The Curieux relates a trait of enthusiasm | correct the stiffness of his paternal alleys on the part of a milord which we suspect and flower-beds. Then, in 1774, came Marie will prove new to his countrymen. A Antoinette, who, under the direction of Scotch earl, Lord Fife, gave Madame Ves- Bernard de Jussieu and a clever gardener, tris a thousand guineas to allow a cast to be converted Trianon into a charming parterre, taken of her leg, which was superb. The where the system of the English painter, earl died, and this cherished leg was sold for William Kent, and his rival, Browne (the half-a-crown! The moral reflection is con-inventor Du Fresnoy was altogether forgotveyed in a line from Lamartine:

'J'ai pesé dans ma main la cendre des héros.'

This leg should have been sent to the fair at Leipsic along with Kant's wig. The Germans are, or were, the people for answering to an extraordinary call on sensibility or sentiment. When Sontag was in the height of her celebrity at Berlin, a party of her military admirers bribed her maid to give them one of her cast-off slippers, had it set as a cup, and toasted her in it till it was worn out. There is another story that a party of students rushed into her hotel whilst her carriage was driving off, and made prey of a wine-glass not quite empty, out of which she had just been drinking, This was put up to auction on the spot, and fetched seventeen dollars. A pair of shoes has been preserved with extravagantly high heels painted by Watteau to represent a flock or sheepfold (bergerie) of Loves. The Duchess de Berry had a shoe that once belonged to Louis XIV., of dark velvet, embroidered with fleurs-de-lis, and adorned with a battlepiece painted by Parrocel.

Puisque nous causons, let us pause a little to speak of the history of the flowers that Marie Antoinette loved so well, that she so largey contributed to multiply and embellish.' We wilingly pause to record the plausible claim put in for the invention of what is commonly called the English system of gardening, by a Frenchman, in the time of Louis Quatorze. It was the poet Du Fresnoy, we are assured, who first ventured on substituting the picturesque variety of the landscape-painter for the rectilinear style of the architects, and was made comptroller of the royal gardens in recognition of his merit. But nature and simplicity were sadly out of keeping with the artificial grandeur of Versailles. The genius of Du Fresnoy was chilled or rebuked by his royal patron, and the reform planned by him stopped short. His system returned to us,' says the Curieux, in the following age, with the British stamp on it, as so many products of French imagination return to us.' Girardin created Ermenonville; M. Boutin, Tivoli; M. de la Borde, Mereville; the poet-painter Watelet, MoulinJoli. The Prince de Ligne did his best to

ten) was more followed than the severe harmony of Le Nostre and De la Quintenie.

Kent died in 1748; and Browne achieved his highest distinction by laying out the grounds of Blenheim, where he committed a solecism which elicited a cutting sarcasm on his illustrious employer, the great Duke of Marlborough. A magnificent bridge over a streamlet provoked the epigram:

'The lofty arch his high ambition shows,
The stream an emblem of his bounty flows.'

Our neighbours were in no hurry to reclaim their property in the invention, if it can be so termed; and we suspect that the resumption simply formed part of the Anglomania that came over them about the time when Marie Antoinette began amusing herself with the creation of Le Petit Trianon. Her fondness for flowers led to one of those revolutions in headdresses of which specimens may be multiplied to weariness. When flowers got common, the court ladies took first to fruit, and afterwards to vegetables. Chaplets of artificial radishes and carrots were in vogue. Madame de Matignon appeared one day, à la jardinière, in a headdress of brown linen striped with blue, ornamented by the artist hand of Léonard with a head of brocoli and an artichoke.

The bare list of collections visited by the Curieux would fill many pages. But his master-passion is for autographs; and he is constantly digressing to expatiate on their value and their charm; on the best methods of utilising, and the sacred duty of preserving them. Indeed, he is a veritable Chinese in his reverence for written paper; and he would cordially assent to the second branch of the rouè maxim, Write not, Burn not, without regarding, probably without suspecting, the consummate profligacy that lurked in it. Yet in his highly interesting dissertation on the Cassette aux Poulets of Fouquet, he incidentally demonstrates the imprudence, to use no stronger term, of giving a permanent form to any shade of forbidden feeling, or any passing burst of irritability, disappointment, or caprice. The one may make an enemy or unmake a friend; the other may destroy a reputation.

Trifles light as air, once committed to paper, which she was held by the Court and her have often led to complications in which private marriage to the King. There is no peace, fortune, and happiness have been hatred like religious hatred, and this very wrecked. marriage became a fresh topic for calumny in the hands of those who had suffered from the persecutions encouraged by her bigotry. 'In 1835, at the French Hospital in London,' says the Curieux, I found, in the possession of an old female inmate, an English libel against Madame de Maintenon, entitled, The French King's Wedding, or the Royal Frolic; being a pleasant account of the intrigues, comical courtship, catterwauling and surprising marriage ceremonies of Louis XIV. with Madame de Maintenon, with a Comical Song, sung to His Majesty: 1708. The old Protestant obstinately refused to cede me the book, which she read and re-read with pleasure, although she found difficulty in understanding it.'

Fouquet, the prince of financiers, was not less renowned for gallantry than for liberality and wealth. His downfall was owing to his indiscreet rivalry with his royal master both in magnificence and love. The first step after his arrest was the seizure of his papers, including the casket in which he kept those notes and letters of female friends and applicants which pass under the denomination of poulets. The opening of this casket was dreaded like that of another Pandora's box, without Hope at the bottom. What varied evils, what scandalous disclosures, what revelation of broken fortunes and fallen or falling virtue, might come forth! The King himself opened the casket, and its contents were read by only two Another lady whom the Curieux deems persons besides himself, the Queen and Tel- unjustly calumniated was the Marquise da lier (the royal confessor). All sorts of sto- Plessis-Bellière, accused of having assisted ries were afloat, and Madame de Molteville Fouquet in his designs on Madame de la remarks that few persons about the Court Vallière on the strength of what is termed were exempt from the charge of having a hideous apocryphal letter amongst the sacrificed to the golden calf; that the fable papers of Conrart. The Marquise was a of Danae was fully borne out, and that, friend of Fouquet and rendered him imporsince, by extraordinary ill-luck, Fouquet tant political services, whether she was paid kept all the letters addressed to him, things for them or not. The reputation of another were read which did great harm to very great lady, the Princess of Monaco (née de many persons. Rumour and malice added, Grammont), who was also compromised by coloured, or invented. A pretended letter the correspondence, is abandoned as not from Madame Scarron (afterwards Madame worth defending; and in this instance at de Maintenon), was handed about, contain- least a sound discretion has been exercised. ing this passage: Leaving her husband to the solitary enjoyment of his miniature sovereignty, she lived a gay life at the French Court, where she was renowned for the rapid succession of her lovers, every one of whom was regularly hung in effigy by the Prince in the avenue of his palace at Monaco, with a label round the neck. The number became startling; strangers came from far and near to admire the spectacle; and the circumstance at length came to the ears of the Grand Monarque. He tried at first to interfere with a high hand, but finding his threats vain, and the scandal on the increase, he was fain to conciliate the Prince by a promise that a strict guard should henceforth be kept on the Princess; whereupon the effigies were removed.

'J'ai toujours fuy le vice, et naturellement je hais le péché; mais je vous avoue que je hais encore davantage la pauvreté. J'ai reçu de vous dix mille écus; si vous voulez encore en apporter dix mille dans deux jours, je verrai ce que j'aurai à faire.'

Another version of the letter commences differently, and ends: Je ne vous deffends pas d'esperer.' The Curieux indignantly denounces this letter as a fabrication, and justifies his incredulity by a passage in the Souvenirs of Madame de Caylas: I remember to have heard that Madame Scarron, being one day obliged to go to speak to M. Fouquet, she thought fit to go so negligently dressed that her friends were ashamed to take her there. Everybody knows what M. Fouquet was, and his weakness for women, and how the vainest and the best placed sought to please him.' The uncharitable might put an opposite interpretation on this neglected dress; and the best defence for Madame Scarron is the continued respect in

Another letter to Fouquet, which no virtuous woman could have written, endorsed Lettre d'une Inconnue by Conrart, was by turns attributed to Madame Scarron and Madame de Sévigné in the Memoires sur la Bastille, and finally given to Madame de Sévigné by the rest of the scandalous chronicles in circulation. Her known and

avowed letters go far to refute the calumny. | his collection of autographs; and he insists With him' (Fouquet), she writes to Bussy, on throwing the entire responsibility of the 'I have always the same precautions and revocation of the Edict of Nantes and other and the same fears, which notably retard arbitrary measures suggested or sanctioned the progress he would willingly make. I by Madame de Maintenon, on the King. The believe he will be tired at last of always ingrained absolutism and egotism of Louis recommencing uselessly the same thing.' XIV., he contends, were at their acme The following passage is copied verbatim from his earliest years. In the public et literatim from an autograph letter of hers library of St. Petersburgh, under the glass to Ménage in the possession of the Cu- covering of a collection of autographs, may be seen one of the copybooks in which his Majesty practised writing as a child. Instead of Evil communications corrupt good manners,' or 'Virtue is its own reward,' the copy set for him was this: Les rois font tout ce qu'ils veulent."

rieux :

.

་

'Je vous remercie, mon cher monsieur, de toutes vos nouuelles. Il y en a deux ou trois dans vostre lettre que ie ne sauois point. Pour celles de M. Fouquet, ie nentends parler dautre chose. Je pense que vous saues bien le deplesir The best mode that could be hit upon for que iny eü davoir esté trouuée dans le nombre de celles qui luy ont escrit. Il est vray que ce teaching history to Louis XV. was that nestait ny la galanterie, ni linterest que mauoient recommended by St. Simon to Fleury, the obligée davoir vn commerce avec luy. Lon royal preceptor, afterwards cardinal and voit clairement que ce nestait que pour les minister. It was to hang a gallery with affaires de M. de la Trousse; mais cela nem- historical portraits and sketches, to make pesche pas que ie nave esté fort touchée de voir this the place of reception for the children quil les avoit mises dans la cassette de ses pou- of the nobility who came to pay their lets, et de me voir nommée parmy celles qui respects to their young sovereign, to have nont pas eu des sentimens si purs que moy. them tutored beforehand and accompanied Dans cette occasion iay besoin que mes amis instruisent ceux qui ne le sont pas. Je vous croy by preceptors, who were to lead the conasses genereux pour vouloir en dire ce que M.versation to prominent events or characters, de la Fayette vous en aprendra, et iay receu and so draw him on to make inquiries and tant dautres marques de vostre amitié que je ne pick up information. fais nulle facon de vous coniurer de me donner encore celle-cy.'

Bussy-Rabutin who, like Fouquet, had failed to touch his charming cousin's heart, quarrelled with her, and took an ungenerous revenge in his Histoire Amoureuse des Gaules. But he soon grew ashamed of his conduct, and did his best to compensate for the wrong by (to use his own language) 'siding with her loudly against the people who sought to confound her with the mistresses of the minister.' To be well-armed for the campaign, he saw Tellier, and was assured by him that the letters of Madame de Sévigné were the letters of a friend who had a great deal of wit, and that they had amused the King more than the insipid tenderness of the other letters, but that the surintendant had mal apropos mixed love with friendship.' Tellier. it is justly added, was not the man to palliate evil if there was any, for it was he of whom the Comte Grammont said, on seeing him go out from a private conference with the King, He looks like a polecat that has just been killing chickens and is licking his blood-stained

muzzle.'

Both Madame de Sévigné and Madame de Maintenon are in high favour with the Curieux, having both contributed largely to

More than half (300 pages) of the third volume of the Causeries is devoted to Montaigne, who is held in high favour, despite of two peculiarities which might have been expected to lower him in the opinion of a collector of autographs. He was an infrequent and careless correspondent, and he expressed a thorough contempt for all who wrote letters with a view to publication or literary fame. He excepts none, not even Cicero and Pliny the Younger, of whom he says::

'This surpasses all meanness of heart in persons of their rank, to have wished to derive glory from egotism and prattle, to the point of employing for this purpose their private letters to their friends; so that, some having missed the time for being sent, they have notwithstanding published them with this worthy excuse that they were unwilling to lose their pains. Does it become two Roman consuls, sovereign magistrates of the imperial State of the world, to occupy their leisure in arranging and dressing up a fine missive, to draw from it the reputation of understanding well the language of their nurse? What could a schoolmaster, who gained his livelihood by it, do worse?"

What would Montaigne have said had he lived to be told of the miserable subterfuge of Pope, who surreptitiously caused his let

The increased facility of communication has encouraged brevity and haste; we dash off a dozen letters in an hour instead of devoting half a morning to the production of one; and literary people are more remarkable than others for carelessness in this respect, probably on the principle avowed by Madame de Stäel: Since I have aimed openly at celebrity by my books, I have left off paying any attention to my letters.'

ters to be published, and then denounced the | brated Frenchwoman to her husband is a publication as a theft; or of the anxious model of conciseness. Je commence, parce care taken by Horace Walpole to transmit que je n'ai rien à faire: je finis, parce que je corrected copies of epistolary gossip to pos- n'ai rien à dire.' — T. A. V. terity? Be their motives what they might, we are indebted to them for compositions which the world would not willingly let die. Throwing over Pliny, somewhat unceremoniously and unnecessarily, M. Feuillet de Conches takes up the cudgels for Cicero, who, he vows, did not write his letters to his familiars - ad familiares for any eyes but theirs; and the proof is that when Atticus applied to him for copies, with a view to a complete collection, he had none. Montaigne, too, it is retorted, printed some of his own letters; and his mode of speaking of them and his method of epistolary composition, are strongly marked by self-complacency:

'On this subject of letters, I wish to say this one word, that it is a work in which my friends hold that I am capable of something; and I should more willingly have chosen this form of publishing my whims, had I had anyone to address (si j'eusse eu à qui parler). I needed, what I have had at other times, a certain commerce that attracted, sustained, and excited me. If all the paper was in existence that I have ever blotted for the ladies, when my hand was truly carried away by my passion, there would haply be found some page worthy to be communicated to idie youth misled by this madness.'

After saying that he writes very fast, and very badly, trusting to the indulgence of the great personages with whom he corresponds to excuse blots and erasures, he continues: :

The letters which cost me most are those that are worth least; from the moment that I flag, it is a sign that I am no longer in the veins I readily begin without plan; the first sometimes produces the second.

'As I had rather compose two letters than close and fold one, I always resign this duty to another; so that, when the substance is finished, I would willingly charge some one with the duty of adjusting those long harangues, offers, and prayers, that we place at the end, and wish that some, new custom would deliver us from them.'

6

The literary public are indebted to M. Feuillet de Conches for a valuable collection of letters in which the place of honour is assigned to Montaigne; and his familiarity with the style and hand-writing of this, the quaintest and most original of essayists, led to his being called in to decide an amusing and instructive controversy. An autograph letter of Montaigne belonging to the Countess Boni de Castellain was put up to auction in 1834, and the agent of M. de Pixérécourt, having received an unlimited commission, gave 700 francs for it to the extreme disgust of his employer; who, on the chance of getting rid of his bargain, started what at first sounded like a plausible objection to its authenticity. The autograph was a Report, dated February befell the writer and his party in an en16, 1588, to Maréchal de Matignon of what counter with a troop of Leaguers, and contains this sentence: Nous n'osions cependant passer outre pour l'incertitude de la sûreté de nos persones, de quoi nous devions estre esclercis sur doubt arose from the word passepors, which, nos passepors. The it was contended, was more modern. reply was that, besides being used in another letter of Montaigne's and in one from the Cardinal de Lorraine of anterior date, it actually occurs eight times in the Ordonnance d'Institution des Postes framed under Louis XI. in 1464. An autograph, however, like Cæsar's wife, cannot endure suspicion: to be once discredited is enough; and the letter which cost 700 francs was subsequently thought dear at thirty. The word passport, Shakspeare in Henry V.'s speech before the it may be remembered, is introduced by battle of Agincourt: Let him depart: his passport shall be made.' But it from The Sentimental Journey,' published

His wish has been granted, and our formal conclusions are now speedily dispatched. His habit of beginning without a plan recalls Rousseau's beau idéal of a loveletter, which (he maintains) should be began without the writer knowing what he is going to say, and end without his knowing what he has said. The letter of a cele-toire du Seizième Siècle.

The

appears

*Lettres Inédites de Michel de Montaigne et de quelques autres Personnages pour servir à l'His