Who was she?—a Princess of the Blood, a Duchess of France, a mistress of the King?
Lords of the chamber obeyed her wishes, ministers signed lettres de cachet at her instance; "ces messieurs," la Queue de la Régence, had their rendezvous at her suppers; she had a country villa that eclipsed Trianon; she had fêtes that outshone the fêtes at Versailles; she had a "droit de chasse" in one of the royal districts; she had the first place on the easels of Coypel, Lancret, Pater, Vanloo, La Tour; the first place in the butterfly odes of Crébillon le Gai, Claude Dorat; Voisenon.
Who was she?—the Queen of France? No; much more—the Queen of Paris!
She was Thargélie Dumarsais; matchless as Claire Clairon, beautiful as Madeleine Gaussin, resistless as Sophie Arnould, great as Adrienne Lecouvreur. She was a Power in France—for was she not the Empress of the Comédie? If Madame Lenormand d'Etioles ruled the government at Versailles, Mademoiselle Thargélie Dumarsais ruled the world at Paris; and if the King's favorite could sign her enemies, by a smile, to the Bastille, the Court's favorite could sign hers, by a frown, to For-l'Evêque.
The foyer was nightly filled while she played in Zaïre, or Polyeucte, or Les Folies Amoureuses, with a court of princes and poets, marshals and marquises, beaux esprits and abbés galants; and mighty nobles strewed with bouquets the path from her carriage to the coulisses; bouquets she trod on with nonchalant dignity, as though flowers only bloomed to have the honor of dying under her foot. Louis Quinze smilingly humored her caprices, content to wait until it was her pleasure to play at his private theatre; dukes, marquises, viscounts, chevaliers, vied who should ruin himself most magnificently and most utterly for her; and lovers the most brilliant and the most flattering, from Richelieu, Roi de Ruelles, to Dorat, poet of boudoir-graces and court-Sapphos, left the titled beauties of Versailles for the self-crowned Empress of the Français. She had all Paris for her chentela, from Versailles to the Caveau; for even the women she deposed, the actors she braved, the journalists she consigned to For-l'Evêque, dared not raise their voice against the idol of the hour. A Queen of France? Bah! Pray what could Marie Leczinska, the pale, dull pietist, singing canticles in her private chapel, compare for power, for sway, for courtiers, for brilliant sovereignty, for unrivalled triumph, with Thargélie Dumarsais, the Queen of the Theatre?
Ravishingly beautiful looked the matchless actress as she sat before her Psyche, flashing [oe]illades on the brilliant group who made every added aigrette, every additional bouquet of the coiffure, every little mouche, every touch to the already perfect toilette, occasion for flattering simile and soft-breathed compliment; ravishingly beautiful, as she laughed at Maurice de Saxe, or made a disdainful moue at an impromptu couplet of Dorat's, or gave a blow of her fan to Richelieu, or asked Saint-Aulaire what he thought of Vanloo's portrait of her as Rodugune; ravishingly beautiful, with her charms that disdained alike rouge and maréchale powder, and were matchless by force of their own coloring, form, and voluptuous languor, when, her toilette finished, followed by her glittering crowd, she let Richelieu lead her to his carriage.
There was a review of Guards on the plain at Sablons that morning, a fête afterwards, at which she would be surrounded by the most brilliant staff of an army of Noblesse, and Richelieu was at that moment the most favored of her troop of lovers. M. le Duc, as every one knows, never sued at court or coulisse in vain, and the love of Thargélie Dumarsais, though perhaps with a stronger touch of romance in it than was often found in the atmosphere of the foyer, was, like the love of her time and her class, as inconstant and vivacious, now settling here, now lighting there, as any butterfly that fluttered among the limes at Trianon. Did not the jest-loving parterre ever salute with gay laughter two lines in a bagatelle-comedy of the hour—
Oui l'Amour papillonne, sans entraves, à son gré;
Chargé longtemps de fers, de soie même, il mourrait!—
when spoken by Thargélie Dumarsais—laughter that hailed her as head-priestess of her pleasant creed, in a city and a century where the creed was universal?
"Ah, bonjour! You have not seen her before, have you, semi-Englishman? You have found nothing like her in the foggy isles, I wager you fifty louis!" cried one of Thargélie Dumarsais's court, the Marquis de la Thorillière, meeting a friend of his who had arrived in Paris only the day before, M. le Chevalier de Tallemont des Réaux, as Richelieu's cortége rolled away, and the Marquis crossed to his own carriage.