THE LETTERS OF A PRINCESS.
It is the fashion to decry French memoirs of court-life, and, considering the quaint freedom of style which characterizes much of this voluminous literature, it is not strange. Many of these memoirs, original letters, etc. are exceedingly interesting, because of their merciless unmasking of some of the sublime figure-heads of history; notably the letters of Madame Charlotte Elizabeth of Bavaria, widow of Monsieur, the only brother of Louis XIV. She always hated the French manners, and longed for her native sauer-kraut and sausages, which to her taste were finer than all the luxuries and dainties of the French cuisine. She was counted a severe moralist, and her tongue was more dreaded than a bayonet-charge. To be sure, her enemies more than hinted that her extraordinary virtue was trebly guarded by her ugliness. On the latter subject she says herself, "I must be cruelly ugly: I never had a passable feature. My eyes are little, my nose short and big, my lips long and flat, my cheeks hanging, my face long, my waist and my legs large, my stature short: sum-total, a little old fright." But she was intelligent and witty, and that, in France at least, goes a long way with a woman. She was also loyal and truthful. No one doubted her word when once she had spoken. This makes her testimony valuable, though many incidents circumspectly narrated by her seem incredible. Of the young duchesse de Bourgogne, second daughter of Louis XIV., she says: One of her amusements was to make her lackeys drag her over the floor by her feet. It is to be presumed that the duchess was a very young person at this time.
Madame Charlotte's portrait of Marie Thérèse, queen of Le Grand Monarque, is not very flattering: "Her teeth were black and broken, and she ate immoderately of garlic and chocolate. She was very fond of basset, but she never won, for she could never learn to play any game. She ate long and very slowly, taking mouthfuls for a canary." The diagnosis of the disease of which the queen died displays the popular pathological lore of those times. Madame says: "She died of an abscess on the arm, for which Fagon bled her. The humor entered and fell on the heart: he then gave her an emetic to remove the humor, and this suffocated her." La Valière, according to Madame Charlotte, was the only woman who ever really loved the king. She limped a little, had lovely eyes, irregular teeth, and was very neat in her person, while Madame de Montespan was just the reverse.
Of Cardinal Richelieu we have a glimpse in madame's letters which his biographers, generally at least, omit. She tells us that he used to have violent fits of insanity, during which he would imagine that he was a horse, jump over a billiard-table, kick his servants, neigh, and make a fearful noise for an hour. His domestics would then get him into bed, and after much sweating he would wake without the least memory of what had passed. As "jumping over a billiard-table" might appear an incredible feat, at least for an aged cardinal, it is proper to remark that the billiard-tables of those times bore about the same relation in size to our modern billiard-tables that the ancient spinnet did to a grand pianoforte.