life. It lasted for the rest of the reign, during which, basking in the
favour of the King and the Royal Family, and worshipped by the young
Countess of Sussex, Charles's daughter by the Duchess of Cleveland, she
gave herself up to a life of pleasure. The consideration she enjoyed
gave her great influence, which, as she detested politics, she made no
use of save to increase her credit with the tradespeople. At first she
did not feel the chain of debt to which she was fastened. Courtin wrote
to Louvois, "If you had seen her dancing the _furlano_ to the music of a
guitar, which she thrummed herself, you would have been captivated." To
which Louvois replied, "If I were at the English Court, I am sure that
all I should do would be to feast my eyes on Madame de Mazarin"--a
curious sidelight on despatches of State of that day, considering, as
Forneron says, that "the only serious man at Whitehall was the French
Ambassador."
The taste that she had developed during her stay in Savoy for art and
letters was now assiduously cultivated. Like a true _femme galante_ of
the seventeenth century, she coloured her very frivolities with an air
of culture. But in the case of the Duchesse de Mazarin the cult of
learning was not altogether an affectation by means of which she sought
to gain the respect she had lost. She was an omnivorous reader,
especially of philosophic works, and very fond of discussing what she
read. If intellectually superficial, she was a brilliant
conversationalist, and had the art of so disguising her thefts from the
brains of the clever men whose society she really enjoyed that they were
undiscovered. She could not write, but she could talk. In her _salon_,
one of the first of the kind in England, all manner of subjects were
discussed: philosophy, religion, history, wit, gallantry, the stage,
music, art, ancient and modern literature. The use of the word "Vast"
once gave rise to a controversy that was finally settled by an appeal to
the French Academy. Intellectuality was the frame in which she set
pleasure; for she still continued her life of aristocratic harlotry, and
was sometimes among the number, from duchesses to demi-reps, that
Chiffinch, the vicious but amusing _concièrge_ of the back-stairs of
Whitehall, smuggled of nights into the royal bedchamber. But these blots
on her spiritual life, which possibly in our times in the case of such a
woman might be excused by the words, "artistic temperament," required no
excuse at all then. Moreover, Madame de Mazarin kept a good table and an
open house--two means of silencing scandal that are not yet ineffective.
Among the men of distinction who comprised her little court were: the
poet Waller, "who had visited several Courts and was at home in none";
Vossius, the sceptic prebendary of Windsor, "understanding most European
languages and speaking none well, possessing a profound knowledge of the
manners and customs of the ancients, but entirely ignorant of those of
his contemporaries, talking as if he were commenting on Juvenal or
Petronius, and at the very time he was writing books to prove the Divine
inspiration of the Septuagint, intimating privately at Madame de
Mazarin's that he believed in no revelation at all"; my Lord Rochester,
who needs no description; the respectable Justel, whose Huguenot faith
had made him an exile; and last, but not least, St. Evremond.
[Illustration: ST. EVREMOND.]
Of all the brilliant moths that flitted round the beauty, charm, and
hospitality of the Duchesse de Mazarin, St. Evremond was the wittiest,
gayest, best educated, most popular, and sincerest. He was over thirty
years her senior, a man past sixty when she came to England, and, from
the day of their meeting to the day of her death, Madame de Mazarin
found in him a devoted friend and a sensible adviser. He was to her
father-confessor and duenna in one; while her house was his to enter at
will, her society his chief happiness, and her death the one real grief
that perhaps he ever knew. The relation that existed between them was
purely platonic; and if there are those who see merely a psychological
phenomenon in a clean, honest attachment between an upright old
philosopher and a young wayward woman, we prefer in this instance to
claim it as a virtue for both. Madame de Mazarin's account at least in
the Book of Life is so heavily against her that, without letting her
off, we can afford to credit her with so small a virtue.
She used to call him playfully her "old satyr," for he was given to
satire, and his views of life were so generous as to be Epicurean. His
philosophy, he declared, consisted in hatred of vice, indulgence to
guilt, and grief for misfortune--a view of duty that alone was
calculated to make him a favourite in such loose society as that of the
Restoration. But St. Evremond had not always been a sage with "a
disfiguring growth of a large wen between his eyebrows which he treated
as a subject for a joke." He had once upon a time been young,
good-looking, and unsteady, one of six sons in an old Norman family. In
their youth, he says, his brothers were known at home by nicknames that
hit off their characters well. There was St. Evremond the Honest, St.
Evremond the Crafty, St. Evremond the Soldier, St. Evremond the Beau,
St. Evremond the Hunter. He himself, even then, was known as St.
Evremond the Wit. His father gave him a brilliant education and destined
him for the Bar, but the Thirty Years' War was just then seducing all
the young men of Europe to the career of arms, so St. Evremond gave up
studying law and got a commission. He saw a vast amount of active
service and was dangerously wounded at the Battle of Nordlingen. He who
for forty years wielded the pen had previously carried a sword for
thirty. In fencing he had few, if any, superiors--St. Evremond's pass
was famous in the art of self-defence.
Even in those days he was noted for his sarcasms, and it was to his pen
that he owed the loss of his sword. An intercepted letter ruined him.
It contained a scathing satire on Cardinal Mazarin, in which he
declared, with poisoned irony _à propos_ of a certain treaty which
Mazarin had signed, that "a Minister does not so much belong to the
State as the State to the Minister." Mazarin was dead, but Anne of
Austria took upon herself to resent the sneer. St. Evremond was obliged
to flee in order to escape the Bastille. He arrived in England in 1661,
aged forty-eight, and of all the French exiles who lived on the charity
of Charles none were so worthy of it. When Madame de Mazarin came to
England he had been established fourteen years in that country. His
reputation was European, and among his many admirers and correspondents
abroad he counted the famous courtezan, Ninon de Lenclos. Most of his
friends led openly profligate lives, his was conspicuously clean. In an
age of corruption he preserved his honour without earning the contempt
of his companions. Over-rigid in morals, he was indulgent to others;
irreligious, he respected religion. He was one of the forerunners of
Voltaire, or, rather, Voltaire might have been like him had he been born
a century earlier. St. Evremond's wit was Voltairean with the poison
left out. Once towards the end of her long life Ninon wrote him repining
she had come to the conclusion with La Rochefoucauld that "old age was
the hell of women." "Don't let M. de La Rochefoucauld's hell frighten
you," he replied; "it is a hell specially contrived for a maxim. Speak
boldly the word Love and let that of Old Woman never come out of your
mouth."
Regarded then as one of the most intellectual luminaries of his time, he
is remembered now merely as one of the flashlights that history turns on
the Court and times of the last Stuarts. His place is with Pepys and
Evelyn and Gramont; no book on Restoration society could be written
without mentioning him. It was the age of Satire. At Whitehall the
good-natured, cynical King and his courtiers enjoyed the lampoons and
couplets of the coffee-houses, provided they were witty. At the Duchesse
de Mazarin's the satire was refined, the banter delicate. "Ah, Monsieur
Vossius," she cried, as the clerical sceptic entered her rooms one day,
"perhaps you who read all sorts of good books, except the Bible, will
explain a point we are discussing?" As she never cherished resentment,
and detested nothing so much as dissension, it was understood that those
who wished to enjoy her hospitality and friendship should leave their
private spites and ill-temper at home. At no place in London was
pleasure so unclouded as at the Duchesse de Mazarin's. "The greatest
freedom in the world is to be seen there," wrote St. Evremond, "and an
equal discretion; everybody is more commodiously served at Madame de
Mazarin's than at home and more respectfully than at Court. 'Tis true
there are frequent disputes, but then it is with more knowledge than
heat; it is not done out of a spirit of contradiction, but only to
discover fully the matters in agitation; rather to animate conversation
than to inflame it. What they game for is inconsiderable, and as they
play only for diversion, you cannot discover in their faces either the
fear of losing or the annoyance of having lost. Gaming," adds the honest
old Epicurean, "is relieved there by the most delicious repasts in the
world."
In time, however, to St. Evremond's dismay, the spirited, cultured
discussions began to flag, and finally almost entirely ceased. The
passion of gambling took possession of the Duchesse; with her to flee
from temptation was to yield to it, desire only ceased when she had
drained it to the dregs. A shady croupier, Morin by name, obliged to
leave Paris, came over to London and introduced basset. This game became
the rage, and Morin dethroned the whole intellectual areopagus at Madame
de Mazarin's. St. Evremond protested in vain, but he could not resist
lending her money when she asked for it. To show that she was alive to
his remonstrances at her extravagance, he was the only one of her
creditors she ever repaid. In this way the gay, thoughtless years sped
by; but if the thrilling adventures of her early life, consisting
chiefly of flights in men's apparel, were over, there were still many
strange and dramatic sensations in store for her. The most indolent of
women, she was destined from first to last to live in a whirl of
excitement.
Oates denounced her as an accomplice of all the Popish plots that
agitated the country. That was an anxious time for the Duchesse as to
all the French at Court. But it was as nothing to the experience that
followed. In 1683, when not far off her fortieth year, the Baron Banier,
a handsome, romantic young boy and son of one of Gustavus Adolphus's
generals, came to London, and fell in love with Madame de Mazarin. It
mattered not to him that she laughed at him, he went about the town with
her name on his lips heedless of ridicule. Suddenly this harmless
flirtation became tragic. Her nephew, the young Chevalier de Soissons, a
brother of the yet-to-be-famous Prince Eugene of Savoy and son of her
sister Olympe, came at this time to pay his aunt a visit. Like Baron
Banier, the Chevalier de Soissons fell head over ears in love with her.
Maddened by his horrible passion, he must needs take it into his head to
be jealous of his Swedish rival. The two young fellows, blind to all
sense of decency, to the _éclat_ of such a duel, met, and the Chevalier
de Soissons left Banier dead upon the field of dishonour. The noise of
such a scandal may be imagined. The Chevalier would not, or could not,
flee; he was arrested and tried, and without doubt, but for the pulling
of many strings behind the scenes, would have been executed. "It is fire
not blood that flows in the veins of us Mancinis," he is reported to
have said. Thanks to the laxity of the laws in his time, the flaming
young Chevalier was suffered to go to Malta and join the Order of the
Knights Templars, among whom, far from his beautiful aunt, the fates
granted him a few years of obscurity in which to cool.
"I could not have believed it possible," wrote Madame de Sévigné, "that
the eyes of a grandmother could have wrought such havoc." But this
shocking scandal, which called to mind the things that had been said of
Madame de Mazarin and her brother years before, and made people even in
that day of antique vice shudder, overwhelmed her. Shame, despair, and
perhaps cunning, made her dive till the storm was spent. She closed her
house, hung her _salon_ in black, and saw nobody but the ever-faithful
St. Evremond.
The scandal had not yet subsided when a fresh one burst over her head.
Her eldest daughter, whom she had not seen for nearly twenty years,
escaped from a convent, in which, in spite of her prayers, her father
insisted she should take the veil, and fled to her mother. She was
accompanied by the Marquis de Richelieu, a younger son, penniless,
profligate, and as handsome as Adonis. The arrival of the couple could
offer nothing but embarrassment to the Duchesse de Mazarin. For this
elopement had attracted universal attention by the absurd behaviour of
the Duc de Mazarin and the ridicule to which it exposed this strange
family. Instead of removing every obstacle at once to his runaway
daughter's marriage, even with so undesirable a _parti_ as the marquis,
the Duc de Mazarin went about consulting monks and priests all over
France as to whether he should consent to the marriage or not. In the
meantime the fugitives were obliged to live as lover and mistress for
two years before M. de Mazarin yielded.
Perhaps the fact of such a rake as de Richelieu remaining faithful for a
period of such duration may be more mercenary than it appears. But if he
counted on this unexceptional fidelity to win him some of the Mazarin
millions that his father-in-law had not yet frittered away, he was
mistaken. The Duc gave his daughter a paltry dowry and a pardon signed
by the King--the first ever granted for the abduction of a novice from
her convent. Marriage, however, spoilt the romance, for the habits
contracted when she was an outlaw, and perhaps also the Mancini "fire
not blood" in her veins, prevented the Marquise de Richelieu from
settling down. She climbed over a wall one night and went off with
another man, to a life which, while possessing all the elements of that
adventurous libertinage that history so often condones in condemning,
can be described by no stretch of the imagination as anything else than
vulgar prostitution. As for M. le Marquis, he went back to his pot-house
companions and the bottle--the latter a liquid solace that enabled his
mother-in-law as well to sustain the shafts of outrageous fortune.
For the ridicule that never made the least impression on the Duc de
Mazarin was the only thing apparently that could make the least
impression on his scandal-proof Duchesse. Ridicule and debt produced in
her a black melancholy which she tried to drown in whisky. In sober
moments the once _insouciante_ beauty talked of retiring to the same
convent in Spain as her still more unhappy sister, Madame la Connétable.
St. Evremond was in despair and used all his powers of persuasion and
influence to combat so morbid a resolution and the drunkenness that
prompted it. At the same time her ridiculous husband slyly took
advantage of her unnerved state to try to get her into his power; he
invited her to return to his roof and submit her life to his will. But
unlike the Bourbons, Madame de Mazarin had learnt something from
experience. She still had the sense to refuse and the wit to reply,
"_Point de Mazarin!_"
The result of all these accumulated troubles was a serious illness, but
with the recovery of her health she regained her former gaiety. To St.
Evremond's delight the drink habit lost its hold upon her--for a time;
her _salon_ was once more the rendezvous of wit and fashion; cowed by
her dazzling beauty, that nothing could impair, ridicule slunk out of
her path. The last year of the orgy of the Restoration found her still
basking in the sunshine of prosperity; she was one of the three sultanas
who were with Charles that Sunday night in the grand gallery at
Whitehall when the Merry Monarch was stricken with apoplexy. What a
scene that must have been! What a terror and warning! The death of
Charles in the prime of life finished the mad dance of pleasure; to
none of the dancers had it been sweeter than to the Duchesse de
Mazarin.
She shed floods of tears over her royal companion to whom she owed so
much happiness, and whose Queen she might have been but for a
miscalculation on the part of her uncle, the Cardinal. Well might she
weep, for with the passing of Charles the dam that she had so
successfully erected against misfortune burst. It is true that James II.
continued to her the pension his brother had allowed her; but his reign
was short, and his successor, the cold William of Orange, had other uses
for his money than the pensioning of beautiful exiles. Moreover, the
Restoration was over; public opinion had changed; it was a disgrace to
have been connected with the Stuart Court. The very people who had once
welcomed the Duchesse de Mazarin as a possible and popular King's
mistress in place of the hated Duchess of Portsmouth now clamoured that
she should be packed out of the country. Nothing could have been more
disastrous for her than an order of banishment; it meant the choice
between sordid poverty in Amsterdam or Brussels, or submission to her
persecuting husband and imprisonment in France. What a fate for one who
had queened it for fifteen joyous years at Whitehall! Fortunately, yet
strangely, her enormous debts saved her from this degradation. Her
creditors noisily protested against her expulsion, which would have
meant to them a total loss, and they interceded with the new King in her
favour. William finally granted her a pension of two thousand pounds
and his protection.
For the next ten years, tormented by her creditors, whose prisoner now
she virtually was, and persecuted by her husband, who brought a suit to
deprive her for ever of any claim to her uncle's fortune, the Duchesse
de Mazarin led a feverish life. "In the daytime," says Forneron, "she
might be seen searching for Oriental curiosities in the ships that had
freshly arrived from India. At Newmarket, she was up and out on
horseback at five in the morning. On racing days there were the
excitements of betting and of being jostled in the crowd on the course.
In the evening there was the theatre. After the play came the oyster
supper and then basset. Bacchus consoled her as she descended towards
the grave." Occasionally her sisters and children visited her, and St.
Evremond and a little court of admirers were ever in attendance. But her
day was over, and the shadows of the everlasting night had begun to fall
on her. In the summer of 1699, in her fifty-third year, her health
failed rapidly; death had no terrors for her, she met it with
indifference. The end to this turbulent life came at Chelsea, then a
riverside village, whither she had gone for a change of air. Her sister,
the Duchesse de Bouillon and her son, the Duc de la Meilleraye, had come
over a few days before from Paris, and were with her at the last. St.
Evremond, her constant friend for twenty-five years, was inconsolable;
the famous wit followed her four years later at the age of ninety, and
was buried in Westminster Abbey.
But even in death the adventures of the Duchesse de Mazarin were not
finished; the corpse of the notorious beauty could not get buried. It
was seized by her creditors, who wrangled and haggled over it with her
husband, whom the news of her death overwhelmed with a late remorse. He
was obliged to pay her debts in full before her body was suffered to
leave the country. But even when he finally got possession of it he did
not bury it. This strange, half-mad old man, who had so often compelled
his wife when alive to accompany him on his interminable wanderings,
once more set out with her when dead. "For over a year," says Saint
Simon, "M. de Mazarin, who had been so long separated from her, carried
her body about with him from one estate to another. Once he suffered it
to rest for a short time in the church of Notre Dame de Liesse, where
the peasants treated it as that of a saint and touched it with their
beads. At last he took it to Paris and buried it beside her famous
uncle, the Cardinal, in the church of the 'Collège des Quatre
Nations'"--now the Palais de l'Institut!
The following pasquinade of the day will serve as well as another for
her epitaph:--
"Ci-dessous gît la Mazarin,
Qui des femmes fut la plus belle!
Ci-dessous gît la Mazarin!
Ses enfants seraient sans chagrin
Si leur père était avec elle;
Ci-dessous gît la Mazarin,
Qui des femmes fut la plus belle!"
[Illustration: "MY LADY CASTLEMAINE."
(BARBARA VILLIERS, DUCHESS OF CLEVELAND.)
_After Wissing._]
BARBARA VILLIERS, DUCHESS OF CLEVELAND
A COURTEZAN OF THE RESTORATION
The difference between Hortense Mancini and Barbara Villiers is the
difference between the refinement and the grossness of vice. If we had
met them in fiction we should have said that the former might have been
created by Balzac and the latter by Zola. The history of Barbara
Villiers is like a study of the progress of vice.
At the first glance it would seem that such a statement was calculated
to cause the respectable reader to skip the following biographical
account of this British Imperia. But on considering that her name must
possess some powerful interest for the imagination, from the quantity of
ink that has been spilt over it, and the impassioned diatribes it has
inspired, we are inclined to believe that what we have to relate of the
famous beauty will fire rather than extinguish curiosity. For no emotion
is so pleasant to most of us creatures of circumstance as that of
righteous indignation, and that is what her Grace of Cleveland usually
excites. Yet it has always seemed to us one of the strangest
psychological phenomena that men should fly into a literary passion over
the iniquities of persons who have been dead for centuries. Personally,
we have never been able, like most people, to look upon Nero as if he
were a notorious criminal of our own day, whose trial at the Old Bailey
filled a column or two in the morning papers. Nor can we work ourselves
up to any heat over a profligate woman, who lived two hundred years ago
when she enjoyed considerable public esteem, as if she were still
living, when we should, no doubt, have her arrested, tried, and given
the full penalty of the law. No people are more ridiculous than the
literary policemen who nab historical offenders and prosecute them at
the bar of a remote posterity, unless it be the literary whitewashers
who defend the same criminals at the same bar. Such convictions and
acquittals of the dead are like a burlesque of Justice which lacks the
sense of humour. One should remember that Charles II., with all his
vices so repugnant to us now, was perhaps from first to last the most
popular king that ever sat upon the English throne. People talk of the
whole period of the Restoration as if he personally were responsible for
its shameless license, quite ignoring the well-known fact that the
nation was heartily tired of the "weel-spread looves and lang, wry
faces" of the Cromwellian _régime_. Instead of heaping a late ignominy
upon him, it would be more sensible, if equally impractical, to arraign
the British people who made him possible. He was but the crowned
representative of their own unbridled vices. To us this man, who "never
said a foolish thing and never did a wise one," seems, at the distance
we have got from him, to be as imaginary as if he had occurred in one of
Oscar Wilde's comedies. After two hundred years to treat him _seriously_
is out of the question. His answer to an indignant generation he knows
not might very well be his own cynical laugh.
From this it must not be supposed that we intend to flatter the memory
of Barbara Villiers. On the contrary, we should prefer to forget her,
but this the period in which she lived will not permit us. No mention of
the Restoration would be possible without reference to her. So, as we
are obliged to consider her, we shall imagine that the "trough of
Zolaism" in which we have found her is frozen, and try to skate on it
without breaking through.