The Château of Courbépine, which Louis XV. had fixed as Madame de Prie’s place of exile, was situated a little to the north of the town of Bernay, in the midst of an immense wooded plain. It had been purchased by the Marquis de Prie, not long after his marriage, from Léonor de Matignon, Bishop of Lisieux. At first, she received but few visitors, but when it became known that Monsieur le Duc had expressed a very ardent desire to see her, and had told the Maréchal de Villars that “he himself was the cause of all her misfortunes and that she did not deserve them; that she had always been disinterested, and that the unsatisfactory condition of her affairs would in time prove this,” people began to think that, in view of a possible return of the prince to power, it would be imprudent to ignore the woman who still retained his affections. From that time it became quite the fashion to go and spend a day or two with the proscribed, and the latter never had any cause to complain of lack of company. Nevertheless, she felt bitterly the change in her position, and could not disguise from herself the fact that, notwithstanding the chivalrous endeavours of Monsieur le Duc to saddle himself with the responsibility for their common misfortune, she had largely contributed to it. She saw, too, her relatives and protégés deprived of their charges and reduced in some instances to poverty; and this troubled her sorely. There can be no doubt that, in time, she would have been permitted to return, if not to the Court, at least to Paris and Chantilly; but her health, always delicate, had begun to give way beneath the stress of so many agitations. She demanded and obtained authorization to visit the waters of Forges, but the relief they afforded her was only temporary. In the early autumn of 1727 she met with a carriage accident, and though the injuries she received were not in themselves very serious, they hastened her death, which took place on 7 October, 1727, in her thirtieth year.
Her enemies attributed her death to poison administered by her own hand, and the Marquis d’Argenson has published, in his “Mémoires,” a highly-coloured version of this hypothesis, upon which we need not dwell here, since its absurdity has now been clearly established.
Monsieur le Duc survived his mistress nearly fourteen years. In 1730, he was pardoned and returned to Court, but he never reappeared again on the political stage, and consecrated the last years of his life to the study of chemistry and natural history. In 1728, he took unto himself a second wife, in the person of the Princess Charlotte of Hesse-Rheinfels, who is described as “blonde et d’un embonpoint agréable,” with whom he seems to have lived very contentedly, notwithstanding the fact that she is said to have been erased from the list of eligible princesses at the time of the marriage of Louis XV. on account of her bad temper. By her he left one son, Louis Joseph de Bourbon, Prince de Condé, the organizer and leader of the “Army of Condé,” which played so gallant a part in the Wars of the French Revolution. Monsieur le Duc died on the 27 January, 1740, in his forty-ninth year.
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FOOTNOTES:
[1] The Court was staying at the Château of la Roche-Guyon, not far from Mantes. As there had been a heavy fall of snow, François I. suggested that the younger members of the Court should organize a snowball-fight. Sides were accordingly formed; one led by the Dauphin and François de Lorraine, afterwards Duc de Guise, defending a house; the other, led by Enghien, besieging it. “During the combat,” says Martin du Bellay, “some ill-advised person threw a linen-chest out of the window, which fell on the Sieur d’Enghien’s head, and inflicted such injuries that he died a few days later.” Du Bellay does not give the name of the “ill-advised person,” but certain writers, less reticent, name François de Guise, and have even gone so far as to assert that he acted by orders of the Dauphin, who was jealous of Enghien’s military fame, while others say that he was a certain Conte di Bentivoglio, an Italian noble in the service of the Guises, whom they accuse of having instigated the deed. It is probable, however, that the death of Enghien was due merely to one of those acts of brutal horse-play so common at this epoch, and that the culprit, whoever he may have been, was innocent of any homicidal intention. See on this matter the author’s “Henri II.: his Court and Times” (London, Methuen; New York, Scribner, 1910).
[2] “Histoire des Princes de Condé.”
[3] Comte Jules Delaborde, “Éléonore de Roye, Princesse de Condé, 1535–1564.”
[4] Brantôme.