the whole Court, was quick to guess her motive. Having led the Duchesse
de Mercoeur back to her seat, he went up sulkily to his cousin and asked
her to dance. But the next day when Anne, who had had time to cool,
coaxingly explained to him her plans for his marriage, he replied
firmly, with all the pride of a boy of seventeen, "that he did not like
little girls."
Anne of Austria did not patiently brook attempts to thwart her, but in
this instance by wisely discerning her master in her son she managed to
marry him--in his own good time--to another niece, the daughter of her
brother, the King of Spain. As for the Queen of England, her
disappointment was very bitter, and she wept and prayed and plotted
against Cromwell more than ever. While Henrietta returned to her former
obscurity, and though she did not cherish resentment against Louis, for
whom she cared quite as little as he cared for her, she did not forget
the slight she had received from him.
At last the day of triumph she had anticipated for her brother arrived.
When the news reached Paris of the _gaudeamus_ with which Charles II.
was received in England, Henrietta Maria and her daughter were
transported with joy. The sister of the King of England became at once a
_partie_ eagerly sought after. Among those who wished to marry her was
the Emperor. She, however, willingly consented to the proposal for her
hand made by France on behalf of Monsieur, Louis XIV.'s brother, not
because she loved him, but because such an alliance was to the interest
of her own brother. This marriage was no sooner arranged, to the great
satisfaction of Henrietta Maria, to whom the thought of her daughter on
the steps of the French throne was almost as pleasing as the sight of
her on the throne itself would have been, than the Queen and the
Princess went to England to share in the triumph of King Charles.
Without detailing the events of this visit, on which Henrietta's right
to be classed among the beauties of the Court of Whitehall rests, quite
as much as on the fact of her birth, it will be sufficient to say that
it was a success. With the restoration of Charles to the throne of his
ancestors, Stuarts of every degree of consanguinity had flocked to
London. They came from all over Europe, rich and poor, blood relations
and collaterals; there never had been in the history of the family such
a reunion. As most of them wanted something, a young king in the hour of
victory could not but be generous; offices and honours rained on Stuarts
of Blantyre and Stuarts of Richmond; places and pensions on aunt-Queens
of Bohemia, on princely cousin Ruperts, and dowager sisters of Orange.
Retrenchment was a word that had not been invented to frighten nations
with in that day. But of all her family the one who got the lion's share
of this prodigal profusion was the Princess Henrietta. The others took
the wealth of the people, she won its heart.
In the bacchanal joy of the Restoration sentiment was conspicuous. The
interest in the dramatic romance of the dynasty was heightened by the
well-known sympathy between the King and his youngest sister. Though she
had grown up unobserved in the French Court, England had been following
her career. Cavaliers had noisily drunk her health on the Rhine, in the
army of Condé, in the Highlands, and in whispers all over
Cromwell-ridden England. Even the Puritans had heard with sentimental
contempt--for there was sentiment in them too--of Charles Stuart's
letters to the little girl in the Louvre, which bore the simple,
pathetic address, "For my dear, dear sister." To this member of the
family at least the nation was prepared to give no grudging welcome. The
sudden and overwhelming gladness that had come into her life had
transformed her into a fascinating girl of seventeen. Beautiful in the
vulgar, plastic sense she was not, yet she created the impression of
beauty. Like Madame de Pompadour, she possessed the _beauté sans
traits_. The lights in her expressive eyes, the swift changes of her
mobile face, spoke to all of the sympathy and gaiety of her temperament.
The praises of Whitehall echoed in the coffee-houses, everybody talked
of her, everybody wished to see her. Her public appearances were
ovations. It was impossible to resist her smile. It was the smile of one
who seems to desire nothing so much as to please. In a princess this is
even more winning than tact in a king. "On dirait qu'elle demande le
coeur," says M. Anatole France, "voilà le secret de Madame."
Money was as necessary to her as to any of the others of her family;
_she_ had never had a farthing of her own. But to none of the Stuarts
did the nation give so gracefully and so quickly. The House of Commons
not only voted her a gift of ten thousand pounds, but sent her the money
on the same day. But in the midst of all this popularity and joy a great
gloom fell over Whitehall. Henrietta's youngest brother, the Duke of
Gloucester, had died of small-pox just before she arrived in England;
and now her only sister, the Princess of Orange, fell ill of the same
disease and succumbed after a short illness. This tragedy occurring at
such a time "wholly altered," says Evelyn, "the face and gallantry of
the whole Court." Henrietta Maria, terrified lest she should lose her
only surviving daughter, on whose future she built such high hopes,
eagerly hastened to leave a country which seemed to bring nothing but
disaster to her family. Their departure was facilitated by the
impatience of the French Government to conclude the projected alliance
with England--an impatience manifested through the anxiety of Monsieur
in regard to the health of his _fiancée_. Within less than three months
of leaving Paris for London the Princess was back in the city of her
adoption, and shortly afterwards her marriage with the French king's
only brother took place, by which she became, as regards rank, the
second woman in the kingdom.
Those who remembered what an insignificant girl she had been were amazed
at the change in her. It was not, however, she who had changed, but
merely the light in which she had stood. Heretofore, because it had not
considered her, the world took it for granted that she was not worth
considering. But now as the wife of the first prince of the blood all
eyes were turned upon her, while she, like an understudy who suddenly
finds herself in the _rôle_ for which she has been trained, acted her
part to the best of her ability. That she electrified the French Court
as she had done Whitehall did not in the least surprise the few who had
known her intimately; on the contrary, they confidently expected her
success. Madame de Motteville, a shrewd observer who knew her well, had
predicted that "when she appeared on the great theatre of the Court of
France she would play one of the leading parts there."
To her the _ancien régime_ owed its two chief characteristics--its
gaiety and its grace. She possessed "une vivacité d'esprit et une
élégance de manières" that in casting their spell over women as well as
men created a model which made France down to the Revolution the supreme
arbiter of taste in Europe. Her own natural ability--a quality that very
few of the Stuarts lacked--sharpened and refined by the careful
education her mother had given her, made her readily discern true genius
from its sham. The artistic and intellectual appealed to her strongly.
In the searchlight that the people fix upon royalty she was never seen
to better advantage than when in the company of the elect of the nation.
If Louis XIV. may be compared to Augustus, Madame was his Mecænas. She
more than he made his fame splendid. It was she who mined and refined
the ore which Louis stamped with his name. La Rochefoucauld and
Bussy-Rabutin, Bossuet and Boileau, Condé and Turenne, Madame de Sévigné
and Madame de La Fayette, all alike found in her an eager, sympathetic,
and even a critically discriminating admirer.
In her day the peasants did not count as human beings; they were
considered either as food for cannon or the mine that produced the gold
of the upper classes. When the "people" were spoken of it was the
_bourgeoisie_, the Third Estate, that was meant. The distance between
this class and the throne was so bridgeless that only a revolution, one
hundred and fifty years in the building, could span it. But across even
this vast space the fascination of Madame penetrated. In the sublime
_oraison funèbre_ that the great Bossuet pronounced over her dead body,
he merely stated the simple truth when he declared that the people of
Paris shuddered when, like a clap of thunder, there resounded over the
city the appalling news, "_Madame se meurt! Madame est morte!_"
That smile, "which seemed to ask for one's heart," had captured that of
Paris as it had that of London.
Stories of her enthusiastic appreciation of genius were related
everywhere, but none touched the people like those which showed her in
the act of levelling the barriers between the idols of the masses and
the heroes of the Court. Everybody knew that she wept over Racine.
Everybody had heard how Boileau had been drawn from his obscurity by a
quotation from his unknown poem with which she had greeted him, when
passing by chance through an ante-room in which the poor poet was
waiting to solicit the patronage of some great lord. Everybody
remembered that she had stood sponsor to the child of Molière, and had
"Tartuffe" acted in her own house before the King while the Church was
condemning the play and demanding that the author should be burnt alive.
In a country like France such things strike the imagination. With the
"people" Madame could not but be popular.
At the same time she became "toute la joie, tout le plaisir de la cour."
If the long reign of Louis XIV. had a gorgeous summer in Athenaïs de
Montespan, and a bleak winter in Madame de Maintenon, brightened for a
brief moment by the sunshine of the lovely Duchess of Burgundy, it had a
joyous spring in Henrietta of England. This Golden Age of France, as it
has been termed, was never so happy as when Madame infected
Fontainebleau and Versailles with her gaiety.
But the Court was not sincere like the people. Courts never are. Those
who owed their places and pensions to the Queen Mother and the Queen
naturally studied to please them, and nothing would have pleased Anne of
Austria and Marie Thérèse, of Spain so much as the ruin of this radiant,
_spirituelle_ Madame who cast them into the shade. To the people of
Paris, who shuddered when the couriers came from St. Cloud with the news
of her tragic death, the Court of France appeared as dazzling as did
the palace of Armida to Renaud before he crossed its threshold. It was
only those within who had breathed its poisoned air, tasted its
treacherous pleasures, and languished in its labyrinth of intrigue who
knew how fatal it was. The roses that strewed the Court of France
concealed death-traps. All who lived there walked gingerly, the first
princess of the blood--aye, the Queen herself, no less than the
courtiers. To some the sense of danger gives an added zest to the joy of
living. Madame was one of these. All her ingenuity was requisitioned to
outwit her enemies, of whom the chief were her mother-in-law, her
sister-in-law, and her husband.
The young King, who had been trained by his mother to play a great
_rôle_ on the throne of France, took his position even now very
seriously. He was, however, naturally fond of amusement, and it was
certainly not his Queen who could provide it for him. His Spanish
cousin, whom he had married for reasons of high policy, bored him
utterly. Marie Thérèse was very plain, very stupid, and very virtuous.
She fenced herself round with etiquette, and lived on a sort of
unscalable Olympian height in all the gloomy splendour of the Spanish
Court in which she had been bred. Her only recreations appeared to be
cards and eating. All the Bourbons were famous gluttons, but Marie
Thérèse in this matter suffered none to take precedence of her. Louis
was not long in drawing the inevitable comparison between his wife and
his sister-in-law; and when he wished amusement, conformable to his
dignity and agreeable to his temperament, it was to Madame he went. The
more he saw of her the more he liked her. A word, a phrase, an opinion,
would suddenly arrest his attention, and from going to Madame for
amusement he began to go for something else as well.
He seemed to have quite forgotten that he had ever looked upon her with
disdain. But while she bore him no grudge for the slight he had put on
her when there had been a question of her marrying him, she took a
certain malicious, coquettish pleasure in encouraging his growing
tenderness. What a sweet, innocent revenge it would be to make him fall
in love with her! In a private station such a flirtation might have
escaped attention, but in an Argus-eyed Court the first sigh will be
suspected, the first understanding detected. The Queen, who possessed
among the numerous qualities with which she bored her husband that of
jealousy, complained to Anne of Austria that Madame was robbing her of
her husband's affections. The Queen Mother, who liked to exercise over
her family the influence which she no longer possessed in the
Government, lent a ready ear to these confidences, and as she herself
had a grievance against Madame for outshining her, she soon found the
means of venting it. When Anne of Austria had a score to pay off she
stopped at nothing. In this instance the means she employed were
despicable. She set her younger son, Monsieur, against his wife.
[Illustration: "MONSIEUR."
(PHILIPPE D'ORLÉANS.)
_After Wallerant Vaillant._]
The character of Philippe d'Orléans belongs to a type with which readers
of latter-day fiction are very familiar. This prince of the seventeenth
century was the beau-ideal decadent that many modern novelists have
delighted to depict. His mother and Mazarin, warned by the troubles the
previous King's brother, Gaston d'Orléans, had caused the throne, were
determined that Philippe should be trained to play the most paltry part
in affairs. Consequently, while Louis XIV. was given the education which
fitted him to become an able king, Monsieur was encouraged in every
tendency that could enfeeble him. "The prettiest child in France" had
grown up a young man of striking beauty with not a redeeming virtue. The
last Valois king was the most degenerate monarch that ever sat on the
throne of France, but he was at least picturesque. Monsieur did not
possess even this quality. To find his equal one would have to go back
to the decline of the Roman Empire. In the third century he might have
won the purple and worn it like Heliogabalus, and the Prætorians would
have poisoned or strangled or slain him. But he had the luck to be born
in a Christian and more indulgent era, and died peacefully in his bed
after a life of incredible uselessness and scandal. Brought up entirely
among women, he had acquired an effeminacy that, when clad in women's
dress, a costume he frequently affected, made it difficult to believe he
belonged to the other sex. The study of clothes was his chief
consideration, he spent hours rouging and perfuming himself. Court
functions, to which he looked forward like a child to a party, provided
him with the opportunity to wear his gorgeous costumes. A State funeral
afforded him as much pleasure as a State wedding.
La Grande Mademoiselle declares that when her father, Gaston d'Orléans,
died, the King on paying her his visit of condolence, said--
"To-morrow you will see Monsieur in a trailing violet mantle. He is
enchanted to hear of your father's death so as to have the pleasure of
wearing it."
And as Louis predicted, Monsieur went to the funeral wearing a mantle of
a "furieuse longueur."
Added to his taste for dress and pageants, he delighted in collecting
precious furniture, pictures, and jewels. He also wrote neurotic verses
and swore love-till-death friendships--most of which he betrayed. Of his
literary accomplishments the Bibliothèque Nationale contains the
voluminous and ridiculous correspondence with which he honoured the
witty Madame de Sablé. As to the scandals into which his pleasures led
him, perhaps the least said about them the better. Those who are
interested in such things may learn all about them in the memoirs of his
period. Shame was an emotion he never knew. When his favourite, the
Chevalier de Lorraine, the most profligate man of his century, was
banished, Monsieur sulked. He possessed, however, two traits that in a
decadent of his type are rather surprising. He liked the society of
women quite as much as that of his own sex. By his two marriages he had
seven children, of whom no one ever doubted that he was the father. He
was, also, with all his vanity and effeminacy, personally brave. When he
served in the army it was said "that he was more afraid of spoiling his
complexion than of bullets." Strange to say, the division he commanded
covered itself with glory. At a certain siege he so distinguished
himself that Louis, who was extremely jealous of the tributes paid to
others, sarcastically shouted--
"Take care, brother; I advise you to lie as flat on the ground as
possible!"
Perhaps his degeneracy was not so much inherent as due to that
remorseless tyranny known as "politics," which can find a host of
plausible excuses to gain an end. Had Monsieur been given a fair chance
he might have shown as much ability as Louis himself. After his first
campaign, brilliant though it was, he was never given another command.
He had been trained to fear his brother, but now and then he resented
the dwarfing to which he was continually subjected. One cannot help
feeling a certain satisfaction on reading that once in boyhood in a "fit
of ungovernable passion he dashed a bowl of soup into his brother's
face."
When Madame married him the process of degeneration was complete. "He
was a woman," says Saint-Simon, "with all her faults and none of her
virtues; childish, feeble, idle, gossiping, curious, vain, suspicious,
incapable of holding his tongue, taking pleasure in spreading slander
and making mischief." The union of this wretched creature and the
fascinating Madame could not but be unhappy. It was a foregone
conclusion that the _mignons_ of Monsieur should be jealous of her
influence. They had already roused all the paltry jealousy of his nature
against her when Anne of Austria reinforced them with her malice. Not
that Monsieur loved his wife and resented her coquetry with his brother.
"I never loved her after the first fortnight," he confessed in later
life. Monsieur's jealousy was purely personal. He was jealous of her
popularity, of her wit, of her brains--in a word, of her superiority to
himself.
He was also jealous of the attention the King paid her.
The family bickerings to which his attachment to his sister-in-law
subjected Louis were irritating to his pride. To silence them Madame,
who had no desire to forego a friendship that amused and flattered her
as much as it pleased the King, devised a ruse by which everybody was
thrown off the scent. In order to enable Louis to continue his visits
and to divert in another direction the hostility to which they exposed
her, it was agreed that the King should feign a passion for one of
Madame's maids of honour. The one selected for this questionable purpose
was a sweet, unsophisticated young girl fresh from Touraine--the
celebrated Mademoiselle de la Vallière.
The ruse succeeded only too well. Madame's enemies were completely
hoodwinked, but Louis fell head over ears in love with the maid of
honour. Madame, who ought to have foreseen this _dénouement_, was at
first astonished and mortified. She was, however, too amiable to cherish
resentment, and, to show Louis how little she cared, she plunged more
gaily than ever into a life of pleasure, whereby she became involved in
another and more dangerous flirtation, famous in French history as:
L'affaire Guiche-Madame.
* * * * *
This "affaire" may be described as the historical parent of a numerous
family of the purest French breed, of which some of the more familiar
descendants are the Diamond Necklace, the Panama, the Dreyfus.
Complexity of intrigue was to each what the "Austrian lip" is to the
Hapsburgs--a family characteristic. Those who wish a graphic account of
the story should read Dumas' "Vicomte de Bragelonne." We can do no more
here than give a rough sketch of it.
[Illustration: ARMAND, COMTE DE GUICHE.
_From a painting in the possession of the Duc de Gramont._]
Like all of the Gramonts, Armand de Guiche was an original character.
His family, with the exception of the famous Chevalier, who, afterwards
returned to favour, stood high at Court. His father, the
Maréchal--Maréchal _Lampon_ they called him in Paris, from the number of
lampoons his doings had inspired--was held in great esteem by Louis, who
forgave him his private life for the sake of his public worth. His
sister, the flighty Princess of Monaco, of whom there are many curious
stories in the memoirs of the period, was loved by Monsieur as much as
he could ever love any one, and an intimate friend of Madame as well; as
was also his aunt, the Marquise de Saint-Chaumont, who was afterwards
governess to her children. He himself had passed all his life at Court,
where till the infamous Chevalier de Lorraine came on the scene he was
the bosom-friend of Monsieur.
Fortune had been particularly kind to him. He possessed everything
necessary to make him a general favourite: birth, wealth, good looks,
winning manners. The consciousness, however, of these great advantages,
says Madame de La Fayette, "gave him a certain scornful air that
tarnished his merit not a little, yet one must own no one at Court had
so much of it as he." The temperament of this hero was no less romantic
than his appearance. His brain teemed with the most chivalrous and
erotic ideas; he longed for a _grande passion_, but it must not be one
of your commonplace, vulgar sort. He wanted a Guinevere to play
Launcelot to, a Francesca to whom he might be the Paolo. And they
married him when little more than a boy, much against his will, to an
honest, prosaic girl. The marriage was, of course, unhappy--for the
Comtesse de Guiche. She would have given half of her life to have been
loved by him, but marriage had only served to make him long more than
ever for the realisation of his extravagant, impossible ideal. Now and
then he fancied for a moment he had found what he sought; one of these
brief illusions was a girl who afterwards became the famous Princesse
des Ursins.
He was still seeking the unattainable when Madame returned from London
and fascinated the Court. The high-flown imagination of the Comte de
Guiche was at once inflamed. It pleased him to think that the danger of
lifting his eyes to one so far removed from him added to the glory of
such a passion. But Guiche's head was not yet so cracked that all sense
had left it. Having learnt from the example of his uncle, the Chevalier
de Gramont, how unwise it was to excite the jealousy of Louis in an
affair of the heart, he prudently waited till the King had left the
field before he entered it. But when his chance arrived he behaved in
the most singular manner. Although they were thrown constantly together
both at Fontainebleau and the Tuileries, Madame was as unaware of his
infatuation as Dulcinea del Toboso of Don Quixote's. The Comte de
Guiche, however, had no intention of concealing his passion from the
rest of the world. The jealousy of Monsieur was aroused--the jealousy of
a slighted husband and a slighted friend. He and Guiche quarrelled, and
the latter "broke with the prince of the blood as if he were his equal."
The "_bruit_," as it was called, that this quarrel occasioned was the
first intimation that Madame received of the devotion of her quixotic
admirer. As she was not interested in the Comte de Guiche, who had now
withdrawn from Court, the affair would have ended here but for
Mademoiselle de Montalais, one of her maids of honour.