The Saxons gave way at the first shock of the imperial troops, but the King of Sweden had dashed forward, and nothing could withstand him; Tilly himself, hitherto proof against lead and steel, fell wounded in three places; five thousand dead were left on the field of battle; and Gustavus Adolphus dragged at his heels seven thousand prisoners. "Never did the grace of God pull me out of so bad a scrape," said the conqueror. He halted some time at Mayence, which had just opened its gates to him. Axel Oxenstiern, his most faithful servant and oldest friend, whose intimacy with his royal master reminds one of that between Henry IV. and Sully, came to join him in Germany; he had hitherto been commissioned to hold the government of the conquests won from the Poles. He did not approve of the tactics of Gustavus Adolphus, who was attacking the Catholic League, and meanwhile leaving to the Elector of Saxony the charge of carrying the war into the hereditary dominions of Austria. . . . "Sir," said he, "I should have liked to offer you my felicitations on your victories, not at Mayence, but at Vienna." "If, after the battle of Leipzig, the King of Sweden had gone straight to attack the emperor in his hereditary provinces, it had been all over with the house of Austria," says Cardinal Richelieu; "but either God did not will the certain destruction of that house, which would perhaps have been too prejudicial to the Catholic religion, and he turned him aside from the counsel which would have been more advantageous for him to take, or the same God, who giveth not all to any, but distributeth his gifts diversely to each, had given to this king, as to Hannibal, the knowledge how to conquer, but not how to use victory."

Gustavus Adolphus had resumed his course of success: he came up with Tilly again on the Leek, April 10, 1632, and crushed his army; the general was mortally wounded, and the King of Sweden, entering Augsburg in triumph, proclaimed religious liberty there. He had moved forward in front of Ingolstadt, and was making a reconnoissance in person. "A king is not worthy of his crown who makes any difficulty about carrying it wherever a simple soldier can go," he said. A cannon-ball carried off the hind quarters of his horse and threw him down. He picked himself up, all covered with blood and mud. "The fruit is not yet ripe," he cried, with that strange mixture of courage and fatalism which so often characterizes great warriors; and he marched to Munich, on which he imposed a heavy war-contribution. The Elector of Bavaria, strongly favored by France, sought to treat in the name of the Catholic League; but Gustavus Adolphus required complete restitution of all territories wrested from the Protestant princes, the withdrawal of the troops occupying the dominions of the evangelicals, and the absolute neutrality of the Catholic princes. "These conditions smacked rather of your victorious prince, who would lay down and not accept the law." He summoned to him all the inhabitants of the countries he traversed in conqueror's style: "Surgite d mortuis," he said to the Bavarians, "et venite ad judieium" (Rise from the dead, and come to judgment). Protestant Suabia had declared for him, and Duke Bernard of Saxe-Weimar, one of his ablest lieute ants, carried the Swedish arms to the very banks of the Lake of Constance. The Lutheran countries of Upper Austria had taken up arms; and Switzerland had permitted the King of Sweden to recruit on her territory. "Italy began to tremble," says Cardinal Richelieu; "the Genevese themselves were fortifying their town, and, to see them doing so, it seemed as if the King of Sweden were at their gates; but God had disposed it otherwise."

The Emperor Ferdinand had recalled the only general capable of making a stand against Gustavus Adolphus. Wallenstein, deeply offended, had for a long while held out; but, being assured of the supreme command over the fresh army which Ferdinand was raising in all directions, he took the field at the end of April, 1632. Wallenstein effected a junction with the Elector of Bavaria, forcing Gustavus Adolphus back, little by little, on Nuremberg. "I mean to show the King of Sweden a new way of making war," said the German general. The sufferings of his army in an intrenched camp soon became intolerable to Gustavus Adolphus. In spite of inferiority of forces, he attacked the enemy's redoubts, and was repulsed; the king revictualled Nuremberg, and fell back upon Bavaria. Wallenstein at first followed him, and then flung himself upon Saxony, and took Leipzig; Gustavus Adolphus advanced to succor his ally, and the two armies met near the little town of Liitzen, on the 16th of November, 1632.

There was a thick fog. Gustavus Adolphus, rising before daybreak, would not put on his breastplate, his old wounds hurting him under harness: "God is my breastplate," he said. When somebody came and asked him for the watchword, he answered, "God with us;" and it was Luther's hymn, "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott" (Our God is a strong tower), that the Swedes sang as they advanced towards the enemy. The king had given orders to march straight on Lutzen. "He animated his men to the fight," says Richelieu, "with words that he had at command, whilst Wallenstein, by his mere presence and the sternness of his silence, seemed to let his men understand that, as he had been wont to do, he would reward them or chastise them, according as they did well or ill on that great day."

It was ten A. M., and the fog had just lifted; six batteries of cannon and two large ditches defended the Imperialists; the artillery from the ramparts of Liitzen played upon the king's army, the balls came whizzing about him; Bernard of Saxe-Weimar was the first to attack, pushing forward on Liitzen, which was soon taken; Gustavus Adolphus marched on to the enemy's intrenchments; for an instant the Swedish infantry seemed to waver; the king seized a pike and flung himself amidst the ranks. "After crossing so many rivers, scaling so many walls, and storming so many places, if you have not courage enough to defend yourselves, at least turn your heads to see me die," he shouted to the soldiers. They rallied: the king remounted his horse, bearing along with him a regiment of Smalandaise cavalry. "You will behave like good fellows, all of you," he said to them, as he dashed over the two ditches, carrying, as he went, two batteries of the enemy's cannon. "He took off his hat and rendered thanks to God for the victory He was giving him."

Two regiments of Imperial cuirassiers rode up to meet him; the king charged them at the head of his Swedes; he was in the thickest of the fight; his horse received a ball through the neck; Gustavus had his arm broken; the bone came through the sleeve of his coat; he wanted to have it attended to, and begged the Duke of Saxe-Altenburg to assist him in leaving the battle-field; at that very moment, Falkenberg, lieutenant- colonel in the Imperial army, galloped his horse on to the king and shot him, point-blank, in the back with a pistol. The king fell from his horse; and Falkenberg took to flight, pursued by one of the king's squires, who killed him. Gustavus Adolphus was left alone with a German page, who tried to raise him; the king could no longer speak; three Austrian cuirassiers surrounded him, asking the page the name of the wounded man; the youngster would not say, and fell, riddled with wounds, on his master's body; the Austrians sent one more pistol-shot into the dying man's temple, and stripped him of his clothes, leaving him only his shirt. The melley recommenced, and successive charges of cavalry passed over the hero's corpse; there were counted nine open wounds and thirteen scars on his body when it was recovered towards the evening.



One of the king's officers, who had been unable to quit the fight in time to succor him, went and announced his fall to Duke Bernard of Saxe-Weimar. To him a retreat was suggested; but, "We mustn't think of that," said he, "but of death or victory." A lieutenant-colonel of a cavalry regiment made some difficulty about resuming the attack: the duke passed his sword through his body, and, putting himself at the head of the troops, led them back upon the enemy's intrenchments which he carried and lost three times. At last he succeeded in turning the cannon upon the enemy, and "that gave the turn to the victory, which, nevertheless, was disputed till night."

"It was one of the most horrible ever heard of," says Cardinal Richelieu; "six thousand dead or dying were left on the field of battle, where Duke Bernard encamped till morning."

When day came, he led the troops off to Weisenfeld. The army knew nothing yet of the king's death. The Duke of Saxe-Weimar had the body brought to the front. "I will no longer conceal from you," he said, "the misfortune that has befallen us; in the name of the glory that you have won in following this great prince, help me to exact vengeance for it, and to let all the world see that he commanded soldiers who rendered him invincible, and, even after his death, the terror of his enemies." A shout arose from the host, "We will follow you whither you will, even to the end of the earth."

"Those who look for spots on the sun, and find something reprehensible even in virtue itself, blame this king," says Cardinal Richelieu, "for having died like a trooper; but they do not reflect that all conqueror-princes are obliged to do not only the duty of captain, but of simple soldier, and to be the first in peril, in order to lead thereto the soldier who would not run the risk without them. It was the case with Caesar and with Alexander, and the Swede died so much the more gloriously than either the one or the other, in that it is more becoming the condition of a great captain and a conqueror to die sword in hand, making a tomb for his body of his enemies on the field of battle, than to be hated of his own and poniarded by the hands of his nearest and dearest, or to die of poison or of drowning in a wine-butt."

Just like Napoleon in Egypt and Italy, Gustavus Adolphus, had performed the prelude, by numerous wars against his neighbors, to the grand enterprise which was to render his name illustrious. Vanquished in his struggle with Denmark in 1613, he had carried war into Muscovy, conquered towns and provinces, and as early as 1617 he had effected the removal of the Russians from the shores of the Baltic. The Poles made a pretence of setting their own king, Sigismund, upon the throne of Sweden; and for eighteen years Gustavus Adolphus had bravely defended his rights, and protected and extended his kingdom up to the truce of Altenmarket, concluded in 1629 through the intervention of Richelieu, who had need of the young King of Sweden in order to oppose the Emperor Ferdinand and the dangerous power of the house of Austria. Summoned to Germany by the Protestant princes who were being oppressed and despoiled, and assured of assistance and subsidies from the King of France, Gustavus Adolphus had, no doubt, ideas of a glorious destiny, which have been flippantly taxed with egotistical ambition. Perhaps, in the noble joy of victory, when he "was marching on without fighting," seeing provinces submit, one after another, without his being hardly at the pains to draw his sword, might he have sometimes dreamed of a Protestant empire and the imperial crown upon his head; but, assuredly, such was not the aim of his enterprise and of his life. "I must in the end make a sacrifice of myself," he had said on bidding farewell to the Estates of Sweden; and it was to the cause of Protestantism in Europe that he made this sacrifice. Sincerely religious in heart, Gustavus Adolphus was not ignorant that his principal political strength was in the hands of the Protestant princes; and he put at their service the incomparable splendor of his military genius. In two years the power of the house of Austria, a work of so many efforts and so many years, was shaken to its very foundations. The evangelical union of Protestant princes was re-forming in Germany, and treating, as equal with equal, with the emperor; Ferdinand was trembling in Vienna, and the Spaniards, uneasy even in Italy, were collecting their forces to make head against the irresistible conqueror, when the battle-field of Lutzen saw the fall, at thirty years of age, of the "hero of the North, the bulwark of Protestantism," as he was called by his contemporaries, astounded at his greatness. God sometimes thus cuts off His noblest champions in order to make men see that He is master, and He alone accomplishes His great designs; but to them whom He deigns to thus employ He accords the glory of leaving their imprint upon the times they have gone through and the events to which they have contributed. Two years of victory in Germany at the head of Protestantism sufficed to make the name of Gustavus Adolphus illustrious forever.

Richelieu had continued the work of Henry IV.; and Chancellor Oxenstiern did not leave to perish that of his master and friend. Scarcely was Gustavus Adolphus dead when Oxenstiern convoked at Erfurt the deputies from the Protestant towns, and made them swear the maintenance of the union. He afterwards summoned to Heilbronn all the Protestant princes; the four circles of Upper Germany (Franconia, Suabia, the Palatinate, and the Upper Rhine), and the elector of Brandenburg alone sent their representatives; but Richelieu had delegated M. de Feuquieres, who quietly brought his weight to bear on the decision of the assembly, and got Oxenstiern appointed to direct the Protestant party; the Elector of Saxony, who laid claim to this honor, was already leaning towards the treason which he was to consummate in the following year; France at the same time renewed her treaty with Sweden and Holland; the great general of the armies of the empire, Wallenstein, displeased with his master, was making secret advances to the cardinal and to Oxenstiern; wherever he did not appear in person the Imperial armies were beaten. The emperor was just having his eyes opened, when Wallenstein, summoning around him at Pilsen his generals and his lieutenants, made them take an oath of confederacy for the defence of his person and of the army, and, begging Bernard of Saxe-Weimar and the Saxon generals to join him in Bohemia, he wrote to Feuquieres to accept the king's secret offers.

Amongst the generals assembled at Pilsen there happened to be Max Piccolomini, in whom Wallenstein had great confidence: he at once revealed to the emperor his generalissimo's guilty intrigues. Wallenstein fell, assassinated by three of his officers, on the 15th of February, 1634; and the young King of Hungary, the emperor's eldest son, took the command-in chief of the army under the direction of the veteran generals of the empire. On the 6th of September, by one of those reversals which disconcert all human foresight, Bernard of Saxe-Weimar and the Swedish marshal, Horn, coming up to the aid of Nordlingen, which was being besieged by the Austrian army, were completely beaten in front of that place; and their army retired in disorder, leaving Suabia to the conqueror. Protestant Germany was in consternation; all eyes were turned towards France.

Cardinal Richelieu was ready; the frequent treasons of Duke Charles of Lorraine had recently furnished him with an opportunity, whilst directing the king's arms against him, of taking possession, partly by negotiation and partly by force, first of the town of Nancy, and then of the duchy of Bar; the duke had abdicated in favor of the cardinal, his brother, who, renouncing his ecclesiastical dignity, espoused his cousin, Princess Claude of Lorraine, and took refuge with her at Florence, whilst Charles led into Germany, to the emperor, all the forces he had remaining. The king's armies were coming to provisionally take possession of all the places in Lothringen, where the Swedes, beaten in front of Nordlingen, being obliged to abandon the left bank of the Upper Rhine, placed in the hands of the French the town of Philipsburg, which they had but lately taken from the Spaniards. The Rhinegrave Otto, who was commanding in Elsass for the confederates, in the same way effected his retreat, delivering over to Marshal La Force Colmar, Schlestadt, and many small places; the Bishop of Basle and the free city of Mulhausen likewise claimed French protection.

On the 1st of November, the ambassadors of Sweden and of the Protestant League signed at Paris a treaty of alliance, soon afterwards ratified by the diet at Worms, and the French army, entering Germany, under Marshals La Force and Breze, caused the siege of Heidelberg to be raised on the 23d of December. Richelieu was in treaty at the same time with the United Provinces for the invasion of the Catholic Low Countries. It was in the name of their ancient liberties that the cardinal, in alliance with the heretics of Holland, summoned the ancient Flanders to revolt against Spain; if they refused to listen to this appeal, the confederates were under mutual promises to divide their conquest between them. France confined herself to stipulating for the maintenance of the Catholic religion in the territory that devolved to Holland. The army destined for this enterprise was already in preparation, and the king was setting out to visit it, when, in April, 1635, he was informed of Chancellor Oxenstiern's arrival. Louis XIII. awaited him at Compiegne. The chancellor was accompanied by a numerous following, worthy of the man who held the command of a sovereign over the princes of the Protestant League; he had at his side the famous Hugo Grotius, but lately exiled from his country on account of religious disputes, and now accredited as ambassador to the King of France from the little queen, Christina of Sweden. It was Grotius who acted as interpreter between the king and the chancellor of Sweden. A rare and grand spectacle was this interview between, on the one side, the Swede and the Hollander, both of them great political philosophers in theory or practice, and, on the other, the all-powerful minister of the King of France, in presence of that king himself. When Oxenstiern and Richelieu conferred alone together, the two ministers had recourse to Latin, that common tongue of the cultivated minds of their time, and nobody was present at their conversation. Oxenstiern soon departed for Holland, laden with attentions and presents: he carried away with him a new treaty of alliance between Sweden and France, and the assurance that the king was about to declare war against Spain.

And it broke out, accordingly, on the 19th of May, 1635. The violation of the electorate of Treves by the Cardinal Infante, and the carrying-off of the elector-archbishop served as pretext; and Louis XIII. declared himself protector of a feeble prince who had placed in his hands the custody of several places. Alencon, herald-at-arms of France, appeared at Brussels, proclamation of war in hand; and, not be able to obtain an interview with the Cardinal Infante, he hurled it at the feet of the Belgian herald-at-arms commissioned to receive him, and he affixed a copy of it to a post he set up in the ground in the last Flemish village, near the frontier. On the 6th of June, a proclamation of the king's summoned the Spanish Low Countries to revolt. A victory had already been gained in Luxembourg, close to the little town of Avein, over Prince Thomas of Savoy, the duke-regnant's brother, who was embroiled with him, and whom Spain had just taken into her service. The campaign of 1635 appeared to be commencing under happy auspices. These hopes were deceived; the Low Countries did not respond to the summons of the king and of his confederates; there was no rising anywhere against the Spanish yoke; traditional jealousy of the heretics of Holland prevented the Flanders from declaring for France; it was necessary to undertake a conquest instead of fomenting an insurrection. The Prince of Orange was advancing slowly into Germany; the Elector of Saxony had treated with the emperor, and several towns were accepting the peace concluded between them at Prague; Bernard of Saxe-Weimar, supported by Cardinal Valette, at the head of French troops, had been forced to fall back to Metz in order to protect Lothringen and Elsass. In order to attach this great general to himself forever, the king had just ceded to Duke Bernard the landgravate of Elsass, hereditary possession, as it was, of the house of Austria. The Prince of Conde was attacking Franche-Comte; the siege of Dole was dragging its slow length along, when the emperor's most celebrated lieutenants, John van Weert and Piccolomini, who had formed a junction in Belgium, all at once rallied the troops of Prince Thomas, and, advancing rapidly towards Picardy, invaded French soil at the commencement of July, 1636. La Capelle and Le Catelet were taken by assault, and the Imperialists laid siege to Corbie, a little town on the Somme four leagues from Amiens.

Great was the terror at Paris, and, besides the terror, the rage; the cardinal was accused of having brought ruin upon France; for a moment the excitement against him was so violent that his friends were disquieted by it: he alone was unmoved. The king quitted St. Germain and returned to Paris, whilst Richelieu, alone, without escort, and with his horses at a walk, had himself driven to the Hotel de Ville right through the mob in their fury. "Then was seen," says Fontenay-Mareuil, "what can be done by a great heart (vertu), and how it is revered even of the basest souls, for the streets were so full of folks that there was hardly room to pass, and all so excited that they spoke of nothing but killing him: as soon as they saw him approaching, they all held their peace or prayed God to give him good speed, that he might be able to remedy the evil which was apprehended."

On the 15th of August, Corbie surrendered to the Spaniards, who crossed the Somme, wasting the country behind them; but already alarm had given place to ardent desire for vengeance; the cardinal had thought of everything and provided for everything: the bodies corporate, from the Parliament to the trade-syndicates, had offered the king considerable sums; all the gentlemen and soldiers unemployed had been put on the active list of the army; and the burgesses of Paris, mounting in throngs the steps of the Hotel de Ville, went and shook hands with the veteran Marshal La Force, saying, "Marshal, we want to make war with you." They were ordered to form the nucleus of the reserve army which was to protect Paris. The Duke of Orleans took the command of the army assembled at Compiegne, at the head of which the Count of Soissons already was; the two princes advanced slowly; they halted two days to recover the little fortress of Roze; the Imperialists fell back; they retired into Artois; they were not followed, and the French army encamped before Corbie.

Winter was approaching; nobody dared to attack the town; the cardinal had no confidence in either the Duke of Orleans or the Count of Soissons. He went to Amiens, whilst the king established his headquarters at the castle of Demuin, closer to Corbie. Richelieu determined to attack the town by assault; the trenches were opened on the 5th of November; on the 10th the garrison parleyed; on the 14th the place was surrendered. "I am very pleased to send you word that we have recovered Corbie," wrote Voiture to one of his friends, very hostile to the cardinal [OEuvres de Voiture, p. 175]: "the news will astonish you, no doubt, as well as all Europe; nevertheless, we are masters of it. Reflect, I beg you, what has been the end of this expedition which has made so much noise. Spain and Germany had made for the purpose their supremest efforts. The emperor had sent his best captains and his best cavalry. The army of Flanders had given its best troops. Out of that is formed an army of twenty-five thousand horse, fifteen thousand foot, and forty cannon. This cloud, big with thunder and lightning, comes bursting over Picardy, which it finds unsheltered, our arms being occupied elsewhere. They take, first of all, La Capelle and Le Catelet; they attack, and in nine days take, Corbie; and so they are masters of the river; they cross it, and they lay waste all that lies between the Somme and the Oise. And so long as there is no resistance, they valiantly hold the country, they slay our peasants and burn our villages; but, at the first rumor that reaches them to the effect that Monsieur is advancing with an army, and that the king is following close behind him, they intrench themselves behind Corbie; and, when they learn that there is no halting, and that the march against them is going on merrily, our conquerors abandon their intrenchments. And these determined gentry, who were to pierce France even to the Pyrenees, who threatened to pillage Paris, and recover there, even in Notre-Dame, the flags of the battle of Avein, permit us to effect the circumvallation of a place which is of so much importance to them, give us leisure to construct forts, and, after that, let us attack and take it by assault before their very eyes. Such is the end of the bravadoes of Piccolomini, who sent us word by his trumpeters to say, at one time, that he wished we had some powder, and, at another, that we had some cavalry coming, and, when we had both one and the other, he took very good care to wait for us. In such sort, sir, that, except La Capelle and Le Catelet, which are of no consideration, all the flash made by this grand and victorious army has been the capture of Corbie, only to give it up again and replace it in the king's hands, together with a counterscarp, three bastions, and three demilunes, which it did not possess. If they had taken ten more of our places with similar success, our frontier would be in all the better condition for it, and they would have fortified it better than those who hitherto have had the charge of it. . . . Was it not said that we should expend before this place many millions of gold and many millions of men with a chance of taking it, perhaps, in three years? Yet, when the resolution was taken to attack it by assault, the month of November being well advanced, there was not a soul but cried out. The best intentioned avowed that it showed blindness, and the rest said that we must be afraid lest our soldiers should not die soon enough of misery and hunger, and must wish to drown them in their own trenches. As for me, though I knew the inconveniencies which necessarily attend sieges undertaken at this season, I suspended my judgment; for, sooth to say, we have often seen the cardinal out in matters that he has had done by others, but we have never yet seen him fail in enterprises that he has been pleased to carry out in person and that he has supported by his presence. I believed, then, that he would surmount all difficulties; and that he who had taken La Rochelle in spite of Ocean, would certainly take Corbie too in spite of Winter's rains. . . . You will tell me, that it is luck which has made him take fortresses without ever having conducted a siege before, which has made him, without any experience, command armies successfully, which has always led him, as it were, by the hand, and preserved him amidst precipices into which he had thrown himself, and which, in fact, has often made him appear bold, wise, and far-sighted: let us look at him, then, in misfortune, and see if he had less boldness, wisdom, and far sightedness. Affairs were not going over well in Italy, and we had met with scarcely more success before Dole. When it was known that the enemy had entered Picardy, that all is a-flame to the very banks of the Oise, everybody takes fright, and the chief city of the realm is in consternation. On top of that come advices from Burgundy that the siege of Dole is raised, and from Saintonge that there are fifteen thousand peasants revolted, and that there is fear lest Poitou and Guienne may follow this example. Bad news comes thickly, the sky is overcast on all sides, the tempest beats upon us in all directions, and from no quarter whatever does a single ray of good fortune shine upon us. Amidst all this darkness, did the cardinal see less clearly? Did he lose his head during all this tempest? Did he not still hold the helm in one hand, and the compass in the other? Did he throw himself into the boat to save his life? Nay, if the great ship he commanded were to be lost, did he not show that he was ready to die before all the rest? Was it luck that drew him out of this labyrinth, or was it his own prudence, steadiness, and magnanimity? Our enemies are fifteen leagues from Paris, and his are inside it. Every day come advices that they are intriguing there to ruin him. France and Spain, so to speak, have conspired against him alone. What countenance was kept amidst all this by the man who they said would be dumbfounded at the least ill-success, and who had caused Le Havre to be fortified in order to throw himself into it at the first misfortune? He did not make a single step backward all the same. He thought of the perils of the state, and not of his own; and the only change observed in him all through was that, whereas he had not been wont to go out but with an escort of two hundred guards, he walked about, every day, attended by merely five or six gentlemen. It must be owned that adversity borne with so good a grace and such force of character is worth more than a great deal of prosperity and victory. To me he did not seem so great and so victorious on the day he entered La Rochelle as then; and the journeys he made from his house to the arsenal seem to me more glorious for him than those which he made beyond the mountains, and from which he returned with the triumphs of Pignerol and Suza."

This was Cardinal Richelieu's distinction, that all his contemporaries, in the same way as Voiture, identified the mishaps and the successes of their country with his own fortunes, and that upon him alone were fixed the eyes of Europe, whether friendly or hostile, when it supported or when it fought against France.

For four years the war was carried on with desperation by land and sea in the Low Countries, in Germany, and in Italy, with alternations of success and reverse. The actors disappeared one after another from the scene; the emperor, Ferdinand II., had died on the 15th of February, 1637;—the election of his son, Ferdinand III., had not been recognized by France and Sweden; Bernard of Saxe-Weimar succumbed, at thirty-four years of age, on the 15th of July, 1639, after having beaten, in the preceding year, the celebrated John van Weert, whom he sent a prisoner to Paris. At his death the landgravate of Elsass reverted to France, together with the town of Brisach, which he had won from the Imperialists.

The Duke of Savoy had died in 1637; his widow, Christine of France, daughter of Henry IV., was, so far as her brother's cause in Italy was concerned, but a poor support; but Count d'Harcourt, having succeeded, as head of the army, Cardinal Valette, who died in 1638, had retaken Turin and Casale from the Imperialists in the campaign of 1640; two years later, in the month of June, 1642, the Princes Thomas and Maurice, brothers-in-law of the Duchess Christine, wearied out by the maladdress and haughtiness of the Spaniards, attached themselves definitively to the interests of France, drove out the Spanish garrisons from Nice and Ivrea, in concert with the Duke of Longueville, and retook the fortress of Tortona as well as all Milaness to the south of the Po. Perpignan, besieged for more than two years past by the king's armies, capitulated at the same moment. Spain, hard pressed at home by the insurrection of the Catalans and the revolt of Portugal at the same time, both supported by Richelieu, saw Arras fall into the hands of France (August 9, 1640), and the plot contrived with the Duke of Bouillon and the Count of Soissons fail at the battle of La Marfee, where this latter prince was killed on the 16th of July, 1641. In Germany, Marshal Guebriant and the Swedish general Torstenson, so paralyzed that he had himself carried in a litter to the head of his army, had just won back from the empire Silesia, Moravia, and nearly all Saxony; the chances of war were everywhere favorable to France, a just recompense for the indomitable perseverance of Cardinal Richelieu through good and evil fortune. "The great tree of the house of Austria was shaken to its very roots, and he had all but felled that trunk which with its two branches covers the North and the West, and throws a shadow over the rest of the earth." [Lettres de Malherbe, t. iv.] The king, for a moment shaken in his fidelity towards his minister by the intrigues of Cinq-Mars, had returned to the cardinal with all the impetus of the indignation caused by the guilty treaty made by his favorite with Spain. All Europe thought as the young captain in the guards, afterwards Marshal Fabert, who, when the king said to him, "I know that my army is divided into two factions, royalists and cardinalists; which are you for?" answered, "Cardinalists, sir, for the cardinal's party is yours." The cardinal and France were triumphing together, but the conqueror was dying; Cardinal Richelieu had just been removed from Ruel to Paris.

For several months past, the cardinal's health, always precarious, had taken a serious turn; it was from his sick-bed that he, a prey to cruel agonies, directed the movements of the army, and, at the same time, the prosecution of Cinq-Mars. All at once his chest was attacked; and the cardinal felt that he was dying. On the 2d of December, 1642, public prayers were ordered in all the churches; the king went from St. Germain to see his minister. The cardinal was quite prepared. "I have this satisfaction," he said, "that I have never deserted the king, and that I leave his kingdom exalted, and all his enemies abased." He commended his relatives to his Majesty, "who on their behalf will remember my services;" then, naming the two secretaries of state, Chavigny and De Noyers, he added, "Your Majesty has Cardinal Mazarin; I believe him to be capable of serving the king." And he handed to Louis XIII. a proclamation which he had just prepared for the purpose of excluding the Duke of Orleans from any right to the regency in case of the king's death. The preamble called to mind that the king had five times already pardoned his brother, recently engaged in a new plot against him.

The king had left the cardinal, but without returning to St. Germain. He remained at the Louvre. Richelieu had in vain questioned the physicians as to how long he had to live. One, only, dared to go beyond commonplace hopes. "Monsignor," he said, "in twenty-four hours you will be dead or cured." "That is the way to speak!" said the cardinal; and he sent for the priest of St. Eustache, his parish. As they were bringing into his chamber the Holy Eucharist, he stretched out his hand, and, "There," said he, "is my Judge before whom I shall soon appear; I pray him with all my heart to condemn me if I have ever had any other aim than the welfare of religion and of the state." The priest would have omitted certain customary questions, but, "Treat me as the commonest of Christians," said the cardinal. And when he was asked to pardon his enemies, "I never had any but those of the state," answered the dying man.

The cardinal's family surrounded his bed; and the attendance was numerous. The Bishop of Lisieux, Cospdan, a man of small wits, but of sincere devoutness, listened attentively to the firm speech, the calm declarations, of the expiring minister. "So much self-confidence appalls me," he said below his breath. Richelieu died as he had lived, without scruples and without delicacies of conscience, absorbed by his great aim, and but little concerned about the means he had employed to arrive at it. "I believe, absolutely, all the truths taught by the church," he had said to his confessor, and this faith sufficed for his repose. The memory of the scaffolds he had caused to be erected did not so much as recur to his mind. "I have loved justice, and not vengeance. I have been severe towards some in order to be kind towards all," he had said in his will, written in Latin. He thought just the same on his death-bed.

The king left him, not without emotion and regret. The cardinal begged Madame d'Aiguillon, his niece, to withdraw. "She is the one whom I have loved most," he said. Those around him were convulsed with weeping. A Carmelite whom he had sent for turned to those present, and, "Let those," he said, "who cannot refrain from showing the excess of their weeping and their lamentation leave the room; let us pray for this soul." In presence of the majesty of death and eternity human grandeur disappears irrevocably; the all-powerful minister was at that moment only this soul. A last gasp announced his departure; Cardinal Richelieu was dead.

He was dead, but his work survived him. On the very evening of the 3d of December, Louis XIII. called to his council Cardinal Mazarin; and next day he wrote to the Parliaments and governors of provinces, "God having been pleased to take to himself the Cardinal de Richelieu, I have resolved to preserve and keep up all establishments ordained during his ministry, to follow out all projects arranged with him for affairs abroad and at home, in such sort that there shall not be any change. I have continued in my councils the same persons as served me then, and I have called thereto Cardinal Mazarin, of whose capacity and devotion to my service I have had proof, and of whom I feel no less sure than if he had been born amongst my subjects." Scarcely had the most powerful kings yielded up their last breath, when their wishes had been at once forgotten: Cardinal Richelieu still governed in his grave.



The king had distributed amongst his minister's relatives the offices and dignities which he had left vacant; the fortune that came to them was enormous; the legacies left to mere domestics amounted to more than three hundred thousand-livres. During his lifetime Richelieu had given to the crown "my grand hotel, which I built, and called Palais-de-Cardinal, my chapel (or chapel-service) of gold, enriched with diamonds, my grand buffet of chased silver, and a large diamond that I bought of Lopez." In his will he adds, "I most humbly beseech his Majesty to think proper to have placed in his hands, out of the coined gold and silver that I have at my decease, the sum of fifteen hundred thousand livres, of which sum I can truly say that I made very good use for the great affairs of his kingdom, in such sort, that if I had not had this money at my disposal, certain matters which have turned out well would have, to all appearances, turned out ill; which gives me ground for daring to beseech his Majesty to destine this sum, that I leave him, to be employed on divers occasions which cannot abide the tardiness of financial forms."

The minister and priest who had destroyed the power of the grandees in France had, nevertheless, the true instinct respecting the perpetuation of families. "Inasmuch as it hath pleased God," he says in his will, "to bless my labors, and make them considered by the king, my kind master, showing recognition of them by his royal munificence, beyond what I could hope for, I have esteemed it a duty to bind my heirs to preserve the estate in my family, in such sort that it may maintain itself for a long while in the dignity and splendor which it hath pleased the king to confer upon it, in order that posterity may know that, as I served him faithfully, he, by virtue of a complete kingliness, knew what love to show me, and how to load me with his benefits."

The cardinal had taken pleasure in embellishing the estate of Richelieu, in Touraine, where he was born, and which the king had raised to a duchy-peerage. Mdlle. de Montpensier, in her Memoires, gives an account of a visit she paid to it in her youth. "I passed," she says, "along a very fine street of the town, all the houses of which are in the best style of building, one like another, and quite newly made, which is not to be wondered at. MM. de Richelieu, though gentlemen of good standing, had never built a town; they had been content with their village and with a mediocre house. At the present time it is the most beautiful and most magnificent castle you could possibly see, and all the ornament that could be given to a house is found there. This will not be difficult to believe if one considers that it is the work of the most ambitious and most ostentatious man in the world, premier minister of state too, who for a long while possessed absolute authority over affairs. It is, nevertheless, inconceivable that the apartments should correspond so ill in size with the beauty of the outside. I hear that this arose from the fact that the cardinal wished to have the chamber preserved in which he was born. To adjust the house of a simple gentleman to the grand ideas of the most powerful favorite there has ever been in France, you will observe that the architect must have been hampered; accordingly he did not see his way to planning any but very small quarters, which, by way of recompense, as regards gilding or painting, lack no embellishment inside.

"Amidst all that modern invention has employed to embellish it, there are to be seen, on the chimney-piece in a drawingroom, the arms of Cardinal Richelieu, just as they were during the lifetime of his father, which the cardinal desired to leave there, because they comprise a collar of the Holy Ghost, in order to prove to those who are wont to misrepresent the origin of favorites that he was born a gentleman of a good house. In this point, he imposed upon nobody."

The castle of Richelieu is well nigh destroyed; his family, after falling into poverty, is extinct; the Palais-Cardinal has assumed the name of Palais-Royal; and pure monarchy, the aim of all his efforts and the work of his whole life, has been swept away by the blast of revolution. Of the cardinal there remains nothing but the great memory of his power and of the services he rendered his country. Evil has been spoken, with good reason, of glory; it lasts, however, more durably than material successes even when they rest on the best security. Richelieu had no conception of that noblest ambition on which a human soul can feed, that of governing a free country, but he was one of the greatest, the most effective, and the boldest, as well as the most prudent servants that France ever had.

Cardinal Richelieu gave his age, whether admirers or adversaries, the idea which Malherbe expressed in a letter to one of his friends: "You know that my humor is neither to flatter nor to lie; but I swear to you that there is in this man a something which surpasses humanity, and that if our bark is ever to outride the tempests, it will be whilst this glorious hand holds the rudder. Other pilots diminish my fear, this one makes me unconscious of it. Hitherto, when we had to build anew or repair some ruin, plaster alone was put in requisition. Now we see nothing but marble used; and, whilst the counsels are judicious and faithful, the execution is diligent and magnanimous. Wits, judgment, and courage never existed in any man to the degree that they do in him. As for interest, he knows none but that of the public. To that he clings with a passion so unbridled, if I may dare so to speak, that the visible injury it does his constitution is not capable of detaching him from it. Sees he anything useful to the king's service, he goes at it without looking to one side or the other. Obstacles tempt him, resistance piques him, and nothing that is put in his way diverts him; the disregard he shows of self, and of all that touches himself, as if he knew no sort of health or disease but the health or disease of the state, causes all good men to fear that his life will not be long enough for him to see the fruit of what he plants; and moreover, it is quite evident that what he leaves undone can never be completed by any man that holds his place. Why, man, he does a thing because it has to be done! The space between the Rhine and the Pyrenees seems to him not field enough for the lilies of France. He would have them occupy the two shores of the Mediterranean, and waft their odors thence to the extremest countries of the Orient. Measure by the extent of his designs the extent of his courage." [Letters to Racan and to M. de Mentin. OEuvres de Malherbe, t. iv.]



The cardinal had been barely four months reposing in that chapel of the Sorbonne which he had himself repaired for the purpose, and already King Louis XIII. was sinking into the tomb. The minister had died at fifty-seven, the king was not yet forty-two; but his always languishing health seemed unable to bear the burden of affairs which had been but lately borne by Richelieu alone. The king had permitted his brother to appear again at court. "Monsieur supped with me," says Mdlle. de Montpensier, "and we had the twenty-four violins; he was as gay as if MM. Cinq-Mars and De Thou had not tarried by the way. I confess that I could not see him without thinking of them, and that in my joy I felt that his gave me a pang." The prisoners and exiles, by degrees, received their pardon; the Duke of Vendome, Bassompierre, and Marshal Vitry had been empowered to return to their castles, the Duchess of Chevreuse and the ex-keeper of the seals, Chateauneuf, were alone excepted from this favor. "After the peace," said the declaration touching the regency, which the king got enregistered by the Parliament on the 23d of April. The little dauphin, who had merely been sprinkled, had just received baptism in the chapel of the Castle of St. Germain. The king asked him, next day, if he knew what his name was. "My name is Louis XIV.," answered the child. "Not yet, my son, not yet," said the king, softly.

Louis XIII. did not cling to life: it had been sad and burdensome to him by the mere fact of his own melancholy and singular character, not that God had denied him prosperity or success. He had the windows opened of his chamber in the new castle of St. Germain looking towards the Abbey of St. Denis, where he had, at last, just laid the body of the queen his mother, hitherto resting at Cologne. "Let me see my last resting-place," he said to his servants. The crowd of courtiers thronged to the old castle, inhabited by the queen; visits were made to the new castle to see the king, who still worked with his ministers; when he was alone, "he was seen nearly always with his eyes open towards heaven, as if he talked with God heart to heart." [Memoires sur la Mort de Louis XIII., by his valet-de-chambre Dubois; Archives curieuses, t. v. p. 428.] On the 23d of April, it was believed that the last moment had arrived: the king received extreme unction; a dispute arose about the government of Brittany, given by the king to the Duke of La Meilleraye and claimed by the Duke of Vendome; the two claimants summoned their friends; the queen took fright, and, being obliged to repair to the king, committed the imprudence of confiding her children to the Duke of Beaufort, Vendome's eldest son, a young scatter-brain who made a great noise about this favor. The king rallied and appeared to regain strength. He was sometimes irritated at sight of the courtiers who filled his chamber. "Those gentry," he said to his most confidential servants, "come to see how soon I shall die. If I recover, I will make them pay dearly for their desire to have me die." The austere nature of Louis XIII. was awakened again with the transitory return of his powers; the severities of his reign were his own as much as Cardinal Richelieu's.

He was, nevertheless, dying, asking God for deliverance. It was Thursday, May 14. "Friday has always been my lucky day," said Louis XIII.: "on that day I have undertaken assaults that I have carried; I have even gained battles: I should have liked to die on a Friday." His doctors told him that they could find no more pulse; he raised his eyes to heaven and said out loud, "My God, receive me to mercy!" and addressing himself to all, he added, "Let us pray!" Then, fixing his eyes upon the Bishop of Meaux, he said, "You will, of course, see when the time comes for reading the agony prayers; I have marked them all." Everybody was praying and weeping; the queen and all the court were kneeling in the king's chamber. At three o'clock, he softly breathed his last, on the sane day and almost at the same moment at which his father had died beneath the dagger of Ravaillac, thirty-three years before.

France owed to Louis XIII. eighteen years of Cardinal Richelieu's government; and that is a service which she can never forget. "The minister made his sovereign play the second part in the monarchy and the first in Europe," said Montesquieu: "he abased the king, but he exalted the reign." It is to the honor of Louis XIII. that he understood and accepted the position designed for him by Providence in the government of his kingdom, and that he upheld with dogged fidelity a power which often galled him all the while that it was serving him.



CHAPTER XIII.——LOUIS XIII., RICHELIEU, AND LITERATURE.

Cardinal Richelieu was dead, and "his works followed him," to use the words of Holy Writ. At home and abroad, in France and in Europe, he had to a great extent continued the reign of Henry IV., and had completely cleared the way for that of Louis XIV. "Such was the strength and superiority of his genius that he knew all the depths and all the mysteries of government," said La Bruyere in his admission-speech before the French Academy; "he was regardful of foreign countries, he kept in hand crowned heads, he knew what weight to attach to their alliance; with allies he hedged himself against the enemy. . . . And, can you believe it, gentlemen? this practical and austere soul, formidable to the enemies of the state, inexorable to the factious, overwhelmed in negotiations, occupied at one time in weakening the party of heresy, at another in breaking up a league, and at another in meditating a conquest, found time for literary culture, and was fond of literature and of those who made it their profession!" From inclination and from personal interest therein this indefatigable and powerful mind had courted literature; he had foreseen its nascent power; he had divined in the literary circle he got about him a means of acting upon the whole nation; he had no idea of neglecting them; he did not attempt to subjugate them openly; he brought them near to him and protected them. It is one of Richelieu's triumphs to have founded the French Academy.

We must turn back for a moment and cast a glance at the intellectual condition which prevailed at the issue of the Renaissance and the Reformation.

For sixty years a momentous crisis had been exercising language and literature as well as society in France. They yearned to get out of it. Robust intellectual culture had, ceased to be the privilege of the erudite only; it began to gain a footing on the common domain; people no longer wrote in Latin, like Erasmus; the Reformation and the Renaissance spoke French. In order to suffice for this change, the language was taking form; everybody had lent a hand to the work; Calvin with his Christian Institutes (Institution Chretienne) at the same time as Rabelais with his learned and buffoonish romance, Ramus with his Dialectics, and Bodin with his Republic, Henry Estienne with his essays in French philology, as well as Ronsard and his friends by their classical crusade. Simultaneously with the language there was being created a public intelligent, inquiring, and eager. Scarcely had the translation of Plutarch by Amyot appeared, when it at once became, as Montaigne says, "the breviary of women and of ignoramuses." "God's life, my love," wrote Henry IV. to Mary de' Medici, "you could not have sent me any more agreeable news than of the pleasure you have taken in reading. Plutarch has a smile for me of never-failing freshness; to love him is to love me, for he was during a long while the instructor of my tender age; my good mother, to whom I owe everything, and who set so great store on my good deportment, and did not want me to be (that is what she used to say) an illustrious ignoramus, put that book into my hands, though I was then little more than a child at the breast. It has been like my conscience to me, and has whispered into my ear many good hints and excellent maxims for my behavior and for the government of my affairs."

Thanks to Amyot, Plutarch "had become a Frenchman:" Montaigne would not have been able to read him easily in Greek. Indifferent to the Reformation, which was too severe and too affirmative for him, Montaigne, "to whom Latin had been presented as his mother-tongue, rejoiced in the Renaissance without becoming a slave to it, or intoxicated with it like Rabelais or Ronsard. "The ideas I had naturally formed for myself about man," he says, "I confirmed and fortified by the authority of others and by the sound examples of the ancients, with whom I found my judgment in conformity." Born in 1533, at the castle of Montaigne in Perigord, and carefully brought up by "the good father God had given him," Michael de Montaigne was, in his childhood, "so heavy, lazy, and sleepy, that he could not be roused from sloth, even for the sake of play." He passed several years in the Parliament of Bordeaux, but "he had never taken a liking to jurisprudence, though his father had steeped him in it, when quite a child, to his very lips, and he was always asking himself why common language, so easy for every other purpose, becomes obscure and unintelligible in a contract or will, which made him fancy that the men of law had muddled everything in order to render themselves necessary." He had lost the only man he had ever really loved, Stephen de la Boetie, an amiable and noble philosopher, counsellor in the Parliament of Bordeaux. "If I am pressed to declare why I loved him," Montaigne used to say, "I feel that it can only be expressed by answering, because he was he, and I was I." Montaigne gave up the Parliament, and travelled in Switzerland and Italy, often stopping at Paris, and gladly returning to his castle of Montaigne, where he wrote down what he had seen; "hungering for self-knowledge," inquiring, indolent, without ardor for work, an enemy of all constraint, he was at the same time frank and subtle, gentle, humane, and moderate. As an inquiring spectator, without personal ambition, he had taken for his life's motto, "Who knows? (Que sais-je?)" Amidst the wars of religion he remained without political or religious passion. "I am disgusted by novelty, whatever aspect it may assume, and with good reason," he would say, "for I have seen some very disastrous effects of it." Outside as well as within himself, Montaigne studied mankind without regard to order and without premeditated plan. "I have no drill-sergeant to arrange my pieces (of writing) save hap-hazard only," he writes; "just as my ideas present themselves, I heap them together; sometimes they come rushing in a throng, sometimes they straggle single file. I like to be seen at my natural and ordinary pace, all a-hobble though it be; I let myself go, just as it happens. The parlance I like is a simple and natural parlance, the same on paper as in the mouth, a succulent and a nervous parlance, short and compact, not so much refined and finished to a hair as impetuous and brusque, difficult rather than wearisome, devoid of affectation, irregular, disconnected, and bold, not pedant-like, not preacher-like, not pleader-like." That fixity which Montaigne could not give to his irresolute and doubtful mind he stamped upon the tongue; it came out in his Essays supple, free, and bold; he had made the first decisive step towards the formation of the language, pending the advent of Descartes and the great literature of France.

The sixteenth century began everything, attempted everything; it accomplished and finished nothing; its great men opened the road of the future to France; but they died without having brought their work well through, without foreseeing that it was going to be completed. The Reformation itself did not escape this misappreciation and discouragement of its age; and nowhere do they crop out in a more striking manner than in Montaigne. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Rabelais is a satirist and a cynic, he is no sceptic; there is felt circulating through his book a glowing sap of confidence and hope; fifty years later, Montaigne, on the contrary, expresses, in spite of his happy nature, in vivid, picturesque, exuberant language, only the lassitude of an antiquated age. Henry IV. was still disputing his throne with the League and Spain. Several times, amidst his embarrassments and his wars, the king had manifested his desire to see Montaigne; but the latter was ill, and felt "death nipping him continually in the throat or the reins." And he died, in fact, at his own house, on the 13th of September, 1592, without having had the good fortune to see Henry IV. in peaceable possession of the kingdom which was destined to receive from him, together with stability and peace, a return of generous hope. All the writers of mark in the reign of Henry IV. bear the same imprint; they all yearn to get free from the chaos of those ideas and sentiments which the sixteenth century left still bubbling up. In literature as well as in the state, one and the same need of discipline and unity, one universal thirst for order and peace was bringing together all the intellects and all the forces which were but lately clashing against and hampering one another; in literature, as well as in the state, the impulse, everywhere great and effective, proceeded from the king, without pressure or effort. "Make known to Monsieur de Geneve," said Henry IV. to one of the friends of St. Francis de Sales, "that I desire of him a work to serve as a manual for all persons of the court and the great world, without excepting kings and princes, to fit them for living Christianly each according to their condition. I want this manual to be accurate, judicious, and such as any one can make use of." St. Francis de Sales published, in 1608, the Introduction to a Devout Life, a delightful and charming manual of devotion, more stern and firm in spirit than in form, a true Christian regimen softened by the tact of a delicate and acute intellect, knowing the world and its ways. "The book has surpassed my hope," said Henry IV. The style is as supple, the fancy as rich, as Montaigne's; but scepticism has given place to Christianism; St. Francis de Sales does not doubt, he believes; ingenious and moderate withal, he escapes out of the controversies of the violent and the incertitudes of the sceptics. The step is firm, the march is onward towards the seventeenth century, towards the reign of order, rule, and method.

The vigorous language and the beautiful arrangement in the style of the magistrates had already prepared the way for its advent. Descartes was the first master of it and its great exponent.



Never was any mind more independent in voluntary submission to an inexorable logic. Rene Descartes, who was born at La Haye, near Tours, in 1596, and died at Stockholm in 1650, escaped the influence of Richelieu by the isolation to which he condemned himself, as well as by the proud and somewhat uncouth independence of his character. Engaging as a volunteer, at one and twenty, in the Dutch army, he marched over Germany in the service of several princes, returned to France, where he sold his property, travelled through the whole of Italy, and ended, in 1629, by settling himself in Holland, seeking everywhere solitude and room for his thoughts. "In this great city of Amsterdam, where I am now," he wrote to Balzac, "and where there is not a soul, except myself, that does not follow some commercial pursuit, everybody is so attentive to his gains, that I might live there all my life without being noticed by anybody. I go walking every day amidst the confusion of a great people with as much freedom and quiet as you could do in your forest-alleys, and I pay no more attention to the people who pass before my eyes than I should do to the trees that are in your forests and to the animals that feed there. Even the noise of traffic does not interrupt my reveries any more than would that of some rivulet." Having devoted himself for a long time past to the study of geometry and astronomy, he composed in Holland his Treatise on the World (Traite du Monde). "I had intended to send you my World for your New Year's gift," he wrote to the learned Minime, Father Mersenne, who was his best friend; "but I must tell you that, having had inquiries made, lately, at Leyden and at Amsterdam, whether Galileo's system of the world was to be obtained there, word was sent me that all the copies of it had been burned at Rome, and the author condemned to some fine, which astounded me so mightily that I almost resolved to burn all my papers, or at least not let them be seen by anybody. I confess that if the notion of the earth's motion is false, all the foundations of my philosophy are too, since it is clearly demonstrated by them. It is so connected with all parts of my treatise that I could not detach it without rendering the remainder wholly defective. But as I would not, for anything in the world, that there should proceed from me a discourse in which there was to be found the least word which might be disapproved of by the church, so would I rather suppress it altogether than let it appear mutilated."

Descartes' independence of thought did not tend to revolt, as he had proved: in publishing his Discourse on Method he halted at the threshold of Christianism without laying his hand upon the sanctuary. Making a clean sweep of all he had learned, and tearing himself free, by a supreme effort, from the whole tradition of humanity, he resolved "never to accept anything as true until he recognized it to be clearly so, and not to comprise amongst his opinions anything but what presented itself so clearly and distinctly to his mind that he could have no occasion to hold it in doubt." In this absolute isolation of his mind, without past and without future, Descartes, first of all assured of his own personal existence by that famous axiom, "Cogito, ergo sum" (I think, therefore I am), drew from it, as a necessary consequence, the fact of the separate existence of soul and of body; passing oft by a sort of internal revelation which he called innate ideas, he came to the pinnacle of his edifice, concluding for the existence of a God from the notion of the infinite impressed on the human soul. A laborious reconstruction of a primitive and simple truth which the philosopher could not, for a single moment, have banished from his mind all the while that he was laboring painfully to demonstrate it.

By a tacit avowal of the weakness of the human mind, the speculations of Descartes stopped short at death. He had hopes, however, of retarding the moment of it. "I felt myself alive," he said, at forty years of age, "and, examining myself with as much care as if I were a rich old man, I fancied I was even farther from death than I had been in my youth." He had yielded to the entreaties of Queen Christina of Sweden, who had promised him an observatory, like that of Tycho Brahe. He was delicate, and accustomed to follow a regimen adapted to his studies. "O flesh!" he wrote to Gassendi, whose philosophy contradicted his own: "O idea!" answered Gassendi. The climate of Stockholm was severe; Descartes caught inflammation of the lungs; he insisted upon doctoring himself, and died on the 11th of February, 1650. "He didn't want to resist death," said his friends, not admitting that their master's will could be vanquished by death itself. His influence remained for a long while supreme over his age. Bossuet and Fenelon were Cartesians. "I think, therefore I am," wrote Madame de Sevigne to her daughter. "I think of you tenderly, therefore I love you; I think only of you in that manner, therefore I love you only." Pascal alone, though adopting to a certain extent Descartes' form of reasoning, foresaw the excess to which other minds less upright and less firm would push the system of the great philosopher. "I cannot forgive Descartes," he said; "he would have liked, throughout his philosophy, to be able to do without God, but he could not help making Him give just a flick to set the world in motion; after that he didn't know what to do with God." A severe, but a true saying; Descartes had required everything of pure reason; he had felt a foreshadowing of the infinite and the unknown without daring to venture into them. In the name of reason, others have denied the infinite and the unknown. Pascal was wiser and bolder when, with St. Augustine, he found in reason itself a step towards faith. "Reason would never give in if she were not of opinion that there are occasions when she ought to give in."

By his philosophical method, powerful and logical, as well as by the clear, strong, and concise style he made use of to expound it, Descartes accomplished the transition from the sixteenth century to the seventeeth; he was the first of the great prose-writers of that incomparable epoch, which laid forever the foundations of the language. At the same moment the great Corneille was rendering poetry the same service.

It had come out of the sixteenth century more disturbed and less formed than prose; Ronsard and his friends had received it from the hands of Marot, quite young, unsophisticated and undecided; they attempted, at the first effort, to raise it to the level of the great classic models of which their minds were full. The attempt was bold, and the Pleiad did not pretend to consult the taste of the vulgar. "The obscurity of Ronsard," says M. Guizot, in his Corneille et son Temps, "is not that of a subtle mind torturing itself to make something out of nothing; it is the obscurity of a full and a powerful mind, which is embarrassed by its own riches, and has not learned to regulate the use of them. Furnished, by his reading of the ancients, with that which was wanting in our poetry, Ronsard thought he could perceive in his lofty and really poetical imagination what was needed to supply it; he cast his eyes in all directions, with the view of enriching the domain of poetry. 'Thou wilt do well to pick dexterously,' he says, in his abridgment of the art of French poetry, 'and adopt to thy work the most expressive words in the dialects of our own France; there is no need to care whether the vocables are Gascon, or Poitevin, or Norman, or Mancese, or Lyonnese, or of other districts, provided that they are good, and properly express what thou wouldst say.' Ronsard was too bold in extending his conquests over the classical languages; it was that exuberance of ideas, that effervescence of a genius not sufficiently master over its conceptions, which brought down upon him, in after times, the contempt of the writers who, in the seventeenth century, followed, with more wisdom and taste, the road which he had contributed to open. 'He is not,' said Balzac, 'quite a poet; he has the first beginnings and the making of a poet; we see in his works nascent and half-animated portions of a body which is in formation, but which does not care to arrive at completion.' "

This body is that of French poetry; Ronsard traced out its first lineaments, full of elevation, play of fancy, images, and a poetic fire unknown before him. He was the first to comprehend the dignity which befits grand subjects, and which earned him in his day the title of Prince of poets. He lived in stormy times, not much adapted for poetry, and steeped in the most cruel tragedies; he felt deeply the misfortunes of his country rent by civil war, when he wrote,—

"A cry of dread, a din, a thundering sound Of men and clashing harness roars around; Peoples 'gainst peoples furiously rage; Cities with cities deadly battle wage; Temples and towns—one heap of ashes lie; Justice and equity fade out and die Unchecked the soldier's wicked will is done With human blood the outraged churches run; Bedridden Age, disbedded, perisheth, And over all grins the pale face of Death."

There was something pregnant, noble, and brilliant about Ronsard, in spite of his exaggerations of style and faults of taste; his friends and disciples imitated and carried to an extreme his defects, without possessing his talent; the unruliness was such as to call for reform. Peace revived with Henry IV., and the court, henceforth in accord with the nation, resumed that empire over taste, manners, and ideas, which it was destined to exercise so long and so supremely under Louis XIV. Malherbe became the poet of the court, whose business it was to please it, to adopt for it that literature which had but lately been reserved for the feasts of the learned. "He used often to say, and chiefly when he was reproached with not following the meaning of the authors he translated or paraphrased, that he did not dress his meat for cooks, as if he had meant to infer that he cared very little to be praised by the literary folks who understood the books he had translated, provided that he was understood by the court-folks." A complete revolution in the opposite direction to that which Ronsard attempted appeared to have taken place, but the human mind never loses all the ground it has once won; in the verses of Malherbe, often bearing the imprint of beauties borrowed from the ancients, the language preserved, in consequence of the character given to it by Ronsard, a dignity, a richness of style, of which the times of Marot showed no conception; and it was falling, moreover, under the chastening influence of an elegant correctness. It was for the court that Malherbe made verses,"striving, as he said, to degasconnize it," seeking there his public and the source of honor as well as profit. As passionate an admirer of Richelieu as of Henry IV., naturally devoted to the service of the order established in the state as well as in poetry, he, under the regency of Mary de' Medici, favored the taste which was beginning to show itself for intellectual things, for refined pleasures, and elegant occupations. It was not around the queen that this honorable and agreeable society gathered; it was at the Hotel Rambouillet, around Catherine de Vivonne, in Rue St. Thomas du Louvre. Literature was there represented by Malherbe and Racan, afterwards by Balzac and Voiture, Gombault and Chapelain, who constantly met there, in company with Princess de Conde and her daughter, subsequently Duchess de Longueville, Mademoiselle du Vigean, Madame and Mdlle. d'Epernon, and the Bishop of Lucon himself, quite young as yet, but already famous. "All the wits were received at the Hotel Rambouillet, whatever their condition," says M. Cousin: "all that was asked of them was to have good manners; but the aristocratic tone was established there without any effort, the majority of the guests at the house being very great lords, and the mistress being at one and the same time Rambouillet and Vivonne. The wits were courted and honored, but they did not hold the dominion." At that great period which witnessed the growth of Richelieu's power, and of the action he universally exercised upon French society, at the outcome from the moral licentiousness which Henry IV.'s example had encouraged in his court, and after a certain roughness, the fruit of long civil wars, a lesson was taught at Madame de Rambouillet's of modesty, grace, and lofty politeness, together with the art of forming good ideas and giving them good expression, sometimes with rather too much of far-fetched and affected cleverness, always in good company, and with much sweetness and self-possession on the part of the mistress of the house. In 1627, Cardinal Richelieu, having become minister, sent the Marquis of Rambouillet as ambassador to Spain. He wanted to be repaid for this favor. One of his friends went to call upon Madame de Rambouillet. At the first hint of what was expected from her, "I do not believe that there are any intrigues between Cardinal Valette and the princess," said she, "and, even if there were, I should not be the proper person for the office it is intended to put upon me. Besides, everybody is so convinced of the consideration and friendship I have for his Eminence that nobody would dare to speak ill of him in my presence; I cannot, therefore, ever have an opportunity of rendering him the services you ask of me."

The cardinal did not persist, and remained well disposed towards Hotel Rambouillet. Completely occupied in laying solidly the foundations of his power, in checkmating and punishing conspiracies at court, and in breaking down the party of the Huguenots, he had no leisure just yet to think of literature and the literary. He had, nevertheless, in 1626, begun removing the ruins of the Sorbonne, with a view of reconstructing the buildings on a new plan and at his own expense. He wrote, in 1627, to M. Saintot, "I thank him for the care he has taken of the Sorbonne, begging him to continue it, assuring him that, though I have many expenses on my hands, I am as desirous of continuing to build up that house as of contributing, to the best of my little ability, to pull down the fortifications of La Rochelle." The works were not completely finished at the death of the cardinal, who provided therefor by his will.



At the same time that he was repairing and enriching the Sorbonne, the cardinal was helping Guy de la Brosse, the king's physician, to create the Botanic Gardens (Le Jardin des Plantes), he was defending the independence of the College of France against the pretensions of the University of Paris, and gave it for its Grand Almoner his brother, the Archbishop of Lyons. He was preparing the foundation of the King's Press (Imprimerie royale), definitively created in 1640; and he gave the Academy or King's College (college royal) of his town of Richelieu a regulation-code of studies which bears the imprint of his lofty and strong mind. He prescribed a deep study of the French tongue. "It often happens, unfortunately, that the difficulties which must be surmounted and the long time which is employed in learning the dead languages, before any knowledge of the sciences can be arrived at, have the effect, at the outset, of making young gentlemen disgusted and hasten to betake themselves to the exercise of arms without having been sufficiently instructed in good literature, though it is the fairest ornament of their profession. . . . It has, therefore, been thought necessary to establish a royal academy at which discipline suitable to their condition may be taught them in the French tongue, in order that they may exercise themselves therein, and that even foreigners, who are curious about it, may learn to know its riches and the graces it hath in unfolding the secrets of the highest discipline." Herein is revealed the founder of the French Academy, skilful as he was in divining the wants of his day, and always ready to profit by new means of action, and to make them his own whilst doing them service.

Associations of the literary were not unknown in France; Ronsard and his friends, at first under the name of the brigade and then under that of the Pleiad, often met to read together their joint productions, and to discuss literary questions; and the same thing was done, subsequently, in Malherbe's rooms.

"Now let us speak at our ease," Balzac would say, when the sitting was over, "and without fear of committing solecisms."

When Malherbe was dead and Balzac had retired to his country house on the borders of the Charente, some friends, "men of letters and of merits very much above the average," says Pellisson in his Histoire de l'Academie Francaise, "finding that nothing was more inconvenient in this great city than to go often and often to call upon one another without finding anybody at home, resolved to meet one day in the week at the house of one of them. They used to assemble at M. Conrart's, who happened to be most conveniently quartered for receiving them, and in the very heart of the city (Rue St. Martin). There they conversed familiarly as they would have on an ordinary visit, and upon all sorts of things, business, news, and literature. If any one of the company had a work done, as, often happened, he readily communicated its contents to all the others, who freely gave him their opinion of it, and their conferences were followed sometimes by a walk and sometimes by a collation which they took together. Thus they continued for three or four years, as I have heard many amongst them say; it was an extreme pleasure and an incredible gain, insomuch that, when they speak nowadays of that time and of those early days of the Academy, they speak of it as a golden age during the which, without bustle and without show, and without any other laws but those of friendship, they enjoyed all that is sweetest and most charming in the intercourse of intellects and in rational life."

Even after the intervention and regulationizing of Cardinal Richelieu, the French Academy still preserved something of that sweetness and that polished familiarity in their relations which caused the regrets of its earliest founders. [They were MM. Godeau, afterwards Bishop of Grasse, Conrart and Gombault who were Huguenots, Chapelain, Giry, Habert, Abbe de Cerisy, his brother, M. de Serizay and M. de Maleville.] The secret of the little gatherings was not so well kept but that Bois-Robert, the cardinal's accredited gossip, ever on the alert for news to divert his patron, heard of them and begged before long to be present at them. "There was no probability of his being refused, for, besides that he was on friendly terms with many of these gentlemen, the very favor he enjoyed gave him some sort of authority and added to his consequence. He was full of delight and admiration at what he saw, and did not fail to give the cardinal a favorable account of the little assembly, insomuch that the cardinal, who had a mind naturally inclined towards great things, and who loved the French language, which he himself wrote extremely well, asked if those persons would not be disposed to form a body and assembly regularly and under public authority." Bois-Robert was intrusted with the proposal.

Great was the consternation in the little voluntary and friendly Academy. "There was scarcely one of these gentlemen who did not testify displeasure: MM. de Serizay and de Maleville, who were attached to the households of the Duke of La Rochefoucauld and Marshal Bassompierre, one in retirement on his estates and the other a prisoner in the Bastille, were for refusing and excusing themselves as best they might to the cardinal. Chapelain, who had a pension from his Eminence, represented that "in good truth he could have been well pleased to dispense with having their conferences thus bruited abroad, but in the position to which things were reduced, it was not open to them to follow the more agreeable of the two courses; they had to do with a man who willed in no half-hearted way whatever he willed, and who was not accustomed to meet resistance or to stiffer it with impunity; he would consider as an insult the disregard shown for his protection, and might visit his resentment upon each individual; he could, at any rate, easily prohibit their assemblies, breaking up by that means a society which every one of them desired to be eternal." The arguments were strong, the members yielded; Bois-Robert was charged to thank his Eminence very humbly for the honor he did them, assuring him that they were all resolved to follow his wishes. "I wish to be of that assembly the protector and the father," said Richelieu, giving at once divers proofs that he took a great interest in that establishment, a fact which soon brought the Academy solicitations from those who were most intimate with the cardinal, and who, being in some sort of repute for wit, gloried in being admitted to a body which he regarded with favor.

In making of this little private gathering a great national institution, Cardinal Richelieu yielded to his natural yearning for government and dominion; he protected literature as a minister and as an admirer; the admirer's inclination was supported by the minister's influence. At the same time, and perhaps without being aware of it, he was giving French literature a centre of discipline and union whilst securing for the independence and dignity of writers a supporting-point which they had hitherto lacked. Whilst recompensing them by favors nearly always conferred in the name of the state, he was preparing for them afar off the means of withdrawing themselves from that private dependence, the yoke of which they nearly always had to bear. Set free at his death from the weight of their obligations to him, they became the servants of the state; ere long the French Academy had no other protector but the king.

Order and rule everywhere accompanied Cardinal Richelieu; the Academy drew up its statutes, chose a director, a chancellor, and a perpetual secretary: Conrart was the first to be called to that honor; the number of Academicians was set down at forty by letters patent from the king. "As soon as God had called us to the conduct of this realm, we had for aim, not only to apply a remedy to the disorders which the civil wars had introduced into it, but also to enrich it with all ornaments suitable for the most illustrious and the most ancient of the monarchies that are at this day in the world. Although we have labored without ceasing at the execution of this design, it hath been impossible for us hitherto to see the entire fulfilment thereof. The disturbances so often excited in the greater part of our provinces, and the assistance we have been obliged to give to many of our allies, have diverted us from any other thought but that of war, and have hindered us for a long while from enjoying the repose we procured for others. . . . Our very clear and very much beloved cousin, the cardinal-duke of Richelieu, who hath had the part that everybody knows in all these things, hath represented to us that one of the most glorious signs of the happiness of a kingdom was that the sciences and arts should flourish there, and that letters should be in honor there as well as arms; that, after having performed so many memorable exploits, we had nothing further to do but to add agreeable things to the necessary, and ornament to utility; and he was of opinion that we could not begin better than with the most noble of all the arts, which is eloquence; that the French tongue, which up to the present hath only too keenly felt the neglect of those who might have rendered it the most perfect of the day, is more than ever capable of becoming so, seeing the number of persons who have knowledge of the advantages it possesses; it is to establish fixed rules for it that he hath ordained an assembly whose propositions were satisfactory to him. For these reasons and in order to secure the said conferences, we will that they continue henceforth, in our good city of Paris, under the name of French Academy, and that letters patent be enregistered to that end by our gentry of the Parliament of Paris."

The Parliament was not disposed to fulfil the formality of enregistration. The cardinal had compressed it, stifled it, but he had never mastered it; the Academy was a new institution, it was regarded as his work; on that ground it inspired great distrust in the public as well as the magistrates. "The people, to whom everything that came from this minister looked suspicious, knew not whether beneath these flowers there were not a serpent concealed, and were apprehensive that this establishment was, at the very least, a new prop to support is domination, that it was but a batch of folks in his pay, hired to maintain all that he did and to observe the actions and sentiments of others. It went about that he cut down scavenging expenses of Paris by eighty thousand livres in order to give them a pension of two thousand livres apiece; the vulgar were so frightened, without attempting to account for their terror, that a tradesman of Paris, who had taken a house that suited him admirably in Rue Cinq Diamants, where the Academy then used to meet at M. Chapelain's, broke off his bargain on no other ground but that he did not want to be in a street where a 'Cademy of Canspirators (une Cademie e Manopoleurs) met every week." The wits, like St. Evremond, in his comedy of the Academistes, turned into ridicule the body which, as it was said, claimed to subject the language of the public to its decisions:—

"So I, with hoary head, to' school Must, like a child, go day by day, And learn my parts of speech, poor fool, when Death is taking speech away!"

said Maynard, who, nevertheless, was one of the forty.

The letters patent for establishment of the French Academy had been sent to the Parliament in 1635; they were not registered until 1637 at the express instance of the cardinal, who wrote to the premier President to assure him that "the foundation of the Academy was useful and necessary to the public, and the purpose of the Academicians was quite different from what it had been possible to make people believe hitherto."

The decree of verification, when it at length appeared, bore traces of the jealous prejudices of the Parliament. "They the said assembly and academy," it ran, "shall not be powered to take cognizance of anything but the ornamentation, embellishment, and augmentation of the French language, and of the books that shall be made by them and by other persons who shall desire it and want it."

The French Academy was founded; it was already commencing its Dictionary in accordance with the suggestion enunciated by Chapelain at the second meeting; the cardinal was here carrying out that great moral idea of literature which he had expressed but lately in a letter to Balzac: "The conceptions in your letters," said he, "are forcible and as far removed from ordinary imaginations as they are in conformity with the common sense of those who have superior judgment. Truth has this advantage, that it forces those who have eyes and mind sufficiently clear to discern what it is to represent it without disguise." Neither Balzac and his friends, nor the protection of Cardinal Richelieu, sufficed as yet to give lustre to the Academy; great minds and great writers alone could make the glory of their society. The principle of the association of men of letters was, however, established: men of the world, friendly to literature, were already preparing to mingle with them; the literary, but lately servitors of the great, had henceforth at their disposal a privilege envied and sought after by courtiers; their independence grew by it and their dignity gained by it. The French Academy became an institution, and took its place amongst the glories of France. It had this piece of good fortune, that Cardinal Richelieu died without being able to carry out the project he had conceived. He had intended to open on the site of the horse-market, near Porte St. Honore and behind the Palais-Cardinal, "a great Place which he would have called Ducale in imitation of the Royale, which is at the other end of the city," says Pellisson; he had placed in the hands of M. de la Mesnardiere, a memorandum drawn up by himself for the plan of a college "which he was meditating for all the noble sciences, and in which he designed to employ all that was most telling for the cause of literature in Europe. He had an idea of making the members of the Academy directors and as it were arbiters of this great establishment, and aspired, with a feeling worthy of the immortality with which he was so much in love, to set up the French Academy there in the most distinguished position in the world, and to offer an honorable and pleasant repose to all persons of that class who had deserved it by their labors." It was a noble and a liberal idea, worthy of the great mind which had conceived it; but it would have stifled the fertile germ of independence and liberty which he had unconsciously buried in the womb of the French Academy. Pensioned and barracked, the Academicians would have remained men of letters, shut off from society and the world. The Academy grew up alone, favored indeed, but never reduced to servitude; it alone has withstood the cruel shocks which have for so long a time agitated France; in a country where nothing lasts, it has lasted, with its traditions, its primitive statutes, its reminiscences, its respect for the past. It has preserved its courteous and modest dignity, its habits of polite neutrality, the suavity and equality of the relations between its members. It was said just now that Richelieu's work no longer existed save in history, and that revolutions have left him nothing but his glory; but that was a mistake: the French Academy is still standing, stronger and freer than at its birth, and it was founded by Richelieu, and has never forgotten him.

Amongst the earliest members of the Academy the cardinal had placed his most habitual and most intimate literary servants, Bois-Robert, Desmarets, Colletet, all writers for the theatre, employed by Richelieu in his own dramatic attempts. Theatrical representations were the only pleasure the minister enjoyed, in accord with the public of his day. He had everywhere encouraged this taste, supporting with marked favor , Hardy and the Theatre Parisien. With his mind constantly exercised by the wants of the government, he soon sought in the theatre a means of acting upon the masses. He had already foreseen the power of the press; he had laid hands on Doctor Renaudot's Gazette de France; King Louis XIII. often wrote articles in it; the manuscript exists in the National Library, with some corrections which appear to be Richelieu's. As for the theatre, the cardinal aspired to try his own hand at the work; his literary labors were nearly all political pieces; his tragedy of Mirame, to which he attached so much value, and which he had represented at such great expense for the opening of his theatre in the Palais-Cardinal, is nothing but one continual allusion, often bold even to insolence, to Buckingham's feelings towards Anne of Austria. The comedy, in heroic style, of Europe, which appeared in the name of Desmarets, after the cardinal's death, is a political allegory touching the condition of the world. Francion and Ibere contend together for the favors of Europe, not without, at the same time, paying court to the Princess Austrasia (Lorraine). All the cardinal's foreign policy, his alliances with Protestants, are there described in verses which do not lack a certain force: Germanique (the emperor) pleads the cause of Ibere with Europe:—

"No longer can he brook to gaze on such as these, Destroyers of the shrines, foes of the Deities, By Francion evoked from out the Frozen Main,[1] That he might cope with us and equal war maintain.

EUROPE.

O, call not by those names th' indomitable race, Who 'midst my champions hold honorable place. Unlike to us, they own no shrine, no sacrifice; But still, unlike Ibere, they use no artifice; About the Gods they speak their mind as seemeth best, Whilst he, with pious air, still keepeth me opprest; Through them I hold mine own, from harm and insult free, Their errors I deplore, their valor pleases me. What was that noble king,[2] that puissant conqueror, Who through thy regions, like a mighty torrent, tore? Who marched with giant strides along the path of fame, And, in the hour of death, left victory with his name? What are those gallant chiefs, who from his ashes rose, Whom still, methinks, his shade assists against their foes?

[1] The Swedes. [2] Gustavus Adolphus.

What was that Saxon heart,[1] so full of noble rage, He, whom thine own decrees drove from his heritage? Who, with his gallant few, full many a deed hath done Within thine own domains, and many a laurel won? Who, wasting not his strength in strife with granite walls, Routs thee in open field, and lo! the fortress falls? Who, taking just revenge for loss of all his own, Compressed thy boundaries, and cut thy frontiers down. How many virtues in that prince's[2] heart reside Who leads yon free-set[3] people's armies in their pride, People who boldly spurned Ibere and all his laws, Bravely shook off his yoke and bravely left his cause? Francion, without such aid, thou say'st would helpless be; What were Ibere without thy provinces and thee?

GERMANIQUE.

But I am of his blood:—own self same Deities.

EUROPE.

All they are of my blood:—gaze on the self-same skies Do all your hosts adore the Deities we own? Nay, from your very midst come errors widely sown. Ibere for chief support on erring men relies Yet, what himself may do, to others he denies. What! Francion favor error! This is idle prate: He who from irreligion thoroughly purged the state! Who brought the worship back to altars in decay; Who built the temples up that in their ashes lay; True son of them, who, spite of all thy fathers' feats, Replaced my reverend priests upon their holy seats! 'Twixt Francion and Ibere this difference remains: One sets them in their seats, and one in iron chains."