Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.")/Saint-Amant
SAINT-AMANT
I
This most jolly and genial smoker, toper, rover, soldier, and poet, after deservedly enjoying great celebrity during his lifetime, was almost forgotten, even in France, until Philarète Chasles called attention to him by a brilliant article in the Revue des Deux Mondes, 1839, under the title, "The Victims of Boileau: I. The Guzzlers (Goinfres). Marc-Antoine de Gerard de Saint-Amant." This was followed, in 1844, by Théophile Gautier's sympathetic and picturesque sketch in Les Grotesques, a series of ten portraits of half or wholly forgotten French humorous and humoristic poets, from Villon to Scarron, including Théophile Viau and Cyrano de Bergerac, also men of real genius. Finally, in 1855, C. L. Livet edited, with a careful prefatory memoir, a complete edition of his works, including many pieces never before published, in two vols., in the Bibliothèque Elzévirienne (P. Janet, Paris), so that all the world might again read what all the world had of old admired. In English the only notice of him that I have met occurs in that bright and pleasant book, "The French Humourists from the 12th to the 19th Century," by Walter Besant, author of "Studies in 48 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES Early French Poetry." The above have mainly fur- nished the materials for the following article. Marc-Antoine de Gerard, Sieur de Saint-Amant, was born, in 1594, at Rouen, near the famous abbey of Saint-Amant, whence he took the name by which he is generally known, and died at Paris on the 29th December, 1661. The details for his biography are but scanty, and chiefly drawn from scattered state- ments and allusions in his own writings. His father was a distinguished naval officer, two-and- twenty years in the service of our Elizabeth, in which he attained the command of a squadron. At one period of his life he fell into the hands of the Turks, and was for three years a prisoner in the Black Tower at Constantinople. His two brothers perished fighting against the Turks — the one at the mouth of the Red Sea, the other, who had served under Gustavus Adolphus, at Candia, where he commanded a French regiment in the Vene- tian service. Two of his cousins-german also fell fighting the Turks, and one of his uncles had been in slavery amongst them. Thus our poet had plenty of family reasons for detesting those infidels; and his natural love and reverence for wine may have been intensified by the fact that it was forbidden by the Prophet. His education was considerably neglected, as his father could not attend to it, and his mother seems to have died when he was young. Thus he learnt neither Greek nor Latin ; but, as he tells us himself, the familiar conversation of people in good society, and the diversity of wonderful things he saw in his travels, afterwards remedied the defects in his early training. He also mastered Spanish, Italian, and English ; was an excellent musician and elocuSAINT-AMANT 49 tionist, reciting his own compositions so well that an epigram, attributed to Gombaud, remonstrates — " Your verse is fine when you declaim, But, when I read it, very tame : You can't continually recite ; So such as I can read, pray write." But we must not accept an epigram au pied de la lettre, as our neighbours say. We are told that three times in his youth he was nearly drowned in the Seine ; and he certainly had a holy horror of fresh water ever after. While yet quite young he became distinguished as a passionate lover of good eating, and yet more of good drinking ; and his society was much sought after by the jolly nobles of Louis XIII., not yet cowed by the stern discipline of Richelieu. Although he was very free in his speech, he never abused their familiarity, and they held him in singular esteem. He was soon attached to the household of one of the greatest of these, the Duke de Retz, with whom he retired to the domain of Belle-Isle, which the duke's father, backed by his relative, Catherine de Medici, with whom he had come from Florence, had forced the monks to sell to him at a low price. Here Saint-Amant lived truly in clover, as, indeed, he managed, without any managerrient or forethought, to live nearly all his life. M. Livet cites a letter, to which I shall have to refer again when I come to speak of the poems, from a M. Roger, Commissary of the Navy at Belle-Isle, to Desforges-Maillard. The writer had in his family old relatives, to whom one of his ancestors, seneschal of the isle, had communicated the following details : " The poet lived at Belle-Isle several years. He there composed a great part of his D 50 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES works, and especially his ' Solitude,' which is the best of all. His sonnet which commences, Assis sur un fagot, une pipe ci la main (' Seated upon a faggot, pipe in hand '), was written in a wine shop {cabaret), in the borough of Sauzon, in Belle-Isle, kept by a man named La Plante, whose posterity still exist. Saint-Amant was a debauchee. Nature alone had made him a poet ; wine gave him enthusiasm. Often the marshal of Belle-Isle and he mounted to an old buttery-hatch {credence), where they had a table loaded with bottles of wine. There, each on his chair, they made sittings of four-and-twenty hours. The Duke de Retz came to see them from time to time in this attitude. Sometimes the table, the pots, the glasses, the chairs, the topers all rolled down together from the top to the bottom." So that these truly Gargan- tuan orgies of full twenty-four hours at a time are not so fabulous as Mr. Besant seems to imply, and not the Marquis but the marshal of Belle-Isle was the boon companion of our poet. Sometime after 1620 he returned to Paris, where he charmed again with his high spirits, his lute, and his poems, all the prodigal friends whom he names so tenderly in his various pieces : the Baron de St. Brice, Chassaingrimont, Maricourt, Butte, La Motte, Chateaupers, Marigny-Mallenoe. It was a wild time, when men revelled and made love and fought duels at a rate which may well make our puny and decorous generations incredulous with astonishment. It was a riot of social lawlessness, soon to be scared and repressed by Richelieu, and then to be chained and gagged, stark and dumb, by the morose despotism of Louis XIV., which, in its turn, prepared the way for SAINT-AMANT 5I the Great Revolution. For the quick French ever vibrate between the extremes of anarchy and tyranny : the golden mean, loved of our duller wits, is mean indeed in their logic. The cabaret in those days, like the coffee-house with us in Queen Anne's time, and like no place now that I know of in either France or England, was the really social resort of wit and genius, rank and fashion. There Racan long lodged while young and poor ; there the severe Boileau got help lessly drunk in preaching sobriety to the incorrigible Chapelle ; there Liniere lampooned this same Boileau, while spending rapidly the money Boileau had just lent him ; there Mezeray composed all his writings ; there the pious Racine, even in 1666, went two or three times a day; there Perron, before he was a cardinal, quarrelled with a stranger, whom he stabbed ; and there, above all, our Saint-Amant was king and high-priest, Abbot of Unreason, Lord of Misrule, rotund, rubicund, and Rabelaisian. Men vaunted him as their Master of the Revels, and boasted of drinking with him. Thus Vion Dalibray, the bitter epigrammatist, cries — " Thou who, like Bacchus, hast drunk through all the world, Teach me, Saint-Amant." And again — " I will make myself famous, at least in the cabaret ; They shall speak of me as they speak of Faret. What matters it, friend, whence our glory may swell? I can acquire it with trouble scant, For, thanks to my God, I already drink well, And I have been on the spree with Saint-Amant." " See him at the cabaret," writes M. Livet, " draped in his careless security. It is there that he finds that 52 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES genius which Boileau accords him for works of de- bauch and extravagant satire. Considering, in effect, the time and the place in which the 'Cabarets' and the ' Chamber of the Debauchee ' were composed, these poems are the masterpieces of their kind. When he wrote them, Uke the drunken poet of Martial, or like Master Adam, on a wall, with a bit of charcoal, by fits and starts, amidst bursts of laughter, jests, and the clinking of glasses, the poet scarcely thought of Boileau, and still less of the advice which the satirist after- wards gave to authors — ' Add sometimes, and erase often.' He wrote without pausing, never corrected, and took good care not to efface ; and, when the inspiration was exhausted, you should have heard the wild re- marks of his friends, no less voluble than himself! You should have seen their jovial grimaces ! A fresh pitcher paid his efforts, a fresh pipe rekindled his ideas ; and all at the same time, without listening to or hearing each other, read again, declaimed, criti- cised, varied whatever verses had tickled their joyous imaginations." Yes, our friend was always guzzling in the cabaret, excepting, be it understood, during the hours of Church service; for mine host caught har- bouring guests during those hours would have been liable to be sent to the galleys. This cruel restriction had, however, the advantage of giving tipplers set times during which they could partially sober them- selves at church, in saintly preparation for another bout at the tavern. In 1 63 1, Saint- Amant made a journey to England, where all that I learn of him is that he celebrated the SAINT-AMANT 53 loves of their majesties Charles I. and Henrietta Maria, "in a very indiscreet style," and that he was faithful to his own love, the bottle. In 1633 he went to Rome with the fleet of the Marquis de Crequi. On the foundation of the French Academy he was made one of its first members. Pellissoh, in his " History of the Academy," records that at the meeting on January 2, 1635, three of the members excused themselves from making the pre- scribed discourse, though very capable, viz., Serizay, Balzac, and Saint-Amant. Our hero, in lieu of a discourse, which would have been much too dry for his taste, promised to gather for the famous Diction- ary all the burlesque or grotesque locutions in the language ; and surely no one living was master of a richer store of them than he. But it does not appear whether he fulfilled his promise. It is not likely that he cared much for the Academy, that arena of the gladiateurs du bien dire, to whose society he in- finitely preferred that of —
- ' les honnetes yvrognes
Aux coeurs sans fard, aux nobles trognes, Tours les goziers voluptueux, Tous les debauchez vertueux, Qui parmi leurs propos de table, Joignent I'utile au delectable." , In 1637 he accompanied Henri de Lorraine, Comte d'Harcourt, who was appointed to command the fleet against Spain. This nobleman, surnamed Cadet la perle, because he was of the younger branch of the great house of Lorraine-Elbeuf, and wore a pearl in his ear, was born in 1601, and died in 1666. He distinguished himself very early as a valiant and 54 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES skilful soldier, and then in peace as a wild young rake and desperate duellist. His excesses were so outrageous and notorious, that when Richelieu sent for him and said, "M. le Comte, the king wills that you leave the country," he considered himself banished, and replied : " I am ready to obey." The great Cardinal, however, continued, "But it is to command the naval expedition." So was virtue rewarded ; and, strange to say, the choice was fully justified by events. As our poet was much with him after this time, a short summary of his career may be given. With the Mediterranean fleet he captured Oristani, in Sardinia, and the isles of St. Honorat and Marguerite. In 1639 he took command of the French army in Piedmont ; and with 8000 men attacked and defeated 20,000 Spaniards. After this battle it is recorded that the Marquis de Leganez, the Spanish commander, sent the message to D'Harcourt :
- ' If I were the King of France, I would have you
beheaded for attacking with so inferior a force ; " to which D'Harcourt responded : " And if I were the King of Spain, I would have you beheaded for getting beaten with a force so superior." Then came the remarkable leaguer of Turin : French in the citadel being besieged by Prince Thomas of Savoy, himself besieged by d'Harcourt, himself invested by Leganez. D'Harcourt managed to take the city in three months. In 1643 he went as ambassador to England, and made a vain attempt to reconcile the Parliament and the king. Ih 1645 he commanded in Catalonia, con- quering at Llorenz, but repulsed from Lerida. Sent to Flanders in 1649, he defeated the Spaniards near Valenciennes, and captured the town of Condd In SAINT-AMANT 55 the troubles of the Fronde he took the part of Anne of Austria, conducted the young king Louis XIV. into Normandy, and maintained his authority there, in despite of the Duchess de Longueville. He forced the Prince de Cond^ to raise the siege of Cognac in 165 1, and kept Guienne quiet. Then he threw up his command, finding his services ill rewarded, and stung by the epigram of Conde, thus translated by Mr. Besant — " That soldier fat and short, Renowned in story, The noble Count d'Harcourt, Brimful of glory, Who raised Cazal and took Turin, Is bailiflf now to Mazarin." At the head of foreign troops he invaded Alsace and took several towns, but had to retire, beaten by the Duke de la Fert6. He then made his peace with the court, and was appointed Governor of Anjou. He died of apoplexy, in the abbey of Royaumont. He was generous and great-hearted as he was brave. When our poet went with him, in 1637, his secre- tary was Faret. (Why does Mr. Besant throughout write him Fwret? Always in the French I find him Faret, rhyming as inevitably to cabaret as la gloire to la victoire, love to dove, or quaffed to laughed.) Duty apart, the three were inseparable, and etiquette was banished. Among themselves, the Comte d'Harcourt was the Round, Saint-Amant the Fat, and Faret the Old. Nor was this familiar intimacy a secret to any one. The poet, in his preface to the piece in which he describes the Passage of Gibraltar, tells us that he composed it " beneath the stars which looked on 56 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES US drinking, with the glass, not the pen, in hand. And in the piece itself he sings of Harcourt — " Already aloft on the poop, To pledge me he takes his cup, Where sparkles and laughs the nectar ; And crying Masse ! to the troop, His voice alarms Gibraltar." Masse! being the summons to drink all together. In 1638 Saint-Amant returned to Paris for a time, and while there addressed to the Chancellor Seguier a petition for the privilege of conducting a glass- factory. This was readily granted ; and in his poem on Cider he has vaunted the miracles accomplished under his direction in this new enterprise. It should be remarked that this employment, and even the work- ing in the factory, was not considered derogatory to a gentleman ; the injurious and often dangerous nature of the work, as well as the beauty of the product, being held to lift it from among menial labours. At this time Adam Billault, jolly Master Adam, who, according to Baillet, does more credit to carpenters than to poets, visiting Paris, would first of all be pre- sented to Saint-Amant. The next year he rejoined d'Harcourt, then in Piedmont ; and he seems to have taken a gallant part in all the fighting, wielding pen and sword and glass with equal vigour and address. Early in 1643 he was again in Rome, where he com- posed La Rome Ridicule, a work which has been often imitated. It appeared at Paris the same year, without name of either author or printer, who were prudent in not revealing themselves, for the publisher was imprisoned, and ran some danger of being put to SAINT-AMANT 57 death. The publisher of the Custode de la JReine, a satire of that time, was hanged, and the printer would have been hanged too, if caught. It is a pity that, in what are pleasantly termed civilised nations, poor poets can no longer hope to see such extreme justice done to those concerned in bringing out their works ! II In this same year of 1643, our poet went with the Comte d'Harcourt to England, on the mission already mentioned. Looking up to Charles I. with the un- perturbed reverence of those who had not yet thought of doubting the perfection of kings, and, as a French- man, devotedly loyal to Henrietta Maria, he had not only no sympathy with the Parliamentarians, he had not even comprehension of the sanity of the thoughts working in those " malign Roundheads," as he very roundly terms them. Cromwell was not then full to the front, and so escaped his wrath ; but it is delicious for us jn these times to read his Epigramme En- diabl'ee sur Fairfax, his Bedevilled or Devilish (how translate ?) Epigram, on that really conscientious and able, if not great, leader. Can you try to imagine why, in 1643, this good Lord Fairfax was still left on earth ? You might guess many times before you guessed the real reason — that is to say, the reason of our good friend Saint- Amant. This reason is that the devil, his Satanic Majesty, who, of course, has a fellow-feeling for other kings, and especially for kings in bad estate, fears that the said Fairfax, by some attempt at assassination {attentat), or by some 58 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES oblique means, would, at least, revolutionise hell or make it a republic. Wherefore our friend can con- clude convincingly : " You see now what has made the devil hesitate, even to this hour, to carry him off." This historical judgment of a really bright intelligence on contemporary matters which he had unusually good opportunities of judging, gives us some idea of the value of judgments contemporary and posterior of intelligences usually anything but bright; the which judgments, elaborated in schools which know nothing at all practically of the subjects in question, are imposed upon us, the unread, and generally accepted by us, as that sublime thing, " the verdict of history." But Saint-Amant had personal reasons for discontent with England as he found it, and as it found him. He tells us, in a stanza really admirable for rhythmic power and energy : " I lose all in England — hair, clothes, and liberty ; I lose here my time and my health, which is worth all the gold of the 'earth ; I lose here my heart, stolen by a beautiful eye, beyond hope of recovery ; and I believe, God not aiding, that at last I shall lose here all my wits." These are broad general charges, but he has emphasised one of them in another poem. Having on a certain occasion drunk freely, with the noble trust in Providence of a Hafiz or a Burns, he was overcome with sleep, and while he slept some mis- creant robbed him. He lifts up his voice : — " Gods, who look on while they rob me asleep, In which of you now can men have any faith, Now that Bacchus has betrayed Saint-Amant ? " What a nobly pathetic indignation ! Bacchus has SAINT-AMANT 59 betrayed Saint- Amant ! The god has rendered his most ardent worshipper into the hands of his foes ! It is ineffably humiliating, not so much even for the god as for the mortal with his firm faith in the god. M. Ch. Livet ejaculates, Horresco referens ! as for my- self, I can only avow that in my humble opinion the Et tu Brute of Caesar is scarcely so magnanimous and touching. To end this tragic episode, it may be added that he promptly summed up his experiences of our nation in a poem entitled, " Albion ; heroic-comic caprice." Either because this was too virulent, even for that time, or because France was growing rightly afraid of an England waging war against its king, the publication was not hazarded. That it was written con amore^ which in this case means con odio, the conclusion sufficiently attests. With the date 12th February, 1644, we read the grandiose epigraph, Cest fait, " It is done ; " as if he would say, with the most savage energy, " I have finished and anni- hilated this infamous England, in which they not only rebel against their anointed sovereign, but also sacrilegiously rob Saint-Amant when he is divinely drunk." In 1645 we find him again at Paris, Montreuil hav- ing succeeded d'Harcourt as ambassador to England. This brings us to his connection with the famous Marie de Gonzague, daughter of the Duke of Mantua, who became so singularly the wife of two successive kings of Poland, these being brothers. It is not here the place to recount her life ; but it may be remarked that she was beautiful, witty, and adventurous, and was more or less involved in the conspiracy against Richelieu headed by her lover, Cinq-Mars. In 1645 6o BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES she accepted the hand of Ladislas Sigismund, King of Poland, who died shortly afterwards. His brother, the ex-Jesuit and Cardinal Casimir, succeeded to the throne, and in 1649 married this queen-dowager, his sister-in-law. The Ahh6 de Villeloin, Sieur de MaroUes, who then enjoyed an immense reputation, was in high favour with the new queen, and exercised great influence over her, having been her tutor. Another great favourite was her secretary, M. des Noyers. Both of these were warm friends of Saint- Amant, and exerted themselves so efficiently in his service that we read, in the " Memoirs of Marolles," under the date of 1645 : "The Queen of Poland, in consideration of my constant praise of the poems of Saint-Amant and because she had listened to some of his serious pieces with much pleasure, appointed him one of the gentlemen of her household, with a pension of three thousand /ivres, which she assured to him by warrant, and which she caused to be sent to him expressly." Saint-Amant, according to his wont, paid abundantly in verse the debt of gratitude he owed to all three. In a sonnet to the Queen he celebrates the love she has inspired in " the greatest king of the pole," but naturally says nothing of the nocturnal visits paid her before by Cinq-Mars, or of those letters she had written to him, whose discovery brought her into serious danger after his death. To Des Noyers he wrote a miscellaneous epistle {Epitre diver sifiee) from Coillure, the port of Roussillon, where he was staying with his dear friend, the Gover- nor Tilly. He is constantly staying with dear friends, the best fellows, and joUiest souls on earth, all de- lighted to secure the boon-companionship of such SAINT-AMANT 6l a cordial joy-inspirer. Having duly thanked Des Noyers for his good offices, he proceeds to recount his various enjoyments, a theme of which he never tires. He was not the man to be ashamed of his pleasures, or to demurely conceal them ; on the con- trary, he riots in their celebration as heartily as he rioted in the pleasures themselves. Then comes an abrupt transition. He remarks —
- ' Whatever's the custom in any nation
Is always sure of approbation." And to prove this he shows the real and manifold absurdity of the fashion then prevailing in France. The elaborate description of costume is a master- piece of graphic satire, full of the most piquant details. Having commenced his " Moses Saved," which he terms the Idyll heroic, he set out for Warsaw to show it to the Queen of Poland, to whom it was to be dedicated but, as he tells the Queen in the letter of dedication, he was arrested at St. Omer. " Doubt- less, had I not said at once that I had the honour to be one of your gentlemen of the chamber, and had 1 not been shielded by such beautiful and power- ful arms, I should not have been able to parry the stroke of misfortune. I ran risk of my life, and the ' Moses Saved ' would have been Moses lost." He goes on to tell how he tried to refashion and complete the work en voyage : " But I found that the muses of the Seine are so delicate that they could not accom- pany me in this long journey; that the fatigues of travel affrighted them, and that absolutely I must retire to some solitary retreat in the country where these 62 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES fair virgins dwell, in order to carry out my projected work." Accordingly he returned to Paris, where we find him during the first troubles of the Fronde. As the loyal friend and follower of D'Harcourt, he made a satiric chanson on Conde. This great man, though equal, as we have seen, to an epigram on D'Harcourt, did not feel equal to a combat in satire with a pro- fessional like Saint-Amant, or else thought such a combat beneath his dignity. He therefore took the dignified course of having our brave poet cudgelled on the Pont Neuf by some of his retainers, a noble example which may have been in the mind of Buckingham in his similar quarrel with glorious John Dryden. This indignity may have disgusted Saint- Amant for a while with the region where dwell those fair virgins, the muses of the Seine ; at any rate he soon afterwards, in 1649, set out again for Poland, and this time got there ; and remained, well and honourably treated, for two years. It is even re- corded that he was not only gentleman of the chamber, but also Councillor of State. In some fine verses, semi-serious and grandiose, written in anti- cipation of this visit, he says that he has it in his mind to turn Pole ; to clothe himself as a noble and proud Sarmatian ; to adopt Polish fashions, even in their banquets, where they drink so much ; to learn the language, and polish it, and translate his poems into it, in a style lofty, magnificent, and various ; to become, in fine, the fat Saint-Amantsky instead of the fat Saint-Amant However, he re- turned to France in 165 1, calhng at Stockholm on the way, being sent there by his royal patroness to represent her at the coronation of Christina, the SAINT-AMANT 63 Queen of Sweden. He gained great favour with this most eccentric daughter of Gustavus Adolphus ; and, when she visited Paris in 1656, and the members of the French Academy were presented to her, she recognised him with particular pleasure. In 1653 or 1654 his "Moses Saved" appeared under the title of "The Heroic Idyll," a title which naturally excited much criticism ; although, as he tells us, it was approved by the Academy, Little is known of his life after this period. Many of his old friends and patrons were dead ; the manners of the court were altogether different, and the style of literature in vogue was also materially changing. Moliere, Corneille, Racine, Boileau were shaping the grand classical literature of France, the literature of severe taste and rigid order; the wild caprice and license of Saint-Amant and his friends would no longer be tolerated. Philarete Chasles compares him in this, his decay, to Falstaff grown old, after Prince Hal had become Henry V. Boileau, with his narrow^ arrogant, stark common-sense; Boileau, who had not a glimmer of poetry or geniality in his composition, was the cold-blooded executioner of these riotous, rich-blooded rakes of Parnassus, these revellers whose Hippocrene ran red with wine, and who took such scandalous liberties with the chaste muses. The best of them, such as our Saint-Amant, had abundance of energy, wit, fancy — nay, imagination and genius, all abundantly lacking in the cold-blooded pedant and pedagogue Boileau. But they had not good taste — they were quite unregulated; they indulged in the most fantastic conceits, and their glaring faults were pitilessly condemned. Such are our neighbours — wild 64 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES for liberty, insane for rigorous discipline, the freest of men enamoured of fetters. Boileau was not con- tented with judging the poems of Saint-Amant; he went beyond his jurisdiction to deal with the private life; and his judgment, which would have been signally mean, even if true, is most ignobly base, seeing that it is false. In his first Satire, dating about six years after Saint-Amant's death, he writes : — " Saint-Amant n'eut du ciel que sa veine en partagc : L'habit qu'il eut sur lui fut son seul heritage ; Un lit et deux placets composaient tout son bien, Ou, pour en mieux parler, Saint-Amant n'avait rien. Mais, quoi ! las de trainer une vie importune, II engagea ce rien pour chercher la fortune ; Et tout charge de vers qu'il devait mettre au jour, Conduit d'un vain espoir il parut a la cour." Ask me not to try to translate. You remember Byron's very just characterisation of this species of verse (" Childe Harold," iv. 38) :— "And Boileau, whose rash envy could allow No strain which shamed his country's creaking lyre, That whetstone of the teeth — monotony in wire ! " This general accusation of indigence is sufficiently refuted by what I have already told of the fortunes of Saint-Amant : at the utmost it could only be applicable to the last years of his life. In the words of M. Li vet : "Perhaps it would have been becoming to respect, and not to mock the poverty, happily only imagined, of a poet who had redeemed by seven or eight years of serious piety the wild errors of his youth. . . . Meanwhile, with the revenue of the glass factory of which he had the privilege, with the pension he SAINT-AMANT 65 received from the Queen of Poland, with the profits of his works, which were highly esteemed before Boi- leau's time, with the friendship of the Due d'Arpajon, the various members of the family De Retz, and many other great lords, we find it hard to believe that he was in that deep indigence generally attributed to him by several satires." We know that he re-issued his works in 165 1, a pretty sure sign of their continued popularity. About 1656, following the fashion of the time, he undertook a "Map of the Land of Reason." In 1658 appeared La Genereuse, a poem. It is said that the glass- works failed, but we know not when. It is also said that some years before his death the troubles in Poland stopped his pension from the queen. He left some fragments of a poem, " Joseph and his Brothers in Egypt." There is a story that " he founded his hopes of the future " on a poem in honour of the king. He had certainly once promised, in his most modest fashion, to write such a poem, com- paring the exploits of the king to those of Samson, " wherein I will display as much strength of genius as he had vigour in his arms." Is not that in the truly great style ! But the story in question relates that the poem in question was entitled, "The Speak- ing Moon " {La Lune Parlante) ; that it was written in honour of the birth of the Dauphin ; that it com- plimented Louis XIV. on his swimming; that the king could not endure the reading of it ; and that the author did not long survive this disgrace. Now the Dauphin was born ist November 1661, and Saint- Amant died on the 29th December, so that the death certainly came soon after the birth. But, on the one £ 66 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES hand, is it credible that the most joyous of men, a veteran of sixty-seven, after all his various experiences of life, would be broken-hearted because one par- ticular poem failed of success? and, on the other, is it credible that a man perishing in neglect and misery would have access to the king, and to such a king as Louis XIV. had become in 1661? This story is told by Brossette, and only one contempo- rary repeats the tale. The story of Brossette and the story of Boileau are to one another as the two cats of Kilkenny. According to the Chevraana, he passed his last days in a humble hotel of the Rue de Seine. He led there a tranquil and penitent life, far from the agita- tions of earlier times, endeavouring to redeem his old wicked poems by pious verses , which were unfortunately not so good as the others. That last touch is exceed- ingly characteristic. In fact, Saint-Amant was never irreligious. Born a Huguenot, he became a Catholic ; and one of his earliest poems, written in the Belle- Isle days — which is, perhaps, the finest of his serious pieces — "The Contemplator," was addressed to the Bishop of Nantes, Philippe Cospeau, a man of great talent and profound piety, who took extreme interest in the young poet and gave him much excellent advice. We are apt to sneer at the ease with which Continental Roman Catholics conciliate devout faith with im- morality ; yet I think I have heard of Calvinists and Methodists (not to speak of other sectarians amongst us) who managed to unite the loosest rascality in conduct with the strictest orthodoxy in doctrine. For there is a good deal of human nature in man (and certainly not less in woman), whether Catholic SAINT-AMANT dj or Protestant, Christian or heathen ; and where all live in glass houses none should throw stones. It is recorded that his landlord, who had long known and loved him, never spoke to him about the rent. And then we read : "The Thursday, 29th December 1661, day of St. Thomas of Canterbury, died in the house of M. Monglas, long his host, who had died eight days before, the Sieur Saint-Amant, aged 73 or 75 [probably 67], after an illness of two days. He received the sacraments, and died a little before noon. M. I'Abbe de Villeloin [Marolles] attended him in his last moments, and administered to him the last rites. He is buried at [incomplete]." That was not such a bad end ! Only two days' ill- ness ; in the house of a dear friendly host, who had never asked for rent ; an old friend at his bedside with the consolations of religion. Even blameless men may sigh. May our last end be like his ! As Mr. Besant says, in his " French Humourists " (p. 25), after citing Rutebeuf, La Fontaine, Henry Miirger, Marot, Villon : " They are all alike. When the last hour comes, they send for the priest and patch up a hasty peace with the Church. Good, easy-going French Church ! She receives all these sinners on the easiest terms, gives them the kiss of a mother who only laughs at the follies of her children, and promises them, before they go to bed, forgiveness and a whole holiday for the morrow." 68 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES III Philarete Chasles, preluding the series of essays of which that on our poet is the first, says : " The sacred battalion of the poets of caprice is about to defile before us, led by some great lords, accompanied by one or two female adventurers; it contains no more charming personage than the smoker, the snuff- taker, drinker, rake, vagabond, brave and vauntful personage, the good fat Saint-Amant {le bon gros Saint-Amant) — for he had the paunch ;^of Falstaff, as he had his wit. Payen, Megrin, Butte, Gilot, Desgranges, Dufour, Chasteaupers, all illustrious for having tippled with this great man, come after him, and are celebrated in his songs. The viveurs of good society, the Comte d'Harcourt, Retz-le-Bonhomme, De Gevres, De Tilly, Du Maurier, De Nerveze, Puy- laurens, form the main body; then the adventurous princesses, Christina of Sweden and Marie de Gon- zague, wandering stars whose rays illumine this troop of voluptuaries. It draws with it the Abbe de Marolles and the song-writer Faret, all the brothers in de- bauchery, chiefs or soldiers of the boisterous society which, from 1630 to 1650, alarmed and annoyed Louis XIV." But, while Saint-Amant's rank as the first of good fellows is thus acknowledged and confirmed, what of his rank as a poet? M. Chasles thus commences the essay : " This was a poet, alas ! and a poet lost for the future. He had genius {de resprit)^ a genius ardent and subtle : he versified with wonderful ability. The language of poetry was pliant and flexible under SAINT-AMANT 6g his pen, as the fusible matter which twists and curls at the breath of the glass-blower : he knew much of men and things." And Theophile Gautier, a com- petent judge in this matter, if ever there was one, writes : " Saint- Amant is assuredly a very great and very original poet, worthy to be named among the best of whom France can boast. His rhyme is ex- tremely rich, abundant, unexpected, and often beyond hope ; his rhythm is manifold {nombreux), ably sus- tained, and varied ; his style is very diversified, very picturesque, full of images, sometimes without taste, but always interesting and fresh." And again, in his sketch of Thdophile de Viau : " He seems to me, Regnier dead and Corneille not yet arrived, the most remarkable poet of this period. . . . Saint-Amant is the only one, in my opinion, who can advantageously compare with him ; but Saint-Amant also is a great poet, of a magnificent bad taste, and of a verve warm and luxuriant, who hides many jewels in his dung- heap; but he has not the elevation and the melan- choly of Theophile, balancing these with a grotesque and a rushing energy with which Theophile was not endowed. The one writes the poetry of a fat man, the other the poetry of a lean man : such is the differ- ence." After these testimonies I need say nothing myself as to Saint-Amant's real poetical merits, except that I would rather have ten pages of Saint-Amant than a hundred of Boileau ; and would rather read a hundred pages of Saint-Amant than ten of Boileau at any time, save when desperately in want of sleep. Let us glance at a few of the poems. The first, generally considered the best of the serious pieces, is said to date certainly anterior to 1624, and to have 70 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES probably been composed in a grotto (at Belle-Isle), which more than a century after was still called the grotto of Saint- Amant, and " to which he retired when he was sick with too much wine." Gautier says : " It is a very fine piece, and of the strangest novelty for the epoch in which it appeared. It con- tains in germ almost all the literary revolution which afterwards broke out. In it, nature is studied im- mediately, and not through the works of previous masters. You find nothing in the poets called classi- cal of that time which has this freshness of colouring, this transparency of light, this vagrant and melancholy reverie, this calm and sweet style, which give so great a charm to the ode on * Solitude.' " His friend Faret's eulogium must be cited for its ingenious quaintness, in the style of the time. He assures us that if all those who admired it had followed their first impulse after reading it, "Solitude" would have been destroyed by its own praise ! Three lines have been specially and most justly admired ; they are so beautiful that they must be given in the original : — " J'escoute h. demy transporte, Le bruit des aisles du Silence, Qui vole dans robscurite." By-the-bye this poem was translated into I^tin by Etienne Bachot, a famous doctor, who wrote also (is that other famous doctor, John Brown, of Edin- burgh, aware of the fact?) Ilorce Stibsecivce. I have already mentioned the " Contemplator," which, with M. Livet, I am inclined to regard as even more profound and tender than the "Solitude." In Le Soleil Levant ("The Sunrise") there is a charming SAINT-AMANT 7I touch of fancy, not unworthy of young Heine himself, which shows what delicate chords vibrated in this stout reveller (the original is much daintier than my rather free version) : — ' ' The pretty butterfly comes then, Its tremulous pinions rise, And seeing the sun shines again, From flower to flower it flies, To tell the good news of the time — That day returns to bless our clime. There in our gardens rich and bright, Where many a rare thing grows, It carries from the lily white A kiss unto the rose ; And seems, a messenger discreet, To tell her some love-message sweet." I need scarcely say that the lily is masculine and the rose feminine, in French. In La Pluye he sings — " Falling on the foliage green, What a pleasant sound rain stirs ! How should I charm every ear, If the sweetness whispering here Could be breathed into my verse ! " And surely he strikes some fine tones in La Nuit : — " Peaceful and lonely night, Without or moon or stars, With thy most sombre veils Enshroud the day that jars ; Come quickly, goddess, grant this boon to me ; I love one dark like thee. 72 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES The winds no longer blow, The rain has ceased to dash, The thunder sleeps ; I hear Only the fountain's plash, And some delicious lutes, whose notes arise, Languid with lovers' sighs." In La Jouyssance he exclaims — " But dare I hope, O wonder of the skies ! To be as surely in your soul As I can see myself within your eyes ? " As a transition from his love of nature to his love of nature's best fruit, we have in La Pluye^ from which I have already quoted : — " The heavens are black from base to top, And their influence benign Pours so much water on the vine. That we need never drink a drop." In La Debauche, partly translated by Mr. Besant ("French Humourists," p. i86), he invokes Bacchus, among other charms — ' ' By this pipe from which I wave All the incense thou dost crave." And Mr. Besant also translates a good part of what he terms " the liveliest, brightest letter possible " to Faret, entitled Les Cabarets. The conclusion is worth giving as it stands in the original : — " Et de I'air dont tu te gouvernes, Les moindres escots des tavernes Te plaisent plus cent mille fois Que ne font les echos des bois. Et a moy aussi." SAINT-AMANT 73 He loves these energetic conclusions. Thus, in Le Fromage (like the real Pantagruelist he is, he cele- brates cheese, ham, sausage, and all excitants to thirst, with only less rapture than the wine that slakes it), he concludes : — " O of Bacchus thou sweet lure ! Cheese, thou art a treasure sure ! So may but of thee to think Spur me evermore to drink ! Fill Lackeys 1 " The " Orgye " is of befitting dithyrambic irregularity. As it is brief (I mean the poem, not the debauch), it may be given entire : — "Bring wine ! bring wine ! the freshest, sparkling red ! Pour, waiter, pour, till to the brim it fills, For I would drink a toast in mighty swills — Here's to the health of all alive and dead ! Pour me yet of this rich red wine, For it alone makes my red blood run ; It is my fire, my blood, and my sun. Oh, but it's sweet ! it ravishes my soul ; No such pleasure in life as the bowl. No such pleasure in life as to drink ; Keep pace with me, my dear friend Faret, Or you shall be, ere you can wink, Stripped of the name that rhymes with cabaret ! " In Le Enamoure he cites touching proofs of his devotion to his mistress : — " Since to good ham I prefer The visage of a damsel fair, I can smoke not as of yore, And in wine exceed no more : 74 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES Now ten pints a day suffice ; Even this, you lovely droll, Who enslave me with your eyes, Is to drink your health, my soul ! " But our poet was not always either tender or jolly ; with him, also, at times, indignation made verses, as witness this horrible " Imprecation " : — '* If to Evreux I e'er go, May I burn with fever slow ! May I turn into a dog ! May I turn into a frog ! Let me be cut off from wine, Nor get trust when I would dine ; May for ever civil brawls Trouble those accursed walls ; May the sweet sun, glad and bright, Never bless it with its light ; May it rain there swords and spears ; May all ills which in old years Bards have prophesied, all those Horrors, outrages, and woes, Poison, murder, streams of blood, Pest and famine, fire and flood. Be right soon accomplished there, Filling it with black despair. This is what just anger heated Him to cry, at table seated. Furiously excited thus 'Gainst that city infamous, Him of all men most benign, Who in these days drink good wine. O good tipplers ! Dear Faret I With just cause you scorn that lair More than thirty churches there. And not one poor cabaret." SAINT-AMANT 75 One shudders to think of the maledictions our friend would have launched had he found himself, not in a single city, but in a whole state subject to the Maine Law ! The last lines pleasantly recall those of my honoured namesake, that most valiant and jolly Norwegian song-smith, as we find them in Laing's translation of that glorious series of sagas, "The Heimskringla " : — " A hundred miles through Eida wood, And the devil an alehouse, bad or good." We now come to a matter of special interest to Nicotians. On Vol. i., p. 182, of M. Livet's edition, stand these two sonnets : — " Assis sur un fagot, une pipe a la main, Tristement accoude centre une cheminee, Les yeux fixes vers terre, et I'ame mutinee, Je songe aux cruautes de mon sort inhumain, L'espoir, qui me remet du jour au lendemain, Essaye a gaigner temps sur ma peine obstinee, Et me venant promettre une autre destinee. Me fait monter plus haut qu'un empereur romain. Mais a peine cette herbe est-elle mise en cendre, Qu'en mon premier estat il me convient descendre. Et passer mes ennuis k redire souvent : Non, je ne trouve point beaucoup de difference De prendre du Tabac a vivre d'esperance, Car I'un n'est que fumee, et I'autre n'est que vent." " Voicy le rendezvous des enfants sans soucy, Que pour me divertir quelquefois je frequente. Le maistre a bien raison de se nommer la Plante Car il gaigne son bien par une plante aussy. Vous y voyez Bilol pasle, morne et transy, Vomir par les nazeaux une vapeur errante ; Vous y voyez Sallard chatouiller la servante. Qui fit du bout du mez en portrait raccourcy, 76 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES Que ce borgne * a bien plus Fortune pour amie Qu'un de ces curieux qui, soufflant I'alchimie, De sage devient fol, et de riche indigent ! Cestuy-la sent enfin sa vigueur consumee, Et voit tout son argent se resoudre en fumee ; Mais lui, de la fumee il tire de I'argent." As will appear directly, I have no need to try my hand at the first. I give the following version of the second in default of a better : —
- ' Of careless souls this is the meeting-place,
Which sometimes I frequent for my delight, The master calls himself La Plante with right, For to a plant his fortune he can trace. You see there Bilot pale as in sad case, From both whose nostrils vapour takes its flight. While Sallard tickles at the servant light. Who laughs with nose up and foreshortened face. How much this one-eyed better friends must be With Fortune than those alchemists we see From wise becoming mad, from rich quite poor ! They find at length their health and strength decay. Their money all in smoke consumed away ; But he from smoke gels money more and more." Of a truth, it may be remarked, parenthetically, save in the fact that he was singular with respect to eyes, this La Plante was the very fore-ordained prototype of Cope, with his opulent Tobacco Plant of the two- fold leaves, literary and nicotian ! Now, in the Tobacco Platitiox August 1874, under the heading, " Who wrote it ? " Mr. Besant's transla- tion of the first of these sonnets is cited from the " French Humourists " (p. 184), together with a sonnet
- La Plante was " un cabaretier borgne qui tenait un cabaret
borgne," the one-eyed host of a low wine-shop, or, as we should say, pot-house. SAINT-AMANT J'J on Tobacco by Sir Robert Aytoun, so closely re- sembling it that it was clear that either Sir Robert imitated Saint-Amant or Saint-Amant imitated Sir Robert; whence the question, Whose was the original? Sir Robert was born 1570, and died February 163I, as is recorded on his monument in Westminster Abbey. He studied civil law at the University of Paris, and was on the Continent from 1590 till 1603, when a Latin poem to King James brought him into favour with that monarch. He was an accomplished courtier, was private secretary to Queen Anne, and afterwards to Henrietta Maria, and received many a good gift from royalty. His English and Latin poems (he wrote others in Greek and French, but these have not been preserved) were privately printed in 187 1, by the Rev. Charles Rogers, LL.D., Historiographer to the Historical Society, from the collation of two MSS., and the comparison with such of the pieces as appear in Watson's Collection. The sonnet on Tobacco is not in that collection. Aytoun's verses are smooth and graceful, and sometimes something more. Dryden said they were among the best of that age ; Burns altered, without improving, his " For- saken Mistress " (" I do confess thou art sae fair ") ; the first "Old-Long-Syne" is attributed to him; and the "Invocation of his Mistress," which Dr. Rogers prints in his volume, has been ascribed to Raleigh. It is that containing the well-known stanza : — " Silence in love bewrays more woe Than words, though ne'er so witty ; A beggar that is dumb, you know, Doth merit double pity." He was, therefore, quite capable of writing the sonnet 78 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES in question ; and, as Saint-Amant visited England in 1 63 1, Sir Robert might then have shown him it in MS. But, on the other hand, Saint-Amant published his first volume of poems in 1627 or 1629 (I find both dates given, and have no means of deciding) ; and these two sonnets seem to have been included in it, both referring to his Belle-Isle period. Then there is the direct and specific evidence of the letter cited by M. Livet, which I have given in the first part. Again, we have the two sonnets together in Saint- Amant, while there is no other such piece in Sir Robert. Furthermore, we know that Saint-Amant was a great smoker, while it is not at all probable that Sir Robert, as a favourite of James, indulged in the weed. Lastly, I don't believe that Sir Robert ever sat on a faggot in his life, being far too courtly a gentleman ; whereas Saint-Amant may have done so countless times in one and the other cabaret borgne. Wherefore, although, as a leal Scot, I would fain claim the honour for my countryman of writing this, " one of the earliest sonnets extant in praise of tobacco," as Mr. Besant says, 1 am constrained to yield to Saint-Amant the credit of being the original. And now to finish with our jolly friend. Mr. Besant says : " Though he is a dependant, he is never a parasite. A gentleman he is born, a gentle- man he remains." This is quite true. Strange as it may seem, he was thoroughly independent in every- thing, and could be haughty if his self-respect were touched. As a poet, he says : " If I read the works of another, it is simply to guard myself from repeating his thoughts." One day, says Tallemant, dining at the table of the coadjutor (the celebrated De Retz, afterwards cardinal), he could exclaim before an assemblage of valets: "I have fifty years of liberty on my head." "You have written pretty verses," said Esprit, his colleague at the Academy, to him, at the table of Chapelain. "Deuce take your pretty," he cried angrily, and could scarcely be persuaded to stay. On another occasion he shouted: "Shut the doors! let no one enter; no valets here! I have trouble enough to recite before their masters." He called himself the fat Virgil, and the Norman Democritus. I must not omit to mention one of the best jokes of his life: it is said that in his latter days he had hopes of an abbey, or even a bishopric. Surely he would have been a noble priest, after the order of Saint Rabelais; for of him, as of Chaucer's Monk, it could have safely been said:—
"Now certeinly he was a fair prelat;
He was not pale as a for-pyned goost."
And as of Chaucer's Frere:—
"Ful sweetly herde he confessioun,
And plesaunt was his absolucioun.
He was an esy man to geve penance.
*****He knew wel the tavernes in every toun,
And every ostiller or gay tapstere."