Love affairs of the Courts of Europe

by Thornton Hall

Seldom has there been a more singular union than this of the Duc d'Orléans' prodigal daughter with the almost imbecile grandson of the French King. The Duc de Berry, it is true, was good to look upon. Tall, fair-haired, with a good complexion and splendid health, he was physically, at twenty-four, no unworthy descendant of the great Louis. He had, too, many amiable qualities calculated to win affection; but he was mentally little better than a clown. His education had been shamefully neglected; he had been suppressed and kept in the background until, in spite of his manhood, he had all the shyness, awkwardness and dullness of a backward child.

As he himself confessed to Madame de Saint-Simon, "They have done all they could to stifle my intelligence. They did not want me to have any brains. I was the youngest, and yet ventured to argue with my brother. Afraid of the results of my courage, they crushed me; they taught me nothing except to hunt and gamble; they succeeded in making a fool of me, one incapable of anything and who will yet be the laughing-stock of everybody."

Such was the weak-kneed husband to whom was now allied the most precocious, headstrong young woman in all France; who, although still short of her sixteenth birthday, was a past-mistress of the arts of pleasure, and was now determined to have her full fling at any cost. She had been thoroughly spoiled by her too indulgent father, who was even then the most powerful man in France after the King; and she was in no mood to brook restraint from anyone, even from Louis himself.

The pleasures of the table seem now to have absorbed the greater part of her life. Read what her grandmother, the Princess Palatine, says of her: "Madame de Berry does not eat much at dinner. How, indeed, can she? She never leaves her room before noon, and spends her mornings in eating all kinds of delicacies. At two o'clock she sits down to an elaborate dinner, and does not rise from the table until three. At four she is eating again—fruit, salad, cheese, etc. She takes no exercise whatever. At ten she has a heavy supper, and retires to bed between one and two in the morning. She likes very strong brandy." And in this last sentence we have the true secret of her undoing. The Royal Princess was, even tat this early age, a confirmed dipsomaniac, with her brandy bottle always by her side; and was seldom sober, from rising to retiring.

To such a woman, a slave to the senses, a husband like the Duc de Berry, unredeemed by a vestige of manliness, could make no appeal. She wanted "men" to pay her homage; and, like Catherine of Russia, she had them in abundance—lovers who were only too ready to pay court to a beautiful Princess, who might one day be Queen of France. For the Dauphin was now dead; his eldest son, the Duc de Bourgogne, had followed him to the grave a few months later. Prince Philip had renounced his right to the French crown when he accepted that of Spain; and, between her husband and the throne there was now but one frail life, that of the three-year-old Duc d'Anjou, a child so delicate that he might easily not survive his great-grandfather, Louis, whose hand was already relaxing its grasp of the sceptre he had held so long.

On the intrigues with which this Queen in posse beguiled her days, it is perhaps well not to look too closely. They are unsavoury, as so much of her life was. Her lovers succeeded one another with quite bewildering rapidity, and with little regard either to rank or good-looks. One special favourite of our Sultana was La Haye, a Court equerry, whom she made Chamberlain, and who is pictured by Saint-Simon as "tall, bony, with an awkward carriage and an ugly face; conceited, stupid, dull-witted, and only looking at all passable when on horseback."

So infatuated was the Duchesse with her ill-favoured equerry that nothing less would please her than an elopement to Holland—a proposal which so scared La Haye that, in his alarm, he went forthwith to the lady's father and let the cat out of the bag. "Why on earth does my daughter want to run away to Holland?" the Due exclaimed with a laugh. "I should have thought she was having quite a good enough time here!" And so would anyone else have thought.

And while his Duchesse was thus dallying with her multitude of lovers and stupefying herself with her brandy bottle, her husband was driven to his wits' end by her exhibitions of temper, as by her infidelities. In vain he stormed and threatened to have her shut up in a convent. All her retort was to laugh in his face and order him out of her apartment. Violent scenes were everyday incidents. "The last one," says Saint-Simon, "was at Rambouillet; and, by a regrettable mishap, the Duchesse received a kick."

The Duc's laggard courage was spurred to fight more than one duel for his wife's tarnished fame. Of one of these sorry combats, Maurepas writes, "Her conduct with her father became so notorious that His Grace the Duc de Berry, disgusted at the scandal, forced the Duc d'Orléans to fight a duel on the terrace at Marly. They were, however, soon separated, and the whole affair was hushed up."

But release from such an intolerable life was soon coming to the ill-used Duc. One day, when hunting, he was thrown from his horse, and ruptured a blood-vessel. Fearful of alarming the King, now near the end of his long life, he foolishly made light of his accident, and only consented to see a doctor when it was too late. When the doctors were at last summoned he was a dying man, his body drained of blood, which was later found in bowls concealed in various parts of his bedroom. With his last breath, he said to his confessor, "Ah, reverend father, I alone am the real cause of my death."