Devereux — Complete

“Hush! Madame,” said I, “spare me for a moment;” and I rose, and mingled with the Abbe’s companions.

“So, you have only arrived to-day,” I heard one of them say to him.

“No, I could not despatch my business before.”

“And how are matters in England?”

“Ripe! if the life of his Majesty (of France) be spared a year longer, we will send the Elector of Hanover back to his principality.”

“Hist!” said the companion, and looked towards me. Montreuil ceased abruptly: our eyes met; his fell. I affected to look among the group as if I had expected to find there some one I knew, and then, turning away, I seated myself alone and apart. There, unobserved, I kept my looks on Montreuil. I remarked that, from time to time, his keen dark eye glanced towards me, with a look rather expressive of vigilance than anything else. Soon afterwards his little knot dispersed; I saw him converse for a few moments with Dubois, who received him I thought distantly; and then he was engaged in a long conference with the Bishop of Frejus, whom, till then, I had not perceived among the crowd.

As I was loitering on the staircase, where I saw Montreuil depart with the Bishop, in the carriage of the latter, Hamilton, accosting me, insisted on my accompanying him to Chaulieu’s, where a late supper awaited the sons of wine and wit. However, to the good Count’s great astonishment, I preferred solitude and reflection, for that night, to anything else.

Montreuil’s visit to the French capital boded me no good. He possessed great influence with Fleuri, and was in high esteem with Madame de Maintenon, and, in effect, very shortly after his return to Paris, the Bishop of Frejus looked upon me with a most cool sort of benignancy; and Madame de Maintenon told her friend, the Duchesse de St. Simon, that it was a great pity a young nobleman of my birth and prepossessing appearance (ay! my prepossessing appearance would never have occurred to the devotee, if I had not seemed so sensible of her own) should not only be addicted to the wildest dissipation, but, worse still, to Jansenistical tenets. After this there was no hope for me save in the King’s word, which his increasing infirmities, naturally engrossing his attention, prevented my hoping too sanguinely would dwell very acutely on his remembrance. I believe, however, so religiously scrupulous was Louis upon a point of honour that, had he lived, I should have had nothing to complain of. As it was—but I anticipate! Montreuil disappeared from Paris, almost as suddenly as he had appeared there. And, as drowning men catch at a straw, so, finding my affairs at a very low ebb, I thought I would take advice, even from Madame de Balzac.

I accordingly repaired to her hotel. She was at home, and, fortunately, alone.

“You are welcome, mon fils,” said she; “suffer me to give you that title: you are welcome; it is some days since I saw you.”

“I have numbered them, I assure you, Madame,” said I, “and they have crept with a dull pace; but you know that business has claims as well as pleasure!”

“True!” said Madame de Balzac, pompously: “I myself find the weight of politics a little insupportable, though so used to it; to your young brain I can readily imagine how irksome it must be!”

“Would, Madame, that I could obtain your experience by contagion; as it is, I fear that I have profited little by my visit to his Majesty. Madame de Maintenon will not see me, and the Bishop of Frejus (excellent man!) has been seized with a sudden paralysis of memory whenever I present myself in his way.”

“That party will never do,—I thought not,” said Madame de Balzae, who was a wonderful imitator of the fly on the wheel; “my celebrity, and the knowledge that I loved you for your father’s sake, were, I fear, sufficient to destroy your interest with the Jesuits and their tools. Well, well, we must repair the mischief we have occasioned you. What place would suit you best?”

“Why, anything diplomatic. I would rather travel, at my age, than remain in luxury and indolence even at Paris!”

“Ah, nothing like diplomacy!” said Madame de Balzac, with the air of a Richelieu, and emptying her snuff-box at a pinch; “but have you, my son, the requisite qualities for that science, as well as the tastes? Are you capable of intrigue? Can you say one thing and mean another? Are you aware of the immense consequence of a look or a bow? Can you live like a spider, in the centre of an inexplicable net—inexplicable as well as dangerous—to all but the weaver? That, my son, is the art of politics; that is to be a diplomatist!”

“Perhaps, to one less penetrating than Madame de Balzac,” answered I, “I might, upon trial, not appear utterly ignorant of the noble art of state duplicity which she has so eloquently depicted.”

“Possibly!” said the good lady; “it must indeed be a profound dissimulator to deceive me.”

“But what would you advise me to do in the present crisis? What party to adopt, what individual to flatter?”

Nothing, I already discovered and have already observed, did the inestimable Madame de Balzac dislike more than a downright question: she never answered it.

“Why, really,” said she, preparing herself for a long speech, “I am quite glad you consult me, and I will give you the best advice in my power. Ecoutez donc; you have seen the Duc de Maine?”

“Certainly!”

“Hum! ha! it would be wise to follow him; but—you take me—you understand. Then, you know, my son, there is the Duc d’Orleans, fond of pleasure, full of talent; but you know—there is a little—what do you call it? you understand. As for the Duc de Bourbon, ‘tis quite a simpleton; nevertheless we must consider: nothing like consideration; believe me, no diplomatist ever hurries. As for Madame de Maintenon, you know, and I know too, that the Duchesse d’Orleans calls her an old hag; but then—a word to the wise—eh?—what shall we say to Madame the Duchess herself?—what a fat woman she is, but excessively clever,—such a letter writer!—Well—you see, my dear young friend, that it is a very difficult matter to decide upon,—but you must already be fully aware what plan I should advise.”

“Already, Madame?”

“To be sure! What have I been saying to you all this time?—did you not hear me? Shall I repeat my advice?”

“Oh, no! I perfectly comprehend you now; you would advise me—in short—to—to—do—as well as I can.”

“You have said it, my son. I thought you would understand me on a little reflection.”

“To be sure,—to be sure,” said I.

And three ladies being announced, my conference with Madame de Balzac ended.

I now resolved to wait a little till the tides of power seemed somewhat more settled, and I could ascertain in what quarter to point my bark of enterprise. I gave myself rather more eagerly to society, in proportion as my political schemes were suffered to remain torpid. My mind could not remain quiet, without preying on itself; and no evil appeared to me so great as tranquillity. Thus the spring and earlier summer passed on, till, in August, the riots preceding the Rebellion broke out in Scotland. At this time I saw but little of Lord Bolingbroke in private; though, with his characteristic affectation, he took care that the load of business with which he was really oppressed should not prevent his enjoyment of all gayeties in public. And my indifference to the cause of the Chevalier, in which he was so warmly engaged, threw a natural restraint upon our conversation, and produced an involuntary coldness in our intercourse: so impossible is it for men to be private friends who differ on a public matter.

One evening I was engaged to meet a large party at a country-house about forty miles from Paris. I went, and stayed some days. My horses had accompanied me; and, when I left the chateau, I resolved to make the journey to Paris on horseback. Accordingly, I ordered my carriage to follow me, and attended by a single groom, commenced my expedition. It was a beautiful still morning,—the first day of the first month of autumn. I had proceeded about ten miles, when I fell in with an old French officer. I remember,—though I never saw him but that once,—I remember his face as if I had encountered it yesterday. It was thin and long, and yellow enough to have served as a caricature rather than a portrait of Don Quixote. He had a hook nose, and a long sharp chin; and all the lines, wrinkles, curves, and furrows of which the human visage is capable seemed to have met in his cheeks. Nevertheless, his eye was bright and keen, his look alert, and his whole bearing firm, gallant, and soldier-like. He was attired in a sort of military undress; wore a mustachio, which, though thin and gray, was carefully curled; and at the summit of a very respectable wig was perched a small cocked hat, adorned with a black feather. He rode very upright in his saddle; and his horse, a steady, stalwart quadruped of the Norman breed, with a terribly long tail and a prodigious breadth of chest, put one stately leg before another in a kind of trot, which, though it seemed, from its height of action and the proud look of the steed, a pretension to motion more than ordinarily brisk, was in fact a little slower than a common walk.

This noble cavalier seemed sufficiently an object of curiosity to my horse to induce the animal to testify his surprise by shying, very jealously and very vehemently, in passing him. This ill breeding on his part was indignantly returned on the part of the Norman charger, who, uttering a sort of squeak and shaking his long mane and head, commenced a series of curvets and capers which cost the old Frenchman no little trouble to appease. In the midst of these equine freaks, the horse came so near me as to splash my nether garment with a liberality as little ornamental as it was pleasurable.

The old Frenchman seeing this, took off his cocked hat very politely and apologized for the accident. I replied with equal courtesy; and, as our horses slid into quiet, their riders slid into conversation. It was begun and chiefly sustained by my new comrade; for I am little addicted to commence unnecessary socialities myself, though I should think very meanly of my pretensions to the name of a gentleman and a courtier, if I did not return them when offered, even by a beggar.

“It is a fine horse of yours, Monsieur,” said the old Frenchman; “but I cannot believe—pardon me for saying so—that your slight English steeds are so well adapted to the purposes of war as our strong chargers,—such as mine for example.”

“It is very possible, Monsieur,” said I. “Has the horse you now ride done service in the field as well as on the road?”

“Ah! le pauvre petit mignon,—no!” (petit, indeed! this little darling was seventeen hands high at the very least) “no, Monsieur: it is but a young creature this; his grandfather served me well!”

“I need not ask you, Monsieur, if you have borne arms: the soldier is stamped upon you!”

“Sir, you flatter me highly!” said the old gentleman, blushing to the very tip of his long lean ears, and bowing as low as if I had called him a Conde. “I have followed the profession of arms for more than fifty years.”

“Fifty years! ‘tis a long time.”

“A long time,” rejoined my companion, “a long time to look back upon with regret.”

“Regret! by Heaven, I should think the remembrance of fifty years’ excitement and glory would be a remembrance of triumph.”

The old man turned round on his saddle, and looked at me for some moments very wistfully. “You are young, Sir,” he said, “and at your years I should have thought with you; but—” (then abruptly changing his voice, he continued)—“Triumph, did you say? Sir, I have had three sons: they are dead; they died in battle; I did not weep; I did not shed a tear, Sir,—not a tear! But I will tell you when I did weep. I came back, an old man, to the home I had left as a young one. I saw the country a desert. I saw that the noblesse had become tyrants; the peasants had become slaves,—such slaves,—savage from despair,—even when they were most gay, most fearfully gay, from constitution. Sir, I saw the priest rack and grind, and the seigneur exact and pillage, and the tax-gatherer squeeze out the little the other oppressors had left; anger, discontent, wretchedness, famine, a terrible separation between one order of people and another; an incredible indifference to the miseries their despotism caused on the part of the aristocracy; a sullen and vindictive hatred for the perpetration of those miseries on the part of the people; all places sold—even all honours priced—at the court, which was become a public market, a province of peasants, of living men bartered for a few livres, and literally passed from one hand to another, to be squeezed and drained anew by each new possessor: in a word, Sir, an abandoned court; an unredeemed noblesse,—unredeemed, Sir, by a single benefit which, in other countries, even the most feudal, the vassal obtains from the master; a peasantry famished; a nation loaded with debt which it sought to pay by tears,—these are what I saw,—these are the consequences of that heartless and miserable vanity from which arose wars neither useful nor honourable,—these are the real components of that triumph, as you term it, which you wonder that I regret.”

Now, although it was impossible to live at the court of Louis XIV. in his latter days, and not feel, from the general discontent that prevailed even there, what a dark truth the old soldier’s speech contained, yet I was somewhat surprised by an enthusiasm so little military in a person whose bearing and air were so conspicuously martial.

“You draw a melancholy picture,” said I; “and the wretched state of culture which the lands that we now pass through exhibit is a witness how little exaggeration there is in your colouring. However, these are but the ordinary evils of war; and, if your country endures them, do not forget that she has also inflicted them. Remember what France did to Holland, and own that it is but a retribution that France should now find that the injury we do to others is (among nations as well as individuals) injury to ourselves.”

My old Frenchman curled his mustaches with the finger and thumb of his left hand: this was rather too subtile a distinction for him.

“That may be true enough, Monsieur,” said he; “but, morbleu! those maudits Dutchmen deserved what they sustained at our hands. No, Sir, no: I am not so base as to forget the glory my country acquired, though I weep for her wounds.”

“I do not quite understand you, Sir,” said I; “did you not just now confess that the wars you had witnessed were neither honourable nor useful? What glory, then, was to be acquired in a war of that character, even though it was so delightfully animated by cutting the throats of those maudits Dutchmen?”

“Sir,” answered the Frenchman, drawing himself up, “you did not understand me. When we punished Holland, we did rightly. We conquered.”

“Whether you conquered or not (for the good folk of Holland are not so sure of the fact),” answered I, “that war was the most unjust in which your king was ever engaged; but pray, tell me, Sir, what war it is that you lament?”

The Frenchman frowned, whistled, put out his under lip, in a sort of angry embarrassment, and then, spurring his great horse into a curvet, said,—