François-Vincent Cousin

“ He says that the age is already prepared for a change, and that that change will terminate in a system, probably not very dissimilar to his own. The facility with which foreign, particularly French, theories are received by us, makes it incumbent on some one to present them naked and undisguised to the public, lest the ornaments of style and manner should give currency to opinions, which in themselves can add little to our knowledge or happiness. In the execution of his work we think M. Cousin quite felicitous; he always writes perspicuously and elegantly. ”

“ Many an amazed secret stare and many a sour smile his eulogies drew from cousin Mandeville; for even in his enthusiasm Sir Winterton praised with discrimination; it was the sterling worth, the heart of the man, that he admired; shallow people stuck at superficial defects of manner; not such was Sir Winterton. "I trust him as I do myself," he used to say to Lady Mildmay, and she, in honest joy, posted off with the testimonial to May Quisanté; besides she was eager to seize a chance of throwing out another hint or two about Quisanté's health. ”

“ I refused to do so when powerful, and upon yourself."
"You were wrong; you would have been master now."
"And what happiness should I find in my power when shared as it must be by a woman who does not understand me; who loved me feebly, and prefers a crown?"
"Inconceivable folly!" said the Capuchin, laughing.
"All with her; nothing without her—that was my desire."
"It is from obstinacy and vanity that you persist; it is impossible," replied Joseph. "It is not in nature."
"Thou who wouldst deny the spirit of self-sacrifice," answered Cinq-Mars; "dost thou understand that of my friend?" ”

“ Vincent was sitting at the side of the oblong table and the stranger at the end. Between them, under Vincent's elbow, was the chair on which the box was resting. Both glanced at it, the stranger eagerly and yet with a little shudder, Vincent quickly and only for an instant. The next, his eyes were on the stranger's.
"You seem to know my name," he observed dryly.
"Yes," said the other, talking quietly now and with his restraint ebbing away as he spoke, "I know all about you, Mr. Barlow. It is the vase which you are taking to your uncle. ”

“ These are in truth the outstanding problems of modern philosophy.
Cousin’s doctrine of spontaneity in volition can hardly be said to be more successful than his impersonality of the reason through spontaneous apperception. Sudden, unpremeditated volition may be the earliest and the most artistic, but it is not the best. Volition is essentially a free choice between Volition. alternatives, and that is best which is most deliberate, because it is most rational. ”

“ He upholds the essentially spiritual nature of man, his liberty, moral responsibility and obligation, the dignity of human virtue, disinterestedness, charity, justice and beauty. These fruits of the spirit reveal, Cousin claimed, a God who is both the author and the ideal type of humanity, a Being who is not indifferent to the welfare and happiness of his creatures. There is a vein of romanticism about Cousin, and in him may be seen the same spirit which, on the literary side, was at work in Hugo, Lamartine and De Vigny. ”

“ No doubt, if dreams and reveries have to be brought within the confines of any given system, Vincent, by reason of his clear-sightedness, is the very man to do it better than thousands of others. And he treats everything with a jovial good-temper which is always very delightful. ”

“ III. Cousin.
The pasteur, Jean Cousin, as a sound divine, a beneficent Christian, and an able and influential man, was never equalled among all the refugee clergy. Although Bishop Grindal’s superlatives were entirely laudatory, and not intending any personal comparisons (in fact, Cousin at the time had no colleague) , yet they were literally true. He was the most faithful and most beloved of the ministers of the French Church (D. Joannes Cognatus, [1] Galliae ecclesiae, quae apud nos est, minister fidelissimus et frater meus in Domino carissimus) . ”

“ Yet the chief author of this prosperity was calumniated, outraged, and menaced; and he knew not whether some officer of the guards or some one of the enthusiasts whom Madame de Chevreuse held at her disposal, was not reserving for him the fate of the Marshal d'Ancre. At the end of the month of June, he speaks in a letter to his friend, the Cardinal Bichy, just as he soliloquizes in the Carnets. "Every one sees," says he, "that I spare no fatigue, and that the crown has no more zealous, faithful, and disinterested subject than myself ”

“ If you will, I can render you an important service; I command a few brave men.”
“What service?” asked Cinq-Mars. “We will see.”
“I commence by a piece of information. This morning while you descended the King’s staircase on one side, Father Joseph ascended the other.”
“Ha! this, then, is the secret of his sudden and inexplicable change! Can it be? A king of France! and to allow us to confide all our secrets to him.”
“Well! is that all? Do you say nothing? You know I have an old account to settle with the Capuchin.” ”

“ We are the sons of chance; but relative to other men, we have passions which we must satisfy."
"I breathe again!" exclaimed Cinq-Mars; "he believes not in God!"
Joseph continued:
"Richelieu, you, and I were born ambitious; it followed, then, that everything must be sacrificed to this idea."
"Wretched man, do not compare me to thyself!"
"It is the plain truth, nevertheless," replied the Capuchin'; "only you now see that our system was better than yours." ”

“ Ah, who will protect thee, my son, in that dangerous place?” he continued, reseating himself, and again taking his pupil’s hands in his own with a paternal solicitude, as he endeavored to read his thoughts in his countenance.
“Why, I do not exactly know,” said Cinq-Mars, looking up at the ceiling; “but I suppose it will be the Cardinal de Richelieu, who was the friend of my father.”
“Ah, my dear Henri, you make me tremble; he will ruin you unless you become his docile instrument. Alas, why can not I go with you? Why must I act the young man of twenty in this unfortunate affair? ”

“ On his side, Mazarin did not deceive himself. He could not yet have been master of the heart of Anne of Austria, since at this time, that is, during the month of July, 1643, he shows extreme disquietude in his most confidential notes. The dissimulation with which every one accused the queen alarmed him, and we see him pass through all the alternations of hope and of fear. It is curious to seize and follow the varying emotions of his soul. In his official letters to the generals and ambassadors, [35] he affects a security which he does not feel ”

“ Add to all this the mind and the manners of Mazarin; he was pliant and insinuating; always master of himself, of an immovable serenity in the gravest emergencies, full of confidence in his good star, and diffusing his confidence everywhere about him. It must also be said that—cardinal as he was—Mazarin was not a priest; that, nourished in the maxims of the gallantry of her country, Anne of Austria had always loved to please ”

“ He had fleeting visions of certain miserable moments—visions of the triumphant and exuberant Vincent, of being taken to see Vincent graduated with honours, to hear him read a valedictory poem he had written, to see him surrounded, overwhelmed with admiration, of watching him win races, play in tennis tournaments and amateur theatricals, of hearing him sing. It seemed to him that he had spent a great part of his youth sitting beside his mother and watching Vincent show off. ”

“ Marie wept no longer; but, raising her angelic voice, which awakened a faint echo along the aisles of the church, as the softest sigh of the organ, she said, returning the ring to Cinq-Mars:
"O dearest, be not angry! I comprehend you not. Can we break asunder what God has just united, and can I leave you, when I know you are unhappy? If the King no longer loves you, at least you may be assured he will not harm you, since he has not harmed the Cardinal, whom he never loved. Do you think yourself undone, because he is perhaps unwilling to separate from his old servant? ”

“ There was no man whom he revered or admired so much as M. Vincent, he declared enthusiastically; no one who was of such use in the Council of Conscience.
But the summoning of the Council rested with Mazarin, and the intervals between its meetings became longer and longer. Anne of Austria's sudden spurt of energy—she was a thoroughly indolent woman by nature—began to die out as she became accustomed to her new responsibilities; she was only too glad to leave all matters of State to a man who declared that his only desire was to save her worry and trouble. ”

“ One of the Italians pretended to chat and laugh in a subdued manner with the young daughter of the Marechale; the other talked to the deaf old Abbe, who, with one hand behind his ear that he might hear, was the only one who appeared attentive. Cinq-Mars had sunk back into his melancholy abstraction, after throwing a glance at the Marechal, as one looks aside after throwing a tennis-ball until its return; his elder brother did the honors of the table with the same calm. Puy-Laurens observed the mistress of the house with attention; he was devoted to the Duc d'Orleans, and feared the Cardinal. ”

“ Besides, he is, so these gentlemen say, either some great speculator, or some great seigneur, and either would suit me. I love Paris; and I want a house, a carriage, an opera-box, etc., in Paris.”
“That’s right,” said Vinet. “When people dream, they needn’t refuse themselves anything. If I had the pleasure of being your brother I should marry you to the young Marquis de Cinq-Cygne, who seems to me a lively young scamp who will make the money dance, and will laugh at his mother’s prejudices against the actors in the famous Simeuse melodrama.” ”

“ Nothing would have been easier than to put in a plea for a benefice or a bishopric; but Vincent, who was both humble and unselfish, had no thought of his own advancement. His only desire was to get his business over and to leave the Court as quickly as possible.
The question of how he was to live remaining still unanswered, he took a room in a house near one of the largest hospitals in Paris and devoted himself to the service of the sick and dying. But even the rent of the little room was more than he could afford to pay, and he was glad to share it with a companion. ”

“ That bony head, armed with two flaming eyes, and terminating in a pointed and grizzly beard, the cap and vestments of the color of blood and flames,—all appeared to him like an infernal spirit.
"You must reign," he said, in a languid voice.
"But will you give me up Cinq-Mars and De Thou?" again urged the implacable minister, bending forward to read in the dull eyes of the Prince, as an avaricious heir follows up, even to the tomb, the last glimpses of the will of a dying relative.
"You must reign," repeated the King, turning away his head.
"Sign then," said Richelieu ”

“ While conducting herself guardedly towards Louis XIII. and his minister, Anne of Austria had not abandoned her former sentiments nor even her designs, and she may even have been compromised in the affair of the Count de Soissons, if we may believe these notable words from Alexandre de Campion to Madame de Chevreuse, dated the 15th of August, 1641: "Have no fear of the letters which speak of that person for whom of all others you have the greatest devotion ”

“ The most dangerous of the Importants received orders to withdraw from Paris. Montrésor, Béthune, Saint-Ybar, Varicarville, and some others, were confined in the country under strict surveillance, or even forced to quit France. The Vendômes were commanded to retire to Anet; [9] and the château d'Anet soon becoming what the hôtel de Vendôme had been in Paris,—the asylum of the conspirators,—Mazarin demanded them of the Duke César, who took good care not to deliver them. The cardinal was compelled almost regularly to besiege the château. ”

“ The Duc de Bouillon, seizing the moment to bring forward the grand question he had in view, quitted Cinq-Mars, to whom he had just given his hand with an air of the most zealous friendship, and approaching the Queen with him, "It is miraculous, Madame," said he, "that this period still contains in its bosom some noble characters, such as these;" and he pointed to the master of the horse, to young Beauvau, and to De Thou. "It is only in them that we can place our hope for the future. Such men are indeed very rare now, for the great leveller has swung a long scythe over France." ”

“ Marie hesitated a moment, and then said:
“Nothing is more simple, Madame, than our attachment. I inhabited, you know, the old chateau of Chaumont, with the Marechale d’Effiat, the mother of Monsieur de Cinq-Mars. I had retired there to mourn the death of my father; and it soon happened that Monsieur de Cinq-Mars had to deplore the loss of his. In this numerous afflicted family, I saw his grief only, which was as profound as mine. ”

“ His continued travelling had given Vincent a good deal of knowledge of human nature, or rather of tact in dealing with all sorts of people, and he could, when he chose, assume any character to suit the circumstances, with the same ease as a serpent writhes itself into various coils, or as an actor interprets various rôles. But Otto, with an involuntary pride in his own healthy strength, which ever went straight at its object, despised Vincent, because of the poisonous fascination which he had the power to shed about him, and the seduction of which others were unable to resist. ”