Rien ne peut arreter sa vigilante audace. / L'ete n'a point de feux, l'hiver n'a point de glace=--Nothing can check his watchful daring. For him the summer has no heat, the winter no ice.
Le grand monarque=--The grand monarch, Louis XIV.
L'etat c'est moi. [I am the state.] -- Louis XIV</p>
1. Here a captive heart busted. 2. Here a poor prisoner, forsook by the world and friends, fretted his sorrowful life. 3. Here a lonely heart broke, and a worn spirit went to its rest, after thirty-seven years of solitary captivity. 4. Here, homeless and friendless, after thirty-seven years of bitter captivity, perished a noble stranger, natural son of Louis XIV.
Louis XVIII. re-entered Paris. The circling dances of the 8th of July effaced the enthusiasms of the 20th of March. The Corsican became the antithesis of the Bearnese. The flag on the dome of the Tuileries was white. The exile reigned. Hartwell's pine table took its place in front of the fleur-de-lys-strewn throne of Louis XIV. Bouvines and Fontenoy were mentioned as though they had taken place on the preceding day, Austerlitz having become antiquated. The altar and the throne fraternized majestically. One of the most undisputed forms of the health of society in the nineteenth century was established over France, and over the continent. Europe adopted the white cockade. Trestaillon was celebrated. The device non pluribus impar re-appeared on the stone rays representing a sun upon the front of the barracks on the Quai d'Orsay. Where there had been an Imperial Guard, there was now a red house. The Arc du Carrousel, all laden with badly borne victories, thrown out of its element among these novelties, a little ashamed, it may be, of Marengo and Arcola, extricated itself from its predicament with the statue of the Duc d'Angouleme. The cemetery of the Madeleine, a terrible pauper's grave in 1793, was covered with jasper and marble, since the bones of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette lay in that dust.
* Elisabeth de Rossan, Marquise de Ganges, was one of the famous women of the court of Louis XIV. where she was known as "La Belle Provencale." She was the widow of the Marquise de Castellane when she married de Ganges, and having the misfortune to excite the enmity of her new brothers-in-law, was forced by them to take poison; and they finished her off with pistol and dagger.--Ed.
The fall of the Bourbons was full of grandeur, not on their side, but on the side of the nation. They quitted the throne with gravity, but without authority; their descent into the night was not one of those solemn disappearances which leave a sombre emotion in history; it was neither the spectral calm of Charles I., nor the eagle scream of Napoleon. They departed, that is all. They laid down the crown, and retained no aureole. They were worthy, but they were not august. They lacked, in a certain measure, the majesty of their misfortune. Charles X. during the voyage from Cherbourg, causing a round table to be cut over into a square table, appeared to be more anxious about imperilled etiquette than about the crumbling monarchy. This diminution saddened devoted men who loved their persons, and serious men who honored their race. The populace was admirable. The nation, attacked one morning with weapons, by a sort of royal insurrection, felt itself in the possession of so much force that it did not go into a rage. It defended itself, restrained itself, restored things to their places, the government to law, the Bourbons to exile, alas! and then halted! It took the old king Charles X. from beneath that dais which had sheltered Louis XIV. and set him gently on the ground. It touched the royal personages only with sadness and precaution. It was not one man, it was not a few men, it was France, France entire, France victorious and intoxicated with her victory, who seemed to be coming to herself, and who put into practice, before the eyes of the whole world, these grave words of Guillaume du Vair after the day of the Barricades:--
Under Louis XIV., not to go any further back, the king rightly desired to create a fleet. The idea was a good one. But let us consider the means. There can be no fleet, if, beside the sailing ship, that plaything of the winds, and for the purpose of towing it, in case of necessity, there is not the vessel which goes where it pleases, either by means of oars or of steam; the galleys were then to the marine what steamers are to-day. Therefore, galleys were necessary; but the galley is moved only by the galley-slave; hence, galley-slaves were required. Colbert had the commissioners of provinces and the parliaments make as many convicts as possible. The magistracy showed a great deal of complaisance in the matter. A man kept his hat on in the presence of a procession--it was a Huguenot attitude; he was sent to the galleys. A child was encountered in the streets; provided that he was fifteen years of age and did not know where he was to sleep, he was sent to the galleys. Grand reign; grand century.
In the Rue Boucherat, Rue de Normandie and the Rue de Saintonge there still exist a few ancient inhabitants who have preserved the memory of a worthy man named M. Gillenormand, and who mention him with complaisance. This good man was old when they were young. This silhouette has not yet entirely disappeared--for those who regard with melancholy that vague swarm of shadows which is called the past--from the labyrinth of streets in the vicinity of the Temple to which, under Louis XIV., the names of all the provinces of France were appended exactly as in our day, the streets of the new Tivoli quarter have received the names of all the capitals of Europe; a progression, by the way, in which progress is visible.
History proves this at every turn. Is the ferment of the peoples of the west at the end of the eighteenth century and their drive eastward explained by the activity of Louis XIV, XV, and XVI, their mistresses and ministers, and by the lives of Napoleon, Rousseau, Diderot, Beaumarchais, and others?
"In the first place, I won't have any kings; if it were only from an economical point of view, I don't want any; a king is a parasite. One does not have kings gratis. Listen to this: the dearness of kings. At the death of Francois I., the national debt of France amounted to an income of thirty thousand livres; at the death of Louis XIV. it was two milliards, six hundred millions, at twenty-eight livres the mark, which was equivalent in 1760, according to Desmarets, to four milliards, five hundred millions, which would to-day be equivalent to twelve milliards. In the second place, and no offence to Combeferre, a charter granted is but a poor expedient of civilization. To save the transition, to soften the passage, to deaden the shock, to cause the nation to pass insensibly from the monarchy to democracy by the practice of constitutional fictions,--what detestable reasons all those are! No! no! let us never enlighten the people with false daylight. Principles dwindle and pale in your constitutional cellar. No illegitimacy, no compromise, no grant from the king to the people. In all such grants there is an Article 14. By the side of the hand which gives there is the claw which snatches back. I refuse your charter point-blank. A charter is a mask; the lie lurks beneath it. A people which accepts a charter abdicates. The law is only the law when entire. No! no charter!"
At first sight, the exterior of the house at Auteuil gave no indications of splendor, nothing one would expect from the destined residence of the magnificent Count of Monte Cristo; but this simplicity was according to the will of its master, who positively ordered nothing to be altered outside. The splendor was within. Indeed, almost before the door opened, the scene changed. M. Bertuccio had outdone himself in the taste displayed in furnishing, and in the rapidity with which it was executed. It is told that the Duc d'Antin removed in a single night a whole avenue of trees that annoyed Louis XIV.; in three days M. Bertuccio planted an entirely bare court with poplars, large spreading sycamores to shade the different parts of the house, and in the foreground, instead of the usual paving-stones, half hidden by the grass, there extended a lawn but that morning laid down, and upon which the water was yet glistening. For the rest, the orders had been issued by the count; he himself had given a plan to Bertuccio, marking the spot where each tree was to be planted, and the shape and extent of the lawn which was to take the place of the paving-stones. Thus the house had become unrecognizable, and Bertuccio himself declared that he scarcely knew it, encircled as it was by a framework of trees. The overseer would not have objected, while he was about it, to have made some improvements in the garden, but the count had positively forbidden it to be touched. Bertuccio made amends, however, by loading the ante-chambers, staircases, and mantle-pieces with flowers.
From that moment forth, all was over; the Ogre of Corsica,--the usurper,--the tyrant,--the monster who was the lover of his own sisters,--the actor who took lessons of Talma,--the poisoner of Jaffa,--the tiger,--Buonaparte,--all this vanished, and gave place in his mind to a vague and brilliant radiance in which shone, at an inaccessible height, the pale marble phantom of Caesar. The Emperor had been for his father only the well-beloved captain whom one admires, for whom one sacrifices one's self; he was something more to Marius. He was the predestined constructor of the French group, succeeding the Roman group in the domination of the universe. He was a prodigious architect, of a destruction, the continuer of Charlemagne, of Louis XI., of Henry IV., of Richelieu, of Louis XIV., and of the Committee of Public Safety, having his spots, no doubt, his faults, his crimes even, being a man, that is to say; but august in his faults, brilliant in his spots, powerful in his crime.
"Well, what is there surprising in that? When I live at Auteuil, you must come there, as you belong to my service." Bertuccio hung down his head before the imperious look of his master, and remained motionless, without making any answer. "Why, what has happened to you?--are you going to make me ring a second time for the carriage?" asked Monte Cristo, in the same tone that Louis XIV. pronounced the famous, "I have been almost obliged to wait." Bertuccio made but one bound to the ante-chamber, and cried in a hoarse voice--"His excellency's horses!" Monte Cristo wrote two or three notes, and, as he sealed the last, the steward appeared. "Your excellency's carriage is at the door," said he.
The inundation of 1802 is one of the actual memories of Parisians of the age of eighty. The mud spread in cross-form over the Place des Victoires, where stands the statue of Louis XIV.; it entered the Rue Saint-Honore by the two mouths to the sewer in the Champs-Elysees, the Rue Saint-Florentin through the Saint-Florentin sewer, the Rue Pierre-a-Poisson through the sewer de la Sonnerie, the Rue Popincourt, through the sewer of the Chemin-Vert, the Rue de la Roquette, through the sewer of the Rue de Lappe; it covered the drain of the Rue des Champs-Elysees to the height of thirty-five centimetres; and, to the South, through the vent of the Seine, performing its functions in inverse sense, it penetrated the Rue Mazarine, the Rue de l'Echaude, and the Rue des Marais, where it stopped at a distance of one hundred and nine metres, a few paces distant from the house in which Racine had lived, respecting, in the seventeenth century, the poet more than the King. It attained its maximum depth in the Rue Saint-Pierre, where it rose to the height of three feet above the flag-stones of the water-spout, and its maximum length in the Rue Saint-Sabin, where it spread out over a stretch two hundred and thirty-eight metres in length.
"It has always been so, my dear Morrel, since the reign of Louis XIV. The emperor is more strict in prison discipline than even Louis himself, and the number of prisoners whose names are not on the register is incalculable." Had Morrel even any suspicions, so much kindness would have dispelled them.
In addition to this, he said things which had the genuine sparkle of the old rock. Thus, when the King of Prussia, after having restored Louis XVIII., came to pay the latter a visit under the name of the Count de Ruppin, he was received by the descendant of Louis XIV. somewhat as though he had been the Marquis de Brandebourg, and with the most delicate impertinence. M. Gillenormand approved: "All kings who are not the King of France," said he, "are provincial kings." One day, the following question was put and the following answer returned in his presence: "To what was the editor of the Courrier Francais condemned?" "To be suspended." "Sus is superfluous," observed M. Gillenormand.[22] Remarks of this nature found a situation.
If the purpose of history be to give a description of the movement of humanity and of the peoples, the first question--in the absence of a reply to which all the rest will be incomprehensible--is: what is the power that moves peoples? To this, modern history laboriously replies either that Napoleon was a great genius, or that Louis XIV was very proud, or that certain writers wrote certain books.
After traversing a hundred paces, skirting a wall of the fifteenth century, surmounted by a pointed gable, with bricks set in contrast, he found himself before a large door of arched stone, with a rectilinear impost, in the sombre style of Louis XIV., flanked by two flat medallions. A severe facade rose above this door; a wall, perpendicular to the facade, almost touched the door, and flanked it with an abrupt right angle. In the meadow before the door lay three harrows, through which, in disorder, grew all the flowers of May. The door was closed. The two decrepit leaves which barred it were ornamented with an old rusty knocker.
What we know of the spiritual manifestations in the Cévennes (which much resembled those of the Swedish Raestars of Smaland in 1844) is chiefly derived from _Le Théâtre sacré des Cévennes_, London, 1707, reprinted at Paris in 1847; _A Cry From the Desert_, &c., by John Lacy, London, 1707; _La Clef des prophéties de M. Marion_, London, 1707; _Avertissements prophétiques d'Élie Marion_, &c., London, 1707. About the date of these publications the three prophets of the Cévennes, Marion, Durand-Fage and Cavalier (a cousin of the famous Jean Cavalier) were in London and were objects of lively curiosity. The consistory of the French church in the Savoy sent a protest to the lord mayor against "cette secte impie et extravagante" and the matter was tried at the Guildhall. Misson, author of the _Théâtre sacré_, declared in defence of the accused, that the same spirit which had caused Balaam's ass to speak could speak through the mouths of these prophets from the Cévennes. Marion and his two friends Fatio, a member of the Royal Society of London, and Daudé, a leading savant, who acted as his secretaries, were condemned to the pillory and to the stocks. Voltaire relates (_Siécle de Louis XIV._ c. 36) that Marion wished to prove his inspiration by attempting to raise a dead body (Thomas Ernes) from St Paul's churchyard. He was at last compelled to leave England.[1] Entry: CAMISARDS
After the death of Louis XIV. Desmarets was dismissed by the regent along with all the other ministers. He withdrew to his estates. To justify his ministry he addressed to the regent a _Compte rendu_, which showed clearly the difficulties he had to meet. His enemies even, like Saint Simon, had to recognize his honesty and his talent. He was certainly, after Colbert, the greatest finance minister of Louis XIV. Entry: DESMARETS
CAMBERT, ROBERT (1628-1677), French operatic composer, was born in Paris in 1628. He was a pupil of Chambonnières. In 1655, after he had obtained the post of organist at the church of St Honoré, he married Marie du Moustier. He was musical superintendent to Queen Anne of Austria, mother of Louis XIV., and for a time held a post with the marquis de Sourdeac. His earlier works, the words of which were furnished by Pierre Perrin, continued to be performed before the court at Vincennes till the death of his patron Cardinal Mazarin. In 1669 Perrin received a patent for the founding of the _Académie Nationale de musique_, the germ of the Grand Opéra, and Cambert had a share in the administration until both he and Perrin were discarded in the interests of Lulli. Displeased at his subsequent neglect, and jealous of the favour shown to Lulli, who was musical superintendent to the king, he went in 1673 to London, where soon after his arrival he was appointed master of the band to Charles II. One at least of his operas, _Pomone_, was performed in London under his direction, but it did not suit the popular taste, and he is supposed to have killed himself in London in 1677. His other principal operas were _Ariadne ou les amours de Bacchus_ and _Les Peines et les plaisirs de l'amour_. Entry: CAMBERT
CLEVELAND, BARBARA VILLIERS, DUCHESS OF (1641-1709), mistress of the English king Charles II., was the daughter of William Villiers, 2nd Viscount Grandison (d. 1643), by his wife Mary (d. 1684), daughter of Paul, 1st Viscount Bayning. In April 1659 Barbara married Roger Palmer, who was created earl of Castlemaine two years later, and soon after this marriage her intimacy with Charles II. began. The king was probably the father of her first child, Anne, born in February 1661, although the paternity was also attributed to one of her earliest lovers, Philip Stanhope, 2nd earl of Chesterfield (1633-1713). Mistress Palmer, as Barbara was called before her husband was made an earl, was naturally much disliked by Charles's queen, Catherine of Braganza, but owing to the insistence of the king she was made a lady of the bedchamber to Catherine, and began to mix in the political intrigues of the time, showing an especial hatred towards Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, who reciprocated this feeling and forbad his wife to visit her. Her house became a rendezvous for the enemies of the minister, and according to Pepys she exhibited a wild paroxysm of delight when she heard of Clarendon's fall from power in 1667. Whilst enjoying the royal favour Lady Castlemaine formed _liaisons_ with various gentlemen, which were satirized in public prints, and a sharp quarrel which occurred between her and the king in 1667 was partly due to this cause. But peace was soon made, and her influence, which had been gradually rising, became supreme at court in 1667 owing to the marriage of Frances Stuart (la belle Stuart) (1648-1702) with Charles Stuart, 3rd duke of Richmond (1640-1672). Accordingly Louis XIV. instructed his ambassador to pay special attention to Lady Castlemaine, who had become a Roman Catholic in 1663. Entry: CLEVELAND
In pursuance of a new aggressive policy in Germany Louis XIV. sent his troops, as a diplomatic menace rather than for conquest, into that country in the autumn of 1688. Some of their raiding parties plundered the country as far south as Augsburg, for the political intent of their advance suggested terrorism rather than conciliation as the best method. The league of Augsburg at once took up the challenge, and the addition of new members (Treaty of Vienna, May 1689) converted it into the "Grand Alliance" of Spain, Holland, Sweden, Savoy and certain Italian states, Great Britain, the emperor, the elector of Brandenburg, &c. Entry: GRAND
CHIC (a French word, either a shortened form of _chicane_, or derived from the Ger. _Schick_, tact or skill), a term properly used, in French artistic slang, of a work of art possessing brilliant but superficial technical ability, or of one executed without reference to a model or study of nature. The use of the word in French dates from the reign of Louis XIV. and then denoted a lawyer who was master of "chicane." "Chic," in general use, now connotes "smartness," in dress, speech, &c. Entry: CHIC
LEOPOLD I. (1640-1705), Roman emperor, the second son of the emperor Ferdinand III. and his first wife Maria Anna, daughter of Philip III. of Spain, was born on the 9th of June 1640. Intended for the Church, he received a good education, but his prospects were changed by the death of his elder brother, the German king Ferdinand IV., in July 1654, when he became his father's heir. In 1655 he was chosen king of Hungary and in 1656 king of Bohemia, and in July 1658, more than a year after his father's death, he was elected emperor at Frankfort, in spite of the intrigues of Cardinal Mazarin, who wished to place on the imperial throne Ferdinand, elector of Bavaria, or some other prince whose elevation would break the Habsburg succession. Mazarin, however, obtained a promise from the new emperor that he would not send assistance to Spain, then at war with France, and, by joining a confederation of German princes, called the league of the Rhine, France secured a certain influence in the internal affairs of Germany. Leopold's long reign covers one of the most important periods of European history; for nearly the whole of its forty-seven years he was pitted against Louis XIV. of France, whose dominant personality completely overshadowed Leopold. The emperor was a man of peace and never led his troops in person; yet the greater part of his public life was spent in arranging and directing wars. The first was with Sweden, whose king Charles X. found a useful ally in the prince of Transylvania, George II. Rakocky, a rebellious vassal of the Hungarian crown. This war, a legacy of the last reign, was waged by Leopold as the ally of Poland until peace was made at Oliva in 1660. A more dangerous foe next entered the lists. The Turks interfered in the affairs of Transylvania, always an unruly district, and this interference brought on a war with the Empire, which after some desultory operations really began in 1663. By a personal appeal to the diet at Regensburg Leopold induced the princes to send assistance for the campaign; troops were also sent by France, and in August 1664 the great imperialist general, Montecucculi, gained a notable victory at St Gotthard. By the peace of Vasvar the emperor made a twenty years' truce with the sultan, granting more generous terms than his recent victory seemed to render necessary. Entry: LEOPOLD
He set sail from Shoreham on the 15th of October 1651, and landed at Fécamp in Normandy the next day. He resided at Paris at St Germain till June 1654, in inactivity, unable to make any further effort, and living with difficulty on a grant from Louis XIV. of 600 livres a month. Various missions to foreign powers met with failure; he was excluded from Holland by the treaty made with England in April 1654, and he anticipated his expulsion from France, owing to the new relations of friendship established with Cromwell, by quitting the country in July. He visited his sister, the princess of Orange, at Spa, and went to Aix-la-Chapelle, thence finally proceeding in November to Cologne, where he was hospitably received. The conclusion of Cromwell's treaty with France in October 1655, and the war between England and Spain, gave hope of aid from the latter power. In April 1656 Charles went to Bruges, and on the 7th of February 1658 to Brussels, where he signed a treaty with Don John of Austria, governor of the Spanish Netherlands, by which he received an allowance in place of his French pension and undertook to assemble all his subjects in France in aid of the Spanish against the French. This plan, however, came to nothing; projected risings in England were betrayed, and by the capture of Dunkirk in June 1658, after the battle of the Dunes, by the French and Cromwell's Ironsides, the Spanish cause in Flanders was ruined. Entry: CHARLES
Carignano was erected by Charles Emmanuel I. of Savoy into a principality as an appanage for his third son, Thomas Francis (1596-1656), whose descendant, Charles Albert, prince of Carignano, became king of Sardinia on the extinction of the elder line of the house of Savoy with the death of Charles Felix in 1831. The house of Carignano developed two junior branches, those of Soissons and Villafranca. The first of these, which became extinct in 1734, was founded by Eugene Maurice, second son of Thomas, by his wife Marie de Condé, countess of Soissons, who received his mother's countship as his appanage. In 1662 the town of Yvois in the Ardennes was raised by Louis XIV. into a duchy in his favour, its name being changed at the same time to Carignan. The famous Prince Eugene was the second son of the first duke of Carignan. The branch of Villafranca started with Eugene Marie Louis (d. 1785), second son of Louis Victor of Carignano, whose grandson Eugene (1816-1888), afterwards an admiral in the Italian navy, was created prince of Savoy-Carignano, by King Charles Albert in 1834. He had contracted a morganatic marriage, and in 1888, on the occasion of his silver wedding, the title of countess of Villafranca was bestowed upon his wife, his eldest son, Filiberto, being at the same time created count of Villafranca, and his younger son, Vittorio, count of Soissons. Entry: CARIGNANO