Part 15

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 Thérèse, 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 _rôle_ on the throne of France, took his position even now very seriously. He was, however, naturally fond of amusement, 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 Thérèse 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 Thérèse 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 amusement, 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 amusement 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 outshining 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.

The character of Philippe d'Orléans 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'Orléans, 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 Prætorians 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 sex. 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'Orléans, 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 friendships--most of which he betrayed. Of his literary accomplishments the Bibliothèque Nationale contains the voluminous and ridiculous correspondence with which he honoured the witty Madame de Sablé. 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 sex. 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 passion 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 friendship 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 passion 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 Vallière.

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 _dénouement_, 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.

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 Maréchal--Maréchal _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 passed 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 passion_, 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 passion. 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 passion 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 régime_. 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 assuring 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 _ennuyée_, and when in this mood, like the Duchesse 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 passed 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.

Montalais, believing that with persons of such consequence she was pulling the strings of an intrigue that would govern the State, wished to give an air of importance to an affair in which she was interested. So, under the pledge of the strictest secrecy, she confided to La Vallière all that had passed between Guiche and Madame. Poor La Vallière, who had sworn never to hide anything from her royal lover, kept the secret till it endangered her own happiness. For Louis, talking one day to his mistress about Madame, noticed that she became confused, whereupon he instantly suspected that something important was being hidden from him. As the unfortunate girl, whom he had seduced and was later to abandon heartlessly, could not deny that she had a secret from him and, owing to her promise to Montalais, would not betray it, the King left her in a passion, swearing never to see her again. But when twenty-four hours had elapsed and she neither saw nor heard from the man she loved as few kings have been loved, Mademoiselle de la Vallière lost her head and fled to a convent. Louis, however, was no sooner informed of her flight than he went after her; and at the sight of him the beautiful girl, whom the loss of her virtue and the loss of her lover had between them nearly driven mad, rushed to his arms and told him all she knew.

The surprise of Madame--who had no idea that La Vallière was acquainted with her secrets--may be imagined when Louis coldly informed her that he was aware of her indiscretions. For her, the flirtation with which she had amused herself might easily have had serious consequences; but she was quick to discover the loop-hole by which she, and even Guiche--for she was not base enough to leave him to his fate--might escape. It was in Louis' infatuation for La Vallière that she discovered her opportunity. To him it was necessary that his mistress's flight should be hushed up by her return to the Court of Madame in the position from which she had fled. And as the cunning Madame would only agree to this on the condition that Guiche, whom she promised not to see again, should not be molested, ruin was thus averted.

At this point the Louis-Vallière intrigue became disentangled from that of Guiche-Madame, and wandered off into another and more intricate labyrinth, where after many adventures it was finally devoured by the dragon Montespan; while the Affaire Guiche-Madame, having anointed its wounds with the oil of intrigue, picked itself up and went on its perilous way more vigorously than ever.

It began its new lease of life, however, with an indiscretion. The Comte de Guiche had a friend to whom he was in the habit of confiding all his secrets, and who now appeared on the scene to play the part of villain as consummately as ever it was interpreted. This individual was the famous or infamous Marquis de Vardes, one of the most polished and attractive men at Court. He was something of a Chevalier de Gramont on an inferior scale. His epigrams and _bons mots_ were proverbial, and the dexterity with which he could turn an awkward situation to his advantage was unrivalled. He was quite universally popular, and even Louis allowed him to take an occasional liberty with him.

"De Vardes!" wrote Madame de Sévigné to her daughter; "toujours de Vardes! He is the gospel according to the day!"

This brilliant and popular Marquis was, however, as proficient in intrigue as Mademoiselle de Montalais herself, and utterly devoid of principle. The confidences of Guiche and perhaps, too, the fascination of Madame, had inspired him with the desire to win her heart. To achieve his end it was necessary that his friend Guiche should be got out of the way. On learning that the King knew of Madame's flirtation, he went to Guiche's father, the Maréchal de Gramont, and so cleverly worked on the old man's fears that he himself went to Louis and begged his Majesty to order his son to join his regiment in Lorraine. This the King willingly did, but when the news of Guiche's departure reached Madame, believing that Louis had not kept his word to her, she broke hers to him. Guiche persuaded her to grant him a farewell interview, and Montalais undertook to arrange matters. But while the Comte de Guiche, skilfully smuggled into the palace, was saying good-bye to Madame, who should be unexpectedly announced but Monsieur! The ever-vigilant Montalais had only time to whisper a warning, and the high-flown Guiche was obliged to fling dignity to the winds and escape like some ridiculous _bourgeois_ lover in a similar predicament. When Monsieur entered his wife's apartment the Comte de Guiche was in the chimney!

This expedient, however, did not prevent the _dénouement_ to which the foolish flirtation was now hurrying. Two of Madame's women, who were jealous of Montalais, having seen her smuggle Guiche into their mistress's bedroom, promptly went off to Anne of Austria and told her what they knew. Such a piece of news was too much for Anne to keep to herself, so she imparted it, with the usual exaggeration with which one embroiders a sensation, to Monsieur. His revenge was characteristic. Having packed Montalais out of the palace the next morning before his wife was awake, he went off to Henrietta Maria and complained of her daughter's conduct. But, thanks to Madame, the disagreeable notoriety this affair might have created was again averted. She frankly confessed to having acted foolishly, promised to treat Guiche for the future with the indifference she felt towards him, and begged her husband's forgiveness. Monsieur, disarmed by such straightforward conduct, and satisfied with having humbled his wife, agreed to a reconciliation, which, however, was not of long duration. As he had sense enough to understand that a scandal would damage him as much as Madame, he suffered Guiche to depart quietly for Lorraine, and contented himself with insisting on the dismissal of Montalais.

The ground was now cleared for Vardes. His plans to make himself master of Madame by love if possible, otherwise by blackmail, were most skilfully laid. As it was, above all, necessary that he should not excite the jealousy of Monsieur against himself, he set to work to excite it against the young Prince de Marsillac, the eldest son of La Rochefoucauld. He succeeded so well that Marsillac was banished from the Court, and Monsieur treated Vardes with almost as much favour as he did his _mignon_, the Chevalier de Lorraine. Having been informed by his friend Guiche of all that had passed between him and Madame, Vardes was led to believe that the passion was mutual, and in his treacherous determination to supplant Guiche he did not hesitate to paint the absent lover in the worst possible light.