The Press.
London, England, 1858-12-25 00:00:00

rt6l.

LONDON, SATURDAY, DECEMBER 25, 1858.

No. 295.--Vol. VI.

Al
iltraturt.

Madame la Marquise de Pompadour. Par M.
Capefigue. London: Jeffs.

IT has been our destiny—by whichever minister-
ing genius directed—to peruse a fair proportion
of those gossiping discursive narrations which M.
Capefigue pleasantly and complacently entitles
"histories." As after-dinner reading, when
hygienic rules forbid any stress upon the brain,
these "histories" are agreeable enough. The
style, though unifbrittly slip-sop and occasionally
ungrammatical, is flowing and easy. The reflec-
tions are just so far raised above puerility as to
escape being absolutely dull. And the narrative
ambles trippingly on, conciliating rather reverie
than sleep, like the urbane garrulity of some
octogenarian of " the old school," full of semi-
scandalous reminiscences of Fox, Sheridan, and
the Regent.
If any qualities in M. Capefirtues productions
awaken graver feelings than amusement, they
are,—a facile treatment of questions of foreign
policy, indicating a certain amount of diplomatic
experience ; and an advocacy of the ancien regime
fearless and consistent enough to command our
respect, if it cannot win our sympathy. This
advocacy is carried, indeed, to an extreme, at the
present day well-nigh unique. Every conceivable
virtue of that self-condemned fabric is dwelt upon
with enthusiasm. Every blemish is either
lovingly veiled, or, where forced into notice, is
placed in such softened and tender light, that,
spite of ourselves, we are fain as we gaze to echo
that sentiment, so popular on occasions of general
mourning—" After all, black is a most becoming
colour !"

In the work before us, however, if the " whole-
hog " absolutist is as inflexibly consistent as ever,
the diplomatist at least has completely belied his
character and his training
There are two ways of injuring a cause—by an
adroit attack, and by a maladroit defence. Of
the two, the latter is decidedly the most damaging.
Towards an open enemy we can present at least
a guarded and watchful front. But the friend-
ship which, in its rapturous demonstrations,
reverses our position and, at the same time,
pinions our arms with an embrace, is of all perils
the most perilous.
Such however is the form—the grossly un-
diplomatic form—in which M. Capefigue has here
manifested his friendship for the Bourbons.
If there is one phase of the Bourbon r6gitne
from the contemplation of which the Faubourg
St. Germain should turn with special repugnance,
it is the reign of Louis XV. In that reign all the
pullulating vices of absolutism seem to have
reached their highest development. The mo-
narch himself, illiterate, feeble, selfish, and
depraved, exemplified with almost typical accuracy
the demoralizing effects of irresponsible power.
The aristocracy. imitating, on, if possible, an
exaggerated scale, the moral deformities of the
centre round which it revolved, distributed—as
was inevitable where feudalism still ruled
supreme—the contaminating virus through the
entire ot. the social system. The poorer
classes, depraved by innoculation, debased and

ignorant from contempt and neglect, were not the
less bigoted and superstitious ; while the priest-
hood, breathing an atmosphere thus vitiated on
either side, and claiming entire exemption from
the wholesome check of public responsibility,
fell, as human beings so placed must ever fall,
into a state of demoralization fully on a par with
that around them.

Now, one would imagine a phase of social de-
composition like this the very last to which an
admirer of the ancien regane would desire to call
attention. Or if the subject must be handled—if
its treatment ranged itself under that canonized
category, the duty of the historian "—then at
least such an admirer would surely select the
least putrescent portions of the matter before him,
and place these in the strongest and most favour-
able light. Not so, however, does the ex-
diplomatist M. Capefigue look at the thing.
Whether from an obliquity of moral vision,
singular, though not perhaps unique, in a man
so emphatically orthodox ; or whether from the
not very refined idea that a bad cause is best
gained by boldly "brazening it out," M. Cape-
figue has chosen precisely the mast repulsive
aspect, and certainly one of the least decorous
characters, of this deplorable epoch as the ve-
hicles of his latest panegyric on absolute
monarchy. It is true that his preface gravely
asserts, The author's object has been to
" refute by authentic documents all the calumnies
" disseminated against the Marchioness by means
" of pamphlets written in England, in Holland,
and in Prussia, and accepted as truth by a
" whole school of historians." But, even setting
aside the obvious prudence of leaving filth un-
stirred, we confess ourselves at a loss to detect
any approach to a "documentary refutation of
calumnies " in the work before us. We beg
pardon !—there is indeed a whole chapter dedi-
cated to the proof that the Marchioness of
Pompadour was the child, not of a butcher, but
of a " purveyor of meat"—and was, moreover, a
young lady provided by her anxious mother with
" a most brilliant education." To M. Capefigue,
with whom noble birth and humble birth are
clearly synonyms for virtue and vice, a "refuta-
tion" of this kind is evidently most important.
To ourselves, we confess that the rehabilitation of
the lady's antecedents seems rather to tell against
than for her. At any rate, it makes her more
amenable to the homely reproach, " She ought
to have known better ! " But with regard to the
graver accusations, which affect, not his heroine's
virtue—of that there can of course be no ques-
tion—but her freedom from some of the coarsest
forms of vice, 11. Capeflgue supplies literally
nothing which has even the semblance of •` docu-
mentary refutation." His method, where he
meets with a difficulty, if remarkable for sim-
plicity and concision, is, certainly, entirely free
from any approach to that " philosophical spirit "
for which he everywhere professes such profound
contempt. It consists in purely asserting, with
virtuous indignation, that, whatever a low-bred
and degenerate world may think to the con-
trary, M. Capefigue utterly and entirely dis-
believes " the atrocious calumny " under re-
view :
Is it true (he asks) that Male. de Pompabur was the
complacent go-between of the King's promiscuous amours?
I repeat, it u odioau tu imayixe it Subsequently to the

GRA'rIS.

solemn Easter sacrament, prepared by Father Sacy, no
relation beyond that of a lively and profound friendship
existed between the King and the Marchioness ;—I have
never believed in sacrilege., in hypocritical communions ! •
The King was pious (!) in the midst of his foibles of the
heart (!) ; the Marchioness was in the hands, indeed, of
an indulgent director, bat one incapable of playing with
the holy sacraments of the altar.

And by way of "documentary proof" of the
above assertions, we have the following foot-
note :

The Marchioness no longer makes use of rouge—which
announces a reform.—Jouraal de Burlier, Annie 17:A. )

If M. Capefigue had been satisfied with this
curious testimony to Mme. de Pompadour's piety
and her Confessor's sense of the sacred duties of
his office, no harm at least—if no good—would
have been done. But will it be believed that,
after this unique " refutation," our skilful ex-
diplomatist proceeds to cite, in the following page,
an authenticated case in which " the Pompa-
dour " actually did personate something very
like the shameless character which history has
ascribed to her! The argument he curiously
draws from this is, that, as only one case of the
kind is recorded by an authority which he
chooses to recognize (that of Mine. d'Hausset), so
only one case of the kind can possibly have
occurred !

This style of reasoning, followed throughout
the book, has certainly the merit of novelty, if
not of originality. For, after all, there is no real
originality in taking the views, opinions, and
judgments of the rest of the world, and simply
converting them from affirmative into negative
propositions. Such, however, appears to us to
be, literally and exclusively, M. Capefigue's
modus operandi. Where historians unanimously
condemn, M. Capefigue decidedly approves;
where they approve, he condemns. The true
philosophy of history is evidently contained, for
him, in that tradition of our earlier age, " the
rule of contrary."
Illustrations may be culled from any page,
opened at hazard. A few will amuse our readers,
while they justify our criticism.
It would, we repeat, be difficult to find any
single point, in the whole range of history, on
which more unanimous censure has been passed
than on the reign of Louis XV. All sides—all
shades of political opinion, from the Henri-
quintist down to the red republican—agree in
characterizing his rule as among the most humi-
liating, the most disastrous of modern times. For
anybody but M. Capefigue, this notorious fact
would be rather embarrassing. But that in-
genious gentleman simply ignores it, and calmly
informs us, in a careless parenthesis, that
Louis XV. was a prince " who honoured and
elevated France" !

Ordinary mortals, in England at least, cherish
the idea that continuous and flagrant violation of
any oue of the Ten Commandments is irrecon-
aileable with sound pretensions to piety. M.
Capefigue is entirely of an opposite opinion.
Drawing no useless veil over the French king's
infamous vices—detailing without comment his
revolting amours with four sisters of the "si
illastre famine de Neale "—touching incidentally
on depravities of far coarser kind, but no less

• But how reonucile this charitable incredulity with the
King's " faithful observance of all the external duties of reli-
gion," praised in another passage ?

•.
1274 THE PRESS, DECEMBER 25, 1858.

notorious,—M. Capefigue quietly talks of Louis's
piety" as a thing generally admitted and quite
above any necessity of qualification :

Louis XV. the IMVA, apropos of the Illuminist crotchets
of the Count Saint-Germain) was too profoundly religious
ever to accept any of these phantasies of belief, which lie
outside of the catechism.

the first painful birth of the modern r6gime.
" The special character of the eighteenth cen-
" tury," says M. (2apefigue, on the other hand,
" is that of a sweet and facile existence, of a
" smiling happiness which breathes in all its
" creations."

France, in that century, had many great names
of which she is deservedly proud—names of men
who strove nobly, if vainly, to purify the Augean
corruption around them, and to whose contem-
plation every well-constituted mind must turn
with exquisite relief; after immersion in the pol-
luted atmosphere of the administrative and
Court history of the times. Let us see in what
light Capefigue views some of the most illus-
trious among those Illustrations of his country

the literary roues above mentioned. To these
latter " Madame la Marquise de Pompadour"
bears pretty well the same relation that the
lozenge with an arsenic base does to the lozenge
with a plaster of Paris base. Both compounds
are poisonous. But, while the latter works by
slow steps and through indirect channels, the
former acts at once, and filters its venom straight
into " the noble parts " (to use an old anato-
mical term) of the system. We congratulate the
causes advocated by M. Capefigue—we congra-
tulate the Legitimists in gen..Tal and the Uivrerl
in particular—upon their champion !

The Anglomania (be says) had been brought into
fashion by the publications of a magistrate of the Bor-
deaux Parliament, a Lel esprit, a man of dubious and
affected erudition, the President Secondat de Montesquieu.
He had made his literary debut with a pretentious, cap-
tiour, and flimsy book, the " Lettres Persanes," in which
no institution was respected. This book had won him
popularity with the philosophical party ; and, after having
philandered with the ➢fuses in the Temple de Guide, he
published the " Esprit des Lois," a work extravagantly
overrated (deinesuresment lotde), a meteorological almanac
on national institutions. The barometrical philosophy—
the erudite coucelii of Moutesquieu, had great success in
the parliamentary classes. The author of these little
phrases, of these petty verses of the Temple de Guide, with
his exclusive veneration for English institutions, his theory
of the balance and harmony of powers, chimed in per-
fectly with the new ideas of the Parliament, and justified
their ambition and their resistance.

The economist school, always full of charlatanism, had
got the weak side of thelKing—his interest in the welfare
of the people and his rural tastes. It discoursed about
nothing but the amelioration of the labouring classes—
paraded its great statistical lies about the produce of a
field, of eggs, of ears of corn—published the first prisons
litutiques, newspapers, journals, fix.—and, by all these
expedients, made its way up to the King and Mrite de
Pompadour, in order to achieve for itself a magnificent
position. Thus, for instance, a young man much patro-
nized by Quesnay and by Mine. de Pompadour, a great
talker about ameliorations, but surly and headstrong in
his opinions, by name Turgot, after having persuaded
a3me thousands of labourers to go and die in the marshes
of French Guiana, pocketed during eighteen months at
Paris 100,000 hares a year as governor of the colony
which he had never visited.

But, we repeat, to enumerate all the instances in
which this redoubted champion of abuses runs
full tilt against the recorded and long-weighed
decisions of reason and common sense—from his
rapturous admiration of la Pompadour's criminal
extravagance, down to his curious discovery that
the unpopularity of the Jesuits was simply due
to their being "in advance of their age "—would
be to translate the whole book. 'We cannot,
however, refrain from quoting M. Capefigue's
account of " the " Pompadour's introduction to
the poor Queen. It will serve as a fair specimen
of our author's style—a style which strikes us
as a pleasing cross between Mr. " Diary " Raikes
and the celebrated Jenkyns of the Morning
P081:-

Hanworth. Originally published in F ' roger,
Magazine. London : J. W. Parker and Son.
MAIL LINE stories, which it seems now almostthe universal fashion to republish, have certain
characteristics which are nearly sufficient to
mark them off as a distinct class of fiction. Like
‘serials " on a smaller scale, their chief business
is to have something amusing, witty. or terrific
in every number ; and the development of the
plot and the characters is usually a matter of
secondary importance. Hence they are usually
rather fatiguing to read through in a collected
form
; the interest is disjointed, and every situa-
tion is lighted up with a sort of artificial glare ;
so that their merit in their temporary shape is
often in an inverse ratio to that which they show
in their permanent one. " Hanworth" differs
from most of its class, and especially from those
which have hitherto appeared in Fraser.
Its periodical appearances there did not
excite in us any very lively feeling of
expectation, and towards the end we found
it a somewhat difficult task to identify the
characters, or to carry our recollection back to the
precise situation occupied by them in each pre-
ceding number. Perhaps Colonel Melville's
dashing stories have a little spoilt our taste for
domestic fiction ; or the multiplicity of maga-
zines and serials, of which it is necessary to be
au courant, have palled on a somewhat jaded
mental appetite. Really, now-a-days, unless the
characters are left on the brink of a precipice, or
the eve of a duel, one's interest grows languid
before the month comes round again. From
whatever cause, we found the successive in-
stalments of " Hanworth " rather up-hill work.
We have heard, indeed, that this is not the gene-
ral opinion, and that Fraser has been more than
usually in demand during the continuance of the
story. Certainly there is no accounting for
tastes,—unless perhaps the semi-aristocratic
sphere through which the narrative moves, and its
perfectly unexceptionable character and style, may
explain the preference said to be shown for it.
We ourselves cannot understand any ones look-
ing with impatience for a fresh chapter of "Han-
worth ;" but the most brilliant writers appear
bores to some people, and, conversely, the most
tedious, like the blue-bottle in Sydney Smith's
famous illustration, have their clienti'le of patient
and faithful admirers. However, we are quite
willing to admit that the tale improves upon
being read in a collected form. A strawberry, or
an oyster, which would be painfully nasty if cut
up and taken piecemeal, may be swallowed whole
with much satisfaction ; and perhaps a similar
process of simultaneous deglutition may be
.ne-
cessary with certain novels. " Hanworth '
laudably short—less than 300 pages; and through
this space the characters are kept up with con-
sistency and probability. We have nothing to
complain of in them except a degree of stiffinesq
and tameness which leaves on ones mind the
impression of a number of gracetul and well-
dressed tableaux virana—not of animated human
beings in their every-day guise. Not that
there is anything at all abnormal in
the doings of the Hanworth party—they
are probably like hundreds of people who
may be met with every day. But, as we have
heard it said, they resemble puppets whose
joints
want oiling. Lord Hanworth himself, in spite
of all the author's attempts to make him definite,
and in spite of a few sensible speeches and several
very good qualities and actions attributed to him,
remains vague and shadowy to the last. Edith
and Margaret remind us of the blonde and the
dark beauty in Mr. Frank Stones picture of
" Sympathy." They flush and tremble when
Lord Hanworth makes himself too agreeable to
the one or not agreeable enough to the other:.
a slight fleecy misunderstanding perturbs the

As a lady of title, the new Marchioness had to be pre-
sented to the King, to the Queen, to the Princes and
Princesses of the Royal Family. She accomplished this
duty with perfect propriety and dignity, under the escort
of the Princess of Conti, who had been selected for that
office by the King. The curtseys were ekganl. The Queen
addressed a few kind words to the Marchioness, and even
put some gracious questions to her about several of her
friends with whom she had been herself acquainted. The
Marchioness, in saluting the Queen with marked respect,
replied, " Madam, I passionately desire to accomplish all
that your Majesty shall command from me for your service."
How very gratifying this assurance must have
been to her Majesty !—and what serene pleasure
those " elegant curtseys " must have given her !
In laying down this book, we have a final re-
mark to make. Modern French literature con-
tains much to revolt—much that is glaringly
immoral ! But this immorality is at least
unmasked, and therefore half-disarmed. Paul
de Kock, Balzac, Dumas fi/s, make no pretension
whatsoever to be correct, much less religious,
men. They speak their opinions boldly and
carelessly out, like the young roue one meets
in the billiard-room, whose dashing improprie-
ties are almost too puerile to waken sober indig-
nation, and are utterly forgotten as soon as the
door has closed upon their declaimer. But this
grave biography, which claims historic beatifica-
tion for a notorious adultress—which places reli-
gion before us as a thing utterly distinct from
morality—which gilds with grandiloquent praise
a society of which heartlessness, reckless extra-
vagance, and an ostentatious contempt for every
form of purity and virtue, constitute the promi-
nent characteristics—seems to us far more pro-

toundly immoral than the worst productions of