THE PRINCESS QUITS MADRID BY COMMAND OF LOUIS XIV.--AFTER A SHORT EXILE
SHE RECEIVES PERMISSION TO VISIT VERSAILLES.
MADAME DES URSINS had received Louis XIV.'s command to withdraw into
Italy. Quitting Madrid as a State criminal (_en criminelle d'état_), the
Princess directed her steps towards the land indicated for her exile. We
must refer, however, to "The Memoirs of Saint Simon" those of our
readers who are desirous of admiring the presence of mind with which
Madame des Ursins, recalled thus unexpectedly and struck by the Olympian
bolt, suffered herself to be in nowise disconcerted, but skilfully
managed to retreat slowly and in good order, yielding ground only step
by step,[32] without appearing to disobey, she found time to arouse her
friends at Versailles into action, "who representing the severity of
such a fall for a dictatress of her quality, urged that the King, having
been obeyed, and having glutted his vengeance, a feeling of
commiseration ought to be shown thereafter, and that it was not
advisable to push the Queen to extremity." These reasons commented upon
by the Duke d'Harcourt, a man of great weight in the affairs of the
Peninsula, by Marshal de Villeroy and the Noailles, prevailed with Louis
XIV., who granted the Princess his permission, ardently solicited, to
stop at Toulouse and there take up her abode. That was but the first
step to a rehabilitation towards which laboured with equal ardour,
though by very different ways, the youthful spouse of Philip V. and the
grave companion of Louis XIV. Madame de Maintenon, accepting willingly
the part of missionary of Divine justice, held it as a point of honour
not to deceive the hope of the illustrious accused, who had attributed
those functions to her at a juncture so _à propos_. And whether that she
felt a real affection for Madame des Ursins, whether that she wished to
mitigate the Duchess of Burgundy's regret for her sister's vexation,
whether, in short, she feared to see Louis XIV. lose by so abrupt a
change all authority over the affairs of Spain, she was disposed in
every event to serve the exile. The Princess, to give time for the storm
to expend its fury, well knowing that acts hastily determined upon are
ordinarily the least durable, did not seek to hurry matters herself with
the French King, but wrote to Madame de Noailles, hoping that her letter
might be shown: "You are not ignorant of my attachment and respect for
Madame de Maintenon; the obligations that I owe her are ever present to
me, and the reliance that I place in the generosity of her heart."[33]
All the correspondence from Toulouse is in that vein, and, still
further, she adroitly represents herself as a victim, as a woman
disabused of worldly grandeur, and afflicted solely at having displeased
Louis XIV.
[32] "_A lents tours de roue._" St. Simon, tom. vii.
[33] Recueil of M. Geffroy, Letter lvi.
This conduct allayed the mutterings of the spent tempest. The court grew
accustomed to behold in her an unfortunate noblewoman resigned to her
exile with an antique patience.
At the end of four months passed in the capital of Languedoc, in the
depth of a retreat enlivened by an assiduous correspondence with the two
courts, Madame des Ursins received permission to appear at Versailles
and there to justify herself. The intervention of Madame de Maintenon
had nothing more in it than was perfectly natural under the
circumstances; not that she had the desire to govern Spain, as Saint
Simon affirms, nor even France, however entirely she might govern Louis
XIV. What she desired to establish on either side of the Pyrenees was a
species of moral control of the house of Bourbon. And, by keeping her
informed of the most minute particulars touching the King and Queen, by
inspiring the Duchess of Burgundy's sister with the duteous affection of
the elder for her _aunt_, Madame des Ursins rendered the Marquise de
Maintenon the only service the latter cared for, and the only one, to
speak the truth, which could add anything to her importance.
The motives of Louis XIV. were of a very different kind, and his politic
mind did not hesitate to sacrifice to them his grievances, however
legitimate they might be. Far from pacifying the Court of Spain, the
departure of the Princess des Ursins had been the signal for an outburst
of the most complete anarchy. To the rule exercised by the Queen had
succeeded an entire absence of direction, and matters were conducted
with an incoherence so shocking, that M. de Torcy having exhausted both
his advice and his patience, opened with perfect terror the despatches
drawn from that Pandora's box. The accord--at least apparent, which the
preponderance of Madame des Ursins had maintained among the members of
the _despacho_ by the intervention of the Duke de Montellano, her
creature, was abruptly broken up, and the Austrian party gathered
strength from the effect of that disorder and that universal
dissolution. The Archduke, proclaimed King of Spain by the Emperor under
the name of Charles III. and recognised in that quality by England and
Holland, had just landed at Lisbon; the campaign opened against the
Portuguese had ended, after some ephemeral successes, by a sort of
disbanding of the Spanish army, through want of clothing, pay, and
provisions, in the supply of which nothing was done after Orry's
departure, recalled to France from the same motives as the Princess.
Gibraltar, the defence of which had been confided by an inexplicable
negligence to fifty men, was torn away for ever by a handful of British
seamen from the crown of the Catholic kings; Catalonia, Arragon, the
kingdom of Valentia, made ripe for insurrection by the Prince of
Darmstadt, were on the eve of escaping from their allegiance. At the
beginning of 1705, the armies of Philip V. were composed of five or six
thousand men in rags, their tottering fidelity daily tampered with, and
the little band of French auxiliaries exhausted itself in fruitless
efforts to retake Gibraltar, which, covered as it was by the English
fleet, remained mistress of the Straits, after the first disaster
inflicted on the French marine in that war which was destined to cost it
its last vessel.
To the government of prime ministers, and still more that of women,
Louis XIV. had an insuperable antipathy. It must therefore have cost him
much to renounce the flattering hope of seeing his grandson make
practical application of the lofty instructions in which his personal
royalty reflected itself with so much splendour; but such a prince as he
knew but too well that a political idea is valueless when it remains
inapplicable. Impressed with the sorrowful conviction, he was compelled
to recognise that Philip's ailing temperament rendered all equilibrium
between intelligence and will impossible, so far so that that unhappy
Prince could not elude his fate save by escaping from himself. In the
approaching perils which the disasters of the French armies foreboded,
the hope of preserving Spain even under the dictation of Madame des
Ursins was better, after all, than the certainty of losing that crown by
estranging the _camarera-mayor_. After the battle of Blenheim, the
defection of the Duke of Savoy and the disastrous Italian campaign, the
restoration of the Princess to her charge was, on the part of Louis
XIV., a first concession to evil fortune, a determination for which his
sagacity triumphed over his repugnance. And so Saint Simon ought to have
seen, instead of representing the triumph obtained by Madame des Ursins
at Versailles as the inexplicable effect of a species of sudden
fascination.
That victory suddenly transformed her who was but a short time
previously an accused person into "a court divinity." The Spanish
ambassador, followed by a swarm of courtiers, went forth to meet her
outside the gates of Paris, and offered her his mansion during her stay
in the capital. There she received "all France" we are told.[34] Her
every look was interpreted, and the words she addressed to ladies of the
highest consideration impressed them with a rapturous sense of her
condescension. Nothing could exceed the King's attentions in every way
that could contribute to her honour and distinction, and from the
majestic fashion with which it was all received, with such a rare
admixture of grace and politeness it reminded the beholders of the early
days of the Queen-Mother. Whether the particular determination of the
King shone through this marked graciousness, or that the well-known
dexterity of the Princess did not allow of any doubt of her success, she
was welcomed on all hands, not with those timid precautions and that
ambiguous reserve which characterise the incertitude of courts, but
with that lively, prompt and decided enthusiasm which only greets
unclouded favour and assured fortune. At the balls which were given at
the royal residences, Louis XIV., the Duchess of Burgundy, and all the
princes treated her with the most affable condescension. If Louis XIV.
showed great tact in appearing to attribute to his conversations with
Madame des Ursins a preconceived resolution which had really been the
simple result of events, and if the easy grace of the gentleman covered
in some sort the retreat of the politician, it will be readily imagined
that the Princess did not suffer herself to be beaten in address. When
the desire to see her return to the side of the young Queen of Spain was
intimated to her, she spoke of the disgust with which the condition of
that miserable country filled her, and which made it impossible to do
any good there. To the King's impatience she opposed the impaired state
of her health, and placed herself under medical treatment, having at
that identical moment a real interest in being pronounced out of health.
She delayed from day to day a departure that was more and more pressed
for, cautiously making it understood that in order to avoid the mishaps
and the mistakes of the past, the safety of Spain must be sought in a
complete unity of direction, and that the inevitable preponderance of
the Queen would constrain the placing of that political direction, not
in the embassy, but in the Palace. This was to demand nothing less than
a _carte blanche_ to govern the kingdom; but however audacious in itself
such exigence might be, it offended no one, so glad were all concerned,
after so many mistakes, to find one head which could courageously
confront the responsibility of a situation that had become so perilous.
She was the only Frenchwoman who could govern Spain, and the cabinet of
Versailles, satisfied with having shown its strength, exhibited
henceforth that majestic condescendence towards her which is the
flattery made use of by monarchs in their relations with indispensable
agents.
[34] Saint Simon.
She was not in a hurry, therefore, to return to Madrid. Probably she was
anxious to enjoy her triumph, and by it to crush for a long while the
trembling jealousy of her enemies; perhaps, sure of setting out when she
chose, it was her aim to make her presence in Spain felt. Be that as it
may, we do not believe, as it has been supposed, that she herself was
tired of her political _rôle_ whatever may have been the mask with which
her prudence sought to cover her ambition during her disgrace, the
existence of that ambition is clear enough as a matter of history. We
admit nothing more, in answer to the insinuations of Saint Simon, that
dazzled with the royal favour she had dreamed of supplanting Madame de
Maintenon in the great King's confidence. Of a judgment eminently sound
and precise, she had too much of the practical in her character to
cradle her imagination with such chimæras. Madame des Ursins'
quick-sightedness fathomed all the advantages she might derive from the
general discouragement, and promised herself to let nothing be lost by
it either for herself or her dependents, however equivocal their
position might be towards her. She procured the admission of D'Aubigny
into the cabinet of Louis XIV., and, a thing more difficult still, into
that of Madame de Maintenon. She caused Orry to be reinstated in his
former functions, at the same time that one of her most dangerous
enemies, the father Daubenton, received an order to quit Madrid, where
his restless nullity had lost itself in a maze of intrigues. Authorised
in a manner to form her ministry, she nominated the President Amelot as
Ambassador for Spain, a diplomatist although very high minded, yet of
somewhat subaltern ability, one of the lights of that magistracy from
which Louis XIV. loved to recruit the staff of his government, and
whence Madame des Ursins herself sprung on her mother's side. The
Marshal de Tessé was appointed to the command of the army, and Orry, a
pupil of Colbert and a distinguished financier, was one of those clever
and hard-working citizens who were amongst the best of French ministers
of that epoch. This selection, equally excellent for both monarchs, was
better still for the Princess, to whom it guaranteed a valuable
concurrence without leaving her to apprehend any resistance. Those three
men, from the very moment of their arrival in Madrid, found themselves
face to face with two grave difficulties. The first was the opposition
of the grandees; the second, a foreign invasion. Aristocratic
conspiracies were hatching in the capital. The Archduke Charles had
landed in Catalonia, and several noblemen were endeavouring to clear the
road for him as far as Madrid. The Marquis de Leganez was the soul of
this plot. Ever since the accession of Philip V. he had eluded taking
the oath of allegiance: and later, summoned to take up arms against the
Archduke, he had refused. From that moment he became a suspected person.
His sole refuge was a conspiracy: and that was his destruction. Arrested
by order of the new administration, he was conducted to the fortress of
Pampeluna, afterwards to Bordeaux, whence his vain and tardy
protestations in favour of Philip V. failed to extricate him. This
energetic blow struck terror into the hearts of the grandees and
prepared the triumphal return of the Princess.