By his marriage with Mlle. de Nantes, Louis III., Duc de Bourbon, had had nine children—three sons and six daughters—all of whom survived him.[252] The eldest son, Louis Henri, hitherto known as the Duc d’Enghien, was, at the time of his father’s death, in his eighteenth year. Like the latter, he preferred the title of Duc de Bourbon to that of Prince de Condé, and, like him, was henceforth styled Monsieur le Duc. In contrast to his father, who had been very short and rather thick-set, Louis Henri de Bourbon-Condé was tall and thin, with a long face and prominent cheek-bones. At this period, however, he was not considered an ill-looking young man, but two years later he had the misfortune to meet with an accident which disfigured him.
In the winter of 1712—that fatal winter which witnessed the successive deaths of the charming Duchesse de Bourgogne, her husband, and their eldest son, the little Duc de Bretagne—he took part in a battue at Marly with the Dauphin and that prince’s younger brother, the Duc de Berry. Monsieur le Duc and the Duc de Berry were standing facing one another, on opposite sides of a frozen pool. The latter fired at a bird, which was flying very low, and missed it; and part of the charge, rebounding from the ice, struck Monsieur le Duc in the left eye, the sight of which was destroyed.
The young prince succeeded to his father’s post of Grand Master of the King’s Household, to his government of Burgundy, and to the command of the cavalry and infantry regiments of Condé. In 1711 he took part in the Flemish campaign under Villars, and in the assault on Hordain showed that he had inherited the courage of his race. In the following year, he was in nominal command of the cavalry of the Army of Flanders, and assisted at the sieges of Douai, Le Quesnoy, and Bouchain; while in 1713 he followed Villars to the Rhine, was present at the sieges of Landau and Freiburg, and was made maréchal de camp.
In his will, Louis XIV. had named the Duc de Bourbon a member of the Council of Regency, as soon as he should reach the age of twenty-four; but on the death of le Grand Monarque, his wishes were immediately set aside, and the Regent, the Duc d’Orléans, proceeded to appoint the Council himself, with Monsieur le Duc as its president. Apart, however, from the share he took in the campaign against the legitimated sons of the late King, the Duc du Maine and the Comte de Toulouse, with the object of reducing them to the rank of simple peers of the realm, the prince appears to have occupied himself very little with politics during the first years of the Regency, and confined his activities to the financial speculations in which half Paris was then engaging. With so much ardour, indeed, did he espouse the cause of the Scotch adventurer Law that he was accused of being one of the authors of the “System” which involved the country in such disaster. Any way, he had the courage to defend the fallen idol to the very last, and when Law, his life being no longer safe in Paris, made his escape to Flanders, it was one of the Duc de Bourbon’s carriages which conveyed him to the frontier.
Very wealthy before the “System,” his great fortune was materially increased by successful speculation. In 1720 it was computed at not less than sixty million livres.
The character of the prince is very diversely estimated by his contemporaries. Some writers, such as Marais, Barbier, and Duclos, judge him severely, and describe him as hasty in temper, brusque in his manners, debauched, dishonourable, rapacious, and entirely destitute of political capacity. Others, like Saint-Simon and the Dowager-Duchess d’Orléans, recognize in him a certain merit. The former acknowledges that, with all his faults, he had “an indomitable obstinancy, an inflexible firmness;” while the mother of the Regent, whose opinions at least possess the advantage of being consistently sincere, writes of him in 1719:
“Monsieur le Duc has many good qualities and many friends. He is polished and knows how to behave well, but his attainments are not very extensive. Nor is he better informed, but there is a loftiness and a nobility in his character, and he knows how to uphold his rank.”
Louis Henri de Bourbon-Condé, in fact, was neither the odious nor the incapable person whom certain historians have depicted. His courage was indisputable; if he was rapacious, he was also generous and open-handed; if he was a bad enemy, he was also a faithful friend; he possessed cultured tastes, and beneath his love of pleasure and his apparent indifference to public affairs he concealed qualities which only required to be stimulated into activity to make of him, if not a statesman, at least a formidable party-leader.
In the summer of 1713, Monsieur le Duc was married to his cousin, Marie Anne de Bourbon-Conti, at the same time as his second sister, Mlle. de Bourbon, became the wife of the young Prince de Conti. This double marriage, which was regarded with more or less repugnance by all four of the parties concerned, affords a curious illustration of the despotism exercised by Louis XIV. over the members of the Royal House.
The death of Monsieur le Prince, in 1709, had been followed by a most acrimonious lawsuit over his will between the Condés and Contis, which, suspended for a while by the sudden demise of his successor, had been resumed with redoubled bitterness as soon as decency permitted. Nothing was further from the thoughts of the Contis than an alliance with their detested cousins, and, in point of fact, secret negotiations had been for some time in progress between them and the Orléans family for the marriage of the Prince de Conti to Mlle. de Chartres, second daughter of the future Regent.