noticed it before. The hiccough seized her. She told Esprit (one of the
doctors) that it was the death-hiccough. She had asked several times how
soon she should die; she repeated the question, and although she was
answered as a person not near death, we saw well that she had no hope.
Her thoughts never rested on life; she never uttered a word of
reflection on the destiny which was taking her off in the prime of life;
never questioned the doctors as to whether it were possible to save
her; showed no impatience for remedies, except in so far as the violence
of her pains made her long for them; exhibited a calmness in the
certainty of death, in the suspicion of poison; in short, a courage of
which no example can be found, and which it is difficult even to
represent."
When Montague, the English Ambassador, arrived, she said--
"You see the sad condition I am in. I am going to die. Ah! how I pity
the King, my brother, for I am sure he loses the person in the world who
loves him best."
"A little while later," says Montague in a letter he wrote to Charles,
"she called me again, bidding me _be sure_ to say all the kind things in
the world from her to her brother, and thank him for all his kindness
and care of her.
"'Pray tell my brother I never persuaded him to join France out of my
own interest, but because I thought it for his honour and advantage, for
I always loved him above all things in the world.'
"I asked her in English if she believed herself poisoned. Some confessor
standing near catching the word _poison_, which is the same in French as
in English, quickly interposed--
"'Madame, you must accuse nobody, but offer up your life as a sacrifice
to God.'
"So she only shrugged her shoulders."
Perhaps the most touching incident of this leave-taking was associated
with Tréville. This man was the Captain of Monsieur's Mousquetaires,
and one of the wittiest and best-educated men at Court. "To talk like
Tréville, to be as learned as Tréville, was the highest compliment you
could pay a man." He was one of the chiefs of the Port-Royal coterie,
which was the centre of intellectual life in France--and he loved
Madame. It was a love that did them both honour--a chivalrous devotion
that never overstepped the bounds of respect. To approach Madame at such
a moment and take leave of her for ever before the envious eyes of that
crowded, callous room was impossible to Tréville. But, notwithstanding
her hectic excitement and intense suffering, Madame observed him
standing in the background.
"Adieu, Tréville, adieu, mon ami!" she waved.
The simple farewell broke his heart. The next day he left the Court and
the world for ever.
In these last terrible moments she forgot no one. Monsieur having left
the room, she sent to call him back, and in bidding him farewell
declared that "she had never been faithless to him." The solemnity of
the occasion on which these words were uttered has inclined most of her
biographers to acquit her of the adulteries with Louis and the Comte de
Guiche of which she was suspected. There are other evidences, however,
of Madame's virtue which might be cited quite as convincing as this; and
in regard to the Comte de Guiche at all events, the various ladies for
whom he sighed before he met Madame were all agreed in attributing a
physical rather than a spiritual cause to the "Platonic" character of
his amours.
Her strength now began to fail fast, and as a last resort the doctors
decided to bleed her. The incision was made in her foot, but no blood
flowed, and her exhaustion was so extreme that they thought she would
die while her foot was still in the warm water. The doctors then
declared that they would try one more remedy, but she begged them to
give her the Extreme Unction before it was too late. It was given to her
by a priest who was present, and who exhorted and rebuked her like a
Scotch Calvinist. When he had finished she said meekly--
"At what o'clock did Jesus Christ die? At three o'clock?"
"Do not mind that, Madame," he replied, "you must endure life and wait
for death with patience."
At this moment Bossuet arrived. He was so overcome at the sight of her
that he nearly fainted.
"He spoke to her of God," says Madame de La Fayette, "in a manner
suitable to her condition and with that eloquence which marks all his
sermons. He made her perform such little acts as he thought necessary,
and she entered into all that he told her with zeal. While he was
speaking a maid of honour approached to give her something of which she
had need. She said to her in English, in order that Bossuet might not
hear, and preserving till death the politeness characteristic of her--
"'Remember to give M. Bossuet, when I am dead, the emerald ring that I
have had made for him.'
"While he was praying with her he was nearly exhausted by the strain on
his nature. Madame asked him gently if she might not take a few moments'
rest; he told her that she might, and he would withdraw and pray for
her. M. Feuillet" (the priest who had given her the Extreme Unction)
"remained at her side, and almost at the same moment Madame begged him
to recall M. Bossuet, for she felt she was about to die. M. Bossuet
hurried back and gave her the crucifix. She took it and embraced it with
ardour. M. Bossuet continued to speak to her, and she replied with the
same clearness as if she had never been ill, keeping the crucifix
pressed to her lips to the last. As her strength failed it fell from her
hands, and she lost speech and life at the same time. Her agony lasted
but a moment; and after two or three little convulsive movements of the
mouth, she expired at half-past two in the morning, and nine hours after
having been taken ill."
* * * * *
It is only natural that the suddenness and mystery of such an illness
and death should have been fertile in historical speculation.
For about one hundred and fifty years the world generally took it for
granted that Madame was poisoned--especially as some of the doctors
privately expressed this opinion, which was contrary to their official
statement at the post-mortem. But in the early part of the nineteenth
century the world suddenly changed its mind and declared that Madame
died "naturally" of cholera morbus or peritonitis. As far as we are
concerned one theory is as good as another. Our object is not to emulate
the latest authorities and perform, like them, a literary autopsy on
remains we have never seen. At this late day it is of not the least
consequence to the world whether Madame was poisoned or not. By all
means let us take it for granted, with M. Anatole France and many
another of equal distinction, that her untimely end was natural. But as
the other theory is thoroughly in keeping with seventeenth-century
customs, it is, if no longer worthy of credence--which, after all, is
not proved--at least pregnant with possibility.
As a good "poison story" it will always be worth telling; and as no one
has ever told it more graphically than Saint-Simon we will give his
version.
He says that when the news that Madame had expired reached Versailles--
"The King, who had gone to bed, rose, sent for Brissac, who was the
captain of the guards and close at hand, and commanded him to choose six
body-guards, trusty and secret, to go and take up Simon Morel, Madame's
_maître d'hôtel_, and to bring him to him in his cabinet. This was done
before morning. When the King saw him he ordered Brissac and his valet
de chambre to withdraw, and assuming a most alarming aspect and tone--
"'My friend,' said he, surveying him from head to foot, 'listen well to
me. If you confess all and tell me the truth about what I want to know
from you, whatever you may have done I pardon you; it shall never be
mentioned again. But beware how you disguise the least thing, for if you
do you are a dead man before you leave this place. Has not Madame been
poisoned?'
"'Yes, Sire,' answered Morel.
"'And who has poisoned her and how?' said the King.
"He replied that it was the Chevalier de Lorraine, who had sent the
poison from Italy to Beuvron and Effiat (two of Monsieur's equerries).
Whereupon the King, redoubling his assurances of favour and threats of
death, said--
"'And my brother, did he know of it?'
"'No, Sire. None of us three were fools enough to tell him. He never
keeps a secret, he would have ruined us.'
"At this reply, the King uttered a long 'Ah!' like a man oppressed, who
all at once breathes again.
"'Well,' said he, 'that is all I want to know.' And Brissac restored
Morel to liberty."
[Illustration: THE CHEVALIER DE LORRAINE.]
Saint-Simon further declares that a few days before Monsieur married his
second wife Louis took her aside and told her these circumstances,
assuring her that Monsieur was innocent of any participation in this
crime, and that were he not convinced of it he would not have permitted
his remarriage. This second Madame, or La Palatine, as she was
called, who by this marriage became the mother of the Regent d'Orléans,
and was not the least original of the many strikingly original persons
of "_le grand siècle_," tells the story in another fashion, in that
remarkable correspondence of hers from which as much historical ore has
been mined as from Saint-Simon's memoirs:--
"It is only too true," she writes in her blunt, vigorous way, "that
Madame was poisoned, but without the knowledge of Monsieur. While the
villains were arranging the plan of poisoning the poor woman, they
deliberated whether they should tell Monsieur or not.
"The Chevalier de Lorraine said, 'No, don't tell him, for he cannot hold
his tongue. If he does not tell the first year, he may have us all
hanged ten years afterwards.'
"They therefore made Monsieur believe that Madame had taken poison in
Holland (on her way back from England), which did not act until she
arrived at St. Cloud. Nor was it Madame's chicory-water that Effiat had
poisoned, but the goblet. A valet de chambre, who was with Madame and
afterwards in my service, told me that in the morning while Monsieur and
Madame were at Mass, Effiat went to the sideboard, and taking Madame's
glass rubbed the inside of it with a paper, and that he, the valet, said
to him--
"'Monsieur d'Effiat, what are you doing in this room, and why do you
touch Madame's glass?'
"Effiat answered, 'I am dying with thirst, I wanted something to drink,
and the glass being dirty I was cleaning it with some paper.'
"After dinner Madame asked for some chicory-water, and as soon as she
had swallowed it she cried out, 'I am poisoned!'
"All that were present drank of the same chicory-water, but not from the
same glass, so, of course, it did them no harm."
Such are the most authoritative "poison" theories which
nineteenth-century investigation has very brilliantly but not altogether
exploded.
* * * * *
Madame's death, as may be imagined, created a profound sensation
throughout Europe. In London, considering how slight had been her
connection with her native country, the indignation was remarkable. An
infuriated mob rushed to the French Embassy, which but for the
precautions taken by the Government to protect it they would have
destroyed. Whitehall was utterly prostrated. Charles took to his bed for
several days.
"Never," said Rochester, "was any one so regretted since dying was the
fashion."
But for the good sense of the King, England would have declared war on
France. Louis, whose grief was genuine, did all that he could to prove
his regret--all but punish the suspected poisoners. On the contrary,
Effiat was promoted and the Chevalier de Lorraine, whom he detested, to
Monsieur's and his own delight, was recalled. Perhaps no other course
was left open to him, if the report of foul play which threatened to
plunge him into a war was not to be hushed up at all costs. But to prove
to Charles II. and Europe that he was free from implication in this
strange death, he at once ordered a post-mortem, at which English
doctors and the English Ambassador were present. The verdict of the
autopsy was "death from natural causes." It served to allay popular
anger but not popular suspicion.
Louis also gave Madame such a funeral as few kings have ever had.
"I do not think," wrote Madame de Sévigné, who was present, "that there
will be any better music in heaven."
Bossuet pronounced over the corpse his masterpiece, which is familiar to
every schoolboy in France. On his finger, placed there by Louis himself,
there glittered the emerald Madame had bequeathed him with her dying
breath, and which he wore till his own death. The body was buried at St.
Denis beside that of Henrietta Maria. It was the first that the mob dug
up one hundred and twenty-three years later when the tombs of the kings
were desecrated. It was flung into a pit behind the church along with
Louis' and the rest of his dynasty's. By a curious coincidence it--or
what was supposed to be it--was the first body restored to its original
resting-place after Waterloo.
By a still more curious coincidence, Madame's daughter, Marie Louise,
whom they married to the last King of Spain, of the House of Austria,
died at the same age and in the same strange way as her mother. There is
something decidedly uncanny in the fate that decreed that Effiat, as
French Ambassador at Madrid, should be the medium through whom her
husband corresponded with her; that the Chevalier de Lorraine should be
the man appointed to lead her to the altar; and that the Comtesse de
Soissons should be the one to poison her!
If happiness be the aim of prince and peasant alike, it was not, at all
events, in the Armida-courts of the seventeenth century that it was to
be found. It was of Madame, his friend and patron, that Molière was
thinking when his Alceste sang--
"Si le roi me donnait,
Paris sa grande ville,
Et qu'il me fallut quitter
L'amour de ma mie,
Je dirais au roi Henri
Reprenez votre Paris,
J'aime mieux ma mie, ô gué,
J'aime mieux ma mie."
[Illustration: THE DUCHESS OF PORTSMOUTH.
_After Sir Godfrey Kneller._]
LOUISE DE KÉROUAL, DUCHESS OF PORTSMOUTH
A SPY OF THE RESTORATION
If proof were required of anything so obvious as the cynicism of fame,
one might cite the subject of this memoir as an example. Of European
importance in her own day, and now--excepting Nell Gwynn--unquestionably
the best remembered because the most odious of all the women of the
Restoration, although "Madam Carwell," as the English people called her,
has escaped oblivion, the mere spelling of her name has become a matter
of indifference to history.
Kéroual, Kéroualle, Querouralles, Querouailles are some of the ways it
is printed, and we only adopt the first as being the most frequent
French mode.
A similar uncertainty attaches to her origin.
The Duchess of Portsmouth, however, had no doubt about it and was
herself extremely proud of her ancestry, and boasted--when in England,
be it understood--an ancient and distinguished lineage. It is
characteristic of _parvenus_. Colbert, Louis XIV.'s famous Finance
Minister, claimed a noble Scot, by name Cuthbert, who flourished in the
reign of Macbeth or earlier, as the progenitor of his shopkeeper father.
But there were many like Madame de Sévigné, whose opinions take
precedence over those of most of her contemporaries, who had the
greatest contempt for the Duchess of Portsmouth's family pretensions. Be
the matter as it may, by Louise de Kéroual's first start in life there
hangs a tale.
Her father, whether or not he could trace his ancestry back to the
fourteenth century as his daughter declared--when there was a saying in
Brittany: "The Kérouals for antiquity, the Kermans for riches, and the
Kergournadecs for chivalry"--went to Paris as a boy to seek his fortune.
Of this he appears to have amassed in the wool trade sufficient to
enable him to retire in middle life to his native Brittany, where, being
from all accounts an honest and unpretentious man, he devoted his
leisure to the bringing up of his son and two daughters, and dispensing
modest hospitality. It was at his house in Brest that Evelyn made his
acquaintance, "and being used very civilly, was obliged to return it in
London," when "Monsieur Querouaille and his lady, parents to the famous
beauty," paid the Duchess of Portsmouth a visit. Her Grace was then,
adds Evelyn, "in the height of favour, but he never made any use of it."
The bringing-up of his children, however, would seem to have been beyond
the abilities of the civil wool merchant, and owing to the dissension of
his daughters he placed Louise, the elder and prettier of the two, at a
boarding-school in a neighbouring town. Here she developed the
insinuating manners that later on were "to tie England and France
together with her silken girdle."
Having won the friendship of the head-mistress, she obtained certain
social privileges, which, from the reports of the use she made of them,
so alarmed the retired wool merchant that he sent her to Paris to the
care of a widowed aunt. This lady, whose very name has long since been
forgotten, owed in a great measure her means of subsistence to the
generosity of the Duc de Beaufort, in whose service her husband had
died. According to the author of the curious libel known as "The Secret
History of the Duchess of Portsmouth," Louise got round her aunt as
easily as she had got round the head-mistress of her boarding-school.
For it was not long before she made the acquaintance of the Duc de
Beaufort, and interested this powerful nobleman in her behalf. Whereby
she was constrained to learn the rudiments of intrigue, a subject in
which she was afterwards to become pre-eminently proficient.
It is easy to censure a girl who deliberately prefers to seek her
happiness in immorality. It is done every day. But there are few girls
of the alert, ambitious nature of Louise de Kéroual, who if placed in
her position would not follow her example. What were her prospects? On
the one hand she had the choice between returning home and marrying
some petty, humdrum _bourgeois_, or immuring herself for the rest of her
life in a convent. On the other, by prudently selling her virtue, she
might have the riches, gaiety, and pleasure she craved, and still remain
respectable. Of these two prospects, the first was impossible to Louise.
But the second was an opportunity--one of those opportunities that
Shakespeare says, "if taken at the flood, lead on to fortune"--the great
opportunity of life that most of us sigh for and fail to recognise till
too late. To Louise de Kéroual it came in the guise of a Duc de
Beaufort, High Admiral of France. Her mind never suffered the slightest
misgiving, her conscience the least qualm. Like all persons destined for
success, she knew what she wanted and took it. A woman so _rusée_ as
Louise was not such a fool as to be found out. Her _liaison_ with the
Duc de Beaufort was never suspected.
How long it lasted it is impossible to say, but it was brought to an
abrupt end in the summer of 1669, when the Duc de Beaufort was given the
command of the naval expedition which had for its object the relief of
the Venetians who for twenty-four years had been besieged by the Turks
in Crete. From this expedition he never returned, but before he sailed
Louise took care to provide for her future by obtaining through his
influence one of the posts of maid of honour to Madame which had just
fallen vacant. This was the beginning of her fortune. The report that
she accompanied Beaufort to Crete disguised as a page is a mere
fabrication of her libeller. The Kéroual who accompanied the Duc de
Beaufort to Crete was her younger brother, Sebastien, whom, no doubt,
she now tried to provide for, as she did on a later occasion in England
for her sister, Henriette. Sebastien, however, did not long enjoy the
fruits of his sister's patronage; he died a few days after his return
from Crete.
It was probably through this event that Louise became acquainted with
the Comte de Sault, who on Beaufort's death appears to have taken
Sebastien into his service, in which he was at the time of his death.
This Comte de Sault was the eldest son of the Duc de Lesdiguières, and
one of the best-known men at Court. He had won the chief prize a few
years before in the famous jousts in front of the Tuileries, which gave
their name to the Place du Carrousel. The Comte de Sault soon occupied
more or less publicly the same place in the maid of honour's affections
that had previously been held by the Duc de Beaufort. In fact, there was
so little privacy about their relations that Madame de Sévigné and
Louvois did not hesitate to put the worst construction on them, while
several years later in England "a great peer taunted her insultingly
with the recollection of this old scandal."
This affair was, however, decently conducted, as such things were in
France, and Mademoiselle de Kéroual's social standing did not suffer.
Perhaps she may have hoped to arrest the notice of the King himself, but
if so she was disappointed. During the short time that she was in
Madame's service the monarch's attention was too much absorbed by the
beautiful Mademoiselle de la Vallière to be diverted by Mademoiselle de
Kéroual. From all accounts Louis was scarcely aware of her existence
till she was recommended to him as an agent likely to be of use in
binding Charles II. hand and foot in the toils of French diplomacy.
As the Imperial policy of Louis XIV. was never so successful as when
Louise de Kéroual queened it at Whitehall, some account of the obstacles
opposed to it is necessary in order to understand the nature of the game
she was unexpectedly called upon to play.
The "hereditary enmity" which until quite recent times so long estranged
France and England might be compared to the feud between the Capulets
and the Montagues. From time to time, however, this ancient feud was
patched up, so to speak, by romantic Romeo and Juliet _ententes_, which,
unfortunately, owing to national incompatibility of temper, always
ended, as such love-affairs only too often do in real life, in mutual
mistrust and animosity. In no instance was the cause of estrangement
ever the same. In the age of Louis XIV. the bone of contention was
Religion. It is impossible in this day of religious indifference to
realise the force of the passions that tormented these two foolish
nations then. England was passionately Protestant, and the Civil War and
ten years of Cromwell had made her democratic. For the first time in
her history England had found an ideal. France, on the other hand, never
found hers till the Revolution, but as the "eldest daughter of the
Church" she was bigotedly Catholic, and Richelieu and Mazarin had
converted her to despotism. The temper of the two neighbours being such,
strife was only a question of time, and the political interests of each
only served to whet animosity. By the middle of the seventeenth century
it was evident that the great House of Austria was slowly dying in
Spain, and France, governed by a vigorous and ambitious king who was
surrounded with the ablest brains in Europe, determined by fair means or
foul to be its heir. Louis XIV. cast a covetous eye on Flanders, and at
the bare thought of having such a virile neighbour in the place of this
old decrepit one Protestant Holland turned uneasily towards England. The
plunder of Spain did not at that time tempt England. Nor was there any
particular reason why she should fight Holland's battles, especially as
Holland had come out of the recent Thirty Years' War her commercial
rival. On the contrary, it would have been to England's interest to see
Holland weakened. But a nation with an ideal has "principles," and
England made hers the excuse to defy Catholic and despotic France to
plunder Spain at the expense of Protestant and democratic Holland.
Consequently England joined the Triple League.