HENRIETTA, DUCHESSE D'ORLÉANS
FROM A STEEL ENGRAVING
In her account of her visit Mme. de Motteville said:
She showed us a little golden cup, from which she habitually drank, and she swore to us that that was all the gold of any kind that had been left in her possession. She said that, more than that, all her servants had demanded their wages and said that they would leave her service if she refused to satisfy their demands; and she said she had not been able to pay them.
The spectacle of royal poverty and the tragical turn taken by English affairs gave Mademoiselle cause for serious thought. She saw that whatever the Prince might be in the future, he was not a desirable suitor at the epoch existent; and she spoke freely:
Were I to marry that boy I should have to sell everything that I might possess and go to war! I should not be able to help it. I could not rest until I had staked my all on the chance of reconquering his kingdom! But as I had always lived in luxury, and as I had been free from care, the thought of such an uncertain condition troubled me.
Had the Prince of Wales been a hero of the type of the Cid, Mademoiselle would have thrown prudence to the winds. Personal attraction, the magnetism of love, the arguments used by Lauzun would have called her from her dreams of the pomp becoming her rank, and she would have confronted poverty gaily; her whole career proved that she was not of a calculating mind. The Prince of Wales was by three years her junior; he was awkward and bashful, and so ignorant that he had no conception of his own affairs. He lounged distractedly through the vast, empty Louvre, absorbed in purposeless thought, and, goaded by his mother, he frequented the Tuileries and besieged the heart of his cousin, whom he amazed by the sluggish obstinacy of his attentions. He paid his court with the inconsequent air of a trained parrot; the details of his love-making were ordered by his mother, and when, tormented by personal anxieties, the Queen of England forgot to dictate his discourse, he sat before Mademoiselle with lips closed. He talked so little that it was said he "opened his teeth only to devour fat meat." At one of the banquets of the Queen of France he refused to touch the ortolans, and falling upon an enormous piece of beef and upon a shoulder of mutton he "ate as if there had been nothing else in the world, and as if he had never eaten before."
"His taste," mused Mademoiselle, "appeared to me to be somewhat indelicate; I was ashamed because he was not as good in other respects as he bore witness that he was in his feeling for me."