She Stands Accused Part 9

Incredible as it may seem, de Feucheres took four years to realize what was the real relationship between his wife and the Prince de Conde. The aide-de-camp and his wife had a suite of rooms in the Prince's favourite chateau at Chantilly, and the ambition which Sophie had foreseen would be furthered by the marriage was realized. She was received as La Baronne de Feucheres at the Court of Louis XVIII. She was happy--up to a point. Some unpretty traits in her character began to develop: a violent temper, a tendency to hysterics if crossed, and, it is said, a leaning towards avaricious ways. At the end of four years the Baron de Feucheres woke up to the fact that Sophie was deceiving him. It does not appear, however, that he had seen through her main deception, because it was Sophie herself, we are told, who informed him he was a fool--that she was not the Prince's daughter, but his mistress.

Having waked up thus belatedly, or having been woken up by Sophie in her ungoverned ill-temper, de Feucheres acted with considerable dignity. He begged to resign his position as aide to the Prince, and returned his wife's dowry. The departure of Sophie's. .h.i.therto complacent husband rather embarra.s.sed the Prince. He needed Sophie but felt he could not keep her unattached under his roof and he sent her away--but only for a few days. Sophie soon was back again in Chantilly.

The Prince made some attempt to get de Feucheres to return, but without success. De Feucheres applied for a post in the Army of Spain, an application which was granted at once. It took the poor man seven years to secure a judicial separation from his wife.

The scandal of this change in the menage of Chantilly--it happened in 1822--reached the ears of the King, and the Baronne de Feucheres was forbidden to appear at Court. All Sophie's energies from then on were concentrated on getting the ban removed. She explored all possible avenues of influence to this end, and, incidentally drove her old lover nearly frantic with her complaints giving him no peace. Even a rebuff from the d.u.c.h.esse de Berry, widow of the son of that prince who was afterwards Charles X, did not put her off. She turned up one day at the Tuileries, to be informed by an usher that she could not be admitted.

This desire to be reinstated in royal favour is at the back of all Sophie's subsequent actions--this and her intention of feathering her own nest out of the estate of her protector. It explains why she worked so hard to have the Prince de Conde a.s.sume friendly relations with a family whose very name he hated: that of the Duc d'Orleans. It is a clue to the mysterious death, eight years later, of the Prince de Conde, last of the Condes, in circ.u.mstances which were made to pa.s.s as suicide, but which in unhampered inquiry would almost certainly have been found to indicate murder.

III

Louis-Henri-Joseph, Duc de Bourbon and Prince de Conde, seems to have been rather a simple old man: a useless old sinner, true enough, but relatively harmless in his sinning, relatively venial in his uselessness. It were futile to seek for the morality of a later age in a man of his day and rank and country, just as it were obtuse to look for greatness in one so much at the mercy of circ.u.mstance. As far as bravery went he had shown himself a worthy descendant of "the Great Conde." But, surrounded by the vapid jealousies of the most useless people who had ever tried to rule a country, he, no more than his father, had the faintest chance to show the Conde quality in war. Adrift as a comparatively young man, his world about his ears, with no occupation, small wonder that in idleness he fell into the pursuit of satisfactions for his baser appet.i.tes. He would have been, there is good reason to believe, a happy man and a busy one in a camp. There is this to be said for him: that alone among the spineless crowd of royalists feebly waiting for the miracle which would restore their privilege he attempted a blow for the lost cause. But where in all that bed of disintegrating chalk was the flint from which he might have evoked a spark?

The great grief of the Prince's life was the loss of his son, the young Duc d'Enghien, shamefully destroyed by Bonaparte. It is possible that much of the Prince's inertia was due to this blow. He had married, at the early age of fourteen, Louise-Marie-Therese-Mathilde d'Orleans, daughter of Louis-Philippe, Duc d'Orleans and the d.u.c.h.esse de Chartres, the bride being six years older than her husband. Such a marriage could not last. It merely sustained the honeymoon and the birth of that only son. The couple were apart in eighteen months, and after ten years they never even saw each other again. About the time when Sophie's husband found her out and departed the Princesse died. The Prince was advised to marry again, on the chance that an heir might be born to the large fortune he possessed. But Sophie by then had become a habit with the Prince--a bad one--and the old man was content to be left to his continual hunting, and not to bother over the fact that he was the last of his ancient line.

It may be easily believed that the Prince's disinclination to marry again contented Sophie very well. And the fact that he had no direct heir was one in which she saw possibilities advantageous to herself.

The Prince was then sixty-six years old. In the course of nature he was almost bound to predecease her. His wealth was enormous, and out of it Sophie wanted as much by bequest as she could get. She was much too shrewd, however, to imagine that, even if she did contrive to be made his sole heir, the influential families who had an eye upon the great possessions of the Prince, and who through relationship had some right to expect inheritance, would allow such a will to go uncontested. She therefore looked about among the Prince's connexions for some one who would accept coheirship with herself, and whose family would be strong enough in position to carry through probate on such terms, but at the same time would be grateful enough to her and venal enough to further her aim of being reinstated at Court. Her choice in this matter shows at once her political cunning, which would include knowledge of affairs, and her ability as a judge of character.

It should be remembered that, in spite of his t.i.tle of Duc de Bourbon, Sophie's elderly protector was only distantly of that family. He was descended in direct line from the Princes de Conde, whose connexion with the royal house of France dated back to the sixteenth century. The other line of 'royal' ducs in the country was that of Orleans, offshoot of the royal house through Philippe, son of Louis XIII, and born in 1640.

Sophie's protector, Louis-Henri-Joseph, Prince de Conde, having married Louise-Marie, daughter of the great-grandson of this Philippe, was thus the brother-in-law of that Louis-Philippe, Duc d'Orleans, who in the Revolution was known as "Egalite." This was a man whom, for his political opinion and for his failure to stand by the King, Louis XVI, the Prince de Conde utterly detested in memory. As much, moreover, as he had hated the father did the Prince de Conde detest Egalite's son. But it was out of this man's family that Sophie selected, though ultimately, her coheir.

Before she arrived at this point, however, Sophie had been at pains to do some not very savoury manoeuvring.

By a dancer at the Opera, called Mimi, the Prince de Conde had an illegitimate daughter, whom he had caused to be educated and whom he had married to the Comte de Rully. The Comtesse de Rully and her husband had a suite at Chantilly. This was an arrangement which Sophie, as reigning Queen of Chantilly, did not like at all. While the Rully woman remained at Chantilly Sophie could not think that her sway over the Prince was quite as absolute as she wished. It took her six years of badgering her protector, from 1819 to 1825, to bring about the eviction.

But meantime (for Sophie's machinations must be taken as concurrent with events as they transpire) the Baronne de Feucheres had approached the son of Philippe-Egalite, suggesting that the last-born of his six children, the Duc d'Aumale, should have the Prince de Conde for G.o.dfather. If she could persuade her protector to this the Duc d'Orleans, in return, was to use his influence for her reinstatement at Court. And persuade the old man to this Sophie did, albeit after a great deal of badgering on her part and a great deal of grumbling on the part of the Prince.

The influence exerted at Court by the Duc d'Orleans does not seem to have been very effective. The King who had dismissed her the Court, Louis XVIII, died in 1824. His brother, the Comte d'Artois, ascended the throne as Charles X, and continued by politically foolish recourses, comparable in history to those of the English Stuarts, to alienate the people by attempting to regain that anachronistic absolute power which the Revolution had destroyed. He lasted a mere six years as king. The revolution of 1830 sent him into exile. But up to the last month or so of those six years he steadfastly refused to have anything to do with the Baronne de Feucheres--not that Sophie ever gave up manoeuvring and wheedling for a return to Court favour.

About 1826 Sophie had a secret proposition made to the King that she should try to persuade the Prince de Conde to adopt as his heir one of the brothers of the d.u.c.h.esse de Berry, widow of the King's second son--or would his Majesty mind if a son of the Duc d'Orleans was adopted? The King did not care at all.

After that Sophie pinned her faith in the power possessed by the Duc d'Orleans. She was not ready to pursue the course whereby her return to Court might have been secured--namely, to abandon her equivocal position in the Prince de Conde's household, and thus her power over the Prince.

She wanted first to make sure of her share of the fortune he would leave. She knew her power over the old man. Already she had persuaded him to buy and make over to her the estates of Saint-Leu and Boissy, as well as to make her legacies to the amount of a million francs. Much as she wanted to be received again at Court, she wanted more just as much as she could grab from the Prince's estate. To make her inheritance secure she needed the help of the Duc d'Orleans.

The Duc d'Orleans was nothing loth. He had the mind of a French bourgeois, and all the bourgeois itch for money. He knew that the Prince de Conde hated him, hated his politics, hated his very name. But during the seven years it took Sophie to bring the Prince to the point of signing the will she had in mind the son of Philippe-Egalite fawned like a huckster on his elderly and, in more senses than one, distant relative. The scheme was to have the Prince adopt the little Duc d'Aumale, already his G.o.dchild, as his heir.

The ways by which Sophie went about the job of persuading her old lover do not read pleasantly. She was a termagant. The Prince was stubborn. He hated the very idea of making a will--it made him think of death. He was old, ill, friendless. Sophie made his life a h.e.l.l, but he had become dependent upon her. She ill-used him, subjecting him to physical violence, but yet he was afraid she might, as she often threatened, leave him. Her way of persuading him reached the point, it is on record, of putting a knife to his throat. Not once but several times his servants found him scratched and bruised. But the old man could not summon up the strength of mind to be quit of this succubine virago.

At last, on the 29th of August, 1829, Sophie's 'persuasions' succeeded.

The Prince consented to sign the will, and did so the following morning.

In its terms the Duc d'Aumale became residuary legatee, and 2,000,000 francs, free of death-duty, were bequeathed to the Prince's "faithful companion, Mme la baronne de Feucheres," together with the chateaux and estates of Saint-Leu-Taverny, Boissy, Enghien, Montmorency, and Mortefontaine, and the pavilion in the Palais-Bourbon, besides all the Prince's furniture, carriages, horses, and so on. Moreover, the estate and chateau of Ecouen was also given her, on condition that she allowed the latter to be used as an orphanage for the descendants of soldiers who had served with the Armies of Conde and La Vendee. The cost of running this establishment, however, was to be borne by the Duc d'Aumale.

It might be thought that Sophie, having got her way, would have turned to kindness in her treatment of her old lover. But no. All her mind was now concentrated on working, through the Duc d'Orleans, for being received again at Court. She ultimately succeeded in this. On the 7th of February, 1830, she appeared in the presence of the King, the Dauphin and Dauphine. In the business of preparing for this great day Chantilly and the Prince de Conde were greatly neglected. The beggar on horseback had to be about Paris.

But events were shaping in France at that time which were to be important to the royal family, to Sophie and her supporters of the house of Orleans, and fatal in consequence to the old man at Chantilly.

On the 27th of July revolution broke out in France. Charles X and his family had to seek shelter in England, and Louis-Philippe, Duc d'Orleans, became--not King of France, but "King of the French" by election. This consummation had not been achieved without intrigue on the part of Egalite's son. It was not an achievement calculated to abate the Prince de Conde's hatred for him. Rather did it inflame that hatred.

In the matter of the famous will, moreover, as the King's son the little Duc d'Aumale would be now in no need of the provision made for him by his unwilling G.o.dfather, while members of the exiled royal family--notably the grandson of Charles, the Duc de Bordeaux, certainly cut out of the Prince's will by the intrigues of Sophie and family--were in want of a.s.sistance. This is a point to be remembered in the light of subsequent events.

IV

While she had been looking after herself Sophie Dawes had not been unmindful ofthe advancement of hangers-on of her own family. She had about her a nephew and a niece. The latter, supposed by some to have a closer relationship to Sophie than that of mere niece, she had contrived to marry off to a marquis. The Marquise de Chabannes de la Palice need not here concern us further. But notice must be taken of the nephew.

A few million francs, provided by the Prince de Conde, had secured for this James Dawes the t.i.tle of Baron de Fla.s.sans, from a domain also bestowed upon him by Sophie's elderly lover. De Fla.s.sans, with some minor post in the Prince's household, acted as his aunt's jackal.

If Sophie, after the election to kingship of Louis-Philippe, found it necessary to be in Paris a great deal to worship at the throne her nephew kept her well informed about the Prince de Conde's activities.

The old man, it appeared, had suddenly developed the habit of writing letters. The Prince, then at the chateau of Saint-Leu expressed a desire to remove to Chantilly. He was behaving very oddly all round, was glad to have Sophie out of his sight, and seemed unwilling even to hear her name. The projected move to Chantilly, as a fact, was merely a blind to cover a flight out of Sophie's reach and influence. Rumour arose about Saint-Leu and in Paris that the Prince had made another will--one in which neither Sophie nor the Duc d'Aumale was mentioned. This was a move of which Sophie had been afraid. She saw to it that the Prince did not get away from Saint-Leu. Rumour and the Prince's conduct made Sophie very anxious. She tried to get him to make over to her in his lifetime those properties which he had left to her in his will, and it is probable enough that she would have forced this request but for the fact that, to raise the legal costs, the property of Saint-Leu would have had to be sold.

This was the position of affairs about the middle of August 1830. It was believed the Prince had already signed a will in favour of the exiled little Duc de Bordeaux, but that he had kept the act secret from his mistress.

On the morning of the 11th of the month the Prince was met outside his bedroom in his night attire. It was a young man called Obry who thus met the Prince. He was the old man's G.o.dchild. The old man's left eye was bleeding, and there was a scratch on his cheek as if made by a fingernail. To Obry the Prince attributed these wounds to the spite of the Baronne de Feucheres. Half an hour later he told his valet he had hit his head against a night-table. Later again in the day he gave another version still: he had fallen against the door to a secret staircase from his bedroom while letting the Baronne de Feucheres out, the secret staircase being in communication with Sophie's private apartments.

For the next ten days or so the Prince was engaged in contriving his flight from the gentle Sophie, a second plan which again was spoiled by Sophie's spies. There was something of a fete at Saint-Leu on the 26th, the Prince's saint's day. There was a quarrel between Sophie and the Prince on the morning of the 26th in the latter's bedroom. Sophie had then been back in Saint-Leu for three days. At midnight on the 26th the old man retired after playing a game or two at whist. He was to go on the 30th to Chantilly. He was accompanied to his bedroom by his surgeon and a valet, one Lecomte, and expressed a desire to be called at eight o'clock. Lecomte found a paper in the Prince's trousers and gave it to the old man, who placed it on the mantelshelf. Then the valet, as he said later, locked the door of the Prince's dressing-room, thus--except for the entrance from the secret staircase--locking the old man in his room.

The Prince's apartments were on the first floor of the chateau. His bedroom was approached through the dressing-room from the main corridor.

Beyond the dressing-room was a pa.s.sage, turning left from which was the bedroom, and to the right in which was an entrance to an anteroom.

Facing the dressing-room door in this same pa.s.sage was the entrance to the secret staircase already mentioned. The staircase gave access to the Baronne de Feucheres' apartments on the entrance floor. These, however, were not immediately under the Prince's rooms. An entresol intervened, and here the rooms were occupied by the Abbe Briant, a creature of Sophie's and her secretary, the Widow Lacha.s.sine, Sophie's lady's-maid, and a couple named Dupre. These last, also spies of Sophie's, had their room direcdy below the Prince's bedroom, and it is recorded that the floor was so thin that they could hear not only the old man's every movement, but anything he said.

Adjacent to the Prince's room, and on the same floor, were the rooms occupied by Lambot, the Prince's aide, and the valet Lecomte. Lambot was a lover of Sophie's, and had been the great go-between in her intrigues with the Orleans family over the will. Lecomte was in Sophie's pay.

Close to Sophie's apartments on the entrance floor were the rooms occupied by her nephew and his wife, the de Fla.s.sans. It will be seen, therefore, that the wing containing the Prince's rooms was otherwise occupied almost completely by Sophie's creatures.

You have, then, the stage set for the tragedy which was about to ensue: midnight; the last of the Condes peaceably in his bedroom for the night, and locked in it (according to Lecomte). About him, on all sides, are the creatures of his not too scrupulous mistress. All these people, with the exception of the Baronne de Fla.s.sans, who sat up writing letters until two, retire about the same time.

And at eight o'clock next morning, there being no answer to Lecomte's knocking to arouse the Prince, the door is broken open at the orders of the Baronne de Feucheres. The Prince is discovered dead in his bedroom, suspended by the neck, by means of two of his own handkerchiefs knotted together, from the fastening of one of the French windows.

The fastening was only about two and a half feet off the floor.

The handkerchief about the dead man's neck was loose enough to have permitted insertion of all the fingers of a hand between it and the neck. The second handkerchief was tied to the first, and its other end was knotted to the window-fastening, and the dead man's right cheek was pressed against the closed shutter. The knees were bent a little, the feet were on the floor. None of the usual indications of death by strangulation were present. The eyes were half closed. The face was pale but not livid. The mouth was almost closed. There was no protrusion of the tongue.

On the arrival of the civil functionaries, the Mayor of Saint-Leu and a Justice of the Peace from Enghien, the body was taken down and put on the bed. It was then found that the dead man's ankles were greatly bruised and his legs scratched. On the left side of the throat, at a point too low for it to have been done by the handkerchief, there was some stripping of the skin. A large red bruise was found between the Prince's shoulders.

The King, Louis-Philippe, heard about the death of the Prince de Conde at half-past eleven that same day. He immediately sent his High Chancellor, M. Pasquier, and his own aide-de-camp, M. de Rumigny, to inquire into the matter. It is not stretching things too far to say that the King's instructions to these gentlemen are revealed in phrases occurring in the letters they sent his Majesty that same evening. Both recommend that Drs. Marc and Marjolin should be sent to investigate the Prince's tragic death. But M. Pasquier mentions that "not a single doc.u.ment has been found, so a search has already been made." And M. de Rumigny thinks "it is important that n.o.body should be accused who is likely to benefit by the will." What doc.u.ment was expected to be discovered in the search? Why, a second will that would invalidate the first. Who was to benefit by the first will? Why, the little Duc d'Aumale and Dame Sophie Dawes, Baronne de Feucheres!

The post-mortem examination was made by the King's own physicians.

During the examination the Prince's doctors, MM. Dubois and Gendrin, his personal secretary, and the faithful one among his body-servants, Manoury, were sent out of the room. The verdict was suicide. The Prince's own doctors maintained that suicide by the handkerchiefs from the window-fastening was impossible. Dr Dubois wrote his idea of how the death had occurred:

The Prince very likely was asleep in his bed. The murderers must have been given entrance to his bedroom--I have no wish to ask how or by whom. They then threw themselves on the Prince, gripped him firmly, and could easily pin him down on his bed; then the most desperate and dexterous of the murderers suffocated him as he was thus held firmly down; finally, in order to make it appear that he had committed suicide and to hinder any judicial investigations which might have discovered the ident.i.ty of the a.s.sa.s.sins, they fastened a handkerchief about their victim's neck, and hung him up by the espagnolette of the window.

And that, at all hazards, is about the truth of the death of the Duc de Bourbon and Prince de Conde. There was some official display of rigour in investigation by the Procureur; there was much play with some mysterious papers found a good time after the first discovery half-burned in the fireplace of the Prince's bedroom; there was a lot put forward to support the idea of suicide; but the blunt truth of the affair is that the Prince de Conde was murdered, and that the murder was hushed up as much as possible. Not, however, with complete success.

There were few in France who gave any countenance to the theory of suicide.

The Prince, it will be remembered, had a practically disabled left arm.

It is said that he could not even remove his hat with his left hand. The knots in the handkerchiefs used to tie him to the espagnolette were both complicated and tightly made. Impossible for a one-handed man. His bed, which at the time of his retiring to it stood close to the alcove wall, was a good foot and a half away from that wall in the morning.

Impossible feat also for this one-handed man. It was the Prince's habit to lie so much to one side of the bed that his servants had to prop the outside edge up with folded blankets. On the morning when his death was discovered it was seen that the edges still were high, while the centre was very much pressed down. There was, in fact, a hollow in the bed's middle such as might have been made by some one standing on it with shoes on. It is significant that the bedclothes were neatly turned down.