Part 17 (1/2)
They merited the attention. Theirs was real love, a love struggling between duty and fervor, one that effected the miracle of an interchange of soul, transferring the ent.i.ty of the beloved into the heart of the lover and completed at last by a union entered into with the pride of those who recognize above their own will no higher power than that of G.o.d.
Admirable and emulative the beauty of it pa.s.sed into a proverb:--”C'est beau comme le Cid.”
The Cid was a Spaniard. But of another age. Melancholy but very proud, the Spaniard of the seventeenth century lived in a desert which the Inquisition had made. The Holy Office that had sent Christ to the Aztecs brought back Vizlipoutzli, a Mexican deity whose food was hearts. His carnivorousness interested the priests at home. They put night around them, a night in which there was flame, fireworks of flesh at which a punctilious etiquette required that royalty should a.s.sist and which, while inducing the hysteria that there entered into love, illuminated the path of empire from immensity to nothingness.
At the close of the seventeenth century, Spain, bankrupt through the expulsion of the Jews, barren through loss of the Moors, was a giant, moribund and starving. Only the Holy Office, terribly alive, was terribly fed. Every man was an object of suspicion and every man was suspicious.
The secret denunciation, the sudden arrest, the dungeon, the torture, the stake, these things awaited any one. The nation, silent, sombre, morbid, miserably poor, none the less was draped proudly enough in its tatters.
The famine, haughty itself, that stalks through the pages of Cervantes is the phantom of that pride. Beside it should be placed the rigid ceremonial of an automaton court where laughter was neither heard nor permitted, where men had the dress and the gravity of mutes, where women counted their beads at b.a.l.l.s, where a minutious etiquette that inhibited a queen from looking from a window and a.s.sumed that she had no legs, regulated everything, att.i.tudes, gifts, gestures, speech, the etiquette of the horrible Escorial through which gusts of madness blew.
Other courts had fools. The court of Spain had Embevecidos, idiots who were thought to be drunk with love and who, because of their condition, were permitted, like grandees, to wear the hat in the presence. On festivals there were other follies, processions semi-erotic, wholly morbid, through cathedrals haunted by entremetteuses, through chapels in which hung Madonnas that fascinated and shocked, Virgins that more nearly resembled Infantas serenaded by caballeros than queens of the sky and beneath whose indulgent eyes rendez-vous were made by lovers whom, elsewhere, etiquette permitted only the language of signs.[69]
To journey then from Madrid to Paris was like pa.s.sing from a picture by Goya to a tale of Perrault. Paris at the time was marvelling at two wonders, an earthly Olympus and real love. The first was Versailles, the second La Valliere. Louis XIV created the one and destroyed the other.
Already married, attentive meanwhile to his brother's wife, he was coincidentally epris with their various maids of honor. Among them was a festival of beauty in the festival of life, a girl of eighteen who had been made for caresses and who died of them, the only human being save Louis XIV that ever loved the fourteenth Louis. Other women adulated the king. It was the man that Louise de la Valliere adored. To other women his sceptre was a fan. To her it was a regret. Could he have been some mere lieutenant of the guards she would have preferred it inexpressibly. The t.i.tle of d.u.c.h.ess which he gave her was a humiliation which she hid beneath the name of Soeur Louise de la Misericorde. For her youth which was a poem of love had the cloister for climax. That love, a pastime to him, was death to her. At its inception she fled from it, from the sun, from the Sun-King, and flinging at him a pa.s.sionate farewell, flung herself as pa.s.sionately into a convent.
Louis stormed it. If necessary he would have burned it. He strode in booted and spurred as already he had stalked into Parliament where he shouted:--”L'Etat c'est moi.” Mlle. de la Valliere c'etait lui aussi. The girl, then prostrate before a crucifix, was clinging to the feet of a Christ. But her G.o.d was the king. He knew it. When he appeared so did she.
For a moment, Louis, he to whom France knelt, knelt to her. For a moment the monarch had vanished. A lover was there. From a chapel came an odor of incense. Beyond, a knell was being tolled. For background were the scared white faces of nuns, alarmed at this irruption of human pa.s.sion in a retreat where hearts were stirred but by the divine. A moment only. Louis, with his prey, had gone.
Thereafter for a few brief years, this girl who, had she wished could have ruled the world, wanted, not pomp, not power, not parade, love, merely love, nothing else. It was very ambitious of her. Yet, precisely as through fear of love she had flung herself into a cloister, at the loss of it she returned there, hiding herself so effectually in prayer that the king himself could hardly have found her--had he tried. He omitted to.
Louis then was occupied with the Marquise de Montespan. Of trying he never thought. On the contrary. Mme. de Montespan was very fetching.
A year later, in the Church of the Carmelites, in the presence of the patient queen, of the impatient marquise, of the restless court--complete, save for Louis who was hunting--Mlle. de la Valliere, always semi-seraphic but then wholly soul, saw the severe Bossuet slowly ascend the pulpit, saw him bow there to the queen, make the sign of the cross and, before he motioned the bride to take the black veil which was a white shroud, heard, above the sobs of the a.s.sistants, his clear voice proclaim:--
'Et dixit qui sedebat in throno: Ecce nova facio omnia.'
Behind the bars, behind the veil, wrapped in that shroud, for thirty-six years Louise de la Misericorde, dead to love and dead to life, expiated her ambition.
The fate of Louis Quatorze was less n.o.ble. The Olympus in which he was Jupiter with the Montespan for Venus became a prison. The jailer was Mme.
de Maintenon. Intermediately was the sun. That was his emblem. About him the spheres revolved. To him incense ascended. A n.o.body by comparison to Alexander, unworthy of a footnote where Caesar is concerned, through sheer pomp, through really royal magnificence, through a self-infatuation at once ridiculous and sublime, through the introduction of a studied politeness, a ceremonial majestic and grave, through a belief navely sincere and which he had the ability to instil, that from him everything radiated and to him all, souls, hearts, lives, property, everything, absolutely belonged, through these things, in a gilded balloon, this pigmy rose to the level of heroes and hung there, before a wondering world, over a starving land, until the wind-inflated silk, pierced by Marlborough, collapsed.
In the first period Versailles was an opera splendidly given, the part.i.tion by Lully, the libretto by Moliere, in which the monarch, as tenor, strutted on red heels, ogling the prime donne, eyeing the house, warbling airs solemn yet bouffe. In the second the theatre was closed.
Don Juan had turned monk. The kingdom of Louis XIV was no longer of this world. It was then only that he was august. In the first period was the apogee of absolutism, the incarnation of an entire nation in one man who in pompous scandals, everywhere imitated, gave a ceremonious dignity to sin. Over the second a biblical desolation spread.
IX
LOVE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
To the cradle of the eighteenth century came the customary gifts, in themselves a trifle unusual. Queen Anne sent the dulness of perfect gentility. Queen Maintenon gave bigotry. Louis XIV provided the spectacle of a mythological monster. But Molinos, a Spanish fairy, uninvited at the christening, malignantly sent his blessing. The latter, known as quietism, was one of love's aberrations. It did not last for the reason that nothing does. Besides the life of a century is long enough to outgrow many things, curses as well as blessings. For the time being, however, throughout Europe generally and in certain sections of America, quietism found adherents.
The new evangel, originally published at Rome, had a woman, Mme. Guyon, for St. Paul. Its purport Boileau summarized as the enjoyment in paradise of the pleasures of h.e.l.l. As is frequently the case with summaries, that of Boileau was not profound. Diderot called it the true religion of the tender-hearted. Diderot sometimes nodded. Quietism was not that. A little before rose-water had been distilled from mud. Quietism reversed the process. From the lilies of mysticity it extracted dirt. In itself an etherealized creed of predeterminism, it put fatalism into love. The added ingredient was demoralizing. Already Maria d'Agreda, a Spanish nun, had written a tract that made Bossuet blush. The doctrine of Molinos made him furious. Against it, against Mme. Guyon, against Fenelon who indorsed her, against all adherents, he waged one of those memorable wars which the world has entirely forgotten. It had though its justification. Morbid as everything that came from Spain, quietism held that temptations are the means that G.o.d employs to purge the soul of pa.s.sion. It taught that they should not be shunned but welcomed. The argument advanced was to the effect that, in the omnisapience of the divine, man is saved not merely by good works but by evil deeds, by sin as well as by virtue.
In the Roman circus, the Christian, once subtracted from life, was subtracted also from evil. What then happened to his body was a matter of indifference to him. In quietism that indifference was solicited before subtraction came. It was disclosed as a means of grace to the living.
Through the exercise of will, or, more exactly through its extinction, the Christian was told, to separate soul from body. The soul then, asleep in G.o.d, lost to any connection between itself and the flesh, was indifferent, as the martyr, to whatever happened.
The result is as obvious as it was commodious. The body, artificially released from all restraint and absolved from any responsibility, was free to act as it listed.
In discussing the doctrine, Fenelon declared that there are souls so inflamed with the love of G.o.d and so resigned to His will that, if they believed themselves d.a.m.ned, they would accept eternal punishment with thanksgiving.
For propagating this insanity Fenelon was accorded the honors of a bishopric which was exile. Mme. Guyon received the compliment of a _lettre de cachet_ which was prison. The Roman Inquisition cloistered Molinos.