Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/859

Rh M O R M O R 829 June 1572 he returned to France, and had begun to enter upon a diplomatic career (his earliest extant &quot; memoire,&quot; laid by Coligny before Charles IX., had reference to the duty of France to support the Low Countries in their struggle for independence) when the St Bartholomew mas sacre, from which he escaped with difficulty, compelled him to take refuge across the Channel. There he rendered valuable services to William of Orange, and also to the duke of Alen^on-Anjou, as a semi-official political agent. Returning to France at the instance of La Noue towards the end of 1573, he took part with various success in numerous military enterprises, and was made prisoner at Dormans in 1575 (10th October), but not having been re cognized he got off for a small ransom. Shortly afterwards he married Charlotte Arbaleste at Sedan, and at her re quest wrote as a bridal present the Discours de la Vie et de la Mart (1576), which has been so often reprinted and translated. In 1577 Henry of Navarre made him a mem ber of his council and sent him on a diplomatic mission to England, and during this visit, which lasted more than a year, he found time among his other pressing occupations to prepare for the press his Traite de Vfiglise ou Von traite des principals questions qui out ete mues sur ce point en nostre temps (1578), which at once became popular. From July 1578 till his return to France in 1582 he was chiefly in the Low Countries, engaged in public business, and during this interval he wrote and published a considerable work in apologetical theology (Traite de la verite de la religion chrctienne contre les At/ices, JZpicuriens, Pay ens, Juifs, etc., 1581). With the death of the duke of Anjou in 1584, by which Henry of Navarre was brought within sight of the throne of France, the period of Mornay s greatest political activity began ; his importance in the Huguenot counsels was further increased in 1588 by the death of the prince of Conde, to whose influence he practi cally succeeded. In April 1589 he was rewarded for the reconciliation of the two Henries with the governorship of Saumur, and he took active part in many of the military operations that followed the assassination of Henry III. in the following August. He was present at the siege of Dieppe, fought by the side of Henry IV. at Ivry, and was one of the besiegers of Rouen in 1591-92, until sent on a mission to the court of Elizabeth. A crisis in his political career was marked by Henry s abjuration of Protest antism in July 1593, which gradually led to Mornay s withdrawal from the court. In this year it was that he founded the Protestant academy or university of Saumur, which had a distinguished history until its suppression by Louis XIV. in 1683. In 1598 he published a work on which he had long been engaged, entitled De I institution, mage, et doctrine du saint sacrement de VEucharistie en rEglise ancienne.. It having reached his ears that Cardinal Du Perron had alleged that of the (thousands of) citations in this controversial work he could point out five hundred that were falsified or misunderstood, he challenged his assailant to a public discussion. This was at last arranged for by the good offices of the king, and took place at Fontainebleau on 4th May 1600. Only nine passages were discussed, but in each case the decision, one is not surprised in the circumstances to learn, went against the Protestant. Mornay, from whom every indication of the particular passages to be impugned had been persistently withheld, was forced by supervening illness to withdraw. Only once again did he appear at court, in 1607. He continued, however, to give his party the benefit of his counsel and active support to the end of his long and busy l ;ff &amp;gt; His last work, entitled Mystere d iniquite, Jest a life. dire, Vhistoire de la Papaute, appeared in 1611. In 1618 he was chosen a deputy to represent the French Protest ants at the synod of Dort. Prohibited by Louis XTII. from personally attending, he nevertheless contributed materially to the deliberations of that assembly by written communications. In 1621 he was deprived of his governor ship ; and his death took place at La Foret-sur-Sevre on llth November 1623. Two volumes of Afdmoircs, from 1572 to 1589, appeared at La Fort-t in 1624, and a continuation, in two volumes, at Amsterdam in 1652 ; a more complete edition (Memoircs. correspondanccs, et vie) in twelve volumes, 8vo, was published at Paris in 1624-25. The greater number of his works were translated into English during his lifetime. MORNY, CHARLES AUGUSTS Louis JOSEPH, Due DK (1811-1865), was the natural son of Hortense Beauharnais, queen of Holland, and of the comte de Flahaut, a leading dandy of the period, and was thus brother to Napoleon III. The secret of his birth (23d October 181 1) was care fully kept ; he was acknowledged as son by the comte de Morny for a consideration, and was brought up by his paternal grandmother, Madame de Souza, a writer of society novels, and a woman of great wit and high breeding. As a boy of nineteen he was declared after the revolution of 1830 a hero of July, and was entered at the staff college. In 1832 he was gazetted sub-lieutenant, and served in Algeria as aide-de-camp to General Oudinot ; he was pre sent at Mascara and Constantine, and was made a chevalier of the Legion of Honour. In 1838 he returned to Paris, and began his career as dandy and speculator. In the first capacity he set the fashions both of dress and manners to the young men of Paris, and conceived the idea of the modern society journal, and in the second established a manufactory of beetroot sugar at Clermont-Ferrand. This last idea brought about his election for the department of the Puy-de-D6me. In the chamber he voted consistently with the ministers. The republic of 1848 marked the crisis in his fortunes, and by 1851 all his speculations had failed, and all his property was sold. In desperation he determined to play a part in politics, and was the heart and soul of the coup d etat of December 1851. The success of the coup d etat was certain, owing to the fear of the extreme republicans entertained by the great majority of the nation, and all that was needed was a head for intrigue and an utter absence of scruples to shed innocent blood. Morny and St Arnaud fulfilled these requisites. Morny was on the day of the coup d etat made minister of the interior, but he had no taste for the drudgery of adminis tration, and in January 1852 found an excuse for resigning on the question of the property of the Orleanist princes. The empire established, he was again able to begin specu lating, and used both the money of the state and his influence with his brother for the success of his schemes. He had been in 1852 re-elected deputy for Clermont- Ferrand, and was in 1854 elected president of the corps legislatif, an office which he held for the rest of his life. This office in every way suited him; he had large pay, and resided in a magnificent official residence, where he produced little plays to admiring audiences. The work was not hard, being chiefly to maintain the Government majority in a good humour by sumptuous entertainments, and to win over the Liberals by the same tactics. He still speculated in railways, pictures, mines, and even in a new watering-place, Deauville, and, being absolutely unscru pulous and venal, amassed an immense fortune in spite of the utmost extravagance. In 1856 he was special ambassador at the coronation of Czar Alexander II., when he spent immense sums, and married a wealthy Russian, Princess Troubetzkoy. In 1862 he was created a duke, and in 1865, after continuing to the last his career of dissi pation, died of sheer anaemia from the measures he took to keep himself fit for yet further excesses. Of the due de Morny little good can be said either as a statesman or a man. lie looked upon everything from a purely selfish point