THE REGENT'S DAUGHTER
Many unwomanly women have played their parts in the drama of Royal
Courts, but scarcely one, not even those Messalinas, Catherine II. of
Russia and Christina of Sweden, conducted herself with such a shameless
disregard of conventionality as Marie Louise Elizabeth d'Orléans, known
to fame as the Duchesse de Berry, who probably crowded within the brief
space of her years more wickedness than any woman who was ever cradled
in a palace.
It is said that this libertine Duchesse was mad; and certainly he would
be a bold champion who would try to prove her sanity. But, apart from
any question of a disordered brain, there was a taint in her blood
sufficient to account for almost any lapse from conventional standards
of pure living. Her father was that Duc d'Orléans who shocked the none
too strait-laced Europe of two centuries ago by his orgies; her
grandfather was that other Orleans Duke, brother of Louis XIV., whose
passion for his minions broke the heart of his English wife, the Stuart
Princess Henriettta; and she had for mother one of the daughters of
Madame de Montespan, light-o'-love to _le Roi Soleil_.
The offspring of such parents could scarcely have been normal; and how
far from normal Marie Louise was, this story of her singular life will
show. When her father, the Duc de Chartres, took to wife Mademoiselle de
Blois, Montespan's daughter, there were many who significantly shrugged
their shoulders and curled their lips at such a union; and one at least,
the Duc's mother, Elizabeth Charlotte, Princess Palatine, was
undisguisedly furious. She refused point-blank to be present at the
nuptials, and when her son, fresh from the altar, approached her to ask
her blessing, she retorted by giving the bridegroom a resounding slap on
the face.
Such was the ill-omened opening to a wedded life which brought nothing
but unhappiness with it and which gave to the world some of the most
degenerate women (in addition to a son who was almost an idiot) who have
ever been cradled.
The first of these degenerates was Marie Elizabeth, who was born one
August day in the year 1695, and who from her earliest infancy was her
father's pet and favourite. His idolatry of his first-born child,
indeed, is one of the most inscrutable things in a life full of the
abnormal, and in later years afforded much material for the tongue of
scandal. He was inseparable from her; her lightest wish was law to him;
he nursed her through her childish illnesses with more than the devotion
of a mother; and, as she grew to girlhood, he worshipped at the shrine
of her young beauty with the adoration of a lover and put her charms on
canvas in the guise of a pagan goddess.
The Duc's affection for his daughter, indeed, was so extravagant that
it was made the subject of scores of scurrilous lampoons to which even
Voltaire contributed, and was a delicious morsel of ill-natured gossip
in all the _salons_ and cabarets of Paris. At fifteen the princess was
already a woman--tall, handsome, well-formed, with brilliant eyes and
the full lips eloquent of a sensuous nature. Already she had had her
initiation into the vices that proved her undoing; for in a Court noted
for its free-living, she was known for her love of the table and the
wine-bottle.
Such was the Duc's eldest daughter when she was ripe for the altar and
became the object of an intrigue in which her scheming father, the Royal
Duchesses, the Duc de Saint-Simon, the King himself, and the Jesuits all
took a part, and the prize of which was the hand of the young Duc de
Berry, a younger son of the Dauphin, the grandson of King Louis.
Over the plotting and counterplotting, the rivalries and jealousies
which followed, we must pass. It must suffice to record that the King's
consent was at last won by the Orleans faction; Madame de Maintenon was
persuaded to smile on the alliance; and, one July day, the nuptials of
the Duc de Berry and the Orleans Princess were celebrated in the
presence of the Royal family and the Court. A regal supper followed;
and, the last toast drunk, the young couple were escorted to their room
with all the stately, if scarcely decent, ceremonial which in those days
inaugurated the life of the newly-wedded.
Seldom has there been a more singular union than this of the Duc
d'Orléans' prodigal daughter with the almost imbecile grandson of the
French King. The Duc de Berry, it is true, was good to look upon. Tall,
fair-haired, with a good complexion and splendid health, he was
physically, at twenty-four, no unworthy descendant of the great Louis.
He had, too, many amiable qualities calculated to win affection; but he
was mentally little better than a clown. His education had been
shamefully neglected; he had been suppressed and kept in the background
until, in spite of his manhood, he had all the shyness, awkwardness and
dullness of a backward child.
As he himself confessed to Madame de Saint-Simon, "They have done all
they could to stifle my intelligence. They did not want me to have any
brains. I was the youngest, and yet ventured to argue with my brother.
Afraid of the results of my courage, they crushed me; they taught me
nothing except to hunt and gamble; they succeeded in making a fool of
me, one incapable of anything and who will yet be the laughing-stock of
everybody."
Such was the weak-kneed husband to whom was now allied the most
precocious, headstrong young woman in all France; who, although still
short of her sixteenth birthday, was a past-mistress of the arts of
pleasure, and was now determined to have her full fling at any cost. She
had been thoroughly spoiled by her too indulgent father, who was even
then the most powerful man in France after the King; and she was in no
mood to brook restraint from anyone, even from Louis himself.
The pleasures of the table seem now to have absorbed the greater part
of her life. Read what her grandmother, the Princess Palatine, says of
her: "Madame de Berry does not eat much at dinner. How, indeed, can she?
She never leaves her room before noon, and spends her mornings in eating
all kinds of delicacies. At two o'clock she sits down to an elaborate
dinner, and does not rise from the table until three. At four she is
eating again--fruit, salad, cheese, etc. She takes no exercise whatever.
At ten she has a heavy supper, and retires to bed between one and two in
the morning. She likes very strong brandy." And in this last sentence we
have the true secret of her undoing. The Royal Princess was, even tat
this early age, a confirmed dipsomaniac, with her brandy bottle always
by her side; and was seldom sober, from rising to retiring.
To such a woman, a slave to the senses, a husband like the Duc de Berry,
unredeemed by a vestige of manliness, could make no appeal. She wanted
"men" to pay her homage; and, like Catherine of Russia, she had them in
abundance--lovers who were only too ready to pay court to a beautiful
Princess, who might one day be Queen of France. For the Dauphin was now
dead; his eldest son, the Duc de Bourgogne, had followed him to the
grave a few months later. Prince Philip had renounced his right to the
French crown when he accepted that of Spain; and, between her husband
and the throne there was now but one frail life, that of the
three-year-old Duc d'Anjou, a child so delicate that he might easily not
survive his great-grandfather, Louis, whose hand was already relaxing
its grasp of the sceptre he had held so long.
On the intrigues with which this Queen _in posse_ beguiled her days, it
is perhaps well not to look too closely. They are unsavoury, as so much
of her life was. Her lovers succeeded one another with quite bewildering
rapidity, and with little regard either to rank or good-looks. One
special favourite of our Sultana was La Haye, a Court equerry, whom she
made Chamberlain, and who is pictured by Saint-Simon as "tall, bony,
with an awkward carriage and an ugly face; conceited, stupid,
dull-witted, and only looking at all passable when on horseback."
So infatuated was the Duchesse with her ill-favoured equerry that
nothing less would please her than an elopement to Holland--a proposal
which so scared La Haye that, in his alarm, he went forthwith to the
lady's father and let the cat out of the bag. "Why on earth does my
daughter want to run away to Holland?" the Due exclaimed with a laugh.
"I should have thought she was having quite a good enough time here!"
And so would anyone else have thought.
And while his Duchesse was thus dallying with her multitude of lovers
and stupefying herself with her brandy bottle, her husband was driven to
his wits' end by her exhibitions of temper, as by her infidelities. In
vain he stormed and threatened to have her shut up in a convent. All her
retort was to laugh in his face and order him out of her apartment.
Violent scenes were everyday incidents. "The last one," says
Saint-Simon, "was at Rambouillet; and, by a regrettable mishap, the
Duchesse received a kick."
The Duc's laggard courage was spurred to fight more than one duel for
his wife's tarnished fame. Of one of these sorry combats, Maurepas
writes, "Her conduct with her father became so notorious that His Grace
the Duc de Berry, disgusted at the scandal, forced the Duc d'Orléans to
fight a duel on the terrace at Marly. They were, however, soon
separated, and the whole affair was hushed up."
But release from such an intolerable life was soon coming to the
ill-used Duc. One day, when hunting, he was thrown from his horse, and
ruptured a blood-vessel. Fearful of alarming the King, now near the end
of his long life, he foolishly made light of his accident, and only
consented to see a doctor when it was too late. When the doctors were at
last summoned he was a dying man, his body drained of blood, which was
later found in bowls concealed in various parts of his bedroom. With his
last breath, he said to his confessor, "Ah, reverend father, I alone am
the real cause of my death."
Thus, one May day in 1714, the Duchesse found herself a widow, within
four years of her wedding-day; and the last frail barrier was removed
from the path of self-indulgence and low passions to which her life was
dedicated. When, with the aged King's death in the following year, her
father became Regent of France, her position as daughter of the virtual
sovereign was now more splendid than ever; and before she had worn her
widow's weeds a month, she had plunged again, still deeper, into
dissipation, with Madame de Mouchy, one of her waiting-women, as chief
minister to her pleasures.
It was at this time, before her husband had been many weeks in his
grave, that the Comte de Riom, the last and most ill-favoured of her
many lovers, came on the scene. Nothing but a perverted taste could
surely have seen any attraction in such a lover as this grand-nephew of
the Duc de Lauzun, of whom the austere and disapproving Palatine Duchess
draws the following picture: "He has neither figure nor good-looks. He
is more like an ogre than a man, with his face of greenish yellow. He
has the nose, eyes, and mouth of a Chinaman; he looks, in fact, more
like a baboon than the Gascon he really is. Conceited and stupid, his
large head seems to sit on his broad shoulders, owing to the shortness
of his neck. He is shortsighted and altogether is preternaturally ugly;
and he appears so ill that he might be suffering from some loathsome
disease."
To this unflattering description, Saint-Simon adds the fact that his
"large, pasty face was so covered by pimples that it looked like one
large abscess.'" Such, then, was the repulsive lover who found favour in
the eyes of the Regent's daughter, and for whom she was ready to discard
all her legion of more attractive wooers.
With the coming of de Riom, the Duchesse entered on the last and worst
stage of her mis-spent life. Strange tales are told of the orgies of
which the Luxembourg, the splendid palace her father had given her, was
now the scene--orgies in which Madame de Mouchy and a Jesuit, one Father
Ringlet, took a part, and over which the evil de Riom ruled as "Lord of
merry disports." The Duchesse, now sunk to the lowest depths of
degradation, was the veriest puppet in his strong hands, flattered by
his coarse attentions and submitting to rudeness and ridicule such as
any grisette, with a grain of pride, would have resented.
When these scandalous "carryings-on" at the Luxembourg Palace reached
the Regent's ears and he ventured to read his daughter a severe lecture
on her conduct, she retaliated by snapping her fingers at him and
telling him in so many words to mind his own business. And to the tongue
of scandal that found voice everywhere, she turned a contemptuous ear.
She even locked and barred her palace gates to keep prying eyes at a
safe distance.
But, although she thus defied man, she was powerless to stay the steps
of fate. Her health, robust as it had been, was shattered by her
excesses; and when a serious illness assailed her, she was horrified to
find death so uncomfortably near. In her alarm she called for a priest
to shrive her; and the Abbé Languet came at the summons to bring her the
consolations of the Church. He refused point-blank, however, to give the
sinner absolution until the palace was purged of the presence of de Riom
and Madame de Mouchy, the arch-partners in her vices.
To this suggestion the Duchesse, perilous as her condition was, returned
an uncompromising "No!" If the Abbé would not absolve her--well, there
were other priests, less exacting, who would; and one such priest of
elastic conscience, a Franciscan friar, was summoned to her bedside.
Then ensued an unseemly struggle around the dying woman's bed, in which
the Regent, Cardinal Noailles, Madame de Mouchy, and the rival clerics
all played their parts.
While the obliging friar remained in the room awaiting an opportunity to
administer the last Sacrament, the Abbé and his curates kept watch at
the bedroom door to see that he did no such thing; and thus the siege
lasted for four days and nights until, the patient's crisis over, the
services of the Church were summarily dispensed with.
With the return of health, the Duchesse's piety quickly evaporated. It
is true that she had had a fright; and, by way of modified penitence,
she vowed to dress herself and her household in white for six months and
also to make a husband of her lover. Within a few weeks, de Riom led the
Regent's daughter to the altar, thus throwing the cloak of the Church
over the licence of the past.
Now that our Princess was once more a "respectable" woman, she returned
gladly to her old life of indulgence; until the Duchess Palatine
exclaimed in alarm, "I am afraid her excesses in drinking and eating
will kill her." And never was prediction more sure of early fulfilment.
When she was not keeping company with her brandy bottle, she was gorging
herself with delicacies of all kinds, from patties and fricassées to
peaches and nectarines, washed down with copious draughts of iced beer.
As a last desperate effort to reform her, at the eleventh hour, the
Regent packed de Riom off to his regiment. A few days later, the
Duchesse invited her father to a sumptuous banquet on the terrace at
Meudon, at which, regardless of her delicate health, she ate and drank
more voraciously than ever. The same evening she was taken ill; and
when, on the following Sunday, her mother-in-law, the Duchess, visited
her, she found the patient in a deplorable condition--wasted to a
"shadow" and burning with fever. "She was suffering such horrible pains
in her toes and under the feet," says the Duchess, "that tears came to
her eyes. She looked so very bad that three doctors were called in
consultation. They resolved to bleed her; but it was difficult to bring
her to it, for her pains were so great that the least touch of the
sheets made her shriek."
A few days later, in the early hours of 17th July, 1719, the Duchesse de
Berry passed away in her sleep. The life which she had wasted with such
shameless prodigality closed in peace; and at the moment when she was
being laid to rest in the Church of St Denis, Madame de Mouchy, blazing
in the dead woman's jewels, was laughing merrily over her
champagne-glass at a dinner-party to which she had invited all the
sharers in the orgies which had made the Palace of the Luxembourg
infamous!
The moral of this pitifully squandered life needs no pointing out. And
on reviewing it one can only in charity echo the words spoken by Madame
de Meilleraye of another sinner, the Chevalier de Savoie, "For my part,
I believe the good God must think twice before sending one born of such
parents to the nether regions."