choir, terminating in an apse with radiating chapel, contains the fine tomb and statue of Clement VI., carved stalls and some admirable Flemish tapestries of the early 16th century. There is a ruined cloister on the south side. The church, which dates from the 14th century, was built at the expense of Pope Clement VI., and belonged to a powerful Benedictine abbey founded in 1043. There are spacious monastic buildings of the 18th century. The abbey was formerly defended by fortifications, the chief survival of which is a lofty rectangular keep to the south of the choir. Trade in timber and the making of lace chiefly occupy the inhabitants of the town.
LA CHALOTAIS, LOUIS RENÉ DE CARADEUC DE (1701–1785),
French jurist, was born at Rennes, on the 6th of March
1701. He was for 60 years procureur général at the parliament
of Brittany. He was an ardent opponent of the Jesuits;
drew up in 1761 for the parliament a memoir on the constitutions
of the Order, which did much to secure its suppression
in France; and in 1763 published a remarkable “Essay on
National Education,” in which he proposed a programme of
scientific studies as a substitute for those taught by the Jesuits.
The same year began the conflict between the Estates of Brittany
and the governor of the province, the duc d’Aiguillon (q.v.).
The Estates refused to vote the extraordinary imposts demanded
by the governor in the name of the king. La Chalotais was the
personal enemy of d’Aiguillon, who had served him an ill turn
with the king, and when the parliament of Brittany sided with
the Estates, he took the lead in its opposition. The parliament
forbade by decrees the levy of imposts to which the Estates
had not consented. The king annulling these decrees, all the
members of the parliament but twelve resigned (October 1764
to May 1765). The government considered La Chalotais one
of the authors of this affair. At this time the secretary of state
who administered the affairs of the province, Louis Philypeaux,
duc de la Vrillière, comte de Saint-Florentin (1705–1777), received
two anonymous and abusive letters. La Chalotais was suspected
of having written them, and three experts in handwriting
declared that they were by him. The government therefore
arrested him, his son and four other members of the parliament.
The arrest made a great sensation. There was much talk of
“despotism.” Voltaire stated that the procureur général, in
his prison of Saint Malo, was reduced, for lack of ink, to write
his defence with a toothpick dipped in vinegar—which was
apparently pure legend; but public opinion all over France was
strongly aroused against the government. On the 16th of
November 1765 a commission of judges was named to take charge
of the trial. La Chalotais maintained that the trial was illegal;
being procureur général he claimed the right to be judged by
the parliament of Rennes, or failing this by the parliament of
Bordeaux, according to the custom of the province. The judges
did not dare to pronounce a condemnation on the evidence of
experts in handwriting, and at the end of a year, things remained
where they were at the first. Louis XV. then decided on a
sovereign act, and brought the affair before his council, which
without further formality decided to send the accused into exile.
That expedient but increased the popular agitation; philosophes,
members of the parliament, patriot Bretons and Jansenists
all declared that La Chalotais was the victim of the personal
hatred of the duc d’Aiguillon and of the Jesuits. The government
at last gave way, and consented to recall the members of
the parliament of Brittany who had resigned. This parliament,
when it met again, after the formal accusation of the duc
d’Aiguillon, demanded the recall of La Chalotais. This was
accorded in 1775, and La Chalotais was allowed to transmit
his office to his son. In this affair public opinion showed itself
stronger than the absolutism of the king. The opposition to
the royal power gained largely through it, and it may be regarded
as one of the preludes to the revolution of 1789. La Chalotais,
who was personally a violent, haughty and unsympathetic
character, died at Rennes on the 12th of July 1785.
See, besides the Comptes-Rendus des Constitutions des Jésuites and the Essai d’éducation nationale, the Mémoires de la Chalotais (3 vols., 1766–1767). Two works containing detailed bibliographies are Marion, La Bretagne et le duc d’Aiguillon (Paris, 1893), and B. Pocquet, Le Duc d’Aiguillon et La Chalotais (Paris, 1901). See also a controversy between these two authors in the Bulletin critique for 1902.
LA CHARITÉ, a town of central France in the department
of Nièvre, on the right bank of the Loire, 17 m. N.N.W. of Nevers
on the Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée railway. Pop. (1906) 3990.
La Charité possesses the remains of a fine Romanesque basilica,
the church of Sainte-Croix, dating from the 11th and early 12th
centuries. The plan consists of a nave, rebuilt at the end of
the 17th century, transept and choir with ambulatory and side
chapels. Surmounting the transept is an octagonal tower of
one story, and a square Romanesque tower of much beauty
flanks the main portal. There are ruins of the ramparts, which
date from the 14th century. The manufacture of hosiery, boots
and shoes, files and iron goods, lime and cement and woollen
and other fabrics are among the industries; trade is chiefly in
wood and iron.
La Charité owes its celebrity to its priory, which was founded in the 8th century and reorganized as a dependency of the abbey of Cluny in 1052. It became the parent of many priories and monasteries, some of them in England and Italy. The possession of the town was hotly contested during the wars of religion of the 16th century, at the end of which its fortifications were dismantled.
LA CHAUSSÉE, PIERRE CLAUDE NIVELLE DE (1692–1754),
French dramatist, was born in Paris in 1692. In 1731
he published an Épître à Clio, a didactic poem in defence of
Lériget de la Faye in his dispute with Antoine Houdart de la
Motte, who had maintained that verse was useless in tragedy.
La Chaussée was forty years old before he produced his first
play, La Fausse Antipathie (1734). His second play, Le Préjugé
à la mode (1735) turns on the fear of incurring ridicule felt by
a man in love with his own wife, a prejudice dispelled in France,
according to La Harpe, by La Chaussée’s comedy. L’École
des amis (1737) followed, and, after an unsuccessful attempt
at tragedy in Maximinien, he returned to comedy in Mélanide
(1741). In Mélanide the type known as comédie larmoyante
is fully developed. Comedy was no longer to provoke laughter,
but tears. The innovation consisted in destroying the sharp
distinction then existing between tragedy and comedy in French
literature. Indications of this change had been already offered
in the work of Marivaux, and La Chaussée’s plays led naturally
to the domestic drama of Diderot and of Sedaine. The new
method found bitter enemies. Alexis Piron nicknames the
author “le Révérend Père Chaussée,” and ridiculed him in one
of his most famous epigrams. Voltaire maintained that the
comédie larmoyante was a proof of the inability of the author
to produce either of the recognized kinds of drama, though he
himself produced a play of similar character in L’Enfant prodigue.
The hostility of the critics did not prevent the public from shedding
tears nightly over the sorrows of La Chaussée’s heroine.
L’École des mères (1744) and La Gouvernante (1747) form, with
those already mentioned, the best of his work. The strict
moral aims pursued by La Chaussée in his plays seem hardly
consistent with his private preferences. He frequented the
same gay society as did the comte de Caylus and contributed
to the Recueils de ces messieurs. La Chaussée died on the 14th
of May 1754. Villemain said of his style that he wrote prosaic
verses with purity, while Voltaire, usually an adverse critic of
his work, said he was “un des premiers après ceux qui ont du
génie.”
For the comédie larmoyante see G. Lanson, Nivelle de la Chaussée et la comédie larmoyante (1887).
LACHES (from Anglo-French lachesse, negligence, from
lasche, modern lâche, unloosed, slack), a term for slackness
or negligence, used particularly in law to signify negligence
on the part of a person in doing that which he is by law bound
to do, or unreasonable lapse of time in asserting a right, seeking
relief, or claiming a privilege. Laches is frequently a bar to
a remedy which might have been had if prosecuted in proper
time. Statutes of limitation specify the time within which
various classes of actions may be brought. Apart from statutes
of limitation courts of equity will often refuse relief to those
