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From St. Pauls. THE JACKDAW AUTHOR. THERE is a class of writers whose works are valueless till they are old, and then become of great value. There is also cheese, which is good for nothing when new; and wine which is undrinkable till its precious qualities shall have been evoked by time; and there are men who do more harm than good in the world, and give those round about them more pain than pleasure, till age and experience have ripened and mellowed them. But in all these cases there must be a basis of valuable qualities from the first, which only needed maturing to fit them for service; whereas, in the case of the books referred to, no such merit can be predicated of them. They were absolutely good for nothing when written; were generally deemed to be good for nothing by the contemporaries of their authors, would be yet more emphatically judged to be worthless if they were produced at the present day; and which have acquired, by virtue of the lucky chance which has preserved them, a very real and very universally recognized value. It may furthermore be remarked, as a curious circumstance connected with this class of literature, that if the minds which produced it had been of a calibre capable of doing better work, the books left by them to us would have been incomparably less valuable.

These authors are the diarists, the keepers of journals, the small-beer chroniclers, who do not aspire to record a nation's history, but who are entitled to put "quorum pars magni fui!" as an epigraph to their labours. And of this class the writer of whom we are about to speak was a very notable specimen.

him amuse themselves with for a moment, but which no human being but he dreams of storing up and hoarding.

It is true, your Jackdaw is an idle bird; and in this view the "magni formica laboris " would seem the more correct emblem of the tribe. For the model anecdotist, or historiette-preserver, must be an idler of unwearied industry. It is essential that he should have nothing on earth to do,- nothing, that is, of the sort of things that other men look on as duties or tasks of bread-winning industries; and yet he should have a decided turn for diligence. "Strenua nos exercet inertia!" might be their adopted motto. The model diarist must never go home to his bed from banquet, ball, or boudoir too tired to take his ever-ready pen at once in hand. There must be no deferring the business of life till the next morning. If he does not book the trashy nothings, of which his shallow mind is full, while the feeble impression they have made is yet fresh, the froth on the top of them will have subsided before the morrow. And it is that froth which will give the flavour to his liquor when it shall be uncorked after a couple of hundred years.

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Your model diarist must furthermore belong to the class of men who are universally reckoned as "good fellows;" but he should be a specimen of that variety of the class to which the term is somwhat contemptuously applied. He must have no evil qualities of mind, heart, or manners, so prominently developed as to make any man or woman shun him; nor any good or great qualities so strongly marked as to make even the poorest-minded, the loosest liver, or the most frivolous afraid of him. He must be the acquaintance of every man, and the dear The works produced by such writers may friend of none. He must be universally be appropriately said to belong to the Jack-liked and trusted by the women, but not daw school of literature. It may be urged, given to indulge in 'grandes passions" perhaps, that the ant would be a more fitting with regard to any of them. He must be armorial bearing for the family. For it may considered the safest of men, and a model be accurately said of each of them, "trahit of discretion while he lives; and only be quodcunque potest, atque addit acervo!" discovered to have been the very reverse The Jackdaw, however, is probably the fit- of this when he has been long since dead. ter symbol of the tribe. For a certain spice It is very desirable that he should be no of the furtive tendency contributes admira- strong partisan of any faction in Church or ably to the characterizing of it. Always State. He should, on the contrary, be one awake, always on the watch, always with of those light and easy-going skimmers of pricked ears, it is the habit and the business the social seas, which float in all waters of your diarist, or your maker of "histori- deep or shallow, and are deemed to be suffiettes," to pounce on unconsidered trifles, ciently insignificant to be welcomed by men and carry them off secretly to his hiding- of parties and natures so opposed as never place among masses of accumulated manu- to associate with each other. His curiosity script. Nothing comes amiss to him. But and turn for observation should be suffispecially he seems to prize such waifs and ciently strong to make him ready at all strays as others do not think worth preserv-times to act on the nihil humanum a me ing;-odds and ends, which the people about alienum" principle; and yet it is good that

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he should be imbued with a sufficient spice of the tuft-hunting spirit to make him an assiduous frequenter of the houses of the great, and not above having an eye and ear for the servants' hall as well as for the reception-rooms.

Thus fitted for the task, the heaper up of "historiettes" will hardly fail to pile together a work which no human being will dream of bestowing paper and print on for many a year, and which indeed will probably run great risks of being consigned to the waste-paper dealer as soon as the breath is out of the writer's body; but which, if it happily escape those dangers, and get once comfortably covered with dust in some library or garret, will one day emerge and make its author's name a household word among men.

most part, these materials for history have been discovered in large masses. As nothing came amiss to the jackdaw author, his hoards naturally grew to be voluminous. In most European countries it has been found that this disinterring of the jackdaw hoards has to a greater or lesser degree necessitated the re-writing of history; and histori ans have not been slow to gird up their loins to the new task. England and France especially have been busy at this work; and in the latter country it has been more particularly the seventeenth century which has as yet profited by the new discoveries. It is fortunate that it should have been so. For of all French history that of the seventeenth century is the most deeply and largely interesting to mankind, inasmuch as then the life was being lived, and the causes It is specially of late years, - within the being moulded, which produced the great last thirty or forty years or so, that the cataclysm that, at the close of the eighteenth true value of such writings has been fully century changed the face and the prospects appreciated. The use of them has been dis- of the civilized world, and made it such as covered only since men have learned to ex-it was. Nor is there a volume of all the pect that history should be presented to vast number of volumes of the class, which them, not under the guise of a dry and has been characterized in the preceding fleshless skeleton, but in that of a recogniz- pages, that does not do much towards makable figure, reclothed with flesh, and col-ing the reader feel that he better understands oured with the hues of life. The old histo- how and why the Revolution must have come, ries resembled the old maps; in which there and how, when it did come, it was such as were wide blank spaces inscribed with a we know it to have been. brief notice to the effect that "impassable deserts" filled all that portion of the earth. Huge tracts of social life, swarming with inhabitants, and containing the sources of those big facts which the historian did record, just as the so-styled deserts contained the sources of the streams which the geographers marked when they had grown big, and came near the sea, were all left vacant. But modern curiosity and modern science will not tolerate these vast blanks. And it is not only that we have discovered the value of the due filling up of such blanks, and the true historical importance of knowing how the masses of undistinguished men and women lived, and eat and drank, and bought and sold, and talked and amused themselves; but we have come to recognize that even the biggest figures, which History even on her tallest stilts has preserved for us, are very imperfectly known or understood, when presented to us like isolated sticks of timber, instead of like trees in the midst of the forest they over-topped, and surrounded by the underwood out of which they sprung. Eager, accordingly, has been the hunt of late years among the dust of great libraries, and muniment rooms, and old family depositaries, for the forgotten writings of the jackdaw authors of past days. And the result has been very considerable. For the

In the list of the jackdaws of the pen, Tallemant des Reaux holds a very high, if not the highest place; and if the reader has in any degree interested himself with French historical inquiry and criticism during the last thirty or forty years, he cannot have avoided meeting with very frequent reference to his pages. Just about two centuries ago, the name of Gedeon Tallemant des Reaux was very frequently heard in all sorts of places in Paris, where men did congregate. Then for several generations it was so totally unheard of that not even the biographical dictionaries remembered it! Now once more it has become so much a household word, that an English reader can scarcely have failed to have often heard of him. Yet the man himself, and the nine volumes of his " Historiettes," as he has chosen to call them, have hardly been ever so presented to the English public as to make the present attempt to introduce him and them to our readers needless or unwelcome.

Gedeon Tallemant des Reaux was born at La Rochelle on the 7th of November, 1619. His great grandfather, François Tallemant des Reaux, migrated to that town from Tournay in the Low Countries, in order to escape from the persecution to which his profession of the Protestant faith

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then exposed him. His operations as a having purchased them! Of course once merchant prospered in his new home; and introduced and tolerated, the evil continued he became there a town-councillor and ad- to assume larger and larger proportions joint of the mayor. His two sons, Gedeon under every successive reign. Under Maand Pierre, carried the rising fortunes of zarin a scheme was invented by virtue of the family to a yet higher point. Associat- which the holders of all these offices were ing with them their brother-in-law, Paul required to pay a heavy sum every ninth Yvon, they established a banking business at year, in consideration of which the offices Bordeaux. Here also the Huguenot family were secured to their families in perpetuity. prospered exceedingly, so much so that This payment was called the Paulette." Gedeon, the elder brother, purchased an The numbers of these offices, created appointment of secretary to the king, solely for sale, were multiplied to a perLouis XIII., became the farmer of sun- fectly extraordinary degree under Louis dry taxes, and was appointed "Tresorier XIV. And the titles of many of the bodies de l'Epargne" for Navarre. He died in of officers, for they were created in large 1634, leaving behind him a very consider- batches, - thus brought into existence, are able fortune. This Gedeon was not the absurdly grotesque. There were "Inspectgrandfather, but the great uncle of Gedeon, ors of Liquors," "Inspectors of Butchers," the jackdaw author, who alone has caused" Inspectors of Pigs," "Stackers of Wood," the family name ever to be mentioned in the "Measurers of Charcoal," "Measurers of nineteenth century. Pierre, the younger Controllers of Fresh Butter." son, was the author's grandfather. He must "Tasters of Salt Butter," "Inspectors of also have been a wealthy man, but his ca- Wigs," "Controllers of Poultry," and a reer seems to have been a less brilliant one vast number more. The Chancellor Pontthan that of his elder brother. This elder chartrain, who was one of the most prolific brother, the senior partner in the Bordeaux inventors in this sort, said that "it seemed bank, the farmer of taxes, and secretary by as if Providence had an especial care for purchase to the king, left a fortune to his France; for scarcely has the king created a son Gedeon, the second, which enabled him new appointment, before God creates on to soar yet higher in the empyrean of finan- the spot a fool to purchase it!" Neverthecial greatness, and as a first step he pur- less, the vanity of a fool was not the only chased an appointment as Counsellor in the motive that produced purchasers for all Parliament of Paris. these places. The tenure of them exempted the holders from the tax called the taille; and as the payment of this was held to be in some sort infamous, as it fell only upon people of peasant race, it was thought a very desirable thing to be freed from liability to it. Besides, many of the charges" brought in large gains.

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This shameful practice of selling appointments to offices of profit and dignity prevailed in France from the time of Louis XII. to within about twenty years before the Revolution. It was a culminating monstrosity of bad government reached by France alone among the Governments of Europe; and suffices to stamp the old Gedeon the second, son of the Bordeaux Bourbon and Valois Government of France banker, became a purchaser of dignities on as the worst of all the oppressive tyrannies a larger scale than his father. As we have under which Europe groaned for so many seen, he bought a place of Counsellor of centuries. It is true that the shame was in the Parliament of Paris, and was installed some degree shared by the Papal Court; for in it on the 10th of June, 1637. And it would be strange, indeed, if any abuse shortly afterwards he married. The richest ever invented had not found a congenial men in France at that day were the "Inhome there. But even at Rome the evil tendants" of finance. One of these, Puget was not so great and so shameless as at the de Montauron, was noted as a man of imCourt of France. Offices of state and dig- mense wealth. He had an only daughter, nities were sold in vast numbers by the Marie de Montauron. But she was illegitiPontiffs. But Frenchmen alone permitted mate. And the highly respectable Huguetheir lives, and honours, and fortunes to lie not family of the Tallemants were extremely at the mercy of judges who had bought the averse to one of their race marrying a girl right of judging them! Under Louis XII. so disgraced. The Montaurons, on the appointments in the department of finance other hand, would not ally themselves with only were made saleable. Though bad a Huguenot. But the double difficulty did enough, the evil was infinitely less than not avail as any barrier between the new when under Francis I. the administration Counsellor of Parliament and the fortune of justice was entrusted to men whose sole of the Intendant's daughter. Gedeon lost title to their appointments consisted in no time in conforming to the orthodox faith;

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and less in laughing to scorn the scruples | he is the same man as you have known him of his provincial relatives. He was married at Paris, except that his expenses are larger to Marie de Montauron, and employed a still! But for Madame l'Intendante, to portion of her dower in purchasing the whisper a secret, she is entirely changed. place of Maitre des Requêtes." Thus Quoique," say the travellers, breaking off the career of the most brilliant and lucrative into verse according to their habit: offices was open to him; and he obtained "Quoique sa beaute soit extreme, first the Intendance" of Orleans, and subsequently, in 1653, that of Guienne.

Gedeon Tallemant was now safe to become one of the richest men in France. He did become so very speedily. But Gedeon the Catholic, grandson of the prudent old Huguenot La Rochelle trader, was one of those men whom no amount of wealth can prevent from ruining themselves. His dissipation was boundless, and of every sort. Perhaps among the least ruinous of his modes of spending money was the gratification of an ambition, at that time much the mode in France, of playing the Mecanas. He permitted whole swarms of needy scribblers, whom the public and the booksellers refused to feed, to live upon him. And some of a different class, who ought to have been above the habitudes, which placed the trade of literature very much upon a level with that of a begging-letter writer, did not scruple to barter their flattery for a portion of the prodigal Intendant's wealth. Among others, Corneille dedicated his "Cinna" to him. According to the account of him given by his nephew in the "historiette " dedicated to him, he must have been a grossly ignorant, and very worthless man. He is represented to have been absurdly, yet not unreasonably, jealous of his wife, who was, according to our author's account, in all respects good for as little as her husband. Here is a picture of the life of an "Intendant de Finance "in the provincial capital of Intendancy," taken from the account given by the two celebrated friends Chapelle and Bachaumont, of a journey by them in the south of France about the year 1656.

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Qu'elle ait toujours ce grand œil bleu Plein de douceur, et plein de feu, Elle n'est pourtant plus la meme; Car nous avons appris qu'elle aime, Et qu'elle aime bien fort - le jeu! She who did not know formerly what cards All the women in the town have become were, now passes her nights at lansquenet. gamblers to please her. They come regularly to her house to divert her, and whoever would see a brilliant assembly has only to pay her a visit. Mademoiselle du Pin," this was an illegitimate sister of the Intendant, those who are not fond of play. "is always there to entertain truth, her conversation is so amusing and And, in the worst off. There Messieurs the Gaswitty, that that part of the company is not cons may take lessons in polite behaviour and fashionable conversation:

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Mais cette agreable du Pin

Qui dans sa maniere est unique
A l'esprit mechant et bien fin;
Et si jamais Gascon s'en pique
Gascon fera mauvaise fin."

No doubt Bordeaux regretted it, when these "noctes cœnæque deûm" came to an end; and the ruined Intendant had to break up his establishment and return to Paris.

There his first cousin, Pierre Tallemant, the father of the jackdaw author, would have nothing to say to him. But Gedeon, the son of Pierre, undertook to manage his affairs for him, and reconcile him to his (Gedeon's) father, on conditions of amendment and prudence in his mode of life. “I undertook," says the historiette writer, "to "As soon as we had stopped on shore, receive his revenues and give him so much - of the Garonne at Bordeaux, and had a month, on condition that he would respent some time in admiring the situation model his style of living, and lodge himself of the town, we went to the inn of the after my fashion. I made them cry again Chapeau Rouge, where M. Tallemant came and again, both him and his wife. I beto call upon us immediately on our arrival. gan by proposing that he should send away From that moment we returned no more to his cook. All right,' said he; I will our lodgings all the time we were at Bor- send him away in four months!' His wife deaux, except to sleep. The days passed exclaimed, For heaven's sake, cousin, in the pleasantest manner conceivable at the manage to keep me one footman!' And house of M. l'Intendant; for all the good then they deceived me. They took lodg people of the town have no other rendez-ings opposite to them for the servants they vous than his house. He has made the pretended to discharge! In short, finding discovery that most of them are his cousins; them incurable, I gave them up, and would and from his style of life one might take have nothing to say to their affairs! " him for the Premier President of the province rather than the Intendant. In a word,

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The Intendant died, leaving his widow and children destitute, in 1668. The eldest

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of them, Paul, became an abbé, obtained This rich marriage made the life of leisthe Priory of St. Albin, and was made a ure passed in all the society of Paris, to member of the Academy by the influence which we owe the Historiettes," possible of his relations and friends of the family. to Tallemant. But before commencing that He produced quantities of occasional verses, Parisian life he made a journey in Italy, idyls, pastorals, words for operas, dis- together with two of his brothers, and the courses, panegyrics, funeral orations, and young Abbé de Retz. The cause of this academical harangues, all long since for- companionship is characteristic of the times. gotten! When he was made an Academi- The young De Retz had been a candidate cian, neither Quinault nor Racine, nor La for some distinction at the Sorbonne, and Fontaine, nor Boileau, had been found his principal competitor had been the Abbé worthy of that honour, though Racine had de la Mothe Houdancourt, afterwards already produced Andromache,' and Bishop of Rennes and Archbishop of Auch, Boileau had written seven of his immortal who was the special protégé of the Cardinal "Satires!" Nevertheless, what the abbé de Richelieu. De Retz was the successful gave the world was what the world wanted, candidate; whereupon Richelieu became and the world in return rewarded him well. furious with anger. The Sorbonne humbly He had pensions, and priories, and bene- represented, not that De Retz had in truth fices, and was made by the Minister Col- merited the distinction, but that it was bert Superintendent of the Inscriptions in impossible for them to pass over the claims the Royal Residences! In this capacity, of the nephew of the Cardinal di Gondy, when Le Brun painted the well-known who had been a special protector of the series of pictures in the great gallery at Sorbonne. But Richelieu was appeased by Versailles, the Abbé Tallemant furnished no such representations. Was not he also the inscriptions to be placed under them. a protector of the Sorbonne? Whom had They were, when they had been so placed, they to thank for the new buildings even voted to be so bad that they were all can- then in course of construction? The angry celled! None the less for that mischance, prelate threatened to make them very senhe remained a favourite with the literary sible to whom they owed their present if clique of the fashionable world of Paris, not their past "protection," by forthwith and, after a peaceful and prosperous life, causing the new buildings to be razed to died in his 70th year; and has a long, the ground! And the all-powerful ministhough not altogether accurate, article con- ter's anger was so hot, that it was deemed secrated to him by Daunou in the "Bio-expedient to get the obnoxious successful graphie Universelle."

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candidate, the young Abbé de Retz out of Pierre Tallemant, the father of our au- the way and out of sight by sending him to thor, also went to Paris; but before he did travel in Italy. Tallemant's appreciation so he had already acquired a very hand- of his young fellow-traveller, the "little some fortune. He married twice, and had dark man, very near-sighted, ill-made, families by both of his wives, the last of ugly, and awkward in all his actions, and whom was Marie Rambouillet, the sister dirty in his habits, who could neither write of the well-known and enormously wealthy a line straight, nor manage to put his own financier, Nicolas Rambouillet. But in-clothes on,". shows that his talents of asmuch," says his son, the author of the observation, and the habit of recording the Historiettes," " as he did not seem at all fruit of them, were even at that early age disposed to part with any of his wealth as developed in no ordinary degree. long as he lived, I determined to look out When they arrived at Florence, De Retz for a rich wife who would make me inde- was lodged in the house of his relative, the pendent of my father." Belonging, as he Cavaliere Gondi, who was at that time Secdid, both on his father's and on his mother's retary of State to the Grand Duke of Tusside, to the world of the "haute finance," cany. And the remarks which Tallemant the great farmers of taxes, or "partisans "makes thereupon afford an amusing instance as they were called in those days, it was of that inevitable ignorance of Frenchmen not difficult to him to succeed in his pur- respecting everything not French, which pose. Indeed, he had no need to look far- seems to have been as remarkable in the ther than to his own first cousin, Elizabeth seventeenth as in the nineteenth century. Rambouillet, the daughter of his mother's "This Chevalier di Gondy," he writes, brother. The young heiress was only "had the portraits of the Gondys of France eleven and a half years old, when her in his salon; for," this " for" is delicousin was betrothed to her; and the mar- cious! they are not such grands seigriage was not solemnized till two years neurs in Italy as they are here. They are, later. however, gentlemen. I saw at Florence

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