Court Beauties of Old Whitehall Part 12

"Adieu, Treville, adieu, mon ami!" she waved.

The simple farewell broke his heart. The next day he left the Court and the world for ever.

In these last terrible moments she forgot no one. Monsieur having left the room, she sent to call him back, and in bidding him farewell declared that "she had never been faithless to him." The solemnity of the occasion on which these words were uttered has inclined most of her biographers to acquit her of the adulteries with Louis and the Comte de Guiche of which she was suspected. There are other evidences, however, of Madame's virtue which might be cited quite as convincing as this; and in regard to the Comte de Guiche at all events, the various ladies for whom he sighed before he met Madame were all agreed in attributing a physical rather than a spiritual cause to the "Platonic" character of his amours.

Her strength now began to fail fast, and as a last resort the doctors decided to bleed her. The incision was made in her foot, but no blood flowed, and her exhaustion was so extreme that they thought she would die while her foot was still in the warm water. The doctors then declared that they would try one more remedy, but she begged them to give her the Extreme Unction before it was too late. It was given to her by a priest who was present, and who exhorted and rebuked her like a Scotch Calvinist. When he had finished she said meekly--

"At what o'clock did Jesus Christ die? At three o'clock?"

"Do not mind that, Madame," he replied, "you must endure life and wait for death with patience."

At this moment Bossuet arrived. He was so overcome at the sight of her that he nearly fainted.

"He spoke to her of G.o.d," says Madame de La Fayette, "in a manner suitable to her condition and with that eloquence which marks all his sermons. He made her perform such little acts as he thought necessary, and she entered into all that he told her with zeal. While he was speaking a maid of honour approached to give her something of which she had need. She said to her in English, in order that Bossuet might not hear, and preserving till death the politeness characteristic of her--

"'Remember to give M. Bossuet, when I am dead, the emerald ring that I have had made for him.'

"While he was praying with her he was nearly exhausted by the strain on his nature. Madame asked him gently if she might not take a few moments'

rest; he told her that she might, and he would withdraw and pray for her. M. Feuillet" (the priest who had given her the Extreme Unction) "remained at her side, and almost at the same moment Madame begged him to recall M. Bossuet, for she felt she was about to die. M. Bossuet hurried back and gave her the crucifix. She took it and embraced it with ardour. M. Bossuet continued to speak to her, and she replied with the same clearness as if she had never been ill, keeping the crucifix pressed to her lips to the last. As her strength failed it fell from her hands, and she lost speech and life at the same time. Her agony lasted but a moment; and after two or three little convulsive movements of the mouth, she expired at half-past two in the morning, and nine hours after having been taken ill."

It is only natural that the suddenness and mystery of such an illness and death should have been fertile in historical speculation.

For about one hundred and fifty years the world generally took it for granted that Madame was poisoned--especially as some of the doctors privately expressed this opinion, which was contrary to their official statement at the post-mortem. But in the early part of the nineteenth century the world suddenly changed its mind and declared that Madame died "naturally" of cholera morbus or peritonitis. As far as we are concerned one theory is as good as another. Our object is not to emulate the latest authorities and perform, like them, a literary autopsy on remains we have never seen. At this late day it is of not the least consequence to the world whether Madame was poisoned or not. By all means let us take it for granted, with M. Anatole France and many another of equal distinction, that her untimely end was natural. But as the other theory is thoroughly in keeping with seventeenth-century customs, it is, if no longer worthy of credence--which, after all, is not proved--at least pregnant with possibility.

As a good "poison story" it will always be worth telling; and as no one has ever told it more graphically than Saint-Simon we will give his version.

He says that when the news that Madame had expired reached Versailles--

"The King, who had gone to bed, rose, sent for Brissac, who was the captain of the guards and close at hand, and commanded him to choose six body-guards, trusty and secret, to go and take up Simon Morel, Madame's _maitre d'hotel_, and to bring him to him in his cabinet. This was done before morning. When the King saw him he ordered Brissac and his valet de chambre to withdraw, and a.s.suming a most alarming aspect and tone--

"'My friend,' said he, surveying him from head to foot, 'listen well to me. If you confess all and tell me the truth about what I want to know from you, whatever you may have done I pardon you; it shall never be mentioned again. But beware how you disguise the least thing, for if you do you are a dead man before you leave this place. Has not Madame been poisoned?'

"'Yes, Sire,' answered Morel.

"'And who has poisoned her and how?' said the King.

"He replied that it was the Chevalier de Lorraine, who had sent the poison from Italy to Beuvron and Effiat (two of Monsieur's equerries).

Whereupon the King, redoubling his a.s.surances of favour and threats of death, said--

"'And my brother, did he know of it?'

"'No, Sire. None of us three were fools enough to tell him. He never keeps a secret, he would have ruined us.'

"At this reply, the King uttered a long 'Ah!' like a man oppressed, who all at once breathes again.

"'Well,' said he, 'that is all I want to know.' And Brissac restored Morel to liberty."

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE CHEVALIER DE LORRAINE.]

Saint-Simon further declares that a few days before Monsieur married his second wife Louis took her aside and told her these circ.u.mstances, a.s.suring her that Monsieur was innocent of any partic.i.p.ation in this crime, and that were he not convinced of it he would not have permitted his remarriage. This second Madame, or La Palatine, as she was called, who by this marriage became the mother of the Regent d'Orleans, and was not the least original of the many strikingly original persons of "_le grand siecle_," tells the story in another fashion, in that remarkable correspondence of hers from which as much historical ore has been mined as from Saint-Simon's memoirs:--

"It is only too true," she writes in her blunt, vigorous way, "that Madame was poisoned, but without the knowledge of Monsieur. While the villains were arranging the plan of poisoning the poor woman, they deliberated whether they should tell Monsieur or not.

"The Chevalier de Lorraine said, 'No, don't tell him, for he cannot hold his tongue. If he does not tell the first year, he may have us all hanged ten years afterwards.'

"They therefore made Monsieur believe that Madame had taken poison in Holland (on her way back from England), which did not act until she arrived at St. Cloud. Nor was it Madame's chicory-water that Effiat had poisoned, but the goblet. A valet de chambre, who was with Madame and afterwards in my service, told me that in the morning while Monsieur and Madame were at Ma.s.s, Effiat went to the sideboard, and taking Madame's gla.s.s rubbed the inside of it with a paper, and that he, the valet, said to him--

"'Monsieur d'Effiat, what are you doing in this room, and why do you touch Madame's gla.s.s?'

"Effiat answered, 'I am dying with thirst, I wanted something to drink, and the gla.s.s being dirty I was cleaning it with some paper.'

"After dinner Madame asked for some chicory-water, and as soon as she had swallowed it she cried out, 'I am poisoned!'

"All that were present drank of the same chicory-water, but not from the same gla.s.s, so, of course, it did them no harm."

Such are the most authoritative "poison" theories which nineteenth-century investigation has very brilliantly but not altogether exploded.

Madame's death, as may be imagined, created a profound sensation throughout Europe. In London, considering how slight had been her connection with her native country, the indignation was remarkable. An infuriated mob rushed to the French Emba.s.sy, which but for the precautions taken by the Government to protect it they would have destroyed. Whitehall was utterly prostrated. Charles took to his bed for several days.

"Never," said Rochester, "was any one so regretted since dying was the fashion."

But for the good sense of the King, England would have declared war on France. Louis, whose grief was genuine, did all that he could to prove his regret--all but punish the suspected poisoners. On the contrary, Effiat was promoted and the Chevalier de Lorraine, whom he detested, to Monsieur's and his own delight, was recalled. Perhaps no other course was left open to him, if the report of foul play which threatened to plunge him into a war was not to be hushed up at all costs. But to prove to Charles II. and Europe that he was free from implication in this strange death, he at once ordered a post-mortem, at which English doctors and the English Amba.s.sador were present. The verdict of the autopsy was "death from natural causes." It served to allay popular anger but not popular suspicion.

Louis also gave Madame such a funeral as few kings have ever had.

"I do not think," wrote Madame de Sevigne, who was present, "that there will be any better music in heaven."

Bossuet p.r.o.nounced over the corpse his masterpiece, which is familiar to every schoolboy in France. On his finger, placed there by Louis himself, there glittered the emerald Madame had bequeathed him with her dying breath, and which he wore till his own death. The body was buried at St.

Denis beside that of Henrietta Maria. It was the first that the mob dug up one hundred and twenty-three years later when the tombs of the kings were desecrated. It was flung into a pit behind the church along with Louis' and the rest of his dynasty's. By a curious coincidence it--or what was supposed to be it--was the first body restored to its original resting-place after Waterloo.

By a still more curious coincidence, Madame's daughter, Marie Louise, whom they married to the last King of Spain, of the House of Austria, died at the same age and in the same strange way as her mother. There is something decidedly uncanny in the fate that decreed that Effiat, as French Amba.s.sador at Madrid, should be the medium through whom her husband corresponded with her; that the Chevalier de Lorraine should be the man appointed to lead her to the altar; and that the Comtesse de Soissons should be the one to poison her!

If happiness be the aim of prince and peasant alike, it was not, at all events, in the Armida-courts of the seventeenth century that it was to be found. It was of Madame, his friend and patron, that Moliere was thinking when his Alceste sang--

"Si le roi me donnait, Paris sa grande ville, Et qu'il me fallut quitter L'amour de ma mie, Je dirais au roi Henri Reprenez votre Paris, J'aime mieux ma mie, o gue, J'aime mieux ma mie."

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE d.u.c.h.eSS OF PORTSMOUTH.

_After Sir G.o.dfrey Kneller._]