The most characteristic example is that of Lemaire, brother of the woman Vertemart. His complete innocence was absolutely proved. There was no possible charge against him but his having been shut up with the Abbé Guibourg, who ‘had told him everything.’ On August 4, 1681, Louvois wrote to La Reynie: ‘At present Lemaire is not to be set at liberty. I have written to Desgrez what will enable him, if he shows him my letter, to endure his long detention with less pain.’ Louvois and Louis XIV were struck by the revolting iniquity of this detention. In August 1682, Louvois sent to Lemaire the considerable sum of 150 pistoles, promising to forward an equal sum every year on condition that he took himself out of the kingdom, never set foot in it again all his life, and spoke to nobody in the world of what he had heard while at Vincennes. If he ever broke one of these engagements, the king would have him seized and incarcerated for the rest of his days.
La Reynie died on June 14, 1709, at the age of eighty years. In his will there is a touching clause which depicts this excellent man to the life. He asks that his body may be interred in the parish cemetery, and not in the church, ‘being unwilling that my corpse should be laid in a spot where the faithful assemble, and that the decay of my body should increase the pollution of the air, and thereby endanger the life of ministers and people.’ The lieutenant of police, who had devoted a part of his life to the sanitation and good government of the great city confided to his administration, gave an excellent practical lesson on his death-bed, doubtless to the wounding of his dearest sentiments as a Catholic and a believer.
Gabriel Nicolas de la Reynie was in fact a character of rare worth. In our account of him, we have not had to show him as the man of fine culture, the scholar in constant correspondence with Baluze, purchasing and collecting Greek and Latin manuscripts, the skilled patron of the printing-press, the bibliophile to whom we owe the preservation of the original text of Molière. He was a worthy representative of his period, the great epoch in French history. The seventeenth century attained the furthest extremes in good as in evil. It was then that France produced her greatest captains, her greatest statesmen, her most illustrious judges; it was then that the greatest names in literature, art, philosophy, and scholarship dazzled the world; then that the ‘daughters of charity’ displayed their devotion; that Madame de Chantal diffused around her the sweet perfume of her virtues; but it was then, too, that a Marquise de Brinvilliers extended the boundaries of crime, and an Abbé de Guibourg murdered children upon an altar, over the bare body of a Marquise de Montespan.
THE DEATH OF ‘MADAME'[12]
Who has not read Bossuet’s funeral oration on Henrietta Anne of England, Duchess of Orleans? Who has not thrilled at the echo of that powerful and poignant apostrophe?—'O woful night! O awful night, when there rang through the air like a sudden thunderclap the amazing tidings, Madame is dying, Madame is dead!... Madame passed from morn to eve like the grass of the field. In the morning she flourished, with what graces you know; in the evening we saw her cut down.... What awful speed! In nine hours the work is accomplished.’ Bossuet’s masterpiece has crowned the memory of Madame with an immortal halo in which the charms, the quick and exquisite imagination of the young princess, who enchanted her contemporaries,—the lady who set the tone for taste and wit in the midst of the wittiest and most brilliant Court the world has ever known—will shine resplendent through the ages.
The circumstances in which this startling death occurred have aroused the attention of historians. Madame had returned from England, where she had succeeded in getting the Treaty of Dover signed on June 1, 1670, by the ministers of her brother Charles II—the treaty assuring Louis XIV of the alliance of England against Holland, and permitting him to conquer Flanders and Franche-Comté for France. Madame remained at Dover from May 24 to June 12; she then re-embarked for France, happy in the successful result of her mission; and she arrived at Saint-Germain on the 18th. ‘At the age of twenty-six,’ says Madame de la Fayette, ‘she saw herself the link between the two greatest kings of the century; she had in her hands a treaty on which depended the fate of a part of Europe; the pleasure and the importance given by affairs of moment being joined in her with the attractions bestowed by youth and beauty; there was a grace and a sweetness enveloping her whole person that won for her a kind of homage, which must have been the more pleasant in that it was rendered rather to her personality than to her rank.’
Need anything be said of the manners of Monsieur? ‘The miracle of firing the heart of this prince,’ says Madame de la Fayette, ‘was reserved for no woman in the world.’ And yet his heart was wonderfully tender! Madame had definitively secured the exile of the Chevalier de Lorraine, the infamous friend of her husband.
Madame died suddenly at St. Cloud, a prey to the most cruel anguish, on the night of the 29th of June 1670, about three o’clock in the morning. Rumours of poison were instantly set afloat, which were not long in gaining strength and currency. They formed the general opinion at Court, in Paris, in the whole of France, in England, Holland, and Spain, where Madame’s daughter became queen. Charles II refused to receive the letter in which the Duke of Orleans informed him of his sister’s death. ‘The Duke of Buckingham, the English ambassador,’ wrote Colbert de Croissy, ‘is in transports of rage.’ The people of London were hardly restrained from violent outbursts against the Frenchmen residing there. The streets rang with the cry of ‘Down with the French!’ The French embassy had to be protected. Monsieur’s second wife, Madame Palatine, was always convinced that Madame had died of poison, and everything tends to show that Louis XIV, at all events in the first moments, shared these suspicions.
In regard to the possible authors of the crime, some accused the Dutch, against whom the Treaty of Dover was directed; others accused Monsieur himself and the Chevalier de Lorraine. In either case, the historical interest of the problem is very great; the popular imagination heightened it through the magnificent commentary with which Bossuet embroidered the death of the beautiful princess; and it has been enhanced by all the efforts made for more than a century past to solve it. ‘For fifty years and more,’ writes one of the masters of modern erudition, M. Arthur de Boislisle, ‘the question has been more closely studied, and the evidence weighed with more care, at least by impartial and serious writers familiar with the documents of Louis XIV’s reign or with scientific problems. But it happens that some have abstained from giving a decisive verdict, and others have varied between poison, in which Walckenaer, Paul Lacroix, and François Ravaisson very firmly believed, and death by accident or disease, accepted by Mignet, Loiseleur, and Littré; with the result that the question has become darkened rather than illuminated between conclusions diametrically opposed, but coming from men of equal authority.’ Monsieur de Boislisle himself refrains from stating any conclusion, and recently we have Doctor Legué, a specialist, in his interesting book, Médecins et Empoisonneurs, devoting a new study to the question, and endeavouring to prove that Madame was poisoned by corrosive sublimate.
Thanks to a minute study of the documents, guided by the work of Monsieur de Boislisle we have just quoted, thanks above all to the skilful guidance of two masters of modern science, we arrive, as will be seen by and by, at an indisputable solution.