On receiving tidings of this mournful death, Madame Infanta wrote her father a most touching letter. She said she wished to come and mingle her tears with those of her family. She arrived in France in September, 1752, and remained with her father for a year.
Madame Infanta was not happy. She did not greatly esteem her husband, and that Prince cut a rather sorry figure in the little sovereignty of Parma and Piacenza. He had neither money nor prestige; and his wife, who was very intelligent, his wife, of whom Bernis said that she would make a good minister of foreign affairs, was constantly dreaming of some more considerable establishment for him. She thought by turns of exchanging the Duchy of Parma for Tuscany, or acquisitions in Flanders, Lorraine, or even Corsica. She fancied that, thanks to her father’s affection and the territorial changes in Europe, she would end by obtaining something. The Marquis d’Argenson, who had not much sympathy for her, wrote, September 27, 1753: “It is to be hoped she will never come back to France. Is it just that the State should suffer because she was married so badly? Along with her go a great quantity of chariots loaded with all sorts of things that the King has given her.”
Madame Infanta returned to France a third time, but only to die there. She arrived at the château of Choisy, September 3, 1757. To credit M. Michelet, it was she alone who brought about the Seven Years’ War. But there is no foundation for this assertion of the great writer who, toward the close of his life, created what one might call the school of imaginative history. At the time when she reappeared at court, Madame Infanta was glowing with freshness, brilliancy, and health. No one could have foreseen that her death was so near at hand. One of her last letters was addressed to her son Ferdinand, whom she had left at Parma. It commenced as follows:—
“Life is uncertain, my son, and my character is too sincere for me either to vaunt or even to affect perfect indifference as to the length of mine; but I feel that the wish to see you, to leave you worthy of the name you bear in the world, such, in fine, as I desire you, is one of the ties that attach me most to life, and one of the reasons, perhaps, which will most abridge mine by the continual torments caused me by this desire and the fear of not obtaining it. It will be a great consolation to be able to leave you an avowal of my sentiments if I die before you are in a condition to read it. If I live, it will serve me as a plan whereon to form you; and in either case, it will always be to you a proof of my tenderness and of my care for your welfare at an age when many people do not yet think of it.”
Not many days after writing this letter, Madame Infanta was attacked by small-pox, and died December 6, 1759. The twins, who had loved each other so tenderly, both died prematurely. Madame Henriette had died at the age of twenty-four, Madame Infanta at thirty-two. She was buried at Saint Denis, close to her sister, so that their union lasted even in the tomb.
Marie Leczinska’s heart was broken with grief. But instead of murmuring against Providence, she bent filially beneath the hand of God who smote her. Her five remaining children, the Dauphin, Adelaide, Victoire, Sophie, and Louise, showed her a profound affection. Never was a mother better loved. Louis XV. took pleasure in the society of his daughters. As a father, he had that sort of citizenlike good-nature which is unhappily rare among princes. Mesdames lodged underneath their father, in the former apartment of Madame de Montespan. Madame Adelaide occupied a chamber which communicated by a private staircase with that of her father. “Often,” relates Madame Campan in her Memoirs, “he brought and drank coffee there which he had made himself. Madame Adelaide pulled a bell-rope, which announced the King’s visit to Madame Victoire. On rising to go to her sister, Madame Victoire rang for Madame Sophie, who in her turn rang for Madame Louise.”
In a twinkling the four sisters were gathered around their father. At six in the evening, at the unbooting of the King after the chase, as people said in those days, the princesses came to pay a visit to Louis XV., but this time with a certain etiquette. “The princesses,” says Madame Campan again, “put on an enormous hoop which supported a skirt braided with gold and embroideries. They fastened a long train to their waist, and hid the negligence of the rest of their habiliments by a large cape of black taffeta, which covered them up to the chin. Knights of honor, ladies, pages, equerries, ushers, carrying large torches, accompanied them to the King. In an instant the whole palace, usually solitary, was in movement; the King kissed each princess on her forehead.” In reality, he found more true happiness in the virtuous intimacy of his daughters than in the circle of his courtiers and the arms of his favorites. There were moments when people believed that in growing old the debauchee would become wise. “The King,” wrote D’Argenson, “seems to wish for no society but that of his family, like a patriarch and a good man.”
Marie Leczinska felt thankful to her husband for the affection he had for his daughters. The relations of Mesdames with their mother were full of confidence, sweetness, and gaiety. They liked to enter those little apartments of the Queen, where Marie Leczinska forgot the splendor of the throne to live modestly as a good mother. The little apartments[64] comprised three rooms: a salon, a bathroom, and a studio for painting. Madame the Countess d’Armaillé, whose graceful and solid work we have so often had occasion to quote, has given a charming description of these three rooms in which Marie Leczinska spent the greater portion of her time. “Is it not true,” she says, “that one may divine the character and tastes of a woman by merely inspecting the sanctuary of her private life, or, to speak more simply, that place in the dwelling where she habitually prefers to stay? It matters little whether this room be a garret or a drawing-room. Nothing is so intimate as certain interior arrangements; nothing tells the story of a woman better than the way in which she orders the room she inhabits. In the little apartments of the Queen one found everything which makes the charm of a peaceful existence. Here, pieces of work begun for the poor, or for churches, a whole piece of furniture embroidered by her hand; there, an open harpsichord with Moncrif’s cantatas, Rameau’s operettas, Polish hymns; further away a drawing-table, a spinning-wheel provided with its distaff, frames for embroidering and weaving, a small printing-press; then flowers, paintings, portraits of children, miniatures. On a console, a vase offered by Marshal de Nangis, a manuscript given by Cardinal de Fleury, a porcelain pagoda with verses by Madame de Boufflers; in an embrasure of the window a cabinet containing the Queen’s favorite books, with some verses by the Duchess de Luynes; everywhere souvenirs of friendship, of maternal tenderness, of useful or agreeable occupations.” It was there that, surrounded by her children, the virtuous Queen tasted the joys of the heart, those joys imparted only by a good conscience, and which the mistresses for whom Louis XV. deserted her had never known.
XV
THE DAUPHINESS MARIE JOSÈPHE OF SAXONY
Marie Leczinska was not less happy in her son than in her daughters. The bad examples of the court had not spoiled the upright and honest nature of the Dauphin. As is said by Baron de Gleichen in his Memoirs, the piety of the young prince was enlightened, and his policy foresaw the dangers of irreligion. As son and father, as brother and husband, he never ceased to display the qualities of a good and virtuous heart. He had deeply mourned his first wife, that sympathetic Spanish Infanta, who died in 1746, when hardly twenty years old. Reasons of State demanded that, in spite of his great sorrow, he should promptly contract a second marriage.