LIFE OF MADAME BEAUHARNAIS DE MIRAMION.* IT is always an

interesting task to rescue a worthy human life from oblivion, and though the biography of Madame de Miramion is essentially religious, and is introduced to the English public under the auspices of Lady Herbert of Lea, the general reader will find it contains curious historical pickings, and that the lady of whom it treats was worthy of long remembrance,—a soft brown or purple tint in the brilliant mosaic of the society of the Grand Siecle.

Mademoiselle Bonneau de Rubelle was born in Paris in 1629, She belonged to the noblesse de la robe, her father being King's councillor and secretary, and she was all her life intimately mixed up with the higher magistrature. Those were days when the legal and judicial bodies formed a solid part of the organization of the State. It is so still in England, but the student of French history knows only too well that the Bar and the Bench have suffered in importance and coherence by the same causes which have broken down the territorial noblesse and the authority of the throne. It is to be hoped that the Republic of the future, while opening a free career to talent, may not fail in producing men worthy to rank with D'Aguesseau, Malesherbes, or Berryer,—men like our own Erskine or Brougham, of more than national renown.

Madame de Rubelle died when her young daughter was only nine years old ; and her widowed husband went to live with his brother, M. Bonneau, in a great house in the Marais, then the fashionable quarter of Paris. This brother was Sieur de Plessis, but seems to have kept to his plain family name. He entertained a great deal of company, being himself secretary and privy councillor to the King, Louis XIII. It was a most brilliant

* The Lift of Madams Beleaharnais de lfiramion. London : Bentley. epoch at Paris. The celebrated Hotel de Rambouillet was in full vogue. M. de Lamoignon, another notability of the magistrature, and Madame de la Sabliere, La Fontaine's friend, were receiving the best company in their salons. Corneille was giving his great tragedies at the theatre of the Hotel de Bourgoyne, and it was said, "Tout Paris pour Chimene a les yeux de Rodrigue." So great was the sensation excited by the Cid..

We know very little about Mademoiselle de Rubelle's child- hood, except that she once went to the inland waters of Forges, in Normandy, with her fashionable aunt. They went by short stages. in their private coach, accompanied by a number of men servants on horseback, stopping at St. Germain, Mantes, and Rouen. Wonderful family cavalcades went lumbering along the rutty roads or over the terrible paves of those days. The Prussians have lately been described as ploughing their way with the greatest difficulty over the royal road between St. Germain and Versailles, the pave having been dislodged in the centre, for their especial benefit, by the defenders of Paris. That pave, with its. broad sandy aides, is a relic of the days when Mademoiselle de- Rubelle went to drink the waters of Forges in her aunt's private. coach.

At fifteen years of age she was presented at Court ; in the Château de Marsay, in Poitou, which belongs to a descendant of her brother's, is a portrait representing her in the glow of youth and beauty. She was tall, plump, had blue eyes, an aquiline nose, and a profusion of nut-brown hair curling in natural ringlets. Add to these advantages a very large fortune, said to amount to. £112,000, and it may be imagined that this young lady did not want for suitors.

Now, at the old church of St. Nicolas des Champs, once buried in the thickest part of Paris, but now accessible by the Boulevard. de Sebastopol, Mademoiselle de Rubelle, who was exceedingly devout, had remarked one M. de Miramion, in constant attend- ance upon his mother. " Therefore, when among the suitors proposed to her by her family she heard the name of M. de Miramion, her blushes discovered to everyone the person whom her heart had chosen." And she was but sixteen when, in 1645, she- married Jean Jacques de Beauharnais, Lord of Miramion, Coun- sellor to the Paris Parliament, only son of a Councillor of State- and of the high and mighty Lady Marguerite de Choisy. The bridegroom was not quite twenty-seven years of age ; " he was handsome, well made, of a charming character, and with a fortune equal to that of his wife." The two young people went in French fashion to live in the house of M. de Mira- mion's grandfather, M. de Choisy, who had long been the friend as well as the counsellor of the reigning king, and of his great father, Henry IV. M. de Choisy lived with his aged wife in a magnificent mansion situated at the corner of the Rue du. Temple and of the Rue Michel le Comte. We give the localities, as marking the immense difference in the quarters of the town in- habited 200 years ago. Grand old houses may be still seen in the Rue du Temple, sunk to the level of our Soho. Here, amidst aunts, uncles, and cousins, lived the newly-married pair for some

months, " united in a holy affection, full of humility and purity before God, of charity and goodwill towards men, and of love to each other, but of a love which drew them both nearer to. God, they seemed to realize the charming picture which the great Catholic poet Dante has drawn of a heavenly marriage."

Six months thus passed, when the young husband was seized, with one of those violent fevers so fatal when treated according to the medical theories of the seventeenth century. We do not hear whether he was bled, or starved, or medicined beyond power of re- covery; but the strong man died in the flower of his age, and his young widow fell fainting upon his dead body. Her mother-in-law roused her into a cold, weak, half-conscious state, and handing her a potion, said, " Drink, for your child's sake." She drank and lived,. though it is sufficiently astonishing that she did survive ; for we are told that the doctors bled her nine times before the birth of the poor little babe. It was a daughter, and lived to become the wife of the President de Neamonde. There is a portrait of her, taken before her marriage, still extant. She is sitting, and, holding on her knees a little pet dog ; she is dressed in white silk, and wears magnificent pearls. This poor little plank saved out of so great a shipwreck was very merry and sensible, and when Madame de Miramion's time came to die she expired in her daughter's arms.

But we are not come to the end of the more romantic period of Madame de Miramion's life. Many efforts were made to induce her to renounce her widowhood. Her husband's cousin and her own intimate friend, M. de Caumartin, tried hard to get her to accept him ; but though such a union would not have removed her from

the beloved family circle in the Hotel de Choisy, she could not forget the young husband of her love, nor give him a successor.

She had another suitor of a much more violent sort. In those days, Mont Valerien, of which we have lately heard so much, was not a bristling fortress, but a place of pilgrimage ; Madame de Miramion, going there with her mother-in-law, accompanied by an equerry and two maids, and a footman, and also by four mounted men-servants who rode at the carriage-doors, was forcibly abducted by the Comte de Bussy-Rabutin, and carried off to a feudal fortress three leagues from Sens, " which belonged to the Grand Prior of France, Hugh de Bussy-Rabutin, that debauched and immoral man whom Madame de Sevigne called ' My uncle, the corsair !' " This castle was fortified and moated, defended by several drawbridges, which " were let down one after the other, with a great clanking of iron chains." The Comte meant to bully or persuade her into marrying him, having, it seems, been told by a certain Father Clement that she would not be averse. How Madame de Miramion, by sheer force of moral indignation, re- gained her liberty is very well told. She actually got back safe to Sens in the middle of the night, and was there told that "the town was up in arms by order of the Queen-Regent, to go to the assistance of the widow of a councillor of Parliament, who had been carried off by force by a nobleman of rank. ' Alas ! ' she said, 'it is L' " Her brother, M. de Rubelle, was in the town, and hastened to her. When she saw him she fainted away, and was afterwards so ill that the last sacraments were administered. As for the Comte de Bussy-Rabutin, she pursued him at law for some time, and " then forgave him for the love of God," but her family, against her entreaty, kept up the suit, and Comte de Bussy- Rabutin only got off at last by protection of the Prince de Conde, and had to pay £4,000.

But it is not by the loves or the sorrows shared or inspired -during the youth of Madame de Miramion that she deserved to be remembered. Many women, in that brilliant Paris of the seventeenth century, were both beautiful and wealthy, and not a few were pious and of good repute. Madame de Miramion was more than this. As her extreme youth waned, and her loving nature recovered the great shock of her husband's death, she began to concern herself with works of active charity. There was then in Paris a certain abbe, attached to the church of St. Nicolas

As for Madame de Miramion, the story of her abundant good works is told at length for all who love to read of such. She lived to be sixty-six, and died amidst the tears and blessings both of the rich and the poor. " For several days it bad been impossible to pass before her house, so great had been the number of carriages and the multitude of persons of all classes whose very life seemed to hang upon hers." Exactly fifty years had elapsed since her widowhood ; and that long half-century had been spent in constant acts of kindness. .She was intimately concerned in all those great foundations, some of which have survived the storm of revolution, one of which is known on every battle-field, and in the hospitals for the sick, the wounded, the foundlings, or the insane. Madame de Sevigne wrote, "as to Madame de Miramion, that mother of the poor and the Church, hers is, indeed, a public loss." The Due de St. Simon, usually far from addicted to a tender mention of any of dais contemporaries, speaks of her death in exactly the same way.

Says he, "And it really was a loss the, King always had the greatest consideration for her, which her humility made her use with much prudence She may be termed the mother and guardian of the poor." While the Duc de Noailles calls her 4‘ the Great Almoner of the seventeenth century."

We cannot conclude this review without a remark upon the profound contrasts exhibited by that century, so prolific in all the virtues, but in all the vices too. It is as if a stream of purest mountain water flowed side by side with the vilest sewer of a crowded town. To read the life of Madame de Miramion, and then to take up certain other contemporary memoirs, is enough to make the honest reader rub his eyes with astonishment, and say " Can both be true ? " Our heroine had a brother, M. de Purnou, to whom she was tenderly attached, and who followed her mourning to the grave. He died at a great age, and with an

excellent reputation in the province to which he had retired. Yet the infamous Cardinal Dubois, the corruptor of the youth and parasite of the middle age of Philippe d'Orleans, speaks of M. de Purnou in the most abominable way, not only accusing him of being accessory to the murder of Madame Henriette, but lavishing upon him those dirty epithets of which his own pen was so prolific. Madame.de Maintenon shares the same fate. To open the pages of Cardinal Dubois (they are quite unreadable) is to lay the finger on the cancer which eat into the heart and political vitality of France ; to ponder the life of Madame de Miramion is to learn to appreciate those qualities of faith and self-sacrifice which partially purified the siecle de Louis is Grand, and have never ceased to afford ground of hope for the future of the country over which his descendants have ceased to reign.