If you scrape the rubbish-heap of servile, coeval flattery that usually
smothers the personality of a monarch, you will discover a few kings
who have been truly great; many who have achieved greatness because they
were wisely content to serve as masks for the great intellects of their
time; and, for the rest, some bad kings, some foolish kings, and some
ridiculous kings. But in all that royal gallery of history you will
hardly find a more truly absurd figure than that of the resplendent Roi
Soleil, the Grand Monarque, the Fourteenth Louis of France.
I am not aware that he has ever been laughed at; certainly never to the
extent which he deserves. The flatterers of his day, inevitable products
of his reign, did their work so thoroughly that even in secret they do
not appear to have dared to utter--possibly they did not even dare
to think--the truth about him. Their work survives, and when you have
assessed the monstrous flattery at its true worth, swept it aside and
come down to the real facts of his life, you make the discovery that
the proudest title their sycophancy could bestow and his own fatuity
accept--Le Roi Soleil, the Sun-King--makes him what indeed he is: a
king of opera bouffe. There is about him at times something almost
reminiscent of the Court buffoons of a century before, who puffed
themselves out with mock pride, and aped a sort of sovereignty to excite
laughter; with this difference, however, that in his own case it was not
intended to be amusing.
A heartless voluptuary of mediocre intelligence, he contrived to wrap
himself in what Saint-Simon has called a “terrible majesty.” He was
obsessed by the idea of the dignity, almost the divinity--of kingship. I
cannot believe that he conceived himself human. He appears to have
held that being king was very like being God, and he duped the world by
ceremonials of etiquette that were very nearly sacramental. We find
him burdening the most simple and personal acts of everyday life with a
succession of rites of an amazing complexity. Thus, when he rose in the
morning, princes of the blood and the first gentlemen of France were in
attendance: one to present to him his stockings, another to proffer
on bended knee the royal garters, a third to perform the ceremony of
handing him his wig, and so on until the toilette of his plump, not
unhandsome person was complete. You miss the incense, you feel that some
noble thurifer should have fumigated him at each stage. Perhaps he never
thought of it.
The evil fruits of his reign--evil, that is to say, from the point
of view of his order, which was swept away as so much anachronistic
rubbish--did not come until a hundred years later. In his own day France
was great, and this not because but in spite of him. After all, he was
not the absolute ruler he conceived himself. There were such capable men
as Colbert and Louvois at the King's side'; there was the great genius
of France which manifests itself when and as it will, whatever the
regime--and there was Madame de Montespan to whose influence not a
little of Louis's glory may be ascribed, since the most splendid years
of his reign were those between 1668 and 1678 when she was maitresse en
titre and more than Queen of France. The women played a great part at
the Court of Louis XIV, and those upon whom he turned his dark eyes were
in the main as wax under the solar rays of the Sun-King. But Madame de
Montespan had discovered the secret of reversing matters, so that in her
hands it was the King who became as wax for her modelling. It is with
this secret--a page of the secret history of France that we are here
concerned.
Francoises Athenais de Tonnay-Charente had come to Court in 1660 as
a maid of honour to the Queen. Of a wit and grace to match her superb
beauty, she was also of a perfervid piety, a daily communicant, a model
of virtue to all maids of honour. This until the Devil tempted her. When
that happened, she did not merely eat an apple; she devoured an entire
orchard. Pride and ambition brought about her downfall. She shared the
universal jealousy of which Louise de la Valliere was a victim,
and coveted the honours and the splendour by which that unfortunate
favourite was surrounded.
Not even her marriage with the Marquis de Montespan some three years
after her coming to Court sufficed to overcome the longings born of
her covetousness and ambition. And then, when the Sun-King looked with
favour upon her opulent charms, when at last she saw the object of her
ambition within reach, that husband of hers went very near to wrecking
everything by his unreasonable behaviour. This preposterous marquis had
the effrontery to dispute his wife with Jupiter, was so purblind as not
to appreciate the honour the Sun-King proposed to do him.
In putting it thus, I but make myself the mouthpiece of the Court.
When Montespan began to make trouble by railing furiously against the
friendship of the King for his wife, his behaviour so amazed the King's
cousin, Mademoiselle de Montpensier, that she called him “an extravagant
and extraordinary man.” To his face she told him that he must be mad to
behave in this fashion; and so incredibly distorted were his views, that
he did not at all agree with her. He provoked scenes with the King, in
which he quoted Scripture, made opposite allusions to King David which
were in the very worst taste, and even ventured to suggest that the
Sun-King might have to reckon with the judgment of God. If he escaped
a lettre de cachet and a dungeon in the Bastille, it can only have been
because the King feared the further spread of a scandal injurious to the
sacrosanctity of his royal dignity.
The Marchioness fumed in private and sneered in public. When
Mademoiselle de Montpensier suggested that for his safety's sake she
should control her husband's antics, she expressed her bitterness.
“He and my parrot,” she said, “amuse the Court to my shame.”
In the end, finding that neither by upbraiding the King nor by beating
his wife could he prevail, Monsieur de Montespan resigned himself after
his own fashion. He went into widower's mourning, dressed his servants
in black, and came ostentatiously to Court in a mourning coach to take
ceremonious leave of his friends. It was an affair that profoundly
irritated the Sun-King, and very nearly made him ridiculous.
Thereafter Montespan abandoned his wife to the King. He withdrew first
to his country seat, and, later, from France, having received more than
a hint that Louis was intending to settle his score with him. By that
time Madame de Montespan was firmly established as maitresse en titre,
and in January of 1669 she gave birth to the Duke of Maine, the first
of the seven children she was to bear the King. Parliament was to
legitimize them all, declaring them royal children of France, and the
country was to provide titles, dignities, and royal rent-rolls for them
and their heirs forever. Do you wonder that there was a revolution
a century later, and that the people, grown weary of the parasitic
anachronism of royalty, should have risen to throw off the intolerable
burden it imposed upon them?
The splendour of Madame de Montespan in those days was something the
like of which had never been seen at the Court of France. On her estate
of Clagny, near Versailles, stood now a magnificent chateau. Louis had
begun by building a country villa, which satisfied her not at all.
“That,” she told him, “might do very well for an opera-girl”; whereupon
the infatuated monarch had no alternative but to command its demolition,
and call in the famous architect, Mansard, to erect in its place an
ultraroyal residence.
At Versailles itself, whilst the long-suffering Queen had to be content
with ten rooms on the second floor, Madame de Montespan was installed
in twice that number on the first; and whilst a simple page sufficed
to carry the Queen's train at Court, nothing less than the wife of a
marshal of France must perform the same office for the favourite. She
kept royal state as few queens have ever kept it. She was assigned a
troop of royal bodyguards for escort, and when she travelled there was a
never-ending train to follow her six-horse coach, and officers of State
came to receive her with royal honours wherever she passed.
In her immeasurable pride she became a tyrant, even over the King
himself.
“Thunderous and triumphant,” Madame de Sevigne describes her in those
days when the Sun-King was her utter and almost timid slave.
But constancy is not a Jovian virtue. Jupiter grew restless, and
then, shaking off all restraint, plunged into inconstancy of the most
scandalous and flagrant kind. It is doubtful if the history of royal
amours, with all its fecundity, can furnish a parallel. Within a few
months, Madame de Soubise, Mademoiselle de Rochefort-Theobon, Madame
de Louvigny, Madame de Ludres, and some lesser ones passed in rapid
succession through the furnace of the Sun-King's affection--which is to
say, through the royal bed--and at last the Court was amazed to see the
Widow Scarron, who had been appointed governess to Madame de Montespan's
royal children, empanoplied in a dignity and ceremony that left no doubt
on the score of her true position at Court.
And so, after seven years of absolute sway in which homage had been
paid her almost in awe by noble and simple alike, Madame de Montespan,
neglected now by Louis, moved amid reflections of that neglect, with
arrogantly smiling lips and desperate rage in her heart. She sneered
openly at the royal lack of taste, allowed her barbed wit to make
offensive sport with the ladies who supplanted her; yet, ravaged
by jealousy, she feared for herself the fate which through her had
overtaken La Valliere.
That fear was with her now as she sat in the window embrasure, hell in
her heart and a reflection of it in her eyes, as, fallen almost to the
rank of a spectator in that comedy wherein she was accustomed to the
leading part, she watched the shifting, chattering, glittering crowd.
And as she watched, her line of vision was crossed to her undoing by the
slender, wellknit figure of de Vanens, who, dressed from head to foot in
black, detached sharply from that dazzling throng. His face was pale and
saturnine, his eyes dark, very level, and singularly piercing. Thus
his appearance served to underline the peculiar fascination which he
exerted, the rather sinister appeal which he made to the imagination.
This young Provencal nobleman was known to dabble in magic, and there
were one or two dark passages in his past life of which more than
a whisper had gone abroad. Of being a student of alchemy, a
“philosopher”--that is to say, a seeker after the philosopher's stone,
which was to effect the transmutation of metals--he made no secret. But
if you taxed him with demoniacal practices he would deny it, yet in a
way that carried no conviction.
To this dangerous fellow Madame de Montespan now made appeal in her
desperate need.
Their eyes met as he was sauntering past, and with a lazy smile and a
languid wave of her fan she beckoned him to her side.
“They tell me, Vanens,” said she, “that your philosophy succeeds so well
that you are transmuting copper into silver.”
His piercing eyes surveyed her, narrowing; a smile flickered over his
thin lips.
“They tell you the truth,” he said. “I have cast a bar which has been
purchased as good silver by the Mint.”
Her interest quickened. “By the Mint!” she echoed, amazed. “But, then,
my friend--” She was breathless with excitement. “It is a miracle.”
“No less,” he admitted. “But there is the greater miracle to come--the
transmutation of base metal into gold.”
“And you will perform it?”
“Let me but conquer the secret of solidifying mercury, and the rest is
naught. I shall conquer it, and soon.”
He spoke with easy confidence, a man stating something that he knew
beyond the possibility of doubt. The Marquise became thoughtful. She
sighed.
“You are the master of deep secrets, Vanens. Have you none that will
soften flinty hearts, make them responsive?”
He considered this woman whom Saint-Simon has called “beautiful as the
day,” and his smile broadened.
“Look in your mirror for the alchemy needed there,” he bade her.
Anger rippled across the perfect face. She lowered, “I have looked--in
vain. Can you not help me, Vanens, you who know so much?”
“A love-philtre?” said he, and hummed. “Are you in earnest?”
“Do you mock me with that question? Is not my need proclaimed for all to
see?”
Vanens became grave.
“It is not an alchemy in which myself I dabble,” he said slowly. “But I
am acquainted with those who do.”
She clutched his wrist in her eagerness.
“I will pay well,” she said.
“You will need to. Such things are costly.” He glanced round to see that
none was listening, then bending nearer: “There is a sorceress named La
Voisin in the Rue de la Tannerie, well known as a fortuneteller to many
ladies of the Court, who at a word from me will do your need.”
La Montespan turned white. The piety in which she had been reared--the
habits of which clung to her despite the irregularity of her life--made
her recoil before the thing that she desired. Sorcery was of the Devil.
She told him so. But Vanens laughed.
“So that it be effective. . .” said he with a shrug.
And then across the room floated a woman's trilling laugh. She looked
in the direction of the sound and beheld the gorgeous figure of the King
bending--yet haughty and condescending even in adoration--over handsome
Madame de Ludres. Pride and ambition rose up in sudden fury to trample
on religious feeling. Let Vanens take her to this witch of his, for be
the aid what it might, she must have it.
And so, one dark night late in the year, Louis de Vanens handed a masked
and muffled lady from a coach at the corner of the Rue de la Tannerie,
and conducted her to the house of La Voisin.
The door was opened for them by a young woman of some twenty years
of age--Marguerite Monvoisin, the daughter of the witch--who led them
upstairs to a room that was handsomely furnished and hung with fantastic
tapestry of red designs upon a black ground--designs that took monstrous
shapes in the flickering light of a cluster of candles. Black curtains
parted, and from between them stepped a short, plump woman, of a certain
comeliness, with two round black beads of eyes. She was fantastically
robed in a cloak of crimson velvet, lined with costly furs and closely
studded with double-headed eagles in fine gold, which must have been
worth a prince's ransom; and she wore red shoes on each of which there
was the same eagle design in gold.
“Ah, Vanens!” she said familiarly.
He bowed.
“I bring you,” he announced, “a lady who has need of your skill.”
And he waved a hand towards the tall cloaked figure at his side.
La Voisin looked at the masked face.
“Velvet faces tell me little, Madame la Marquise,” she said calmly.
“Nor, believe me, will the King look at a countenance that you conceal
from me.”
There was an exclamation of surprise and anger from Madame de Montespan.
She plucked off her mask.
“You knew me?”
“Can you wonder?” asked La Voisin, “since I have told you what you carry
concealed in your heart?”
Madame de Montespan was as credulous as only the very devout can be.
“Since that is so, since you know already what I seek, tell me can you
procure it me?” she asked in a fever of excitement. “I will pay well.”
La Voisin smiled darkly.
“Obdurate, indeed, is the case that will not yield to such medicine as
mine,” she said. “Let me consider first what must be done. In a few days
I shall bring you word. But have you courage for a great ordeal?”
“For any ordeal that will give me what I want.”
“In a few days, then, you shall hear from me,” said the witch, and so
dismissed the great lady.
Leaving a heavy purse behind her, as Vanens had instructed her, the
Marchioness departed with her escort. And there, with that initiation,
as far as we can ascertain, ended Louis de Vanens's connection with the
affair.
At Clagny Madame de Montespan waited for three days in a fever of
impatience for the coming of the witch. But when at last La Voisin
presented herself, the proposal that she had to make was one before
which the Marchioness recoiled in horror and some indignation.
The magic that La Voisin suggested involved a coadjutor, the Abbe
Guibourg, and the black mass to be celebrated by him. Madame de
Montespan had heard something of these dread sacrificial rites to Satan;
sufficient to fill her with loathing and disgust of the whitefaced,
beady-eyed woman who dared to insult her by the proposal. She fumed and
raged a while, and even went near to striking La Voisin, who looked
on with inscrutable face and stony, almost contemptuous, indifference.
Before that impenetrable, almost uncanny, calm, Madame de Montespan's
fury at last abated. Then the urgency of her need becoming paramount,
she desired more clearly to be told what would be expected of her.
What the witch told her was more appalling than anything she could have
imagined. But La Voisin argued:
“Can anything be accomplished without cost? Can anything be gained in
this life without payment of some kind?”
“But the price of this is monstrous!” Madame de Montespan protested.
“Measure it by the worldly advantages to be gained. They are not small,
madame. To enjoy boundless wealth, boundless power, and boundless
honour, to be more than queen--is not all this worth some sacrifice?”
To Madame de Montespan it must have been worth any sacrifice in this
world or the next, since in the end she conquered her disgust, and
agreed to lend herself to this horror.
Three masses, she was told, would be necessary to ensure success, and
it was determined that they should be celebrated in the chapel of the
Chateau de Villebousin, where Guibourg had been almoner, to which he had
access, and which was at the time untenanted.
The chateau was a gloomy mediaeval fortress, blackened by age, and
standing, surrounded by a moat, in a lonely spot some two miles to the
south of Paris. Thither on a dark, gusty night of March came Madame de
Montespan, accompanied by her confidential waiting-woman, Mademoiselle
Desceillets. They left the coach to await them on the Orleans road, and
thence, escorted by a single male attendant, they made their way by a
rutted, sodden path towards the grim castle looming faintly through the
enveloping gloom.
The wind howled dismally about the crenellated turrets; and a row of
poplars, standing like black, phantasmal guardians of the evil place,
bent groaning before its fury. From the running waters of the moat,
swollen by recent rains, came a gurgling sound that was indescribably
wicked.
Desocillets was frightened by the dark, the desolate loneliness and
eeriness of the place; but she dared utter no complaint as she stumbled
forward over the uneven ground, through the gloom and the buffeting
wind, compelled by the suasion of her mistress's imperious will. Thus,
by a drawbridge spanning dark, oily waters, they came into a vast
courtyard and an atmosphere as of mildew. A studded door stood ajar, and
through the gap, from a guiding beacon of infamy, fell a rhomb of yellow
light, suddenly obscured by a squat female figure when the steps of the
Marchioness and her companions fell upon the stones of the yard.
It was La Voisin who stood on the threshold to receive her client. In
the stone-flagged hall behind her the light of a lantern revealed her
daughter, Marguerite Monvoisin, and a short, crafty-faced, misshapen
fellow in black homespun and a red wig--a magician named Lesage, one of
La Voisin's coadjutors, a rogue of some talent who exploited the witches
of Paris to his own profit.
Leaving Leroy--the Marchioness's male attendant below in this fellow's
company, La Voisin took up a candle and lighted Madame de Montespan up
the broad stone staircase, draughty and cold, to the ante-room of the
chapel on the floor above. Mademoiselle Desceillets followed closely and
fearfully, and Marguerite Monvoisin came last.
They entered the ante-room, a spacious chamber, bare of furniture save
for an oaken table in the middle, some faded and mildewed tapestries,
and a cane-backed settle of twisted walnut over against the wall. An
alabaster lamp on the table made an island of light in that place of
gloom, and within the circle of its feeble rays stood a gross old man of
some seventy years of age in sacerdotal garments of unusual design: the
white alb worn over a greasy cassock was studded with black fir-cones;
the stole and maniple were of black satin, with fir-cones wrought in
yellow thread.
His inflamed countenance was of a revolting hideousness: his cheeks were
covered by a network of blue veins, his eyes squinted horribly, his lips
vanished inwards over toothless gums, and a fringe of white hair hung
in matted wisps from his high, bald crown. This was the infamous
Abbe Guibourg, sacristan of Saint Denis, an ordained priest who had
consecrated himself to the service of the Devil.
He received the great lady with a low bow which, despite herself, she
acknowledged by a shudder. She was very pale, and her eyes were dilating
and preternaturally bright. Fear began to possess her, yet she suffered
herself to be ushered into the chapel, which was dimly illumined by a
couple of candles standing beside a basin on a table. The altar light
had been extinguished. Her maid would have hung back, but that she
feared to be parted from her mistress. She passed in with her in the
wake of Guibourg, and followed by La Voisin, who closed the door,
leaving her daughter in the ante-room.
Although she had never been a participant in any of the sorceries
practised by her mother, yet Marguerite was fully aware of their extent,
and more than guessed what horrors were taking place beyond the closed
doors of the chapel. The very thought of them filled her with loathing
and disgust as she sat waiting, huddled in a corner of the settle. And
yet when presently through the closed doors came the drone of the voice
of that unclean celebrant, to blend with the whine of the wind in the
chimney, Marguerite, urged by a morbid curiosity she could not conquer,
crept shuddering to the door, which directly faced the altar, and going
down on her knees applied her eye to the keyhole.
What she saw may very well have appalled her considering the exalted
station of Madame de Montespan. She beheld the white, sculptural form of
the royal favourite lying at full length supine upon the altar, her arms
outstretched, holding a lighted candle in each hand. Immediately before
her stood the Abbe Guibourg, his body screening the chalice and its
position from the eye of the watching girl.
She heard the whine of his voice pattering the Latin of the mass, which
he was reciting backwards from the last gospel; and occasionally
she heard responses muttered by her mother, who with Mademoiselle
Desceillets was beyond Marguerite's narrow range of vision.
Apart from the interest lent to the proceedings by the presence of
the royal favourite the affair must have seemed now very stupid and
pointless to Marguerite, although she would certainly not have found it
so had she known enough Latin to understand the horrible perversion
of the Credo. But when the Offertory was reached, matters suddenly
quickened. In stealing away from the door, she was no more than in time
to avoid being caught spying by her mother, who now issued from the
chapel.
La Voisin crossed the ante-room briskly and went out.
Within a very few minutes she was back again, her approach now heralded
by the feeble, quavering squeals of a very young child.
Marguerite Monvoisin was sufficiently acquainted with the ghastly rites
to guess what was impending. She was young, and herself a mother.
She had her share of the maternal instinct alive in every female
animal--with the occasional exception of the human pervert--and the
hoarse, plaintive cries of that young child chilled her to the soul with
horror. She felt the skin roughening and tightening upon her body, and a
sense of physical sickness overcame her. That and the fear of her mother
kept her stiff and frozen in an angle of the settle until La Voisin had
passed through and reentered the chapel bearing that piteous bundle in
her arms.
Then, when the door had closed again, the girl, horrified and
fascinated, sped back to watch. She saw that unclean priest turn and
receive the child from La Voisin. As it changed hands its cries were
stilled.
Guibourg faced the altar once more, that little wisp of humanity that
was but a few days old held now aloft, naked, in his criminal hands.
His muttering, slobbering voice pronouncing the words of that demoniac
consecration reached the ears of the petrified girl at the keyhole.
“Ashtaroth, Asmodeus, Princes of Affection, I conjure you to acknowledge
the sacrifice I offer to you of this child for the things I ask of
you, which are that the King's love for me shall be continued, and that
honoured by princes and princesses nothing shall be denied me of all
that I may ask.”
A sudden gust of wind smote and rattled the windows of the chapel and
the ante-room, as if the legions of hell had flung themselves against
the walls of the chateau. There was a rush and clatter in the chimney of
the ante-room's vast, empty fireplace, and through the din Marguerite,
as her failing limbs sank under her and she slithered down in a heap
against the chapel door, seemed to hear a burst of exultantly cruel
satanic laughter. With chattering teeth and burning eyes she sat
huddled, listening in terror. The child began to cry again, more
violently, more piteously; then, quite suddenly, there was a little
choking cough, a gurgle, the chink of metal against earthenware, and
silence.
When some moments later the squat figure of La Voisin emerged from the
chapel, Marguerite was back in the shadows, hunched on the settle to
which she had crawled. She saw that her mother now carried a basin under
her arm, and she did not need the evidence of her eyes to inform her of
the dreadful contents that the witch was bearing away in it.
Meanwhile in the chapel the ineffably blasphemous rites proceeded. To
the warm human blood which had been caught in the consecrated chalice,
Guibourg had added, among other foulnesses, powdered cantharides, the
dust of desiccated moles, and the blood of bats. By the addition of
flour he had wrought the ingredients into an ineffable paste, and over
this, through the door, which La Voisin had left ajar, Marguerite heard
his voice pronouncing the dread words of Transubstantiation.
Marguerite's horror mounted until it threatened to suffocate her. It
was as if some hellish miasma, released by Guibourg's monstrous
incantations, crept through to permeate and poison the air she breathed.
It would be a half-hour later when Madame de Montespan at last came out.
She was of a ghastly pallor, her limbs shook and trembled under her as
she stepped forth, and there was a wild horror in her staring eyes. Yet
she contrived to carry herself almost defiantly erect, and she spoke
sharply to the half-swooning Desceillets, who staggered after her.
She took her departure from that unholy place bearing with her the
host compounded of devilish ingredients which when dried and reduced to
powder was to be administered to the King to ensure the renewal of his
failing affection for her.
The Marchioness contrived that a creature of her own, an officer of
the buttery in her pay, should introduce it into the royal soup. The
immediate and not unnatural result was that the King was taken violently
ill, and Madame de Montespan's anxiety and suspense were increased
thereby. On his recovery, however, it would seem that the demoniac
sacrament--thrice repeated by then--had not been in vain.
The sequel, indeed, appeared to justify Madame de Montespan's faith
in sorcery, and to compensate her for all the horror to which in
her despair she had submitted. Madame de Ludres found herself coldly
regarded by the convalescent King. Very soon she was discarded, the
Widow Scarron neglected, and the fickle monarch was once more at the
feet of the lovely marchioness, her utter and devoted slave.
Thus was Madame de Montespan “thunderously triumphant” once more,
and established as firmly as ever in the Sun-King's favour. Madame de
Sevigne, in speaking of this phase of their relations, dilates upon the
completeness of the reconciliation, and tells us that the ardour of
the first years seemed now to have returned. And for two whole years it
continued thus. Never before had Madame de Montespan's sway been more
absolute, no shadow came to trouble, the serenity of her rule.
But it proved, after all, to be no more than the last flare of an
expiring fire that was definitely quenched at last, in 1679, by
Mademoiselle de Fontanges. A maid of honour to madame, she was a child
of not more than eighteen years, fair and flaxen, with pink cheeks and
large, childish eyes; and it was for this doll that the regal Montespan
now found herself discarded.
Honours rained upon the new favourite. Louis made her a duchess with
an income of twenty thousand livres, and deeply though this may have
disgusted his subjects, it disgusted Madame de Montespan still more.
Blinded by rage she openly abused the new duchess, and provoked a fairly
public scene with Louis, in which she gave him her true opinion of him
with a disturbing frankness.
“You dishonour yourself,” she informed him among other things. “And you
betray your taste when you make love to a pink-and-white doll, a little
fool that has no more wit nor manners than if she were painted on
canvas!” Then, with an increase of scorn, she delivered herself of an
unpardonable apostrophe: “You, a king, to accept the inheritance of that
chit's rustic lovers!”
He flushed and scowled upon her.
“That is an infamous falsehood!” he exclaimed. “Madame, you are
unbearable!” He was very angry, and it infuriated him the more that
she should stand so coldly mocking before an anger that could bow the
proudest heads in France. “You have the pride of Satan, your greed is
insatiable, your domineering spirit utterly insufferable, and you have
the most false and poisonous tongue in the world!”
Her brutal answer bludgeoned that high divinity to earth.
“With all my imperfections,” she sneered, “at least I do not smell as
badly as you do!”
It was an answer that extinguished her last chance. It was fatal to
the dignity, to the “terrible majesty” of Louis. It stripped him of
all divinity, and revealed him authoritatively as intensely and even
unpleasantly human. It was beyond hope of pardon.
His face turned the colour of wax. A glacial silence hung over the
agonized witnesses of that royal humiliation. Then, without a word, in a
vain attempt to rescue the dignity she had so cruelly mauled, he turned,
his red heels clicked rapidly and unsteadily across the polished floor,
and he was gone.
When Madame de Montespan realized exactly what she had done, nothing
but rage remained to her--rage and its offspring, vindictiveness. The
Duchess of Fontanges must not enjoy her victory, nor must Louis escape
punishment for his faithlessness. La Voisin should afford her the means
to accomplish this. And so she goes once more to the Rue de la Tannerie.
Now, the matter of Madame de Montespan's present needs was one in which
the witches were particularly expert. Were you troubled with a rival,
did your husband persist in surviving your affection for him, did those
from whom you had expectations cling obstinately and inconsiderately
to life, the witches by incantations and the use of powders--in which
arsenic was the dominant charm--could usually put the matter right for
you. Indeed, so wide and general was the practice of poisoning become,
that the authorities, lately aroused to the fact by the sensational
revelations of the Marchioness de Brinvilliers, had set up in this
year 1670 the tribunal known as the Chambre Ardente to inquire into the
matter, and to conduct prosecutions.
La Voisin promised help to the Marchioness. She called in another witch
of horrible repute, named La Filastre, her coadjutor Lesage, and two
expert poisoners, Romani and Bertrand, who devised an ingenious plot for
the murder of the Duchess of Fontanges. They were to visit her, Romani
as a cloth merchant, and Bertrand as his servant, to offer her their
wares, including some Grenoble gloves, which were the most beautiful
gloves in the world and unfailingly irresistible to ladies. These gloves
they prepared in accordance with certain magical recipes in such a way
that the Duchess, after wearing them, must die a lingering death in
which there could be no suspicion of poisoning.
The King was to be dealt with by means of a petition steeped in similar
powders, and should receive his death by taking it into his hands. La
Voisin herself was to go to Saint-Germain to present this petition on
Monday, March 13th, one of those days on which, according to ancient
custom, all comers were admitted to the royal presence.
Thus they disposed. But Fate was already silently stalking La Voisin.
It is to the fact that an obscure and vulgar woman had drunk one glass
of wine too many three months earlier that the King owed his escape.
If you are interested in the almost grotesque disparity that can lie
between cause and effect, here is a subject for you. Three months
earlier a tailor named Vigoureux, whose wife secretly practised magic,
had entertained a few friends to dinner, amongst whom was an intimate
of his wife's, named Marie Bosse. This Marie Bosse it was who drank that
excessive glass of wine which, drowning prudence, led her to boast of
the famous trade she drove as a fortune-teller to the nobility, and even
to hint of something further.
“Another three poisonings,” she chuckled, “and I shall retire with my
fortune made!”
An attorney who was present pricked up his ears, bethought him of the
tales that were afloat, and gave information to the police. The police
set a trap for Marie Bosse, and she betrayed herself. Later, under
torture, she betrayed La Vigoureux. La Vigoureux betrayed others, and
these others again.
The arrest of Marie Bosse was like knocking down the first of a row of
ninepins, but none could have suspected that the last of these stood in
the royal apartments.
On the day before she was to repair to Saint-Germain, La Voisin,
betrayed in her turn, received a surprise visit from the police--who, of
course, had no knowledge of the regicide their action was thwarting--and
she was carried off to the Chatelet. Put to the question, she revealed
a great deal; but her terror of the horrible punishment reserved
for regicides prevented her to the day of her death at the stake--in
February of 1680 from saying a word of her association with Madame de
Montespan.
But there were others whom she betrayed under torture, and whose arrest
followed quickly upon her own, who had not her strength of character.
Among these were La Filastre and the magician Lesage. When it was found
that these two corroborated each other in the incredible things which
they related, the Chambre Ardente took fright. La Reynie, who presided
over it, laid the matter before the King, and the King, horror-stricken
by the discovery of the revolting practices in which the mother of
his children had been engaged, suspended the sittings of the Chambre
Ardente, and commanded that no further proceedings should be taken
against Lesage and La Filastre, and none initiated against Romani,
Bertrand, the Abbe Guibourg, and the scores of other poisoners and
magicians who had been arrested, and who were acquainted with Madame de
Montespan's unholy traffic.
But it was not out of any desire to spare Madame de Montespan that the
King proceeded in this manner; he was concerned only to spare himself
and his royal dignity. He feared above all things the scandal and
ridicule which must touch him as a result of publicity, and because
he feared it so much, he could impose no punishment upon Madame de
Montespan.
This he made known to her at the interview between them procured by his
minister Louvois, at about the time that the sittings of the Chambre
Ardente were suspended.
To this interview that proud, domineering woman came in dread, and in
tears and humility for once. The King's bearing was cold and hard. Cold
and hard were the words in which he declared the extent of his knowledge
of her infamy, words which revealed the loathing and disgust this
knowledge brought him. If at first she was terror-stricken, crushed
under the indictment, yet she was never of a temper to bear reproaches
long. Under his scorn her anger kindled and her humility was sloughed.
“What then?” she cried at last, eyes aflash through lingering tears. “Is
the blame all mine? If all this is true, it is no less true that I
was driven to it by my love for you and the despair to which your
heartlessness and infidelity reduced me. To you,” she continued,
gathering force at every word, “I sacrificed everything--my honour, a
noble husband who loved me, all that a woman prizes. And what did you
give me in exchange? Your cruel fickleness exposed me to the low mockery
of the lick-spittles of your Court. Do you wonder that I went mad, and
that in my madness I sacrificed what shreds of self-respect you had left
me? And now it seems I have lost all but life. Take that, too, if it
be your pleasure. Heaven knows it has little value left for me! But
remember that in striking me you strike the mother of your children--the
legitimate children of France. Remember that!”
He remembered it. Indeed, he was never in danger of forgetting it; for
she might have added that he would be striking also at himself and at
that royal dignity which was his religion. And so that all scandalous
comment might be avoided she was actually allowed to remain at Court,
although no longer in her first-floor apartments; and it was not until
ten years later that she departed to withdraw to the community of Saint
Joseph.
But even in her disgrace this woman, secretly convicted among other
abominations of attempting to procure the poisoning of the King and of
her rival, enjoyed an annual pension of 1,200,000 livres; whilst none
dared proceed against those who shared her guilt--not even the infamous
Guibourg, the poisoners Romani and Bertrand, and La Filastre--nor yet
against some scores of associates of these, who were known to live by
sorcery and poisonings, and who might be privy to the part played by
Madame de Montespan in that horrible night of magic at the Chateau de
Villebousin.
The hot blast of revolution was needed to sweep France clean.