Produced by Audrey Longhurst, Emanuela Piasentini and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
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|Transcriber's note. |
| |
|The original punctuation, language and spelling have been |
|retained, except where noted at the end of the text. |
|Minor typographical errors have been corrected without note.|
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|The [oe] ligature has been rendered as oe. |
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|Alternative spellings: |
|château: chateau |
|camerara: camarera |
|Fenelon: Fénelon |
|Ferté-Senneterre: Ferte-Senneterre |
|Hôtel: Hotel |
|Leganez: Léganez |
|Orléans: Orleans |
|Querouialle: Quérouialle |
|Saint-Megrin: Saint-Mégrin |
|Sévigné: Sevigné, Sévigne |
|Tremouille: Trémouille |
|Tarent: Tarente |
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POLITICAL WOMEN.
BY
SUTHERLAND MENZIES,
AUTHOR OF "ROYAL FAVOURITES," ETC.
IN TWO VOLUMES.
VOL. II.
HENRY S. KING & CO.,
65, CORNHILL, AND 12, PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON.
1873.
[_All rights reserved._]
CONTENTS OF VOLUME II.
BOOK V.--_continued._
PAGE
CHAP. III.--The struggle between Condé and Turenne--Noble
conduct of Mademoiselle de Montpensier--Fall of
the Fronde 3
IV.--The Duke de Nemours slain in a duel by his
brother-in-law Beaufort 12
V.--Triumph of Mazarin 16
BOOK VI.
CHAP. I.--Closing scenes--Madame de Longueville 35
II.--Madame de Chevreuse 49
III.--The Princess Palatine 54
IV.--Madame de Montbazon 61
V.--Mademoiselle de Montpensier 69
VI.--The Wife of the Great Condé 80
PART II.
The Duchess of Portsmouth 93
PART III.
BOOK I.
PRINCESS DES URSINS.
CHAP. I.--Two ladies of the Bedchamber during _the war of
the Spanish Succession_--Lady Churchill and the
Princess des Ursins--Political motives for their
elevation in England and Spain 127
II.--The Princess des Ursins--The married life of
Anne de la Tremouille--She becomes the centre of
contemporary politics in Rome 131
III.--Madame des Ursins aspires to govern Spain--Her
manoeuvres to secure the post of Camerara-Mayor 141
IV.--The Princess assumes the functions of
Camerara-Mayor to the young Queen of Spain--An
unpropitious royal wedding 148
V.--Onerous and incongruous duties of the
Camerara-Mayor--She renders Marie Louise popular
with the Spaniards--The policy adopted by the
Princess for the regeneration of Spain--Character
of Philip and Marie Louise--Two political systems
combated by Madame des Ursins--She effects the
ruin of her political rivals and reigns
absolutely in the Councils of the Crown 161
VI.--The Princess makes a false step in her
Statecraft--A blunder and an imbroglio 175
VII.--The Princess quits Madrid by command of Louis
XIV.--After a short exile, she receives
permission to visit Versailles 184
VIII.--The Princess triumphs at Versailles 192
BOOK II.
CHAP. I.--Sarah Jennings and John Churchill 207
II.--State of parties in action on the accession of
Queen Anne--Harley and Bolingbroke aim at
overthrowing the sway of the female
"Viceroy"--Abigail Hill becomes the instrument
of the Duchess's downfall--Squabbles between
the Queen and her Mistress of the Robes 215
III.--Success of the Cabal--The Queen emancipates
herself from all obligations to the Duke and
Duchess of Marlborough--The downfall of the
Duchess and the Whigs resolved upon--The
Duchess's stormy and final interview with
the Queen 233
IV.--The disgrace of the Duchess involves the fall
of the Whigs--Anne demands back the Duchess's
gold keys of office--Extraordinary influence of
Sarah and Abigail on the fortunes of Europe--The
illustrious soldier and his disgraced wife
driven from England 242
BOOK III.
CHAP. I.--Delicate and perilous position of the Princess
des Ursins after the Battle of Almanza--She
effects an important reform by the centralisation
of the different kingdoms of Spain--The Duke of
Orleans heads a faction inimical to the
Princess--She demands and obtains his recall--Her
bold resolution to act in opposition to the timid
policy of Versailles--The loftiness of her past
conduct and character--The victory of Villaviciosa
definitely seats the House of Bourbon on the
throne of Spain 251
II.--The Princess's share in the Treaty of Utrecht--At
the culminating point of her greatness, a
humiliating catastrophe is impending--Philip
negotiates for the erection of a territory into
a sovereignty for Madame des Ursins--The sudden
death of Queen Marie Louise causes a serious
conjunction for the Princess--Her power begins
to totter 264
III.--The Princess finds herself friendless in
Spain--Suspicions and slanders rife with regard
to the relations existing between her and the
King--The projected creation of a sovereignty
fails, through the abandonment of England--Philip,
in consequence, refuses to sign the Treaty of
Utrecht, but Louis XIV. compels the King and
Princess to yield--Their _têtes-à-têtes_ causing
great scandal, the King suddenly orders the
Princess to find him a wife 272
IV.--Among the Princesses eligible to become Philip's
consort, he chooses the Princess of Parma--Alberoni
deceives Madame des Ursins as to the character of
Elizabeth Farnese--The Camerara-Mayor's prompt and
cruel disgrace at the hands of the new Queen--She
is arrested and carried to St. Jean de Luz--Her
courage under adversity--She returns to Rome, and
dies there 287
BOOK IV.
I.--_Closing Scenes_--The Princess des Ursins 301
II.--Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough 307
BOOK V.
(_Continued._)
POLITICAL WOMEN.
CHAPTER III.
THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN CONDÉ AND TURENNE AT PARIS--NOBLE CONDUCT OF
MADEMOISELLE DE MONTPENSIER--FALL OF THE FRONDE.
THE second-rate actors in this shifting drama presented no less
diversity in the motives of their actions. Beaufort, who commanded the
troops of Gaston, and Nemours those of Condé, although brothers-in-law,
weakened by their dissentions an army which their concord would have
rendered formidable. The necessity of military operations required their
absence from Paris; but they preferred rather to there exhibit
themselves to their mistresses, decked out in a general's uniform, and
grasping the truncheon of command. No greater harmony existed between
the Prince de Conti and Madame de Longueville than when La Rochefoucauld
severed them. At Bordeaux they favoured opposite parties, and
contributed to augment the discord prevailing, and to weaken the party
of the Princes by dividing it. The Duchess de Longueville, when no
longer guided by La Rochefoucauld, did not fail to lose herself in
aimless projects, and to compromise herself in intrigues without result.
On Nemours being wounded, his wife repaired to the army to tend him, and
the Duchess de Châtillon, under pretext of visiting one of her
châteaux, accompanied her as far as Montargis; thence she went to the
convent of Filles de Sainte-Marie, where, believing herself quite
incognita, she went, under various disguises, to see him whom she had
never ceased to love. These mysterious visits soon became no longer a
secret to any one; and then Condé and his sister could convince
themselves how different are the sentiments which love inspires and
those which self-interest and vanity simulate. The great Condé, by his
intelligence and bearing, had all the means of pleasing women; but
obtained small success notwithstanding. Mademoiselle Vigean excepted, he
appears to have been incapable of inspiring the tender passion, in the
truest acceptation of the phrase. He went further than his sister, it
seems, in the neglect of his person. It was his habit of life to be
almost always badly dressed, and only appeared radiant on the field of
battle. So that the Duke de Nemours was not the only rival with whom
Condé had to contend for the favours of that beauty for whom Louis XIV.
in his boyish amusements had shown a preference, and which has furnished
a theme for some agreeable trifling to the sparkling muse of Benserade.
An abbé, named Cambiac, in the service of the house of Condé, balanced
for some time the passion to which Nemours had given birth in the bosom
of the Duchess de Châtillon, and the jealousy of Nemours failed to expel
Cambiac. The Duchess kept fair with him as the man who had obtained the
greatest sway over her relation, the Princess-dowager de Condé. The
condescension of the Duchess de Châtillon towards this intriguing and
licentious priest procured her, on the part of the Princess-dowager, a
legacy of more than a hundred thousand crowns in Bavaria, and the
usufruct of an estate worth twenty thousand livres in rent per annum.
Cambiac, however, retired, when he knew that Condé was his rival. But
the victor of Rocroy had more address in winning battles than in
conducting a love intrigue. He was clumsy enough to employ as a
go-between in his courtship of his new mistress a certain gentleman
named Vineuil, who was, it is true, one of his most skilful and attached
followers, but whose good looks, agreeable and satirical wit, and
enterprising character rendered him a very dangerous emissary among
women. He had even acquired some celebrity through his successes in that
way. Madame de Montbazon, Madame de Mouy, and the Princess of Wurtemberg
had successively experienced the effects of his seductions. Vineuil made
himself very agreeable to Madame de Châtillon, and if Condé were wronged
by him in that quarter, he never knew of it; for Vineuil was always in
great favour with him. Nemours excited his jealousy, and Nemours only
dreaded Condé. However, shortly before, in the month of March, 1652, the
Marquis de la Boulay and Count de Choisy, both enamoured of this Queen
of Hearts, were bent on fighting a duel about her. A rumour of their
intention got wind. The Duchess de Châtillon heard of it, and appeared
unexpectedly on the spot fixed by the two adversaries for a rendezvous;
and at the very instant they were about to unsheath their swords, she
flung herself between them, seized each by the hand, and led them into
the presence of the Duke d'Orleans, who charged Marshals l'Hospital,
Schomberg, and d'Etampes, then in Paris, to arrange that affair and
prevent a duel. In this they succeeded, but these rivalries and gallant
intrigues very sensibly weakened Condé's party, and hindered there being
anything secret or combined in the execution of projects determined upon
in the councils of its chief.
In the meantime, the siege of Etampes had been raised; and the army of
Condé had issued forth, probably with the intention of attacking Turenne
if he were found engaged with the Duke de Lorraine. On its approaching
Paris, Condé took the command of it, and fixed his head-quarters at
Saint-Cloud, in order to manoeuvre on both banks of the Seine. The
proximity of his camp to Paris did him far greater harm than even a
defeat would have done. With but a scanty commissariat, Condé was of
course obliged to permit every sort of licence. All the crops were
ruined in the neighbouring fields; the peasantry were plundered,
injured, and their domestic peace destroyed; and the country-houses of
the rich Parisians were pillaged and burned in all directions. The evils
of civil war now came home to the hearts of the people of the capital,
and, forgetting how great a part they themselves had taken in producing
the results they lamented, they cast the whole blame upon Condé, and
regarded him thenceforth with a malevolent eye.
That prince was distracted with different passions and different
feelings. He was himself desirous of peace, and willing to make
sacrifices to obtain it. His fair mistress, the Duchess de Châtillon,
linked with La Rochefoucauld and the Duke de Nemours, confirmed him in
seeking it; but, on the other hand, his sister, who sought to break off
his connection with Madame de Châtillon, joined with the Spaniards, to
whom he had bound himself by so many ties, to lead him away from Paris,
and to protract the war. Gaston's daughter, too, Mademoiselle de
Montpensier, mingled in all these intrigues, and took the same unwise
means to force herself as a bride upon the young King, which De Retz
took to force himself as minister upon his mother. But while these
separate interests tore the capital, the peril of the army of Condé
became imminent. Turenne having brought the Court to St. Denis, caused a
number of boats to be drawn up from Pontoise, and commenced the
construction of a bridge opposite Epinay.
Condé, betrayed on all sides, could at length perceive what an error he
had committed in quitting the army only to lose himself amidst a series
of impotent intrigues, and in having preferred the counsels of such a
fickle mistress as Madame de Châtillon to those of a courageous and
devoted sister such as Madame de Longueville. Towards the end of June,
he got on horseback with a small number of intrepid friends, and rode
forth to try for the last time the fate of arms.
It was too late. Marshal de la Ferté-Senneterre had brought from
Lorraine powerful reinforcements to the royal army, which thereby
amounted to twelve thousand men. That of the Fronde had scarcely the
half of that number, and it was discouraged, divided, incapable of
giving battle, and could only carry on a few days' campaign around
Paris, thanks to the manoeuvres and energy everywhere exhibited by its
chief. It was evident that no other alternative remained to Condé but to
treat with the Court at any price, or to throw himself into the arms of
Spain, and the famous combat of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, seriously
considered, was only an act of despair, an heroic but vain protest of
courage against fortune. Success would have remedied nothing, and a
defeat might have been expected, in which Condé might have lost his
glory and his life. It was no slight error of Turenne to risk a combat
against such an adversary without a disposition of his entire force, for
at that moment La Ferté-Senneterre was still with the artillery before
the barrier Saint-Denis. Reunited, the Queen's two generals might
overwhelm Condé; separated, La Ferté-Senneterre remained useless, and
Turenne left alone might purchase his victory very dearly. The latter
therefore required that La Ferté should hasten to join him by forced
marches, and that the attack should not be commenced before he arrived.
But the orders of the Court admitted of no delay, and the Duke de
Bouillon himself advised an immediate attack, in order to avoid having
the appearance of manoeuvring with Condé. Hence the fatal combat of the
2nd of July, 1652, in which so many valiant officers, of whom the army
was proud, perished uselessly.
Historians in relating the details of that deplorable day have dwelt
upon the courage and talent displayed by Condé within that narrow arena,
that small space of ground which extended from the barrier du Trône, by
the main street of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, in front of the Bastille.
As usual, he had formed a picked squadron which he led on all points,
himself leading the most desperate charges. He had posted himself in
front of Turenne, disputing foot to foot with him the _Grande Rue Saint
Antoine_, and during the intervals of relaxation of the enemy's attacks,
he rode off towards Picpus to encourage Tavannes, who was repelling with
his customary vigour every attack made by Saint-Mégrin, or to hold in
check, on the side of the Seine and Charenton Navailles, one of
Turenne's best lieutenants. It was in the _Grande Rue_ where the rudest
shocks were delivered. Turenne and Condé there rivalled each other in
boldness and obstinacy, both charging at the head of their troops, both
covered with blood, and unceasingly exposed to the fire of musketry.
Turenne, far superior in numbers, was rapidly gaining ground, when Condé
suddenly, sword in hand, at the head of his squadron of fifty brave
gentlemen, forced him to fall back, and the affair remained undecided
until Navailles, who had just received a reinforcement with artillery,
overthrew all the barricades in his path, and in advancing, threatened
to surround Condé. The latter, throwing himself quickly in that
direction, saw on reaching the last barricade his two friends, Nemours
and La Rochefoucauld, the one wounded in several places and unable to
stand, the other blinded by a ball which had passed through his face
just below the eyes, and both in immediate danger of being made
prisoners. All exhausted as he was--for the fighting lasted from morning
till evening,--Condé had still heart and energy to make a last charge
for their rescue, and to place them in safety within the city. He felt
the old flame of Rocroy and Nordlingen firing his blood, and he fought
like the boldest of his dragoons. The citizens on the ramparts beheld
with emotion the Prince, covered with blood and dust, enter a garden,
throw off his casque and cuirass, and roll himself half-naked upon the
grass to wipe off the sweat in which he was bathed. Meanwhile, La
Ferté-Senneterre had come up. From that moment all gave way, and the
Prince, feebly seconded by his disheartened soldiers, with the greatest
difficulty reached the Place de la Bastille. There he found the gates of
Paris shut. In vain did Beaufort urge the city militia to go to the
assistance of that handful of brave men on the point of succumbing:
wearied with three years of discord and manipulated by Mazarin, it no
longer responded to the summons of its old chief. Splendidly dressed
ladies waved signals to their champions and lovers below, and the
streets became alive with the shouting of armed citizens, who desired to
be let out to the aid of their defenders, and could not see with cold
blood the slaughter of their friends. Thousands went to the Luxembourg
to beseech Gaston to open the gates of the city for the reception of
the wounded and the protection of the over-matched. Long trains of
wounded and dying young men began to be carried in; the groans and blood
were horrible to hear and see; and the women of all ranks and ages were
frantic with sympathy and grief. De Retz and terror had so chilled the
Duke d'Orleans into inaction that he would have let Condé perish, had
not Mademoiselle de Montpensier, who was at that time smitten with
Condé, wrung indignantly from her father, by dint of tears and
entreaties, an order to open the gates to the outnumbered Prince.
Mazarin, from the heights of Charonne, where he had stationed himself
with the young King, might well have thought that it was all over with
his worst enemy; and, when startled to hear that Mademoiselle herself
had even ordered the cannon of the Bastille to be fired upon the royal
army, exclaimed, "With that cannon-shot she has slain her husband,"
making allusion to the ambition which the Princess d'Orleans always had
to espouse the youthful Louis XIV. True, on that same day, Mademoiselle
destroyed with her own hand her dearest hopes; but that trait of
generosity and greatness of soul has for ever honoured her memory, and
shields it from many errors and much ridicule. After having solemnly
pledged itself to Condé, it would have been the height of opprobrium for
the House of Orleans to let Condé fall before their eyes: better to have
perished with him, and at least saved its honour.
Mademoiselle has related in what condition she found Condé, when having
placed herself at the window of a little dwelling near the Bastille, in
order to see the troops pass as they entered the city, the Prince
hurried for a moment from the gate to speak to her. He neither thought
of himself, all covered with blood as he was, nor even of his cause,
very nearly hopeless: he thought only of the friends he had lost. It
did not occur to him that they were those who had embarked him in
negotiations the results of which had proved so fatal: he thought only
that they had died for him, and his anguish grew insupportable. "He
was," says Mademoiselle, "in a most pitiable state; he was not wounded
himself, yet he was covered from head to foot with dust and blood, his
hair all disordered, his face flushed with exertion, his cuirass
battered with blows, and having lost the scabbard of his sword in the
fight, he held the blade naked in his hand." As he entered, the memory
of all those he had seen fall around him seemed to rush suddenly upon
Condé, and casting himself upon a seat, he burst into tears. "Forgive
me," said the great soldier, "I have lost all my friends--the gallant
young hearts that loved me." "No, they are only wounded," said his
cousin, "and many of them not dangerously; they will recover and love
you still." Condé sprang up at the good news, and rushed back into the
fight. At the head of all his effective cavalry, he made one desperate,
long-continued charge, and drove the enemy backward for a mile. In the
meantime, the gates were opened wide, and, file after file, the weary
soldiers marched into the city; and dashing homeward after his brilliant
assault, Condé and his squadron galloped in the last: but when the
ponderous bars were once more drawn across the portals, it was felt that
the combatants indeed were saved, but that the Fronde was destroyed.
CHAPTER IV.
THE DUKE DE NEMOURS SLAIN IN A DUEL BY HIS BROTHER-IN-LAW, BEAUFORT.
SOME few days after the fierce fight of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine,
Condé had an interview with the Duke d'Orleans, "who embraced him with
an air as gay as though he had failed him in nothing."[1] Condé uttered
no word of reproach out of respect to his daughter. He did not behave
exactly in the same way towards Madame de Châtillon. She had addressed a
note to him begging him to visit her. She showed this effusion to
Mademoiselle, saying, "He will at least see from that the uneasiness
which is felt for him." But Condé's mind was disabused, and when he met
her who had been his ruin, "he cast upon her, we are told, the most
terrible glances conceivable, showing by the expression of his
countenance how much he despised her."[2] Well would it have been if
soon afterwards the grand-nephew of Henry IV. had not lent anew his ear
to the song of the syren and resumed the slavery of her dishonouring
fetters!
[1] Mademoiselle de Montpensier, tom. ii. p. 148.
[2] The same.
It is not to our purpose to retrace the melancholy scenes of which,
after the combat of Saint Antoine, and during the remainder of the month
of July, 1652, Paris was the theatre. It would be only to dwell upon the
sad spectacle of the agony and supreme convulsions of a beaten party,
struggling in vain to escape its fate, and seeking safety in excesses
which only served to precipitate its destruction.
Condé left no violent extreme untried to determine Paris to make further
sacrifices for his cause. Dissatisfied with the deliberations of the
Hôtel de Ville, he caused it to be carried by assault by the populace,
who killed several of the _échevins_. The Fronde, however, was
approaching its last agony. Divided amongst themselves by selfish
interests, and outwearied with endless intrigues, the majority of the
Frondeurs only awaited a fitting opportunity of treating with Mazarin.
An amnesty soon made its appearance, and the Cardinal took the step of
quitting France once more in order to facilitate a reconciliation. But
Condé, on his side, was very little disposed thereto, for he had gone
very far indeed to retrace his steps. Furious at having failed to reach
the object which he had thought to attain, exasperated by the
abandonment of his partisans, by the sarcasms of pamphleteers, he
demanded securities and large indemnifications; and proposed such hard
conditions that all accord with him became impossible. Thereupon he
collected some troops around his standard, a tolerably large number of
gentlemen, and rejoined the Duke de Lorraine, who was advancing upon
Paris. Their united forces amounted to eighty squadrons and eight
thousand infantry. Turenne had scarcely half that strength; but he
manoeuvred so skilfully round Paris, that they failed to get any
advantage over him. Condé withdrew; and when the King, on his return to
the Louvre, published a second amnesty (October, 1652), the Prince had
crossed the frontier, after having taken several strongholds in his line
of march. Shortly afterwards, he became generalissimo of the Spanish
armies, whilst a decree of the parliament declared him guilty of high
treason and a traitor to the State.
Previous to Condé's departure from Paris, intense indignation had been
excited in every well-balanced mind by a shocking event--the Duke de
Nemours having been slain by the hand of his brother-in-law, the Duke de
Beaufort, in an abominable duel. From De Nemours the provocation had
come, and all the wrong was on his part; but as the victim, he was
deplored by all those who were ignorant of what had contributed to bring
about the affair, and for some time the new governor of Paris (Beaufort)
could not show himself in public.
In the Dukes de Nemours and La Rochefoucauld, Condé had lost his two
pacific advisers. In vain had he offered to La Rochefoucauld the post of
Nemours, the command under him, and thus to be the second authority in
his army. La Rochefoucauld had excused himself on account of his wound,
and Condé gave the vacant command to the Prince de Tarente.
Henceforward, Madame de Châtillon quite alone was unable to
counterbalance the counsels and influence of Madame de Longueville, and
Condé plunged deeper than ever into the Spanish alliance and the war
waged by that nation against France.
Whilst all these events were happening, Bordeaux had become the theatre
of continued troubles. Madame de Longueville no longer agreed with her
younger brother; the inhabitants of the city, who had only entered
half-heartedly and been almost forced into rebellion, became impatient
to extricate themselves from the constrained position in which they were
held. As the sequel to negotiations which the city carried on with the
Duke de Vendôme, who blockaded it, there was a general amnesty.
When Condé retired to the Netherlands, it was not long before it became
known, to the national humiliation, that the best soldier of France, a
prince of the blood and protector of the people, had followed the recent
example of his conqueror, and sold his services to Spain. The young King
made his triumphal entry into Paris, accompanied by his mother and
Turenne. He convoked the Courts, and received them into favour,
"provided they returned within the limits of their duties, and abstained
from interfering with the government." Gaston was sent into honourable
exile, to his castle in the beautiful town of Blois, and the
Cardinal-Archbishop, the evil spirit of the Fronde, was received with
apparent cordiality, and began to entertain hopes of supplanting his
rival; but when he had fallen into disrepute with the citizens, he was
quietly carried off to Vincennes, and left to meditate on his plots and
schemings within the bars of his solitary apartment. The Parisians were
now so changed from what they had been, that they received their old
enemy, the Cardinal Mazarin, with demonstrations of delight, when he
made his solemn entry into the repentant city with young Louis as an
attendant at his side.
CHAPTER V.
THE TRIUMPH OF MAZARIN.
MAZARIN might well have claimed the right of accompanying to Paris, on
the 21st October, 1652, Louis the Fourteenth and Anne of Austria, and to
share the joy of their victory over the Fronde, for he was the true
achiever of it. It was he who, by retiring so opportunely, by leaving
the Fronde to itself, had allowed it to exhibit at its entire ease its
fury and impotence; it was he who, from the depth of his exile,
disquieted by the success of Châteauneuf, had collected troops, rallied
round him experienced generals, raised the banner of the monarchy, and
from one vantage ground to another had carried it forwards even to
Paris. But by reappearing there prematurely, Mazarin might have risked
the rekindling of animosities scarcely yet extinguished. It was his own
advice he followed--to second the effect of the amnesty, by a momentary
absence, in order to leave no pretext to those who had so often promised
to yield if he quitted the kingdom. Sure of the young King, surer still
of his mother, leaving with them his instructions and approved advisers,
Mazarin had disappeared, withdrawing at first to Bouillon, across the
frontier; then, as by degrees the King's government became consolidated
at Paris, he drew nearer and moved to Sedan; next, he went openly to
join the royal army, taking with him powerful reinforcements, munitions,
provisions, and money. Admirably commanded by Turenne and La
Ferté-Senneterre, it had forced the little army of Condé and the Duke de
Lorraine to slowly beat a retreat in the direction of the Netherlands.
Active, resolute, indefatigable, he did not hesitate to prolong the
campaign beyond its ordinary limits, until the end of December, and even
up to January, 1653. He had only quitted the army on beholding the enemy
abandon French territory, and after having made the frontier of
Champagne and Picardy secure from any chance of a return of offensive
operations. It was then that he put his troops into winter quarters, and
that he himself, heralded and sustained by these solid successes, had
taken the road to Paris.
On the 3rd of February, 1653, he therein made a truly triumphal entry.
The young King, accompanied by his brother the Duke d'Anjou, went out
for more than a league to meet him, received him with the greatest
apparent affection, took him into his carriage, and two hours afterwards
they entered by the Porte Saint-Denis, in great pomp, amidst the joyous
shouts of that same populace which, two years previously, had pursued
him with imprecations. The Cardinal was thus enthusiastically conducted
to the Louvre, where Anne of Austria awaited him.
He there beheld once more that courageous Queen, whom history, misled by
the impostors of the Fronde, has too much misconceived, that stanch
friend, an example among all queens, and almost among all women, of a
constancy equal to either fortune; who, in the early days of 1643, had
discerned the great abilities of Mazarin, and seen in him the only man
capable of properly conducting the affairs of France; who, after having
owed to him five long years of glory, had in 1648 and 1649 defended him
against the aristocracy, the parliament, and the people united; who
later had only consented to his retirement because he himself had judged
it necessary; who during his absence had alike resisted every species of
seduction, every kind of menace, and had never ceased to be governed by
his counsels; who, at Gien, learning the rout of her troops at Bleneau
whilst at her toilet, went on with it calmly, when everyone else spoke
of flight, rivalling Mazarin himself in courage and coolness. On finding
themselves once more together under the roof of royalty after so many
long and sorrowful separations, after seeing each other so often on the
very verge of ruin, they might well be proud of their mutual constancy,
which had deserved and brought about the halo of prosperity surrounding
that auspicious day, and together look forward for the rest of their
lives with the solid hope of sharing a glorious repose.
Around the Queen, the Cardinal was welcomed by a brilliant array of
great nobles and fair ladies, formerly the bitter enemies Of Richelieu's
successor, but who were there assembled to compliment him upon his happy
return.
Amongst those ladies foremost in their congratulations was the Princess
Palatine, with whom we have already made some acquaintance--Anne de
Gonzagua, one of the most eminent personages of the seventeenth century.
Of an admirable beauty, which served in some sort as a setting to an
intellect the most solid, she was as capable of taking part in the
deliberations of statesmen as in the assemblies of wits or in gallant
intrigues, seeking, it is true, her advantages, but not by the betrayal
of any one; who, without treason to royalty, had given advice the most
judicious to the Fronde, and would have saved it, if the Fronde could
have been saved. As she had never ceased to keep up the best
understanding with Mazarin, she could very well associate herself with
his triumph.
She was there also, that other famous female politician, of a grade
still higher, as beautiful and as gallant, of a less gracious, perhaps,
but yet stronger disposition, more capable still of grand enterprises,
and never suffering herself to be stayed by any danger or any
scruple--the widow of the Constable de Luynes, Marie de Rohan, Duchess
de Chevreuse, who formerly had lent a hand to every plot concocted
against Mazarin, and in concert with the Palatine had proposed, as we
have seen, the sole measure which could bring together all the
Cardinal's enemies, and form a great aristocratical party strong enough
to make head against royalty:--the marriage of Condé's son with a
daughter of the Duke d'Orleans, and that of her own daughter with the
Prince de Conti. This latter match having been broken off in a manner
the most outrageous to her feelings, Madame de Chevreuse had separated
from Condé with éclat; and, too experienced to ally herself with the
sort of _tiers-parti_ which Retz had proposed, but allowing herself to
be gently and skilfully guided by the Marquis de Laignes, whom Mazarin
with his usual adroitness had known how to win over, she had returned to
the side of her early friend, Anne of Austria, and became resigned to
the power of a man who at any rate knew his own mind, and whose robust
ambition never wavered at the breath of vanity or the gust of momentary
passion. The fame and honour that she might expect from the Fronde had
been offered to her by Mazarin, and in return Madame de Chevreuse had
brought to royalty the declared support of the three illustrious
families, the Rohans, De Luynes, and the Lorraines. It was she who, ever
puissant over the Duke de Lorraine, had negotiated a secret treaty
between him and the Cardinal, and who by turns had made him act in such
contrary directions. Restored entirely to the Queen's favour, Madame de
Chevreuse was at her side in the Louvre, to welcome warmly the return of
the prosperous Cardinal.
After Madame de Chevreuse, Mazarin had had no adversaries more dangerous
than the Vendômes and Bouillons. And yet on that memorable day of
February 3rd, 1653, he could consider the heads of those two powerful
families as the firmest supporters of his greatness.
Cæsar, Duke de Vendôme, natural son of Henry the Fourth, was much more
formidable by his intelligence, his valour, and his craft than by his
birth. There was nothing--even to the virtues of his wife, a reputed
saint,--which was not put to the profit of his ambition. His daughter,
the beautiful Mademoiselle de Vendôme, had married that brilliant Duke
de Nemours, who had come to such a miserable end. His eldest son, the
Duke de Mercoeur, was a sagacious and estimable prince, and the Duke de
Beaufort, his youngest, was the idol of the populace of Paris. It was
Beaufort who, in 1643, urged by the two duchesses De Montbazon and De
Chevreuse, had formed the design of assassinating Mazarin. The Duke de
Vendôme had been suspected of being implicated in that affair; he had at
least given shelter in his château at Anet to all the accomplices of his
son; and, forced to quit France to avoid the arrest with which he was
threatened, he had wandered for several years through Italy and England,
everywhere stirring up enemies against the Cardinal. The latter saw
clearly that it was better to acquire a son of Henry the Fourth at a
given price, than to prosecute him without the slightest advantage.
After all, what did the Duke desire, and what were his demands when
Mazarin became prime minister? Either that the government of Brittany,
which his father, Henry the Fourth, had destined for him, and that his
father-in-law, Philibert Emmanuel of Lorraine, held; or that the
Admiralty, one of the highest posts in the state, should be given him.
Mazarin had repulsed these pretensions in 1643, but looked upon them
favourably in 1652; he therefore made the Duke High-Admiral, even
conferred upon him the title of State Minister, with a seat at the
council-board, after being assured that Vendôme, having secured that
which he had always sought to attain, would serve him as firmly as he
had formerly opposed him. He had an infallible pledge for his fidelity.
The Duke's eldest son, the loyal and pious Duke de Mercoeur, had
married one of the Cardinal's nieces, the amiable and virtuous Laura
Mancini, so that the house of Vendôme was interested in and inseparably
united to Mazarin's fortunes. Therefore, on the 3rd of February, 1653,
the High-Admiral Cæsar de Vendôme, engaged in pursuing the Spanish fleet
in the sea of Gascony, entered the Gironde, and threatened the relics of
the Fronde at Bordeaux. On his part, the Duke de Mercoeur, named
governor of Provence, watched over that important province for the King
and Mazarin, whilst the Duke de Beaufort, who earlier had been desirous
of laying violent hands on the Cardinal, and who yet quite recently had
shown himself as his implacable enemy, covered and protected by the
services of his father and brother, retired to Anet, without being the
least in the world disquieted; satisfied with beholding Madame de
Montbazon satisfied because plenty of money had been given her, and
awaited quietly the moment at which he should succeed his father in the
command of the fleet, and shed his blood in the service of his King.
The Bouillons were of little less importance than the Vendômes. The
Duke was a politician and a soldier of the first class, capable of
conducting a government or leading an army, and who had only one
sentiment or thought in heart and head--the aggrandisement of his house.
Already sovereign prince of Sedan, urged by his wife, still more
ambitious than himself, he had in 1641, in the hope of securing fresh
territorial acquisitions, treated with Spain, taken part in the revolt
of the Count de Soissons, and won the battle of La Marfée against the
royal army. In 1642, he had entered into the conspiracy of the Duke
d'Orleans and Cinq Mars, and, arrested, thrown into chains at
Pierre-Encise, he had only saved his head from the scaffold by
abandoning his principality. Ever since, he had not ceased to agitate
for the recovery of that which by treason he had lost. He had again
demanded Sedan from Mazarin in 1643, and not being able to obtain it at
the hands of that great servant of the Crown, that, in order to satisfy
a private interest, France should renounce one of its best strongholds
on the frontier of the Netherlands, he had ranked himself among the
Cardinal's enemies, and forced at first to flee, like the Duke de
Vendôme, had scarcely returned to France ere he embraced with ardour the
Fronde, though without the slightest conviction, be it understood, and
in the sole hope of easily obtaining from it what he could not snatch
from royalty. He had enlisted with him in the Fronde his brother
Turenne, of whom he disposed absolutely, and who was equally ambitious,
and equally covetous of the grandeur of their family, but after his own
fashion, and the mould of his frigid, reflective, and profoundly
dissembling character. At the peace of Ruel, in 1649, the Duke de
Bouillon had demanded "his re-establishment in Sedan, or if the Queen
preferred to reimburse him for it at an estimated price, with the
possessions promised and due to his house; for himself, the government
of Auvergne; for his brother that of Haute and Basse Alsace, with that
of Philipsbourg and the command of all the armies of Germany." Mazarin
had then committed the error of not satisfying this ambitious and
powerful house; hence, in 1650, the conduct of the Duke in Guienne and
that of Turenne at Stenay and in Flanders. In 1651, the Queen treated
seriously with the Duke, and on his return Mazarin succeeded in entirely
gaining him over. Not desiring at any price to restore Sedan to him, he
granted the equivalent demanded--a great domain at Château-Thierry, much
richer than that of Sedan, and, without effective sovereignty, that
title of _Prince_, so dear to the vanity of the Bouillons, which the
head of the family could not only transmit to his children, but which
could descend also to his brother Turenne. The Duke de Bouillon having
once taken the part of abandoning Condé, in spite of all his
engagements, and of serving royalty, did it with the same energy which
he had displayed at Paris and Bordeaux. He never afterwards forsook
Mazarin, but assisted him with his advice, and suffered even more than
once in person, by acting with his customary vigour, and the obstinate
ardour of his country and race. It was he who, on the night of the
battle of Bleneau, brought reinforcements to Turenne, and enabled him to
stop Condé. It was he, again, who, on the 2nd of July, 1652, to let
Mazarin see that he had gained him for good and all, joined with the
Cardinal in pressing Turenne, against all the rules of war, not to wait
the coming up of the troops of La Ferte-Senneterre. A truthful witness,
and one of the principal actors in that sanguinary drama, Navailles,
even affirms that the Duke de Bouillon took part in the affair, and
that he was at the attack in which Saint-Megrin perished. If Bouillon
had lived, with his immeasurable ambition and his capacity equalling his
ambition, would he have been contented with the second rank, and would
he always have remained the devoted servant of the Cardinal?
None can say: for the Duke de Bouillon was cut short in his ambitious
career; he died on the 9th of August, 1652, without having enjoyed those
possessions and those honours which he had so greatly coveted; but ere
closing his eyes he saw them pass to his children. Turenne, carefully
conciliated and caressed, was made, on his brother's death, governor of
Auvergne, and the viscounty of Turenne erected into a principalty. Very
shortly afterwards he also received the post of minister of state.
Mazarin went even still further: desirous of heaping up benefits upon
the illustrious soldier whose honesty and ambition he had so long known,
desirous at the same time to attach in his person all the Protestant
party by decisive acts, which would show in a conspicuous manner that
whosoever should serve him well would be faithfully recompensed, without
distinction of religion, the skilful and politic Cardinal made the Duke
de la Force, a Protestant and the father-in-law of Turenne, Marshal of
France, as his father had been. Thus, on the 3rd of February, 1653,
Turenne was likewise at the Louvre at Mazarin's side, as the
representative of all his family, and already occupied with preparation
for the campaign that was about to open in the spring in the
Netherlands, and where he was to take command of the French army.
But if Mazarin had taken care to win over successively those chiefs of
the Importants and the Frondeurs in whom his experienced eye had
recognised as sincerely disposed to a loyal submission, he had this time
taken care not to allow himself to be betrayed by false appearances,
and did not fail to strike at, or at least banish from Paris, those whom
he despaired of acquiring. He had lent himself with good grace to the
reconciliation sought by the Duke d'Orleans; as it was not his wish to
give to France and Europe the appearance of ill-treating the King's
uncle, and constrain him perhaps once more to go in search of a foreign
asylum; but by conciliating him in the most suitable way, he had taken
surety of him, and being convinced that too much lenity would only
embolden him to mix himself up in fresh intrigues, he did not permit him
to remain in Paris, when the King returned thither, for fear lest in his
palace of the Luxembourg, surrounded by perfidious advisers, whilst
lavishing great marks of deference upon the Queen and the young King, he
might cherish and rekindle on occasion the hopes of the Fronde.
Therefore, it was arranged that the Duke d'Orleans should quit Paris on
the day previous to that of the King's entry, and consequently he
retired at first to Limours, then to Blois, the ordinary refuge of his
treason and faint-heartedness, where, in nowise persecuted, but watched
and kept within bounds, he passed amidst general indifference the
remainder of his contemptible career. Mademoiselle remained also for
some time in disgrace at St. Fargeau, and consoled herself by degrees
for the ruin of her divers pretensions with her large fortune and small
court. The Cardinal de Retz putting a good face upon a losing game, and
especially desirous of receiving from the King's own hand the cardinal's
hat granted him by the Pope, in order to claim the right of wearing the
dress and of enjoying the honours and privileges attached to that high
dignity, had been among the first to meet the King at Compiègne at the
head of the clergy of Paris, and had addressed him in a bold and artful
speech, in the style of that of Cæsar in the affair of Cataline,
skilfully covering the defeat of his party, recommending the policy of
moderation, referring more than once to the conduct of Henry the Great
towards the Leaguers, and through fear lest it should not be
sufficiently understood that he was speaking about himself, citing the
pacific words of Henry to his great uncle, the Cardinal de Gondi. In
that oration he had also insinuated some high compliments to the Queen,
as though he had resumed his former hopes. The next day, at mass, the
King placed the red hat upon his head, and henceforward De Retz assumed
and wore the dress of cardinal. After the King's return, he had carried
his audacity so far as to present himself at the Louvre to pay, as a
faithful subject, his homage to their Majesties. On the 1st of December,
he preached with great effect at Notre Dame, and recommenced his old
course of life of 1648, making pious sermons in the intervals of his
gallant rendezvous, devoting the morning to preaching at church, the
evening to _bonnes fortunes_, and reknitting in the dark the meshes of
his old intrigues. But Mazarin knew him thoroughly: he was persuaded
that De Retz was incapable of confining himself to his ecclesiastical
functions, incompatible as they were with his dissipated and licentious
habits, with his restless and factious disposition, and so under his
minister's advice on some slight suspicion arising, the King had him
arrested even in the very Louvre, on the 19th of December, 1652, and
conducted to the donjon of Vincennes.
Mazarin was too cautious to treat La Rochefoucauld after the same
fashion. He knew marvellously well that, separated from Condé and Madame
de Longueville, who constituted all his importance, La Rochefoucauld was
no longer to be dreaded, and that he was not of a humour to make
himself the champion and martyr of a vanquished party. The serious wound
which he had received in the combat of Saint Antoine turned him, so to
speak, to advantage. Struck by a ball which had traversed both cheeks
and temporarily deprived him of sight, it was impossible for him to
continue in active service and to follow the army. He did not therefore
play false to Condé in not accepting the command of such troops as
remained to the Fronde--a command which, on his retirement, was offered
to the Prince de Tarent. It was absolutely essential that he should be
speedily cured of his wound; and that real motive covering his weariness
and long-felt disgust, he did not, like Persan, Bouteville, and Vauban,
join the Prince in Flanders. On the other hand, he had not objected to
the amnesty, and therefore could not be included in the royal
declaration issued on the 13th of November against Condé, Conti, Madame
de Longueville, and their chief adherents. But Mazarin took good care
not to pursue him, and La Rochefoucauld, after allowing the first
outburst of the storm to pass over, retired to his estates to bury
himself in obscurity for a few years, and to taste that repose of which
he had so great need. Then he quitted his retreat and reappeared at
Paris. It must have been necessary for him to go very far in
conciliation to be received again into favour. He succeeded in it,
however, by saving appearances, to use a modern phrase, and in skilfully
managing the transition. He made his peace with the politic and gracious
Cardinal, rode in his carriage, saying with as much reason as wit,
"Everything happens in France!" He managed to get his son into intimacy
with the young King, and, wonderful to relate, he obtained from Mazarin,
in indemnification for the losses he had experienced in carrying on war
against him, a thumping pension of eight thousand livres.
If space permitted us thus to run over successively the list of all the
great nobles who had previously had a hand in the Fronde, it would be
easy to show that on the 3rd of February, 1653, the most ardent and the
most illustrious of those we have cited, and many others, such as the
Duke d'Elbeuf and Marshal Houdancourt, both generals of the Fronde at
Paris in 1648 and 1649, the Duke de Guise, so strongly bound to Condé,
almost all, in short, were ranged round Mazarin, and fought with him and
for him, and that for one sole but very sufficient reason--which was
that the clever Cardinal knew how to make them understand wherein lay
their true interests.
Self-interest, self-interest, such was, with very few exceptions, the
unique mainspring of the aristocracy in the Fronde, and La Rochefoucauld
has only erected into a maxim and even generalised into excess the
principle which he had seen practised everywhere around him.
It may thus be judged whether, as some writers have asserted without the
slightest knowledge of the facts, the Fronde was a great and generous
cause which failed of obtaining success. On the contrary, it was simply
a powerful coalition of individual interests, and if considered under
the aspect of an abortive anticipation of the French revolution, and
some general design sought for therein in one way or another, it would
be rather that of stifling in its cradle the principles of that
revolution.
Is it true that the Fronde, as has been asserted, was a counterpart, a
sort of miserable imitation, of the revolution which was then convulsing
England? Not the least in the world. That other error, still stranger
than the preceding, rests upon a false and deceitful analogy--that
common shoal of historical considerations and comparisons. At bottom,
the earlier part of the English revolution was almost entirely of a
religious character, whilst in the Fronde the religious element did not
intervene at all, thanks to the enlightened protection enjoyed by the
Protestants. It seemed, indeed, like a demoniacal caricature of our
British troubles at that moment. No sternness, no reality; love-letters
and witty verses supplying the place of the Biblical language and awful
earnestness of the words and deeds of the Covenanters and Independents;
the gentlemen of France utterly debased and frivolised; religion
ridiculed; nothing left of the old landmarks; and no Cromwell possible.
All sense of honour disappears when conduct is regulated by the shifting
motives of party politics. The dissensions of the Fronde accordingly
produced no champion to whom either side could look with unmingled
respect. The great Condé and the famous Turenne showed military talent
of the highest order, but a want of principle and a flighty frivolity of
character counterbalanced all their virtues. The scenes of those five or
six years are like a series of dissolving views, or the changing
combinations of a kaleidoscope; Condé and Turenne always on opposite
sides--for each changed his party as often as the other; battles
prepared for by masquerades and theatricals, and celebrated on both
sides with epigrams and songs; the wildest excesses of debauchery and
vice practised by both sexes and all ranks in the State; archbishops
fighting like gladiators, and intriguing like the vulgarest
conspirators; princes imprisoned with a jest, and executions attended
with cheers and laughter; the highest in the land caballing, cheating,
and lying, but keeping a firm grasp of power:--no country was ever so
split into faction, or so denuded of great men.
But, while all these elements of confusion were heaving and tumbling in
what seemed an inextricable chaos, the monarchical principle, strange to
say, still burned brightly in the hearts of all the French. Even in
their fights and quarrelings there was a deep reverence entertained for
the ideal of the throne. The King's name was a tower of strength; and
when the nation, in the course of the miserable years from 1610 to 1661,
saw the extinction of nobility, religion, law, and almost of civilised
society, it caught the first sound that told it it still had a King, as
an echo from the past assuring it of its future. It forgot Louis the
Thirteenth, the Regency, and the Fronde, and only remembered that its
monarch was the grandson of Henry the Fourth, when it witnessed in his
reign the culmination of the French monarchy, and the splendid
intellectual development with which it was simultaneous.
And that brilliant day of Mazarin's triumph was shadowed by no eclipse.
It was not one of those lucky freaks of fate often followed by long
disgrace: no, that Minister's triumph rested on solid foundations. Not
only he saw at his feet, in the Louvre, all his former enemies
vanquished, but not one of them able to rise again in enmity, for all
their strength was exhausted. The wearied citizens wanted repose, and
placed all their hopes in royalty. The parliaments, ashamed of having
allowed their ancient loyalty to be surprised by the deceitful caresses
of the discontented nobles, returned voluntarily within the prudent
limits of their institution, satisfied with having seen the government
recognise all their legitimate complaints, and bind itself to respect
their just and necessary independence. The aristocracy thought itself
still more fortunate at having thus been extricated from this last
defeat. It left, it is true, upon the field of battle some few of its
feudal pretensions, but in exchange, titles, honours, and wealth were
lavished upon it, and its vanity could at any rate console its ambition.
The good fortune of Mazarin opened the eyes of everyone to his merit. No
one could refrain from applauding his firmness and his capacity. Had he
proved unsuccessful, he would only have been looked upon as a second
Concini; victorious, he was another Richelieu to whom it was necessary
to succumb, but who might be served without loss of honour, because,
after having shown that he was as firm in his principle of government as
his imperious predecessor, he did not play the tyrant; and, far from
making the weight of his power felt, he forced himself rather to
disguise it under flattering words, did not show the least resentment
for former injuries, extended a hand to everyone who came to him,
listened to every complaint that had anything legitimate in it,
entertained every pretension that was at all reasonable, and seemed
disposed to base his government upon skilful concessions and not upon
useless rigour. His star was believed in, his moderation inspired
confidence, and people grew eager to participate in his triumph. Already
at Vendôme, a grandson of Henry the Great had espoused one of his
nieces; the proudest among the French nobility were soon about to
contend for the hands of the others; and the man whom the Fronde had so
persecuted was about to place his family upon the steps of the throne.
The solemn reception which the King and Queen gave Mazarin at the Louvre
on the 3rd February, 1653, was not therefore an idle pageant or empty
ceremony. That same day, Mazarin could understand that a new era had
arisen for him, more brilliant and more secure than that of 1643, after
the defeat of the _Importants_, and that that sterile and sanguinary
halt upon the road of reform and the civilising march of monarchy known
in history under the name of the Fronde was at last and for ever
terminated.
BOOK VI.
CLOSING SCENES.
CHAPTER I.
THE DUCHESS DE LONGUEVILLE.
HAVING rapidly summarised the fate and fortunes of the leading male
actors who figured in the Fronde, we will now glance briefly at the
closing scenes in the careers of the fair politicians whom we have seen
playing such brilliant and prominent parts in that curious tragi-comedy.
To high-born French women--princesses and duchesses--the revolt of the
Fronde especially belonged. They were at once its main-springs, its
chief instruments, its most interested agents; and among them Madame de
Longueville, who enacted the most conspicuous part, was by its events
the most ill-treated of all.
We have seen her the heroine--or, perhaps the adventuress--of the civil
war, rushing into dangers and mixing herself up in intrigues of every
kind, in order to serve the interests of another. She was not a
consummate politician like the Palatine, for she had no real business
tact. Her true character and the unity of her life should be sought
where they were really shown--in her devotion to him whom she loved. It
is there--in that devotion wholly and always the same, at once
consistent, yet absurd, and very touching even in its downright follies.
All her eccentric movements were attributable to the restless and fickle
spirit of La Rochefoucauld. Solely occupied with his own interests, it
was he who drew her into the vortex of party politics and civil war,
with a view to his own self-aggrandisement. It was for love of him that
she sacrificed domestic peace, repose, and reputation.
At Bordeaux Madame de Longueville had at first enjoyed the same
popularity as that which she had acquired in Paris at the commencement
of the first Fronde. Upon that section of the second Fronde which had
its head-quarters in the South, the Duchess, after its chief, the Prince
de Conti, was the most likely person to exercise a decisive influence
alike by the clearness of her intellect, the firmness of her character,
and the great confidence with which she had inspired the entire party.
In 1650 she had covered herself with glory at Stenay, and the eyes of
not only France, but the whole of Europe, were fixed upon her. She was
unable to play the same part at Bordeaux. Invested at Stenay with
supreme authority, she had been compelled, as it were, to display all
the intelligence and energy she possessed: at Bordeaux she was only an
adviser indifferently well listened to. And moreover, in 1650, her frame
of mind was widely different. With a sincere attachment to the interests
of her party and her house, another and more intimate sentiment animated
and sustained her: she loved and was beloved. A reciprocal devotedness
justified in some measure that passion which had already passed through
three long and trying years, and found its aliment and its strength in
common sacrifices. In fact, if Madame de Longueville had braved in
Normandy all kinds of danger and even death to cross the sea in order to
reach the Netherlands and unfurl at Stenay the banner of the Princes, La
Rochefoucauld, too, it must be remembered, had been continually in arms.
That interval was the golden era of their lives. They suffered and
combated for each other. They had the same cause, the same faith, the
same hopes. Their hearts were never more united than during that cruel
year when, separated by civil war, they could scarcely, from the
furthest extremities of France, address each other, amid risks
innumerable, in a few apparently insignificant lines, but through which,
nevertheless, there breathed a tenderness and confidence proof against
everything. Now all was changed. As we have said, La Rochefoucauld had
grown wearied of the Fronde, into which he had hopefully flung himself
in 1648. In 1651 he became desirous of reconciling himself with the
Court, and making a pact which would have infallibly separated them,
since M. de Longueville, irritated with all that had at length reached
his ears, had summoned his wife in a menacing tone to join him in
Normandy. It was she who then, in her turn, was compelled to draw over
La Rochefoucauld. He continued to follow in her footsteps through the
sentiment of devotedness that still lingered in his heart, but without
conviction, and with a lukewarmness which deeply wounded Condé's
high-souled sister. She felt that she was no longer loved commensurately
with the heroic and tender ideal of which she had dreamed, and that a
struggle with fortune, too long continued, had cast down his inconstant
and wavering spirit. Hence also arose that momentary error which we have
neither disguised nor excused. Love enfeebled and discouraged had
delivered her up once more to her natural coquetry, and coquetry
stimulated by politics had made her brave the semblance of an infidelity
towards La Rochefoucauld and herself. Without being hurried away in the
slightest degree by the senses or the heart, in her endeavour to carry
off the Duke de Nemours from Madame de Châtillon and the peace party,
and engage him more deeply in that of the war and Condé, she had
slightly compromised herself; and La Rochefoucauld, influenced by an
implacable resentment, instead of breaking with her openly, had, at
Paris, entered into a shameful league with Madame de Châtillon and his
pretended rival, the Duke de Nemours, in order that they might rob the
poor Duchess of her last consolation, the esteem and affection of Condé.
Left in Guienne, without any great or engrossing occupation, with a
vacant mind, discontented both with others and herself, Madame de
Longueville was no longer the brilliant Bellona of Stenay, but her pride
and dignity, which she could not lose, never failed to sustain her. She
therefore resolved to remain even unto the end faithful to that brother
whose heart was sought to be steeled against her by the whispers of
calumny: to remain in Bordeaux as long as possible, without recoiling
from any means which necessity might prescribe. Not for a single day,
not for an hour, did she dream of separating her fate from that of
Condé, and of bending the knee before his victorious enemies.
At length, however, it was her inevitable fate to yield to the star of
Mazarin and Louis XIV., who having obtained the mastery over the South
as elsewhere, she was compelled to quit the factious city, and repair,
by command of the Court, to Montreuil-Bellay, a domain belonging to her
husband in Anjou. Shortly afterwards she obtained permission to go to
Moulins, where her aunt, the inconsolable widow De Montmorency, was
superior of the convent (_Filles de Sainte-Marie_). From that visit to
Moulins may be dated the conversion of the beautiful and adventurous
princess. On emerging from such a chaos of turmoil and commotion, in
that calm and holy retreat, her thoughts reverted to the pure and
innocent period of her youth, to the brilliant and tumultuous past, to
the sorrowful and disenchanted present. Embroiled with the Court and
her brothers, abandoned by La Rochefoucauld, in the decline of her
beauty, upon the eve of maturity, she saw in Heaven alone a refuge
against others and herself. But the Divine grace had to be awaited as
well as prayed for, the prickings of conscience were succeeded by
relapses--the ties to be broken were still so strong! At length, one day
when engaged in reading, "a veil, as it were, was drawn from before the
eyes of my mind," she wrote, in that somewhat hyperbolical style of
which she was fond; "all the charms of truth, concentrated upon one sole
object, presented themselves before me. Faith, which had remained dead
and buried beneath my passions, became renewed. I felt like a person
who, after a long sleep in which he has dreamed of being great, happy,
esteemed, and honoured by everybody, awakens all on a sudden to find
himself loaded with chains, pierced with wounds, weighed down with
heaviness, and pent up in some dark prison." To that conviction she
remained faithful until death, and expiated her six years of deviation
by a penitence which lasted for five-and-twenty, and continued ever on
the increase.
The first act of the Duchess, after her conversion, was to implore
pardon of her husband. M. de Longueville behaved generously, and went to
meet her at Moulins, and took her back with him to Rouen with every mark
of delicacy and distinction. Reverting to the aspirations of her youth,
Madame de Longueville placed herself in active communication with the
good Carmelites, whom she had never entirely forgotten. She was
constantly writing to Mademoiselle du Vigean, the _sous-prieure_, for
guidance in her new way of life; for she had need of spiritual advice,
and cried out for help, and help came through the good offices of the
Marquise de Sablé, who had herself withdrawn from the world to
Port-Royal, and supplied the want felt by her illustrious friend by
placing her in the hands of one of the great spiritual guides of that
day, M. Singlin. Between the ghostly adviser and the fair penitent there
ensued frequent conversations curiously flavoured with a spice of
romance. Persecution had already attacked Port-Royal, and M. Singlin, in
order not to be recognised, went to the Hôtel de Longueville disguised
as a doctor, his features being concealed by an ample wig. M. Singlin
strove to fix limits to the ardour by which Madame de Longueville was
carried away, he counselled her to remain in the outer world, to which
her husband and children bound her, and in which her salvation, he said,
might be as surely accomplished by exacting more vigilance than it would
be found necessary to exercise in the retirement of the cloister.
Madame de Longueville's piety had been generally subordinated to the
vicissitudes of a very agitated existence. Her primitive tendency to
devotion was rekindled on every occasion that she experienced a trouble,
a disenchantment, or any failure of courage. In 1651, when she had been
somewhat compromised by the homage of the Duke de Nemours, she had
retired to the Carmelite convent at Bourges; then towards the end of her
sojourn in Guienne she had sought refuge among the Benedictines at
Bordeaux. But all these gleams of repentance vanished so soon as some
caprice of fortune came to reawaken, by the hope of fresh success, her
natural inclination for political intrigue and pleasure. On accompanying
her husband to Normandy she appeared wholly resolved not to allow
herself to be engrossed by anything save her eternal welfare. However,
it appears that her desire to abstain henceforward from all political
intrigue was looked upon incredulously for several years; since, in
1659, at the time of the Treaty of the Pyrenees being signed, Mazarin,
replying to Don Louis de Haro, who required that the French Minister
should restore Condé "to all his birthrights," still placed, as we have
noticed, Madame de Longueville among the feminine trio, who, said he,
"would be capable of governing or of overturning three great kingdoms."
Yet Mazarin yielded, and Condé returned to France.
The long and rigid penitence which she imposed upon herself, and which
Madame de Motteville characterised by the expressive term--"very
august," restored to her somewhat of that importance which she was
desirous of renouncing through humility. But the world is ever
distrustful on the score of a repentance which has some tinge of
ostentation about it. One historian remarks that "the Duchess de
Longueville being unable to dispense with intrigues, after she had
renounced those of love and politics, found sufficient to satisfy her in
devotion." This sentence, read aright, would mean that the schisms of
Catholicism gave her an opportunity of playing a considerable part in
taking under her protection the persecuted party of the Jansenists.
Madame de Longueville, on whom was bestowed the designation of "Mother
of the Church," and who in that quality recovered some reputation at the
Court of France, and acquired a very great one at the Court of Rome,
rendered an eminent service to the Jansenists by obtaining for them from
the Pope, in 1668, that theological transaction which was called "The
Peace of Clement the Ninth." It would, however, be unjust to tax her
with hypocrisy. All that was extreme in the pious practices to which she
devoted herself must be attributed to her exalted nature, which mingled
passion with every sentiment of her soul.
When the Duke de Longueville died in 1663, the Duchess availed herself
of the state of independence in which her widowhood placed her to give
herself up wholly to exercises of piety and penitence, and the education
and care of her children. The latter occupation caused her much
grief--the Count de Dunois, by his bad conduct and imbecility, and the
Count de Saint Paul himself, the son so dearly beloved, by his
precocious debaucheries and fiery impatience of character. Then, as by
degrees they had less need of her care, she devoted herself deeper and
deeper to expiation, lavishing her fortune to repair in the provinces
ruined by civil war the evils she had helped to inflict, weeping and
humbling herself in her efforts to subdue that pride which was the
characteristic of her race, receiving outrages and insults
uncomplainingly, accepting them as the just chastisement of her sins,
and forgiving those who dealt her the most cruel wounds. And so, in
austerities and self-mortification she ended her days, sharing them
between the Carmelites, in whose convent she had an apartment, and
Port-Royal des Champs, where she had built a wing--having a preference
for Port-Royal. She was always naturally disposed to favour the
rebellious, and these rebels, it must be remembered, were the persecuted
for conscience' sake. Madame de Longueville's protection was extended to
the principal Jansenists, whom she sheltered in her chateau, and her
influence at length brought about that peace in the Church, which, so
long as she lived, gave calm and security to the sacred community.
Notwithstanding her predilection for Port-Royal, she continued to
inhabit her hôtel, which she did not quit until after the death of the
Count de Saint-Paul (1672), killed so unfortunately by the side of the
Great Condé at the passage of the Rhine.
That blow was the last of Madame de Longueville's earthly troubles--it
overwhelmed her. Madame de Sevigné has depicted in a few touching
sentences the scene which was witnessed when the fatal tidings reached
the wretched mother: "Mademoiselle des Vertus returned two days since to
Port-Royal, where she is constantly staying. They sent M. Arnauld to
fetch her, that she might break the terrible news. Mademoiselle des
Vertus had only to show herself; her hurried return was the certain
signal that something sad had happened. In fact, as soon as she
appeared, she was greeted with: 'Ah! mademoiselle, how is my brother?'
Her thoughts dare not venture further question. 'Madame, his wound is
going on favourably.' 'There has been a battle! and my son?' No answer.
'Ah! mademoiselle, my son, my dear boy, answer me, is he dead?' 'Madame,
I cannot find words to reply to you.' 'Ah! my dear son! did he die upon
the spot? Was not one single moment given him? Ah! _Mon Dieu!_ what a
sacrifice!' And thereupon she sank down in bed, and of all that the most
poignant anguish could exhibit in convulsions and swooning, and in dead
silence and stifled groans, by bitter tears and appeals to Heaven, and
by tender and pitiful plaints, she went through them all. She sees
certain persons, she takes broths, because it is the will of God; but
she gets no rest; and her health, already very bad, is visibly shaken.
For myself, I wish she may die, not believing that she can survive such
a loss." Some few days afterwards Madame de Sevigné writes: "There
exists in the world one man not less touched by this blow: it has
occurred to me that if they had both met each other in the first burst
of grief and no one else had been present, all other feelings would
have given place to tears and moans re-echoed from the depths of both
their hearts."
With this young Duke de Longueville disappeared the last witness to
bygone errors. The last link was broken, and, from that day, Madame de
Longueville belonged no more to this world. She died on the 15th April,
1679, at the Carmelites, where her remains were interred; her heart
being taken to Port-Royal. A year afterwards, in the same convent of
Carmelites, the Bishop of Autun, Roquette, whom Molière had in view when
drawing the character of Tartuffe, pronounced her funeral oration.
Madame de Sevigné, who was present at the ceremony, says of the orator:
"It was not a _Tartuffe_, it was not a _Pantaloon_: it was a prelate of
distinction, preaching with dignity, and going over the entire life of
that Princess with an incredible address; passing by all the delicate
passages, mentioning, or leaving unmentioned, all the points that he
ought to speak or be silent upon. His text was "Fallax pulchritudo,
mulier timens Deum laudabitur." Assuredly many delicate points must have
presented themselves in the life of a princess who had been a politician
and a Frondeuse, a gallant woman, and a Jansenist. Yet Father Talon, a
Jesuit, who was present at her death, was fond of repeating on fitting
occasions: "Jansenist as much as you will, she died the death of a
saint."
There were three well-defined periods in the agitated life of the
Duchess de Longueville--and happily the end was conformable to the
beginning, to neutralise, as it were, the censurable middle part. But
admitting such condonation, does not that same _mezza camin_ constitute
the seduction which that brilliant period exercises over almost every
writer who seeks to portray it, over those even who indulge in ecstacies
on the score of her penitence? So the prestige of beauty and the charms
of mind traverse centuries to win unceasingly posthumous admiration!
These are the qualities which give a more undying interest to the career
of Madame de Longueville even than the grandeur of her soul; for that is
an incontestable feature which all must recognise, whether partisans or
adversaries:--in spite of her errors and deviations, she certainly
possessed greatness of soul. If a terse judgment then were summed up of
her character, it might be said without flattery that, take her all in
all, she was not unworthy of being the sister of the great Condé.
With the opinions of such astute statesmen as Cardinal Mazarin and Don
Louis de Haro upon the mischievous tendencies of political women, it may
be well, in the instance of Madame de Longueville to couple the
sentiments of an acute and highly intellectual writer of our own day,
who showed herself a subtle analyst of character. Mrs. Jameson,
discoursing upon the characteristics of Shakespere's women (in the form
of a dialogue between Alda and Medon) calls them "affectionate, thinking
beings, and moral agents; and then witty, as if by accident, or as the
Duchess de Chaulnes said of herself 'Par la grace de Dieu.'
"Or," retorts _Medon_, the male interlocutor, "politicians to vary the
excitement! How I hate political women!
"_Alda._ Why do you hate them?
"_Medon._ Because they are mischievous.
"_Alda._ But why are they mischievous?
"_Medon._ Why?--why are they mischievous? Nay, ask them, or ask the
father of all mischief, who has not a more efficient instrument to
further his designs in this world than a woman run mad with politics.
The number of political, intriguing women of this time, whose boudoirs
and drawing-rooms are the _foyers_ of party spirit, is another trait of
resemblance between the state of society now and that which existed at
Paris before the Revolution."
In another place, however, the same judicious and usually discriminating
writer is betrayed into giving--more from conjecture, it would seem,
than close acquaintance with the facts of her life--an historically
false and singularly unjust estimate of Madame de Longueville's
character.
"_Alda._ Women are illustrious in history, not from what they have been
in themselves, but generally in proportion to the mischief they have
done or caused. * * * Of those which have been handed down to us by many
different authorities under different aspects, we cannot judge without
prejudice; in others there occur certain chasms which it is difficult to
supply; and hence inconsistencies we have no means of reconciling,
though doubtless they might be reconciled if we knew the whole, instead
of a part.
"_Medon._ But instance--instance!
"_Alda._ Do you remember that Duchess de Longueville, whose beautiful
picture we were looking at yesterday?--the heroine of the Fronde?--think
of that woman--bold, intriguing, profligate, vain, ambitious,
factious!--who made rebels with a smile; or if that were not enough, the
lady was not scrupulous,--apparently without principle as without shame,
nothing was _too_ much! And then think of the same woman protecting the
virtuous philosopher Arnauld,[3] when he was denounced and condemned,
and from motives which her worst enemies could not malign, secreting him
in her house, unknown even to her servants--preparing his food herself,
watching for his safety, and at length saving him. Her tenderness, her
patience, her discretion, her disinterested benevolence not only defied
danger (that were little to a woman of her temper), but endured a
lengthened trial, all the ennui caused by the necessity of keeping her
house, continued self-control, and the thousand small daily sacrifices
which, to a vain, dissipated, proud, impatient woman, must have been
hard to bear. Now, if Shakespere had drawn the character of the Duchess
de Longueville, he would have shown us the same individual woman in both
situations:--for the same being, with the same faculties and passions
and powers, it surely was: whereas in history, we see in one case a fury
of discord, a woman without modesty or pity; and in the other an angel
of benevolence, and a worshipper of goodness; and nothing to connect the
two extremes in our fancy.
[3] The Jansenist.
"_Medon._ But these are contradictions which we meet on every page of
history, which make us giddy with doubt or sick with belief; and are the
proper objects of inquiry for the moralist and the philosopher."
* * * * *
With a true eye for the refined and the beautiful, and that honestly
sympathetic nature without which it is impossible to discriminate
between what is noble and what is mediocre, still Mrs. Jameson, in the
above reflections upon the character of Madame de Longueville, was
obviously led to draw hasty and erroneous conclusions either from a
superficial glance at detached passages in the Duchess's extraordinary
career with regard to the dates of which she is widely in error, or
others during which her conduct and actions were but too easily
susceptible of misrepresention and distortion at the hands of partisan
writers. Such unjust judgment would most probably be formed by accepting
anecdotes, like those contained in Tallemant's scandalous chronicle or
Bussy Rabutin's "Letters," as historic truths; or by placing implicit
faith in every statement made by De Retz or La Rochefoucauld, given as
both were to exaggeration and over-colouring, and whose object,
moreover, was not so much to tell the truth as always to exalt
themselves, sometimes by its suppression, at others by downright
falsification.
Without attempting to extenuate the errors of Madame de Longueville,
moral or political, it has been the author's endeavour to reconcile the
apparent contradictions in her character, imputed in the passage above
cited, by assigning the different incidents, which have doubtless caused
an intelligent woman to falter in her judgment, to their proper place in
the order of time. For as, during the Olympian contests, swift-footed
Spartan boys, to typify the transmission of Truth, ran with a lighted
torch, and, as each fell breathless, another took up the flambeau and
bore it on, bright and rapid, to the goal, so should the light of
History be passed steadily and carefully from hand to hand, and its
sacred flame--the Truth--be kept ever burning clearly onward in the
course of time.
CHAPTER II.
THE DUCHESS DE CHEVREUSE.
SIDE by side with the two great statesmen, Richelieu and Mazarin, the
clever, daring, vivacious, charming Marie de Rohan occupied a more
elevated position, and certainly played a more extended part, than any
other of the political women who were her contemporaries during the
stirring times of the first half of the seventeenth century.
Seductive, with irresistible fascination of manner, singular grace and
animation; of pregnant wit, though quite uneducated; devoted to
gallantry, and too high-spirited to heed propriety; obeying no control
save that of honour; despising, for those she loved, danger, fortune,
and opinion; rather restless than ambitious; risking willingly her own
life as well as that of others; and after having passed the best part of
her existence in intrigue of every kind--thwarted more than one
plot--left more than one victim on her path--traversed nearly the whole
of Europe, by turns an exile and a conqueress who not unfrequently
dazzled even crowned heads; after having seen Chalais lay his head on
the block, Châteauneuf turned out of the ministry and imprisoned, the
Duke de Lorraine well-nigh despoiled of his territories, Buckingham
assassinated, the King of Spain embroiled in a war of ever-recurring
disasters, Anne of Austria humiliated and overcome, and Richelieu
triumphant; sustaining the struggle, nevertheless, even to its bitter
end; ever ready, in that desperate game of politics--become to her a
craving and a passion--to descend to the darkest cabals or adopt the
rashest resolves; with an incomparable faculty of discerning the actual
state of affairs or the predominant evil of the moment, and of strength
of mind and boldness of heart enough to grapple with and destroy it at
any cost; a devoted friend and an implacable enemy; and, finally, the
most formidable foe that Richelieu and Mazarin, in their turn,
encountered:--such was the celebrated Duchess de Chevreuse whom we have
seen alternately courted and dreaded by the two great political
master-spirits of her time, the founders of monarchical unity in France.
When the Fronde broke out, that ardent factionist rushed once more to
Brussels, and there brought over to her party the support of Spain,
together with her own long experience. She was then nearly fifty years
old. Age and sorrow, it is true, had dimmed the lustre of her beauty;
but she was still abounding in attraction, and her firm glance, her
decision, her quick and accurate perception, her dauntless courage and
genius, were yet entire. She had there also found a last friend in the
Marquis de Laigues, captain of the Duke d'Orleans' guards, a man of
sense and resolution, whom she loved to the end, and whom, after the
decease of the Duke de Chevreuse in 1657, she linked probably with her
own destiny by one of those "marriages of conscience"[4] then somewhat
fashionable. It was not our purpose to follow her step by step through
the last civil war, and so plunge the reader into the labyrinth of the
Fronde intrigues. Suffice it to say, therefore, that she played therein
one of the most prominent parts. Attached, heart and soul, to that
faction and its essential interests, she steered it through all the
shoals and quicksands which encircled it with incomparable skill and
vigour. After having so long enlisted the support of Spain, she knew the
proper moment to effect a timely separation from it. She always
preserved her great influence over the Duke de Lorraine, and it is not
difficult to recognize her hidden hand behind the different and often
contrary movements of Charles IV. She had a principal share in the three
great movements which mark and link together the entire history of the
Fronde between the war in Paris and the peace of Ruel. In 1650 she was
inclined to prefer Mazarin to Condé, and she ventured to advise laying
hands on the victor of Rocroy and Lens. In 1651--an interval of
incertitude for Mazarin, who very nearly ensnared himself in the meshes
of his own craftiness and a too-complicated line of conduct--a great
interest, the well-founded hope of marrying her daughter Charlotte to
the Prince de Conti, brought her back once more to the Condé party, and
hence the deliverance of the imprisoned Princes. In 1652, the
accumulated blunders of Condé brought her back again and for ever to
Anne of Austria and Mazarin. She did not endorse De Retz's foolish idea
of constructing a third party during the revolt, nor dream of a
government shared between Condé and Mazarin, with a worn-out parliament
and the fickle Duke d'Orléans. Her politic instinct told her that, after
an intestine struggle so long sustained, a solid and durable power was
the greatest necessity of France. Mazarin, who, like Richelieu, had
never opposed her but with regret, sought for, and was very glad to
follow her advice. She passed over, therefore, with flying colours to
the side of royalty, served it, and in return received its services.
After Mazarin, she predicted the talent in Colbert, before he was
appointed to office; she laboured at his elevation and the ruin of
Fouquet: and the proud but judicious Marie de Rohan gave her grandson,
the Duke de Chevreuse, the friend of Beauvilliers and Fenelon, to the
daughter of a talented burgess--the greatest financial administrator
France ever had. Thenceforward she readily obtained all she could desire
for herself and for her family; and thus having reached the summit of
renown and consideration, like her two illustrious sister-politicians,
Madame de Longueville and the Princess Palatine, she finished in
profound peace one of the most agitated careers of that stormiest of
epochs--the seventeenth century.
[4] See "Memoirs of Brienne the Younger," tom. ii. chap. xix., p.
178. "Le Marquis de Laigues qui certainement étoit mari de
conscience de la Duchesse."
It is said that the Duchess also, towards the close of her earthly
pilgrimage, felt the influence of divine grace, and turned heavenwards
her gaze, wearied with the changefulness of all sublunary things. She
had seen successively fall around her all whom she had either loved or
hated--Richelieu and Mazarin, Louis XIII. and Anne of Austria, the Queen
of England, Henrietta Maria, and her amiable daughter the Duchess
d'Orléans, Châteauneuf, and the Duke of Lorraine. Her fondly loved
daughter had expired in her arms, of fever, during the miserable war of
the Fronde. He who had been the first to lure her from the path of
duty--the handsome but frivolous Holland--had ascended the scaffold with
Charles I.; and her last friend, much younger than herself, the Marquis
de Laigues, had preceded her to the tomb.
Arrived at length but too clearly at the conviction that she had given
up her mind to chimeras and illusions, and seeking self-mortification
through the same sentiment which had brought about her ruin, the
once-haughty Duchess became the humblest of women. Renouncing all
worldly grandeur, she quitted her splendid mansion in the Faubourg St.
Germain, built by Le Muet, and retired into the country--not to
Dampierre, which would have only too vividly recalled to her remembrance
the brilliant days of her past existence--but to a modest dwelling at
Gagny, near Chelles. There she awaited her last hour, far from the
world's observation, and ere long expired in tranquillity at the age of
seventy-nine, the same year as Cardinal de Retz and Madame de
Longueville. She desired to have neither solemn obsequies nor funeral
oration, and forbade that any of those lofty titles which she had borne
through life and had learned to despise should accompany her to the
grave. It was her wish to be buried obscurely in the small and ancient
church of Gagny; and there, in the southern aisle, near the chapel of
the Virgin, some faithful but unknown hand has placed upon a slab of
black marble the following epitaph:--
"Here lies Marie de Rohan, Duchess de Chevreuse, daughter of
Hercule de Rohan, Duke de Montbazon. She espoused, first, Charles
d'Albert, Duke de Luynes, peer and constable of France, and
secondly, Claude de Lorraine, Duke de Chevreuse."
CHAPTER III.
THE PRINCESS PALATINE.
THE political importance of the Princess Palatine dates from 1650, when
the arrest of Condé, Conti, and the Duke de Longueville urged her, as we
have seen, to take part in the struggles of the Fronde. The Duchesses de
Chevreuse, De Montbazon, De Guéméné, and other famous feminine
factionists of that time, became, in the hands of Anne de Gonzagua, as
so many wires with which she moved at her will the men whom these women
governed; for the Princess exercised alike over all those men and women
that superiority which disinterestedness, good faith, and firmness of
decision confer. De Retz, when he discovered her characteristics, was
immediately struck with the above-named qualities, especially the two
latter. "To have stability of purpose," said he, when speaking of his
first interview with Anne, "is a rare quality, which indicates an
enlightened mind far above the ordinary class." And further on, "I do
not think," he remarks, "that Queen Elizabeth had more capacity to
govern a state." Mazarin, too, somewhat later, in alluding to the dread
in which he held the famous trio of political women for their capacity
to work mischief, remarked to Don Louis de Haro:--"The most turbulent of
the male politicians do not give us half so much trouble to keep them
within bounds as the intrigues of a Duchess de Chevreuse or a Princess
Palatine."
Anne de Gonzagua, the Princess Palatine, lived long after the Fronde in
the midst of all sorts of political troubles and diplomatic intrigues:
conferences innumerable were held beneath her roof, and in that tortuous
labyrinth she wandered and manoeuvred to her heart's delight. Sometimes
she laboured to reconcile Condé with Anne of Austria, sometimes to
reunite Gaston and Condé, or perhaps the Queen and Madame de
Longueville. She often failed, it is true, in these attempts, and
meanwhile Mazarin, with more address, setting in motion in his retreat
beyond the frontier the most powerful machinery, and making magnificent
promises, again appeared above the political horizon--winning over his
enemies one after another through his secret agents; at one time it was
Châteauneuf, at another Gondi, whom he made for good and all a cardinal;
at another it was Madame de Chevreuse. He had passed his word to the
Princess Palatine that he would some day give her the post of
superintendent of the young Queen's household: he did so, in fact, but
on condition that she should relinquish it two months later to the
Countess de Soissons, which she did in all good faith. Then she withdrew
from court, somewhat undeceived no doubt touching men and things
therein, if it really were the case that she ever had indulged in great
illusions concerning court life.
Years rolled away, however: Mazarin died. Court intrigue with her was at
an end. The personages who had been mixed up in the Fronde hurly-burly,
so menacing in reality, so puerile in aspect, so insignificant as an
isolated fact, and so formidable as a symptom, appeared affected by that
decay which change of circumstances more than lapse of time imposes upon
men and ideas. All that sort of thing was out of fashion. The reign of
the _Grand Monarque_ was in all its heyday. Besides, the Palatine was
no longer young; she had married her daughters, and dwelt in seclusion.
And it was when living thus tranquilly that a rapid, unforeseen,
enthusiastic conversion came upon her like a surprise. For all relating
thereto, we must listen to Bossuet, who dwells upon it in his funeral
oration upon the Princess. His eloquence revels in relating the miracles
suddenly wrought in such a soul as hers. He expatiates on that sudden
change with an apostolic joy and an incomparable majesty: it was a
subject worthy of him, the brilliant narrator of solemn events. It was
exoteric to that life upon which it was so difficult to pronounce an
eulogium; he was not trammelled in the flow of his diction by those
oratorical precautions which are so distressingly hampering to an
impetuous genius like his. He celebrated a victory of grace, and that in
accents the most touching and expressions the most powerful. It was the
hymn of an illustrious conversion, chanted by the noblest mortal voice
ever heard.
Bossuet relates with inimitable art the Princess's two dreams; the
simple anecdotes are dramatised, poetised--one might almost say
sanctified--in proceeding from his lips. But, in short, whether Anne de
Gonzagua saw or thought that she saw that mystical mendicant, and those
symbolical animals, in her slumbers, the truth is that in soul she was
touched, agitated, shaken, overcome. An ardent faith, an invincible
longing for prayer and penitence, had obtained the mastery over that
rebellious soul. She felt once more the enthusiasm of her early youth;
she felt beating once more, at the Divine Master's name, that heart
which had too often throbbed for His creatures only. Her scepticism
vanished; she had no other ambition left save that of gaining heaven,
and holy tears were seen to dim those eyes wherein it once seemed as
though the source of such emotion was dried up for ever. It was done. A
great thing was accomplished, whatsoever had been the cause. A soul
which incredulity had frozen into apathy became fervent before its
Creator. Anne de Gonzagua did not fear to let her repentance be seen;
she desired that the publicity of her penitence might obliterate, if it
were possible, the scandal of her past life. Her conscience became
tender, even scrupulous. "_Plus elle était clairvoyante,_" says Bossuet;
"_plus elle était tourmentée._" Henceforward she devoted herself wholly
to charity and prayer. She became as humble as she had hitherto been
proud. She cherished a life of seclusion as much as she had once loved
mundane notoriety. She became as sincerely a Christian as she had
formerly been an infidel. During the lapse of twelve years this
startling confession of faith did not belie itself for a single day.
"Everything became poor about her house and person," says her
illustrious panegyrist. "She saw with sensible delight the relics of the
pomps of this world disappear one after another, and alms-giving taught
her to retrench daily something fresh.... A person so delicate and
sensible had suffered for twelve entire years, and almost without an
interval, either the most vivid anguish or languor exhausting alike to
mind and body; and notwithstanding, during the whole of that time, and
in the unheard-of torments of her last illness, in which her sufferings
were increased to the utmost excess, she had not to repent of having
once wished for an easier death. Again and again did she suppress that
weak wish by uttering, so soon as she felt it arising, with the Saviour,
the prayer of the Sacred Mystery of the Garden, 'Father, thy will, not
mine, be done!'"
Such a sight must have moved the least susceptible--to have beheld the
Palatine thus redeem her past errors. She was anxious to write with her
own hand the account of her conversion, and addressed it to the
celebrated Rancé, the Abbé of La Trappe. It was from that narrative that
Bossuet drew the source of his own. Some few years previously, with that
polished and elegant vein which intercourse with so many superior minds
tends to create, she had written, as though she had foreseen that she
would not despair of her spiritual future, a short but charming
panegyric upon Hope. Bussy-Rabutin has preserved this relic in one of
his letters. "I have never in my life," he says, with no doubt a little
too much enthusiasm, "seen anything better or more delicately written."
There is to be found in it, it is true, a happy inspiration and a
passage capable of pleasing minds struggling with difficulties. "It is
permitted to us," she says, "to measure our hope by our courage, it is
noble to sustain it amidst trials; but it is not less glorious to suffer
the entire ruin of it with the same high-heartedness which had dared to
conceive it." Those are noble sentiments, and revealing a vigorous
mental power. The end of the Princess Palatine (1681) showed clearly
that she had not, for the mere pleasure of expressing herself elegantly,
vaunted the delights of a saint-like hope. "Ready to render up her
soul," says Bossuet, "she was heard to utter in dying accents, 'I am
about to see how God will treat me, but I hope for His mercy.'" Such was
the close of that life, the piety of which illuminated its latter years;
such was the death of that Princess who, after having been remarkable
among the women of her time for her beauty, her errors, and, at last, by
her penitence, had the rare good fortune to be praised by the most
illustrious of historians, priests, and authors of the great century.
Our notice of this celebrated woman would be incomplete without a
passing glance at the singular fortunes of Henri de Guise, subsequent to
his desertion of his first love, Anne de Gonzagua.
The Duke de Guise, after playing a conspicuous part in the first
dissensions of the Regency, and after having killed Coligny, had married
at Brussels the widow of the Count de Bossut, with whom he became
quickly disgusted, and whose fortune he squandered. A violent passion
next possessed him for the charming and witty Mademoiselle de Pons, maid
of honour to the Queen. He took it into his head to espouse her, and
"the marriage was spoken of as though he had never been married before."
That phantasy, however, did not hinder him from taking part, as a
volunteer, in the campaigns of 1644 and 1645. Whilst at Rome in 1647,
endeavouring to obtain a dispensation to enable him to secure the hand
of Mademoiselle de Pons, the Neapolitans, having revolted against the
Spaniards under Masaniello, elected him as their leader, and gave him
the title of generalissimo of their army. Brave, enterprising, and born
for adventure, able, moreover, to render available ancient pretensions
to that kingdom, through René d'Anjou, who in 1420 had espoused Isabelle
de Lorraine, encouraged in short, if not supported, by the French Court,
where it was deemed politic to keep at a distance from it a man bearing
the great name of Guise, so formidable some sixty years before, the
young prince embarked in a simple felucca, sailed boldly through the
naval armament of Don Juan, seized the reins of government, defeated the
Spanish troops, and made himself master of the country. He won all
hearts by his address, his gentleness, and his affability. But want of
circumspection in his gallantries, the objects of which were not always
of a rank equal to his own, caused jealousies and discontent among the
nobles. His enemies, profiting by a sortie which he made for the purpose
of getting a convoy into Naples, delivered up the city to the Spaniards.
His repeated efforts to re-enter the place proved futile. After having
defended himself like a lion, he was nevertheless carried prisoner to
Madrid. The great Condé, who was then serving the enemies of his
country, demanded that Guise should be set at liberty, in the hope that
he might foment troubles in France. But the ill-treatment which the Duke
had experienced at the hands of the Spaniards left impressions upon his
mind which made him regardless of a promise that had been extorted from
him. He attempted again in 1654 to reconquer the kingdom of Naples, with
the aid of a French fleet, but failed of success. He then went back to
Paris to seek indemnity for the loss of his crown. In 1655 he was
appointed to the post of grand-chamberlain of France. He figured in the
famous _carrousel_ of 1663, at the head of a quadrille of American
savages, whilst the great Condé appeared as chief of the Turks. On
seeing those two personages so pitted, some wit observed, "There go the
heroes of history and fable." The Duke de Guise might indeed be very
aptly compared to a mythological entity, or to a knight errant of the
age of chivalry. His duels, his romantic amours, his profusion, the
varied adventures of his life, rendered him exceptionable in everything.
He died in 1664, leaving no issue.
CHAPTER IV.
MADAME DE MONTBAZON.
AMONGST the celebrated women of the first half of the seventeenth
century, many were, says Bussy Rabutin, "pitiable," whilst some were
"brazen." We must assert unhesitatingly that Madame de Montbazon
belonged to the latter class. She was "one of those personages, however,
who made the most noise" at the courts of Louis the Thirteenth and Anne
of Austria, as we are told by Madame de Motteville, and as we have
already seen by the prominent political part she played in the factions
of the Importants and the Fronde. In summing up her character, we shall
be silent upon the subject of many of her faults, though it is not our
wish to excuse one of them.
"She was not wanting in wit," remarks Tallemant; "for she had been
acquainted with so many witty people!" There is a spice of flattery in
this, for we must agree with Madame de Motteville and M. Cousin that the
wit of the dazzling rival of Madame de Longueville was far from being as
delicate and attractive as was her handsome person, though we cannot at
the same time look upon Tallemant's phrase as a calumny. Both space and
courage would alike fail us, should we attempt to produce a list of all
the lovers, titled and untitled, who had peculiar opportunities of
sharpening the wit of Madame de Montbazon.
Among the first of her adorers, beside the name of Gaston d'Orléans,
must be cited that of the Duke de Chevreuse, her husband's kinsman.
Their _liaison_ furnished matter for a ballad, and was very nearly the
cause of a duel at the door of the king's apartments, between the Duke
de Montmorency and the Duke de Chevreuse; but that did not hinder Madame
de Montbazon from becoming the friend of her step-daughter, who, older
and more experienced in the political world than she was, often used her
as an instrument. The young Duchess was a more dangerous rival to Madame
de Guéméné, her other step-daughter, from whom she carried off, not her
husband, but the Count de Soissons. And it was not enough that she
obtained an easy conquest over her, for she instigated the Count to add
outrage to desertion, and he docilely compromised his forsaken mistress
by a gross and shameful perfidy.
But, passing rapidly over the errors of her youth, it is the close of
Madame de Montbazon's political career with which we are now concerned.
The influence which the gay and gallant Duchess long exercised over the
Duke de Beaufort had sometimes proved useful to the interests of the
Court, and during the early troubles of the Fronde the Queen and Mazarin
took care to keep her favourably disposed towards them. But the
importance which Beaufort's infatuated passion gave or seemed to give
her, speedily made the Duchess one of the heroines of the
Fronde--though, it must be owned, one of the secondary heroines. Her
allies were careful not to allow her to take upon herself a part she was
unable to sustain. Violent, unreflecting, accessible to the most
contradictory suggestions, ready for any turn, and the sport of every
caprice, she was wanting in all the better qualities of a political
woman. Her indiscretion became formidable on all occasions when secresy
was necessary, and more than once the Duke de Beaufort was obliged to be
excluded from the assemblages at which the chiefs of the Fronde took
counsel together. It was well known that he dare not keep anything from
his mistress, and it might chance that a royalist might turn to account
the confidence which she wormed out of her lover, for conformity in
political sentiments was not one of the conditions which she imposed
upon the adorers whose homage she welcomed. Her correspondence with
Marshal d'Albret exposed her moreover to be subject to, without being
aware of it, the influences of the Court, and her intimacy with Vineuil
tended to make her an ally, in spite of herself, of the Prince de Condé.
Hence it is easy to explain the mistrust with which she inspired the
Coadjutor of Paris, the future Cardinal de Retz. She herself did not
fail to perceive the surveillance which he exercised around her; and she
was irritated to see with what facility he modified in his own fashion
the line of conduct which she had just previously dictated to the Duke
de Beaufort. She was forced to confess that his authority prevailed over
her own. One evening, disheartened by the incapacity of the grandson of
the great Henry, and terrified by the dangers to which their imprudence
exposed the Frondeurs, and esteeming the political talent of Gondi to be
more truly worthy of her own, she opened her heart to him, and proposed
that they should enter into a treaty of alliance. The gallant Coadjutor
would only consent to accept one portion of the treaty, and, happily for
the Duke de Beaufort, who was busily occupied with a game at chess
during that strange conversation, he stipulated to eliminate from the
proposed association everything that related to politics. But the
Duchess would not consent to those terms.
In love, Madame de Montbazon was very mercenary; we say it once for all,
and beg to be excused from citing proof of the assertion. In politics,
she also surrendered herself very willingly to any representation the
eloquence of which was aided by crowns or pistoles. It was thus that in
the month of August, 1649, she promised that the Duke de Beaufort should
not oppose the return of the Court, at the same moment that she opened
her hand to receive a considerable sum. It was thus that, the same year,
she accepted two thousand pistoles from the Spanish envoys, who,
desirous of rendering her favourable, promised besides that the sum of
twenty thousand crowns and a pension of six thousand livres if she would
secure to them the concurrence of the Duke de Beaufort. But she did not
always meet with debtors so honest as Mazarin and the Spanish
ambassadors. In 1650, whilst the treaty was preparing which sought to
unite the Frondeurs with the Princes, then prisoners at Havre, a
negotiation was entered into with Madame de Montbazon in which the
Prince de Conti was offered to her as a husband for her daughter. The
proposition was not accepted. The proposers were not discouraged, and a
sum of a hundred thousand crowns was offered to her. This time the
Duchess could not resist, and the treaty was signed in all due form.
Unfortunately, when the Princes were liberated, she was imprudent enough
to confide her voucher to the Princess Palatine, who, with perfidious
haste, had promised to take care of her interests. She never saw the
precious contract again, and the Prince de Condé only answered her
demands by cruel and cutting jeers. In that adventure, it was not Madame
de Montbazon who played the shabbiest part.
The aid which the Duchess had often lent the Court amidst intrigues the
most contradictory, did not preserve her from exile when the King made
his entry into Paris, on its definite pacification in October, 1652. She
did not return thither till 1657. "She was still beautiful, and as much
carried away by vanity as though she had been only in her twenty-fifth
year," says Madame de Motteville, when noting her reappearance. "She
relied all the same upon her charms," she adds with a somewhat malicious
finesse, "for she returned with the same desire of pleasing; and those
who saw her assured me that the mourning garb which she wore as a widow,
and to which she added everything in the shape of ornament that
self-love could suggest, rendered her so charming, that in her case it
might be said that the course of nature was changed, since so many years
and so much beauty could meet together."[5] Thus, by dint of care and
art, did Madame de Montbazon succeed in preserving her beauty much
longer than she could have hoped for, since, in the pride of her
eighteen summers, she declared that old age commenced at thirty, and
requested it as a favour that she might be flung into the river and
drowned so soon as she reached the dreaded period. Who would have dared
to remind her of that imprudent proposal in 1640? And who could have
refused her a respite even in the latter moments of her existence?
[5] The same sentiments were thus versified by Loret, when
announcing that the Duchess had obtained permission to return to
Court:
"Montbazon, la belle douairière,
Dont les appas et la lumière
Sous de lugubres vêtements
Paraissent encore plus charmants...."
Permission had scarcely been given her to appear at Court, when she was
attacked by an illness which seemed nothing more than a common cold,
but which turned out to be the measles. In the course of a few days the
malady proved fatal. Three hours only were accorded to this
earthly-minded woman to prepare for death. She made confession and
received the sacrament with every indication of the most lively piety
and the most sincere repentance, saying to her daughter, the Abbess of
Caen, "that she regretted not having always lived in a cloister as she
had, and that she looked with horror upon her past life." Up to those
last three hours, she had refused to believe that there were degrees in
the morality of women, and to admit that they were not all equally
virtuous.
"She was little regretted by the Queen," Madame de Motteville tells us,
"as she had frequently forsaken her interests to follow her own
caprices. The minister heard of her death with the feeling one
entertains for one's deceased enemy. Her former lovers looked upon her
with contempt; and those who admired her still, were but little touched
at her loss, because each, jealous of his rival, left tears and grief as
the share of the Duke de Beaufort, who was at that moment the most
beloved."
On that point Madame de Motteville was in error. Which of the two--M. de
Beaufort or M. de Rancé--was most beloved it would be difficult to
determine. But this is so far certain, that M. de Rancé, the future
founder of La Trappe, was the lover who regretted her the most
sincerely. He had hastened to her sick couch so soon as he heard of her
illness; and he had arrived, not too late, and only to find himself the
spectator of a most horrible sight, as has frequently been related with
much romantic and dramatic detail, but soon enough to pass within her
chamber the last hours left to her of life. "Already balancing and
wrestling between heaven and this world," says Saint Simon, who was in
his confidence, "the sight of that so sudden death achieved in him the
determination of withdrawing from the world which he had for some time
meditated."
Among the different versions of this catastrophe, Laroque asserts that,
after an absence on a long journey, on De Rancé's return, he called at
the Hôtel Montbazon, and then learned, for the first time, the death of
the Duchess; that he was shown into her room, where, to his horror, the
headless body lay in its coffin. The head had been cut off, either
because the lead coffin was not made long enough or for the purpose of
an anatomical study. Some assert that De Rancé took the head, and that
the skull of the woman he loved so well was found in his cell at La
Trappe. History, however, will not accept this romantic incident.
Touching the fate of De Rancé's rival--when Louis XIV. returned to Paris
in 1652, the Duke de Beaufort submitted to the royal authority, and took
no further part in the civil war, which the Prince de Condé carried on
for several years longer. Later, the Duke obtained the command of the
royal fleet. In 1664 and 1665, he was at the head of several expeditions
against the African corsairs. In 1666 he commanded the French men-of-war
ordered to join those of Holland against England. Finally, in 1669, he
went to the aid of the Venetians, attacked by the Turks in the island of
Candia. The galleys and vessels, newly constructed in the port of
Toulon, disembarked seven thousand men under Beaufort--a contingent too
weak for such a dangerous undertaking. That aid only served to retard
the taking of Candia for a few days, and was the means of useless
bloodshed. In a sortie, the rash and impetuous grandson of Henry the
Great was cut to pieces in the most merciless way; and as his body
could not be found after the fight, his death gave rise to fables sought
to be rendered probable by the remembrance of the eccentric part he had
previously played.
CHAPTER V.
MADEMOISELLE DE MONTPENSIER.
ANNE MARIE LOUISE D'ORLÉANS, Duchess de Montpensier, whom history
distinguishes by the epithet of _La Grande Mademoiselle_, after telling
us in her memoirs, at least twenty times, in order to make herself
better known, that she was fond of glory, adds--"The Bourbons are folks
very much addicted to trifles, with very little solidity about them;
perhaps I myself as well as the rest may inherit the same qualities from
father and mother."[6] With this hint, whoever scans her portrait may
readily read the character her features reveal:--a mind false to the
service of a noble and generous heart; an honest but frivolous mind, too
often swayed, by a bombastic heroism; a _précieuse_ of the Hôtel
Rambouillet, whom Nicolas Poilly very happily painted as Pallas, with
her helmet proudly perched upon the summit of her fair tresses; an
amazon, who bordered upon the adventuress, and, notwithstanding,
remained the princess; in short, a personage at whom one cannot help
laughing heartily, nor at the same time help admiring.
[6] The daughter of Gaston d'Orléans and the charming Marie de
Bourbon, she was born in 1627, the same year as Bossuet and Mad. de
Sévigné. Her mother died five days after her birth.
Passing by the subject of her numerous matrimonial projects, we hasten
on to the commencement of her political--and perhaps we may add her
military[7]--career, when, in January, 1652, a treaty had been concluded
between _Monsieur_ her father, Condé, and the Duke de Lorraine, the
Duchess d'Orléans had signed in her brother's name, and the Count de
Fiesque in the name of Condé. On her part, Mademoiselle, somewhat
fantastic but loyal and courageous, had joined her mother-in-law, and
declared for the Fronde, partly through her liking for _éclat_ and the
notoriety of parading at the head of the troops, with her two ladies of
honour, the Countesses of Fiesque and Frontenac, transformed into
aides-de-camp; partly by the secret hope that by Mazarin's defeat and
her father's triumph she might succeed in espousing the young King, and
so exchange the helmet of the Fronde for the crown of France.
[7] Her father, writing to her companions in arms the Countesses of
Fiesque and Frontenac shortly after their entrance into Orleans,
complimented them upon their courage, and addressed his letter to
_the Countesses Adjutant-Generals in the Army of my Daughter against
Mazarin_.
It would be a great mistake to attribute to this fair Frondeuse a
liberalism of ideas to which she was most assuredly a stranger. "It must
be," she somewhere remarks, "that the intentions of the great are like
the mysteries of the Faith: it does not belong to mankind to penetrate
within them; men ought to revere them, and to believe that they are
never otherwise than for the welfare and salvation of their country."
But, however that may be, it did not prevent the civil war from being a
very amusing thing for Mademoiselle. To hear the drums beating to arms
one fine morning, to see men running through the streets to defend the
barricades as well as their untrained hands could wield musket and
sabre, to lie upon the floor in a large chamber at Saint-Germain, and to
find on awaking that chamber filled with soldiers in great buff
jerkins,--those were pleasures not to be always found at will, and were
to be made the most of when met with. Such pleasures, moreover,
savouring of the unforeseen, the adventurous, and the grotesque, solely
determined Mademoiselle's conduct in the outset. But on the second
Fronde breaking out, when the struggle of the Parliament with royalty
had become a quarrel between princes and ministers, Mademoiselle felt
that the honour of her house was at stake. Gaston, after having pledged
himself to the Prince de Condé, so far as a man who does not know his
own mind can give a pledge, contented himself with whistling, as he was
wont to do, or to dissertating cleverly without acting. But his daughter
wrested from him an authority to go herself and defend Orleans against
the troops of Louis XIV.; his daughter, on seeing the unfortunate
adherents of Condé engaged with her in rebellion overpowered at the
Faubourg Saint-Antoine, secured their retreat by ordering the guns of
the Bastille to cannonade the royal forces, although that cannonade
should slay the husband of whom she still dreamed; that daughter, too,
when she heard of the disgraceful scenes of the 4th of July, 1652,
boldly did what no one else dare do,--she flew to the assistance of the
victims of the Hôtel de Ville, without bestowing a thought of the
imminent danger she thereby ran.
But it is in the Princess's own Memoirs that the curious epopee must be
read; and to which a dry abridgment does injustice. Whether she hold
council of war with her fair _Maréchales de Camp_, without allowing the
men folks to give her their ready cut-and-dried advice,--whether she be
thrust into Orleans through the gap of an old gateway, and, covered with
mud, be seen carried along its streets in an old arm-chair, laughing
heartily,--or when hastening to arrest the massacre at the Hôtel de
Ville, she stops to look at Madame Riche, the ribbon-vendor, talking in
her chemise to her gossip, the beadle of St. Jacques, who has nothing
on but his drawers,--the reader is always reminded that he sees and
hears the granddaughter of Henry IV.--a Parisian with a touch of the
princess in all she says and does, and he cannot help asking himself
momentarily whether it be all incorrigible frivolity, or some quaint
species of natural heroism which speaks and acts thus strangely.
Heroic or frivolous, Mademoiselle expiated her pranks by an exile of
four years in her manor of Saint-Fargeau. The rupture with her father,
who drove her out of doors, and denied her permission to take refuge
under any other roof he owned, her consequent wanderings, at times not a
little affecting, and at others comical, when directing her steps
towards her place of banishment, her arrival at the ruinous château
which has neither doors nor windows, and which is haunted by ghosts, and
the attempts to embellish the tumble-down place, and people it with
gaiety, animation, and life, are so many scenes to which the piquant
style of Mademoiselle gives singular attractiveness. Whilst avenues were
being planted and a theatre built, matrimonial negotiations went on as
briskly as ever, and pretenders to her hand abounded--the Elector of
Bavaria, the Duke of Savoy, the nephew of the Duke of Lorraine, the Duke
de Neuborg. The reception of M. de Neuborg's envoy, an honest Jesuit,
who draws out of his pocket victoriously two portraits of his good lord,
ogles Mademoiselle as long as he could, and talks "goguette" to her for
a whole hour, is one of the most amusing farces anywhere to be met with.
Unluckily, the farce was not worth the candle in the opinion of certain
judges, and all the diversions of Saint-Fargeau did not prevent our
princess from regretting with all her heart that pompous Court of
Versailles in which the young Louis was giving such graceful ballets,
brilliant carousals, and piquant masquerades. The masquerades of 1657
carried the day over the political aims of 1652, and the fair exile
experienced a vivid longing to be once more received into favour at the
court of her royal cousin.
To take up sword or pen and fall foul of the government was almost
always an easy thing to do in France; the difficulty lay in proposing
peace after the war, to hit upon profitable reconciliations or lucrative
treaties. Mademoiselle did her best; and at length, in that same year of
1657, she made her appearance in the royal camp near Sedan, having at
her carriage-door the silly and complaisant Mazarin, who believed all
she wished him to believe, and who presented the princess with a little
Boulogne bitch, in token of good friendship; she made her excuses to the
King for having been naughty, and promised to be wise in future. Louis
behaved more graciously towards the fair rebel than did his mother, and
said that everything should be buried in oblivion; but he did not forget
the cannonade of the Bastille. After five years' seclusion, she again
looked forward to resume her position at Court, to keep one of her own,
to enthrone herself at the Luxembourg, and doubtless contract some
sovereign alliance. Vain illusions! Conflicts of the heart were about to
succeed to those political storms from whose effects she had just
recovered. The most vainglorious of the daughters of France was destined
to extinguish with the wet blanket of vile prose the brilliancy of a
long and romantic career.
History, justly severe upon the Fronde, ought not, we think, to treat
too harshly the Frondeuse of the blood-royal. Upon one delicate point of
her private life the biographer cannot, unfortunately, show the same
indulgence. The supreme criterion for the appreciation of certain women,
and the irresistible argument, is the man whom they have loved.
Assuredly we may pardon many things recorded of the _Grande
Mademoiselle_, even her shrewish relations with her step-mother, even
her haughty contempt for her half-sisters, but we cannot pardon her M.
de Lauzun. We are all well acquainted with that individual, with his
cunning and supercilious cast of countenance, servile or arrogant,
according to circumstances and interests, adroit in concealing a
merciless egotism, a revolting brutality, under the guise of a
theatrical liberality; brave so far as was necessary to be insolent with
impunity, intelligent no further than to the extent at which selfishness
blinds the judgment, and delighting in mischief when there was nothing
to dread from it. To all this may be added an incisive tone of voice,
and language keenly sarcastic or servilely obsequious, an insatiable and
inordinate sensuality, innumerable conquests among the fair sex, and
extraordinary adventures. At first sight, at a Court masquerade, in
1659, the bully made an impression upon the _précieuse_, and she noticed
him for his exquisite elegance during the marriage fêtes of Louis XIV.
When she met him in the Queen's apartments, she remarked that he had
more wit than anyone else, and found a particular pleasure in talking
with him. The charm operated so effectually that the princess of
forty-three was at length fain to own that she passionately loved the
Gascon cadet, who was then in his thirty-eighth year. Determined as she
was naturally, that discovery overwhelmed her. "I resolved," she says,
"never to speak to M. Lauzun again save in hearing of a third person,
and I was anxious to avoid opportunities of seeing him in order to drive
him out of my head. I entered upon such a line of conduct; I only
exchanged a few trivial words with him. I found that I did not know what
I was saying, that I could not put three words of good sense together;
and the more I sought to shun him, the more desirous I was of seeing
him." At her wits' end, the poor Princess cast herself at the foot of
the altar, on one occasion when she took the sacrament, and ardently
besought Heaven to enlighten her as to the course she ought to pursue.
The inspiration is by no means difficult to anticipate. "Heaven's grace
determined me not to struggle longer to drive out of my mind that which
was so strongly established in it, but to marry M. de Lauzun."
Two things, however, were necessary to accomplish this: firstly, that M.
de Lauzun should thoroughly understand that he was beloved, and that he
would deign to espouse Mademoiselle's twenty-two millions; and next that
King Louis should consent to a marriage, the strangest certainly ever
resolved upon. Strange, indeed, that she, the grand-daughter of Henry
the Great, Mademoiselle d'Eu, Mademoiselle de Dombes, Mademoiselle
d'Orléans, Mademoiselle the King's first cousin, the Mademoiselle
destined to the throne, should ask the King's permission to marry a
Gascon cadet. Louis, as the sequel to an overture made to him by several
nobles collectively, friends of Lauzun, with M. de Montausier at their
head, granted his permission. But when the question arose, thanks to the
blind vanity of Lauzun, of their union being celebrated at the Louvre
and in the face of all France, like an alliance "of crown to crown;"
when a feeling which was shared by every member of the royal house was
on the point of communicating itself to all the sovereign families of
Europe, Louis, with great reason, began to take account of the political
interests which this whim of the Princess brought into play, and
retracted, as King, the authority which he had given as head of a
family. Contemporary writers seem never tired of dwelling upon the
manifestations of Mademoiselle's grief, at times as laughable as at
others it was touching; receiving the condolence of all the Court as
though she had been a lone widow, Madame de Sévigné tells us, and
exclaiming excitedly in her despair to every fresh visitor, as she
pointed to the vacant place in her bed, "He should be there! he should
be there!"
This took place on the 18th of December, 1670. On the 25th of November,
1671, M. de Lauzun was arrested, thrown into the Bastille, and taken
thence to Pignerol, where he was subjected to a captivity of ten years.
What passed in that interval has proved a great subject of controversy
amongst ingenious writers. The most probable explanation seems to be
that, notwithstanding the King's refusal, the marriage between Lauzun
and Mademoiselle had been accomplished. The evidence of twenty different
persons might be cited in support of the fact, but one may suffice. An
historian of the last century, M. Anquetil, relates that at the Château
d'Eu, in 1774, an apartment was still pointed out which had been
occupied by Lauzun, situated above that of the princess, and
communicating by a secret staircase with her alcove. At the same period,
Anquetil saw at Treport a tall person resembling Mademoiselle not only
in her figure, but strikingly like her portraits. She seemed to be about
seventy or seventy-five. She was called, throughout that part of the
country, the Princess's daughter. She seemed to believe so herself, and
was in receipt of a pension of fifteen hundred francs paid punctually,
without knowing from what quarter they came. She occupied a handsome
house for which she paid no rent, although for it she held no
proprietary deed. All this, coupled with the age of the lady, who stated
that she was born in 1671, would seem decisive as to the clandestine
marriage which probably occasioned the arrest of Lauzun.
Ten years of anguish and poignant regrets passed over poor
Mademoiselle's head--ten years employed in imploring and bargaining for
the restoration of her dearly beloved captive. "Consider what you have
it in your power to do to please the King, in order that he may grant
you that which you have so much at heart," was the artful suggestion
daily repeated in her ear by Madame de Montespan. And to render the
discovery more easy, she took care to bring with her, and to send to her
very frequently, that charming little Duke du Maine to whom the county
of Eu, the duchy of Aumale, and the principality of Dombes would have
been a fitting appanage. To despoil herself for the deliverance of the
man she loved with such an infatuated affection, the Princess would not
have hesitated a moment. The difficulty was to despoil the man himself,
already in possession of a portion of what was required, and very
keen-witted indeed to keep what he had acquired. The negotiation, for a
long while brought to a dead-lock by the resistance of Lauzun, was at
length concluded. M. de Lauzun, emerged from Pignerol, but restricted at
first to a residence in Touraine or Anjou, received at length permission
to revisit Paris and behold once more the benefactress who could still
secure to him the enjoyment of an income of forty thousand livres. "I
did not know him," exclaimed the woebegone Princess, shortly after his
release, "and my sole consolation is that the King, who is more
clear-sighted than I am, did not know him either." Tardy
clear-sightedness! M. de Lauzun had then made himself known
unmistakably--by beating her. But, if the truth must be told, she had
first scratched his face.
Thus ended, in vulgar squabbles, more and more stormy, a connection so
romantically begun. Lauzun, disappointed in his hope of a magnificent
alliance, considered himself despoiled by the Princess's donation, and,
finding himself after ten years' captivity the husband of a woman of
fifty-four, showed her neither tenderness nor respect. It was,
therefore, a relief to her when he took his departure for England in
1685. The ill-assorted couple never met again. Lauzun more than once
endeavoured to obtain an interview with the Princess, but she would not
forgive him, and died without consenting to his urgent appeals. It was
in her latter years only, and under the perceptibly increasing sway of
religious influences, that her miserably tormented mind recovered peace
and repose. Mademoiselle, who had only given up dancing in 1674,
withdrew gradually from Court when she found that she had become an
object of pity, if not of mockery, therein. The _Grande Mademoiselle_
expired on the 5th of April, 1693, in her palace of the Luxembourg, aged
sixty-six. That singularity, which had so remarkably characterised her
life, pursued her even beyond it. At her obsequies, celebrated with much
magnificence, her entrails, imperfectly embalmed, fermented, and the urn
which contained them burst with a loud explosion during the ceremonies.
All present fled in the extremity of terror.
Was it from the singularity of her existence, from the essentially
French tone of her character, from the grandeur of an epoch during which
no one passed unnoticed, that the species of popularity half-indulgent,
half-sportive, which attached to her name must be attributed? To all
these doubtless, but likewise to another cause more decisive still.
Mademoiselle does not take her place only in the sufficiently extensive
catalogue of princely eccentricities; she holds a creditable position
upon the list of French writers. Nor should it be forgotten that the
gates of the Luxembourg were by her thrown open to all the _beaux
esprits_ of her time, "qui y trouvaient leur place comme chez Mécænas;"
and that she fostered both by encouragement and example La Rochefoucauld
and La Bruyère, and that it is no slight claim to remembrance that she
led France to appreciate the _Maxims_ of the one and the _Characters_ of
the other. May such considerations serve as extenuating circumstances
when we bring her up for judgment for the flagrant crime of--M. de
Lauzun.
CHAPTER VI.
THE WIFE OF THE GREAT CONDÉ.
AMONG so many heroines of beauty, glory, and gallantry, who achieved
celebrity at this stirring epoch of French history, there is one whose
name ought not to be effaced from, nor placed lowest on the list,
although a humble--we were going to say, a humiliated, disdained, and
sacrificed wife; a martyr to conjugal faith, but who, perhaps, can
scarcely be called a "political" woman.
Mademoiselle de Brézé, as already intimated, had entered into the Condé
family through the detestable influence of authority and politics. The
Duke d'Enghien, therefore, unhappily held his wife in aversion; her
mother-in-law, Charlotte de Montmorency, despised her; Madame de
Longueville, her sister-in-law, did not esteem her; Mademoiselle de
Montpensier declares that "she felt pity for her," and that was the
gentlest phrase she could find to apply to a person who had so signally
crossed her views and inclination.
Married at thirteen to the future hero of Rocroy and Lens, both before
marriage and again more strongly after, the young Duke had protested by
a formal act that he yielded only to compulsion and his respect for
paternal authority in giving her his hand. Henry (II.), Prince de Condé,
who thus exacted his son's compliance, merely followed his usual
instincts as a greedy and ambitious courtier in seeking an alliance with
Cardinal Richelieu, whose niece Mademoiselle de Brézé was, through her
mother, Nicole du Plessis. Mademoiselle de Montpensier, who thought that
she had more reason than any one else to be indignant at the match,
tells us plainly that the Prince threw himself at the feet of his
eminence to solicit from him both Mademoiselle de Brézé for the Duke
d'Enghien, and M. de Brézé, her brother, for Mademoiselle de Bourbon,
and that he only escaped from the disgrace of a double _mésalliance_
through the Cardinal's clemency, who, in reply, told him that "he was
quite willing to give untitled young ladies to princes, but not
princesses to untitled young gentlemen."
Did the young Duchess personally merit that aversion and contempt?
Mademoiselle has told us, indeed, that she was awkward, and that, "on
the score of wit and beauty, she had nothing above the common run." But
Madame de Motteville, less passionate and more disinterested in her
judgments, recognises certain advantages possessed by her. "She was not
plain," she tells us, "but had fine eyes, a good complexion, and a
pretty figure. She spoke well when she was in the humour to talk." The
discerning court lady adds that, "if Madame de Condé did not always
display a talent for pleasing in the ball-room or in conversation, the
fidelity with which she clung to her husband during adversity, and the
zeal she showed for his interests and for those of her son during the
Guienne campaign, ought to compensate for the misfortune of not having
been able to merit, by more eminent virtues, a more brilliant and widely
celebrated reputation."
Here, then, it seems incumbent upon us to divine, from the _façon de
parler_ of that day, what were _the eminent virtues_ which the Princess
de Condé needed to deserve the esteem of her husband; or to ask whether
tried fidelity, courage, devotedness, were not then ranked among the
eminent virtues. They were so, no doubt; and it is probable that what
Madame de Motteville understands by those words, was the eminence of
qualities peculiar to the women, who more than ever in her day derived
from them a species of celebrity which closely resembled glory--the
éclat of beauty, wit, grace, intrepidity, and power of charming; in a
word, that which was possessed in so high a degree by a Madame de
Longueville, a Madame de Chevreuse, a Marie de Hautefort, and a
Mademoiselle du Vigean.
Whatever might have been the personal merit of the wife of the great
Condé, did the little she had justify the wretchedness of her destiny?
No: some beauty, wit, virtue, courage, a timid disposition perhaps, an
unpretending virtue, a courage even mediocre, easily overthrown, and
which needed the pressure of circumstances and danger for its
development,--in all this there was nothing to invoke the ire of the
implacable sisters.
In contemplating her truly deplorable existence, afflicted from its
beginning to its end by every kind of grief and humiliation, one can
scarcely resist the idea of the ascendency of an invincible fatality,
making her a victim of the irresistible force of events and destiny. The
woes of Claire de Brézé commenced in her earliest childhood. At the time
of her marriage to the Duke d'Enghien she had lost her mother some six
years, that parent having died in 1635. What befell her infancy,
abandoned to the neglect of a fantastic and libertine father, ruled even
before his widowhood by a mistress, the wife of one of his lacqueys,
whom he killed one day during a hunting match in order to get him out of
the way; of a father who, Tallemant tells us, carelessly remarked, when
his daughter's marriage was agreed upon--as though she belonged to some
one else--"They are going to make a princess of that little girl!"
She was destined, nevertheless, to have her hour of fame and
distinction, and that hour dawned amidst disasters of every sort, and
upon the captivity of her husband. At the moment of the arrest of the
Prince, whilst the Princess-dowager was conferring with her adherents
upon the best measures to be adopted for the deliverance of the Princes
and for the safety of her little grandson, the young Princess,
overcoming her timidity, interrupted Lenet, who was proposing a plan for
their flight, and another for a campaign, and, after the humblest tokens
of respect and deference for her mother-in-law, _entreated her not to
separate her from her son, protesting that she would follow him
everywhere joyfully, whatsoever might be the peril, and that she would
expose herself to any risk to aid her husband_.[8]
[8] Lenet.
From that moment, we trace, almost from day to day as it were, in the
_Mémoires_ of Lenet proofs of the zeal and constancy of the Princess de
Condé. She escapes from Chantilly on foot, with her son and a small band
of faithful followers, traverses Paris, whence she reaches, in three
days and by devious roads, Montrond, the place pointed out by Lenet as
the safest retreat and the most advantageous to defend. Her letters to
the Queen and ministers, to the magistrates, to her relatives, are
stamped with nobility and firmness. Threatened in Montrond by La
Meilleraye, who was advancing in force, she again made her escape under
cover of a hunting party, after having provided for the safety of the
place and others which depended on it, and went in search of, amid a
host of difficulties, sometimes on horseback, at others in a litter or
by boat, the Dukes de Bouillon and La Rochefoucauld, who escorted her
to Bordeaux. One must turn to Lenet for all the details of that toilsome
journey and of the insurrection at Bordeaux, which he has related with
all the minutiæ and animation of an eye-witness and an actor who more
than once figured in the front rank. No longer timid, no longer awkward,
in presence of danger the daughter of Marshal de Brézé became the amazon
and almost the heroine. She held reviews, councils of war, negotiated,
and issued orders. Scarcely had she reached Bordeaux, her entry into
which was quite an ovation, than she besieged the Parliament chamber to
procure the registration of her requests and protestations against the
unjust detention of her husband. "She solicited the judges on their way
out of court, representing to them with tears in her eyes the unhappy
condition of all her oppressed house.... The young Duke, whom a
gentleman (Vialas) carried in his arms, caught the counsellors round the
neck as they passed, and weepingly besought at their hands the
liberation of his father, in so tender a manner that those gentlemen
wept also as bitterly as he and his mother, and gave them both good
hopes." She harangued the magistrates, supplicated them, urged them; she
even protected them, on one occasion that the populace of Bordeaux,
finding them not so bold as they could have wished, endeavoured by
clamour to obtain a decree contrary to the views of the party of the
Princes. She repaired to the palace, and from the top of the steps
conjured the furious rabble and made them lay down their arms. "And it
must be owned," says Lenet, "that she had a particular talent for
speaking in public, and that nothing could be better, more appropriate,
nor more conformable to her position than what she said." On that day,
the Princess de Condé, upon the steps of the Hôtel de Ville of Bordeaux,
appeared no longer unworthy of being ranked with Madame de Longueville
at the town-hall at Paris, or with Mademoiselle d'Orléans at the Porte
St. Antoine. Brienne adds that she worked, with her own hands, with the
ladies of the city, at the fortifications, and that she was anxious
herself to embroider, upon the banners of her army, the emblem and
device of the revolt--a grenade exploding, with the word _coacta_!
We have already seen the result of that three months' resistance--the
peace concluded at Bordeaux, the amnesty accorded to all those who had
taken up arms in Guienne, in a word, all the conditions proposed by the
Princess and the Dukes conceded, with the exception of one only--the
principal, that which had been the prime cause of all that
insurrection--the deliverance of the Prince de Condé, whom Mazarin
persisted in retaining prisoner, whilst at the same time promising to do
everything towards abridging his captivity.
The Princess was sent back to Montrond with her son, vexed no doubt at
not having conquered, but proud of having dared so much, and satisfied
at having deserved for that once to share his imprisonment. That day
came, however,--the day of gratitude and justice. On one occasion
already, whilst yet at Vincennes, the Prince, as he watered the tulips
celebrated by Mademoiselle de Scudéry in song, remarked to some one,
"_Who would have thought that I should be watering tulips whilst Madame
la Princesse was making war in the south!_"
But later, when the campaign at Bordeaux had ended, the Prince still a
prisoner at Havre, forwarding a communication in cypher to Lenet, added
thereto a short note for the Princess, couched in terms so tender that
Lenet, fearing lest in the exuberance of her delight the Princess might
betray the secret of that correspondence, hesitated for some moments to
communicate it to her. That note, the first and sole recompense of her
devotion, courage, and constancy, we must here transcribe, as the tardy
and begrudging compensation for such long-continued ingratitude, such
long-continued disdain, for so many cruel and unmerited outrages.
"Il me tard, Madame, que je sois en état de vous embrasser mil fois
pour toute l'amitié que vous m'avez temoigné, qui m'est d'autant
plus sensible que ma conduite envers vous l'avoit peu méritée; mais
je sçauray si bien vivre avec vous à l'advenir, que vous ne vous
repentirés pas de tout ce que vous avés faict to me pour moy, qui
fera que je seray toute ma vie tout à vous et de tout mon coeur."
Poor Clémence de Maillé! how, at that first testimony of an affection
which she had despaired of ever gaining, did her heart, so long pent up,
burst forth with ecstatic delight! And how must Lenet, on witnessing
that touching effusion of irrepressible rapture, have congratulated
himself at not having persevered in his diplomatic prudence! She took
the letter, shed tears over it, kissed it, read it over and over again,
and tried to get it by heart--for she might lose it. Then she selected
from her toilette her finest ribbon (a bright _flame-coloured_ one), and
sewed that precious missive to it, in order to carry it always upon her
person, beneath her dress--upon her chemise, Lenet bluntly tells us, and
who adds that that gush of delirious delight lasted until the morrow.
Alas! that warm ray was the only one that Condé, in his glory, let fall
upon her, and it was but evanescent. The danger over, the prison opened,
Condé restored to his honours and his power, she became once more the
despised, alienated, humiliated wife. Mademoiselle, on meeting her
again, asked whether it were true that she had taken part _in that
which was done in her name?_ On her return from Montrond (after the
letter), she found her, it is true, _plus habile_; but she was shocked
at the delight manifested by the Princess on seeing all the great world
flock to visit her, so wholly forsaken as she had previously been, and
she concluded that, being carried out of her normal condition, she
thought too much of herself.
Then came humiliations the most cutting, and the deepest grief. Twice
was she attacked by dangerous illness, from which it was asserted she
could not recover. And each time that report was welcomed at Court as
the joyous announcement of a marriage or a succession. Everybody busied
themselves with finding another wife for the Prince; and some thought
once more of Mademoiselle: "that rumour reached my ears," says she, "and
I mused upon it." Unfortunately for her, the poor Princess recovered,
and Mademoiselle had to wait for Lauzun. In another place she remarks
somewhat spitefully, "Madame la Princesse arrived in better health than
_could have been anticipated; no one could have imagined that she would
so soon recover_."
At length a tragic event, the consequences of which exhibit in a
sinister light the perseverance of ill-feeling that had always been
shown towards her in the family of which she had become a member, came
to add itself to that almost unbroken chain of tribulations, outrages,
and troubles amid which no sort of calamity seemed wanting. Two officers
of her household took it into their heads to quarrel and draw swords
upon each other. The Princess (she was then in her forty-third
year--1671) placed herself between the angry combatants with the
intention of separating them, and by so doing received a stab in her
side. The individual who inflicted the wound was brought to trial. As
for her,
"When she was cured, the Prince had her conducted to Châteauroux,
one of his country-houses. She has been there kept for a long time
imprisoned, and at present permission is only given her to walk in
the court-yard, always strictly watched by the people whom the
Prince always keeps about her. _The Duke is accused of having
suggested to the Prince the treatment to which his mother is
subjected: he was very glad_, it is said, to find a pretext for
putting her in a place where she would _spend less_ than in
society."[9]
[9] Mémoires of Mademoiselle de Montpensier, 4th part.
Was it the hereditary avarice of the house of Condé which thus revealed
itself in the odious sentiment of that unworthy son? Poor woman! Her
only crime was that of being too liberal. She had, it is true, foolishly
placed her diamonds in pledge at Bordeaux to support the cost of the
war. But had she not, as a set-off to her prodigality, brought to the
Duke d'Enghien and his father her share of Richelieu's wealth? That
prudent advice of the excellent son was followed: the Princess was still
a prisoner at Châteauroux, when the Prince her husband died, in 1686;
and by way of a precaution--which cannot be thought of without a
shudder, giving as it does the measure of an implacable hatred--he
recommended that she should be so kept after his decease. This once,
Mademoiselle did find a word of pity for the persecuted wife and mother.
"I could have wished," says she, when speaking of the last moments of
the Prince, "that he had not prayed the King to let his wife always be
kept at Châteauroux, and I was very sorry for it...."
And it was there, doubtless, that she died in 1694, at the age of
sixty-six. The collections of funeral orations and sermons of celebrated
preachers of that day will be searched in vain for any funeral tribute
to her memory. And a feeling of disappointment arises that Bossuet, in
his panegyric of the hero, could not find a word of praise, of
consolation, or even of pity for the ill-fated shadow he left sorrowful
and abandoned by all, to bear his name in pitiless obscurity to the
grave.
Mysterious destiny! strange fatality! which neither personal demerits,
wrongs, nor faults justified, which neither love, devotedness, nor
unfailing virtue, approved and respected even by the calumnious, could
avert.
PART II.
THE DUCHESS OF PORTSMOUTH.
VERY little is known for certain concerning the antecedents of Louise
Querouaille before she figured at the Court of France as one of the
maids of honour to the unfortunate Henrietta, Duchess of Orleans, sister
of Charles the Second of England. The contemporaries of the merry
monarch, witnesses and censors of his political errors, in tracing them
to their source, have attributed them primarily to the foreign
favourite, who was, more than any other of the many mistresses of that
Prince, odious in the eyes of the English people.
At the commencement of 1670, the splendour and corruption of the French
Court had reached their acme. The seraglio of the great King recalled to
mind that of Solomon, whilst his brother, enslaved by effeminacy and
debauchery, had only to hold up his finger and the most important
personages of the state were suitably provided with mistresses to such
an extent that at length it became necessary to transfer occasionally to
foreign courts those attractive creatures who, by antiphrasis doubtless,
were always called "maids of honour." It was in the household of his
sister-in-law, Henrietta of England, that Louis had first met the two
mistresses of his predilection; and when he wished to assure himself by
a new tie of his royal vassal on the other side of the channel, it was
still the domestic circle of the Duchess of Orleans which supplied him
with the diplomatist in petticoats he wanted.
When Mademoiselle Querouaille's mission to the Court of St. James's
became thoroughly understood, and her position as Duchess of Portsmouth
assured in it, her previous history was hunted up, the details of which
no one knew--not even the royal family of France, who had used her as an
instrument without caring to trouble itself about her origin. Madame de
Sévigné, in her letters to her daughter, speaks of the Duchess of
Portsmouth in a very disrespectful fashion, so much so as to reveal, if
not the certainty, at least the belief that the antecedents of the _maid
of honour_, as she says, were not the most honourable. In 1690, five
years after Charles's death, a pamphlet was published in London in which
the Duchess figures under the fictitious name of _Francelie_; Louis XIV.
designated as _Tirannides_, and our English king as _Prince des Iles_.
In the preface to the French translation of this pamphlet, which bears
the title of _Histoire secrète de la Duchesse de Portsmouth_, it is
stated that the author desired to give, by these changes of name, some
additional piquancy to the revelations contained in his book. According
to such chronicle, the father of Louise Querouaille was a wool merchant
of Paris. After having realised a moderate fortune in trade, he retired
into Brittany, his native country, with his two daughters; the youngest,
Louise, being amiable and pretty; the eldest, plain and ungraceful. The
dissimilarity of the two sisters, the one universally pleasing, the
other displeasing everybody, created such misunderstanding between them
that their father was obliged to separate them. He kept the plain
daughter at home, and placed the younger and pretty one as a boarder in
a neighbouring town to that in which he lived. Louise thereby acquired
accomplishments which enhanced her natural charms. She was sharp,
cunning, insinuating, and having gained the confidence and goodwill of
the lady to whose care her father had entrusted her, the former
introduced her amongst her relations and general society. In that circle
Mademoiselle Querouaille ere long inspired passions, rumours of which
reached the ears of the old wool-merchant. Fearing lest his daughter
might but too thoughtlessly respond to the attentions of which she was
the object, he withdrew her from the boarding-house, and took her to
Paris, where he left her under the care of his sister-in-law, then a
widow. Her husband had been a dependent of the Duke de Beaufort, and she
herself lived, for the most part, upon the bounty of that nobleman, who,
on reconciling himself with the Court after the Fronde, had obtained the
post of high-admiral of France. Shortly after the arrival of Louise in
Paris, in 1669, the Duke seeing her walking in the Tuileries gardens
with her relative, and being struck with the young girl's beauty, and
moreover it is said with the effect which she produced upon the public,
became suddenly enamoured of her. The author of the _Histoire secrète_
relates the manoeuvres resorted to by Beaufort and Louise to deceive the
vigilance, more affected than real, as it would seem, of her old aunt.
In short, the Duke's passion made rapid progress; and the young girl,
yielding to the wishes of a lover who adored her and heaped magnificent
presents upon her, allowed herself to be carried off by him at the
moment that he was about to enter upon his naval command. That
expedition had for its object the succour of the Venetians, who for some
twenty-four years had been blockaded by the Turks in Candia.
Mademoiselle Querouaille, disguised as a page, embarked with the Duke,
who, shortly after landing, was cut to pieces in action. An officer of
the French force, whom the before-cited chronicle merely designates as a
marquis, and to whom Beaufort had confided the secret of his love,
offered to conduct Louise back to France. It appears that Mademoiselle
Querouaille would have preferred to have been accompanied on her return
by a certain smart page who had been in the Duke's service, but the
marquis did not give her the option of such a choice. Yet, though Louise
could not withdraw herself from the protection of the latter, there is
no reason to believe that he forced his love upon her. The anonymous
chronicler concedes that much; but, in his opinion, the Marquis might
have hoped that Louise would have acknowledged his care and respect by
the same favours which she had accorded to "Beaufort, and," he adds,
"one may presume that a girl who previously, urged by love, had allowed
the Duke to carry her off to Candia, could do no less for a man who
showed her so much attention on the voyage back to France." More or less
just as these inductions may be, it appears quite certain that this same
prank of Mademoiselle Querouaille was the foundation of her fortunes. In
giving his friends an account of the expedition in which he had taken
part, the Marquis did not omit the episode of the Duke de Beaufort's
pretended page. Henrietta of England, to whom this romantic tale was
carried, became desirous of seeing the heroine of it, and Louise
Querouaille was therefore duly introduced to the Duchess. The fictitious
Cherubino was cunning enough to represent herself as being the victim of
a forcible abduction. Henrietta listened to her story with the liveliest
interest, took her into her household, and soon afterwards admitting her
amongst the number of her maids of honour. Louise, at the age of
nineteen, was thus at once introduced to all the pleasures and
temptations of a magnificent and dissipated court. Her introduction took
place at a critical moment (1669), and, in deciding her future, fate
has made her destiny and character matter of history.
The conquest or the ruin of Holland had long been one of the favourite
projects of Louis the Fourteenth. The Dutch, however, resisted his
overgrown power, as their ancestors had formerly defied that of Philip
the Second of Spain. In order to carry his plans into execution, Louis
found it necessary to detach England from the interests of Holland. This
was matter of some difficulty, for an alliance with France against
Holland was so odious to all parties in England, so contrary to the
national prejudices and interests, that though Louis did not despair of
cajoling or bribing Charles into such a treaty, the utmost caution and
secresy were necessary in conducting it.
The only person who was at first trusted with this negotiation was the
Duchess of Orleans. She was at this time about five-and-twenty, "a
singular mixture of discretion, or rather dissimulation, with rashness
and petulance; of exceeding haughtiness, with a winning sweetness of
manner and disposition which gained all hearts." She was not, however,
exactly pretty or well made, but had the dazzlingly fair complexion of
an Englishwoman, "un teint de rose et de jasmin," a profusion of light
hair, with eyes blue and bright as those of Pallas. She had inherited
some of the nobler qualities of her grandfather, Henri Quatre, and all
the graces and intriguing spirit of her mother, Henrietta Maria. Early
banished from England by the misfortunes of her family, she regarded the
country of her birth with indifference, if not abhorrence, and was a
Frenchwoman in education, manners, mind, and heart. She possessed
unbounded power over the mind of Charles the Second, whose affection for
her was said to exceed that of a brother for a sister; he had never
been known to refuse her anything she had asked for herself or others,
and Louis trusted that her fascinations would gain from the king of
England what reason and principle and patriotism would have denied.
The shrewdness of mind and inclination for intrigue which characterised
his sister-in-law's maid-of-honour did not escape the observation of
Louis. In her he found an apt as well as willing instrument in the
secret negotiation of which he had constituted her mistress the
plenipotentiary. For such compliance the manners of the time may, to a
certain extent, furnish La Querouaille with an excuse. At Versailles,
ideas of honour and morality had lost their ordinary signification: the
men envied generally the lot of Amphitryon, and the women lost every
instinct of modesty when it became a question about satisfying a caprice
of Jupiter. Breathing such a vitiated atmosphere, and having so many
lamentable examples before her eyes, Mademoiselle Querouaille saw only
the dazzling side of the proposition made to her--the hope of reigning
despotically over the heart of a great prince, and of becoming the equal
of that La Vallière whose _elevation_ was the object of so much envy and
feminine ambition.
It was arranged, therefore, that the piquant Bas-Bretonne should be
brought under the notice of the amorous Charles II. during a visit to
him, arranged to take place at Dover. In order to give the interview
between the royal brother and sister the appearance of an accidental or
family meeting, the pretext of a progress to his recently acquired
Flemish territories was resorted to by Louis, who set out with his
queen, his two mistresses De Montespan and La Vallière, the Duchess of
Orleans and Mademoiselle de Montpensier, with their respective retinues,
and attended by the most beautiful women of the Court. The splendour
exhibited on this occasion exceeded all that had been witnessed, even
during the reign of this pomp-loving monarch. Thirty thousand men
marched in the van and rear of the royal party; some of them destined to
reinforce the garrisons of the conquered country, others to work upon
the fortifications, and others again to level the roads. It was a
continued series of fêtes, banquets, and triumphs, the ostensible
honours being chiefly for Madame de Montespan; the real object of this
famous journey, well-nigh unparalleled for its lavish and luxurious
ostentation, was known only to Henrietta of England, who enjoyed in
secret her own importance, and this gave a new zest to the pleasures
with which she was surrounded.
On reaching Dunkirk, the Duchess of Orleans embarked for England with
her maid-of-honour and a small but chosen retinue, and met Charles at
Dover, where this secret negotiation was initiated. The result
anticipated came to pass, and proved that Louis had not miscalculated
the power of his sister-in-law over her easy-going and unscrupulous
brother. Charles fell into the snare laid for him, and Henrietta carried
most of the points of that disgraceful treaty, which rendered the King
of England the pensioned tool of France, and his reign the most abject
in the annals of her native country.
Aiming rather to stimulate than gratify the languid desires of her
brother for fresh feminine novelty, the Duchess of Orleans, with
finished finesse, appeared not to perceive the attention which the
piquant charms and almost childish grace of her young maid-of-honour won
from the captivated King. Nor did she, at her departure, leave Louise in
England, as some historians have erroneously supposed. In order to
render the impression which her fair attendant had made upon Charles
more deep and lasting, it was sought by her absence to incite the desire
felt by her royal brother to retain her in his Court. The secret
negotiation with which Louis had entrusted his sister-in-law had not
been, in fact, yet completed. To conduct it to a prosperous termination,
to preserve perfect harmony between France and England, it was still
needful to make use of another kind of female influence. It was
necessary, moreover, that such influence should become permanent--a
thing hitherto very difficult at courts wherein the fair sex disputed
strenuously and shamelessly for the royal favour. But thus much seemed
certain--that the key to the will of the sovereign of Great Britain had
been found in Mademoiselle Louise Querouaille.
Charles had indeed written in reply to his sister, on the 8th July of
the preceding year (1668), that "in every negotiation she shall have a
share, which will prove how much I love her." In August he told the
French ambassador--"The Duchess of Orleans passionately desires an
alliance between me and France; and as I love her tenderly, I shall be
happy to let her see what power her entreaties have over me." Henrietta,
probably, did not consider that by thus bringing her brother into
alliance with France she was betraying her native country. She no doubt
thought rather of augmenting the greatness of Charles than of benefiting
England. The sea should be given up to England; the territory of
Continental Europe to France. Louis XIV. expressly declared, in
opposition to the views of Colbert, "that he would leave commerce to the
English--three-fourths of it at least--that all he cared for was
conquest." But that would have involved, as a first step, the conquest
of England herself, and have cost torrents of blood. The fascinating
Henrietta, doubtless, did not perceive this when she trod so far in the
fatal footsteps of her ancestress, Mary Stuart. She had none of her rash
violence, but not a little of her spirit of romantic intrigue, and that
feminine delight of having in hand a tangled skein, of which she held
securely the end of the thread.
The secret negotiation of the treaty, however, went on between the two
kings. Louis had submitted to exorbitant conditions on the score of
money, and to another, moreover, sufficiently weighty. It was that
Charles, converted to the Romish faith, should share with him in the
conquest of Holland, should send a considerable military force thither,
and should keep for himself the Dutch islands opposite to England--an
advantage so enormous to the latter power that it would have rendered
national the odious alliance, and glorified the treason.
Two points still remained unsettled: first, to persuade Charles to
commence the war before his conversion--a step considered easy to
obtain; but that conversion terrified him when the moment came for
carrying it out. Secondly--and which proved the most difficult--was to
induce him to despatch very few troops--too few to take and afterwards
hold the territory promised him. Louis XIV. stipulated to send 120,000
men there; Charles II. engaged to furnish 6000, which number his sister
prevailed upon him to reduce to 4000.
Such was the sad, disgraceful, deplorable negotiation imposed by the
great King upon his sister-in-law. She had always obeyed him (as she
herself said), and she obeyed him in this matter, rendering her brother
doubly a traitor by his abandonment of the latter condition, which
lessened his treason.
Everybody had envied the Duchess her visit to England, none knew the
bitterness it entailed. The King confided in her, and yet distrusted
her. Otherwise he would not have had her accompanied by the pretty doll,
with her baby face, whose office it was to ensnare the licentious
Charles. Henrietta was compelled to take her over to England, and, in
fact, to chaperone her. For such self-abasement the King had handsomely
rewarded the compliant maid-of-honour, promising to give her an estate,
and so much per head for each bastard she might have by Charles of
England.
Henrietta endured all this shameful bargaining, hoping that her royal
brother would obtain from the Pope the dissolution of her marriage with
the worthless, stupid, profligate Duke of Orleans, on whom her wit and
charms were equally thrown away. She might then remain at his court and
be the virtual Queen of England, by governing him through female
influence. Her brilliant hopes, however, were destined to be speedily
dissipated, and her career cut short by a painful and treacherous death.
On her return from England, two surprises awaited her: not only did she
find the Duke, her husband, exasperated against her, but what she had
least of all expected, the King very cold in his demeanour towards her.
Louis had got from her all he desired. His changed attitude emboldened a
cabal in her own household to effect her destruction. Those who formed
it were creatures of her husband's detestable favourite, the Chevalier
de Lorraine, whom they believed had been banished by the King through
her entreaties. The poor Duchess wept bitterly on finding that she had
now no support from any one about her. The Duke, in the exercise of his
marital authority, took her from Court, not permitting her any longer to
visit Versailles. The King might have insisted upon her attendance
there but did not. In tears, she suffered herself to be carried off to
St. Cloud. There she felt herself alone, with every hand against her.
The weather was excessively hot. On her arrival at St. Cloud, she took a
bath, which made her ill, but she soon recovered from it, and during two
days was tolerably well--eating and sleeping. On the 28th of June she
asked for a cup of chicory, drank it, and at the same moment became red,
then pale, and shrieked aloud. The poor Duchess, commonly so patient
under pain, gave way under the excess of her anguish, her eyes filled
with tears, and she exclaimed that she was dying.
Inquiries were made about the water the Duchess had drunk, and her
waiting-woman said that she had not prepared it herself, but had ordered
it to be made, and then asked that some of it might be given her, drank
of it; but there is no evidence to show that the water had not been
changed in the interval.
Was it an attack of cholera, as was said? The symptoms in no wise
indicated that species of disorder. The Duchess's health was very much
shattered, and she was doubtless liable to be rapidly carried off. But
the event had very plainly been hastened (as in the case of Don Carlos);
nature had been assisted. The Duke's valets--who were, as to fidelity,
much more the servants of his banished favourite, the Chevalier de
Lorraine--comprehended that, in the approaching alliance of the two
kings, and the need they would have of each other's confidence, the
Duchess might in some moment of tenderness recover her absolute power
over the King, who would in such event sweep his brother's household
clear of them all. They well knew the Court, and surmised that, if she
were to die, the alliance would nevertheless be maintained, and the
matter hushed up; that she would be lamented, but not avenged; that
facts accomplished would be respected.
Good care was taken not to confide the secret to the wretched Duke, her
husband; it was even thought that it might be possible to get him out of
the way--to keep him in Paris, where by chance, indeed, he was detained.
Philip of Orleans was really astonished when he beheld his agonised
wife, and ordered an antidote to be given her; but time was lost in
administering the _poudre de vipère_. The Duchess asked only for an
emetic, and the doctors obstinately refused her one. Strange, too, the
King, who, on his arrival, remonstrated with them, was equally
unsuccessful in obtaining for the sufferer that which she craved. The
medicos held steadily to their opinion: they had pronounced it to be
cholera, and they would not swallow their own words.
Were they in the plot? That did not follow. For, besides the
professional pride which forbade them to belie themselves, they might
fear to discover more than they wished--to act in a very uncourtier-like
manner by discovering traces but too evident of poisoning. In such case
the alliance, perhaps, might have been broken off, and the projects of
both King and clergy for the Dutch and English crusade have come to
nothing. Such blundering fellows would never have been forgiven. So the
physicians were prudent and politic. It was altogether a grievous
spectacle. Here was a woman universally beloved, yet who inspired no one
with any strong feeling. Everybody was interested--went and came; but no
one would assume any responsibility, no one obeyed her last and constant
prayer. She wanted to eject the poison by the aid of an emetic. No one
dared to give it her. "Look," she exclaimed, "my nose is gone--shrunk
to nothing." It was observed, in fact, that it was already like that of
an eight days' corpse. For all that, they stuck to the doctors' opinion:
"It is nothing." With only one exception, nobody seemed uneasy about
her; some even laughed. Mademoiselle de Montpensier alone showed
indignation at all this heartless indifference, and had the courage to
remark that "At any rate they should endeavour to save her soul," and
went in search of a confessor.
The people belonging to the household, one and all, recommended that the
curé of St. Cloud should be sent for, certain that, as he was unknown to
the Duchess, their mistress would confess nothing of moment to him.
Mademoiselle, however, would not hear of him as confessor. "Fetch
Bossuet," she said, "and meanwhile call in the Canon Feuillet."
Feuillet was a very wary ecclesiastic, and quite as prudent as the
physicians. He persuaded _Madame_ to offer herself up as a sacrifice to
Heaven without accusing anyone. The Duchess said, in fact, to Marshal de
Grammont, "They have poisoned me--but by mistake." She exhibited
throughout an admirable discretion and perfect gentleness. She embraced
the Duke, her husband, whispering to him--in allusion to the outrageous
arrest of the Chevalier de Lorraine--that she had "never been unfaithful
to him."
The English Ambassador having arrived, she spoke to him in English,
telling him to conceal from her brother that she had been poisoned. The
Abbé Feuillet, who had not quitted her, overhearing the word "_poison_,"
stopped her, saying, "_Madame_, think only of God now!" Bossuet, who
next came in, continues Feuillet, confirmed her in those thoughts of
self-abnegation and discretion. For a long time back, she had looked to
Bossuet to console her in that supreme moment. She desired that after
her decease an emerald ring should be given to him which she had
reserved for that purpose.
By degrees, however, the unfortunate Duchess found herself left almost
alone. The King had taken his departure, after manifesting great
emotion, and the Duke also in tears. All the Court had disappeared.
Mademoiselle de Montpensier was too much affected to bid her farewell.
She was sinking fast, felt an inclination to sleep, woke up suddenly,
inquired for Bossuet, who placed a crucifix in her hand, and, whilst in
the act of embracing it, she expired. The clock at that moment struck
three, and the first faint light of dawn was visible (June 29th, 1670).
The English Ambassador expressed a desire to be present at the
_post-mortem_ examination, and the doctors did not fail to pronounce the
cause of her death to be an attack of _cholera morbus_ (so Mademoiselle
de Montpensier states), and that mortification had for some time past
set in. He was not the dupe of such opinion; neither was Charles II.,
who, at first, indignantly refused to receive the letter addressed to
him by the Duke of Orleans. But to persevere in such a line of conduct
would have been to bring about a rupture of the pending negotiation and
the loss of the French subsidy. He calmed down, therefore, and pretended
to believe the explanations that were offered him. It was, however,
remembered that the Chevalier de Lorraine, the Duke's unworthy
favourite, had openly accused _Madame_ as the instigator of his
banishment; and Saint-Simon asserts that the King, before consenting to
his brother marrying again, was resolved to know whether he had really
had the Duchess poisoned, and with that view summoned Furnon,
Henrietta's master of the household. From him he learned that the
poison had been sent from Italy by the Chevalier de Lorraine to
Beauveau, equerry to the Duchess, and to D'Effiat, her captain of the
guard, but without the knowledge of the Duke. "It was that
_maître-d'hôtel_ who himself related it," says Saint-Simon, "to M. Joly
de Fleury, from whom I had it."
A story but too probable. But that which appears incredible, and which
nevertheless is quite certain, was that the poisoners were perfectly
successful, that shortly after the crime the King permitted the
Chevalier de Lorraine to serve in the army, appointed him
marshal-de-camp, and allowed him to return to Court. What explanation,
what palliation, can there be for such an enormous outrage to our common
humanity? It has truly been said that "the intrigues which led to the
murder of the unfortunate Henrietta of England present such a scene of
accumulated horrors and iniquity, that, for the honour of human nature,
one could wish that the curtain had never been raised which hid them
from our knowledge."
The last political act of the Duchess of Orleans was one of decisive
import, and calculated to secure for a long time the subjection of the
English nation. Although seriously afflicted by the death of his sister,
the thoughtless Charles seemed especially occupied with the design of
bringing over to England the attractive maid-of-honour who had made such
a lively impression upon him, as had been intended, during the short
visit to Dover already mentioned. On the melancholy tidings of
Henrietta's death reaching England, the profligate Duke of Buckingham
was despatched to Paris as envoy extraordinary, ostensibly to inquire
into the particulars of that catastrophe but in reality, as Burnet
says, to conclude the treaty. This he accomplished; France agreeing to
give two millions of livres (£150,000) for Charles's conversion to
popery, and three millions a year for the Dutch war. Large sums of money
were also distributed to Buckingham, Arlington, and Clifford.
Buckingham, that complaisant companion of "the merry monarch," who,
"everything by turns and nothing long," having been the first to observe
the impression the mignonne maid-of-honour had made on the King's
susceptible fancy, had little hesitation in attaching to his diplomatic
office the very undignified one of Sir Pandarus, and therefore with a
brave defiance of decorum bent all his efforts to overcome the scruples,
if any there might be, lingering in the mind of Louise with regard to
transferring herself to the service of the Queen of England, poor
Catherine of Braganza. As she was then placed through the death of the
Duchess of Orleans, a convent was the only retreat Mademoiselle
Querouaille could look forward to in France; and as religious seclusion
was not at all congenial to the lively nymph, she was not found
impracticable to Buckingham's overtures. Nor were the latter's efforts
entirely disinterested in the matter. He had lately had a fierce quarrel
with "old Rowley's" imperious mistress, the Duchess of Cleveland, and
having sworn hatred and revenge against that profligate beauty, sought
to turn the French maid-of-honour to his own advantage by raising up a
rival in the King's affections, who should be wholly governed by
himself. He therefore represented seriously to Louis that the only way
to secure Charles to French interests was to give him a French mistress;
and he told Charles jestingly that he ought to take charge of his
sister's favourite attendant, if only out of "decent tenderness for her
memory."
The delicate affair, in short, was soon arranged; an invitation, so
formally worded as to wear the semblance of propriety, was sent from the
English Court, and Louise immediately departed for Dieppe, escorted by
part of the Duke of Buckingham's suite, and his grace's promise to join
her with all convenient speed. But, as usual with the man whose
"ambition was frequently nothing more than a frolic, and whose best
designs were for the foolishest ends," who "could keep no secret nor
execute any design without spoiling it," he totally forgot both the lady
and his promise, and, leaving the forsaken demoiselle at Dieppe to cross
the Straits as she best might, sailed to England by way of Calais. Lord
Montagu, then our Ambassador at Paris, hearing of the Duke's escapade,
immediately sent over for a yacht, and ordered some of his own
attendants to convey her, with all honour, to Whitehall, where she was
received by Lord Arlington with all respect, and forthwith appointed
maid-of-honour to the Queen.
The intoxication of Charles was complete, and the man who had supported
patiently the furious outbreaks of Barbara Palmer[10] and the saucy
petulence of Nell Gwynne, was the more able to appreciate "les grâces
décentes" of the foreign maid-of-honour, who, in the profaned walls of
Whitehall, diffused the delicate odour of Versailles.
[10] Duchess of Cleveland.
The purpose of her receiving an appointment at the Court of St. James's
was apparently foretold, for Madame de Sévigné thus writes to her
daughter:--"Ne trouvez-vous pas bon de savoir que Querouaille dont
l'étoile avait été devineé avant qu'elle partit, l'a suivie
très-fidèlement? Le roi d'Angleterre l'a aimée, elle s'est trouvée avec
une légère disposition à ne le pas haïr."[11]
[11] Letter 190.
It is doubtful, however, whether Charles did immediately enjoy his
conquest. If it be noted that the Duke of Richmond only came into the
world in 1672, we may be led to suppose that Mademoiselle Querouaille
did not yield without hesitation to the desires of her royal lover; and
that supposition becomes almost a certitude, when one reads this passage
of a letter which Saint-Evremond addressed to his fair countrywoman:--
"Suffer yourself rather to follow the bent of your temptation,
instead of listening to your pride. Your pride would soon cause you
to be sent back to France, and France would fling you, as has been
the lot of many others, into some convent. But allowing that you
should choose of your own free will that dismal kind of retreat,
still it would be necessary beforehand to render yourself worthy of
entering therein. What a figure you would cut there, if you had not
the character of a penitent! True penitence is that which afflicts
and mortifies us at the recollection of our faults. Of what has a
good girl to be penitent who has done nothing wrong? You would
appear ridiculous in the eyes of the other nuns, who, repenting
from just motives, should discover that your repentance was only
grimace."
Louise committed the error of not only approving the advice of that
equivocal monitor, but the greater error of following it. Experience
came very soon to open her eyes.
In 1672, as has been said, the Querouaille having presented the King
with a son, her favour increased considerably. In 1673 she was created
_Duchess of Portsmouth_, and at the close of the same year Louis XIV.,
alike to flatter the King of England, and to confirm him in his alliance
with himself against Holland, as to reward the good offices of Louise
Querouaille, conferred upon the latter the domain of D'Aubigny, in
Berry. This domain given, in 1422, by Charles VII. to John Stuart, "as a
token of the great services which he had rendered in war to that King,"
had reverted to the crown of France. In the letter of donation which
Louis sent to Charles, it stated that "after the death of the Duchess of
Portsmouth, the demesne of Aubigny shall pass to such of the natural
children of the King of Great Britain as he shall nominate." Charles II.
nominated Charles Lennox (his son by Querouaille), and created him Duke
of Richmond on the 19th of August, 1675.
Although _maîtresse-en-titre_, and favourite mistress as she became, she
could not, however, prevent the unworthy and frequent resort of the
debauched prince to rivals of a lower grade, and Madame de Sévigné
penned some amusing lines on the subject of those duplicate
amours:--"Querouaille has been in no way deceived; she had a mind to be
the King's mistress, she has her wish. He passes almost every evening in
her company, in presence of the whole Court. She has a child which has
just been acknowledged, and on whom two duchies have been bestowed. She
amasses wealth, and makes herself feared and respected wherever she can;
but she could not foresee finding a young actress in her path by whom
the King is bewitched.... He shares his attentions, his time, and his
health between them both. The actress is quite as proud as the Duchess
of Portsmouth: she spites her, makes wry faces at her, assails her, and
often carries the King off from her. She boasts of those points in which
she is preferable--that she is young, silly, bold, debauched, and
agreeable; that she can sing, dance, and play the part _de bonne foi_.
She has a son by the King, and is determined that he shall be
acknowledged. Here are her reasons:--'This Duchess,' she says, 'acts
the person of quality; she pretends that she is related to everybody in
France. No sooner does any grandee die, than she puts on mourning. Ah
well! if she is such a great lady, why did she condescend to become a
_catin_? She ought to expire with shame: for myself, it is my
profession; I don't pique myself on anything else. The King keeps me; I
am at present his solely. I have brought him a son, whom I intend he
shall acknowledge, and I am assured that he will, for he loves me quite
as well as he does his Portsmouth.' This creature takes the top of the
walk, and embarrasses and puts the Duchess out of countenance in a most
extraordinary manner."
In Mrs. Nelly, with all her good qualities, Charles had not found
exactly a rose without thorns to stick in his button-hole. In her too
wild fun, or spirit of mockery, she was apt, as most others, to give
demonstration of all the variety of her woman's nature and her woman's
wit, and to make her baffled and humbled sovereign wish in his inmost
heart that he had never had anything to do with her.
Such were the annoyances--doubtless unforeseen by Mademoiselle
Querouaille on quitting France, and to which La Vallière and Montespan
were not exposed in the Court of the _Grand Monarque_, where vice itself
put on airs of grandeur and majesty. It must be owned, however, that
Madame de Sévigné exaggerates when she pretends to establish a sort of
equilibrium between the position of the actress and that of the Duchess.
The triumphs of Nell Gwynne were triumphs of the alcove; whilst her
Grace of Portsmouth reigned without a rival over the realm of diplomacy.
Charles II. was in the habit of passing a great portion of his time in
her apartments, where often, in the midst of a joyous circle, he met
Barillon, the French Ambassador, who, from his agreeable manners, was
freely admitted to all the amusements of the indolent monarch. It was by
means of these frequent conversations that, seizing the favourable
moment, the Duchess and the Ambassador succeeded in obtaining an order
which suddenly changed the face of Europe, by bringing about the
signature of the Treaty of Niméguen, and more than once it fell to her
lot to obtain a success of the same kind, to which neither her arrogant
Grace of Cleveland nor the piquant Nelly could ever pretend. In
political affairs the Querouaille held her own triumphantly over all her
rivals, and obtained a dominion that ended only with the life of
Charles. Too sensible to exact a strict fidelity from the King, the
Duchess of Portsmouth was content to sigh in silence so long as her
womanly feelings alone were sported with; but when it seemed likely that
the influence which she strove to utilise to the profit of France might
be trenched upon, her resentment broke forth in sudden and sweeping
ebullitions which even the dread of a public scandal was impotent to
repress. The correspondence of Bussy-Rabutin furnishes us with a scene
of that description:--
"It is rumoured that Querouaille has been sermonising the King,
crucifix in hand, as well both to wean him from other women as to
bring him back to Christianity: in fact, it appears that she
herself has been very near the point of death. However, three or
four days afterwards, finding herself better, she rose from her
bed, and dragged herself into the box where the King was seeing a
play in company with Madame de Mazarin, and there she overwhelmed
him with endless reproaches for his infidelity. Love and jealousy
are strong passions."
Hortensia Mancini, Duchess de Mazarin, who was commonly thought to be
the finest woman in Europe, and more than that--a very great lady, aunt
of the Duchess of York, might have easily supplanted the "baby-faced"
Querouaille in the inconstant heart of Charles Stuart, but that the
haughty Italian paid small attention to the predilections of that
prince, whom she cut to the quick by receiving before his face the
advances of the Prince de Monaco, and so Charles returned "_à ses
premières amours_." That phrase, somewhat vague in so far as it applies
to the sensual instincts of a man who did not even believe in
friendship, describes at least accurately that passionate feeling with
which the Duchess of Portsmouth had inspired him. Under certain
circumstances--very rare, it is true--she went so far as to sacrifice to
him entirely her political _rôle_, and when the question of the famous
"bill of exclusion" arose, she was seen to throw herself at the King's
feet, and implore her royal lover not to rush headlong to
destruction;[12] entreating him to abandon, if it must be so, the
interests of his brother and those of Catholicism, rather than
compromise his crown and life. Such proceeding appears still more
generous, if we reflect that, in spite of the irregular position which
she had accepted, the Duchess had remained deeply attached to her
religion and her native country, and that at that juncture no one was
ignorant that an era of persecution was about to commence for the
reformed Churches of France. Two years later, on the eve of the Niméguen
treaty, the decline of the great reign was already foreshadowed; the
influence of incapable though _right-thinking_ men became daily more
marked, and the star of the austere Frances d'Aubigny (Maintenon) arose
slowly above the horizon. Conversions at any price were clamoured for,
and no extent of sacrifice deterred the proselytisers from bringing back
within the fold souls of quality, save leaving one day to Louvois'
dragoons the charge of enlightening the Protestant vulgar. The Duchess
of Portsmouth was, together with the Duchess of York, at the head of the
English propagandists, and, curious enough, a regular exchange of
edifying letters took place between the future foundress of Saint-Cyr
and the joyous sinner of the Court of St. James's. Louis XIV., desirous
of duly recompensing the services of the royal favourite, conferred upon
her by letters-patent dated January, 1684, the French title of Duchess
d'Aubigny.
[12] Macaulay.
Thus had Louise Querouaille reached the summit of her rapid prosperity;
but a great turn of chance was at hand, and in a moment she was about to
be hurled from that dizzy height.
Lord Macaulay has graphically sketched the memorable scene in which she
figured so creditably when Charles was struck with his fatal seizure. On
the 2nd of February, 1685, "scarcely had Charles risen from his bed when
his attendants perceived that his utterance was indistinct, and that his
thoughts seemed to be wandering. Several men of rank had, as usual,
assembled to see their sovereign shaved and dressed. He made an effort
to converse with them in his usual gay style; but his ghastly look
surprised and alarmed them. Soon his face grew black; his eyes turned in
his head; he uttered a cry, staggered, and fell into the arms of one of
his lords. A physician, who had charge of the royal retorts and
crucibles, happened to be present. He had no lancet; but he opened a
vein with a penknife. The blood flowed freely; but the King was still
insensible.
"He was laid on his bed, where, during a short time, the Duchess of
Portsmouth hung over him with the familiarity of a wife. But the alarm
had been given. The Queen and the Duchess of York were hastening to the
room. The favourite concubine was forced to retire to her own
apartments. Those apartments had been thrice pulled down and thrice
rebuilt by her lover to gratify her caprice. The very furniture of the
chimney was massive silver. Several fine paintings, which properly
belonged to the Queen, had been transferred to the dwelling of the
mistress. The sideboards were piled with richly wrought plate. In the
niches stood cabinets, masterpieces of Japanese art. On the hangings,
fresh from the looms of Paris, were depicted, in tints which no English
tapestry could rival, birds of gorgeous plumage, landscapes, hunting
matches, the lordly terrace of Saint-Germain's, the statues and
fountains of Versailles.[13] In the midst of this splendour, purchased
by guilt and shame, the unhappy woman gave herself up to an agony of
grief, which, to do her justice, was not wholly selfish."
[13] Evelyn's Diary, Jan. 24, 1681-2. Oct. 4, 1683.
On the morning on which the King was taken ill, the Duchess of York had,
at the request of the Queen, suggested the propriety of procuring
spiritual assistance. "For such assistance," continues Macaulay,
"Charles was at last indebted to an agency very different from that of
his pious wife and sister-in-law." A life of frivolity and vice had not
extinguished in the Duchess of Portsmouth all sentiments of religion, or
all that kindness which is the glory of her sex. The French Ambassador,
Barillon, who had come to the palace to inquire after the King, paid her
a visit. He found her in an agony of sorrow. She took him into a secret
room, and poured out her whole heart to him. "I have," she said, "a
thing of great moment to tell you. If it were known, my head would be in
danger. The King is really and truly a Catholic; but he will die
without being reconciled to the Church. His bedchamber is full of
Protestant clergymen. I cannot enter it without giving scandal. The Duke
is thinking only of himself. Speak to him. Remind him that there is a
soul at stake. He is master now. He can clear the room. Go this instant,
or it will be too late."
Barillon hastened to the bedchamber, took the Duke aside, and delivered
the message of the mistress. The conscience of James smote him. He
started as if roused from sleep, and declared that nothing should
prevent him discharging the sacred duty which had been so long delayed.
Several schemes were discussed and rejected. At last the Duke commanded
the crowd to stand aloof, went to the bed, stooped down, and whispered
something which none of the spectators could hear, but which they
supposed to be some question about affairs of state. Charles answered in
an audible voice, "Yes, yes, with all my heart." None of the bystanders,
except the French Ambassador, guessed that the King was declaring his
wish to be admitted into the bosom of the Church of Rome.
The difficulty was to find a priest at a moment's notice; for, as the
law then stood, the person who admitted a proselyte into the Roman
Catholic Church was guilty of a capital crime. John Huddleston, a
Benedictine monk, however, who had, with great risk to himself, saved
the King's life after the battle of Worcester, readily consented to put
his life a second time in peril for his prince. Father Huddleston was
admitted by the back door. A cloak had been thrown over his sacred
vestments; and his shaven crown was concealed by a flowing wig. "Sir,"
said the Duke, "this good man once saved your life. He now comes to save
your soul." Charles faintly answered, "He is welcome." Huddleston went
through his part better than had been expected, for he was so illiterate
that he did not know what he ought to say on an occasion of so much
importance, and had to be instructed on the spot by a Portuguese
ecclesiastic, one Castel Melhor. The whole ceremony occupied about
three-quarters of an hour; and, during that time, the courtiers who
filled the outer room had communicated their suspicions to each other by
whispers and significant glances. The door was at length thrown open,
and the crowd again filled the chamber of death.
It was now late in the evening. The King seemed much relieved by what
had passed. His natural children were brought to his bedside--the Dukes
of Grafton, Southampton, and Northumberland, sons of the Duchess of
Cleveland; the Duke of St. Albans, son of Eleanor Gwynne; and the Duke
of Richmond, son of the Duchess of Portsmouth. Charles blessed them all,
but spoke with peculiar tenderness to Richmond. One face, which should
have been there, was wanting. The eldest and best beloved child was an
exile and a wanderer. His name was not once mentioned by his father.
During the night Charles earnestly recommended the Duchess of Portsmouth
and her boy to the care of James; "And do not," he good-naturedly added,
"let poor Nelly starve." The Queen sent excuses for her absence by
Halifax. She said she was too much disordered to resume her post by the
couch, and implored pardon for any offence which she might unwittingly
have given. "She asks my pardon, poor woman!" cried Charles; "I ask hers
with all my heart."
At noon of the next day (Friday, February 6th) he passed away without a
struggle.
As it commonly happens in the sequel of such sudden and mournful events,
the most absurd rumours did not fail to be circulated on the subject of
Charles's death. According to one, the Duchess of Portsmouth had
poisoned the King with a cup of chocolate; another asserted that the
Queen had poisoned him with a jar of preserved pears. Time has done
justice to these ridiculous suspicions; but that which will probably
never be discovered is the exact nature of the unfortunate monarch's
malady, whom a deplorable fatality caused to fall into the hands of
ignorant physicians who, not being able to agree amongst themselves,
tortured the patient haphazard for many hours together.
Hume, at the end of his dissertation upon the hypothesis of the
poisoning of Charles, relates the following anecdote:--"Mr. Henley, of
Hampshire, told me that the Duchess of Portsmouth having come to England
in 1699, he learned that she had caused it to be understood that Charles
II. had been poisoned, and that, being desirous of ascertaining the fact
from the Duchess's own mouth, she told him that she continually urged
the King to place himself at his ease as well as his people, and to live
in perfect understanding with his Parliament; that he had taken the
resolution of sending his brother out of the kingdom, and to convoke a
Parliament, which was to have been put in execution on the day after
that upon which he was seized with his first access; that, above
everything, the King recommended her to keep it secret, and that she had
only revealed it to her confessor; but she believed that her confessor
had revealed the secret to persons who made use of that evil means of
preventing the _coup d'état_."
If such, indeed, was the political attitude of the Duchess during the
last months of Charles's life, it may be conceived that the supreme
recommendations of the dying monarch may have exercised little influence
over the predetermined resolves of his ignoble successor, and it
explains the sudden step she took to regain her native country. On her
return to France she carried with her a large treasure in money and
jewels. She had come to England poor, had lived there in splendour, but
without much care for the future, and having proudly enjoyed a
full-blown prosperity, was now about to endure adversity with courageous
resolution. Having quarrelled with James II., the Duchess could not
think of taking up her abode at Versailles, where her position would not
have been tenable; she determined therefore to settle herself in Paris,
where her house and surroundings became the object of a rigorous
surveillance.
"It reached the King's ears," says Saint-Simon, "that great freedom of
speech prevailed in her circle, and that she herself spoke very freely
of him and Madame de Maintenon, upon which M. de Louvois was directed to
prepare immediately a _lettre de cachet_ to exile her far away. Courtin
was an intimate friend of Louvois, who had a small house at Meudon,
where the former was accustomed to enter his cabinet unceremoniously at
all hours. On his entrance one evening, he found Louvois alone writing,
and whilst the minister was absorbed in that occupation, Courtin
perceived the _lettre de cachet_ lying upon the bureau. When Louvois had
finished writing, Courtin, with some emotion, asked him what that
_lettre de cachet_ was? Louvois told him its purpose. Courtin remarked
that it was surely an ungracious act, for that, even if the report were
true, the King might be content to go no further than advising her to be
more circumspect. He begged and entreated him to tell the King so on his
part before acting upon the _lettre de cachet_; and that, if the King
would not believe his words, he should get him, before going further, to
look at the despatches of his negotiations with England, especially
those relating to the important results he had obtained through the
Duchess of Portsmouth at the time of the Dutch war, and during the whole
of his embassy; and that after such services rendered by her, it would
be dishonour to himself to forget them. Louvois, who remembered it all
very well, after Courtin had reminded him of several important facts,
suspended the execution of the _lettre de cachet_, and gave the King an
account of the interview, and of what Courtin had said; and upon such
testimony, which recalled several facts to the King's mind, he ordered
the _lettre de cachet_ to be thrown into the fire, and had the Duchess
of Portsmouth admonished to be more reserved in future. She defended
herself stoutly from what had been imputed to her, and, true or false,
she took heed in future of the nature of the conversation which was held
at her house.
Louis XIV., become a bigot and a persecutor, suffered none but silent
and submissive slaves to surround him. The Duchess showed herself docile
to Courtin's advice, and passed in profound obscurity the many long
years which, remained to her of existence. Saint-Simon and Dangeau say
nothing more about her, save to enregister the meagre favours which the
Court measured out with an avaricious hand, and that woman, to whom was
owing the signature of the Treaty of Niméguen, was reduced in 1689 to
solicit a pension of 20,000 livres, which was considerably diminished
when the disasters soon afterwards happened which impoverished the
French nation.
Such was the parsimony exercised by the great Monarch towards a woman
who had laboured strenuously for French interests so long as her sway
over Charles of England lasted, and which sway only ceased with his
life. "Therein she employed unceasingly all her talent for politics, all
her fascinations, all her wit," says the English chronicler already
cited, and whose object has been, according to his translator, anonymous
like himself, to demonstrate that if Charles II. acted in a way so
little conformable to the interests not only of several foreign states,
but still more of his own kingdom, it was the Duchess of Portsmouth who
urged him to it, through the passion with which she had inspired him, by
her cunning, and the power she possessed over his mind. The same
translator afterwards remarks, that "this lady obtained more easily from
the King in a moment and with a _coup de langue_ things the most
unreasonable and the most contrary to true policy, than all the most
judicious, the most voluble, the most insinuating persons could obtain
from him in matters infinitely reasonable and just." Without attributing
to the Duchess of Portsmouth a power of action so prejudicial to the
interests of the British nation as her anonymous biographer has done,
who wrote under the excitement of discontent caused, says Lyttleton, by
"the strengthening of the alliance with France, the secret enemy of
England and the Protestant religion, as well as by a costly war with
Holland, her natural ally," Hume states that "during the rest of his
life Charles II. was extremely attached to Querouaille, and that this
favourite contributed greatly to the close alliance between her own
country and England." Voltaire, without particularising the effects of
the ascendancy of the Duchess of Portsmouth over Charles II., says that
that monarch "was governed by her to the very last moment of his life."
He adds that "her beauty equalled that of Madame de Montespan, and that
she was in England what the other beauty had been in France, but with
more influence." This assertion, accurate as it is so far as concerns
political influence--for Madame de Montespan never exercised any over
the government of Louis XIV.--is not equally so with regard to the
question of beauty. On that head, indeed, the Duchess had her
detractors. "I have seen that famous beauty, Mademoiselle Querouaille,"
wrote Evelyn in his _Diary_, about a month after her arrival in England;
"but, in my opinion, she is of a childish, simple, and baby face."
PART III.
BOOK I.
CHAPTER I.
TWO LADIES OF THE BEDCHAMBER DURING THE WAR OF THE SPANISH SUCCESSION,
LADY CHURCHILL AND THE PRINCESS DES URSINS--POLITICAL MOTIVES FOR THEIR
ELEVATION IN ENGLAND AND SPAIN.
AT the outset of that historic period known as the _War of the Spanish
Succession_ a remarkable feature presents itself in the fact that two
women were chosen to be, as it were, its advanced sentinels--the one of
the Austrian party in England, the other of the French party in Spain.
These were Lady Churchill (wife of the famous soldier, Marlborough),
first lady of the bedchamber to our Queen Anne, and the Princess des
Ursins, fulfilling, under the title of _Camerara-Mayor_, the same
functions for the new Queen of Spain, Marie-Louise of Savoy, first wife
of Philip V.
The perpetual struggle previously waged between France and Spain for two
centuries constitutes a theme of no ordinary interest. True, that in
modern times armed interventions and dynastic and family tendencies have
attested the political predominance of the former power, but it was not
so in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the bigoted Philip
II. looked upon himself as the head of all Catholicism and the
vicegerent of God on earth. The general character of the struggle, the
events, the men, the results, are all worthy of consideration, and
replete with illustrations of historical and political adventure. Every
effort made by the two great adversaries shook Europe to its centre, and
the ultimate result of each has always been in favour of the great cause
of religious and political freedom. Two centuries of warfare between two
absolute governments and two states so profoundly Catholic gave birth to
the first European republic--Holland; and served to confirm the power of
the great Protestant state--England; and to establish religious liberty
in Germany.
A brief glance at the more immediate circumstances which brought about
this _War of Succession_ may here be necessary. The Treaty of the
Pyrenees had terminated the long struggle above alluded to; peace being
cemented by the marriage of the Infanta Maria Theresa, daughter of
Philip IV. of Spain, to the young Louis XIV. of France, on the 3rd of
June, 1660. The royal husband renounced for himself and his heirs all
right of succession to the Spanish throne, but was promised in return a
moderate dowry, which, however, was only partially paid. Forty years
after this marriage, Charles II. of Spain, widowed, childless, and
broken in health, selected as his successor Prince Leopold of Bavaria,
but he died when five years old. In this difficulty Charles consulted
Pope Innocent XII., who decreed that the children of the Dauphin of
France were the true, only, and legitimate heirs. But this negotiation
was conducted with such profound secresy that it was only after the
accession of Philip V., grandson of Louis XIV., that the Pope's
interference became public.
The Holy Father's reply, however, was so positive, that all the scruples
of Charles II. were removed. His previous will was immediately burnt in
the presence of his confessor; and a new one drawn up wherein Philip
d'Anjou was declared absolute heir to the crown and kingdom of Spain;
which, in the event of his demise, were to devolve to the Duke de Berri,
third son of the Dauphin; and, he failing, to the Archduke Charles; with
the reservation, as regarded the two first, that they should not unite
in their own persons the sovereignties of France and Spain; and in that
of the third that he should renounce all claim to the empire of Germany
if he ever became heir to the Spanish throne; while it was, moreover,
finally decreed that, if by any extraordinary concatenation of events,
neither of those three princes should be enabled to claim the bequest of
Charles II., it should devolve upon the Duke of Savoy without any
restriction whatever.
The precaution was well-timed; for shortly afterwards, Charles, losing
the use of his faculties, descended into the vaults of the Escurial,
where he had commanded the tombs of his father, mother, and first wife
to be opened in order that he might consult their tenants upon the
sacred obligations of the will he had just signed. Wildly interrogating
the mouldering relics, upon which he imprinted impassioned kisses, the
unfortunate monarch fell senseless upon an adjacent tomb, destined
shortly to receive his own remains, and was carried from those gloomy
sepulchres back to his couch only to be borne back again in a few short
days a corpse.
The royal will--the subject of so much gloomy meditation, of discussions
the most anxious in the councils of the Escurial, and of intrigues the
most active on the part of the foreigner, had been accepted by Louis
XIV. in the name of his grandson, the Duke d'Anjou. The cabinet of
Versailles, hoping to ally the Duke of Savoy to its policy, had brought
about a marriage between Philip V. and the daughter of Victor Amadeus
II., Marie Louise, sister of the young Duchess of Burgundy. The House of
Hapsburg, during a period of almost hopeless anarchy, had exhausted its
efforts in the attempt to establish a political duality in Spain. "If
the government of that monarchy be closely scrutinised," wrote Count de
Rébenac,[14] "it will be found that disorder everywhere prevails to an
excessive degree; but that, in the condition in which matters stand,
scarcely any change can be ventured upon without risk of incurring
dangers more to be dreaded than the existing evils, and a complete
revolution would be necessary before perfect order in the state could be
re-established." Rébenac added that it was not the elements of strength
that were wanting to Spain, but that they were scattered as in a chaos,
and that no master-mind existed capable of reducing them to order and
unity. The dynasty, in fact, which reigned at Madrid at that juncture
had passed from incapacity to impotence, and henceforward there only
remained to Spain her _law of succession_ to rescue her from her
abasement. The miserable Charles II. was then making and unmaking his
will continually--sometimes indicating a prince of Bavaria as his
successor, at others a prince of the house of Austria. At last he chose,
as has been said, a grandson of Louis XIV., in the hope of interesting
France in the preservation of the duality of the monarchy. Two years
afterwards one half of Europe was in arms to hurl the youthful Philip
from his throne.
[14] Memoirs of Count de Rébenac's Embassy to Spain in 1689, MS. No.
63, fol. 224, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.