Читать книгу The Angel of the Assassination - Bowen Marjorie - Страница 4

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"Peuple, livrons-nous aujourd'hui aux transports d'une pure allégresse! Demain nous combattrons encore les vices et les tyrans!" —Maximilien de Robespierre.

"The origin of heroism might proceed from the opinions of some philosophers who taught that the souls of great men were often raised to the stars and introduced among the immortal gods. According to these stories, the ancient heroes inhabited a pure and serene climate, situate above the moon." — Classical Dictionary, 1788. "I beheld the shape of Charlotte Corday beyond the moon." —Klopstock.

In the month of July, 1768, Madame de Corday d'Armont came for a visit from her house at Mesnil-Imbert to the farm of Ronceray-les-Ligneries, near Vimoutiers, which was part of her husband's land and where one of her relations resided. She was a gentle, quiet woman of a melancholy and resigned appearance, of an old Norman family, entitled to be called noble dame, but weighted down by the burden of aristocratic poverty. She was pretty, but delicate, and had lost the sight of one eye.

Ronceray is situated near the borders of Orne and Calvados, in a lonely part of Normandy. Meadows, orchards and marshy ground surrounded the modest farm-house, which was little better than the dwelling of a well-to-do peasant, though dignified by the title of logis. It consisted of two floors, the ground rooms being paved with flagstones; the windows were low and narrow, the fireplaces large and open. A natural spring flowing into a pleasant sheet of water graced the home fields and the immediate landscape of pasturage and orchards of pear trees was encircled by irregular hills.

Madame de Corday d'Armont had been married four years and was the mother of two boys, Jacques-François and Charles-François. She was expecting the birth of a third child, and while she was reposing in the isolated farm-house she was suddenly taken by the pangs of labour and her daughter was born in the humble bedchamber on the first floor. In order that mother and infant might not be disturbed, and as a sign of rejoicing that another child had been born to the noble house of Corday, one of the most ancient in the Calvados and the Orne, the peasants beat the marshes all night to silence the frogs.

The day after her birth the infant was taken to the little church of Saint Saturnin-des-Ligneries which, austere and lonely, yet stands, environed by fertile fields and wind-shaped oaks, in a narrow, peaceful valley. M. de Corday d'Armont himself was present at the baptism, the godmother was noble dame, Françoise-Marie-Anne-Levaillant de Corday, and the godfather, messire Jacques-Alexis-de-Gautier, écuyer seigneur of Mesnival, a relation to Madame de Corday d'Armont.

The child was christened Marie-Anne-Charlotte, and when her birth was registered at the mairie of Exorches, her father was described as messire Jacques-Francois de Corday écuyer seigneur d'Armont, and her mother as noble dame Marie-Jacqueline de Gautier. Marie-Anne-Charlotte might then claim on either side blood that entitled her to rank among the provincial nobility.

She was also, on either side, of pure Norman descent. The Cordays could trace their titles of nobility to 1077; their arms were surmounted by the coronet of a Count, the blue shield with the three broken chevrons (d'azur a trois chevrons, brisés d'or) was distinguished by the rebus Corde et Ore. These Norman gentlemen, of untainted blood and unsmirched reputations, soldiers, civil servants, modest landowners, lived from generation to generation on their hereditary estates. They were proud of the title gentilhommes, that is, nobles of the land and the sword, owing their rank to their services, not to court favour. Sturdy, robust, independent, typical Normans, with a strain of mysticism and obstinacy, the Cordays had not produced by 1768 any outstanding character, although there was, especially among the women, a reputation for a certain eccentricity. They were, however, connected by marriage with two of the most famous names in French literature; Marie-Anne-Charlotte de Corday d'Armont was the great-granddaughter of Pierre Corneille, whose grand-daughter had espoused Adrien de Corday in 1701. Through this marriage the Cordays might also claim kinship with Bernard de Fontenelle, Corneille's nephew, who lived to be a hundred years old and who was said to have a second brain instead of a heart within his breast.

M. de Corday d'Armont took his wife and infant daughter back to his father's domain of Mesnil-Imbert, the Manor house of which, though officially described as manoir seigneurial, was no more than a comfortable farm-house.

M. de Corday de Cauvigny's estate of Mesnil-Imbert was enclosed by wooded hills, crowned by wind-swept oaks, and the Manor house was built on a slope above a valley and covered with apple trees. Handsome chestnut trees shaded the sheds, barns and bakehouse; a deep well provided abundant fresh water. The dwelling itself was solid and attractive, with its peaceful air of family life and the natural labours of the land. The house, heavily beamed, was covered by a hip roof of slate, the bricks faded to an old rose-colour, the windows of unequal size, the entrance modest. A simple flower-garden, fields, orchards formed the domain that was peaceful and solitary to the point of melancholy.

The fecund Norman landscape was monotonous if agreeable. Agriculture was the sole occupation of this part of the province Calvados, which took its name, according to a fantastic legend, from a vessel of the Invincible Armada, the Salvador, that foundered on the reefs on the coast at Asnelles. The air was humid, frequent sea winds twisted the trees and stripped the foliage, and there were long periods of rain, grey clouds, and a chill light without brilliancy.

The Manor house consisted of a vestibule, coldly paved with flags, a large kitchen with open joists overhead, a huge pent-house chimney supported by large corbels, a wainscoted dining-room and a wide stairway leading to the first floor, which consisted of three chambers and three closets. The furniture was heavy, old-fashioned, and designed entirely for use; there were no luxuries, but as many comforts as the age afforded in the way of warmth, food, service. There were a few books, a few pictures, one or two musical instruments, respectable hangings, drapery and silver, and the walls were wainscoted or papered, but apart from these refinements it was a life without polish, without amusement, without leisure. It was also, because of constant poverty and the galling contrast between means and pretensions, a life without gaiety.

M. de Corday d'Armont was the third son of M. de Corday de Cauvigny, from whom he had received Armont as his portion. A poor portion the young man had always considered it, and the difference between his birth and his revenues had galled him ever since he had left the College of Beaumont-en-Auge at Pont l'Evêque, where he had been educated. In character and intellect he was mediocre, in his tastes simple, ordinary in his opinions, depressed by the struggle to bring up a family on an income that never exceeded fifteen hundred livres. M. de Corday d'Armont was a true Norman in appearance, tall, robust, inclined to stoutness, with small, regular features and bright colouring between red and gold.

He lived on a farm entitled Bois on this estate of his father, Mesnil-Imbert, and rented the lands of Ronceray, where he grazed cattle and tilled the land, not disdaining himself to assist in the manual labour.

This farm, to which he returned with his infant daughter in the summer of 1768, was built round a courtyard planted with fruit-trees and flanked by a flower-garden. Here, there was even less of luxury than in the Manor house—the walls were papered, there was a salon in the rez-de-chaussée.

The neighbouring estate of Glatigny, distant seven hundred metres from the ferme du Bois, was owned by an elder branch of the family of Corday; there had been a lordly house there since the sixth century and the château had belonged to the Corday family since 1400. It was a handsome building, surrounded by a moat crossed by wooden bridges, built with two wings and surmounted by a very high tiled roof, a grande allée led to the entrance and another long avenue of poplar trees showed the distant spire of Saint-Gervais-les-Sablons. This lonely Manor house had dignity and grace; it was furnished with refinement, if not with elegance, but when beaten upon by the sea storms of autumn that gave all the trees a landward twist, or under the grey skies and heavy rains of winter, it was melancholy of aspect.

The Cordays were beloved for their pure Norman birth, their dignified, austere life, their kindness to their dependants. They, like the peasantry, languished under the decaying feudal system; there was little to be made from the land, but "there was always bread in the château" for those in need.

Nor had their poverty blemished the reputation of these gentilhommes in the eyes of their neighbours; a legend that gave them royal blood embellished their race; a Mlle. de Chayot, descended from the Bailleul (John Balliol, King of Scotland), had married a Corday; she claimed the gift of healing the King's evil.

Between these two estates of Mesnil-Imbert and Glatigny and the lands he had hired at Ronceray, M. Corday d'Armont passed his time and watched his children grow up. Jacqueline-Eleonore was born soon after her sister; she was gentle, and either from some congenital defect or from the results of an accident, slightly hunch-backed. Though the ferme du Bois was their usual lodging, the children were free of the two Manor houses, Glatigny and Mesnil-Imbert; the two boys were soon sent to school in order to prepare for the sole career that seemed suited to their birth and their poverty; their harassed father strained his resources to send them to the Ecole Militaire. The two little girls grew up in solitude, knowing only their relations, the servants and labourers who toiled about them. At Bois they had a little closet lined by a common blue paper; at Mesnil-Imbert, where they often stayed, Marie-Anne-Charlotte had a cabinet to herself austerely furnished with plain bed, chairs, table and mirror; the walls were not even whitewashed but showed rough brick; an oak chest held the child's few clothes; close by was a small room fitted up as an oratory, where Madame de Corday trained her infant daughters to offer up their prayers at a humble altar. The window looked out on an avenue of elms stretching towards a wood, and the rude little chamber, austere as a nun's cell, was filled by the sounds of the winds that constantly troubled the trees and whistled through the uncarpeted, untapestried rooms.

Sometimes, as they grew older, the children would be taken on holy days to Glatigny to enjoy a simple festival, which would be announced by the sound of trumpets echoing oddly across the lonely fields. On these rare occasions the tired mother, always gracious and well-bred, would find fresh muslin kerchiefs for her daughters and ribbons for their hair, and they would dance gaily in the salon of the old château, that was handsomely adorned by sculptured woodwork. M. de Corday de Cauvigny was very fond of his grandchildren, who were also caressed and petted by Marjotte (Fanchon Marjot), the faithful servant of the château, and the little girls, who had no companions of their own age and no amusements, grew to like life better in their grandfather's houses, Glatigny or Mesnil-Imbert, than in the pinched, quiet establishment of their parents at the ferme du Bois.

M. de Corday d'Armont was devoted to his frail wife—their neighbours, in the classic taste of the moment, named them Philemon and Baucis. No quarrels, no differences of opinion, no humours, disturbed this simple home. It was, however, darkened by bitter care, by lack of all diversion, by a sense of grievance, at least on the part of the man. He resented his lot as third son, the system whereby he had to live like a gentleman on a farmer's earnings, his inherited instincts warred with his circumstances. He had to toil hard, often holding the plough himself and, though he declared agriculture to be the most honourable of callings, he was galled by the inability to live like the nobleman he felt himself to be. His gloom and his discontent darkened his home and disturbed the expanding spirits of his daughters. M. de Corday d'Armont was no philosopher and had been educated above his position, or he would have found his Norman life not so ill. The real sting of poverty lies with the town dweller or the homeless wanderer; this man owned land, a house, had work for every day to his hand, dealt directly with the fruits of the earth, had men and animals at his command, neighbours to respect him, relations to whom to turn at need, a comfortable bed, a warm hearth, a loving wife and blooming children. In brief, he could have enjoyed the life of classic dignity then becoming so fashionable with many philosophers—the "back to nature" existence that many firmly held would be the salvation of mankind. But M. de Corday was neither genial, jovial, nor philosophe; he brought the anxiety of the town to the country. The education of his sons meant heavy expense, he lived beyond his means and chafed at his inadequacy. In vain he toiled among his crops and beasts, in vain his wife laboured to contrive and save in the household; there was never enough. Discontent- was in the French air; some of the numerous books and pamphlets that voiced the complaints of the intellectuals found their way to the Calvados and on to the shelves at Mesnil-Imbert, beside the works of Corneille and Plutarch. M. de Corday d'Armont read and brooded over the Contrat Social, by J. J. Rousseau, the Philosophe des Deux Indes, by the abbé Raynal, and his disappointment increased. Not only was everything wrong with France, but he was the victim of other men's blunders; he began to inveigh against the feudal system to which he felt he had been sacrificed and became more and more self-centred and sombre.

The life that so fretted the father pleased the daughters; monotonous though it might appear to townsfolk, it was to the country-bred, lonely children, full of interest, even of excitement. They had everything that the city dweller misses; the rhythm of nature, blotted out in cities, was clearly discernible to them; they marked the four clear seasons, the budding of spring, the flowering of summer, the fruitage of autumn, the pause of winter; close to the earth, they were familiar with the processes of growth; they saw the seed planted from which their food would come. Bread to them was not something bought in a shop; they watched the grain ground, the flour mixed, the loaves shaped and baked in the great fournil. They gathered the fruits that appeared at their simple board on dishes of Norman pottery, they helped their mother and the maid make butter and cheese, skim the cream and set the milk in wide-mouthed crocks. They roamed unchecked over their own land when the hawthorn whitened the hedges and sweetened the air, they rode home behind the stout Norman horses bringing in haysel and harvest.

Their toys were the chestnuts that came sliding through the leaves on the old trees near Mesnil-Imbert, the acorns found beneath the oaks in the great avenue, the twisted sticks to be picked up after a night of storm, the sedge grasses to be found round the Manor house pond.

The winters were long. When the snow fell the children would help the servants sweep it away from the road that connected Glatigny and Mesnil-Imbert; when the cold was intense they would slide on the pond, throw balls in the bare garden or collect the scarlet berries from the hedges. There were other days when there was neither snow, frost, nor storm, but only a long greyness of rain and steady wind, and when perhaps for weeks there would be no blue sky, no ray of sun, no relief from the soughing of the dripping boughs, the whistling of the wind in the chimney corner, the slash of the rain-drops on the small windows of the farm-house.

The little girls were not idle during the leaden, windy weather when the mornings were dark and the evenings short; under the guidance of their mother they learned to sew, to memorise the prayers in the Psalter, the Holy Hours, the beads on the rosary. They drew from her the fervour of a simple faith, as from Nature they learned the changeless sequence of the seasons; she taught them the manners of gentlefolk and the arts of the housewife; they were instructed in the history of France, and in particular that of Normandy and the exploits of the House of Corday, which had given a captain to the campaigns of Robert Guiscard in Sicily and an officer to the household of the Duc de Bourgogne.

Madame de Corday d'Armont knew all the folk-tales of Normandy, and seated by the winter fire burning beneath the huge cowl, related these together with legends of the saints and the Virgin.

The lamps and candles never burnt very long; oil and tallow had to be hoarded; in their chill bedrooms, with the rain and wind without, under the rough clean sheets and home-spun coverlets, the little girls had many hours in which to dream.

The elder child grew robust and beautiful; nourished by pure food, inured to the hardships of poverty, she showed, in her fine limbs and well-cut features, her healthy gallant race. Her spirits were high, her gaiety almost turbulent; she preferred the company of her brothers when they were home on holidays to that of her fragile mother and her delicate sister. She liked to go with the peasants when they worked in the fields and orchards, her arms bare, her neck open, clad in a plain gown of red linen with the masses of brilliant, blond hair hanging free on her shoulders. She was not, however, rough or rude, her air was well-bred, her manners modest, and though she rejoiced so much in the active life of the countryside and possessed a witty humour, a fund of laughter and gaiety, she also liked solitude, to muse by herself in the shade of some lonely tree at midday, to sit alone by the pond and watch the clouds mirrored behind her own face in the water, or to hide herself in some remote corner of granary or barn.

There was much besides Nature with which she could feed her dreams; a desk once used by Pierre Corneille was treasured in the Manor house of Mesnil-Imbert, and before she could read the antique stories he used as his material, they were familiar to her from the lips of her parents. Rome and Sparta were words as familiar to her as Calvados and Orne; the heroes and the actions of antiquity were woven into the incidents of her daily life to form one ineffaceable impression. Hers was the usual experience of the lonely, imaginative child—her dreams, fed by tales and coloured by enthusiasms fostered in silence, blended with the familiar round of her material existence until the impression of mingled truth and fantasy became ineffaceable. The smell of new bread baking in the great ovens, the half-sickly perfume of the hawthorn blossom, the aroma of ripe fruit at the apple harvest, the scent of burning autumn leaves, of the byre, of the pails of fresh milk, were all associated in her mind, and without any sense of incongruity, with the martial figures of noble Romans, the severe outlines of Spartan heroes.

Her education did not, as is so often the case, obscure these early dreams or half-efface these early tendencies. Her uncle, the abbé Charles Amédée de Corday, who was curé of Vicques in the Calvados, was given this charge when Marie-Anne-Charlotte outgrew her mother's cares, and he developed the child's mind and heart along the lines she had already chosen for herself. He taught her to read from the stately lines of Pierre Corneille, he encouraged her to admire those antique virtues praised by the great dramatist, which she already by instinct cherished. The priest found nothing strange in inculcating a passionate acceptance of pagan standards of heroism alongside a simple acceptance of Christianity. He was a rich man, of high principles, giving much in charity, akin to his pupil in independence and loftiness of character. He lived in the house attached to the chapelle Saint-Roch, near Vicquette, and often sent his carriage and pair to fetch his niece to her lessons. In the dignified austerity of his study, with the crucifix on the plain walls, and copies of the classics in worn calf on the shelves, he instilled nobility of conduct, fearlessness, grandeur of soul, self-sacrifice and exalted piety into the receptive mind of the eager child. These ideals suited her nature as glove fits hand; she had to the full that glow of generous enthusiasm for greatness not uncommon in extreme youth, but which, instead of being fostered is usually overlaid and even destroyed by contact with the world. But Mlle. de Corday d'Armont had no one to disturb her ingenuous passion r for sublimity and heroism. It was, indeed, encouraged by her austere life, the noble outline of her country spread undefaced before her, the direct teaching of the unworldly priest, even by the mournful complaints of her father lamenting the wrongs that he unjustly suffered.

The child began to dream of herself as devoted to some great self-sacrifice, some splendid abnegation, some tremendous service to a high ideal. She mused over heroism as some girls muse over love; she felt in herself the pride, the courage, the fortitude necessary to the accomplishment of a famous deed. So exactly did the tragedies of Corneille suit her temper, that she exclaimed: "I am of the race of the Emilias and the Cinnas!"

She expanded intellectually with great rapidity; her ideas became early set; no one had much influence over her once her mind was decided; the Norman independence defended the Norman mysticism with a masculine energy and a remarkable eloquence. She early showed that quick irony, that keen sense of humour often found with saintliness. Saintliness indeed soon became associated with Mlle. de Corday d'Armont; she was named "une sainte personne." Her reading of Corneille and Plutarch, her dreams of the simple age of heroism, did not interfere with her cheerful and dutiful conduct at home. She worked willingly at her household tasks and tended affectionately the fast-failing mother who with every month was less able to exert her feeble strength.

In 1782, when Marie-Anne-Charlotte was twelve years old, her childhood, which had not been without pleasure and gaiety, and which had known a healthy freedom and a beautiful background, came to an end. M. de Corday d'Armont, with the petulant energy of a weak man forcing his character, brought a lawsuit against two of his brothers-in-law. This was a desperate attempt to retrieve his fortunes sinking under the expense of the two youths at College. The life at Mesnil-Imbert and the ferme du Bois was given up and the family removed to Caen. The unhappy father's sole hope was a successful termination to his law case.

He had, indeed, chosen the shadow for the substance; had he decided to bring up his sons as farmers his daughters as farmers' wives, he might have secured a pleasant, care-free, if humble existence; but he was unable to forget his noble birth and so sank deeper into the shifts and humiliations of genteel poverty.

Caen, the ancient capital of Calvados and situate on the Orne sixteen kilometres from the coast, was a town of sufficient elegance and culture to be named the Norman Athens. There was a University, several splendid churches, abbeys and convents, many learned societies, and the handsome streets were lined by the hôtels of the Norman nobility; it was also a garrison town. These proud and reserved people, rigid with the prejudices of their classes, lived among themselves and gave to the old town a sad and dull air. Most of the hôtels had black marble slabs at the doors which bore the names of aristocratic owners, too proud to live on their estates, too insignificant to venture to Paris, rich enough, from the labours of the peasantry, to live in luxury that bred idle men and insolent women. Between this class and that of the despised and servile bourgeoisie were the money-lenders, the bankers, all the dealers in finance who sucked the blood of la haute noblesse, as they sucked that of the peasantry. The château of William the Conqueror and the numerous massive churches of Norman architecture connected this town of select provincial snobbery with a bold and stormy past, while several houses with carved and sculptured wooden façades bore witness to the fantastic and opulent taste of the Renaissance. The fine and sober beauty of the bell-tower of Saint Pierre, of the thirteenth century, gave distinction to the sombre outline of the town. M. de Corday d'Armont had nothing to do with the haughty and wealthy society of Caen to which by birth he belonged; he rented a small house of the humblest description at the Buttes de Saint-Gilles, near the famous abbaye-aux-dames or de la Trinité and the ancient church of Saint-Gilles situate on the limits of the town on the south-east.

The abbaye-aux-dames, a magnificent building in the Romanesque style, was founded by Matilda, wife of William the Conqueror, in expiation of the irregularity of her marriage; in repentance for the same fault her husband had raised at Caen the abbaye-aux-hommes and the church of Saint-Etienne. The work of the pious Queen had been damaged in the Hundred Years' War and restored in the reign of Louis XIV, but the heavy and impressive towers, the magnificent porch, the graceful clocher, retained their pristine aspect of sombre splendour. The body of Matilda still rested under the marble slab in the choir where it had been placed in 1083, and the black-robed nuns with the white band and gimp of the order of Saint Benoît still moved in dignified peace through the cloisters. One portion of the abbaye had been reconstructed in 1704 and served as a hôtel-Dieu; beyond was the old convent park which contained a labyrinth or maze of horn-beam hedges; in the centre of this was a hillock that commanded an excellent view of Caen. An allée of elms shaded the walls of the abbaye, so that although the life was confined and dull compared to that of Mesnil-Imbert, the poor home of M. de Corday d'Armont was situate in a position ennobled by the grandeur of the convent and made pleasant by the park and trees. Saint-Gilles was another ancient building that adorned the neighbourhood; it was a humble church, old, neglected, which served the poor people; bread was given away every Sunday morning after Mass.

The family of de Corday d'Armont had few friends in Caen and their poverty was more keenly felt in the proud town than it had been on their own lands. No longer could Marie-Anne-Charlotte run free in her gown of red linen; she and her sister had to sew at little caps, kerchiefs and aprons for themselves in order that they might make a decent appearance; the toils of Madame de Corday d'Armont increased with the melancholy of her husband. No dissension added to their burden; complete love and confidence existed between the parents and their two children; the father, with Norman frugality, would place his slender resources in a drawer accessible to all, often portioning them out, in the presence of his children, for the necessaries of life.

Mlle. de Corday d'Armont lost much of her gaiety and high spirits. She devoted herself with almost fanatic enthusiasm to her domestic duties; this child of fourteen was already inclined to extremes—all she did must be done passionately, pushed to its limits. Her manner was grave and severe; she disclosed herself to none and the hard reality of her life did not Interrupt her dreams. She was still surrounded by beauty; if she could no longer muse by the pond in the home field or in the shade of the old chestnut trees, she could sit under the rich shadow of the arcades of the Roman nave of the abbaye, watched by the grimacing masks in the capitals of the columns (which seemed to peep from their world of fantasy at the strange child wrapt in her visions) or worship in the fine Gothic chapel, in the transept, in the holy, lamp-lit gloom.

She was free of the old park and the maze, of the peaceful allée of elms; she could hear the singing of the choirs, the praises of the nuns, the sombre harmonies of the organ, and, when venturing with her mother down the elegant streets, she could hear from window or garden the sound of clavecin or lute, violin or harp, playing the melodies of Haydn or Mozart, Gluck or Lully. Often her uncle, the good abbé, came over to Caen to examine her in her studies. There was also, for the thoughtful and watchful child, curious aspects of the great world to be noted in Caen, people and things she had never seen before; the smart officers, powdered and frizzed, the young students, the old professors in robe and gown, the inns where travellers stayed, the shops that showed Parisian novelties, the fashionably dressed women in their carriages with their lackeys and lap-dogs. Mlle. de Corday d'Armont noted this modern life as she saw it from the outside and shrank the deeper into her dreams and pored the longer over her tales of antique heroism.

Books, pamphlets, newspapers were more easily available in Caen than they had been in Mesnil-Imbert. The young girl heard her father discussing the faults and troubles of the government, the suggested remedies of the intellectuals; his own bitterness coloured his comments on the state of the country.

In 1774, when Marie-Anne-Charlotte was enjoying her gay infancy, the age of cynical frivolity had come to an end with the death of Louis XV, who had said: "Bah, the crazy old machine will last my time, and who comes after must take care of himself." His successor, Louis XVI, blundered forward, like a man who has given the reins to fate; his ministers, Maurepas, Malesherbes, Turgot, set themselves to make the best of the disordered finances of a country without a constitution.

M. de Corday d'Armont discussed with avidity the proposals of the government to abolish monopolies, introduce free trade and land taxes; he keenly noted their failure before the opposition of clergy and nobility, and the rise of Necker, a Swiss banker, to be chief minister—Necker, a commoner and a Protestant, detested by all but the lower classes, whose reforms raised a clamour throughout France. The poor Norman gentilhomme also read many of the republican and atheistical books then flooding the country. The axioms of Locke and Montesquieu filtering through J. J. Rousseau, the materialism of Condillac and Helvetius, the infidel opinions of Voltaire, the new and startling Republic founded in North America, all the catchwords of the philosophes and the half-unintelligible jargon of their followers were discussed in the poor home in the shade of the ancient abbaye which seemed to stand as a permanent memorial of a changeless faith and an unshakable government.

The fall of the Necker ministry and the reactionary policy of M. de Calonne, with his vast loans raised to conciliate the Queen, the Princes and the nobility, filled M. de Corday d'Armont with mingled excitement and apprehension. Where was he, poor overburdened gentleman, to find his count in all this confusion? He had no fixed political ideas, he only knew that there was something very wrong with a condition of affairs that kept a man of his blood and rank in poverty.

His eldest daughter marked his bitter comments, his weak complaints, and she searched the writings of the philosophes for an answer to these puzzles of mankind's rights and wrongs.

A more personal grief soon clouded the Norman gentleman's vexation with his affairs; his wife failed rapidly in health and he was unable to procure for her the assistance he wished. The illness of the mother, the anguish of the father, strongly affected the elder daughter; she was not aware what was the burden under which her mother was sinking, but she saw, clearly enough, a human tragedy evolving in her poor home. Her fortitude was remarkable; she deliberately trained herself to endure suffering in silence. One of her few friends, Mlle. de Loyer, once met her dragging herself along the walls by the abbaye, her face covered with blood, half-fainting from pain and shock. She had fallen in leaving the church, but refused to admit that she was hurt and smiled at her frightened mother, who exclaimed:

"Ah, this poor child is too hard on herself! She never complains and I have to guess when she is ill—she never tells me!"

This friend noted that the grave child was "douce, calme, douée dune raison au-dessus de son âge"—industrious and thoughtful, also "une jeune personne accomplie."

Mlle. de Corday d'Armont soon had need of all her precocious energy. Birth and death met in the humble house, darkened by privation; Madame de Corday d'Armont died in giving to the world a third daughter who soon followed her to the grave. In this home, too modest even for the decencies of life to be observed, the child saw, at first hand, the rituals of the entering and leaving of life, the hustle of the midwife, the solemnity of the undertaker, the cradle and the pompes funèbres in one sad scene. She saw her mother's face, hollowed by anxiety and fatigue, stiffen into rigidity; she heard the plaints of the new-born infant fading into perpetual silence; she observed the useless, the almost guilty grief of the father, humiliated by his poverty. Her shy, half-aware maidenhood was shocked; she withdrew her secret soul even further into those sanctuaries inhabited by her phantom heroes and heroines.

The little household had been dealt a shattering blow; grief and gloom descended darkly on the widowed father, on the little girls in their cheap black gowns; the vague revolt of the man against his destiny was heightened by his loss; the gravity of the children Increased as they realised their unfortunate portion, their disasters and their helplessness. The elder was true to her ideals, she tried to be a mother to the delicate Jacqueline-Eléonore, a housekeeper to her father. She undertook, with sweetness and energy, the most menial tasks, filling not only the place of the dead mother, but of the servant they could not afford.

M. de Corday d'Armont was baffled; his lawsuit dragged on, his lands brought him a poor return, his heavy expenses continued. And in the background was France, putting a thousand questions to herself as she awoke, with convulsive heavings, from what seemed centuries of sleep. Before his poor hearth, with his helpless little girls beside him, the unhappy man pored over those specimens of the infidel and democratic writings that came his way; was there any help for him in the teachings of the intellectuals, the rebels, the philosophes?

Until the eighteenth century the governments of peoples were almost entirely decided by powerful men of action, or by able intriguers. When force ruled and ignorance obeyed, the role of theorist was useless and dangerous, nor was the power of the press sufficient to make it worth while to endeavour to influence opinion through books. With the weakening of tyrannies, with the fading of superstition and the spread of the printing press, with a rapidly growing discontent and wonder as to this and that among all classes, came the men-of-letters, the self-styled philosophers who began to focus and voice the popular grievances, to question institutions sacred and quasi-sacred, to criticise the privileged classes and to compassionate the serf, the peasant, the little townsmen. What, asked these bold speculators, is the best form of government? What is the nature of the contract between ruler and people? What concern has the church with the state, or either with ethics or a man's private conscience? How can the rapacity of the clergy and the nobility, their exemption from taxation, their idle lives, be justified? Of what use are the laws that leave a large portion of the nation in a state of hopeless misery?

These and other questions, equally pertinent, equally disturbing, at first severely censured, gradually spreading, began to occupy all thinking men in France. Voltaire and d'Alembert, Condillac, Fontenelle, Diderot, all the authors of the Encyclopaedia, Montesquieu with his famous Esprit des Lois, all had, despite the efforts of outraged authority, a considerable vogue among all classes. These writers were none of them men of action. As soldiers, as politicians, as administrators or organisers of any kind they would have been failures. They lacked all experience of public affairs, many of their theories were vague, unworkable, the whims of amateurs. But they possessed the perilous gift of powerful, vivid pens, the very least of them were accomplished journalists. They saw the palpable injustices, cruelties, hypocrisies, follies of the social and religious systems under which they lived, and they pointed them out with every resource of literary art. Who would fail to be impressed by an obvious truth, presented with eloquence, fire and wit? The man who voices a general grievance is sure of a wide hearing from those made inarticulate by weakness. The French people whom the philosophes addressed were no worse off than their ancestors of a hundred years before; but when they found indignant complaints in the air they were ready to applaud vigorously and to bring out their personal grievances.

These men-of-letters were mostly republican and infidel. They suggested a sweeping away of decaying institutions, the Church, the Monarchy, the Feudal system, the privileges of clerics and nobles. They were not so ready with practical, constructive criticism; their ideals appeared to be the dim Republics of Greece and Rome, the England of Locke, Sydney, Cromwell, and later, the United States of Benjamin Franklin and Washington. The consequence of these brilliant discontents, these paper reforms, founded on such genuine wrongs, was that the public became agitated by a thousand glittering prospects without knowing how to put one into practice.

Most beloved, most dangerous, and most gifted of the writers who fascinated, alarmed and roused France, was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He had died ten years before the de Corday d'Armont family came to Caen, but his writings were only beginning to filter from the intellectuals to the people, with whom they were to enjoy for so long a sensational popularity and to have an unprecedented influence.

It is impossible to proceed with the study of the development of Mlle. de Corday d'Armont without briefly considering J. J. Rousseau, who together with the abbé Raynal, Pierre Corneille, the Old Testament and Plutarch, was her guide in her extraordinary career.

This son of the Swiss watchmaker was one of the most remarkable men of a remarkable age; he stood at the source of many modern tendencies and it is often disputed whether or no he still has influence on modern thought. At least, even if the works that once sent a nation frantic are rarely read save for academic purposes, many of his ideas which seemed so original and startling to his contemporaries have been incorporated in present schools of thought. Not only were these ideas in themselves seductive, but J. J. Rousseau possessed the immense advantage of being able to clothe them in clear, attractive and passionate language. His novel, Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse, was eminently successful in conveying that luscious romantic atmosphere, half-sensuous, half-sentimental, that enables the sensitive, refined reader to indulge in highly-coloured, amorous emotionalism under the guise of a tribute to virtue. J. J. Rousseau had caught the trick from Richardson; the lachrymose story of Julie, like the mournful tale of Clarissa Harlowe, owed its frenzied popularity to the adroit handling of the sex element. Thousands of women, when reading these tempting pages, saw themselves pursued, besieged, languished over, captured while preserving all the flattering bloom of chastity.

No less popular was Emile, where a new theory of education was expounded with a grace and fervour which started a fashion that lasted for years; while the Social Contract owed much of its immense influence to the fact that it contained ideas and theories that people of the most diverse opinions could applaud. J. J. Rousseau was a theorist, a failure in all his personal relationships, ill from birth with a most distressing complaint that drove him out of society, and ended in partial insanity and persecution mania, an hysterical neurotic, and in the early part of his life at least, a vagabond and a scoundrel. He yet was able, in the few books he left behind, to influence most profoundly a whole generation and to leave his name as a challenge and an authority on the lips of numberless men of various beliefs who had very little idea of what the famous philosopher had written and no clear conception of his theories or ideals. J. J. Rousseau's philosophy was indeed difficult to define; many of his doctrines were not original, he was a disciple of Montesquieu and owed much to Locke; he himself admitted that he could see separate truths, but could not combine them into a satisfactory whole. He was timid, anti-revolutionary, prepared to accept Monarchy; many of his famous dicta, such as "L'homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers," which became a catch-phrase, are manifestly false, and his persistent sentimentalism, so sharply in contrast with the outlook of his predecessors, Voltaire, Condillac, Fontenelle, enervated all he wrote and tainted all he taught.

To what then did he owe his unparalleled popularity, the vast numbers of his enthusiastic disciples? First, perhaps, to his complete sincerity. Though Rousseau largely lived in a self-created world as far as his own personal relationships were concerned, while even many of the statements in Confessions are suspect, and he could be deceived to the point of hallucination (as in the affair with David Hume), yet in his attitude towards society he was able to detach himself completely, to see the condition of mankind with brilliant clarity and to comment on it with passionate sincerity. Rousseau had none of the rather superficial cynicism, the classic calm, the neat irony of the philosophes; humanity to him was not a matter for witty comment, hardly for moral indignation, but for tears.

This manifest sincerity had a universal appeal; none of Rousseau's readers, whatever his or her intelligence or circumstances, could fear that he was writing for effect, for fame, for money, or indeed otherwise than from his heart. Rousseau was also a visionary and an idealist, and these qualities strike in a most powerful fashion to the secret depths of all sensitive, suffering, or discontented hearts. Though he confessed, himself, to a certain inability to put together all the diverse theories he evolved so as to form a complete scheme for the betterment of mankind, yet he was no dreamy builder of fanciful Utopias. In the Contrat Social he suggested reforms, pointed out defects in existing institutions, and advised remedies with convincing clarity and judgment; in the Pologne he drew up an elaborate and detailed scheme for the working of a model state. It was easy for his readers to believe that it was possible to put into practice all these ideas in the new states being organised in Europe, and in the New World, notably in North America. There was nothing in Rousseau's doctrines to shock the orderly, the decent, the timid. He foresaw and dreaded a revolution in France; he was neither an anarchist nor an infidel; he advocated nothing violent, and that safe compromise between a democracy and tyranny, the constitutional Monarchy was, in the Contrat Social, his choice of government. But doubtless his strongest appeal, the main cause of his great popularity, was his direct attack upon the warmest sentiments of the heart. He believed in the moral law, the essential goodness of mankind; that is, he argued that a universal happiness might be obtained by basing the law, the linch-pin of the State, upon morality and goodness—these being defined according to Christian ethics. Coincident with this principle ran that of "back to nature." Rousseau himself said, with some peevishness, that this was not to be interpreted as meaning a life in a desert or a wilderness, or a casting aside of all the advantages of civilisation. It meant, rather, a protest against the evil influences of cities, the corruption of courts and bourses, an escape from the endless complications of intrigues for place, power and money, the meannesses, vices, despairs and disasters inseparable from a competitive struggle for existence. Rousseau thought that the greatest happiness for mankind lay in family life, in close contact with the earth, in simplicity of manners, in modest desires, in rural surroundings.

This was a startling doctrine for eighteenth-century France. For generations the land had been despised, worked by the lowest class, who were treated virtually as slaves, while the middle classes crowded into commerce and the nobility clustered round the King, abandoning their estates for the cities, where they intrigued to obtain some State-paid position. Only here and there did a gentleman live on his land, and usually then, like M. de Corday d'Armont, he regarded his lot with bitterness and struggled to get his sons away from the earth that had bred them.

"Back to nature" became, in theory at least, increasingly popular in the years following the death of Rousseau (1778). Everyone could understand it; with equal poignancy it appealed to the failures, the poverty-stricken, the idealists, the lonely and the fanciful. Here was none of the difficulty and dryness of philosophy or economics or politics—all was reduced to the simple terms of family life; the nerve of the State was to be found not in Kings, nobles or parliaments, but on the humble hearths of the people. It seemed of such a seductive simplicity, this picture of domestic bliss founded on virtue, where all was tender and noble, where the general goodness of man triumphed over all obstacles, where the children ran free, lived austerely and grew up full of kindness and compassion, where the father looked after the land, the mother after the house, and all was reduced to such simplicity that no difficulties could arise. The country responded to the sentimental appeal, to the idealism, the apparent common sense. Rousseau roused a need for tenderness, a longing for domestic joys, for virtuous and languishing love, for self-sacrifice. He stirred a nostalgia for the land, not for the land of the park and the garden, the hunt and the fête champêtre, but for the land of the field and the orchard, the farm and the cottage, the seed-time and harvest. Added to the attractiveness of his matter was the charm of Rousseau's style; he wrote a vigorous and limpid French, ardent and persuasive. The flaws in his ideas, the faults in his proposals were manifest; even his famous "Man is born free, and is everywhere in chains," which has such an air of startling truth, may be disputed on the ground that man is not born free, he is born helpless. And it is obvious that a national life of classic dignity and simplicity, occupied in tending the kindly fruits of the earth, would not have been possible in eighteenth-century Europe. Rousseau indeed recognised, almost in despair, the difficulties of national reformation. In 1772 he had written, almost as his last words, "Il n'y a que Dieu qui puisse gouverner le monde, et it faudrait des facultés plus qu'humaines pour gouverner des grandes nations." (Pologne.)

He placed his faith, as all reformers must, in the children, in education. He regarded the child (and this seemed an enticing novelty), not as a mere reflex of the parent, but as a powerful and individual force. Starting from Plato's principle that the complete life is only possible in a social organisation arranged to make goodness paramount, he saw in the child the germ of the future realisation of this ideal. The child was to be taught to live a natural life—i.e., one in which all the natural instincts of goodness found full scope, and to take his part in a society which existed solely to co-ordinate and protect these moral principles; the child, too, should early understand patriotism in its widest sense.

"C'est l'éducation qui doit donner aux times la forme nationale, et diriger tellement leurs opinions et leurs gouts, qu'elles soient patriotes par inclination, par passion, par nécessité. Un enfant en ouvrant les yeux doit voir la patrie, et jusqu' a la mort ne doit plus voir qu' elle. Tout vrai républicain suça avec le lait de sa mère l'amour de sa patrie, c' est-a-dire des lois et de la liberté." (Pologne.)

Rousseau himself was aware that much of what he taught was vague, or impracticable, or visionary; he even, in his deep sincerity, thought sometimes that it might be false. "Peut-être tout ceci n'est-il qu'un tas de chimères; mais voila mes idées. Ce n'est pas ma faute si elles ressemblent si peu a celles des autres hommes, et it n'a pas défendu de moi d'organiser ma tête d'une autre facon." (Ibid.)

Chimeras or no, the ideas of Rousseau gradually spreading from the intellectuals to the main body of the reading public, were accepted by many who did not understand more than their superficial meaning. Rousseau's romanticism and sentimentality appealed to thousands who cared nothing for the moral law or the goodness of man, numberless young women saw themselves as Julie and their lovers as Saint-Preux, numberless ardent reformers and patriots saw themselves overturning the existing order of things in order to carry out Rousseau's ideas on the ruins, numberless mothers and governesses educated their charges in the manner of Emile. Some nobles took Rousseau seriously and pondered over his dicta, far more made him the plaything of the moment; tears and hermitages, plank beds, the following of a trade, and a lachrymose concern for "the lowest classes" became as fashionable as the pantin dolls or the untwisting of braid had been a few years previously. Indeed, every class, every individual, could find in the seductive pages of Rousseau something new, something attractive, something to discuss or to copy. On some natures the ideas of Rousseau acted like a madness, working them up to a frenzy of enthusiasm, blinding them with sublime ideals, dissolving them in tears of tenderness and compassion. The name of the Genevan was on the lips of many self-named disciples whose conduct he would have abhorred; it was used as a rallying cry by parties he would have completely repudiated; his theories became twisted, his meaning misunderstood, his ideals ignored by those who professed to be his ardent followers. Folly, stupidity, hysteria, the falsity of sentimentality, all advanced themselves with his name. But here and there some sincere and noble soul accepted Rousseau on the terms of sincerity and nobility, rejected Julie, and brooded, without morbidity or egotism, on Pologne and the Contrat Social. These thinking people perceived that much was wrong with the condition of France. The philosophes had opened the eyes of the sensible middle classes to cruelty, injustice, unequal distribution of wealth and taxes, the hypocrisy of the Church, the tyranny of the nobles, the anachronism of the feudal system. Might not the remedy be found in the pages of J. J. Rousseau? It must be remembered, to the credit of those serious-minded people who were dazzled by this extraordinary man, that he was a brilliant genius, and in much, a prophet.

Amiel (writing in 1877) found him "un ancêtre en tout," in romantic reverie, where he inspired Chateaubriand, in rustic rambles where he led Töpffer, in literary botany before George Sand, in the cult of nature enlarged upon by Saint-Pierre, in the theory of democracy before the Revolution of 1789. In politics and theology he was the leader of Mirabeau and Renan, in teaching he inspired Pestalozzi, and in the description of Alpine scenery, Saussure; he made music and "confessions" fashionable and created a new French style: "en somme on peut dire que rien de Rousseau ne s'est perdu et que personne n'a influé plus que lui, sur la Révolution Française...et sur le XIXe siècle."

Amiel, then, found J. J. Rousseau at the source of many modern tendencies—from ethics to country walks. George Sand paid an earlier tribute: "Il m'a transmis, comme à tous les artistes de mon temps, l'amour de la nature, l'enthousiasme du vrai, le mépris de la vie factice et le dégoût des vanités du monde."

H. Taine (writing in 1876), who disliked Rousseau, admits the attractiveness of his "sensibilité délicate et profonde, l'humanité, l'attendrissement, le don des larmes, la faculté d'aimer, la passion de la justice, le sentiment religieux, l'enthousiasme."

It is easy to understand that to oppressed, refined, sensitive and noble souls, bewildered by what they saw around them, uneasy as to the future and longing to be of service to humanity, the works of such a writer would be as a Bible, second only to Plutarch's De viris illustribus, which seemed to relate the deeds of the heroes of that vanished world which had provided the basis for much of the Genevan's inspiration.

In 1782, while in Paris, Madame de Genlis was bringing up the children of the duc d'Orléans according to Emile, Mlle. de Corday d'Armont was beginning, in her sad poverty at Caen, to read the exciting and enticing works of J. J. Rousseau, which exactly suited her expanding mind, already formed by the heroics of Corneille.

The harassed father, to whom the necessity of finding the daily bread made all philosophy vain, soon returned with his daughters to Mesnil-Imbert, while he tried to place the eldest in the establishment for impoverished gentlewomen endowed by Madame de Maintenon at Saint-Cyr.

The little housewife, with her head full of Corneille, Rousseau and Plutarch, did not fail in childish tenderness to "papa" on his birthday; when she had no means with which to buy a present, she wrote a little verse:

"'Souffrez, tendre papa, que mon zèle devance,

L'âge oil l'on ne connaît ni rime, ni raison,

J'ai pour bouquet mon coeur, que pent de plus l'enfance?

Le présent quand on s' aime est toujours de saison.'

Je suis avec tout le respectueux et sincère attachement,

"Marie-Anne-Charlotte."

The placid, melancholy Norman fields did not look so fair to the young girl as before she had left them to go to Caen. Her laugh was no longer so frequent, nor so joyous; she did not run so freely over the fields or muse so long beside the resting water. This was not only because she was grieving for her mother and had the cares of the little household on her shoulders; it was because her eyes were opened to much that she had not noticed in her gay childhood, the peasantry working like beasts without reward or hope, the struggle to pay the taxes to Church and noble, the dîme, the gabelle, the misery of the corvée, the long labour with rude implements to make the earth yield a living, the stark poverty of the labourer's hut, the shifts of the small gentry's dwelling, her own family's grim effort to maintain caste in face of penury—all these things passed into the soul of the girl. She knew now where the money went that was wrung from a soil too often watered by tears—to support the idle men, the insolent women, the fat tradesmen, the pampered lackeys whom she had seen in Caen.

Melancholy and indignation coloured her childish musings, but her Norman firmness kept her resigned, silent, even cheerful.

However many political pamphlets M. de Corday d'Armont had read, however little he believed in the stability of the government he despised, he was as eager to attach his children to ancient institutions as if he believed that these would last for ever. Every sacrifice had been made to place the sons in the army; then the daughters must be taken under the wing of the Church.

The application to Saint-Cyr failed. The father used his only weapon, the influence of his rank and connections, and solicited for his girls the advantage of an education at the abbaye-aux-dames.

Their aunt, Madame de Louvagny, was a nun in this establishment; she put the case of the two noble and desolate young girls before her friend, the Abbess of the Convent, Madame de Belzunce. She was aided in her petition by another nun, Madame de Pontécoulant, and by particular favour, the demoiselles de Corday d'Armont were accepted on the foundation of Queen Matilda, which allowed maintenance and education to five young girls of high birth but impoverished means.

Thus, at the age of fourteen, Mlle. de Corday d'Armont, with her younger sister Eléonore, entered the magnificent, rigid and sombre abbaye as a pensionnaire. This made an abrupt break with her former life; the existence of the rustic infant, the anxious little housewife, the earnest pupil of the uncle priest, had come to an end.