IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS. obedient and grateful, seeing that others fare worse. Henry. If my ear is frost-bitten, your worship's toe may be frost-bitten off and never cure me. Wolfgang. Be comforted and satisfied. The outlawry of thy son Arnold is reversed, on payment of a slender fine for the proclamation of it, and of another for its annulment, not much heavier. We have fresh accusations against him, which our clemency will not bring forward unless he trespass in future. Henry. Of what offence is the boy accused? Wolfgang. Of the seditious song he was heard to sing last winter, which he is known to have composed. We have three witnesses, who will declare upon their consciences that they believe by eagle he means the emperor our lord; by hooknosed wolf, the arch-chancellor; by dozing bear, the metropolitan. I say nothing of the squirrel, and the uncurling of her tail: no action might lie but court ladies, wnen they relax a little of their coldness and severity, are still to be treated with deference and respect. Henry. Upon my faith, Sir Wolfgang, I know nothing of the matter: if ever I heard the verses I have clean forgotten them. Wolfgang. Anastasius Griffenhoof! read aloud those seditious rhymes marked Z. Storm Morgarten's larch-plumed crest, You whose pliant legs with ease Squirrel, young, nest, nuts, and all. Fishers! leave the spangled trout, Or the saints of lanky Lent. Give me rather men of proof (What say you ?) than wall and roof; Pour the mead for those who stay, Some that moan and some that purr, But have never enter'd here. They are out upon the snow, Thessinger, sit still.. be bolder.. I could tell of many fiercer, Of the truant shepherd-dog. Sleep before the hearth to-night, Back, my hounds. . give us our turn Wolfgang. Call Abraham Konig and Rehoboam Usher. Behold them, sir! Wolfgang. Abraham Konig, you shall well and truly.. you know the rest. What is your belief on the words "Hanging just below the nose,” applied to rue? Konig. It appears to me.. Wolfgang. In other words, you are firmly persuaded. Konig. Yes, as your Honour commanded me, I am firmly persuaded that rue means bitterness and reviling and threat; for we say, as your Honour said, you shall rue such and such a thing: And then, as your Honour remarked, just below the nose is the mouth, so that this reviling and bitterness and threat must hang about their mouths. Wolfgang. Rehoboam Storck! are you likewise firmly persuaded of the same? Storck. I am. Wolfgang. And what do you believe is meant by the dogs being kicked up from the hearth, as having an ill scent? Storck. I do firmly believe that the meaning is, what your Honour ordered me to consider and deliver, namely, saving your Honour's presence, that the higher magistrates were meant thereby, who have indeed an ill savour in the country, and who were to be traitorously and violently dispossessed of their warm places, and that they were to rue their misdeeds. Wolfgang. What misdeeds, carrion! Proceed; what dost understand by the bitter herb being tucked just under the nose? Storck. Hemp, mayhap. Storck. Your Honour has confounded me. Storck. The teeth, in young folks. Wolfgang. I could flay thee alive. But one witness who sweareth stoutly to the citation of well and truly, is enough: I called another for form's sake. Usher. Sir.. in your Honour's ear, if so it please you. If you read the verse again, you will find the word not to be rue, but tansey. Wolfgang. Hush, idler! Judges are no botanists .. look again. Usher. Of a truth, the written word is tansey. Wolfgang. The erased word, I uphold it, was rue. Rehoboam Storck! did not this same libellous and most seditious man, Arnold, son of Henry of Melctal, call thee a felon? not having proven thee such. Storck. He did. Wolfgang. On what plea or count? Why dost thou not speak? Storck. I went out at dusk, may it please your Honour, to cut the roots of sundry young trees, belonging to the said Arnold . . as he said. Wolfgang. Was it so dark that nobody could see thee? Storck. I wish it had been. Wolfgang. Simpleton ! it would then have been felony. Hearing these loose lines, can anyone doubt their aim and intent? But let them pass. I am authorised, as I told you before, to reverse thy son's outlawry and to commute thy own sentence: at the same time I am also commanded to denounce unto thee, that, if ever thou seest thy son again, thou be deprived of eye-sight. Henry. I am deprived of eye-sight if I do not see him. Of sun and snows we have seen enough at seventy. Ho! Arnold! Arnold! help! Arnold. Father! who hurts thee? who threatens thee? Off, gentlemen! Off, strangers! Off, soldiers! Slaves, miscreants, Austrians, stand off. Wolfgang. Murder in my presence! Henry. They bleed all five under thy yew-stick .. one is dying. . I was faint: I am not so now: fly, in the name of God! Again, I pray thee, Arnold, if thou lovest thy father, go! begone; I command thee. Arnold. O God! I heard thy name and was disobedient: my father has commanded and I obey. . forgive me, O my God! Wolfgang. Seize him, the traitor. Dastards.. but perhaps it may be better to catch him anywhere else. Who would have thought it! fair as morning, ardent as noon, and terrible as midnight on the shoals. Thou at least canst not run so fast. Henry. I hope I can not. Wolfgang. Anastasius! call the priest Reginald Grot to strengthen him with admonition, and Sigismund Lockhart the greffier to translate the sentence into the vulgar tongue; and to read it before the people, in the name of his Apostolic Majesty the Emperor and King, Albert, by the grace of God, et cetera; and in the public square to provide that the sentence be well and duly executed, forthwith. Henry. Send also for the great man Gessler: tell him to come and see a sight: he has not many more such to see. Welcome good Reginald! welcome too, my worthy master Lockhart! Come, thy band sits well enough, let it rest; begin. Lockhart. The instrument must be translated; a good hour's labour yet, to the ablest clerk. Henry. Reginald! thou pressest my hand, and sayest nothing. Dost thou turn thy back upon me? is this thy comfort? Reginald. There is a Comforter who has given thee strength, and taken mine from me: keep it, good old man : do my tears hurt thee? Henry. They do indeed: go home: blessed soul! I never knew thy temper until now. Many have turned away from me before, but none to hide their compassion at my sufferings. What a draught of sight have I taken with my lord judge Wolfgang! It lasts me yet, and will last me for life. O my young eagle, my own Arnold! I shall never see thee more upon the rocks of Uri: never shall I tremble at thy hardihood, nor press thee to my bosom for reproaching thee too much about it. But I shall hear thy carols in the woods of Underwald. Let them be blithe as usual; let them be blither still, for I shall more want pastime, and shall listen for sweet sounds all day long. Do not ask me again, as in the Lay of the Leap, whether thou hast given me the heart-ache. I was always in thy songs before they ended, even where spring | broken. Is this the place? Blow away, boys! the and summer, even where youth and fair maidens, were discoursed of. Prythee do not go on so. Above all, I charge thee, Arnold, never say, "O my poor father! art thou blind for me!" I was fancying my Arnold at my side. Foolish old man, with my eyes yet open and their two balls un weather is misty: it will not light this arrowhead is too blunt: have you nothing better my old eyes are sunken and tough. Ay, that seems sharper: put it just under the piece of mountainash: it will soon redden there. Well done, boy, that is right. BOSSUET AND THE DUCHESS DE FONTANGES*. Bossuet. Mademoiselle, it is the king's desire that I compliment you on the elevation you have attained. Fontanges. O monseigneur, I know very well what you mean. His Majesty is kind and polite to everybody. The last thing he said to me was, "Angélique! do not forget to compliment Monseigneur the bishop on the dignity I have conferred upon him, of almoner to the dauphiness. I desired the appointment for him, only that he might be of rank sufficient to confess you, now you are duchess. Let him be your confessor, my little girl. He has fine manners." Bossuet. I dare not presume to ask you, mademoiselle, what was your gracious reply to the condescension of our royal master. Fontanges. O yes you may. I told him I was almost sure I should be ashamed of confessing such naughty things to a person of high rank, who writes like an angel. if they told me fibs I would never trust them again. I do not care about them; for the king told me I was only to mind him. Bossuet. Lowest and highest, we all owe to his Majesty our duty and submission. Fontanges. I am sure he has mine: so you need not blame me or question me on that. At first, indeed, when he entered the folding-doors, I was in such a flurry I could hear my heart beat across the chamber: by degrees I cared little about the matter and at last, when I grew used to it, I liked it rather than not. Now, if this is not confession, what is? Bossuet. We must abstract the soul from every low mundane thought. Do you hate the world, mademoiselle? Fontanges. A good deal of it all Picardy for example, and all Sologne: nothing is uglier .. and, oh my life! what frightful men and women! Bossuet. I would say, in plain language, do you Bossuet. The observation was inspired, made- hate the flesh and the devil? moiselle, by your goodness and modesty. Fontanges. You are so agreeable a man, monseigneur, I will confess to you directly, if you like. Bossuet. Have you brought yourself to a proper frame of mind, young lady? Fontanges. What is that? Bossuet. Do you hate sin? Fontanges. Very much. Bossuet. Are you resolved to leave it off? Fontanges. I have left it off entirely since the king began to love me. I have never said a spiteful word of anybody since. Bossuet. In your opinion, mademoiselle, are there no other sins than malice? Fontanges. I never stole anything: I never committed adultery: I never coveted my neighbour's wife I never killed any person: though several have told me they should die for me. Bossuet. Vain, idle talk! did you listen to it? Fontanges. Indeed I did, with both ears; it seemed so funny. Bossuet. You have something to answer for then. Fontanges. No, indeed I have not, monseigneur. I have asked many times after them, and found they were all alive: which mortified me. Bossuet. So then! you would really have them die for you? Fontanges. O no, no. . but I wanted to see whether they were in earnest or told me fibs: for The Abbé de Choisy says that she was "belle comme un ange, mais sotte comme un panier.” Fontanges. Who does not hate the devil? If you will hold my hand the while, I will tell him so.. I hate you, beast! There now. As for flesh, I never could bear a fat man. Such people can neither dance nor hunt, nor do anything that I know of. Bossuet. Mademoiselle Marie-Angélique de Scoraille de Rousille, duchesse de Fontanges! do you hate titles and dignities and yourself! Fontanges. Myself! does any one hate me! why should I be the first? Hatred is the worst thing in the world: it makes one so very ugly. Bossuet. To love God, we must hate ourselves. We must detest our bodies if we would save our souls. Fontanges. That is hard: how can I do it? I see nothing so detestable in mine: do you? To love is easier. I love God whenever I think of him, he has been so very good to me: but I can not hate myself, if I would. As God hath not hated me, why should I? Beside, it was he who made the king to love me; for I heard you say in a sermon that the hearts of kings are in his rule and governance. As for titles and dignities, I do not care much about them while his Majesty loves me, and calls me his Angélique. They make people more civil about us; and therefore it must be a simpleton who hates or disregards them, and a hypocrite who pretends it. I am glad to be a duchess. Manon and Lisette have never tied my garter so as to hurt me since, nor has the mischievous old La Grange said anything cross or bold on the contrary, she told me what a fine colour and what a plumpness it gave me. Would not you be rather a duchess than a waiting-maid or a nun, if the king gave you your choice? Bossuet. Pardon me, mademoiselle, I am confounded at the levity of your question. Fontanges. I am in earnest, as you see. Bossuet. Flattery will come before you in other and more dangerous forms: you will be commended for excellencies which do not belong to you and this you will find as injurious to your repose as to your virtue. An ingenuous mind feels in unmerited praise the bitterest reproof. If you reject it you are unhappy, if you accept it you are undone. The compliments of a king are of themselves sufficient to pervert your intellect. Fontanges. There you are mistaken twice over. It is not my person that pleases him so greatly; it is my spirit, my wit, my talents, my genius, and that very thing which you have mentioned ... what was it? my intellect. He never complimented me the least upon my beauty. Others have said that I am the most beautiful young creature under heaven; a blossom of Paradise, a nymph, an angel; worth (let me whisper it in your ear. . do I lean too hard?) a thousand Montespans. But his Majesty never said more on the occasion than that I was imparagonable! (what is that?) and that he adored me; holding my hand and sitting quite still, when he might have romped with me and kissed me. Bossuet. I would aspire to the glory of converting you. Fontanges. You may do anything with me but convert me: you must not do that: I am a Catholic born. M. de Turenne and Mademoiselle de Duras were heretics: you did right there. The king told the chancellor that he prepared them, that the business was arranged for you, and that you had nothing to do but to get ready the arguments and responses, which you did gallantly, did not you? And yet Mademoiselle de Duras was very awkward for a long while afterward in crossing herself, and was once remarked to beat her breast in the litany with the points of two fingers at a time, when everyone is taught to use only the second, whether it has a ring upon it or not. I am sorry she did so; for people might think her insincere in her conversion, and pretend that she kept a finger for each religion. Bossuet. It would be as uncharitable to doubt the conviction of Mademoiselle de Duras as that of M. le Maréchal. Fontanges. I have heard some fine verses, I can assure you, monseigneur, in which you are called the conqueror of Turenne. I should like to have been his conqueror myself, he was so great a man. I understand that you have lately done a much more difficult thing. Bossuet. To what do you refer, mademoiselle? Fontanges. That you have overcome quietism. Now, in the name of wonder, how could you manage that? Bossuet. By the grace of God. Fontanges. Yes indeed; but never until now did God give any preacher so much of his grace as to subdue this pest. Bossuet. It has appeared among us but lately. Fontanges. O dear me! I have always been subject to it dreadfully, from a child. Bossuet. Really! I never heard so. Fontanges. I checked myself as well as I could, although they constantly told me I looked well in it. Bossuet. In what, mademoiselle? Fontanges. In quietism; that is, when I fell asleep at sermon-time. I am ashamed that such a learned and pious man as M. de Fénelon should incline to it, as they say he does. * Bossuet. Mademoiselle, you quite mistake the matter. Fontanges. Is not then M. de Fénelon thought a very pious and learned person? Bossuet. And justly. Fontanges. I have read a great way in a romance he has begun, about a knight-errant in search of a father. The king says there are many such about his court; but I never saw them, nor heard of them before. The marchioness de la Motte, his relative, brought it to me, written out in a charming hand, as much as the copy-book would hold, and I got through I know not how far. If he had gone on with the nymphs in the grotto I never should have been tired of him; but he quite forgot his own story, and left them at once; in a hurry (I suppose) to set out upon his mission to Saintonge in the pays d'Aunis, where the king has promised him a famous heretic-hunt. He is, I do assure you, a wonderful creature; he understands so much Latin and Greek, and knows all the tricks of the sorceresses. Yet you keep him under. Bossuet. Mademoiselle, if you really have any thing to confess, and if you desire that I should have the honour of absolving you, it would be better to proceed in it, than to oppress me with unmerited eulogies on my humble labours. Fontanges. You must first direct me, monseigneur: I have nothing particular. The king assures me there is no harm whatever in his love toward me. Bossuet. That depends on your thoughts at the moment. If you abstract the mind from the body, and turn your heart toward heaven... Fontanges. O monseigneur, I always did so.. every time but once.. you quite make me blush. Let us converse about something else, or I shall grow too serious, just as you made me the other day at the funeral sermon. And now let me tell you, my lord, you compose such pretty funeral * The opinions of Molinos on mysticism and quietism had begun to spread abroad: but Fénelon, who had acquired already a very high celebrity for eloquence, had not yet written on the subject. We may well suppose that Bossuet was among the earliest assailants of a system which he afterward attacked so vehemently. The stormier superstition swept away the more vapory. sermons, I hope I shall have the pleasure of hear- | not talk thus gravely. It is in vain that you ing you preach mine. * Bossuet. Rather let us hope, mademoiselle, that the hour is yet far distant when so melancholy a service will be performed for you. May he who is unborn be the sad announcer of your departure hence! May he indicate to those around him many virtues not perhaps yet full-blown in you, and point triumphantly to many faults and foibles checked by you in their early growth, and lying dead on the open road you shall have left behind you! To me the painful duty will, I trust, be spared: I am advanced in age: you are a child. Fontanges. O no, I am seventeen. Bossuet. I should have supposed you younger by two years at least. But do you collect nothing from your own reflection, which raises so many in my breast? You think it possible that I, aged as I am, may preach a sermon on your funeral. Alas, it is so! such things have been! There is, however, no funeral so sad to follow as the funeral of our own youth, which we have been pampering with fond desires, ambitious hopes, and all the bright berries that hang in poisonous clusters over the path of life. Fontanges. I never minded them; I like peaches better; and one a day is quite enough for me. Bossuet. We say that our days are few; and, saying it, we say too much. Marie-Angélique, we have but one: the past are not ours, and who can promise us the future? This in which we live is ours only while we live in it; the next moment may strike it off from us; the next sentence I would utter may be broken and fall between us. The beauty that has made a thousand hearts to beat at one instant, at the succeeding has been without pulse and colour, without admirer, friend, companion, follower. She by whose eyes the march of victory shall have been directed, whose name shall have animated armies at the extremities of the earth, drops into one of its crevices and mingles with its dust. Duchess de Fontanges! think on this! Lady! so live as to think on it undisturbed! Fontanges. O God! I am quite alarmed. Do speak to me in so sweet a voice. I am frightened even at the rattle of the beads about my neck: take them off, and let us talk on other things. What was it that dropped on the floor as you were speaking? It seemed to shake the room, though it sounded like a pin or button. Bossuet. Never mind it leave it there: I pray you, I implore you, madame! Fontanges. Why do you rise? why do you run? why not let me? I am nimbler. So, your ring fell from your hand, my lord bishop! How quick you are! Could not you have trusted me to pick it up? Bossuet. Madame is too condescending: had this happened, I should have been overwhelmed with confusion. My hand is shrivelled; the ring has ceased to fit it. A mere accident may draw us into perdition: a mere accident may bestow on us the means of grace. A pebble has moved you more than my words. Fontanges. It pleases me vastly: I admire rubies: I will ask the king for one exactly like it. This is the time he usually comes from the chase. I am sorry you can not be present to hear how prettily I shall ask him: but that is impossible, you know: for I shall do it just when I am certain he would give me anything. He said so himself: he said but yesterday "Such a sweet creature is worth a world.." and no actor on the stage was ever more like a king than his Majesty was when he spoke it, if he had but kept his wig and robe on. And yet you know he is rather stiff and wrinkled for so great a monarch; and his eyes, I am afraid, are beginning to fail him; he looks so close at things. Bossuet. Mademoiselle, such is the duty of a prince who desires to conciliate our regard and love. Fontanges. Well, I think so too; though I did not like it in him at first. I am sure he will order the ring for me, and I will confess to you with it upon my finger. But first I must be cautious and particular to know of him how much it is his royal will that I should say. XENOPHON AND CYRUS THE YOUNGER. Cyrus. Xenophon, I have longed for an oppor- ing to report thou wert the disciple of Socrates tunity of conversing with thee alone, on matters the mage, whom the Athenians condemned to in which thou excitest my admiration. Accord-drink hemlock, because he had a genius of his own. * Bossuet was in his 54th year: Mademoiselle de Fontanges died in childbed the year following: he survived her twenty-three. Though Bossuet was capable of uttering and even of feeling such a sentiment, his conduct toward Fénelon, the fairest apparition that Christianity ever presented, was ungenerous and unjust. While the diocese of Cambray was ravaged by Louis, it was spared by Marlborough; who said to the archbishop that if he was sorry he had not taken Cambray, it was chiefly because he lost for a time the pleasure of visiting so great a man. Peterborough, the next of our generals in glory, paid his respects to him some years afterward. Xenophon. It is true, O Cyrus! I was. Cyrus. Verily, O wonderful man, thou must be the best farrier and hunter in Greece; and, thinking on thee, I have oftentimes wished in my heart that so deserving a country as thy Attica, which is not destitute of wolves, polecats, and foxes, had, for every one of them, a leopard, a lion, and a tiger. Xenophon. O son of Darius, king of kings! the gods do not bestow all their gifts upon one country; or, having bestowed them, it seemeth good unto their divine majesties that mortals |