First Stay in Paris

There was relative peace in France. The seventh of a series of monstrous wars had been ended by a patched-up agreement. Wrecked cities and unpeopled villages, burnt farms and fields laid waste bore witness everywhere to the fury of faction and the malevolent rancour of opponents who disguised personal hatred under the convenient mask of religion. From the disappearance of tolerant classic paganism, the unformulated aspirations or discontent of races and classes found in this or that religious creed a suitable rallying cry; and now the opposed forces which made for liberty on the one hand and for the compact state on the other set up their separate religious banners. All the scoundrels in France gathered round the one or the other of these; they dubbed themselves Catholic or Huguenot; all that was atavistic in human nature was aroused, and all the vilest and most primitive passions were set loose. “Pick me out,” wrote Montaigne, “pick me out from the Catholic army all the men who are actuated either by a pure zeal for religion or by loyalty to their country and you will not find enough to form one single company.” Everywhere poverty, hunger, suffering and disease were the result of these wars. Bruno journeyed to Paris through provinces marked by scath and bale. All the way, to use the words of Castelnau, was “one long bleeding wound.” Bruno crystallizes his experience in three significant phrases: “the French uproar,” “the French fury” and “the bloody Seine.” ¹ The best of the sons of France, men of broad mind and dignified character, brilliant scholars and original thinkers had, for the most part, been slaughtered or exiled. Montaigne retired to the remote home of his ancestors; he speaks of it as the only château in France “which had no guard or sentinel but the stars.”