In spite of all, we find ourselves regretting that this princess, taken from us at the age of twenty-six, whose natural fairy-like presence bewitched all hearts, did not live to reign beside the virtuous pupil of Fénelon. The reign of their son, that Louis XV. who was only a pretty child at their deaths and became the most contemptible of kings, would at least have been postponed. But what good is there in re-making history and in setting up a mere idea of what might have been?
[Sainte-Beuve does not show his usual justice and careful discrimination in his foregoing semi-acceptance of Duclos’ tale of “perfidy.” The whole story of Marie-Adélaïde’s position at the French Court should have been more clearly sifted. The two daughters of Vittorio Amadeo, Duke of Savoie, were, in a sense, hostages given by him to Louis XIV. in 1696 and 1701 as an earnest of faithful alliance. Circumstances, however, forced the duke in 1703 (during the war of the Spanish Succession) into the coalition against France.
From the tenth century the princes of the ancient house of Savoie had been, for various reasons geographical and political, the upholders of Italian unity, or, as one might better say, of Italian existence. France had felt this under all her attempts to master Italy, until finally her wisest statesmen, Henri IV., Richelieu, and Mazarin, saw that their true policy was to use Piedmont against the extension of the two branches of the House of Austria. The whole history of the Princes of Savoie is a romance, hitherto neglected, which ought to be traced out and written by a sympathetic hand.
The alliance of France and Piedmont, so useful to the former by enabling her to maintain her conquests on the northern frontier, was converted by Louis XIV. into a species of vassalage, to which the indolent nature of Carlo Emmanuele submitted. The latter died in 1675, leaving one son, Vittorio Amadeo, aged nine, under the regency of his mother, Jeanne de Nemours, an ambitious and powerful woman. It is impossible to give here even a brief sketch of the House of Savoie, an heroic history, which should be rescued from the archives of Turin and elsewhere—in it will be found, we may add parenthetically, the story of the Waldenses and the secret of the Iron Mask.
Vittorio Amadeo married Anne, daughter of Monsieur, Louis XIV.’s brother, by his first wife, Henrietta, daughter of Charles I., King of England. The grandmother to whom the following letters are chiefly addressed was the father’s mother, Jeanne de Nemours.
These letters, which seem to us very short, were laborious undertakings to the princess, who was never able to write easily. The first, in a childish round text hand, filling a sheet of paper twenty-three centimetres long by sixteen centimetres wide, is better written than those of her after life. The grammar and the spelling improved somewhat in later years, though never keeping pace with the improvement in the diction. They are signed with a sort of hieroglyphic, seldom with her name, and tied by a silken thread, the seal being a lozenge with the arms of Savoie, or sometimes the impression of a little dog.
Returning to the charge of Duclos (an historian of gossip rather than of history), it seems enough to say: (1) that his story has never been supported in any way; (2) that the tone of the princess’s letters refutes it; (3) that what we know from Madame about the opening of letters makes it certain that the little duchess, surrounded as she was, could not have sent documents and plans undetected; (4) that Madame, that lynx for evil tales, and who did not like the dauphine, though she did her justice, makes no allusion to this story; and (5) that Saint-Simon, in a position to know everything, states the contrary.
The little princess arrived in France, and was met by the king at Montargis, November 4, 1696. The following is her first letter to her grandmother, Jeanne de Nemours, dowager Duchess of Savoie. This letter and one written two years later are here given in the French as amusing specimens of her spelling and punctuation.]
De Versaie ce 13 Novembre [1696]