tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">[49] and "Monsieur Confess."[50] Even as Queen Elizabeth, Henrietta had French dancing-masters. Her mother-in-law, Queen Anne, chose Frenchmen as precentors in the Chapel Royal. Nicolas Lanier, one of these, became a favourite to Charles i., who employed him in buying abroad pictures for the Royal Gallery. When a mask was played at Court, Corseilles, a Frenchman, painted the scenery. It is owing to Queen Henrietta that French players, for the first time since the remote days of Henry vii., came over to London in 1629 and 1635 and were granted special privileges, such as the permission to perform in Lent.[51] They were not welcome to the people: a riot broke out at Blackfriars on their first visit, and, for reflecting on the Queen on the occasion of their second visit, Prynne the Puritan was prosecuted and cruelly punished.

At the Restoration, Charles ii. followed his mother's example. Yet we must guard against the tendency to exaggerate in the King a gallomania dictated more by reasons of policy than determined by taste. When he came to Paris for the first time in 1646 he could not speak a word of French,[52] and later on, he often hesitated to use a language that seemed unfamiliar.[53] Yet he had been taught French by an official in the Paris Post-house, who tampered with the letters coming into his hands, and in his hours of leisure wrote pamphlets in favour of the fallen House.[54]

The Frenchmen invited over to England after the Restoration do not appear to have known English. However, the Count de Gramont was an exception to the rule. They formed in Whitehall quite a colony: Cardinal D'Aubigny was the Queen's almoner, and Mademoiselle de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, the King's mistress; Louis de Duras, Earl of Feversham, commanded one of the regiments of guards; Nicolas Lefèvre, sometime professor of chemistry in Paris, was at the head of the Royal laboratory; Blondeau engraved the English coins; Fabvollière was the King's engineer, Claude Sourceau, the King's tailor; Paris players, the famous Bellerose among them, went to London and acted before the Court; Frenchmen were to be found even in the Royal kitchens, witness René Mézandieu, a serjeant in the Poultry Office.[55]

The Pepys papers yield proof of the general use then made of the French tongue. An Italian named Cesare Morelli writing to Pepys from Brussels in 1686 discards his mother-tongue; probably knows no English, so naturally uses French.

If the Frenchmen at the Court of Charles ii. did not learn English, the English summoned to Paris by Louis xiv. helped but little to make their language known. A curious thing happened: through living long in a foreign country, the exiled Englishman would forget his mother-tongue. Macaulay tells how the Irish Catholics that hurried back to England under James ii. appeared to be out of their element. Their uncouthness of expression stirred their countrymen's laughter.[56] One Andrew Pulton, returning after eighteen years' absence, asked leave, when called upon to dispute with Dr. Tenison, to use Latin, "pretending not to any perfection of the English tongue."

Colbert had occasion to reciprocate Charles ii. in inviting a few Englishmen to serve Louis xiv., such as one Kemps, "employed in the laboratory," and the portrait-painter Samuel Cooper. The minister's attention was often directed towards England, in which his political genius divined latent possibilities. But the financial transactions of Charles ii. had revolted his habits of honesty, and he distrusted the English, of whom his master Mazarin had had occasion to complain.[57] So he prepared to have recourse to Frenchmen. "M. Duhamel," writes his secretary De Baluze, "says that M. de Saint-Hilaire has written a memoir on the State of the Church in England and on the diversity of religions there, and has left the paper in England; but he will send it over as soon as he gets back."[58]

On the list of payments made to scholars can be read the name of M. de Beaulieu, "busy translating English manuscripts." Others besides Colbert needed English translators: "Père de la Chaise," Henry Savile wrote to ambassador Jenkins (29th July 1679), "has had the speeches of the five last Jesuits hanged in England translated into French."[59]

The rule laid down by Colbert was followed by his successors. By the side of ambassadors it became the habit to set interpreters or unofficial agents. Such, for instance, was Abbé Renaudot, "who knew English so well that he could not only translate Lord Perth's letters, but compose in English, either letters addressed to the French agents in England, or drafts of ordinances and proclamations in the name of James ii."[60] To him was due the French translation of the papers of Charles ii. and the Duchess of York, published by command of James ii.

No one about Henrietta of England, Charles ii.'s sister, wife to the Duc d'Orléans, seems to have thought of learning English. The Princess could discourse with the Duke of Buckingham about the "passion of the Count de Guiche for Madame de Chalais" without letting her voice drop to a whisper. No one among the bystanders understood what she was saying.[61] On her death-bed she summoned the English ambassador