The question has been raised—Did Madame des Ursins always use the intimate and uncontrolled influence she had obtained over the young Queen of fourteen in a purely devoted and disinterested way? It would be difficult, certainly, to answer in the affirmative. Louville, her rival and enemy, a man of talent and ardour, but passionate, represents her as the wickedest woman on earth, to be got rid of at the earliest possible moment and at any cost, “sordid and thievish to a marvellous degree.” He raises the same accusation against Orry, a clever man whom Louis XIV. had sent to Spain to put some order into her finances. These accusations seem to have been unjustifiable. The Marshal Duke of Berwick, who kept himself aloof from all these odious bickerings, does more justice to Orry, and everything leads the impartial student to think that Madame des Ursins on that score comes out of the scrutiny with still cleaner hands. “Je suis gueuse, il est vrai,” she writes to Madame de Noailles on first going to Spain, “mais je suis encore plus fière.” Detailing to Madame de Maintenon somewhat later the indignities they both had to put up with from accusations of a like nature, she speaks of them in a tone of lofty irony and sovereign contempt which appears to exclude anything like falsehood.
But what seems more certain—if the truth must be told—is, although a little singular at first sight, that at the age of sixty and upwards, Madame des Ursins still had lovers. “She is hair-brained in her conduct,”[27] wrote Louville to the Duke and Duchess de Beauvilliers. One Sieur d’Aubigny, a kind of household steward whom she had promoted to be her equerry, was lodged in the Retiro palace near the apartments of her women, where he was seen one day brushing his teeth very unconcernedly at the window. C’était un beau et grand drôle très-bien fait et très-découplé de corps et d’esprit,[28] and not a bête brute, as Louville calls him. But he was bold and somewhat insolent, as one who conceived that he had a right to be so. On another occasion, Louville and the Duke de Medina-Cœli entering the apartments of Madame des Ursins, into which she ushered them in order that they might talk more unrestrainedly, D’Aubigny who was installed at the other end, seeing only the Princess and believing her to be alone, began to apostrophise her in terms of very rude and coarse familiarity, which threw all present into confusion. The feminine failing of Madame des Ursins, was, we are told, this; “gallantry and l’entêtement de sa personne was in her the dominant and overweening weakness above all else, even to the latest period of her life.” So Saint Simon says, and he renders her full justice moreover for her spirited and elevated qualities.
But to return to the matter of the intercepted despatch. What piqued the Princess most was, to find details in it exaggerating the authority of D’Aubigny, and a statement to the effect that it was generally believed that she had married him. On reading this passage the pride of the great lady was more outraged even than her modesty. Beside herself with rage and vexation, she wrote with her own hand upon the margin of the letter, “Pour mariée, non” (“At any rate, not married”), showed it in this state to the King and Queen of Spain, to a number of other people, always with strange clamouring, and finally crowned her folly by sending it to Louis XIV., with furious complaints against the Abbé for writing it without her knowledge, and for inflicting upon her such an atrocious injury as to mention such a thing as this pretended marriage. Her letter and its enclosure reached the King at a very inopportune moment. Just before he had received a letter, which, taken in connection with this of the Princess des Ursins, struck a blow at her power of the most decisive kind. At the same time that the original thus annotated was despatched to the Marquis de Torcy, a copy of it was addressed by the Princess to the Duke de Noirmoutier, her brother, and the latter caused it to be circulated throughout Paris, to the great scandal of a society which had still some little respect left for morals and royal power.
Louis XIV. owed it to himself not to allow such excessive audacity to go unpunished. At the same time the affairs of Spain were then in such a state of confusion, the danger of exasperating the young Queen appeared so great, that it was necessary to defer severe measures, however justifiable they might be. It was only some months afterwards, when Philip V. had quitted Madrid for the frontiers of Portugal, to take command of his army, reinforced by a French corps under the command of the Duke of Berwick, that Louis thought it possible to make himself obeyed and to strike what he himself called a decisive blow.
“The complaints against the Princess des Ursins,” wrote the King to the Abbé d’Estrées,[29] “have reached such a point that at length it is necessary to take notice of them. I should have used less delay if I had only consulted the welfare of the State; but I was compelled to wait until the King quitted Madrid. I had reason to foresee that he would be only too much influenced by the Queen’s tears, that they might hinder him from deferring with sufficient promptitude to my advice.... If the King offers resistance, let him see how onerous is the war which I am waging for his interests. Do not tell him that I will abandon him, for he would not believe you; but let him understand that whatever may be my affection for him, I can, if he does not respond thereto, make peace at the expense of Spain, and grow tired of supporting a monarchy wherein I only see disorders and contradictions in matters the most reasonable that I may urge in his own interest. In fine, after such an éclat, nothing short of success will do; my honour, the interest of the King, my grandson, and that of the monarchy are concerned therein.... The directions that I give you are absolutely necessary for my service, but the consequences will be disagreeable for you. They have not ceased to make mischief between my grandson and yourself; matters have made such an impression that he has already on several occasions requested me to recall you.”
Louis XIV. gave the Abbé, therefore, an order to leave forthwith, adding to the expression of his lively regret the assurance that this disgrace, wholly involuntary as it was, should not damage his future fortunes. Such was the extremity to which a subject had brought the most absolute prince in Europe. It may thus be seen what extensive roots the woman had already thrown out in Spain who balanced so nicely the power of the French King in his grandson’s court. It will shortly afterwards be more clearly apparent; but if the éclat of such a part enhances the importance of Madame des Ursins, her character remains singularly compromised by it. However indulgently we may be disposed to look upon it, we cannot dissever from a system of policy the unworthy hostility waged by a Frenchwoman against two ambassadors of her sovereign with so cruel a perseverance. The Cardinal d’Estrées was desirous of carrying the same measures in Spain as Madame des Ursins; he there represented their common master with a loftier title and a more legitimate authority. His errors of conduct, which were numerous, had in some sort been forced upon him, and if he had the misfortune to fall into ambushes, to another person must be attributed the fault of preparing them. In that period of two years, the least honourable of her political life, the Princess had solely as a stimulant her egotistic and impatient ambition. In subordinating to her interests those of two monarchies, in alleging as an excuse for the violence of her attacks the right of her own superiority, she confirmed in the minds of her adversaries by her example the truth, that for ardent natures it is less perilous to exercise than to pursue power.
Philip, reduced by the Queen’s absence to his natural indolence, opposed no resistance to the injunctions of his grandfather. Assailed in her tenderest affections, wounded in her dignity as a sovereign, and resenting at fifteen years of age that twofold outrage in as lively a degree as in the maturity of life, Marie-Louise restricted herself at first to a disdainful silence which, nevertheless, revealed the hope either of a terrible vengeance or a speedy retaliation. Madame des Ursins submitted to the commands of her sovereign with the stately haughtiness, the expression of which is conveyed in one of her very best letters to Madame de Noailles. The consciousness of the great services rendered by her to both monarchies with an inviolable fidelity, the bitter astonishment at finding her relative, until then so devoted, “prefer to herself persons who were merely her allies, and whose wickedness ought to have inspired her with horror,” her adroit flattery of Madame de Maintenon, “to whom Providence had reserved, as by an assured privilege for her virtue, the sacred mission of causing truth and justice in the end to triumph;” “Heaven wishing to avail itself of her services for that purpose in spite of herself;” such are the chief features of that clever defence, in which calculation tempers rage and resentment, and which ought to be read in its entirety in the interesting letters of the Princess.[30]
But the letters likewise of the great King which have come down to us, show that there was no need of the foolish insult conveyed by her own epistle, to make him angry with Madame des Ursins. The complaints raised against her were then universal, at least at Versailles, and at a distance it was difficult to separate those which were founded on false reports. With the well-known temper which characterised Louis XIV., it must have seemed a thing inconceivable that such importance should be conceded to a woman whom he had placed there to do his bidding. Finding that his grandson and the young queen were disposed to resist his recall of the camerara-mayor, he addressed them as a father and as a king:—
“You ask for my advice,” he says to Philip V. (20th August, 1704), “and I write you what I think; but the best advice becomes useless when it is only asked for and followed after the mischief has happened.... You have hitherto given your confidence to incapable or interested persons.... (And speaking of the recall of Orry and of another agent) it seems, however, that the interest of those particular persons wholly engages your attention, and at a time when you ought only to have elevated views you dwarf them down to the cabals of the Princess des Ursins, with which I am unceasingly wearied.”
And to the Queen, Louis XIV. writes still more explicitly (20th September, 1704,):—