Mingle-Mangle by Monkshood. RETROSPECTIVE REVIEWALS: XI.-D'URFÉ. It has by many been taken for granted that D'Urfé was describing actual scenes and events within his own experience, connected with his own history, when he wrote that model romance, the " Astræa." The choicest lovepassages, they say, were autobiographical records. Pastoral hero, pastoral heroine, pastoral associates of any prominence, were demonstrably, they assure us, D'Urfé himself, D'Urfe's wife, D'Urfé's friends and acquaintance. With or without foundation for the conjecture, there has always been a disposition on the part of the public to favour private rumours to this effect. The tendency began before the days of D'Urfé, and it had certainly not died out when Mr. Bulwer produced his "Pelham," or Miss Bronte her "Jane Eyre." To Motteux, in his preface to the English translation of Rabelais, "the Astrea of the Lord d'Urfé, which has charmed all the ingenious of both sexes, and is still the admiration of the most knowing, merely as a romance," appears a production that deserves all this admiration, on the ground of its being not "merely a romance," but fiction founded upon fact; for it "has been discovered," adds Peter, "long ago, by some few, to have throughout it a foundation of truth: but as it only contains the private amours of some persons of the first quality in that kingdom, and even those of its noble author, he had so disguised the truths which he describes, that few had the double pleasure of seeing them reconciled to the outward fictions; till, among the works of the greatest orator of his time, the late Monsieur Patru, of the French Academy, they had a key to a part of that incomparable pastoral, which he says he had from its author; and none that have known Patru, or read his works, or Boileau's, will have any reason to doubt of what he says." That illustrious American traveller, and free-and-easy Penciller by the Way, Mr. N. P. Willis, dear to the Quarterly Review, and Punch, and the English aristocracy to a man, entitles one of his collected volumes: "People I have Met; or, Pictures of Society and People of Mark drawn under a thin Veil of Fiction." Which title might, on Patru's showing, serve as a convenient alias for the Lord d'Urfé's romance. For Patru expressly states that the author of Astræa, to make his truths more agreeable, has interwoven them with "mere fictions, which yet are generally but the veils that hide some truths, which might otherwise not so properly appear in such a work; sometimes he gives us a part of the chief intrigues of a person, such actions as that person transacted at another time, or on another occasion: and, on the other hand, he sometimes divides one history, so that under different names still he means but one person: thus Diana and Astrea, Celadon and Silvander, are the same."* Mr. Disraeli, who, in his Curiosities of Literature, "brings the Astrea forward to point out," he says, "the ingenious manner by which a fine imagination can veil the common incidents of life, and turn whatever it *Motteux, pref. to Rabelais, VOL. XLV. H touches into gold" (brave words, my masters!)-commends this romance as a "striking picture of human life, for the incidents are facts beautifully concealed. They relate the amours and gallantries of the court of Henry the Fourth." D'Urfé's brother, Anne by name, having put away his wife, Diana of Chateaumorand, a wealthy heiress, after two-and-twenty years' cohabitation, our romancer married the lady, of whom he is said to have been enamoured before Anne made her his own; and in the romance "he [Honoré d'Urfé] is Sylvander and she Astrea while she is married to Anne; and he Celadon and she Diana when the marriage is dissolved." "Sylvander is called an unknown shepherd, who has no other wealth than his flock; because our author was the youngest of his family, or rather a knight of Malta, who possessed nothing but honour." "The history of Philander is that of the elder D'Urfé [Anne]." "In this manner has our author dismissed his own private history," &c. "These particulars were confided to Patru, on visiting the author in his retirement."* So, again, Sir Walter Scott-who says that D'Urfé, "being willing to record certain love intrigues of a complicated nature which had taken place in his own family, and amongst his friends," imagined to himself a species of Arcadia on the banks of the Lignon, inhabited by swains and shepherdesses, who live for love and for love alone. It is a certain fact, writes M. Victor Cousin, in his Sketches of French Society in the Seventeenth Century, that D'Urfé undertook "in the Astræa' to relate his prolonged amours with the beautiful Diana of Châteaumorand; and whatever difficulties may have been subsequently raised against this view, we are not aware, for our part, of any good reason for calling in question the narrative of truth-speaking [véridique] Patru."+ On the other hand, that judicious and accomplished critic, M. SaintMarc Girardin, thus deals with the vexed question: "Let us not go looking in romances for the life of the romancers; rather let us expect to find the reverse [le contre-pied]: we shall then run less risk of mistakes. But Patru was not content with reasons like this, borrowed from the experience of life; he asked D'Urfé if it was true that he was Celadon, and that the great Enric was Henri the Great. He even claimed present knowledge of some truths in the 'Astræa,' for his brother, then a good deal in the world, had informed him what was said on the subject. Thus the Prince of Condé was Calidon and the Princess of Condé was Célidée; Marguerite of Valois, Henri the Fourth's first wife, was Galatée; Gabrielle d'Estrée was Daphnide. He urged D'Urfé to acknowledge all this; but D'Urfé replied that nineteen was an early age to be entrusted with so many secrets of such great importance; and the worthy Patru, not seeing that D'Urfé was gently laughing at him, 'would not take a refusal, but kept returning to the point. At length,' Patru tells us, 'he said to me, after dinner one day, when I was urging him with all the warmth you can imagine, "I give you my word that, on your return, you shall get from me all you desire." And yet,' said I, I shall only be twenty, then. True,' he rejoined, embracing me; 'but with such intelligence and inclinations as yours, a year in Italy is no slight matter. And besides, are you astonished at my wanting to see you once again ، *Curios. of Lit. First series. Scott's Miscel. Prose Works: Essay on Romance. La Soc. Fr. au XVII® Siècle d'après le grand Cyrus de Mlle. de Scudéry, t. i. pp. 7 sq. at the least before I die?'-When Patru returned from Italy, D'Urfé was dead [1625]. But had he found D'Urfé alive, he would not have made much way in his discoveries. D'Urfé, in point of fact, had no secret to reveal to him. Like all great romancers, he had borrowed his romance from experience. He had painted the passions, manners, and characters of the world he lived in; but he had not sought to take portraits. He defends himself from this notion in his preface to L'Astrée : 'If thou find thyself,' thus he addresses his book, among those who profess to interpret dreams and to discover the most secret thoughts of others, and they affirm that Celadon is this particular man and Astrée that individual woman, make them no reply, for they know not what they say.' Do not, therefore, let us look in D'Urfé for the romantic history of the close of the sixteenth century; let us look there for an historian of the human heart."* It was when young Patru, of Boswellising disposition, was at Turin, during his Italian expedition, that he came across D'Urfé, then fifty and upwards, who had retired to that city, the entirely French atmosphere of which, at the time in question, was attractive to the veteran romancer. D'Urfé was in 1624 the head and front, the crowned head and laurelled front, of his country's literature-in the estimate of young people, at least, to whom his delineation and elaboration, most scientific as well as most sentimental, of the tender passion, was a thing of beauty, and a joy for ever. "D'Urfé était le plus grand nom de la littérature et le plus accrédité parmi les jeunes gens, puisqu'il avait chanté l'amour." Accordingly, Patru approached him, as M. Girardin says, with a sort of passionate veneration, and, being both enthusiastic and inquisitive, begged him to "explain the Astræa." For people of the Patru class-a large majority, by the way-would have it that "Astræa" was something more than a romance-that it was, in reality, the history of the author and of his times. "The craze for discovering the hero of a romance in its author, is not new, we see. Only, in our own day, this craze, instead of being a matter of curiosity with the public, is become a pretension of the authors. They first of all make the hero after their own likeness, or rather after an image of their fancy; but when once the hero is thus created, they constrain themselves and this is properly the malady of our day-to model their life and destiny upon the life and destiny of their imaginary hero. "According to the beaux esprits of the time, D'Urfé was Celadon, and Diane de Châteaumorand, his wife, was Astrée.† The story ran that he had been in love with Diane while a youth; but Diane was to belong to his elder brother, Anne d'Urfé. Honoré had been forced, therefore, to leave his mistress, and had, in his despair, got himself made a knight of Malta. But ere long his brother Anne obtained from the Pope a cassation of his marriage, and Honoré got his vows dispensed with, and, returning to France, wedded, after all, the beautiful Diane he had loved so well and regretted so much." D'Urfé's first production was also appealed to-the poem called Sireine. "Sireine is a shepherd on the banks of the Eridan, who is forced to leave his mistress. Her parents, during his * Saint-Marc Girardin: Cours de Lit. dram. iii. 68 sq. Once for all let us here remark, that, in this mingle-mangle, we are almost inevitably capricious in the spelling of proper names. Sireine comes back, absence, marry her to an old man, rich and ugly. Le devoir, belle, n'a pouvoir, Crossed in love, but ever constant,-with a mistress ever faithful, but austerely attached to the law of duty,-voilà the story of the shepherd Sireine, and afterwards of the shepherd Celadon. It was also, they said, the story of Honoré d'Urfé himself. Such a conte, observes M. Girardin, had its beauty, and was just the thing to please young Patru. But now for the histoire. “Honoré d'Urfé was not in love, early in life, with Diane de Châteaumorand, who was seven years older than himself; and when he wedded her, after the marriage with Anne d'Urfé, his elder brother, was annulled, he did so, not to carry out the first engagements of his heart, but to prevent the great wealth Diane had brought with her, from going out of the family. Diane had been very handsome when young, but was now become very bulky; besides which, she was peevish and sluttish, always having in her bedroom and on her bed five or six big dogs, who were never away from her." D'Urfé found the atmosphere close and rather too canine. If he held his tongue, he must compromise matters by holding his nose. Love me, love my dog,-has been righteously discussed by Elia among the fallacies of proverbs. To tell the plain truth in plain English, D'Urfé was fairly "stunk out." After six years' endurance, the six big dogs in the bedroom were half a dozen too many for him, and he left them in possession. They might be fruitful and multiply, henceforth, to their own and Diana's content, for what he cared. He was off, to breathe airs not quite so heavyladen with animal odours; Cologne itself would be preferable, where Coleridge once counted two and seventy stenches, All well defined, and several stinks. Apply to the Pope for a divorce, said D'Urfé's friends to him. Your brother got him to dispense with his marriage vows, and you yourself got him to relieve you of your Malta ones. At him again. But no; D'Urfé thought, and said, that the D'Urfés had already given His Holiness employment enough. So he left his fat frowsy Diana without formal separation of any kind, and betook himself, as we have seen, to the very Frenchified city of Turin, where he composed his celebrated romance, to console himself for his actual history, so far was he from making that history the theme of his romance. The real Diana would not have looked well, the real dogs (all six of them, and on the counterpane) would not have smelt well, in that genteelest of prose pastorals. For, to quote M. Girardin again, "In this romance, all is beautiful, all is charming. The lovers are lively and men of worth, the ladies tender and true; the cottages are elegant and proper, tenanted by shepherds of good society and shepherdesses of soft and kindly tempers. Nobody grows old there, and nobody grows fat, though the attachments are of prolonged duration; and all this in the finest country in the world, and on the banks of the most charming river you can imagine-that is to say, in the author's own country, a country, however, which he had quitted early in life, and whose woods and meadows and waters were now adorned, for him, with all the memories of youth and childhood. "In addition to the disappointments of domestic, D'Urfé was also made acquainted with those of political life. On his return from Malta, he joined the League party, attaching himself to the fortunes of the Duc de Nemours, half-brother of the Guises, and who, after the defeat of the Duc de Mayenne, and Henri Quatre's entry into Paris, endeavoured to make himself master of the provinces of which Lyons is the metropolis. But D'Urfé met with injustice and disgrace in the usurper's little court; and, sick of the League, but put into prison by the Royalists first as a Leaguer, and afterwards by the Leaguers as a Royalist, he had recourse to philosophy: during his captivity at Montbrison, in 1594, he wrote some Moral Epistles,' which he completed at Turin in 1596. Philosophy sufficed to console him for political mishaps; but as a solace for domestic mishaps there was need of the imagination-and thus and then it was that he wrote L'Astrée. This progress," adds our critic, "is to my liking the sham griefs of political life are consoled by the dry maxims of philosophy; the vexations of the heart are charmed away by imagination, that is to say, by the dream and fiction of a better and happier life than the one actually led. This kind of day-dream tranquillises the soul, without deadening it."* And thus day-dreaming, D'Urfé composed that romance to which may be applied Lady Frampul's eulogy, It is the marrow of all lovers' tenets, if indeed her ladyship does not herself so apply it, for she remembers the "Astræa” when summing up the love-lore of Lovel,— Who hath read Plato, Heliodore, or Tatius, Ben Jonson's testimony proves that already, in 1630, D'Urfé was reckoned, even among strangers and foreigners, one of the fathers of the church of Love. And it is well known that pious bishops of-not that church, but the church of Christendom, deliberately and officially approved of the all-popular "Astræa." Pierre Camus, for example, Bishop of Belley-himself a writer of "devout stories," which are in fact "little romances," and incited to such authorship by no less a counsellor than Saint Francis of Sales (qui le lui conseilla de la part de Dieu),-Pierre Camus uttered an episcopal benediction on L'Astrée, on the score of its chaste tone and honourable feeling, while pronouncing the author to be one of the most modest and accomplished gentlemen that the mind can conceive." In 1624, D'Urfé received a letter signed by nine-and-twenty princes and princesses, and nineteen great lords and ladies in Germany, who had assumed the names of the characters in L'Astrée, and had formed a "réunion pastorale," which they called "Academy of True *Saint-Marc Girardin, iii. 65-68. † Ben Jonson: "The New Inn," Act III. Sc. 2. |