THE RIVAL SISTERS
It was an unkind fate that linked the lives of the fifteenth Louis of
France and Marie Leczinska, Princess of Lorraine, and daughter of
Stanislas, the dethroned King of Poland; for there was probably no
Princess in Europe less equipped by nature to hold the fickle allegiance
of the young French King, and no Royal husband less likely to bring
happiness into the life of such a consort.
When Princess Marie was called to the throne of France, she found
herself transported from one of the most penurious and obscure to the
most splendid of the Courts of Europe--"frightened and overwhelmed," as
de Goncourt tells us, "by the grandeur of the King, bringing to her
husband nothing but obedience, to marriage only duty; trembling and
faltering in her queenly rôle like some escaped nun lost in Versailles."
Although by no means devoid of good-looks, as Nattier's portrait of her
at this time proves, her attractions were shy ones, as her virtues were
modest, almost ashamed.
She shrank alike from the embraces of her husband and the gaieties of
his Court, finding her chief pleasure in music and painting, in long
talks with the most serious-minded of her ladies, in Masses and
prayers--spending gloomy hours in her oratory with its death's head,
which she always carried with her on her journeys. Such was the nun-like
wife whom Louis XV. led to the altar shortly after he had entered his
sixteenth year, and had already had his initiation into that career of
vice which he pursued with few intervals to the end of his life.
Already, at fifteen, the King, who has been mockingly dubbed "_le bien
aimé_" was breaking away from the austere hands of his boyhood's mentor,
Cardinal Fleury, and was beginning to snatch a few "fearful joys" in the
company of his mignons, such as the Duc de La Tremouille, and the Duc de
Gesvres, and a few gay women of whom the sprightly and beautiful
Princesse de Charolois was the ringleader. But he was still nothing more
than "a big and gloomy child," whose ill-balanced nature gravitated
between fits of profound gloom and the wild abandonment of debauch; one
hour, torn and shaken by religious terrors, fears of hell and of death;
the next, the very soul of hysterical gaiety, with words of blasphemy on
his lips, the gayest member of a band of Bacchanals in some midnight
orgy.
To such a youth, feverishly seeking distraction from his own black
moods, the demure, devout Princess, ignorant of the caresses and
coquetry of her sex, moving like a spectre among the brilliant,
light-hearted ladies of his Court, was the most unsuitable, the most
impossible of brides. He quickly wearied of her company, and fled from
her sighs and her homilies to seek forgetfulness of her and of himself
in the society of such sirens of the Court as Mademoiselle de
Beaujolais, Madame de Lauraguais, and Mademoiselle de Charolois, whose
coquetries and high spirits never failed to charm away his gloomy
humours.
But although one lady after another, from that most bewitching of
madcaps, Mademoiselle de Charolois, to the dark-eyed, buxom Comtesse de
Toulouse, practised on him all their allurements, strove to awake his
senses "by a thousand coquetries, a thousand assaults, the King's
timidity eluded these advances, which amused and alarmed, but did not
tempt his heart; that young monarch's heart was still so full of the
aged Fleury's terrifying tales of the women of the Regency."
Such coyness, however, was not long to stand in the way of the King's
appetite for pleasure which every day strengthened. One day it began to
be whispered that at last Louis had been vanquished--that, at a supper
at La Muette, he had proposed the health of an "Unknown Fair," which had
been drunk with acclamation by his boon-companions; and the Court was
full of excited speculation as to who his mysterious charmer could be.
That some new and powerful influence had come into the young sovereign's
life was abundantly clear, from the new light that shone in his eyes,
the laughter that was now always on his lips. He had said "good-bye" to
melancholy; he astonished all by his new vivacity, and became the leader
in one dissipation after another, "whose noisy merriment he led and
prolonged far into the night."
It was not long before the identity of the worker of this miracle was
revealed to the world. She had been recognised more than once when
making her stealthy way to the King's apartments; she was his chosen
companion on his journey to Compiègne; and it was soon public knowledge
that Madame de Mailly was the woman who had captured the King's elusive
heart. And indeed there was little occasion for surprise; for Madame de
Mailly, although she would never see her thirtieth birthday again, was
one of the most seductive women in all France.
Black-eyed, crimson-lipped, oval-faced, Madame de Mailly was one of
those women who "with cheeks on fire, and blood astir, eyes large and
lustrous as the eyes of Juno, with bold carriage and in free toilettes,
step forward out of the past with the proud and insolent graces of the
divinities of some Bacchanalia." With the provocative and sensual charm
which is so powerful in its appeal, she had a rare skill in displaying
her beauty to its fullest advantage. Her cult of the toilette, the Duc
de Luynes tells us, went with her even by night. She never went to bed
without decking herself with all her diamonds; and her most seductive
hour was in the morning, when, in her bed, with her glorious dishevelled
hair veiling her pillow, a-glitter with her jewels, she gave audience to
her friends.
Such was the ravishing, ardent, passionate woman who was the first of
many to carry Louis' heart by storm, and to be established in his palace
as his mistress--to inaugurate for him a new life of pleasure, and to
estrange him still more from his unhappy Queen, shut up with her
prayers and her tears in her own room, with her tapestry, her books of
history, and her music for sole relaxation. "The most innocent
pleasures," Queen Marie wrote sadly at this time, "are not for me."
Under Madame de Mailly's rule the Court of Versailles awoke to a new
life. "The little apartments grow animated, gay to the point of licence.
Noise, merriment, an even gayer and livelier clash of glasses, madder
nights." Fête succeeded fête in brilliant sequence. Each night saw its
Royal debauch, with the King and his mistress for arch-spirits of the
revels. There were nightly banquets, with the rarest wines and the most
costly viands, supplemented by salads prepared by the dainty hands of
Mademoiselle de Charolois, and ragouts cooked by Louis himself in silver
saucepans. And these were followed by orgies which left the celebrants,
in the last excesses of intoxication, to be gathered up at break of day
and carried helpless to bed.
Such wild excesses could not fail sooner or later to bring satiety to a
lover so unstable as Louis; and it was not long before he grew a little
weary of his mistress, who, too assured of her conquest, began to
exhibit sudden whims and caprices, and fits of obstinacy. Her jealous
eyes followed him everywhere, her reproaches, if he so much as smiled on
a rival beauty, provoked daily quarrels. He was drawn, much against his
will, into her family disputes, and into the disgraceful affairs of her
father, the dissolute Marquis de Nesle.
Meanwhile Madame de Mailly's supremacy was being threatened in a most
unexpected quarter. Among the pupils of the convent school at Port Royal
was a young girl, in whose ambitious brain the project was forming of
supplanting the King's favourite, and of ruling France and Louis at the
same time. The idle dream of a schoolgirl, of course! But to Félicité de
Nesle it was no vain dream, but the ambition of a lifetime, which
dominated her more and more as the months passed in her convent
seclusion. If her sister, Madame de Mailly, had so easily made a
conquest of the King, why should she, with less beauty, it is true, but
with a much cleverer brain, despair? And thus it was that every letter
Madame received from her "little sister" pleaded for an invitation to
Court, until at last Mademoiselle de Nesle found herself the guest of
Louis' mistress in his palace.
Thus the first important step was taken. The rest would be easy; for
Mademoiselle never doubted for a moment her ability to carry out her
programme to its splendid climax. It was certainly a bold, almost
impudent design; for the girl of the convent had few attractions to
appeal to a monarch so surrounded by beauty as the King of France. What
the courtiers saw, says the Duc de Richelieu, was "a long neck clumsily
set on the shoulders, a masculine figure and carriage, features not
unlike those of Madame de Mailly, but thinner and harder, which
exhibited none of her flashes of kindness, her tenderness of passion."
Even her manners seemed calculated to repel, rather than attract the man
she meant to conquer; for she treated him, from the first, with a
familiarity amounting almost to rudeness, and a wilfulness to which he
was by no means accustomed. There was, at any rate, something novel and
piquant in an attitude so different from that of all other Court ladies.
Resentment was soon replaced by interest, and interest by attraction;
until Louis, before he was aware of it, began to find the society of the
impish, mocking, defiant maid from the convent more to his taste than
that of the most fascinating women of his Court.
The more he saw of her, the more effectually he came under her spell.
Each day found her in some new and tantalising mood; and as she drew him
more and more into her toils, she kept him there by her ingenuity in
devising novel pleasures and entertainments for him, until, within a
month of setting eyes on her, he was telling Madame de Mailly, he "loved
her sister more than herself." One of the first evidences of his favour
was to provide her with a husband in the Comte de Vintimille, and a
dower of two hundred thousand livres. He promised her a post as
lady-in-waiting to Madame la Dauphine and gave her a sumptuous suite of
rooms at Versailles. He even conferred on her husband the honour of
handing him his shirt on the wedding-night, an evidence of high favour
such as no other bridegroom had enjoyed.
It was thus little surprise to anyone to find the Comtesse-bride not
only her sister's most formidable rival, but actually usurping her place
and privileges. Nor was it long before this place, on which she had set
her heart first within the walls of the Port Royal Convent, was
unassailably hers; and Madame de Mailly, in tears and sadness, saw an
unbridgeable gulf widen between her and the man she undoubtedly had
grown to love.
That Félicité de Nesle had not over-estimated her powers of conquest was
soon apparent. Louis became her abject slave, humouring her caprices and
submitting to her will. And this will, let it be said to her credit, she
exercised largely for his good. She weaned him from his vicious ways;
she stimulated whatever good remained in him; she tried, and in a
measure succeeded in making a man of him. Under her influence he began
to realise that he was a King, and to play his exalted part more
worthily. He asserted himself in a variety of directions, from looking
personally after the ordering of his household to taking the reins of
State into his own hands.
Nor did she curtail his pleasures. She merely gave them a saner
direction. Orgies and midnight revelry became things of the past, but
their place was taken by delightful days spent at the Château of Choisy,
that regal little pleasure-house between the waters of the Seine and the
Forest of Sénart, with all its marvels of costly and artistic
furnishing. Here one entertainment succeeded another, from the hunting
which opened, to the card-games which closed the day. A time of innocent
delights which came sweet to the jaded palate of the King.
Thus the halcyon months passed, until, one August day in 1741, the
Comtesse was seized with a slight fever; Louis, consumed by anxiety,
spending the anxious hours by her bedside or pacing the corridor
outside. Two days later he was stooping to kiss an infant presented to
him on a cushion of cramoisi velvet. His happiness was crowned at last,
and life spread before him a prospect of many such years. But tragedy
was already brooding over this scene of pleasure, although none, least
of all the King, seemed to see the shadow of her wings.
One early day in December, Madame de Vintimille was seized with a severe
illness, as sudden as it was mysterious. Physicians were hastily
summoned from Paris, only, to Louis' despair, to declare that they could
do nothing to save the life of the Comtesse. "Tortured by excruciating
pain," says de Goncourt, "struggling against a death which was full of
terror, and which seemed to point to the violence of poison, the dying
woman sent for a confessor. She died almost instantly in his arms before
the Sacraments could be administered. And as the confessor, charged with
the dead woman's last penitent message to her sister, entered Madame de
Mailly's _salon_, he dropped dead."
Here, indeed, was tragedy in its most sudden and terrible form! The King
was stunned, incredulous. He refused to believe that the woman he had so
lately clasped in his arms, so warm, so full of life, was dead. And when
at last the truth broke on him with crushing force, he was as a man
distraught. "He shut himself up in his room, and listened half-dead to a
Mass from his bed." He would not allow any but the priest to come near
him; he repulsed all efforts at consolation.
And whilst Louis was thus alone with his demented grief, "thrust away in
a stable of the palace, lay the body of the dead woman, which had been
kept for a cast to be taken; that distorted countenance, that mouth
which had breathed out its soul in a convulsion, so that the efforts of
two men were required to close it for moulding, the already decomposing
remains of Madame de Vintimille served as a plaything and a
laughing-stock to the children and lackeys."
When the storm of his grief at last began to abate, the King retired to
his remote country-seat of Saint Leger, carrying his broken heart with
him--and also Madame de Mailly, as sharer of his sorrow; for it was to
the woman whom he had so lightly discarded that he first turned for
solace. At Saint Leger he passed his days in reading and re-reading the
two thousand letters the dead Comtesse had written to him, sprinkling
their perfumed pages with his tears. And when he was not thus burying
himself in the past, he was a prey to the terrors that had obsessed his
childhood--the fear of death and of hell.
At supper--the only meal which he shared with others, he refused to
touch meat, "in order that he might not commit sin on every side"; if a
light word was spoken he would rebuke the speaker by talk of death and
judgment; and if his eyes met those of Madame de Mailly, he burst into
tears and was led sobbing from the room.
The communion of grief gradually awoke in him his old affection for
Madame de Mailly; and for a time it seemed not unlikely that she might
regain her lost supremacy. But the discarded mistress had many enemies
at Court, who were by no means willing to see her re-established in
favour--the chief of them, the Duc de Richelieu, the handsomest man and
the "hero" of more scandalous amours than any other in France--a man,
moreover, of crafty brain, who had already acquired an ascendancy over
the King's mind.
With Madame de Tencin, a woman as scheming and with as evil a reputation
as himself, for chief ally, the Due determined to find another mistress
who should finally oust Madame de Mailly from Louis' favour; and her he
found in a woman, devoted to himself and his interests, and of such
surpassing loveliness that, when the King first saw her at Petit Bourg,
he exclaimed, "Heavens! how beautiful she is!"
Such was the involuntary tribute Louis paid at first sight to the charms
of Madame de la Tournelle, who was now fated to take the place of her
dead sister, Madame de Vintimille, just as the Comtesse had supplanted
another sister, Madame de Mailly.