LOVE AFFAIRS
OF THE COURTS OF EUROPE
BY
THORNTON HALL, F.S.A.,
Barrister-at-Law,
Author of "Love romancies of the Aristocracy",
"Love intrigues of Royal Courts", etc., etc.
TO
MY COUSIN,
LENORE
CONTENTS
CHAP
I. A COMEDY QUEEN
II. THE "BONNIE PRINCE'S" BRIDE
III. THE PEASANT AND THE EMPRESS
IV. A CROWN THAT FAILED
V. A QUEEN OF HEARTS
VI. THE REGENT'S DAUGHTER
VII. A PRINCESS OF MYSTERY
VIII. THE KING AND THE "LITTLE DOVE"
IX. THE ROMANCE OF THE BEAUTIFUL SWEDE
X. THE SISTER OF AN EMPEROR
XI. A SIREN OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
XII. THE CORSICAN AND THE CREOLE
XIII. THE ENSLAVER OF A KING
XIV. AN EMPRESS AND HER FAVOURITES
XV. A SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY CINDERELLA
XVI. BIANCA, GRAND DUCHESS OF TUSCANY
XVII. RICHELIEU, THE ROUÉ
XVIII. THE INDISCRETIONS OF A PRINCESS
XIX. THE INDISCRETIONS OF A PRINCESS--_continued_
XX. THE LOVE-AFFAIRS OF A REGENT
XXI. A DELILAH OF THE COURT OF FRANCE
XXII. THE "SUN-KING" AND THE WIDOW
XXIII. A THRONED BARBARIAN
XXIV. A FRIEND OF MARIE ANTOINETTE
XXV. THE RIVAL SISTERS
XXVI. THE RIVAL SISTERS--_continued_
XXVII. A MISTRESS OF INTRIGUE
XXVIII. AN ILL-FATED MARRIAGE
XXIX. AN ILL-FATED MARRIAGE--_continued_
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
BIANCA CAPELLO BONAVENTURA GRAND DUCHESS OF TUSCANY
CATHERINE THE SECOND OF RUSSIA
COUNT GREGORY ORLOFF
DESIRÉE CLARY
JOSEPHINE DE BEAUHARNAIS, EMPRESS (BY PRUD'HON)
LOLA MONTEZ, COUNTESS OF LANDSFELD
LUDWIG I., KING OF BAVARIA
FRANCESCO I., GRAND DUKE OF TUSCANY
CAROLINE OF BRUNSWICK, WIFE OF GEORGE IV
LOVE AFFAIRS OF THE COURTS OF EUROPE
CHAPTER I
A COMEDY QUEEN
"It was to a noise like thunder, and close clasped in a soldier's
embrace, that Catherine I. made her first appearance in Russian
history."
History, indeed, contains few chapters more strange, more seemingly
impossible, than this which tells the story of the maid-of-all-work--the
red-armed, illiterate peasant-girl who, without any dower of beauty or
charm, won the idolatry of an Emperor and succeeded him on the greatest
throne of Europe. So obscure was Catherine's origin that no records
reveal either her true name or the year or place of her birth. All that
we know is that she was cradled in some Livonian village, either in
Sweden or Poland, about the year 1685, the reputed daughter of a
serf-mother and a peasant-father; and that her numerous brothers and
sisters were known in later years by the name Skovoroshtchenko or
Skovronski. The very Christian name by which she is known to history
was not hers until it was given to her by her Imperial lover.
It is not until the year 1702, when the future Empress of the Russias
was a girl of seventeen, that she makes her first dramatic appearance on
the stage on which she was to play so remarkable a part. Then we find
her acting as maid-servant to the Lutheran pastor of Marienburg,
scrubbing his floors, nursing his children, and waiting on his resident
pupils, in the midst of all the perils of warfare. The Russian hosts had
for weeks been laying siege to Marienburg; and the Commandant, unable to
defend the town any longer against such overwhelming odds, had announced
his intention to blow up the fortress, and had warned the inhabitants to
leave the town.
Between the alternatives of death within the walls and the enemy
without, Pastor Glück chose the latter; and sallying forth with his
family and maid-servant, threw himself on the mercy of the Russians who
promptly packed him off to Moscow a prisoner. For Martha (as she seems
to have been known in those days) a different fate was reserved. Her red
lips, saucy eyes, and opulent figure were too seductive a spoil to part
with, General Shérémétief decided, and she was left behind, a by no
means reluctant hostage.
Peter's soldiers, now that victory was assured, were holding high revel
of feasting and song and dancing. They received the new prisoner
literally with open arms, and almost before she had wiped the tears from
her eyes, at parting from her nurslings, she was capering gaily to the
music of hautboy and fiddle, with the arm of a stalwart soldier round
her waist.
"Suddenly," says Waliszewski, "a fearful explosion overthrew the
dancers, cut the music short, and left the servant-maid, fainting with
terror, in the arms of a dragoon."
Thus did Martha, the "Siren of the Kitchen," dance her way into Russian
history, little dreaming, we may be sure, to what dizzy heights her
nimble feet were to carry her. For a time she found her pleasure in the
attentions of a non-commissioned officer, sharing the life of camp and
barracks and making friends by the good-nature which bubbled in her, and
which was always her chief charm. When her sergeant began to weary of
her, she found a humble place as laundry-maid in the household of
Menshikoff, the Tsar's favourite, whose shirts, we are told, it was her
privilege to wash; and who, it seems, was by no means insensible to the
buxom charms of this maid of the laundry. At any rate we find
Menshikoff, when he was spending the Easter of 1706 at Witebsk, writing
to his sister to send her to him.
But a greater than Menshikoff was soon to appear on the scene--none
other than the Emperor Peter himself. One day the Tsar, calling on his
favourite, was astonished to see the cleanliness of his surroundings and
his person. "How do you contrive," he asked, "to have your house so well
kept, and to wear such fresh and dainty linen?" Menshikoff's answer was
"to open a door, through which the sovereign perceived a handsome girl,
aproned, and sponge in hand, bustling from chair to chair, and going
from window to window, scrubbing the window-panes"--a vision of industry
which made such a powerful appeal to His Majesty that he begged an
introduction on the spot to the lady of the sponge.
The most daring writer of fiction could scarcely devise a more romantic
meeting than this between the autocrat of Russia and the red-armed,
bustling cleaner of the window-panes, and he would certainly never have
ventured to build on it the romance of which it was the prelude. What it
was in the young peasant-woman that attracted the Emperor it is
impossible to say. Of beauty she seems to have had none--save perhaps
such as lies in youth and rude health.
We look at her portraits in vain to discover a trace of any charm that
might appeal to man. Her pictures in the Romanof Gallery at St
Petersburg show a singularly plain woman with a large, round
peasant-face, the most conspicuous feature of which is a hideously
turned-up nose. Large, protruding eyes and an opulent bust complete a
presentment of the typical household drudge--"a servant-girl in a German
inn." But Peter the Great, who was ever abnormal in all his tastes and
appetites, was always more ready to make love to a woman of the people
than to the most beautiful and refined of his Court ladies. His standard
of taste, as of manners, has not inaptly been likened to that of a Dutch
sailor.
But whatever it was in the low-born laundry-woman that attracted the
Tsar of Russia, we know that this first unconventional meeting led to
many others, and that before long Catherine (for we may now call her by
the name she made so famous) was removed from his favourite's household
and installed in the Imperial harem where, for a time at least, she
seems to have shared her favours indiscriminately between her old master
and her new--"an obscure and complaisant mistress"--until Menshikoff
finally resigned all rights in her to his sovereign.
When Catherine took up her residence in her new home, Waliszewski tells
us, "her eye shortly fell on certain magnificent jewels. Forthwith,
bursting into tears, she addressed her new protector: 'Who put these
ornaments here? If they come from the other one, I will keep nothing but
this little ring; but if they come from you, how could you think I
needed them to make me love you?'"
If Catherine lacked physical graces, this and many another story prove
that she had a rare gift of diplomacy. She had, moreover, an unfailing
cheerfulness and goodness of heart which quickly endeared her to the
moody and capricious Peter. In his frequent fits of nervous irritability
which verged on madness, she alone had the power to soothe him and
restore him to sanity. Her very voice had a magic to arrest him in his
worst rages, and when the fit of madness (for such it undoubtedly was)
was passing away she would "take his head and caress it tenderly,
passing her fingers through his hair. Soon he grew drowsy and slept,
leaning against her breast. For two or three hours she would sit
motionless, waiting for the cure slumber always brought him, until at
last he awoke cheerful and refreshed."
Thus each day the Livonian peasant-woman took deeper root in the heart
of the Emperor, until she became indispensable to him. Wherever he went
she was his constant companion--in camp or on visits to foreign Courts,
where she was received with the honours due to a Queen. And not only
were her presence and her ministrations infinitely pleasant to him; her
prudent counsel saved him from many a blunder and mad excess, and on at
least one occasion rescued his army from destruction.
So strong was the hold she soon won on his affection and gratitude that
he is said to have married her secretly within three years of first
setting eyes on her. Her future and that of the children she had borne
to him became his chief concern; and as early as 1708, when he was
leaving Moscow to join his army, he left behind him a note: "If, by
God's will, anything should happen to me, let the 3000 roubles which
will be found in Menshikoff's house be given to Catherine Vassilevska
and her daughter."
But whatever the truth may be about the alleged secret marriage, we know
that early in 1712, Peter, in his Admiral's uniform, stood at the altar
with the Livonian maid-servant, in the presence of his Court officials,
and with two of her own little daughters as bridesmaids. The wedding, we
are told, was performed in a little chapel belonging to Prince
Menshikoff, and was preceded by an interview with the Dowager-Empress
and his Princess sisters, in which Peter declared his intention to make
Catherine his wife and commanded them to pay her the respect due to her
new rank. Then followed, in brilliant sequence, State dinners,
receptions, and balls, at all of which the laundress-bride sat at her
husband's right hand and received the homage of his subjects as his
Queen.
Picture now the woman who but a few years earlier had scrubbed Pastor
Glück's floors and cleaned Menshikoff's window-panes, in all her new
splendours as Empress of Russia. The portraits of her, in her
unaccustomed glories, are far from flattering and by no means
consistent. "She showed no sign of ever having possessed beauty," says
Baron von Pöllnitz; "she was tall and strong and very dark, and would
have seemed darker but for the rouge and whitening with which she
plastered her face."
The picture drawn by the Margravine of Baireuth is still less
attractive: "She was short and huddled up, much tanned, and utterly
devoid of dignity or grace. Muffled up in her clothes, she looked like a
German comedy-actress. Her old-fashioned gown, heavily embroidered with
silver, and covered with dirt, had been bought in some old-clothes shop.
The front of her skirt was adorned with jewels, and she had a dozen
orders and as many portraits of saints fastened all along the facings of
her dress, so that when she walked she jingled like a mule."
But in the eyes of one man at least--and he the greatest in all
Russia--she was beautiful. His allegiance never wavered, nor indeed did
that of his army, which idolised her to a man. She might have no boudoir
graces, but at least she was the typical soldier's wife, and cut a brave
figure, as she reviewed the troops or rode at their head in her uniform
and grenadier cap. She shared all the hardships and dangers of
campaigns with a smile on her lips, sleeping on the hard ground, and
standing in the trenches with the bullets whistling about her ears, and
men dropping to right and left of her.
Nor was there ever a trace of vanity in her. She was as proud of her
humble origin as if she had been cradled in a palace. To princes and
ambassadors she would talk freely of the days when she was a household
drudge, and loved to remind her husband of the time when his Empress
used to wash shirts for his favourite. "Though, no doubt, you have other
laundresses about you," she wrote to him once, "the old one never
forgets you."
The letters that passed between this oddly assorted couple, if couched
in terms which could scarcely see print in our more restrained age, are
eloquent of affection and devotion. To Peter his kitchen-Queen was
"friend of my Heart," "dearest Heart," and "dear little Mother." He
complains pathetically, when away with his army, "I am dull without
you--and there is nobody to take care of my shirts." When Catherine once
left him on a round of visits, he grew so impatient at her absence that
he sent a yacht to bring her back, and with it a note: "When I go into
my rooms and find them deserted, I feel as if I must rush away at once.
It is all so empty without thee."
And each letter is accompanied by a present--now a watch, now some
costly lace, and again a lock of his hair, or a simple bunch of dried
flowers, while she returns some such homely gift as a little fruit or a
fur-lined waistcoat. On both sides, too, a vein of jocularity runs
through the letters, as when Catherine addresses him as "Your
Excellency, the very illustrious and eminent Prince-General and Knight
of the crowned Compass and Axe"; and when Peter, after the Peace of
Nystadt, writes: "According to the Treaty I am obliged to return all
Livonian prisoners to the King of Sweden. What is to become of thee, I
don't know." To which she answers, with true wifely (if affected)
humility: "I am your servant; do with me as you will; yet I venture to
think you won't send _me_ back."
Quite idyllic, this post-nuptial love-making between the great Emperor
and his low-born Queen, who has so possessed his heart that no other
woman, however fair, could wrest it from her. And in her exalted
position of Empress she practised the same diplomatic arts by which she
had won Peter's devotion. Politics she left severely alone; she turned a
forbidding back on all attempts to involve her in State intrigues, but
she was ever ready to protect those who appealed to her for help, and to
use her influence with her husband to procure pardon or lighter
punishment for those who had fallen under his displeasure.
Nor did she forget her poor relations in Livonia. One brother, a
postillion, she openly acknowledged, introduced to her husband, and
obtained a liberal pension for him; and to her other brothers and
sisters she sent frequent presents and sums of money. More she could not
well do during her husband's lifetime, but when she in turn came to the
throne, she brought the whole family--postillion, shoemaker,
farm-labourer and serf, their wives and families--to her capital,
installed them in sumptuous apartments in her palaces, decked them in
the finest Court feathers, and gave them large fortunes and titles of
nobility.
When the Tsar's quarrel with his eldest son came to its tragic
_dénouement_ in Alexis' death, her own son became heir presumptive to
the throne of Russia. And thus the chain that bound Peter to his Empress
received its completing link. It only remained now to place the crown
formally on the head of the mother of the new heir, and this supreme
honour was hers in the month of May, 1729.
Wonderful tales are told of the splendours of Catherine's coronation. No
existing crown was good enough for the ex-maid-of-all-work, so one of
special magnificence was made by the Court jewellers--a miracle of
diamonds and pearls, crowned by a monster ruby--at a cost of a million
and a half roubles. The Coronation gown, which cost four thousand
roubles, was made at Paris; and from Paris, too, came the gorgeous coach
with its blaze of gold and heraldry, in which the Tsarina made her
triumphal progress through the streets of the capital from the Winter
Palace. The culminating point of this remarkable ceremony came when,
after Peter had placed the crown on his wife's head, she sank weeping at
his feet and embraced his knees.
Catherine, however, had not worn her crown many months when she found
herself in considerable danger of losing not only her dignities but even
her liberty. For some time, it is said, she had been engaged in a
liaison with William Mons, a handsome, gay young courtier, brother to a
former mistress of the Tsar. The love affair had been common knowledge
at the Court--to all but Peter himself, and it was accident that at last
opened his eyes to his wife's dishonour. One moonlight night, so the
story is told, he chanced to enter an arbour in the palace gardens, and
there discovered her in the arms of her lover.
His vengeance was swift and terrible. Mons was arrested the same night
in his rooms, and dragged fainting into the Tsar's presence, where he
confessed his disloyalty. A few days later he was beheaded, at the very
moment when the Empress was dancing a minuet with her ladies, a smile on
her lips, whatever grief was in her heart. The following day she was
driven by her husband past the scaffold where her lover's dead body was
exposed to public view--so close, in fact, that her dress brushed
against it; but, without turning her head, she kept up a smiling
conversation with the perpetrator of this outrage on her feelings.
Still not content with his revenge, Peter next placed the dead man's
head, enclosed in a bottle of spirits of wine, in a prominent place in
the Empress's apartments; and when she still smilingly ignored its
horrible proximity, his anger, hitherto repressed, blazed forth
fiercely. With a blow of his strong fist he shattered a priceless
Venetian vase, shouting, "Thus will I treat thee and thine"--to which
she calmly responded, "You have broken one of the chief ornaments of
your palace; do you think you have increased its charm?"
For a time Peter refused to be propitiated; he would not speak to his
wife, or share her meals or her room. But she had "tamed the tiger" many
a time before, and she was able to do it again. Within two months she
had won her way back into full favour, and was once more the Tsar's
dearest _Katiérinoushka._
A month later Peter was dead, carrying his love for his peasant-Empress
to the grave, and Catherine was reigning in his stead, able at last to
conduct her amours openly--spending her nights in shameless orgies with
her lovers, and leaving the rascally Menshikoff to do the ruling, until
death brought her amazing career to an end within sixteen months of
mounting her throne.