Love affairs of the Courts of Europe Part 3

"Picture," says de Goncourt, "the glittering shop, where all day long charming idlers and handsome great gentlemen lounged and ogled; the pretty milliner tripping through the streets, her head covered by a big, black _caleche_, whence her golden curls escaped, her round, dainty waist defined by a muslin-frilled pinafore, her feet in little high-heeled, buckled shoes, and in her hand a tiny fan, which she uses as she goes--and then imagine the conversations, proposals, replies!"

Such was Jeanne Becu in the first bloom of her dainty beauty, the prettiest grisette who ever set hearts fluttering in Paris streets; with laughter dancing in her eyes, a charming pertness at her red lips, grace in every movement, and the springtide of youth racing through her veins.

When Voltaire first saw her portrait, he exclaimed, "The original was fashioned for the G.o.ds." And we cannot wonder, as we look on the ravishing beauty of the face that wrung this eloquent tribute from the cold-blooded cynic--the tender, melting violet of the eyes, with their sweeping brown lashes, under the exquisite arch of brown eyebrows, the dainty little Greek nose, the bent bow of the delicious tiny mouth, the perfect oval of the face, the complexion "fair and fresh as an infant's," and a glorious halo of golden hair, a dream of fascinating curls and tendrils.

It was to this bewitching picture, "with the perfume and light as of a G.o.ddess of love," that Jean du Barry, self-styled Comte, adventurer and roue, succ.u.mbed at a glance. But du Barry's tenure of her heart, if indeed he ever touched it at all, was brief; for the moment Louis XV.

set eyes on the ravishing girl he determined to make the prize his own, a superior claim to which the Comte perforce yielded gracefully.

Thus, in 1768, we find Jeanne Becu--or "Mademoiselle Vaubarnier," as she now called herself--transported by a bound to the Palace of Versailles and to the first place in the favour of the King, having first gone through the farce of a wedding ceremony with du Barry's brother, Guillaume, a husband whom she first saw on the marriage morning, and on whom she looked her last at the church door.

Then followed for the maid of the kitchen a few years of such Queendom and splendour as have seldom fallen to the lot of any lady cradled in a palace--the idolatrous worship of a King, the intoxication of the power that only beauty thus enshrined can wield, the glitter of priceless jewels, rarest laces, and richest satins and silks, the flash of gold on dinner and toilet-table, an army of servants in sumptuous liveries, the fawning of great Court ladies, the courtly flatteries of princes--every folly and extravagance that money could purchase or vanity desire.

Six years of such intoxicating life and then--the end. Louis is lying on his death-bed and, with fear in his eyes and a tardy penitence on his lips, is saying to her, "Madame, it is time that we should part." And, indeed, the hour of parting had arrived; for a few days later he drew his last wicked breath, and Madame du Barry was under orders to retire to a convent. But her grief for the dead King was as brief as her love for him had been small; for within a few months, we find her installed in her beautiful country home, Lucienne, ready for fresh conquests, and eager to drain the cup of pleasure to the last drop. Nor was there any lack of ministers to the vanity of the woman who had now reached the zenith of her incomparable charms.

Among the many lovers who flocked to the country shrine of the widowed "Queen," was Louis, Duc de Cosse, son of the Marechal de Brissac, who, although Madame du Barry's senior by nine years, was still in the prime of his manhood--handsome as an Apollo and a model of the courtly graces which distinguished the old _n.o.blesse_ in the day of its greatest pride, which was then so near its tragic downfall.

De Ca.s.se had long been a mute worshipper of Louis' beautiful "Queen,"

and now that she was a free woman he was at last able to pay open homage to her, a homage which she accepted with indifference, for at the time her heart had strayed to Henry Seymour, although in vain. The woman whose beauty had conquered all other men was powerless to raise a flame in the breast of the cold-blooded Englishman; and, realising this, she at last bade him farewell in a letter, pathetic in its tender dignity.

"It is idle," she wrote, "to speak of my affection for you--you know it.

But what you do not know is my pain. You have not deigned to rea.s.sure me about that which most matters to my heart. And so I must believe that my ease of mind, my happiness, are of little importance to you. I am sorry that I should have to allude to them; it is for the last time."

It was in this hour of disillusion and humiliation that she turned for solace to de Cosse, whose touching constancy at last found its reward.

It was not long before friendship ripened into a love as ardent as his own; and for the first time this fickle beauty, whose heart had been a p.a.w.n in the game of ambition, knew what a beautiful and enn.o.bling thing true love is.

Those were halcyon days which followed for de Cosse and the lady his loyalty had won; days of sweet meetings and tender partings--of a union of souls which even death was powerless to dissolve. When they could not meet--and de Cosse's duties often kept him from her side--letters were always on the wing between Lucienne and Paris, letters some of which have survived to bring their fragrance to our day.

Thus the lover writes, "A thousand thanks, a thousand thanks, dear heart! To-day I shall be with you. Yes, I find my happiness is in being loved by you. I kiss you a thousand times! Good-bye. I love you for ever." In another letter we read, "Yes, dear heart, I desire so ardently to be with you--not in spirit, my thoughts are ever with you, but bodily--that nothing can calm my impatience. Good-bye, my darling. I kiss you many and many times with all my heart." The curious may read at the French Record Office many of these letters written in a bold, flowing hand by de Cosse in the hey-day of his love. The paper is time-stained, the ink is faded; but each sentence still palpitates with the pa.s.sion that inspired it a century and a quarter ago.

And with this great love came new honours for de Cosse. His father's death made him Duc de Brissac, head of one of the greatest houses in France, owner of vast estates. He was appointed Governor of Paris and Colonel of the King's own body-guard. He had, in fact, risen to a perilous eminence; for the clouds of the great Revolution were already ma.s.sing in the sky, and the _sans-culotte_ crowds were straining to be at the throats of the cursed "aristos," and to hurl Louis from his throne. Brissac (as we must now call him) was thus an object of special hatred, as of splendour, standing out so prominently as representative of the hated _n.o.blesse_.

Other n.o.bles, fearful of the breaking of the storm, were flying in droves to seek safety in England and elsewhere. But when the Governor of Paris was urged to fly, he answered proudly, "Certainly not. I shall act according to my duty to my ancestors and myself." And, heedless of his life, he clung to his duty and his honour, presenting a smiling face to the scowls of hatred and envy, and spending blissful hours at Lucienne with the woman he loved.

Nor was she any less conscious of her danger, or less indifferent to it.

She also had become a target of hatred and scarcely veiled threats.

Watchful eyes marked every coming and going of Brissac's messengers with their missives of love; it was discovered that Brissac's aide-de-camp, whose life they sought, was in hiding in her house; that she was supplying the n.o.ble emigrants with money. The climax was reached when she boldly advertised a reward of two thousand louis for a clue to the jewellery of which burglars had robbed her--jewels of which she published a long and dazzling list, thus bringing to memory the days when the late King had squandered his ill-gotten gold on her.

The Duc, at last alarmed for her--never for himself--begged her either to escape, or, as he wrote, to "come quickly, my darling, and take every precaution for your valuables, if you have any left. Yes, come, and your beauty, your kindness and magnanimity. I am ashamed of it, but I feel weaker than you. How should I feel otherwise for the one I love best?"

But already the hour for flight had pa.s.sed. The pa.s.sions of the mob were breaking down the barriers that were now too weak to hold them in check; the Paris streets had their first baptism of blood, prelude to the deluge to follow; hideous, fierce-eyed crowds were clamouring at the gates of Versailles; and de Brissac was soon on his way, a prisoner, to Orleans.

The blow had fallen at last, suddenly, and with crushing force. When "Louis Hercule Timoleon de Cosse-Brissac, soldier from his birth," was charged before the National High Court with admitting Royalists into the Guards, he answered: "I have admitted into the King's Guards no one but citizens who fulfilled all the conditions contained in the decree of formation": and no other answer or plea would he deign to his accusers.

From his Orleans prison, where he now awaited the inevitable end, he wrote daily to his beloved lady; and every day brought him a tender and cheering letter from her. On 11th August, 1792, he writes: "I received this morning the best letter I have had for a long time past; none have rejoiced my heart so much. Thank you for it. I kiss you a thousand times. You indeed will have my last thought. Ah, my darling, why am I not with you in a wilderness rather than in Orleans?"

A few days later news reached Madame du Barry that her lover, with other prisoners, was to be brought from Orleans to Paris. He would thus actually pa.s.s her own door; she would at least see him once again, under however tragic conditions. With what leaden steps the intervening hours crawled by! Each sound set her heart beating furiously as if it would choke her. Each moment was an agony of antic.i.p.ation. At last she hears the sound of coming feet. She flies to the window, piercing the dark night with straining eyes. The sound grows nearer, a tumult of trampling feet and hoa.r.s.e cries. A mob of dark figures surges through her gates, pours riotously up the steps and through the open door. In the hall there is a pandemonium of cries and oaths; the door of her room is burst open, and something is flung at her feet. She glances down; and, with a gasp of unspeakable horror, looks down on the severed head of her lover, red with his blood.

The _sans-culottes_ had indeed taken a terrible revenge. They had fallen in overwhelming numbers on the prisoners and their escort; the soldiers had fled; and de Brissac found himself the centre of a mob, the helpless target of a hundred murderous blows. With a knife for sole weapon he fought valiantly, like the brave soldier he was, until a cowardly blow from behind felled him to the ground. "Fire at me with your pistols," he shouted, "your work will the sooner be over." A few moments later he drew his last gallant breath, almost within sight of the house that sheltered his beloved.

United in life, the lovers were not long to be divided. "Since that awful day," Madame du Barry wrote to a friend, "you can easily imagine what my grief has been. They have consummated the frightful crime, the cause of my misery and my eternal regrets--my grief is complete--a life which ought to have been so grand and glorious! Good G.o.d, what an end!"

Thus cruelly deprived of all that made life worth living, she cared little how soon the end came. "I ask nothing now of life," she wrote, "but that it should quickly give me back to him." And her prayer was soon to be granted. A few months after that night of horrors she herself was awaiting the guillotine in her cell at the conciergerie.

In vain did an Irish priest who visited her offer to secure her escape if she would give him money to bribe her jailers. "No," she answered with a smile, "I have no wish to escape. I am glad to die; but I will give you money willingly on condition that you save the d.u.c.h.esse de Mortemart." And while Madame de Mortemart, daughter of the man she loved, was making her way to safety under the priest's escort, Jeanne du Barry was being led to the scaffold, breathing the name of the man she had loved so well; and, however feeble the flesh, glad to follow where he had led the way.

CHAPTER VI

THE REGENT'S DAUGHTER

Many unwomanly women have played their parts in the drama of Royal Courts, but scarcely one, not even those Messalinas, Catherine II. of Russia and Christina of Sweden, conducted herself with such a shameless disregard of conventionality as Marie Louise Elizabeth d'Orleans, known to fame as the d.u.c.h.esse de Berry, who probably crowded within the brief s.p.a.ce of her years more wickedness than any woman who was ever cradled in a palace.

It is said that this libertine d.u.c.h.esse was mad; and certainly he would be a bold champion who would try to prove her sanity. But, apart from any question of a disordered brain, there was a taint in her blood sufficient to account for almost any lapse from conventional standards of pure living. Her father was that Duc d'Orleans who shocked the none too strait-laced Europe of two centuries ago by his orgies; her grandfather was that other Orleans Duke, brother of Louis XIV., whose pa.s.sion for his minions broke the heart of his English wife, the Stuart Princess Henriettta; and she had for mother one of the daughters of Madame de Montespan, light-o'-love to _le Roi Soleil_.

The offspring of such parents could scarcely have been normal; and how far from normal Marie Louise was, this story of her singular life will show. When her father, the Duc de Chartres, took to wife Mademoiselle de Blois, Montespan's daughter, there were many who significantly shrugged their shoulders and curled their lips at such a union; and one at least, the Duc's mother, Elizabeth Charlotte, Princess Palatine, was undisguisedly furious. She refused point-blank to be present at the nuptials, and when her son, fresh from the altar, approached her to ask her blessing, she retorted by giving the bridegroom a resounding slap on the face.

Such was the ill-omened opening to a wedded life which brought nothing but unhappiness with it and which gave to the world some of the most degenerate women (in addition to a son who was almost an idiot) who have ever been cradled.

The first of these degenerates was Marie Elizabeth, who was born one August day in the year 1695, and who from her earliest infancy was her father's pet and favourite. His idolatry of his first-born child, indeed, is one of the most inscrutable things in a life full of the abnormal, and in later years afforded much material for the tongue of scandal. He was inseparable from her; her lightest wish was law to him; he nursed her through her childish illnesses with more than the devotion of a mother; and, as she grew to girlhood, he worshipped at the shrine of her young beauty with the adoration of a lover and put her charms on canvas in the guise of a pagan G.o.ddess.

The Duc's affection for his daughter, indeed, was so extravagant that it was made the subject of scores of scurrilous lampoons to which even Voltaire contributed, and was a delicious morsel of ill-natured gossip in all the _salons_ and cabarets of Paris. At fifteen the princess was already a woman--tall, handsome, well-formed, with brilliant eyes and the full lips eloquent of a sensuous nature. Already she had had her initiation into the vices that proved her undoing; for in a Court noted for its free-living, she was known for her love of the table and the wine-bottle.

Such was the Duc's eldest daughter when she was ripe for the altar and became the object of an intrigue in which her scheming father, the Royal d.u.c.h.esses, the Duc de Saint-Simon, the King himself, and the Jesuits all took a part, and the prize of which was the hand of the young Duc de Berry, a younger son of the Dauphin, the grandson of King Louis.

Over the plotting and counterplotting, the rivalries and jealousies which followed, we must pa.s.s. It must suffice to record that the King's consent was at last won by the Orleans faction; Madame de Maintenon was persuaded to smile on the alliance; and, one July day, the nuptials of the Duc de Berry and the Orleans Princess were celebrated in the presence of the Royal family and the Court. A regal supper followed; and, the last toast drunk, the young couple were escorted to their room with all the stately, if scarcely decent, ceremonial which in those days inaugurated the life of the newly-wedded.

Seldom has there been a more singular union than this of the Duc d'Orleans' prodigal daughter with the almost imbecile grandson of the French King. The Duc de Berry, it is true, was good to look upon. Tall, fair-haired, with a good complexion and splendid health, he was physically, at twenty-four, no unworthy descendant of the great Louis.

He had, too, many amiable qualities calculated to win affection; but he was mentally little better than a clown. His education had been shamefully neglected; he had been suppressed and kept in the background until, in spite of his manhood, he had all the shyness, awkwardness and dullness of a backward child.

As he himself confessed to Madame de Saint-Simon, "They have done all they could to stifle my intelligence. They did not want me to have any brains. I was the youngest, and yet ventured to argue with my brother.

Afraid of the results of my courage, they crushed me; they taught me nothing except to hunt and gamble; they succeeded in making a fool of me, one incapable of anything and who will yet be the laughing-stock of everybody."

Such was the weak-kneed husband to whom was now allied the most precocious, headstrong young woman in all France; who, although still short of her sixteenth birthday, was a past-mistress of the arts of pleasure, and was now determined to have her full fling at any cost. She had been thoroughly spoiled by her too indulgent father, who was even then the most powerful man in France after the King; and she was in no mood to brook restraint from anyone, even from Louis himself.

The pleasures of the table seem now to have absorbed the greater part of her life. Read what her grandmother, the Princess Palatine, says of her: "Madame de Berry does not eat much at dinner. How, indeed, can she?

She never leaves her room before noon, and spends her mornings in eating all kinds of delicacies. At two o'clock she sits down to an elaborate dinner, and does not rise from the table until three. At four she is eating again--fruit, salad, cheese, etc. She takes no exercise whatever.

At ten she has a heavy supper, and retires to bed between one and two in the morning. She likes very strong brandy." And in this last sentence we have the true secret of her undoing. The Royal Princess was, even tat this early age, a confirmed dipsomaniac, with her brandy bottle always by her side; and was seldom sober, from rising to retiring.

To such a woman, a slave to the senses, a husband like the Duc de Berry, unredeemed by a vestige of manliness, could make no appeal. She wanted "men" to pay her homage; and, like Catherine of Russia, she had them in abundance--lovers who were only too ready to pay court to a beautiful Princess, who might one day be Queen of France. For the Dauphin was now dead; his eldest son, the Duc de Bourgogne, had followed him to the grave a few months later. Prince Philip had renounced his right to the French crown when he accepted that of Spain; and, between her husband and the throne there was now but one frail life, that of the three-year-old Duc d'Anjou, a child so delicate that he might easily not survive his great-grandfather, Louis, whose hand was already relaxing its grasp of the sceptre he had held so long.

On the intrigues with which this Queen _in posse_ beguiled her days, it is perhaps well not to look too closely. They are unsavoury, as so much of her life was. Her lovers succeeded one another with quite bewildering rapidity, and with little regard either to rank or good-looks. One special favourite of our Sultana was La Haye, a Court equerry, whom she made Chamberlain, and who is pictured by Saint-Simon as "tall, bony, with an awkward carriage and an ugly face; conceited, stupid, dull-witted, and only looking at all pa.s.sable when on horseback."

So infatuated was the d.u.c.h.esse with her ill-favoured equerry that nothing less would please her than an elopement to Holland--a proposal which so scared La Haye that, in his alarm, he went forthwith to the lady's father and let the cat out of the bag. "Why on earth does my daughter want to run away to Holland?" the Due exclaimed with a laugh.

"I should have thought she was having quite a good enough time here!"

And so would anyone else have thought.