he was habitually received; and here, of course, he became familiar with the host who was sometimes his counsellor and frequently his creditor. Sprung from different origins, the noble and the burgher classes had grown into contact, and were, if not united, at least adjacent. It must not be supposed that such a man as Bonis was by any means the only rich, nor even perhaps the richest burgess of his provincial town. Those great townsmen, Tozet and Gourdo, were (we imagine) certainly wealthier. Even the smaller citizens such as the mercer, the butcher, the keeper of the public baths buy jewels, plate, velvets, silk, embossed silver belts and such expensive trifles for their families. The butcher's wife has a far finer quality of linen for her undergarments than the neighboring seigneuresse. Nearly every citizen of importance appears to have kept a tutor for his children.* We learn from the "Ménagier de Paris," and from Bonis's ledgers, that every burgess of good position employed a housekeeper and a major-domo, or dispenser, to supervise his numerous staff of servants. Life among these tradesmen who were fast becoming financiers was evidently a costly life; luxurious, fond of display, and tinctured, as we shall see, by the facile erudition of the age. £350 a year and his poultry.* £2,000 was considered a very great dowry for an heiress, yet the intrinsic worth of this sum was not more than £1,000 sterling. Such a great lady as Ermengarde de Lautrec was richly dowered with £1,500. Jeanne de Dammartin brought £850 to Etienne Marcel, and was considered an heiress.f The wife of Giraud Bonis brought £220 to her husband. Regnault d'Auriac who, at his death, left £30,000 tournois, was one of the richest members of his class and province. Bonis himself possessed in landed property about the same amount. Guillaume de Harselli, the great doctor of Laon, was also the possessor of thirty thousand livres, "of which," says Froissart, "I suppose he did not spend two sous per diem, for he used to lunch and dine among his patients. But all his pleasure was to assembler grand' foison de florins. And of such wood, methinks, are all your famous doctors made." We may therefore fairly presume this sum of £30,000, found at Montauban, at Laon, at Montpellier, to represent the fortune of a wealthy burgess. Now, in the fourteenth century, the normal rate of interest (for those whose scruples allowed them to touch it) was ten per cent. A capital of £30,000 well invested, would bring in at least three thousand livres. We know that It would be interesting to establish the the rent of a large house and garden at cost of living in the later fourteenth cen- Montauban in 1345 was £17 per annum, tury, to find out what sum represented and that in Paris at the close of the cenwealth and ease, what was considered the tury, a house fitted up with the newest dowry of an heiress, and what was the improvements could be rented for twenty average yearly outlay of a wealthy knight | livres. Therefore the three thousand a or burgess. The Knight of La Tour Lan-year of our rich provincial merchant, comdry, insisting on the wealth of some ladies pared with the price of things and conof his acquaintance, says of one of them, "Her husband has certainly fifteen hundred livres a year;" and of another, "She must, I should think, have an income of £1,700." This was evidently riches for a fourteenth-century nobleman. When the son of the Viscount of Rouen married, under Charles V., his father allowed him Bonis, p. 25. Arnaut Bernaut, of Montauban, has a tutor for his children; p. 34, R. Delpy, Bourgeois of Montauban, has a tutor named B. Pépin for his children; p. 54, Ausac d'Ausac, Bourgeois of Montauban, has a tutor for his children; p. 151, the Seigneur de Flaunhac has a tutor for his children; p. 180, Gualhart de Guordo, Bourgeois of Montauban, has a tutor for his children. (Circa 1345.) M. Siméon Luce gives a list yet more complete of the tutors and schoolmasters of a district in the north of France some thirty years later, in his history of Du Guesclin, p. 15. We employ the numbers in full face to denote the medieval livre in opposition to the pound sterling. "La Livre du Chevalier de La Tour Landry, pour l'enseignement de ses filles ;" publié d'après les manuscrits de Paris et de Londres, par M. Anatole de Montaiglon, 1854. trasted with the wealthy noble's income of fifteen hundred, shows his importance and the scale of his establishment. We have, in previous papers published in this review, discoursed so long upon the furniture and garments of the fourteenth century, that we will leave our readers to reconstruct the walls, tapestried with the history of the Maccabees or the legend of the San Gréal, the painted wedding. chests, the great four-post beds with their quilts of miniver, the cushioned windowseats, with strips of carpet laid before them, the quaint draped settle by the fire, with on the other side a deep high-backed chair, with baldaquin and cushions for the master. We bid them fancy the floor strown over with green trails in summer, and in winter with leopard skins, rush Communicated by Comte Albert de Circourt. † Siméon Luce, La Guerre du Cent Ans, p. 52. Froissart. Chroniques, book iv., chap. xxx mats, and carpets, imitated from the industry of the Saracens. We will ask him to imagine the merchant seated by the hearth in his cloth hood lined with silk, his ample tunic, his long crimson sleeves furred with sable. At his feet on a low stool, his young wife stoops to warm her hands before the blaze; she has come in from mass and is still dressed in a houppe lande of black silk, which, half thrown off, discovers the amber necklace round her throat and the tight princess robe of green cloth, cut low in front and edged with fur. Her gown lies heaped in long, fur-bordered folds along the floor, but is split up at the sides to show the under bodice with hanging sleeves of tawny silk curiously embroidered with gold thread and pearls. On her head the lady wears (at the reader's discretion) a high peaked hennin of white cambric; a soft veil of Eastern silk pleated and folded round the brows like the wimple of a nun; or a hair net of colored silk, showing on either cheek a thick plait of hair looped and pendant from brow to chin. We will not stay to consider the price and fashion of these garments; we have already touched upon this subject, always palpitating to a woman. There is another subject, more interesting still, for which hitherto we have had scant information, but which to-day opens fruitfully and effectually before us. What were the ideas, the opinions, the prejudices of a burgess of the fourteenth century. What was the soul of the man? Despite his riches and his relations with the nobility (they probably disdained him as a parvenu and he was probably aware of it), the fourteenth-century burgess was Liberal in sentiment and politics. Far from denying his popular origin, if he was ever secretly ashamed of it, that secret humiliation added a point to his rancor against the nobles, against whom he loved to pit the virtuous poor. The real beauty of this feeling is sometimes marred, in his manifestation of it, by a suspicion of cant - honest cant, if we may use the term, almost involuntary; yet we feel his democrat sympathies to be a form of Grundyism. Our sense of humor is struck when the "Ménagier de Paris," after quoting the "Chemin de Pauvreté et de Richesse," to show the superiority of the workmen's breakfast of bread and garlic with clear water, goes on to mix a handful of spice with every dish. We constantly are made to feel how purely theoretic and literary was that preference for poverty which the richest class in France combined with so keen an eye to practical comfort. In a popular poem of the period-in, as it were, the pages of a middle-class and fourteenth-century Piers Plowman- we read one line that explains, much better than all his Liberal tirades, the real view of existence taken by our excellent burgess: "God made the world that man might enjoy his property" (Renard le Contrefait).* The author of this poem was a grocer a clerk unfrocked pour femme, who had returned to the trade which appears to have been his father's: Marchand fu et espiciers Le temps de dix ans tous entiers. When for lack of customers he left this business which he had learned in youth – Cil gingembre, cil laictuaire, Que je sçavois si bien faire Et fils quand j'estoye enfanchon. do we get so true a reflex of the soul of Perhaps in no other pages of the time the average man of the man in the street as in the interminable musings of this studious grocer, so respectable, so matter-of-fact, so conventional in every moment of his soul, yet not devoid of generous indignation against his political satisfied; he is full of contempt for the opponents. Never was man more selfnobles who oppress the poor: They have gone too far, the knights; Reason will destroy them as she did the Templars." Yet they themselves are every one the serf of somebody. 66 Il n'est pas un qui n'ait son maistre. And they, moreover, have to pay far heavier fines than the citizens. Endless expenses! When their suzerain goes to war, or when the fancy moves him to convoke them to his court, then, at a moment's notice, the noble's purse is emptied for new horses, new armor, new apparel, no end to the fal-lals, which, a few months later, he is glad to sell for next to nothing. "Tis an out-at-elbows trade, and every man of them, if he dies young, leaves his orphans at the mercy of an unscrupulous suzerain. As for the poor, they are still more to be pitied. And here the good grocer tells us a ghastly little story, a story which took place in his own county, not far from Troyes, in the very district which a little afterwards was devastated by the Peasants' Revolt: "Renard le Contrefait," Bib. Nat. MS. Français, 370. I owe my knowledge of this interesting poem to the kindness of M. Gaston Paris, who has lent me his unpublished notes and extracts from the manuscript. There was a lady at Doches near Troyes. | instead of those finicking and effeminate And there was a young woman in the village nobles! Heat or hardship would be as nothwho died suddenly and was buried in fifteen ing to them; they would fare better off a little ells of fine linen which the lady had spun for cheese than your fine knights off capons! her own use. When the lady heard of it she They are strong enough to stand the rough was exceeding angry road and the long way. If the bread be stale and the bed wretched, these stalwart lads will never find out the difference. Ne me plaist mie Que tel vilainne ait dedans terre ma toile. She ordered the grave to be opened, and the winding-sheet stripped off the corpse which was thrown back naked into the trench. The linen was cut into horse cloths for the lady's palfreys. And the people of the village looked on and said nothing-but rather loved and feared so proud a lady of the Manor Clearly the world was made that the burgesses might enjoy their property. Another poet, writing towards the end of the fourteenth century, after the defeat of Nicopolis, complains more bitterly still of the nobles' vanity: They are good for nothing, not even to fight: a little heat, a little cold, half kills them. Ah, how far more sensible it would be if we sent our strong, sturdy peasants to the wars Let the gentle reader pardon so much Old French! But the poem is the more precious that it has never been printed; and it is easier for one of us to skip a few lines than for another to refer to a manuscript in Paris. And what an insight these few lines give us into the burgess's view of life! What an abscence of chivalry or adventure! How far, how very far, we are already from the Holy Sepulchre! "The burgesses have the best of it," says our grocer; "theirs is the greatest class and the richest. They can disport their bodies as they please, and can all wear king's garments. The hunt and the chase are for them. When the squires ride to the army, the burgesses go to sleep; when the squires are cut in pieces, the burgesses go and swim; when the squires ride to shame and destruction, the burgesses go to play!" They look like monkeys, their cloaks are so short. Or like panthers, so parti-colored, splashed and slashed with divers hues. But their shoes have beaks a yard long. What fashion of thing are they? Owls, perhaps; for they wake by night, and lie in bed till the bells ring noon. They think of nothing but games and gambling and the heaping together of money; they make a mock of men more serious than they. The ménagier of Paris, we remember, warns his young wife that though he loves her to amuse herself, she must accept no invitations to the balls and festivities of the great seigneurs. (This passage, by the way, is a proof that such invitations were given by the Parisian nobles to the more considerable bourgeois.) In fact, play ran high among the aristocracy, even among the women: "Ne soyez jamais grandes jouaresses," says the Knight of La Tour to his daughters. Vainly the king punished games of chance with heavy fines and banishment. We are compelled to believe that, at any rate in the fourteenth century, the most noble salons of the kingdom were often little better than gambling hells. A. MARY F. ROBINSON. (Madame JAMES DARMESTETER.) L'Apparicion de Maistre Jehan de Meung, Bib. Nat. Fr. 811, No. 7,203. This MS. is adorned with charming miniatures representing the persons and costumes of a princess (Valentine of Milan), a prior, a monk, a Jew, a Saracen, etc., at the end of the fourteenth century. We believe that the text, or some part of it, has been published by the Société des Bibliophiles de France. This poem was written by Honorat Bonnet, prior of Salon. † Ballades d'Eustache Deschamps. Publié par le Marquis de Queux de St. Hilaire. Ballade cccciv. From Longman's Magazine. THACKERAY AND HIS BIOGRAPHERS. his liking for a good dinner. All his experience he gave us, all his loves, hates, hopes and fears, his religion, his devotion to good letters, his generosity, his little bouts of impatience and petulance. What more, I ask, do we want? I know not whether a long, heavy biography of Montaigne exists or not. Montaigne tells us all we need to learn about him; we know him as well as Dr. Johnson, out of his own essays. Even so, if we have eyes to see, and a heart to feel, we know through his books, and through the letters published not long ago, all that is essential about Mr. Thackeray. Some like what they have learned thus; some love the memory of the man, and his nature as they discern it; some do not love him at all, and pardon nothing, as they certainly seem to understand nothing. There were just such people about him while he lived. Some thought him a snob; some called him a cynic; one declared that "there is a want of heart in all he writes;" that "his style of conversation is either openly cynical or affectedly good-natured and benevolent." We only see, feel, and understand in proportion as we have eyes, hearts, and brains. All these may be exercised on the Thackeray who declares himself in his books, just as well as on any Thackeray of a stout, well-padded bi IT is generally understood that Mr. Thackeray wished no biography of himself to be written. The only contemporary author who could write that life as it should be done has therefore been obedient to her father's desire. It is easy to understand and to sympathize with Mr. Thackeray's reluctance to be made the hero of a biography. Scarce any biography in the world, except Boswell's masterpiece, tells the truth, and the whole truth. A man, like Cromwell, wants to be painted warts and all, if he must be painted. No modern biographer is likely to do this kind of work. Either he revels in all the tattle he can collect against and about his subject, or he has a dozen reasons-all excellent - for not speaking out. Many biographies are prolonged and anecdotic epitaphs. Mr. Thackeray was the last man in the world to enjoy the prospect of this too benevolent immortality. On the other hand, it is not every one who wants to have all the trifles of his private life-his petulances, fits of temper, his blunders, his bad luck, dragged into the light. Mr. Carlyle may have thought this desirable; and if so, then, as the Yankee remarks, "I guess he got his druther." But it is easy to understand the absence of this "druther" in an author's mind. A writer like Mr. Thack-ography. eray gave himself to the world in his art, and with rather too little than too much reserve. Any one can read a melancholy chapter of his life, "a living sorrow," in the " Hoggarty Diamond." Who wants As no such biography has been produced by members of his family, there are various brief stories of his life, by the late Mr. Hannay, by Mr. Anthony Trollope, and, now, by Mr. Herman Merivale and the details except the lover of tattle? Mr. Frank T. Marzials.* This has been Anybody can tell that he has loved unhap- an unlucky little'book. Mr. Merivale as a pily, or what are the fortunes of Clive young man knew Mr. Thackeray. He is Newcome, of the elder George Warring a true Thackerayan; he is not misled by ton, of Henry Esmond derived from? the drivel about cynicism. But he knew They are written in tears. Every one sees Mr. Thackeray towards the close of a life that Mr. Thackeray was not particularly to which fame came late, and decline and happy at school, that he enjoyed himself death early. Thus Mr. Merivale may lay at college, that he lived a good deal in too much stress on the melancholy of his Paris, that he often heard the chimes at hero. He must have been gay enough in midnight, that he had lost money at cards. earlier years. Mr. Merivale has been alWe have the evidence of Mr. Deuceace, lowed to use some documents in the posof Blundell Blundell, of Pendennis, of session of Mr. Thackeray's family; he has Captain Costigan. He had met and studied also the advantages of sympathy, of old minxes, or he could not have given us hereditary friendship, and of education Becky and Betty. What do the names of such as Thackeray enjoyed. But, unluckthe minxes of real life matter to us? Iily, Mr. Merivale's health broke down when could a tale, or a tradition, unfold concerning one of these ladies, but this is not a column of the New Journalism. What Mr. Thackeray thought of that glorious institution we can read in his remarks on Young Grub Street; he is as frank about his animosities as about his dinners and he had written some six chapters, including one on Thackeray's friendship. Mr. Marzials, without some of Mr. Merivale's opportunities, finished the book as well as he might, and the effect is, inevitably, Walter Scott. repetitions, and I venture to prefer Mr. By this time, in articles such as Dr. 66 "' for It was not stupid people only who misconceived him. A man justly celebrated used to be fond of telling an anecdote against Mr. Thackeray which was clearly based on a misunderstanding. I have had to hear it several times, and restrained a longing to reply in certain well known words of Dr. Johnson's. It is plain enough, then, that Mr. Thackeray's emotional nature met, as Mr. Merivale says, with disappointment in the world. Current and probable, though necessarily unprinted, anecdotes prove as much. Then, as to literary success, his was vast, but it came so late that he might almost have spoken of it as Johnson did of Chesterfield's favor. It was a success curiously unpremeditated and unprepared for. As every one knows, art, and not literature, was the field in which Mr. Thackeray would have preferred to find fame. Without the prick of necessity, it seems probable that he would not have written at all, Mr. Merivale makes it plain enough (it or, if he had written, would have made was always plain enough) that Mr. Thack- history his topic. A letter of his was eray's life was neither a successful nor a printed lately, by a merchant of autohappy one. He was extremely sensitive graphs, in which Mr. Thackeray tells an sensitive about others and about him-editor that he wishes to do an article of self. "He liked to be liked, but he loved historical research. "I like the work; it to be loved," and he also loved much. is so gentlemanly," he says. Probably, These are not the qualities of a life which when he was turning out copy is to be happy, especially if what we call Punch and other miscellanies, he often bad luck or ill fortune accompanies them. longed, as doubtless other men do, for the The most affectionate heart, a heart that more austere and classical air of scholarmatched his brain, was widowed early, or ship. He was naturally a serious student wedded to a living regret. He could find of literature. Had he been rich, he might nowhere the kind of love that was essen- have done no more, perhaps even much tial to him, and he probably was not even less, than his friend Fitzgerald. Like liked as he liked to be liked. Fitzgerald, he was almost or quite a poet, as Mr. Merivale says, but he never seems to have trusted himself in poetry; in poetry he seldom "spoke out." This reticence came of modesty and self-criticism. His true bent was really better indicated by his undergraduate parodies and tiny satires than by his love of painting or his liking for the work of scholarship. But it was necessity, the need of writing for his livelihood, that revealed to him his forte. Thus, when he succeeded at last, it was in a direction which he had not thought of in the dreams of his youth. "At last," too, was long in coming. His contemporary, Mr. Dickens, was a popular idol, as Mr. Merivale remarks, "before Thackeray knew what he was going to be." "Vanity Fair" was not published till 1848, and then he had but fourteen years in front of him; and, ere they ended, his body was worn out; he had shot his bolt, and we have only the broken promise of "Denis Duval" to show us how much of his He was not by any means all things to all men ; where he despised a man, or was bored by a man, it may be assumed that he did not disguise his emotions. He allows Philip Firmin to behave like a brute, and apparently he has a kind of sympathy for that truculent hero. I do not mean, of course, that he behaved like Philip Firmin; but if he could tolerate Philip at all, he was probably quite candid when he was bored. That is natural, but it is not what Marcus Aurelius, let us say, would have recommended. Like most humorists he was a man of moods; when his mood and that of any one in his company were uncongenial, perhaps he may sometimes have become as chilly as Gray, though, doubtless, never so wild as Charles Lamb. So he would get a reputation for being cynical and heartless- a charge contradicted as much by the generosity of his conduct as by the tenor of his writings. |