"You have put the matter in a new light," said the Czar; but you allow that, in individuals, contempt of death is sometimes a virtue."
"Yes, when it springs from mental reasonings, not physical indifference. But your Majesty has already put in action one vast spring of a system which will ultimately open to your subjects so many paths of existence that they will preserve contempt for its proper objects, and not lavish it solely, as they do now, on the degradation which sullies life and the axe that ends it. You have already begun the conquest of another and a most vital error in the philosophy of the ancients,—that philosophy taught that man should have few wants, and made it a crime to increase and a virtue to reduce them. A legislator should teach, on the contrary, that man should have many wants: for wants are not only the sources of enjoyment,—they are the sources of improvement; and that nation will be the most enlightened among whose populace they are found the most numerous. You, Sire, by circulating the arts, the graces, create a vast herd of moral wants hitherto unknown, and in those wants will hereafter be found the prosperity of your people, the fountain of your resources, and the strength of your empire."
In conversation on these topics we often passed hours together, and from such conferences the Czar passed only to those on other topics more immediately useful to him. No man, perhaps, had a larger share of the mere human frailties than Peter the Great; yet I do confess that when I saw the nobleness of mind with which he flung aside his rank as a robe, and repaired from man to man, the humblest or the highest, the artisan or the prince,—the prosperity of his subjects his only object, and the acquisition of knowledge his only means to obtain it,—I do confess that my mental sight refused even to perceive his frailties, and that I could almost have bent the knee in worship to a being whose benevolence was so pervading a spirit, and whose power was so glorious a minister to utility.
Towards the end of January, I completed my mission, and took my leave of the court of Russia.
"Tell the Regent," said Peter, "that I shall visit him in France soon, and shall expect to see his drawings if I show him my models."
In effect, the next month (February 16), the Czar commenced his second course of travels. He was pleased to testify some regard for me on my departure. "If ever you quit the service of the French court, and your own does not require you, I implore you to come to me; I will give you /carte blanche/ as to the nature and appointments of your office."
I need not say that I expressed my gratitude for the royal condescension; nor that, in leaving Russia, I brought, from the example of its sovereign, a greater desire to be useful to mankind than I had known before. Pattern and Teacher of kings, if each country in each century had produced one such ruler as you, either all mankind would /now/ be contented with despotism or all mankind would be /free/! Oh! when kings have only to be good, to be kept forever in our hearts and souls as the gods and benefactors of the earth, by what monstrous fatality have they been so blind to their fame? When we remember the millions, the generations, they can degrade, destroy, elevate, or save, we might almost think (even if the other riddles of the present existence did not require a future existence to solve them), we might almost think a hereafter /necessary/, were it but for the sole purpose of requiting the virtues of princes,—or their SINS!4
CHAPTER V
RETURN TO PARIS.—INTERVIEW WITH BOLINGBROKE.—A GALLANT ADVENTURE.—AFFAIR WITH DUBOIS.—PUBLIC LIFE IS A DRAMA, IN WHICH PRIVATE VICES GENERALLY PLAY THE PART OF THE SCENE-SHIFTERS
IT is a strange feeling we experience on entering a great city by night,—a strange mixture of social and solitary impressions. I say by night, because at that time we are most inclined to feel; and the mind, less distracted than in the day by external objects, dwells the more intensely upon its own hopes and thoughts, remembrances and associations, and sheds over them, from that one feeling which it cherishes the most, a blending and a mellowing hue.
It was at night that I re-entered Paris. I did not tarry long at my hotel, before (though it was near upon midnight) I conveyed myself to Lord Bolingbroke's lodgings. Knowing his engagements at St. Germains, where the Chevalier (who had but a very few weeks before returned to France, after the crude and unfortunate affair of 1715), chiefly resided, I was not very sanguine in my hopes of finding him at Paris. I was, however, agreeably surprised. His servant would have ushered me into his study, but I was willing to introduce myself. I withheld the servant, and entered the room alone. The door was ajar, and Bolingbroke neither heard nor saw me. There was something in his attitude and aspect which made me pause to survey him, before I made myself known. He was sitting by a table covered with books. A large folio (it was the Casaubon edition of Polybius) was lying open before him. I recognized the work at once: it was a favourite book with Bolingbroke, and we had often discussed the merits of its author. I smiled as I saw that that book, which has to statesmen so peculiar an attraction, made still the study from which the busy, restless, ardent, and exalted spirit of the statesman before me drew its intellectual food. But at the moment in which I entered his eye was absent from the page, and turned abstractedly in an opposite though still downcast direction. His countenance was extremely pale, his lips were tightly compressed, and an air of deep thought, mingled as it seemed to me with sadness, made the ruling expression of his lordly and noble features. "It is the torpor of ambition after one of its storms," said I, inly; and I approached, and laid my hand on his shoulder.
After our mutual greetings, I said, "Have the dead so strong an attraction that at this hour they detain the courted and courtly Bolingbroke from the admiration and converse of the living?"
The statesman looked at me earnestly: "Have you heard the news of the day?" said he.
"How is it possible? I have but just arrived at Paris."
"You do not know, then, that I have resigned my office under the Chevalier!"
"Resigned your office!"
"Resigned is a wrong word: I received a dismissal. Immediately on his return the Chevalier sent for me, embraced me, desired me to prepare to follow him to Lorraine; and three days afterwards came the Duke of Ormond to me, to ask me to deliver up the seals and papers. I put the latter very carefully in a little letter-case, and behold an end to the administration of Lord Bolingbroke! The Jacobites abuse me terribly; their king accuses me of neglect, incapacity, and treachery; and Fortune pulls down the fabric she has built for me, in order to pelt me with the stones!"5
"My dear, dear friend, I am indeed grieved for you; but I am more incensed at the infatuation of the Chevalier. Surely, surely he must already have seen his error, and solicited your return?"
"Return!" cried Bolingbroke, and his eyes flashed fire,—"return!—Hear what I said to the Queen-Mother who came to attempt a reconciliation: 'Madam,' said I, in a tone as calm as I could command, 'if ever this hand draws the sword, or employs the pen, in behalf of that prince, may it rot!' Return! not if my head were the price of refusal! Yet, Devereux,"—and here Bolingbroke's voice and manner changed,—"yet it is not at these tricks of fate that a wise man will repine. We do right to cultivate honours; they are sources of gratification to ourselves: they are more; they are incentives to the conduct which works benefits to others; but we do wrong to afflict ourselves at their loss. 'Nec quaerere nec spernere honores oportet.'6 It is good to enjoy the blessings of fortune: it is better to submit without a pang to their loss. You remember, when you left me, I was preparing myself for this stroke: believe me, I am now prepared."
And in truth Bolingbroke bore the ingratitude of the Chevalier well. Soon afterwards he carried his long cherished wishes for retirement into effect; and Fate, who delights in reversing her disk, leaving in darkness what she had just illumined, and illumining what she had hitherto left in obscurity and gloom, for a long interval separated us from each other, no less by his seclusion than by the publicity to which she condemned myself.
Lord Bolingbroke's dismissal was not the only event affecting me that had occurred during my absence from France. Among the most active partisans of the Chevalier, in the expedition of Lord Mar, had been Montreuil. So great, indeed, had been either his services or the idea entertained of their value, that a reward of extraordinary amount was offered for his head. Hitherto he had escaped, and was supposed to be still in Scotland.
But what affected me more nearly was the condition of Gerald's circumstances. On the breaking out of the rebellion he had been suddenly seized, and detained in prison; and it was only upon the escape of the Chevalier that he was released: apparently, however, nothing had been proved against him; and my absence from the head-quarters of intelligence left me in ignorance both of the grounds of his imprisonment and the circumstances of his release.
I heard, however, from Bolingbroke, who seemed to possess some of that information which the ecclesiastical intriguants of the day so curiously transmitted from court to court and corner to corner, that Gerald had retired to Devereux Court in great disgust at his confinement. However, when I considered his bold character, his close intimacy with Montreuil, and the genius for intrigue which that priest so eminently possessed, I was not much inclined to censure the government for unnecessary precaution in his imprisonment.
There was another circumstance connected with the rebellion which possessed for me an individual and deep interest. A man of the name of Barnard had been executed in England for seditious and treasonable practices. I took especial pains to ascertain every particular respecting him. I learned that he was young, of inconsiderable note, but esteemed clever; and had, long previously to the death of the Queen, been secretly employed by the friends of the Chevalier. This circumstance occasioned me much internal emotion, though there could be no doubt that the Barnard whom I had such cause to execrate had only borrowed from this minion the disguise of his name.
The Regent received me with all the graciousness and complaisance for which he was so remarkable. To say the truth, my mission had been extremely fortunate in its results; the only cause in which the Regent was concerned the interests of which Peter the Great appeared to disregard was that of the Chevalier; but I had been fully instructed on that head anterior to my legation.
There appears very often to be a sort of moral fitness between the beginning and the end of certain alliances or acquaintances. This sentiment is not very clearly expressed. I am about to illustrate it by an important event in my political life. During my absence Dubois had made rapid steps towards being a great man. He was daily growing into power, and those courtiers who were neither too haughty nor too honest to bend the knee to so vicious yet able a minion had already singled him out as a fit person to flatter and to rise by. For me, I neither sought nor avoided him: but he was as civil towards me as his /brusque/ temper permitted him to be towards most persons; and as our careers were not likely to cross one another, I thought I might reckon on his neutrality, if not on his friendship. Chance turned the scale against me.
One day I received an anonymous letter, requesting me to be, at such an hour, at a certain house in the Rue ———. It occurred to me as no improbable supposition that the appointment might relate to my individual circumstances, whether domestic or political, and I certainly had not at the moment any ideas of gallantry in my brain. At the hour prescribed I appeared at the place of assignation. My mind misgave me when I saw a female conduct me into a little chamber hung with tapestry descriptive of the loves of Mars and Venus. After I had cooled my heels in this apartment about a quarter of an hour, in sailed a tall woman, of a complexion almost Moorish. I bowed; the lady sighed. An /eclaircissement/ ensued; and I found that I had the good fortune to be the object of a /caprice/ in the favourite mistress of the Abbe Dubois. Nothing was further from my wishes! What a pity it is that one cannot always tell a woman one's mind!
I attempted a flourish about friendship, honour, and the respect due to the /amante/ of the most intimate /ami/ I had in the world.
"Pooh!" said the tawny Calypso, a little pettishly, "pooh! one does not talk of those things here."
"Madame," said I, very energetically, "I implore you to refrain. Do not excite too severe a contest between passion and duty! I feel that I must fly you: you are already too bewitching."
Just as I rose to depart in rushes the /femme de chambre/, and announces, not Monsieur the Abbe, but Monseigneur the Regent. Of course (the old resort in such cases) I was thrust in a closet; in marches his Royal Highness, and is received very cavalierly. It is quite astonishing to me what airs those women give themselves when they have princes to manage! However, my confinement was not long: the closet had another door; the /femme de chambre/ slips round, opens it, and I congratulate myself on my escape.
When a Frenchwoman is piqued, she passes all understanding. The next day I am very quietly employed at breakfast, when my valet ushers in a masked personage, and behold my gentlewoman again! Human endurance will not go too far, and this was a case which required one to be in a passion one way or the other; so I feigned anger, and talked with exceeding dignity about the predicament I had been placed in the day before.
"Such must always be the case," said I, "when one is weak enough to form an attachment to a lady who encourages so many others!"
"For your sake," said the tender dame, "for your sake, then, I will discard them all!"
There was something grand in this. it might have elicited a few strokes of pathos, when—never was there anything so strangely provoking—the Abbe Dubois himself was heard in my anteroom. I thought this chance, but it was more; the good Abbe, I afterwards found, had traced cause for suspicion, and had come to pay me a visit of amatory police. I opened my dressing-room door, and thrust in the lady. "There," said I, "are the back-stairs, and at the bottom of the back-stairs is a door."
Would not any one have thought this hint enough? By no means; this very tall lady stooped to the littleness of listening, and, instead of departing, stationed herself by the keyhole.
I never exactly learned whether Dubois suspected the visit his mistress had paid me, or whether he merely surmised, from his spies or her escritoire, that she harboured an inclination towards me; in either case his policy was natural, and like himself. He sat himself down, talked of the Regent, of pleasure, of women, and, at last, of this very tall lady in question.
"/La pauvre diablesse/," said he, contemptuously, "I had once compassion on her; I have repented it ever since. You have no idea what a terrible creature she is; has such a wen in her neck, quite a /goitre/. /Mort diable/!" (and the Abbe spat in his handkerchief), "I would sooner have a /liaison/ with the witch of Endor!"
Not content with this, he went on in his usual gross and displeasing manner to enumerate or to forge those various particulars of her personal charms which he thought most likely to steel me against her attractions. "Thank Heaven, at least," thought I, "that she has gone!"
Scarcely had this pious gratulation flowed from my heart, before the door was burst open, and, pale, trembling, eyes on fire, hands clenched, forth stalked the lady in question. A wonderful proof how much sooner a woman would lose her character than allow it to be called not worth the losing! She entered, and had all the furies of Hades lent her their tongues, she could not have been more eloquent. It would have been a very pleasant scene if one had not been a partner in it. The old Abbe, with his keen, astute marked face, struggling between surprise, fear, the sense of the ridiculous, and the certainty of losing his mistress; the lady, foaming at the mouth, and shaking her clenched hand most menacingly at her traducer; myself endeavouring to pacify, and acting, as one does at such moments, mechanically, though one flatters one's self afterwards that one acted solely from wisdom.
But the Abbe's mistress was by no means content with vindicating herself: she retaliated, and gave so minute a description of the Abbe's own qualities and graces, coupled with so any pleasing illustrations, that in a very little time his coolness forsook him, and he grew in as great a rage as herself. At last she flew out of the room. The Abbe, trembling with passion, shook me most cordially by the hand, grinned from ear to ear, said it was a capital joke, wished me good-by as if he loved me better than his eyes, and left the house my most irreconcilable and bitter foe!