ABUNDANCE OF LATER SIXTEENTH-CENTURY PROSE—A DISTINCTION—SULLY—BODIN—THE GREAT MEMOIR-WRITERS—CARLOIX—LA NOUE—D’AUBIGNé—MONLUC—BRANT?ME—THE ‘SATYRE MéNIPéE’—ITS ORIGIN—ITS AUTHORS—ITS FORM AND SPIRIT—MONTAIGNE—HIS ‘ESSAYS’—THE SCEPTICISM OF MONTAIGNE—HIS STYLE—CHARRON AND DU VAIR.
Abundance of later sixteenth-century prose.

No race has ever allowed less of what it has done, suffered, or even only seen, to be lost than the French. It has ever been the ambition of the men of that people to leave some record of themselves. We have to thank what an ill-conditioned critic might call its vanity for a memoir-literature which would be inadequately praised if it were only called the first in the world. The world has not only no equal, but no second, to be used as a comparison. The France of the wars of Religion, agitated as it was, was exceptionally rich in these delightful books. For that we have good reason to be grateful, since this time, full as it was of colour,[327] of ability, of passion, and of the most remote extremes in character, has left us the means of knowing it more fully than we can know our own generation. As it was also an age of great political and religious strife, treatises on politics and religion were naturally written, seeing that amid all the turmoil and fury men continued to write. There is more cause for surprise when we meet also with works of science, or on the arts—though the surprise is not perhaps fully justified, since even in the wildest times the great mass of men live their lives very much as in peace. When commotions have reached the point of causing universal disturbance, they soon end. Mankind would starve if they were not suspended.
A distinction.

Out of all the mass of writing produced in the second half of the sixteenth century in France (or by men who must be assigned to that period but who lived into the seventeenth), which is valuable for one reason or another, all is not literature. Only a part can be read from any other motive than interest in the matter. The historians Palma Cayet, Jean de Serres, and his brother Olivier de Serres, author of the Théatre d’Agriculture, for instance, will hardly be read for their style, or except by students. Sully. As much must be said of the memoirs of Sully, which are called for short Les ?conomies Royales.[104] It is not because this book[328] began to be published at the Chateau de Sully in 1638 that we must leave it aside, for in matter and spirit it belongs to the previous century. Nor is it because Les ?conomies Royales are wanting in interest. They are of great historical value, and the form is attractive from its mere oddity. Sully employed four secretaries to tell him his own life, so that they are found informing their master, “Monsieur your father had four sons, for whom he had no other ambition than to make them such gallant men that they might raise their house to its ancient splendour, from which the fall of the elder line to the distaff [i.e., to female heirs] three times, and the unthrifty courses of his ancestors, and especially of his father, had much diminished it in goods.” Or a little further on, “This [viz., to be a faithful and obedient servant] you also swore to him in such fair terms, with so much confidence, and in so agreeable a tone of voice, that he at once conceived great hopes of you.” Yet the oddity and the matter are the virtues of the ?conomies Royales. Something equivalent must needs be said of the memoirs of Castelnau, of Gaspard de Saulx-Tavannes—written[329] by his son Jean—of Condé, of Fran?ois de Guise, and many others.[105]
Bodin.

Jean Bodin (1530-1596) is a great name in political science. His République, first published in French in 1578 and then enlarged and translated into Latin by the author in 1586, must always remain of value, if for no other reason than because it shows how it was possible for men of the sixteenth century who were not merely servile courtiers, to believe in the “right divine” of kings and the excellence of despotism. Bodin’s influence, even among ourselves, was strong in the seventeenth century. Strafford was almost certainly thinking of him when he told the Council that the king was entitled, as representative of the State, to act legibus solutus; and his doctrine was taught in incomparable English by Hobbes. Yet Bodin will hardly be read for his French, and what we cannot read for the form cannot be called literature.
The great memoir-writers.

It shows, as fully as anything well could, the wealth of French prose that we can leave aside so many writers, even in what is not one of the great periods, and yet retain a considerable body of literature in the very fullest sense of the word. Montaigne, who is pre-eminent, stands[330] by himself, alike in form and in matter, and so for other reasons does the Satyre Ménippée. But among the memoir-writers who also were in some cases historians, there are five who would of themselves be enough to make the wealth of any other literature in this kind—Carloix, La Noue, D’Aubigné, Monluc, and Brant?me. They came indeed in a happy hour. The generation was full of strong and violent characters, and of sudden picturesque events to supply them with matter. The language had been developed and shaped by Rabelais, Calvin, and the translators with Amyot at their head, while it had not yet been pruned by the pedantry of the seventeenth century. It still kept its colour. In history the classics and the Italians had supplied models of more capability than the chronicles which Comines had followed. For the model of the memoir, a people who could look back to Joinville and Villehardouin had no need of foreign influence.
Carloix.

The five writers just named are not only excellent in themselves, but each of them is either in his own person the representative of a class, or makes us acquainted with one. Vincent Carloix wrote, not his own life, but that of his master, Fran?ois de Scépeaux, Marshal de Vieilleville (1509-1571).[106] Carloix was the Marshal’s secretary for thirty-five years, and was fully trusted by him. It was by Vieilleville’s direction that the secretary undertook the memoirs, for which he was supplied with ample materials. He gives, as to the matter, the picture of[331] a very important member of the party called “Les Politiques”—that is, those Frenchmen who, with no wish to separate from the Church of Rome, had yet no fanatical enmity to the Huguenots on religious grounds, but who were the enemies of the Dukes of Guise of the house of Lorraine. “Les Politiques” conquered in the end by alliance with Henry IV., and from them, years after the death of Vieilleville, came one of the most remarkable of political satires, the Satyre Ménippée. The style of Carloix is one of singular life and colour, “although,” as the editor of the edition of 1757 says, “it is full of Gaulish, and antiquated, phrases and expressions.” It would now appear more proper to put “because.” Carloix has been said to have taken “Le Loyal Serviteur,” who wrote the life of Bayard, as his model. But if so, he followed him only in his plain narrative. Carloix has a wit and a share of the quality called by the French malice, wanting to Bayard’s simple-hearted squire. Under his air of candour he is a shrewd experienced man of the world.
La Noue.

Fran?ois de la Noue, called Iron Arm, was born in Brittany of a well-connected family in 1531, and was killed at the siege of Lamballe in 1591. His character was drawn in the concise words of Henry IV.: “He was a thorough good soldier, and, still more, a thorough good man.” “C’était un grand homme de guerre, encore plus un grand homme de bien.” What are called his memoirs form the twenty-sixth book of his Discours Politiques et Militaires, a great work of description, criticism, and[332] reflection, rather than history, composed while he was a prisoner in the hands of the Spaniards in the Low Countries.[107] La Noue, who was converted to “the religion” by the chaplain of Coligny, was a type of all that was best among the Huguenots. He did not embrace the fanaticism together with the principles of his party. The memoirs, which are in fact an account of the wars of Religion, from the first “taking up of arms” in 1562 till 1570, are remarkably impartial. La Noue was one of the small body of men who can be perfectly loyal to their own party, and yet never falsify the story in its favour. He is just to the chiefs on the other side. Though a profoundly moral man, he was saved from priggery by a very real sense of humour. He could see the laughable side of things. His style wants the inimitable flash of Monluc, and it has not got the very peculiar flavour of the prose of D’Aubigné, but it is nervous, clear, exact, and thoroughly excellent in its own way—the way of a wise temperate man, a quiet gentleman, and modest valiant soldier.
D’Aubigné.

The title of memoir-writer must be understood in a very wide sense when it is applied to D’Aubigné. Strictly speaking, the short Vie à ses Enfants is his memoir.[108] The Histoire Universelle, his main work in prose, is a great general history of contemporary events at home and abroad. But then it is also a history of events in which D’Aubigné himself played an active part, and which[333] he tells from an intensely personal point of view. It is to be noted that it ends with the wars of Religion, and the peace which was brought about by the abjuration of the king—that is to say, when D’Aubigné himself ceased to take a prominent share in public affairs. To judge by his other prose work, which is considerable,[109] D’Aubigné was by nature a vehement—or even virulent—pamphleteer. His Baron de F?neste and his Confession de Sancy are fiercely satirical. They are also rather obscure, and not easily readable. It was on the suggestion of Henry IV. that he first began to think of writing the history of his time. He was to have worked in co-operation with the President Jeannin, an ex-Leaguer, and another thorough-going partisan. It is difficult to imagine what they could have produced between them. This fantastic scheme was dropped, and the Histoire Universelle was written after the king’s death. The style of D’Aubigné shows the influence of his learned education, and of his practice in the poetic school of Ronsard. He sometimes uses purely pedantic words, as when he says that his father put him under the charge of a tutor, “Jean Costin, homme astorge et impiteux.” Astorge is a Greek word (?στοργο?), which would never have been used by Carloix, La Noue, or Monluc. Again, he deliberately followed classic models in the long speeches, frequently delivered by himself, which abound in his History, and are the most carefully written[334] parts. When he tells Henry IV. in one of these addresses that it is useless for him to endeavour to make peace with the Court, because “you are guilty of your birth, and of the wrongs which have been done you,” the echo of Sallust and of Tacitus is distinctly audible; yet he can also be colloquial, and has no scruple in using idiomatic and proverbial phrases which a later generation would have rejected as unworthy of the “dignity of history.” Dignity is not wanting to D’Aubigné, but it is given by the force of his thoughts and of his character, which is that of a man who might be a tyrannical friend and an exacting servant, but who was brave and high-minded.
Monluc.

For a perfect picture of a partisan on the other side we have only to go to the Commentaries of one whom D’Aubigné describes as “ce vieux renard de Monluc.” Yet Blaise de Lasseran-Massencome, Seigneur de Monluc, is perhaps hardly to be called a party man. Like the Lord Byron of our own civil war, he “was passionately the king’s.” He was born in or about 1503, near Condom, of an ancient and impoverished family of Gascony. Though the eldest son, he had even less than the traditional cadet’s portion. He could boast that, though a gentleman born, he had fought his way up from the lowest rank. After serving in the wars of Italy, he was named Governor of Guyenne by the king, and there distinguished himself by a ferocity exceptional even in those times. An arquebuse-wound in the face at the siege of Rabastens in 1570 disabled him for active service. His Commentaries were dictated in his last[335] years, and he died in 1577.[110] It is one of the many sayings attributed to Henry IV. that the Commentaries of Monluc are “the Soldier’s Bible.” Whether the king said it or not, no truer description of this delightful book could be given. Monluc was a man of his time and his race. He “had the honour to be a Gascon” in every sense of the word, having all the valour, enterprise, craft, humour, and expansive vanity of the type. But he was also a perfect soldier, and profoundly convinced that his business was the greatest a man could follow. His Commentaries were avowedly written to show the “captains and lieutenants of France” what a soldier ought to be, by the example of Blaise de Monluc. The very thoroughness of his vanity gives the book a sincere tone. We feel that he was far too well pleased with himself to think it necessary to lie. That he saw things through the colouring medium of his self-sufficiency is possible—even certain—but at least he gives them as he saw them. Monluc was also a very able man, who was not wanting in appreciation of the humorous side of his own gasconnades, and therefore his vanity is never silly. The style is that of a book dictated by a man with a boundless faconde—that is to say, command of ready language; but it is too vivid and has too much substance ever to be garrulous. At times he can strike out images of great force.

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Brant?me.

Different though they were in life and character, there is a certain resemblance between Monluc and Brant?me. Both have the same air of perfect satisfaction with themselves, and both pour out the fruits of their varied experience with the same appearance of colloquial confidence.[111] Pierre de Bourdeilles, called Brant?me from the name of an abbey of which he was lay abbot—that is to say, of which he drew the abbot’s portion by favour of the king, without taking the vows—was a younger son of a distinguished family of Perigord. He was born about 1540, and died in 1614. During many years he travelled much, fought more or less, and lived at Court in the intervals of journeys or campaigns. Being disappointed of a place which the king had promised him, he was preparing to revenge himself by treason, when his horse fell with him, and crippled him for life. Brant?me now betook himself to writing his reminiscences as a consolation. Though he professed a certain contempt for letters, he spent great pains on his work, and its bulk is considerable. In addition to some minor treatises—the so-called Discours des Duels, the Rodomontades Espaignolles, and a few others—he made two great collections, which he named Des Hommes and Des Femmes. These he rewrote and revised not a little. It was his wish that they should be published as he left them, but his heirs neglected his directions. His manuscripts were copied, handed[337] about, and finally straggled into print by fragments, to which the booksellers gave fancy names, such as Les Grandes Dames, Les Dames Galantes, and so forth. The admiration which Monluc felt for his own business of soldiering, Brant?me extended to every manifestation of energetic character by deed or word, moral or immoral, with a marked, but mainly artistic, preference for good sayings and immorality. He is not to be trusted in details, but he is in himself an invaluable witness to the time which produced him. Nowhere else can we see so fully the combination of the French love of showy action, and indifference to what we call morality, with the cruel wickedness of Italy, which distinguished the Court of the later Valois. He does not seem to have been in himself a bad man, and yet it does not appear that he saw any difference between right and wrong. Murders, and breaches of the seventh commandment, committed by ladies and gentlemen in a spirited way, have his admiration quite as easily as the most honourable actions. He tells all in the same brightly coloured, rapid, gossipping style, and stops to rejoice over every striking story which runs from his pen, whether it be a trait of magnanimity on the part of the Duke of Guise, or the brutal murder of three unarmed traders by one of his own friends, who was angry, and relieved his feelings by a butchery.

The attempt to enumerate all the writers who may be classed with one or another of the five just named could lead to nothing but a catalogue of mere names. Marguerite de Valois (1553-1615), the wife whom Henry IV. married at the “red wedding” of Saint[338] Bartholomew, and afterwards repudiated, wrote memoirs under the direct inspiration of her friend and admirer Brant?me. Pierre de l’Estoile (1545-1611)[112] wrote Mémoires-Journaux—i.e., a diary of his time. The Correspondence of Catherine de Medici—recently edited by M. de Ferrière—of Duplessis-Mornay (1549-1623), and of the Cardinal D’Ossat (1557-1604), which have long been known, the Negotiations of Pierre Jeannin (1546-1632), the great History of De Thou, written in Latin, are all of value, and are all well written. The list could easily be swollen, but it would be to little purpose where space does not allow of more than mention. From the literary point of view they are notable as showing that the autobiographical, anecdotic, historical, and, in short, average practical writing faculty of the French, which has given their literature its unrivalled continuity, was in full vigour during these generations, when, as one is tempted to think, men must have been far too intent on keeping themselves alive in the prevailing anarchy to have leisure for the use of the pen. Spain, in its happier days, produced something approaching the French historical and memoir work of the later sixteenth century. Elizabethan England, rich beyond comparison in poetic genius, has nothing like it to show. It could not be, of course; and yet we could have spared, not Marlowe, but perhaps Greene and Peele, and certainly Nash, Lodge (the lyrics apart), and Breton, to see the Armada, and the voyages to the Isles, through the eyes of an English Monluc, or the pacification[339] of Ireland as told by a La Noue of our own, or such a picture of the Court of Elizabeth as could have been painted by the nearest conceivable English approach to Brant?me.
The Satyre Ménipp&e............