La Grande Mademoiselle. Barine Arvède

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СКАЧАТЬ the hardihood to lay hold upon an inkstand. D'Urfé knew that war demoralises a people; he comprehended the situation of his country; he had been a member of the League, and one of the last to surrender. He knew that the spirit of love was hovering over France, waiting to find a resting-place. François de Sales and d'Urfé were friends, and in such close communion of thought that, to quote the words of Montégut, "there was not a simple analogy, there was almost an identity of inspiration and of talent between Astrée and the Introduction à la vie dévote."

      D'Urfé had only to remember the æstheticism which surrounded his expanding youth to comprehend the general weariness caused by the lack of intellectual symmetry and by the rusticity of the manners of the new reign. He was a serious and thoughtful man; he had devoted long months, even years, to meditation and to study before he had touched his pen, and by repeated revisions he had ranged in his book the greater part of the thoughts and the aspirations of his epoch. In a word, the obscure provincial writer who had never entered the Louvre had composed a quasi-universal work resuming all the intellectual and sentimental life of an epoch. Astrée was a powerful achievement; but one, or at most but two, such books can be produced in a century.31 D'Urfé's laborious efforts attained a double result. While he extricated and brought into the light the ideal for which he had searched years together, he excited his contemporaries to strive to be natural and real, and the first French novel, Astrée, was our first romance with a thesis. The subject is commonplace: lovers whose theme is love, and a lovers' quarrel; in the last volume of the book, love triumphs, the quarrel is forgotten, and the lovers marry.

      In the beginning of the work, the shepherdess Astrée, beside herself with causeless jealousy, overwhelms the shepherd Celadon with reproaches and Celadon, tired of life, throws himself into the Lignon. Standing upon the bank of the river, he apostrophises a ring and the riband left in his hand when his shepherdess escaped his grasp:

      "Bear witness, O dear cord! that rather than break one knot of my affections I will renounce my life, and then, when I am dead, and my cruel love beholds thee in my hand, thou shalt speak for me, thou shalt say that no one could be loved as I loved her… Nor lover wronged like me!" Then he appeals to the ring. "And thou, emblem of eternal, faithful love, be glad to be with me in death, the only token left me of her love!"

      Hardly has he spoken when, turning his face toward Astrée, he springs with folded arms into the water. The nymphs save him, and his romantic adventures serve as the wire carrying the action of the romance.

      But the system is inadequate to its strain. Dead cars bring about a constantly recurring block, and more than an hundred personages of more or less importance stop the way by their gallant intrigues. The romance mirrors the passing loves and the fevered and passionate life of the be-ribanded people who hung up their small arms in their panoplies, twisted their lances into pruning-hooks, and replaced the pitiless art of war by the political arts of peace. Honoré d'Urfé's heroes appear to be more jealously careful of their fine sentiments than of the sword-thrusts lavishly distributed by the lords and gentlemen of their days. They are much more zealous in their search for elegant expressions than in bestirring themselves to serious action. The perfumed students of phraseology have changed since the night of Saint Bartholomew, when more than one of them fought side by side with Henry de Guise; but it is not difficult to recognise the precursors of the Fronde in the druids, shepherds, and chevaliers of Astrée, and so thought d'Urfé's first readers.

      With extreme pleasure they contemplated themselves in the noble puppets seen in the romance, basking in the sun of peace. Away with care! They had nothing worse to fight than lovers' casuistries, and they lay in the shadows of the trees, enjoying the riches of a country redeemed by their own blood. With them were their ladies; lover and lass were disguised as shepherd and shepherdess, or as mythological god and goddess. Idle and elegant as they were, the happy lovers had been tortured by wounds, racked by pride, stung by the fire of battle; to sleep for ever had been the vision of many a bivouac, and now war was over, and to lie in a day-dream fanned by the summer winds and watched by the eye of woman, – this was the evolution of the hope of death! This was the restorative desired by the provincial nobles when they stood firm as rocks in ranks thinned and broken by thirty years of civil and religious war. Such a rest the jaded knights had hoped for when they accepted their one alternative, and, by their recognition of Henry IV., acknowledged submission to a principal superior to private interest and personal ambition.

      The high nobility had soon tired of order and obedience. Never was it more turbulent or more undisciplined than under Louis XIII. and in the minority of Louis XIV., but it must be noted as one of the signs of the times that it no longer carried its jaunty ease of conscience into its plots and its mutinies. Curious proofs of this fact are still in existence; the revolting princes and lords stoutly denied that they had taken arms against the King. If they had openly made war, and so palpably that they could not deny it, they invariably asserted with affirmations that they had done it "to render themselves useful to the King's service." Gaston d'Orléans gave the same reason for his conduct when he deserted France for a foreign country. All averred that they had been impelled to act by a determination to force the King to accept deliverance from humiliating tyranny, or from pernicious influences. During the Fronde, when men changed parties as freely as they changed their gloves, the rebels protested their fidelity to the King, and they did it because the idea of infidelity was abhorrent to them.

      No one in France would have admitted that it could be possible to hold personal interests or personal caprice above the interests of the State, and in the opinion of the French cavalier this would have been reason enough for any action; but there was a more practical reason; the descendants of the great barons were beginning to doubt their power to maintain the assertion of their so-called rights. By suggesting subjects for the meditations of all the people of France who could read or write Astrée had contributed a novelty in scruples. In our day such a book as Astrée would excite no interest; the reiteration of the "torrents of tenderness" to which it owed its sentimental influence would make it a doubtful investment for any publisher, and even the thoughtful reader would find its best pages difficult reading; but when all is said and done, it remains, and it shall remain, the book which best divines our perpetually recurring and eternal necessities.

      It treats of but one passion, love, and yet it gives the most subtle study in existence. In it all the ways of loving are minutely analysed in interminable conversations. All the reasons why man should love are given, with all the reasons why he should not love. All the joys found by the lover in his sufferings are set forth, with all the sufferings that his joys reserve for him. All the reasons for fidelity and all the reasons for inconstancy are openly dissected. A complete list is given of all the intellectual sensations of love (and of some sensations which are not intellectual). In short, Astrée is a diagnosis of the spiritual, mental, and moral condition of the love-sick. It contains all the "cases of conscience" which may or might arise, under the same or different circumstances, in the lives of people who live to love, and who, thus loving, see but one reason for existence – people who severally or individually, each in his own way and according to his own light, exercise this faculty to love, – still loving and loving even then, now, and always.

      D'Urfé's conception was of the antique type. He regarded love as a fatality against which it were vain to struggle. Toward the middle of the book the sorrowful Celadon, crushed by the wrath of Astrée, is hidden in a cavern where he "sustains life by eating grasses." The druid Adamas knows that Celadon is perishing by inches, and he essays to bring the lover to reason. Celadon answers him:

      "If, as you say, God gave me full possession of power over myself, why does He ask me to give an account of myself? – for just as He gave me into my own hands and just as He gave me to myself, so have I given myself to her to whom I am consigned for ever. First of all! If He would have account of Celadon, let Him apply to her of whom I am! Enough for me if I offend not her nor violate my sacred gift to her. God willed my life, for by my destiny I love; and God knows it, and has always known it, for since I first began to have a will I gave myself to her, СКАЧАТЬ