A STREAM OF FRENCH HISTORIES

The Dauphin. By J. B. Morton. (Longtnans. 12s. 6d.) MR. ROEDER'S prolonged biography—it runs to 600 pages— of the Medici who was married to King Henry H of France,

and chiefly figures in our school books for her share in the massacre of St. Bartholomew, has met in America with a great success, due no doubt to the modern standpoint of its author and the brightness of his style. A now popular philosophy of history is implicit in the first pages of the book and becomes explicit in the last paragraph, Mr. Roeder's reflections upon the disappearance of Catherine from the dusty stage where she had played so long and so difficult a part. Mr. Roeder has opened his story with an account of the Medicis in Florence, representatives of the "new world-idea" of Capitalism to which the Church itself suc- cumbed with the elevation to the Papacy of the Medici, Leo X, who personified " money " and the advent of the new capitalist society. And in bidding farewell to his subject, he has dwelt upon the shaping economic reality which, as he holds, underlay the appearances, the religious passions and the princely rivalries, among which Catherine pursued

her circumspect and balancing policies : "The day was to come when religion itself, and not merely the quarrel of creeds, would wither .away, and the stakes for which men had suffered so bitterly would no longer have any meaning for the world. Then and then only could the underlying issues which the religious question had masked and misled in the sixteenth century emerge. . . . Two hundred years later France and the world were ripe for the revolution of 1789. But. . . again political democracy is seen to be nothing without economic democracy. It has remained for our own day to attack the fundamental question . . . "

Mr. Roeder is a psychologist as well as a philosopher, and he probes deep. "Her nature was so negative that whatever she did left the effect of a blank." "Physically, morally, politically, her sterility reappeared ; and the only progress it was possible to trace in her life was the growing influence of continual frustration, gradually neutralising and deadening her, until she became what she was destined to be, a completely negative nature." Others have spoken more simply of Catherine, seeing in her the poor woman from a foreign country, with her husband dead, working hard to protect her three children who reigned in succession in most untoward circumstances. I do not think, however, that even the professional historians are likely to find much fault with Mr. Roeder's crowded and lively pages. Though he seeks to approach Catherine and the French religious wars from a new angle, the facts which he presents are in the main

the accepted facts, such as the absence of religious conviction in the French Court and the growth of a republican and

separatist sentiment in the Huguenot movement.

It was the paradox of the time that the Catholic League, or a minority in it, came to share this sentiment, and the "Lost Revolution" of Mr. Roeder's title refers to the rising

of the lower-middle classes in Paris, fanatically Catholic, in 1588. The "Day of the Barricades" showed how low the monarchy and the legitimist principle had fallen, and

Catherine was dead before her last son, Henry III, saved these by reconciling himself with the "man of the two religions," Henry of Navarre. The story of how the latter succeeded in gaining his heritage in the face of Spain, the League and the Catholic Church, is told in a shorter book which has followed Mr. Roeder's Lost Revolution into our publishing lists : Mr. Quentin Hurst's Henry of Navarre, a less speculative work, unpretentious, but excellent of its class. Mr. Hurst tells how France stood in sore need of a great man, and found him in Henri IV who succeeded to the throne without the political friendship of either of the religious parties and without funds, and with nothing but his genial character and legitimacy to recommend him. He was a king without a kingdom, and twice he failed to enter Paris by force. Mr. Hurst represents these two sieges as the failure of a still possible hope that France might be re-unified through Protestantism. The defeats made Henry's conversion inevitable, for they showed him that unity could then only come through common Catholicism. But to most historians, including (I should gather) Mr. Roeder, it has seemed that the decision that

France should not be Protestant had already been taken when Catherine de Medici, in a panic lest the Catholic Guise should forestall her, struck Coligny down on the eve of St. Bartholomew.

Henry IV is a less difficult subject for the biographer than Catherine, so much more of the direct evidence survives, and much of it anecdotal. There is a good story in Mr. Hurst's book of the disputation between a Catholic divine and a Huguenot, which influenced Henry towards the adoption of Catholicism. The Huguenot having admitted that a Catholic might find salvation, Henry answered : "Prudence advises that I should be of their religion and not of yours, because being of theirs I can be saved both according to their opinion and to yours, but being of theirs I can be saved only according to. yours : "-

an an argument which has carried weight with devout souls like Newman as well as with sceptics of Henry's type.

With Knave of Hearts we skip a reign, and find ourselves out of theology and politics, in adventures chiefly amorous, Miss Coryn having raided Cytherea for her subject. Drawing on the so fruitful memoirs, &c., of Louis XIV's time, she describes the exploits of the Lauzun who figures in " serious " histories as the French commander at the Boyne, and also in de Sevigne and Saint-Simon. The ugly little man was irresistible to women, and Miss Coryn opens her story by tracing the " reactions" of "La Grande Mademoiselle," the Princess of Monaco, his mistress as well as Louis', and other ladies of the Court, on his entrance into Henrietta of England's Salon :

"The Princess' relations with him were of long standing and one of them was that of cousinship. . . . King Louis most obligingly withdrew his encroaching foot from the boundaries of the Prin- cipality; but even as he retreated on one side, he advanced on the other, menacing fresh boundaries. . . . The threatened territory was undoubtedly the official property of Prince Grimaldi, while Monsieur de Lauzun was so constant an inhabitant as almost to have established a legal residence."

This mock serious manner' is not inappropriate in a book on Lauzun whose shameless career contained many elements of good comedy ; and Miss Coryn has reconstructed quite brilliantly the scenes leading up to the amazing marriage of the adventurer with La Grande Mademoiselle.

The impudent Gascon, concealed under Madame de Montespan's bed at the hour of Louis' visit, reappears for us in Mr. Karl Bartz's book, a translation from the German, as an instance of the gross deceptions which Louis had to endure in his search for friendship among men. Karl Bartz's book is not, however, a chronique scandaleuse ; it is a serious and artistic attempt to show how the French State, in a sombre enough background of misery, became under Louis the brilliant model for all Europe. The task is accomplished in a series of short chapters, chronologically ordered, on the policies, arts, wars, industries, court life and personalities of this reign. Louis XIV is not an intellectually pretentious work ; nor does it give obvious signs of ambitious research. But Mr. Bartz's descriptive brevity, a remarkable contrast to the method of Mr. Roeder in the study of Catherine, produces a pictorial effect which is very satisfying.

The death of a dramatic and mysterious figure often stirs the imagination so strongly that a legend of survival grows up. This has been shown in our time when there are still many people who say that Kitchener never sank in the ' Hampshire ' ; and so it was with the Irish in the case of Parnell, whom even John Dillon fancied that he had seen in a hotel in Chicago three years after the funeral at Glas- nevin. But of all such beliefs the most widespread has con- cerned the son of Louis XVI, who is the subject of Mr. J. B. Morton's biography The Dauphin. A boy's ten years, even if inclusive of thirty-two months' horrible imprisonment, hardly offers sufficient material for a biography ; and Mr. Morton's book can be more aptly called the study of a death than a "Life." In the earlier chapters, however, the story of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, seen as .a father and mother, from the flight to Varennes to their executions, is admirably presented ; nor could one better the restrained yet imaginative use to which Mr. Morton has put the awful documents of the subsequent solitary confinement of the royal child. When he comes to the question of the Dauphin's alleged Survival of this treatment, or rescue, he unravels decisively the web of mystery ; and his pages become, as

is said on the cover, as exciting as a detective novel.

J. M. HONE.