The title of memoir-writer must be understood in a very wide sense when it is applied to D’Aubigné. Strictly speaking, the short _Vie à ses Enfants_ is his memoir.[108] The _Histoire Universelle_, his main work in prose, is a great general history of contemporary events at home and abroad. But then it is also a history of events in which D’Aubigné himself played an active part, and which he tells from an intensely personal point of view. It is to be noted that it ends with the wars of Religion, and the peace which was brought about by the abjuration of the king--that is to say, when D’Aubigné himself ceased to take a prominent share in public affairs. To judge by his other prose work, which is considerable,[109] D’Aubigné was by nature a vehement--or even virulent--pamphleteer. His _Baron de Fœneste_ and his _Confession de Sancy_ are fiercely satirical. They are also rather obscure, and not easily readable. It was on the suggestion of Henry IV. that he first began to think of writing the history of his time. He was to have worked in co-operation with the President Jeannin, an ex-Leaguer, and another thorough-going partisan. It is difficult to imagine what they could have produced between them. This fantastic scheme was dropped, and the _Histoire Universelle_ was written after the king’s death. The style of D’Aubigné shows the influence of his learned education, and of his practice in the poetic school of Ronsard. He sometimes uses purely pedantic words, as when he says that his father put him under the charge of a tutor, “Jean Costin, homme astorge et impiteux.” Astorge is a Greek word (ἄστοργος), which would never have been used by Carloix, La Noue, or Monluc. Again, he deliberately followed classic models in the long speeches, frequently delivered by himself, which abound in his History, and are the most carefully written parts. When he tells Henry IV. in one of these addresses that it is useless for him to endeavour to make peace with the Court, because “you are guilty of your birth, and of the wrongs which have been done you,” the echo of Sallust and of Tacitus is distinctly audible; yet he can also be colloquial, and has no scruple in using idiomatic and proverbial phrases which a later generation would have rejected as unworthy of the “dignity of history.” Dignity is not wanting to D’Aubigné, but it is given by the force of his thoughts and of his character, which is that of a man who might be a tyrannical friend and an exacting servant, but who was brave and high-minded. [SN: _Monluc._]