THE PRINCE AMONG- THE OLD NOBLESSE.
TF the visit of the Prince of Wales to the Due de la Roche-
formauld-Bisaccia, the Due de Tremouille, the Duchesse de Luynes, and the Due d'Aumale has not the slightest political significance, it shows at least that the old French Noblesse still keep up much of the stateliness which marked their lives before the Revolution tried to sweep them all away. The Prince visited nothing less than'a Due or a Duchess° of the grandest lineage. His first entertainer bears a name which cannot be cut out of French history. The La Rochefoucaulds were great names be- fore the Prince's own fatnily had reached the English throne. We cannot go through any literary or pictorial gallery of the reign of Louis /IV. without meeting at every turn the splendid and haughty noble who bore that name. M. de la Rochefoucauld, as he is painted for us by the Due de Saint Simon, is always making a stir at Court by the favour which he receives from the King, and by the fidelity with which he repays his master's bounty. He scarcely ever quits the Court, even to pay a visit, and he never does so without asking leave from the King. Although he is short-sighted, he always goes with his master on his hunting expeditions. The frankest and the haughtiest of men, he says to Louis what no other person dare to whisper, and the Minister Louvois does him the honour to fear his enmity. Although living in the most voluptuous of Courts, he hates all women; and he is himself httted by Madame de Maintenon. Madame de Sevigne, who often speaks of him, seemed to think it a mark of his real goodness, however, that he should have keenly felt the death of his mother. A splendid and lordly noble, he is yet so careless as to be the prey of his valets. Success has come so easily to him that he cannot measure its value, and yet he is filled with envy when the King gives away an abbey or a bishopric at the bidding of any other courtier. At last he commits the unpardonable sin of wearying Louis, and, when many rebuffs bring the fact to his mind, he quits the Court, to bury himself in a country house, in much the same spirit as Madame de la Valliere takes the veil when she loses the favour of Louis through the newer fascinations of Madame de Montespan. The absolute devotion of so haughty a noble as M. de la Roche- foucauld to the King, and his personal abasement in the presence of Majesty, help to make us understand the feelings with which the Due de in Rochefoucauld-Bisaccia still fights for the restoration of the Comte de Chambord. And it needs some effort of the imagination to call up the state of mind which could thus have made one of the proudest men that ever breathed be the abject servant of another man not a whit better-bred than himself, go through life in the attitude and with the soul of a beatified lacquey, and abjectly feel that he was honoured by the permission to be an upper menial. Such a state of mind has fled so far away from England that it is difficult for us to form any conception of it, although we know the historical fact that it was once an enormous social and political force. It resembles a vanished form of religious faith, like that which, five hundred years ago, made the most highly-educated men believe that their path through life was beset by witches and demons. Loyalty was a religion to the courtiers of Louis XIV., the only religion that most of them had ; and some of their descendants have been able to keep it alive, by jealously setting against the blasts of criti- cism the adamantine barrier of prejudice. Some of the French families have nourished their loyalty as tenderly as some of the old English nobles have retained their ancient Catholicism ; and just as a Howard might say that his family had never been stained by heresy, so might a La Rochejacquelin boast that his house had never harboured treason-to its King. The secret of loyalty, as well as the secret of religious faith, can be transmitted from father to
son, like a mental instinct or a physical capacity. The Due de la Rochefoucauld, it is true, has mixed too much with the world, and has felt the rough pressure of political forces too keenly, to cherish the more heroic delusions of the Legitimists. We must go to such men as General Cathelineau or M. de Blacus, men who have bound the Comte de Chambord up with the Breviary, in order to find the old, passionate, reckless self-abasement of loyalty. But
the Prince of Wales will have seen quite enough of that devotion to make him reflect on the immense distance which the English people have travelled from the worship which they also gave to their Kings in other days. Their loyalty was at one time almost as sentimental and blind as that of the French themselves. Prince Charles Stuart called into daylight an astonishing amount of frenzied idolatry for Kings, and the memory of it still lives in many stirring traditions and some pretty songs. But-the Stuarts had before that time freed the mass of the nation from its religious loyalty, and the House of Hanover was happily not fitted to spread the malady anew. Our loyalty is as different from the ancient poetical product as our aristocracy is from the Crusaders. It is strictly defined by Act of Parliament, and it is, in fact, the fruit of a hard bargain which we have driven with our Kings. All the more interesting is it to see the real, old, genuine article meet- ing the Prince of Wales in chateaux which are so many historic records of the immense place that it once filled in the society of Europe.
The Prince went to see another great noble, the Due de Tremouille, whose name also flits through the records of the time when the Court of France was most splendid and most reckless. The Correspondent of the Times gives a very pretty picture of the preparations that were made for the arrival of the visitor. The castle was to be decorated with flowers and Venetian lanterns, and all the noble company set about the task. The Duo de Chartres, who is a grandson of King Louis Philippe ; the Duchess de Chartres ; the Comte de Fitzjames, a descendent of the Stuarts, and therefore a far-off kinsman of the Prince, helped other nobles to put up the wreaths and the lights, amid much laughter. The scene must have been very like one of those exhibitions of gaiety about which the Due de Saint-Simon speaks in his gossiping way, on which Madame de S4Vignd casts the sparkle of her pen, and which live on the canvass of Watteau. The Court life of France has been largely handed down to us in the form of these pictures. The chroniclers do not tell us much about business ; they say nothing about the common people, except it be to wonder at and curse their growing sullen, new and insubordination; they speak often and much about the sermons in which the Pere Bourdaloue and Monseigneur Bonnet did themselves and the Gospel the honour of preaching to the Court ; but they say most of all about gaiety. Life might almost seem to have never had a serious business for the people that we meet with in the pages of Madame de Sevignd. The gravest event appears to be the death of a courtier or the displeasure of the King; and in truth, her correspondents and her friends are all so high in rank, and the plebeian throng is so far out of sight, as to leave no room for wonder that the seraphic throng should have had nothing to do, except to dress, visit, gossip, make repartees, hunt, study the caprices of Madame de Maintenon, and worship Louis. They were the most brilliant set of triflers ever seen in this afflicted world. Generations of pampered ease and the fasci- nations of the Court had made them unfit to do anything better with their time than to form pretty subjects for the pictures that have come down to us on Sevres ware. Among them, of course, were men of strong intellect and fierce passions; men who, when tried by adversity, would develop into such heroic, cruel fanatics as Victor Hugo has drawn with exaggerated lines in the Marquis de Lantenac. But it is the splendid trifling of the Court which has chiefly written itself on history, and no effort can bring the spirit of that trifling back again. The group of dukes
and duchesses at Rambouillet may have been a very pretty re- production of a Watteau in colour and in form, but the back- ground did not harmonise with the gaiety. The back-ground was steeped in the black shadow of the Revolution. The com- pany could not be very gay, when they did not know what politi- cal event might turn up next, when they knew that a sudden change of Government might sentence some of them to exile, and when bulletins were coming to them respecting the result otthe elections in the Pas de Calais, the Alpes Maritimes, and the Seine- et-Oise. The Correspondent of the Times says that they were much troubled after dinner by the news of the Republican victories. All the gaiety fled, and they seem to have forgotten their visitor for a moment. If the Prince has a turn for philosophical reflec- tion as well as for pheasant-shooting, be may have thought that the gaiety of Venetian lanterns wanted gaiety of heart to make it harmonious, and that such a spirit cannot easily lie within the reach of nobles who are fighting hard against a fate which they must know to be inevitable.
If the Prince is fond of taking skeletons out of cup- boards, he will have found a peculiarly grim specimen at Chantilly. That chateau was once among the grandest in France, and it was a typical abode of feudal glory. The Great Conde, who was its owner, represented all that was most brilliant in the noblesse, before they fell victims to the enervating atmosphere of the Court. But for such men as he, they would never have filled so great a place in history, and Richelieu would not have needed to break their power. The descendant of the Great Conde, the last of the Dues de Bourbon, was, however, not less striking a type of the mental feebleness into which the nobles fell in their later days. The Revolution seemed to have smitten him with moral paralysis, and his vast wealth helped to chain him down to a state of splendid misery. Through the reigns of Louis XVIIL and Charles X. he lived at Chantilly and other houses almost like a hermit, and during his later years he was so despotically ruled by his mistress, a low-born Englishwoman, that he had no will of his own. He was persuaded to leave his wealth to the Due d'Aumale, after a series of negotiations in which the mistress had so large a share that they do not form an edifying chapter of domestic diplomacy ; and then the Due de Bourbon hanged him- self one night with the window-cord of his bed-room. At first, his valet and even his mistress were suspected to have murdered him, but there was no sufficient evidence to prove that they were guilty, and the last of the Princes of Conde must be held to have perished by his own hand because he was bored with exist- ence. A picture of the old noblesse as we see them in these days of their shattered glory would be incomplete, if it did not find room for the lonely, idle, listless, miserable Due de Bourbon, as well as for the Legitimists who have been giving the Prince of Wales a sight of such pomp as they have rescued from the fire of the Revolution.
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