A BRETON LEGEND.
At Carnac in Brittany, close on the bay,
They show you a church, or rather the gray
Ribs of a dead one, left there to bleach
With the wreck lying near on the crest of the beach;
Roofless and splintered with thunder-stone,
'Mid lichen-blurred gravestones all alone,
'Tis the kind of ruin strange sights to see
That may have their teaching for you and me.
Something like this, then, my guide had to tell,
Perched on a saint cracked across when he fell.
But since I might chance give his meaning a wrench,
He talking his patois and I English-French,
I'll put what he told me, preserving the tone,
In a rhymed prose that makes it half his, half my own.
An abbey-church stood here, once on a time,
Built as a death-bed atonement for crime:
'Twas for somebody's sins, I know not whose;
But sinners are plenty, and you can choose.
Though a cloister now of the dusk-winged bat,
'Twas rich enough once, and the brothers grew fat,
Looser in girdle and purpler in jowl,
Singing good rest to the founder's lost soul.
But one day came Northmen, and lithe tongues of fire
Lapped up the chapter-house, licked off the spire,
And left all a rubbish-heap, black and dreary,
Where only the wind sings miserere.
Of what the monks came by no legend runs,
At least they were lucky in not being nuns.
No priest has kneeled since at the altar's foot,
Whose crannies are searched by the nightshade's root,
Nor sound of service is ever heard,
Except from throat of the unclean bird,
Hooting to unassoiled shapes as they pass
In midnights unholy his witches' mass,
Or shouting "Ho! ho!" from the belfry high
As the Devil's sabbath-train whirls by;
But once a year, on the eve of All-Souls,
Through these arches dishallowed the organ rolls,
Fingers long fleshless the bell-ropes work,
The chimes peal muffled with sea-mists mirk,
The skeleton windows are traced anew
On the baleful flicker of corpse-lights blue,
And the ghosts must come, so the legend saith,
To a preaching of Reverend Doctor Death.
Abbots, monks, barons, and ladies fair
Hear the dull summons and gather there:
No rustle of silk now, no clink of mail,
Nor ever a one greets his church-mate pale;
No knight whispers love in the châtelaine's ear,
His next-door neighbor this five hundred year;
No monk has a sleek benedicite
For the great lord shadowy now as he;
Nor needeth any to hold his breath,
Lest he lose the least word of Doctor Death.
He chooses his text in the Book Divine,
Tenth verse of the Preacher in chapter nine:—
"'Whatsoever thy hand shall find thee to do,
That do with thy whole might, or thou shalt rue;
For no man is wealthy or wise or brave
In that quencher of might-bes and would-bes, the grave.'
Bid by the Bridegroom, 'To-morrow,' ye said,
And To-morrow was digging a trench for your bed;
Ye said, 'God can wait; let us finish our wine';
Ye had wearied Him, fools, and that last knock was mine!"
But I can't pretend to give you the sermon,
Or say if the tongue were French, Latin, or German;
Whatever he preached in, I give you my word
The meaning was easy to all that heard;
Famous preachers there have been and be,
But never was one so convincing as he;
So blunt was never a begging friar,
No Jesuit's tongue so barbed with fire,
Cameronian never, nor Methodist,
Wrung gall out of Scripture with such a twist.
And would you know who his hearers must be?
I tell you just what my guide told me:
Excellent teaching men have, day and night,
From two earnest friars, a black and a white,
The Dominican Death and the Carmelite Life;
And between these two there is never strife,
For each has his separate office and station,
And each his own work in the congregation;
Whoso to the white brother deafens his ears,
And cannot be wrought on by blessings or tears,
Awake in his coffin must wait and wait,
In that blackness of darkness that means too late,
And come once a year, when the ghost-bell tolls,
As till Doomsday it shall on the eve of All-Souls,
To hear Doctor Death, whose words smart with the brine
Of the Preacher, the tenth verse of chapter nine.
Modern times began in France with the death of Mazarin. Spain, Austria, and Italy no longer led the world in politics, literature, and refinement. The grande nation, delivered from Ligue and Fronde, took her position with England at the head of civilized Europe. This great change had been going on during eighty years of battle, murder, anarchy, and confusion. As always, the new grew up unnoticed, until it overtopped the old. The transformation was complete in 1661, when Louis XIV. appeared upon the scene, and gave his name to this brilliant period, with not much better claim to the distinction than had Vespucci to America.
There had been a prodigious yield of brains in France. A host of clever men developed the new ideas in every direction. Philosophy and science, literature and language, manners, habits, dress, assumed the forms with which we are so familiar. Then commenced the grand siècle, the era Frenchmen date from. They look upon those gallant ancestors almost as contemporaries, and still admire their feats in war, and laugh over their strokes of wit. The books they wrote became classics, and were in all hands until within the last twenty or thirty years. Latterly, indeed, they have been less read, for thought is turning to fresh fields, and society seems to be entering upon a new era.
No man more fully recognized the great change that was going on, or did more to help it forward, than Nicolas Fouquet, Vicomte de Vaux, and Marquis de Belleîle,—but better known as the Surintendant. In the pleasant social annals of France, Fouquet is the type of splendor, and of sudden, hopeless ruin. "There was never a man so magnificent, there was never a man so unfortunate," say the lively gentlemen and ladies in their Mémoires. His story is told to point the old and dreary moral of the instability of human prosperity. It is, indeed, like a tale of the "Arabian Nights." The Dervish is made Grand Vizier. He marries the Sultan's daughter. His palace owes its magical beauty to the Genies. The pillars are of jasper, the bases and capitals of massive gold. The Sultan frowns, waves his hand, and the crowd, who kissed the favorite's slipper yesterday, hoot and jeer as they see him pass by to his dungeon, disgraced, stripped, and beaten, Fouquet was of good family, the son of a Councillor of State in Louis XIII.'s time. Educated for the magistracy, he became a Maître des Requétes (say Master in Chancery) at twenty, and at thirty-five Procureur-Général (or Attorney-General) of the Parliament of Paris, which was only a court of justice, although it frequently attempted to usurp legislative, and even executive functions. During the rebellious troubles of the Fronde, the Procureur and his brother, the Abbé Fouquet, remained faithful to Mazarin and to the throne. The Abbé, in the ardor of his zeal, once offered the Queen his services to kill De Retz and salt him, if she would give her consent. It was at the request of the Queen that the Cardinal made the trusty Procureur Surintendant des Finances, the first position in France after the throne and the prime-ministership.
Pensions, and the promise of comfortable places, had collected about the Surintendant talent, fashion, and beauty. Some of the ablest men in the kingdom were in his employ. Pellisson, famous for ugliness and for wit, the Acanthe of the Hôtel de Rambouillet, the beloved of Sappho Scudéry, was his chief clerk. Pellisson was then a Protestant; but Fouquet's disgrace, and four years in the Bastille, led him to reëxamine the grounds of his religious faith. He became, luckily, enlightened on the subject of his heresies at a time when the renunciation of Protestantism led to honors and wealth. Change of condition followed change of doctrine. The King attached him to his person as Secretary and Historiographer, and gave him the management of the fund for the conversion of Huguenots. Gourville, whom Charles II., an excellent judge, called the wisest of Frenchmen, belonged to Fouquet, as a receiver-general of taxes. Molière wrote two of his earlier plays for the Surintendant. La Fontaine was an especial favorite. He bound himself to pay for his quarterly allowance in quarterly madrigals, ballads, or sonnets. If he failed, a bailiff was to be sent to levy on his stanzas. He paid pretty regularly, but in a depreciated currency. The verses have not the golden ring of the "Contes" and the "Fables."
"Le Roi, l'État, la Patrie,
Partagent toute votre vie."
That is a sample of their value. Quack-medicine poets often do as well. He wrote "Adonis" for Fouquet, and had worked three years at the "Songe de Vaux," when the ruin of his patron caused him to lay it aside. It is a dull piece. Four fairies, Palatiane, Hortésie, Apellanire, and Calliopée, make long speeches about their specialty in Art, as seen at Vaux. Their names sufficiently denote it. A fish comes as ambassador from Neptune to Vaux, the glory of the universe, where Oronte (Fouquet's alias, in the affected jargon of the period)
"fait bâtir un palais magnifique,
Où règne l'ordre Ionique
Avec beaucoup d'agrément."
Apollo comes and promises to take charge of the live-stock, and of the picture-gallery. The Muses, too, are busy.
"Pour lui Melpomène médite,
Thalie en est jalouse,"—
and soon—
Fouquet's physician, Pecquet, is well known to physiologists by his treatise, "De Motu Chyli," and by "Pecquet's reservoir." His patron was warmly interested in the new discoveries in circulation, which were then, and so long after, violently opposed by the Purgons and the Diafoirus of the old school. The Surintendant's judgment was equally good in Art. Le Brun, the painter, owed fame and fortune to him. He gave him twelve thousand livres a year, besides paying a fixed price for each of his works. With the exception of Renaudot's journal, Loret's weekly gazette, published in the shape of a versified letter to Mademoiselle de Longueville, was the only newspaper in France. Fouquet furnished the editor with money and with items. He allowed Scarron sixteen hundred livres a year, when Mazarin struck his name from the pension-list, as punishment for a "Mazarinade," the only squib of the kind the Cardinal had ever noticed. Poor Scarron was hopelessly paralyzed, and bedridden. He had been a comely, robust fellow in his youth, given to dissipated courses. In a Carnival frolic, he appeared in the streets with two companions in the character of bipeds with feathers,—a scanty addition to Plato's definition of man. This airy costume was too much for French modesty, proverbially shrinking and sensitive. The mob hooted and gave chase. The maskers fled from the town and hid themselves in a marsh to evade pursuit. The result of this venturesome travestissement was the death of both his friends, and an attack of inflammatory rheumatism which twisted Scarron for life into the shape of the letter Z.
The Surintendant's hôtel, at St. Mandé, was a marvel of art, his library the best in France. The number and value of his books was urged against him, on his trial, as evidence of his peculations. His country-seat, at Vaux, cost him eighteen millions of livres. Three villages were bought and razed to enlarge the grounds. Le Vau built the château. Le Brun painted the ceilings and panels. La Fontaine and Michel Gervaise furnished French and Latin mottoes for the allegorical designs. Le Nôtre laid out the gardens in the style which may still be seen at Versailles. Torelli, an Italian engineer, decorated them with artificial cascades and fountains, a wonder of science to Frenchmen in the seventeenth century. Puget had collected the statues which embellished them. There was a collection of wild animals, a rare spectacle before the days of zoological gardens,—an aviary of foreign birds,—tanks as large as ponds, in which, among other odd fish, swam a sturgeon and a salmon taken in the Seine. Everything was magnificent, and everything was new,—so original and so perfect, that Louis XIV., after he had crushed the Surintendant, could find no plans so good and no artists so skilful as these pour embellir son règne. He was obliged to imitate the man he hated. Even Fouquet's men of letters were soon enrolled in the service of the King.
In March, 1661, Mazarin died, full of honor. His favorite saying, "Il tiempo è un galantuomo," was fulfilled for him. In spite of many desperate disappointments and defeats, Messer Tiempo had made him rich, powerful, and triumphant. The young King, who had already announced his theory of government in the well-known speech, "L'État, c'est moi," waited patiently, and with respect, (filial, some have said,) for the old man to depart. He put on mourning, a compliment never paid but once before by a French sovereign to the memory of a subject,—by Henry IV. to Gabrielle d'Estrées. When the Council came together, the King told them, that hitherto he had permitted the late Cardinal to direct the affairs of State, but that in future he should take the duty upon himself,—the gentlemen present would aid him with their advice, if he should see fit to ask for it. It was a "neat little speech," and very much to the point: Louis XIV. had the talent of making neat little speeches. But the Surintendant, who presided in the Council, did not believe him. A prince, he thought, two-and-twenty years of age, fond of show and of pleasure, of moderate capacity, and with no education, might undertake for a while the cares of government, but, when the novelty wore off, would tire of the labor. And then, whose pretensions to shoulder the burden were so well founded as Fouquet's? He was almost a king, and had the political patronage of a president. The revenue of the nation passed through his hands. Fermiers and traitants, those who farmed the taxes and those who gathered them for a consideration, obeyed his nod and laid their offerings at his feet. A judicious mixture of presents and promises had given him the control of judges enough in the different Parliaments to fortify his views of the public business by legal decisions. In his own Parliament he was supreme. Clever agents, stationed in important places, both at home and abroad, watched over his interests, and kept him informed of all that transpired, by faithful couriers. But he misunderstood his position, and was mistaken in his King. Louis XIV. had, indeed, little talent and less education. He could never learn Latin, at that time as much a part of a gentleman's training as French is now with us; but he had what for want of a more distinctive word we may call character,—that well-proportioned mixture of sense, energy, and self-reliance which obtains for its possessor more success in life, and more respect from those about him, than brilliant mental endowments. It was the moral side of his nature which was deficient. He was selfish, envious, and cruel; and he had not that noble hatred of the crooked, the mean, and the dishonorable which becomes a gentleman. Mazarin once said,—"There is stuff enough in him to make four kings and one worthy man." Divide this favorable opinion by four, and the result will be an approximation to the value of Louis XIV. as a monarch and a man. There was a king in him,—a determination to be master, and to bear no rival near the throne, no matter of how secondary or trifling a nature the rivalry might be.
Fouquet had been deep in Mazarin's confidence, his agent and partner in those sharp financial operations which had brought so much profit to the Cardinal and so little to the Crown. One of their jobs was to buy up, at an enormous discount, old and discredited claims against the Treasury, dating from the Fronde, which, when held by the right parties, were paid in full,—a species of fraud known by various euphemisms in the purest of republics. All the checks and balances of our enlightened system of administration, whether federal, state, or municipal, do not prevent skilful officials from perverting vast sums of money to their own uses. In France, demoralized by years of civil war, the official facilities for plundering were concentrated in the hands of one clever man. We can easily understand that his wealth was enormous, and his power correspondingly great.
When the late Cardinal, surfeited with spoils, was drawing near his end, scruples of conscience, never felt before, led him to advise the King to keep a strict watch upon the Surintendant. He recommended for that purpose his steward, Colbert, of whose integrity and knowledge of business he had the highest opinion. Colbert was made Under-Secretary of State, and Fouquet's dismissal from office determined upon from that time.
The Surintendant had no previsions of danger. With his usual boldness, he laid the financial "situation" of the kingdom before his new master, confessed frankly what it was impossible to conceal, laid the blame of all irregularities upon Mazarin, or upon the exigencies of the times, and ended by imploring an amnesty for the past, and promising thrift and economy for the future. The King appeared satisfied, and granted a full pardon. Fouquet, more confident than ever, dashed on in the old way, while Colbert and his clerks were quietly digging the pit into which he was soon to fall. Colbert was reinforced by Séguier, the Chancellor, and by Le Tellier, a Secretary of State, who had an energetic son, Louvois, in the War Department. All three hated the Surintendant, and each hoped to succeed him. Fouquet's ostentation and haughtiness had made him enemies among the old nobility. Many of them were eager to see the proud and prosperous man humiliated,—merely to gratify that wretched feeling of envy and spite so inherent in poor human nature, and one of the strongest proofs of that corruption "which standeth in the following of Adam."
Louis XIV. had reasons of his own for his determination to destroy the Surintendant. First of all, he was afraid of him. The Fronde was fresh in the royal memory. Fouquet had enormous wealth, an army of friends and retainers; he could command Brittany from his castle of Belleîle, which he had fortified and garrisoned. Why might he not, if his ambition were thwarted, revive rebellion, and bring back misery upon France? The personal reminiscences of the King's whole life must have made him feel keenly the force of this apprehension. He was ten years old, when, to escape De Retz and Beaufort, the Queen-Mother fled with him to St. Germain, and slept there upon straw, in want of the necessaries of life. After their return to Paris, the mob broke into the Louvre, and penetrated to the royal bedchamber. He could not well forget the night when his mother placed him upon his knees to pray for the success of the attempt to arrest Condé, who thought himself the master. He was twelve when Mazarin marched into France with seven thousand men wearing green scarfs, the Cardinal's colors, and in the Cardinal's pay. After the young King had joined them, the Parliament of Paris offered fifty thousand crowns for the Cardinal's head. He was thirteen when Condé, in command of Spanish troops, surprised the royalists at Bléneau, and would have captured King and Court, had it not been for the skill of Turenne. A few years before, Turenne had served against France, under the Spanish flag. The boy-King had witnessed the battle of St. Antoine,—had seen the gates of Paris closed against him, and the cannon of the Bastille firing upon his army, by order of his cousin, Mademoiselle, the grand-daughter of Henry IV. He had known a Parliament at Paris, and an Anti-Parliament at Pontoise. In 1651, Condé, De Retz, and La Rochefoucauld fought in the Palais Royal, almost in the royal presence. In 1652 he had been compelled to exile Mazarin again; and it was not until 1658 that Turenne finally defeated Condé and Don John of Austria, and opened the way to the Peace of the Pyrenees, and the marriage with the Infanta. Oliver Cromwell aided the King with six thousand of his soldiers in this battle, and seized upon Dunkirk to repay himself,—only three years before. No wonder Louis was anxious to place the throne beyond the reach of danger and insult, and to crush the only man who seemed to have the power to rekindle a civil war.
A stronger and a meaner motive he kept to himself. He was small-minded enough to think that a subject overshadowed him, nec pluribus impar. He hated Fouquet because he was so much admired,—because he was called the Magnificent,—because his châteaux and gardens were incomparably finer than St. Germain or Fontainebleau,—because he was surrounded by the first wits and artists,—no trifling matter in that bright morning of French literature, when every gentleman of station in Paris aspired to be a bel-esprit, or, if that was impossible, to keep one in his employ. "Le Roi s'abaissa jusqu'à se croire humilié par un sujet." His "gloire" as he called it, was his passion, not only in war and in government, where it meant something, but in buildings and furniture, dress and dinners, madrigals and bon-mots. The monopoly of gloire he must and would have,—nobly, if possible, but at any rate, and in every kind, gloire.
And the unlucky Surintendant had sinned against the royal feelings in a still more unpardonable way. The King was in love with La Vallière. He had surrounded his attachment with the mystery the young and sentimental delight in. Fouquet, quite unconscious of the royal fancy, had cast eyes of favor upon the same lady. Proceeding according to the custom of men of middle age and of abundant means, he had wasted no time in petits soins and sighs, but, Jupiter-like, had offered to shower two hundred thousand livres upon the fair one. This proposition was reported to the King, and was the cause of the acharnement, the relentless fury, he showed in persecuting Fouquet. He would have dealt with him as Queen Christina had dealt with Monaldeschi, if he had dared. The hatred survived long after he had dismissed the fair cause of it from his affections, and from his palace.
Such was the Surintendant's position when he issued his invitation to the King, Court, and bel-air for the seventeenth of August, 1661,—the fête de Vaux, which fills a paragraph in every history of France. In June, he had entertained the Queen of England in a style which made Mazarin's pageants for the Infanta Queen seem tasteless and old-fashioned. The present festival cast the preceding one into the shade. It began in the early afternoon, like a déjeuner of our day. The King was there, the Queen-Mother, Monsieur, brother to the King, and Madame, daughter of Charles I. of England, attended by Princes, Dukes, Marquises, and Counts, with their quick-witted, sharp-tongued, and independent spouses. The highest and noblest of France came to stare at Fouquet's magnificence, to wonder at the strange birds and beasts, and to admire the fountains and cascades. After a walk about the grounds, the august company were served with supper in the château. Vatel was the maître d'hôtel. The King could not conceal his astonishment at the taste and luxury of the Surintendant, nor his annoyance when he recognized the portrait of La Vallière in a mythological panel. Over doors and windows were carved and painted Fouquet's arms,—a squirrel, with the motto, "Quò non ascendam?" The King asked a chamberlain for the translation. When the device was interpreted, the measure of his wrath was full. He was on the point of ordering Fouquet's instant arrest; but the Queen-Mother persuaded him to wait until every precaution had been taken.
After supper, the guests were conducted to the play. The theatre was at the end of an alley of pines, almost al fresco. The stage represented a garden decorated with fountains and with statues of Terminus. Scenery by Le Brun; machinery and transmutations by Torelli; stage-manager, Molière; the comedy, "Les Fâcheux," "The Bores," composed, written, and rehearsed expressly for this occasion, in the short space of fifteen days. This piece was put upon the stage in a new way. The ballet, introduced by Mazarin a few years before, was the fashion, and indispensable. As Molière had only a few good dancers, he placed the scenes of the ballet between the acts of the comedy, in order to give his artists time to change their dresses and to take three or four different parts. To avoid awkwardness in these transitions, the plot of the comedy was carried over into the pantomime. This arrangement proved so successful that Molière made use of it in many of his later plays.
The curtain rises upon a man in citizen's-dress (Molière). He expresses amazement and dismay at seeing so large and so distinguished an audience, and implores His Majesty to pardon him for being there without actors enough and without time enough to prepare a suitable entertainment. While he is yet speaking, twenty jets of water spring into the air,—a huge rock in the foreground changes into a shell,—the shell opens,—forth steps a Naiad (pretty Mademoiselle Béjart, a well-known actress,—too well known for Moliere's domestic comfort) and declaims verses written by Pellisson for the occasion. Here is a part of this prologue in commonplace prose; Pellisson's verses are of a kind which loses little by translation. The flattery is heavy, but Louis XIV. was not dainty; he liked it strong, and probably swallowed more of it with pleasure and comfort during fifty years than any other man.
"Mortals," said la Béjart, "I come from my grotto to look upon the greatest king in the world. Shall the land or the water furnish a new spectacle for his amusement? He has only to speak,—to wish; nothing is impossible to him. Is he not himself a miracle? And has he not the right to demand miracles of Nature? He is young, victorious, wise, valiant, and dignified,—as benevolent and just as he is powerful. He governs his desires as well as his subjects; he unites labor and pleasure; always busy, never at fault, seeing all, hearing all. To such a prince Heaven can refuse nothing. If Louis commands, these Termini shall walk from their places, these trees shall speak better than the oaks of Dodona. Come forth, then, all of you! Louis commands it. Come forth to amuse him, and transform yourselves upon this novel stage!" Trees and Termini fly open. Dryads, Fauns, and Satyrs skip out. Then the Naiad invokes Care, the goddess whose hand rests heavily upon monarchs, and implores her to grant the great King an hour's respite from the business of State and from his anxiety for his people. "Let him give his great heart up to pleasure. To-morrow, with strength renewed, he will take up his burden, sacrifice his own rest to give repose to mankind and maintain peace throughout the universe. But to-night let all fâcheux stand back, except those who can make themselves agreeable to him." The Naiad vanishes. The Fauns dance to the violins and hautboys, until the play begins.
After the comedy, the spectators walked slowly to the château. A feu d'artifice, ending in a bouquet of a thousand rockets from the dome, lighted them on their way back. Another repast followed, which lasted until the drums of the royal mousquetaires, the King's escort, were heard in the courtyard. This was the signal for breaking up.
The Surintendant seemed to be on the highest pinnacle of prosperity, beyond the reach of Fate. There was at Rome a Sire de Maucroix, sent thither by Fouquet on his private business. To him his friend La Fontaine wrote a full description of the day, and of the effect Vaux had produced upon the fashionable world. "You would think that Fame [la Renommée] was made only for him, he gives her so much to do at once.
'Plein d'éclat, plein de gloire, adoré des mortels,
Il reçoit des honneurs qu'on ne doit qu'aux autels.'"
A few days later, the Surintendant arrived at Angers, on his way to Nantes. Arnauld writes, that the Bishop of Angers and himself waited upon the great man to pay their respects. "From the height upon which he stood, all others seemed so far removed from him that he could not recognize them. He scarcely looked at us, and Madame, his wife, seemed neither less frigid nor more civil." On the fifth of September, nineteen days after the fête, the thunderbolt fell upon him.
A Procureur-Général could be tried only by the Parliament to which he belonged. To make Fouquet's destruction more certain, Colbert had induced him, by various misrepresentations, to sell out. He received fourteen hundred thousand livres for the place, and presented the enormous sum to the Treasury. This act of munificence, or of restitution, did not save him. If he had been backed by fifty thousand men, the King could hardly have taken greater precautions. His Majesty's manner was more gracious than ever. To prevent a rising in the West, Louis journeyed to Nantes, which is near Belleîle. Fouquet accompanied the progress with almost equal state. He had his court, his guards, his own barge upon the Loire,—and travelled brilliantly onward to ruin. The palace in Nantes was the scene of the arrest. Fouquet, suspecting nothing, waited upon the King. Louis kept him engaged in conversation, until he saw D'Artagnau, a name famous in storybooks, and the mousquetaires in the courtyard. Then he gave the signal. The Surintendant was seized and taken to Angers, thence to Amboise, Vincennes, and finally to the Bastille. He was confined in a room lighted only from above, and allowed no communication with family or friends. The mask was now thrown off, and the blow followed up with a malignant energy which showed the determination to destroy. The King was very violent, and said openly that he had matter in his possession which would hang the Surintendant. His secretaries and agents were arrested. His friends, not knowing how much they might be implicated, either fled the kingdom, or kept out of the way in the provinces. Pellisson and Dr. Pecquet were sent to the Bastille; Guénégaud lost half his fortune; the Bishop of Avranches had to pay twelve thousand francs; Gourville fled to England; Pomponne was ordered to reside at Verdun. Fouquet's papers were examined in the presence of the King. Letters were there from persons in every class of life,—a very large number from women, for the prisoner had charms which the fair sex have always found it difficult to resist. Madame Scarron had written to thank him for his bounty to the poor cripple whose name and roof protected her. The King had probably never before heard of this lady, who was to be the wife and ruler of his old age. The portfolio contained specimens of the gayest and brightest of letter-writers. In the course of his career, the gallant Surintendant had attempted to add the charming widow Sévigné to his conquests. She refused the temptation, but always remained grateful for the compliment. Le Tellier told her cousin, Bussy-Rabutin, that the King liked her letters,—"very different," he said, "from the douceurs fades"—the insipid sweet things—"of the other feminine scribes." Nevertheless, she thought it prudent to reside for a time upon her estate in Brittany. A copy of a letter by St. Évremond was found, written three years before from the Spanish frontier. It was a sarcastic pleasantry at the expense of Mazarin and the Paix des Pyrénées, St. Évremond was a soldier, a wit, and the leader of fashion; Colbert hated him, and magnified a jeu d'esprit into a State-crime. He was exiled, and spent the rest of his long life in England. Of the baser sort, hundreds were turned out of their places and thrown penniless upon the world. It was a coup d'état, a revolution, and most people were against Fouquet. It is such a consolation for the little to see the mighty fall!
The instinct which impels friends and servants to fly from sinking fortunes is a well-established fact in human natural history; but Fouquet's hold upon his followers was extraordinary: it resisted the shock of ruin. They risked court-favor, purse, and person, to help him. Gourville, before he thought of his own safety, carried a hundred thousand livres to Madame Fouquet, to be used in defending the Surintendant, or in bribing a judge or a jailer. The rest of his property he divided, intrusting one half to a devout friend, the other to a sinful beauty, Ninon de l'Enclos, and fled the country. The "professor" absorbed all that was left in his hands; Ninon returned her trust intact. This little incident was made much use of at a later day by the Philosophes, and Voltaire worked it up into "Le Dépositaire." From the Bastille, Pellisson addressed to the King three papers in defence of his chief: "masterpieces of prose, worthy of Cicero," Voltaire says,—"ce que l'éloquence a produit de plus beau." And Sainte-Beuve thinks that Louis must have yielded to them, if he had heard them spoken, instead of reading them in his closet. The faithful La Fontaine fearlessly sang the sorrows of his patron, and accustomed "chacun à plaindre ses malheurs." He begged to the King for mercy, in an ode full of feeling, if not of poetry. "Has not Oronte been sufficiently punished by the withdrawal of thy favor? Attack Rome, Vienna, but be merciful to us. La Clémence est fille des Dieux." A copy of this ode found its way to the prisoner. He protested against these lines:—
"Mais, si tu crois qu'il est coupable,
Il ne veut point être innocent."
Two years of prison had not broken him down to this point of self-abasement. Could any Sultan, or even the "Oriental Despot" of a radical penny-a-liner, be implored in more abject terms? Madame de Sévigné, Madame de Scudéry, Le Fèvre, talked, wrote, and spared no expense for their dear friend. Brébeuf, the poet, who had neither influence nor money, took to his bed and died of grief. Hesnault, author of the "Avorton," a sonnet much admired in those days, and translated with approval into English verse, as,
"Frail spawn of nought and of existence mixed,"
eased his feelings by insulting Colbert in another sonnet, beginning thus:—
"Ministre avare et lâche, esclave malheureux."
The poet escaped unpunished. His affront gave Colbert the chance for a mot,—an opportunity which Frenchmen seldom throw away. When the injurious verses were reported to the Minister, he asked,—"Is there anything in them offensive to the King?" "No." "Then there can be nothing in them offensive to me." Loret, of the Gazette, was not so lucky. A gentle appeal in his journal for less severity was punished by striking the editor from the pension-list,—a fine of fifteen hundred livres a year. Fouquet heard of it, and found means to send, by the hands of Madame Scudéry, a year's allowance to the faithful newsman.
The Government was not ready to proceed to trial until 1664. For three years the sharpest lawyers in France had been working on the Act of Accusation. It was very large even for its age. The accompanying Pièces were unusually voluminous. The accused had not been idle. His Défenses may be seen in fourteen closely printed Elzevir 18mos.
The unabated rigor of Fouquet's prison had convinced his friends that it was useless to hope for clemency, and that it might be difficult to save his life. The King was as malignant as at first; Colbert and Le Tellier as venomous, as if it had been a question of Fouquet's head or their own. They talked about justice, affected moderation, and deceived nobody. Marshal Turenne, speaking of their respective feelings in the matter, said a thing which was considered good by the bel-esprits:—"I think that Colbert is the more anxious to have him hanged, and Le Tellier the more afraid he will not be."
But meantime the Parisians had changed their minds about the Surintendant. Now, they were all for him. His friends had done much to bring this about; time, and the usual reaction of feeling, had done more. His haughtiness and his pomp were gone and forgotten; there remained only an unfortunate gentleman, crushed, imprisoned, threatened with death, attacked by his enemies with a bitterness which showed they were seeking to destroy the man rather than to punish the criminal,—yet bearing up against his unexampled afflictions with unshaken courage. The great Public has strong levelling propensities, both upward and downward. If it delights to see the prosperous humbled, it is always ready to pity the unfortunate; and even in 1664 the popular feeling in Paris was powerful enough to check the ministers of an absolute king, and to save Fouquet's life. His persecutors were so eager to run down their prey that they overran it "In their anxiety to hang him," some one said, "they have made their rope so thick that they cannot tighten it about his neck."
In November, 1664, Fouquet was brought before a commission of twenty-two judges, selected from the different Parliaments of the kingdom. After protesting against the jurisdiction of the court, he took his seat upon the sellette, although a chair had been prepared for him beside it. The interrogatories commenced. There were two principal charges against him. First, diversion of the public funds to his own use,—embezzlement or defalcation we should call it. Proof: his great expenditure, too large for any private fortune. Answer: that his expenses were within the income he derived from his salaries, pensions, and the property of himself and wife. He was questioned closely upon his administration of the finances. He was invariably self-possessed and ready with an answer, and he eluded satisfactorily every attempt of the judges to entrap him, although, as one of his best friends confessed, "some places were very slippery." The second charge, treason against the State, was based upon a paper addressed to his wife, and found in his desk. Fifteen years before, after a quarrel with Mazarin, he had drawn up a plan of the measures to be taken by his family and adherents in case of an attack upon his life or liberty. It was a mere rough draught, incomplete, which had remained unburned because forgotten. The fortifications of Belleîle and the number of his retainers were brought up as evidence of his intention to carry out the "projet," as it was called, if it became necessary. Fouquet's explanations, and the date of the paper, were satisfactory to the majority of the Commission. At last even the Chancellor admitted that the proof was insufficient to sustain this part of the accusation. Fouquet's answer to Séguier, during the examination on the "projet," was much admired, and repeated out-of-doors. Séguier asserted more than once, "This is clearly treason." "No," retorted Fouquet, "it is not treason; but I will tell you what is treason. To hold high office, to be in the confidence of the King; then suddenly to desert to the enemies of that King, to carry over relatives, with the regiments and the fortresses under their command, and to betray the secrets of State: that is treason." And that was exactly what Chancellor Séguier had done in the Fronde.
In French criminal jurisprudence, the theory seems to be that the accused is guilty until he has proved his innocence, and those conversant with French trials need not be told that the judges assist the public prosecutor. In this case, they sought by cross-examinations to confuse Fouquet, and to entrap him into dangerous admissions. Séguier sternly repressed any leanings in his favor; he even reproved some of the judges for returning the salutation of the prisoner, as he entered the court-room.
The trial lasted five weeks. All Paris looked on absorbed, as at a drama of the most exciting interest. Fouquet never appeared so admirable as then, at bay, firmly facing king, ministers, judges, eager for his blood, excited by the ardor of pursuit, and embittered by the roar of applause with which his masterly defence was received out-of-doors. Even those who knew the Surintendant best were astonished at his courage and his presence of mind. He seemed greater in his adversity than in his magnificence. Some of the judges began to waver. Renard, J., said,—"I must confess that this man is incomparable. He never spoke so well when he was Procureur; he never showed so much self-possession." Another, one Nesmond, died during the trial, and regretted openly on his death-bed that he had lent himself to this persecution. The King ordered that this dying speech and confession should not be repeated, but it circulated only the more widely.
"No public man," Voltaire says, "ever had so many personal friends"; and no friends were ever more faithful and energetic. They repeated his happy answers in all quarters, praised his behavior, pitied his sufferings, and reviled and ridiculed his enemies. They managed to meet him, as he walked to and from the Arsenal, where the Commission sat, and cheered him with kind looks. Madame de Sévigné tells us how she and other ladies of the same faith took post at a window to see "notre pauvre ami" go by. "M. d'Artagnau walked by his side, followed by a guard of fifty mousquetaires. He seemed sad. D'Artagnau touched him to let him know that we were there. He saluted us with that quiet smile we all knew so well." She says that her heart beat and her knees trembled. The lively lady was still grateful for that compliment.
The animosity which the King did not conceal made an acquittal almost hopeless, but great efforts were made to save the life of the Surintendant. Money was used skilfully and abundantly. Several judges yielded to the force of this argument; others were known to incline to mercy. Fouquet himself thought the result doubtful. He begged his friends to let him know the verdict by signal, that he might have half an hour to prepare himself to receive his sentence with firmness.
The Commission deliberated for one week,—an anxious period for Fouquet's friends, who trembled lest they had not secured judges enough to resist the pressure from above. At last the court was reopened. D'Ormesson, a man of excellent family and social position, who had favored the accused throughout the trial, delivered his opinion at length. He concluded for banishment. The next judge voted for decapitation, but with a recommendation to mercy. Next, one Pussort, a malignant tool of the Chancellor, inveighed against Fouquet for four hours, so violently that he injured his case. His voice was for the gallows,—but, in consideration of the criminal's rank, he would consent to commute the cord for the axe. After him, four voted for death; then, five for banishment. Six to six. Anxiety had now reached a distressing point. The Chancellor stormed and threatened; but in vain. On the twenty-fifth of December the result was known. Nine for death, thirteen for banishment. Saved! "I am so glad," Sévigné wrote to Simon Arnauld, "that I am beside myself." She exulted too soon. The King was not to be balked of his vengeance. He refused to abide by the verdict of the Commission he himself had packed, and arbitrarily changed the decree of banishment to imprisonment for life in the Castle of Pignerol,—to solitary confinement,—wife, family, friends, not to be permitted to see the prisoner, or to write to him; even his valet was taken away.
Thus the magnificent Surintendant disappeared from the world forever,—buried alive, but indomitable and cheerful. His last message to his wife was, "I am well. Keep up your courage; I have enough for myself, and to spare."
"We still hope for some relaxation," Sévigné writes again; but none ever came from the narrow-hearted, vindictive King. He exiled Roquesante, the judge who had shown the most kindness to Fouquet, and turned an Avocat-Général out of office for saying that Pussort was a disgrace to the Parliament he belonged to. Madame Fouquet, the mother, famous for her book of prescriptions, "Recueil de Recettes Choisies," who had cured, or was supposed to have cured, the Queen by a plaster of her composition, threw herself at the King's feet, with her son's wife and children. Their prayer was coldly refused, and they soon received an order to reside in remote parts of France. Time seemed to have no mollifying effect upon the animosity of the King. Six years later, a young man who attempted to carry a letter from Fouquet to his wife was sent to the galleys; and in 1676, fifteen years after the arrest, Madame de Montespan had not influence enough to obtain permission for Madame Fouquet and her children to visit the prisoner.
This cruel and illegal punishment lasted for twenty years, until an attack of apoplexy placed the Surintendant beyond the reach of his torturer. So lost had he been in his living tomb, that it is a debated point whether he died in Piguerol or not. He has even been one of the candidates for the mysterious dignity of the Iron Mask. In his dungeon he could learn nothing of what was passing in the world. Lauzun, whose every-day life seemed more unreal and romantic than the dreams of ordinary men, was confined in Pignerol. Active and daring as Jack Sheppard, he dug through the wall of his cell, and discovered that his next neighbor was Fouquet. When he told his fellow-prisoner of his adventures and of his honors, how he had lost the place of Grand Master of the Artillery through Louvois, and had only missed being the acknowledged husband of the grand-daughter of Henry IV. because Madame de Montespan persuaded the King to withdraw his consent, Fouquet, who recollected him as a poor cadet de famille, thought him crazy, and begged the jailer to have him watched and properly cared for.
The Surintendant had twice wounded the vanity of his King. He had presumed to have a more beautiful château than his master, and had unluckily fancied the same woman. Louis revenged himself by burying his rival alive for twenty years. That Fouquet had plotted rebellion nobody believed. He was too wise a politician not to know that the French were weary of civil war and could not be tempted to exchange one master for half a dozen military tyrants. That he had taken the public money for his own use was not denied, even by his friends; and banishment would have been a just punishment, although, perhaps, a harsh one. For it is hardly fair to judge Fouquet by our modern standard of financial honesty, low as that may be. We, at least, try to cover up jobs, contracts, and defalcations by professions or appearances. The difficulty of raising money for the expenses of Government in a state impoverished by years of internal commotions had accustomed public men to strange and irregular expedients, and unscrupulous financiers catch fine fish in troubled waters. Mazarin openly put thousands of livres into his pocket; the Surintendant imitated him on a smaller scale. But, if he paid himself liberally for his services, he also showed energy and skill in his attempts to restore order and economy in the administration of the revenue. After his disgrace money was not much more plenty. France, it is true, tranquil and secure within her borders, again showed signs of wealth, and was able to pay heavier taxes; but the King wasted them on his wars, his châteaux, and his mistresses, as recklessly as the Surintendant. He had no misgivings as to his right to spend the people's money. From his principle, "L'État, c'est moi," followed the corollary, "The income of the State is mine." From 1664 to 1690 one hundred and sixteen millions of livres were laid out in unnecessary hôtels, châteaux, and gardens. His ministers imitated him at a humble distance. Louvois boasted that he had reached his fourteenth million at Meudon. "I like," said Louis, "to have those who manage my affairs skilfully do a good business for themselves."
Before many years had passed, it was evident that Colbert, with all his energy and his systems, did not make both the financial ends meet any better than the Surintendant. A merchant of Paris, with whom he consulted, told him,—"You found the cart upset on one side, and you have upset it on the other." Colbert had tried to lighten it by striking eight millions of rentes from the funded debt; but it was too deeply imbedded in the mire; the shoulder of Hercules at the wheel could not have extricated it. After Colbert was removed, times grew harder. Long before the King's death the financial distress was greater than in the wars and days of the Fronde. Every possible contrivance by which money could be raised was resorted to. Lotteries were drawn, tontines established, letters of nobility offered for sale at two thousand crowns each. Those who preferred official rank could buy the title of Councillor of State or of Commissioner of Police. New and profitable offices were created and disposed of to the highest bidder,—inspectorships of wood, of hay, of wine, of butter. Arbitrary power, no matter whether we call it sovereign prince or sovereign people, falls instinctively into the same ways in all times and countries. The Demos of a neighboring State, absolute and greedy as any monarch, have furnished us with plenty of examples of this last imposition upon industry. Zealous servants are rewarded and election-expenses paid by similar inspectorships and commissionerships, not only useless, but injurious, to every one except those who hold them.
When these resources became exhausted, a capitation-tax was laid, followed by an assessment of one tenth, and the adulteration of the currency. The King cut off the pension-list, sold his plate, and dismissed his servants. Misery and starvation laid waste the realm. At last, the pompous, "stagy" old monarch died, full of infirmities and of humiliations; and the road from the Boulevard to St. Denis was lined with booths as for a fête, and the people feasted, sang, and danced for joy that the tyrant was in his coffin. Time, the galantuomo, amply avenged Fouquet.
The approach to Salt Lake City from the east is surprisingly harmonious with the genius of Mormonism. Nature, usually so unpliant to the spirit of people who live with her, showing a bleak and rugged face, which poetically should indicate the abode of savages and ogres, to Hans Christian Andersen and his hospitable countrymen, but lavishing the eternal summer of her tropic sea upon barbarians who eat baked enemy under her palms, or throw their babies to her crocodiles,—this stiff, unaccommodating Nature relents into a little expressiveness in the neighborhood of the Mormons, and you feel that the grim, tremendous cañons through which your overland stage rolls down to the City of the Saints are strangely fit avenues to an anomalous civilization.
We speak of crossing the Rocky Mountains from Denver to Salt Lake; but, in reality, they reach all the way between those places. They are not a chain, as most Eastern people imagine them, but a giant ocean caught by petrifaction at the moment of maddest tempest. For six hundred miles the overland stage winds over, between, and around the tremendous billows, lying as much as may be in the trough, and reaching the crest at Bridger's Pass, (a sinuous gallery, walled by absolutely bare yellow mountains between two and three thousand feet in height at the road-side,) but never getting entirely out of the Rocky-Mountain system till it reaches the Desert beyond Salt Lake. Even there it runs constantly among mountains; in fact, it never loses sight of lofty ranges from the moment it makes Pike's Peak till its wheels (metaphorically) are washed by the Pacific Ocean; but the mountains of the Desert may legitimately set up for themselves, belonging, as I believe, to a system independent of the Rocky Mountains on the one side and the Sierra Nevada on the other. At a little plateau among snowy ridges a few miles east of Bridger's Pass, the driver leans over and tells his insiders, in a matter-of-fact manner, through the window, that they have reached the summit-level. Then, if you have a particle of true cosmopolitanism in you, it is sure to come out. There is something indescribably sublime, a conception of universality, in that sense of standing on the water-shed of a hemisphere. You have reached the secret spot where the world clasps her girdle; your feet are on its granite buckle; perhaps there sparkles in your eyes that fairest gem of her cincture, a crystal fountain, from which her belt of rivers flows in two opposite ways. Yesterday you crossed the North Platte, almost at its source (for it rises out of the snow among the Wind-River Mountains, and out of your stage-windows you can see, from Laramie Plains, the Lander's Peak which Bierstadt has made immortal); that stream runs into the sea from whose historic shores you came; you might drop a waif upon its ripples with the hope of its reaching New Orleans, New York, Boston, or even Liverpool. To-morrow you will be ferried over Green River, as near its source,—a stream whose cradle is in the same snow-peaks as the Platte,—whose mysterious middle-life, under the new name of the Colorado, flows at the bottom of those tremendous fissures, three thousand feet deep, which have become the wonder of the geologist,—whose grave, when it has dribbled itself away into the dotage of shallows and quicksands, is the desert-margined Gulf of California and the Pacific Sea. Between Green River and the Mormon city no human interest divides your perpetually strained attention with Nature. Fort Bridger, a little over a day's stage-ride east of the city, is a large and quite a populous trading-post and garrison of the United States; but although we found there a number of agreeable officers, whose acquaintance with their wonderful surroundings was thorough and scientific, and though at that period the fort was a rendezvous for our only faithful friend among the Utah Indians, Washki, the Snake chief, and that handful of his tribe who still remained loyal to their really noble leader and our Government, Fort Bridger left the shadowiest of impressions on my mind, compared with the natural glories of the surrounding scenery.
Mormondom being my theme, and my space so limited, I must resist the temptation to give detailed accounts of the many marvellous masterpieces of mimetic art into which we find the rocks of this region everywhere carved by the hand of Nature. Before we came to the North Platte, we were astonished by a ship, equalling the Great Eastern in size, even surpassing it in beauty of outline, its masts of columnar sandstone snapped by a storm, its prodigious hulk laboring in a gloomy sea of hornblendic granite, its deck-houses, shapen with perfect accuracy of imitation, still remaining in their place, and a weird-looking demon at the wheel steering it on to some invisible destruction. This naval statue (if its bulk forbid not the name) was carved out of a coarse millstone-grit by the chisel of the wind, with but slight assistance from the infrequent rain-storms of this region. In Colorado I first began to perceive how vast an omission geologists had been guilty of in their failure to give the wind a place in the dynamics of their science. Depending for a year at a time, as that Territory sometimes does, upon dews and meltings from the snow-peaks for its water, it is nevertheless fuller than any other district in the world of marvellous architectural simulations, vast cemeteries crowded with monuments, obelisks, castles, fortresses, and natural colossi from two to five hundred feet high, done in argillaceous sandstone or a singular species of conglomerate, all of which owe their existence almost entirely to the agency of wind. The arid plains from which the conglomerate crops out rarefy the superincumbent air-stratum to such a degree that the intensely chilled layers resting on the closely adjoining snow-peaks pour down to reëstablish equilibrium, with the wrathful force of an invisible cataract, eight, ten, even seventeen thousand feet in height. These floods of cold wind find their appropriate channels in the characteristic cañons which everywhere furrow the whole Rocky-Mountain system to its very base. Most of these are exceedingly tortuous, and the descending winds, during their passage through them, acquire a spiral motion as irresistible as the fiercest hurricane of the Antilles, which, moreover, they preserve for miles after they have issued from the mouth of the cañon. Every little cold gust that I observed in the Colorado country had this corkscrew character. The moment the spiral reaches a loose sand-bed, it sweeps into its vortex all the particles of grit which it can hold. The result is an auger, of diameter varying from an inch to a thousand feet, capable of altering its direction so as to bore curved holes, revolving with incalculable rapidity, and armed with a cutting edge of silex. Is it possible to conceive an instrument more powerful, more versatile? Indeed, practically, there is no description of surface, no kind of cut, which it is not capable of making. I have repeatedly seen it in operation. One day, while riding from Denver to Pike's Peak, I saw it (in this instance, one of the smaller diameters) burrow its way six or seven feet into a sand-bluff, making as smooth a hole as I could cut in cheese with a borer, of the equal diameter of six inches throughout, all in less time than I have taken to describe it. Repeatedly, on the same trip, I saw it gouge out a circular groove around portions of a similar bluff, and leave them standing as isolated columns, with heavy base and capital, presently to be solidified into just such rock pillars as throng the cemeteries or aid in composing the strange architectural piles mentioned above. Surveyor-General Pierce of Colorado, (a man whose fine scientific genius and culture have already done yeoman's service in the study of that most interesting Territory,) on a certain occasion, saw one of these wind-and-silex augers meet at right angles a window-pane in a settler's cabin, which came out from the process, after a few seconds, a perfect opaque shade, having been converted into ground-glass as neatly and evenly as could have been effected by the manufacturer's wheel. It is not a very rare thing in Colorado to be able to trace the spiral and measure the diameter of the auger by rocks of fifty pounds' weight and tree-trunks half as thick as an average man's waist, torn up from their sites, and sent revolving overhead for miles before the windy turbine loses its impetus. The efficiency of an instrument like this I need not dwell upon. After some protracted examination and study of many of the most interesting architectural and sculpturesque structures of the Rocky-Mountain system, I am convinced that they are mainly explicable on the hypothesis of the wind-and-silex instrument operating upon material in the earthy condition, which petrified after receiving its form. Indeed, this same instrument is at present nowise restricted by that condition in Colorado, and is not only, year by year, altering the conformation of all sand and clay bluff's on the Plains, but is tearing down, rebuilding, and fashioning on its facile lathe many rock-strata of the solidity of the more friable grits, wherever exposed to its action. Water at the East does hardly more than wind at the West.
Before we enter the City of the Saints, let me briefly describe the greatest, not merely of the architectural curiosities, but, in my opinion, the greatest natural curiosity of any kind which I have ever seen or heard of. Mind, too, that I remember Niagara, the Cedar-Creek Bridge, and the Mammoth Cave, when I speak thus of the Church Buttes.
They are situated a short distance from Fort Bridger; the overland road passes by their side. They consist of a sandstone bluff, reddish-brown in color, rising with the abruptness of a pile of masonry from the perfectly level plain, carved along its perpendicular face into a series of partially connected religious edifices, the most remarkable of which is a cathedral as colossal as St. Peter's, and completely relieved from the bluff on all sides save the rear, where a portico joins it with the main precipice. The perfect symmetry of this marvellous structure would ravish Michel Angelo. So far from requiring an effort of imagination to recognize the propriety of its name, this church almost staggers belief in the unassisted naturalness of its architecture. It belongs to a style entirely its own. Its main and lower portion is not divided into nave and transept, but seems like a system of huge semi-cylinders erected on their bases, and united with reëntrant angles, their convex surfaces toward us, so that the ground-plan might be called a species of quatre-foil. In each of the convex faces is an admirably proportioned door-way, a Gothic arch with deep-carved and elaborately fretted mouldings, so wonderfully perfect in its imitation that you almost feel like knocking for admittance, secure of an entrance, did you only know the "Open sesame." Between and behind the doors, alternating with flying-buttresses, are a series of deep-niched windows, set with grotesque statues, varying from the pigmy to the colossal size, representing demons rather than saints, though some of the figures are costumed in the style of religious art, with flowing sacerdotal garments.
The structure terminates above in a double dome, whose figure may be imagined by supposing a small acorn set on the truncated top of a large one, (the horizontal diameter of both being considerably longer in proportion to the perpendicular than is common with that fruit,) and each of these domes is surrounded by a row of prism-shaped pillars, half column, half buttress in their effect, somewhat similar to the exquisite columnar entourage of the central cylinder of the leaning tower of Pisa. The result of this arrangement is an aërial, yet massive beauty, without parallel in the architecture of the world. I have not conveyed to any mind an idea of the grandeur of this pile, nor could I, even with the assistance of a diagram. I can only say that the Cathedral Buttes are a lesson for the architects of all Christendom,—a purely novel and original creation, of such marvellous beauty that Bierstadt and I simultaneously exclaimed,—"Oh that the master-builders of the world could come here even for a single day! The result would be an entirely new style of architecture,—an American school, as distinct from all the rest as the Ionic from the Gothic or Byzantine." If they could come, the art of building would have a regeneration. "Amazing" is the only word for this glorious work of Nature. I could have bowed down with awe and prayed at one of its vast, inimitable doorways, but that the mystery of its creation, and the grotesqueness of even its most glorious statues, made one half dread lest it were some temple built by demon-hands for the worship of the Lord of Hell, and sealed in the stone-dream of petrifaction, with its priests struck dumb within it, by the hand of God, to wait the judgment of Eblis and the earthquakes of the Last Day.
After leaving Church Buttes and passing Fort Bridger, our attention slept upon what it had seen until we entered the region of the cañons. These are defiles, channelled across the whole breadth of the Wahsatch Mountains almost to the level of their base, walled by precipices of red sandstone or sugar-loaf granite, compared with which the Palisades of the Hudson become insignificant as a garden-fence. The least poetical man who traverses these giant fissures cannot help feeling their fitness as the avenues to a paradoxical region, an anomalous civilization, and a people whose psychological problem is the most unsolvable of the nineteenth century. During the Mormon War, Brigham Young made some rude attempts at a fortification of the great Echo Cañon, half a day's journey from his city, and this work still remains intact. He need not have done it; a hundred men, ambushed among the ledges at the top of the cañon-walls, and well provided with loose rocks and Minié-rifles, could convert the defile into a new Thermopylae, without exposure to themselves. In an older and more superstitious age, the unassisted horrors of Nature herself would have repelled an invading host from the passage of this grizzly cañon, as the profane might have been driven from the galleries of Isis or Eleusis.
About forty miles from Salt Lake City we began to find Nature's barrenness succumbing to the truly marvellous industry of the Mormon people. To understand the exquisite beauty of simple green grass, you must travel through eight hundred miles of sage-brush and grama,—the former, the homely gray-leaved plant of our Eastern goose-stuffing, grown into a dwarf tree six feet high, with a twisted trunk sometimes as thick as a man's body; the latter, a stunted species of herbage, growing in ash-tinted spirals, only two inches from the ground, and giving the Plains an appearance of being matted with curled hair or gray corkscrews. Its other name is "buffalo-grass"; and in spite of its dinginess, with the assistance of the sage, converting all the Plains west of Fort Kearney into a model Quaker landscape, it is one of the most nutritious varieties of cattle-fodder, and for hundreds of miles the emigrant-drover's only dependence.
By incredible labor, bringing down rivulets from the snow-peaks of the Wahsatch range and distributing them over the levels by every ingenious device known to artificial irrigation, the Mormon farmers have converted the bottoms of the cañons through which we approached Salt Lake into fertile fields and pasture-lands, whose emerald sweep soothed our eyes wearied with so many leagues of ashen monotony, as an old home-strain mollifies the ear irritated by the protracted rhythmic clash or the dull, steady buzz of iron machinery. Contrasting the Mormon settlements with their surrounding desolation, we could not wonder that their success has fortified this people in their delusion. The superficial student of rewards and punishments might well believe that none but God's chosen people could cause this horrible desert, after such triumphant fashion, to blossom like the rose.
The close observer soon notices a painful deficiency in these green and smiling Mormon settlements. Everything has been done for the farm,—nothing for the home. That blessed old Anglo-Saxon idea seems everywhere quite extinct. The fields are billowing over with dense, golden grain, the cattle are wallowing in emerald lakes of juicy grass, the barns are substantial, the family-windmill buzzes merrily on its well-oiled pivot, drawing water or grinding feed, the fruit-trees are thrifty,—but the house is desolate. Even where its owner is particularly well off, and its architecture somewhat more ambitious than the average, (though, as yet, this superiority is measured by little more than the difference between logs and clapboards,) there is still no air about it of being the abode of happy people, fond of each other, and longing after it in absence. It looks like a mere inclosure to eat and sleep in. Nobody seems to have taken any pride in it, to feel any ambition for it. Woman's tender little final touches, which make a dear refuge out of a mud-cabin, and without which palatial brownstone is only a home in the moulding-clay,—those dexterous ornamentations which make so little mean so much,—the brier-rose-slip by the doorstep, growing into the fragrant welcome of many Junes,—the trellised Madeira-vines,—the sunny spot of chrysanthemums, charming summer on to the very brink of frost,—all these things are utterly and everywhere lacking to the Mormon inclosure. Sometimes we passed a fence which guarded three houses instead of one. Abundant progeny played at their doors, or rolled in their yard, watched by several unkempt, bedraggled mothers owning a common husband,—and we could easily understand how neither of these should feel much interest in the looks of a demesne held by them in such unhappy partnership. The humblest New-England cottage has its climbing flowers at the door-post, or its garden-bed in front; but how quickly would these wither, if the neat, brisk house-mistress owned her husband in common with Mrs. Deacon Pratt next door!
The first Mormon household I ever visited belonged to a son of the famous Heber Kimball, Brigham Young's most devoted follower, and next to him in the Presidency. It was the last stage-station but one before we entered Salt Lake, situated at the bottom of a green valley in Parley's Cañon (named after the celebrated Elder, Parley Pratt); and as it looked like the residence of a well-to-do farmer, I went in, and asked for a bowl of bread and milk,—the greatest possible luxury after a life of bacon and salt-spring water, such as we had been leading in the mountains. A fine-looking, motherly woman, with a face full of character, gray-haired, and about sixty years old, rose promptly to grant my request, and while the horses were changing I had ample time to make the acquaintance of two pretty young girls, hardly over twenty, holding two infants, of ages not more than three months apart. Green as I was to saintly manners, I supposed that one of these two young mothers had run in from a neighbor's to compare babies with the mistress of the house, after our Eastern fashion, universal with the owners of juvenile phenomena. When the old lady came back with the bread and milk, and both of the young girls addressed her as "mother," I was emboldened to tell her that her daughters had a pretty pair of children.
"They are pretty," said the old lady, demurely; "but they are the children of my son"; then, as if resolved to duck a Gentile head and heels into Mormon realities at once, she added,—"Those young ladies are the wives of my son, who is now gone on a mission to Liverpool,—young Mr. Kimball, the son of Heber Kimball; and I am Heber Kimball's wife."
A cosmopolitan, especially one knowing beforehand that Utah was not distinguished for monogamy, might well be ashamed to be so taken off his feet as I was by my first view of Mormonism in its practical workings. I stared,—I believe I blushed a little,—I tried to stutter a reply; and the one dreadful thought which persistently kept uppermost, so that I felt they must read it in my face, was, "How can these young women sit looking at each other's babies without flying into each other's faces with their fingernails, and tearing out each other's hair?" Heber Kimball afterwards solved the question for me, by saying that it was a triumph of grace.
Such another triumph was Mrs. Heber Kimball herself. She was a woman of remarkable presence, in youth must have been very handsome, would have been the oracle of tea-fights, the ruling spirit of donation-visits, in any Eastern village where she might have lived, and, had her home been New York, would have fallen by her own gravity into the Chief Directress's chair of half a dozen Woman's Aid Societies and Associations for Moral Reform. Yet here was this strong-minded woman, as her husband afterward acknowledged to me, his best counsellor and right-hand helper through a married life reaching into middle-age, witnessing her property in that husband's affections subdivided and parcelled out until she owned but a one-thirtieth share, not only without a pang, but with the acquiescence of her conscience and the approbation of her intellect. Though few first wives in Utah had learned to look concubinage in the face so late in life as this emphatic and vigorous-natured woman, I certainly met none whose partisanship of polygamy was so unquestioning and eloquent. She was one of the strangest psychological problems I ever met. Indeed, I am half inclined to think that she embraced Mormonism earlier than her husband, and, by taking the initiative, secured for herself the only true wifely place in the harem,—the marital after-thoughts of Brother Heber being her servants rather than her sisters. She was most unmistakably his favorite.
One day in the Opera-House at Salt Lake, when the carpenters were laying the floor for the Fourth-of-July-Eve Ball, Heber and I got talking of the pot-pourri of nationalities assembled in Utah. Heber waxed unctuously benevolent, and expressed his affection for each succeeding race as fast as mentioned.
"I love the Danes dearly! I've got a Danish wife." Then turning to a rough-looking carpenter, hammering near him,—"You know Christiny,—eh, Brother Spudge?"
"Oh, yes! know her very well!"
A moment after,—"The Irish are a dear people. My Irish wife is among the best I've got."
Again,—"I love the Germans! Got a Dutch wife, too! Know Katrine, Brother Spudge? Remember she couldn't scarcely talk a word o' English when she come,—eh, Brother Spudge?"