peasants of that place curious to know the day. They came in great
numbers to Bar-sur-Aube, with the intention of witnessing the ceremony,
and remained there some days. Amongst them was a young peasant, a comely
young fellow, who came to Madame de Suremont and inquired bluntly for
Mademoiselle Filliette, a name by which my sister had formerly been known
in the country. ‘I know no such person,’ replied she: ‘whom do you mean
by Mademoiselle Filliette?’ ‘Why, madame,’ replied the clown, ‘the sister
of mademoiselle who is just married. Please tell her I am Colas, of
Fontette; she will recollect me.’
“Madame de Suremont communicated this to my sister, who, out of
compassion for the unfortunate rustic, refused to see him lest such an
interview should make him more unhappy. Durand, indeed, to detain my
sister in the country, had promised her in marriage to this peasant,
whose appearance was greatly in his favour, but the recognition of
her birth by the people in the neighbourhood had kindled in the bosom
of Marianne hopes of an alliance more consonant to her ideas, more
consistent with her present station. Far from despising this poor
creature, she wished to avoid giving him pain. She begged me, therefore,
to speak to him: I did so. ‘Good day, my dear friend,’ said I, ‘what are
your commands for my sister?’ ‘I wish, madame,’ replied he, ‘to have the
honour of paying my respects to her. She is of the same age, we have
stood sponsors together, and M. Durand, her godfather, promised me that
I should marry her. But her fortune is changed; she is now Mademoiselle
de Valois; and I am not quite such a fool as to think that she will have
me for her husband, as she is descended from the blood-royal; but I wish
to have the pleasure of seeing her in her fine clothes, for I am sure,’
continued he, bursting into tears, ‘she is very handsome!’[23] I could
not help shedding a tear of pity for this honest rustic. His grief,
however, was not to be alleviated; the presence of my sister would but
have increased his misery; at least she thought so, and could not be
prevailed upon to see him. Finding himself without hope, he went home
again, murmuring at what he termed the false-heartedness of his mistress.
“Some few days after I accompanied my sister to Fontette, where, it being
Sunday, we went to mass. All the peasants rose from their seats at our
entrance, and desired the curate should do us honour, as the children
of the Baron de Saint-Remi their late lord. We received the holy water
and the consecrated bread in the seat of honour; the bells were rung,
and every one testified their joy on our arrival. They crowded about the
house where we were staying; we ordered them six livres a-piece, for
which they testified their gratitude by drinking our healths, and the
health of the Baron de Saint-Remi de Valois, and his safe return. They
then conducted me to the mansion of my ancestors, and round the grounds
of the patrimonial estate. This mansion, this noble estate, thought I
to myself, might have been possessed by the descendants of those who
acquired it by valour,[24] and enjoyed it with hospitality. I lamented
the ravages of luxury: I thought of the credulity and easy temper of my
father, who sacrificed everything to the extravagance of his wife. Had it
not been for these he might have sustained the dignity of his ancestors,
and his miserable offspring have maintained that position to which they
were by birth entitled.”[25]
To provide herself with a suitable _trousseau_, Mademoiselle de Valois
had been obliged to raise one thousand livres on a mortgage of her
pension for two years; while, to defray the expenses incident to the
wedding, M. de la Motte, on his part, sold for six hundred livres a horse
and cabriolet which he had only bought a short time previously on credit
at Lunéville, where his corps was doing garrison duty.[26]
We will close this chapter with a pair of portraits of Monsieur and
Madame de la Motte, which their friend Beugnot has sketched for our
benefit. “M. de la Motte,” observes his rival, “was an ugly man, but well
made and skilled in all bodily exercises, whilst, despite his ugliness,
the expression of his face was amiable and mild. He did not exactly lack
talent, still what he possessed was frittered away on trifles. Destitute
of all fortune, he was clever enough to get head over ears in debt, and
only lived by his wits and on the trifling allowance of three hundred
francs a year which his uncle, M. de Suremont, was obliged to make him to
enable him to retain his position in the gendarmerie.”
With regard to Madame de la Motte, Beugnot says: “She was not exactly
handsome, was short in stature, slender, and well formed. Her blue
eyes were full of expression and over-arched with black eyebrows; her
face rather long; her mouth wide, but adorned with fine teeth, and,
what is the greatest attraction in such a face as hers, her smile was
enchanting. She had a pretty hand, a very small foot, and a complexion of
dazzling whiteness. When she spoke her mind exhibited no sign of acquired
knowledge, but she had much natural intelligence, and a quick and
penetrating understanding. Engaged in a perpetual conflict with society
from the time of her birth, she had learned to disdain its laws, and had
but little respect for those of morality.”
M. Beugnot adds the following anecdote:
“When I returned home that evening my father mentioned to me that fifteen
or twenty years previously, whenever he went to collect his rents in the
parish of Essoyes, the curé of Fontette never failed to tax his purse for
the poor children of Jacques de Saint-Remi, who were huddled together
in a dilapidated hovel with a trap-hole in front, through which soup,
vegetables, broken victuals, and other charitable doles were passed by
the neighbours.”[27]
VI.
1780–1782.
COUNTESS DE LA MOTTE.—IN BARRACKS AT LUNÉVILLE.—ON A FIFTH FLOOR IN
PARIS.—ENSNARES THE GRAND ALMONER.
From the day of her marriage, in the summer of 1780, our heroine assumed
the title of Countess de Valois de la Motte, though on ordinary occasions
she dropped the former portion of it, retaining only the name of De
la Motte, by which she afterwards became so notorious. The wedding
did not take place a day too soon, for in the course of the same or
following month the countess gave birth to male twins, that died a few
days afterwards. Thereupon Madame de Suremont, glad of an excuse for
getting rid of her new relation—the old lady used to say to Beugnot that
“the most unhappy year of her life was the one she spent in the society
of this demon,”—turned the newly-married couple out of her house.[28]
They took refuge for a time with Madame de la Tour, a married sister
of the count’s—the young gendarme following the example of his wife,
had likewise assumed a title—but were finally obliged to rely on their
own resources, which, as may be supposed, were of the narrowest. De la
Motte himself had nothing but his sword, and the countess had not even
her scanty pension to depend upon. Now commenced with them that life of
shifts and expedients, which is certain in the long run to disappoint
those who are unhappily reduced to enter upon it, which subverts the
principles, destroys the best habits of even the firmest characters, and
too frequently culminates in crime. By borrowing money from friends and
neighbours so long as they were disposed to lend it, by occasional loans
from money-lenders at exorbitant rates of interest, by running into debt
with the tradespeople, and by certain small bounties received from Paris,
to assist the descendants of Henri II., in answer to supplicatory letters
written by the countess, the newly-married couple dragged on as best they
could.
The count’s leave of absence having at length expired, he was summoned
back to garrison duty at Lunéville, a dull, decaying, fortified town,
composed of straight streets and regular buildings, where in subsequent
years the treaty of peace was signed between France and Austria which
gave to the former the coveted frontier of the Rhine. The palace built
by Philip, duke of Lorraine, grandfather of Marie-Antoinette, was then,
as now, a _caserne de cavalerie_, and it was to this barrack that Count
de la Motte took his wife to share with him his incommodious quarters.
Here madame’s “lively complexion” and “excess of vivacity,” as she styles
them, were not long in exercising their sway over the more susceptible of
her husband’s comrades. In September of the following year the count and
his wife had determined upon proceeding to Paris to urge the Marchioness
de Boulainvilliers to interest herself in their behalf, a project which
was knocked on the head by the count’s commanding officer, the Marquis
d’Autichamp,—whose too familiar intimacy with Madame de la Motte was the
talk not merely of the corps, but of the town,[29] and who had himself
contemplated escorting madame on her journey to the capital,—peremptorily
refusing the count any further leave of absence. Just at this time
intelligence reaches the De la Mottes that the Marquis and Marchioness
de Boulainvilliers are at Strasbourg, only some threescore miles or so
away. Commanding-officer d’Autichamp, we suppose, relents; for the count
gets a few days’ leave, and to Strasbourg the pair hasten as fast as a
French diligence of the eighteenth century will carry them, which is,
however, not fast enough, for on their arrival they learn from the great
charlatan of the age, Count Cagliostro, who just then happens to be
showing off in the capital of Alsace, that the Marquis and Marchioness
de Boulainvilliers have departed for Cardinal Prince Louis de Rohan’s
Palace at Saverne. There was nothing else but to give chase, so off the
De la Mottes start, and on their arrival in the vicinity of the episcopal
château, put up at some little inn, whence the countess writes to Madame
de Boulainvilliers, apprising her that she is in the neighbourhood, and
asking when she may be permitted to call upon her. The next day she is
honoured by a visit from the marquis, who escorts her over to his wife.
Some few days afterwards, while the marchioness and madame are taking a
carriage drive together, they meet the Cardinal de Rohan, Grand Almoner
of France, to whom Madame de Boulainvilliers introduces her _protégée_,
and strongly recommends her to this powerful prelate’s kindly notice.[30]
On her return home to barrack quarters, if home indeed they could be
called, the countess harped, day after day, upon her fancied claims to
the three estates that formerly belonged to her family, and no wonder if
she at length came to the conclusion that Paris and Versailles, rather
than a dull garrison town like Lunéville, were the proper spheres for her
enterprise and ambition. To Paris, therefore, she resolved to go; but,
alas! how was she to obtain the means of defraying the expenses of her
journey and of her sojourn in the capital? Commanding-officer d’Autichamp
would willingly escort her there, and pay all travelling expenses, but
just then her husband is jealous and cannot be brought to consent.
Fortunately for the countess, one of her Bar-sur-Aube friends—the father
of the M. Beugnot, of whom we have already spoken—came to the rescue with
a loan of one thousand livres, and to her honour it may be recorded,
that whenever afterwards she spoke of this service she was always much
moved, and, what is perhaps more to her credit, during the period of
her dishonest prosperity she paid the money, as she paid all the debts
she had contracted at Bar-sur-Aube, her adopted home. However corrupt
her general character may have been, she was certainly not wanting in
gratitude.
This thousand livres she and her husband divided equally between them,
and they then set forth in different directions it is true, but still
with the same object at heart, namely, to procure the restitution of
the Saint-Remi estates. The countess went to Paris to press her claims
on the attention of those in power. The count resigned his post in
the gendarmerie, never to do, from that hour forward, another day of
honest work during the remainder of his long life, and betook himself
to Fontette to search for evidence on the spot, and to ascertain the
exact nature of the steps requisite to be taken to recover possession of
this and the adjacent Saint-Remi domains. Arrived at his destination, he
caused a _Te Deum_ to be chanted in the church, and, as the congregation
were leaving, scattered handfuls of silver among the gaping crowd, who,
on experiencing this mark of favour, did not hesitate to hail him as
their lord; and lord of Fontette he was by courtesy, so long as his money
lasted, which, unfortunately for the rustics of the place, was not long.
His last livre dissipated, the count was only too glad to get back again
to Bar-sur-Aube to such a home as his sister was able to offer him.[31]
The countess, on her part, so soon as she arrived in Paris, proceeded to
set to work. She wrote at once to young Beugnot, who was then prosecuting
his legal studies in the capital, informing him that she had a letter
for him from his father, and asking him to call upon her. Beugnot lost
no time in complying with her request, and found the purport of the
letter was to urge him thoroughly to examine the countess’s claims to
the Fontette, Essoyes, and other estates, and see if there was any real
foundation for them. “I took the affair,” says Beugnot, “seriously in
hand as my father desired me, and readily enough found the letters patent
of Henri II. which conferred the domains in question on his natural son,
but I could not trace the various deeds diverting the possession of them
from the Saint-Remis into the hands of the different proprietors who
were in nowise connected with the family. One of the latest of these, a
M. Orceau de Fontette, superintendent of Caen, had exchanged the lands
held by him with the king. This was a favourable circumstance for us in
the prosecution of our claim, as the king had only to forego his hold
upon the property to restore to the Saint-Remis one of the possessions of
their forefathers.”[32]
The young lawyer now proceeded to compose a “Mémoire,” wherein, in
true French style, he spoke of his client’s case as “one more insult
of fortune to the Valois, the hard lot of a branch detached from that
ancient tree which had so long covered with its royal shade France and
other European states. I interspersed my composition,” says Beugnot,
“with those philosophical reflections then so much in fashion, and asked
the Bourbons to pay the natural debt of those from whom they had received
so magnificent a heritage. I submitted my composition to M. Elie de
Beaumont, a celebrated advocate, and also a man of taste. ‘It is a pity,’
remarked he, ‘that we cannot bring this business before the Parliament;
it would make your reputation.’ Alas! I did not even receive for my
labour the honours of print. People said it was entirely a matter for the
royal favour, and that to print the ‘Mémoire’ would be contrary to the
respect due to the king.”[33] Beugnot thereupon composed a new “Mémoire,”
or rather petition to the crown, which was in due course presented,
though without producing the result which the sanguine expectations of
the countess and her advocate anticipated from it.
Early in November, 1781, either by previous invitation from the
marchioness or of her own accord, Madame de la Motte presented herself
at the Hôtel de Boulainvilliers, bent upon jogging the marchioness’s
memory with reference to a commission in the dragoons which she had made
a half promise to obtain for the count, her husband, and intending to say
a few words respecting her own claim to the Saint-Remi estates, when,
to her surprise and grief, she found her benefactress lying dangerously
ill. She remained and tended her until her death, which took place in
about three weeks; yet, strange to say, she was unable to forego her
passion for intrigue even at a time like this, for she admits, while the
marchioness was lying past hope of recovery, having had a _tête-à-tête_
interview with the marquis, on the length of which she was rallied by
the gentlemen staying at the hôtel. During this interview the marquis,
she tells us, made her “a downright proposal” to the effect that on his
wife’s death she should reside with him as his mistress, he engaging to
procure for her husband a post in some regiment which should “prevent him
from troubling them too often.” All this she calmly listened to, and when
the marchioness was dead still continued to reside under the same roof
with the man who had made this disgraceful proposition to her, exposed,
as she herself admits, to his daily persecutions. The old reprobate, too,
was always upbraiding her, she says, with “loving other men better than
him,” and openly accused her of carrying on an intrigue beneath his roof
with the old Bishop of Langres, who visited her much more frequently than
the marquis thought necessary or prudent.
After a while the count, who had been rusticating ever since his Fontette
expedition at Bar-sur-Aube, turned up at the Boulainvilliers hôtel to
look after his wife, when the marquis, in revenge, as madame says, for
the contempt with which she invariably treated him, endeavoured to arouse
the jealousy of her husband by accusing her—falsely, of course—with being
too intimate with his son-in-law, and of sundry unbecoming familiarities
with the count’s cousin, who had pawned his watch to defray the expense
of a three-days’ frolic with the countess at Versailles. However, Count
de la Motte, according to his wife, “had too much good sense to give
any credit to these insinuations; he listened attentively, but did not
believe a single iota of them.”[34]
While the countess was residing under the Boulainvilliers roof she was
constantly on the look-out to push her own or her husband’s fortunes, and
eventually succeeded in talking over the Baron de Crussol, son-in-law
of the Marquis de Boulainvilliers, to procure M. de la Motte a post in
the Count d’Artois’s body-guard. This necessitated the count’s removal
to Versailles; so, turning their backs on the Hôtel de Boulainvilliers,
where the marquis had for some time past adopted an unpleasant system of
retrenchment in order to bring madame to “his way of thinking”—in other
words, had placed the descendant of the house of Valois and her tall and
hungry spouse on exceedingly short commons—the pair went forth in search
of whatever Fortune might please to send them.
From certain hints dropped by the countess it is evident that she had
grown disgusted with the avarice and meanness rather than with what
she styles the “detested attentions” of the marquis, who, had he only
loosened his purse-strings, and dispensed his bounty with a liberal
hand, had been looked upon favourably enough, and possibly had been the
means of saving Cardinal Prince de Rohan from getting entangled in the
countess’s toils.
It is not to be supposed that at this epoch of her career Madame de la
Motte had forgotten her introduction to this prelate, or that she omitted
to remind him of it, and of Madame de Boulainvilliers’ recommendation
of her to his notice and sympathy. Was he not, in fact, Grand Almoner
of France, and, by virtue of his office, dispenser of the king’s and a
nation’s bounties? and humiliating though she might pretend it to be for
one who had the blood of the Valois in her veins to have to appeal to the
servant of the sovereign instead of to the throne itself, the pill, if a
trifle bitter, must nevertheless be swallowed.
Cardinal Prince Louis de Rohan, at this time in his eight-and-fortieth
year, is described as a tall, portly, handsome-looking man, with a
slightly ruddy complexion, bald forehead, and almost white hair. There
was a noble and easy bearing about him,[35] and his manners are said to
have been singularly agreeable so long as he kept his temper, of late
grown exceedingly choleric, under restraint. He was weak and vain, and
credulous to a degree; anything but devout, and mad after women.[36]
Unrestricted by his priestly office, he led a notoriously dissolute life,
which scandalized even the loose moralists of that loose epoch; still, he
was commonly looked upon as a good-enough sort of man so far as little
acts of kindness and generosity were concerned, more especially, too,
when the suppliant happened to be of the fair sex, and youthful, and a
beauty withal. It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that he responded
favourably to the countess’s first and second appeals. This gave her
hope; and, the better to profit by the grand almoner’s liberality, and
to secure his influence in support of her claims, she took an apartment
in Paris during the summer of 1782 within a short distance of his hôtel.
It was a poor sort of a lodging, consisting merely of two ill-furnished
rooms on the topmost _étage_ at the Hôtel de Reims, in the Rue de la
Verrerie, a narrow, ill-paved, irregularly-built street—devoted at the
present day, not to glass factories or warehouses, as its name would
imply, but to grocery, soap, candle and dried fruit stores, and to
locksmiths’ shops, every one of which hangs out its monster red or golden
key by way of sign—running from the Rue des Lombards into the Rue de
Bercy, which intersects the Rue Vieille-du-Temple, where the Hôtel de
Strasbourg, or Palais-Cardinal, as it was sometimes called, in which for
the moment all the countess’s hopes are centred, was situated.
This hôtel built in the year 1712 by Cardinal Constantine de Rohan,
uncle of the grand almoner, on a portion of the gardens of the Hôtel de
Soubise, is now the National Printing Office, and internally retains no
traces of what it was when Prince Louis de Rohan lived here in state
befitting the dignity of a prince of the German empire and a cardinal of
the Holy Roman Church. The entrance gateway and the buildings forming
the external boundaries of the court in front of the hôtel are, with
the exception of some evident alterations, much the same as they were
in the days when the Countess de la Motte was a frequent visitor at
the Palais-Cardinal. The court itself is divided by parallel ranges of
buildings at right angles with the principal front, and a gateway on the
right-hand side leads to what was evidently the stable-court, where a
noble bas-relief by Couston, representing the watering of the horses of
the sun, with the animals full life-size, may be seen over one of the
arched entrances to the stables—those stables where the horse of one of
the cardinal’s heyducs dropped down dead on a memorable occasion of which
we shall by-and-by have to speak.
The principal façade of the De Rohan hôtel has undergone only some slight
alteration since the grand almoner’s time, but it is far different
with the interior; the grand staircase has been removed, and the
magnificent _salons de réception_ have been converted into _bureaux_ for
the officials attached to the national printing establishment. In the
principal waiting-room are four paintings by Boucher, said to have formed
part of the original decorations of the Palais-Cardinal: one represents
Mars attiring for the wars, with Venus holding his shield and Cupid
handing him his helmet; another shows Mars reposing, with Venus, who
looks wonderfully like a French marchioness of the eighteenth century,
with even a scantier allowance of drapery than usual, reclining beside
him on a cloud; a third portrays Juno with her peacock, the immortal Jove
facing her, and Boreas and Æolus at his feet, blowing as though they
would burst; while in the fourth subject we have Neptune ruling the waves
with his trident, and a trio of lusty sea-gods spurting water out of long
conch-shaped shells.
The garden front of the Palais-Cardinal is far more elegant than the one
which looks upon the court; being decorated with lofty columns surmounted
with enriched capitals, and having sundry emblems as well as the armorial
bearings of the house of Rohan sculptured on the projections of the
façade. Only a small portion of the palace garden now remains to it, the
chief part being covered over with long ranges of offices in which the
workpeople attached to the national printing establishment ply their
several callings.