Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/16

 Earring) wrote at the Court of France his beautiful «Inno a Dio » and exclusively employed the best Italian in his correspondence.

Notwithstanding the great influence of the French Jesuits at Constantinople in the first half of the following century, an influence which was opposed by the Latin-writing colonists of Holland, who were represented by the ambassador of the Low Countries, the French language gained no ground in this region. If the Fathers preached in French, they wrote to the neighbouring princes of Wallachia and Moldavia in Italian. The same occidental form was used by the English Ambassadors despatched to Turkey in the reign of Queen Elizabeth of England; a certain Austell and Edward Barton.

A change was introduced only when Louis XIV took the lead as the first of all kings of his time, the arbiter of all courtly life and the initiator of a unified etiquette. De Hayes, that persecuted and harassed ambassador of the French king, was no longer obliged exclusively to employ Italian, the influence of which continued in the first half of the eighteenth century. His successor, de Nointel, proud of the literary achievements of his country, was able to present to a diplomatic gathering at the Embassy a series of French classical plays.

At the same time, if French was not spoken at the Court of the rich Wallachian prince, Constantin Brâncoveanu, who reigned with all the pomp and circumstance of a western monarch, a French Ludovicist inspiration is to be detected in the carefully elaborated chronicles of his reign and in the large measure of protection accorded by this enlightened prince to all exponents of learning.

But a certain Italian character of Roumanian culture remained strongly affirmed. The spiritus rector of all cultural manifestations in Wallachia was an uncle of Brâncoveanu,