Court Beauties of Old Whitehall Part 10

To facilitate matters Anne gave a dance in honour of Henrietta, who was then eleven and very precocious, if equally unattractive, for her age.

The young King, who by all the rules of etiquette, which he observed so faithfully in after life, should have offered his hand to his cousin, accorded this honour, to his mother's dismay, to the d.u.c.h.esse de Mercoeur, the eldest of the beautiful nieces of Mazarin. Anne, who though now no longer Regent, nevertheless deluded herself with the thought that her influence over her son was still paramount, was covered with mortification and lost her head. She went up to her son and ordered him to dance with his cousin. But the expression on Louis' face warned the observant Henrietta Maria that another humiliation was imminent for her, and she tried to avert it with a tact that was hardly to be expected of her by at once intervening between the mother and son, declaring that her daughter had hurt her foot and could not dance.

"Well, then," cried the exasperated Anne, "if Henrietta does not dance neither shall Louis."

The boy, intensely mortified at the scene his mother was making before the whole Court, was quick to guess her motive. Having led the d.u.c.h.esse de Mercoeur back to her seat, he went up sulkily to his cousin and asked her to dance. But the next day when Anne, who had had time to cool, coaxingly explained to him her plans for his marriage, he replied firmly, with all the pride of a boy of seventeen, "that he did not like little girls."

Anne of Austria did not patiently brook attempts to thwart her, but in this instance by wisely discerning her master in her son she managed to marry him--in his own good time--to another niece, the daughter of her brother, the King of Spain. As for the Queen of England, her disappointment was very bitter, and she wept and prayed and plotted against Cromwell more than ever. While Henrietta returned to her former obscurity, and though she did not cherish resentment against Louis, for whom she cared quite as little as he cared for her, she did not forget the slight she had received from him.

At last the day of triumph she had antic.i.p.ated for her brother arrived.

When the news reached Paris of the _gaudeamus_ with which Charles II.

was received in England, Henrietta Maria and her daughter were transported with joy. The sister of the King of England became at once a _partie_ eagerly sought after. Among those who wished to marry her was the Emperor. She, however, willingly consented to the proposal for her hand made by France on behalf of Monsieur, Louis XIV.'s brother, not because she loved him, but because such an alliance was to the interest of her own brother. This marriage was no sooner arranged, to the great satisfaction of Henrietta Maria, to whom the thought of her daughter on the steps of the French throne was almost as pleasing as the sight of her on the throne itself would have been, than the Queen and the Princess went to England to share in the triumph of King Charles.

Without detailing the events of this visit, on which Henrietta's right to be cla.s.sed among the beauties of the Court of Whitehall rests, quite as much as on the fact of her birth, it will be sufficient to say that it was a success. With the restoration of Charles to the throne of his ancestors, Stuarts of every degree of consanguinity had flocked to London. They came from all over Europe, rich and poor, blood relations and collaterals; there never had been in the history of the family such a reunion. As most of them wanted something, a young king in the hour of victory could not but be generous; offices and honours rained on Stuarts of Blantyre and Stuarts of Richmond; places and pensions on aunt-Queens of Bohemia, on princely cousin Ruperts, and dowager sisters of Orange.

Retrenchment was a word that had not been invented to frighten nations with in that day. But of all her family the one who got the lion's share of this prodigal profusion was the Princess Henrietta. The others took the wealth of the people, she won its heart.

In the baccha.n.a.l joy of the Restoration sentiment was conspicuous. The interest in the dramatic romance of the dynasty was heightened by the well-known sympathy between the King and his youngest sister. Though she had grown up un.o.bserved in the French Court, England had been following her career. Cavaliers had noisily drunk her health on the Rhine, in the army of Conde, in the Highlands, and in whispers all over Cromwell-ridden England. Even the Puritans had heard with sentimental contempt--for there was sentiment in them too--of Charles Stuart's letters to the little girl in the Louvre, which bore the simple, pathetic address, "For my dear, dear sister." To this member of the family at least the nation was prepared to give no grudging welcome. The sudden and overwhelming gladness that had come into her life had transformed her into a fascinating girl of seventeen. Beautiful in the vulgar, plastic sense she was not, yet she created the impression of beauty. Like Madame de Pompadour, she possessed the _beaute sans traits_. The lights in her expressive eyes, the swift changes of her mobile face, spoke to all of the sympathy and gaiety of her temperament.

The praises of Whitehall echoed in the coffee-houses, everybody talked of her, everybody wished to see her. Her public appearances were ovations. It was impossible to resist her smile. It was the smile of one who seems to desire nothing so much as to please. In a princess this is even more winning than tact in a king. "On dirait qu'elle demande le coeur," says M. Anatole France, "voila le secret de Madame."

Money was as necessary to her as to any of the others of her family; _she_ had never had a farthing of her own. But to none of the Stuarts did the nation give so gracefully and so quickly. The House of Commons not only voted her a gift of ten thousand pounds, but sent her the money on the same day. But in the midst of all this popularity and joy a great gloom fell over Whitehall. Henrietta's youngest brother, the Duke of Gloucester, had died of small-pox just before she arrived in England; and now her only sister, the Princess of Orange, fell ill of the same disease and succ.u.mbed after a short illness. This tragedy occurring at such a time "wholly altered," says Evelyn, "the face and gallantry of the whole Court." Henrietta Maria, terrified lest she should lose her only surviving daughter, on whose future she built such high hopes, eagerly hastened to leave a country which seemed to bring nothing but disaster to her family. Their departure was facilitated by the impatience of the French Government to conclude the projected alliance with England--an impatience manifested through the anxiety of Monsieur in regard to the health of his _fiancee_. Within less than three months of leaving Paris for London the Princess was back in the city of her adoption, and shortly afterwards her marriage with the French king's only brother took place, by which she became, as regards rank, the second woman in the kingdom.

Those who remembered what an insignificant girl she had been were amazed at the change in her. It was not, however, she who had changed, but merely the light in which she had stood. Heretofore, because it had not considered her, the world took it for granted that she was not worth considering. But now as the wife of the first prince of the blood all eyes were turned upon her, while she, like an understudy who suddenly finds herself in the _role_ for which she has been trained, acted her part to the best of her ability. That she electrified the French Court as she had done Whitehall did not in the least surprise the few who had known her intimately; on the contrary, they confidently expected her success. Madame de Motteville, a shrewd observer who knew her well, had predicted that "when she appeared on the great theatre of the Court of France she would play one of the leading parts there."

To her the _ancien regime_ owed its two chief characteristics--its gaiety and its grace. She possessed "une vivacite d'esprit et une elegance de manieres" that in casting their spell over women as well as men created a model which made France down to the Revolution the supreme arbiter of taste in Europe. Her own natural ability--a quality that very few of the Stuarts lacked--sharpened and refined by the careful education her mother had given her, made her readily discern true genius from its sham. The artistic and intellectual appealed to her strongly.

In the searchlight that the people fix upon royalty she was never seen to better advantage than when in the company of the elect of the nation.

If Louis XIV. may be compared to Augustus, Madame was his Mecaenas. She more than he made his fame splendid. It was she who mined and refined the ore which Louis stamped with his name. La Rochefoucauld and Bussy-Rabutin, Bossuet and Boileau, Conde and Turenne, Madame de Sevigne and Madame de La Fayette, all alike found in her an eager, sympathetic, and even a critically discriminating admirer.

In her day the peasants did not count as human beings; they were considered either as food for cannon or the mine that produced the gold of the upper cla.s.ses. When the "people" were spoken of it was the _bourgeoisie_, the Third Estate, that was meant. The distance between this cla.s.s and the throne was so bridgeless that only a revolution, one hundred and fifty years in the building, could span it. But across even this vast s.p.a.ce the fascination of Madame penetrated. In the sublime _oraison funebre_ that the great Bossuet p.r.o.nounced over her dead body, he merely stated the simple truth when he declared that the people of Paris shuddered when, like a clap of thunder, there resounded over the city the appalling news, "_Madame se meurt! Madame est morte!_"

That smile, "which seemed to ask for one's heart," had captured that of Paris as it had that of London.

Stories of her enthusiastic appreciation of genius were related everywhere, but none touched the people like those which showed her in the act of levelling the barriers between the idols of the ma.s.ses and the heroes of the Court. Everybody knew that she wept over Racine.

Everybody had heard how Boileau had been drawn from his obscurity by a quotation from his unknown poem with which she had greeted him, when pa.s.sing by chance through an ante-room in which the poor poet was waiting to solicit the patronage of some great lord. Everybody remembered that she had stood sponsor to the child of Moliere, and had "Tartuffe" acted in her own house before the King while the Church was condemning the play and demanding that the author should be burnt alive.

In a country like France such things strike the imagination. With the "people" Madame could not but be popular.

At the same time she became "toute la joie, tout le plaisir de la cour."

If the long reign of Louis XIV. had a gorgeous summer in Athenas de Montespan, and a bleak winter in Madame de Maintenon, brightened for a brief moment by the suns.h.i.+ne of the lovely d.u.c.h.ess of Burgundy, it had a joyous spring in Henrietta of England. This Golden Age of France, as it has been termed, was never so happy as when Madame infected Fontainebleau and Versailles with her gaiety.

But the Court was not sincere like the people. Courts never are. Those who owed their places and pensions to the Queen Mother and the Queen naturally studied to please them, and nothing would have pleased Anne of Austria and Marie Therese, of Spain so much as the ruin of this radiant, _spirituelle_ Madame who cast them into the shade. To the people of Paris, who shuddered when the couriers came from St. Cloud with the news of her tragic death, the Court of France appeared as dazzling as did the palace of Armida to Renaud before he crossed its threshold. It was only those within who had breathed its poisoned air, tasted its treacherous pleasures, and languished in its labyrinth of intrigue who knew how fatal it was. The roses that strewed the Court of France concealed death-traps. All who lived there walked gingerly, the first princess of the blood--aye, the Queen herself, no less than the courtiers. To some the sense of danger gives an added zest to the joy of living. Madame was one of these. All her ingenuity was requisitioned to outwit her enemies, of whom the chief were her mother-in-law, her sister-in-law, and her husband.

The young King, who had been trained by his mother to play a great _role_ on the throne of France, took his position even now very seriously. He was, however, naturally fond of amus.e.m.e.nt, and it was certainly not his Queen who could provide it for him. His Spanish cousin, whom he had married for reasons of high policy, bored him utterly. Marie Therese was very plain, very stupid, and very virtuous.

She fenced herself round with etiquette, and lived on a sort of unscalable Olympian height in all the gloomy splendour of the Spanish Court in which she had been bred. Her only recreations appeared to be cards and eating. All the Bourbons were famous gluttons, but Marie Therese in this matter suffered none to take precedence of her. Louis was not long in drawing the inevitable comparison between his wife and his sister-in-law; and when he wished amus.e.m.e.nt, conformable to his dignity and agreeable to his temperament, it was to Madame he went. The more he saw of her the more he liked her. A word, a phrase, an opinion, would suddenly arrest his attention, and from going to Madame for amus.e.m.e.nt he began to go for something else as well.

He seemed to have quite forgotten that he had ever looked upon her with disdain. But while she bore him no grudge for the slight he had put on her when there had been a question of her marrying him, she took a certain malicious, coquettish pleasure in encouraging his growing tenderness. What a sweet, innocent revenge it would be to make him fall in love with her! In a private station such a flirtation might have escaped attention, but in an Argus-eyed Court the first sigh will be suspected, the first understanding detected. The Queen, who possessed among the numerous qualities with which she bored her husband that of jealousy, complained to Anne of Austria that Madame was robbing her of her husband's affections. The Queen Mother, who liked to exercise over her family the influence which she no longer possessed in the Government, lent a ready ear to these confidences, and as she herself had a grievance against Madame for outs.h.i.+ning her, she soon found the means of venting it. When Anne of Austria had a score to pay off she stopped at nothing. In this instance the means she employed were despicable. She set her younger son, Monsieur, against his wife.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "MONSIEUR."

(PHILIPPE D'ORLeANS.)

_After Wallerant Vaillant._]

The character of Philippe d'Orleans belongs to a type with which readers of latter-day fiction are very familiar. This prince of the seventeenth century was the beau-ideal decadent that many modern novelists have delighted to depict. His mother and Mazarin, warned by the troubles the previous King's brother, Gaston d'Orleans, had caused the throne, were determined that Philippe should be trained to play the most paltry part in affairs. Consequently, while Louis XIV. was given the education which fitted him to become an able king, Monsieur was encouraged in every tendency that could enfeeble him. "The prettiest child in France" had grown up a young man of striking beauty with not a redeeming virtue. The last Valois king was the most degenerate monarch that ever sat on the throne of France, but he was at least picturesque. Monsieur did not possess even this quality. To find his equal one would have to go back to the decline of the Roman Empire. In the third century he might have won the purple and worn it like Heliogabalus, and the Praetorians would have poisoned or strangled or slain him. But he had the luck to be born in a Christian and more indulgent era, and died peacefully in his bed after a life of incredible uselessness and scandal. Brought up entirely among women, he had acquired an effeminacy that, when clad in women's dress, a costume he frequently affected, made it difficult to believe he belonged to the other s.e.x. The study of clothes was his chief consideration, he spent hours rouging and perfuming himself. Court functions, to which he looked forward like a child to a party, provided him with the opportunity to wear his gorgeous costumes. A State funeral afforded him as much pleasure as a State wedding.

La Grande Mademoiselle declares that when her father, Gaston d'Orleans, died, the King on paying her his visit of condolence, said--

"To-morrow you will see Monsieur in a trailing violet mantle. He is enchanted to hear of your father's death so as to have the pleasure of wearing it."

And as Louis predicted, Monsieur went to the funeral wearing a mantle of a "furieuse longueur."

Added to his taste for dress and pageants, he delighted in collecting precious furniture, pictures, and jewels. He also wrote neurotic verses and swore love-till-death friends.h.i.+ps--most of which he betrayed. Of his literary accomplishments the Bibliotheque Nationale contains the voluminous and ridiculous correspondence with which he honoured the witty Madame de Sable. As to the scandals into which his pleasures led him, perhaps the least said about them the better. Those who are interested in such things may learn all about them in the memoirs of his period. Shame was an emotion he never knew. When his favourite, the Chevalier de Lorraine, the most profligate man of his century, was banished, Monsieur sulked. He possessed, however, two traits that in a decadent of his type are rather surprising. He liked the society of women quite as much as that of his own s.e.x. By his two marriages he had seven children, of whom no one ever doubted that he was the father. He was, also, with all his vanity and effeminacy, personally brave. When he served in the army it was said "that he was more afraid of spoiling his complexion than of bullets." Strange to say, the division he commanded covered itself with glory. At a certain siege he so distinguished himself that Louis, who was extremely jealous of the tributes paid to others, sarcastically shouted--

"Take care, brother; I advise you to lie as flat on the ground as possible!"

Perhaps his degeneracy was not so much inherent as due to that remorseless tyranny known as "politics," which can find a host of plausible excuses to gain an end. Had Monsieur been given a fair chance he might have shown as much ability as Louis himself. After his first campaign, brilliant though it was, he was never given another command.

He had been trained to fear his brother, but now and then he resented the dwarfing to which he was continually subjected. One cannot help feeling a certain satisfaction on reading that once in boyhood in a "fit of ungovernable pa.s.sion he dashed a bowl of soup into his brother's face."

When Madame married him the process of degeneration was complete. "He was a woman," says Saint-Simon, "with all her faults and none of her virtues; childish, feeble, idle, gossiping, curious, vain, suspicious, incapable of holding his tongue, taking pleasure in spreading slander and making mischief." The union of this wretched creature and the fascinating Madame could not but be unhappy. It was a foregone conclusion that the _mignons_ of Monsieur should be jealous of her influence. They had already roused all the paltry jealousy of his nature against her when Anne of Austria reinforced them with her malice. Not that Monsieur loved his wife and resented her coquetry with his brother.

"I never loved her after the first fortnight," he confessed in later life. Monsieur's jealousy was purely personal. He was jealous of her popularity, of her wit, of her brains--in a word, of her superiority to himself.

He was also jealous of the attention the King paid her.

The family bickerings to which his attachment to his sister-in-law subjected Louis were irritating to his pride. To silence them Madame, who had no desire to forego a friends.h.i.+p that amused and flattered her as much as it pleased the King, devised a ruse by which everybody was thrown off the scent. In order to enable Louis to continue his visits and to divert in another direction the hostility to which they exposed her, it was agreed that the King should feign a pa.s.sion for one of Madame's maids of honour. The one selected for this questionable purpose was a sweet, unsophisticated young girl fresh from Touraine--the celebrated Mademoiselle de la Valliere.

The ruse succeeded only too well. Madame's enemies were completely hoodwinked, but Louis fell head over ears in love with the maid of honour. Madame, who ought to have foreseen this _denouement_, was at first astonished and mortified. She was, however, too amiable to cherish resentment, and, to show Louis how little she cared, she plunged more gaily than ever into a life of pleasure, whereby she became involved in another and more dangerous flirtation, famous in French history as: L'affaire Guiche-Madame.

This "affaire" may be described as the historical parent of a numerous family of the purest French breed, of which some of the more familiar descendants are the Diamond Necklace, the Panama, the Dreyfus.

Complexity of intrigue was to each what the "Austrian lip" is to the Hapsburgs--a family characteristic. Those who wish a graphic account of the story should read Dumas' "Vicomte de Bragelonne." We can do no more here than give a rough sketch of it.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ARMAND, COMTE DE GUICHE.

_From a painting in the possession of the Duc de Gramont._]

Like all of the Gramonts, Armand de Guiche was an original character.

His family, with the exception of the famous Chevalier, who, afterwards returned to favour, stood high at Court. His father, the Marechal--Marechal _Lampon_ they called him in Paris, from the number of lampoons his doings had inspired--was held in great esteem by Louis, who forgave him his private life for the sake of his public worth. His sister, the flighty Princess of Monaco, of whom there are many curious stories in the memoirs of the period, was loved by Monsieur as much as he could ever love any one, and an intimate friend of Madame as well; as was also his aunt, the Marquise de Saint-Chaumont, who was afterwards governess to her children. He himself had pa.s.sed all his life at Court, where till the infamous Chevalier de Lorraine came on the scene he was the bosom-friend of Monsieur.

Fortune had been particularly kind to him. He possessed everything necessary to make him a general favourite: birth, wealth, good looks, winning manners. The consciousness, however, of these great advantages, says Madame de La Fayette, "gave him a certain scornful air that tarnished his merit not a little, yet one must own no one at Court had so much of it as he." The temperament of this hero was no less romantic than his appearance. His brain teemed with the most chivalrous and erotic ideas; he longed for a _grande pa.s.sion_, but it must not be one of your commonplace, vulgar sort. He wanted a Guinevere to play Launcelot to, a Francesca to whom he might be the Paolo. And they married him when little more than a boy, much against his will, to an honest, prosaic girl. The marriage was, of course, unhappy--for the Comtesse de Guiche. She would have given half of her life to have been loved by him, but marriage had only served to make him long more than ever for the realisation of his extravagant, impossible ideal. Now and then he fancied for a moment he had found what he sought; one of these brief illusions was a girl who afterwards became the famous Princesse des Ursins.

He was still seeking the unattainable when Madame returned from London and fascinated the Court. The high-flown imagination of the Comte de Guiche was at once inflamed. It pleased him to think that the danger of lifting his eyes to one so far removed from him added to the glory of such a pa.s.sion. But Guiche's head was not yet so cracked that all sense had left it. Having learnt from the example of his uncle, the Chevalier de Gramont, how unwise it was to excite the jealousy of Louis in an affair of the heart, he prudently waited till the King had left the field before he entered it. But when his chance arrived he behaved in the most singular manner. Although they were thrown constantly together both at Fontainebleau and the Tuileries, Madame was as unaware of his infatuation as Dulcinea del Toboso of Don Quixote's. The Comte de Guiche, however, had no intention of concealing his pa.s.sion from the rest of the world. The jealousy of Monsieur was aroused--the jealousy of a slighted husband and a slighted friend. He and Guiche quarrelled, and the latter "broke with the prince of the blood as if he were his equal."

The "_bruit_," as it was called, that this quarrel occasioned was the first intimation that Madame received of the devotion of her quixotic admirer. As she was not interested in the Comte de Guiche, who had now withdrawn from Court, the affair would have ended here but for Mademoiselle de Montalais, one of her maids of honour.

This girl was an _intrigante_ of a type that abounded at the French Court throughout the _ancien regime_. Her object was to insinuate herself, so to speak, into fortune, by making herself useful to some great person. She sought an interview with the Comte de Guiche, and gained his confidence by a.s.suring him that she would win him the favour of Madame. The means she employed did not at first meet with the slightest success. Madame refused to read the letters Guiche sent her through the maid of honour, or to hold any communication with him. But Montalais was not disheartened. By dint of continually harping to her mistress on the subject of the Count she succeeded in creating a certain impression on her mind; and one day, just as Madame was leaving Fontainebleau for Paris, Montalais with a mischievous air flung into her coach all Guiche's unopened letters. As the journey was tedious and Madame had nothing better to do she read the billets. The originality of their style, which was so obscure as to suggest that the writer had no idea what he meant, amused her. The whim seized her to reply--and the flirtation began.

As her heart was not involved in the flirtation, her interest in her curious lover would no doubt speedily have waned. But love of excitement, the natural gaiety of her disposition, and the life she led with Monsieur, whose jealousy might more accurately be described as a malicious espionage, inclined Madame to coquetry. Moreover, the unexpected end to her flirtation with the King had created a sort of blank in her life; she was easily _ennuyee_, and when in this mood, like the d.u.c.h.esse de Longueville, the pleasures she sighed for were not innocent. Her jaded gaiety required a fresh stimulant, and this the flirtation with Guiche gave her. The sense of the danger they both ran from detection pleased her as a child is pleased in playing with fire.

Letters pa.s.sed between them every day, four of Guiche's to Madame's one.

One day Guiche disguised himself as an old woman and, aided by Montalais, visited his mistress. The skill with which he evaded recognition by Madame's ladies while he told them their fortunes would have done credit to a Rochester. But success may sometimes invite disaster.