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honour, as the powers that be, the representatives of the first Napoleon. It is said that the present Emperor in no way discourages it, and that he augurs no danger to his dynasty from the frequent appearance of the portraits of Marie Antoinette and her fair-haired boy, side by side with those of his Empress and the Prince Imperial. Be this as it may, and apart from all theories of legitimacy, it is a sign of grace and hope for France, that her eyes have so far recovered from the glare of revolutionary conflagration and military glory, as to look with pity and reverence, and perhaps with something of remorseful regret, upon the sufferings and the sufferers of those days of preternatural wickedness and of supernatural goodness.

Among the memoirs which have lately illustrated the period of the Revolution, the two works named at the head of this article have a special interest. The life of Madame de Lafayette, with a notice of her mother, the Duchess d'Ayen, is now published for the first time, though portions of the latter had already appeared in the beautiful memoir of Madame de Montagu. Taken together, the two volumes give us not only the portraits of three most remarkable and admirable women, but a life-like family group, which brings us at once into the centre of the old French society of the last century, which, with its good and its evil, was swept away for ever with the ancient monarchy of France. Almost all the members of the family of Noailles, one of the most illustrious among the court nobility, were, on the eve of the French Revolution, more or less affected by the fervour for liberty, and for the general reformation of abuses, which, to their credit, was as enthusiastically felt by the privileged classes, who had personally everything to lose, as by the roturiers, who had everything to gain by the change, and nothing (in Burke's words) to sacrifice but their shoe-buckles-* the obscure provincial advocates, country attorneys and notaries, by whom the Tiers état was chiefly represented in the assembly of the States General.

"It is not generally known," says the biographer of Madame de Montagu, "with what earnestness and good faith the nobility-and not only the provincial nobility, but even many of the magnates of the Court-had embraced the idea of a general reformation of the State, and hailed the approach of political liberty." This was proved by the part taken by the nobility in all the measures preparatory to the convocation of the States General. In the various documents then drawn up

*One of the harmless affectations of the early appear at court with shoe-strings instead of buckles.

Republicans was to
Hence :-

"Roland the just, with ribbons in his shoes."-Anti-Jacobin.

by them, we find the assertion of all the civil and political rights which the Republicans afterwards boasted to have wrested from them, and in a far fuller and more perfect form than that in which the Revolution left them after its career of horrors. They had, in fact, left little or nothing to the invention of modern Liberals. They had laid down all the great principles of representative government: a national representation by election; the equal division of taxes among all citizens; the fixed and periodical assemblage of the States General, to which, with the sanction of the king, was reserved the right of legislation; the responsibility of ministers; the liberty and security of individuals; the inviolability of property; liberty of commerce, labour, and industry; liberty of the press; the abolition of lettres de cachet: all these things, and much more in the same spirit, were claimed by the nobility and clergy no less than by the Tiers Etat.

...

If well employed, these elements would have sufficed to found a free government in France like that of England. . . . The Revolution wrecked this great reform, which would have been so easily effected under a king like Louis XVI. ; its breath raised the tempest, the hand of the helmsman failed, and the vessel perished.

Unhappily, together with these enlightened and patriotic political views, too many of the higher as well as of the middle class had become deeply imbued with the soi-disant philosophy which Voltaire and other disciples of Bolingbroke had imported second-hand from England. The prevalent Anglomania was not only for round hats, high-trotting horses,* and constitutional governments, but for religious, or rather irreligious theories, which bore in reality as little resemblance to the then prevalent English Protestantism of Burke and George III. as the squalid sans culottism of Marat to the decent Whiggery of Somers.

The Count de Ségurt thus describes the opinions of the young French nobles, which he himself at the time shared :—

"A courtier," says Sir Walter Scott, in his 'Life of Napoleon," "deeply infected with the fashion of the time, was riding beside the king's carriage at a full trot, without observing that his horse's heels threw the mud into the royal vehicle. Vous me crottez, monsieur,' said the king. The horseman, considering the words were vous trottez, and that the prince complimented his equestrian performance, answered, 'Oui, Sire, à l'Anglaise." The good-humoured monarch drew up the glass, and only said to the gentleman in the carriage, Voilà une Anglomanie bien forte.' Alas! the unhappy prince lived to see the example of England, in her most dismal period, followed to a much more formidable extent.

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↑ He married a younger sister of the Duchess d'Ayen.

Impeded in this light career by the antiquated pride of the old Court, the irksome etiquette of the old order of things, the severity of the old clergy, the aversion of our parents to our new fashions and our costumes, which were favourable to the principles of equality, we felt disposed to adopt with enthusiasm the philosophical doctrines professed by literary men, remarkable for their boldness and their wit. Voltaire seduced our imagination; Rousseau touched our hearts; we felt a secret pleasure in seeing that their attacks were directed against an old fabric, which presented to us a Gothic and ridiculous appearance. We were thus pleased at this petty war, although it was undermining our own rank and privileges and the remains of our ancient power; but we felt not these attacks personally, we merely witnessed them. It was as yet but a war of words and paper, which did not appear to us to threaten the superiority of existence we enjoyed, consolidated as we thought it by a possession of many centuries. . . . We were pleased with the courage of liberty, whatever language it assumed, and with the convenience of equality. There is a satisfaction in descending from a high rank, as long as the resumption of it is thought to be free and unobstructed; and regardless, therefore, of consequences, we enjoyed our patrician advantages, together with the sweets of plebeian philosophy.

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It is evident, although rather implied than asserted by the dutiful children and grandchildren to whom we owe the memoirs before us, that the Duke d'Ayen, the head of the family of Noailles, had tasted of this poisoned chalice. He was an approved soldier and a brilliant man of the world, distinguished by a talent for conversation inherited from his grandfather, the old Maréchal de Noailles-science, literature, agriculture, philosophy, the business of the court and the camp, were alike familiar to him. He was, in fact, the very typical man of that gay and graceful French world of the eighteenth century, which was then fast drifting to so unlooked-for and tragical a conclusion. Like many others of his class, he possessed higher and nobler qualities than those which glittered on the surface. inflexible truthfulness and integrity he was not surpassed even by his pious and scrupulously conscientious wife. "The idea," says Madame de Lafayette, "of regulating life by principles of duty, abstracting from all self-interest, had been rendered so habitual to us, not only by my mother's instructions, but by her daily and hourly example, as well as by that of my father on the occasions, unhappily too rare, when we were able to study it closely, that the first instances which we met with of an opposite conduct in those who are commonly called honest people, excited a surprise which it took many years passed in the world to weaken." Yet, though deeply attached to her husband, and although on great occasions he never failed to manifest his affection and esteem for her, Madame d'Ayen

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The Duke lived

could scarcely be accounted a happy wife. little at home. "Perhaps," says her daughter, "my mother, in her early youth, had suffered the superiority of her mind to appear too plainly to be pleasing to a young man." (She was two years older than the Duke, who had married at sixteen.) Perhaps she had taken too little pains to please him; at least, she accused herself of having erred in this respect. It is certain that in the details of life she could never sufficiently overcome her natural indecision; and my father, attributing this to scrupulosity, took less pleasure in her society than would have been for his happiness and ours." This coldness on the part of her husband served, no doubt, to turn the full tide of her deep and strong affections upon her children, by whom it was devotedly and enthusiastically returned. " God had formed her before all things to be a mother." So wrote Madame de Lafayette, in the touching notice of her life, the writing of which beguiled the weary hours of captivity which she shared with her husband at Olmutz.* "We were," she continues, "the objects of the tenderest affection of her heart, and our training the first of her duties. To this lively impulse of the most motherly heart which God ever made, was joined the deeply-rooted intention to do the will of God, and to accomplish His work, so that she might be able one day to say to Him, after the example of our Lord, 'Of those whom Thou hast given to me I have lost none,' Everything was devoted to us; all her faculties were applied to our good and to our happiness; her solicitude and her foresight to turn aside everything which might injure us; her penetration to discern our characters, in order to direct each in the way most suited to it; the uprightness and strength of her mind to remove all frivolities from our education, and to accustom us, from our very childhood, to reason clearly and justly; her exceeding tenderness to cement our mutual union; and, lastly, her sweet eloquence, strengthened by her example, to teach us Christian virtue, with its principle, its aids, and its rewards."

The Duchess d'Ayen was the granddaughter of the celebrated Chancellor d'Aguesseau. Her mother having died a few days after her birth, she was sent at three years old to the Convent of the Visitation, at S. Denis, to be trained under the gentle yet firm discipline by which the daughters of S. Jane Frances de Chantal formed so many children of the nobility of France for a life of perfection, either in the world or in the cloister,—

* It was written with a toothpick and a morsel of Indian ink on the margin of a copy of Buffon; pen, ink, and paper, as well as knives and forks, being denied to the captives by the vigilance of the Austrian authorities,

a life which so many of her contemporaries consummated, like herself, on the scaffold.

From her earliest childhood (says Madame de Lafayette) my mother attached herself to the teaching of her holy instructresses with that uprightness and energy which were her distinctive characteristics, so that, with an uncertain, although superior mind, with a great physical and moral propensity to be disturbed and troubled under various circumstances, it was always manifest that this trouble and disquietude related only to the one object which pervaded her mind. "My heart," she might have said, "has never had any other fear than to offend against Thy law." Such, O my God, were the dispositions of my mother's heart, Thou didst form them within her, Thou hast crowned them, and that eternal justice which is none other than Thyself, now fills all the desires of her heart according to that promise of our Lord, "Blessed are they who hunger and thirst after justice, for they shall be filled."

At fourteen Mademoiselle d'Aguesseau left the convent for her father's house, which was ordered with almost conventual regularity, and at eighteen she was married to the Duke d'Ayen, who became afterwards, by the death of the Maréchal, his father, Duke de Noailles. The death of her first child, a boy, was followed by the successive births of five daughters. A son, as it may be easily supposed, was earnestly desired, to wear and transmit the honours of this almost princely house. The boon was at last granted, which seemed to fill up the only void in its prosperity. But the mother's heart trembled at the dangers which must beset her frail treasure in the world, and with the heroism of a martyr, she offered him without reserve to God. On Holy Thursday, when she returned from praying at the Sepulchre, she said to a friend: "I have just killed my son, and I am a little afraid for my daughters. If any of my children should fall ill, I shall be very much afraid. I have offered them all to God, that He may restore them all to me for eternity. I hope, however, that He will leave me my girls; but I think that He has accepted my boy, and that I shall not keep him long." So deep was this impression, that when the child fell sick of a lingering illness, she never indulged a moment's hope. When he was in his agony, as she held him clasped tightly in her arms, she said to him, from the very depths of her mother's heart,-"You have gained the victory; my child, nothing can now part us or separate us for eternity."

To the five daughters who remained, Madame d'Ayen devoted the remaining years of her life. Though they had other teachers, she herself superintended their education.

They came to her (says Madame de Montagu) the first thing in

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