La Grande Mademoiselle declares that when her father, Gaston d'Orléans, died, the King on paying her his visit of condolence, said—
"To-morrow you will see Monsieur in a trailing violet mantle. He is enchanted to hear of your father's death so as to have the pleasure of wearing it."
And as Louis predicted, Monsieur went to the funeral wearing a mantle of a "furieuse longueur."
Added to his taste for dress and pageants, he delighted in collecting precious furniture, pictures, and jewels. He also wrote neurotic verses and swore love-till-death friendships—most of which he betrayed. Of his literary accomplishments the Bibliothèque Nationale contains the voluminous and ridiculous correspondence with which he honoured the witty Madame de Sablé. As to the scandals into which his pleasures led him, perhaps the least said about them the better. Those who are interested in such things may learn all about them in the memoirs of his period. Shame was an emotion he never knew. When his favourite, the Chevalier de Lorraine, the most profligate man of his century, was banished, Monsieur sulked. He possessed, however, two traits that in a decadent of his type are rather surprising. He liked the society of women quite as much as that of his own sex. By his two marriages he had seven children, of whom no one ever doubted that he was the father. He was, also, with all his vanity and effeminacy, personally brave. When he served in the army it was said "that he was more afraid of spoiling his complexion than of bullets." Strange to say, the division he commanded covered itself with glory. At a certain siege he so distinguished himself that Louis, who was extremely jealous of the tributes paid to others, sarcastically shouted—
"Take care, brother; I advise you to lie as flat on the ground as possible!"
Perhaps his degeneracy was not so much inherent as due to that remorseless tyranny known as "politics," which can find a host of plausible excuses to gain an end. Had Monsieur been given a fair chance he might have shown as much ability as Louis himself. After his first campaign, brilliant though it was, he was never given another command. He had been trained to fear his brother, but now and then he resented the dwarfing to which he was continually subjected. One cannot help feeling a certain satisfaction on reading that once in boyhood in a "fit of ungovernable passion he dashed a bowl of soup into his brother's face."
When Madame married him the process of degeneration was complete. "He was a woman," says Saint-Simon, "with all her faults and none of her virtues; childish, feeble, idle, gossiping, curious, vain, suspicious, incapable of holding his tongue, taking pleasure in spreading slander and making mischief." The union of this wretched creature and the fascinating Madame could not but be unhappy. It was a foregone conclusion that the mignons of Monsieur should be jealous of her influence. They had already roused all the paltry jealousy of his nature against her when Anne of Austria reinforced them with her malice. Not that Monsieur loved his wife and resented her coquetry with his brother. "I never loved her after the first fortnight," he confessed in later life. Monsieur's jealousy was purely personal. He was jealous of her popularity, of her wit, of her brains—in a word, of her superiority to himself.
He was also jealous of the attention the King paid her.
The family bickerings to which his attachment to his sister-in-law subjected Louis were irritating to his pride. To silence them Madame, who had no desire to forego a friendship that amused and flattered her as much as it pleased the King, devised a ruse by which everybody was thrown off the scent. In order to enable Louis to continue his visits and to divert in another direction the hostility to which they exposed her, it was agreed that the King should feign a passion for one of Madame's maids of honour. The one selected for this questionable purpose was a sweet, unsophisticated young girl fresh from Touraine—the celebrated Mademoiselle de la Vallière.
The ruse succeeded only too well. Madame's enemies were completely hoodwinked, but Louis fell head over ears in love with the maid of honour. Madame, who ought to have foreseen this dénouement, was at first astonished and mortified. She was, however, too amiable to cherish resentment, and, to show Louis how little she cared, she plunged more gaily than ever into a life of pleasure, whereby she became involved in another and more dangerous flirtation, famous in French history as: L'affaire Guiche-Madame.