Je voudrais de tout mon cœur, Madame, que votre état fût aussi heureux que le mien. J'ai vu mourir le Roi comme un saint et comme un héros. J'ai quitté le monde que je n'aimais pas; je suis dans le plus aimable retraite que je puisse désirer, et partout, Madame, je serai toute ma vie, avec le respect et l'attachement que je vous dois, votre très humble et très obéissante servante.

One may put that as an offset to Saint-Simon's odious misrepresentations of Mme. de Maintenon's conduct during the King's last illness. As everybody knows, Mme. de Maintenon left Versailles even before the King was dead and retired to Saint-Cyr with her memories. The last letter in the book gives us a strange last glimpse of Louis XIV's second wife, as she waited for the death she was persuaded would reunite them

j'ai quitté mes lunettes que j'avais prises il y a trentecinq ans, et je travaille en tapisserie jour et nuit, car je dors peu; ma retraite est paisible et très complète. Quant à la société, on ne peut en avoir avec des personnes qui n'ont nulle connaissance de ce que j'ai vu.

"Ce que j'ai vu " was the longest and in many ways the most important reign in French history. Mme. de Maintenon was connected with the Royal family of France for forty-five years, and for thirty years she was Louis's wife; after all that immense effort

and fatigue, that "comedy which begins every morning and ends only at night," it is chilling to

think of the sleepless and friendless old woman working night and day at her samplers. One might say of her life what a French critic said of Flaubert's masterpiece of disillusion: "Son goût du néant porte au cœur.” 1

1 Mme. de Maintenon: "Lettres a D'Aubigné et Mme. des Ursins." Introduction de Gonzague Truc. Paris, 1923.

XII

THE PRINCE DE LIGNE

THE Prince de Ligne is an inexhaustible subject; his Serene Highness-for the Lignes are genuine Highnesses of the Empire—played nearly as many parts in literature as in life. But, like many royal and noble authors, the Prince suffered from a plethora of experience and a famine of retirement; all his books seem truncated by the necessity of calling on the Emperor, setting out for Versailles, or a new campaign or a new mistress; they are fragmentary and more remarkable for sudden sallies of wit than the spirit of continuity. Thus we are probably right in thinking the Prince more interesting than his books, the recital of what he did more amusing at any rate than the record of what he thought. When a man is as witty as the Prince de Ligne there ought to be some means of making him immortal for the benefit of posterity.

The "Mémoires" of the Prince de Ligne are fragmentary but extraordinarily interesting; they seem as if cut into paragraphs by his innumerable journeys,

for when he was still only middle-aged he calculated that he had spent 150,000 florins and three years of his life in travelling carriages. The Prince lived in the days when there was still a Europe and a European society, and he was a great traveller at a time when all journeys had to be made with horses. Before the year 1786, when the Turkish war and the subsequent revolutions in Belgium and France kept him in Vienna, he had made the journey from Brussels to Vienna, by way of Paris, thirty-four times, from the army to Vienna twelve times during three wars, from Belœil to Paris eighteen times. It is not wonderful that his Mémoires are a little choppy.

The Prince's account of his childhood is the most vivid and curious part of this vivid, curious book. His father, Claude-Lamoral II de Ligne, was a singular character. He was a grand seigneur of the eighteenth century, when it was not the fashion to be a good husband or a good father. He did not love his son: "Je ne sais pas pourquoi," says the Prince, car nous ne nous connaissions point." We are given a curious anecdote showing the old Prince's taste for ceremony and dignity: his wife was very much afraid of him, and was delivered of her child wearing a grand vertugadin, and died in the same costume a few weeks later. And yet the child was so carelessly baptized by the almoner of

his father's regiment that his baptismal certificate could never be found. The old Prince thought himself a Louis XIV (and indeed his portrait shows something of the same well-nourished dignity), and squandered millions on his gardens and on magnificent display, giving entertainments worthy of a king. Yet he had bursts of ridiculous avarice, scolding his servants furiously for giving a glass of wine instead of beer to the chaplain who came to preach in Lent. His idea of education was curious: he gave his son a variety of tutors, most of them ignorant, but never any money. The young Prince was allowed a small sum of money for each head of game he brought in, but had to buy his own powder and shot, and never had any money but what he earned in this way until he was married. The result of his changing tutors was a certain religious confusion; the young Prince was at one time of his childhood a Molinist, then a Jansenist, and then an atheist; when it came to the time for his first Communion it was discovered he knew nothing about Christianity, and he had to be instructed by the village priest, qui n'y comprenait rein non plus que moi." Add to this remarkable education the fact that the usual attentions he received from his father were gloomy prognostics of his future, and remarks that he would be "un sujet détestable," and it is not hard to understand the