literature. That is equally true in France. The history of the French stage is continuous from the Confrérie de la Passion, through the Enfants sans Souci, and the professional actors who succeeded them at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, down to the "maison de Molière." But in the sixteenth century it skirted literature, and the alliance was not made between them till the time of Rotrou and Corneille. So the earlier dramatic literature remains a curiosity, or at the most an indication of what was to come. Its best tragedy is an "essai pâle et noble," and its comedy a rough experiment, too often the very reverse of noble. In order to show how the writers of the great time, and of the eighteenth century classic school, while working on the same fund of principles, and with similar aims, differed from their predecessors, it would be necessary to go beyond the scope of this book. 326 CHAPTER XI. FRENCH PROSE-WRITERS OF THE LATER SIXTEENTH CENTURY. ABUNDANCE OF LATER SIXTEENTH-CENTURY PROSE-A DISTINCTION-SULLY -BODIN-THE GREAT MEMOIR WRITERS CARLOIX LA NOURD'AUBIGNÉ-MONLUC-BRANTÔME-THE SATYRE MÉNIPÉE ITS ORIGIN ITS AUTHORS-ITS FORM AND SPIRIT-MONTAIGNE-HIS Abundance of 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 later sixteenth of that people to leave some record of century prose. 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, 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. 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 A distinction. 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 Théâtre 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 Economies Royales.1 It is not because this book 1 The true title, which is too characteristic not to be given in full, is, "Des Sages et Royales Economies domestiques, politiques, et militaires de Henri le Grand, le prince des vertus, des armes, et des lois, et le père en effet [i.e., en realité] de ses peuples françois. Et began to be published at the Château 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 Economies 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 Economies Royales. Something equivalent must needs be said of the memoirs of Castelnau, of Gaspard de Saulx des servitudes utiles, obéissantes, convenables, et administrations loyales de Maximilien de Béthune, l'un des plus confidents familiers et utiles soldats et serviteurs du grand Mars des François. Dédiés à la France, à tous les bons soldats et tous peuples François." It is described as printed at Amestelredam (Amsterdam), at the sign of the three immortal virtues crowned with amaranth-i.e., Faith, Hope, Charity (of which last Sully had no great share), by Alethinosgraphe of Clearétimélée, and Graphexechon of Pistariste—i.e., Veracious - Writer of Glory - Virtue - Care, and Emeritus Secretary of High Probity. The Economies Royales are included by M. Petitot in his collection of memoirs, 2nd series, vols. i.-ix. Tavannes-written by his son Jean-of Condé, of François de Guise, and many others.1 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. 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 The great memoirwriters. body of literature in the very fullest sense of the word. Montaigne, who is pre-eminent, stands 1 These memoirs are included in the great collections of Petitot, and Michaud and Poujoulat. M. Zeller, in two volumes of his excellent Histoire de France racontée par les contemporains, has made up a consecutive story by extracts from the writers named above and others. No other literature could supply so much good reading of the same kind, and they are to be obtained for the "ridiculous sum" of tenpence each. |