The Prince de Ligne. His memoirs, letters, and miscellaneous papers

Front matter

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Contents

INTRODUCTION, By C.-A. SAINTE-BEUVE. . . . . . . . 1 TRANSLATOR’s NOTE . . . . + . ee ew ew . . . 835 PREFACE TO EpItTION oF 1809, By MADAME DE STAËL-

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MEMOIR, LETTERS, AND MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS.

CHAPTER I. Francis I, EMPEROR of GERMANY . . «© . 0 ee we . In the Imperial gallery, Vienna

IL THE PRINCE DE LIGNE. . . . . . . ee ee ew . .

By Au. La Berge; from the edition of the Prince’s works published in 1860.

IV. Marra THERESA, EMPRESS OF AUSTRIA . . . . © ee e In the Royal gallery, Munich.

IV. Mme. GEOFFRIN . . ee hw By Chardin (Jean-Baptiste-Siméon); in the Trocadéro.

V. Jean-Jacques Rousseau. . . «1 1 0 ee ew ew By Latour; in the Palais-Bourbon.

VI. VOLTAIRE, Fraxçois-Marre AROUET, CALLED . « « «+ + By Tournières (Robert Le Vrac); in the Museum of Rouen.

VIL. FREDERICK THE GREAT, KING or Prussta . . . , + « © By Camphausen; in the Berlin gallery.

Paez 13 vi LIST OF PHOTOGRAVURE ILLUSTRATIONS,

CHAPTER VIII. MARIE-ANTOINETTE, QUEEN OF FRANCE ..... By Mme. Vigée-Lebrun (Elisabeth-Louise); at Versailles.

VIII. Parxrere “Écazrré” Duc D'ORLÉANS . . . . . By Regnault (Jean-Baptiste, Baron); in the Trocadéro.

X. La Fontaine... . , ir ais

By Rigaud (Elyacinthe)y à in possession mn M. “Ie Vicomte Héricart de Thury, Château de Thury.

XI. BELŒIL, THE GARDENS. . . . dorer ss From a photograph given by the Prince de ines

XIL Lovurs XVI. Kine or Franck. . . . He te By Duplessis (Joseph Silfrède); in the Trocadéro,

Introduction

By C.-A. SAINTE-BEUVE:

More than once writers have drawn upon the Prince de Ligne’s collection of his Works in thirty-four volumes, rather fantastically entitled by him “ Mélanges militaires, littéraires, et sentimentaires ” (1795-1808) in order to make extracts, either in two volumes or in five, under the title of “Selected Works” or “Memoirs and Miscellanies.” Mme. de Staél, in the lifetime of the prince, made a volume of his “ Letters and Thoughts.” After reading one or other of these abridged collections we have in our minds a very vivid and lifelike Prince de Ligne. The more he is allowed to speak for himself the better that likeness is defined; moreover, it seems as if, in relation to him, all forms of brilliant eulogy have been exhausted. If his “Memoirs” should some day appear in full the whole will be said, or rather, said over again, for we shall then have a full-length portrait of him in all its freshness. Time can only add to the value of certain details which belong to the manners and morals of a vanished society. “I should not write thus if I were to be read at once,” says the Prince de Ligne at the end of one of his narratives ; “but a hundred years hence these little things, which now seem nothings, will give pleasure. I judge so by that which I derive from the ‘ Souvenirs of Mme. de Caylus, the ‘Memoirs’ of the mother of the Regent, those of Saint-Simon [at the time when this was

1 From the “Causeries du Lundi,” June, 1863. VOL. 1.—1 written the latter were known only by fragments], and fifty other writers of anecdotes of the Court of France of those times.”

Without pretending to forestall the final idea of him which he will leave after his Memoirs have been wholly published, I wish to say a few words here of the Prince de Ligne as of one who has written much, and, without precisely treating him as an author, to make use of what he has himself put in print, in order to offer a few remarks on the man and on his period.

Born in Belgium, May 12, 1735, of the illustrious family whom we all know, he does not like to tell his exact age; he says that his baptismal record has been lost. He would fain be, as he was in fact, the man “ who is never more than twenty.” He diverts us with an account of his tutors, who are more or less incapable or vicious, and he speaks in a singular tone of his father. “My father never liked me; I do not know why, for we never knew each other. But it was not the fashion at that time to be a good father, or a good husband. My mother was very much afraid of him; she was brought to bed of me attired in a great farthingale.” In the days of this haughty and stern parent it was customary for fathers to be feared. But if manners had then an antiquated stiffness, by the time the prince wrote these flippant lines fashions had changed, the old manners had suddenly relaxed; from respect they had dropped to impertinence; all things were treated with a jest. Still, one could wish that the amiable prince were less ready to trifle with those sentiments of nature and family which he was so well fitted to feel. He gayly quotes a correspondence that he had with his father on the day he was appointed colonel of the regiment that bore the family name and of which his father was proprietary colonel: “ Monseigneur, I have the honour to inform your Highness that I have just been appointed colonel of your regiment. I am, with profound respect, etc.” The answer was not long in coming: “Monsieur, after the misfortune of having you for a son, nothing could more keenly affect me than the misfortune of having you for colonel. Receive, etc.”

But the lively scoffer who does the honours of his father thus, tells us elsewhere, in doing justice to his high qualities: “He had great elevation of soul; he was as proud within as he was without.” On the last occasion when he saw his father, the latter, who was then ill, said, when charging him with certain matters: “After all, they concern you more than they do me, because—” That “because,” he confesses, which expressed the certainty of an approaching end, made him burst into tears.

The Prince de Ligne had a son whom he loved tenderly, whose comrade and friend he was, leading him under fire the moment the occasion offered; the death of this son, in the first war of the Revolution, broke his heart. He had more natural feeling than he likes to admit. If, in the feudal and seigniorial rigidity of the preceding generation there still remained an excess of the ancient customs, it will be seen, by the way the prince speaks of them, that in him there was an opposite excess, an airy tone of the world and an affectation of unrestraint, which presupposes a certain manner and style.

This was, in fact, the defect of his early years. It was the first bend that he thought proper to give himself in order to please. As a young man he had no other religion than that of pleasing, and that (which ruled him above all) of glory and military honour. When he was only fifteen he wrote a little “Treatise on the Profession of Arms.” This liking for arms was something more in the young Prince de

Ligne than the shining instinct of valour. Subsequently he wrote much on«war, he studied and meditated all parts of the subject, he analyzed the actions and the merits of the great. captains of former wars and the generals of his own time. I do not know what the men of his profession think of him, but the Duke of Wellington is said to have esteemed his military works. Independently of the special knowledge of which he gives proof, and of the actual ameliorations which he proposed in his day, I see in what he writes that which makes the soul of the noble profession of a soldier, — the alliance of abnegation with a glorious emulation. “We perform services,” he said, “ we endure hardships, we receive praise.” He makes an apostrophe to “ Beginners in war” which breathes the sacred fire. But while he gives those electrifying counsels, he speaks in a tone that is not less generous or less comforting to men who have failed to make their way although they deserved to do so; to those who are dissatisfied, who complain of the service and whom a slight affront might drive into renouncing it. It is the reverse of the medal, but on that side also he points to Honour.

«A wrong, an injustice, or too little justice and favour,” he says, “may sometimes make you regret that you have sacrificed your days to your country. Ah! never blame yourself for that. The respect of the Army consoles and avenges us for the foolish distribution of favours. Remember the caressing, yet respectful air of those you have led to victory; remind yourself of what you have heard them say of you in their tents, or in their bivouacs on the battle-field. In what other profession, despite its drawbacks and the caprices of fortune, can a man be more respected? An old sub-lieutenant commands more respect than a minister of State; his company trembles when he appears. No one stands aside for a great lord, but the soldier who meets an officer in the street stops and salutes. Never, never quit the noblest of careers.”

We have seen in Vauvenargues a most distinguished soldier and philosopher, who felt the glory of arms and renounced them with regret. The Prince de Ligne said of him: “ Vauvenargues is too sad for a man of war; he sees things too gloomily.” In this he supposes wilfulness on the part of Vauvenargues, whereas it was really melancholy, acting on a serious nature and constant ill-health. The prince himself carried to war a jaunty, animated air, that heightened his valour and gave it a species of grace.

We have his “ Journal of the Seven Years’ War,” of which he made all the campaigns in the service of Austria; a journal, he says, “that was written more on horseback than otherwise.” In this war he was, successively, captain, lieutenant-colonel, and then colonel in the Wallon regiment which bore his name and belonged to his father! On the 17th of May, 1757, he saw an advanced post for the first time and heard the first balls whistle. “I was happy as a king,” he writes. His impatience cannot away at any time with the methodical slowness of Maréchal Daun. After each success they chant Te Deums, which lose much time. They let the enemy retire in good order after gaining advantages. “It might have been difficult to damage them,” he remarks, “but the truth is we were not damaging.” In a first affair, where the object was to occupy the crest of a height, he arrives with his company at the same time as the enemy. “We had a moment of flux and reflux, like the pit at the opera.” This image comes naturally to him, as though war

1 Wallons (in English, Walloons) : Belgians of Gallic origin, speaking French, and occupying the provinces of Hainault, Namur, Liege, Luxem bourg, and southern Brabant. — Tr, were a fête. He makes his first prisoners, a captain and fifteen or sixteen men, who, finding their retreat cut off, surrender. “I sent them to the rear with boyish delight.” The affair over, he has lost half his battalion, and the victorious fragments remain exposed to the fire of a battery. “It came into no one’s head to order us under shelter, though all was over, and our artillery was scarcely answering that of the Prussians. But one does not like to give advice in such matters,’ — meaning thereby that he preferred to remain exposed to danger, even uselessly. I only cite these passages to give an idea of the tone of the Prince de Ligne in speaking of things of war with rapidity and zest.

If we go deeper, without, however, pretending to technical knowledge, we find the characters of the various generals vividly sketched by means of their own actions: Maréchal Daun, prudent, circumspect, methodical, who on one occasion was seen to gallop for the first and only time in his life, and after the victory of Hochkirch began on the field to write to Maria Theresa,—that she might receive his account of it on Saint-Theresa’s day, — instead of giving the proper orders for pursuit. He rested his sheet of paper on a stone. “It was our stone of stumbling,” remarks the prince, who liked such play on words, especially if there was any imagination in it. In his opinion, the victory should have been completed before it was reported. Of Lacy and Loudon, who are the generals of his choice and his admiration, he is proud and self-glorifying to call himself from afar the pupil. As for the great Frederick, the Prince de Ligne makes us fully feel the spirit of his tactics during this weary war, in which he was satisfied, as a general thing, not to be crushed,—to be “neither victor nor vanquished, content with that state of uncertainty.” Apropos of a situation advantageous to the Prussians, “the king,”

observes the Prince de Ligne, “occupied it perfectly; he enjoyed his usual pleasure, that of keeping us in suspense.”

At the close of the campaign of 1759, the Prince de Ligne, being then twenty-four years old, was chosen to carry to the King of France at Versailles the news of the affair at Maxen [where the Prussian general Finck surrendered to the Austrians]. He relates his first appearance in that Athens, to which by nature he belonged, with piquancy and some little flourish. His fine Parisian moment, his dashing French hour, had not yet come.

Some years after peace was made he returned to Paris, and lived there for a time before he was sufficiently appreciated. Madame du Deffand, a severe but also a most clearsighted judge, speaks of having just made his acquaintance in the summer of 1767; he was then thirty-two years old. “The Prince de Ligne,” she says in a letter to Horace Walpole (August 3d), “is not the stepson of the Princesse de Ligne-Luxembourg, but her nephew. He is an acquaintance of mine and I see him sometimes; he is gentle, polished, a good fellow, and a trifle wild. He wishes, I fancy, to resemble the Chevalier de Boufflers, but he has not, by any means, so much wit; he is, in fact, his mimic.” I am struck by the fact that Grimm about the same time says nearly the same thing in speaking of a letter addressed by the prince in 1770 to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, offering him an asylum against persecution at Beleil [his countryseat in Belgium], like M. de Girardin, who made Jean- Jacques accept one later at Ermenonville. “This letter,” Grimm adds, “has had no success in Paris, because it is not thought sufficiently genuine; the pretension to intellect is a malady that people do not recover from in this country” Two points may be remarked on here: in the first place, persons who are already in possession of reputation and credit, and who watch your start, make difficulties in admitting you; they compare you with others who have won a rank already ; the places are all taken in their mind, the heights are occupied. To gain them, you must dislodge your predecessors, which cannot be done in a day, nor without some effort. Secondly, it is to be inferred that the Prince de Ligne at starting forced his manner. Saint-Lambert said of the dawning Boufflers, “He is Voisenon the Great” The Prince de Ligne was aiming to be Boufflers the Great. This was pretension. He has written somewhere: “I prefer a stanza of Anacreon to the Iliad, and the Chevalier de Boufilers to an Encyclopedia.”

I have noted already (for I like to grasp the lofty or the serious sides of agreeable people) his worship of the military religion, which enraptured him as a child with the glory of such heroes as Prince Eugéne and Maurice de Saxe. Possibly all that he lacked to take high rank in this direction was a command-in-chief, bestowed in time; for, without speaking of his intrepidity on the battle-field, he possessed the cowpd'œil, the glance that sees, of a true soldier. But together with this noble and strengthening ideal he had another, of a totally different kind, which came of an imagination that was somewhat affected and spoiled by the air of the century. “ Who cares,” he said, “ that Bussy fought at the head of the light-horse of France at the battle of the Dunes? But they remember well enough the ‘ Amorous History of the Gauls’ and the Song of the Hallelujah. When a man paints himself in his works, especially on the side of voluptuous pleasure, he interests every one, above all, young men; they long to have lived with the agreeable rakes of Anet and the Temple, and those gentlemen at Roissy.” All of which carries us back to thé little suppers with roués, the Du Barrys and others, and to a certain early affectation of license and fashionable debauchery, of which the Prince de Ligne may have had, perhaps insensibly, to correct himself. He did correct himself of it, as he did of the desire to display his wit, of which he had plenty without assuming it. “But even in their errors there are persons whom everything becomes, because they have grace and tact.” He himself was one of those persons from his youth up; and until his end he must always have had the desire to please. “None but boors are without it.” But his great precept in such matters is, above all else, to amitate no one. “The method would surely be detected and all would be spoiled. The greatest art in pleasing is to have no art.” This he must have practised himself, if not in his first period, certainly in his second.

He whom Madame du Deffand and Grimm found difficulty in admitting to be of the pure race of French wits, became one so naturally that, writing in 1807 from Tôüplitz to his compatriot Prince d’Aremberg, Mirabeau’s former friend, and speaking to him of M. de Talleyrand, who had just arrived, he says: “Fancy his pleasure in being received by me ; for there are no Frenchmen left in the world but him and you and me— who are not Frenchmen.” And in saying that he spoke the truth.

He made his first essay in Paris under Louis XV., but he succeeded completely under Louis XVI., in that young and frolicsome Court, among his true contemporaries. He has painted in a few airy pages, with inimitable touch, those matutinal and familiar cavalcades, those promenades, where Queen Marie Antoinette enraptured and thrilled all hearts, yet never ceased to deserve respect. He has shown us that lovable and calumniated queen in her true colours; as he does, later on, all the other illustrious sovereigns he has known, — the Empress Catherine, Frederick the Great, Joseph IL, Gustavus ITI. On each of these historical personages the Prince de Ligne is at once an accurate and rapid witness and the most animated, easy, and natural of painters. His judgments are of great value, and the sound sense that underlies his amiability is readily discerned.

In the interviews that he had with Frederick at the camp of Neustadt in 1770, the conversation having turned on religion, the king talked freely and with little decency, as he did with such men as La Mettrie and d’Argens. “ I thought,” says the Prince de Ligne, “that he set rather too high a value on his damnation and boasted too much of it. ... At any rate, it was bad taste to exhibit himself in that way. I made no reply when he spoke to me thus” With Voltaire, another sovereign, to whom he made a visit at Ferney, and whose conversation, gestures, incongruities even, in all their dishabille and petulance, he gives us to the life, he had more than one serious discussion. “He was just then in love,” he says, “ with the English Constitution. I remember that I said to him: ‘ Monsieur de Voltaire, add to that its supporter, the ocean, without which it would not last a year.” The man who seemed the more trivial of the two was not in this instance the least wise.

This serious and sensible side of his nature, which he never had any opportunity of developing to results in public affairs, turned in the Prince de Ligne to the profit of his character as l’homme aimable. But even in being only that, to the exclusion of other things, there is progress to be made if such a man would continue to deserve his reputation. He must nourish that charm, as he advances, with all sorts of accurate and solid ideas, without appearing to do so; the agreeable man of sixty, if only to seem always twenty, must not be agreeable as men are at twenty, when half their charm, in many cases, is a winning face and pretty manners. He must, though all the while preserving his desire to please, add to that charm qualities which he did not have at twenty. While feeling himself ever in concert with youth, he must have experience that shall always accompany him, yet never be marked. But for that matter, the Prince de Ligne, who knows all about it far better than any one, shall develop the idea as it suits him, and recite to us the several degrees, or, so to speak, the successive seasons of the homme aimable.

“I know men,” he says, “who have only as much wit as they need to be fools. Listen to them, they talk well; read them, they write finely; at any rate it is said so. All men have intelligence now-a-days; but if there is not much in their ideas, distrust their phrases. Unless there is wit, novelty, piquancy, and originality, such men of intellect are in my opinion fools. Those who have this wit, novelty, and piquancy may still be only half agreeable; but if to that half they add imagination, charming details, perhaps even happy incongruities, things unexpected that flash like lightning, refinement, elegance, precision, a pretty turn of instruction, of reasoning that does not weary and is never in the least commonplace, a simple or distinguished bearing, a happy choice of expressions, gayety, aptness, grace, carelessness, a manner of their own in speaking or writing, you may then say that such men have really and truly minds and are agreeable.”

But now comes a second degree, the second season that makes a lasting maturity, without which the agreeable man, even though he be defined in the above manner, runs a risk of dying within himself, or of turning into fossilized youth.

“Tf,” says the prince, “ adding to all this, he has a know]- edge of the literature and the language of other nations, if he has philosophy, if he has seen much, compared well, judged soundly, met with adventures, played a part in the world, and if he has loved, or been loved, he is still more agreeable.”

You think that this attains to the highest degree ; but the Prince de Ligne, who will not content himself at so small a cost, and who imports into this grace and social felicity something of the fire and vivifying poesy which he puts into his actions of war, completes his model and gives us, in so doing, his own portrait.

“Tf, adding still further to the above, he inspires the desire to meet him again, if he leads others to find in-him a continual charm, if he is greatly concerned for others, and greatly detached from himself, with a strong desire to please, to oblige, to take part in the success of others, to make others shine, if he knows how to listen, if he possesses sensibility, elevation of mind, sincerity, probity, and excellence of heart, oh, then he brings happiness to the society in which he lives, and he is certain of universal success.”

You will observe that in order to complete and crown his picture he thinks it essential to add to his idea of the charming man a sentiment of humanity, of affection, of sincere self-detachment in the midst of success. The reason is, he well knows that the peril of what is commonly called amiability in social life and the use, exclusively, of mental gifts is hardness and selfishness; the remedy must therefore be found in the qualities themselves, the contrary of their defects, in order that the full charm may be acquired, and that the charm may last.

Among the desultory writings which escaped the Prince de Ligne during the first half of his life and which best depict him at that date, I note particularly those that he has written about gardens in connection with his own at Beleil. This was the period when the Abbé Delille published his poem entitled “Gardens,” in which he said of

Belceil, that beautiful place near Ath in Belgium, the property and partly the creation of the Prince de Ligne, “ Belceil, magnificent, yet rural!” France was then in a vein of creation and remodelling of gardens; the English style was being introduced and breaking in upon the harmonies of Le Notre. It was who should study to diversify Nature, and profit by the study to embellish her. M. de Girardin created Ermenonville; M. de Laborde, Méréville ; M. Boutin had Tivoli; M. Watelet, Moulin-Joli. Belceil was, and I am glad to think still is, a combination charmingly composed of French and English gardens,— something natural, yet regular; elegant, but majestic. All that was grand, formal, and in the style of Le Nôtre came from the prince’s father; he himself was ever seeking to add the varied, the unexpected ; time alone was lacking to him to complete his work, his poem. He is not exclusive; he would be very sorry to banish the straight line; he does not wish to substitute English monotony for French monotony, which was happening even then; but in gardens, as in love, it is his opinion that we should not show too much at first, because, the first moments of pleasure over, we yawn and are bored. He treats of buildings in their relation to the surrounding country. One building should be a palace, a royal residence, another a chateau, another a country-house, a hunting-box, a house in the fields or among the vineyards. But wherever it be, “I exclude,” he says, “everything with a bourgeois façade, without movement in the roof and elevation, without centre, without projection on the wings; also all that is plaster with its vulgar air; and I advise either the noble or the simple, the magnificent or the pretty, but always the appropriate, the piquant, and the distinguished.” Why do we say English gardens rather than Chinese gardens, or natural gardens? According to the prince,

Horace has pictured to us an English garden; his Qua pinus ingens is the best, sweetest, and most smiling description of them. “That little brook that is fretting to escape,” said the prince, “gave me even more pleasure to arrange than I take in reading.”

In reading all that he has written about gardens we are repaid by charming passages, sketches of sites as if in water-colour, washed-in lightly but very vividly touched. Sometimes he exclaims against “templomania;” though he himself admits too many altars, statues, and allegories, according to the taste of his day. Still, in the designs among which he dallies there are plans and suggestions wholly natural and suited to all fortunes. “If you are not rich,” he says, “you can still have all you need with a house of one story, simple, neat, the roof hidden, a coating of colour, a few casts of bas-reliefs or some rustic lattice-work; a broad and rapid brook escaping from real rocks, a trembling footbridge, like that of Aline, a few benches, perhaps a stonetable, a shepherd’s hut, a movable salon rolling on four wheels ; a few pines, proud without arrogance ; a few Italian poplars, darting upward, not showy, but agile and friendly, one weeping willow, one Judas-tree, an acacia, a plane-tree; three flower-beds, cast hap-hazard on the grass, daisies in a corner of your lawn and a little field of poppies and of bluets.”

I make no mention of the chapter on allegories, inscriptions, hieroglyphics, of which he desires that no abuse be made, though at the same time he grants their use as a tribute paid to the taste of the day.

“With all this,” he adds, “and a ha-ha, unseen and sunken, letting us enjoy the slopes, the vales, the woods, the fields, the village, the ancient castle of the neighbourhood, I could surpass both Kent and Le Notre; and with twenty thousand francs for the whole work, and two hundred francs a year to keep it up, I could bring travellers fifty miles off their route to see it.”

It is thus that he constructs you a Tibur, according to the dream of a moderate competency; but if you are rich, he will propose to you columns, marbles, galleries with burnished domes and tiers of terraces. “I mean that these shall be far distant from each other, in a great space,” he says, “ blending with water and turf and the finest oaks.”

By these quotations I am only trying to give the sentiment that circulates through all that the Prince de Ligne has written about gardens. He writes in a style most contrary to that of certain persons of our acquaintance, — in a joyous style, through which the sun-rays pass. He brings to his composition of gardens a strong recollection of society and a taste for attracting and bringing it thither. He thinks, with La Fontaine, that “ gardens talk little” He loves Nature, but rarely to be alone with it. He takes the country on his return from camps, in the interval between two campaigns, as he himself says happily : “You whom the Court and Army relieve for a while of attendance, amuse yourselves in your gardens, uplift your souls in your forests.” He is so. sociable, even in his hours of retreat and solitude, that he would not be sorry if he could see a great capital from his rural home. “‘ There, I should say, sitting at the foot of an ancient oak, ‘there is the great assemblage of absurdities and vices,” and he enumerates them; pushing to its conclusion the pretty theme, which parodies that of the sage of Lucretilis enjoying the sight of a storm. But he wants all sorts of people about him, even animals, provided they are not stupid. This is truly that spirit of society which was mingled by the eighteenth century with its love for gardens. Since then we have made a stride in our worship of Nature; I do not say that we like to be alone more than they did in former times, but we are less afraid of being so; and we have fewer garden amateurs who would say with the Prince de Ligne: “I have always so loved social life of every kind that I lately parted with a Salvator Rosa for almost nothing, because it was sheer desert, and deserted places have to me an air of annihilation ; a picture without figures is like the end of the world.”