La Grande Mademoiselle, 1627-1652. Barine Arvède

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СКАЧАТЬ and volume of his train. It was because La Grande Mademoiselle had, from earliest youth, possessed an army of squires, of courtiers, of valets, and of serving-men and serving-women—a horde beginning with the fine milord and ending with the hare-faced scullion, seen now and then in some shadowy retreat of the palace, low-browed, down-trodden, looking out with dazzled eyes upon the world of life and luxury—it was because she had been a ruler even in her swaddling bands, that she could aspire, naturally and without overweening arrogance, to the hands of the most powerful sovereigns. "The sons of France," says a document of 1649, "are provided with just such officials as surround the King; but they are less numerous. … The Princes have officers in accordance with their revenues and in accordance with the rank that they hold in the kingdom."[8]

      The same document furnishes us with details of the installation of Anne of Austria. If, when we estimate the equipage of Mademoiselle, we reduce it by half of the estimate of the Queen's equipage, we fall short of the reality. Like an army in campaign, a Court ought to be sufficient unto itself, able to meet all its requirements. The upper domestic retinue of the Queen comprised more than one hundred persons, maîtres-d'hôtel or stewards, cup-bearers, carvers, secretaries, physicians, surgeons, oculists, musicians, squires, almoners, nine chaplains, "her confessor," a common confessor, and too many other kinds of employees to be enumerated. Under all these officials, each one of whom had his own especial underlings, were equal numbers of valets and of chambermaids who assured the service of the apartments. The Court cooking kept busy one hundred and fifty-nine drilled knife-sharpeners, soup-skimmers, roast-hasteners, and water-handers, or people to hand water as the cooks needed it for their mixtures. There were other servitors whose business it was to await the beck and call of their superiors—call-boys, always waiting for signals. Then came the busy world of the stables; then fifty merchants or shop-men, and an indefinite number of artisans of all the orders of all the trades. In all there were between six and seven hundred souls, not counting the valets of the valets or the grand "charges," the officials close to the Queen, the Queen's chancellor, the chevaliers d'honneur, or gentlemen-in-waiting, the ladies in-waiting, and maids of honour.

      

      The great and noble people were often very badly served by their hordes of servants. Madame de Motteville tells us how the ladies of the Court of Anne of Austria were nourished in the peaceful year 1644, when the Court coffers were yet full.

      According to the law of etiquette, the Queen supped in solitary state. Her supper ended, we ate what was left. We ate without order or measure, in any way we could. Our only table service was her wash-cloth and the remnants of her bread. And, though this repast was very ill-organised, it was not at all disagreeable, because it had the advantage of what is called "privacy," and because of the quality and the merit of those who sometimes met there.

      The most modern Courts still retain some vestiges of the Middle Ages. Louis XIII. had, or had had, four dwarfs, their salary being three hundred "tournois" or Tours livres. The King paid a man to look after his dwarfs, keep them in order, and regulate their conduct.[9]

      To the day of her death, despite her exile and her misery, Marie de Médicis maintained in her service a certain Jean Gassan, who figures in her will as employed in "keeping the parrot."

      When a child, Louis XIV. had two baladins. Mademoiselle had a dwarf who did not retire from her service until 1645. The registers of the Parliament (date, 10th May, 1645) contain letters patent and duly verified, by which the King accorded to "Ursule Matton, the dwarf of Mademoiselle, sole daughter of the Duke of Orleans, the power and the right to establish a little market in a court behind the new meat market of Saint Honoré."[10]

      Marie de Médicis completed the house and establishment of her granddaughter by giving her, for governess, a person of much virtue, wit, and merit, Madame de Saint Georges, who knew the Court thoroughly. Nevertheless Mademoiselle asserted that she had been very badly raised, thanks to the herd of flattering hirelings who thronged the Tuileries, and who no sooner surrounded her than they became insupportable.

      It is a common thing [said she] to see children who are objects of respect, and whose high birth and great possessions are continually the subject of conversation, acquire sentiments of spurious glory. I so often had at my ears people who talked to me either about my riches or about my birth that I had no trouble to persuade myself that what they said was true, and I lived in a state of vanity which was very inconvenient.

      While very young she had reached a degree of folly where it displeased her to have people speak of her maternal grandmother, Madame de Guise. "I used to say: 'She is my distant grandmamma; she is not Queen.'"

      It does not appear that Madame Saint Georges, that person of so much merit, had done anything to neutralise evil influences.

      Throughout the seventeenth century, opinions on the education of girls were very vacillating because little importance was attached to them. In 1687, after all the progress accomplished through the double influence of Port Royal and Madame de Maintenon, Fénelon wrote:

      Nothing is more neglected than the education of girls. Fashion and the caprices of the mothers often decide nearly everything. The education of boys is considered of eminent importance because of its bearing upon the public welfare; and while as many errors are committed in the education of boys as in the education of girls, at least it is an accepted idea that a great deal of enlightenment is required for the successful education of a boy.

      It was supposed that contact with society would be sufficient to form the mind and to polish the wit of woman. In this fact lay the cause of the inequality then noticeable in women of the same class. They were more or less superior from various points of view, as they had been more or less advantageously placed to profit by their worldly lessons, by the spectacle of life, and by the conversation of honest people.

      The privileged ones were women who, like Mademoiselle and her associates, had been accustomed to the social circles where the history of their times was made by the daily acts of life. Their best teachers were the men of their own class, who intrigued, conspired, fought, and died before their eyes—often for their pleasure. The agitated and peril-fraught lives of those men, their chimeras, and their romanticism put into daily practice, were admirable lessons for the future heroines of the Fronde. To understand the pupils, we must know something of their teachers. What was the process of formation of those professors of energy; in what mould was run that race of venturesome and restless cavaliers who evoked a whole generation of Amazons made in their own image? The system of the education of France of that epoch is in question, and it is worthy of a close and detailed examination.

      IV

      From their infancy, boys were prepared for the ardent life of their times. They were raised according to a clearly defined and fixed idea common to rich and poor, to noble and to plebeian. The object of a boy's education was to make him a man while he was still very young. The only difference in the opinions of the gentleman and of the bourgeois was this:

      The gentleman believed that action was the best stimulant to action. The bourgeois thought that the finer human sentiments, the so-called "humanities," were the only sound foundations for a virile and practical education. But whatever the method used, in that day, a man entered upon life at the age when our sons are but just beginning interminable studies preliminary to their "examinations." At the age of eighteen, sixteen—even fifteen years—the De Gassions, the La Rochefoucaulds, the Omer Talons, and the Arnauld d'Andillys had become officers, lawyers, or men of business, and in their day affairs bore little resemblance to modern affairs. In our day men do not enter active life until they have been aged and fatigued by the march of years. The time of entrance upon the career of life ought not to be a matter of indifference to a people. At the age of thirty years a man no longer thinks and feels as he thought and felt at the age of twenty. His manner of making war is different; and there is even more difference in his political action. He has СКАЧАТЬ