Love affairs of the Courts of Europe Part 15

Even to such a stipulation Henri, such was his infatuation, made no demur. With his own hand he wrote an agreement pledging himself to make Demoiselle Henriette his lawful wife in case, within a certain period, she became the mother of a son; and undertaking to dissolve his marriage with his wife, Marguerite of France, for this purpose. And this agreement, signed with his own hand, he sent to the Seigneur d'Entragues and his wife, accompanied by a _douceur_ of a hundred thousand crowns.

But before it was dispatched a more formidable obstacle than even the lady's natural guardians remained to be faced--none other than the Duc de Sully, the man who had shared all the perils of a hundred fights with Henri and was at once his chief counsellor and his _fidus Achates_.

When at last he summoned up courage to place the doc.u.ment in Sully's hands, he awaited the verdict as nervously as any schoolboy in the presence of a dreaded master. Sully read through the paper, was silent for a few moments, and then spoke. "Sire," he said, "am I to give you my candid opinion on this doc.u.ment, without fear of anger or giving offence?" "Certainly," answered the King. "Well then, this is what I think of it," was Sully's reply, as he tore the doc.u.ment in two pieces and flung them on the floor. "Sully, you are mad!" exclaimed Henri, flaring into anger at such an outrage. "You are right, Sire, I am a weak fool, and would gladly know myself still more a fool--if I might be the only one in France!"

It was in vain, however, that Sully pointed out the follies and dangers of such a step as was proposed. Henri's mind was made up, and leaving his friend, in high dudgeon, he went to his study and re-wrote his promise of marriage. The way was at last clear to the gratification of his pa.s.sion. Henriette was more than willing, her parents' scruples and greed were appeased, and as for Sully--well, he must be left to get over his tantrums. Even to please such an old and trusted friend he could not sacrifice such an opportunity for pleasure and a new lease of life as now presented itself!

Halcyon months followed for Henri--months in which even Gabrielle was forgotten in the intoxication of a new pa.s.sion, compared with which the memory of her gentle charms was but as water to rich, red wine. That Henriette proved wilful, capricious, and extravagant--that her vanity drained his exchequer of hundreds of thousands of crowns for costly jewellery and dresses, was a mere bagatelle, compared with his delight in her manifold allurements.

But Sully had by no means said his last word. The decree for annulling Henri's marriage with Marguerite de Valois was p.r.o.nounced; and it was of the highest importance that she should have a worthy successor as Queen of France--a successor whom he found in Marie de Medicis.

The marriage-contract was actually sealed before the King had any suspicion that his hand was being disposed of, and it was only when Sully one day entered his study with the startling words, "Sire, we have been marrying you," that the awakening came. For a few moments Henri sat as a man stunned, his head buried in his hands; then, with a deep sigh, he spoke: "If G.o.d orders it so, so let it be. There seems to be no escape; since you say that it is necessary for my kingdom and my subjects, why, marry I must."

It was a strange predicament in which Henri now found himself. Still more infatuated than ever with Henriette, he was to be tied for life to a Princess whom he had never even seen. To add to the embarra.s.sment of his position, the condition of his marriage promise to Henriette was already on the way to fulfilment; and he was thus pledged to wed her as strongly as any State compact could bind him to stand at the altar with Marie de Medicis. One thing was clear, he must at any cost recover that fatal doc.u.ment; and, while he was giving orders for the suitable reception of his new Queen, and arranging for her triumphal progress to Paris, he was writing to Henriette and her parents demanding the return of his promise of marriage agreement--to her, a pleading letter in which he prays her "to return the promise you have by you and not to compel me to have recourse to other means in order to obtain it"; to her father, a more imperious demand to which he expects instant obedience.

As some consolation to his mistress, whose alternate tears, rage, and reproaches drove him to distraction, he creates her Marquise de Verneuil and promises that, if he should be unable to marry her, he will at least give her a husband of Royal rank, the Due de Nevers, who was eager to make her his wife.

But pleadings and threats alike fail to secure the return of the fatal doc.u.ment, and Henri is reduced to despair, until Henriette gives birth to a dead child and his promise thus becomes of as little value as the paper it was written on. The condition has failed, and he is a free man to marry his Tuscan Princess, while Henriette, thus foiled in her great ambition, is in danger not only of losing her coveted crown, but her place in the King's favour. The days of her wilful autocracy are ended; and, though her heart is full of anger and disappointment, she writes to him a pitiful letter imploring him still to love her and not to cast her "from the Heaven to which he has raised her, down to the earth where he found her." "Do not let your wedding festivities be the funeral of my hopes," she writes. "Do not banish me from your Royal presence and your heart. I speak in sighs to you, my King, my lover, my all--I, who have been loved by the earth's greatest monarch, and am willing to be his mistress and his servant."

To such humility was the proud, arrogant beauty now reduced. She was an abject suppliant where she had reigned a Queen. Nor did her pleadings fall on deaf ears. Her Royal lover's hand was given, against his will, to his new Queen, but his heart, he vowed, was all Henriette's--so much so that he soon installed her in sumptuous rooms in his palace adjoining those of the Queen herself.

Was ever man placed in a more delicate position than this King of France, between the rival claims of his wife and mistress, who were occupying adjacent apartments, and who, moreover, were both about to become mothers? It speaks well for Henri's tactfulness that for a time at least this _menage a trois_ appears to have been quite amiably conducted. When Queen Marie gave birth to a son it was to Henriette that the infant's father first confided the good news, seasoning it with "a million kisses" for herself. And when Henriette, in turn, became a mother for the second time, the double Royal event was celebrated by fetes and rejoicings in which each lady took an equally proud and conspicuous part.

It was inevitable, however, that a woman so favoured by the King, and of so imperious a nature, should have enemies at Court; and it was not long before she became the object of a conspiracy of which the d.u.c.h.esse de Villars and the Queen were the arch-leaders. One day a bundle of letters was sent anonymously to Henri, letters full of tenderness and pa.s.sion, addressed by his beloved Marquise, Henriette, to the Prince de Joinville. The King was furious at such evidence of his mistress's disloyalty, and vowed he would never see her again. But all his storming and reproaches left the Marquise unmoved. She declared, with scorn in her voice, that the letters were forgeries; that she had never written to Joinville in her life, nor spoken a word to him that His Majesty might not have heard. She even pointed out the forger, the Duc de Guise's secretary, and was at last able to convince the King of her innocence.

The d.u.c.h.esse de Villars and Joinville were banished from the Court in disgrace; the Queen had a severe lecture from her husband; and Henriette was not only restored to full favour, but was consoled by a welcome present of six thousand pounds.

But the days of peace in the King's household were now gone for ever.

Queen Marie, thus humiliated by her rival, became her bitter enemy and also a thorn in the side of her unfaithful husband. Every day brought its fierce quarrels which only stopped on the verge of violence. More than once in fact Henri had to beat a retreat before his Queen's clenched fist, while she lost no opportunity of insulting and humiliating the Marquise.

It is impossible altogether to withhold sympathy from a man thus distracted between two jealous women--a shrewish wife, who in her most amiable mood repelled his advances with coldness and cutting words, and a mistress who vented on him all the resentment which the Queen's insults and snubs roused in her. Even all Sully's diplomacy was powerless to pour oil on such vexed waters as these.

The Queen, however, had not long to wait for her revenge, which came with the disclosure of a conspiracy, at the head of which were Henriette's father and her half-brother, the Comte d'Auvergne, and in which, it was proved, she herself had played no insignificant part.

Punishment came, swift and terrible. Her father and brother were sentenced to death, herself to perpetual confinement in a monastery.

But even at this crisis in her life, Henriette's stout heart did not fail her for a moment. "The King may take my life, if he pleases," she said. "Everybody will say that he killed his wife; for I was Queen before the Tuscan woman came on the scene at all." None knew better than she that she could afford thus to put on a bold front. Henri was still her slave, to whom her little finger was more than his crown; and she knew that in his hands both her liberty and her life were safe. And thus it proved; for before she had spent many weeks in the Monastery of Beaumont-les-Tours, its doors were flung open for her, and the first news she heard was that her father was a free man, while her brother's death-sentence had been commuted to a few years in the Bastille.

Thus Henriette returned to the turbulent life of the palace--the daily routine of quarrels and peacemaking with the King, and undisguised hostility from the Queen, through all of which Henri's heart still remained hers. "How I long to have you in my arms again," he writes, when on a hunting excursion, which had led him to the scene of their early romance. "As my letter brings back the memory of the past, I know you will feel that nothing in the present is worth anything in comparison. This, at least, was my feeling as I walked along the roads I so often traversed in the old days on my journey to your side. When I sleep I dream of you; when I wake my thoughts are all of you." He sends her a million kisses, and vows that all he asks of life is that she shall always love him entirely and him alone.

One would have thought that such a conquest of a King and such triumph over a Queen would have gratified the ambition of the most exacting of women. But the Marquise de Verneuil seems to have found small satisfaction in her victories. When she was not provoking quarrels with Henri, which roused him to such a pitch of anger that at times he threatened to strike her, she received his advances with a coldness or a sullen acquiescence calculated to chill the most ardent lover. In other moods she would drive him to despair by declaring that she had long ceased to love him, and that all she wanted from him was a dowry to carry in marriage to one or other of several suitors who were dying for her hand.

But Madame's day of triumph was drawing much nearer to an end than she imagined. The end, in fact, came with dramatic suddenness when Henri first set eyes on the radiantly lovely Charlotte de Montmorency. Weary at heart of the tempers and exactions of Henriette, it needed but such a lure as this to draw him finally from her side; and from the first flash of Charlotte's beautiful eyes this most susceptible of Kings was undone. Madame de Verneuil's reign was ended; the next quarrel was made the occasion for a complete rupture, and the Court saw her no more.

Already she had lost the bloom of her beauty; she had grown stout and coa.r.s.e through her excessive fondness for the pleasures of the table, and the rest of her days, which were pa.s.sed in friendless isolation, she spent in indulging appet.i.tes, which added to her mountain of flesh while robbing her of the last trace of good-looks. When the knife of Ravaillac brought Henri's life and his new romance to a tragic end, the Marquise was among those who were suspected of inspiring the a.s.sa.s.sin's blow; and although her guilt was never proved, the taint of suspicion clung to her to her last day.

After fruitless angling for a husband--the Duc de Guise, the Prince de Joinville, and many another who, with one consent, fled from her advances, she resigned herself to a life of obscurity and gluttony, until death came, one day in the year 1633, to release her from a world of vanity and disillusionment.

CHAPTER XXII

THE "SUN-KING" AND THE WIDOW

Search where you will in the record of Kings, you will find nowhere a figure more splendid and more impressive than that of the fourteenth Louis, who for more then seventy years ruled over France, and for more than fifty eclipsed in glory his fellow-sovereigns as the sun pales the stars. Nearly two centuries have gone since he closed his weary and disillusioned eyes on the world he had so long dominated; but to-day he shines in history in the galaxy of monarchs with a l.u.s.tre almost as great as when he was hailed throughout the world as the "Sun-King," and in his pride exclaimed, "_I_ am the State."

Placed, like his successor, on the greatest throne in Europe, a child of five, fortune exhausted itself in lavishing gifts on him. The world was at his feet almost before he had learned to walk. He grew to manhood amid the adulation and flatteries of the greatest men and the fairest of women. And that he might lack no great gift, he was dowered with every physical perfection that should go to the making of a King.

There was no more goodly youth in France than Louis when he first practised the arts of love-making, in which he later became such an adept, on Mazarin's lovely niece, Marie Mancini. Tall, with a well-knit, supple figure, with dark, beautiful eyes illuminating a singularly handsome face, with a bearing of rare grace and distinction, this son of Anne of Austria was a lover whom few women could resist.

Such conquests came to him with fatal ease, and for thirty years at least, until satiety killed pa.s.sion, there was no lack of beautiful women to minister to his pleasure and to console him for the lack of charms in the Spanish wife whom Mazarin thrust into his reluctant arms when he was little more than a boy, and when his heart was in Marie Mancini's keeping.

Among all the fair and frail women who succeeded one another in his affection three stand out from the rest with a prominence which his special favour a.s.signed to each in turn. For ten early years it was Louise de la Baume-Leblanc (better known to fame as the d.u.c.h.esse de Lavalliere) who reigned as his uncrowned Queen, and who gave her life to his pleasure and to the care of the children she bore to him. But such constancy could not last for ever in a man so const.i.tutionally inconstant as Louis. When the Marquise de Montespan, in all her radiant and sensuous loveliness, came on the scene, she drew the King to her arms as a flame lures the moth. Her voluptuous charms, her abounding vitality and witty tongue, made the more refined beauty and the gentleness of the d.u.c.h.esse flavourless in comparison; and Louise, realising that her sun had set, retired to spend the rest of her life in the prayers and piety of a convent, leaving her brilliant rival in undisputed possession of the field.

For many years Madame de Montespan, the most consummate courtesan who ever enslaved a King, queened it over Louis in her magnificent apartments at Versailles and in the Tuileries. He was never weary of showering rich gifts and favours on her; and, in return, she became the mother of his children and ministered to his every whim, little dreaming of the day when she in turn was to be dethroned by an insignificant widow whom she regarded as the creature of her bounty, and who so often awaited her pleasure in her ante-room.

When Francoise d'Aubigne was cradled, one November day in the year 1635, within the walls of a fortress-prison in Poitou, the prospect of a Queendom seemed as remote as a palace in the moon. She had good blood in her veins, it is true. Her ancestors had been n.o.blemen of Normandy before the Conqueror ever thought of crossing the English Channel, and her grandfather, General Theodore d'Aubigne, had won distinction as a soldier on many a battlefield. It was to her father, profligate and spendthrift, who, after squandering his patrimony, had found himself lodged in jail, that Francoise owed the ignominy of her birthplace, for her mother had insisted on sharing the captivity of her ne'er-do-well husband.

When at last Constant d'Aubigne found his prison doors opened, he shook the dust of France off his feet and took his wife and young children away to Martinique, where at least, he hoped, his record would not be known. On the voyage, we are told, the child was brought so near to death's door by an illness that her body was actually on the point of being flung overboard when her mother detected signs of life, and rescued her from a watery grave. A little later, in Martinique, she had an equally narrow escape from death as the result of a snakebite. A child thus twice miraculously preserved was evidently destined for better things than an early tomb, more than one declared; and so indeed it proved.

When the father ended his mis-spent days in the West Indian island, the widow took her poverty and her fledgelings back to France, where Francoise was placed under the charge of a Madame de Villette, to pick up such education as she could in exchange for such menial work as looking after Madame's poultry and scrubbing her floors. When her mother in turn died, the child (she was only fifteen at the time) was taken to Paris by an aunt, whose miserliness or poverty often sent her hungry to bed.

Such was Francoise's condition when she was taken one day to the house of Paul Scarron, the crippled poet, whose satires and burlesques kept Paris in a ripple of merriment, and to whom the child's poverty and friendless position made as powerful an appeal as her budding beauty and her modesty. It was a very tender heart that beat in the pain-racked, paralysed body of the "father of French burlesque"; and within a few days of first setting eyes on his "little Indian girl," as he called her, he asked her to marry him. "It is a sorry offer to make you, my dear child," he said, "but it is either this or a convent." And, to escape the convent, Francoise consented to become the wife of the "bundle of pains and deformities" old enough to be her father.

In the marriage-contract Scarron, with characteristic buffoonery, recognises her as bringing a dower of "four louis, two large and very expressive eyes, a fine bosom, a pair of lovely hands, and a good intellect"; while to the attorney, when asked what his contribution was, he answered, "I give her my name, and that means immortality." For eight years Francoise was the dutiful wife of her crippled husband, nursing him tenderly, managing his home and his purse, redeeming his writing from its coa.r.s.eness, and generally proving her grat.i.tude by a ceaseless devotion. Then came the day when Scarron bade her farewell on his death-bed, begging her with his last breath to remember him sometimes, and bidding her to be "always virtuous."

Thus Francoise d'Aubigne was thrown once more on a cold world, with nothing between her and starvation but Scarron's small pension, which the Queen-mother continued to his widow, and compelled to seek a cheap refuge within convent walls. She had however good-looks which might stand her in good stead. She was tall, with an imposing figure and a natural dignity of carriage. She had a wealth of light-brown hair, eyes dark and brilliant, full of fire and intelligence, a well-shaped nose, and an exquisitely modelled mouth.

Beautiful she was beyond doubt, in these days of her prime; but there were thousands of more beautiful women in France. And for ten years Madame Scarron was left to languish within the convent walls with never a lover to offer her release. When the Queen-mother died, and with her the pitiful pension, her plight was indeed pitiful. Her pet.i.tions to the King fell on deaf ears, until Montespan, moved by her tears and entreaties, pleaded for her; and Louis at last gave a reluctant consent to continue the allowance.

It was a happy inspiration that led Scarron's widow to the King's favourite, for Madame de Montespan's heart, ever better than her life, went out to the gentle woman whom fate was treating so scurvily. Not content with procuring the pension, she placed her in charge of her nursery, an office of great trust and delicacy; and thus Madame Scarron found herself comfortably installed in the King's palace with a salary of two thousand crowns a year. Her day of poverty and independence was at last ended. She had, in fact, though she little knew it, placed her foot on the ladder, at the summit of which was the dazzling prize of the King's hand.

Those were happy years which followed. High in the favour of the King's mistress, loving the little ones given into her charge as if they were her own children, especially the eldest born, the delicate and warm-hearted Duc de Maine, who was also his father's darling, Madame had nothing left to wish for in life. Her days were full of duty, of peace, and contentment. Even Louis, as he watched the loving care she lavished on his children, began to thaw and to smile on her, and to find pleasure in his visits to the nursery, which grew more and more frequent. There was a charm in this sweet-eyed, gentle-voiced widow, whose tongue was so skilful in wise and pleasant words. Her patient devotion deserved recognition. He gave orders that more fitting apartments should be a.s.signed to Madame--a suite little less sumptuous than that of Montespan herself; and that money should not be lacking, he made her a gift of two hundred thousand francs, which the provident widow promptly invested in the purchase of the castle and estate of Maintenon.

Such marked favours as these not unnaturally set jealous tongues wagging. Even Montespan began to grow uneasy, and to wonder what was coming next. When she ventured to refer sarcastically to the use "Scarron's widow" had made of his present, Louis silenced her by answering, "In my opinion, _Madame de Maintenon_ has acted very wisely"; thus by a word conferring n.o.ble rank on the woman his favourite was already beginning to fear as a rival.

And indeed there were soon to be sufficient grounds for Montespan's jealously and alarm. Every day saw Louis more and more under the spell of his children's governess--the middle-aged woman whose musical voice, gentle eyes, and wise words of counsel were opening a new and better world to him. She knew, as well as himself, how sated and weary he was of the cup of pleasure he had now drained to its last dregs of disillusionment; and he listened with eager ears to the words which pointed to him a surer path of happiness. Even reproof from her lips became more grateful to him than the sweetest flatteries from those of the most beautiful woman who counted but half of her years.

The growing influence of the widow Scarron over the "Sun-King" had already become the chief gossip of the Court. From the allurements of Montespan, of Mademoiselle de Fontanges, and of de Ludre he loved to escape to the apartments of the soft-voiced woman who cared so much more for his soul than for his smiles. "His Majesty's interviews with Madame de Maintenon," Madame de Sevigne writes, "become more and more frequent, and they last from six in the morning to ten at night, she sitting in one arm-chair, he in another."

In vain Montespan stormed and wept in her fits of jealous rage; in vain did the beautiful de Fontanges seek to lure him to her arms, until death claimed her so tragically before she had well pa.s.sed her twentieth birthday. The King had had more than enough of such Delilahs. Pleasure had palled; peace was what he craved now--salve for his seared conscience.

When Madame de Maintenon was appointed princ.i.p.al lady-in-waiting to the Dauphine and when, a little later, Louis' unhappy Queen drew her last breath in her arms, Montespan at last realised that her day of power was over. She wrote letters to the King begging him not to withdraw his affection from her, but to these appeals Louis was silent; he handed the letters to Madame de Maintenon to answer as she willed.

The Court was quick to realise that a new star had risen; ministers and amba.s.sadors now flocked to the new divinity to consult her and to win her favour. The governess was hailed as the new Queen of Louis and of France. The climax came when the King was thrown one day from his horse while hunting, and broke his arm. It was Madame de Maintenon alone who was allowed to nurse him, and who was by his side night and day. Before the arm was well again she was standing, thickly veiled, before an improvised altar in the King's study, with Louis by her side, while the words that made them man and wife were p.r.o.nounced by Archbishop de Harlay.