He delighted in practical jokes, generally of an extremely malicious kind, of which the following will serve as an example:
DIANE GABRIELLE DE THIANGES, DUCHESSE DE NEVERS
The Duc de Luxembourg,[221] son of the celebrated marshal, had a young and pretty wife,[222] who suffered, like a good many other ladies about the Court, from excessive sensibility, a fact which was “known to everybody in France except her husband.” On the occasion of a visit of the Court to Marly, both M. de Luxembourg and his consort were invited to take part in a masquerade. Monsieur le Duc undertook to provide the former with what he declared to be a highly original costume, and, since he enjoyed the reputation of being a great authority on such matters, his offer was gladly accepted. Thereupon the malicious prince proceeded to array his unconscious victim in various fantastic garments, which he crowned with a gigantic pair of antlers, which almost touched the candelabra. Thus attired, he was conducted into the ballroom, where, by a sudden shifting of his mask, his identity was quickly revealed. When the company perceived who it was who was thus parading the emblem of a deceived husband, a great shout of laughter rang through the room, which redoubled when the luckless Luxembourg, mistaking the hilarity which his appearance aroused for a tribute to the originality of his costume, bowed repeatedly.
In his youth, Monsieur le Duc, like most of his family, was very much addicted to gallantry. When his affections were engaged, nothing cost too much, and “he made some amends for a shape which resembled a gnome rather than a man.”[223] “He was grace, magnificence, gallantry personified—a Jupiter transformed into a shower of gold. Now, he disguised himself as a lackey; another time, as a female vendor of articles for the toilette; anon, in some other fashion. He was the most ingenious man in the world.”[224]
Among the great ladies who smiled upon him was the lovely and fascinating Gabrielle de Thianges, who became, in 1670, the wife of the Duc de Nevers, the brother of the famous Mancini sisters.[225] “Few women,” says Saint-Simon, “have surpassed her in beauty. Hers was of every kind, with a singularity which charmed.” And he declares that when she died, at the age of sixty, she was “still perfectly beautiful.”
If we are to believe Madame de Caylus, the duchess, after the fall of her aunt, Madame de Montespan, had, at that lady’s suggestion, made an attempt to capture the affections of the King, “in order to keep the royal favour in the family,” and that it was only upon the failure of this intrigue that she resolved to content herself with Monsieur le Duc. But, whatever may have been the lady’s feelings towards him, Monsieur le Duc was desperately enamoured of her, and the fertility of resource which he displayed and the sums he appears to have expended in order to enjoy her society were really astonishing.
Voltaire asserts, in a note to the first edition of the Souvenirs of Madame de Caylus, that, for the purpose of entering secretly into the apartment of the duchess, he had bought the two houses on either side of the Hôtel de Nevers. Saint-Simon goes much further and says that, to conceal their rendezvous, “he rented all the houses on one side of a street near Saint-Sulpice, furnished them, and pierced the connecting walls.” If we are to believe this anecdote, the Maréchal de Richelieu must have been but a feeble plagiarist when, many years later, he adopted a similar means of entrance into the Palais-Royal and the Hôtel de la Popelinière.[226] But since Saint-Sulpice, though close to the Hôtel de Condé, was a long way from the Hôtel de Nevers, we must confess that we do not quite see how such operations were to bring Monsieur le Duc to the side of his beloved. Perhaps, however, Saint-Simon intends us to understand that, in order not to excite the least suspicion, the prince was in the habit of entering a house at one end of the street, and the lady one at the other extremity, and of meeting in the middle. Any way, it seems rather a tall story, even for Saint-Simon.
Despite so many precautions, the Duc de Nevers scented treason, and resolved to escape it by the procedure which he usually adopted in such circumstances, namely, by carrying his wife off to Rome.[227] “M. de Nevers,” writes Madame de Caylus, “was in the habit of setting off for Rome in the same way as any one else would go out to supper; and Madame de Nevers had been known to enter her carriage in the persuasion that she was only going for a drive, and then to hear her husband say to the coachman: “To Rome.” In time, however, the lady began to know her husband better and to be more on her guard against him, and happening to discover his intention of taking her upon another of these sudden journeys, she promptly warned her lover and begged him to devise some means of averting, or, at any rate, of postponing, their threatened separation.
Now, the Duc de Nevers, like all the Mancini, had a very pretty turn for verse-making, of which he was inordinately vain, and nothing delighted him more than to hear his poetical effusions recited before an appreciative audience. Aware of this little weakness, Monsieur le Duc resolved to lay a trap for him, into which he felt convinced he could not fail to fall. But let us listen to Madame de Caylus: