At the height of his business, we are told, when he was most pressed, if it happened that the conversation turned to spiritual matters, his face would light up and he would discuss the life of prayer for an hour at a stretch, with ‘so much contentment, feeling and knowledge that you would have imagined him to be a hermit, a man engaged in continual orison.’ Yet more astonishing to Dom Tarisse was the way in which the friar directed the nuns of his order. This foreign minister, this second-in-command of a great state, instructed them in the spiritual life ‘with so much fervour and knowledge, such a high mystical doctrine, that the most learned contemplative and spiritual could not have done as much.’
This austere and busy life was lived out against a background of ever-deepening popular misery, ever-increasing governmental ruthlessness. In France, the huge sums required to finance the foreign policy of Father Joseph and his master, the Cardinal, were being extorted, sou by sou, from those least able to pay. ‘Money,’ Richelieu remarked in the lordly tone of one who is living sumptuously at other people’s expense, ‘money is nothing, if we accomplish our ends.’ Caring as he did only for foreign policy, only for the great game of negotiation and war, played between princes for the prize of personal glory and dynastic prestige, he was ready to go to any lengths at home. To the privileged, so long as they did not presume to set themselves up against the central authority, Richelieu was always and on principle very indulgent. Those who felt the full weight of his fiscal tyranny were the poor artisans and small tradesmen in the towns, and, in the country, the dumb millions of the peasantry.
At the end of the reign of Henri IV, the taille, a tax levied on commoners as commoners, amounted to about ten million livres annually; at the end of Richelieu’s tenure of office, a very slightly increased population was paying the government four and a half times as much. So intense was the hardship inflicted by the Cardinal’s fiscal policy that its despairing victims rose repeatedly in revolts, which they knew in advance to be futile, and from which they could expect only the gibbet, the wheel, the branding iron, the galleys and, for those who remained unpunished, a yet more ruthless treatment at the hands of the tax gatherers. In spite of which, rebellion followed rebellion. There were outbreaks in Burgundy in 1630, in Provence in 1631, at Lyons and Paris in 1632, at Bordeaux in 1635, throughout all the provinces of the South-West in 1636, in Normandy in 1639.
Richelieu sent his troops to put down the disorders and continued regularly to decree fresh increases in taxation. He felt sorry for the poor; but, as he wrote philosophically, ‘only God can make something out of nothing, and extortions which are intolerable in their nature, become excusable from the necessities of war.’ Whether the war itself was a necessity, he did not pause to inquire. He just took it for granted that it was.
Beyond France’s eastern frontiers conditions were, of course, incomparably worse. In 1633 there appeared at Paris, avec Privilege du Roy, a series of etchings, preceded by a decorative title-page bearing the words: Les Miseres et les Malheurs de la Guerre, Representes par Jacques Callot, Noble Lorrain, et mis en lumiere par Israel, son amy. Like Goya’s ‘Los Desastres de la Guerra,’ Callot’s Miseres et Malheurs are pieces of first-hand reporting. Each series is the portrait of a war, taken from the life -but taken in one case by an artist of passionate temperament and possessed of an unrivalled gift for the pictorial expression of his indignations and his pities, in the other by a man whose gift as an illustrator was a gift for complete emotional detachment paradoxically combined with a gift for realistic representation of actuality in all its aspects, the horrible and the pleasant, the tragic and the farcical. Goya was, of course, by far the greater artist of the two; but there are qualities in the art of Callot which make it possible for one to return again and again to his etchings, to pore over them with a fascinated and bewildered, a half-amused and half-horrified admiration.
There is nothing quite like these small, crowded, minutely detailed and yet perfectly composed and organized illustrations -illustrations of Florentine masques and festivals, of the figures of the Commedia dell’ Arte, of fairs and carnivals, of soldiers on parade, of the intricacies of siege-craft, of the horrors and atrocities of war. There is nothing quite like them, because no other artist has approached his subject in a spirit of such complete neutrality, with so much imperturbability, such a degree of Pyrrhonic ataraxia. Callot’s art is the aesthetic analogue of the personal conduct of François de Sales, concerning whom it was said that it was a matter of indifference to him whether he was in a state of consolation or of desolation. To infer, however, from his art that Callot himself was emotionally neutral to the scenes he represented is, of course, unjustifiable. Indeed, the fact that he chose to depict the miseries of war is a sufficient indication that he found those miseries distressing.
Callot’s imperturbability is in his style; and style is by no means always or completely the man. In art, sincerity depends on talent. A man without talent is incapable of ‘honestly’ expressing his feelings and thoughts; for his daubs and doggerel fail utterly to correspond with his mental processes. Similarly, heredity and training may equip a man with a certain kind of talent, which permits him to express one class of ideas, but is not adapted to the expression of other classes. Intrinsically, the dry and elegant precision of Callot’s style was most consonant with decorative or topographical subjects. He chose, however, to apply his talent to the delineation of wild merriment and of a wilder horror to Francatrippa and his companions capering in their carnival masks and fancy dress, to the atrocities of a peculiarly savage war.
The result is inexpressibly curious. It is as though the theme of ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ had been treated by Jane Austen in the style of’ Emma.’ Decorously, impassibly, with a meticulous care for detail and a steady preoccupation with formal elegance, he sets before us, first the handsome preliminaries to a campaign-the troops in parade-ground order under their standards -then the campaign itself-battles between opposing armies and, at greater length and in more detail, the sufferings of the civil population at the hands of marauding soldiers, the ferocious attempts of their commanders to enforce discipline. From etching to etching we follow the artist’s record of pillage, murder, arson, rape, torture and execution. The little figures in their slouched hats, their baggy pantaloons, their high boots turned hack below the knee in a loose, wide cuff of leather stand there frozen in the midst of the most atrocious activity, but always (thanks to Callot’s supremely unexpressionistic manner) with the air of dancers holding a pose in a ballet. In one plate it is an inn that is being robbed.
In another the soldiers have turned highwaymen. A third shows the hall of a great house; half a dozen of the ruffians are breaking open the chests and closets, and in the background, another holds down a lady, while his companion, without troubling to remove his hat, prepares to violate her; to the right, a group is standing around a bonfire made of broken furniture, above which the master of the house has been hung head downwards from a hook in the ceiling, while a son, perhaps, or a too faithful servant, sits on the floor, tightly hound, his feet roasting in the flames and the swords of his tormentors at his back. It is horrible; but the horror is sterilized by Callot’s style into the choreographic symbol of horror. In the next etching we are shown a burning church and soldiers loading the sacred ornaments into a waggon, while from a neighbouring convent, in the words of the rhymed caption which accompanies the plates, others
“tirent des saints lieux les vierges désolées,
Qu’ils osent enlever pour estre violées.13”
About twenty of these nuns are being marched off to be raped at leisure round the camp-fire, in the evening. One -the youngest no doubt, and the prettiest of the novices -is being hoisted by a couple of privates into the arms of an officer mounted high oh his tall charger. A year or two from now, these nuns-such of them as have survived-will have joined the hordes of male and female camp-followers, who followed the armies hither and thither across the face of Germany. Half starved, covered only with a few stinking rags, verminous and syphilitic, with burdens on their back and naked pot-bellied children trailing after them, they will march all summer long behind their masters, they will cower in the rains and frosts of interminable winters, until finally, long before the war is over, the God who has forsaken them once more takes pity and they die, to be eaten by dogs or perhaps by their famished companions. Such, if they had happened to live on the other side of the Rhine, might easily have been the fate of Father Joseph’s Calvarians.
From violated nuns, Callot goes on to peasants murdered or led away to slavery, to travellers waylaid in a forest, robbed for profit and butchered for pleasure. Then
