abbé assumed a mild hypocritical look; the Scotchman was implacable. They spoke to me of state reasons, of finances, of bankruptcy, and he, Philip, I believe that for a moment he smiled. Ah! Dieu me damne! Í will be revenged over all three, and of him the last. Beware, Law! Beware, Dubois! And after that, it will be for us two, Philip!" There were other antecedents relative to Madame de Parabère of a doubtful character, and the name of Richelieu is mixed up with her intrigues, but Capefigue rejects the letters published by M. Feuillet de Couche as apocryphal, and he declares that the marshal so powerful under Louis XV. was a mere painted doll in the time of the Regency, and was ridicule itself personified in his amours. The Count de Parabère, it is to be observed, died in 1718, and Saint-Simon says of him: "As for the part that he played here below, he might as well have gone before." Such was the kind of philosophy that was current at that epoch. It was in passing through these episodes of gallantry that the crisis of Law's system was arrived at. Opposition had succeeded to enthusiasm, and insulting songs were vociferously chanted not only in the Rue Quincampoix, but in the purlieus of the Palais Royal. Four lines will give an idea of their character: Law, le fils ainé de Satan Nous met tous à l'aumone, Madame de Parabère and Nocé, as also the Regent himself, came in for the same wrathful denunciations as Law; "as if," says Capefigue," they were in any way responsible for the follies of speculation." In France, the people always go to extremes; a system which might have succeeded with moderation was ruined by excessive speculation, and when this passion brought with it the inevitable result of a crisis, the people went to the other extreme of despondency, terror, and insult. The Regent, threatened in his person, trembled for a moment before the insurrections at the Palais Royal and at Law's bank, in the Rue de Richelieu, and he was only enabled to recover his courage and serenity at his "petits soupers." The Duke and Duchess of Maine also took advantage of this crisis to foment a Legitimist conspiracy at their château at Sceaux, whence their poet-laureate, Lagrange-Chancel, fulminated his Philippics," in which the Regent was compared to Tiberius : Vers cet impudique Tibère Conduis Sabran et Parabère. The zeal and energy of the Marquis de Fave saved the Regency on this occasion, and the Duke and Duchess of Richelieu, and most of the other accomplices in the "Complot Cellarmare," as it was called, were committed to the Bastille under lettres de cachet. Henri Sanson claims for his ancestor Charles the credit of having first discovered this plot through a ring of M. de Richelieu's, found upon an adventurer's finger-Antoinette Sicard by name-and who had been condemned to flagellation for malpractices. The success of this second coup d'état was to strengthen the usurpation of the Regent. Madame de Parabère is said to have been no stranger to the additional powers conferred also at the same time on the Abbé Dubois, and to his appointment to the episcopacy of Cambrai. "The VOL. LVI. 2 F promise," Saint-Simon tells us, "was made between two kisses to Madame de Parabère." The Regent himself was elated, and he went more into public than heretofore. His "petits soupers" were no longer confined to the Palais Royal; they were extended to the Luxembourg, to La Muette, and the little Château d'Asnières. The Regent was devotedly attached to his daughter, the Duchess of Berri, who resided at the first-mentioned place, but, at an epoch of such utter corruption, even this parental affection was infamously misrepresented not only by Chancel, but by Voltaire, who was devoted to the party of the Duchess of Maine. The charming little château of Asnières, with its flowery islands, bathed by the Seine, had been made over to Madame de Parabère, and here she received the Regent in the manner he most liked, "without noise or ceremony, but with an adorable familiarity." Suppers must have corresponded at that epoch to what we now misname dinners, for after repasts so designated, served up on china, with wine imbibed from Bohemian glasses, the partyused to adjourn to the river and indulge in the tranquil pleasure of angling. The Regent was personally no coward, for several attempts were made upon his person at this epoch, and once when thus engaged with Madame de Parabère in piscatorial relaxation, the boatmen threatened to cast them both into the river. He was probably encouraged in this indifference by Madame de Parabère, who seems to have been above weakness of any kind. Capefigue says that there were no quarrels between the Regent and his mistress, but Mathieu Marais and De Barbier assert the contrary, and that the fair lady's gallantry at Asnières caused many a quarrel and more than one rupture, out of all of which madame issued triumphant by the sheer force of her character. Madame de Parabère preserved, indeed, to the last that influence which her natural strength of character, more even than her beauty, had won for her over the Regent. She knew that love with the prince was a matter of distraction, not of business, and she had the good sense never to intrude except when she was sought for. Whilst she, also, always treated the prince with the respect due to his position, she yet preserved a certain amount of haughtiness which ensured respect on his side. The circle of amiable ladies that grouped around the Regent was, however, also increasing. A new guest had made her first appearance at the suppers of the Regency-Madame de Sabran-who soon divided with Madame de Parabère the affections-such as they were-of the prince, and who obtained the same influence over him. The two ladies, however, succumbing to the prince, not for love, but for an object--for money and position -were not jealous of one another. Madame de Sabran is said to have lorded it over the prince to an extent that Madame de Parabère never ventured. Madame de Sabran had also her own especial establishment at St. Maur. With the majority of Louis XV., the Regent became once more the Duke of Orleans, and his health began at the same time to give way before a life of dissipation, his sufferings being augmented by wounds received in battle. Yet it was just at this epoch, when ill and fatigued, that he suddenly became enamoured of the youth and beauty of Madame d'Averne. Facilis descensus Averni, as the pamphleteers of the day propounded; and so it was in reality, for it was this abominable licentiousness of the court that paved the way to the revolution. The Countess d'Averne had her day and her salon like the others. Voltaire, always assiduous in flattering the beauty that was in the ascendant, wrote verses for her to recite before the Regent. But neither wine could any longer inebriate, nor youth nor beauty keep any hold of the affections of the exhausted prince. Going to Versailles with the young king, as the bigoted Madame de Maintenon had succeeded to the La Vallières, and Montespan with the blasé Louis XV., so the pious Madame de Phalaris now succeeded to that temporary place in the Regent's favour which had been enjoyed for so short a time by Madame d'Averne. It is but fair to admit that this latter lady, like Madame de Parabère and De Sabran, did not take this last act of inconstancy much to heart, and she consoled herself in her own way as best she could. Madame d'Averne is said, on her side, to have found that consolation in the society of the Count d'Alincourt and the young Duke of Richelieu. The Duchess of Phalaris was the last of the favourites, and the duke, who is said to have hastened his end by his assiduous devotion to business, and his anxiety for the young king, his pupil, died in a manner which can scarcely be said to corroborate this view of the matter, whilst Madame de Phalaris was reading a light and attractive story to beguile his last hours. The surgeon, Chirac, is also said to have hastened his end by copious bleedings-a practice which, in such a case, certainly could not be pursued with impunity. Thanks to the much calumniated Law, the quondam Regent, who had taken up the sceptre when France was exhausted by the prodigalities of Louis XV., was enabled to hand it over to Louis XV. with the country calm, prosperous, without wars or debts. If some suffered for their insane cupidity, the country gained by a system which, at all events, gave breathing-time to restore the finances to a healthy condition. The most lamentable histories to relate are those which concern the end of those ladies who, beloved for a brief time, have shone in a world of pleasure only to pass an inglorious and self-accusing old age. Mademoiselle Desmarés was one of the least unfortunate. Connected with the Comédie-Française, she consoled herself for the loss of the prince's affections by devotion to her profession, and by wedding a person in her own sphere of life. She had a daughter by the Regent, whom she was, most cruelly, never allowed to see, and who became, as the Marchioness of Ségur, one of the most amiable and estimable ladies of the eighteenth century. Mademoiselle Florence, of the Opera, had a son, who, as Count of Saint-Albin, became Archbishop of Cambrai, and was an exemplary prelate, both by his manners and his orthodox opinions. The Countess of Argenton, who always declared that her friendship for the prince was most beneficial to him, keeping him from other and more disorderly connexions, solaced herself by marrying the Chevalier d'Oppède. Her son by the Duke of Orleans became Grand Prior of the Order of Malta, and he was at one time much looked up to, as the title which he bore of Bâtard d'Orleans reminded the people of Dunois; and it was even anticipated that he would prove a match for the English. A poet of the day apostrophised, indeed, the prince as follows: Tout un peuple alarmé n'a plus qu'une espérance: Madame de Parabère, although discarded and supplanted, never, as we have before said, entirely lost her influence over the wayward prince. She was mainly indebted for this to the fact that she never troubled him with her griefs or her reproaches. She never loved the duke-the days of the simple and affectionate-hearted La Vallière were gone-but she enjoyed his society, joined with infinite zest in his habits of life, participated in his pleasures and his pains, and often not only cheered, but encouraged him in the times of his darkest trials. But when the prince became sickly and satiated, abandoned pleasures for the predications of a De Phalaris, and gave himself up to public affairs and to the superintendence of the education of the young king, Madame de Parabère was no longer a fitting companion, and she had the good sense to feel that it was so. The duke, sickly and asthmatic, with a purple face, blind of one eye, and prostrate alike in body and mind, could no longer sympathise with the sparkling vivacity and still healthy bearing of his quondam favourite. M. Capefigue tells us, from a notice in the manuscript journal of the Regency, that Madame de Parabère withdrew to a convent, and lived and died "in the resolves of a sweet piety." But with her, we are also told, lived (the Jesuits were very accommodating) Messieurs d'Alincourt and Beringhem (on whose account the rupture at Asnières). She especially befriended Mademoiselle Aissé, who is described as a courtisane philosophe." When forty years of age she inspired the old Duke of Brancas with a tender passion, and he wished to marry her; but "passionately preoccupied with the desire of pleasing, she passed her later days in the company of the Duke of Antin, great amateur of music and concerts." There is a strange inconsistency between the two statements. As to the Countess of Sabran, she remained not the less a 66 grande dame" for being a discarded mistress of the Regent's. At court, or out of it, she not the less remained a Foix and a Sabran, and she could give back in contempt and sarcasms whatever insults successful courtiers kept in store for those who were unsuccessful. Overtaken, however, by old age, she ultimately withdrew into Provence, and, "mindful of the pious traditions of her family, which reckoned a saint among its members, she also became pious, and died asking pardon of God for the outrages done to him in a life of dissipation." The Countess d'Averne had the good sense to resign herself to oblivion; she had acquired a fortune during the few brief moments of her ascendancy, and she withdrew to enjoy it without luxury or ostentation. The Duchess of Phalaris did not possess the same good sense. Her ambition was to remain young and captivating, when her tremulous voice betrayed her age. She attached herself to two other old women of the Regency, Mesdames d'Alluys and la Fontaine Martel, and who together formed a little group of philosophical old ladies, whose pride it was to discard all prejudices and to give good suppers, and who were hence for both qualities much beloved by Voltaire, who declared of Madame la Fontaine Martel: Martel, l'automne de vos jours, Vant mieux que le printemps d'un autre. OUR LITTLE LIFE, DREAM-FRAUGHT, SLEEP ROUNDED. A CUE FROM SHAKSPEARE. BY FRANCIS Jacox. WE are such stuff As dreams are made of, and our little life the grand, deep, mystic utterance is Prospero's,* when the baseless fabric of the vision he has conjured up for his guests, at his bidding dislimns, and he takes its shadowy substance for text of a sermon on life, and presents a dissolving view of the great globe itself, all whose cloudcapp'd towers and gorgeous palaces and solemn temples, shall, like that insubstantial pageant faded, be melted into air, into thin air, nor leave a rack behind. Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting. Our deathis not death the Brother of Sleep? Sleep rounds our little life; and to sleep is perchance to dream-ay, there's the rub; for in that sleep of life, as well as of death, what dreams may come! may come, and do. One might apply to the sleep-rounding which encircles all this little life, and connects its exit with its entrance on the stage of earth, what Cassius says of his birth-day and his death-day in one, on the fateful plains of Philippi, -Time is come round, And where I did begin, there I shall end; Nascentes morimur, says Maxilius, FINISque ab ORIGINE pendet. Not that Prospero, or Shakspeare through him, regarded the sleep that ends (as it began) the circle of individual existence, as an eternal sleep, dreamless and dead,-in the sense of the Roman poet, Nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux, Or of the free-and-easy-thinking French one, D'où nous venons ? l'on n'en sait rien. D'où nous vient-elle ? D'où nous venons? l'on n'en sait rien. Où nous irons, le sait-on bien ?§ At no time of his life was William Hazlitt an orthodox Christian; and his essay on the Fear of Death is by no means addressed to orthodox critics. To die, he there discourses, is only to be as we were before we were born; yet no one feels any remorse, or regret, or repugnance, in contemplating this last idea, which indeed he takes to be rather a relief and disburthening of the mind: "it seems to have been holiday time * The Tempest, Act IV. Sc. 1. + Catullus. † Julius Cæsar, Act V. Sc. 3. Béranger, Les Bohémians. |