The duchesse shrank back as if she had been lashed across the face. Shielding her eyes with her hands, she ran, shuddering, from the theater.
Scribe's play, "Adrienne Lecouvreur," and the opera of the same title, make much of this episode. So did eighteenth-century Paris. Folk openly declared that the Duchesse de Bouillon would not long rest impotent under so public an insult. And they were right.
Whether the poison was sent in a bouquet, as contemporary writers declared, or in some other form, Adrienne was suddenly stricken by mortal illness.
Less than half a century had passed since the dying King Charles had "lived a week in spite of the best physicians in England." And the science of medicine had crept forward but few hesitating steps in the past forty-five years. Poor, stricken Adrienne did not even need the best malpractice in France to help her to her grave.
Doctors great and doctors greater—the quacks of the Rive Gauche and the higher-priced quacks of court and Faubourg—all stood in turn at the dying girl's bedside and consulted gravely in Latin; while Saxe raged at them and cursed them for a parcel of solemn nincompoops—which they were.
After a time they all trooped away, these long-faced men of pill and potion. They confessed they could find no remedy. They could not so much as name the ailment. At least, they did not—aloud. For the memory of the first poison scandal and its revealer's fate was still fresh in men's minds.
And after the doctors came the priest; a priest hastily summoned by the infidel Voltaire, who had been crying outside the death-chamber door.
The priest was among the most bigoted of his kind. In his eyes, the victim was not the reigning beauty of Paris, but a sinning creature who had defied God's laws by going on the stage.
Theology in those days barred actors and actresses from the blessings of the Church.
Yet, bigoted as was this particular priest, he was not wholly heartless. The weeping little monkey-like man crouched on the stairs outside the door may have touched his heart; for Voltaire could be wondrous eloquent and persuasive. Or the red-eyed, raging giant on his knees at the bedside may have appealed to his pity; almost as much as did the lovely white face lying so still there among the pillows. At all events, the good priest consented to strain a point.