Turn we now to "the master of the them on to the betrayal of one another's revels," the Regent himself. Saint-Si- secrets. This created for him more enemon, that immortal painter of the men mies than any other of his vices. He and manners of that age, thu pictures Philippe d'Orléans; the date of the portrait is 1715, just previous to the King's death: M. le Duc d'Orléans was not above the middle height, very stout without being fat, is air and carriage easy and very distinguished, his face full, agreeable, and very high coloured, his hair black, his peruke of the same hue. Although he danced badly, there was in his countenance, in his gestures, in his manners, an infinite grace which adorned his commonest actions. He was gentle, free, and easy of access. His voice was agreeable and his speech was wonderfully clear and fluent. conversation he was equally at home whether the subject was passing events or the most abstract sciences, whether it was politics, finance, war, the court, arts, or mechanics. His knowledge of history and biography was enormous, his memory prodigious, whether for facts, names, or dates. In was alike incapable of hate and love. The only person who ever exercised any real power over his mind was Dubois, and his power from first to last was absolute. Unlike the late king, he was never in any way ruled by his mistresses, nor was he ever known, even in the most helpless moment of intoxication, to betray to them a state secret. "He was "he born ennuyé,” says Saint-Simon; was so accustomed to live out of himself that he could not endure to re-enter." He could exist only in the movement and whirlwind of stirring events; he must be at the head of an army, or busied in preparations for a campaign, or in the noise and excitement of a debauch. Without bustle, tumult, some sort of excess, time hung insupportably heavy upon his hands. And yet his tastes and accomplishments were numerous and brilliant. He delighted in experimental His model was Henry the Fourth, chemistry, in distilling perfumes; he was whom he imitated both in his virtues and an admirable painter, as well as connoisvices; and the flattery to which he was seur, and had collected works of art which alone susceptible was to be likened in both in number and value equalled those features, manners, and achievements to of the King himself. He was a passionthat great king. In this lies the key-ate lover of music, and had composed note of much of his character. Theoret- more than one opera of no mean merit. ically he loved a free government, and "Never," to again quote Saint-Simon, was ever praising the English constitution. He was not ambitious of regal power, for the Spanish affair was the suggestion of others, and the idea was quickly abandoned. His ambition, says SaintSimon, "was to command while war lasted, and at other times to seek pleasure, without constraint to himself or to others." In his impiety he was ostentatious to affectation; for his most out-round her bed, but that, unfortunately, rageous debauches he would select fasts and holy days. He paraded his contempt for sacred things. One Christmas he attended midnight mass with the King at Versailles. He was observed to be devoutly intent upon a book which all believed to be a missal. The next day a lady expressed to him the pleasure she had felt at seeing him thus devout. "You are very simple, madame," he replied, "it was Rabelais, which I had taken with me as a protection against ennui." The beauty of the chapel, the splendour of the spectacle, and the nobleness of the music, undoubtedly the finest that could be heard in Europe, were sufficient guarantees against ennui. He was notoriously false and insincere. He loved to set everybody by the ears, and thus lead "was man born with talents so numerous and so varied, and never was man such an idler, nor so entirely delivered up to ennui and nothingness." To account for this unhappy contradiction, Madame his mother, who was a great reader of fairy lore, invented a pretty little fable. She said, that at his birth all the fairies had been summoned one old fairy, who had disappeared for such a very long time as to have quite slipped out of everybody's memory, was forgotten. Suddenly, however, she ap peared, leaning upon her stick. Piqued at the universal forgetfulness, she revenged herself by rendering all the talents presented by the other fairies useless, not one of which, while preserving all, he was ever able to turn to good account. The political life of the Regent commenced at one in the afternoon, the morning having passed in gradually arousing himself from the stupor of the previous night's debauch. After he had taken chocolate his brain cleared, and he was ready for business. His first visit was to the Louvre, to the young king, whom he always treated with the most profound respect. There he would re- stupefaction, swinish sleep, and a mass of main conversing about an hour, after human clay scattered, amidst other remwhich he attended the council of state; nants of the feast, over satin couch and this despatched, he paid a visit either to gorgeous carpet. More than once death his mother at Saint-Cloud, to the Du- joined in the party, and clasping some chesse de Berry at the Luxembourg, or to victim in his bony arms, spread shrieking some of his other children, for all of horror and dismay amongst the revellers. whom he had a great affection. So passed the time until ten at night, the hour for supper. One of the wildest of these bacchanals was the Regent's daughter. Married at a very early age to the Duc de Berry, a The guests at these famous, or rather good-natured but weak-minded prince, infamous, feasts, which almost rival in who was desperately fond of her, but historical celebrity the epicurean ban- whom she despised and hated her whole quets of Apicius or Lucullus, were usually life-it was not a long one, only twentyrestricted to twenty; but, as we shall four years was a horror of immorality. presenty see, this number was frequently She was only nineteen when the Duke increased ad libitum. They were select- died, undoubtedly of poison; but by ed from all, and from the most diverse, whom administered it would be difficult classes of society - nobles, poets, philos- to say. Passionate, haughty, insufferably ophers, wits, abbés, courtesans, court la- arrogant, she pretended to the rights of a dies. The apartments were furnished queen. She was accompanied, when she with the most costly voluptuousness, the passed through the streets, by the band tables loaded with magnificent plate, flowers, and the most delicious wines and viands. As a preparative for drinking, the hanap, an immense goblet in the form of a barrel, hooped with gold and filled with wine, was handed from guest to guest, which goblet it was de rigueur to empty at the first round. Coarse bon mots, sallies of licentious wit, chiefly directed against religion and morality, in which each strove to outdo the other in irreverence and impiety, passed from mouth to mouth; the wild license momentarily increasing as the wine circulated, until the revel ended in helpless intoxication. This was the more decorous of the petits soupers. There were others which in numbers, riot, and indiscriminate gathering resembled an old Greek saturnalia or a performance of the mysteries of Aphrodite. But of the musketeers, by the music of trumpets and cymbals. But with all that she was the slave of a little pimple-faced man, the Comte de Riom, to whom she was at length secretly united. One might have imagined him to be the avenger of the dead husband, he treated her with such utter and capricious tyranny; he ordered her toilet, her dresses, her every move-、 ment, and compelled her for the lightest offence to kneel at his feet and ask for pardon. Her summer residence was at La Muette, in the very centre of the Bois de Boulogne; for amidst all her dissipations she had a love for trees and solitude and the simple pleasures of country life. At times a sense of her enormities would overwhelm her; more than once she fled to the Carmelites of Chaillot to weep and pray, racked by a terrible remorse. after a time her fierce passions would About this time Canaillac originated once more master her, and drag her back public balls. The opera house was built to the saturnalias, where all the past was in the garden of the Palais Royal, and a quickly forgotten until wild gaiety lapsed private door afforded direct communica- again into wild despair. At length her tion between the two buildings. The Re-health began to sink, but her dissipation gent frequently attended these balls, and only increased until death closed her terthrough this entrance sometimes brought rible career. Her death was a great blow a company of the masquers to supper. to Orléans, who was passionately attached Then strange noisy groups would gather to her. pell-mell round the luxurious tables, and The vices of the Fronde were those of greedily devour the costly comestibles factions, and arose out of the disorganizaand choice wines: grisettes, danseuses, tion of society; the vices of the age of noble ladies in the motley attire of Chi- Louis were clothed in a garb of outward nese bayadères, nuns, fairies, Circas- decency and were not regarded as things sians; sacrilegious jests and wild laugh- to be proud of; even over illicit amours ter, a Babel of tongues, disputes, quarrels, was cast a veil of poetry and romance sometimes blows; delirious mirth, oaths, that concealed their grossness. But unblasphemy, bacchanalian songs, posés der the Regency vice was laurel-crowned. plastiques, unbridled license of all kinds, 'It was a reproach to a man not to be a debauchee, not to nightly drink himself into a state of insensibility. The only churchman that Orléans expressed an admiration for was the Grand Prior, and that because for forty years he had never gone to bed sober. It was ridiculous in a woman to be wise, or modest, or virtuous; every lady of the Court had a nickname, gathered from the calendar of love, which concealed a licentious meaning; one was Sainte Facile, another Sainte Pleureuse, another Sainte Contente, etc. The poems and epigrams were not mere effusions of licentious wit; they stripped human frailty of every sentiment, every rag of decency, and not only presented it in its naked deformity, but bedaubed with vileness more than natural, with the very ordure of vice. Never since the last days of old Rome had human nature sunk so nearly to the level of the brute. In the meanwhile the people looked with horror upon the godless rule, for the moral corruption had not yet descended to the bourgeois class, which was still composed of God-fearing men, amongst whom the marriage tie and the ordinances of religion still obtained respect. The Regent was hated. Paris was filled not only with lampoons and satires against him and his Court, but with terrible philippics, accusing him of crimes too hideous to be even glanced at in these pages. The most remarkable of these extant is that of La Grange Chancel, who expiated its composition by years of imprisonment. The young Arouet (Voltaire) then just rising into fame, with that audacious irony which always characterized the man, actually solicited the presence of Orléans and the Duchesse de Berry at the first representation of "Edipus." They acceded to his request, and were equal to the occasion, joining in the tumultuous applause with which the play was greeted by an audience who applied every incident of the ghastly story to the Regent and his daughter; and to further testify his gratification with the work the Duke bestowed a pension upon the author. At forty-six Philippe d'Orléans was a wreck, broken down in health and strength, his once handsome face blotched and carbuncled, his person heavy and obese. In vain the doctors entreated him to reform his mode of life. They warned him that he was in hourly danger of apoplexy; advised bleeding. "Come, to-morrow," was still his answer. One day it was the 21st of December, 1723 -he had dined heartily, and passed into his cabinet in company with the Duchesse Falari; he complained of dulness, and requested her to tell him one of the pretty stories for the relation of which she was famous. She sat down at his feet, and resting her head upon his knees began. But she had scarcely completed the first sentence when the Duke's head fell forward upon his chest; she raised her eyes in affright, then springing to her feet, rushed out to call assistance. All in vain - he was dead! So died, in the very prime of manhood, a man who might, but for evil training and the cruel jealousy of Louis the Fourteenth, have transmitted to posterity a name loaded with the honours of genius, instead of which it has become the symbol of all that is vicious and sensual. From Temple Bar. NICOLE VAGNON. BY THE AUTHOR OF "PATTY." THE evening is very still -the whitestemmed, silver-leaved birch-trees scarcely move a twig; only a ripple on the broad river, and the plash of its mimic waves on the much indented bank, tell that the wind has not quite gone to sleep with the sun, and may be hard at work before that luminary gets up again. For the sun has set; it vanished a few minutes since among those dark hills behind Villequier. You cannot see Villequier from this side of the river; both church and houses nestle closely among the orchards that clothe the slope of these same hills, even down to the river bank; but the charming little Norman village lies just at the point where the Seine curves in its serpentine fashion on its way to Quillebœuf. The sun has set behind Villequier, but it has left the opposite sky full of colour, and the soft rose tint spreads over the river till it melts in a yellow grey beneath the wooded heights of Caudebec. These heights, sometimes clothed with ruddy oak and the still tender green of beech, sometimes white, where the limestone crag has chosen to reign undisturbed in savage ruggedness, continue almost without interruption from Caudebec to Villequier. The high road runs between them and the steep orchardclothed river bank, so that, except where a break comes among the trees, darkness soon follows the sunset. There is such a break just before you of the road. They pause before a large white gate set in the hedge. Half way between the cliff and the road a massive white house glimmers among trees, and some outbuildings in a group near at hand show that it is a farmstead. "Are you coming in?" says the girl. "Not to-night-I am late there is no time." He speaks in a hurried weak voice, as if he were coining an excuse. "Bon soir, my beloved. I shall not many times more have to bid you good evening." reach the line of tall, slender-limbed | recede, and some sloping fields with hawbirch-trees, and two persons, a man and a thorne hedges border the left-hand side woman, are standing still, as if to enjoy the lovely light spread over sky and river. The rose tint is fading fast; in its place comes a tender luminous grey, too exquisite for earth. The tint on the water just below Villequier is deep olive now, and far on towards Caudebec, where the Seine again curves out of sight, it deepens in hue as the hills above grow darker against the pearl-tinted sky. But the man and woman are not looking at the river, nor at the yawning fern-fringed cave beside the high road, nor at the charming feature which a projecting strip of land, clothed with light foliage, gives the curving river; they do not even notice how wan and weird the tall birch-trees are against the beech-covered cliff that rises on the other side of the road, nor how mysteriously they bend forwards to the river. The two persons are looking only at one another, they are betrothed lovers, and their names are Jules Barrière and Nicole Vagnon. "It grows late," the young man says, "and your mother will say I do not keep my word. I have said we shall be home by daylight. Come then, Nicole." Nicole does not look tenderly up into the brown eyes which seem to become sweet so easily. She has drawn her hand from her lover's arm, and she twists her supple fingers together an instant before she speaks. "But, Jules,". - at the tone an annoyance which he tries not to show clouds all the sweetness in his eyes — "you have not answered me; are you going to the fête at La Mailleraye?" 66 I cannot answer what I do not know, ma petite." But the jovial tone in his voice is forced. "If I do not meet with Floris, and if he does not ask me again, I shall probably keep out of it." "Which means that you will let yourself be guided by circumstances instead of by what is right." At the impatient words Jules draws away, and turns his shoulder sulkily towards his well-beloved; in an instant Nicole's face changes to an expression of penitence: "Oh, how wrong, how wicked I am, to doubt you! But indeed I cannot like you to be with Floris Mercœur; he is so-so masterful, and, Jules, he is not good." Jules swings round impatiently. A sweet persuasive smile softens Jules' face. Nicole looks up, and she seems conquered by the look that meets her in his brown eyes. She smiles, but rather sadly, and puts her hand in his arm. They walk rapidly along the road to Villequier. They are well matched for height, both well grown and well made; but Jules is handsome, in the common acceptance of the word, and Nicole only pleasantlooking. Really they are just the same age, but Nicole's decided features, the absence of all bloom on her dark skin," Peste! make her look much older than Jules does. It seems as if nature had used the girl unfairly; her dark slate-coloured eyes would not have looked so misplaced with Jules' clear red and white skin; for though his cheeks are nearly as tawny as his luxuriant hair and beard, his forehead, just now when he raises his hat and wipes it with his blue handkerchief, is as white as a lady's hand. His dark melting brown eyes would have lightened Nicole's sallow skin. Jules has a straight A BENT, pale, withered woman creeps nose too, and a regular mouth. Certain- slowly along the road that winds beside ly, so far as mere beauty of face goes, the Seine between Caudebec and Ville. they are an ill-matched pair. quier; she carries a basket in one hand, They walk on silently; there are close-but with the other she leans heavily on a growing osiers instead of birches between stick. The road is full of sunshine this them and the river, and the road is dark-morning, and the river sparkles along merer than it was near the cave. The cliffs rily as it shows here and there through the Because Floris is not in favour with Monsieur le Curé he is of course a lost soul. I know the jargon, Nicole, and it is very well for women. Trust me, ma petite," he says more gently, "I know how to guide myself." He puts both hands on her shoulders and ends his words in kisses; and yet, though the kisses are very loving, Nicole sighs heavily as she goes up to the house. II. thickly planted orchards that slope down in a blouse, who has been sweeping the to the water side. But the poor bent wo-cour, puts his broom against the wall and man gives a sigh of relief at sight of the runs through the gate to obey his miswhite gate of the Maison Blanche. The walk, with all its loveliness, has been too much for her failing strength. The ground rises in a grassed hill inside the white gate, a sort of wild orchard, in the midst of which is a barn and a cider-press, and outside the barn a shed for cows and some small pigsties. There is a dog tied up a little way within the gate, and he sets up a bark at the sight of a visitor. A multitude of cocks and hens are walking about round the feet of a tall erect woman, who comes out of the barn and puts up one well-shaped brown hand to shield her proud blue eyes as she makes out the intruder. tress. He comes back soon with Henriette's basket, and then stands leaning against the gate, keeping it open with his shoulder till the lame woman appears. "Thank you, my friend," she pants out her words. "Is Mam'selle Nicole at home?" "Ah! for that I cannot tell, mam'selle. Mam'selle is in and out, and here and there, and all in a quarter of an hour." "Bien." Henriette gives a gentle nod, and moves up into the house. wall, and looking over the sloping garden below into the Seine; and above the doorway is an inscription carved in the stone, so defaced by time and hard usage as to be almost obliterated. She finds Madame Vagnon waiting for her in a huge, stone-walled, stone-flagged room; the ceiling of dark oak, with No one would guess that the finely heavy beams crossing one another; the formed, handsome woman, with aquiline fire-place is built out into the room, features and imperious bright eyes, is with a seat on each side within its prosister to the poor bent creature, with a jecting jambs, and a steep tiled roof face like a withered leaf, leaning now a atop. Facing the door is a broad winminute on the gate before she mounts dow, recessed some depth in the splayed the slope. In dress there is not much apparent difference. Madame Vagnon has a gown of greyish green stuff and a lilac cotton apron, her sleeves are rolled back to her shoulders and show her shapely brown arms; her hair is gathered under a white handkerchief, which wreathes round her head and fastens with a small projecting horn just above each of the delicate ears. Her dress is rather what would seem to be suited to the cook instead of the mistress of the grand old stone house, which faces her as she stands at the door of the barn; but when she moves and walks towards the entrance gate which closes in the courtyard, stopping as she crosses the slope to nod to her sister below, Madame Vagnon looks like a queen in disguise. "Bon jour, Henriette." She bends her stately head. "Stay there, and I will send Victor to carry thy basket." Madame smiles a little as she goes in through the gates and takes her stately way across the basse-cour, making the pigeons fly up in a white cloud, from a nodding gossip they are having near the broken flight of steps to the top of the staircase tower. "Victor, go down and fetch the basket for Mam'selle Henriette." To herself Madame thinks, as she goes up some steps into a broad flagged passage, "Of course she is tired; but if she would only live here she need never walk so far as Caudebec." At the word, Victor, a merry-faced lad The sisters kiss on each cheek, and then Madame points to a low chair near the open window. "Thou art tired." "A little; and Nicole, she is well?" There is such a wistful look as the lame woman asks this, that one would imagine Nicole to be a subject of much anxiety. Madame "Nicole is as well as usual." Vagnon speaks with the extra calm of a person who knows that more has been intended by the question addressed to her than has been expressed in it. "And-and Augustine, I may not get a chance of speaking to thee alone after the dear child comes in-is the marriage to take place?" Henriette's wasted hands have clasped themselves together while she speaks, and she bends forward over them with an imploring look in her poor faded eyes. But Madame Vagnon has no sympathy with her sister's agitation, her own manner stiffens. "Why not, Henriette? The world must go on in its appointed way, and its institutions must not be deranged and set aside at the will of one man or one woman. I have consented to Nicole's marriage with Jules Barrière, and the marriage must take place." |