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An "Author-Sovereign," as Lord Shaftesbury, in his anomalous but emphatic style, terms this class of writers, is placed between a double eminence of honours, and must incur the double perils; he will receive no favour from his brothers, the Fainéants, as a whole race of ciphers in succession on the throne of France were denominated, and who find it much more easy to despise than to acquire; while his other brothers, the republicans of literature, want a heart to admire the man who has resisted the perpetual seductions of a court-life for the silent labours of his closet.
It was less than a century since the death of Charlemagne, and the office of king had grown almost as helpless as in the period of the Rois Fainéants. Under the stress of the continuous invasions, by perfectly natural process the central authority had passed to the feudal magnates. Many of the feudal states had actually organized into independent governing bodies.
The style in which duty, and the knowledge of their profession, is enforced, prevents fainéants from long remaining in the profession. In the evening I presided at the Celtic Club, who received me with their usual partiality.
In 1618 the great chamber, the finest of its kind in Europe, with its rich stained glass, its double vaultings resplendent with blue and gold, was gutted by fire, and its long line of statues of the kings of France, from Pharamond to Henry IV. the rois fainéants with pendent arms and lowered eyes, the valiant warrior kings with heads and arms erect disappeared for ever.
These men who, in the days of Nobunaga, Hideyoshi and Ieyasu, had directed the policies of their fiefs and led their armies in the field, were gradually transformed, during the lone peace of the Tokugawa era, into voluptuous fainéants or, at best, thoughtless dilettanti, willing to abandon the direction of their affairs to seneschals and mayors, who, while on the whole their administration was able and loyal, found their account in contriving and perpetuating the effacement of their chiefs.
The effect of this immurement was soon visible; the Manchu rule, which was emphatically a rule of the sword, was rapidly so weakened that the emperors became no more than rois faineants at the mercy of their ministers. The Manchu people, who belong to the Mongol or Turanian Group, number at the maximum five million souls.
Henry, who was a few yards in advance of his companion, paused at a short distance from the free, and being somewhat over-heated, took off his cap to wipe his brow, laughingly observing "In good truth, Suffolk, we must henceforth be rated as miserable faineants, to be scared from our path by a silly wench's tale of deerstealers and wild huntsmen. I am sorry I yielded to her entreaties.
Their orthodoxy is attested not only by their innumerable religious foundations and endowments, but by their importing into Cairo a line of Abbasid caliphs fainéants indeed, but in a manner representative of the great caliphs of Baghdad, extinguished by the Mongols in 1258 and in maintaining them till the Ottoman sultan usurped their very nominal authority as Commanders of the Faithful.
The last of the Fatimite caliphs were mere tools in the hands of rival ministers, and passed their ignoble lives Rois Fainéants in their luxurious palaces. Syria, which had been theirs, was lost to them, and occupied partly by Mohammedans of the rival sect, and partly by the Christians.
The hero carries home the trophy of his prowess , and his wife, springing from her tent, utters a long shrill scream of joy, a preliminary to boasting of her man's valour, and bitterly taunting the other possessors of noirs faineants: the derided ladies abuse their lords with peculiar virulence, and the lords fall into paroxysms of envy, hatred, and malice.
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