Henri and his friends escaped in order to establish the royal authority at Chartres. "Ungrateful Paris," said the monarch, as he rode through the gates, "for I loved you better than I did my wife;" which was true!

The quarrel was a curious one, and its settlement was made up of mirth and murder. De Guise seized the capital on pretence that the king, by his favour to the Huguenots, encouraged the latter to massacre the Papists. He refused to give it up but upon condition that Henri should consent to exterminate the Protestants. Henri laughingly agreed, and invited De Guise to repair to Blois to arrange the necessary preliminaries. De Guise did what no other man in France would have done, he accepted the invitation, and was butchered soon after he entered Blois. Henri galloped gaily past Rambouillet on his return to Paris to profit by his own wickedness and the folly of his "trusty and right well-beloved cousin."

Not long before this murder was committed, in 1588, the Hotel Pisani, in Paris, was made jubilant by the birth of that celebrated Catherine de Vivonnes, who was at once both learned and lovely; and who lived to found that school of lingual purists whose doings are so pleasantly caricatured in the Precieuses Ridicules of Molière. Catherine espoused Charles d'Angennes, the Lord of Rambouillet, who was made a Marquis for her sake. His young wife looked upon marriage rather as a closing act of life than otherwise. But then her's had been a busy youth. In her second lustre she knew as many languages as a lustrum has years. Ere a fourth had expired, her refined spirit and her active intellect were disgusted and weary with the continual sameness and the golden emptiness of the court. She cared little to render homage to a most Christian king who disregarded the precepts of Christianity; or to be sullied by homage from a king that could not be paid without insult to a virtuous woman. Young Catherine preferred in the summer eve to lie under the shadows of her father's trees, which once reared a world of leafy splendour on the spot now occupied by the ex-Palais Royal; and there she read the works coined by great minds.

During the long winter evenings she lay in stately ceremony upon her bed, an unseemly custom of the period, and there, surrounded by philosophers and wits, enjoyed and encouraged the "cudgelling of brains." At her suggestion the old hotel was destroyed, and after her designs a new one built; and when, in place of the old dark panelling obscurely seen by 66 casements that kept out the light," she covered the walls of her receptionrooms with sky-blue velvet, and welcomed the sun to shine upon them, universal France admiringly pronounced her mad, incontinently caught the infection, and broke out into an incurable disease of fancy and good taste.

The fruit of the union above spoken of was abundant, but the very jewel in that crown of children, the goodliest arrow in the family quiver, was the renowned Julie d'Angennes, whose fame has perhaps eclipsed that of her mother. Her childhood was passed at the feet of the most eminent men in France. Around her cradle Balzac enunciated his polished periods, and Marot his tuneful rhymes, Voiture his conceits, and Vaugelas his learning. She lay in the arms of Armand Duplessis, then almost as innocent as the angel who unconsciously smiled on that future ruthless Cardinal de Richelieu; and her young ear heard the elevated measure of Corneille's "Melite." To enumerate the circle which were wont to assemble within the Hotel Rambouillet, in Paris, or to loiter in the gardens and halls of the country chateau of whose history we are the unworthy chroniclers, would require more space than we can justly accord.

The circle comprised parties who hitherto were respectively exclusive; nobles met citizen wits, to the great benefit of the former; and Rambouillet afforded an asylum to the persecuted of all parties. They who resisted Henri IV. found safety within the hospitable threshold, and many who survived the bloody oppression of Richelieu sought therein for refuge, solace, and balm for their lacerated souls.

Above all, Madame de Rambouillet effected the social congregation of the Women were brought to encounter male wits, sometimes to con

sexes.

quer, always to improve them. The title to enter was, worth joined with ability; the etiquette was pedantically strict, as may be imagined by the case of Voiture, who, on one occasion, after conducting Julie through a suite of apartments, kissed her hand on parting from her, and was very near being expelled for ever from Rambouillet, as the reward of his temerity. Voiture subsequently went to Africa. On his return he was not admitted to the illustrious circle but on condition that he narrated his adventures; and to these the delighted assembly listened, all attired as gods and goddesses, and gravely addressing each other as such. Madame de Rambouillet presided over all as Diana, and the company did her abundant homage. This it is true was for the nonce; but there was a permanent travesty notwithstanding. It was the weak point of this assembly that not only was every member of it called by a feigned, generally a Greek, name, but the same rule was applied to most men and things beyond it; nay, the very oaths, for there were little expletives occasionally fired off in ecstatic moments, were all by the heathen gods. Thus, as a sample, France was Greece, Paris was Athens, and the Place Royale was only known at Rambouillet as the Place Dorique. The name of Madame de Rambouillet was Arthenice, that of Mademoiselle de Scudery was Agannippe, and Thessalonice was the purified cognomen of the Duchess de la Tremouille. But out of such childishness resulted great good, notwithstanding Molière laughed, and the Academie derided Corneille and all others of the innovating coterie. The times were coarse; things, whatever they might be, were bluntly called by their names; ears polite experienced offence, and at Rambouillet periphrasis was called upon to express what the language otherwise conveyed offensively by the medium of a single word. The idea was good, although it was abused. Of its quality some conjecture may be formed by one or two brief examples; and we may add, by the way, that the French Academy ended by adopting many of the terms which it at first refused to acknowledge; popularity has been given to much of the remainder; and thus a great portion of the vocabulary of Rambouillet

"Mo

has become idiomatic French. deste," "friponne," and "secrete," were names given to the under garments of ladies, which we now should not be afraid to specify. The sun was the "amiable illuminator;" to "fulfil the desire which the chair had to embrace you," was simply to "sit down;" horses were "plushed coursers" a carriage was "four cornices ;" and chairmen were "baptized mules;" a bed was "the old dreamer;" a hat "the buckler against weather;" to laugh was to "lose your gravity;" dinner was the "meridional necessity;" the ear was the "organ" or "gate of hearing;" and the "throne of modesty" was the polished phrase for a fair young cheek. There is nothing very edifying in all this, it is true, but the fashion set people thinking, and good ensued. Old indelicacies disappeared, and the general spoken language was refined. If any greater mental purity ensued from the change we can scarcely give the credit of it to the party at Rambouillet, for, with all their proclaimed refinement, their nicety was of the kind described in the well-known maxim of the Dean of St. Patrick.

One of the most remarkable men in the circle at Rambouillet was the Marquis de Salles; he was second son of the Duc de Montausier, and subsequently inherited the title. At the period of his father's death his mother found herself with little dower but her title. She exerted herself, however, courageously, instructed her children herself, brought them up in strict Huguenot principles, and afterwards sent them to the Calvinistic College at Sedan, where the young students were famous for the arguments which they maintained against all comers-and they were many-who sought to convert them to Popery. At an early age he assumed the profession of arms, the only vocation for a young and penniless noble, and he shed his blood liberally for a king who had no thanks to offer to a Protestant; his wit, refinement, and gallant bearing, made him a welcome guest at Rambouillet, where his famous attachment to Julie, who was three years his senior, gave matter for conversation to the whole of France. Courageous himself, he loved courage in others; and his love for Julie d'Angennes was fired by the

rare bravery exhibited by her in tending a dying brother, the infectious nature of whose disease had made even his hired nurses desert him. In the season of mourning the whole court, led by royalty, went and did homage to this pearl of sisters; but no words of admiration fell so sweetly on her ear as those whispered to her by the young Montausier. One evidence of his gallantry is yet extant it is in that renowned volume called the "Guirlande de Julie," of which he was the projector, and in the accomplishment of which artists and poets lent their willing aid. It is a superb vellum tome; the frontispiece is the garland or wreath from which the volume takes its name. Each subsequent page presents one single flower from this wreath (there are eighteen of them), with verses in honour of Julia, composed by a dozen and a half of very insipid poets. This volume was some years ago sold to Madame d'Uzes, a descendant of the family, when its cost amounted to nearly one thousand francs per page.

As everything was singular at Rambouillet, so of course was the wooing of Julie and Montausier. It was "very long a-doing," and we doubt if in the years of restrained ardour, of fabulous constancy, of reserve, and sad yet pleasing anguish, the lover ever dared to kiss the hand of his mistress, or even to speak of marriage but by a diplomatic paraphrase. The goddesses of Rambouillet entertained an eloquent horror of the gross indelicacy of such unions, for which Molière has whipped them with a light but cutting scourge. The lover, moreover, was a Huguenot. What was he to do? He rushed to the field, was the hero of two brilliant campaigns, and then wooed her as Marechal de camp, and Governor of Alsatia. The nymph was coy; the swain again buckled on his armour, and in the melée at Dettingen was captured by the foe. After a ten months' detention he was ransomed by his mother for ten thousand crowns. Here-entered Rambouillet Lieutenant. General of the armies of France, and asked for the recompense of his fourteen years of constancy and patience. Julie was shocked when she reflected on the brief time they had been acquainted. At length the marquess made profession of Romanism, and thus GENT. MAG. VOL. XXXIV.

purchased the double aid of the church and the throne. The king, the queen, Cardinal Mazarine, and a host of less influential mediators, besought her to relent, and the shy beauty at length reluctantly surrendered. The marriage took place in 1645, and Julie then was within sight of forty years of age. The young wits, you may be sure, had much to say thereon; the older beaux esprits looked admiringly, but a world of whispered wickedness went on among them nevertheless.

Montausier, for he now was duke, became the reigning sovereign over the literary circle at Rambouillet during the declining years of Julie's mother, who died in 1665, after a long retirement, and almost forgotten by the sons of those whom she once delighted to honour. The most delicate and most difficult public employment held by the duke was that of governor to the dauphin. This office he filled with singular ability. He selected Bossuet and Huet to instruct the young prince in the theoretical wisdom of books, but the practical teaching was imparted by himself; and many a morning saw the governor and his pupil issue from the gilded gates of Versailles to take a course of popular study among the cottages and peasantry of the environs. His heart was shattered by the death of Julie in 1671, at the age of sixty-four; he survived her nineteen years; they were passed in sorrow, but also in continually active usefulness; and when at length, in 1690, the grave of his beloved wife opened to receive him, Flechier pronounced a fitting funeral oration over both.

The daughter and only surviving child of this distinguished pair gave with her hand the lordship of Rambouillet to the duc D'Uzes. The D'Angennes had held it for three centuries. It was now, in 1706, destined to become royal, Louis XIV. having purchased it for the Count of Toulouse, the legitimized son of himself and Madame de Montespan. The count was Grand Admiral of France at the age of five years. In 1704 he had just completed his 25th year. M. Gozlan tells us that the count defeated the combined English and Dutch squadrons before Malaga, dismasting the English, sinking the Dutch admiral, and slaying three thousand men, S

without the slightest injury to his own fleet! Credant Judæus Gozlanque; we know better. The fleets were those under Rooke and Shovel, and they had just immortalized themselves by the capture of Gibraltar. The count fought bravely doubtless, but not with the results mentioned by the author. The adversaries were engaged for a whole day, when the van of the French gave way. For two entire succeeding days the English vainly endeavoured to bring the count again into close action; but the latter made all sail, and finally escaped us. Not a ship was taken or destroyed by either party, but the French, our superiors in force, were so roughly handled that they did not risk another engagement by sea during the remainder of the war. Besides, if the count had been so successful as his chronicler declares him to have been, why did Pontchartrain, the minister of marine, recall him, settle him down at Rambouillet, and leave him there for the remainder of his life to shoot rabbits and raise cabbages?

The son of Louis XIV. was, long before his death, created Duc de Penthievre, but he was not the renowned duke of that name. The better fame points to his son and successor, who was also Grand Admiral of France ere he knew salt water from fresh, and who studied naval tactics as Uncle Toby and the corporal fought their old battles, namely, with toy batteries, and in the duke's case with little vessels and small sailors, all afloat on a miniature fish-pond made to represent, for the nonce, the mighty and boundless deep. This grand admiral never ventured on the ocean, but he bore himself chivalrously on the bloody field of Dettingen, when the argument of a second butchery was again held there, and he won imperishable laurels by his valour at Fontenoy, where from morn to eve victory sat upon our English helms, and yet abandoned us at last. For such scenes and their glories, however, Penthievre cared little, and he hastened, ere the French Te Deum was raised above the last named field, to his happy hearth at home. Rambouillet was then the abiding place of all the virtues. There the duke read aloud the inspired page while his wife sat at his side making

garments for the poor, and Florian, his secretary and friend, meditated those graceful rhymes, or harmonious prose, in which human nature is in pretty masquerade, walking about like Watteau's figures, in visors, brocades, high heels, and farthingales. When the duchess died in child-birth of her sixth child, her husband withdrew to La Trappe, where for weeks he prayed and slept upon the bare stones. He was tried sorely, and did not despise the heavenly chastening. Five times did the inevitable angel descend into the circle formed by his six children, and each time departed with one of his little ones. Among the early called was his young son, just married to that Princess de Lamballe whom the children of liberty hacked to pieces in the streets of Paris. The daughter who survived him gave her hand to the Duc de Chartres, and her son, after many vicissitudes, now keeps his diminished state, an exiled king, at princely Claremont.

The only sport carried on by the duke and Florian in the domain and vicinity of Rambouillet was in quest of the worthy indigent, and great was the rejoicing when the day was good and the sport plentiful. Louis XV. coveted possession of the place for other purposes, but the duke would not surrender his father's house; all that the king could obtain was permission to build a hunting-seat in the forest, dedicated to St. Hubert. Therein were wont to assemble a company at whose doings the good saint would have blushed could he have witnessed them. One night a gay and glittering array of king and courtiers, chacun avec sa chacune, repaired to the pavilion of St. Hubert. When suppertime arrived, they discovered that the provisions for the banquet had been left behind at Versailles. "Let us go

to Penthievre!" was the cry of the ladies and their lords, but the king looked grave at the proposition. Hunger and the universal opposition, however, overcame him; forth the famished revellers issued, and played a reveillée on the gates of Rambouillet loud enough to have startled the seven sleepers. "Penthievre is in bed,” said

one.

"He is conning his breviary," said another. "Gentlemen, he is perhaps at prayers," said the king, who,

like an Athenian, could applaud the virtue which he failed to practise, "let us withdraw!" "If I do," said the Du Barry, "I shall die of hunger; knock again." To the storm which again beset the gates the latter yielded, and, as they swung open, they disclosed the duke, who, girt in a white apron and with a ladle in his hand, received his visitors with the announcement that he was engaged in helping to make soup for his poor! But the monarch and his followers declared that the poor could not be in such danger of starvation as they were, and they seized the welcome provision, devoured it with the appetite of those for whom it was intended, and paid their grave host in the false coin of pointless jokes. The host was worth a wilderness of such kings as he who sat at the board uninvited. His greatness may be recognised in his reply to a poor woman who humbly kissed his hand and asked a favour as he was passing in a religious procession. "In order of religion, before God," said he, "I am your brother; in all other cases, for ever your friend."

It was a sad day to him when Louis XVI. in 1785, compelled him to accept sixteen millions of francs, and part with Rambouillet. He retired to Eu, and took with him the dead whom when living he had most dearly loved. There were nine of that silent company, and as the duke passed with them on his sad and solemn way, the clouds wept over them, and the people crowded the long line of road paying their homage in honest

tears.

A few short years, and then ensued that fatal "10th of August" which gave Louis to the scaffold and a republic to France, and which dragged from the dairy at Rambouillet the queen and princesses, whose pastime it was to milk the cows in fancy dresses. The duke refused to emigrate, having faith in the affection of the people. Among that people were men who not only murdered his daughter-in-law, but who are said, in their cannibal frenzy, to have torn out her heart and devoured it. Penthievre bowed his grey head in anguish. This and similar excesses slew him. He died of the Revolution as surely as though the guillotine had visited him. In his last hours, the

people flocked beneath his windows, and at their solicitation the dying prince blessed and pardoned them as he was held up to the sight of those who gazed on him from below. They showed their gratitude by afterwards tearing his body from the grave, and with it those nine buried dear ones, father, mother, brother, wife, and five of the six whom that wife had borne to him, and then cast the whole into a deep ditch, over which filial piety has since raised an expiatory chapel.

During the Republic, Rambouillet escaped notice, and the merino sheep which Louis XVI. introduced there, with much difficulty, lived tranquilly, and bequeathed, in their multiplied successors, no inconsiderable benefit to France. The peace of the locality was once more disturbed, when, on the 27th March 1814, the empress MariaLouisa, with the King of Rome in her arms, sought shelter there, while she awaited the issue of the bloody struggle which her own father was maintaining against her husband. The empress passed three days at Rambouillet solacing her majestic anguish-by angling for carp! She was then carried to Blois, there to proclaim the visionary accession of her son to a throne that had ceased to exist. From Blois, in less than a week, she returned to Rambouillet escorted by her countrymen, the destroyers of her son's inheritance; and when the emperor of Austria sat that night before the wood fire with the ex-king of Rome upon his knee, the archduchess Maria Louisa talked about his teeth, and ten thousand Austrian soldiers kept watch around the walls of the astonished palace.

Nor was this the last dynasty that passed, on its overthrow, through the funereal arch of Rambouillet. On the last of the "three glorious days" of July, a poor, pale, palsied fugitive, rushed into the chateau, obtained, not easily, a glass of water and a crust, and forthworth hurried on, to meet captivity at last. This was the prince de Polignac. Two hours after he had left came the old monarch, Charles X. covered with dust, dropping tears like rain, bewildered with past memories and present realities, and loudly begging food for the two "children of France," the offspring of his favourite