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and the most ungrateful man on the face of the earth." La Force, who was half asleep, did not hear, and muttered, "What do you say, D'Aubigné?" upon which the king, who was noted for his quickness of hearing, quietly said, He says I am a skinflint and the most ungrateful man on the face of the earth." D'Aubigné felt rather sheepish, but Henry was not in the least annoyed. The story is unfortunately not quite authentic, for it is only given in the notes of the early editions of the memoirs and does not appear in the manuscript. But in his history D'Aubigné relates a similar story in which when his bedfellow did not hear his remark, the king chimed in with "How deaf you are, don't you hear that he says I want to marry my sister to several brothers-in-law at once?" "Go to sleep," coolly replied D'Aubigné, "we have plenty more things to say about you."

had clasped when he gave it. He returned at once to St. Luc, who received him with tears. Fortunately just at this time a Catholic of some note was taken prisoner by the Huguenots, and an exchange was effected. On recovering his liberty, D'Aubigné was disgusted to learn that during his captivity the island had been sold by the king of Navarre to the Catholics. This ingratitude, as it seemed to him, on the part of his master, made him entertain serious thoughts of quitting his service; but Henry was bound up with the Huguenot cause, and to desert one was to desert the other. So with characteristic energy D'Aubigné set himself down to a diligent study of the Catholic controversialists, to see if he could find, as he expresses it, a "crumb of salvation" in the Roman religion. One of the writers whom he consulted was our countryman, the Jesuit Campian, who had been hanged at Tyburn five years before; but he found him more eloquent than convincing. The celebrated Cardinal Bellarmine made at first a much greater impression on him, but the result of a careful study of such of his works as were then published was that he became a more confirmed Protes-olics were very averse to see a Protestant

tant than ever.

The only other incident to be noted in this period is his marriage in 1583 to Suzanne de Lzay, with whom six years before he had fallen violently in love on seeing her at a window as he rode one day into the town of St. Gelais. His married life seems to have been thoroughly happy, though his wife must have had many an anxious moment, and can have enjoyed but little of his society. In 1588, however, D'Aubigné, being, as he says, trop las de courir, constituted himself governor of Maillezais, a fortress near La Rochelle which he had taken. His master by no means approved of his retirement, but D'Aubigné having for more than twenty years never had four consecutive days' holiday, except when prevented by wounds or sickness from military work, thought himself entitled to some rest and refused to give up his governorship. It does not appear, however, that he was any the less active for the cause in consequence.

From the time when Henry became king of France the memoirs become less detailed. The death of Henry the Third left his successor in a very difficult position, for the Leaguers refused to recognize him as king, and even the moderate Cath

on the throne. D'Aubigné eloquently and forcibly advised him to stand to his colors, to trust to his old companions, and to rally round him those Catholics that were for king rather than for pope. Henry for a time followed his advice, and in most of the battles and sieges which marked the course of the struggle between him and the League, between France and Spain, between toleration and bigotry, D'Aubigné took a prominent part.

In 1590 he had the misfortune to lose his wife, and for three years afterwards, he tells us, he did not pass a single night without weeping. Henry's conversion to the Catholic religion (1593) considerably estranged him from his old servant, who loved the cause even better than the man with whom it had been so long identified, and who from this time forward devoted himself to redressing the grievances of his Protestant brethren. Soon after Jean Chastel's attempt to assassinate the king (1594), D'Aubigné after a considerable absence reappeared at court. "Voilà MonThe following story is too characteristic sieur Monseigneur d'Aubigné," he heard of both Henry and D'Aubigné to be passed the king say, as he stood in the courtyard over. One night shortly before the tak-waiting for the royal carriage to drive in. ing of Maillezais, while D'Aubigné, as was apparently his custom, was sleeping with M. de la Force in a room opening out of Henry's bedroom, he said to his companion, "La Force, our master is a skinflint

The "Monsieur Monseigneur" augured a cold reception, but the king embraced him warmly, and bade Gabrielle d'Estrées do the same. Presently the king showed him the mark on his lip which Chastel had

made. "Sire," said D'Aubigné, "you have as yet only renounced God with your lips, and he has been satisfied with piercing your lips, but when you renounce him with your heart, it is your heart that he will pierce." "Noble words," exclaimed Gabrielle, "but out of place." "Yes," said D'Aubigné, "for they are of no use." As a proof that he had not lost Henry's confidence, the king of the League, Cardinal de Bourbon, was entrusted to his keep. ing at Maillezais. Some one alleged D'Aubigné's unruliness and discontent as an objection. “D'Aubigné's word," said the king, "will be enough to prevent any fear on that score." The sequel showed that the king was right. For on the Duchesse de Retz sending a messenger to him with an alternative bribe of two hundred thousand ducats, or one hundred and fifty thousand crowns with the governorship of Belle Isle, D'Aubigné's verbal answer was: "The second offer is the better one, for it would enable me to eat in peace and safety the bread of my treason; but as my conscience follows me so closely that it would embark with me when I sailed for Belle Isle, you can go back with the assurance that had I not given you my word, I would send you to the king."

dom of speech, must inevitably have resulted in what Henry most desired, a speedy war. The king however changed his mind, and, instead, related to him in detail his grand scheme for destroying the power of the house of Austria.* D'Aubigné snorted like a war-horse at the pros. pect of this mighty undertaking, and begged that, in his quality of vice-admiral of Saintonge and Poitou, he might be allowed to take part in it by making a descent on Spain. But Henry's plans, which might have changed the whole course of European history, were suddenly cast to the winds by an assassin's knife.

With Henry's death the last link of D'Aubigné's allegiance to his Catholic rulers was broken, and from this time forth he identified himself_more closely with the malcontents at La Rochelle. On Condé's revolt breaking out he became his quartermaster-general, but the war was soon ended by the treaty of Loudun (1616), which D'Aubigné bitterly characterizes as une foire publique d'une générale lâcheté, d'une particulière infidélité. Soon afterwards Condé seeing D'Aubigné in the distance shouted to him, "Go home to Doignon." "Good-bye," said D'Aubigné, "go to the Bastille." And to the In 1598, D'Aubigné's efforts in favor of Bastille Condé in fact went, and passed his co-religionists were rewarded by the three years there, while D'Aubigné conEdict of Nantes. It was a strange irony soled himself with the completion of his of fate that its revocation by the grandson great work "Les Tragiques," which he of the man who passed it should have had begun nearly forty years before. It been partly owing to the influence of the was published with the strange title, granddaughter of the man to whose im-"Les Tragiques donné au publique par le portunities its passing was largely due. But so it was; Françoise d'Aubigné, Mme. de Maintenon, was Agrippa d'Aubigné's granddaughter.

During the last years of the king's life, he grew gradually more and more out of favor. According to his own account his friendship with De la Trémouille, Duc de Thouars, whom Henry especially disliked, was the main cause. But doubtless age and discontent, and the feeling that his long services had met with little or no reward, had neither softened his temper nor made his manners more courtier-like. It is therefore hardly to be wondered at if the stern, virtuous, grumbling old Huguenot had become somewhat distasteful to a sovereign who still spent in gay pleasure such moments as he could snatch from the prosecution of world-wide schemes. But it is satisfactory to find that before his death he took D'Aubigné again into favor, and even talked of sending him as an ambassador to Germany, an act which, considering D'Aubigné's undiplomatic free

larcin de Prométhée (au Desert, 1616).” Not long afterwards he sold his two fortresses of Doignon and Maillezais, which somehow or other seem to have become his private property, to the Huguenot government at La Rochelle, and retired to St. Jean d'Angely, where he published at his own expense his "Histoire Universelle," and accounted it a great honor that it was condemned and burnt by the Royal College at Paris.

But he no longer felt himself at ease or even safe in France. He was an object of suspicion to the government, and his own friends at La Rochelle showed him scant courtesy. He therefore determined to spend the remainder of his days at Geneva. Here, in recognition of his long and faithful services to the Protestant

ticulars of this "grand design," as it is called, which It is unfortunate that D'Aubigné has given no par has so much exercised historians; but the little he says tends to confirm the view now generally taken of it, that the main object of it was merely the humiliation of the house of Austria, and not, as Sully says in his

memoirs, the remodelling of the whole of Europe.

It was apparently in 1628, after the tak ing of La Rochelle, that D'Aubigné wrote his memoirs, and two years afterwards, on May 9th (Ascension Day), 1630, after a fortnight's illness, retaining his consciousness almost to the last, and with the praise of God on his lips, he went to his long rest. His widow's letters testify how tenderly she loved him and how sincerely she mourned him. He left three legitimate children, Constant and two daughters, and an illegitimate son named Nathan, the ancestor of the family of Merle d'Aubigné. This Nathan was the son of one Jacqueline Chayer, with whom D'Aubigné lived for a short time after the death of his first wife. In his will he expresses great repentance for his sin, and says that he had called his son Nathan after the prophet who censured King David.

cause, he was received with every mark of | happened to be residing for a season at honor. The mayor came in state to call his country's expense. upon him, took him to church and put him in the ex-mayor's seat, the seat appropriated to princes and royal ambassadors, and finally crowned his hospitality by giv. ing a public dinner in his honor. But the French government did not leave him in peace even at Geneva, where he was as active in the Protestant cause as ever, and great efforts were made to induce the Genevese to dislodge him. Accordingly for better security he built himself a house in the neighborhood, and during the building had once more a narrow escape of his life. While standing on the fifth story of the scaffolding, superintending the operations he was turned seventy- he suddenly fell, but catching hold of a newly laid stone, and therefore anything but firmly fixed, he hung by one hand, two pointed spikes waiting to receive him below, till assistance came. "It pleased God," he plaintively adds, "to leave me at no time and in no place free from danger." In the same year he was condemned to death by the French government for having used some stones of a dismantled church for his house. He was then engaged to be married to a widow, and it struck him that the way in which she received the news of his condemnation would be an excellent test of her courage and worth. So he promptly told her, and received this gratifying answer, "I am happy to share with you in God's quarrel; what God hath joined together, no man shall put asunder." The marriage took place in the following year.

There is not much more to relate. To Englishmen it will be interesting to hear that the old man at the age of seventy-two was nearly making a journey to England in company with James Hay, Lord Carlisle, James the First's magnificent favorite; but he was stopped by a rumor that Geneva was likely to be besieged, and to be absent in a time of danger was wholly contrary to his principles. His latter days were embittered by the conduct of his son Constant. Gifted with many of his father's talents and educated by the first professors in France, whose services were obtained by giving them double the ordinary pay, he might have achieved honorable distinction. But he took to drinking and gambling, married a woman of low condition and then killed her, and finally completed his father's mortification by becoming a Catholic. His celebrated daughter, Françoise, was born in the conciergerie of the prison of Noirt, where he

The first thing that strikes one in D'Aubigné's character is his ceaseless, untiring energy. From the time when at four years old he began his studies to almost the very end of his long life he was never for a moment idle. When he is not fighting, he is writing; when he is not planning an enterprise, he is planning a house. The numerous hairbreadth escapes which he had from death by fever, from death in battle, from death by assassination, from death by the public hangman, make his life one long romance. Most faithfully did he carry out his father's injunctions not to spare his head in the Protestant cause. His bravery, his utter carelessness of his own person, amounted at times, as he himself admits, to temerity. It may be the duty of a commander to encourage his men by being foremost in every danger, but no possible advantage can arise from his fighting in his shirt. Not a few of D'Aubigné's actions savored not so much of the cool courage of a grown-up man, as of the bravado of a boy who courts danger merely from the love of excitement and applause. But D'Aubigné's faults are all on the surface. Foolhardy, if you please, obstinate, self-confident, arbitrary, rough in speech and manner, he was at heart chivalrous, loyal, honorable, full of warm and tender feeling. In the life he led, the life of a soldier in a war that was at once domestic and religious, and in an age inferior to none in dissoluteness, he must have been the daily witness of every sort of excess, and he did not escape untainted from the contact. But amid the dark assassins, the cynical debauchees, the effeminate voluptuaries,

manuscript of the memoirs which had belonged to Mme. Maintenon; and having satisfied himself on investigation that it was an accurate copy of the original, which is still in existence at Geneva, he printed from it the first authentic edition.

ARTHUR TILLEY.

From The National Review.

SOME CURIOSITIES OF DIET.

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the careless pleasure-seekers that crowd the canvas of the wars of religion, the noble figure of the old Huguenot stands forth in pleasing contrast. Sainte-Beuve says of him that he was a type of his age, and to a certain extent this is true. In his restlessness and energy, in his thirst after learning, in his varied acquirements, in his indifference to personal danger, he was a true son of the Renascence; but the sterner and purer morality which he had learnt from the Protestant religion makes him rather resemble one of the heroes of an earlier generation, of an age when BETWEEN the bewildering profusion of chivalry still reigned in the land, when the Food and Cookery Exhibition, held valor had not degenerated into ferocity, in London last spring, and the penury of nor the love of woman into sensual lust. the very poor, what an interval! On one His name is not unworthy to stand hand, all the richest viands the world can beside those of the many distinguished produce, on the other, starvation. Protestants who in the sixteenth century one hand, cooking of the most exquisite did so much to raise France to greatness, description, that would almost make a beside those of Jean Goujon, Bernard savory dish of a pair of old kid gloves; Palissy, Ambroise Paré, the Estiennes, on the other, ignorance, hopelessness, and and Ramus. And it must be remembered that it is not as a mere soldier, as Mark Pattison contemptuously calls him, that D'Aubigné is honored in France at the present day, but as a man of letters, as the author of "Les Tragiques." The memoirs from which I have taken the foregoing account of his life are characterized by Michelet as le plus beau livre du temps, and though this praise is perhaps excessive, it is in the right direction. There is an atmosphere of manly sincerity and single-heartedness about them that makes one's heart expand to the writer. No doubt an old man of seventy-five, writing probably from recollection, is not always accurate in his statements, and it is not inconsistent with D'Aubigné's character that he should a little magnify some of his exploits, but it is impossible to help feeling that in the main his statements are true. There may be inaccuracies with regard to matters of detail, such as dates and the names of places, but the general tone of the narrative is truthful. That it was not written for the world is shown by the preface, in which D'Aubigné enjoins his children not to allow more than two copies of the work to be made, and to keep them in the family. This injunction was for a time faithfully kept, but in the year 1729 the memoirs were published, under the title of "Histoire Secrète," at Cologne. This edition, however, in the true taste of the eighteenth century, was modernized by the editor, and another which appeared in 1731 at the Hague fared still worse. In 1851 M. Lalanne found in the library of the Louvre a

indigence so profound that a salt herring is cooked in a most primitive fashion lighted at a piece of burning paper and allowed to flare for a minute or two, then extinguished and eaten. Such extremes almost necessarily mark modern society, and are inseparable from the highly artificial conditions attending it, but they fil! the thoughtful with sadness, and make one half wonder if this is, after all, the best of all possible worlds. And then the revelations, so far from new to the worker among the poor, but so startling to the rich, brought to light by the recent commission on the sweating system, are enough to appal the hardest-hearted; and, nevertheless, who can suggest any remedy as long as the labor market is glutted with incompetent and needy applicants for work? Life a heritage of woe, work done amid conditions destroying hope, strength, and vigor, a veritable battle for existence, a struggle to keep body and soul together, come what may to others, suffer who may. All very sad, and it is little consolation to perceive in it the working of great economic laws resulting in the survival of the fittest; in short, a beneficent struggle for existence.

Man is that one animal who can adapt himself to the changing conditions of life, and the vicissitudes of climate. He can live in the coal-mine and on the lofty mountain summit. He is equally at home in Greenland and in the hottest parts of central Africa. He can exist upon every kind of food-flying, creeping, swimming, running. Every plant yields him its produce; all nature is under subjection

to him. It is to cooking, however, that he owes a great part of his superiority to other animals; it fits much food for his wants which otherwise he would have to throw away, and careful preparation and skilful cooking enlarge his resources a thousandfold. Were it not for cooking, what could he live upon beyond a few fruits and nuts? and as he could only get these in warm climates, half the earth's surface would be closed to him as a permanent residence.

and Myatt then resolved to plant an acre the following year. Now rhubarb is so commonly grown that early in summer it ceases to have any money value, and a little later is thrown away in vast quantities; and we have seen cartloads tossed carelessly on one side. Vegetable marrows have also grown in favor of late years, and are now a valuable addition to the national dietary. The same is equally true of the tomato, which continues dear, however, especially in small towns, though it has of late wandered from the precincts of first-class fruiterers' establishments, and is at last being seen in small shops in obscure streets. It is so prolific and easily cultivated that before long it ought to be found in every grocer's, and in hundreds of thousands of houses.

Much curious information can be given about food, treated not scientifically, but as a source of amusement; and we pur. pose laying before the reader some facts that cannot fail to interest him, althougk some of them may be rather startling.

How much of the greater vigor and better health of our times is due to more wholesome food would be an interesting question to discuss; and that a wellarranged dietary has a great deal to do with the increasing longevity of our generation cannot be denied. As recently as the time of Queen Elizabeth vegetables were little cultivated, and still less used; and some of the kinds which are now seen in every house half-a-dozen times a month, were absolutely unknown. The breakfast of the maiden queen commonly consisted of salt meat, bread, and strong National prejudices regarding food are ale. It was not till the introduction into an endless source of merriment to the England of artificial grasses from France philosopher. The Turks, not very squeamthat much live-stock could be kept through ish in their diet, according to Dr. W. the winter. As lately as 1724 Dr. Cheyne F. Ainsworth, of Euphrates exploration wrote that no distemper was more com- fame, will not touch oysters, which we mon, fatal, and obstinate than scurvy, one and our American cousins regard as dainof the most easily prevented of all dis- ties. The Digger Indians of the Pacific eases, and Dr. Cullen lamented that coast, among the wretchedest of mortals, women, from their indoor and sedentary laid in a store of locust powder, suffilives, suffered greatly from the effects of cient to last seven years, after the great bad diet. Sir John Hawkins introduced swarms of 1875. According to Frank the potato into Ireland in 1565, and twenty Buckland, whose dietetic experiments years later Sir Francis Drake introduced showed a brave spirit and a singular it into England, and in 1586 Sir Walter disregard of conventional prejudices, the Raleigh also brought it over here, but two flesh of the boa-constrictor is good, and centuries passed before it became a com- tastes like veal. Quass, the fermented mon food. Sir Walter Scott, in "Wa- cabbage water of the Russians, is deverley," describes the cottages of Tully scribed as tasting like stale fish and Veolan as having gardens filled with soapsuds, but, in spite of its somewhat gigantic plants of kale or colewort encir- objectionable flavor, it has millions of cled with groves of nettles, where the votaries. Rats in Chinese cities sell at "now (1804) universal potato was un- two shillings the dozen, and in the butchknown. In 1800 the quartern loaf sold at er's shop the hind quarters of the dog Is. 5d., while in January, 1801, it was Is. hang side by side with those of the sheep, 11d.; in July, 1810, it touched the appal- and command a higher price per pound. ling figure of 2s. 5d. Rhubarb is quite The edible birds' nests of the same omof recent introduction, and is said to have nivorous people fetch double their weight been brought to this country in 1573 from in silver, the finest varieties, indeed, comthe Volga, but for two hundred years manding six sovereigns the pound. The remained a gardener's curiosity. Mr. West Indian negroes refuse to touch Joseph Myatt, of Deptford, was the first stewed rabbit, but eat palm-worms fried in Englishman to cultivate it on a large scale, fat, and baked snakes. Parrots, though and in or about 1810 sent his sons to the tough, are eaten in Mexico, while the ArBorough Market with five bunches, of gentine Guachos hunt skunks for the sake which they could only sell three. They of their flesh. In Corsica the octopus is took ten the next time, and sold them all; | first boiled and then roasted, and is es