says no, and demands damages for the calumny. No witnesses are called, and how the case ends it is impossible to tell, the only ascertained fact being that the husband was imprisoned in February and let out in July.

This M. Ravaisson will hardly think a case in which the Bastille was socially or morally useful. With the best intentions it seems to have failed, too, in the case of young Varin, son of the celebrated engraver. This hopeful youth had had some money left him in his own right by his mother; on the strength of which he seems to have taken every opportunity of thwarting his father. Not being studiously disposed, he was placed at the Royal Academy, a sort of old French Sandhurst, whence he was turned out, along with his half-brother, for bringing in girls disguised as students, Then he is sent as an attaché into Italy, where in eight months he runs through 9,000 livres and gets sent home in disgrace. His father wants to buy him a place about Court, but his bad character makes this impossible. So the army is next tried; and he is five or six months at Sedan, where he spends a great deal of money and gets into trouble about some bill transactions. Then comes the last resource; he is to be "smuggled into the Church." They send him to several colleges-from one he runs off in three days, "not liking to sit down in elass with children of twelve years old;" from another he steals out at night to a neighboring cabaret, leaving his soutane at a friend's house close by, and so scandalizes the good monks that they oblige his father to withdraw him. Monks' schools, "where they want you to kiss the ground and kneel for long hours together, and to do all the other ridiculous nonsense which they teach the poor lads who are being trained up for priests to go through," do not seem to suit young Varin. He has three months' Bastille. Whether it so far cured him that his father was able to 66 get him into the Church" after all, would be a curious question for those who feel how much the deplorable state of the Gallican church had to do with the violence of the French Revolution. Next comes the case of a bookseller, seized as he is coming back from Holland, where most

NEW SERIES-VOL. VI. No. 1.

French books with any independence of thought were beginning to be published: he is accused of distributing Jansenist tracts. The governor, who examines him, assures Chancellor Seignelay that he is innocent; but significantly adds, "the influence of his enemies is stronger than his innocence."

This was in 1661. Two years before this the Marquis l'Hospital has ten days' imprisonment for the sole purpose of keeping him out of the way of justice. This feudal tyrant owed his immunity to his being the cousin of the Marshal de l'Hospital. Down on his estates he played the oppressor so outrageously that a parish priest mentioned him in his sermon. Whereupon my lord took a couple of his pages, waylaid the priest, who was walking home along the high road with one of his parishioners, killed the poor man who was escorting him, and gave his reverence wounds enough to have killed half a dozen men. The poor priest falls on his knees and begins recommending his soul to God. "Oh, you'll pray, will you (says the ruffian)? I'll show you how your prayers are answered," and he breaks his victim's jaw with the butt end of a musket. Finally he rides him down, and gives him, as a coup de grâce, a thrust through the ribs with his sword. Wonderful to tell, the priest recovers, brings his action, and gets the support of his order all through France. The Marquis is tried before several parliaments, and, by all, is condemned to death. But the Marshal, who had won favor as one of the murderers of Concino Concini, was powerful enough to get the sentence remitted. The Parliament of Paris, however, made such a stand against the injustice, that the Marquis was put into the Bastille in order that he might be out of the jurisdiction of the ordinary courts of law. While there he begs for and obtains "letters of abolition," a form of royal pardon which the king at his coronation had sworn never to exercise "in cases of duel, rape, or crimes against the clergy." It is satisfactory to find that, even in 1659, public opinion was strong enough to prevent the king from letting the pardoned Marquis go immediately at large. His "order of release" is dated 9th July; but he is simply transferred from the Bastille to Fort l'Evêque, out

5

of which he and his pages escape one dark night in October-the Marquis breaking his leg in getting down-and are driven off by friends waiting outside

"Dans une chaise de sureté,

En quelque lieu de qualité,"

as the old rhyming Gazette of the time tells

us.

Characteristic is the case of Forcoal, clerk of the council and king's secretary. His father had farmed the épices (judges' extra fees) for the Chambre des Comptes. He died owing them 72,000 livres. Of course the proper way would have been to sue his assigns before the Parliament, but the Chamber preferred taking the law into its own hands, and put Forcoal into their "coal-hole," 66 a low room (says Privy Councillor Poncet) where his health must soon suffer." The king interferes. The Chambre de l'Edit, another of these little courts, composed of equal numbers of Romanist and Protestant judges, transfers him to the Conciergerie (the Forcoals were Protestants); the scene is a curious one, in which the Sieur Carnavalet, lieutenant of the guard, truncheon in hand, comes in before the Chamber, and, after two low bows, demands the body of Forcoal. Finally the man has three months' Bastille, to keep him out of the way while he is arranging his affairs.

Now, will M. Ravaisson seriously as sert that in any of these cases the good done is at all sufficient to make up for the lawlessness of the procedure, and the danger of putting such a power in the hands of the Government? The case of poor Mademoiselle de Vezilli, who, maddened by the loss of her lawsuits and by the ill-treatment she received from her brothers, waits for the judges as they come out of court, and flies at the President de Mesme, tearing his beard and scratching his face, and crying out, "You unjust judge," makes more in our author's favor. It was well that the poor creature should be shut up out of harm's way. At this Conciergerie she had refused to eat, and remained obstinately silent during divers examinations, saying she would plead before no one, save the king. She is probably taken good care of in the Bastille, for Louis writes from Fontainebleau ordering a waiting-maid to be

found for her during her illness. But, if this is a fair case for royal interference, why should a government which had so much to do in and out of France take cognizance of every case of slander? Why imprison, for instance, one Lesmoal, for asserting that he had, down in Brittany, married the Marchioness of Kerman, who had since come before the world as wife of the Marquis of Montgaillard? The fact is, Louis XIV.'s despotism aimed at too much. Strictly paternal as far as the nobility was concerned-for the "canaille" was left pretty much to itself, provided it paid its duesit erred, as according to English notions Continental governments so very generally err, by making no distinction between really important things and absolute trifles. One can fancy that Mazarin and Loménie and Le Tellier might have found fitter work in 1659 than getting evidence about a pretended marriage, and imprisoning poor fellows who "wrote news letters" to gain a livelihood. Wicquefort, son of an Amsterdam merchant, and resident envoy of the Elector of Brandenburg, is naturally enough impounded by Mazarin, when it is found that he has been telling his master all about the goings on of Louis XIV. and the Cardinal's niece, Mancini. But Mazarin bears no malice; and Wicquefort, sent across the frontier after a three days' imprisonment, still holds a French pension, and lives to disgrace himself by selling Dutch state-secrets to the English ambassador. Miscellaneous, indeed, is the group of prisoners to whom M. Ravaisson introduces us. Forgers; "fast" younger brothers kept out of mischief till their friends can get them sent to sea; an ambassador who has talked a little too freely to the Portuguese, and who must be put in honorable confinement to satisfy the Spaniards, for whose sake also a captain of marines gets two months for an epigram on the ambassador Don Luis de Haro; Irishmen recruiting for the Portuguese army; rebels against the salt tax; aggrieved relations who seize the property of a priest who has willed it all to the Church; a Chevalier de Clermont, knight of Malta and captain of a galley, who helps his scapegrace friend, the disinherited Marquis Arpajon, to take and plunder one of his father's castles-such

times make a mock procession with a broome for cross, and a bucket for holywater vessel, and has sung the De Profundis over a boon companion who pretended to be dead. "In fact (adds the Cardinal) most of the sixty prisoners now in the Bastille live like devils amid oaths and blasphemies of all kinds." Surely such a miserable state of things hardly carries out M. Ravaisson's opinion that the Bastille was a useful State engine. To us it seems to have been a sort of "domestic institution," the "corner" into which the paternal despot put his naughty boys. Very remarkable is the mild way in which almost every one is treated; we can, out of all our author's cases, only recall one who is put to death, and this is a Norman noble, De Bonnesson, imprisoned, with several others for plotting to help Condé.

:

By and bye, we fancy, this mildness was exchanged for severity, just as instead of a man being simply banished for performing a travestie of the baptismal service over a pig (p. 173), he would probably a century later have been broken on the wheel for such impiety. Anyhow, we do not think M. Ravaisson has made out his case as yet. He may do so in the volumes which are to follow this but at present we can only look on his attempt to raise the Bastille in public estimation as one of the wildest paradoxes of this paradox-loving age. For all that, we think his estimate of Louis le Grand a very fair one. "Louis (said Mazarin) has in him the makings of four kings and of one honest man into the bargain." He would have been a great king anywhere; specially is he so in France, than which no nation has suffered more from miserable faniéans, to whom a king who worked daily eight hours in his study was a wonderful contrast. Just as the weakness following the Wars of the Roses gave absolute power to Henry VII., so the decimation of the nobles by Richelieu, and the strange way in which the magistracy sank during the Fronde, left Louis in a condition to say, "L'état c'est moi." He was a useful despot, and M. Ravaisson is justified in saying of him that "en cherchant à moraliser un pays, il avait policé toute l'Europe." It has not been sufficiently noticed how his ordonnances are the basis of the

present French Code, which so many of us speak of as if it came brand-new from the brain of Napoleon. "Louis' grand fault," says M. Ravaisson, "was that he fancied that he might now and then transgress the good laws which he himself had laid down."

We have said most about M. Ravaisson's book, because, though it will undoubtedly take high rank as a book of reference in all historical libraries, it is not a work which the general reader is likely to buy. Mr. Bridges' lectures, on the contrary, ought to be in everybody's hands. They contain a clear view of the formation of the French monarchy, pointing out the grand distinction that, whereas with us the boroughs went with the aristocracy, in France they sided with the king. They give a life-like portrait, sketched with a loving hand, of Richelieu, whom Mr. Bridges successfully defends against the charges so constantly repeated against him. They enable us to tread our way through the tangle of the Fronde, that temporary league between the aristocracy and the middle class; and they show us how great a man Colbert was, and how far in advance of the other statesmen of his day. Much as we differ from Mr. Bridges in some of his conclusions, we are glad that he brings out clearly the indefensible character of our "commercial wars," which, beginning with the buccaneering of Queen Elizabeth, went on to the French Revolution, and have unhappily since been too often repeated in the far East. Herein we have, sad to say, set an example which other nations have been only too ready to follow. The French outrage in Corea is the latest instance of this agressive policy. Mr. Bridges silences, too, the silly talk dealt in by those who have kicked away the ladder of protection now that it can no longer serve their turn, to the effect that "State help never having founded any permanent industry." The silk manufacture in France, solely due to Colbert, is an instance to the contrary. Further, we are grateful to him for pointing out that the French peasant, amid all his poverty, ground down as he was by taxation, never became the political nonentity, the mere animated machine, which the English laborer is. As for M. Clément's book,

it should be read by all who want to know something more than mere historic details of the reign of the grand Monarque. It is a good companion to the memoirs which make the French history of this period such a fascinating study. The police became under Louis XIV. quite a State business. Society was still restless, working with half-checked excitement; the old order was gone for ever, and an intermediate time of licence had left men unwilling to submit to rules. Everything had to be reorganized. M. Clément looks on the struggle between Colbert and Fouquet as the last battle between feudalism with its absurd pretensions and the new regime. One-half of the taxes got into the treasury; one of Fouquet's clerks was proved to have saved more than four million francs in less than two years. No one can find fault with Louis XIV. for strengthening his hands against rebellious and traitorous nobles, and plundering finance ministers, by the use of the Bastille. The sad time in his reign is when the feudal reaction sets in, accompanied with the religious bigotry of the Maintenon party. This was a time, too, of disaster abroad, and of famine and misery at home. How did the Bastille work then ? M. Ravaisson will enable us to judge in some of his future volumes; but, meanwhile, we must remark that the cloud which hangs over the closing years of Louis XIV.'s reign shows plainly enough how unsatisfactory a thing despotism is, even when it has such a "useful State engine" as the Bastille to second it.

THE BENGAL FAMINE OF 1866.*

During the first week of June the people began anxiously to look out for the rains. Before the second week expired the suspense had become insupportable, for the next ten days would decide whether the stricken districts were to reap a harvest in September, or whether they would have to suffer on till the end of the year. Morning after morning the sun blazed forth from the unclouded east;

*Continued from p. 759 of the last volume.

the earth became as one great brick field; the blood of goats streamed in vain from the altars, and rumors of more terrible sacrifices spread in undertones from ear to ear. The western highlanders still maintain, that if the gods take any delight in sacrifice, the oblation of a man's life is the one most likely to procure their favor. A tribe, consisting of industrious and inoffensive subjects of the Crown, when questioned as to its practice, would only answer, "How can we poor creatures afford such offerings? Where is a man to be bought cheap in these days?" It was now whispered that dark deeds had been done in the forest, and that the Great Mountain, the national god of the highlanders, would in due time send rain. Nor had the altars of the highly civilized Hindus escaped the taint of human blood. During the progress of the famine suspicions attached to more than one shrine, and the Press narrated how, in an important provincial capital within a short journey of the metropolis, the police had burst into a temple, only in time to find a ghastly head and a pool of blood in front of the idol. Many devout Hindus, indeed, believed that all such sacrifices would prove ineffectual. The signs of the times answered to those which their prophetical books foretold would precede the destruction of the world, and the appointed order of things was not to be so stayed. A venerable gentleman, who, after a life of faithful service to our Government, had attained the position of senior native magistrate in the district of Beerbhoom, labored to convince the writer of the soundness of these views. He was a Brahman of the highest class, and came to the task armed with the learning of his order. Texts from the canonical books were brought forward to prove that the epidemic which had raged during several years in Lower Bengal, that the cyclone and tidal wave, which, in the autumn of 1864, had swept over the sea-board villages, and that the present famine formed a series of divine warnings that the end of the Kalpa was at hand. Nor did the events of the natural world speak alone. Society had reached the stage which had been foretold as the final one in the existing order

* No instance of cannibalism, however, or of any approach to cannibalism, was brought to light.