BOOKS.
AN EIGHTLENTH-CENTURY ROY ANCE.*
MISS WEBSTER has made the loves of the Chevalier de Boufflers and Mine. de Sabran a peg on which to hang a vivid and highly interesting account of one of the most pathetic episodes recorded in history. She relates how the joyous, artificial French society of the eighteenth century, which, like that of ancient Rome, was laughing when it died, foundered at the first. onslaught of that "fermentation epouvantable dens tous lea esprits," of which the hero of her story noted the preva- lence in 1788. "Before 1789," Mme. Vies+ le Bran said, "women were queens ; the Revolution dethroned them." The early part of the history, which deals with the period before the savagery of a maddened nation had thrown a tragic gloom over the political stage, is, therefore, eminently adapted to bring into prominence the special merits of feminine authorship. Miss Webster's sympathies are distinctly Royalist, but she possesses all the qualities necessary in order to present to her countrymen and country-women a true picture of the most terrible transition from gay to grave which the world has ever witnessed. The quick instincts of her sex enable her to understand, in part to condone, and certainly to foresee the inevitable end of the period when the Chevalier, whom she describes as a mixture of Don Quixote and Don Juan, was constrained to address the woman whom he loved with a passionate ardour as "a sister dearer than Antigone," and to encourage her to occupy herself chiefly with translating the writings of the Stoic philosopher Seneca. She knows that when Mme. de Sabran spoke to her love-stricken swain in "a little frosty voice" a hidden fire really lurked beneath the ice. She can understand how it was that, after receiving conclusive proof that her lover had succumbed to the florid charms of some rather coarse provincial " Duleinea del Toboso," Mine. do Sabran bade him "an eternal adieu" with the full intention that the farewell should be the very reverse of eternal, for did she not still feel that he " was true to her in spirit " 7 She can estimate, as none but a woman can, the secret which enabled Mine. de Sabran to maintain for a lifetime her hold on a man who " adored women with fury but without fidelity." Miss Webster reveals to us the key to the enigma. "In the matter of holding a man's affection nothing, perhaps, is more important than the art of changing the key. The woman who harps is lost. . . . Mme. de Sabran never harped." No mere man could understand, as Miss Webster does, that the studied negligence of Mine. de Sabran's toilet was in reality a manifestation of the highest art in dressing. Moreover, in dealing with the more sombre phases of a period when the world of France appeared to have gone mad, those tender maternal instincts, which Euripides said are inbred in women, are touched to the core by the account of the little Dauphin, with clasped hands, piteously wailing "Grace pour Mamas! Glace pour Maman I " when his queenly mother was surrounded by a raging mob of maenads and viragoes.
The keynote which gave the tone to the whole eighteenth-century French society was the desire to escape from boredom. The Chevalier made an epigrammatic and faithful summary of the aspirations of his own class when he said : " Mourir n'est rien, se battre eat assez jell, mais s'ermuyer eat affreux." Neither was the fear of boredom wholly confined to terrestrial regions. A hint was at times thrown out that it might even pervade regions which were celestial. It is probable that, save an eighteenth-century Frenchman, no human being of any country or of any generation would have indulged in the pagan utterance of the Chevalier, who said: "II n'y a quo Dieu qui alt an aeaez grand fonds do gaiete pour no pas s'ennuyer de tons lee hommages qu'on lei rend." Tho Chevalier was, in fact, a typical product of the age in which he lived. Its foibles, its vices, and its superficial graces were in his blood. They were inherited from his extremely immoral, frivolous, but withal attractive "belle Merman," the Marquise de Boni- Hers, of Maugraa's chronicles, whose lovers were as the sands of the sea. She was not, strictly speaking, a literate woman. At sixty-eight years of age she learnt to spell from the husband of her maid, whose name was Petitdemange. Exulting in her newly acquired knowledge, she wrote to one of her old lovers, whom she called "petit Veau " : 0 See how well I put the accents on the a's since our Petitdemange has taught me spelling 1" But, in spite of her illiteracy, her mother-wit enabled her to impress a stamp of real originality and interest on those "
couplets" and "bouts-rime," mostly distinguished for their extreme milliness and vapidity, which formed the delight of the French society of her day. Her rhyming dissertation on brevity, ending with the refrain, "Lea longs propos sent sots," is too well known to require quotation, but the following characteristic record of the events of a week may be cited as a fitting example both of her style and her morals: " Dimanche, je fus aimable ; Lundi, jo f us autrement ; Mardi, je pris Fair capable ; Mercredi, je Es renfant ; Jeudi, je fus raisonnable ; Vendrodi, rens un amant ; Samedi, jo fus coupable ; Dimanche, il fist inconstant."
• The Chevalier do Zouifias. By Hata H. Webster. Leaden: Joint Murray. 1125. est.'
She is said to have adopted as her own epitaph one composed by the Conitesse de Verrue :— " Ci-glt, dens une paix profonde, Cette dame de volupth Qui, pour plus grando Barad, Fit son Pendia on ce monde."
Manifestly, the Epicurean Marquise was of the opinion expressed at a later period by one of her own countrywomen, that information about the joys of the celestial Paradise is deplorably scarce.
Her son came into the world in strange circumstances. Whilst travelling in a post-chaise, his mother was seized with the pangs of labour. The child was born in the grass by the roadside, an elderly Magistrate, who had been deputed to accompany the Marquise as an escort, performing the part of accoucheur. In after life, the Chevalier of course wrote a " couplet " about the strange incidents oonnected with his birth. It took the form of an epitaph ;— " Ci-git un chevalier qui sans cease courut, Qui sur los grands chernins naquit, v(kut, mourut, Pour prover ce quo dit le sage, Quo notre via eat on voyage' No lees strange were the methods adopted in preparing the child for all the vicissitudes of that "voyage in life "—the Taos' acsaXepas re Eliv of the gloomy anthologist, Palladaa—to which he alluded in his own epitaph. "There was nothing," Miss Webster says, "in his early influences to give him the most elementary ideas of morality." He was handed over to the care of a certain Abbe Porquot—surely one of the most strange preceptors ever selected as a guide to youth. The Abbe', main characteristic appears to have been an "entire lack of religions knowledge." When asked to say grace at the table of King Stanislaus, one of the numerous lovers of tho light-hearted Marquise, he excused himself on the ground that he had forgotten the Breed idle. "Theology did not interest him ; he preferred Voltaire." Then, this dignitary of the Church proceeded to make love, and apparently with some success, to his pupil's mother, and both tutor and pupil passed their time merrily in "rhyming together on woman, love, and folly."
Nevertheless, the rapt attention which the boy paid to sermons caused the Court Chaplain to exclaim that he "was a flower destined to adorn the altar." He was, therefore, sent to a seminary, but his clerical career was of short duration. " J'aime mioux," he said, " etre bon diable quo mauvais saint." "M. de Bouffiers," the worldly-wise Prince de Ligne wrote, "was in turn an abbe,' a soldier, an author, an adminis- trator, a deputy, and a philosopher ; and amongst all those callings he was only out of place in the first."
When the storm-cloud of the Revolution burst, Mme. de Sabran had some true forebodings of what was likely to happen, but her feather- headed lover, who, besides being a libertine, was also an idealist, and
who "felt that in Athens, or even in Sparta, he would have boon worth something," at once rushed to the conclusion that a brilliant political opening was accorded to him. "I have always," he said, "had a fancy for Revolutions." He was an actor in Beaumarchais.' iconoclastic
comedy, and "throw himself into the rale of Figaro with all the ardour of conviction." He joined the ranks of those genii:shorn:nes dimocrales who were busily engaged in digging the grave of the Order to which
they belonged. A true child of that " " which had become the fashion of the day, he waxed eloquent over the decision of the poor bewildered King to siimmon the States-General, "as the good father of a family would call advisers around him to consult on the welfare of his children." He and many of his class looked for the advent of a millennium, unmindful of the harsh wisdom of that realistic)
Corsican autocrat, who was closely watching the movement which was to lead him to power, and who thought that "to try to do good during a Revolution was like writing on the sands of the sea-shore. All was destined to be swept away by the winds or the waves." Thus, in the worths of the Prince de Ligno, "good Royalist society made the Republic without knowing it."
I would fain dwell at greater length on Miss Webster's attractive pages. I should like to explain how, in the pro-Revolutionary period, the children of the class which was doomed to destruction were no less artificial than their parents ; how tho little five-year-old son of Mine, do Sabran acted in a manner which made all the audience "melt into tears"; how at the age of nine this same son fell deeply in love with an English lady old enough to be his mother, and "wrote hor a long ode in six cantos called La Charrietade " ; how the life-long wish of Mine. de Seinen was eventually attained when her union with the Chevalier was hallowed by the performance of the marriage ceremony ; how these frivolous French aristocrats, who wore the froth of the world, though they could not govern know how to die ; how they thus gained a moral victory over monsters, such as Fouquier-Tinville, who drove them like so many sheep to the scaffold ; and how Mme. do Sabran's daughter, Delphino de Custine, whose father-in-law and husband both perished, saved her life when in imminent danger from a howling mob, by saying to "a horrible-looking fish-hag with a baby in her arms" "What a pretty child you have there." But the inexorable editorial mandate, which limits the space at my disposal, obliges me to forbear. I will; therefore, only add that the male readers of Miss Webster's attractive volume will in all probability fall posthumously in love with her heroine before they set it down, and that those of her own sex will assuredly admit that the has gained well-deserved laurels in a special field of literature in which women excel. Cam=
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