When she died, Henry proposed to replace her by Mademoiselle D’Entragues, whose beauty had made some sensation at court. Negotiations were opened with the lady, who dutifully placed the matter in the hands of her family, and father, mother, and brothers began to treat with the king for the prostitution of their daughter and sister. They asked a hundred thousand crowns. The king thought the sum large, and offered fifty thousand, but the family refusing to give way, he acceded to their demands. They then added that they would like to have a promise of marriage, conditioned upon the lady’s bearing a male child within a year. To this likewise Henry agreed, in spite of Sully’s remonstrances; and Mdlle. D’Entragues became the acknowledged mistress of the king. It need not be added that the promise of marriage was never fulfilled.
Some time afterward Henry fell in love with a young lady who was betrothed to Marshal Bassompierre. As ardent as ever, he sent for the marshal, explained his feelings, and ordered Bassompierre to renounce his claims. The marshal obeyed, and Henry married the lady (who was a Montmorency) to the Prince of Condé. The marriage was hardly over before the king opened negotiations with the bride. It will be scarcely credited that the emissary he employed was the mother of the Prince of Condé, who left no means untried to effect the dishonor of her son. The prince, of less complacent temper than most other courtiers, refused to allow his wife to become the king’s mistress. He removed her from France, and, just as Henry was about to send after her, the assassin Ravaillac freed Condé from the danger.
The disorders of Henry III., the predecessor of the King of Navarre, are shamefully notorious. There was a time during his reign when, for the same reason which induced the establishment of Dicteria at Athens, prostitution almost seemed a desirable institution at Paris. In his youth he had been a famous seducer of the ladies of honor. An anecdote of his life at this period not only reveals the tone of the court, but happily shows that depravity was not so universal as might be imagined. When Henry was chosen King of Poland, he was anxious to settle his mistress, Mdlle. de Chateauneuf, by finding her a husband. He applied to a courtier, the Provost of Paris, M. de Nantonillet, but received the scathing reply that “M. de Nantonillet would not marry a prostitute till the king had established brothels in the Louvre.”
It is best, perhaps, to throw a veil over the later stories of Henry III., his mignons, and the frightful infamies that were practiced in Paris in his time. They may be divined from the fact that Brantome mentions some orgies in which the king and a party of friends, male and female, stripped themselves naked, and tried to place themselves on a level with the brute creation, as rather redeeming instances of his sensuality.
We shall take occasion hereafter to follow the history of the court from Louis XIII. to modern times. Meanwhile, some features of society bearing on prostitution in the age we have sketched must be briefly noted.
It is asserted by all the chroniclers that the influence of the League (Ligue) was most pernicious. A sort of religious enthusiasm seems to have been kindled by the sectarian strife of the period, and practices which purported to be religious, but were only immoral, were encouraged by the highest authorities. Religious fanaticism ruled throughout France. Men and women walked naked in processions which were led by the curates. As was natural at an age of civil war, violence was freely used toward females by both of the contending armies. At every city that was taken, either by the Leaguers or the Huguenots, all the women, married and single, were violated by the soldiery; such, at least, is the statement of a contemporary historian. Moreover, in the general confusion, no proper police was enforced either at Paris or elsewhere, and the windows of print-shops teemed with lewd pictures, which no one, says the historian, thought of having seized. It was, in fact, a period of anarchy. The Moyen de parvenir, by Beroalde de Venille, which has reached us, affords some criterion of the popular literature of the day. Aretino, text and plates, was much in vogue; and Sanchez and Benedicti left their lay rivals far behind in the composition of works which may contend for the palm of lewdness with Martial or Petronius.[192]
Throughout the Middle Ages, and, indeed, up to the middle of the seventeenth century, great complaint was made by the clergy of the indecency of the dress of the people of France. About the thirteenth century it became fashionable to adorn the toe of the shoe or boot with an ornament in metal; either a lion’s claw, or an eagle’s beak, or something of that kind. Some immodest person ventured to substitute a sexual image in bronze for the usual appendage, and the fashion soon became general. Women even adopted it, and all the best society of Paris soon exhibited the indecency on their feet. The king forbade their use by royal edicts,[193] and a special bull was fulminated against them by Pope Urban V.,[194] but the monstrous shoes held their ground against both, and were only disused when fashion set in a different direction. The Braguette was another enormity of the same character. Originally, it is said, the working-classes invented the idea of a small bag hanging between the knees in which a knife or other utensil could be carried. The fashion was adopted about the beginning of the fifteenth century by men of rank, and became immediately of an immodest nature. All the arts of fashion were called into requisition to give the braguettes the most novel and remarkable appearance, and every possible means was used to render them at once disgustingly indecent and extravagantly rich. They were attached to the dress with gay-colored ribbons, and, when the wearer was a rich man, were adorned with jewels and lace. At the time Montaigne wrote, braguettes had almost gone out of vogue: they were worn only by old men, who, in the language of the essayist, “make public parade of what can not decently be mentioned.” Women, on their side, invented hoops, bustles, and low-necked dresses. The libraries contain a large collection of works written by moralists and preachers of the time against these “indecent abuses” of the ladies. As they are all in use at the present time, we may perhaps conclude that the old French moralists were unnecessarily alarmed; but it is likely that the form of the bustle was by no means as modest as that of modern crinoline skirts, and that the fashion of ladies’ drawers had not yet come in. Such, at least, is the inference from some of the criticisms they provoked. The exposure of the breasts was checked for a time under Louis XIV., but the reform was evanescent, and the custom against which churchmen thundered in the sixteenth century survives to-day.
Some allusion has already been made to the theatre. Theatricals were forbidden by the early French kings, at the instigation of the Church, but the prohibition was evaded by the performance of scenes from the Gospel dramatized. From the remains of these Moralities it would appear that they were always coarse and often immoral. The devil always played a prominent part, and would have been inconsistent had he not outraged decency. Under Henry III. women began to appear on the stage, and farces very broad in ideas and language began to be played instead of the old Moralities. We are led to believe that nothing was too scandalous to be represented on the stage; in fact, the idea seems to have been to crowd as much sensuality and vice into the farces as possible. Scarcely any incident of life was too indecent to be either portrayed or described, and if the latter, the description was given in the most undisguised language. It is altogether impossible to transcribe scenes of this nature. Enough to say that women were made to go through the pains of childbirth on the stage; husband and wife went to bed in presence of the public; and when modesty prompted the retirement of actors for causes still more indecent, a colleague rarely failed to explain why they had retired and what they were doing behind the curtain. Many of La Fontaine’s most grivois stories were taken from farces which were once acted with copious pantomime before the ladies of Paris. Even as late as the reign of Henry IV., plays of this character were commonly acted at Paris at the Hotel de Bourgogne. It was usual for the star actor to speak a prologue or an interlude, which was invariably recommended by its indecency. We have some of the titles of these prologues, and they were generally of the same character as the one on the question, Uter vir an mulier se magis delectet in copulatione.
Of the number of regular prostitutes exercising their calling in France during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries no correct estimate can be made. It was undoubtedly large. During the religious wars, a writer on the side of Protestantism undertook to draw up a statement of the number of prostitutes and lewd women whose vices were chargeable to the clergy. His estimate is, of course, open to suspicion, as being a sectarian performance; but, allowing for great exaggeration, it will still appear alarming. He calculates that there were at that time one million of women, more or less, who led habitually lewd lives, and ministered to the passions of the clergy. These were independent of the married women who were led into adultery, and of the pimps and procuresses who were in clerical pay.[195]
To return to the laws regulating prostitution, it appears that a serious effort was made to put it down under the sovereignty of Catharine of Medicis. An ordinance of Charles IX., dated 1560, prohibited the opening or keeping of any brothel or house of reception for prostitutes in Paris. For a short period it seems that the practice was actually suppressed, and the consequence is said to have been a large increase of secret debauchery. A few years after the passage of the ordinance, a Huguenot clergyman named Cayet proposed to re-establish public brothels in the interest of the public morals, but the authorities of his Church assailed him so vehemently that his scheme fell to the ground without having had the benefit of a public discussion, and he was himself driven to join the Romanists. In 1588 an ordinance of Henry III. reaffirmed the ordinance of 1560, and alleged that the magistrates of the city had connived at the establishment of brothels. Ordinances of the provost followed in the same strain, and all prostitutes were required to leave Paris within twenty-four hours. An ordinance dated 1635 was still more rigorous. It condemned all men concerned in the “traffic of prostitution” to the galleys for life, and all women and girls to be “whipped, shaved, and banished for life, without any formal trial.” As might be imagined, this ordinance was alternately disregarded and made to serve the purposes of private malice. Men who wished to revenge themselves on their mistresses accused them of being prostitutes; but it does not appear that the actual supply was ever seriously diminished.