THE ABBE EDGEWORTH.*

FiLs de Saint Louis, tnontez an ciel !" For many years the fame of the Abbe Edgeworth rested on those words, sup. posed to have been spoken at the supreme moment when he stood on the scaffold beside the good man whose worthiness of that high descent was never so plainly shown as in his last few hours. As most people know, it is now thought probable that the Abbe Edgeworth never used those words at all. He could not himself remember what he said ; and the roll of Santerre's drums, which silenced Louis XVI.'s last words to the people, must have made any voice inaudible. Then, in the Abhe's own words, "the most atrocious yells" greeted the showing of the King's head to the multitude in the Place de la Revolution. The faithful confessor, after kneeling a few moments in horror and despair beside the body, was allowed to escape unnoticed through the crowd and to carry the King's last message to his defender, 31. de Malesherbes, who strongly advised him, for his own safety, to leave France at once. This the Abbe Edgeworth refused to do. He had for some time acted as confessor to Madame Elisabeth. The Archbishop of Paris—remembered, hardly to his honour, as one of the first of the clergy to emigrate—bad left his flock in his spiritual charge. It was thus that the quiet and saintly man, whose character can be read in his letters—cheerful, modest, simple, straightforward, unworldly—came to be offered and to accept the perilous mission of ministering to Louis XVI. during the last hours of his life. It is to him that we owe the most vivid and detailed account of the unhappy King's words and bearing all through those terrible hours, from the afternoon of January 20th to the morning of January 21st, 1793, which fills seventeen pages of Miss Montagu's book. If the King showed real Christian heroism it is also plain that the Abbe Edgeworth was worthy of his post. His fame need not depend on those words, for which the clever journalist Lacretelle is now supposed to have been responsible,

Henry Essex Edgeworth was born in Ireland, at Edgeworths- town, in the year 1745. His father, the Rev. Robert Edgeworth, a Protestant by .birth, ancestry, and education.

• Ths 1W Hayworth and His Friends. Hy Violette M. Montagu. With i-Pbotognerare Frontispiece sad 16 other-111natastiona. Londca_i: Herhort Jenkins. [Ia. 6d. net.]

changed his religion after long and conscientious study. His

wife, a granddaughter of Archbishop Usher, was also received into the Church of Rome, and the family removed to France.

After Mr. Edgeworth's death in 1769 they returned to Ireland, leaving Henry, the second son, to follow up his studies for the priesthood. In later years Mrs. Edgeworth and her daughter lived in a Paris convent near the Missions EtrangCres, where the Abbe was established, and bere the Revolution found them. Mrs. Edgeworth died in prison ; her daughter was at length released. Their presence in Paris was one of the reasons which kept the Abbe Edgeworth—known as "de Firmont " from Firmount, part of the Irish property—from escaping, as he might have done, to Ireland or England.

He remained in France, in constant danger of death, till 1796- By that time his duty there appeared to he done. The death. of Madame Elisabeth bad followed those of the King and Queen; Madame Royale had been released after long months- of solitary confinement in the Temple; and Paris had become an impossible abode for a marked man such as the Abbe Edgeworth, whose devotion to the royalist cause was known to all the world. With some difficulty lie succeeded in reach-

ing Portsmouth, and after visiting the Comte d'Artois at

Edinburgh and delivering the message with which Madame Elisabeth had charged him, he settled in London for a short time. There he was received with distinction and kindness. A. pension from George III. was offered by Pitt in a personal interview, but was declined by the Abbe, who "replied that he could not think of accepting any money for himself as long as there were so many poor and suffering imigres to provide 'for." As a fact, he was at this tine better off than many of his friends, receiving a small income from Ireland. Some years later this was lost through the fault of a trustee, and then, not long before his death, the Abbe accepted George III.'s offer.

It was during this visit to London that the Abbe Edgeworth made the acquaintance of his celebrated cousin Maria. We are not told what kind of impression the clever young Irish- woman made on him; but she, on her side, was enchanted, andi declared that she would never forget him. His portrait indeed, singularly handsome, with a certain delicate calm and sweet- ness, though without much suggestion of the stedfast strengths and courage he possessed, shows a personage with all the graceful charm of the two countries that could lay claim to him. Maria and her father, critical and imaginative both, might well have been pleased to claim such a cousin. There came a day, however, when they were equally eager to disown him. This was on the occasion of their visit to Paris in 1802. when the First Consul's officials seized on a rumour that Mr. Richard Lovell Edgeworth was the brother of the well-known royalist, the Abbe Edgeworth de Firmont, and promptly ordered him out of France. Mr. Edgeworth had to prove,. not without difficulty, that the relationship was too distant to be compromising.

The Abbe might have ended his days in his native Ireland,.

as President of Maynooth ; the appointment was offered to him by the governors of the College, and his life-long friend, Dr. Moylan, pressed him to accept it. But this faithful servant of the exiled Bourbons found a nearer duty in con- veying despatches sent from France, by way of England, to

Louis X VIII.'s melancholy little Court at Blankenburg. He was received there with the kindness and the gratitude be deserved, and his visit, supposed to be temporary, ended in his appointment as chaplain to the King-, in whose service he remained for the rest of his life. "He shall stay with me,",

wrote Louis XVIII. " . . He has sacred claims to the affectionate veneration of all good Frenchmen : what claims has he not to mine !" And it appears that the Abbe was by no means unwilling to take up the offered position. He had no taste indeed for Court frivolities, but Blankenburg was not Versailles. At the same time, it is plain from his letters_ that he shared in the hopeful illusions of those who surrounded him.

"Blankenburg," he wrote in 1797, "is at present almost as quiet as the monastery of La Trappe ; but . this state of things cannot last. Several incidents seem to point towards a change in France; if that change comes about I must confess that Versailles would not be my favourite abode. I hope that God, when matters, are settled, will permit me to return to my first retreat in the Rue dn. Bac, where some of-the happiest days- in- nay life were passed,' In 1804, after seven years' experience of the Eandarings

and adversities of the unhappy Court, the Abbe Edgeworth wrote from Warsaw to the same old friend, "I am now here, bound to the most unfortunate family in the universe, and quite determined to share their misfortunes to the very end. . . ." It may be added that his personal opinion of the King was far more favourable than that of most historians and biographers, who have scarcely a good word to say of him. It is difficult to explain away as mere courtly flattery the words of so honest a man. One can only suppose that the King's talent and wisdom, of which the Abbe speaks with enthusiasm, made it easy for him to dazzle and hoodwink his more simple-minded chaplain as to matters of religion and morality. It may be suspected, however—though this is not the place for a careful study of Louis XVIII.'s character— that be had right on his side in some of his domestic diffi- culties, especially those concerning his wife and her mischievous friend, Madame de Gourbillon. The Abbe Edgeworth can hardly bare been ignorant of the history of that quarrel, and it is significant that while cordially praising the Due and Duchesse d'Angouleme, the King's companions in adversity, he merely mentions the name of the Queen.

Madame Royale was always an object of the Abbe's loyal and tender interest. The sincerity of her nature, the courage and dignity with which she bore her misfortunes, while proving her a worthy princess of the old stock, may well have _reminded him of her aunt Madame Elisabeth, his earliest

friend at the French Court. She herself was bound by special -ties to the man who had attended her father on the scaffold.

After her marriage, when she and the Due d'Angonleme were „living at Mittau with Louis XVIII., her intercourse with . the Abbe was intimate and constant. She nursed him with her own hands through his last illness in 1807, a fever caught from the French prisoners detained in Courland on the way back from the Russian campaign, whom he had tended in the prison of Mittau till his own strength failed. It may be said of him that he lived for French royalty and died for France.

Miss Montagu's book is full of interest. Naturally the events in the Abbe Edgeworth's life could hardly themselves fill a volume, but the background of those years has figures and situations enough for an even larger canvas, and the central portrait is that of a man rare in character and eonduct, who deserves not to be forgotten.