt and accursed society that ever was.”3 Brantôme was a scandalmonger, but his testimony should enter the picture:
As for our fair women of France … they have in the last fifty years learned so much gentleness and delicacy, so much attraction and charm in their clothes, in their fair looks and wanton ways … that now none can deny that they surpass all other women in every respect…. Moreover, the wanton language of love is in France more wanton, more exciting and sweeter-sounding, than in other tongues. And more than all, this blessed liberty which we have in France … renders our women more desirable and captivating, more tractable and easy of access than all others; and further, adultery is not so generally punished as in other lands … In a word, it is good to make love in France.4
The kings set the fashion. Francis II died too soon for sinning. Charles IX had his Marie Touchet. Henry III passed from mignonettes to mignons. Henry IV was faithfully heterosexual. Neither he nor his mistress Gabrielle d’Estrées seems to have objected to her being portrayed naked to the waist.5 When his daughter Henrietta Maria of France, aged seventeen, married Charles I, she had had so many liaisons that her confessor advised her to take the Magdalen as her model and England as her penance.6
Even so, the complaisance of the women lagged behind the eagerness of the men, and prostitutes labored to meet the swelling demand. Paris recognized three types: the chèvre coiffée (she-goat with a hairdo) for the court, the petrel (chattering bird) for the bourgeoisie, and the pierreuse, who served the poor and lived in a stone basement. There were educated tarts for aristocrats, like Marion Delorme, who, dying, confessed ten times, since after each shriving she reminded herself of untold sins.7 Charles IX and Henry III issued edicts outlawing brothels, and an ordinance of Louis XIII (1635) required that all detected prostitutes should be “whipped, shaved, and banished,” and that all men concerned in the traffic should be sent to the galleys for life.8 Several men, including Montaigne and a Huguenot clergyman, protested against such measures, and advocated the legalization of brothels in the interest of public morals.9 These laws remained on the statute books till the late eighteenth century, but were seldom enforced. Other decress fought in vain against nature’s perversions and vagaries; Montaigne tells of a girl who at twenty-two was changed into a man.10 Obscene literature found a ready market, and print-shop windows displayed erotic pictures without incurring any now known interference.
Social and political morality suffered from the wars. The sale of public offices was extended to a nearly universal venality. The financial administration, before Sully cleansed it, was corrupt to the point of chaos.11 War was not as indiscriminately devastating as it was soon to be under Louis XIV; yet we hear of armies, Huguenot as well as Catholic, engaging in wholesale massacre, pillage, and rape, stringing citizens up by the thumbs, or kindling a fire under their feet, to extort hidden gold. Dueling became more frequent in the sixteenth century, perhaps because the sword became a regular part of male dress. It was forbidden by Charles IX, under the urging of Michel de L’Hôpital, but it became almost an epidemic under Henry III; seconds as well as principals were expected to fight; duels, said Montaigne, were now battles. Richelieu’s edict against dueling differed from its predecessors in being vigorously and impartially enforced. After his death the practice revived.
Crime was frequent. Nocturnal Paris was mostly unlit; robbery and murder flourished; violent brawls disordered the streets, and travel in the countryside endangered life as well as limb. Penalties were barbarous; we are not sure that they were effective deterrents, but probably crime would have been still worse without them. Imprisonment was genteel for gentlemen; aristocrats sent to the Bastille could pay for comfortable quarters equipped with their own furniture and wives. Common criminals might be sent to stifling dungeons or be deported to colonies or condemned to the galleys. Traces of this last penalty go back to 1532, but its earliest known enactment in French law belongs to 1561. The galériens were usually sentenced for ten years; the letters GAL were branded on their backs. In winter they remained in their docked galleys or were herded into prisons, chiefly at Toulon or Marseille. During the Religious Wars many captured Huguenots were sentenced to the galleys, where they received such brutal treatment that death must have seemed a boon. Epidemics of suicide broke out in those bitter decades, above all among the women of Lyon and Marseille.
II. MANNERS
Manners improved while morals declined. Catherine de Médicis had brought Italian politeness with her, a sense of beauty, a taste for elegance, a refinement in appointments and dress. Brantôme thought her court the finest that had ever been, “a veritable earthly Paradise,” sparkling with “at least three hundred ladies and damoiselles”12 dressed to the height of taxation. French court ceremonial, established by Francis I, now displaced the Italian as the model of Europe. Henry III created the office of Grand Master of the Ceremonies of France and issued an edict detail
ing the ritual and protocol of court behavior, specifying the persons who were to be admitted to the king’s presence, the manner of addressing him, of serving him at his rising, his toilette, his meals, and his retiring, who might accompany him on his walks or hunts, who might attend the court balls. Henry III, timid and finicky, insisted on these rules; Henry IV violated them freely, Louis XIII ignored them, Louis XIV expanded them into a liturgy rivaling High Mass.
Court dress became increasingly costly and ornate. Marshal de Bassompierre wore a coat made of cloth of gold, laden with pearls weighing fifty pounds and costing fourteen thousand écus.13 Marie de Médicis at the baptism of her son wore a robe covered with three thousand diamonds and thirty-two thousand other precious stones.14 A courtier considered himself poor unless he had twenty-five costumes of divers styles. Sumptuary laws were numerous and soon ignored. One, issued by Henry IV, forbade “all inhabitants of this kingdom to wear either gold or silver on their clothes, except prostitutes and thieves,”15 but even this clever correlation failed. Preachers complained about the calculated risk that ladies took in only partly covering their curves; if we may believe Montaigne, who was not often guilty of wishful thinking, “our ladies (dainty-nice though they be) are many times seen to go open-breasted as low as the navel.”16 To accentuate white skin or rosy cheeks, women began in the seventeenth century to adorn them with spots or patches which the prosaic called mouches, or flies. They stiffened stays with whalebone and spread their hoopskirts with wire. They tossed their hair up in a dozen tempting shapes. Men wore theirs in long and flowing curls, and crowned themselves with broad hats gaily plumed. Louis XIII, becoming prematurely bald, made the wig fashionable. The sexes rivaled each other in vanity.
Their fine manners did not deter them from eating with their fingers. Even in the nobility forks did not replace fingers before 1600, hardly before 1700 in other ranks. A fashionable restaurant, La Tour d’Argent, where Henry III dined on his way back from the hunt, achieved fame by supplying forks. Already in the seventeenth century the French were eating frogs and snails. Wine was their favorite drink. Coffee was coming into use, but was not yet indispensable. Chocolate had come in through Spain from Mexico; some physicians condemned it as an inopportune laxative; others prescribed it for venereal disease; Mme. de Sévigné told of a pregnant lady who indulged in it so immoderately that she gave birth to a charming little blackamoor—un petit garçon noir comme le diable.17
The improvement in manners was reflected in transportation and amuseraments. Public coaches were now common in Western Europe, and in France the well-to-do began to move about in splendid carrosses equipped with curtains and glass. Tennis was the rage, and dancing claimed all classes. The stately pavane came in from Spain, taking its name from the Spanish for peacock—pavo; its proud and graceful evolutions gave it an aristocratic flair, and the kissing that was part of it helped to circulate the blood. Under Catherine de Médicis the ballet became the crown of court entertainments, combining music and the dance to tell a tale in verse or pantomime; her loveliest ladies took part, in costumes and settings artistically designed; one such ballet was performed in the Tuileries on the day after the Massacre of St. Bartholomew.
Musicians were the heroes of the passing hour. They exercised such fascination on the French that one courtier, at a concert in 1581, clapped his hand on his sword and swore that he must challenge the first man he met; thereupon the conductor led his orchestra into a gentle strain that soothed the savage breast.18 The lute was still the favorite instrument, but in 1555 Balthazar de Beaujoyeux, the first famous violinist in history, brought a band of violinists to Catherine’s court and made violin music popular. In 1600 Ottavio Rinuccini followed Marie de Médicis into France and introduced there the idea of opera. Singing was still the favorite music, and Père Mersenne rightly judged that no other sound in nature could match the beauty of a woman’s voice.19
Music, literature, fine manners, and cultured conversation now came together in one of the most basic contributions of France to civilization—the salon. Italy, alma mater of modern arts, had shown the way in such urbane gatherings as those ascribed to Urbino in Castiglione’s Courtier; it was from Italy that the salon—like the violin, the château, ballet, opera, and syphilis—came to France. Its founder in France was born in Rome (1588) to Jean de Vivonne, French ambassador to the papacy, and Giulia Savelli, an Orsini heiress. Catherine de Vivonne received an education exceptional for a girl of the sixteenth century. At twelve she was married to Charles d’Angennes, who, as Marquis of Rambouillet, held high office under Henry IV and Louis XIII. The young Marquise complained that French speech and manners fell short of the Italian in correctness and courtesy, and she noted with disapproval the separation between the intellectual classes—poets, scholars, scientists, savants—and the nobility. In 1618 she designed for her family the Hôtel de Rambouillet in the Rue St.-Thomas-du-Louvre in Paris. One room was hung with panels of blue velvet bordered with silver and gold; in this spacious salon blew the Marquise received her guests in what became the most celebrated salon in history. She took care to invite men and women of congenial manners but diverse interests: nobles like the Great Condé and La Rochefoucauld, ecclesiastics like Richelieu and Huet, generals like Montausier and Bassompierre, highborn dames like the Princess of Conti, the duchesses of Longueville and Rohan, lettered ladies like Mmes. de La Fayette and de Sévigné and MIle. de Scudéry, poets like Malherbe, Chapelain, and Guez de Balzac, scholars like Conrart and Vaugelas, wits like Voiture and Scarron. Here Bossuet preached a sermon at the age of twelve, and Corneille read his plays. Here aristocrats learned to take interest in language, science, scholarship, poetry, music, and art; men learned from women the graces of courtesy; authors learned to hide their vanity, savants to humanize their erudition; wit rubbed elbows with pedigrees; correct speech was debated and acquired, and conversation became an art.
The Marquise managed these lions and tigers with a tact that painlessly trimmed their claws. Despite bearing seven children, she kept her beauty long enough to inspire passion in Voiture and Malherbe, who, being poets, kindled into flame at every smile; despite these fires she was respected by all for her fidelity to her dull husband; despite ill health, she gave her guests an example of good cheer and sprightly intelligence; despite losing two sons to death and three daughters to religion, she silenced her melancholy till she wrote her epitaph. In an age of sexual license and untamed speech she spread about her a contagion of manners and decency. Good taste—bon ton, good tone—became a passport to her salon. Marshals and poets left their swords and shafts in the vestibule; politeness turned the edge of difference; discussion flourished, dispute was banned.
At last the refinement was carried to excess. The Marquise drew up a code of correctness in speech and deed; those who practiced it too precisely were called précieux or précieuses; and in 1659, when the Marquise was retired and solitary, Molière pounced upon these fanciful residues of her art and finished them off with ridicule. But even the excess had its use; the précieuses helped to clear the meaning and connotations of words and phrases, to cleanse the language of provincialisms, bad grammar, and pedantry; here in germ was the French Academy. In the Hôtel de Rambouillet Malherbe, Conrart, and Vaugelas developed those principles of literary taste that led to Boileau and the classic age. The précieuses contributed to that analysis of the passions which elongated the romances and lured Descartes and Spinoza; they helped to embroider the relations of the sexes with that strategy of retreat, and consequent idealization of the elusive treasure, which made for romantic love. Through this and the later salons French history became more than ever bisexual. The status of women rose; their influence increased in literature, language, politics, and art. The respect for knowledge and intellect increased, and the sense of beauty spread.
But would the salons and the Academy have made Rabelais impossible? Would they have closed the French mind to the gay physiology, the easy ethic, the proliferating pedantry of Montaigne? Or w
ould they have forced and raised these geniuses to a subtler and higher art?
We have gone too far forward. Montaigne was twenty-six years dead when Mme. de Rambouillet opened her salon. Let us turn back in our course and listen for an hour to the greatest writer and thinker of France in this age.