In sixteenth-century France an Academy was a kind of finishing school for young gentlemen. The studies included horsemanship and mathematics, fortification and fencing, military drill, calligraphy and good manners. At Pluvinel’s, the most aristocratic and fashionable of all the Academies in France, the regular course of instruction lasted two years; but the already brilliantly accomplished François Leclerc du Tremblay was able to take his degree in gentlemanliness in less than one. By the autumn of 1495 he was ready for the Grand Tour. Accompanied by a trusted old servant and ten or twelve other young noblemen of his own age, he set out for Italy. And what about Barlaam and Josaphat? What about the hermits, and that treatise on the religious life and his vows at the foot of the crucifix? Had they slipped his memory? Had he pushed them impatiently aside along with the other foolishnesses of childhood? Not at all. Nothing had been forgotten, and the old resolutions still stood.
He was only waiting for the right moment, the final and unmistakable call. It might come very soon; it might be delayed perhaps for years. Meanwhile he would obey his mother and do his best to perform all the duties of the estate into which he had been born. For the other young men in his company, this jaunt to Italy was the first exciting opportunity to be free of parental control, and free, what was more, in that promised land of the Sonnetti Lussuriosi and Giulio Romano’s engravings. For François, on the contrary, it was merely another stage in a process of education that was to equip him, physically and mentally, to accomplish, in some yet undetermined sphere, the will of his God and Saviour. Strong in the vow of chastity he had made after the incident with the arquebus, strong too in his horror and dread of women, he had no fear of the temptations to which his companions, as they rode southward from Paris, were already gleefully promising themselves to succumb. Italy would teach him only what it was right and necessary for him to learn; nothing more.
Once over the border, François did not waste his time.- In Florence he studied the language, fencing and, above all, the art of horsemanship, for which, at that period, the Italians were famed above all others. He was an excellent rider and had a passion for horseflesh and all the niceties of equitation -a passion which he was soon compelled to sacrifice to his religious vocation; for a Capuchin might travel only on his own bare feet. From Florence he proceeded to Rome, where he had an opportunity of learning something of the papal foreign office, a model of diplomatic sharp practice unrivalled by anything of its kind in Europe.
Turning northward again, François stopped at Loretto for religious reasons; at Bologna, to visit the university; at Ferrara, to pay his respects to the Duke and inspect His Highness’s museum of natural history; and at Padua, for a considerable stay to study jurisprudence. The letters which François sent at this time to his mother have been lost. It is a pity; for it would be interesting to know if he made the acquaintance of Galileo, who was then teaching at Padua, or what were the subjects discussed at those informal meetings which were regularly held, out of school hours, at the houses of the professors.
From Padua, the young man proceeded to Venice, which was full of exiled Byzantine scholars and was consequently the best place in all Europe for studying Greek. From Venice he crossed the Alps into Germany, of which he saw enough at least to know what the country looked like before the Thirty Years’ War. Less than a year after his departure he was back again in Paris.
When the young Baron de Maffliers was presented at court, he made an excellent impression. Gabrielle d’Estrées, the king’s young mistress (she was only two years older than François himself), called him ‘the Cicero of France and of his age.’ The Monarch expressed himself less emphatically, but he too took approving notice of the youth. It was not to be wondered at François was not only handsome, in a finely aristocratic and aquiline style; he was also very intelligent; behaved himself with discretion beyond his years; had the most exquisite manners; and could converse delightfully about anything-but without ever abandoning that reserve, without ever departing from that caution, with which he tempered his enthusiasms, his teeming imagination, his impulses to immediate action. Years later, Cardinal Richelieu had two nicknames for his old friend and collaborator’ Ezechiely’ and ‘Tenebroso-Cavernoso.’
The names were admirably chosen to describe that curiously complex nature. Ezechiely was the enthusiast, the visionary, the Franciscan evangelist and mystic; Tenebroso-Cavernoso, the man who never gave himself away, the poker-faced diplomatist, the endlessly resourceful politician. These two strangely dissimilar personalities inhabited the same body, and their incongruous conjunction was an important element in the character of the man whose destiny we have set ourselves to follow.
François spent a full year at court. It was an instructive interlude. In that very co-educational school of the Louvre, he learned all kinds of useful lessons to listen with an air of respectful interest to royal bores; to suffer high-born fools gladly; to pay delicate compliments to the ladies whose much-exposed bosoms filled him with such an intensity of fascinated disgust; to pick the brains of the well informed without appearing to be inquisitive; to discriminate between the important and the unimportant, the genuinely powerful and the merely showy. For the future Secretary of State and diplomat, such knowledge was indispensable.
Early in 1597 François was given an opportunity to continue his education in yet another field; he was sent to get his first taste of war at the siege of Amiens. This fortress, full of munitions and military stores, had been betrayed by a supporter of the League to the Spaniards, who were in turn besieged by a French army under the command of the Constable, Montmorency. Now, Montmorency was the husband of that legitimized daughter of Henri II who, twenty years before, had graciously condescended to be François Leclerc’s godmother. He took the boy under his personal care and was much gratified by the way in which he conducted himself throughout the siege. Men began to prophesy that this young Baron de Maffliers would make a first-rate soldier.
Amiens fell in due course, and its fall was an excellent occasion for concluding the war, of which both Henri IV and Philip II were heartily tired. Henri IV, however, had allies, without whose consent he could not make peace. Of these allies, the most important was Elisabeth of England, who had reasons of her own for wishing to prolong hostilities. To secure Elizabeth’s assent to peace, Henri IV dispatched to London a seasoned diplomat, Hurault de Maisse, who happened to be a distant relative of the du Tremblays. François made use of the connection to get himself attached to the ambassador’s retinue, and in the autumn of this same year, Is 97, he landed in England. For a young man in search of an education, London provided golden opportunities. The court was frequented by accomplished and even learned men, with whom one could talk in Latin about Erasmus and the Iliad and the new edition of Aulus Gellius.
The Elizabethan drama was in full eruption, and the distinguished foreign guests were frequently treated to the, for them, somewhat bewildering spectacle. And all the while, of course, Hurault de Maisse was busily negotiating with the Queen and her ministers; François was given the opportunity of studying diplomacy in action and from the inside. Finally, there was the old royal harridan, to whom it was the attache’s special duty to pay court. She, for her part, was delighted to converse with so handsome a young man, so exquisitely brought up and with such an extraordinary mastery of those dead and living languages, which she herself knew so well and was so fond of talking. (When Hurault de Maisse complimented her on this accomplishment, Elizabeth characteristically answered that there was nothing remarkable in teaching a woman to speak; the difficulty was to make her hold her tongue.)
For any other young man, that brief visit in London would have been nothing but a most amusing and perhaps instructive adventure. And, in effect, that was what it was for François Leclerc during the first week or two of his stay. He was excited by the strangeness of all he saw, pleased with his own success, charmed and delighted by the people with whom he came in contact. He enjoyed himself in England, and he liked the English.
And precisely because he liked them, his happy exhilaration at being among them suddenly evaporated. These
