FAMOUS WOMEN OF THE FRENCH COURT.

From the French of Imbert de Saint-Amand.

Each with Portrait, 12mo, $1.25.

THREE VOLUMES ON MARIE ANTOINETTE.

MARIE ANTOINETTE AND THE END OF THE OLD RÉGIME.

MARIE ANTOINETTE AT THE TUILERIES.

MARIE ANTOINETTE AND THE DOWNFALL OF ROYALTY.

THREE VOLUMES ON THE EMPRESS JOSEPHINE.

CITIZENESS BONAPARTE.

THE WIFE OF THE FIRST CONSUL.

THE COURT OF THE EMPRESS JOSEPHINE.

FOUR VOLUMES ON THE EMPRESS MARIE LOUISE.

THE HAPPY DAYS OF MARIE LOUISE.

MARIE LOUISE AND THE DECADENCE OF THE EMPIRE.

MARIE LOUISE AND THE INVASION OF 1814.

MARIE LOUISE, THE RETURN FROM ELBA, AND THE HUNDRED DAYS.

TWO VOLUMES ON THE DUCHESS OF ANGOULÊME.

THE YOUTH OF THE DUCHESS OF ANGOULÊME.

THE DUCHESS OF ANGOULÊME AND THE TWO RESTORATIONS.

THREE VOLUMES ON THE DUCHESS OF BERRY.

THE DUCHESS OF BERRY AND THE COURT OF LOUIS XVIII.

THE DUCHESS OF BERRY AND THE COURT OF CHARLES X.

THE DUCHESS OF BERRY AND THE REVOLUTION OF JULY, 1830.

Four New Volumes.

WOMEN OF THE VALOIS AND VERSAILLES COURTS.

WOMEN OF THE VALOIS COURT.

WOMEN OF THE COURT OF LOUIS XIV.

WOMEN OF THE COURT OF LOUIS XV. Vol. I.

WOMEN OF THE COURT OF LOUIS XV. Vol. II.

MARIE LECZINSKA.

WOMEN OF VERSAILLES

THE
COURT OF LOUIS XV.

BY

IMBERT DE SAINT-AMAND

TRANSLATED BY

ELIZABETH GILBERT MARTIN

WITH PORTRAITS

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1893

COPYRIGHT, 1893, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

CONTENTS

THE COURT OF LOUIS XV.

INTRODUCTION

If you want romance, said M. Guizot one day, why not turn to history? The great author was right. The historical novel is out of fashion at present. People are tired of seeing celebrated people misrepresented, and they agree with Boileau that

“Nothing is so beautiful as the true, the true alone is lovely.”

Are there, in fact, any inventions more striking than reality? Can any novelist, however ingenious, find more varied combinations or more interesting scenes than the dramas of history? Could the most fertile mind imagine any types so curious as, for example, the women of the court of Louis XV.? The eternal womanly, as Goethe said, is all there with its vices and virtues, its pettiness and its grandeur, its weakness and its strength, its egotism and its devotion. What an instructive gallery! What diverse figures, from such a saint as Madame Louise of France, the Carmelite, to Madame Dubarry, the courtesan! In the Countess de Mailly, we have the modest favorite; in the Duchess de Châteauroux, the haughty favorite; in the Marquise de Pompadour, the intriguer, the female minister, the statesman; in Queen Marie Leczinska, the model of conjugal duty and fidelity; in the Dauphiness Marie Antoinette, the resplendent image of grace and youth, of poesy and purity; in the six daughters of the King, Madame the Infanta, so tender toward her father; Madame Henriette, her twin sister, who died of chagrin at twenty-four because she could not marry according to her inclination; Madame Adelaide and Madame Victoire, inseparable in adversity as well as in happier days; Madame Sophie, gentle and timid; Madame Louise, Amazon and Carmelite by turns, who cried in the delirium of her last agony: “To Paradise, quick, quick, to Paradise at full gallop!”

History is the resurrection of the dead, but this resurrection is not an easy matter. To withdraw one’s self from the present in order to live in the past, to display characters, to make audible the words of all these personages who are sleeping their last sleep, to rekindle so many extinct flames, evoke so many vanished shades, is a work that would need the wand of a magician. History interests and impassions only when it penetrates the secret of souls. To make it a painting, in animated tones and warm colors, and not an insignificant monochrome, it is necessary that men and things should reappear as in a mirror that reflects the past.

The preservation of the palace where they passed their existence facilitates the renascence of the women of the court of Louis XV. It is something to be able to say: Here such an event was accomplished, such a remark uttered. Here such a personage rendered her last sigh. The sight of the rooms where so many dramas were unfolded is in itself a fruitful lesson. The theatre remains; the decorations are hardly changed. But this is not all. The dust must be shaken from the costumes; the actors and actresses must be hunted up; the play must begin anew.

There is no lack of materials for this work of reconstruction; they are even rather too abundant: memoirs by Duclos, Marais, Barbier, the Duke de Luynes, Maurepas, Villars, the Marquis d’Argenson, President Hénault, Madame du Hausset, Count de Ségur, Weber, Madame Campan;—histories by Voltaire, M. Henri Martin, Michelet, Jobez;—works by the brothers Goncourt, Sainte-Beuve, M. de Lescure, the Countess d’Armaillé, Boutaric, Honoré Bonhomme, Campardon, Capefigue, Le Roi, Barthélemy;—collections by M. Feuillet de Conches and M. d’Arneth;—the secret correspondence of Louis XV. with his secret diplomatic corps, that of Count Mercy-Argenteau with the Empress Maria Theresa, new editions of ancient books, autographs, recent publications—one is embarrassed by such a mass of riches. Not days, but months and years, are needed to become well acquainted with all these treasures. But life is so short and so preoccupied with affairs that the public, with few exceptions, has neither time nor inclination to study so many volumes. Is it not a critic’s business to spare his readers minute researches, to guide them through the labyrinth, to condense long works, to bring out saliently the most characteristic passages; in a word, to facilitate study and popularize history while scrupulously respecting truth? This is what we shall try to do for Louis XV. and the women of his court.

This much-decried monarch is one of those wavering, inconsequent, bizarre types of whom so many are found in our world of contradictions and miseries. Alas! who has not something of Louis XV. in his own soul? To see the good and do the evil; to believe and not to practise; to vainly seek a remedy for ennui in sensual pleasure; to act against conscience and know self-condemnation, but not amendment; to be dissatisfied with one’s actions and lack strength for true repentance,—is not this the common lot? How many honest citizens are mere repetitions of Louis XV., lacking his crown! They show respect for their wives and affection for their children. They blame free thinkers severely. They speak respectfully of religion. And at the same time they do not observe the maxims of morality which they preach; they keep mistresses, they are guilty of shameful debaucheries. Their life is a series of incongruities; they know neither what they are nor what they desire. Such was Louis XV. His religion was not hypocrisy. His attempts at conversion came to nothing, but they issued from the depths of his troubled conscience. He remained in the mire, but he dreamed of the light. Let us not be pitiless then. Is it graceful in demagogues to display such severity toward kings? Is there more morality under the red liberty caps than above the red-heeled slippers? Louis XV. was not a faithful husband, but he had a great veneration for his wife and a profound affection for his children. In spite of unpardonable scandals he was not so odious a character as he has been painted. Weakness is the word that best characterizes him, not malignity.

Take his favorites from the sovereign, and he might be not simply a worthy man, but a great king. He is intelligent and kindly. His people adore him. Fortune has crowned him. Voltaire goes into ecstasies over the glories of this reign, which the advocate Barbier declares to be the finest epoch in the entire history of France. What compromises, what ruins all this? The great enemy, voluptuousness.

Oh! how swift, how slippery, is the descent into vice! How one fault entails another! During several years (1725–1733) Louis XV. is a model husband. Then he mysteriously commits a first infidelity; afterwards he stops at nothing. He is timid at first; he hides himself, but by degrees he becomes bolder. He declares himself at first with the Countess de Mailly; afterwards with her sister, the Countess de Vintimille; however, he still maintains some restraint. Louis XV. is stingy with the State funds; his old preceptor, Cardinal Fleury, retains some influence over him. But Fleury dies (1743); the King has a mentor no longer; he emancipates himself; the scandal gains strength and is triumphant in the person of a third sister, the Duchess of Châteauroux. Heaven, nevertheless, sends the monarch some severe lessons; Madame de Vintimille had died in childbirth (1741); the King himself came near dying at Metz; the Duchess of Châteauroux dies of chagrin and other emotions at the close of 1744. People think Louis XV. is about to change his ways. ’Tis an error: here comes the minister in petticoats, the Marquise de Pompadour, a queen of the left hand. She, to use Voltaire’s expression, is a sort of grisette made for the opera or the seraglio, who tries to amuse this bored monarch by diversions still more preposterous than his dulness. She dies at the task, and Louis XV. has not even a tear for her. As Rochefoucauld has said: “If a man thinks he loves his mistress for love of her, he is much mistaken.” Louis XV. is growing old. The Queen dies in 1768. He regrets her, and people fancy that at last he is going to follow the wise advice of his surgeon, and not merely rein his horses up, but take them out of the traces. They are reckoning without the woman who is about to bring the slang of Billingsgate to Versailles. After great ladies the great citizeness; after her the woman of the people; the De Nesle sisters are followed by Madame de Pompadour; Madame de Pompadour by Dubarry; Dubarry, the “portiere of the Revolution.”

One thing strikes me in this series of royal mistresses; I see debauchery everywhere, but nowhere love. Love with its refinements, its disinterestedness, its spirit of sacrifice, its mysticism, its poetry—where is it? I perceive not even the least shadow of it. Ah! how right was Rochefoucauld in saying: “It is the same thing with true love as with the apparition of ghosts; everybody talks about, but very few have seen it.” Voluptuousness, on the other hand, is shameless in its cynicism, and when I contemplate this wretched King whom it degrades and corrupts and weakens, who is wearied and complains and is sad unto death, I recall a page from one of the most eloquent of men: “The intoxication once past, there remains in the soul a doleful astonishment, a bitterly experienced void. It may be filled by new agitations; but it is reproduced again vaster than before, and this painful alternation between extreme joys and profound depression, between flashes of happiness and the impossibility of being happy, begets at last a state of continual sadness.... Say no longer to the man attacked by it: See what a fine day! Say no more: Listen to this sweet music! Do not even say: I love you! Light, harmony, love, all that is good and charming can do no more than irritate his secret wound. He is doomed to the Manes, and everything appears to him as if he were in a sepulchre, stifling for want of air and crushed by the weight of marble.... There comes a moment when all the man’s satiated powers give him an invincible certainty of the nothingness of the universe. Once a fleeting smile was all the despairing man needed to open limitless perspectives before him; now the adoration of the world would not affect him. He estimates it at its true value: nothing.”[1]

Is not the profound sadness of Louis XV. a moral lesson as striking as any instruction from the preachers? Here is a sovereign privileged by destiny, handsome, powerful, victorious, surrounded by general admiration, possessor of the first throne of the universe, loved almost to idolatry by his people, having a tender and devoted wife, good and respectful children, soldiers who long to die bravely in his service to the cry of, “Long live the King!” He dwells in splendid palaces; when he pleases, he shakes off the yoke of etiquette and lives like a private gentleman in little residences which are masterpieces of grace and good taste; every one seeks to divine his wishes, his caprices; all the arts are pressed into the service of making life agreeable to him; all pleasures, all elegancies, conspire to charm and entertain him. His health is robust; boon-companion, bold horseman, indefatigable huntsman and lover, he enjoys every pleasure at his will. Well, he is plunged into the depths of ill-humor, the most dismal melancholy, and the sentiment he inspires in those who observe him closely—as every memoir of the time attests—is not envy, but pity.

What conclusion can one draw from this except that neither the dazzle of riches, the prestige of pride, the fumes of incense, the caresses of flattery, the false joys of sensual pleasure, nor the intoxications of power can make man happy! He thirsts in the middle of the fountain; he finds thorns in the crown of roses that encircles his forehead, and a gnawing worm creeps, like Cleopatra’s asp, into the odorous flowers whose perfume he inhales. The lamps of the festival grow dim, the boudoirs look like tombs, and suddenly the Manes, Tekel, Phares, appears in flaming letters on the portals of gold and marble. O King, expect neither truce to thy woes nor distraction from thine ennui, that implacable companion of thy grandeur! Thou art thine own enemy, and all will betray thee, because thou art not reconciled with thyself. Most Christian King, son of Saint Louis, thou dost suffer, and oughtest to suffer, for thou canst neither seat thyself tranquilly upon the throne nor kneel before the altar!

The end of this existence was dismal. Count de Ségur relates that as Louis XV. was going to the chase he met a funeral and approached the coffin. As he liked to ask questions, he inquired who was to be buried. They told him it was a young girl who had died of small-pox. Seized with sudden terror, he returned to his palace of Versailles and was almost instantly attacked by the cruel malady whose very name had turned him pale. Gangrene invaded the body of the voluptuous monarch. People fled from him with terror as if he were plague-stricken. His daughters alone, his daughters, models of courage and devotion, braved the contagion and would not leave his death-bed.

Study history seriously. You fancy you will encounter scandal, but you will find edification. Corrupt epochs are perhaps more fruitful in great lessons than austere ones. It is not virtue, but vice, which cries to us: Vanity, all is vanity. It is the guilty women, the royal mistresses, who issue from their tombs and, striking their breasts, accuse themselves in presence of posterity. These beauties who appear for an instant on the scene and then vanish like shadows, these unhappy favorites who wither in a day like the grass of the field, these wretched victims of caprice and voluptuousness, all speak to us like the sinful woman of the Gospel, and history is thus morality in action.

FIRST PART

[1715–1744]

I
THE INFANTA MARIE ANNE VICTOIRE, BETROTHED OF LOUIS XV.

When Louis XIV. gave up the ghost, Versailles also seemed to die. No one ventured to dwell in the palace of the Sun King. During seven years it was abandoned. September 9, 1715, at the very moment when Louis XV., then five and a half years old, was returning to Vincennes, the body of him who had been Louis XIV. was carried to its last abode, at Saint-Denis. The people danced, sang, drank, and gave themselves up to a scandalous joy. The following epigram got into circulation:—

“Non, Louis n’était pas si dur qu’il le parut,

Et son trépas le justifie,

Puisque, aussi bien que le Messie,

Il est mort pour notre salut.”[2]

Such is the gratitude of peoples! This is what remains of so many flatteries, so much incense! Sic transit gloria mundi.

France, which insulted the memory of the heroic old man, was on its knees before a child. September 12, an enormous crowd was surging around the palace of the Parliament in Paris. Little Louis XV. alighted from his carriage amidst acclamations, and formally entered the palace. He took off his hat, and then, replacing it on his head, said graciously: “Gentlemen, I have come here to assure you of my affection. Monsieur the Chancellor will acquaint you with my will.” And the first president responded: “We are all eager to contemplate you upon your bed of justice like the image of God on earth.”

“Princes are badly brought up,” says the Marquis d’Argenson. “Nothing flatters and nothing corrects them.” Ought not one to be indulgent toward a prince to whom his governor, Marshal Villeray, kept repeating on the balcony of the Tuileries: “Look, master, look at these people; well! they are all yours, they all belong to you.” The regent said to the little monarch: “I am here only to render you my accounts, to offer matters for your consideration, to receive and execute your orders.” The child thought himself a man already.

In 1721 they affianced him to the Infanta Marie Anne Victoire, daughter of Philip V., King of Spain. Louis XV. was not yet eleven years old; the Infanta was only three. They had all the difficulty in the world to induce the monarch to say the necessary yes. His little betrothed arrived in Paris the following year (March 22, 1722). Louis XV. went to meet her at Montrouge. All along the route the houses were decked with hangings and adorned with flowers and foliage. The next day the gazettes informed the public that the Queen—so they called the Infanta—had received from the King a doll worth twenty thousand livres. Three months later (June, 1722), Louis XV. and his betrothed established themselves at Versailles, which again became the political capital of France. The King took possession of the bedchamber of Louis XIV.,[3] which he used until 1738. The Infanta was lodged in the apartment of the Queen, and slept in the chamber[4] that had been occupied by Marie Thérèse, the Bavarian dauphiness, and the Duchess of Burgundy. She made the two youngest daughters of the regent her inseparable companions, treating them as if they were younger than herself, although they were twice her age. She kept them in leading-strings under pretext of preventing them from falling, and as she embraced them on their departure, she would say: “Little princesses, go home now and come to see me every day.”

Louis XV. was crowned at Rheims, October 25, 1722. “People remember,” says the Marquis d’Argenson, “how much he resembled Love that morning, with his long coat and silver cap, in the costume of a neophyte or candidate for kingship. I have never seen anything so affecting as his figure at that time. All eyes grew moist with tenderness for this poor little prince, sole scion of a numerous family, all other members of which had perished, not without a suspicion of having been poisoned.” France idolized this little King whose beauty, of a supreme distinction, had somewhat ideal in it; the Emperor of Germany said he was the child of Europe. Having completed his thirteenth year, he was, as usual, proclaimed of age (February, 1723), and that same year, the Duke of Orleans, who had most loyally fulfilled his duties toward his pupil, assumed the functions of prime minister on the death of Cardinal Dubois. He showed profound deference toward the young sovereign, and carried his portfolio to him at five o’clock every afternoon. The King enjoyed this occupation, and always looked forward impatiently to the hour.

When the Duke of Orleans died suddenly at Versailles (December 2, 1723), Louis XV. regretted him sincerely. It was a woman who reigned under cover of the new prime minister, the Duke of Bourbon. She was one of those ambitious creatures to whom the moral sense is lacking, but who possess wit, grace, and charm; one of those enchantresses who, by dint of intrigues, end by falling into their own snares and cruelly expiate their short-lived triumphs. The Marquise de Prie, the all-powerful mistress of the Duke, was twenty-five years old. The daughter of the rich financier Berthelot de Pléneuf, she had married a nobleman whom she managed to have appointed ambassador to Turin. She led a very fast life in that city, and got herself into debt. Her father being unable to maintain her any longer, she was obliged to escape from the courts of justice, and the Marquis de Prie was recalled from his embassy. The young Marquise was not the woman to be discouraged by such reverses. She had only to show herself in order to subjugate the Duke of Bourbon, and assume a princely luxury. “She had a charming face,” says the Marquis d’Argenson, “a sharp and crafty wit, a touch of genius, ambition, and recklessness.... The Duke was madly in love with her. I knew their habits, their visits to the opera ball, their little house in the rue Sainte Apolline, their gray-looking hack, which had the appearance of a public conveyance on the outside, but was extremely magnificent within.... She played the queen just as I would make a valet-de-chambre of my lackey.”

When they were carrying the reliquary of Sainte Geneviève in procession in 1725, because the rains had spoilt the crops, she said: “The people are crazy; don’t they know that it is I who make rain and fine weather?”

Violent under an air of gentleness, insatiable for money and power beneath an exterior of careless disinterestedness, a libertine through habit rather than from passion, running after pleasure without seeking love, betraying with impunity her lover who believed what she said against the evidence of his own eyes, Madame de Prie despotically ruled both the Duke of Bourbon and France. But one thing disquieted her: the young King’s health was delicate. If he should die suddenly, the crown would revert to the Orleans branch, between which family and the Duke of Bourbon there existed a thoroughgoing enmity. In 1725 the Infanta, the betrothed of Louis XV., was only seven years old. Several years must elapse, therefore, before the marriage could be consummated. Now, there was no repose possible for the Duke and his favorite so long as the King had no direct heir. The Duke slept at Versailles in an apartment directly under that of the King. One night he thought he heard more noise and movement than usual. He rose precipitately and went up stairs in a great fright and his dressing gown. The first surgeon, Maréchal, astonished to see him appear in this guise, asked the cause of his alarm. The Duke, beside himself, could only stammer: “I heard some noise—the King is sick—what will become of me?” Somewhat reassured by Maréchal, he consented to go down again to his apartment, but he was overheard muttering to himself: “I would never get back here again. If he recovers, we must marry him.” It was resolved to send back the Infanta on account of her youth. Her father, Philip V., was indignant at such an outrage. “There is not blood enough in all Spain to avenge such an insult,” said he. At Madrid the shouting populace were allowed to drag an effigy of Louis XV. through the streets, and the shepherds of the Spanish Pyrenees came into the pasture lands of French valleys to hamstring the cattle.

Two Princesses of Orleans were then in Spain. They were both daughters of the regent, and had been sent to Madrid at the time when Marie Anne Victoire, the betrothed of Louis XV., had come to France.[5] One of them, Mademoiselle de Montpensier, born in 1709, married the Prince of the Asturias, eldest son of Philip V. The other, Mademoiselle de Beaujolais, born in 1714, was affianced to Don Carlos, brother to the Prince of the Asturias. The first was sad, cross, and whimsical; the second, on the contrary, was a delightful child, as pretty as she was intelligent. When she arrived in Spain, she was seven years old, the same age as Don Carlos, and Queen Elizabeth Farnese wrote to the Duke of Orleans: “Her little husband is in transports of joy over her, and is only too happy to have such a charming Princess.”

When Philip V. abdicated in 1724, in favor of the Prince of the Asturias (Louis I.), Mademoiselle de Montpensier became Queen. But the new King died at the end of eight months. Philip V. resumed the crown, and the widow remained without any influence at court. As soon as it was known at Madrid that Louis XV. was not to marry the Infanta, Marie Anne Victoire, it was determined by way of reprisals that the widow of King Louis and Mademoiselle de Beaujolais, the betrothed of Don Carlos, should be immediately sent back to Versailles. Spain saw the Queen, who was not at all sympathetic, depart without regret; but people were grieved at the departure of Mademoiselle de Beaujolais, who at the age of nine years was already charming, and who, appearing like a ray of light in the sombre Escurial, had made herself beloved by her little betrothed.

In France, too, the sending back of the Infanta, who was by anticipation already styled the Queen, did not occur without exciting some regret. The little Princess, now seven years old, had been confided to the care of Madame de Ventadour, the former governess of Louis XV., who loved her fondly. The great-granddaughter of Louis XIV. already knew how to nod graciously in response to the homage of the crowd, and everybody admired her pretty ways. But Louis XV., who was in his sixteenth year, and precocious, was hardly satisfied with so young a fiancée. He was pleased therefore with the breaking off of a marriage whose consummation he must have waited for so long, and, according to Voltaire’s expression, he was like a bird whose cage has been changed when he saw the Infanta depart. Beautiful presents, however, were made to the young Princess, and it was determined that her return should be accomplished with a respectful magnificence and ceremony. She left Versailles April 5, 1725, and on reaching the frontier, she was exchanged at Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port for the two Princesses of Orleans (the widow of King Louis and Mademoiselle de Beaujolais). Married in 1729 to Joseph Emanuel, then Prince, afterwards King of Portugal, “she gave that sovereign,” says Voltaire, “the children she was not allowed to give to Louis XV. and was not happier on account of it.” As to the two Princesses of Orleans, their destiny was unhappy: the queen dowager of Spain, who died in 1742, lived in poverty, with a barren title and the simulacrum of a court. Her two families had but one thought,—that of ridding themselves of the support of this unfortunate young woman. Spain showed excessive negligence in the payment of her pension, and after having reigned over one of the principal kingdoms of the world, she was obliged, by economical reasons, to spend three consecutive years with the Carmelites of Paris. Still living, she was treated as if already dead. Her sister, Mademoiselle de Beaujolais, so amiable, sweet, and attractive, retained a tender memory of her former betrothed, Don Carlos (the future Charles III.), who, on his side, did not forget her. Possibly a means of renewing their engagement might have been found. But the young girl died in 1734, carrying her faithful regret with her to the tomb. She was not yet twenty.

The rupture of the marriage of Louis XV. was not a fortunate event. The Prince was only fifteen years old. He might easily have waited several years longer before marrying. His studies and his energy would both have been the gainers by it. Moreover, it was an evil thing to insult a great nation like Spain. It was not alone the Spanish people that were outraged, but the glorious memory of the Infanta’s great-grandfather, the grand King who had said: “There are no more Pyrenees.” A fatal lesson was given to the young sovereign when he was thus taught to violate sworn faith, and habituated from his adolescence to those culpable caprices, those egotistic desertions of which his reign was to afford more than one example.

II
THE MARRIAGE OF MARIE LECZINSKA

In the year 1725, a poor exiled king and his family were living in a dilapidated old commandery in Wissemburg, a little town of Alsace. This king without a kingdom, this fugitive who dignified his poverty by the resignation with which he endured misfortune, was the Pole, Stanislas Leczinski, the protégé of Charles XII. of Sweden. Driven from Poland after a very short reign, Stanislas had found an asylum in France, and lived in Wissemburg in complete retirement with his mother, his wife, his daughter, and several gentlemen who had been faithful to him in misfortune. His daughter, Marie, born in Breslau, June 23, 1703, was at this time twenty-two years old. Pious, gentle, and sympathetic, she was the joy of the exiles. When they spoke to her of projected marriages, she would say to her parents: “Do not think you can make me happy by sending me away; it would be far sweeter to me to share your ill-fortune than to enjoy, at a distance, a happiness which would not be yours.” Her education had been as intelligent as it was austere. She spent the time not occupied in prayer and study in working for the poor of the city or embroidering ornaments for churches. She was a true Christian, one of those admirable young girls whose charm has in it something evangelic, and who make virtue lovable.

One day Stanislas, much moved, entered the room where his wife and daughter were. “Let us kneel down,” he exclaimed, “and return thanks to God!”—“Father,” said Marie, “have you been called back to the throne of Poland?”—“Ah! daughter,” he replied, “Heaven is far more favorable to us than that. You are Queen of France.” It was not a dream. The exile’s daughter, the poor and obscure Princess, living on alms from the French court, who, but the day before, would have been happy to marry one of those who were now to be her principal officials, ascended as if by miracle the greatest throne in the world. How had she happened to be preferred to the ninety-nine marriageable princesses, a list of whom had been drawn up at Versailles? There was but this simple remark below her name in the list: “Nothing disadvantageous is known concerning this family.” Louis XV. who had sent back the daughter of a King of Spain could choose among the wealthiest and most highly placed princesses in Europe. How did they contrive to make him marry this poor Polish girl who brought him no dot and who was seven years his senior (in an inverse sense, the same difference of age that existed between him and the Infanta, his first betrothed)? It is true that a former secretary of embassy, Lozillières, whom the Duke of Bourbon had sent to make inquiries about twenty-seven princesses, had thus drawn the portrait of Marie Leczinska: “This Princess, as simple as the daughter of Alcinoüs, who knows no cosmetics but water and snow, and, seated between her mother and her grandmother, embroiders altar-cloths, recalls to us, in the commandery of Wissemburg, the artlessness of heroic times.” Was it this mythological style which affected sceptical and depraved souls like those of the Duke of Bourbon and his mistress, Madame de Prie?

It was not this, at all events, which chiefly preoccupied them. If they selected Marie Leczinska, it was because they fancied that, owing her elevation solely to their caprice, she would esteem herself in their debt and be their tool. What pleased them in her was that she had no resources; that a price had been set upon her father’s head; that the exile, dispossessed of his throne for thirteen years, had wandered from asylum to asylum, in Turkey, in Sweden, in the principality of Deux-Ponts, and in Alsace; that the young girl was merely agreeable without being beautiful; that she was seven years older than Louis XV.; and that in calling her to the throne in the most unforeseen and inconceivable manner, the Duke and Madame de Prie would create for themselves exceptional claims upon her gratitude.

Louis XV. was at this time the most beautiful youth in the kingdom. An ideal lustre illuminated his charming visage, and when they were praising the graces of her young betrothed to Marie Leczinska: “Alas!” said she, “you redouble my alarms.”

One should read in the sympathetic work of the Countess d’Armaillé,[6] the story of the beginnings of this union which was at first to be so happy. Louis XV. made his official request for the hand of Marie Leczinska through Cardinal de Rohan, Bishop of Strasburg. She contented herself with responding: “I am penetrated with gratitude, Monsieur the Cardinal, for the honor done me by the King of France. My will belongs to my parents, and their consent will be mine.” The marriage by proxy took place at Strasburg, August 14, 1725. The King was represented by the Duke of Orleans. After having received her parents’ blessing, and distributed souvenirs to the faithful companions of her exile, Marie went to join Louis XV. She was greeted everywhere she went with extravagant laudations. “There is nothing which the good French people do not do to divert me,” she wrote at the time to Stanislas Leczinski. “They say the finest things in the world to me, but nobody says that you may be near me. Perhaps they will say so presently, for I am journeying in fairyland, and am veritably under their magical dominion. At every instant I undergo transformations, of which one is more brilliant than the other. Sometimes I am fairer than the Graces; again, I belong to the family of the Nine Sisters; here, I have the virtues of an angel; there, the sight of me makes people happy. Yesterday I was the wonder of the world; to-day I am the lucky star. Every one does his best to deify me, and doubtless I shall be placed among the immortals to-morrow. To dispel the illusion, I lay my hand on my head, and instantly find again her whom you love, and who loves you very tenderly.” The new Queen of France signed this letter with the Polish diminutive of her name: Maruchna.

At Sézanne, September 3, a page, the Prince of Conti, brought her a bouquet from Louis XV. Near Moret, the next day, she saw her husband for the first time. As soon as he appeared she threw herself on her knees on a cushion; the King raised her at once and embraced her affectionately. The royal pair made their entry at Fontainebleau September 5, and were crowned the following day. “The Queen,” wrote Voltaire, “makes a very good appearance, although her face is not at all pretty. Everybody is enchanted with her virtue and her politeness. The first thing she did was to distribute among the princesses and ladies of the palace all the magnificent trinkets composing what is called her corbeille, which consisted of jewels of every sort except diamonds. When she saw the casket in which they had been placed: ‘This is the first time in my life,’ said she, ‘that I have been able to make presents.’ She wore a little rouge on her wedding day, just enough to prevent her from looking pale. She fainted for an instant in the chapel, but only for form’s sake. There was a comedy performed the same day. I had prepared a little entertainment which M. de Mortemart would not execute. In place of it they gave Amphion and Le Médecin malgré lui, which did not seem very appropriate. After supper there were fireworks with many rockets and very little invention and variety.... For the rest, there is a frightful noise, racket, crowd, and tumult here.”

The Queen pleased everybody by her extreme affability. What they admired was neither the magnificence of her costume, the Sancy that sparkled on her corsage, nor the Regent that glittered on her chaste forehead, but her modesty, her benevolence, her gentleness, the grace which is still more beautiful than beauty. Voltaire was in the front rank of the courtiers of this new star which shed so soft a lustre. But he did not find his rôle as flatterer rewarded by sufficient gratuities. Hence he wrote from Fontainebleau: “I have been very well received by the Queen. She wept over Marianne, she laughed over L’Indiscret; she often talks to me, she calls me her poor Voltaire. A blockhead would be satisfied with all this; but, unfortunately, I think soundly enough to feel that praise does not amount to much, and that the rôle of a poet at court always entails upon him something slightly ridiculous. You would not believe, my dear Thiriot, how tired I am of my life as a courtier. Henri IV. is very stupidly sacrificed at the court of Louis XV. I bewail the moments I rob him of. The poor child ought to have appeared already in quarto, with fine paper, fine margins, and fine type. That will surely come this winter, whatever may happen. I think you will find this work somewhat more finished than Marianne. The epic is my forte, or I am very much mistaken.... The Queen is constantly assassinated with Pindaric odes, sonnets, epistles, and epithalamiums. I fancy she takes the poets for court-fools; and in this case she is quite right, for it is great folly for a man of letters to be here. They give no pleasure and receive none.”[7]

By dint of compliments in prose and verse, Voltaire obtained a pension of 1500 livres, which made him write to la présidente de Bernières, November 13, 1725: “I count on the friendliness of Madame de Prie. I no longer complain of court life, I begin to have reasonable expectations.”

Some days afterwards (December 1, 1725), Marie Leczinska left Fontainebleau and went to Versailles. She installed herself in what were called the Queen’s apartments, and slept in the chamber which had been successively occupied by Marie Thérèse, the Bavarian Dauphiness, the Duchess of Burgundy, and the Infanta Marie Anne Victoire. There she brought her ten children into the world, and it was there she was to die.

The early days of the marriage were very happy; at that time Louis XV. was a model youth. The counsels of his former preceptor, the Bishop of Fréjus; the sense of duty; religious beliefs; the timidity inseparable from adolescence,—all these contributed to keep in the paths of wisdom the young monarch who dreamed of being a good husband and father, a good king, and working out his own salvation along with the welfare of his subjects. Naturally inclined to the pleasures of the senses, he attached himself to Marie Leczinska with the ardor of an innocent young man who loves for the first time. Notwithstanding the shamelessness of many of them, the court beauties did not yet venture to raise their eyes toward this royal adolescent, who made even the most audacious respectful, by his gentleness and his reserve. Nothing, at this time, announced the disorders to which the young monarch was one day to yield himself. The roués of the Regency could not console themselves for having so calm and virtuous a master; they awaited with impatience the moment when they could thrust him over the declivity of scandal, and, like real demons, they lay in wait for their prey.

III
THE DISGRACE OF THE MARQUISE DE PRIE

The Marquise de Prie congratulated herself upon having brought Marie Leczinska to the throne. It was, in fact, as D’Argenson has remarked, an excellent choice, according to the views of the Marquise: “Fecundity, piety, sweetness, humanity, and, above all, a great incapacity for affairs. This court policy required, moreover, a woman without attractions and without coquetry, who could only retain her husband through the sense of duty and the necessity of giving heirs to the crown.” The Duke and his favorite had found in the Queen all the gratitude and complaisance they had counted on. As to the King, amused by the chase, festivities, journeys to Marly, Chantilly, and Rambouillet, he occupied himself with politics very little. The prime minister could flatter himself on being a real mayor of the palace. But he had reckoned without a prelate of seventy-four years, to whom ambition had come with age, and who was about to cast down with a breath all this scaffolding of intrigues and calculations.

Fleury, Bishop of Fréjus, the preceptor of Louis XV., was of humble origin, having been the son of a tithe-collector[8] in the diocese of Fréjus. Appointed chaplain to Queen Marie Thérèse in 1680, “he was,” says Saint-Simon, “received at the ministers’ houses where, in fact, he was of as little importance as he was elsewhere, and often supplied the place of a bell before such things had been invented.” He was selected as preceptor for the little Prince, who was to be styled Louis XV., and gained his pupil’s good-will by his easy, gentle, and insinuating character, his perfect calmness, and his mingled veneration and tenderness for a child who, thinking himself always menaced, felt that this assiduous and obsequious devotion protected him. The secret of his affection for Fleury was that Fleury never opposed him. He affected, moreover, an absolute disinterestedness, and seemed to be making a sacrifice to the King by remaining at court instead of taking refuge in a convent. The Bishop was always one of the party when the young King was working, or pretending to work, with his Ministers. In appearance he guarded the most humble, most insignificant attitude; but, in reality, he exerted an influence which exasperated the Duke, and still more Madame de Prie. The Queen herself was jealous of the confidence enjoyed by this silent old man who followed the King like his shadow, and who seemed likely to monopolize everything in spite of his modest airs. The Marquise, who had constant access to the Queen in her capacity as lady of the palace, contrived a real plot with her. It was a question of getting rid of this troublesome third person who was always putting himself between the King and the Prime Minister. “In order to deliver herself from the old Bishop, Madame de Prie devised a scheme by which she might take his place, and enter almost openly into the council of State. She persuaded her lover to induce the King to work in the apartments of the Queen whom he loved, at least with that love which every young man feels for the first woman he possesses. The preceptor, having no lessons to give there, would not follow his pupil, so that, without being pushed too rudely he would slip out of his place, and, naturally, find himself on the ground. Then the Marquise, relying on the good-nature of the Queen, would introduce herself as a fourth, and from that time on would govern the State. Although the plan seemed to her an admirable one, yet its success was not equally so.”[9]

The little conspiracy, however, had been conducted with great vigor. One evening, the Queen, who happened to be with the Duke of Bourbon, sent the King a request to come to her. Louis XV. complied, and the Prime Minister handed him a letter from Cardinal de Polignac containing violent accusations against the Bishop of Fréjus. This was the first time that Fleury had not been present when the King and the Duke were together. Convinced that his exclusion was henceforth determined, he went at once to his own apartment, and after writing a very mournful but tender and respectful letter in which he took leave of his young master, he departed at once for the Sulpician convent at Issy. The Duke and Madame de Prie thought themselves sure of victory, but they were in too great haste to triumph. On reading the letter of his former preceptor the King began to weep. He dared not avow the cause of his chagrin, however, and being always timid and irresolute, he kept silence. His first gentleman, the Duke de Mortemart, at last emboldened him. “What! Sire, are you not the master?” said he. “Have the Duke told to send a messenger at once for Monseigneur de Fréjus, and you will see him again.” This was no sooner said than done. The Bishop returned, and hid his success at first under the appearance of modesty. He pretended to desire nothing for himself, and showed profound deference toward the Duke, but the Prime Minister and his favorite were doomed.

The little King, with his seventeen years, was about to show that he was master. With that dissimulation which from infancy he had been accustomed to consider a quality indispensable to princes, he silently prepared the Duke’s downfall. As he was getting into his carriage to go to Rambouillet, June 11, 1727, he said to his Prime Minister with the most gracious air in the world: “I expect you to supper this evening.” The Duke re-entered the château in perfect confidence. But what was his surprise when, three hours later, he received a royal letter in these terms:—

“I order you, under pain of disobedience, to repair to Chantilly, and to remain there until further orders.” This was a veritable exile. The Duke submitted without a murmur. At the same time, the Queen received this laconic billet from Louis XV.: “I beg you, Madame, and if necessary, I order you, to do all that the Bishop of Fréjus shall tell you from me as if he were myself.” The poor Queen wept and resigned herself. As to Madame de Prie, she was struck at the same time as her lover, and relegated to her estate of Courbépine in Normandy. M. de Prie was startled at this disgrace. He went about asking people with an affectation which made everybody smile: “But what is there in common between the Duke and my wife?” Those who but yesterday were at the feet of the Duke and his favorite now overwhelmed them with gibes and sarcasms. The people lighted bonfires, and the walls were covered with posters whereon might be read: “A hundred pistoles’ reward for whoever finds a valuable mare accustomed to follow a one-eyed horse.”[10]

M. Michelet, usually so severe and merciless toward the court of Louis XV., speaks with a certain complacency of the Marquise de Prie. “Though history ought to be severe toward this female tyrant,” says he, “it is, nevertheless, a duty to own the vigor with which she supported the bold attempts of Duverney. This rude government, thoroughly violent and shameless as it was, had, nevertheless, instincts of life which one may regret in the mortal torpor of the asphyxia which followed it.” One hardly comprehends this indulgence, for there was nothing moral, nothing great in the ephemeral reign of the Duke and his mistress.

It is not an easy thing for a coquettish, ambitious woman, accustomed to have her caprices accepted as laws, to endure disgrace, humiliation, and retirement. Madame de Prie was at first under an illusion. She thought she would be speedily recalled to Versailles, but when she saw she was mistaken, and that her place as lady of the palace had been given to the Marquise d’Arlincourt, her disappointment was cruel. According to M. Michelet: “She devoured her own heart, and could not conceal it. No caged lion or tiger ever was so restless. She was furious, and talked nonsense. She hoped to die, and later on she tried to kill herself by furious excesses; but in vain. She lost nothing by it but her health, her freshness, and her beauty. In extremis she still retained a lover and a friend in her desert. The latter, very malicious, very corrupt, a real cat, was Madame du Deffand, and the two friends scratched each other every day between their caresses. The lover, a young man of merit, persisted in loving her, bad as she was. She was hopelessly dried up, and her last punishment was that she could not resume life through love. She was devoured by pride. She no longer desired anything but to die like a Roman woman, like Petronia.”

All this seems to us exaggerated. We believe Madame de Prie was too frivolous to experience such despair. She had not waited for her exile in order to know those alternations of sadness and folly which accompany vice even when it has the air of being happy. For some time, already, the taste for intrigue, the thirst for pleasure, the ardor of ambition, had kindled in her veins a fever which undermined her strength. Her plumpness had been succeeded by an excessive lankness. Struggling against ill-health with extreme energy, she tried to build herself up, to put a good face on everything, to shake off trouble, and find amusement. Though her body was so much weakened, says the Marquis d’Argenson, her mind and temper were still as gay, shrewd, merry, and frivolous as in the times of her greatest prosperity. Even in her misfortune she had courtiers who deceived her. She had become ugly, and her flatterers continued to tell her she was adorable. She was hopelessly ill, and her physicians told her she was doing very well. Two days before her death she played in a comedy, and recited three hundred lines with as much sentiment as memory. Nevertheless, she had predicted her approaching death. People thought, however, that this was but a jest, a pleasantry. Hence, when she breathed her last, October 6, 1728, after such convulsions that her toes were turned towards her heels, a rumor that she had poisoned herself got abroad. Such a suicide is improbable, and not easily reconcilable with the superficial character of Madame de Prie. M. Michelet adds that she made a farcical confession (bouffonna une confession)—these are the expressions employed by an historian who is often too fanciful. What can M. Michelet know about it? Why does he affirm that she did not repent of her faults and errors? Greater sinners than she have been illuminated at the last moment by a ray of light. It is certain, at all events, that the sudden and terrible death of this young woman of only twenty-nine years, who expiated so cruelly her shameful successes, was a striking lesson for her contemporaries. Was Madame de Prie’s death-bed conversion sincere? God only knows.

IV
THE KING FAITHFUL TO THE QUEEN

For several years Louis XV. gave no scandal. Faithful to his religious duties, he lived like a good Christian and good husband. The courtiers, habituated to the manners of the Regency, did not conceal their surprise and annoyance. One day, in January, 1729, when there had been several sleighing excursions, old Marshal de Villars wrote: “These sleighing parties give the ladies some hopes that things are going to be rather livelier. There was dancing after supper, and if that happens often, it is not impossible that some courageous beauty may lay hold of the King.” But this daring beauty was not to be found. The intimidating politeness and freezing glance of the young sovereign kept all women at a distance. Louis XV. did not yield. People wondered whether pride or timidity, goodness or egotism, wisdom or ennui, was what gave its predominating character to his attitude of taciturnity and extreme reserve.

The character of the King, who as yet did not know himself, was an enigma to the court. Versailles, under the direction of an aged priest, resembled an Escurial, and the small apartments destined to so scandalous a future had at this time the tranquillity of a convent or a sanctuary. If any one mentioned a woman famous for her beauty to the monarch, he would merely say: “She is not more beautiful than the Queen.” Marie Leczinska kept her spouse within the bounds of duty by her exquisite goodness, her remoteness from all intrigue, her submissive and gentle spirit. Loving neither luxury nor racket, she lived like a worthy citizeness, charitable, modest, and entirely occupied with her salvation. She arrived in France in September, 1725, and for three years she did not see Paris. A sort of votive pilgrimage took her there for the first time on October 4, 1728. She had brought twin daughters into the world the previous year, Louise Elizabeth and Henriette of France; this time she desired a son, and to obtain one from Heaven she came to invoke the intercession of the Blessed Virgin in the Parisian churches. Barbier, the advocate, thus describes in his Journal Marie Leczinska’s pious excursion:—

“October.—Monday, 4, our good Queen has seen Paris. She came to Notre Dame to ask a dauphin from the Virgin, and from there she went to Saint-Geneviève with the same end in view. She made this journey incognita after a fashion; that is to say, it was not a formal entry. She had only her usual suite, which consists of four carriages with eight horses apiece.... As to the person of the Queen, she is little, rather slender than stout, not pretty without being disagreeable, and looks good-natured and gentle, which does not impart the majesty needful in a queen. She went about a good deal in Paris and saw astonishing crowds of people. They say that money to the extent of twelve thousand livres was scattered from the door of her carriage.”

Marie Leczinska’s prayer was heard. The next year she had a son (September 4, 1729). She gave the King ten children in ten years (1727–1737). And yet there was no real intimacy between the married pair. During the daytime they scarcely addressed a word to each other. One might have said they never came together but from a sense of duty, for the welfare of the State. Cold, polite, reserved, they mutually intimidated each other.

Was the Queen as clever as she ought to have been in order to keep Louis XV. in the straight path? One may be permitted to doubt it. Her frank and simple nature knew neither astuteness nor diplomacy. The secrets of feminine coquetry were completely foreign to her. If D’Argenson is to be believed, she was not adroit. He says she was too prudish with her husband, thinking she had noticed that in France it was considered in good taste to be so. He accuses her of overdoing the matter, and then lamenting her mistake with bitter tears when it was past all remedy. He says, too, that she did not do all that was in her power to make her society agreeable to her husband. “At the beginning of his marriage,” he writes, “the King wanted to spend his evenings in the Queen’s apartments, playing cards and chatting. The Queen, instead of attracting him thither, putting him at his ease, and amusing him, played the disdainful. Hence the King grew disgusted, accustomed himself to pass the evenings in his own apartments, at first with men and afterwards with women, his cousin Charolais, the Countess of Toulouse. The King is naturally very timid and seeks for those with whom he can be at his ease. When he once meets them, it is plain to what degree he is a man of habitudes.”

The Queen would have tried in vain to use the language of passion to her husband or treat him to jealous scenes. Louis XV. had a horror of everything that seemed to him exaggerated. In his wife’s chagrin he would have seen a freak, a forgetfulness of etiquette, a want of deference. Already, in 1726, Marshal de Villars had recommended calmness and resignation to Marie Leczinska. He says in his Memoirs: “The Queen led me into her cabinet, and spoke to me with keen sorrow of the changes she observed in the King’s affection. Her tears flowed abundantly. I replied: ‘I think, Madame, that the King’s heart is far removed from what is called love; you are not the same with regard to him; but, believe me, it is best not to display your passion too much; don’t let any one see that you fear a diminution in his sentiments, lest the many fine eyes that are ogling him continually should risk everything in order to profit by this change. For the rest, it is all the better for you that the King’s heart is not much inclined to tenderness, because where passion is concerned, natural coldness is less cruel than abandonment.’”

What is to become of this undecided, timid, vacillating king? In which direction will this young man go, who, like Hercules in the fable, is hesitating between Virtue and Pleasure? Will he be a saint or a debauchee? He wants to do what is right, but will he have the courage? Everything conspires to thrust him into the evil way. His morality is begrudged him. The air he breathes is poisonous. The women, who incessantly provoke him, rival each other in glances and coquetries. His former preceptor, now become directing minister, dares not venture a counsel. His first valet de chambre, Bachelier, already dreams of playing the pander, and great lords, with the Duke de Richelieu at their head, likewise aspire to those sorry but lucrative functions. Who would dare to reprimand the monarch if he gave a scandalous example? The clergy hold their peace. The nobles demand but one thing from the King: to choose his mistress among women of quality. Shame needs a blazon. The bourgeoisie will be too prudent to meddle with the secrets of the gods. D’Argenson and Barbier, the nobleman and the advocate, will rival each other in indulgent judgments on adultery.

In D’Argenson’s eyes the sole fault of favorites is their propensity to meddle with State affairs. He adds: “I approve of private persons confiding in a mistress in whose affection they believe; it makes little scandal, and is even edification and honesty, according to the present relaxation of manners, which are coming closer and closer to nature.” Barbier, the lawyer, goes farther still. He says in his Journal, with an astonishing mixture of cynicism and naïveté: “Fifteen out of twenty nobles of the court do not live with their wives, and do have mistresses; nothing is so common even among private persons. It is ridiculous, then, that the King, who is certainly the master, should be in worse condition than his predecessors.”

The courtiers could not accustom themselves to the absence of a royal mistress. It seemed to them as if there was a place vacant, a post to which some one ought to be appointed. How could any one fancy Henri IV. without la belle Gabrielle, Louis XIV. without La Vallière and Montespan? And what! said they with indignation, shall Louis XV. confine himself to his wife, that Polish woman without beauty, and seven years older than himself? In their eyes this would be to derogate from all the traditions of French gallantry. The military men, impatient of peace, fancied that a favorite might be an Agnes Sorel, who would rouse this new Charles VIII. from his torpor, and lead him to victory. Fashionable young people were persuaded that Versailles would become animated, that there would be feasts, suppers, diversions, pleasures of every kind.

The enemies of Cardinal Fleury, all those in search of places, money, or credit, thought that a mistress would bring about the downfall of the old minister, so careful of the State funds. Ah! if the monarch yields, if he succumbs to temptation, the guilty ones will be the counsellors, the cynical, corrupt egotists, who persuade him to evil, who deify his caprices, who exalt his adulteries; they will be Richelieu, the official go-between; Voltaire, the laureate in prose and verse of the reign of the favorites; the women who entreat the Christian Sultan to throw them the handkerchief; the entire century, still more responsible and blameworthy than the King.

V
THE FAVOR OF THE COUNTESS DE MAILLY

There are two kinds of royal favorites: the proud and the humble; those who make a boast of scandal and those who blush at it. The proud brag of their shame as if it were a victory; insatiable for money, credit, pleasures, they are intoxicated with the incense burned at their feet, and haughtily wave the sceptre of left-handed queens. The humble are less unreasonable; they voluntarily abase themselves; they try to gain pardon for a situation whose ignominy they comprehend, and though they have not sufficient moral sense to be willing to renounce the profits of their rôle, neither have they the impudence to make an imperious demand of homage and adulation. At the court of Louis XIV. Madame de Montespan was the type of the haughty mistress. The first mistress of Louis XV., the Countess de Mailly, must be classed among the humble ones.

Louise Julie de Mailly-Nesle, the eldest of five sisters who all played a part at court, was of the same age as the King: like him she was born in 1710. Married in 1726 to Count Louis Alexandre de Mailly, her cousin-german, her fortune was small, and the need of money was said to be one occasion of her faults. The huntsman Le Roy, that master of the hunt who was so sagacious an observer, and whom Sainte-Beuve has qualified as La Bruyère on horseback, thus delineates the portrait of the countess: “This lady was very far from being pretty; but her figure and her manners were very graceful, her sensibility was already recognized, and she had a complaisant character adapted to the abridgment of formalities. This was essential to vanquish the timidity of a prince who was still a novice, whom the least reserve would have abashed. They were sure, moreover, of the disinterestedness of her who was destined to become the favorite, and of her aversion from all ambitious schemes. Some difficulty was experienced in establishing a complete familiarity between a prince excessively timid and a woman whose birth, at least, obliged her to have some regard for appearances.” Madame de Mailly was lady of the palace to the Queen. This facilitated matters. At first everything was managed with the utmost secrecy. “I have learned,” says the Duke de Luynes in his Memoirs, “that the commerce of the King with Madame de Mailly commenced as early as 1783. I know this to be true beyond all doubt, and at that time no one suspected it.”

The favor of the King’s mistress was not known to the public until four years later, and the advocate Barbier declared “that there was nothing to say, the name of De Nesle being one of the first in the kingdom.” “The Queen,” says D’Argenson, “is in a cruel situation at present, on account of Madame de Mailly, whom she is obliged to retain as lady of the palace. During this lady’s weeks she is in a horrible humor, and all her domestics feel the effects of it. Certainly, to make a third after supper, between her and Madame de Mailly, is to render her a great service.” The poor Queen at last resigned herself. When a woman no longer appeals to either a man’s heart or his senses, what can she do? One day when Madame de Mailly asked her sovereign’s permission to go to a pleasure-house where Louis XV. was, Marie Leczinska merely replied: “You are the mistress.”

Cardinal Fleury did not complain, because the favorite neither meddled with affairs nor cost the King much. At this time Louis XV. was as economical as he was timid. Count de Mailly, who had set up an equipage as soon as his wife came into favor, was soon obliged to sell it again, and continued to live a needy life.

In 1738, when Madame de Mailly was openly acknowledged as mistress, Louis XV. changed his bedchamber. He left that where Louis XIV. had died, and which he had himself occupied since 1722, to install himself in the chamber contiguous to the Council hall, and which, even in the time of Louis XIV., had been designated as the billiard room (room No. 126 of the Notice du Musée de Versailles, by M. Eudore Soulié).

Louis XV. found this chamber more convenient than the other, because it opened the series of small rooms called the cabinets (rooms Nos. 126 to 134 of the Notice[11]), where Louis XV. admitted a very small number of courtiers to his intimacy. It was there he hid himself from the vulgar crowd; there that, living more like a private person than a king, he spent his time in trifles and futilities unworthy of a sovereign. There he made tapestry like a woman, or, like a cook, prepared side-dishes with truffles. There, supping after the chase, he sought forgetfulness of his remorse in bumpers of champagne. It was there he sought a remedy for his, alas! incurable melancholy; there that he allowed himself to be vanquished by his enemy, voluptuousness.

Beneath the King’s chamber lodged the Countess de Toulouse, widowed within a year of the son of Louis XIV. and Madame de Montespan. The countess occupied the apartment called the apartment of the baths, which, after having been the abode of Madame de Montespan, had been given to the sons of the celebrated favorite, first to the Duke du Maine, and afterward to the Count de Toulouse (rooms Nos. 52, 53, and 54 of the Notice du Musée). This apartment had one great advantage: it communicated by a private staircase with the King’s study. The Count de Toulouse had the key to this precious staircase. His widow had sufficient address to induce the King to leave it with her. She was at this time a woman of about fifty, who no longer wore rouge, and often spent several hours in a confessional in the chapel, where she read by the light of a candle. In spite of her austere appearance, she was the intimate friend of the Countess de Mailly, and slanderous tongues accused her of facilitating the latter’s meetings with the King.

Another woman also lived in close friendship with Louis XV. This was Mademoiselle de Charolais, who was born in 1695 and died in 1758 unmarried. A sister of the Duke of Bourbon, she had the hauteur of the Condés and the wit of the Mortemarts. She was a type of the extravagant grande dame, a capricious, witty woman, greedy for pleasure, frolicsome as an elf, and fearless as a page. “This princess is very accommodating to the King,” says the Marquis d’Argenson; “she keeps company with Madame de Mailly, and, in the midst of her complaisance, she sometimes proposes to the King to take a prettier mistress. At other times she advises Madame de Mailly to profit by her reign, and secure all the riches and grandeur that she can.... Madame de Mailly is honest and well-intentioned, and confides in her. This is what sustains her, in spite of her lightheartedness, her temper, and the variety of opinions which torment her. But as she is noble in the midst of her necessities, her demands are not acrimonious nor her intrigues underhanded and circuitous.”

Among the influential persons surrounding the King let us not forget his first valet de chambre, Bachelier, the master’s confidant; Bachelier with his occult power, his fifty thousand pounds of income, his charming property of La Celle, which the sovereign honors by visiting. Listen again to D’Argenson: “Le sieur Bachelier is a philosopher, well content with his fortune, which is a good one. He has an income, a country house, and a mistress. He loves his master and is loved by him; he desires the public welfare. People of this character are difficult to displace; it is this also which accounts for the force and elevation of our cardinal, and, fortunately for France, the King likes men of this sort. It is true that Bachelier is still a go-between” (D’Argenson employs a stronger word). “But his office allows this, just as that of a soldier permits him to be a slayer of men. Perhaps it is he who prescribed to the King to limit himself to a single mistress, as he has done up to the present with little Mailly; or to seldom change them, and not to be prodigal of money or power.”

Nothing great could issue from such a society. This voluptuous existence, parodied without poetry or enthusiasm from the scenes of Lancret and Watteau, belittled and atrophied the moral sense of the King. What could he learn from a futile and idle woman like Madame de Mailly, entirely devoted to trifles and her toilet? Listening from morning to night to silly and insignificant tittle-tattle, Louis XV. himself became womanish. His preoccupations were mean, his ideas narrow. He interested himself in petty gossip unworthy of a king, unworthy of a man. Madame de Mailly had neither wit enough to amuse him nor tact enough to lead him. After awhile she wearied him. He kept her near him, however, while looking about for her successor.

VI
THE COUNTESS DE VINTIMILLE

In 1738, the Countess de Mailly had been for five years the mistress of Louis XV., or, rather, his slave. She no longer pleased him, and only the lingering force of habit made him tolerate her. He was so bored that Madame de Mailly wished to divert him at any cost. She had a sister younger than herself, Pauline Félicité, who had completed her education, but still remained at the convent for economical reasons. The young girl, who was not at all religiously inclined, considered herself a prisoner. She champed at her bit. Witty, ambitious, burning to play a part, the splendors of the chateau of Versailles constantly appealed to her imagination. “I, also, would like to amuse myself.” The good-natured Mailly was not alarmed by the thought of a rival. She supposed her sister would be a precious ally, and that since a new-comer was absolutely necessary in the cabinets, it would be better that this new-comer should belong to the De Nesle family. Félicité would dispel the King’s melancholy. The little suppers would no longer have a funereal air. Louis XV. would cheer up; the situation would be saved. Madame de Mailly showed the King the beseeching letters in which her young sister spoke of Versailles as an Eldorado, the kingdom of her dreams. To be summoned to court seemed to her supreme happiness. Louis XV., flattered by so ardent a desire, granted it. Mademoiselle de Nesle arrived at Versailles in December, 1738, and acted at first as her sister’s companion. She pleased the King at once by her more than lively character and her school-girlish good-humor. She was present at all the parties and suppers, and it appears that Louis XV. made her his mistress in 1739. He thought afterwards of finding her a husband.

The sovereign who thus glided over the declivity of scandal was, nevertheless, not without remorse, and his melancholy increased along with his vices. When the Holy Week of 1739 arrived, he felt a secret anguish which troubled him profoundly. This remark of Massillon’s was realized: “The crime which you pursue with such appetite, afterwards pursues you like a cruel vulture, fastening upon and rending your heart to punish you for the pleasure it has given you.”[12]

Corrupt as he was, Louis XV. had faith. He suffered, because he acted against his conscience, and his conscience spoke louder than all his flatterers. The more adulation they gave him the more dissatisfied was he with himself. Nothing is so sad as the condition of a man who believes but does not practise, who is present at divine service, who kneels before the altar, who prays or tries to pray, and yet who does not amend his life. The ceremonies of religion, so touching and poetic, are then no longer consolations. They are torments. Remorse pursues him everywhere. The chants of the Church, if they are sad, increase his disquietude. If they are joyous, their gladness brings them into contrast with the bitterness of his heart. The soul feels that it can nevermore rejoice. Occasionally he conceives a horror of the woman who turns him from his duty; she appears to him for what she is: his enemy, his bad angel. Then the habit of vice resumes its sway. Remorse is stilled for awhile. Holy Week has gone by. But the wound remains at the bottom of his heart, profound, incurable.

Louis XV. dared not communicate in 1739. He had been told of sacrilegious men, who, receiving the Host in their mouths, and thus “eating and drinking their own damnation,” had fallen stiff and dead. This made him reflect, and when the grand provost asked whether he would touch for the king’s evil, which the Kings of France cannot do until after they have received Communion, he drily answered: No. A King of France who does not make his Easter duty, a son of St. Louis who conducts himself like a disciple of Voltaire, what a scandal! Concerning this, Barbier the advocate, writes in his Journal: “It is dangerous for a king to give such an example to his people; we are on good enough terms with the Pope for the Son of the Church to have a dispensation to make his Easter communion, no matter in what state he is, without sacrilege and with a safe conscience.” Strange manner of comprehending religion! The impression made on the court was deplorable in this century apparently so incredulous. D’Argenson himself affirms this. He says: “They tried to hide the indecency by a Low Mass which Cardinal de Rohan should say in the cabinet of the King, Père de Linières being present; the fact that His Majesty had not presented himself either at the tribunal of Penance or to receive the Eucharist would be carefully concealed.”

Some months later (September 23, 1739) the King arranged a marriage for Mademoiselle de Nesle. He had her espouse the Count de Vintimille, and deigned to give the husband the bridal shirt with his own royal hand. This was the first time that Louis XV. had thus honored any one. Madame de Vintimille was the only woman to whom he gave any presents on New Year’s Day, 1740. But the new favorite was not much the richer for them. The monarch, afterwards so prodigal, was at this time more than economical. The countess applied to him at least half of what was said of the Czar Peter when he was in France: “He makes love like a street-porter, and pays in the same way.” The Marquis de Nesle, father of the royal mistresses, remained in a very embarrassed pecuniary position; in November, 1739, he had been suddenly banished to Lisieux, in spite of the credit of his daughters, for having spoken scornfully of “his wretched suit against his wretched creditors.” D’Argenson grows indignant at such severity. He says: “They will have it that the King has performed a Roman action, worthy of Manlius Torquatus and Brutus, in punishing severely his natural and actual father-in-law for a slight offence given to a simple member of the council. This has astonished everybody, for, as a matter of fact, one puts himself under obligations in love, especially when one is king, and has a continuous attachment for one of his subjects.”

At the close of 1740, Madame de Vintimille became pregnant. People said that Louis XV. had more than one reason to be interested in the favorite’s condition. Perhaps he fancied that he was going to taste family joys along with her. Vain hope. Apart from pure sentiments and legitimate affections there are only disappointments and chagrins. Madame de Vintimille was brought to bed with a boy in August, 1741. The King went three or four times a day to inquire about her. He embraced the child with transports. The mother seemed at the height of favor. But the chastisement of Heaven overtook the fault at once. Madame de Vintimille was seized with miliary fever, and died September 9, in atrocious torments, without having had time to receive the sacraments. Louis XV. was dismayed. He felt himself guilty of this death in the sight of God and men. The lover had involuntarily been the executioner. He felt himself overwhelmed by the weight of an implacable malediction, and, horrified at himself, he besought pardon of the dead woman and of God. If he tried to speak, sobs impeded his utterance and he relapsed into silence. Sick and despairing in his bed, he had Mass said in his chamber, and people began to wonder whether he would not seek a remedy for his remorse in asceticism. Madame de Mailly, forgetting the rival in the sister, went to pray every day beside Madame de Vintimille’s tomb, and it was in memory of his second mistress that Louis XV. returned to the first one. She had the advantage of being able to weep with him, and he could make her the confidant of his grief.

VII
THE DISGRACE OF THE COUNTESS DE MAILLY

Louis XV. wept for Madame de Vintimille in company with Madame de Mailly. But those who thought him inconsolable little knew his character; his schemes of conversion were but passing caprices. He had not force enough to break the long chain of his iniquities. He was not merely not recalled to well-doing by the lamentable death of Madame de Vintimille, but he fell back into the paths of scandal with a promptitude which had not even the excuse of passion.

Madame de Mailly was still the acknowledged favorite, but the King had not loved her for a long time. She spent another year at court after the death of Madame de Vintimille. This was a year of sorrow, humiliations, and afflictions. Louis XV. caused the poor deserted woman to drink the chalice of bitterness to the dregs, and made her so unhappy that even the Queen took pity on her.

What is more lamentable than the last agonies of love? To perceive that one has been mistaken; that the being one has thought good, generous, and grateful is wicked, perfidious, and ungrateful; to find hardness instead of mildness, egotism instead of devotion; what an awakening! what a torture! And one cannot complain. Morality, decorum, religion, all command silence. If you groan, the world scoffs at you. Your afflictions obtain scorn and not compassion. You cannot confess your sorrow before either God or men. The being who persecutes and outrages you, who betrays and kills you, is still beloved, and this love, alas! is only a folly, a weakness. You humble yourself, you crawl, you cringe. And all that avails you nothing. Your cause is lost. Nothing is left you but to suffer and to die.

Such was the destiny of Madame de Mailly. To lose the heart of the King was not enough. It was reserved to her to find not merely a rival but a persecutor in her own sister, Madame de la Tournelle.

Marie Anne de Mailly-Nesle, afterwards so well-known under the title of Duchess de Châteauroux, was the fifth and youngest daughter of the Marquis de Nesle. Born in 1717, she married, in 1734, the Marquis de la Tournelle, an extremely pious young man, who spent the greater part of his modest fortune in alms. Becoming a widow in 1740, at the age of twenty-two, she took refuge with her relative, the Duchess de Mazarin, lady of the bedchamber to the Queen, who died two years later. Madame de Tournelle was again on the point of being without an asylum. But the King had already remarked her beauty. She was appointed lady of the palace to the Queen (September, 1742). M. de Maurepas and Cardinal Fleury, who disliked her and already had a presentiment that she would be their all-powerful enemy, made ruthless war upon her. But she had for adviser the most audacious and wily of all the courtiers of Louis XV., the Duke de Richelieu.

The Marquis d’Argenson draws the following portrait of this personage, so celebrated in the erotic annals of the eighteenth century:—

“He carries too far the opinion one ought to have of the defects of the monarchy and the feebleness of our epoch.... He has made himself talked of ever since he was twelve years old. He has been put into the Bastille three times for three causes capable of making a court hero illustrious: for having made love to the Dauphiness, the King’s mother; for a duel, and for a conspiracy against the State. His love for voluptuous pleasures has ostentation rather than actual enjoyment as its end.... He is very much the mode among women; the pretensions and jealousies of coquettes have procured him many favors. There is never any passion in him but plenty of debauchery. He has betrayed a feeble sex; he has taken the senses for the heart. He is not fortunate enough to possess a friend. He is frank through thoughtlessness, suspicious through subtlety and contempt of mankind, disobliging through insensibility and misanthropy. Such is the sorry model copied by a gay and inconsiderate nation like ours.”

The Duke de Richelieu intended to reign under cover of Madame de la Tournelle, whose guide and inspirer he had become. This affair roused his enthusiasm. Pushing even to lyricism his sorry rôle of intermediary, he exclaimed, in an excess of zeal: “I mean that any one who shall enter Madame de la Tournelle’s ante-chamber shall be more highly considered than one who might have been in private conversation with Madame de Mailly.”[13]

The new favorite made conditions before yielding to the King. Proud and imperious, like most beautiful and flattered women, she required guarantees, and transformed a so-called affair of the heart into a diplomatic negotiation. “Love,” says La Rochefoucauld, “lends its name to an infinite number of relations attributed to it, but with which it has no more to do than the Doge with what goes on at Venice.” Madame de la Tournelle did not love, she calculated. More peremptory than Madame de Vintimille, who had tolerated a partnership with Madame de Mailly, she determined to reign alone. What she bargained for was not simply money and consideration but the banishment of her sister. But this was not easy to be obtained. The idea of quitting Versailles afflicted Madame de Mailly. She made herself so humble, so modest, so resigned, so submissive, that Louis XV. felt unable to dismiss her. From time to time he still felt for her certain returns if not of attachment at least of compassion. He would have liked to keep near him, as a faithful servant, this poor woman, whose gentleness and kindness he could not refuse to acknowledge. But Madame de la Tournelle was inflexible. She had signified her intention not to become the mistress of the King until after Madame de Mailly should have been irrevocably driven from the court.

Weakness makes men cruel. Louis XV., ordinarily affable and kind, was about to be severe beyond measure towards his former mistress. She thought to move him by immolating herself, and resigning her place (November, 1742) as lady of the palace to the Queen in favor of her sister, Madame de Flavacourt, who stood well with Madame de la Tournelle. But this sacrifice did not touch the cold heart of the King, and he took pleasure in reducing to despair the woman whose love had become embarrassing and tiresome.

The Duke de Luynes does not disguise his sympathy for the fallen favorite. “Her condition,” he says, “is all the more worthy of compassion, because she really loves the King, and is as zealous for his glory as she is attached to his person. She has many friends, and deservedly, for she has never done any harm, and, on the contrary, has been anxious to be of service.... They pretend that the King said to her some days ago: ‘I have promised you to speak plainly with you. I am madly in love with Madame de la Tournelle.’ Madame de la Tournelle says she is loved by M. d’Agenois, and that she loves him, and has no desire to have the King; that he would please her by letting her alone, and that she will never consent to his proposals but on sure and advantageous conditions.”

Everybody pitied Madame de Mailly: Cardinal Fleury because she had never meddled with politics; women because she was not beautiful; courtiers because she had been serviceable. The Queen was not one of the least affected. She displayed great good-will toward a mistress who had had as much modesty as tact. “The Queen,” says the Duke de Luynes, “seems to sympathize with Madame de Mailly’s situation, and to desire that she shall be well treated.”

D’Argenson is indignant with the faithless monarch. The previous year he had been unwilling to believe in the double passion of Louis XV. for Madame de Mailly and Madame de Vintimille. He wrote at the time: “They are the two most united sisters that ever were seen.... What likelihood is there that they could remain friends if they were disputing the possession of a heart so illustrious and precious?... But people are never willing to believe anything but evil.” At this period, D’Argenson did not doubt the sincerity of his master’s remorse. “The death of Madame de Vintimille,” said he, “will bring back the King to the practice of religion.... He will come in the end to living with Madame de Mailly as the Duke, they say, lived with Madame d’Egmont, simply as a friend, relapsing, if at all, only by accident, and then going quickly to confession.... He has a heart which makes itself heard. How few of his subjects have such a one at present! He is grateful for the sincere attachment shown towards him. He likes kind hearts; he is, perhaps, destined to be the delight of the world.”

A year later, the Marquis is furious at having been duped. “Great news!” he exclaims. “The King has dismissed Madame de Mailly in order to take her sister, Madame de la Tournelle. This was done with inconceivable harshness on the part of the Most Christian King. It is the sister who drives away the sister; she demands her exile, and the taking of this third sister as a mistress makes many people believe that the second one, Madame de Vintimille, went the same way. I, for my part, have always maintained that the King’s extreme sensibility at the death of Madame de Vintimille was a praiseworthy sentiment toward the sister of his friend, whose marriage he had himself arranged. But farewell to virtuous sensibility! So he deceived his mistress, he bound Madame de Vintimille to ingratitude! He considers the child she left as his son, and often has it brought secretly to his room. It is all cleared up, then. Who has the third sister must have had the second.”

Madame de Mailly made no further attempt at resistance. “My sacrifices are consummated,” she exclaimed; “I shall die of them; but this evening I shall be in Paris.” She actually departed, in tears and despairing, almost frenzied, in November, 1742. The King wrote letter after letter to her to tell her—could one believe it?—about his love for Madame de la Tournelle. This time, he said, he was “fixed forever, Madame de la Tournelle having all the mind necessary to make her charming.” The fickle sovereign congratulated himself in this more than strange correspondence on “the general applause given to his choice.”

The new favorite triumphed with a barbarous joy. The De Goncourt brothers, in their well-written and interesting book on the Mistresses of Louis XV.,[14] have given the curious letter she wrote at this time to the Duke de Richelieu, her confidant:—

“Surely Meuse must have let you know what trouble I have had to oust Madame de Mailly; at last I have managed to have her sent away not to come back again. You fancy perhaps that the affair is ended? Not at all; he is beside himself with grief, and does not write me a letter without speaking of it, and begging me to let her return, and he will never approach her, but only ask me to see her sometimes. I have just received one in which he says that if I refuse I shall soon be rid of both her and him; meaning, apparently, that they will both die of chagrin. As it would by no means suit me to have her here, I mean to be firm.... The King has sent you word that the affair is concluded between us, for he tells me, in this morning’s letter, to undeceive you, because he is unwilling to have you think anything beyond the truth. It is true that, when he wrote you, he counted on its being concluded this evening; but I put some difficulties in the way of that which I do not repent of.”

Before the close of the year, the affair was settled. Madame de Mailly, after many tears and supplications, recognized that she was beaten. The King paid her debts, and granted her a pension of ten thousand livres in addition to the twelve thousand she had already, and furnished a house for her in Paris, rue Saint-Thomas-du-Louvre, where she established herself. Thenceforward, Madame de la Tournelle fulfilled, uncontested and without a rival, the official functions of King’s mistress.

VIII
THE REIGN OF THE DUCHESS DE CHÂTEAUROUX

If Louis XV. is a degenerate Louis XIV., his mistresses are likewise inferior to those of the great King. Madame de Mailly, spite of her mildness and her repentance, is not a La Vallière. Though Madame de la Tournelle may become Duchess de Châteauroux, she will never be a Montespan, notwithstanding her ambition and her arrogance. She is doubtless pretty; her big blue eyes, her dazzling white skin, her expression both passionate and arch, make a charming woman of her. But she is not a mistress “thundering and triumphant,” as Madame de Sevigné said of Madame de Montespan; she is not that type of favorite who is “good to display before the ambassadors.” In spite of her high birth, and her schemes for domination, there will always be something mean about her, and the same is true of Louis XV. himself.

She had scarcely become the royal mistress when Cardinal Fleury died (January, 1743). When Mazarin died, Louis XIV. had said: At last I am King. Louis XV. will content himself with saying: Now I am prime minister. He need no longer dread his former preceptor’s lessons on morality and parsimony. He is the master. But he does not at once renounce his economical habits, and at first Madame de la Tournelle has trouble in extracting money from him. “It must be owned,” writes the Duke de Luynes in April, 1743, “that the present arrangement does not resemble what was announced at the commencement of Madame de la Tournelle’s favor.... They said she would make no engagement unless she were assured of a house of her own, her provisions, means to entertain people, and a carriage for her private use, being unwilling to use those of the King. It is true, she does not use these, but she has none of her own; hence, she never goes out, though she is fond of spectacles.”

She ended by making her lover less miserly. In October, 1743, he gave her an excellent cook, an equerry, a berline, six carriage horses, and, finally, the title of Duchess de Châteauroux, with an estate bringing an income of eighty-five thousand livres. The letters patent were worded as follows: “The right to confer titles of honor and dignity being one of the most sublime attributes of supreme power, the kings, our predecessors, have left to us divers monuments of the use they have made of it in favor of persons whose virtues and merit they desired to make illustrious.... Considering that our very dear and well-beloved cousin, Marie Anne de Mailly, widow of the Marquis de la Tournelle, issues from one of the greatest families of our realm, allied to our own and to the most ancient in Europe; that for several centuries her ancestors have rendered great and important services to our crown; that she is attached as lady of the palace to the Queen, our very dear companion, and that she joins to these advantages all the virtues and the most excellent qualities of heart and mind which have gained for her a just esteem and universal consideration, we have thought proper to give her the duchy of Châteauroux, with its appurtenances and dependencies, situated in Berry.”

Parliament was assembled to record these letters patent. “The assembly,” says the Marquis d’Argenson, “has listened gravely to all these flowers of speech which the monarch presents to his mistress, and has decided on the registration.” Barbier, that faithful echo of contemporary public opinion, makes certain observations on the subject in his journal which are not altogether lacking in malice. “These letters,” says he, “are very honorable for the Mailly family. The King declares that it is one of the greatest and finest illustrious houses of the realm, allied to his own and to the most ancient of Europe. One reflection occurs at once: it is surprising that no one has yet decorated the males with the title of duke, and that this celebrity begins with the women. There might be something to criticise in the preamble to the letters; present circumstances considered, the author has not been prudent; the crying them through the streets might also have been dispensed with, it having given occasion for talk.”

Behold Madame de la Tournelle Duchess de Châteauroux. She is officially presented in this quality to the Queen, who says to her, in a kindly way: “Madame, I compliment you on the grace accorded to you by the King.” The Duke de Richelieu is rewarded for his zeal by the post of first gentleman of the chamber. The new duchess thrones it at Versailles. She keeps two of her sisters near her, the Marquise de Flavacourt, who is, like herself, one of the Queen’s ladies of the palace, and the Duchess de Lauraguais, of whom she makes an assiduous companion. Neither of them is pretty enough to make her jealous. She uses them as allies. Louis XV. isolates himself in the society of these three women, who have combined to keep him under the yoke. He amuses himself by giving them nicknames. He calls Madame de Flavacourt the Hen, on account of her frightened air, and the Duchess de Lauraguais la Rue des Mauvaises-Paroles, on account of her caustic speeches.

Could anything great or noble proceed from this coterie? Is it true, that, as the Goncourts have said, “Madame de Châteauroux unites the energies and ambitions of a Longueville to the ardors and haughty insolence of a Montespan?” Is it true that in her pride, her impatience, the fever of her desires, the activity of her projects, the passion of her spirit, she has the fire of a “Fronde as well as the soul of a great reign?” We do not believe it. To judge from the Memoirs of the Duke de Luynes, so impartial a witness, so exact a narrator, the Duchess de Châteauroux was not a political woman, and still less a heroine. He depicts her as dull, indolent, taciturn, bored. “She and her sister,” he says, “spend the day in an armchair; and except in her week, Madame de Lauraguais generally goes out for the first time at eight or nine o’clock in the evening.... The King is with the two sisters as often as possible, and it appears that there is never any question of important matters between the three. Madame de Mailly would not have been so indifferent.”

And yet France had been at war with Austria since 1741, and England since 1742, and people were amazed that Louis XV., then in his prime, had not yet put himself at the head of his troops. One must do him the justice to admit that he was brave, and that, like all his ancestors, he had the sentiment of military honor. He comprehended that longer inaction on his part would be inexcusable, and that his place was with the army. Marshal de Noailles, whom he had chosen for his private adviser, at last decided him on making his first campaign. But not without difficulty. Louis XV. hesitated for more than a year, and the dread of leaving his mistress for several days was not one of the least causes of his perplexity. The Marshal tried to appeal to the royal instincts of his master. “France,” he wrote him, “has never beheld reigns fortunate for the people nor veritably glorious for the kings, except those in which they governed by themselves.... A king is never so great as when he is at the head of his armies.”[15] On his side, Louis XV. wrote to the Marshal, July 24, 1743: “I can assure you I have an extreme desire to know for myself a profession my fathers have practised so well.” And August 9: “If they are going to devour my country, it will be very hard for me to see it crunched without personally doing my utmost to prevent it.”

It was believed the King was at last going to set off; but the Duchess de Châteauroux wanted to be able to follow him. Far from comprehending how ridiculous the presence of a court of women would seem to the army, she intrigued to obtain a favorable opinion of the strange desire she cherished from her friend, the Marshal de Noailles. In a letter dated September 3, 1743, she said to him: “I agree that the King should start for the army: there is not a moment to lose, and it should be done promptly; what is to become of me? Would it be impossible for my sister and me to follow him, and if we cannot go to the army with him, at least to post ourselves where we can hear from him every day?... I think it well to tell you that I have asked the King to let me write you concerning this, and that I do so with his approbation.”

Evidently Louis XV. was not going to make a campaign without his mistress. Nevertheless, the Duke de Noailles was frank enough to reply to the favorite: “I do not think, madame, that you can follow the King with madame, your sister. You, yourself, feel the inconveniences of it, since you afterwards reduce your demands to asking whether you could not come to some town near enough to receive daily news from His Majesty.... I cannot avoid telling you that both the King and yourself would need some plausible reason to justify such a step in the eyes of the public.” The result of this letter was to defer the military inclinations of the monarch. He gave up the autumn campaign of 1743, and did not start for the seat of war until the following spring, May 2, 1744.

IX
THE JOURNEY TO METZ

At last Louis XV. is at the head of his troops. There is a burst of enthusiasm as soon as he appears at the northern frontier. He is thirty-four years old, has a fine bearing and an expression at once kindly and dignified. He sits a horse well and makes an excellent figure in front of the regiments. He is present at the siege of Menin, and people lavish praises on him. He has gone through the trenches, he has visited the ambulances, he has tasted the broth of the invalids and the bread of the soldiers. Everybody cries: “He is a warrior! he is a father! he is a king!” He has brought his chaplain with him, Monseigneur de Fitz-James, Bishop of Soissons, to give him the last sacraments if required, and his confessor, Père Pérusseau, to give him absolution in case he is in danger of death. There are no women in camp. The Duchesses of Châteauroux and Lauraguais have shown themselves at the opera to prove they have not followed the sovereign. Things are going on well. There is not the least scandal. Menin opens its gates June 4. Fireworks are set off at the Hôtel-de-Ville in Paris. The Te Deum is chanted in every church in France. Universal joy and confidence prevail.

But presently a dark cloud appears in this clear sky. Louis XV. is bored at the army as he was at Versailles. Post equitem sedet atra cura. He misses Madame de Châteauroux, and prefers the women’s jokes to the reports of his generals. The favorite is likewise uneasy; she fancies that the warrior will deteriorate the lover; she fears for her position. “In truth, dear uncle,” she writes, June 3, to the Duke de Richelieu, “I was not made for things like these, and from time to time I am seized by terrible discouragements. I am so naturally averse to it all that I must have been a great fool to have meddled with it. However, it is done, and I must have patience; I am persuaded that everything will turn out according to my wishes.”

Madame de Châteauroux is absolutely determined to rejoin the King. But how is it to be done? There is not a single woman with the army. If she should be the first one to arrive, the scandal would be much too great. A princess of the blood, the Duchess de Chartres, gives the example; she sets off under pretext of her husband’s fall from a horse. Directly Mesdames de Châteauroux and de Lauraguais follow suit. June 6 they have the impudence to come and say good by to the Queen, who carries long-suffering so far as to invite them both to supper.

“One cannot sufficiently praise,” says the Duke de Luynes in noting the fact, “the courtesy she displays to all the men and women who come to pay court to her.”

Two days afterward the pair of duchesses leave Versailles by night. The King receives them at Lille, and then goes to take the city of Ypres. Madame de Châteauroux carries fatuity so far as to attribute this success to herself. June 25 she wrote from Lille to the Duke de Richelieu: “You know how ready I always am to see everything in rose-color, and that I think my star, which I rely on, and which is not a bad one, has influence on everything. It answers instead of good generals and ministers. He has never done so well as in placing himself under its direction.” Thus, as is plainly evident, Madame de Châteauroux considers herself as the King’s directress.

A thing painful to admit, because it shows so clearly the demoralization of the period, is that the Marquis d’Argenson finds this ridiculous and scandalous journey quite natural. He writes in his Memoirs, June 30, 1744: “The King has begun to show himself at the head of the army. It must be owned that this conduct is in good taste. Some people claim that it is a stain on his glory to have brought his mistress to the army, thus dishonoring the princesses and great people who came with him. Surely there is some prejudice in such a reproach. For why, in fact, should he deny himself pleasures which harm nobody? The Flemish are superstitious. They have been told that the King has had three sisters; they are scandalized to see these two arrive at Lille. Two hours afterward a barracks took fire, and they said it was caused by fire from heaven.”

Barbier is not quite so indulgent, but he pleads extenuating circumstances. “The public,” says he, “does not find this journey to its taste.... Nevertheless it is just to say that a decent appearance is given it by the concourse of three princesses of the blood and a number of ladies who are all supposed to have gone thither to keep company with Madame the Duchess de Chartres, who had a legitimate excuse for going to the army.”

The people, who have the veritable moral instinct, are more just and more severe. They are indignant. The soldiers jeer at the two duchesses. The Queen is pitied and the favorite detested. While all this is going on, Alsace is invaded, and Louis XV. goes to Metz, dragging after him his train of women like an Asiatic monarch. On the way Madame de Châteauroux falls sick at Rheims. The King thinks she is going to die, and begins to consider where she shall be buried and what sort of mausoleum he shall build for her. It is only a vain alarm. The favorite speedily recovers and goes to join the King at Metz. She establishes herself and her sister in the Abbey of Saint Arnould, and a long wooden gallery is constructed to put the abbey in communication with the palace where Louis XV. is quartered. Four streets are closed for this purpose. The people murmur. In order to quiet them, an effort is made to persuade them that the only purpose of this wooden gallery is to make it easier for the monarch to be present at Mass.

All at once a sinister rumor gets about. The King has fallen ill on August 4. His life is in danger. He thinks he has but a few moments before he must appear before God. All his religious sentiments revive. He wishes to make his confession; but the departure of Madame de Châteauroux is indispensable for that, and Louis XV., always weak, has not courage to dismiss her. He adjourns his confession under the pretext that he needs a little time in which to recollect all his faults. His mistress approaches his bed. He wants to kiss her hand. Then, thinking better of it, he says: “Ah! Princess, I think I am doing wrong; perhaps we shall have to separate.” Madame de Châteauroux parleys with the Jesuit Pérusseau. She implores him not to have her driven away. She swears she will no longer be the King’s mistress, but only his friend. But the Jesuit is firm. Bishop Fitz-James behaves like an apostle; he says frankly to the King: “Sire, the laws of the Church and our holy canons forbid us to bring the Viaticum so long as the concubine is still in the city. I pray Your Majesty to give new orders for her departure, because there is no time to lose. Your Majesty will soon die!” Louis XV. hesitates no longer; the libertine disappears; the devotee alone remains. “I made my first communion twenty-two years ago,” he says to the Bishop; “I wish to make a good one now and let it be the last. Ah! how unworthy I have been up to this day of royalty. What accounts a king must render who is about to appear before God!” Louis XV. receives extreme unction. Bishop Fitz-James, who administers it, turns toward the spectators and addresses them in these words: “Gentlemen the princes of the blood, and you, nobles of the realm, the King charges Monseigneur the Bishop of Metz and me to acquaint you with his sincere repentance for the scandal he has caused in his kingdom by living as he has done with Madame de Châteauroux. He has learned that she is only three leagues from here, and he orders her not to come within fifty leagues of the court. His Majesty deprives her of her post.” “And her sister also,” adds the King.

Could one believe it? This noble and Christian conduct of Bishop Fitz-James finds detractors. Barbier writes in his journal: “People hereabouts regard the action of the Bishop of Soissons as the finest thing in the world. The public often admire the greatest events without reflection. For my part, I take the liberty of considering this conduct very indecent, and this public reparation as an open scandal. The reputation of a king ought to be respected, and he should be allowed to die with the rites of religion, but with dignity and majesty. What is the good of this ecclesiastical parade? It was enough for the King to have interiorly a sincere repentance for what he had done without making a display of it.”

All France is affected. It is rumored that the King’s malady was caused by his grief at the invasion of Alsace. His kindness, his repentance, his courage, his patriotism, are everywhere celebrated. Masses are said for him in every church in the kingdom. The clergy read from the pulpits the bulletins from Metz and accounts of the King’s public penance. People speak of him with tears of tenderness and admiration. As for his favorite, the “Lady in red,” as the people call her, she is loaded with maledictions. The Queen is sent for to Metz. She leaves Versailles August 15, amidst universal emotion. When she reaches her spouse, he receives her with tenderness. He embraces her and asks pardon for the pain he has given her.

The next day Louis XV. has Madame de Villais waked up at four o’clock in the morning. He knows the Queen has great confidence in her, and he wants her to tell him if Marie Leczinska has really forgiven him. He expresses the most beautiful sentiments, begging God, as he says, to withdraw him from the world if his people would be governed better by some one else. His convalescence begins a few days later. The Queen is full of joy; she thinks her husband has become a saint. But here we leave the narrative to the Duchess de Brancas, a witness of the hopes and the disappointments of Marie Leczinska:—

“The old court,” she says in a curious fragment of Memoirs, “found small difficulty in convincing itself that God, after striking the King, would touch his heart. The maid-of-honor was so devoutly persuaded of this one day that, finding the King in such a condition that he could give the Queen indubitable marks of a sincere reconciliation, she had the Queen’s bed changed into a nuptial couch and put two pillows over the bolster. You can understand what hopes were revealed, by the joy of some people and the astonishment of others. The Queen had been wonderfully well dressed since the King’s convalescence; she wore rose-colored gowns. The old ladies announced their hopes by green ribbons; in fact, there had been nothing so spirituelle in toilet adornments seen for a long time; one was reminded of ancient gallantry by the way in which they were relied on to announce everything without compromising anybody. But you can also conceive the pleasure which the Duke de Bouillon and the Duke de Richelieu took in speaking to the King about what was going on in the Queen’s palace. He seemed so dissatisfied with it that these gentlemen thought they would not displease him by notifying the mothers of the churches that they had been mistaken in getting ready a Te Deum which they would never chant, and that nothing was more uncertain than the King’s conversion. This was quite enough to decide these ladies to change their toilette. Some assumed more modest colors, others lowered their headdresses, still others wore less rouge.”

The Duke de Richelieu, that Mephistopheles of Louis XV., had prophesied correctly. When he was sick, the King was a saint. When he was well, he once more became a debauchee. A sort of human respect made him blush at his momentary conversion to virtue. He felt there was something ridiculous in his repentance. He bore a grudge against his confessor, his chaplain, and all those who had given him good advice. The love of his people, far from touching his heart, dissatisfied him, because these loyal and faithful subjects had had the audacity not to kneel before the Duchess de Châteauroux. He took offence at the respect showed to the Queen, and considered the priests who had prayed so well for him almost as adversaries of his royal authority. Poor Marie Leczinska’s illusions were soon dispelled. When Louis XV. was about to leave Metz, she tremblingly asked his permission to follow him to Saverne and to Strasburg. “It is not worth while,” he responded in a dry tone. The Queen went away in despair. The heart she thought she had regained had finally escaped her.

X
THE DEATH OF THE DUCHESS DE CHÂTEAUROUX

What has become of Madame de Châteauroux? How is she bearing her humiliations and her disgrace? We left her at Metz at the moment when, driven away ignominiously by the Bishop of Soissons, treated as an accursed wretch by the people, overwhelmed by the anathemas of the public conscience, she with great difficulty procured a carriage from Marshal de Belle-Isle in which to return to Paris. Her flight had been painful. She only escaped rough treatment by taking by-roads and going through several villages in disguise and on foot. However, she had not yet submitted. From Bar-le-Duc she wrote to M. de Richelieu:[16] “I can well believe that so long as the King’s head is feeble he will be in a state of great devotion; but as soon as he is a little better, I bet I shall trot furiously through his head, and that in the end he will not be able to resist, and will quietly ask Lebel and Bachelier what has become of me.”

In the same letter the fallen favorite speaks of herself with admiring complacency. “So long as the King is living,” she says, “all the torments they want to inflict on me must be borne with patience. If he recovers, I shall affect him the more on that account, and he will feel the more obliged to make me a public reparation. If he dies, I am not the sort of person to humiliate myself, even if I could gain the kingdom of France by it. Up to now I have conducted myself with dignity; I shall always preserve that inclination; it is the only way to make myself respected, to win back the public and retain the consideration I deserve.” Can one be amazed at the illusions cherished by certain kings when a mere royal mistress has her eyes so thickly bandaged?

Debility succeeded to fever. Sometimes Madame de Châteauroux, intoxicated with pride and vengeance, fancied she was about to resume arrogantly the left-handed sceptre which had just slipped through her fingers; sometimes she cast a disdainful glance at the sorry spectacle of the human comedy, and talked of abandoning everything. She wrote from Sainte-Ménehould to the Duke de Richelieu (August 18, 1744): “All this is very terrible and gives me a furious disgust for the place I lived in despite myself, and, far from desiring to return there some day, as you believe, I am persuaded that even if they wished it I could never consent. All I desire, meanwhile, is that the affront offered me shall be repaired, and not to be dishonored. That, I assure you, is my sole ambition.... Ah! my God, what does all this amount to? I give you my word it is all over so far as I am concerned. I would have to be a great fool to go into it again; and you know how little I was flattered and dazzled by all the grandeurs, and that if I had had my own way, I would not have been there; but the thing is done; I must resign myself and think no more about it.”

These be sage reflections. But the favorite’s philosophy lasted no longer than the King’s repentance. La Rochefoucauld says in his maxims: “The intelligence of the majority of women serves rather to fortify their folly than their reason.” Hardly had she reached Paris when the Duchess felt all her ambitious spites and rages rekindle to new life. She wrote to the Duke de Richelieu: “You have good reason to say it would be fine to make the day of the Dupes come round again; for me, I don’t doubt, it is all the same a Thursday; but patience is needed,—in fact, a great deal of patience. All you have been told about the remarks made at Paris is very true; you could hardly believe how far they have gone; if you had been there at the time, you would have been torn to pieces.... I tell you we shall get through it, and I am persuaded it will be a very fine moment; I should like to be there now, as you can easily believe.”

Evidently, renunciation of earthly vanities was already far in the background. The Duchess wrote again to Richelieu, September 13: “I hope the King’s sickness has not taken away his memory. No one but me has known his heart thus far, and I assure you he has a very good one, very capable of sentiments. I don’t deny that there is something a little singular along with all that, but it does not get the upper hand. He will remain devout, but not a bigot; I love him ten times better; I will be his friend, and then I shall be beyond attack. All that these scamps have done during his illness will only make my destiny more fortunate and secure. I shall no longer have to fear either changes, sickness, or the devil, and we shall lead a delicious life.... Adieu, dear uncle, keep yourself well. For my part, I am really thinking of getting a health like a porter’s, so as to enrage our enemies as long as I can and have time to ruin them; that will happen, you may rely on it.”

Meanwhile all this was accompanied by moral and physical sufferings, convulsions, nervous attacks, inquietudes, and agonizing pains. With her ecstasies and self-abasements, her alternatives of pride and humility, folly and clear-sightedness, ardor and disgust, illusions and discouragement, Madame de Châteauroux is the type of the passionate woman. There is nothing sadder than this correspondence, which is the confession of a soul. One lacks courage to be angry with these avowals so naïve in their immorality. To make such scandals possible a whole century must be corrupted. What one should accuse is not a woman, but an epoch.

Madame de Châteauroux understood the character of Louis XV. very well. She knew beforehand that he would come back to her. He had, in fact, but one idea,—to be reconciled with his mistress. He found camp life insupportable. He consented to witness the taking of Fribourg, but as soon as the city surrendered he returned in haste to Paris. He made his formal entry November 13, 1744, at six in the evening, in one of the coronation carriages. Triumphal arches had been erected with the inscription: Ludovico redivivo et triumphatori. The houses were filled to the roofs with applauding spectators. The monarch alighted at the palace of the Tuileries, where the nobles of the realm were drawn up in double line awaiting him. The next day he went with all the royal family to Notre Dame to render thanks to God. Madame de Châteauroux was hidden amongst the crowd. In the evening she wrote to Richelieu: “I have seen him; he looked joyful and affected, so he is capable of a tender sentiment.... A single voice near me recalled my misfortunes by naming me in a very offensive manner.”

It was neither of his glory, his people, or of God that Louis XV. was thinking, as he came out of Notre Dame. Madame de Châteauroux still occupied his whole attention. She lived very near the Tuileries, in the rue de Bac. That night, when all was quiet in the palace, he crossed the Pont-Royal, and arrived unattended at the favorite’s house, like a criminal who comes to entreat pardon. Madame de Châteauroux received him with arrogance, and imposed severe conditions before absolving him. Louis XV. was ready to agree to everything except the dismissal of Maurepas, a useful and agreeable minister, who worked as well as amused himself, and who had the gift of making business easy. The King then returned to the Tuileries, and presently it was rumored that the Duchesses of Châteauroux and Lauraguais were about to reappear triumphantly at court. The people, who resemble the chorus in Greek tragedies, at once resumed their anathemas. “Since the King is going to take her back,” cried the market-women, “he will never find another ‘Pater’ on the streets of Paris.”

The prudent Duke de Luynes was more circumspect in his speech. He said, apropos of the news of this return to favor: “It has been almost publicly spoken of all over Paris, and Versailles, where little is said ordinarily, has not been absolutely exempt from some remarks concerning it. However, as such remarks serve only to displease, and are moreover useless, those who are wisest have kept silence.”

The thing was done, the arrangement concluded. There had been a compromise between the King and his mistress. Maurepas was not to leave the ministry, but it was he who was charged to bear the King’s excuses to Madame de Châteauroux, rue de Bac, and an invitation to return to Versailles. The minister acquitted himself of this commission November 25. The Duchess, who was sick abed, replied that as soon as she was able to get up she would comply with the King’s orders. That evening she wrote to her friend the Duchess de Boufflers: “I rely too much on your friendship not to acquaint you at once with what concerns me. The King has just sent me word by M. de Maurepas, that he was very much offended by all that occurred at Metz, and the indecency with which I had been treated; that he begged me to forget it, and that, to give him a proof of my having done so, he hoped my sister and myself would have the kindness to resume our apartments at Versailles; that he would give us on all occasions tokens of his protection, his esteem, and his friendship, and that he would restore us to our positions.”

So many emotions had prostrated Madame de Châteauroux. Joy revived her for awhile, but all was over with her; she was never again to see either the palace of Versailles, so greatly longed for, or the King whose love had been so fatal to her. She never left her bed again. A burning fever consumed her; she thought herself poisoned, and suffered horrible tortures in soul and body. Her worst enemies would have pitied her. Her agony lasted eleven days. She had a violent delirium accompanied by convulsive movements, and struggled against death with all the energy of her youth, all the vehemence of her character. In spite of his pretended passion, Louis XV. did not trouble himself to come and bid her adieu. He did not even send directly to inquire about her. Madame de Lauraguais, who had just had a child, was not beside her sister’s bed. The Duchess de Châteauroux died alone, December 8, 1744. The King deserted her; Jesus Christ did not forsake her. At her last hour, she repented like Magdalen, and for the first time in years, the dying sinner knew interior peace. “Père Ségand was with her,” says the Duke de Luynes. “As he was speaking to her of the confidence we ought to have in the Blessed Virgin, she replied that she had always worn a little medal of her, and that she had begged two graces through her intercession,—not to die without the sacraments, and to die on one of her feasts. She had already obtained the first and was presently to obtain the second, for she died on the feast of the Conception.”

At first Louis XV. felt crushed. The Queen herself, who practised on so great a scale the wholly Christian virtue of forgiveness of injuries, the Queen shared sincerely in her husband’s grief. She passed in solitude the evening which had been set apart for a friendly reunion at the house of the Duchess de Luynes. During the night she became frightened, and summoned one of her women: “My God!” cried she, “that poor duchess! If she should return!... I think I see her.”—“Eh! madame,” returned the chambermaid, “if she comes back, it will not be Your Majesty that receives her first visit.”

Barbier in his journal pities, not Madame de Châteauroux, as one might imagine, but Louis XV. He says: “Judicious people praise his sensibility, which is the proof of a good character, but they fear for his health. The common herd are rather pleased than otherwise at this death; they would like to have the King unsentimental and take another one to-morrow.” The Marquis d’Argenson writes to Richelieu: “Our poor master has a look which makes one tremble for his life.” D’Argenson might reassure himself. Louis XV. was far too feeble to suffer a long sorrow. His emotions were keen but transitory. There was but one thing in his character which had any tenacity, and that was ennui. He belonged to the numerous family of egoists. Some of them weep a good deal, but console themselves quickly. Nothing was to be changed in the habits of the master. A few days more and the name of the Duchess de Châteauroux would be no more spoken. There was but one person who truly regretted her, and that was Madame de Mailly, the sister to whom she had shown herself so coldly and pitilessly cruel.

An impression of melancholy and sorrow is what remains from all this. What, in brief, was the fate of the three sisters chosen by royal caprice? One of them, the Countess de Vintimille, died in childbed at the age of twenty-eight, and her death was the direct consequence, the immediate chastisement, of her fault. Another, the Duchess de Châteauroux, breathed her last at the age of twenty-seven, the victim of excessive anguish and humiliation. Her favor, like that of Madame de Vintimille, had lasted only two years. The third, the Countess de Mailly, better treated by Providence, since she had at least time for repentance, lived until she was forty. But her last years were merely one long immolation. She covered herself with ashes; she wore a hair shirt; and if, as she was on her way to church, any passer-by recognized and called her by some insulting name, she would say: “You know me—well, then, pray for me.”

How ephemeral are the pleasures of courts! How sad its sensual enjoyments! How dearly one pays for these swift moments of illegitimate joy and false pride! Ah! I understand why Louis XV. should be dissatisfied with others and with himself. I understand his exhaustion, his discouragement, his remorse, and I am not amazed that, in spite of the clink of glasses, the glitter of chandeliers, and the perfume of flowers, the boudoirs of Versailles sometimes resembled sepulchres.

SECOND PART

[1745–1768]

MADAME DE POMPADOUR.

I
LOUIS XV. AND THE ROYAL FAMILY IN 1745

The tragic end of the Duchess de Châteauroux should have inspired Louis XV. with some sage reflections. It was otherwise. At the end of a few weeks a new favorite installed herself in the apartment left vacant by the defunct. Before narrating the long reign of the Marquise de Pompadour, let us glance at the interior of the royal family at the moment when this woman, who was much rather a minister in petticoats than a mistress, and who unhappily personifies a whole epoch, came into favor.

In 1745 Louis XV. is thirty-five years old. From the physical point of view he is a model sovereign. His handsome face is characterized by an expression of benevolent grandeur and gentle majesty. A fine and sympathetic physiognomy, large blue eyes with an expressive and profound regard, an aquiline nose, a truly royal way of carrying his head, the most dignified attitude without the least appearance of stiffness, manners both elegant and simple, an agreeable and penetrating tone of voice, all contribute to give an exceptional charm to this king whom all France surnames the Well-Beloved. He shows extreme politeness to all who approach him, and one might say that he seems to solicit the affection of those to whom he speaks. An accomplished gentleman, he is always calm, always well-bred. He is never irritated, never raises his voice. His domestics find him the easiest of masters. One day as he is getting ready to mount on horseback, somebody fetches him two boots for the same foot. He sits down quietly and contents himself with saying: “He who made the mistake is more annoyed than I am.”[17] In general he is reserved, taciturn; he does not give himself away, but when he concludes to talk, his conversation is full of ingenious views and judicious remarks; he has wit and good sense.

In religious matters he is not a hypocrite; he belongs to that numerous class of Christians who retain both their vices and the faith. He goes to Mass every day. On Sundays and holy days he is also present at Vespers, Sermon, and Benediction. As the Marquis d’Argenson says, he “mutters his Paternosters and prayers in church with customary decency,” and he is putting off to some future time his perfect conversion. When he is urged to eat meat in Lent for the sake of his health, he answers that one ought not to sin on all sides. At another time he is heard congratulating himself on his rheumatic pains, because, says he, his sufferings are an expiation for his faults. One day when he is sending alms to a poor man, he exclaims: “Let this poor man ask God to show mercy to me, for I greatly need it.” When the feasts of the Church draw near, they occupy his mind and disturb it; when he dares not communicate, through fear of sacrilege, his soul is filled with sadness, and the flatteries of his courtiers cannot give peace to his conscience.

His remorse takes the form of ennui. Dissatisfied with himself, he often reflects that he is endangering his salvation for so-called pleasures from which he frequently gains nothing but physical and moral fatigue, which are still harder to endure. Egotism does not prevent him from yielding to disgust. As is remarked by M. Capefigue himself, great admirer as he is of royal pleasures, the capital defect of the King’s character is to allow the immense ennui which consumes him to become too evident. “He suffers the terrible chastisement imposed by satiety, that cold branding of both soul and body; he experiences the emptiness and impotence of sensuality.”

Such also is the conclusion of the Goncourts in their fine work, Les Maîtresses de Louis XV. “Ennui,” they say, “is the sovereign’s evil genius. It strikes with impotence all his fortunate natural endowments; it ages, disarms, extinguishes his will, it stifles his conscience as well as his kingly appetites. Ennui is the private torturer of his sluggish existence, of his heavy hours.... So true is this that the story of a king’s amours is also the story of the ennui of a man.”

The Memoirs of the Duke de Luynes fully confirm this appreciation. He says in them: “The King’s temperament is neither gay nor lively; it is even hypochondriacal. Details concerning maladies, operations, very often matters that concern anatomy, and questions about where one expects to be buried, are, unfortunately, the subjects of his ordinary conversation.” “Where would you like to be buried?” he asks M. de Souvré one day. “At Your Majesty’s feet,” replies the courtier, who is noted for his frankness. Louis XV. remains pensive, because he has just been reminded that kings are not immortal. How well these profound words of Pascal apply to Louis XV.: “It does not require a very lofty soul to understand that there is no true and solid satisfaction here below, that all our pleasures are but vanities, that our woes are infinite, and that in fine death, which threatens us every instant, must put us in a few years, and perchance in a few days, in an eternal state of happiness, or misery, or annihilation. Between us and heaven, hell or nothingness, there is, then, nothing but life, which is the most fragile of all things in the world; and heaven being certainly not for those who doubt whether their soul is immortal, they have nothing to expect but hell or nothingness. Nothing is more real than this, nor more terrible. Do all that the brave demand of us, and yet there is the end which awaits the most beautiful of lives.” Here is the secret of the King’s implacable sadness. Like all men who have but half a religion, he finds in it not consolations, but terrors. The feasts of the Church are not joys but tortures to him.

His monarchical faith is like his religious faith; it disturbs rather than reassures him. He feels himself unworthy to be the anointed of the Lord. His conscience as a king troubles him as much as his conscience as a Christian. He esteems neither himself nor those who surround him. He willingly agrees with his minister of foreign affairs, the Marquis d’Argenson, a monarchist who talks like a republican, that “Numerous and magnificent courts, the bait of fools and the wicked, will never make the splendor of royalty. There will always be display enough in decency.... Be persuaded that the greatest vice of monarchical governments is what is called the court. To begin with the monarch, it is from him that all vices are drawn, and from him that they spread as from the box of Pandora.” But do not exaggerate, do not force the note. Recollect especially that republican courts—and there are such, for democrats in power also have their courtiers—are neither more rigid nor more moral than those of kings and emperors.

It must always be remembered that a real difference exists between the royalty of Louis XIV. and that of Louis XV. Louis XIV. performed his kingly duties with the facility of a great actor playing his part, or, better, with the dignity of an officiating priest. Louis XV., on the contrary, in spite of his noble bearing and the successful beginnings of his reign, is almost ashamed of his royal dignity. He does not like what is grand; what he prefers are small apartments, little suppers, petty conversations. At times the monarch is not even a private gentleman; he is a bourgeois who makes up his own kitchen accounts, who saves candle-ends, who haggles with his domestics, who leads a mean and grovelling existence. It is not he who would have chosen the haughty device of the Sun King: Nec pluribus impar. The beams of the royal star dazzle his eyes. What pleases him is not the splendid glittering Gallery of Mirrors, but smart residences, little dwellings hid in verdure; Choisy for example, where, as the Duke de Luynes puts it, he is almost like a private person who takes pleasure in doing the honors of his château.

But neither let us forget that from time to time Louis XV. has inklings of greatness, dreams of glory and power. He is not the sluggard king that badly informed historians portray. Military instincts revive in him. The pride of his race awaked. “The King amidst his troops, becomingly uniformed in white or blue or jonquil, his hat placed coquettishly above his ear, the white cord, the shoulder-knot on his coat, himself starts the gay speeches, the tales of gallantry. The nobleman goes to battle in ruffles and powdered hair, with perfume on his Brussels lace handkerchief; elegance has never done harm to courage, and politeness is nobly allied to bravery.”[18]

1745 is a triumphant year, the year of Fontenoy, one of our greatest national victories. There Louis XV. and the Dauphin behave like sons of Henri IV. Voltaire’s enthusiasm when he celebrates this great day is not made to order, and the advocate Barbier is sincere in exclaiming that the reign of Louis XV. is the finest in all French history.

Nor let us believe that this monarch, over-lauded by his contemporaries but too much decried by history, is as indolent as people like to say. On the contrary, he works, and works a great deal. He not merely presides with the greatest regularity at the ministerial council, but he busies himself in a very special way with military and diplomatic affairs. If he readily agrees with what is proposed by his ministers without troubling himself to contradict them, it is because apart from official politics he has a secret policy whose springs he personally controls.[19] His intentions are good, he loves France sincerely. What then will ruin him? Two defects which are nearly always inseparable: sensuality and indecision.

Sensuality enfeebles, enervates; the man who is its victim can no longer either act or will. In the end he arrives at that commonplace benevolence, that insignificant good nature, that absence of character and energy, those inconsistencies and hesitations which rob sovereigns as well as private individuals of the very notion of just ideas and the courage of salutary resolutions. Louis XV. comes from the arms of his mistresses without force enough left to be a king.

Distrust and timidity form the basis of his character. “He knows he is badly served,” says M. Boutaric; “absolute master, he has only to speak to be obeyed, and, fortified by conscience, he can command, but he is so timid, let us say the word, so pusillanimous, that after having carefully sought the best way and seen it clearly, he nearly always decides, although with regret, for the worst which is proposed to him by his ministers or his mistresses. It is of public notoriety that when the King proposes anything in council, his opinion is always combated, and that, after making a number of objections, the prince always ends by adopting that of his counsellors, knowing, meantime, that he is doing wrong, and muttering to himself, ‘So much the worse; they would have it.’” Thus he illustrates those lines of Horace:—

“Video meliora proboque,

Deteriora sequor.”

JEANNE D’ALBRET

There are moments when, to use the expression of Duclos, he affects to regard himself as a disgraced prince of the blood without any credit at court. One day when the Queen is complaining of the opposition made to one of her recommendations by a minister, he says: “Why don’t you do as I do? I never ask anything of those people.” In spite of his omnipotence he feels himself always under the necessity of employing subterfuges and underhand expedients. According to a man who knew him well and saw him every day, Le Roy, master of the hounds, he considered dissimulation the most needful quality for a sovereign. “His hobby,” says the Marquis d’Argenson, “is to be impenetrable.” Another of his defects is to consider that very honest men are generally not very able. Hence the great number of disreputable men whom he intrusts with most important positions. With such a system he is doomed to perpetual fluctuations, to that variability which is the sign of weakness. He will hesitate between peace and war, between a Prussian and an Austrian alliance, between the Parliamentarians and their enemies, between the Jesuits and the Jansenists. He has a horror of the philosophers, and he will make Voltaire a gentleman of the chamber and lodge Quesnay in an entresol of the palace of Versailles. He sincerely believes in the truth of the Catholic religion, and he will take as his mistress, counsellor, and directress the friend of the Encyclopedists. By conviction and principle he is essentially conservative, and he will be the precursor of the Revolution.

“Oh! how well the word feebleness,” exclaims D’Argenson, “expresses the passions of certain men endowed with good nature and facility. They see and approve the best and they follow the worst. Their virility is but a prolongation of childhood. Frequently they mistake the shadow of pleasure for pleasure itself. Youthfulness, childishness, self-love without pride, their acts of firmness are but obstinacy and revolt.... With this sad character a prince thinks he governs well when he simply does not govern at all. Every one deceives him, and he is the chief of his own betrayers. He has mistresses for whom he has no predilection, and absolute ministers in whom he does not confide. All the defects of which foreigners accuse Frenchmen are found in him; contrasts everywhere, the effects of a too frivolous imagination which overmasters judgment; wasted talents, good taste which nothing can satisfy, exactness in little things, inconstancy and lack of enthusiasm in great ones ...; memory without remembrance; patience and calm, promptitude and kindness, mystery and indiscretion, avidity for new pleasures, disgust and ennui, momentary sensibility succeeded by general and complete apathy ... total, a good master without humanity.”

Having thus drawn the portrait of Louis XV., D’Argenson says in speaking of the Queen: “She attracts by certain attentions, she repels by making her friendship too common. Her rank is a rallying signal and, since the King has declared mistresses, those who inveigh against scandal attach themselves to her for the sake of displeasing the King and the favorite. Their murmurs are proportioned to the royal patience.”

In 1745 Marie Leczinska, who is the King’s senior by seven years, has arrived at the age of forty-two. When her tenth child was born, July 15, 1737, Madame Louise, who was one day to become a Carmelite, some one asked the King, who already had six living children, if the little princess should be called Madame Seventh. He answered: “Madame Last.” Thenceforward the Queen was neglected. Her husband has treated her with frigid politeness, but has always kept her at a distance; he never speaks to her except before witnesses. On New Year’s day he gives her no presents. Not the least intimacy, the slightest unconstraint. The short daily visits he pays her are matters of decorum, formalities of etiquette. The Queen eats by herself. Between her apartments and those of the King there is a barrier which she never crosses. The familiar life and the cabinet suppers are not for her. Separated from each other by the Peace Salon, the Gallery of Mirrors, and the Council Chamber, each of the spouses has a life apart.

Marie Leczinska is the only person who maintains at Versailles the ceremonious representation of the court of the great King, not through pride, but out of respect for principles. By eleven o’clock in the morning she has already heard one Mass, seen the King for an instant, received her children and the little entries; at noon the state toilette and the great entries. At one o’clock Marie Leczinska hears a second Mass. At two o’clock she dines in public,[20] served by her maid of honor and four ladies in full dress. A low balustrade separates her from a crowd, always curious to be present at this repast and to contemplate the features of a justly honored queen. Toward six in the evening she plays the game of loto then in fashion, the Cavagnole. When the King is present, she never sits down until he bids her do so, and ’tis a wonder if the pair exchange a few syllables. At ten the Queen withdraws, and after supper she sees a very restricted circle: the Duke and Duchess de Luynes, Mesdames de Villars and de Chevreuse, Minister Maurepas, Cardinals de Tencin and de Luynes, President Hénault, Moncrif, and sometimes old Fontenelle. On Sundays the presentation of ladies takes place. It is also the day chosen for the taking of tabourets. The ceremonies occur in the room called the Queen’s Salon,[21] contiguous to the sleeping-chamber. The sovereign’s chair is placed at the back of the room on a platform covered by a canopy.[22] “By a few words, a nod, a glance, a smile, Marie Leczinska knows how to encourage the lady presented, whose embarrassment soon yields to a gentle confidence as the Queen addresses to her one of those remarks which remain engraven in the heart.”[23]

To sum up, neglected as she is by her husband, the Queen is happier than he, because she has the great boon, the supreme good, which he has not: peace of heart. “What comparison is there,” says a great preacher, “between the frightful remorse of conscience, that hidden worm which gnaws incessantly, that sadness of crime which undermines and depresses, that weight of iniquity which crushes, that interior sword which pierces and which we cannot draw out, and the amiable sadness of penitence which works salvation?”[24] This expression “amiable sadness” is most applicable to the Queen. Doubtless she suffers profoundly at seeing Louis XV. throw himself down the declivity of scandal. But, far from recriminating, she offers her sufferings to God. Gentle and pious victim, she finds ineffable consolations at the foot of the altar. Instead of avenging herself on the King by reproaches and bitter speeches, she prays for him. Her calmness, resignation, charity, her Christian virtues, and exquisite affability, make her the object of universal veneration. She is called nothing but the Good Queen.

The Dauphin[25] is not less esteemed than his mother. In 1745 he is sixteen years old. He is a pious, well-taught, well-intentioned young man. He has made serious studies. His favorite reading is Plato, Cicero, Tacitus, Lucretius, Horace, Virgil, Juvenal. He knows by heart the finest passages of the philosophers and poets of antiquity. For him were made those magnificent editions of the Louvre, Ad usum Delphini, one of the most precious monuments of contemporary typography.

Full of respect for his father, he never speaks to him but in the tone of profound submission. He effaces himself, he holds himself in restraint. He says: “A Dauphin should employ one half his mind in concealing the other half.” Louis XV. is suspicious; it is well not to offend him.

The Dauphin marries at Versailles, February 23, 1745, an Infanta of Spain, daughter of Philip V., Marie Thérèse Antoinette Raphaelle, younger sister of that Infanta Marie Anne Victoire whom Louis XV. was to have married. The affront of sending back that princess is thus repaired. The marriage festivities are splendid; no such pomp had ever been seen. “As the King has need of money,” writes Barbier, “especially for the very considerable expenses of the Dauphin’s marriage, a great many tontines are raised.” The day that the Dauphiness arrived at Étampes, the King, who went to meet her, said: “Here is a good day’s work done.” She replied: “Sire, this is not what I dreaded most; I flattered myself you would receive me kindly. I am more afraid of to-morrow and the next day; everybody will be looking at me, and I shall perhaps find less favorable dispositions.” The new Dauphiness is not pretty, but she is sympathetic. Her amiability wins everybody. She says to Madame de Brancas that she does not understand how one can become angry, and that if any possible case arose to make it necessary, she would beg some one the day before to do so in her stead.

This marriage diverts the King, who no longer thinks of the poor Duchess de Châteauroux, who has been dead two months. Pleasures tread on each other’s heels. The court is dazzling. How superb are these Versailles festivities, the last term of elegance and luxury! What a magnificent masked ball[26] in the radiant Gallery of Mirrors, glittering sanctuary of ecstasy and apotheosis, modern Olympus which seems made for goddesses and gods! Imagine that aristocratic crowd which swarms up the Ambassadors’ Staircase, streams through the grand apartments of the King, the halls of Venus, Diana, Mars, Mercury, and Apollo, the War Salon, to be present at the fairy-like ball given in the gallery under the vaulted ceilings decorated by Lebrun’s magic brush! Fancy the animation, the tumult of good company, the harmonious orchestras, the witty or gallant conversations, the bright eyes glowing behind their masks, the colossal mirrors reflecting the richest and most varied costumes: fabulous divinities, great lords and châtelaines of the Middle Ages, Watteau’s shepherds and shepherdesses; chandeliers innumerable, pyramids of candles, baskets of flowers, a rain of diamonds and precious stones, and, to heighten still more the bewildering charm, the mysterious presence of that monarch, the handsomest man in all the kingdom, who hides his royalty under the folds of his domino!

In our civilian and democratic century we find it very difficult to get a perfect notion of such festivities. “We children of a wretched and bloody revolution,” as M. Capefigue says, “see these galleries of glass and gilding inundated with people in rough clothing, with noisy, hobnailed shoes, like a muddy torrent spreading over a parterre of tulips and variegated roses.” Let us not forget that there was chivalry and courage, carelessness and gaiety, animation and native wit, charm and elegance, in the last fortunate days of the French nobility. If the men who shone at that period should return, they would find ours mean and irksome.

The noise of battle succeeds the echoes of the orchestras. Two months and a half after this fine ball Louis XV. and his son are with the army. The King wishes that the Dauphin, although but sixteen years old, should set an example, and at Fontenoy the young man excites the admiration of old soldiers by his ardor and courage.

Louis XV. is a happy father. His son is a model of filial respect. His six daughters, Mesdames Elisabeth, Henriette, Adelaide, Victoire, Sophie, and Louise, all of whom with the exception of Madame Adelaide were educated in the convent of Fontevrault, have the most religious sentiments and display profound affection for their father. Only one of them is married, the eldest, Madame Elisabeth, who espoused in 1739 the Infant Don Philip, son of the King of Spain, and with whom Louis XV. did not part without keen sorrow. In 1745 only two of his daughters, Henriette and Adelaide, are with him. The other three, Victoire, Sophie, and Louise, are still at Fontevrault, and it is singular that this king, so affectionate to his children, should leave them in a convent eighty leagues from Versailles when it would be so easy to place them, if not close beside him, at least in some neighboring convent.

In order to complete this sketch of the royal family in 1745, it remains to say a few words about the Duke d’Orléans and his son, the Duke de Chartres.

Born in 1703, and widowed since 1726 of a princess of Baden, the Duke d’Orléans, only son of the regent, seldom shows himself at court. The premature death of his wife, whom he had the misfortune of losing after two years of marriage, had inspired him with extremely grave and Christian reflections. His tastes have become those of an anchorite. In 1730 he resigned his position as Colonel-general in order to be more at liberty to make very frequent retreats at the Abbey of Sainte Geneviève. In 1742 he finally renounced all political action, and quitted the Council of State in order to install himself definitively in his dear abbey, where he leads the life of a monk, between prayer and study. He has left the administration of his property to his mother, keeping for himself only an income of one million eight hundred thousand livres, which he spends almost entirely in works of charity.

’Tis a curious type this prince, so little like his father; this Christian, pious to asceticism, who sleeps on straw, drinks only water, does without fire in winter, who composes but will not print austere works, a translation of the Psalms with commentaries, part of the Old Testament and some of the Epistles of Saint Paul, a treatise against the theatre, historical and theological dissertations,—a monastic prince whom the court has inclined to the cloister, who at his death (February 4, 1752) will bequeath his library to the Dominicans, his medals to the Abbey of Sainte Geneviève, and whose funeral oration will be composed by Jean Jacques Rousseau.

His son, the Duke de Chartres, is twenty years old in 1745. A brilliant and brave young prince, who has distinguished himself as colonel at the battle of Dettingen, and as lieutenant-general at the siege of Fribourg. Married in 1743 to Louise Henriette de Bourbon-Conti, he loves the world as much as his father dislikes it, and he will be one of the principal actors in the theatre of the little apartments.

So long as the Dauphin has no male children, it is the Orléans branch which, according to the renunciations of the treaty of Utrecht, must ascend the throne of France in case of the death of Louis XV. and his son. But on both sides of the Pyrenees the practical value of these renunciations is contested. When Louis XV. fell seriously ill before his marriage, in 1721, Philip V. made ready to reclaim the crown of France if the young King should die. When the Dauphin, who as yet has no heir, will himself be in danger of death, Madame du Hausset will write in her Memoirs: “The King would be in despair at having a prince of the blood as his recognized successor. He does not like them, and looks at them so distantly as to humiliate them. When his son recovered, he said: ‘The King of Spain would have had a good chance.’ It is claimed that he was right in this, and that it would have been justice; but that if the Duke d’Orléans had had a party, he might have claimed the throne.”

We have just outlined the portraits of the members of the royal family in 1745. We are about to study the character of the woman who, issuing from the middle classes, was to exercise a real domination over the King and all his court during twenty years.

II
THE BEGINNINGS OF THE MARQUISE DE POMPADOUR

There are names which are the abridgment of an entire society. Such is that gay name which rhymes so well with “amour,” which seems made expressly for a grande dame after the manner of Lancret or Watteau, which would fit so well a comic opera or a pastoral, which is worthy to figure in the Temple of Cnidos and to be celebrated by the pretty little verses of the Abbé de Bernis, which evokes so many souvenirs of immoral elegance and factitious sentimentality of boudoirs and alcoves, comedies and gewgaws, pleasures and intrigues: the Marquise de Pompadour. Woman, name, title, all are alike gracious, pretty, sprightly; but nothing is simple, nothing true. The character is that of a comedienne perpetually on the stage. The beauty owes a great part of its prestige to the refinements of luxury and the artifices of the toilette. The marquisate is a contraband one.

The future favorite seems predestined almost from the cradle to her part. She is a little marvel, an infant prodigy. She is only nine years old when a fortune-teller by cards predicts to her that she will be the mistress of Louis XV. This prediction delights her family; they believe in it as if it were written in the Gospels, and they decide to do all in their power to realize it. Aid yourself, and hell will aid you. She who was one day to call herself Madame the Marquise de Pompadour was then named Jeanne Antoinette Poisson. Born in Paris, December 29, 1721, she had a father who was vulgar even to indecency, François Poisson, former clerk of the Paris brothers, who was condemned to be hanged in 1726 for malversations, but rehabilitated in 1741 after several years of exile. Her mother was a Demoiselle de la Motte, daughter of the provision contractor of the Hôtel des Invalides, a very pretty woman, guilty of many infidelities to her husband, and very richly subsidized by a gallant farmer-general, M. Lenormand de Tournehem. The financier imagines, possibly with good reason, that he is the father of little Antoinette. Hence he gives her the most careful education. She is taught everything except virtue. Jéliotte teaches her singing and the harpsichord, Guibaudet dancing, Crébillon declamation. She is an actress, a musician, an accomplished singer. She imitates la Gaussin and la Clairon marvellously. She rides admirably. She dresses ravishingly. She is as pretty as Cupid. Nobody tells a story so well as she. She is pleasing, amusing, delightful. Her mother, enthusiastic over such charms, exclaims: “She is a morsel for a king!”

But how to justify the prediction of the sorceress? The place of king’s mistress is occupied by none but very great ladies: a Countess de Mailly, a Countess de Vintimille, a Duchess de Châteauroux. Can little Poisson aspire to the same rôle? If she persists in such schemes, will not people say that the keg always smells of the herring? Will the Duke de Richelieu permit a bourgeoise to supplant the nobility in this fashion? Mademoiselle Poisson does not allow herself to be discouraged. She has her fixed idea. She believes in what she calls her star. Her marriage is the first rung of the ambitious ladder. March 9, 1741, she marries a rich young man, M. Lenormand d’Étioles, deputy farmer-general, nephew of M. Lenormand de Tournehem, Madame Poisson’s lover. The bride is nineteen, the husband twenty-four years old; he is madly in love, and as his wife tells him she will never betray him unless for the King, he mutters: “Then I can be very easy.”

The young wife is presently the fashion. She is the gem of that financial society which has made such headway since the latter years of Louis XIV. President Hénault writes to Madame du Deffand, July, 1742: “At Madame de Montigny’s I met one of the prettiest women I have ever seen, Madame d’Étioles. She understands music perfectly, sings with all possible gaiety and taste, knows a hundred ballads, and plays comedy at Étioles on a stage as fine as that of the Opera, with machinery and changes of scenes.”

She prepares her success skilfully. The trumpets of fame are at her disposal. Voltaire, Montesquieu, Fontenelle, the Abbé de Bernis, are her friends. At Paris, in her house in rue Croix-des-Petits-Champs, and at Étioles in her château near Corbeil, she leads a life of luxury and pleasures. She is an enchantress, a siren. But she has only one desire,—to make the King the objective point of all this magic. She would scorn any other conquest.

The man she must have is Louis XV. To arrive at this conquest she will exhaust the resources of feminine coquetry. Never were manœuvres more persevering, artifices more sagacious. She has to play the enamoured woman, the passionate woman, to pursue the King when he hunts in the forest of Sénart, to pass and repass, like a graceful apparition, like the goddess of the forests, through the midst of the escort with their dogs and horses, sometimes robed in azure in a rose-colored phaeton, sometimes in rose in a phaeton of blue. One day she is on horseback; another day she drives herself, in an elegant conch shell of rock crystal, two chestnut horses swift as lightning. The King inquires the name of this elegant and pretty woman. Then he sends her some of his game. Madame d’Étioles has good hopes. The Duchess de Châteauroux is dead; she is sure of replacing her.

The masked balls given at the time of the Dauphin’s marriage are excellent opportunities to display one’s self. At the Hôtel de Ville ball the prettiest women of the bourgeoisie are grouped together on a platform hung with velvet, silk, and gold. Madame d’Étioles appears as Diana the huntress, powdered, the quiver on her shoulder, the silver arrow in her hand. For an instant she takes off her mask and pretends to let fly an arrow at the King. “Beautiful huntress,” cries the King, “the darts you discharge are fatal.” Then she resumes her mask and slips into the crowd, but dropping her lace handkerchief as she goes. Louis XV. picks it up and, sultan-like, launches it with a gallant hand at the beautiful unknown. “The handkerchief is thrown,” people mutter on all sides.

Madame d’Étioles is about, then, to reach her goal. She has no reproach to make against her husband, by whom she has had two children: a son born in 1741, who only lived six months, and a daughter, Alexandrine, born in 1743, who will live until 1754. This husband is an excellent man, gentle, affectionate, easy to live with, much in love with his wife, not at all jealous, happy and proud to be the husband of the prettiest woman in Paris. But what would you have? Madame d’Étioles has taken it into her head to be the King’s mistress. ’Tis a fantasy of a coquettish woman which she must absolutely realize.

Taking advantage of her husband’s stay in the country, and protected by one of her relatives, Bivet, valet de chambre to the Dauphin, she makes her way into the palace of Versailles and parades a romantic passion for Louis XV. She says she is menaced by M. d’Étioles’ vengeance and begs the King to shelter her. The monarch is affected and installs her mysteriously in the chamber formerly occupied by Madame de Mailly. Poor M. d’Étioles, on his return to Paris, learns what has befallen him. He faints away at the fatal tidings, and afterwards writes his wife a letter so touching that Louis XV., after reading it, cannot avoid saying: “Madame, you have a very honest husband.” In despair at first, the betrayed husband at last resigns himself. He does not try to contend with a king, and repairs philosophically to the south of France, to make an inspection into finances which is part of his official duties as deputy farmer-general.

At court there is great commotion. It seems impossible to imagine that a woman of the middle classes, une robine, as D’Argenson says, can replace a great lady like the Duchess de Châteauroux. The Duke de Luynes writes in his Memoirs, March 11, 1745: “All the masked balls have given occasion for talk concerning the King’s new amours, and principally of a Madame d’Étioles, who is young and pretty. It is said that for some time she is nearly always here, and that she is the King’s choice. If such is the fact, it can hardly be anything more than a case of gallantry, and not of mistress.”

Louis XV., who is fond of mystery, amuses himself at first by being discreet. He conceals his new favorite. “It is not known where she is lodged,” writes the Duke de Luynes, April 23, 1745, “but, nevertheless, I think it is in a little apartment that Madame de Mailly had, and which adjoins the little cabinets; she does not live here all the time, but comes and goes to Paris.”

A few days later, May 5, 1745, the King sets off for the army with the Dauphin. But Madame d’Étioles has the good sense not to rejoin him there. Nor does she remain at Versailles, but withdraws to her château of Étioles, near Corbeil, where Voltaire and the Abbé de Bernis keep her company. Louis XV., much more occupied with his new mistress than with the war, writes her letter upon letter. The Abbé de Bernis counsels the favorite who, with such a secretary, cannot fail to reply to her royal lover in the most charming and gallantly turned epistles. We read in the Memoirs of the Duke de Luynes (June 19, 1745): “Madame d’Étioles is still in the country, near Paris, and has never wanted to go to Flanders. The King is more in love than ever; he writes and sends couriers to her at every moment.”

All France uttered a cry of enthusiasm on learning the victory of Fontenoy (May 11, 1745). But could one believe it? The person first felicitated by Voltaire on account of that glorious day was neither Louis XV. nor Marshal de Saxe, but Madame d’Étioles. Before writing his poem on Fontenoy, the obsequious poet addressed the favorite in these stanzas:—

“Quand César, ce héros charmant,

Dont tout Rome fut idolâtre,

Gagnait quelque combat brillant,

On en faisait son compliment

À la divine Cléopâtre.

“Quant Louis, ce héros charmant,

Dont tout Paris fait son idole,

Gagne quelque combat brillant,

On doit en faire compliment

À la divine d’Étiole.”[27]

France, always maddened by success, is in a real delirium. The Parliament of Paris sends a deputation to Lille to felicitate the King on his victory and entreat him “so far as may be, not to expose in future his sacred person, on which the welfare and safety of the State depend.” All the supreme courts of the kingdom imitate that of Paris, and the first president of the court of taxes exclaims in his address to the King: “Your Majesty’s conquests are so rapid that the point is how to safeguard the faith of our descendants and lessen the wonder of miracles, lest heroes should dispense themselves from following, and people from believing, in them.” But the conquest which chiefly preoccupies Louis XV. is that of his new mistress.

In July, 1745, she proudly displays eighty amorous epistles from the gallant sovereign; the motto on the seal is: Discreet and faithful; one of them is addressed: À la Marquise de Pompadour, and contains the brevet conferring this title. The new marquise instantly discards the name of Étioles, leaves off her husband’s arms, substitutes three towers in their place, and puts her servants in grand livery. This marquisate enchants Voltaire; he has become the official poet, courtier, and familiar of the favorite, and his complaisant muse thus celebrates the official accession of the new royal mistress:—

“Il sait aimer, il sait combattre;

Il envoie en ce beau séjour

Un brevet digne d’Henri quatre,

Signé: Louis, Mars et l’Amour.

Mais les ennemis out leur tour,

Et sa valeur et sa prudence

Donnent à Gand, le même jour,

Un brevet de ville de France.

Ces deux brevets, si bien venus,

Vivront tous deux dans la mémoire.

Chez lui, les autels de Vénus

Sont dans le temple de la Gloire.”[28]

The democrats, perhaps, are in a trifle too much of a hurry to erect a statue to Voltaire.

III
THE NEW MARQUISE

Louis XV. had had enough of glory. Impatient to meet again the new marquise, he left the army September 1, 1745, and returned to Versailles, where his mistress awaited him in the apartment once occupied by the Duchess de Châteauroux. This change of reign was effected in an official manner. There was no more attempt at mystery. The Marquise de Pompadour was presented September 15, conformably to the rules of etiquette. Every tongue at court was wagging over this scandalous and ridiculous ceremony. Every one wondered how the Queen would look. The King, his wife, and his mistress thus exposed themselves to public view, and the ancient ceremonial became merely a parody. The Princess de Conti, whose debts and prodigalities seemed to condemn her to such complaisant rôles, was the lady who presented her. The Marquise appeared at first before the King, whose countenance betrayed an easily comprehended embarrassment. Then she entered the salon of the Queen and could not hide her confusion.

But Marie Leczinska, good and indulgent even to exaggeration, reassured her by a gracious reception. Naming one of the few aristocratic women with whom Madame de Pompadour was connected, she said: “Have you any news of Madame de Saissac? I have been much pleased to see her sometimes in Paris.” The Marquise, touched and grateful, know not what to answer. She reddened and stammered out: “Madame, I have the greatest passion to please you.”

The Abbé de Bernis celebrated thus the new queen of Cythera:—

“Tout va changer: les crimes d’un volage

Ne seront plus érigés en exploits.

La Pudeur seul obtiendra notre hommage,

L’amour constant rentrera dans ses droits.

L’exemple en est donné par le plus grand des rois,

Et par la beauté la plus sage.”[29]

The choice of Louis XV. was thenceforward settled. The gallant monarch was about to plume himself on fidelity.

What do you think of this modesty and this discretion? As Sainte-Beuve says, these poets have a way of taking things which belongs to them alone.

There was plenty of adulation, but there was also plenty of fault-finding. The great ladies could not get used to seeing a bourgeoise occupy the post of King’s mistress. They observed with malevolent and ever alert attention this improvised marquise who tried to give herself airs of nobility and grandeur. They recalled the fact that her grandfather had been provision-contractor for the Hôtel des Invalides. She is the granddaughter of a butcher, said they; they jeered pitilessly about meat and fish; they found her awkward in her part, like a grisette disguised as a marchioness. Exasperated at seeing at Versailles a royal mistress not of his choosing, the Duke de Richelieu tried, says Duclos, “to make the King consider her on the footing of a bourgeoise out of place, a passing gallantry, a simple amusement not adapted to remain worthily at court.” If anything in her manners or her language was not perfectly well-bred, the favorite became the butt of sarcasm as soon as her back was turned. Louis XV. used to say: “It will amuse me to educate her.”

Madame de Pompadour had at all events the good sense to maintain a humble and submissive attitude when she appeared before the Queen. The rank and virtues of Marie Leczinska intimidated her. Here is a curious passage which occurs in the Memoirs of the Duke de Luynes: “Day before yesterday, as she was returning from Mass, Madame de Pompadour said to Madame de Luynes that she was in the keenest anxiety and most bitter sorrow; that she knew somebody had frightfully aspersed her to the Queen; and, without explaining to what she referred, said she hoped greatly that the Queen would not believe it, and that she begged her to speak about it to her. Madame de Luynes instantly gave an account of this to the Queen.” Here is the letter written to Madame de Pompadour by the Duchess de Luynes: “I have just been speaking to the Queen, Madame, and I earnestly entreated her to tell me frankly if she had anything against you; she answered in the kindliest way that she had not, and that she was even very sensible of your efforts to please her on all occasions; she even desired me to write and tell you so.”

This is the reply of the Marquise: “You bring me to life again, Madame; for three days I have been in unheard-of pain, as you will believe without difficulty, knowing as you do my attachment to the Queen. They have made frightful accusations against me to Monsieur and to Madame the Dauphiness, who have been kind enough to allow me to prove the falsity of the horrors they accuse me of. I had been told some days ago that the Queen had been prejudiced against me; think of my despair, who would give my life for her, who find her goodness to me every day more precious. It is certain that the kinder she is to me, the more will the jealousy of the monsters of this place be employed in abusing me, unless she is so good as to be on her guard against them and will kindly let me know of what I am accused. It will not be difficult for me to justify myself; the tranquillity of my soul on this subject assures me as much. I hope, Madame, that your friendship for me, and still more your knowledge of my character, will be the guarantees of what I am writing you. Doubtless you must be annoyed by such a long story; but my heart is so full that I cannot conceal it from you. You know my sentiments toward you, Madame; they will end only with my life” (February, 1746).

We read again in the Memoirs of the Duke de Luynes (March, 1746): “Madame de Pompadour, who knows the Queen loves flowers, is so attentive as to send her bouquets as often as possible; she continues to seek every occasion to please her.”

The Queen may have reflected that, after all, since a mistress was inevitable, this one was better than another. Since he had been directed by Madame de Pompadour, the King seemed in a less sombre temper and looked a little less bored. But he lost in the favorite’s society the needful energy to continue the successes of the French arms, and sign a really glorious peace.

While Louis XV. was thus wasting away in futilities, Marshal Saxe conquered all Belgium. Louis XV. never made his appearance at the army from May 4 to the middle of June, 1746. After having made a triumphal entry at Antwerp he hastened back to Versailles, apparently to be present when the Dauphiness was delivered, in reality to see Madame de Pompadour again. The Dauphiness died prematurely in July. D’Argenson says she had become as good a Frenchwoman as if she had been born at Versailles. She was regretted, but the hurly-burly of festivities soon began again, and Louis XV., after a very short mourning, resumed his accustomed diversions and pretended pleasures.

The successes of his troops were as brilliant as they were rapid. Never had France held better cards. It was a magnificent occasion to complete national unity in the North. But though they had known how to conquer they knew not how to profit by the victory. The King did not comprehend his mission. He was thinking more about Madame de Pompadour than about the war, and while his soldiers were fighting so bravely, he, wholly given up to frivolous trifles, was amusing himself, or, better, he was trying to do so. This nonchalance became fatal. All the fruits of the war were lost by the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (October 18, 1748).

People had believed that Louis XV., who was master of all Belgium, of two Dutch provinces, of Savoy, and the county of Nice, would claim to retain at least a part of his conquests. But, to the general surprise, he declared he would not treat as a merchant, but as a king. This more than amazing phrase signified that France would demand nothing, nothing for so many dearly bought victories, nothing for the five hundred thousand men she had sacrificed, nothing for the twelve hundred millions added to the national debt. Louis XV. restored all the conquered cities and territories. He engaged not to rebuild the fortresses of Dunkirk; he recognized the English succession in the Protestant line and carried complaisance toward the vanquished of Fontenoy to the point of expelling the Pretender, the heroic Charles Edward, from France. Add to this that the French navy, like that of Spain, was half ruined, and that the time was not far distant when the sailor might salute the ocean as Britannic. It is true that the Infant Philip, married to the eldest daughter of Louis XV., obtained the duchies of Parma and Plaisance. But this was but a petty advantage considered as a recompense for so many sacrifices of men and money.

As might have been expected, the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle was profoundly unpopular. “As stupid as the peace,” people said in Paris. The odium of it was cast upon the woman who, to play her part as queen of the left hand, had meddled with diplomacy, finances, and the army.

In 1746 Voltaire had written to Louis XV.:—

“Grand roi, Londres gémit, Vienne pleure et t’admire.

Ton bras va décider du destin de l’Empire.

La Sardaigne balance et Munich se répent,

Le Batave, indécis, au remords est en proie;

Et la France s’écrie au milieu de sa joie:

‘Le plus aimé des rois est aussi le plus grand!’”[30]

Everything was greatly changed in 1748; London no longer groaned, and Vienna did not admire. There was neither repentance at Munich nor remorse at Batavia, and very little was said about the greatness of the best beloved of Kings. The situation already contained in germ the disasters of the future Seven Years’ War. France, which loves success, no longer compared Madame de Pompadour to la belle Gabrielle. But the favorite had one grand consolation under the rain of sarcasms and satires; her theatre of the little Cabinets of Versailles was succeeding very well; and if she was hissed as a political woman, she was warmly applauded as an actress.

IV
MADAME DE POMPADOUR’S THEATRE

“I have seen all that is done under the sun, and beheld that all is vanity and vexation of spirit. I have said within myself: Let us take all manner of delights and let us enjoy our possessions; and I have recognized that this too is vanity. I have condemned the laughter of folly and I have cried unto joy: Why dost thou deceive us vainly?”