To her the ancien régime owed its two chief characteristics—its gaiety and its grace. She possessed "une vivacité d'esprit et une élégance de manières" that in casting their spell over women as well as men created a model which made France down to the Revolution the supreme arbiter of taste in Europe. Her own natural ability—a quality that very few of the Stuarts lacked—sharpened and refined by the careful education her mother had given her, made her readily discern true genius from its sham. The artistic and intellectual appealed to her strongly. In the searchlight that the people fix upon royalty she was never seen to better advantage than when in the company of the elect of the nation. If Louis XIV. may be compared to Augustus, Madame was his Mecænas. She more than he made his fame splendid. It was she who mined and refined the ore which Louis stamped with his name. La Rochefoucauld and Bussy-Rabutin, Bossuet and Boileau, Condé and Turenne, Madame de Sévigné and Madame de La Fayette, all alike found in her an eager, sympathetic, and even a critically discriminating admirer.
In her day the peasants did not count as human beings; they were considered either as food for cannon or the mine that produced the gold of the upper classes. When the "people" were spoken of it was the bourgeoisie, the Third Estate, that was meant. The distance between this class and the throne was so bridgeless that only a revolution, one hundred and fifty years in the building, could span it. But across even this vast space the fascination of Madame penetrated. In the sublime oraison funèbre that the great Bossuet pronounced over her dead body, he merely stated the simple truth when he declared that the people of Paris shuddered when, like a clap of thunder, there resounded over the city the appalling news, "Madame se meurt! Madame est morte!"
That smile, "which seemed to ask for one's heart," had captured that of Paris as it had that of London.
Stories of her enthusiastic appreciation of genius were related everywhere, but none touched the people like those which showed her in the act of levelling the barriers between the idols of the masses and the heroes of the Court. Everybody knew that she wept over Racine. Everybody had heard how Boileau had been drawn from his obscurity by a quotation from his unknown poem with which she had greeted him, when passing by chance through an ante-room in which the poor poet was waiting to solicit the patronage of some great lord. Everybody remembered that she had stood sponsor to the child of Molière, and had "Tartuffe" acted in her own house before the King while the Church was condemning the play and demanding that the author should be burnt alive. In a country like France such things strike the imagination. With the "people" Madame could not but be popular.
At the same time she became "toute la joie, tout le plaisir de la cour." If the long reign of Louis XIV. had a gorgeous summer in Athenaïs de Montespan, and a bleak winter in Madame de Maintenon, brightened for a brief moment by the sunshine of the lovely Duchess of Burgundy, it had a joyous spring in Henrietta of England. This Golden Age of France, as it has been termed, was never so happy as when Madame infected Fontainebleau and Versailles with her gaiety.
But the Court was not sincere like the people. Courts never are. Those who owed their places and pensions to the Queen Mother and the Queen naturally studied to please them, and nothing would have pleased Anne of Austria and Marie Thérèse, of Spain so much as the ruin of this radiant, spirituelle Madame who cast them into the shade. To the people of Paris, who shuddered when the couriers came from St. Cloud with the news of her tragic death, the Court of France appeared as dazzling as did the palace of Armida to Renaud before he crossed its threshold. It was only those within who had breathed its poisoned air, tasted its treacherous pleasures, and languished in its labyrinth of intrigue who knew how fatal it was. The roses that strewed the Court of France concealed death-traps. All who lived there walked gingerly, the first princess of the blood—aye, the Queen herself, no less than the courtiers. To some the sense of danger gives an added zest to the joy of living. Madame was one of these. All her ingenuity was requisitioned to outwit her enemies, of whom the chief were her mother-in-law, her sister-in-law, and her husband.
The young King, who had been trained by his mother to play a great rôle on the throne of France, took his position even now very seriously. He was, however, naturally fond of amusement, and it was certainly not his Queen who could provide it for him. His Spanish cousin, whom he had married for reasons of high policy, bored him utterly. Marie Thérèse was very plain, very stupid, and very virtuous. She fenced herself round with etiquette, and lived on a sort of unscalable Olympian height in all the gloomy splendour of the Spanish Court in which she had been bred. Her only recreations appeared to be cards and eating. All the Bourbons were famous gluttons, but Marie Thérèse in this matter suffered none to take precedence of her. Louis was not long in drawing the inevitable comparison between his wife and his sister-in-law; and when he wished amusement, conformable to his dignity and agreeable to his temperament, it was to Madame he went. The more he saw of her the more he liked her. A word, a phrase, an opinion, would suddenly arrest his attention, and from going to Madame for amusement he began to go for something else as well.
He seemed to have quite forgotten that he had ever looked upon her with disdain. But while she bore him no grudge for the slight he had put on her when there had been a question of her marrying him, she took a certain malicious, coquettish pleasure in encouraging his growing tenderness. What a sweet, innocent revenge it would be to make him fall in love with her! In a private station such a flirtation might have escaped attention, but in an Argus-eyed Court the first sigh will be suspected, the first understanding detected. The Queen, who possessed among the numerous qualities with which she bored her husband that of jealousy, complained to Anne of Austria that Madame was robbing her of her husband's affections. The Queen Mother, who liked to exercise over her family the influence which she no longer possessed in the Government, lent a ready ear to these confidences, and as she herself had a grievance against Madame for outshining her, she soon found the means of venting it. When Anne of Austria had a score to pay off she stopped at nothing. In this instance the means she employed were despicable. She set her younger son, Monsieur, against his wife.
The character of Philippe d'Orléans belongs to a type with which readers of latter-day fiction are very familiar. This prince of the seventeenth century was the beau-ideal decadent that many modern novelists have delighted to depict. His mother and Mazarin, warned by the troubles the previous King's brother, Gaston d'Orléans, had caused the throne, were determined that Philippe should be trained to play the most paltry part in affairs. Consequently, while Louis XIV. was given the education which fitted him to become an able king, Monsieur was encouraged in every tendency that could enfeeble him. "The prettiest child in France" had grown up a young man of striking beauty with not a redeeming virtue. The last Valois king was the most degenerate monarch that ever sat on the throne of France, but he was at least picturesque. Monsieur did not possess even this quality. To find his equal one would have to go back to the decline of the Roman Empire. In the third century he might have won the purple and worn it like Heliogabalus, and the Prætorians would have poisoned or strangled or slain him. But he had the luck to be born in a Christian and more indulgent era, and died peacefully in his bed after a life of incredible uselessness and scandal. Brought up entirely among women, he had acquired an effeminacy that, when clad in women's dress, a costume he frequently affected, made it difficult to believe he belonged to the other sex. The study of clothes was his chief consideration, he spent hours rouging and perfuming himself. Court functions, to which he looked forward like a child to a party, provided him with the opportunity to wear his gorgeous costumes. A State funeral afforded him as much pleasure as a State wedding.