The enemies of Cardinal Fleury, all those in search of places, money, or credit, thought that a mistress would bring about the downfall of the old minister, so careful of the State funds. Ah! if the monarch yields, if he succumbs to temptation, the guilty ones will be the counsellors, the cynical, corrupt egotists, who persuade him to evil, who deify his caprices, who exalt his adulteries; they will be Richelieu, the official go-between; Voltaire, the laureate in prose and verse of the reign of the favorites; the women who entreat the Christian Sultan to throw them the handkerchief; the entire century, still more responsible and blameworthy than the King.
V
THE FAVOR OF THE COUNTESS DE MAILLY
There are two kinds of royal favorites: the proud and the humble; those who make a boast of scandal and those who blush at it. The proud brag of their shame as if it were a victory; insatiable for money, credit, pleasures, they are intoxicated with the incense burned at their feet, and haughtily wave the sceptre of left-handed queens. The humble are less unreasonable; they voluntarily abase themselves; they try to gain pardon for a situation whose ignominy they comprehend, and though they have not sufficient moral sense to be willing to renounce the profits of their rôle, neither have they the impudence to make an imperious demand of homage and adulation. At the court of Louis XIV. Madame de Montespan was the type of the haughty mistress. The first mistress of Louis XV., the Countess de Mailly, must be classed among the humble ones.
Louise Julie de Mailly-Nesle, the eldest of five sisters who all played a part at court, was of the same age as the King: like him she was born in 1710. Married in 1726 to Count Louis Alexandre de Mailly, her cousin-german, her fortune was small, and the need of money was said to be one occasion of her faults. The huntsman Le Roy, that master of the hunt who was so sagacious an observer, and whom Sainte-Beuve has qualified as La Bruyère on horseback, thus delineates the portrait of the countess: “This lady was very far from being pretty; but her figure and her manners were very graceful, her sensibility was already recognized, and she had a complaisant character adapted to the abridgment of formalities. This was essential to vanquish the timidity of a prince who was still a novice, whom the least reserve would have abashed. They were sure, moreover, of the disinterestedness of her who was destined to become the favorite, and of her aversion from all ambitious schemes. Some difficulty was experienced in establishing a complete familiarity between a prince excessively timid and a woman whose birth, at least, obliged her to have some regard for appearances.” Madame de Mailly was lady of the palace to the Queen. This facilitated matters. At first everything was managed with the utmost secrecy. “I have learned,” says the Duke de Luynes in his Memoirs, “that the commerce of the King with Madame de Mailly commenced as early as 1783. I know this to be true beyond all doubt, and at that time no one suspected it.”
The favor of the King’s mistress was not known to the public until four years later, and the advocate Barbier declared “that there was nothing to say, the name of De Nesle being one of the first in the kingdom.” “The Queen,” says D’Argenson, “is in a cruel situation at present, on account of Madame de Mailly, whom she is obliged to retain as lady of the palace. During this lady’s weeks she is in a horrible humor, and all her domestics feel the effects of it. Certainly, to make a third after supper, between her and Madame de Mailly, is to render her a great service.” The poor Queen at last resigned herself. When a woman no longer appeals to either a man’s heart or his senses, what can she do? One day when Madame de Mailly asked her sovereign’s permission to go to a pleasure-house where Louis XV. was, Marie Leczinska merely replied: “You are the mistress.”
Cardinal Fleury did not complain, because the favorite neither meddled with affairs nor cost the King much. At this time Louis XV. was as economical as he was timid. Count de Mailly, who had set up an equipage as soon as his wife came into favor, was soon obliged to sell it again, and continued to live a needy life.
In 1738, when Madame de Mailly was openly acknowledged as mistress, Louis XV. changed his bedchamber. He left that where Louis XIV. had died, and which he had himself occupied since 1722, to install himself in the chamber contiguous to the Council hall, and which, even in the time of Louis XIV., had been designated as the billiard room (room No. 126 of the Notice du Musée de Versailles, by M. Eudore Soulié).
Louis XV. found this chamber more convenient than the other, because it opened the series of small rooms called the cabinets (rooms Nos. 126 to 134 of the Notice[11]), where Louis XV. admitted a very small number of courtiers to his intimacy. It was there he hid himself from the vulgar crowd; there that, living more like a private person than a king, he spent his time in trifles and futilities unworthy of a sovereign. There he made tapestry like a woman, or, like a cook, prepared side-dishes with truffles. There, supping after the chase, he sought forgetfulness of his remorse in bumpers of champagne. It was there he sought a remedy for his, alas! incurable melancholy; there that he allowed himself to be vanquished by his enemy, voluptuousness.
Beneath the King’s chamber lodged the Countess de Toulouse, widowed within a year of the son of Louis XIV. and Madame de Montespan. The countess occupied the apartment called the apartment of the baths, which, after having been the abode of Madame de Montespan, had been given to the sons of the celebrated favorite, first to the Duke du Maine, and afterward to the Count de Toulouse (rooms Nos. 52, 53, and 54 of the Notice du Musée). This apartment had one great advantage: it communicated by a private staircase with the King’s study. The Count de Toulouse had the key to this precious staircase. His widow had sufficient address to induce the King to leave it with her. She was at this time a woman of about fifty, who no longer wore rouge, and often spent several hours in a confessional in the chapel, where she read by the light of a candle. In spite of her austere appearance, she was the intimate friend of the Countess de Mailly, and slanderous tongues accused her of facilitating the latter’s meetings with the King.
Another woman also lived in close friendship with Louis XV. This was Mademoiselle de Charolais, who was born in 1695 and died in 1758 unmarried. A sister of the Duke of Bourbon, she had the hauteur of the Condés and the wit of the Mortemarts. She was a type of the extravagant grande dame, a capricious, witty woman, greedy for pleasure, frolicsome as an elf, and fearless as a page. “This princess is very accommodating to the King,” says the Marquis d’Argenson; “she keeps company with Madame de Mailly, and, in the midst of her complaisance, she sometimes proposes to the King to take a prettier mistress. At other times she advises Madame de Mailly to profit by her reign, and secure all the riches and grandeur that she can.... Madame de Mailly is honest and well-intentioned, and confides in her. This is what sustains her, in spite of her lightheartedness, her temper, and the variety of opinions which torment her. But as she is noble in the midst of her necessities, her demands are not acrimonious nor her intrigues underhanded and circuitous.”