Louvre; a captain who has brought his company
from one village to another without loss of
life; or a citizen who has faithfully paid his
taxes, depend upon it he will be greatly angry
if the king does not see his name in the
Gazette. . . .

"You must, therefore, have pity, reader; for,
if in the fear of displeasing their contemporaries,
many great authors have abstained from touching
upon the history of the age in which they
lived, with what difficulties shall I not be
surrounded—I, who undertake to write, not the
history of the present century, but that of the
present week, and even of the present day?" . . .

After much more in this strain, the editor
concludes as follows:

"In one point, however, will I place myself
beyond reproach, and that is in my search after
truth. Nevertheless, I intend not to vouch for
the truth of what I say, for it is quite impossible
that amongst five hundred scraps of news,
gathered from every clime, there creep not in
some statements which will need to be corrected
by our good Father Time; but to those who
may be scandalised by the sight of some false
report, I say, that they may come if they will and
rectify the truth by the means of my pen
(which I shall offer them), that the public may
see the true news after the false, and be thus no
longer kept in error."

Renandot's paper had a great success; it
was published weekly, and for a long time was
the only public journal in France. After the
death of the doctor, it was carried on by his
sons, and the exclusive right of publishing a
gazette was for many years kept as a privilege
by his family. The Gazette de France still
exists; and, it may be added to its honour,
that it is perhaps the only paper in the
world that has never modified the colour of its
opinions; it remains now, what it was before
the great Revolution, devoted to the Bourbons,
and a warm supporter of the clerico-legitimate
party.

So long as the Gazette de France—interpreter
of ministerial opinion—flourished alone, it was
useless to make press laws; but during the
troublous times that followed the death of
Louis the Thirteenth, and inaugurated the long
reign of his successor, a few other journals
started into sudden life, and the boldness of
speech of some of them was such that the
authorities, alarmed, began to interfere, and,
as may be supposed, with more vigour than
courtesy. A few impudent gazetteers were
whipped by order of Cardinal Mazarin, and a
few more scourged by sentence of the Paris
parliament; the first suffered for attacking the
court; the last for defending it. On the whole,
it was best to keep one's pen in one's pocket in
those days.

There was one journal, however—and the
smartest of them all, too—upon which neither
court nor parliament dared lay very violent
hands, and this was La Gazette de Loret (so
called from the name of its editor), under the
powerful patronage of the famous Duchess of
Longueville, sister of the great Condé. This
funny little gazette was composed entirely in
verse by a poet named John Loret; it appeared
once a week, treated of all topics current,
political or social, and abounded with gossip, scandal,
and epigram; each copy was printed under the
form of a letter to "Madame la Duchesse, sœur
de Monsieur le Prince," and the honest editor
made no scruple of avowing in one of his earliest
numbers that he received a pension of fourteen
thousand francs from this generous lady.

Here is an extract from the Gazette de
Loret:

"Du marché neuf les harengères,
Et même quelques boulangères,
S'assemblant toutes en un tas,
En chaperon de taffetas.
Remontrèrent l'autre semaine,
À sa majesté la reyne,
Qu'elles tiendroient à grand honneur
Si le roi leur faisoit l'honneur
D'aller ouïr vêpres ou messe
Dans l'église de leur paroisse.
À quoi la reyne promptement
Apporta son consentement.
Le lendemain, voulant donc plaire
À cette tourbe populaire,
Le roi à leur église fut," &c. &c.

To our lady the queen there came last week
A motley deputation,
A curious lot, and, so to speak,
The tag-rag of the nation.
Fish-wives there were in taffety dresses
Female bakers (or baker-esses),
And many more of like condition,
Who offer'd up a meek petition,
That her Majesty might be pleased to grant
Leave to the king, her little son,
To come some day (they mention'd one),
And hear with them the pious chant
Of mass or vespers, in their parish.
At which the queen in bounty lavish,
The next day sent the little king
To hear the mob their matins sing.

Jean Loret's Gazette had a sunny existence
of two years; but the parliament, finding, no
doubt, that the poet was becoming too witty,
forbade him, one morning,

"D'écrire politiquement."

To rhyme on Church, to talk on State,
Or hold on serious things debate.

This makes him exclaim:

"Désormais mes tristes gazettes
Ne seront plus que des sornettes."

My journals now henceforth will be,
Alas! but paltry things to see.

And shortly after his paper expired. Cardinal
Mazarin had then re-seized the government of
France; order was restored, and the malcontent
gazetteers who had been whipped hastened to
wipe their pens for fear of worse. We hear
little more concerning the French press for the
next seventy or eighty years. Louis the
Fourteenth was not a monarch to brook much
opposition; and whilst newspapers in England were
already becoming dangerous weapons in the
hands of turbulent Whigs, the Gazettes de