Love affairs of the Courts of Europe Part 14

CHAPTER XX

THE LOVE-AFFAIRS OF A REGENT

When Louis XIV. laid down, one September day in the year 1715, the crown which he had worn with such splendour for more than seventy years, his sceptre fell into the hands of his nephew Philippe, Duc d'Orleans, who for eight years ruled France as Regent, and as guardian of the child-King, the fifteenth Louis.

Seldom in the world's history has a reign, so splendid as that of the Sun-King, closed in such darkness and tragedy. The disastrous war of the Spanish Succession had drained France of her strength and her gold. She lay crushed under a mountain of debt--ten thousand million francs; she was reduced to the lowest depths of wretchedness, ruin, and disorder, and it was at this crisis in her life as a nation that fate placed a child of four on her throne, and gave the reins of power into the hands of the most dissolute man in Europe.

Not that Philippe of Orleans lacked many of the qualities that go to the making of a ruler and a man. He had proved himself, in Italy and in Spain, one of the bravest of his country's soldiers, and an able, far-seeing leader of armies; and he had, as his Regency proved, no mean gifts of statesmanship. But his kingly qualities were marred by the taint of birth and early environment.

Such good qualities as he had he no doubt drew from his mother, the capable, austere, high-minded Elizabeth of Bavaria, who to her last day was the one good influence in his life. To his father, Louis XIV.'s younger brother, who is said to have been son of Cardinal Mazarin, Anne of Austria's lover, and who was the most debased man of his time in all France, he just as surely owed the bias of sensuality to which he chiefly owes his place in memory.

And not only was he thus handicapped by his birth; he had for tutor that arch-scoundrel Dubois--the "grovelling insect" who rarely opened his mouth without uttering a blasphemy or indecency, and who initiated his charge, while still a boy, into every base form of so-called pleasure.

Such was the man who, amid the ruins of his country, inaugurated in France an era of licentiousness such as she had never known--an incomprehensible ma.s.s of contradictions--a kingly presence with the soul of a Caliban, statesman and sinner, high-minded and low-living, spending his days as a sovereign, a role which he played to perfection, and his nights as a sot and a sensualist.

It was doubtless Dubois who was mostly responsible for the baseness in the Regent's character--Dubois who had taught him a contempt for religion and morality, the cynical view of life which makes the pleasure of the moment the only thing worth pursuing, at whatever cost; and who had impressed indelibly on his mind that no woman is virtuous and that men are knaves. And there was never any lack of men to continue Dubois'

teaching. He gathered round him the most dissolute gallants in France, in whose company he gave the rein to his most vicious appet.i.tes. His "roues" he dubbed them, a t.i.tle which aptly described them; although they affected to give it a very different interpretation. They were the Regent's roues, they said, no doubt with the tongue in the cheek, because they were so devoted to him that they were ready, in his defence, to be broken on the wheel (_la roue_)!

Each of these boon-comrades was a past-master in the arts of dissipation, and each was also among the most brilliant men of his day.

The Chevalier de Simiane was famous alike for his drinking powers and his gift of graceful verse; De Fargy was a polished wit, and the handsomest man in France, with an unrivalled reputation for gallantry; the Comte de Noce was the Regent's most intimate friend from boyhood--brother-in-law he called him, since they had not only tastes but even mistresses in common. Then there were the Marquis de la Fare, Captain of Guards and _bon enfant_; the Marquis de Broglio, the biggest debauchee in France, the Marquis de Canillac, the Duc de Brancas, and many another--all famous (or infamous) for some pet vice, and all the best of boon-companions for the pleasure-loving Regent.

Strange tales are told of the orgies of this select band which the Regent gathered around him--orgies which shocked even the France of the eighteenth century, when she was the acknowledged leader in licence. At six o'clock every evening Philippe's kingship ended for the day. He had had enough--more than enough--of State and ceremonial, of interviewing amba.s.sadors, and of the flatteries of Princes and the obsequious homage of courtiers. Pleasure called him away from the boredom of empire; and at the stroke of six we find him retiring to the company of his mistresses and his roues to feast and drink and gamble until dawn broke on the revelry--his laugh the loudest, his wit the most dazzling, his stories the most piquant, keeping the table in a roar with his infectious gaiety. He was Regent no longer; he was simply a _bon camarade_, as ready to exchange familiarities with a "lady of the ballet" as to lead the laughter at a joke at his own expense.

At nine o'clock, when the fun had waxed furious and wine had set the slowest tongue wagging and every eye a-sparkle, other guests streamed in to join the orgy--the most beautiful ladies of the Court, from the d.u.c.h.esse de Gesores and Madame de Mouchy to the Regent's own daughter, the d.u.c.h.esse de Berry, who, young as she was, had little to learn of the arts of dissipation. And in the wake of these high-born women would follow laughing, bright-eyed troupes of dancing and chorus-girls from the theatres with an escort of the cleverest actors of Paris, to join the Regent's merry throng.

The champagne now flowed in rivers; the servants were sent away; the doors were locked and the fun grew riotous; ceremony had no place there; rank and social distinctions were forgotten. Countesses flirted with comedians; Princes made love to ballet-girls and d.u.c.h.esses alike. The leader of the moment was the man or woman who could sing the most daring song, tell the most piquant story, or play the most audacious practical joke, even on the Regent himself. Sometimes, we are told, the lights would be extinguished, and the orgy continued under the cover of darkness, until the Regent suddenly opened a cupboard, in which lights were concealed--to an outburst of shrieks of laughter at the scenes revealed.

Thus the mad night hours pa.s.sed until dawn came to bring the revels to a close; or until the Regent would sally forth with a few chosen comrades on a midnight ramble to other haunts of pleasure in the capital--the lower the better. Such was the way in which Philippe of Orleans, Regent of France, spent his nights. A few hours after the carouse had ended he would resume his sceptre, as austere and dignified a ruler as you would find in Europe.

It must not be imagined that Philippe was the only Royal personage who thus set a scandalous example to France. There was, in fact, scarcely a Prince or Princess of the Blood Royal whose love affairs were not conducted flagrantly in the eyes of the world, from the Dowager d.u.c.h.esse de Bourbon, who lavished her favours on the Scotch financier, John Law, of Lauriston, to the Princesse de Conte, who mingled her piety with a marked partiality for her nephew, Le Kalliere.

As for the Regent's own daughters, from the d.u.c.h.esse de Berry, to Louise, Queen of Spain, each has left behind her a record almost as scandalous as that of her father. It was, in fact, an era of corruption in high places, when, in the reaction that followed the dismal and decorous last years of Louis XIV.'s reign, Pleasure rose phoenix-like from the ashes of ruin and flaunted herself unashamed in every guise with which vice could deck her.

It must be said for the Regent, corrupt as he was, that he never abused his position and his power in the pursuit of beauty. His mistresses flocked to him from every rank of life, from the stage to the highest Court circles, but remained no longer than inclination dictated. And the fascination is not far to seek, for Philippe d'Orleans was of the men who find easy conquests in the field of love. He was one of the handsomest men in all France; and to his good-looks and his reputation for bravery he added a manner of rare grace and courtliness, a supple tongue, and that strange magnetic power which few women could resist.

No King ever boasted a greater or more varied list of favourites, in which actresses and d.u.c.h.esses vied with each other for his smiles, in a rivalry which seems to have been singularly free from petty jealousy.

Among the beauties of the Court we find the d.u.c.h.esse de Fedari, the d.u.c.h.esse de Gesores, the Comtesse de Sabran at one extreme; and actresses like Emilie, Desmarre, and La Souris at the other, pretty b.u.t.terflies of the footlights who appealed to the Regent no more than Madame d'Averne, the gifted pet of France's wits and literary men, the most charming "blue-stocking" of her day. And all, without exception--d.u.c.h.esses, countesses, and actresses--were as ready to give their love to Philippe, the man, as to the Duc d'Orleans, Regent of France.

Even in his relations with these ministers of pleasure, the Regent's better qualities often exhibit themselves agreeably. To the pretty actress, Emilie, whose heart was so completely his, he always acted with a characteristic generosity and forbearance; and her conduct is by no means less pleasing than his. Once, we are told, when he expressed a wish to give her a pair of diamond ear-rings at a cost of fifteen thousand francs, she demurred at accepting so valuable a present. "If you must be so generous," she pleaded, "please don't give me the ear-rings, which are much too grand for such as me. Give me, instead, ten thousand francs, so that I may buy a small house to which I can retire when you no longer love me as you now do."

Emilie had scarcely returned home, however, when a Court official appeared with a package containing, not ten thousand, but twenty-five thousand francs, which her lover insisted on her keeping; and when she returned fifteen thousand francs, he promptly sent them back again, declaring that he would be very angry if she refused again to accept them.

His love, indeed, for Emilie seems to have been as pure and deep as any of which he was capable. It was no fleeting pa.s.sion, but an affection based on a sincere respect for her character and mental gifts. So highly, indeed, did he think of her judgment that she became his most trusted counsellor. She sat by his side when he received amba.s.sadors; he consulted her on difficult problems of State; and it was her advice that he often followed in preference to the wisdom of all his ministers; for, as he said to Dubois, "Emilie has an excellent brain; she always gives me the best counsel."

When at last he had to part from the modest and accomplished actress it was under circ.u.mstances which speak well for his generosity. A former lover, the Marquis de Fimarcon, on his return from fighting in Spain, sought Emilie out, and, blazing with jealousy, insisted that she should leave the Regent and return to his protection. He vowed that, if she refused, he would murder her; and when, in her alarm, she sought refuge in a convent at Charenton, he threatened to burn the nuns alive in their cells unless they restored her to him. Thus it was that, rather than allow Emilie to run any risks from her revengeful and brutal lover, the Regent relinquished his claim to her; and only when Fimarcon's continued brutality at last made intervention necessary, did he order the bully to be arrested and consigned to the prison of Fort l'eveque.

It is, however, in the story of Mademoiselle Aisse, the Circa.s.sian slave, that we find the best ill.u.s.tration of the chivalry which underlay the Regent's pa.s.sion for women, and which he never forgot in his wildest excesses. This story, one of the most touching in French history, opens in the year 1698, when a band of Turkish soldiers returned to Constantinople from a raid in the Caucasus, bringing with them, among many other captives, a beautiful child of four years, said to be the daughter of a King. So lovely was the little Circa.s.sian fairy that when the Comte de Feriol, France's Amba.s.sador to Turkey, set eyes on her, he decided to purchase her; and she became his property in exchange for fifteen hundred livres.

That she might have every advantage of training to fit her for his seraglio in later years, the child was sent to Paris, to the home of the Amba.s.sador's brother, President de Feriol, where she grew to beautiful girlhood as a member of the family, as fair a flower as ever was transplanted to French soil. Thus she pa.s.sed the next thirteen years of her young life, charming all by her sweetness of disposition, as she won the homage of all by her remarkable beauty and grace.

Such was Ayesha, or Aisse, the Circa.s.sian maid, when at last her "owner"

returned to Paris to fall under the spell of her radiant beauty and to claim her as his chattel, bought with good gold and trained at his cost to adorn his harem. In vain did Aisse weep and plead to be spared a fate from which every fibre of her being shrank in horror. Her "master" was inexorable. "When I bought you," he said, "it was my intention to make you my daughter or my mistress. I now intend that you shall become both the one and the other." Friendless and helpless, she was obliged to yield; and for six years she had to submit to the endearments of her protector, a man more than old enough to be her father, until his death brought her release.

At twenty-four, more lovely than ever, combining the beauty of the Circa.s.sian with the graces of France, Aisse had now every right to look forward at least to such happiness as was possible to a stranger in a strange land. But no sooner was one danger to her peace removed than another sprang up to take its place. The rumour of her beauty and her sweetness had come to the ears of the Regent, and strong forces were at work to bring her to his arms. Madame de Tencin was the leader in this base conspiracy, with the power of the Romish Church at her back; for with the fair Circa.s.sian high in the Regent's favour and a pliant tool in their hands, the Jesuits' influence at Court would be greatly strengthened. Dubois was won over to the unholy alliance; and the Due's _maitresse en t.i.tre_ was bribed, not only to withdraw all opposition to her proposed rival, but to arrange a meeting between the Regent and the victim.

Success seemed to be a.s.sured. Mademoiselle Aisse was to exchange slavery to her late owner for an equally odious place in the harem of the ruler of France. Her tears and entreaties were all in vain; when she begged on her knees to be allowed to retire to a convent Madame de Feriol turned her back on her. Her only hope of rescue now lay in the Regent himself; and to him she pleaded her cause with such pathetic eloquence that he not only allowed her to depart in peace, but with words of sympathy and promises of his protection in the pure and n.o.ble sense of the word.

Thus by the chivalry of the most dissolute man of his age the Circa.s.sian slave-girl was rescued from a life which to her would have been worse than death--to spend her remaining years, happy in the love of an honest man, the Chevalier d'Aydie, until death claimed her while she still possessed the beauty which had been at once her glory and her inevitable shame.

The close of the Regent's mis-spent life came with tragic suddenness.

Worn out with excesses, while still young in years, his doctors had warned him that death might come to him any day; but with the light-heartedness that was his to the last, he laughed at their gloomy forebodings and refused to take the least precautions to safeguard his health. Two days before the end came he declined point-blank to be bled in order to avert a threatened attack of apoplexy. "Let it come if it will," he said, with a laugh. "I do not fear death; and if it comes quickly, so much the better!"

On the evening of 2nd December, 1720, he was chatting gaily to the young d.u.c.h.esse de Falari, when he suddenly turned to her and asked: "Do you think there is any h.e.l.l--or Paradise?" "Of course I do," answered the d.u.c.h.esse. "Then are you not afraid to lead the life you do?" "Well,"

replied Madame, "I think G.o.d will have pity on me."

Scarcely had the words left her lips when the Regent's head fell heavily on her shoulder, and he began to slip to the floor. A glance showed her that he was unconscious; and, rushing out of the room, the terrified d.u.c.h.esse raced through the dark, deserted corridors of the palace shrieking for help. When at last help arrived, it came too late. The Regent had gone to find for himself an answer to the question his lips had framed a few minutes earlier--"is there any h.e.l.l--or Paradise?"

CHAPTER XXI

A DELILAH OF THE COURT OF FRANCE

It was a cruel fate that s.n.a.t.c.hed Gabrielle d'Estrees from the arms of Henri IV., King of France and Navarre, at the moment when her long devotion to her hero-lover was on the eve of being crowned by the bridal veil; and for many a week there was no more stricken man in Europe than the disconsolate King as he wailed in his black-draped chamber, "The root of my love is dead, and will never blossom again."

No doubt Henri's grief was as sincere as it was deep, for he had loved his golden-haired Gabrielle of the blue eyes and dimpled baby-cheeks as he had never loved woman before. It was the pa.s.sion of a lifetime, the pa.s.sion of a strong man in his prime, that fate had thus nipped in the fullness of its bloom; and its loss plunged him into an abyss of sorrow and despair such as few men have known.

But with the hero of Ivry no emotion of grief or pleasure ever endured long. He was a man of erratic, widely contrasted moods--now on the peaks of happiness, now in the gulf of dejection; one mood succeeding another as inevitably and widely as the pendulum swings. Thus when he had spent three seemingly endless months of gloom and solitude, reaction seized him, and he flung aside his grief with his black raiment. He was still in the prime of his strength, with many years before him. He would drink the cup of life, even to its dregs. He had long been weary of the matrimonial chains that fettered him to Marguerite of Valois. He would strike them off, and in another wife and other loves find a new lease of pleasure.

Thus it was with no heavy heart that he turned his back on Fontainebleau and his darkened room, and fared to Paris to find a new vista of pleasure opening to him at his palace doors, and his ears full of the praises of a new divinity who had come, during his absence, to grace his Court--a girl of such beauty, sprightliness, and wit as his capital had not seen for many a year.

Henriette d'Entragues--for this was the divinity's name--was equipped by fate as few women were ever equipped, for the conquest of a King. Her mother, Marie Touchet, had been "light-o'-love" to Charles IX.; her father was the Seigneur d'Entragues, member of one of the most blue-blooded families of France, a soldier and statesman of fame; and their daughter had inherited, with her mother's beauty and grace, the clever brain and diplomatic skill of her father. A strange mixture of the bewitching and bewildering, this daughter of a King's mistress seems to have been. Tall and dark, voluptuous of figure, with ripe red lips, and bold and dazzling black eyes, she was, in her full-blooded, sensuous charms, the very "antipodes" to the childish, fairy-like Gabrielle who had so long been enshrined in the King's heart. And to this physical appeal--irresistible to a man of such strong pa.s.sion as Henri, she added gifts of mind which "baby Gabrielle" could never claim.

She had a wit as brilliant as the tongue which was its vehicle; her well-stored brain was more than a match for the most learned men at Court, and she would leave an archbishop discomfited in a theological argument, to cross swords with Sully himself on some abstruse problem of statesmanship. When Sully had been brought to his knees, she would rush away, with mischief in her eyes, to take the lead in some merry escapade or practical joke, her silvery laughter echoing in some remote palace corridor. A bewildering, alluring bundle of inconsistencies--beauty, savant, wit, and madcap--such was Henriette d'Entragues when Henri, fresh from his woes, came under the spell of her magnetism.

Here, indeed, was an escape from his grief such as the King had never dared to hope for. Before he had been many hours in his palace, Henri was caught hopelessly in the toils of the new siren, and was intoxicated by her smiles and witcheries. Never was conquest so speedy, so dramatic.

Before a week had flown he was at Henrietta's feet, as lovesick a swain as ever sighed for a lady, pouring love into her ears and writing her pa.s.sionate letters between the frequent meetings, in which he would send her a "good night, my dearest heart," with "a million kisses."

In the days of his l.u.s.ty youth the idol and hero of France had never known pa.s.sion such as this which consumed him within sight of his fiftieth birthday, and which was inspired by a woman of much less than half his years; for at the time Henri was forty-six, and Henriette was barely twenty.

He quickly found, however, that his wooing was not to be all "plain sailing." When Henriette's parents heard of it, they affected to be horrified at the danger in which their beloved daughter was placed. They summoned her home from the perils of Court and a King's pa.s.sion; and when Henri sent an envoy to bring them to reason they sent him back with a rebuff. Their daughter was to be no man's--not even a King's--plaything. If Henri's pa.s.sion was sincere, he must prove it by a definite promise of marriage; and only on this condition would their opposition be removed.