ATTITUDES OF GRIEF.

Mr. Shandy’s observation, that grief always seeks a horizontal position, passes for a good joke; it happens, however, to be good philosophy. Grief, by exhausting the vital powers, renders an upright position irksome and painful. Who that has left or lost the object he loves, but has felt the necessity of a drooping head upon folded arms; or the solace of a total prostration of form?

Under the terrible inflictions of all master griefs, the physical and moral forces go together. For who can dissolve that mysterious union, of which so much is said, so little known, and on which for saying anything, so many have been ridiculed as spiritualists, or burnt as materialists? Man is not to be led to inquiry, with impunity. Those who so liberally reward the impostor, never fail to persecute the teacher; and while they swallow every falsehood and fable, most injurious to their true interests and well being, with undoubting confidence, they oppose and impede every noble enterprise, and every beneficial discovery in the range of moral and physical science.

It probably arises from the acute, though not very durable sensibility of southern countries, that on the occasions of heavy suffering, the afflicted sink at once into the utter helplessness of a prostrate attitude. That which nature inspired as a relief, pride soon converted into a ceremony. As soon as the death of a near friend occurred, in any of the royal, noble, or even gentle-blooded families of the continent, the nearest relative, in former times, went to bed. There he remained, or was supposed to remain, a certain number of weeks, days, or hours, according to the rank of the person lamented, until the visits of condolence were over, and grief, regulated by etiquette, was permitted to pause, or throw off “its weight of woe.” From the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, every item in the chambers and toilette of royal affliction, was prescribed by authority. One of the most curious pictures extant of this red-book sensibility of our ancestors, which seems upon a par with their “wisdom,” is to be found in a very old and amusing French work, “Les Honneurs de la Cour,” written by Alienor de Poitiers, Viscountesse de Furnes, a lady of the Court of the Duc de Bourgogne, in 1469. In her chapter upon royal mourning, or (in her own charming old French,) “Sur le deuil que touttes les princesses et autres devoient porter pour leurs maris, pères, mères, et parens,” observes, that a queen of France must remain one year in the chamber, where she first receives the news of her husband’s death; and every body knows, “chaquin doibt scavoir,” that the chambers, halls, &c., of the widowed queen must be hung and covered with a black cloth. A picture is always well worth a dozen descriptions, and the picture of the mourning of the Princess de Charolois, for her father, the Duke de Bourbon, is well worth transcribing.

“Son père éstoit trépassé: incontinent qu’elle sceut la mort, elle demeura en sa chambre six semaines, est éstoit toujours couchée sur un lict couvert de drap blancq de toille, et appuyée d’oreillers: mais elle avait mit sa barbette, son manteau, et chapperon lesquels estoient fourrez de menuvair, et avait le dit manteau une longue queue, aux bords devant le chapperon une paulme de large, le menuvair (c’est à scavoir le gris) estoit crespé dehors. La chambre éstoit toutte tendue de drap noir, et en bas, un grand drap noir, en lieu de tapis velu, et devant la dicte chambre où Madame se tenoit y avoit une autre grand chambre ou salle pareillement tendue de drap noir. Quand Madame estoit en son particulier, elle n’estoit point toujours couchée, ni en une chambre.”⁠[36]⁠

While, however, princesses were obliged to weep for six weeks in black rooms, on state beds, the banneresses (or peeresses) were only required to shed their obedient tears and lie in bed for nine days—a very fair proportion of sensibility, between the ranks of the parties. But though it was not required that they should lie on their bed of sorrow as long as royal mourners, it was ordained that they should sit in front of their beds, for the remnant of their six weeks, “upon a piece of black cloth.”

“Les banneresses ne doibvent estre que nœuf jours sur le lict, pour père ou mère; et le surplus des six semaines, assises devant leur lict, sur un grand drap noir, mais, pour maris, elle doibvent coucher six semaines.”

A strict observance of pompous ceremonies, in nations as in individuals, is a proof of stagnant intellect. None but the vain, the idle, and the useless, can afford the leisure necessary to enact such pageants. The great, therefore, have always been the grand conservators of such abuses of time, taste, and good sense. In England, the old Duchess of Northumberland,—in Ireland, the grandmother of the present Marquis of Ormond,—were the last ladies of quality who appeared with a running footman.

Towards the middle of the seventeenth century, the French people, energized by the civil dissensions of the League and the Fronde, had made a considerable progress in intellect and literature. It was the middle class which produced nearly all the genius that has given to the gorgeous reign of Louis XIV. the character of an Augustan age. Corneille, Racine, Molière, La Bruyère, La Fontaine, Boileau, &c. &c., were all men of the people.

But while the middle class, unimpeded by forms, and unoccupied by ceremonies, were directing the national intellect towards science, literature, and the arts, the court and the aristocracy, stopping short with the past age, remained devoted to the observances of all the idle forms indissolubly mixed up with their exclusive privileges; and, ignorant of books, they were still deeply “studied in sad ostent,” in court calendars of ancient ceremonies “authorized by their grandams.”

The barbarous forms, ceremonies, and observances of the fifteenth century were in full operation in the court of Louis XIV, and are recorded with the same unction by Dangeau, as by the Dame Alienor of Poictiers.

In a work, which says more for the necessity of the French Revolution, and its inevitability, than all that Jacobinism ever preached from the tribune, or fulminated from the press,—he relates circumstantially all the ceremonies observed on the death of the Dauphin, and the prescribed forms of grief strictly adhered to by the royal widow. Even the Princesses of the blood, it appears, were still obliged to grieve in bed. “Madame la Duchesse (says Dangeau) reçut les complimens sur la mort de M. le Duc; elle était sur son lit et en chaperon, qui est un habillement des princesses du sang, quand elle recevoient en cérémonie les complimens sur la mort de leurs maris.”⁠[37]⁠

What a charming picture Madame de Sévigné has left on record of the manner in which the Duchesse de Longueville received “les visites de doléances,” on the death of her gallant son the Count de St. Pol.—One is absolutely seated within the Ruelle, and gazing on those beautiful eyes, steeped in tears of maternal despondency, which once nearly brought the Duc de la Rochefoucauld to the scaffold. Even that anti-sentimental Princess, La grande Mademoiselle, takes her despair to heart on the loss of her lord, and receives the visits of condolence paid her by her friends, on the king’s breaking off her marriage with De Lauzun, as she must have received them had she become his widow.

The origin of the form lies in nature—its absurdities are peculiar to despotic governments, where all is form, and where kings themselves, as the Spanish ambassador said, “are but ceremonies.” The governments that belong to constitutional institutions are not thrown upon the conservation of such barbarous etiquettes; and if English queens and princesses are not obliged to weep for their near relations in bed for six weeks, for the amusement of a crowded and idle court, they probably owe to Magna Charta the liberty of mourning how they please, as long as they please—or of not weeping at all, if they please not to weep.

At the epoch of the French Revolution, the forms of the court of France were virtually as barbarous as those of the court of the Duc de Bourgogne in the fifteenth century; and the description left on record by Madame Campan of the queen’s receiving the “chemise,” is infinitely more indecent, and quite as barbarous, as any thing recited by Dame Alienor de Poictiers, of her “princesses, comtesses, et autres grandes dames,” or by Dangeau in his punctilious record of the ceremonious absurdities of Versailles and the Tuileries in the time of Louis the XIVth, and the Père de la Chaise.

By the bye, I have a whole chapter to write upon beds, sofas, canapés, ruelles, tabourets, lits de répos, &c. &c. &c. &c.—and a most philosophical chapter it will be.