Part 4

In 1738, the Countess de Mailly had been for five years the mistress of Louis XV., or, rather, his slave. She no longer pleased him, and only the lingering force of habit made him tolerate her. He was so bored that Madame de Mailly wished to divert him at any cost. She had a sister younger than herself, Pauline Félicité, who had completed her education, but still remained at the convent for economical reasons. The young girl, who was not at all religiously inclined, considered herself a prisoner. She champed at her bit. Witty, ambitious, burning to play a part, the splendors of the chateau of Versailles constantly appealed to her imagination. “I, also, would like to amuse myself.” The good-natured Mailly was not alarmed by the thought of a rival. She supposed her sister would be a precious ally, and that since a new-comer was absolutely necessary in the cabinets, it would be better that this new-comer should belong to the De Nesle family. Félicité would dispel the King’s melancholy. The little suppers would no longer have a funereal air. Louis XV. would cheer up; the situation would be saved. Madame de Mailly showed the King the beseeching letters in which her young sister spoke of Versailles as an Eldorado, the kingdom of her dreams. To be summoned to court seemed to her supreme happiness. Louis XV., flattered by so ardent a desire, granted it. Mademoiselle de Nesle arrived at Versailles in December, 1738, and acted at first as her sister’s companion. She pleased the King at once by her more than lively character and her school-girlish good-humor. She was present at all the parties and suppers, and it appears that Louis XV. made her his mistress in 1739. He thought afterwards of finding her a husband.

The sovereign who thus glided over the declivity of scandal was, nevertheless, not without remorse, and his melancholy increased along with his vices. When the Holy Week of 1739 arrived, he felt a secret anguish which troubled him profoundly. This remark of Massillon’s was realized: “The crime which you pursue with such appetite, afterwards pursues you like a cruel vulture, fastening upon and rending your heart to punish you for the pleasure it has given you.”[12]

Corrupt as he was, Louis XV. had faith. He suffered, because he acted against his conscience, and his conscience spoke louder than all his flatterers. The more adulation they gave him the more dissatisfied was he with himself. Nothing is so sad as the condition of a man who believes but does not practise, who is present at divine service, who kneels before the altar, who prays or tries to pray, and yet who does not amend his life. The ceremonies of religion, so touching and poetic, are then no longer consolations. They are torments. Remorse pursues him everywhere. The chants of the Church, if they are sad, increase his disquietude. If they are joyous, their gladness brings them into contrast with the bitterness of his heart. The soul feels that it can nevermore rejoice. Occasionally he conceives a horror of the woman who turns him from his duty; she appears to him for what she is: his enemy, his bad angel. Then the habit of vice resumes its sway. Remorse is stilled for awhile. Holy Week has gone by. But the wound remains at the bottom of his heart, profound, incurable.

Louis XV. dared not communicate in 1739. He had been told of sacrilegious men, who, receiving the Host in their mouths, and thus “eating and drinking their own damnation,” had fallen stiff and dead. This made him reflect, and when the grand provost asked whether he would touch for the king’s evil, which the Kings of France cannot do until after they have received Communion, he drily answered: No. A King of France who does not make his Easter duty, a son of St. Louis who conducts himself like a disciple of Voltaire, what a scandal! Concerning this, Barbier the advocate, writes in his _Journal_: “It is dangerous for a king to give such an example to his people; we are on good enough terms with the Pope for the Son of the Church to have a dispensation to make his Easter communion, no matter in what state he is, without sacrilege and with a safe conscience.” Strange manner of comprehending religion! The impression made on the court was deplorable in this century apparently so incredulous. D’Argenson himself affirms this. He says: “They tried to hide the indecency by a Low Mass which Cardinal de Rohan should say in the cabinet of the King, Père de Linières being present; the fact that His Majesty had not presented himself either at the tribunal of Penance or to receive the Eucharist would be carefully concealed.”

Some months later (September 23, 1739) the King arranged a marriage for Mademoiselle de Nesle. He had her espouse the Count de Vintimille, and deigned to give the husband the bridal shirt with his own royal hand. This was the first time that Louis XV. had thus honored any one. Madame de Vintimille was the only woman to whom he gave any presents on New Year’s Day, 1740. But the new favorite was not much the richer for them. The monarch, afterwards so prodigal, was at this time more than economical. The countess applied to him at least half of what was said of the Czar Peter when he was in France: “He makes love like a street-porter, and pays in the same way.” The Marquis de Nesle, father of the royal mistresses, remained in a very embarrassed pecuniary position; in November, 1739, he had been suddenly banished to Lisieux, in spite of the credit of his daughters, for having spoken scornfully of “his wretched suit against his wretched creditors.” D’Argenson grows indignant at such severity. He says: “They will have it that the King has performed a Roman action, worthy of Manlius Torquatus and Brutus, in punishing severely his natural and actual father-in-law for a slight offence given to a simple member of the council. This has astonished everybody, for, as a matter of fact, one puts himself under obligations in love, especially when one is king, and has a continuous attachment for one of his subjects.”

At the close of 1740, Madame de Vintimille became pregnant. People said that Louis XV. had more than one reason to be interested in the favorite’s condition. Perhaps he fancied that he was going to taste family joys along with her. Vain hope. Apart from pure sentiments and legitimate affections there are only disappointments and chagrins. Madame de Vintimille was brought to bed with a boy in August, 1741. The King went three or four times a day to inquire about her. He embraced the child with transports. The mother seemed at the height of favor. But the chastisement of Heaven overtook the fault at once. Madame de Vintimille was seized with miliary fever, and died September 9, in atrocious torments, without having had time to receive the sacraments. Louis XV. was dismayed. He felt himself guilty of this death in the sight of God and men. The lover had involuntarily been the executioner. He felt himself overwhelmed by the weight of an implacable malediction, and, horrified at himself, he besought pardon of the dead woman and of God. If he tried to speak, sobs impeded his utterance and he relapsed into silence. Sick and despairing in his bed, he had Mass said in his chamber, and people began to wonder whether he would not seek a remedy for his remorse in asceticism. Madame de Mailly, forgetting the rival in the sister, went to pray every day beside Madame de Vintimille’s tomb, and it was in memory of his second mistress that Louis XV. returned to the first one. She had the advantage of being able to weep with him, and he could make her the confidant of his grief.

VII

THE DISGRACE OF THE COUNTESS DE MAILLY

Louis XV. wept for Madame de Vintimille in company with Madame de Mailly. But those who thought him inconsolable little knew his character; his schemes of conversion were but passing caprices. He had not force enough to break the long chain of his iniquities. He was not merely not recalled to well-doing by the lamentable death of Madame de Vintimille, but he fell back into the paths of scandal with a promptitude which had not even the excuse of passion.

Madame de Mailly was still the acknowledged favorite, but the King had not loved her for a long time. She spent another year at court after the death of Madame de Vintimille. This was a year of sorrow, humiliations, and afflictions. Louis XV. caused the poor deserted woman to drink the chalice of bitterness to the dregs, and made her so unhappy that even the Queen took pity on her.

What is more lamentable than the last agonies of love? To perceive that one has been mistaken; that the being one has thought good, generous, and grateful is wicked, perfidious, and ungrateful; to find hardness instead of mildness, egotism instead of devotion; what an awakening! what a torture! And one cannot complain. Morality, decorum, religion, all command silence. If you groan, the world scoffs at you. Your afflictions obtain scorn and not compassion. You cannot confess your sorrow before either God or men. The being who persecutes and outrages you, who betrays and kills you, is still beloved, and this love, alas! is only a folly, a weakness. You humble yourself, you crawl, you cringe. And all that avails you nothing. Your cause is lost. Nothing is left you but to suffer and to die.

Such was the destiny of Madame de Mailly. To lose the heart of the King was not enough. It was reserved to her to find not merely a rival but a persecutor in her own sister, Madame de la Tournelle.

Marie Anne de Mailly-Nesle, afterwards so well-known under the title of Duchess de Châteauroux, was the fifth and youngest daughter of the Marquis de Nesle. Born in 1717, she married, in 1734, the Marquis de la Tournelle, an extremely pious young man, who spent the greater part of his modest fortune in alms. Becoming a widow in 1740, at the age of twenty-two, she took refuge with her relative, the Duchess de Mazarin, lady of the bedchamber to the Queen, who died two years later. Madame de Tournelle was again on the point of being without an asylum. But the King had already remarked her beauty. She was appointed lady of the palace to the Queen (September, 1742). M. de Maurepas and Cardinal Fleury, who disliked her and already had a presentiment that she would be their all-powerful enemy, made ruthless war upon her. But she had for adviser the most audacious and wily of all the courtiers of Louis XV., the Duke de Richelieu.

The Marquis d’Argenson draws the following portrait of this personage, so celebrated in the erotic annals of the eighteenth century:--

“He carries too far the opinion one ought to have of the defects of the monarchy and the feebleness of our epoch.... He has made himself talked of ever since he was twelve years old. He has been put into the Bastille three times for three causes capable of making a court hero illustrious: for having made love to the Dauphiness, the King’s mother; for a duel, and for a conspiracy against the State. His love for voluptuous pleasures has ostentation rather than actual enjoyment as its end.... He is very much the mode among women; the pretensions and jealousies of coquettes have procured him many favors. There is never any passion in him but plenty of debauchery. He has betrayed a feeble sex; he has taken the senses for the heart. He is not fortunate enough to possess a friend. He is frank through thoughtlessness, suspicious through subtlety and contempt of mankind, disobliging through insensibility and misanthropy. Such is the sorry model copied by a gay and inconsiderate nation like ours.”

The Duke de Richelieu intended to reign under cover of Madame de la Tournelle, whose guide and inspirer he had become. This affair roused his enthusiasm. Pushing even to lyricism his sorry rôle of intermediary, he exclaimed, in an excess of zeal: “I mean that any one who shall enter Madame de la Tournelle’s ante-chamber shall be more highly considered than one who might have been in private conversation with Madame de Mailly.”[13]

The new favorite made conditions before yielding to the King. Proud and imperious, like most beautiful and flattered women, she required guarantees, and transformed a so-called affair of the heart into a diplomatic negotiation. “Love,” says La Rochefoucauld, “lends its name to an infinite number of relations attributed to it, but with which it has no more to do than the Doge with what goes on at Venice.” Madame de la Tournelle did not love, she calculated. More peremptory than Madame de Vintimille, who had tolerated a partnership with Madame de Mailly, she determined to reign alone. What she bargained for was not simply money and consideration but the banishment of her sister. But this was not easy to be obtained. The idea of quitting Versailles afflicted Madame de Mailly. She made herself so humble, so modest, so resigned, so submissive, that Louis XV. felt unable to dismiss her. From time to time he still felt for her certain returns if not of attachment at least of compassion. He would have liked to keep near him, as a faithful servant, this poor woman, whose gentleness and kindness he could not refuse to acknowledge. But Madame de la Tournelle was inflexible. She had signified her intention not to become the mistress of the King until after Madame de Mailly should have been irrevocably driven from the court.

Weakness makes men cruel. Louis XV., ordinarily affable and kind, was about to be severe beyond measure towards his former mistress. She thought to move him by immolating herself, and resigning her place (November, 1742) as lady of the palace to the Queen in favor of her sister, Madame de Flavacourt, who stood well with Madame de la Tournelle. But this sacrifice did not touch the cold heart of the King, and he took pleasure in reducing to despair the woman whose love had become embarrassing and tiresome.

The Duke de Luynes does not disguise his sympathy for the fallen favorite. “Her condition,” he says, “is all the more worthy of compassion, because she really loves the King, and is as zealous for his glory as she is attached to his person. She has many friends, and deservedly, for she has never done any harm, and, on the contrary, has been anxious to be of service.... They pretend that the King said to her some days ago: ‘I have promised you to speak plainly with you. I am madly in love with Madame de la Tournelle.’ Madame de la Tournelle says she is loved by M. d’Agenois, and that she loves him, and has no desire to have the King; that he would please her by letting her alone, and that she will never consent to his proposals but on sure and advantageous conditions.”

Everybody pitied Madame de Mailly: Cardinal Fleury because she had never meddled with politics; women because she was not beautiful; courtiers because she had been serviceable. The Queen was not one of the least affected. She displayed great good-will toward a mistress who had had as much modesty as tact. “The Queen,” says the Duke de Luynes, “seems to sympathize with Madame de Mailly’s situation, and to desire that she shall be well treated.”

D’Argenson is indignant with the faithless monarch. The previous year he had been unwilling to believe in the double passion of Louis XV. for Madame de Mailly and Madame de Vintimille. He wrote at the time: “They are the two most united sisters that ever were seen.... What likelihood is there that they could remain friends if they were disputing the possession of a heart so illustrious and precious?... But people are never willing to believe anything but evil.” At this period, D’Argenson did not doubt the sincerity of his master’s remorse. “The death of Madame de Vintimille,” said he, “will bring back the King to the practice of religion.... He will come in the end to living with Madame de Mailly as the Duke, they say, lived with Madame d’Egmont, simply as a friend, relapsing, if at all, only by accident, and then going quickly to confession.... He has a heart which makes itself heard. How few of his subjects have such a one at present! He is grateful for the sincere attachment shown towards him. He likes kind hearts; he is, perhaps, destined to be the delight of the world.”

A year later, the Marquis is furious at having been duped. “Great news!” he exclaims. “The King has dismissed Madame de Mailly in order to take her sister, Madame de la Tournelle. This was done with inconceivable harshness on the part of the Most Christian King. It is the sister who drives away the sister; she demands her exile, and the taking of this third sister as a mistress makes many people believe that the second one, Madame de Vintimille, went the same way. I, for my part, have always maintained that the King’s extreme sensibility at the death of Madame de Vintimille was a praiseworthy sentiment toward the sister of his friend, whose marriage he had himself arranged. But farewell to virtuous sensibility! So he deceived his mistress, he bound Madame de Vintimille to ingratitude! He considers the child she left as his son, and often has it brought secretly to his room. It is all cleared up, then. Who has the third sister must have had the second.”

Madame de Mailly made no further attempt at resistance. “My sacrifices are consummated,” she exclaimed; “I shall die of them; but this evening I shall be in Paris.” She actually departed, in tears and despairing, almost frenzied, in November, 1742. The King wrote letter after letter to her to tell her--could one believe it?--about his love for Madame de la Tournelle. This time, he said, he was “fixed forever, Madame de la Tournelle having all the mind necessary to make her charming.” The fickle sovereign congratulated himself in this more than strange correspondence on “the general applause given to his choice.”

The new favorite triumphed with a barbarous joy. The De Goncourt brothers, in their well-written and interesting book on the _Mistresses of Louis XV._,[14] have given the curious letter she wrote at this time to the Duke de Richelieu, her confidant:--

“Surely Meuse must have let you know what trouble I have had to oust Madame de Mailly; at last I have managed to have her sent away not to come back again. You fancy perhaps that the affair is ended? Not at all; he is beside himself with grief, and does not write me a letter without speaking of it, and begging me to let her return, and he will never approach her, but only ask me to see her sometimes. I have just received one in which he says that if I refuse I shall soon be rid of both her and him; meaning, apparently, that they will both die of chagrin. As it would by no means suit me to have her here, I mean to be firm.... The King has sent you word that the affair is concluded between us, for he tells me, in this morning’s letter, to undeceive you, because he is unwilling to have you think anything beyond the truth. It is true that, when he wrote you, he counted on its being concluded this evening; but I put some difficulties in the way of that which I do not repent of.”

Before the close of the year, the affair was settled. Madame de Mailly, after many tears and supplications, recognized that she was beaten. The King paid her debts, and granted her a pension of ten thousand livres in addition to the twelve thousand she had already, and furnished a house for her in Paris, rue Saint-Thomas-du-Louvre, where she established herself. Thenceforward, Madame de la Tournelle fulfilled, uncontested and without a rival, the official functions of King’s mistress.

VIII

THE REIGN OF THE DUCHESS DE CHÂTEAUROUX

If Louis XV. is a degenerate Louis XIV., his mistresses are likewise inferior to those of the great King. Madame de Mailly, spite of her mildness and her repentance, is not a La Vallière. Though Madame de la Tournelle may become Duchess de Châteauroux, she will never be a Montespan, notwithstanding her ambition and her arrogance. She is doubtless pretty; her big blue eyes, her dazzling white skin, her expression both passionate and arch, make a charming woman of her. But she is not a mistress “thundering and triumphant,” as Madame de Sevigné said of Madame de Montespan; she is not that type of favorite who is “good to display before the ambassadors.” In spite of her high birth, and her schemes for domination, there will always be something mean about her, and the same is true of Louis XV. himself.

She had scarcely become the royal mistress when Cardinal Fleury died (January, 1743). When Mazarin died, Louis XIV. had said: At last I am King. Louis XV. will content himself with saying: Now I am prime minister. He need no longer dread his former preceptor’s lessons on morality and parsimony. He is the master. But he does not at once renounce his economical habits, and at first Madame de la Tournelle has trouble in extracting money from him. “It must be owned,” writes the Duke de Luynes in April, 1743, “that the present arrangement does not resemble what was announced at the commencement of Madame de la Tournelle’s favor.... They said she would make no engagement unless she were assured of a house of her own, her provisions, means to entertain people, and a carriage for her private use, being unwilling to use those of the King. It is true, she does not use these, but she has none of her own; hence, she never goes out, though she is fond of spectacles.”

She ended by making her lover less miserly. In October, 1743, he gave her an excellent cook, an equerry, a berline, six carriage horses, and, finally, the title of Duchess de Châteauroux, with an estate bringing an income of eighty-five thousand livres. The letters patent were worded as follows: “The right to confer titles of honor and dignity being one of the most sublime attributes of supreme power, the kings, our predecessors, have left to us divers monuments of the use they have made of it in favor of persons whose virtues and merit they desired to make illustrious.... Considering that our very dear and well-beloved cousin, Marie Anne de Mailly, widow of the Marquis de la Tournelle, issues from one of the greatest families of our realm, allied to our own and to the most ancient in Europe; that for several centuries her ancestors have rendered great and important services to our crown; that she is attached as lady of the palace to the Queen, our very dear companion, and that she joins to these advantages all the virtues and the most excellent qualities of heart and mind which have gained for her a just esteem and universal consideration, we have thought proper to give her the duchy of Châteauroux, with its appurtenances and dependencies, situated in Berry.”

Parliament was assembled to record these letters patent. “The assembly,” says the Marquis d’Argenson, “has listened gravely to all these flowers of speech which the monarch presents to his mistress, and has decided on the registration.” Barbier, that faithful echo of contemporary public opinion, makes certain observations on the subject in his journal which are not altogether lacking in malice. “These letters,” says he, “are very honorable for the Mailly family. The King declares that it is one of the greatest and finest illustrious houses of the realm, allied to his own and to the most ancient of Europe. One reflection occurs at once: it is surprising that no one has yet decorated the males with the title of duke, and that this celebrity begins with the women. There might be something to criticise in the preamble to the letters; present circumstances considered, the author has not been prudent; the crying them through the streets might also have been dispensed with, it having given occasion for talk.”