they frown most terribly. What is Hütten to me? Shall I prefer the authority of Luther to that of the pope? If we had not received a pope from Christ, we should have to invent one." "They scream and scuffle and insult one another," sneers Des Périers, who no longer believed even in the existence of God. Blessed are the poor in spirit, concludes Agrippa; blessed are illiterate people like the apostles; blessed is the ass! CONCLUSION NOTHING now remains but to relate the conclusion of the dream. A dream indeed-all these schemes of happiness which had flashed across the gloomy background of realities like dissolving views on the wall of a lecture-room: the blue sea, the blazing sun, appearing but for a moment, left the blackness deeper still. Margaret, the great organiser of happiness, never found the secret of happiness for herself. Her last days were vexed with the most poignant sorrows: the court, Calvin, the people, well-nigh the whole world, cast her off and treated her as a Utopian dreamer: her husband went the length of striking her, her daughter was torn from her, and Henri II. sent her into exile; several of her friends, such as Ramus and Dolet, were persecuted, alas! from motives far from sincere it was, in truth, what she called "the suburbs of death." By divine mercy her heart, incessantly a prey to anxieties, at length parted company with a life that was anything but love. She perished, poor duchess, at her post as charitable vendor of love-perished in flames, like the salamander! No man came to her aid, none even paused to mourn her. Three young English maidens named Seymour erected to her a frail monument of verse under the auspices of her niece; but save for one devoted friend, Sainte-Marthe, whose enthusiastic funeral oration nevertheless provoked the liveliest criticisms, men maintained a remarkable silence. The princess had greatly erred in scattering her affections and seeking to create a sociology of the heart. Men do not care for love, they wish to fear and obey! There is no true love but the love of an individual. The Saint-Gelais, the Héroëts, the Salels, all those exquisite hearts bubbling over with sentiment when a smile from Margaret could lead them to fortune, now remained mute; the drum had to be set a-beating, and then at length there appeared a volume of elegies, a subtle fantasia in many tongues, which would have been cold as ice but for the vigorous beam Ronsard shot into the midst of the medley-a tiny volume, brilliant, ingenious, perverse, like the princess's soul, full of pretty verses all alike-alike in expression, with the same silvery veneer of tenderness-the very image of the somewhat phantasmagoric and unreal moonshine in which some mystic women delighted: brightness, but no warmth or light. Yes, Margaret was too fond of these intense lights and shades. A thousand causeless murmurings woke echoes in her soul. She sustained herself upon the subtle aroma wafted on certain nights upon the breath of the quickening world. She never heard the full, resounding roar of the sea in the darkness, but was content to see the fringe of foam. At the moment when Margaret disappeared, the power of women in France seemed at its apogee; in reality, it was on the wane. It was attacked more especially on the moral side. According to so-called Puritans like Agrippa, the influence of women resulted in the declension of morals; and what a declension! Everything converged towards the joys of the senses; painters could no longer paint anything but bower scenes, architects could only open doors or pierce balconies, husbands only speculate on the exploits of their wives, Luther only recommend the reading of stories (sometimes astonishing) from the Bible. Unquestionably, feminine influences, even the purest, seemed soft and enervating. The energetic spirit of old France, of the time before Francis I., sprang suddenly to life again. A country gentleman, Du Bellay, sounded the charge against Roman cosmopolitanism by claiming France for the French. At one stroke, as J. M. de Heredia has said, his clear and picturesque style clean obliterated Marot, Saint-Gelais, and the whole of Margaret's school. Du Bellay would have loved Savonarola: he speaks the same tongue as the friends of Anne of France; he has sworn implacable hatred against platonism with its cloying sweetness, against the languors of petrarchism: "He has not breathed in the ardour that sets Italy in flame." Though he has seen Rome, decadent Rome, he has not caught her infection; it is she that he blames, and yet the "bashful squires," the "exiles from joyance," and other vulgar "fantasticals," whom he flagellates and sends packing along with the Round Table, were very often French. He has in his veins the proud and lusty blood of a soldier. Like Anne of France he worships truth, and candour, and lucidity. Ronsard too, of like blood and ancestry, advocates truth: "I love not the false, I love the true." He overwhelms with his vigorous eloquence all sham loves, "Cupids with curled love-locks, but broken arrow"; all the platonic cant, so virtuous in show and so little virtuous in fact: and all these refinements, and hypocrisies, and conceits on twofold incorporeal love! Aimer l'esprit, Madame, c'est aimer la sottise.1 The voices of these two men stirred up no little commotion among a large number of the lesser nobility or quasi-nobility, men of middling station, less sensible to high-falutin' than to the spirit of frankness and independence "gaillards," as they styled themselves, who loved women as they loved "daylight and the sun," but as men, by no means with an idea of "playing lackey to a mistress," particularly one who was wrinkled, painted, or terribly accomplished. De Junon sont vos bras, des grâces vostre sein, That was their type. And they laughed at the Vadiuses and Trissotins of their day, at all the fine carollings that Du Bellay amused himself by imitating, forgotten tunes of long ago, the faded frippery of the ballroom. What merriment there is when a belated poet returns from Italy with 1 To love the mind, Madam, is loving folly. 2 Your arms are Juno's, and your breast A lioness proud your heart has lent. 3 [Trissotin is the affected coxcomb and Vadius the pedant of Molière's famous comedy, Les Femmes savantes (Act iii. scene v.).] another Amadis! Neither Olivier de Magny nor Baïf will take the moon for the sun, or love for a mere ornamentation. The men of the Pléiade had no love for patronage or the Medici species. They hated and abhorred the Jews. Ronsard would have liked to see a fine St. Bartholomew butchery of them, and could not forgive Titus for wasting his chances: his gorge rises at the thought of a Leo the Hebrew1 figuring among the sages of platonism. Good decent fellows, they drape themselves in their somewhat rustic free-and-easiness. From their modest snuggeries they proudly tell the king "Nature has made us of the same flesh and blood as you"; 2 they do not hesitate to write to a Medici lady that the finest royalty is to be "king of oneself." They vie with one another in launching their epigrams against the court, the salons, the ruling women; they sing of woods and dales, even of the wild untrammelled life O bienheureux le siècle où le peuple sauvage -Ronsard. [A Jewish physician whose Dialogues on Love were printed at Venice in 1549.] 2 Ronsard to Henri III. Baïf to Catherine de' Medici. L'homme à la femme y rend obéissance L'esprit bon s'y fait lourd, la femme s'y diffame, La fille y perd sa honte, la veuve y acquiert blasme. La femme sans mary, le prestre sans bréviaire. [At court the woman rules the man The brightest wit grows sluggish, and women smirch their fame, All there is masquerade: the girl without her mother fares, mendier le goust d'une vaine fumée (Jean de la Taille, Satires). [to beg a spark of empty praise (That's very hard to kindle, and too quickly burns away), To cut a dash, and dandify, a lover's part to play.] "[Happy the age when wild in woods The naked savage ran, When nuts and apples were his foods, |