II. 1694-1724. Youth and early manhood—Intendant of Maubeuge.

"I returned after supper at one o'clock. The man told me that his honour, the Chief of Police, desired to see me. It was to copy out fifteen circular letters to as many Intendants, and not to retire till it was done; my brother had already finished his task—an equal number—and my father had told him to go to bed. I took some coffee, and retired at four o'clock."[48]

He is a young man, very dark, with clear-cut features, his eye glancing with a rough vivacity as he plies his pen with nervous hand. There is a future before him; and, though he cannot be more than eighteen or nineteen,[49] he has already a past.

René Louis de Voyer d'Argenson was born at Paris in 1694, in the same year as two puissant men whose fortunes were to intersect his own, the Englishman, Henry St. John, and his friend and countryman Voltaire. Two years later he was joined by his brother, Marc Pierre, known to history as the astute and charming Count d'Argenson. His father, who had but lately come to Paris, was as yet known only as a rising Master of Requests; his mother was a sister of the distinguished de Caumartin, M. d'Argenson's patron and sponsor in the official world. Among his other natural endowments, the young René Louis possessed, and was possessed by, an expansive imagination; he early conceived and resolved upon a career. Before he was well in his teens, he was leading his brother along those devious courses by which a wholesome boy was to be turned into a fine gentleman and a man of the world.

"We were not born libertines, but are become so. I saw all the sights, I was at all the gatherings, I knew all the women. I thought to myself, what a fine figure I was making in the world."[50]

The boys were not overburdened with parental solicitude.

"My mother was good-natured and indulgent, and a clever woman; our escapades did not induce her to interfere with our habits."[51]

The annoyance came from another quarter. The boys had a tutor, who is described with the true d'Argenson stroke as "fou, imbécile, ignorant, libertin, et hypocrite;"[52] one of those persons who, when you have executed some very bad drawings and love them very dearly, will vent his spleen by tearing them up.[53] It became too much for mortal endurance; and when one day the tutor "advanced upon his desk," the boy received him with doubled fists.[54] From that time forward d'Argenson went his way in peace; and the little rake's progress was proceeding apace, when it was overtaken by one of those strokes of destiny which it is equally impossible to foresee and to resist.[55]

He was sent to school.

In 1709, at the age of fifteen, he went with his brother to the Jesuit College of Louis-le-Grand, which had become, under the patronage of the Great King, the most fashionable of French public schools.[56] Thither, thirty years later, he was followed by another d'Argenson—one who, in the fulness of time and the sunshine of circumstance, was to leave a record, not of maimed and weary aspiration, but of rapid, resolute achievement—Anne Robert Jacques Turgot. But the lad was busied with other thoughts. From "a man of the world who could count his conquests,"[57] he had dwindled to the compass of a mere schoolboy; and his heart was heavy over his fallen state. Occasionally the boys acted tragedies at the College; and as d'Argenson sat in the amphitheatre, pilloried in his hateful gown, a glimpse of some fair spectator whom he had known in happier days would cover him with unutterable shame.[58] But he had the tenacity of purpose which distinguished his race; his time would come; and the modest treasure he was able to amass from the savings of his pocket-money, was dissipated upon those rare occasions when he could shake off the class-room dust from his feet, and plume himself in the great world again. "Why," he asks, with that strange recurrent smile of his, "why should one laugh at such an ambition? Surely it is upon the same canvas that that of conquerors is built (bâtie)!"[59] He possessed that keen, yet kindly humour of the man who knows himself, and can laugh at himself, without ceasing to be himself.

One incident in his school career he never forgot. It began with pea-shooters, and ended with a tragedy. One morning, as the venerable professor of rhetoric, Père Lejay,[60] entered the class-room, he was received with a raking fire of peas. The culprit platoon consisted of the Duc de Boufflers, Count d'Argenson, and his faithful apparitor, Marc Pierre. Boufflers received a flogging, and died from the effect of it. His father was only a duke. But when it came to the sons of M. d'Argenson, the retributive rod was stayed by the timely remembrance of that dark and dangerous person: Jesuitical discretion came into play,[61] and the youthful malefactors escaped. It is curious that the brothers should have lived, the one to be the powerful patron of the Jesuits, the other to attack them, for the eyes of posterity, with a weapon which carries further than a "Sarbacane."

But the young Count d'Argenson was not long to trouble the repose of his spiritual task-masters. He was to complete his education in another school, deemed no less necessary to the training of the whole and perfect man. From the sallow austerity of the reverend fathers, with their hard beds and their unspeakable soup, he passed to the gracious converse of ladies' society, where knowledge was savoured with a joyous sweetness, and where the rewards of success were great indeed. Dreaming long afterwards of the year 1712 and of the gallantries of that golden age, he sighs regretfully over the hearts that fell, and over those that might have fallen had the siege been pressed.

"What a fool I was not to have profited by them! I have repented at leisure."[62]

A votary of pleasure, he was never its slave; and an event was approaching which was soon to engage him in the more sober interests of life. On the morning of September 1st, 1715, the eyelids of the Grand Monarque closed upon a long and fateful chapter in French history; and the hearts of men beat high again with the generous hopes of a newer time. France, and the humblest of her children, d'Argenson, had reached the parting of the ways. The "epic of royalty"[63] was over; the epic of revolution was about to begin. In the development of the drama d'Argenson was to bear a modest, but no mean part. He was now twenty-one. The time for dreaming had passed away; the time for action was at hand. On the threshold of his career, we may pause to gather up those early half-conscious political impressions, which, in the case of quick-minded men, have a real, if only half-recognised, influence upon the direction of future thought.

He had been but a boy of eight when great events occurred.[64] We can well imagine with what childish pleasure he must have watched the stirring of the troops in Paris on the renewal of the great War; and the wide-eyed wonderment with which he may have heard how an army of France was cutting down French citizens for the pleasure of those great black men, whom every one laughed with and called abbé; and how everybody said that one Cavalier was as brave as he was beautiful, and that he and the like of him should have been at Blenheim! And then, as he grew in wit, the excitement of boyhood may have been clouded, if ever so little, by the growing desolation, as defeat followed upon disaster. He could remember how haggard men began to cry for bread; until at last, in 1709, the stones of Paris rose in mutiny, and his own father, the Chief of Police, went in fear of his life.[65] And through it all there was no comfort, but only men said that this Great King had been too great, that he had aroused the alarm of Europe, and that at last Europe had turned to bay. And then when the peace had come, and the people were beginning to breathe, Jesuit and Jansenist reopened their feud and reviled each other in the name of God; while d'Argenson suspected, what his friend Arouet and the wits who supped with the Grand Prior disdainfully averred,[66] that there was no truth to be found upon either side, but only arrogant unspirituality. And now the King, great though he had been, had gone the way of little men; and the hearts of his own people rejoiced, even as the nations whom he had humbled in the dust.

D'Argenson never forgot those fatal years. They haunted his memory and moulded his thought; and he could realise the gravity of the course before him, when, in 1716, he began his career as a councillor of the Parlement of Paris. Shortly afterwards, he received his first official appointment as Director of the Press.

As yet he had excited no great hopes. His father saw but little of him, and was inclined to regard him as rather a fool; the paternal hopes were centred upon his brother, the pleasing, popular and imposing Marc Pierre, then a young man of twenty. This unhappy partiality left a fatal mark upon the character of the elder son; and though d'Argenson never speaks of his father but with affection and respect,[67] he cannot disguise how deeply he felt it. And yet, it is curious to remember, he was before all things else his father's son. He inherited from him his passion for work;[68] to him he owed that instinctive regard for "le bien public,"[69] which afterwards ripened into absolute devotion; from him he drew that soundness of heart and incisiveness of mind which are d'Argenson's prime distinction as a thinker and a man. But there was another strand in the stout complexity of the father's nature, something which had led him, when he came to Paris, to shun the companionship of the great, and to seek his pleasure in a self-chosen society of the baser sort,[70] which had surrounded his life with the infernal obscurity of a magician's cell,[71] something of self-sufficience, of self-contentment, self-concentration. That too, for his own confusion, d'Argenson had inherited. It might have remained harmless; but nourished by his father's indifference and neglect, it grew with the rankness of a noxious weed. He came to find comfort in his own society. As his own company became dearer to him, so did the distance widen between himself and his fellows. Alone, he could be natural, forceful, even great at times; in society, he was pursued by a haunting self-distrust, which attracted disparagement and very often ridicule. As yet, it is true, beyond a touch of depreciation here and there,[72] we see very little of it; the energy of youth and his own strength of will enabled him to fight with his misfortune. But it had afflicted him with one disability which no effort, however determined, could overcome. It had rendered him for ever incapable of coping with the blatancy, the loud insistence, the insensate, trumpet-tongued vulgarity, with which every man of affairs is called upon to deal; and he relates an incident in his present experience as Director of the Press which shows that he was as helpless in the face of it now as he afterwards proved in the more august circle of the Council of State. He was arranging some matter with Machault,[73] who was then in charge of the police; his colleague was for carrying things off with a high hand; d'Argenson laid down his pen, looked at the man, rose, and retired from the business.[74] It was an act of weakness, but the weakness was invincible.

In spite of it, and of those defects of manner which led others to hold him in such scant esteem, there was one person who believed in d'Argenson, his aunt, Charlotte Emilie de Caumartin, Marquise de Balleroy. In one of the earlier letters of that famous correspondence[75] in which most of the materials for his life at this period are preserved, he tries to excuse his slackness in the friendly office of literary purveyor. "If I am not sending you any books," he writes (March 23, 1717), "it is not for want of will. I have brought misfortune on the Press. My censorial severity is silencing all our authors." There were more solid reasons for the unwonted lull in the activity of the Press Bureau.[76] There were no authors to silence. The literary efflorescence of the Grand Age was long since dead; while the new spirit, which was to be so fruitful in trouble to d'Argenson's successors, was only fermenting beneath the surface. It made its appearance with the "Lettres Persanes," which came—from Holland—in 1721. The Censor was not even made the tool of a political party. It is true that the battle of the "Constitution"[77] was raging as fiercely as ever; but Madame de Maintenon had disappeared, and it was no concern of Philippe d'Orléans. When the Government at last interfered (by declaration of October 7, 1717),[78] it was to proscribe the publications of both parties. It is very clear, and it is worth remarking, that d'Argenson was in entire accord with the policy of the Regent. His father, still in command of the police, was constantly behind the scenes, and was under no illusion as to the character of the actors.[79] He used to tell Marais that "if the Jansenists were rogues, the Jesuits were as bad, and that he held the proofs with regard to both of them."[80] The attitude of the son may readily be guessed. His one desire was for peace. In a letter to the Marquise (April 2, 1717) he describes a political brochure by one of her friends as "too bad to read, and not silly enough to laugh at. The Abbé de Guitaut had no reason to write that he detested the Constitution, and he had every reason to refrain from publishing his letter."[81] In short, he viewed the controversy with much concern, and the "Constitution" with none whatever.

Another question was coming to the front, which touched him more nearly as parliamentary councillor (Conseiller au Parlement). The Bank was flourishing, and in August, 1717, the Mississippi Company was successfully floated.[82] On the 2nd of September d'Argenson writes a letter:—

"Our Court of Parlement has received a scurvy compliment." It was a question of money, and they "desired explanations." The Regent replied "that it would be a strange thing if the factious opposition of the Parlement were to arrest the course of those advantageous measures which he wished to secure for the public; that we had no right to meddle with matters of finance; and that he would not suffer the royal authority to be made light of so long as it were entrusted to his care."[83]

He appears to be recording the first brush between the forces of the Parlement and of the Crown, and the opening of the hot battle which ended, exactly three years later (August 28, 1720), at Pontoise.[84] The young councillor was soon to be even more deeply interested in the progress of events. Five months afterwards (January 28, 1718) his father became Warden of the Seals, and President of the Council of Finance; and it was soon plain, from the threatening attitude of the Parlement, that their redoubtable enemy had not entered the ministry one moment too soon. For the present, indeed, the Government was content to hold its hand; for Dubois, the demon of the play, had not yet returned from London, where he was sedulously wooing the Hanoverian interest.[85] As for d'Argenson, his heart wavered 'twixt love for his father and loyalty to his brethren of the long robe. He had recourse to argument—for the Marquis was by this time impressed with his son's substantial worth.[86] "A tout ce que je lui exposai" the black-bearded minister had but one reply: "My good fellow! that Parlement of yours, has it any troops? For our part, we have 150,000 men! That's what it all comes to." "Et voilà parler en grand homme!" exclaims his son,[87]with an admiration which is the more natural for its inconsistency. But the "grand homme" was preparing to act. On August 16th Dubois arrived in Paris bearing a treaty of alliance with England; and the great coup d'état which crushed the pretensions of the Parlement and silenced the opposition to Law, followed upon the 26th.[88]

In December d'Argenson married,[89] and cast about for the means to feather his nest. Retiring discomfited from the Palais de Justice, he took refuge, like many an irate but thrifty parliamentarian, in the Rue Quincampoix. In November, 1719, when the tide of elation was in full flood and trembling on the ebb, we hear that d'Argenson "is in for (y est pour) 500,000 livres."[90] Three weeks afterwards, by decree of the 1st of December, the Bank and the Treasury refuse to receive cash. Before the end of the year the shares are falling.[91] On the 3rd of January M. d'Argenson withdraws from the control of the finances; on the 5th, Law takes the helm as Controller-General, and proceeds with the series of desperate decrees designed to save the credit of the Bank.[92] Upon one of the commissions which followed in quick succession d'Argenson was appointed[93] to serve as Master of Requests.[94] He could do so with a light heart. Warned in time, he had managed to extricate himself; and in a letter of the 22nd of February, 1720, we read: "Talking of shares, no one is coming off more prettily than M. d'Argenson l'aîné; he has just completed the purchase of an estate on the Réveillon road; it is his principal acquisition."[95]

Meanwhile he had obtained a provision of another kind. The Warden of the Seals, on withdrawing in January from the control of the finances, had managed, with his usual dexterity, to cover his retreat. Directly afterwards, to the no small scandal of St. Simon,[96] the young Chevalier was entrusted with the Lieutenancy of Police, while the elder brother, Count d'Argenson, received a seat at the Council of State, with an immediate promise of the Intendancy of Maubeuge. Thus it was that about the middle of March,[97] 1720, d'Argenson set out for his seat of government at Valenciennes, leaving Paris to face the appalling ruin created by the crash of the great "System." Though removed from the centre of the drama, a place was reserved for him in the final act. On the 21st of May appeared the suicidal decree which shattered what vestige of credit remained. It was inspired by d'Argenson's father,[98] and cost him the seals. He fell in the beginning of June. In July Law's carriage was wrecked under the very windows of the Regent in the court of the Palais Royal. In December the great adventurer took to flight; and Count d'Argenson had the supreme satisfaction of arresting him at Valenciennes, and, by an order from Paris, detaining his jewel case, the last resource of the broken man.[99] Personally the young Intendant has not much reason to complain. The "System" had left him with the valuable property of Réveillon; he was already a Councillor of State; and at the age of twenty-six he was comfortably established at Valenciennes as the chief magistrate of the important frontier province of Hainaut.

"I am sure I shall entreat you so much that you will come here; my house is not at all bad; it is scarcely in order, but you will find it even better than they usually are. An opera is coming to Valenciennes; we have very pretty lansquenet, ombre, picquet—you get plenty of that in the country[100]—quadrille and even brélan; a carriage; this summer your choice of drives, if you wish to see a country quite new to you, the towns in the environs. In a word, what shall I tell you? You will see people who love you very much, though I am speaking of one who does not know you yet, but for whom I bespeak your friendship."

In this letter, a few weeks after his arrival, when the house-warming is complete, d'Argenson commends himself, his establishment and his young wife, to his trusted and right loyal friend, Madame de Balleroy. We may glance for an instant at this remarkable lady. At the age of nineteen, by a marriage with a country nobleman, she was widowed of the bright buoyancy of life at Paris; and amid the flat fields and uneventful hedgerows of Normandy[101], her heart yearned for the patter of the distant pavement. Her forlorn beauty, her wasted wit, drew round her a little army of friends, held faithful by the affectionate discipline of pity; and in the goodly company of correspondents who reflect for her the gaieties of the Regency,[102] not the least honourable place is held by her nephew d'Argenson.

Certain features which his letters disclose must be brought for a moment into relief. In the first place, he shows himself a devoted friend and a dutiful correspondent; in the latter regard he is a shining example to his brilliant young brother.[103]

Moreover, we occasionally come across a story, which, if we forget the manners of the time, it seems as strange that a gentleman should have been able to write as that a lady should been willing to read. Yet it is comforting to find, in reading such passages, that if there is an utter absence of delicacy or reserve, there is an equal freedom from mere smirking prurience; the man's breath is tainted by the fashion of the time, but at least his heart is whole.

Sometimes again d'Argenson's feeling for the ideal, which explains so many of amiable vagaries, is seen taking wing and soaring away to the sound of his own laughter.

"I mean my bust (February 18, 1718[104]) to be in the library of Balleroy, with that of Pico de la Mirandola, and some great personage or other who, after all, could do no more than read. The proposal, perhaps, is not very reasonable as yet;[105] of the two, I am more like the latter."

In one letter we get a glimpse of d'Argenson's most cherished interior, and so of the man who loved it.

"I assure you, Rouillon (Réveillon) is becoming a fine house. In a gallery on the wing will be my library, with a little reading-room at one end, plenty of desks, sofas, cushions, upholstery in morocco—all the novelties of Holland; and from the windows a vista of avenues, kitchen gardens, woods, meadows, sheep. Won't you be charmed with it when you are at Paris this summer?" (August 8, 1722).[106]

His occasional reference to "le cadet" is interesting, in the light of their subsequent relations. With a touch of good-natured envy he remarks, "My brother is surpassing himself as Chief of Police. He is a perfect courtier; in that regard he has nothing to learn" (August 8, 1722).[107]Perhaps indeed the most precious thing about these letters is the light they throw upon the real character of the younger brother, and on d'Argenson's subsequent portrait of him. A comparison of the young "Chevalier" who writes over his own signature, with the eternal "Mon Frère" of d'Argenson's Journal, enables us to estimate the personal equation in d'Argenson's political criticism. It tends to suggest that the impression of high colouring, exaggeration, unfairness, which is left by the perusal of many of his more trenchant pages, is due, not to the intrinsic falsity of his judgments, but to the violence and heat with which they are pronounced. We see that to many of his indictments the question, "Well! what of it? how could he help it?" would have been at least a valid reply; and we suspect that had d'Argenson judged his own contemporaries with that same deep-sounding charity which, after a century and a half, one can claim no credit for applying to himself, we should have been spared much of that bitterness which he expends so lavishly upon the men of his time, and above all upon his brother, Count d'Argenson. So far as one can see, the truth was this. Marc Pierre was his mother's son, the blood of the Caumartins in every vein.[108] In him the rough-hewn strength of the d'Argenson character was fashioned to a form of lightness and grace; and losing in massiveness, it gained in charm. He had his father's strength without his seriousness; his power of work without his love of it. He impressed his contemporaries[109] by his singular union of facile effectiveness with absolute unconcern. Such a passage as this, which appears in a letter of 1715,[110] needed no signature for identification.

"At last, my dear aunt, the taxes are achieving what all the preachers in the world have never dared to undertake. Luxury is no more. The balls of the Opera and Comedy are as deserted as the ante-chamber of M. Desmarets or M. de Pontchartrain.[111] The churches are rather more patronised than they were; there, for example, you see men of business who have not yet been taxed, praying, at the foot of the altar, for a lot more pleasant than has fallen to their companions; you see poor Molinists beside themselves at the triumph of their adversaries, and sighing for the re-establishment of Jesuit influence. There you see many a young girl in tears, sorrowing for the purse of the financier who used to keep her in such gay profusion, and crying out upon the harshness of the powers that be at present, who work to construct their own fortunes before taking thought for that of their mistresses. Even me you see there now and again, vastly puzzled as to where I shall dine or sup, and turned pious for want of something better to do."

After reading such a passage as this, a new light breaks upon one of the first notices of Count d'Argenson that appear in the Journal, and upon a thousand more that follow at intervals for nearly thirty years.

"It is certainly true that my brother has not the secret of attaching to himself the men whom he serves. His lack of interest is the principal cause; it lays him open to the charge of insincerity in friendship."[112]

It is here, in this "distraction," implicit in every line of that youthful letter, that we touch the real foundation for those continual charges of cold cleverness, absence of principle, paltriness of aim, pettiness of means, with which Count d'Argenson is pursued. It was this that divided the brothers with a severance of interest that nothing could bridge. At the outset of life their roads diverged. The one led to greatness through labyrinths of littleness; the other was the way of honest, impotent, disdainful obscurity. The simple truth was that the younger brother, keen, accomplished, utterly careless, was free to choose the pleasanter of the two; for the elder, it was barred from the beginning. His estrangement from the world had wholly unfitted him for the arts of complaisance and intrigue; and there was something within him which protested that they were as far beneath him as they were beyond his reach. D'Argenson went his own way; he found that it led nowhither. He was to learn that without those arts which he coveted and despised, devotion, disinterestedness, were no passport to power; yet, it is good to reflect, he would never consent to lose his devotion in the ignobler interests of a private life. When the last word is said, it may be found that of the two brothers it was he who had chosen the better part; and that if, in spite of him, knowledge and justice require us to count small blame to the one, we may ascribe with equal heartiness all honour to the other.

This in anticipation; for d'Argenson is still at Valenciennes, without a thought that the unlikeness of character revealed in these letters to Madame de Balleroy will ever lead to open estrangement.

It was about the middle of March, 1720, that d'Argenson took over his province. He left behind him at Paris at least one person who would watch his career with lively interest. In 1718, in the salon of Madame de Lambert, he had been introduced to a man, whose recent expulsion from the French Academy for some shrewd criticisms of the late reign had given him credit among the younger spirits—the Abbé de St. Pierre.[113] We can easily imagine how d'Argenson must have been attracted to a man, who had his own breadth and generosity of mind, and who was crippled like himself by the lack of those social arts which would have secured for his opinions a perilous respect. The regard appears to have been mutual; and when d'Argenson made his first venture in public life, it was under the auspices of the utopian abbé. A letter which survives, addressed by him to the Intendant of Valenciennes,[114] is alone sufficient to suggest the influence which inspired d'Argenson with his political philosophy.

St. Pierre encourages him to attempt a reform in the distribution of the taille; and incidentally he remarks:

"Those states are the best governed where justice between individuals is most exactly observed; there the people are more prosperous than elsewhere. It were to be desired that there were never favours to hope for from a minister, but only justice for which to apply to him; for it is seldom that favour to one is not injustice to another."

He concludes his letter with the words:

"I have a great desire to be able to watch your new government, and I expect your success will soon persuade plenty of people besides myself that you are worthy of high office."

That d'Argenson, from the point of view of the Government at least, was successful, there is little reason to doubt. The chief features of his administration may be lightly reviewed. In addition to his work of routine as superintendent "de justice, police, et finance," he kept an intelligent watch for the appearance of abuses, and also for possibilities of reform. His province, on the frontier of Flanders, involved him in duties of a "military even more than of a judicial or financial character."[115] The condition of the troops engaged his attention; he early discovered that "the army contractors are great rascals," and that the men were being defrauded of a part of their rations; he introduced a reform which was afterwards adopted throughout the French army, and for which he is careful to claim the credit.[116] In another direction he showed the liberal tendencies which afterwards distinguished him. In time of abundance, he permitted the exportation of corn, and derived a useful revenue from the sale of the license.[117] In the same connection too, he succeeded with much address in averting one of the periodical bread panics which were caused by the restrictions on the interchange of corn.[118] With a pitiful regard for the soldiers and the common people, he had a formidable hatred of knaves in authority. Having disposed of the "fraudulent contractors," he turned his attention to "quelques coquins de bourgeois," who availed themselves of the custom of extending the term of municipal tenure upon great occasions, to enjoy their offices at the expense of their fellow citizens. He took the opportunity of the consecration of Louis XV. at Rheims—at which, by the way, d'Argenson himself was present[119]—to post a proclamation "at all the cross-roads of my towns," requiring the elections to proceed as usual.[120] In short, he went to work in such a way as to open the eyes of his oldest friends to the real ability concealed behind his unpromising exterior.[121] But with all his success, he had good reason to be dissatisfied with his position. He had escaped with great luck at the beginning of the Mississippi crash,[122] but before it was over he was badly hit. His father-in-law, M. Méliand, Intendant of Lille, "had been kind enough" to remit his wife's dowry in Bank notes at a time when the notes were only useful as waste paper.[123] There were other disappointments in store for him. In May, 1721, his father died. The old man, regarding the Chevalier, now to be the Count, as the real hope of his family, had bequeathed to him the whole of his personal property, leaving the Marquis d'Argenson burdened with the family estates.[124] Moreover, M. Méliand showed no disposition to retire in his favour from the rich Intendancy at Lille, for which d'Argenson had naturally hoped;[125] and meanwhile, his own establishment at Valenciennes was involving him in expenses which he was ill prepared to meet. In the midst of these embarrassments an event occurred which seemed to open a prospect of escape. To explain it, a slight retrospect will be necessary.

Shortly after his marriage, and about a year before leaving Paris, he had formed an intimacy with a Madame de G——,[126] whom we recognise from his description of her as "sincere, affectionate, faithful, reasonable, and generous," as a type of those virtues which d'Argenson especially loved, and of which he was inclined to suspect the absence in women generally, and in his own wife in particular. Madame de G—— had a cousin, the wife of the Ambassador to Sardinia. In the winter of 1719, this lady returned from Turin, without visible means of subsistence. But there was always a royal road to affluence open to bankrupt ladies-of-fortune, and with no unnecessary delay Madame de Prie was "administered"[127] to that libidinous dyspeptic, the Duc de Bourbon. Shortly afterwards, "we"—that is, M. le Duc, Mesdames de Prie et de G——, and young d'Argenson were "en partie carrée"; at last the dream of his youthful years was realised, and d'Argenson was able to make a fine figure as an intimate of "the first prince of the blood."[128] The "Partie" was broken up by d'Argenson's departure for Valenciennes, and it lingered in his mind merely as a pleasant memory. He was soon to recall it with more lively concern. At the end of November, 1723, business called him to Paris. On the day of his return, he had an interview with the Regent, and remarked how ill he looked.[129] On the following evening, at Valenciennes, he was standing by the chimney corner talking to a friend when a courier was announced. It was the 3rd of December: d'Orléans was dead. We can well imagine with what feelings d'Argenson must have heard that his illustrious patron of the "Partie carrée" had become the ruler of France, and that a lady who had already offered him "les dernières faveurs,"[130] had succeeded to the footstool of Madame de Parabère. Evidently it was not at Valenciennes that the golden eggs were going to be laid. Moreover, his brother was for the second time chief of the Parisian police;[131] he had lately been appointed Chancellor of the Orléans household; in a word, he could be of infinite service. If any doubts remained as to the wisdom of his course, they were dispelled by a letter[132] from his uncle, the Marquis de Balleroy, advising him to use no delay in taking his place at the Council of State. His mind was made up; and on the 28th of December, 1723, he wrote to M. le Duc, resigning the Intendancy of Hainaut.

Eight days afterwards (January 4, 1724), he writes to Madame de Balleroy:

"I have said goodbye to the provincial dignity. Thank heaven! Thank heaven!"

But d'Argenson had not more reason to thank heaven than usual. He soon discovered that, with all his masterly calculation, it was the worst thing he could have done. His brother had not found favour in the eyes of Madame de Prie;[133] and as chancellor of the House of Orléans, he was not acceptable to M. le Duc.[134] The latter, so far from welcoming d'Argenson to the Council of State, was simply incensed at his untimely resignation;[135] it may even have been this that decided him to dismiss Count d'Argenson from the Lieutenancy of Police immediately afterwards. In fact, we have here a first glimpse of one side of d'Argenson's nature, which we shall meet continually in more august, if not to him more important, affairs. He was endowed with a conceptive faculty of the first order; it is the breadth, the intimate grasp of his conceptions, with the complex character behind them, that constitute his enduring claim to remembrance. But he had the attendant weakness of the man of many devices, an eager, unquestioning faith in the efficacy of his own plans; and upon that rock his fortunes were continually splitting. His power of combination and his belief in his own strategy were constantly leading him into precipitate action, and involving him in difficulties against which a man of more sluggish imagination and narrower mind would never have had even to guard. It was not that his strategy was weak; it was generally powerful, and often profound; but the moment it left his study, it became stiff, useless, and often ridiculous, for want of those small political and social arts which his brother possessed to perfection. We can easily imagine the course which that brother would have taken had he been in d'Argenson's place. He would have addressed to M. le Duc a delightful letter of congratulation, reminding him playfully of the old days of the "Part Carrée," and closing with protestations of renewed zeal for his service. He would then have spent the next six months in finding or contriving, honestly or otherwise, a pretext for at once returning to Paris and gratifying his powerful patron. Unhappily such a course was too slow and small and politic for d'Argenson's temperament; his resignation was disastrous; and as chance would have it, it was nearly twenty years before the brothers recovered the ground they now lost. Certainly, in d'Argenson's case at least, it was not for want of effort. After a few months at the Council, he discovered that there were "too few opportunities of serving the public in this business of judge, where one has scarcely a vote for the thirtieth part of a decree."[136] The Intendancy of Paris became vacant; he tried to obtain it; but Madame de Prie was inexorable, and the appointment was refused.

"As for me, I was good for nothing. I was merely an old friend, who had been good enough to be unwilling to take advantage of her kindness."[137]

We shall meet again with this amiable weakness for explaining his failures by reasons which are less correct than they are complimentary to himself. Even yet he did not give up hope. His marriage with Mademoiselle Méliand had given him a right to expect the reversion of the Intendancy of Lille.[138] He now tried to arrange for its transference to him; but M. Méliand drove a hard bargain and the negotiation fell through.

We now reach one of the turning-points in d'Argenson's life. Never was a man more commendably eager to distinguish himself, to play his part in the world, and to preserve an honourable name in honour by contributing his share towards the "Bien Public." He now saw himself, chiefly through his own lack of patient adroitness, banished to the obscurity of private life. He found misfortune a stern mistress, but her lessons were as worth learning as they were hard to learn. It was indeed at this time of disappointment that his mind became imbued with what is rarest and greatest in his political thought. While his brother, in the Orléans household, strove, by all the arts of which he was a master, to win his way back to power, d'Argenson withdrew entirely from the scene. He called to mind the words of his father, that "a lofty and ambitious man will have all or nothing;" and, in M. Aubertin's phrase, he became content with nothing that he might have all. For some years we hear nothing of him; it is only in 1731 that he again appears upon the scene under the protection of the minister Chauvelin.

His life in the interval must be reserved for another chapter. In the present, but one word remains to be said; it is perhaps the most important of all.

We are already in a position to appreciate d'Argenson as of a peculiarly complex nature; and its complexity is the more puzzling from the fact that the sterling ore of character is combined with traits, not of wickedness, but of weakness. He possesses in abundance those qualities which men love and admire; and yet we scarcely become intimately acquainted with him upon any single occasion without being tempted to laughter. The reason is only too clear. His real loftiness of spirit is yoked with a kind of halting timidity, with which the unhappy experience of his earlier years had afflicted him; and for such a man, to be sublime was too often to appear ridiculous. Occasionally amusement deepens to an even less pleasant feeling; for he held, and he had a right to hold, strong opinions upon men and things; and he sometimes records them in terms so unmeasured as to awaken sympathy with his unheard opponents and to arouse suspicion as regards himself. Moreover, he is himself so simply ingenuous as not to understand the necessity of discreet suppression; and he pursues, with painful circumstance, those moods of irritation, disappointment, disillusion, those momentary vices of temper, which all men perhaps are small enough to feel, but few are great enough to be able to record. Such failings might be taken for what they are worth—which is very little—were it not that, magnified out of all proportion by some of d'Argenson's most influential critics, they have been made the basis for conceptions of his character which are too ungenerous to be critically just. Faults they are, undoubtedly; but in reading, day after day, the revelations of his Journal, one feels that in this man, with all his failings, there is something verily great; and that morally, he towers above the ready cox-combs who laughed at him while he lived, or who have sneered at his memory when it alone remained.

It is, then, with keen curiosity that one seeks for something which will explain this persistent faith in d'Argenson, nor is the quest in vain. Here and there among the pages of his Journal, buried amid much that is ephemeral and often worthless, one comes across passages which are perfect gems of feeling and expression. They show us d'Argenson at his best, and enable us to divine what is best in him. Among the first hundred pages there are at least three such episodes standing out in fine relief. One is the tale of the parrot that troubled the repose of the Intendant of Hainaut.[139] Another, even more charming and suggestive, is the story of Kakouin, the pet boar which was given him by St. Contest, his friend of the Entresol, and which came to such an untimely end.[140] Read in the light of many that follow, these pages reveal such a perfect beauty of heart, such a faultlessness of emotional touch, as is as rare as it is lovely; they spring, pure and clear, from the depths of the man's soul, wholly undarkened by that turgidity of feeling to which the enthusiasm of humanity afterwards gave birth.

It was not alone to the pets of his own household that d'Argenson's heart was given. There was room in it left for the "brutes" of La Bruyère, "whose faces, when they rose upon their feet, were as the faces of men." One day, in the year 1725, he travelled four leagues to the village of Sezanne, through which the young Queen, Maria Leczinska, was to pass on her entry into France. His account of what he saw there forms the third of those pictures of this date which enable us to penetrate to the heart of the man, and to follow him afterwards with an unfailing respect. In the course of the narrative he says:

"The harvest and the crops of all sorts were in danger of perishing; they could not be gathered for the continual rains; the poor labourer was looking out for a moment of dry weather in order to get them in. Yet for all that this whole district was beaten with several scourges. The peasants had been carried off to put the roads by which the Queen was to pass into fit condition; and they were only the worse, so much so that Her Majesty often thought she would drown; they had to drag her from her carriage by main force as they could. In several places she and her suite were swimming in the water, which lay over the whole country, and that in spite of the infinite pains expended by a tyrannical ministry."[141]

And further on he says:

"In the evening, after supper, I went for a stroll round the market-place of Sezanne. For a moment the rain had ceased. I spoke to some poor peasants, who had their horses with them, attached to the tail of a cart, and standing in the night without provender. Some of them told me that their horses had had nothing to eat for three days. They were harnessing ten in the place of four; judge how much of them remained!"[142]

One can scarcely pretend, by fragments of translation, to convey even a shade of the impression produced by these whole passages, and by many that deserve to stand beside them. After reading them, and allowing them to leaven and lighten one's whole conception of d'Argenson's character, it is with keen pleasure we meet with a luminous remark in the pages of one of his most accomplished critics:

"C'est par le cœur, en effet, que son esprit est grand," says M. Aubertin;[143] and it is the happiest word that has been devoted to d'Argenson.

We have but to accept it, and we are enabled to remit to their due place those small distempers, those accidents of the inauspicious moment, which have often hardened the regard of criticism; we see how very little they appear by the side of what was greatest and best in d'Argenson. Qualities are virtuous in proportion as they are necessary; and events have thrown a suggestive light upon the relative value of the various virtues in the France of the Eighteenth Century. We see that there was something more real and rare than those elegant adornments, those small dexterities, which were then so dearly prized: that they afford but thin subsistence for a society bereft of honesty, devotion, depth of vision, and soundness of heart. Those qualities d'Argenson possessed, and the children of this world laughed at him. Their generation does not last for ever; and we, who are on the hither side of 1793, may be excused for thinking that, with all the failings that whetted their wit, there were very few among them who could be mentioned in a breath with the man they honoured by their laughter.

D'Argenson could feel, but he was no sentimentalist. The years which he now passed in obscurity were among the happiest and most fruitful of his life.